Tertullian: Apology & the Major Treatises
The Plainspoken Classics - Scriptorium Press (First Edition, 2026)
An original AI translation made directly from the source language.
https://openscriptorium.com


======== Apologeticum — Chapter 1 ========

[1] If it is not permitted to you, rulers of the Roman Empire, seated for judgment in the open and the conspicuous, on the very summit of the state almost, to look plainly and examine face to face what exactly is at stake in the case of the Christians; if, on this one subject alone, your authority either fears or blushes to inquire into it publicly with the diligence justice demands; if, finally — as happened just recently — the hostility to this sect, working itself out too energetically in private trials, blocks the way to any defense: then let the truth be allowed to reach your ears at least by the hidden path of a silent page.
[2] It begs no favor for its case, because it is not even surprised at its situation. It knows that it lives as a foreigner on earth, that among strangers it readily finds enemies, but that its race, its home, its hope, its favor, its dignity are in heaven. One thing alone it is anxious about meanwhile: not to be condemned unknown. [3] What does it cost the laws that rule in their own kingdom, if it is heard? Will their power be more glorious for this, that they condemn even a truth that has been heard? But if they condemn it unheard, besides the odium of injustice they will earn the suspicion of having a guilty conscience as well, refusing to hear what, once heard, they could not condemn.
[4] This, then, is the first charge we lodge before you: the injustice of the hatred directed at the Christian name. That very label which seems to excuse this injustice is the same one that both loads it and convicts it — ignorance, namely. For what is more unjust than for men to hate what they do not know, even if the thing deserves hatred? For it deserves it only once it is established that it deserves it. [5] But while knowledge of its merits is absent, on what does the justice of the hatred rest — a thing that must be proved not by outcome but by conscience? Since, then, men hate for the very reason that they do not know the character of what they hate, why should it not be permitted that the thing be of such a character that they ought not to hate it? So we convict them on both counts at once from each other: that they are ignorant even while they hate, and that they hate unjustly even while they are ignorant.
[6] It is proof of ignorance that, even while excusing the injustice, condemns it — since all who used to hate, because they did not know the character of what they hated, stop hating the very moment they stop being ignorant of it. From these, Christians are made — precisely upon finding out — and they begin to hate what they once were, and to profess what they once hated; and they become as numerous as we are said to be. [7] They cry out that the city is besieged: Christians in the fields, in the forts, on the islands; they grieve that every sex, age, condition, even rank, is going over to this name, as if it were some loss to them. [8] And yet not even this moves their minds to suspect that some hidden good might be at work. They will not allow themselves the more honest guess, they have no wish to look more closely. Here alone does human curiosity go numb. They love not to know, while others rejoice to have found out. How much more would Anacharsis have branded these men — fools passing judgment on the wise — than he branded the tone-deaf judging musicians! [9] They would rather not know, because they already hate. So thoroughly do they prejudge that what they do not know must be of such a kind that, if they did know it, they could not hate it — whereas, if no debt of hatred is found to exist, surely the best course is to stop hating unjustly; and if the merit is in fact established, then far from any hatred being subtracted, more should be added to it, for perseverance, on the very authority of justice itself.
[10] "But," someone says, "that is no proof of goodness just because it converts many; how many, after all, are driven over to evil! How many turncoats to the wrong side!" Who denies it? Yet what is truly evil, not even those it sweeps away dare defend as good. Nature has drenched every evil thing in either fear or shame. [11] In short, wrongdoers are eager to hide, they avoid being seen; caught, they tremble; accused, they deny; even under torture they rarely, if ever, readily confess; condemned, at any rate, they grieve. They count up within themselves the impulses of their own wicked mind, and blame their cowardice on fate or on the stars; for they are unwilling to own as theirs what they recognize as evil. [12] But the Christian — what is there like that in him? No one is ashamed, no one repents, except perhaps of not having been one sooner. If he is denounced, he glories in it; if accused, he offers no defense; questioned, he confesses even unprompted; condemned, he gives thanks. [13] What kind of evil is this, that lacks the natural marks of evil — fear, shame, evasion, remorse, lament? What kind of evil is this, whose culprit rejoices, whose accusation is a wish granted and whose penalty is happiness? This is no madness you can rightly name, you who stand convicted of not even knowing what it is.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 2 ========

[1] If, in short, it is settled that we are the most guilty of men, why are we treated by you differently from our equals — that is, from other guilty men — when the same offense ought to receive the same treatment? [2] Whatever charge is brought against us, when it is brought against others, they use both their own voice and hired advocacy to plead their innocence; the chance to answer, to argue back, stands open, since it is not even lawful for the undefended and unheard to be condemned outright. [3] But to Christians alone nothing is allowed to be said that might clear the case, that might defend the truth, that might keep the judge from acting unjustly; the only thing waited for is what public hatred requires: admission of the name, not a hearing into the charge — [4] whereas, if you are investigating some other guilty man, you are not content, the moment he has confessed to the name of murderer or temple-robber or incestuous man or public enemy — to speak in our own indictments' terms — to pass sentence, unless you also press for what follows: the nature of the deed, the count, the place, the time, the accomplices, the associates. [5] In our case, nothing of the kind, though it would be equally proper to wring out of us — since it is falsely bandied about — how many infants each of us has already tasted, how many acts of incest he has shrouded in darkness, who the cooks were, who the dogs that were present. Oh, what glory for that governor, if he had dug up someone who had already eaten a hundred babies!
[6] And yet we find that even inquiry into us is forbidden. For Pliny the Younger, when he governed a province, having condemned some Christians and driven others from their rank, was nevertheless disturbed by the sheer number of them, and consulted the emperor Trajan as to what he should do from then on; he reported that, apart from their stubbornness in not sacrificing, he had discovered nothing else about their rites except pre-dawn gatherings to sing to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath to a rule of life that forbade murder, adultery, fraud, treachery, and other crimes. [7] Trajan then wrote back that people of this kind were not to be sought out, but that if they were brought forward they should be punished. [8] What a verdict, tangled by its own expediency! He says they are not to be sought out, as though innocent, and orders them punished, as though guilty. He spares and he savages; he looks away and he strikes. Why do you go in circles against yourself, Judgment? If you condemn, why do you not also seek out? If you do not seek out, why do you not also acquit? For hunting down bandits, a military watch is posted through every province; against men charged with treason and public enemies, every man is a soldier — the inquiry is extended even to their accomplices, even to their associates. [9] Only the Christian is it forbidden to seek out, though he may be brought forward — as if an inquiry were meant to do anything other than turn up what is brought forward! So you condemn the man who is handed over, whom no one wished to have searched for; who, I suppose, by now has earned his punishment not because he is guilty, but because he was found when he ought not to have been looked for.
[10] And so, not even in this do you follow the pattern used for judging other wrongdoers: with everyone else who denies, you apply torture to make them confess; with Christians alone, to make them deny — although, if it were something wicked, we would indeed deny it, and you would be forcing us by torture to confess it. Nor, indeed, would you think crimes needed no investigation by torture just because you were sure they were admitted by confession of the name — seeing that today, in the case of a confessed murderer, though you already know what murder is, you nonetheless wring out of him the sequence of his crime. [11] How much more perverse, then, that while you presume our crimes from the mere confession of the name, you force us by torture to fall away from that confession — so that, by denying the name, we may equally deny the very crimes which you had presumed from confessing the name!
[12] But you do not want us, I take it, to perish, whom you believe to be the very worst of men. For that is how you are accustomed to speak to a murderer: "Deny it" — while you order a temple-robber torn apart if he persists in confessing. If that is not how you act toward the guilty, then you must be judging us the most innocent of all — since, as though we were the most innocent, you do not want us to persist in that confession which you know must be condemned by necessity, not by justice. [13] The man cries out, "I am a Christian." He says what he is; you insist on hearing what he is not. As magistrates charged with wringing out the truth, you labor to hear a lie from us alone. "This is what I am," he says, "which you ask whether I am. Why do you twist me the wrong way? I confess, and you torture; what would you do if I denied?" Plainly, when others deny, you do not readily give them credit — but us, the moment we deny, you believe at once.
[14] You ought to be suspicious of this perversity of yours, in case some hidden force is at work in secret that drives you against the very form, against the very nature of judging, and even against the laws themselves. Unless I am mistaken, the laws command that the guilty be dragged into the light, not hidden away; they prescribe that the confessed be condemned, not acquitted. This is what the decrees of the senate lay down, what the mandates of the emperors define. This empire, whose servants you are, is a civil rule, not a tyranny. [15] For among tyrants, torture was applied even as a punishment in itself; among you, it is tempered, applied only for questioning. Keep, then, your own law with us up to the point where it is needed to secure confession — and once confession has forestalled the need, torture is done with; what is needed then is sentence. The guilty man must be marked off for the punishment owed him, not let off it. In fact, no one is eager to acquit him. [16] It is not permitted even to wish for that; and so no one is forced to deny. You reckon the Christian guilty of every offense, a foe to the gods, to the emperors, to the laws, to morals, to the whole of nature — and yet you force him to deny, so that you can acquit a man you could not acquit unless he denies! [17] You are betraying your own laws: you want him, then, to deny that he is guilty, so as to make him innocent — and against his will at that, no longer even guilty of the past! Where does this perversity come from, that you do not even stop to consider that a man who confesses freely deserves more credit than one who denies under compulsion? Or that a man forced to deny might not deny sincerely — and once acquitted, right there after leaving the tribunal, might laugh at your rivalry with him and be a Christian all over again?
[18] Since, then, in everything you treat us differently from other guilty men, striving for this one thing — that we be excluded from that name (for excluded we are, if we do what non-Christians do) — you can understand that there is no crime at issue here at all, but a name; a name pursued by some scheme of rival hostility, whose first aim is that men should refuse to know for certain what they know for certain they do not know. [19] That is why they both believe things about us that cannot be proved and refuse to have them investigated — lest, once investigated, the things they prefer to have believed turn out not to be so — so that the name, the enemy of that rival scheme, may be condemned on presumed, unproven charges, on its own confession alone. That is why we are tortured when we confess, and punished when we persist, and acquitted when we deny — because it is a war fought over a name.
[20] Finally, why, when you read from the record, do you call the man "a Christian"? Why not also "a murderer," if the Christian is a murderer? Why not also "incestuous," or whatever else you believe us to be? Is it only in our case that you are ashamed or reluctant to pronounce the very names of the crimes? If "Christian" is the name of no crime at all, it is quite absurd that the name alone should be the crime.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 3 ========

And then there's this: most people run into their hatred of the name with eyes shut tight, so that even when they hand someone a good character reference they can't help mixing in a slap at the name. "Gaius Seius is a good man — pity he's a Christian." Or another: "I'm amazed that Lucius Titius, such a sensible fellow, has suddenly turned Christian." Nobody stops to reconsider whether Gaius is good and Lucius sensible perhaps because they are Christians, or whether they became Christian because they were already sensible and good. They praise what they know and abuse what they don't know, and they let the thing they don't know trample the thing they do — though it is far more just to form a judgment about the hidden from the evident than to condemn the evident on the strength of the hidden. Others, who used to know these very people as drifters, worthless, disreputable, now brand them for the very thing that deserves praise — hatred has blinded them so badly they turn a compliment into an indictment. "What a woman! So wanton, so gay! What a young man! Such a flirt, such a lady's man!" — "They've become Christians." So the reform gets charged to the name that produced it. Some, too, strike a bargain between that hatred and their own convenience, content to do the injury as long as they no longer have to keep under their own roof the thing they hate. A husband once free of jealousy now throws out a wife who has become chaste; a father once indulgent now disowns a son who has become obedient; a master once mild now banishes from his sight a slave who has become faithful. The moment anyone is improved by this name, he gives offense. The good is not worth as much as the hatred of Christians costs.
Now then, if it is the name that is hated, what crime attaches to names, what charge can be brought against mere words — unless some word of a name sounds barbarous, or ill-omened, or abusive, or obscene? But "Christian," so far as the word can be interpreted, is derived from "anointing." And even when you mispronounce it "Chrestian" — for you don't even have a sure grasp of the name among yourselves — it comes out compounded from sweetness or kindness. So even an innocent name is hated in innocent men.
But, you say, it's the sect that's hated, precisely in the name of its founder. What's new about that, if some school of thought passes its founder's name on as a surname to its followers? Aren't philosophers named after their founders — Platonists, Epicureans, Pythagoreans? Aren't some named from the places of their meetings and lecture-halls — Stoics, Academics? In the same way doctors take their name from Erasistratus, grammarians from Aristarchus, even cooks from Apicius. And yet no one takes offense at anyone professing a name handed down along with the teaching from its teacher. Clearly, if a man wants to condemn a school as bad, and therefore its founder as bad, he will condemn the name too as bad, deserving hatred on the strength of the guilt of the school and its founder. And so, before hating the name, it was first necessary to examine the school through its founder, or the founder through his school. But as things stand, both inquiries — into the school and into its founder — are neglected, and instead the name alone is seized, the name alone is assaulted, and a single word condemns in advance a school unknown and a founder unknown, simply because they are named, not because they are convicted.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 4 ========

So then, having said all this by way of preface to lay bare how unfair the popular hatred toward us truly is, I will now take my stand on the question of our innocence, and I will not only refute the charges brought against us, but turn them back on the very men who bring them, in order that people may learn from this as well that the very faults they don't realize belong to themselves are, in truth, absent in Christians — and at the same time so that the accusers may blush, since I am not saying the worst men accuse the best, but that they, as they would have it, accuse their own equals. We will answer point by point the charges of what we are said to commit in secret — charges which we find these same men committing openly — the charges for which we are reckoned criminal, foolish, contemptible, ridiculous.
But since our truth meets every one of these charges head-on, and in the end the authority of the laws is thrown up as a barrier against it — so that either nothing is to be questioned once the laws have spoken, or an unwilling obedience is to be set above the truth — let me first join issue with you on the laws themselves, as with the laws' own guardians.
To begin with, when you lay it down harshly, saying "It is not permitted for you to exist!" and prescribe this without any more humane reconsideration, you are proclaiming naked force and an unjust tyranny from the citadel of power, if you deny it is permitted simply because you wish it so, not because it ought not to be permitted. But if you refuse to permit it because it ought not to be permitted, then surely what is done well ought not to be forbidden. If I can show that what your law prohibits is good, then that earlier verdict cannot stand against me — the verdict that would rightly have forbidden it, had it been evil. If your law erred, I take it, it was conceived by a man; it did not, after all, fall from the sky. Are you astonished that a man could err in framing a law, or come to his senses again in repealing one? Did not the very laws of Lycurgus, once amended by the Spartans themselves, wound their own author so deeply that he withdrew and starved himself to death in judgment on himself? And do you not, every day, as fresh experience lights up the darkness of antiquity, cut and hack down that whole ancient overgrown forest of laws using fresh blades forged from imperial decrees and rescripts? Did not Severus himself — yesterday, so to speak, that most steadfast of emperors — after all the weight of its old age, throw out the utterly pointless Papian laws, which compelled people to raise children before the Julian law even let them marry? There were also once laws letting creditors cut a condemned debtor's body into pieces; by common consent that cruelty was later erased, and the capital penalty was converted into a mark of public disgrace instead. Confiscation of goods was brought in, preferring to make a man's blood run red with shame rather than spill it outright.
How many laws still lie there among you, badly in need of clearing out — laws commended by neither the count of their years nor the rank of their framers, but by fairness alone, and so, when they are recognized as unjust, they are rightly condemned, even while they go on condemning others! How do we call them unjust? Well, if they punish the mere name, they are even foolish; but if they punish deeds, then why do they punish, under the name alone, deeds which in other people's cases are proven and defended only on the evidence of what was actually done, not on the strength of a name? Say I'm guilty of incest — why don't they investigate? Of infanticide — why don't they force it out of me? Say I commit some offense against the gods, against the emperors — why am I not given a hearing, when I have the means to clear myself? No law forbids the examination of what it forbids the commission of, because a judge does not justly punish unless he first learns that what is forbidden has actually been done, and a citizen cannot faithfully obey a law while ignorant of the nature of what it punishes. No law owes the verdict of its own justice to itself alone, but to those from whom it expects obedience. Otherwise a law is suspect if it refuses to be examined, and downright wicked if, unexamined, it still rules.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 5 ========

To go back a bit and examine the origin of laws of this kind: an old ruling existed that no deity could be consecrated by an emperor without first winning the senate's approval. Marcus Aemilius knows this about his god Alburnus. This also bears on our case, that among you divinity is weighed out by human judgment. Unless a god pleases a man, he will not be a god; by now man must actually do the god the favor of being pleased with him. So then, Tiberius, in whose time the Christian name entered the world, having been informed of it from Syria Palestine — where the truth of that very divinity had been revealed — brought the case before the senate, casting his own vote on its behalf. The senate, because it had not approved the matter itself, rejected it; Caesar held to his own opinion, and threatened danger to any who accused the Christians. Consult your own records; there you will find that Nero was the first to rage against this sect with the imperial sword, precisely when it was rising to greatest prominence at Rome. But we actually glory in having such a man as the one who dedicated us to condemnation. Anyone who knows Nero can understand that only something truly great could have been condemned by him. Domitian too made an attempt — he had a share of Nero's cruelty — but because he was also, after all, a man, he quickly called off what he had begun, and even restored those he had exiled. Such have always been our persecutors — unjust, godless, base men, the very sort you yourselves are accustomed to condemn, and whose victims you are accustomed to restore.
As for the rest, out of so many emperors since then down to today, men wise in things divine and human, produce for me a single one who made war on the Christians! We, on the contrary, can produce a protector — if the letters of Marcus Aurelius, that most serious of emperors, are consulted, in which he testifies that the German thirst was broken by rain obtained, as it happened, through the prayers of Christian soldiers. Even though he did not openly lift the penalty from men of that kind, he nevertheless dispersed it openly in another way, by even attaching a condemnation to their accusers — and a rather grim one at that. What sort of laws, then, are these, which only the wicked, the unjust, the vile, the savage, the foolish, the mad enforce against us — laws which Trajan partly frustrated by forbidding Christians to be sought out, which no Hadrian, curious explorer of everything though he was, ever pressed, which no Vespasian, conqueror of the Jews though he was, ever pressed, which no Pius, no Verus ever pressed? It would, after all, be far easier for the worst men to be uprooted by the best, as by rivals, than by their own partners in crime.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 6 ========

Now I should like the most religious guardians and avengers of the laws and of ancestral institutions to answer for their own good faith, honor, and obedience toward the decrees of their forefathers — whether they have deserted none of them, strayed from none of them, let slip none of the necessary and most fitting points of that discipline. What became of those laws that once curbed extravagance and ostentation — the ones that allowed no more than a hundred coppers to be spent on a dinner, and no more than a single chicken to be served, and that not even fattened; the ones that struck a patrician from the senate roll, as guilty of gross extravagance, for owning ten pounds of silver; the ones that tore down theaters the moment they arose to corrupt public morals; the ones that did not allow the badges of rank and honorable birth to be usurped carelessly or with impunity? For I see dinners now costing hundreds — hundreds of sesterces, that is — and I see silver mined and poured out onto serving dishes, and it's no small matter if these belong not to senators but to freedmen, or even to men whose backs have not yet worn out the whip. I see theaters, too, that are not content to be single, nor bare. For fear that shameless pleasure might grow cold even in winter, the Spartans were the first to invent the cloak for the games. And I see that between respectable matrons and streetwalkers no difference of dress has been left at all.
Where women are concerned, even those institutions of the forefathers that once championed modesty and sobriety have fallen away — the days when no woman knew gold except on a single finger, the one her betrothed had pledged with the ring of engagement; when women abstained from wine so absolutely that a matron was starved to death by her own kin for having broken open the seals on the wine-cellar, and under Romulus a woman who had so much as touched wine was killed with impunity by her husband Metennius. For that reason even kissing one's relatives was a kind of necessity, so that they could be judged by the smell of one's breath. Where now is that happiness of marriages, prospering as it did precisely from good morals, thanks to which, for almost six hundred years from the founding of the city, no household filed for divorce? But now among women there is no limb too light to bear gold, no kiss too free of wine, and divorce is now actually a thing to be wished for, as if it were the very fruit of marriage.
Even where your own gods are concerned, the very things your fathers had prudently decreed, you yourselves, so very obedient, have overturned. Father Liber, with his mysteries, the consuls and the senate's authority drove out — not just from the city, but across the entirety of the Italian peninsula. Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates with their dog-headed Anubis were forbidden entry to the Capitol — that is, driven out of the very senate-house of the gods — by the consuls Piso and Gabinius, men who were certainly no Christians, who even tore down their altars, curbing the vices of shameful, idle superstitions. And you, by restoring these gods, have conferred on them the highest majesty.
Where now is the religion, where the reverence you owe to your ancestors? In dress, in diet, in furnishing, in feeling, even in the way you talk, you have cast off your forefathers. You are forever praising antiquity, while living day to day on novelty. And this shows that, in departing from the good institutions of your ancestors, you are keeping and guarding exactly what you should not, while failing to keep what you should. And as for the one thing you still seem most faithfully to guard as handed down from your fathers, the one point on which you have chiefly branded Christians as guilty of transgression — I mean the cult of the gods — that is precisely where antiquity went most badly astray, even though you have rebuilt altars to Serapis as if he were Roman now, even though you now offer your Bacchic frenzies to an Italian Bacchus; I will show in its proper place that this cult is in fact despised, neglected, and destroyed by you yourselves, against the very authority of your ancestors. For now, though, I will answer that charge of infamous secret crimes, so as to clear my path toward the more open charges.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 7 ========

[1] We are said to be the most depraved of criminals on account of a sacrament of infanticide, and the feast made from it, and the incest that follows the banquet — a rite the dog, that overturner of the lamps, procures for us by decently obliging, being of course the pimp of the darkness for our impious lusts. [2] Yet we are only ever said to do this — you never trouble to dig out what you have been saying so long. So either dig it out, if you believe it, or stop believing it, since you have not dug it out! Your own concealment of the matter prescribes against you the fact that you yourselves do not dare to dig out what you do not even yourselves believe worth uncovering. You impose on the executioner a far different task where Christians are concerned — not that they should say what they do, but that they should deny what they are.
[3] The birth-certificate of this discipline, as we have already shown, dates from Tiberius. From the moment truth began to exist, it began to be hated; the instant it appeared, it was an enemy. It has as many enemies as it has outsiders — the Jews hostile out of rivalry proper to them, the soldiers out of extortion, and even our own household out of sheer human nature. [4] Daily we are besieged, daily we are betrayed, and it is precisely in our own meetings and assemblies that we are caught in the act, most of all. Who has ever come upon an infant wailing in such a rite? [5] Who has ever kept for the judge the bloodied mouths, Cyclops-like and Siren-like, just as he found them? Who has ever caught any unclean traces even on the wives? Who, upon discovering such crimes, has ever concealed them or sold his silence, dragging the very persons involved into court?
If we always hide, when was it ever betrayed what we supposedly commit? [6] Indeed, by whom could it have been betrayed? Not by the guilty themselves, surely, since even by the very form of all mystery-rites, a pledge of silence is owed. Samothrace and Eleusis keep their silence: how much more will such rites as these, which if betrayed would provoke not only divine but also, meanwhile, human punishment — while things merely divine are kept safe! [7] If then they are not betrayed by their own initiates, it follows that it must be outsiders. And how would outsiders come to know, when even pious initiations always bar the profane and take care against witnesses? Unless, perhaps, the impious fear less.
[8] The nature of Rumor is known to everyone. It is your own poet's line: "Rumor, an evil than which nothing else is swifter." Why is Rumor an evil? Because she is swift? Because she is an informer? Or because, above all, she is a liar? For not even when she brings something true is she without the vice of lying — subtracting, adding, altering the truth as she goes. [9] What of the fact that her very condition is such that she only survives by lying, and lives only as long as she is not proven? For the moment she is proven, she ceases to exist, and, having as it were discharged her office of reporting, hands the matter over; and from then on the matter is simply held as fact, simply named as fact. [10] And no one then says, for instance, "They say this happened at Rome," or "Rumor has it that he obtained that province by lot," but rather: "He obtained that province," and "This happened at Rome." [11] Rumor, a name for something uncertain, has no place where a thing is certain. Who indeed believes Rumor, except the unthinking? For the wise man does not put faith in the uncertain. Anyone can reckon that, however widely her ambition has spread it, however emphatically she has built it up, it must nonetheless have sprung at some point from one single source. [12] From there it creeps along the relay-lines of tongues and ears, and thus the flaw of one small seed obscures the rest of the rumor, so that no one stops to consider whether that first mouth may have sown a lie — which often happens either from a talent for rivalry, or from the judgment of suspicion, or from a pleasure in lying that is, in certain people, not even acquired but innate. [13] It is well, however, that time reveals all things — your own proverbs and maxims bear witness to this — by the arrangement of nature, which has so ordained that nothing lies hidden for long, not even what Rumor has failed to spread.
[14] Rightly, then, has Rumor alone for so long been the sole witness of Christian crimes; this is the informer you produce against us — one who, though she has boasted of it for so long and strengthened it into settled opinion over so great a stretch of time, has to this very day been unable to prove it.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 8 ========

[1] To call upon the testimony of nature herself against those who presume such things ought to be believed — look, we set before you the wage paid for these crimes: they promise eternal life in return. Believe it, for the moment! For this is what I ask: even granting you believe it, do you value it enough to reach it by way of such a conscience? [2] Come then, plunge the knife into an infant who is no one's enemy, guilty of nothing, everyone's child; or, if that is another's office, you at least stand by while a human being dies before he has lived; wait for the fleeing new-made soul to escape, catch the raw blood, sate your bread on it, feast on it gladly! [3] Meanwhile, as you recline at table, count off the places — where is the mother, where the sister; note them carefully, so that when the canine darkness falls, you do not go wrong! For you will have committed a sin, unless you also commit incest. [4] Initiated and sealed in such things, you live on forever. I want you to answer me, if eternity is worth that much; and if it is not worth that much, then it is not worth believing either. Even if you believed it, I say you would not be willing; even if you were willing, I say you would not be able. So how is it that some manage this deed while you can't? Or how is it you're unable, when others manage it well enough? [5] Are we of some other nature, I wonder — Dog-heads or Shade-feet? Do others have different rows of teeth, different sinews built for incestuous lust? Whoever believes this of a human being can also do it himself; he is human, and so is the Christian. Whoever cannot do it ought not to believe it. For the Christian is human too, and is exactly what you are.
[6] "But it is imposed and foisted upon the ignorant." Nothing of the kind, it is said, was ever asserted about Christians that they knew of — surely something they should have watched for and hunted down with every vigilance. [7] Yet surely, I think, it is customary for those willing to be initiated to approach first that father of the rites and hear described what must be prepared. Then he says: "You will need an infant, still tender, who does not yet know death, who will laugh under your knife; also bread, with which to soak up the sauce of blood; besides that, candlesticks and lamps and some dogs, and scraps of meat to make them lunge and knock over the lights; above all, you must come together with your mother and your sister." [8] What if they are unwilling, or there simply are none? What, in short, of Christians who have no family? There will be no legitimate Christian, I suppose, unless he has a sister or a son. [9] And what of this — that all these preparations are supposedly made while people are still ignorant of them? Surely afterward they learn of it, and put up with it, and forgive it. "They are afraid of punishment if they cry out." People who deserve to be defended — who indeed would rather perish outright than live under such a burden of conscience? Come now, grant that they are afraid — why then do they persevere? For it follows that you ought not to want to go on being what, had you known beforehand, you would never have become.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 9 ========

[1] I will refute these charges all the more effectively by showing that the very things you accuse us of are done by you yourselves, partly in the open, partly in secret — through which, perhaps, you have also come to believe them of us.
[2] In Africa infants were sacrificed openly to Saturn, right up to the proconsulship of Tiberius, who exposed those same priests on the very trees overshadowing their temple, on votive crosses, as a punishment for their crimes — as the army of our own homeland can testify, which performed that very service for the proconsul. [3] But even now, in secret, this sacred crime persists. It is not only you Christians it holds in contempt; no crime is ever permanently uprooted, nor does any god change the customs he has established. [4] Since Saturn did not spare even his own children, he certainly went on, without sparing, to consume outsiders' children as well — children their own parents actually offered up, and did so willingly, coaxing the infants so that they would not cry as they were sacrificed. And yet there is a great difference between mere homicide and outright parricide.
[5] Among the Gauls, grown men are cut up in sacrifice to Mercury. I set aside the Taurian legends and leave them to their theaters. Look — within that city of Aeneas's devout descendants, so famed for its piety, there is a certain Jupiter whom they drench in their games with human blood. "But that's the beast-fighters," you say. That, I suppose, is somehow less than human! Or is it worse, precisely because it's the blood of a bad man? Certainly, all the same, it is poured out from homicide. Oh, a Christian Jupiter — the only father's son to feed on cruelty!
[6] But since, where infanticide is concerned, it makes no difference whether it is done as a sacred rite or by mere private choice — even though parricide differs from ordinary homicide — let me turn to the general public. How many, I wonder, of these very bystanders, gaping for Christian blood, of even you yourselves, our most just and severe governors, might I press hard upon your own consciences with the question of how many of you have done away with your own children at birth? [7] If indeed the manner of the killing makes any difference, you certainly do it more cruelly, choking out the breath in water, or exposing the child to cold and hunger and dogs; even a grown man, if he had the choice, would rather die by the sword. [8] For us, however, homicide having been forbidden once and for all, we are not permitted to destroy even the child in the womb, while the blood is still being formed into a human being. To prevent a birth is merely a hastened murder, and it makes no difference whether one snatches away a soul once born, or tears one apart in the act of being born. He too is a human being who is going to be one; every fruit already exists in its seed.
[9] As for the feeding on blood and dishes of that tragic kind — read, and see if it is not recorded somewhere, in Herodotus I believe, that certain nations sealed a treaty by each drinking blood drawn from the other's arm. Something of the sort was tasted, I know not what, in Catiline's day too. They say too that among certain tribes of the Scythians, each dead man is eaten by his own kin. [10] But I need not range so far. This very day, right here, blood consecrated to Bellona, drawn from a gashed thigh and caught in the cupped palm, is given as a seal to her devotee. [11] And those men too, who at the arena games gulp down, in their eager thirst, the fresh blood of slaughtered criminals, running warm from the throat, as a cure for the falling sickness — where are they? And what of those who dine on the arena's beast-fed dainties, who go after boar or stag? That boar was wiped clean of the blood he wrestled and drew; that stag lay steeped in a gladiator's blood. Men crave the very bellies of bears, still undigested from human entrails; so flesh belches back from man that has been fed on man. [12] You who eat such things — how far are you, really, from the banquets of the Christians? And do those others do less, who with wild lust gape after human limbs, because they devour them alive? Are they less consecrated to filth by human blood, because they only lap up blood that is still to come? They do not, granted, eat infants — but rather the grown.
[13] Let your error blush before Christians, who do not so much as taste the blood of animals at our meals, and who for that very reason also abstain from things strangled and from carrion, lest we be defiled by blood buried even within the flesh. [14] And yet, among your tests for Christians, you press on us sausages stuffed with blood, perfectly certain, of course, that this is the very thing forbidden them, by which you mean to trip them into straying. But how does it make sense that men you are confident shrink in horror from the blood of cattle should be believed to gape after human blood — unless perhaps you suppose they have found it sweeter? [15] That very test, in fact, ought to be applied to the examination of Christians, just as the burning coal and the incense-box are. For in that way they would be proven guilty by craving human blood exactly as they are proven guilty by refusing to sacrifice; otherwise, they would have to be denied conviction for not tasting it, exactly as for not sacrificing. And in any case, from the hearing of prisoners and the condemning of the guilty, you would certainly never run short of human blood.
[16] Now then, who is more given to incest than those whom Jupiter himself has instructed? Ctesias reports that the Persians mingle with their own mothers. But the Macedonians too are suspect, since, the first time they heard the tragedy of Oedipus performed, they laughed at his anguish over incest and said: " Drive on — into your mother! " [17] Consider now how much room errors like these leave for incestuous mingling, given how much material the passivity of self-indulgence supplies. To begin with, you expose your own children, to be picked up by whatever passing stranger's pity, or to be adopted, once given up, by better parents. Once a lineage has been alienated in this way, the memory of it is bound eventually to be scattered; and the moment an error strikes, incest then spreads on, generation creeping after generation along with the crime. [18] Then again, wherever one happens to be — at home, abroad, across the sea — lust is a constant companion, and its leaps can easily plant children, unknown to their fathers, in any place, out of some stray portion of seed, so that a lineage scattered in this way through human commerce may converge again upon its own kin, blind to the blood-tie of incest it cannot recognize. [19] We are fenced off from any such outcome by a most careful and faithful chastity; and to the very degree that we are safe from illicit unions and from any straying after marriage, to that same degree we are safe from falling into incest. Some among us, far more secure still, drive off the whole force of this error by lifelong virgin continence — old men who have remained boys.
[20] If you considered that these things exist among yourselves, you would see accordingly that they do not exist among Christians. The same eyes would report both facts. But a double blindness pairs up readily enough: those failing to notice what is actually present imagine they perceive what isn't there at all. I will go on to show this in everything. For now, let me speak of the more obvious matters.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 10 ========

[1] "You do not worship the gods," comes the charge, "and you pay no sacrifices on the emperors' behalf." It follows, by the same logic, that we do not sacrifice for anyone else, since we do not even sacrifice for ourselves — we simply do not worship gods at all. And so the charge laid against us is sacrilege joined with treason. That is the whole matter at issue, the sum of it, and it surely merits a hearing — provided the judge is not prejudice or injustice, one of which despairs of the truth, the other refuses it outright.
[2] We have stopped worshiping your gods from the moment we discovered they are not gods. What you ought to be demanding of us, then, is proof that they are not gods, and therefore ought not to be worshiped — since worship would only have been owed them if they had in fact been gods in the first place. And Christians would deserve punishment only if it could be established that those we refuse to worship, thinking them nonexistent, really were gods after all. [3] "But to us," you say, "they are gods." We appeal, we call you to your own conscience as witness against yourselves; let it be the judge, let it condemn us, if it can deny that every one of your gods was once a man. [4] And if conscience itself tries to deny it, it will be refuted by your own historical records — the very sources from which you learned who these gods were, records still bearing witness today, backed by the cities where they were born, the regions where they left traces of their activities, the very places where they are shown to be buried. [5] Must I now run through them one by one, so many and so various — new and old, barbarian and Greek, Roman and foreign, captives and adopted sons, private and public property, male and female, country folk and city folk, sailors and soldiers? [6] It would be tedious even to chase down their titles. Let me compress it all into one summary — and this not so that you may learn it, but so you may remember it again, since you plainly go about pretending to have forgotten: before Saturn, not one single god exists among you. From him the whole census of your higher and better-known divinities begins. Whatever turns out to be true of the origin will hold for everything that comes after. [7] As for Saturn, then — so far as the literature teaches, neither Diodorus the Greek, nor Thallus, nor Cassius Severus, nor Cornelius Nepos, nor any commentator on antiquities of that sort has ever declared him anything but a man; and so far as the physical evidence goes, I find nowhere more reliable testimony than in Italy itself, where Saturn settled after many campaigns and after his stay in Attica, welcomed by Janus — or Janus, as the Salii would have it. [8] The mountain he had lived on was called the Saturnian; the town he had staked out is still called Saturnia to this day; indeed the whole of Italy, after being called Oenotria, took the name Saturnia. From him coinage was first stamped with a design and image, and to this day he presides over the treasury.
[9] All the same, if Saturn was a man, he was certainly born of a man, and precisely because he came from a man, he did not come from Heaven and Earth. But when a man's parents are unknown, it is easy to call him the son of the very powers under which we can all be said to stand. Who does not, out of respect and honor, or simply by human custom, call heaven and earth mother and father — the way unknown people, or people who turn up out of nowhere, are said to have dropped from the sky? [10] That is exactly how Saturn, appearing suddenly, everywhere came to be called a child of heaven; the common people likewise call unaccountable people 'sons of the earth.' I say nothing of the fact that men were still so primitive back then that the mere sight of any stranger struck them as something divine — when today, in our sophistication, men whom the public mourned as dead only a few days earlier are being enrolled among the gods. [11] Enough of Saturn, brief as this has been. Next we shall show that Jupiter too was every bit as much a man, born of a man, and after him the whole swarm of his line, as mortal as the seed that produced them.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 11 ========

[1] And since you do not dare deny that these figures were men, while insisting that after death they were made gods, let us reexamine the reasons that supposedly required this. [2] To begin with, you must concede that there is some higher god, some broker of divinity, who made gods out of men. For they could not have conferred divinity on themselves, since they did not possess it, nor could anyone else have granted it to those who lacked it unless he himself actually owned it. [3] But if there were no one to make gods, then you are assuming, pointlessly, that gods were made, all the while removing the one who would have had to make them. Certainly, if they could have made themselves gods, they would never have been men at all — since that would mean possessing the power of a better condition from the start.
[4] So then, granting that there is someone who makes gods, I return to examining the reasons for making gods out of men, and I can find none — unless that great god needed help and assistance for his divine duties. First, it is beneath him to need anyone's services, least of all a dead man's, since it would have been far more fitting for him to have made some god from the very start who would later provide the service the dead man was going to provide. [5] But I do not even see any job for them to do. This entire body of the world — whether unborn and uncreated, as Pythagoras holds, or born and made, as Plato holds — was, once and for all, in this construction of it, arranged, equipped, and ordered, complete with every mechanism of rational government, right from the start. What perfected everything could not itself have been incomplete. [6] Nothing was waiting around for Saturn and the Saturnian race. Men would be fools not to be certain that from the very beginning rain fell from the sky, stars shone, lights blossomed, thunder rumbled, and Jupiter himself feared the very thunderbolts you put in his hand — likewise that every crop existed in abundance before Liber and Ceres and Minerva, indeed before any first man at all sprang up out of the earth, because nothing needed for man's containment and sustenance could possibly have been supplied only after man existed. [7] In fact these figures are said to have discovered these necessities of life, not to have instituted them. But what is discovered already existed, and what already existed is not credited to the one who discovered it but to the one who instituted it — for it existed before it was discovered. [8] Besides, if Liber is a god because he showed men the vine, then Lucullus got a raw deal, since he was the first to bring cherry trees to Italy from Pontus, and yet he was never made a god as the source of a new fruit — because he only showed it, he did not create it. [9] Therefore, if the universe stood from the very beginning already fully equipped and organized under fixed principles for carrying out its own functions, then this whole line of argument for promoting humanity into divinity collapses — since the offices and powers you distributed to these gods existed from the beginning exactly as they would have existed even if you had never created these gods at all.
[10] But you turn to another argument, answering that the conferral of divinity was really a matter of rewarding merit. And here, I take it, you concede that this deifying god excels in justice, since he would not dispense so great a reward carelessly, undeservedly, or wastefully. [11] I would like, then, to review these merits, and see whether they were of the sort that would have lifted these men into heaven — or rather plunged them into the depths of Tartarus, which you yourselves, when it suits you, describe as the prison of infernal punishments. [12] For that is where the impious are usually thrust down — men who violate their parents, who commit incest with their sisters, who commit adultery with other men's wives, who rape virgins, who molest boys, who rage in cruelty, who kill, who steal, who deceive, and whoever else resembles any one of your gods — and you will not be able to prove a single one of them innocent of crime or vice, unless you deny he was ever a man at all.
[13] And yet, since you cannot deny that these figures were men, further marks now attach to them that will not allow us to believe they were later made gods. If you yourselves sit in judgment to punish such crimes, if every decent person shuns the company, conversation, and companionship of the wicked and the depraved — while your great god of majesty has admitted their exact equals into the fellowship of his own divine rank — then what exactly are you condemning, when you worship their colleagues? [14] Your idea of justice is a standing insult against heaven. Go on, make gods of your worst criminals, so as to please your own gods! It is, apparently, an honor — being consecrated alongside one's equals.
[15] But let me set aside this whole outrageous business and grant that these men really were upright, honest, and good! Even so, how many far greater men have you left down in the underworld! In wisdom, a Socrates; in justice, an Aristides; in generalship, a Themistocles; in grandeur, an Alexander; in good fortune, a Polycrates; in wealth, a Croesus; in eloquence, a Demosthenes. [16] Which of your gods is weightier or wiser than Cato, more just or more soldierly than Scipio? Who is grander than Pompey, luckier than Sulla, wealthier than Crassus, more eloquent than Cicero? How much more fitting it would have been for that god to wait and admit these men instead, since he surely foresaw their superiority! Instead, I suppose, he rushed things, sealed off heaven once and for all, and now sits blushing while his betters mutter away down among the dead.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 12 ========

[1] I will drop this line of argument now, confident that once I have shown what your gods actually are, I will have demonstrated, straight from the truth itself, what they are not. So then, as far as your gods go, all I see are the names of certain long-dead ancients, all I hear are myths, and all I recognize in your sacred rites is myth dressed up as ritual: [2] and as for the statues themselves, my only complaint is that their materials are siblings of ordinary household pots and utensils — indeed made from those very same pots and utensils, as if by some destiny, transformed by consecration, an artist's skill working the transfiguration, and doing so, I might add, most disgracefully, sacrilegiously, in the very act of manufacture — so that in fact it can serve as some comfort in our punishments, we who are made to suffer on account of these very gods, that they themselves suffer the identical treatment merely to come into being.
[3] You hang Christians on crosses and stakes: but what statue is not first shaped out of clay upon a cross-shaped frame of stakes? Your god's body is first fastened to a gibbet before it is ever consecrated. [4] You claw at Christians' flanks with hooked irons: yet on your gods, over every limb, the adze, the plane, and the rasp bear down far more forcefully. We are beheaded: your gods exist headless until the lead and glue and dowel-pegs arrive. We are thrown to the beasts: certainly the very beasts you dedicate to Liber and Cybele and the Heavenly Goddess. [5] We are burned alive: so were your gods, from the very first lump of raw material. We are condemned to the mines: that is where your gods are quarried from. We are exiled to islands: and it is not unusual for one of your gods to be born or to die on an island too. If divinity is established by these very things, then the punished are being consecrated, and our tortures ought to be called divine honors!
[6] But of course your gods, we are told, feel none of these injuries and insults done to their manufacture — just as they feel none of your homage either. What impious talk, what sacrilegious abuse! Gnash your teeth, foam at the mouth! You are the very same people who never took issue with a certain Seneca when he railed at your superstition at greater length and more bitterly than we do. [7] So then, if we refuse to worship the cold statues and images of your dead — likenesses so lifelike that kites and mice and spiders can tell exactly what they are — does not our rejection of a recognized error deserve praise rather than punishment? Can we possibly be said to harm beings we are perfectly certain do not exist at all? What does not exist suffers nothing from anyone, precisely because it does not exist.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 13 ========

[1] "But to us they are gods," you say. And yet how are you caught, on the contrary, acting impiously, sacrilegiously, and irreligiously toward your own gods — you who neglect the very ones you claim to believe exist, destroy the very ones you fear, and mock the very ones you even go to the trouble of avenging? [2] Check me, if I am lying. First, since you each worship different gods, you inevitably insult whichever ones you do not worship. Preferring one god over another cannot happen without insulting the other, since choosing one thing necessarily means rejecting another. [3] So then you already hold in contempt the gods you reject, and you are not afraid to offend them by rejecting them. For as we noted above, the status of each god used to hang on a vote of the senate. A god simply did not exist if some human committee, when consulted, refused him — and by refusing, condemned him.
[4] Your household gods, the ones you call the Lares, you handle with full domestic authority — pawning them, selling them, melting them down, turning a Saturn into a little cooking pot one day and a Minerva into a ladle the next, depending on how battered and worn each one gets from long years of worship, or on how urgently some owner's domestic need trumps his piety. [5] Your public gods you likewise defile by public right, holding them up for auction on the sale-spear. That is how the Capitoline gods, how the market gods, are sold off — under the very same auctioneer's cry, the very same spear, the very same entry in the quaestor's ledger, divinity itself is knocked down and carried off to the highest bidder. [6] Land burdened with tribute is worth less; men's heads assessed for the poll-tax are counted less noble — these, after all, are the marks of captivity — yet the more heavily taxed a god is, the holier he is judged; or rather, the holier he is judged, the more heavily he is taxed. Majesty is turned into a cash crop: religion goes begging door to door among the wine-shops; you charge admission for the mere ground of the temple, for the very privilege of approaching the shrine. It is not permitted to know the gods for free — they are for sale.
[7] What exactly do you do to honor them that you do not equally bestow on your own dead? The same temples, accordingly, the same altars. The same dress and the same insignia on their statues; whatever the dead man's age, his craft, his profession happened to be, that is exactly what the god now looks like. How does Jupiter's banquet differ from a funeral feast, a libation-cup from a funeral urn, a soothsayer from an undertaker? For the soothsayer, too, only ever shows up around the dead. [8] But of course you rightly grant the honor of divinity to your dead emperors — you who confer it on them while they are still alive besides! Your gods will accept the arrangement gladly; indeed they will congratulate themselves that their own masters are now their equals. [9] Yet when you worship Larentina, a common prostitute (I would even prefer a Lais or a Phryne for the honor), right alongside your Junos and your Ceres and your Dianas; when you induct Simon Magus with a statue and an inscription reading 'To the Holy God'; when out of your palace pages you manufacture some god or other by council vote — even though your older gods are no more distinguished, they will still count it an insult that others were allowed the privilege that antiquity granted only to themselves.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 14 ========

[1] I want to review your rites too. I won't even mention what you're like when sacrificing — how you slaughter every diseased, wasted, mangy creature, while from the fat and sound ones you lop off the superfluous bits, little heads and hooves, the very parts you'd have marked at home for the slave-boys or the dogs; how out of Hercules' tithe you don't put even a third part on his altar. I'll praise your wisdom instead, for salvaging something from a dead loss. [2] But when I turn to your literature, on which you're schooled in prudence and the liberal arts, what mockeries I find! That the gods fought each other pitched, paired off like gladiators, over the Trojans and the Achaeans; that Venus was wounded by a mortal's arrow because she wanted to snatch her son Aeneas away from that same Diomedes, who had all but killed him; [3] that Mars was nearly used up by thirteen months in chains; that Jupiter, so as not to suffer the same violence from the rest of the heaven-dwellers, was freed by the services of some monster, and now weeps over Sarpedon's fall, now grunts filthily after his own sister, under the pretext of mistresses he'd once, long ago, not loved quite so much. [4] After that, what poet is not found, on his own leading authority, a defamer of the gods? This one hires out Apollo to King Admetus to graze his flocks; that one lets Neptune's building-labor out to Laomedon on contract. [5] There's even that lyric poet — I mean Pindar — who sings that Aesculapius, for the crime of greed, since he practiced medicine to harm, was condemned by a thunderbolt. What a wicked Jupiter, if the thunderbolt is his — cruel to his own grandson, jealous of a craftsman! [6] Among the most religious of peoples, such things ought neither to have been put about as true nor invented as false. Not even the tragedians and comedians spare the gods, presenting the misfortunes or wanderings of this or that god's household. [7] I'll say nothing of the philosophers — Socrates is enough, who, to the gods' disgrace, swore by an oak, a goat, and a dog. "But Socrates was condemned precisely because he was destroying the gods." Clearly — truth has always been hated; that is, always. [8] Yet the Athenians, repenting of their verdict, later punished Socrates' accusers and set up his golden image in a temple; the rescinding of his condemnation is itself testimony in Socrates' favor. [9] And Diogenes makes some joke or other at Hercules' expense, and the Roman Cynic Varro brings on three hundred Jupiters — or "Jupiterlets," if that's the word — without heads.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 15 ========

[1] Other inventive minds put their wantonness to work even in your entertainments, at the gods' expense. Look at the elegant wit of the Lentuli and Hostilii — are you laughing at mimes, or at your own gods, in their jokes and turns: "Anubis the adulterer," "the Moon turned male," "Diana whipped," "the reading of dead Jupiter's will," "the three starving Hercules mocked." [2] And the writings of the actors set out the whole disgrace of it. The Sun mourns his son thrown from the sky, while you cheer; Cybele sighs for her disdainful shepherd, and you feel no shame; you sit through Jupiter's eulogies being sung, and Juno, Venus, and Minerva being judged by a shepherd. [3] The very fact that your god's image is dressed in a disgraced and notorious head, that an impure body, produced for that trade by effeminization, plays out some Minerva or Hercules — is majesty not violated, is divinity not defiled, by your applause?
[4] Clearly you are more religious in the arena, where, over human blood, over the filth of punishments, your gods dance right along, supplying plots and stories to the condemned — except that the condemned themselves often put on the very gods in question. [5] We have seen Attis castrated once — that god from Pessinus — and the one who used to burn alive had put on Hercules. We laughed, amid the cruel jokes of the midday games, at Mercury testing the dead with a hot iron; we have seen Jupiter's brother hauling off gladiators' corpses with a mallet. [6] Anyone could still track down each of these details, if it mattered to disturb the honor of divinity, if it mattered to wear down the marks of majesty — but of course they're all judged as being held in contempt, both by those who habitually do such things and by those to whom they do them.
[7] But let's call all that mere play! What if I add — and it's no less within everyone's knowledge — that adulteries are arranged in temples, that pimping goes on among the altars, that in the very tents of the temple-wardens and priests themselves, under the same fillets and mitres and purple robes, with the incense burning, lust gets settled up? I don't know — perhaps your gods have more to complain of about you than about the Christians. Certainly, temple-robbers are always caught among your own people; Christians, after all, don't even know the temples by daylight; they might even plunder them themselves — if they worshipped them themselves.
[8] What, then, do people worship who worship none of that? By now it should be plain enough that those who are not worshippers of a lie are worshippers of the truth, and that they no longer go on erring in the very matter where, by recognizing their error, they have stopped erring. Grasp this first point, and from it draw out the whole order of our sacrament — once the false opinions have first been beaten back.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 16 ========

[1] As some of you have dreamed up, our God is supposedly a donkey's head. Cornelius Tacitus planted this suspicion of just that sort. [2] For in the fifth book of his Histories, opening his account of the Jewish war with the origin of the nation, and arguing as he pleased about that origin, and about the nation's name and religion alike, he reports that the Jews, driven out of Egypt — or, as he supposed, exiles wandering the vast wastes of Arabia — when they were parched with thirst in a land utterly bare of water, made use of wild asses as guides to a spring, reckoning that the animals, after grazing, would be heading for a drink; and that out of gratitude for this they consecrated the likeness of that similar beast. [3] And from this, I take it, it was presumed that we too, as kin to the Jewish religion, are initiated into the same image. But that same Cornelius Tacitus — that most talkative teller of lies — reports in that very History that when Gnaeus Pompey took Jerusalem and for that reason entered the temple to spy out the secrets of the Jewish religion, he found no image there at all. [4] And surely, if anything was being worshipped that was represented by some effigy, it would be displayed nowhere more readily than in its own sanctuary — all the more so, since it feared no outside witnesses, worthless as its worship was. Only the priests were allowed to enter; even the sight of it was barred to everyone else by a hung curtain. [5] Yet you yourselves won't deny that you worship every kind of pack-animal, whole strings of gelded horses, along with their Epona. Perhaps this is held against us — that, among the worshippers of every kind of livestock and beast, we alone are the donkey-worshippers.
[6] But whoever thinks us devotees of the cross will be a fellow-worshipper of ours. When some piece of wood is being propitiated, the shape hardly matters, since the material is the same in kind; the form hardly matters, so long as that very thing is the body of a god. And yet how different, really, is Attic Pallas from a cross-beam, or Pharian Ceres, who stands for sale as a rough, unworked stake, a shapeless piece of wood? [7] Every piece of timber that is fixed upright is, in part, a cross. We worship a god who is whole and entire, if we worship one at all. We have already said that the origin of your gods was formed by sculptors starting from the cross. And you, too, adore Victories on your trophies, when the inmost frame of every trophy is a cross. [8] The whole religion of the Roman camp venerates the standards, swears by the standards, sets the standards above all the gods. All those arrays of images on the standards are so many ornaments hung on crosses; the streamers of the flags and banners are the robes of crosses. I commend your carefulness: you refused to consecrate crosses bare and unadorned.
[9] Others, rather more plausibly and with more show of reason, believe the sun is our god. We shall perhaps be reckoned with the Persians, though we don't worship the sun painted on a piece of linen, since we have it everywhere, in its own disc. [10] The suspicion, in fact, arose from this: it became known that we pray facing the east. But then again, plenty of you, out of the same wish to worship the heavenly bodies, move your lips toward sunrise. [11] Likewise, if we give ourselves over to rejoicing on the Sun's day, we do so for a reason quite different from sun-worship — we come second, after those who devote Saturn's day to idleness and feasting, straying, they too, from the Jewish custom, which they don't even recognize as such.
[12] But recently a fresh edition of our god has been published in this very city: some hired scoundrel, cheating the beasts of their due, put up a painting bearing this caption: "Ass-begotten — the Christians’ god." He had donkey's ears, one hoof, and was shown carrying a book and wearing a toga. We laughed at both the name and the shape. [13] But these people ought at once to worship, in due form, that two-shaped godhead of theirs — the gods they've taken on with heads mixed of dog and lion, horned with goat and ram, goat-legged from the loins, serpent-legged from the shins, winged at the sole or at the back.
[14] These points we've made in abundance, so as not to leave any rumor unanswered, as though out of a guilty conscience. Now let us turn to setting out our religion, and clear away all this once and for all.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 17 ========

[1] What we worship is one God — who by the word by which he commanded, the reason by which he ordered, the power by which he was able, brought forth out of nothing this whole mass, with all its equipment of elements, bodies, and spirits, as an adornment to his majesty; whence the Greeks, too, gave the world the name kosmos, "ornament." [2] He is invisible, though he is seen; incomprehensible, though he is represented through grace; beyond estimation, though estimated by human senses — and that is exactly why he is real and so great. What can commonly be seen, grasped, or estimated is something less than the eyes that take it in, the hands that soil it, the senses that find it; but what is truly immense is known to itself alone. [3] This is what makes God estimable — the very fact that he cannot be grasped by estimation; thus the force of his greatness at once sets him before men as known and leaves him unknown. And this is the sum of the offense of those who refuse to acknowledge the one they cannot help but know.
[4] Do you want us to prove it from his works, so many and so great, by which we are contained, by which we are sustained, by which we are delighted — even by which we are terrified? Do you want it proven from the soul's own witness instead? [5] For the soul, though pressed down by the prison of the body, though hemmed in by depraved upbringing, though drained of its strength by lusts and desires, though enslaved to false gods, still, whenever it comes to itself — as from a drunken stupor, as from sleep, as from some sickness — and regains its own health, it speaks the name "God," and this alone, because this one alone is truly God, properly so called. "God is good and great," and "what God has given" — these are on everyone's lips. [6] It calls him, too, to witness as judge: "God sees," "I commend it to God," "God will repay me." O testimony of a soul that is by nature Christian! And note: in pronouncing these words, its gaze turns away from the Capitol and up toward heaven. For it knows the seat of the living God; from him, and from there, it came down.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 18 ========

[1] But so that we might approach him — and his dispositions and his will — more fully and more forcibly, he added the instrument of Scripture, for anyone who wishes to inquire about God, and having inquired, to find him, and having found him, to believe, and having believed, to serve him. [2] For from the very beginning of the world he sent forth men worthy, by the innocence of their righteousness, to know God and to make him known, men flooded with the divine Spirit, so that they might proclaim that God is one, who created the universe, who fashioned man out of the earth — this one is the true Prometheus — who ordered the world with fixed dispositions of times and appointed ends, [3] and further, what signs of his majesty as judge he has issued through rains, through fires, what disciplines he has laid down as owed to himself, what rewards he has set for those who ignore, abandon, or observe them — so that, when this age has run its course, he who is to judge will render to his worshippers the reward of eternal life, and to the profane an equally perpetual and unbroken fire, raising up all the dead from the beginning, re-forming them and reviewing them, for the reckoning of what each side has deserved. [4] We too once laughed at all this. We are from your own ranks. Christians are made, not born.
[5] Those we have called heralds are termed "prophets," from their office of foretelling. Their utterances, and likewise the powers they displayed as pledges of the divine faith, remain in the treasuries of literature, and they are not hidden away. The most learned of the Ptolemies, the one they surname Philadelphus, and the shrewdest in every branch of literature, when in his zeal for libraries he was rivaling, I believe, Pisistratus, among his other efforts at gathering records — records to which either age or some curiosity lent a claim to fame — on the recommendation of Demetrius of Phalerum, then the most respected of grammarians, whom he had put in charge, asked the Jews too for their books, their own native writings, which they alone possessed. [6] For it was from among themselves, and always to themselves, that the prophets had spoken, addressing, that is, God's own household nation, by the favor shown their fathers. Hebrews once, who are now Jews; hence Hebrew, too, the letters and the speech. [7] But so that this knowledge should not go unshared, this too the Jews granted Ptolemy: seventy-two translators were made available to him, men whom Menedemus the philosopher too, that champion of providence, looked up to for the harmony of their opinion. Aristeas has confirmed all this for you as well. [8] Thus he left the records laid open in Greek script; today, at the Serapeum, Ptolemy's library exhibits them alongside the Hebrew originals themselves. [9] And the Jews, too, read them publicly and freely. It's a liberty they pay tax for; every Sabbath it's open to all comers. Whoever listens will find God; whoever even makes an effort to understand will be forced to believe as well.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 19 ========

[1] The utmost antiquity claims first authority for these documents of ours; and among you too it is a point of religion to establish credit on the basis of dates.
(The Fulda Fragment)
[F1] The utmost antiquity confers authority upon a body of writings. For the first prophet, Moses—who took the constitution of the world and the budding-forth of the human race, and then, going back in time, the avenging force of the flood that fell on the wickedness of that age, and set them out by prophecy down to his own lifetime, and thereafter, through the record of his own affairs, published images of things to come; in whose hands too the order of the ages, arranged from the beginning, supplied a reckoning of time—Moses is found to be older by about three hundred years than that most ancient figure of yours, Danaus, when he crossed over into Argos. [F2] He comes, in fact, some thousand years before the Trojan war, and hence before Saturn himself. For according to the history of Thallus, in which it is recorded that the Assyrian war and Saturn king of the Titans fought against Jove, it is shown that that war preceded the fall of Troy by three hundred and twenty-two years. Through this same Moses, moreover, that law peculiar to the Jews was sent from God. [F3] After him came many other prophets besides, older still than your literature; for even the last of them to sing either ran a little ahead of, or at the very least kept pace with, the founders of your wisdom—yes, even with your lawgivers. [F4] For Zechariah belonged to the reign of Cyrus and Darius, at which time Thales, the chief of the natural philosophers, when Croesus questioned him, could give no certain answer about the divine—troubled, evidently, by the voices of the prophets. Solon told that same king to look to the end of a long life before calling it happy, no differently than the prophets had spoken. [F5] So it can be seen that both your laws and your studies took their conception from the Law and from divine teaching. Whatever comes first must necessarily be the seed. Hence you hold certain things in common with us, or close to us: [F6] out of wisdom (sophia), the love of it was called philosophy; out of prophecy, its counterfeit was assigned to poetic divination. Men greedy for glory, wanting to make what they found their own, adulterated it. Even fruit, it happens, degenerates from its seed.
[F7] I could still establish the antiquity of the divine writings in many more ways, if a greater authority for believing them did not already stand ready in the strength of their own truth rather than in the annals of their age. For what will plead their case more powerfully than the daily audit of the whole world, when the arrangements of kingdoms, the falls of cities, the ends of nations, the state of the times, all answer just as they were foretold a thousand years before? [F8] From this, then, the hope you laugh at draws its life, and the confidence you call presumption is strengthened. For a proper review of the past is fit ground for arranging confidence about the future: the same voices proclaimed both, the same writings recorded them. [F9] There is one single time in those writings, though it seems divided among us. So everything that remains is already proven to us, because it was foretold together with the things that have been proven, back when they were still future. You too, so far as I know, have your Sibyl—insofar as that title of a true prophetess of the true God has been seized here and there by others who merely seemed to prophesy, just as your Sibyl's name is a lying counterfeit of the truth, exactly like your gods.
[2] So then, every substance, every matter, every origin, order, and vein of any one of your old authors' pens; most nations too, and famous cities, and the hoary memorials of history; the very shapes of letters themselves, the indices and keepers of things; and—I think I still put it too mildly—your very gods themselves, your temples and oracles and rites: the strongbox of a single prophet outstrips them all in age, in which, as it happens, is stored the treasure of the whole Jewish covenant, and from there now of ours as well. [3] If you have at least heard of one Moses, he is contemporary in age with Inachus of Argos; he comes before Danaus—the most ancient figure among you too—by nearly four hundred years, less seven; he goes ahead of the fall of Priam by about a thousand years; I could even say he precedes Homer by more than five hundred, and I have sources to back me up. [4] As for the rest of the prophets, even granting that they come after Moses, is not the very last of them still shown to be no more recent than the earliest of your own sages, lawgivers, and historians?
[5] By what steps these things can be proved is not so much difficult for me to set out as it is enormous—not hard, but, for the moment, long. One would have to sit down over many documents with the finger-reckoning of an accountant; the archives of the most ancient nations must be unlocked—Egyptians, Chaldeans, Phoenicians—[6] and their own countrymen must be summoned, through whom the record has been handed down: Manetho of Egypt together with Berosus of Chaldea, and also Hieromus the Phoenician, king of Tyre; and their followers too—Ptolemy of Mendes, Menander of Ephesus, Demetrius of Phalerum, king Juba, Apion, Thallus, and, whether to confirm or refute the rest, Josephus the Jew, the native champion of Jewish antiquities. [7] The chronologers of the Greeks, too, must be brought in, and it must be shown when things happened and how the chains of dates link up, so that the tallies of the annals may shine through; one must go traveling through the histories and literatures of the whole world. And yet it is as if I have already brought in part of the proof, by sprinkling in the means by which it could be proved. [8] Still, it is better to put this off, either so that we do not skimp on the case by rushing, or wander too far afield by chasing it out in full.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 20 ========

[1] But I have more to offer already, in place of that postponement: the majesty of the Scriptures, in case we are proving them divine not by their antiquity, in case their age is doubted. Nor is there anything slower or more roundabout to learn this from; the evidence is right in front of you, ready to teach it: the world, the age, and how things turn out. [2] Whatever happens was foretold beforehand; whatever is seen was already heard. That the earth swallows cities, that the seas cheat islands out of their place, that wars foreign and civil tear everything to pieces, that kingdoms grind down kingdoms, that famine and plague and local disasters of every kind lay waste, and death, striking in droves, does the same; that the lowly are changed by being raised on high, and the high by being brought low—[3] that justice grows rare, that wrongdoing grows common, that care for every good discipline goes slack, that even the duties of the seasons and the offices of the elements run off course, that the very shape of nature is thrown into confusion by monsters and portents—all this was written down with foreknowledge. While we suffer it, it is being read; while we recognize it, it is being proven true. A fitting testimony to divinity, I should think, is the truth of its own divination. [4] Hence, then, our confidence about the future too rests secure—already proven, in effect, because it was foretold together with the very things that are proven true every day: the same voices sound, the same writings record it, the same spirit drives it, there is one single time for a prophecy that foretells what is still to come; [5] among men, if at all, a distinction gets drawn only as the thing is checked off—first future, then counted as present, and after that as past. What wrong do we do, I ask you, in believing the future too, we who have already learned to believe it by these two steps?

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 21 ========

[1] But since we have already shown that this sect of ours is propped up on the most ancient documents of the Jews — a sect that most people know to be, comparatively speaking, quite new, dating only from the reign of Tiberius, as we ourselves openly admit — perhaps on that very score its standing may be called into question, as though under the shadow of a supremely respected religion, one certainly permitted by law, it were hiding some presumption of its own. [2] Or the objection may run that, apart from our age, we have nothing to do with dietary restrictions, or festival observances, or the very mark cut into the flesh, or even sharing a name with the Jews — all of which would surely be required if we were bound in service to the same god. [3] But by now even the common crowd knows Christ merely as a man, the sort of man the Jews made him out to be — which makes it all the easier for someone to suppose we are worshippers of a mere man. Yet we are not ashamed of Christ, since it is our pleasure to be classed and condemned under his name, nor do we hold any different assumption about God. So a few words about Christ as God are necessary.
[4] Everything, with the Jews, was a matter of grace before God, so long as there was outstanding righteousness and faith among their forefathers. From that came the greatness of their nation and the loftiness of their kingdom and such great prosperity, that they were forewarned, by the very voice of God with which they were instructed, how to earn God's favor and how not to offend him. [5] But how greatly they transgressed, puffed up with confidence in their fathers, turning aside from discipline into profane conduct — even if they themselves would not confess it, their own condition today proves it. Scattered, wandering, exiled from their own soil and their own sky, they roam the world without a king, without a homeland, without even a stranger's right to set foot, in mere greeting, on the land of their fathers. [6] While these holy voices kept warning them of this, the same voices always kept pressing on them one further thing: that in the final laps of the age's racecourse God would choose for himself worshippers far more faithful, out of every nation and people and place, and to these he would transfer his grace — indeed a fuller grace, since they would be capable of a more expansive discipline.
[7] So he came who, it had been foretold by God, was to come to reform and enlighten that discipline — Christ, that son of God. This, then, was the arbiter and teacher of that grace and discipline, the illuminator and guide of the human race, announced as the Son of God — not begotten in a manner that need blush at the name of "son," or at the seed of a father. [8] God the Father did not, to beget him, endure the incest of a sister, or the rape of someone's daughter or another man's wife, turned into scales or horns or feathers, a lover transformed into gold for the Danaids. Those are the divinities of your Jupiter. [9] But the Son of God had no unchaste mother to give him birth; even she who seems to be his mother had not been married. But let me first explain his substance, and then the manner of his birth will be understood.
[10] We have already declared that God fashioned this whole universe by his Word and Reason and Power. Among your own sages too it is agreed that the Logos — that is, speech and reason — appears to be the maker of the universe. This is what Zeno defines as the artificer who shaped all things in their arrangement; the same, he says, is also called fate, and god, and the mind of Jupiter, and the necessity governing all things. Cleanthes gathers all this into "spirit," which he affirms pervades the universe. [11] We too ascribe a distinct substance to that speech and reason and likewise power, through which we have declared God fashioned everything: we call it Spirit — in whom speech is present as he utters, and reason is present as he arranges, and power presides as he accomplishes. This we have learned was brought forth from God, and generated by that bringing-forth, and therefore called Son of God and God, from unity of substance — for God too is spirit. [12] When a ray is projected from the sun, it is a portion from the whole; yet the source stays whole within that beam, since the beam belongs to it, and the substance is not separated but extended — so spirit comes from spirit, and God from God, as light kindled from light. The source-material remains whole and undiminished, even though you draw off from it many offshoots sharing its quality. [13] So too what has proceeded from God is God and God's son, and the two are one; so too spirit from spirit and God from God make a second by way of degree, not of division in status, and it has not departed from the source, but only issued from it. [14] This ray of God, then, as had always been foretold from of old, descended into a certain virgin and, shaped into flesh in her womb, is born a man mixed with God. The flesh, instructed by spirit, is nourished, grows, speaks, teaches, works — and is Christ. Take this account provisionally, since it resembles your own tales, and let us press forward into demonstrating that Christ is genuine, and who among you provided such rival stories in advance to undermine this truth.
[15] The Jews too knew that a Christ was to come — naturally, since it was to them the prophets spoke. Even now they await his coming, and there is no greater clash between us and them than this: that they do not believe he has already come. For two comings of his were foretold: the first, already accomplished, in the lowliness of a human condition; the second, still impending at the close of the age, in the loftiness of manifest divinity. By failing to understand the first, they took the two for one, since they hope for the second more plainly foretold. [16] For it was the due penalty of their sins that they should fail to understand the earlier coming — for they would have believed, had they understood it, and would have attained salvation, had they believed. They themselves read it written that they were mulcted of wisdom and understanding, and of the fruit of eyes and ears.
[17] Since they had assumed him to be a mere man on the strength of his lowliness, it followed that they should judge him a magician on the strength of his power, when by a word he drove demons out of men, restored sight to the blind, cleansed lepers, braced the limbs of the paralyzed, and finally by a word gave the dead back to life; when he made the very elements his servants, stilling storms and walking upon the sea — showing himself to be the Word of God, that is, that primordial, firstborn Logos, attended by power and reason and upheld by spirit, the very one who by a word both made and had made all things. [18] But at his teaching, by which they were refuted, the Jewish teachers and leading men grew so exasperated — chiefly because a huge multitude was turning aside to him — that at last they hauled him before Pontius Pilate, then governing part of Syria on Rome's behalf, and by the sheer violence of their outcry wrung from him the surrender of Jesus to the cross. He himself had foretold that they would do so — and it would have been little enough, had not the prophets foretold it long before as well. [19] And yet, nailed up as he was, his death displayed many marks peculiar to itself. For he dismissed his spirit with a word, of his own will, forestalling the executioner's office. At that very moment day was withdrawn, the sun standing at midpoint of its course. Those who did not know that this too had been foretold concerning Christ took it, naturally, for an eclipse — and yet you have that catastrophe of the world recorded in your own archives. [20] Then the Jews, having taken him down and laid him in a tomb, surrounded it with a large detachment of soldiers, keeping careful watch, lest, since he had foretold that he would rise from death on the third day, his disciples should steal the corpse away and deceive their already-suspicious minds. [21] But behold, on the third day the earth was suddenly shaken, the stone that had sealed the tomb was rolled back, the guard was scattered in terror, and — with no disciples anywhere in sight — nothing was found in the tomb but the wrappings of the buried man. [22] Nonetheless the leading men, whose interest it was both to spread abroad the crime and to keep a people, tributary and enslaved to them, from turning to faith, put it about that he had been stolen away by his disciples. For he did not present himself to the crowd at large, lest the wicked be freed from their error, and so that faith too — reserved for no small reward — might rest on difficulty. [23] But with certain of his disciples, in Galilee, a region of Judea, he spent some forty days, teaching them what they were to teach. Then, having appointed them to the office of preaching throughout the world, he was taken up into heaven wrapped in a surrounding cloud — a far truer tale than the one your people are accustomed to swear to about Romulus, on Proculus's word.
[24] All this concerning Christ, Pilate — himself by now a Christian in his own conscience — reported to Tiberius, then Caesar. And indeed the Caesars too would have believed concerning Christ, had the age not required emperors, or had believers in Christ been able to hold that office themselves. [25] The disciples too, scattered throughout the world, obeyed the command of their divine teacher; and they themselves, having suffered much at the hands of the pursuing Jews — gladly, in confidence of the truth — at last, at Rome, through Nero's savagery, sowed Christian blood.
[26] But we shall show you competent witnesses to Christ — those very beings you worship. It would be a great deal, were I to bring them forward to make you believe Christians, seeing that it is on their account that you refuse to believe Christians. [27] Meanwhile, this is the sequence of our founding; this is the record we have set forth of our sect and our name, together with its author. Let no one now cast reproach on us, let no one suppose otherwise, since it is not lawful for anyone to lie about his own religion. For when a man says he worships something other than what he actually worships, he denies what he worships, transfers his cult and honor to another object, and by that transfer no longer worships what he has denied. [28] We say it, and we say it openly, and even as you tear us and bloody us on the rack we cry it out: "We worship God through Christ." Suppose him a mere man if you like — it is through him and in him that God wills himself to be known and worshipped.
[29] To answer the Jews: they too learned to worship God through a man, Moses. To meet the Greeks: Orpheus at Pieria, Musaeus at Athens, Melampus at Argos, Trophonius in Boeotia, bound men by their initiations. And to turn my eyes to you, the rulers of the nations: Numa Pompilius was a man, and he burdened the Romans with the most laborious superstitions. [30] Well then, let Christ too have been permitted to devise a divinity of his own — not, however, in order to tame savage men, still half-wild, into civility by stunning a multitude with the winning-over of so many divine powers, as Numa did, but rather in order to open the eyes of men already refined and deceived by their very civility, and bring them to the recognition of truth. [31] Ask, then, whether this divinity of Christ is real; if it is the kind whose recognition reforms a man toward the good, it follows that whatever divinity must be renounced as false is that other kind entirely — a divinity found out, above all, by this test: that it lurks under the names and images of dead men, and by certain signs and miracles and oracles manufactures a counterfeit belief in its own godhead.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 22 ========

[1] And so we say there exist certain spiritual substances. Nor is the name new: the philosophers know demons, Socrates himself waiting on the judgment of his own private daimon. And why not? For they themselves say that a demon clung to him from boyhood, one that plainly dissuaded him from the good. [2] All the poets know it too; even the uneducated crowd uses the word constantly as a curse. Indeed, when it invokes Satan, prince of this evil race, by that same word of execration, it does so out of the soul's own inner conscience. Even Plato did not deny angels. As witnesses to both names, even the magicians stand ready. [3] But how, from certain angels who of their own accord became corrupt, an even more corrupt race of demons arose — condemned by God along with the authors of their kind and with the one we have called their prince — the order of it is known from the holy scriptures. [4] For now it will be enough to set out how they operate.
Their business is the overthrow of man; from the very beginning, spiritual malice took its start with a view to man's ruin. So on bodies they inflict both sicknesses and certain bitter accidents, while on the soul they inflict sudden and extraordinary fits of derangement. [5] Their own subtlety and fineness of texture give them access to both substances of man. Spiritual powers can do a great deal, being invisible and imperceptible, and showing themselves rather in their effect than in the act itself — as when some hidden flaw in the breeze cuts down fruit or crops in the blossom, kills them in the bud, blights them in their ripening, as though the air, tried by some blind agency, poured out its own pestilential draughts. [6] By that same obscure contagion, then, the breathing-upon of demons and angels also works corruptions of the mind, with foul or savage frenzies and madnesses, and with lusts accompanied by various delusions — the chief of which is this: that by it they commend those gods of yours to men's captured and hemmed-in minds, so as to secure for themselves their proper fare of smoke and blood offered to images and statues. [7] And what richer pasture is there for it than to turn a man away from thinking of the true divinity by false illusions? How it works these too, I will now explain.
[8] Every spirit is winged: this is true of both angels and demons. So in an instant they are everywhere. The whole world is a single place to them; what happens anywhere they know as easily as they report it. People mistake their swiftness for godhood, since what they truly are stays hidden. So too they sometimes wish to seem the authors of what they announce; and indeed they sometimes are the authors of evils, but never of goods. [9] They also snatch up God's dispositions, once from the mouths of prophets preaching, now from the readings that echo aloud. And from these, gathering up as it were certain allotments of the times, they ape divinity while they steal divination. [10] As for oracles, with what cleverness they temper their ambiguities to fit the outcome, the cases of Croesus and of Pyrrhus show. As for the rest, the Pythian god announced that a tortoise was being boiled together with the flesh of a sheep, in the manner we described above: in an instant he had been at Lydia. Because they inhabit the upper air, keep close to the heavenly bodies, and mingle with the clouds, they gain advance knowledge of the weather's coming preparations, they can promise rains they already feel approaching. [11] They are, plainly, beneficent too, and busy themselves about cures for sickness. For first they do harm, then they prescribe remedies, new or contrary to expectation, to work a marvel; after which they stop doing harm, and are believed to have cured.
[12] Why should I go on setting out the rest of their arts, or even the powers, of spiritual deception — the phantom apparitions of the Castors, water carried in a sieve, a ship towed by a girdle, a beard turned red at a touch — all so that stones might be believed gods, and the true God go unsought?

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 23 ========

[1] Now if magicians can produce phantasms and slander the souls of the dead already, if they crush boys' voices into oracular utterance, if they play off any number of miracles with the sleight-of-hand of showmen, if they even send dreams, holding as they do the standing power of angels and demons once invited in — the very power through which goats and tables have gotten into the fortune-telling business — how much more should that same power, acting on its own initiative and for its own account, strain every nerve to produce, for itself, what it merely supplies for someone else's trade! [2] Or if angels and demons work the same effects as your gods do, then where is the surpassing excellence of that divinity, which must surely be believed superior to every other power? Is it not more plausible to suppose that those who pass themselves off as gods are the very ones producing these effects that make others believed to be gods, rather than that gods exist on a par with angels and demons? [3] You draw the line, I suppose, by location, so that you count as gods those you nowhere else call gods except at their temples — so that a man is judged to rave one way if he flies over sacred towers, another way if he leaps over the neighbor's roof, and one force is pronounced at work in the man who slashes his genitals or his arms, another in the man who cuts his own throat. Compare the outcomes of the madness, and it is one and the same instigation.
[4] But so far this has been argument; now for the demonstration of the fact itself, by which we shall show that the two names denote one and the same quality. Let someone be produced right here, before your very tribunals, whom it is agreed a demon possesses; ordered by any Christian whatever to speak, that spirit will as readily confess itself a demon, telling the truth, as elsewhere it will call itself a god, telling a lie. [5] Let there likewise be brought forward one of those who are supposed to suffer the presence of a god — who, breathing in the fumes from the altars, conceive divinity out of the smell, who are cured by belching, who prophesy while gasping for breath. [6] Let that Heavenly Virgin herself, promiser of rains, let that very Aesculapius, discoverer of medicines — who on other days supplies life to men doomed to die, through his lazy underlings Thanatus and Asclepiodotus — unless they confess themselves demons, not daring to lie to a Christian, right there pour out the blood of that most insolent Christian!
[7] What could be plainer than this experiment? What proof more trustworthy? The plain truth stands out in the open; its own force attends it; there will be no room left for suspicion. You will call it magic, or some trick of that sort, only if your own eyes and ears allow you to. [8] But what objection can be raised against a thing demonstrated with such naked simplicity? If, on one hand, they are truly gods, why do the demons lie about themselves? Is it to do us a favor? Then your divinity is already subject to Christians, and it can hardly be reckoned divinity at all if it is subjected to a human being and, whenever it serves their own ends, to its own rivals. [9] But suppose instead that they are demons or spirits — why then do they elsewhere pretend to be gods? For just as those who are held to be gods would have refused to call themselves demons if they really were gods — to avoid stepping down from their majesty — so too these, whom you know outright to be demons, would not dare elsewhere to pass themselves off as gods, if there really were any gods at all whose names they were borrowing; they would surely fear to abuse the majesty of their unquestionably superior and fearsome betters. [10] So utterly nonexistent is that divinity you cling to, that if it existed, it would neither be claimed by demons in confession nor denied by the gods. Since, then, both sides converge on the same confession — denying that they themselves are gods — recognize that it is one single kind on both sides, namely demons.
[11] Now go looking for your gods; for what you had assumed to be gods you now know to be demons. And by these very same performances of ours, worked through these same gods of yours, you learn not only this — that they are neither gods themselves nor anyone else — but on the spot you also learn who is truly God, and whether he is one, and whether he is the one and only, whom we Christians profess, and whether he must be believed in and worshipped exactly as the faith and discipline of the Christians has laid down. [12] Let them say, right there, who this "Christ with his fable" is — whether a man of ordinary condition, or a magician, or one whose disciples stole him from the tomb after his death, or one who is now finally down among the dead, or rather not one who is in heaven and about to come from there with the shaking of the whole world, with the horror of the earth, with the wailing of everyone — except Christians — namely, God's power and God's Spirit, together with the Word, the Wisdom, and the Reason, and God's own Son. [13] Whatever you laugh at, let them laugh at it with you too; let them deny that Christ will judge every soul from every age, with the body restored; let them say instead — if they dare — that this task before the tribunal has fallen by lot, by the agreement of Plato and the poets, to Minos and Rhadamanthus. [14] Let them at least refute the mark of their own disgrace and condemnation: let them deny that they are unclean spirits — a fact that ought to be obvious enough already from their diet of blood and smoke and the stinking pyres of cattle, and from the utterly filthy tongues of their own prophets; let them deny that, for their wickedness, they stand already condemned in advance to that same day of judgment along with all their worshippers and all their operations.
[15] And yet this whole dominion and power we hold over them rests on the mere naming of Christ and on reminding them of what awaits them, hanging over their heads, from God through the arbiter Christ. Dreading Christ within God and God within Christ, they submit themselves to those who serve God and Christ. [16] So it is that at our touch and our breath, at the mere thought and presentation of that fire, seized with terror, they even leave our bodies at our command, unwilling, in pain, and blushing with shame in your presence. [17] Believe them, when they speak the truth about themselves — you who believe them when they lie! No one lies to his own disgrace, but rather for his own honor. Testimony given against oneself deserves more trust than denial made in one's own favor. [18] These, in the end, are the testimonies your own gods habitually furnish to make Christians; the more we believe them, the more we believe in Christ as God simply by trusting them so completely. They themselves kindle confidence in our scriptures; they themselves build up the assurance of our hope. [19] You worship them, as far as I know, even at the cost of Christian blood. They would hardly want to lose such profitable, such obliging servants as you — nor would they want to be driven out by you Christians someday, if only, under a willing Christian's orders, they were allowed to lie their way out of proving the truth to you.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 24 ========

[1] This whole confession of theirs — by which they deny being gods, and answer that there is no other god besides the One to whom we are bound — is quite sufficient to dispel the charge of injuring, above all, the Roman religion. For if they are certainly not gods, then certainly there is no religion; and if there is no religion, then, since there are certainly no gods, we are certainly not guilty of injuring any religion. [2] On the contrary, the reproach rebounds upon you: worshipping a lie, you not only neglect the genuine worship owed the one real God but press further into assailing it, and so commit the actual offense of genuine impiety.
[3] Now, granting for argument's sake that they are gods, do you not concede, on the strength of common estimation, that there is some one being more sublime and more powerful, a kind of prince of the world of perfect and consummate majesty? For that is how most people arrange their divinity: that supreme command and dominion belong to one, while its various offices are distributed among many — as Plato describes great Jupiter in heaven with his escort, an army of gods and demons alike; and so, he holds, procurators and prefects and governors should likewise be respected together with him. [4] And yet what crime does a man commit who transfers his efforts and his hopes more directly to Caesar, and confesses the title "god" — just like the title "emperor" — in no one but the prince, when it is judged a capital offense even to say or hear that anyone but Caesar holds it? [5] Let one man worship one god, another Jupiter; let one stretch suppliant hands to heaven, another to the altar of Good Faith; let one — if you can believe it — count the clouds while praying, another the coffered ceiling; let one man vow his own soul to his god, another the soul of a goat. [6] For see to it that this too does not add up to a charge of irreligion: taking away freedom of religion and forbidding free choice of divinity, so that I am not permitted to worship whom I wish, but am forced to worship whom I do not wish. No one — not even a mere man — wants to be worshipped by someone unwilling.
[7] And yet even the Egyptians are granted the right to so absurd a superstition, consecrating birds and beasts, and condemning to death anyone who kills one of these gods of theirs. [8] Every province, too, and every city has its own god: Syria has Atargatis, Arabia has Dusares, Noricum has Belenus, Africa has the Heavenly Goddess, Mauretania has its own petty kings as gods. I have named, I believe, the Roman provinces — and yet those are not thereby Roman gods, since they are no more worshipped at Rome than are the gods that even throughout Italy itself are recognized only by local, municipal consecration: Deluentinus belongs to Casinum, Visidianus to Narnia, the people of Asculum keep their Ancharia, Volsinii holds Nortia, Ocriculum claims Valentia, and Sutrium has its Hostia; and the Faliscans, honoring a certain father Curris, granted Juno that same surname. [9] But we alone are refused the right to a religion of our own choosing. We are accused of harming the Romans, yet are denied the name Romans, all because we withhold worship from the Roman god. [10] Good enough, then, that there exists a God shared by all — willing or not, every one of us falls under him. Yet among you it is permitted to worship whatever you please except this one real God — as if he were not, all the more for that, everyone's God, seeing that every one of us belongs to him.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 25 ========

I think I have proved the case adequately about false divinity versus true, having shown how the proof stands — not merely by disputations, not by argument-chains, but by the very testimony of the ones you believe to be gods — so that nothing further remains to be argued in this case. But since the name of Rome specifically comes to mind, I will not pass over the encounter that the presumption of certain people provokes, who say that the Romans, as a reward for the most scrupulous religious devotion, have been raised to such heights that they came to possess the whole world — and indeed that the gods themselves are the reason, since above all others those flourish who above all others do the gods service. So this, apparently, is the wage the Roman gods paid the Roman name for its gratitude: Sterculus and Mutunus and Larentina built the empire! For I can hardly believe that foreign gods would have wished to grant more to an alien nation than to their own — handing over to men across the sea the native soil in which they were born, grew up, were ennobled, and buried.
Let Cybele see to it herself, if she took a fancy to the city of Rome as a memorial of her own Trojan stock — her own homegrown people, after all, once shielded against Achaean arms — if she foresaw passing over to their avengers, knowing that they would subdue Greece, the conqueror of Phrygia. And so, as a grand proof of the majesty she has bestowed on the city, she put on display even in our own age: when Marcus Aurelius was carried off from the republic at Sirmium on the sixteenth day before the Kalends of April, that most holy chief priest of hers, on the ninth day before the same Kalends — the very day he offers his unclean blood by mutilating even his own arms — issued, for the safety of the emperor Marcus, the usual routine orders, though Marcus had already been taken from us! Oh, what sluggish messengers, what drowsy dispatches — through whose fault Cybele did not learn of the emperor's death in time, lest Christians laugh at a goddess like that!
But neither would Jupiter have let his own Crete be shaken by Roman fasces so readily, if he had not forgotten that Idaean cave, the Corybantic bronze clashing, and the delightful smell of his nurse there. Would he not have set that little grave-mound of his above the whole Capitol, so that the land that covers the ashes of Jupiter might rather be preeminent over the whole world? And would Juno really want the Punic city she loved 'above Samos even' to be destroyed — a city loved, at any rate, by the race of Aeneas's descendants? As far as I know:
here were her arms,
here was her chariot; that this should be the seat of empire for the nations,
if the fates should ever allow it, even then she was striving and cherishing it.
That poor 'wife and sister of Jupiter' had no power against the fates! Clearly, 'Jupiter himself stands subject to fate.' And yet the fates did not dedicate so much honor to the Roman name, when it surrendered Carthage to them against Juno's set purpose and vow, as they gave to that thoroughly prostituted whore Larentina!
It is certain that many of your gods have reigned as kings. So then, if they hold the power to bestow empire — when they themselves were reigning, from whom had they received that favor? Whom did Saturn and Jupiter worship? Some Sterculus, I suppose. But the Romans came later, with their own catalogue of little gods. Even those who did not reign were themselves ruled by others who were not yet worshippers of them — since they were not yet even considered gods. So it belongs to others to grant kingship, because kingship was being exercised long before these gods were even carved into shape.
But how empty it is to credit the pinnacle of the Roman name to merits of religious devotion, when religion only advanced after empire — or rather, kingship — had already advanced! Well then, let religion have advanced with events. For even though a superstitious curiosity was conceived under Numa, still no cult of the gods yet consisted, among the Romans, of either statues or temples. It was a frugal religion, poor in ritual, with no Capitols vying to reach the sky, but haphazard altars of turf, vessels still of Samian pottery, a thin wisp of sacrificial smoke, and the god himself nowhere to be found. For not yet at that time had the ingenuity of the Greeks and the Etruscans flooded the city with the fashioning of images. So the Romans were not religious before they were great, and therefore they were not great because they were religious.
But then how were they great through religion, when their greatness sprang from irreligion? For unless I am mistaken, every kingdom or empire is sought through wars and extended through victories. And wars and victories consist chiefly in the capture and destruction of cities. That business cannot happen without injury to gods — the same devastation levels city walls and temples alike, the same slaughter kills citizens and priests without distinction, and the plundering of sacred wealth is no different from the plundering of profane wealth. So the sacrilege of the Romans is as numerous as their trophies, their triumphs over gods as many as their triumphs over nations, their plunder as extensive as the images of captive gods still standing to this day! And so they let themselves be worshipped even by their own enemies, and decree to those enemies 'empire without end' — enemies whose injuries they ought rather to have repaid than their flatteries. But those who feel nothing are harmed with as much impunity as they are worshipped in vain. Certainly it cannot square with belief that men should seem to have grown great by the merits of religion, when, as we have shown, they either grew by injuring religion or injured religion by growing. Even those kingdoms that were melted down into the sum total of the Roman empire were not without their own religions when they lost it.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 26 ========

Watch, then, that it is not rather he who dispenses kingdoms — whose is the world that is ruled, and the man himself who rules — who has ordered the turns of dominion at their appointed times in the age; he who existed before all time and made the age itself the embodiment of the times; he who raises up cities or brings them low, he under whom the human race once existed without any cities at all! Why are you mistaken? Rome, still a wilderness, existed before some of the gods now hers; she reigned before she ever built that vast sprawl of the Capitol. The Babylonians reigned before there were pontiffs, the Medes before the quindecemvirs, the Egyptians before the Salii, the Assyrians before the Luperci, the Amazons before the Vestal Virgins. Finally, if Roman religious rites confer kingdoms, then Judea — the scorner of all those common deities of yours — could never once have reigned, Judea whose God you honored, Romans, for a time with sacrifices, whose temple you honored with gifts, whose nation you honored with treaties; and you would never have come to rule over her, had she not at last offended in the matter of Christ.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 27 ========

This is enough said against the charge of injured divinity, so that we may not seem to injure something we have shown does not exist. So then, when we are challenged to sacrifice, we plant our foot firmly against it — for the sake of our conscience's conviction, by which we are certain to whom such acts of homage actually go, beneath the prostitution of images and the consecration of human names. But some people reckon it madness that, when we could both sacrifice now and walk away unharmed while keeping our resolve intact in our own minds, we prefer stubbornness to safety. You are, of course, giving us advice for our own good to abuse! But we know where such suggestions come from, who is really running this whole show, and how — sometimes by the cunning of persuasion, sometimes by the harshness of cruelty — he works to knock our constancy down: namely, that spirit of demonic and angelic contrivance, who, hostile to us on account of our defection from him and envious on account of God's grace toward us, wages war on your minds against us with hidden inspiration, tuning and priming you toward every perversity of judgment and every iniquity of cruelty in that undertaking we set out on from the beginning.
For although the whole force of demons and spirits of that kind has been made subject to us, still — like worthless slaves — fear sometimes mixes in defiance, and they long to hurt those they otherwise fear; for even fear breathes out hatred, besides which their desperate condition, already under pre-condemnation, counts it a consolation to enjoy their malice in the meantime, while punishment is delayed. And yet, once seized, they are subdued and give way to their true condition, and those they attack from a distance, they beg from close up. And so, when they burst out against us — in whose power they are — like slaves rebelling from their workhouses or prisons or mines or that sort of penal servitude, knowing full well that they are unequal to us and all the more ruined for the attempt, we resist them regardless as if we were equals, and we fight back, standing firm in the very thing they are attacking — and we never triumph over them more completely than when we are condemned for our faithful obstinacy.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 28 ========

But since it would readily seem unjust to force free men against their will to sacrifice — for even otherwise, a willing mind is what is called for in performing a religious rite — surely it would be reckoned absurd if a man were compelled by another to pay honor to gods whom, on his own account, he ought freely to appease, lest it be taken out of his hands, by right of his own freedom, to say: 'I do not want Jupiter's favor; who are you? Let Janus be angry with me from whatever face he likes; what is that to you?' You yourselves have been shaped by these same spirits to compel us to sacrifice for the emperor's safety, and the necessity of compelling has been laid upon you just as the obligation of risking ourselves has been laid upon us.
We have come, then, to the second charge — of insulting the more august majesty — since indeed you keep watch over Caesar with greater dread and shrewder timidity than over Jupiter himself up on Olympus. And rightly so, if you knew it! For which living man is not more powerful than a dead one? But you don't do even this out of reasoned judgment so much as out of regard for present power; and so on this very point you will be caught out as irreligious toward your own gods, since you pay more fear to human rule. In fact, among you, men swear falsely by all the gods together more readily than by the single genius of Caesar alone.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 29 ========

Let it first be established, then, whether those beings to whom sacrifice is offered can in fact grant safety to emperors or to any man at all — and only then charge us with treason, if angels or demons — beings of the substance of the worst possible spirit — actually perform some benefit; if the lost preserve, if the damned set free, if, in short — as your own conscience knows — the dead protect the living! Why, they would surely first protect their own statues and images and shrines, which, I suppose, are only kept safe by the standing guard of Caesar's soldiers! In fact, I think that very material comes from Caesar's mines, and whole temples exist only by Caesar's nod. Indeed, many gods have had Caesar angry at them; and it counts equally for our case if he has also been favorable to some, granting them some generosity or privilege. So how can beings who are in Caesar's power — who indeed belong to him entirely — hold Caesar's safety in their power, so as to seem able to grant what they themselves obtain more easily from Caesar?
Is this, then, how we commit treason against the majesty of the emperors — because we do not subject them to their own creations, because we do not toy with the duty owed to their safety by pretending it rests in hands cast from lead? No — it is you who are the irreligious ones, who go looking for that safety where it is not, who ask it of those who cannot give it, passing over the one in whose power it actually is; and on top of that you make war on those who know how to ask for it — who are even able to obtain it — precisely because they know how to ask!

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 30 ========

For our part, for the safety of the emperors we call upon the eternal God, the true God, the living God — the very God the emperors themselves prefer to have favorable to them above all others. They know who gave them their empire; they know, being men, who gave them their very life-breath as well; they sense that he is the one and only God, in whose power alone they stand, from whom they rank second, after whom they rank first — before all and above all gods. And why not, since they rank above all men, who at any rate are alive and outrank the dead? They reflect on just how far the strength of their own empire reaches, and that is how they come to understand God: against whom they cannot prevail, and it is precisely through him that they know they do prevail over others. Let an emperor go conquer the sky, then, let him haul the sky captive in his triumph, let him post sentries over the sky, let him levy taxes on the sky! He cannot. That is exactly why he is great — because he is less than the sky; for he himself belongs to the one to whom the sky and every created thing belong. The emperor derives his origin from the same source as the man he was before he was emperor; his power comes from the same source as his very breath. Looking up toward that source, we Christians, with hands outstretched because they are innocent of harm, with head bare because we are not ashamed, in short without a prompter because we pray from the heart, are forever praying for all the emperors: for long life for them, for a secure empire, a safe household, strong armies, a faithful senate, an honest people, a quiet world — whatever a man could wish for, and whatever a Caesar could wish for. These things I cannot pray for from anyone else than the one from whom I know I will obtain them, since he alone is the one who grants them, and I am the one to whom the granting is owed — his servant, who alone worships him, who is put to death on account of his discipline, who offers him the rich and greater sacrifice that he himself commanded: a prayer proceeding from a chaste body, from an innocent soul, from a holy spirit — not a few grains of incense worth a penny, the tears of an Arabian tree, not two mere drops of wine, nor the lifeblood drained from some wretched, doomed steer, and after all that filth, a filthy conscience on top of it. It makes me wonder, when your victims are inspected beforehand by the most vice-ridden of priests, why it is the entrails of the animals rather than those of the very men doing the sacrificing that get examined!
And so let the claws dig into us as we stand there stretched out toward God, let the crosses hang us, let the fires lick us, let the swords cut our throats, let the beasts leap on us: the very posture of a praying Christian is a posture ready for any torment. Go on then, good governors, wring the soul out of a man begging God for the emperor! Here — right here — is where the real crime will lie, in the very place where truth and devotion to God are found!

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 31 ========

So are we flattering the emperor now, faking the loyal wishes we've described, just to dodge the charge? A fine trick that would be—except it works to our advantage, since it forces you to let us prove whatever we assert. So whoever supposes we care nothing for the safety of the Caesars, let him examine the words of our God, our scriptures—which we ourselves do not suppress, and which most accidents of fortune carry into the hands of outsiders anyway. Know from them that we are commanded, in a superabundance of good will, to pray even for our enemies and to wish good things upon those who persecute us. And who counts as a fiercer foe and harasser of Christians than precisely those people whose majesty we stand accused in court of insulting? But there is also a specific, explicit command: "Pray," it says, "for kings and for those in authority and power, that you may live tranquil lives." For when the empire is shaken, all its other members are shaken along with it, and so we too, though reckoned outsiders to the general turmoil, are found caught up in it somewhere.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 32 ========

There is another, greater necessity laid on us to pray for the emperors—indeed for the whole condition of the empire and for the affairs of Rome—because we know that the immense catastrophe threatening the entire world, the very last convulsion bringing on its train of horrors, is held back by the continuance of the Roman empire. So we have no wish to experience that day, and by praying for its postponement we are lending our support to Rome's long survival.
But we do swear—not by the geniuses of the Caesars, but by their welfare, which is a thing more august than any genius. Don't you know that "geniuses" is just another word for demons, and from that comes the diminutive term "demonias"? We look up instead to God's judgment resting on the emperors, since it is he who placed them at the head of the nations. We know that whatever is in them is what God willed, and so we too wish safe what God has willed—and we hold that as a great oath indeed. As for demons, that is, geniuses, our custom is to adjure them—to drive them out of men—not to swear by them, as though conferring on them the honor due to divinity.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 33 ========

But why should I say more about the religion and devotion of Christians toward the emperor? Him we cannot help but revere, as the one whom our Lord has chosen—so that I might rightly say: "Caesar belongs to us more than to you, since it is our God who set him in place." And so, because it serves my own interest as much as his, I labor for his welfare all the more—not only because I ask it of the One who is actually able to grant it, and ask it as one who might deserve to obtain it, but also because, by keeping Caesar's majesty subordinate to God, I commend him the more fully to God, to whom alone I subject him; and I subject him, mind you, without making him God's equal. For I will not call the emperor God—either because I do not know how to lie, or because I dare not mock him, or because he himself would not wish to be called God. If he is a man, it is in his own interest to yield to God; let it be enough for him to be called emperor—that too is a great name, one conferred by God. Whoever calls him God denies that he is emperor; unless he is a man, he cannot be emperor. Even in the moment of his triumph, riding that most exalted chariot, he is reminded that he is a man; a voice is whispered behind him: "Look behind you! Remember you are a man!" And in fact he takes all the more delight in the splendor of that glory precisely because the reminder of his human condition is thought necessary for him. He would be the lesser if he were called God then, since it would not be true; he is the greater who is called back from thinking himself one.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 34 ========

Augustus, the very architect of the empire, did not even want to be called "lord"—for that too is a title belonging to God. I will readily call the emperor "lord," but in the ordinary sense, not when I am compelled to use it in place of the word "God." In every other respect I am a free man in relation to him; for I have only one Lord, God almighty and eternal—the same who is his Lord too. He who is father of his country—how can he be its lord? A title of affection is more welcome than one of power; even in families, fathers are called rather than lords.
So far is it from being right that the emperor should be called God, a thing that simply cannot be believed—not merely a most disgraceful flattery, but a ruinous one. It's as though, having one emperor, you were to hail another: wouldn't you provoke the deepest and most implacable resentment in the one you already had—a resentment that even the man you flattered ought to fear on his own behalf? Be religious toward God, if you want him to be favorable to the emperor! Stop believing there is another god, and so stop calling this man "god" too, when it is precisely God he needs! If flattery of this sort, calling a man God, feels no shame at the lie, let it at least fear the ill omen: it has always been a curse to call a Caesar "god" before his apotheosis.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 35 ========

This, then, is why Christians are branded public enemies: because they offer the emperors no empty, lying, or reckless honors, because as men of the true religion they celebrate even the emperors' festivals with conscience rather than with license. A splendid duty, no doubt—hauling hearths and couches out into the public street, feasting block by block, defacing the city with the look of a tavern, turning wine into mud, racing about in mobs to commit assaults, indecencies, and the enticements of lust! Is public joy really expressed through public disgrace? Do such doings really suit the solemn days of princes, when they wouldn't suit any other day? Those who observe self-discipline out of respect for Caesar are the very ones who cast it off for Caesar's sake, and moral license will pass for piety, and religion will be counted an occasion for debauchery! Oh, how justly we deserve condemnation! For we, sober and chaste and upright, refuse to strike out the emperors' vows and rejoicings—why? Because on the festive day we do not shade our doorposts with laurel, nor turn day into night with lamps. It's a fine and honorable thing, on a public holiday's demand, to dress your house up like some brand-new brothel!
Still, I would like—regarding this offense too, this crime of second-degree treason for which we Christians are charged, namely not celebrating the Caesars' solemnities along with you, in the manner that neither modesty nor decency nor chastity would permit, a manner which occasion for pleasure rather than any worthy reasoning has recommended—I would like to demonstrate your own good faith and honesty in the matter, in case it turns out that even here people worse than Christians are caught out, people who don't want us reckoned Romans at all but rather enemies of the Roman princes. I appeal to the Quirites themselves, to the native-born plebs of the seven hills itself: does that Roman tongue of theirs ever spare a Caesar of its own? The Tiber is witness to that, and so are the schools that train the beast-fighters. And if only nature had spread over our breasts some transparent, glass-like covering, so that the hearts within could be seen engraved with the image of whatever new Caesar happens to be presiding over the show, distributing the largess—even at that very hour when the crowd shouts: "May Jupiter add years to your years, out of what remains of ours!" A Christian no more knows how to say such a thing than he knows how to wish for a new Caesar.
"But that's just the mob," you say. Mob though they are, still Romans—and no one clamors more loudly for Christians' blood than the mob does. Certainly the other ranks are religious out of a sense of duty, out of genuine conviction; nothing hostile breathes from the senate itself, from the equestrian order, from the camps, from the very palace! Where did the Cassiuses and the Nigers and the Albinuses come from? Where did those come from who lay siege to Caesar between two laurel groves? Where did those come from who practice their wrestling holds for the purpose of throttling him? Where did those come from who burst armed into the palace, bolder than any of the notorious Sigeriuses and Parthenii of old? From Romans, unless I'm mistaken—that is, from non-Christians. And yet all those very men, right up to the moment their treachery erupted, were offering sacrifices for the emperor's welfare and swearing by his genius, some outwardly, some in secret—and it was Christians, of all people, whom they called public enemies. And as for those who are daily now being exposed as accomplices or cheerleaders of criminal factions—the surviving gleanings left over after the vintage of parricides has been gathered in—the very men who had barricaded their doorposts with the freshest, leafiest laurels, who had wreathed their entryways in mist with the tallest, brightest lamps, who had claimed the forum for themselves with the most luxurious, most extravagant couches—they did this not to celebrate the public rejoicing, but to rehearse their own private wishes ahead of time under cover of someone else's festival, and to inaugurate, as an example and image of their own hope, a changing of the name in their hearts from one prince to another.
That same service is performed by all who go running to astrologers, fortune-tellers, augurs, and magicians to inquire about the emperor's fate—arts which Christians will not employ even for their own private concerns, knowing them to have been handed down by fallen angels and forbidden by God. But who has need to pry into the emperor's welfare, except someone plotting or wishing something against it, or hoping for and awaiting something after it? For one does not consult about loved ones with the same mindset one uses about masters. Anxious curiosity about the blood one shares is one thing; anxious curiosity about one's servitude is quite another.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 36 ========

If this is so, if men who were called Romans are caught out as enemies, why are we—who are supposed to be enemies—denied the name of Romans? We cannot both fail to be Romans and be enemies at once, when it turns out that those actually deemed Romans are the enemies.
So thoroughly does the loyalty and religion and good faith owed to emperors not consist in observances of that sort—duties which even outright hostility can use as a disguise—but rather in that conduct which our divine faith commands us to display, and truly commands, toward everyone without distinction, as it must. For these are not works of a good conscience that we owe to emperors alone. We dispense no good deed on a basis of favored persons, because in doing it we are really providing for ourselves, since we are not angling for praise or reward from a human being, but from God, who exacts and rewards an impartial kindness. We are the same toward emperors as we are toward our neighbors. We are equally barred from wishing harm, doing harm, uttering harm, or even harboring a harmful thought against anyone at all. Whatever is not permitted against the emperor is not permitted against anyone; and what is forbidden against no one is perhaps forbidden all the more against him, since through God he stands so great.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 37 ========

If we are commanded, as we said above, to love our enemies, whom is left for us to hate? Likewise, if we are forbidden to return an injury—so that we don't become equal to the wrongdoer through the very act—whom can we possibly harm? Consider that point for yourselves! How often you rage against Christians, sometimes on your own initiative, sometimes in obedience to the laws! How often, even without your involvement, the mob claims its own right and attacks us with stones and fire! In their very Bacchanalian frenzy they spare not even dead Christians—dragging some, and not even whole, from the rest of the grave, from that asylum which death itself provides, tearing them apart, hacking them to pieces! Yet in all this conspiracy of hatred marked against us, this readiness to face death itself over some injury done to us, what have you ever noted us doing in retaliation—when a single night with a handful of torches could accomplish plenty of revenge, if it were permitted among us to pay back evil with evil? God forbid that a divine religion should be avenged by human fire, or grieve to suffer the very thing by which it is proven!
For if we wanted to act as open enemies rather than as secret avengers, would we lack the strength of numbers and forces? The Moors, no doubt, and the Marcomanni, and the Parthians themselves, or any nation whatsoever, however great, confined to one region and its own borders, are fewer than we, who belong to the whole world. We sprang up only recently, and already we have crowded into every place belonging to you—the cities, the islands, the strongholds, the towns, the meeting-halls, the very army camps themselves, the tribes, the decuries, the palace, the senate, the forum—leaving you nothing but your temples! For what war would we not have been fit, would we not have been eager, even outnumbered as we are, we who are slaughtered so willingly—if it were not that our religion makes it more permissible for us to be killed than to kill?
We could have fought against you, even unarmed and without rebellion, simply by parting ways—by the sheer resentment of separation. For if so vast a multitude of us had torn ourselves away from you to some remote corner of the world, the loss of so many citizens of whatever quality would certainly have covered your dominion with shame—indeed, would have punished it by that very desertion. Beyond doubt you would have been terrified at your own emptiness, at the hush surrounding you and that numbness typical of a lifeless world; you would have had to go searching for subjects to govern; foes would have outnumbered citizens left to you. As it is, your enemies are actually fewer precisely on account of the sheer numbers of Christians—since almost every city, almost every one of its citizens, now belongs to Christ. And yet it pleases you to brand us haters of mankind, when it is really human wrongdoing you should be branding.
But who would rescue you from those hidden enemies that everywhere lay waste to your minds and your health—I mean the assaults of demons—which we drive off from you without fee, without payment? This alone should have been recompense enough for our vengeance: that from then on the vacated dwelling would stand open to unclean spirits! And yet, giving no thought to the return owed for so great a protection, you have chosen to judge us not merely a nuisance to you but positively necessary as enemies—since enemies, plainly, we are, though not of the human race, but rather of human error.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 38 ========

So it should hardly seem a small kindness that this sect is classed among the unlawful factions, when nothing is committed by it of the sort ordinarily feared from unlawful factions. Unless I am mistaken, the whole reason for prohibiting factions rests on a concern for the public peace, so that the state should not be split into parties — a thing that easily disturbs elections, councils, assemblies, public meetings, even the games, through the rival clashings of partisan enthusiasm, once men had even begun to hire out their violence for profit. But we, cold to every burning ambition for glory and rank, have no need of assembly, and nothing is more foreign to us than public affairs. We recognize one commonwealth for all: the world. And we renounce your spectacles to just the degree that we renounce their origins, which we know were conceived in superstition, since we have no part even in the matters that are transacted at them. Nothing about the madness of the circus, the indecency of the theater, the atrocity of the arena, or the vanity of the athletic ground has anything to say to us in word, sight, or hearing. The Epicureans were free to define pleasure's true nature differently — as tranquility of mind. In what way do we offend you, if we set our sights on other pleasures? If in the end we refuse to be entertained, the loss, if there is one, is ours, not yours. But we do disapprove of what pleases you. And our pleasures do not delight you either.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 39 ========

I will now set forth for you myself the business of the Christian faction, so that having refuted its evils I may display its goods. We are a body knit together by shared religious conviction, by oneness of training, and by the tie of a common hope. We come together as an assembly and a congregation, so that, as though mounting a massed assault, we may besiege God with our prayers. Such force is pleasing to God. We pray also for the emperors, for their ministers and those in authority, for the stability of the world, for peace among things, for the delay of the end. We meet to call to mind the divine writings, whenever the character of the present times makes it necessary either to sound a warning or to jog the memory. In any case, we feed our faith with those sacred words, we raise our hope, we fix firm our confidence, and we pack down the discipline of the precepts all the tighter by constant repetition. Here too there is exhortation, reproof, and divine censure. For judgment is passed with great weight, as befits men certain that they stand before God's gaze, and it is a striking foretaste of the coming judgment if anyone has offended so badly as to be barred from sharing in prayer, in assembly, and in every holy exchange. Those who preside are elders of proven character, who have earned that honor not by purchase but by testimony to their worth — for nothing belonging to God is had at a price. Even the fund we keep, if there is such a thing, is not collected as though religion were being bought back for a fee. Each person puts in a modest contribution on a set day each month, or whenever he wishes and only if he wishes and only if he is able — for no one is compelled; the giving is voluntary. Think of it as a deposit of devotion. For the money is spent not on banquets or drinking parties or thankless gorging, but on feeding and burying the poor, on boys and girls who lack property and parents, on aged household slaves as well, and likewise on the shipwrecked, and on any who are in the mines or on islands or in prisons — provided it is for the cause of God's own sect — they become wards of the confession they made. But it is precisely this working of love that brands us in the eyes of some. "Look," they say, "how they love one another" — for they themselves hate one another — "and how ready they are to die for each other" — for they themselves are readier to kill each other.
And that we call one another brothers — that too, I suppose, drives them mad on no other grounds than that among themselves every name for blood-kinship is a sham of affection. But we are your brothers too, by the law of nature, our common mother, even if you are scarcely men, being such poor brothers. Yet how much more rightly are they called brothers, and are brothers, who have come to know one God as Father, who have drunk one Spirit of holiness, who have trembled their way out of the same womb of ignorance into the one light of truth! Perhaps we are reckoned the less legitimate kind of brothers for this: that no tragic drama cries aloud about our brotherhood, or because we are brothers by virtue of a shared estate, which among you generally dissolves brotherhood instead. And so we, who are fused in mind and soul alike, have no hesitation about sharing property. Everything is held in common among us — except our wives. It is exactly there that we dissolve partnership, at the one point where the rest of mankind practices it — men who not only make free with their friends' marriages but most patiently hand over their own wives to friends as well, following, I suppose, that tradition of our ancestors and their great sages: the Greek Socrates, and Cato the Roman, who shared their wives with friends — wives they had married, presumably, for the sake of producing children, elsewhere as well as at home, though whether the women were willing I cannot say. And why, indeed, should they have troubled themselves over a chastity their husbands had so readily given away? What a fine example of Attic wisdom, what Roman gravity — the philosopher turned pimp, and the censor too!
What wonder, then, if so great a love should feast together? For you also slander our modest suppers — aside from branding them criminal — as extravagant besides. It was of us, no doubt, that Diogenes' remark was meant: "The Megarians shop for dinner as though they were to die tomorrow, but build houses as though they would never die." But it is easier to spot a splinter in another's eye than a beam in one's own. The air turns sour with the belching of so many tribes, curias, and voting-districts at their feasts; a creditor becomes a necessity for the Salii about to dine; the accountants must reckon up the costs of Hercules' tithe-feasts and public banquets; for the Apaturia, the Dionysia, the Attic mysteries, a levy of cooks is called up; at the smoke of Serapis's supper the little linen-clad attendants are roused to action — yet it is the Christians' dining room alone that is put under investigation.
Our supper shows by its very name the reason for itself: it is called by the word that among the Greeks means love. Whatever it costs, it is gain to spend in the name of devotion, since by this refreshment we assist the needy — not in the manner in which among you parasites court glory by bartering away their freedom, letting themselves be fattened up amid insults on the strength of their belly's contract, but rather as, before God, greater regard is shown to the humble. If the occasion for the banquet is honorable, judge the rest of its order of conduct by that same cause! Because it belongs to the duty of religion, it admits nothing base, nothing unrestrained. No one reclines at table before prayer to God has first been tasted; food is eaten only as much as hungry people need; drink only as much as is useful to the modest. So they fill themselves as men who remember that even through the night they must worship God; so they converse as men who know the Lord is listening. After water for the hands and the lighting of lamps, each is invited to come forward and sing to God, from the holy scriptures or from his own invention, as he is able; by this it is tested how he has drunk. Prayer likewise closes the banquet. From there people depart not in gangs bent on violence, nor in bands roaming about, nor in outbursts of wantonness, but with that same care for restraint and modesty as those who have dined not so much on supper as on discipline.
This gathering of Christians is deservedly unlawful, if it matches unlawful things, deservedly to be condemned, if anyone complains of it on the same grounds one complains of factions. For whose destruction do we ever assemble? We are the same, gathered, as we are scattered; the same as a whole as each of us singly — harming no one, grieving no one. When the upright, when the good come together, when the pious, when the chaste assemble, it should not be called a faction, but a senate.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 40 ========

But on the contrary, the name of faction ought to be fitted to those who conspire in hatred of the upright and the honest, who cry out together against innocent blood, offering as a shield for their hatred that further absurdity, that they suppose the Christians are the cause of every public calamity, every misfortune of the people. If the Tiber rises to the walls, if the Nile fails to rise over the fields, if the sky stands still, if the earth shakes, if there is famine, if there is plague, at once the cry goes up: "The Christians to the lion!" So many, for one cause?
I ask you, before Tiberius — that is, before the coming of Christ — how many calamities befell the world and its cities! We read that Hiera, Anaphe, Delos, Rhodes, and Cos sank into the sea with many thousands of people. Plato too records that a landmass greater than Asia or Africa was swallowed by the Atlantic sea. And an earthquake swallowed the sea at Corinth, while the pounding surf tore away a stretch of Lucania and left it set apart under the label Sicily. Surely none of this could have come to pass without loss to those dwelling there. But where, then — I will not speak of the Christians who scorn your gods, but where, then, was your own divine company, when a deluge wiped out the entire world, or, as Plato held, merely the plain? For proof that they are gods of a later date lies in the very towns where they came to be born and where they died, the ones they themselves established — for otherwise those cities would not survive to this day, being themselves also the offspring born after that disaster. Not yet had Palestine received the swarm of Jews out of Egypt, nor had the origin of the Christian sect yet settled there, when a rain of fire burned up the neighboring regions, Sodom and Gomorrah. The land still smells of that burning, and if any fruits of trees grow there, they only try to be fruit for the eyes; touched, they crumble to ash. Nor were Etruria and Campania complaining about Christians when fire poured from the sky on Vulsinii and from their own mountain on Pompeii. No one at Rome yet worshiped the true God when Hannibal was measuring out by the bushel the rings stripped from the slain Romans after Cannae. All your gods were being worshiped by everyone when the Senones themselves occupied the Capitol. And it is well that, if any disaster befalls cities, the same calamities strike the temples as strike the walls, so that I may now turn this back on you: these things do not happen because of the gods, since they happen to the gods as well.
The human race has always deserved ill of God — first, because it was ungrateful to him, whom, though it knew him in part, it did not seek out, but instead invented for itself other gods besides to worship; and then, because in failing to seek the master of innocence, the judge and exacter of guilt, it grew hardened into every vice and crime. But if it had sought him, it would have followed that it would come to know the one it sought, and having come to know him, observe him, and having observed him, find him gracious rather than angry. So now too it ought to know that this same God is angry, just as he always was in the past, before men were called Christians. If mankind enjoyed his goods before it fashioned gods for itself, why should it not understand that the evils, too, come from the one whose goods it failed to recognize? Guilt for the ingratitude lies with the very one guilty of it.
And yet, compare the calamities of old — what happens now is lighter, ever since the world received Christians from God. For from that time the innocence of the age has tempered its own injustices, and men have begun to be intercessors before God. Indeed, when the rains suspend summer and winter alike and the year hangs in doubt, you — well fed every day and about to dine again presently — while the baths, the taverns, and the brothels go on doing business, offer rain-sacrifices to Jupiter, proclaim barefoot processions for the people, hunt for the sky at the Capitol, wait for clouds to appear from the ceiling — turned away all the while from God himself and from heaven. But we, dried out with fasting and wrung dry by every abstinence, cut off from every fruit of life, rolling in sackcloth and ashes, batter heaven with our persistent pleading, we touch God — and when we have wrenched mercy from him, the credit goes to Jupiter.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 41 ========

You, then, are the troublemakers of human affairs, you are the guilty ones, always the enticers of public misfortune, among whom God is spurned and statues are worshiped. For surely it is more credible that the one who is neglected should be angry than the ones who are worshiped; or else your gods are grossly unjust, if because of the Christians they injure their own worshipers too, whom they ought instead to set apart from the deserts of the Christians! "This," you say, "rebounds on your own God as well, if he too, on account of his profane worshipers, allows harm to fall on them." Grant first a hearing to his arrangements, and you will not turn the charge back on us. For he who has set a single eternal judgment after the end of the age does not rush the sorting-out that is the very condition of judgment, ahead of the end of the age. In the meantime he is even-handed toward the whole human race, both indulgent and reproving; he willed that both benefits and hardships should be common to the profane and the pious alike, so that by that same shared lot all of us might experience both his gentleness and his severity. Because we have learned this directly from him, we love his gentleness, we fear his severity; you, on the contrary, despise both. And the result is that all the world's calamities fall on us, if at all, as a warning, but on you as a punishment from God. Yet in fact we are not harmed at all — first, because in this present age nothing matters to us except how quickly we may leave it; and further, because if any misfortune is inflicted, it is charged to your account. But even if some of these things graze us too, as being bound up with you, we rejoice all the more, recognizing in them the divine predictions being confirmed, which strengthen our confidence and the faith of our hope. But if, on the other hand, every evil that befalls you comes from the very gods you worship, and comes because of us, why do you persist in worshiping such thankless, such unjust gods, who ought rather to be helping and standing by you in the Christians' suffering?

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 42 ========

But we are also charged with another count of injuries: we are called useless in business. Yet how so, when we live among you, sharing the same food, dress, and furnishings, the same necessities of life? For we are not Brahmins or the gymnosophists of the Indians, forest-dwellers and exiles from life. We hold in mind our debt of gratitude toward God, our Lord and Maker; none of the produce of his handiwork do we spurn — only we practice moderation, so as not to make use of it excessively or amiss. And so we dwell in this age not without the forum, not without the market, not without your baths, shops, workshops, stables, fairs, and all your other commerce. We sail together with you, and serve in the army, and farm the land, and likewise engage in trade; we put our skills and our labor at your service. How we can seem unprofitable to the business we live with and by, I do not know.
But if I do not attend your ceremonies, still, on that very day, I am a man. I do not bathe at dawn on the Saturnalia, so as not to lose both night and day; but I do bathe at a decent and healthy hour, one that keeps my warmth and my blood — after a wash I can turn stiff and pale as a corpse. I do not recline at the public feast of the Liberalia, which is the custom for beast-fighters eating their last meal; but wherever I do dine, I dine on your own provisions. I do not buy a garland for my head — what is it to you how I use flowers I have bought all the same? I think it more pleasing for them to be loose, free, and wandering every way; but even bound into a wreath, we know a wreath by the nose — let those who smell through their hair see to that! I do not gather at the shows; yet whatever is sold there at those gatherings I may, if I want it, take more freely from my own stock. Incense, plainly, we do not buy; if the Arabians complain, let the Sabaeans know that more of their goods, and dearer, are spent burying Christians than fumigating gods.
"Surely," you say, "the temple revenues are dwindling daily; how few now toss in a coin?" Well, we cannot bring aid both to men and to your begging gods, and we do not think it right to give to any but those who ask. In short, let Jupiter hold out his hand and take it — meanwhile our mercy spends more street by street than your religion does temple by temple.
But the rest of the revenues will have Christians to thank, as we pay our debts in good faith, refraining from defrauding another man's property — so that, if the reckoning were taken, how much is lost to the revenues through the fraud and lying of your own professions could easily be calculated, and the complaint about one branch offset by the gain to all the rest.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 43 ========

I will freely confess who, if anyone, could truly complain of the barrenness of Christians. First would be pimps, procurers, brothel water-boys, then assassins, poisoners, magicians, and likewise soothsayers, diviners, astrologers. That we are unprofitable to these is a great profit indeed.
And yet whatever loss to your affairs comes through this sect can be offset by some compensation. How much do you reckon those worth — not to mention, for now, those who drive demons out of you, not to mention those who also offer prayers on your behalf to the true God, since perhaps you do not believe it — simply those from whom you have nothing at all to fear?

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 44 ========

But that damage to the commonwealth, however genuine and however vast, goes unremarked by anyone; that wound to the city no one weighs, when so many just men are spent, so many innocents expended. We call your own records to witness — you who daily preside over the judging of prisoners, who mark off the charge-sheets with your sentences. So many guilty men are listed by you under every heading of crime: which assassin there, which pickpocket, which temple-robber or corrupter or bath-house thief — which of them is ever entered as a Christian too? Or when Christians are brought forward under their own title, is any of them such as those many guilty men? From your own the prison always seethes, from your own the mines always groan, from your own the beasts are always fattened, from your own the sponsors of the games always feed their flocks of the condemned. No one there is a Christian, except simply and only a Christian; or if he is something else besides, then he is no longer a Christian.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 45 ========

We alone, then, are innocent! What wonder, if it must be so? And indeed it must be so. Taught innocence by God, we know it in its perfection, as revealed by a perfect Master, and we keep it faithfully, as commanded by a Judge who cannot be despised. But to you, human estimation has handed down innocence, and human authority likewise has enforced it; hence you have no discipline full enough, or fearsome enough, to match the truth of innocence. A man's wisdom in demonstrating the good is exactly as great as his authority in exacting it — the one as easy to deceive as the other to hold in contempt. And indeed, which is fuller: to say "You shall not kill," or to teach "Do not even grow angry"? Which more perfect: to forbid adultery, or to bar even the solitary lust of the eyes? Which more thorough: to prohibit the wrongdoing, or the evil word as well? Which better equipped: not to permit injury, or not even to allow retaliation for it? And all this while you should know that even your own laws, which seem to advance toward innocence, were borrowed from the divine law as an older pattern. We have already spoken of the age of Moses.
But how great, after all, is the authority of human laws, when a man can both escape them — often by hiding amid his own offenses — and sometimes despise them, offending either by choice or by necessity? Consider too that however brief, the punishment for any crime will still, after all, not outlast death. So too Epicurus cheapens every torment and pain, pronouncing the mild sort contemptible and the great sort not long-lasting. But we, who are marked and scored under God, the watcher of all things, and who look ahead to eternal punishment from him, are rightly the only ones who attain to innocence — both for the fullness of his knowledge, and for the difficulty of hiding, and for the magnitude of the torment, not brief but everlasting — fearing him whom even the one who judges those who fear must himself fear: God, not a proconsul.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 46 ========

We have, I think, held our ground against the charge of every crime that clamors for the blood of Christians; we have laid out our whole condition, and the means by which we can prove it is as we have shown — namely, from the trustworthiness and antiquity of the divine writings, and likewise from the confession of the spiritual powers. Who will dare to refute us — not with rhetorical art, but by the very method by which we have established our proof — out of the truth? But while our truth is being made plain to each person, meanwhile unbelief, even while being won over by the good in this sect, which has already become known through everyday use and dealing, still does not reckon it, after all, a divine business, but rather a kind of philosophy. "The philosophers," it says, "advise and profess these very same things — innocence, justice, patience, sobriety, chastity." Why then, when we are compared to them in point of discipline, are we not likewise granted their equal license and impunity in practicing it? Or why are they too, as our equals, not pressed to the duties which we risk our lives by refusing?  What philosopher, after all, is ever forced to offer sacrifice, or to swear by the emperor's guardian spirit, or to light lamps that burn pointlessly at midday? Quite the opposite — they openly tear down your gods, and in their writings even accuse your superstitions, while you applaud them. Many of them even bark at your rulers while you tolerate it, and are rewarded with statues and salaries more readily than they are condemned to the beasts.
And rightly so; for they are called philosophers, not Christians. This name "philosopher" does not put demons to flight. Why should it, when philosophers, ranking just below the gods, count demons among them? It is Socrates' own word: "If the daemon permits." The same man, even while he had some inkling of truth in denying the gods, still at the very end ordered a cock sacrificed to Aesculapius — out of respect, I suppose, for the god's father, since Apollo had proclaimed Socrates the wisest of all men. O thoughtless Apollo! He bore witness to the wisdom of a man who denied that the gods existed. To whatever degree hatred blazes against the truth, to that same degree whoever presents it in good faith gives offense; while whoever adulterates and courts it wins favor, under that very name, with the persecutors of truth. The mockers and corrupters of truth court it out of hostility, and in courting it corrupt it, like men chasing glory; while Christians, of necessity, both seek it out and present it whole, as men who care for their own salvation.
So then, we are equal to them neither in knowledge nor in discipline, as you suppose. For what did Thales, that prince of the natural philosophers, ever report back with certainty to Croesus, who was asking him about the divine, after repeatedly begging for more time to think it over? Any Christian craftsman finds God and shows him, and from there assigns, as an actual fact, everything that is sought concerning God — though Plato affirms that the maker of the universe is not easily found, and once found, is hard to declare to everyone. But if we are challenged on chastity, I read out part of the Athenian sentence pronounced against Socrates as a corrupter of youths. A Christian does not even change to the feminine sex. I know too of Phryne the courtesan, warming to the ardor of Diogenes as he reclined above her; I hear too that a certain Speusippus of Plato's school died in adultery. A Christian is born male for his wife alone. Democritus blinded himself, because he could not look at women without desire, and was pained if he failed to have one, and so professes to cure his lack of self-control by self-mutilation. But the Christian, with his eyes intact, does not see women at all; in his mind he is blind to lust. If I am to defend our honesty — look, Diogenes with his muddy feet tramples Plato's proud couches, out of a pride all his own; a Christian is not even proud toward the poor man. If I am to contend on modesty — look, Pythagoras among the Thurians, Zeno among the Prieneans, both reach for tyranny; the Christian does not even reach for a town magistracy. If I am to engage on equanimity — Lycurgus chose to starve himself to death because the Spartans had amended his laws; the Christian, even when condemned, gives thanks. If I compare good faith — Anaxagoras denied his hosts a deposit entrusted to him; the Christian is called faithful even by outsiders. If I am to stand on plain dealing — Aristotle drove his own intimate friend Hermias from his post in disgrace; a Christian does not even harm his enemy. The same Aristotle flatters Alexander as shamefully, angling to rule him rather than guide him, as Plato let himself be peddled to Dionysius for the sake of his belly. Aristippus, under a great show of gravity, plays the wanton in his purple robe; Ichthyas is killed while plotting treachery against his own city. No Christian has ever attempted anything like this against his own people, for all the atrocities laid bare on our side.
But someone will say that even some of our own fall away from the rule of discipline. Even so, they cease to be counted Christians among us; whereas those philosophers, with such deeds to their name, go right on holding the name and honor of wisdom.
So then, what is alike between a philosopher and a Christian, a disciple of Greece and a disciple of heaven, a trafficker in reputation and a trafficker in life, a worker in words and a worker in deeds, a builder of things and a destroyer of them, a friend of error and an enemy of it, one who adulterates the truth and one who restores and expresses it, its thief and its guardian?

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 47 ========

Truth is older than everything, unless I am mistaken — and this too works in my favor: the antiquity that stands behind our divine literature, from which one may easily believe that it was the treasury from which every later wisdom drew. And if I were not already husbanding the bulk of this volume, I would run out this proof as well. What poet, what sophist, has not drunk deep from the fountain of the prophets? It was from there that the philosophers watered the thirst of their own wits, so that what they hold from us we now match against them. That is why, I think, philosophy itself was even banished by some peoples — I mean by the Thebans, the Spartans, the Argives. While men reaching for what is ours — driven, as we have said, by love of fame and a mere lust for eloquence — stumbled on something in the holy scriptures as they leafed through them out of sheer curiosity, they turned it to their own works, not quite believing it divine enough to keep them from tampering with it, and not quite understanding it, since even then it lay under a cloud, obscured even to the Jews themselves, to whom it properly belonged. And even where some simplicity of truth remained, human fussiness, all the more scornful of belief, wavered, and in the process muddled even the certainty it had found into uncertainty. For once they had found God, they did not go on to argue him as they had found him, but debated instead his quality, his nature, his dwelling place. Some assert he is incorporeal, others corporeal — so both the Platonists and the Stoics; some build him out of atoms, others out of numbers, as Epicurus and Pythagoras did; another out of fire, as it seemed to Heraclitus; and the Platonists make him one who cares for things, while the Epicureans, on the contrary, make him idle, unoccupied, and — if I may put it so — no one at all as far as human affairs go. The Stoics place him outside the world, turning this mass from without like a potter; the Platonists place him within the world, remaining inside what he governs, after the manner of a helmsman. So too about the world itself they differ, whether it was born or unborn, whether it will pass away or endure; so too about the state of the soul, which some claim is divine and eternal, others dissoluble — each man delivering or reshaping his verdict as he happens to feel.
Nor is it any wonder that the old document has been twisted by the wits of philosophers, since from that same seed certain men have adulterated even this newer plantation of ours to fit philosophical opinions, splitting off from the one road many crooked and untraceable byways. I mention this so that no one, noting the diversity within this sect of ours, should think we thereby put ourselves on a level with the philosophers, and judge the truth by the variety of its defenders. But we lay down, promptly and plainly, this rule against our own counterfeiters: that the standard of truth is the one that comes down from Christ, transmitted through his own companions — men whom these various latter-day commentators will be shown to postdate by no small margin.
Everything set up against the truth is built out of truth itself, the spirits of error working this rivalry. By them these counterfeits of the wholesome teaching have been smuggled in; by them certain fables too have been planted, meant either to weaken belief in the truth by resembling it, or rather to win credit for themselves at truth's expense — so that a man might refuse to believe the Christians precisely because he does not believe the poets or philosophers either, or, worse, might think the poets and philosophers all the more believable precisely because they are not Christians. And so we are laughed at for preaching that God will judge. Yet the poets and philosophers set up a tribunal in the underworld too, just the same. And if we threaten Gehenna — a hidden fire, a treasury of subterranean punishment — we are laughed down all the harder, though the dead have their own Pyriphlegethon, a river no different. And if we speak of Paradise, a place of divine delight set aside to receive the spirits of the saints, fenced off by a wall of fiery zone from the knowledge of the common world, the Elysian Fields got there first and staked the claim to belief.
Where, I ask you, did all this come from — so exactly matching what the philosophers and poets say? From nowhere but our own sacred writings. If it comes from our sacred writings, as coming from the earlier source, then ours are the more trustworthy and the more to be believed, since even their copies find credit. But if it comes from their own private notions, then our sacred writings will be taken for copies of the later material — which the very shape of things will not allow, for a shadow never precedes the body, nor an image the truth.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 48 ========

Come now — if some philosopher were to declare, as Laberius says on the authority of Pythagoras, that a man is made from a mule, a snake from a woman — a mule's soul, that is, ending up human, a woman's ending up serpentine — and twisted every argument by sheer force of eloquence to fit that opinion, would he not win agreement and plant belief? Would not some be persuaded on that basis to abstain even from meat, for fear of perhaps dining on beef carved from some great-grandfather of theirs? But let a Christian promise that a man will return as a man, and Gaius himself come back as Gaius, and he will be pelted with stones — will not even be granted so much as a public hearing.
If there is some rational principle governing the recycling of human souls into bodies, why should they not go back into the same substance, since being restored means precisely this: being what one already was? As things stand they are no longer what they were, because becoming what they had not been required them, as a prior step, to leave off being what they once had been. It would take a great deal of idle time, too, if we wanted to indulge this line of fancy — working out who is supposed to be turned into which beast. But it suits our own case far better to propose that it is much more worthy of belief that a man will return from a man, whoever it may be in place of whoever it may be, so long as it is a man — so that the same quality of soul is restored to the same condition, even if not to the same outward shape. And certainly, since the whole rationale of restoration is aimed at judgment, the very same person who existed before must necessarily be presented again, so that he may render to God an account, good or bad, of his deserts. That is why the bodies too will be brought back on stage: the soul alone, without the stable matter that is flesh, can suffer nothing, and whatever the soul must suffer entirely at God's judgment, it earned not apart from the flesh but within the flesh, inside which it did everything it did.
"But how," you ask, "can dissolved matter be brought back?" Consider yourself, O man, and you will find the proof of the matter close at hand. Think back on what you were before you existed. Nothing, of course — for you would remember it, had you been something. You, in other words, amounted to nothing before you began to exist, and will return to that identical nothing once your existence ends — why should you not be able to exist again out of nothing, by the will of that same maker who willed you to exist out of nothing in the first place? What novelty would befall you? You who did not exist, came to exist; when again you will not exist, you will come to exist once more. Give me, if you can, the explanation of how you were made, and only then go asking how you will be made again! And in any case it will certainly be easier for you to become again what you once were, since it was no harder for you to become in the first place what you had never once been.
Will anyone doubt God's power, who established this vast body of the world out of what did not exist, no less than out of the death of vacancy and emptiness — a world animated by the spirit that gives life to every soul — a world itself marked and sealed as an example of human resurrection, held up as testimony to you? Light, though slain each day, shines out again, and darkness in its turn withdraws to make way in the same recurring cycle; the stars, though dead, come back to life; the seasons begin again exactly where they end; fruits are consumed and return; seeds, certainly, rise more fruitfully only once they have first rotted and been dissolved; everything is preserved by perishing, everything is reshaped out of ruin. Will you, O man — so great a name, if only you understood yourself, as you might even learn from the Pythian inscription: lord of all things that die and rise again — will you die only in order to be lost for good? Wherever you are dissolved, whatever matter destroys you, swallows you, wears you away, spends you down to nothing — it will give you back. That very nothing belongs to him to whom the whole belongs.
"So," you say, "we must die forever and rise forever?" If the Lord of all things had ordained it so, you would find yourself living out the law of your condition whether you liked it or not. But as it is, he has ordained nothing other than what he has announced. The same rational principle that assembled the universe out of diversity, so that all things should hold together in unity out of rival substances — out of void and solid, out of animate and inanimate, out of comprehensible and incomprehensible, out of light and darkness, out of life itself and death — that same principle has likewise woven the ages together under a fixed and distinct arrangement, so that this first age, the one we inhabit from the beginning of things, flows down through temporal duration toward an end, while the age to come, the one we await, is extended into infinite eternity.
When, then, the end and boundary arrives — the dividing line that stands between — so that even the very shape of this world is transformed, itself just as temporal, having been stretched like a curtain in front of that eternal arrangement, then the whole human race will be restored, to have reckoned against it whatever good or evil it earned in this present age, and from that point suspended in the immense, unbroken span of eternity. And so there will be no more death, no more resurrection after resurrection — we shall be the same people we are now, no others afterward: worshippers of God, forever in God's presence, clothed over with the very substance of eternity that is properly their own; while the profane, and those not wholly given to God, will be in a punishment equally unbroken, fed by fire — a fire that draws its own ongoing supply of incorruptibility from its own divine nature. Even the philosophers have recognized this distinction between the hidden fire and the common one. So it is a very different fire that serves human use from the one that appears at God's judgment, whether it flashes down as lightning from the sky or belches up from the earth through the peaks of mountains — for it does not consume what it burns; rather, in spending itself, it renews itself. That is why mountains go on burning forever and still endure, and why whatever is struck from the sky survives, so that no fire ever reduces it to ash. And this will stand as testimony of the eternal fire, this the model of an unbroken judgment that feeds its own punishment: mountains burn, and last. How much more the guilty, the enemies of God?

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 49 ========

These are the things that, in us alone, get called presumptions, while in the philosophers and poets they pass for the height of learning and the mark of a brilliant mind. They are wise men, we are fools; they deserve honor, we deserve mockery — worse, punishment on top of it. Suppose, for argument's sake, that what we hold to be true is false, and rightly counted mere presumption — it is nevertheless necessary; foolish, yet useful, seeing that those who believe it are thereby compelled to become better people, out of fear of eternal punishment and hope of eternal refreshment. So it does not pay to call false, or to count as foolish, what it pays to have presumed true. Nothing that does good may fairly be condemned on any pretext at all. So the very presumption at work in you is this: to condemn what is useful. And on that showing it cannot be foolish either. Certainly, even granting it false and foolish, it harms no one. Plenty of other beliefs are just as fanciful and legendary, and you impose no penalties for them; unaccused, unpunished, treated as harmless. In cases of that kind, if anything at all is warranted, it is a verdict of ridicule, not swords and fires and crosses and beasts.
At this outrageous cruelty, it is not only the blind mob that exults and gloats, but even some of you, who court the mob's favor through this very injustice, actually boast of it — as if it were not entirely up to us how much power you have over us. Certainly, if I choose, I am a Christian. Only then will you be able to condemn me — if I choose to be condemned. But since you can do nothing to me unless I choose to let you, whatever power you have belongs to my will, not to your authority. So the mob, too, rejoices in vain over our torment. For the joy is really ours, the very joy the mob claims for itself — since we would rather be condemned than fall away from God. It is our persecutors, who hate us, who ought to grieve instead of rejoicing, now that we have gotten exactly what we chose.

======== Apologeticum — Chapter 50 ========

"So," you say, "why do you complain that we persecute you, if you want to suffer, since you ought to love the very people through whom you get what you want?" We certainly do want to suffer -- but the way a soldier wants war. No one, of course, suffers gladly, since it necessarily means fear and danger; and yet he fights with all his strength, and when he wins, the very man who grumbled about the battle rejoices in it, because he gains both glory and spoils. For us the battle is being summoned before the tribunals, to fight there for the truth under threat of our lives. And the victory is winning the very thing you fought for. That victory carries both the glory of pleasing God and the spoils of living forever. But, you say, we are wrapped in flames and killed. Certainly -- once we have won. So we conquer when we are cut down; in the end we escape precisely when we are wrapped up for burning. You may call us now "faggot-men" and "stake-men," because we are bound to a half-axle stake and burned in a wreath of brushwood -- but this is the very dress of our victory, this is our palm-embroidered robe, this the chariot in which we ride in triumph.
So naturally we do not please the losing side -- that is exactly why we are reckoned desperate men, lost causes. But this "desperation" and "ruin" of yours is precisely what, in the matter of glory and fame, raises the standard of courage. Mucius of his own accord laid his right hand down upon the burning altar: what loftiness of spirit! Empedocles gave his whole self to the fires of Etna: what vigor of mind! Some foundress of Carthage gave herself to the pyre rather than to a second marriage: what a proclamation of chastity! Regulus, so that one man should not live in place of many enemy captives, endured crucifixion over his whole body: what a brave man, a victor even in captivity! When Anaxarchus was being pounded to death in a mortar like grain, he said, "Pound, pound away at Anaxarchus's husk -- you are not pounding Anaxarchus!" What greatness of soul in a philosopher, joking even about his own death! I pass over those who bargained for praise by their own sword or some gentler kind of death. And look -- you yourselves crown contests of torture with garlands! An Attic prostitute, when her torturer had at last worn himself out, at last bit through her own tongue and hurled it straight into that furious despot's face, so that even had she wished, once beaten, to betray her fellow plotters, she would already have flung away, along with it, the very voice needed to name them. Zeno of Elea, asked by Dionysius what philosophy actually delivered, answered, "Contempt of death," and then, unmoved under the tyrant's whips, sealed his own verdict all the way to death. Indeed the whips of the Spartans, made all the sharper under the very eyes of encouraging relatives, confer as much honor on the household's endurance as blood they draw.
O permitted glory -- permitted because it is merely human! -- in which neither reckless presumption nor desperate persuasion counts as contempt of death and every kind of atrocity, in which one is allowed to suffer for country, for empire, for friendship as much as it is forbidden to suffer for God! And yet for all those people you cast statues, inscribe portraits, carve their titles for eternity. As far as monuments can manage it, you yourselves in a sense grant even the dead a kind of resurrection. Yet the man who hopes for a true resurrection from the true God, if he suffers for God -- he is insane!
Well then, go on with it, good governors -- much better in the eyes of the people if you sacrifice Christians to them -- torture us, rack us, condemn us, grind us down: your injustice is the proof of our innocence. That is why God allows us to suffer these things. Indeed, just recently, by condemning a Christian woman to the pimp rather than to the lion, you yourselves confessed that among us a stain on chastity is reckoned more atrocious than any punishment, any death. And yet nothing is gained by any refinement of your cruelty; it is rather a recruiting-lure for our sect. The more you mow us down, the more we become: the blood of Christians is seed. Many among you exhort people to bear pain and death -- Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations, Seneca in On Chance Happenings, Diogenes, Pyrrho, Callinicus -- and yet their words never win as many disciples as Christians win by teaching through deeds. That very obstinacy you reproach us with is itself the teacher. For who is not shaken by the sight of it into asking what lies inside the thing? And who, once he has inquired, does not draw near; and once he has drawn near, does not long to suffer, so as to buy up the whole grace of God, to secure full pardon from him by paying with his own blood? For all sins are forgiven in exchange for that. That is why we give thanks on the spot for your very sentences. Such is the rivalry between the divine order and the human: when you condemn us, God absolves us.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 1 ========

Servants of God, learn -- you who are just now approaching God, and you who have already testified and confessed that you have approached him, review it again -- what the standing of faith is, what the ground of truth, what the rule of discipline is that, among the other errors of the world, also strips away the pleasures of the public shows; so that no one sins either through ignorance or through pretending not to know. For the force of pleasure is so great that it can stretch ignorance into an excuse and corrupt a guilty conscience into willful blindness. On both counts someone may still perhaps be charmed by the opinions of the pagans, who habitually argue against us on this point like this: that nothing stands in the way of religion, in the mind and conscience, in taking such outward comforts for the eyes or ears; and that God is not truly offended by a man's enjoyment, provided that, with one's fear of God and one's own honor kept intact, it is no crime to enjoy something in its proper time and proper place. But it is exactly this that we are now most concerned to demonstrate -- how such things do not fit true religion and true obedience to the true God. There are those who reckon that Christians, a breed ready for death, are trained toward this obstinacy by renouncing pleasures, so that, having cut the moorings, as it were, of life, they may more easily hold life cheap, and not miss what they have already made superfluous to themselves -- so that this is thought to be defined by this kind of calculation and human foresight, not by divine command. Because, evidently, it would be a shame even for men who persevere amid such great pleasures to die for the Lord! And yet, even if that were so, obedience was still owed to a discipline of such obstinacy, backed by so fitting a plan.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 2 ========

Now indeed there is no one who does not also put forward this: that all things were established by God and assigned to man, as we ourselves preach, and that of course all things are good, as befits a good author; that among these must be counted all the things out of which the shows are put together -- the horse, for example, and the lion, and bodily strength, and sweetness of voice; and so none of it can seem foreign or hostile to God, since it is agreed to belong to his own creation, nor ought it to be forbidden to worshippers of God, since what is not hostile to him is likewise not foreign to him. And plainly the very buildings of the places themselves -- since the stone, the rubble, the marble, the columns are God's property, he who gave these things as the raw material of the earth -- and indeed the very actions performed there take place under God's own sky.
How wise an arguer human ignorance seems to itself, especially when it is afraid of losing some such thing from the joys and fruits of this world! Indeed you will find more people kept away from this sect by the danger to their pleasures than by the danger to their lives. For even the fool does not fear death, as something owed; and even the wise man does not despise pleasure, as something given -- since for fool and wise man alike there is no reason for living except pleasure. No one denies -- because no one fails to know, since nature herself freely suggests it -- that God is the founder of the universe, and that this universe is as good as it is entrusted to man. But because they do not know God thoroughly, only by natural right and not also by intimate acquaintance -- from a distance, not up close -- they are bound to be ignorant of how he commands or forbids the administration of what he has established, and at the same time of what rival power there is, working against him to corrupt the uses of his divine creation to its own ends -- since you cannot know the will of one you barely know, nor his adversary. So it does not suffice to consider only him by whom all things were founded; one must weigh too him by whom they were twisted awry. Only so will it stand plain to what end things were founded, once it stands plain to what end they were not. Corruption and soundness lie worlds apart, precisely because a founder and a counterfeiter lie worlds apart.
As for the rest, every species of evil, which even the pagans forbid and condemn as beyond doubt, is made up out of the works of God. You see murder committed by iron, by poison, by magic bindings: iron is as much God's property as the herbs are, as the angels are. Did its maker, then, provide it for the purpose of killing a man? Yet by a single, primary command he does away with every kind of murder: "You shall not kill." Likewise gold, bronze, silver, ivory, wood, and whatever material is sought out for fashioning idols -- who put these things in the world except God, the world's author? Did he do so, then, so that they might be worshipped against him? Yet idolatry is the supreme offense against him. What belongs to God that is not what offends God? But when it offends, it has ceased to be God's, and because it has ceased to be his, it offends. Man himself, the author of every disgraceful act, is not only God's work but also his image -- and yet in both body and spirit he has deserted his own founder. For we did not receive eyes for lust, a tongue for slander, ears as a receptacle for slander, a gullet for the sin of gluttony, a belly to be gluttony's accomplice, genitals for excesses of indecency, hands for violence, feet for a wandering life -- nor was the spirit implanted in the body to become a hatchery of plots, of frauds, of injustices. I think not. For if God, the exacter of innocence, hates every malice and even mere malice merely thought up, then beyond doubt he did not establish, for the purpose of any such outcome, whatever he condemns, even though those very deeds are carried out by means of the things he created -- since this is the whole account of the condemnation: the perverse administration, by the creatures, of what was created.
We, then, who having come to know the Lord have also caught sight of his rival, who having discovered the founder have at the same time detected the forger, ought neither to wonder nor to doubt: since that very power of the forging and rivaling angel, from the beginning, cast man himself -- the work and image of God, owner of the whole universe -- down from his integrity, it likewise turned the whole of his substance, established in integrity together with him, into perversity together with him, against its own founder -- so that, in the very thing which it grieved to see granted to man and not to itself, it might both make man guilty before God and establish its own dominion.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 3 ========

Equipped with this understanding against the opinion of the pagans, let us turn instead to the objections raised by our own people. For among us there are some, whether overly simple or overly cautious in belief, who demand scriptural authority for this renunciation of the shows, and leaves itself unsettled, on the ground that this abstinence is not explicitly and by name laid down for the servants of God. Indeed we nowhere find it as plainly stated as this: "You shall not kill, you shall not worship an idol, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not commit fraud" -- laid down so expressly as: "You shall not go to the circus, you shall not watch the theater, the games, the arena." But we do find that the first verse of David bears on this very matter too: "Blessed is the man," he says, "who has not entered the assembly of the ungodly, and has not taken his stand on the path of the sinful, nor settled in the seat of plague." For even though he seems to have declared that man blessed because he did not join the council and the sitting of Jews plotting to have the Lord killed, still divine Scripture always extends widely, wherever, in keeping with the sense of the present matter, discipline too is reinforced by it -- so that here too this verse is not foreign to the prohibition of the shows. For if he called just a handful of Jews then a council of the wicked, how much more so so vast a gathering of the pagan populace? Are the pagans somehow less ungodly, less sinful, lesser foes of Christ than the Jews were on that day? What of this, too -- the rest fits as well: for at the shows people sit in a chair, and stand in a way -- they even call the passages and dividers of the seating-belts "ways," and the paths through the crowd on the slope; and "chair" too is the very name for the curved rows of seating. So, turning it about: "unhappy the man who has entered any assembly whatever of the ungodly, and has taken his stand on any path whatever of the sinful, and has settled in any seat whatever of plague." Let us understand it as said generally, when something else, once said specifically, admits also of a general interpretation -- for some things pronounced specifically carry a general sense too. When God warns or rebukes the Israelites on a point of discipline, he certainly means it for everyone; when he threatens Egypt and Ethiopia with destruction, he certainly passes judgment in advance on every sinning nation. Thus every sinning nation is "Egypt" and "Ethiopia," moving from the particular case to the general kind -- just as, conversely, every show is a "council of the wicked," moving from the general kind to the particular case.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 4 ========

[1] So that no one thinks we are splitting hairs, let me turn to the primary authority: the wording of our own seal. When we go down into the water and make our Christian profession using the wording its rule prescribes, we declare with our own mouth that we have renounced the devil, together with his pomp and his angelic host. [2] Now what will be found to be the chief and principal thing under which that devil, with his pomp and his angelic host, is reckoned, if not idolatry? From idolatry comes every unclean and wicked spirit, so to speak — but no need to dwell on that further. [3] If, then, it turns out that the whole apparatus of the spectacles rests on idolatry, it will stand beyond doubt as settled in advance that the testimony of our renunciation at the font extends to the spectacles too, since they are made over — mortgaged, so to speak — to the devil, together with his pomp and his angelic host, precisely through idolatry. [4] We will trace the origins of each show, in what cradle each grew up in the world; then their titles, under which names each is known; then their trappings, by what superstitions they are furnished; then their venues, under whose patronage they are said to belong; then their arts, to what authors they are credited. If any of this turns out to have nothing to do with an idol, then it will have nothing to do with idolatry, and nothing to do with our renunciation.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 5 ========

[1] As for the origins, being rather obscure and unknown to most of our own people, there was nowhere deeper to dig than the records of pagan literature. [2] Many authors exist who have published treatises on this subject. From them the origin of the games is handed down as follows: Timaeus reports that the Lydians, migrating from Asia, settled in Etruria under the leadership of Tyrrhenus, who had yielded the kingship to his brother after a contest for the throne. So in Etruria, among their other superstitious rites, they also instituted spectacles, under the name of religion. From there the Romans borrowed the imported performers, and along with them the name, so that they were called "ludii" — players — after the Lydians. [3] But even though Varro derives "ludii" from "ludus," that is, from play — just as the Luperci too were called "ludii" because they run about at play — he nevertheless reckons that play to belong to the young, tied to feast days, temples, and rites. [4] Never mind the origin of the word now, since the case turns on idolatry, not etymology. For even when the games were indiscriminately called the Liberalia, they plainly rang with the honor of father Liber. They were first held for Liber by country folk in gratitude for the benefit they credit to him, the discovery of wine. [5] From there came the games called the Consualia, which originally honored Neptune — for they also call him Consus. Then Romulus named the Equirria for the horses, in honor of Mars; though some also credit Romulus with the Consualia, claiming he dedicated them to the god Consus — that is, as they would have it, the god of counsel, whose counsel it was that devised for his soldiers the rape of the Sabine virgins as a means to marriage. [6] A fine piece of counsel indeed — and even now, among the Romans themselves, reckoned just and lawful, not to say so before God! This too counts toward the stain on the origin: do not imagine something good whose beginning was taken from evil — from shamelessness, from violence, from hatred, from a fratricide as founder, from the son of Mars. [7] And even now an altar to Consus lies buried underground beside the very first post where the chariots turn in the Circus, bearing an inscription of this sort: CONSUS BY COUNSEL, MARS BY WAR, THE LARES BY... POWERFUL. There the public priests offer sacrifice on the Nones of July; and on the twelfth day before September's Kalends, the flamen of Quirinus together with the Vestal virgins performs the same rite. [8] Then that same Romulus instituted games for Jupiter Feretrius on the Tarpeian hill — called, Piso reports, the Tarpeian and Capitoline games; after him Numa Pompilius held games for Mars and for Robigo (for they even invented a goddess of blight); then Tullus Hostilius, then Ancus Marcius, and the rest. Which kings instituted games, in what order, and for which idols, is set down in Suetonius Tranquillus, or in the source from which Tranquillus took it. But this will be enough to establish the charge of idolatry against the origin of the games.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 6 ========

[1] To this testimony of antiquity, the age that followed adds its own confirmation, still today displaying in its very titles the shape of that origin — titles by which it is marked which idol, which superstition, each kind of game is registered to. [2] The Megalensian and Apollinarian games, likewise the Cerealian, the Neptunalia, the Latiar, and the Floralia, are celebrated in the name of the community at large; the rest of the games take their superstitious grounds from royal birthdays and anniversaries, from public triumphs, and from municipal festivals. [3] Among these, private funeral endowments also pay their honors to the memory of individuals — this too in keeping with the ancient pattern of the institution. For from the very beginning games were reckoned under two heads: sacred games and funeral games — that is, games for the gods of the nations, and games for the dead. [4] But as far as idolatry goes, it makes no difference to us under what name or title, so long as it reaches the same spirits we have renounced. Let them hold their games for the dead, let them hold them for their gods — it is all one, whether done for their dead or for their gods; both sides fall under a single condition, a single idolatry, and against that idolatry stands our single renunciation.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 7 ========

[1] The origin of games of both kinds is common, their titles are common, springing as they do from common causes; it follows of necessity that their trappings too are common in the general charge of idolatry, their common begetter. [2] But the circus games have a rather more processional staging, from which they properly take their name: a procession goes ahead, proving what it is in itself by the parade of statues, the train of images, the chariots, the ceremonial cars, the litters, the thrones, the crowns, the trophies. [3] And what rites besides, what sacrifices go before, come between, and follow after; how many guilds, how many priesthoods, how many officials are set in motion — the people of that city know it well, the city where the assembly of demons has taken up residence. [4] If in the provinces this is managed with less lavishness, in proportion to lesser resources, still every circus game everywhere must be traced back to the source from which it is sought and derived, and is thereby stained by that source. For even a thin trickle carries the character of its own spring, and a small twig the character of its own branch. [5] Whether the show is extravagant or modest is neither here nor there — what offends God is the procession of the circus as such, whatever its scale: even if it carries only a few statues, idolatry is present in that one; even if it drags along only a single ceremonial car, it is still Jupiter's cart. However cheaply got up or however lavishly and splendidly furnished, any idolatry is rated by the wealth of its own crime.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 8 ========

[1] To go through the venues as I proposed, the Circus is dedicated first and foremost to the Sun. His shrine stands in the middle of the arena, and his image flashes out from the gable of the shrine — they did not think it fitting to consecrate under a roof one whom they keep out in the open. [2] They claim the first show was put on by Circe for her father the Sun, as they would have it, and from her they argue the name "circus." Clearly this witch's business with him — she being priestess of demons and angels, that is — was under this name. So how many acts of idolatry do you recognize in the very layout of that place? [3] Every single ornament of the circus is a separate temple. They ascribe the eggs to the honor of the Castors, believing without a blush that they were hatched from an egg by a Jupiter turned swan. Dolphins spout for Neptune; columns support the Seiae, named from sowing, the Messiae, from the harvest, the Tutulinae, from the guarding of the crops; [4] before these stand three altars serving a threefold godhead, the Great, the Mighty, and the Strong — whom they take to be the same as the Samothracian gods. [5] The sheer bulk of the obelisk, as Hermateles maintains, is prostituted to the Sun; its inscription — and hence its origin — tells us it is Egyptian superstition. The council of demons would have felt the chill without their Great Mother, and so she presides there over the water-channel. [6] Consus, as we said, lies hidden underground at the turning-posts, along with Murcia. An idol was made of her too: their claim is that Murcia stands for a goddess of lust, to whom they vowed a shrine in that part of the Circus. [7] Take note, Christian, how many unclean names have taken possession of the Circus. That territory is foreign to you — so many spirits of the devil have occupied it.
As for the venues, this is the place to deal, in anticipation, with a question some will ask. [8] "What," you say, "if I go into the circus at some other time — for some other reason — am I risking contamination?" There is no blanket rule about places. It is not only these gathering-places for spectacles, but even the temples themselves, that a servant of God may enter without any breach of discipline, if urged by some plain and unrelated necessity, provided it has nothing to do with the proper business or function of the place. [9] For that matter, the streets, the forum, the baths, the stables, and even our own houses are not entirely free of idols either — the whole world is filled with Satan and his angels. [10] Yet it is not because we are in the world that we fall away from God, but only if we lay hold of some crime the world offers. So if I enter the Capitol or the Serapeum to sacrifice or to worship, I fall away from God, just as much as a spectator does at the circus or the theater. Places do not defile us in themselves; it is what is done in those places that defiles — and by that very thing, we have argued, the places themselves are defiled: we are contaminated by what is already contaminated. [11] The reason we have gone through what these places are dedicated to is precisely to show that they belong to whatever is done in them — that the places themselves are dedicated to whatever is done there.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 9 ========

[1] Now to the craft by which the circus games are put on. Horsemanship, in its earlier form, was a simple thing — it was practiced from the horse's back, and ordinary use of it carried no guilt. But once it was drafted into the games, it passed over from a gift of God into the service of demons. [2] So this discipline is credited to Castor and Pollux, to whom, Stesichorus teaches, Mercury distributed horses. But Neptune, too, is a horse-god — the Greeks call him Hippios. [3] As for the yoked team, they consecrated the four-horse chariot to Jupiter, the two-horse chariot to the Moon. And also —
Erichthonius was first to dare to yoke a four-horse chariot,
and mount, triumphant, on the speeding wheels.
Erichthonius, son of Minerva and Vulcan — and that from a fallen lust spilled onto the earth — is a demonic monstrosity; indeed, he is the devil himself, not some serpent-child. [4] But if Trochilus of Argos is the source, he dedicated the invention of the chariot first to Juno as his own. If Romulus was the first at Rome to display a four-horse team, then I suppose he too is enrolled among the idols, if he is the same as Quirinus. [5] With such founders behind them, the chariot teams, once they came in, were rightly dressed by their patrons in the colors of idolatry. For at first there were only two colors, white and red. White belonged to winter, for its bright snows; red was pledged to summer, for the sun's ruddy glow. But later, as pleasure and superstition both advanced, some consecrated the red to Mars, others the white to the Zephyrs; the green they gave to Mother Earth or to spring, the blue to Sky and Sea or to autumn. [6] But since every kind of idolatry is condemned by God, that kind is certainly condemned too which is profaned by dedication to the elements of the world.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 10 ========

[1] Let us cross over now to the theatrical shows, whose origin in common and matching titles, following the very naming pattern from the beginning of the games, along with their administration bound up with the horse-races, we have already shown. [2] Their trappings, too, are shared partners from that same quarter, by which the procession moves toward the stage from the temples and altars, from that unhappy business of incense and blood, amid pipes and trumpets, escorted by the two most polluted officiants of funerals and sacred rites alike: the undertaker's assistant and the soothsayer. [3] So, having crossed from the origins of the games to the circus games, we now direct ourselves from there to the theatrical games, beginning from the fault of the place. The theater, properly speaking, is a shrine of Venus. This, in fact, is how that kind of structure came to escape notice in the world. [4] For the censors often tore down theaters just as they were rising, out of concern for public morals, foreseeing, no doubt, the grave danger such wantonness posed — so that from this point on the very verdict of the pagans themselves may stand as testimony agreeing with us, and, by this human precedent, add weight to our own discipline. [5] And so Pompey the Great, outdone only by his own theater, once he had built that citadel of every kind of shamelessness, fearing that someday the censors might pass judgment against his memory, capped it with a shrine to Venus, and when he summoned the people by public notice to its dedication, he called it not a theater but a temple of Venus, "beneath which," he said, "we have set tiers for viewing." [6] So he cloaked a work already condemned, and deserving further condemnation, under the title of a temple, and mocked discipline itself with a show of religion. But Venus and Liber suit each other well. Those two demons are conspirators, sworn accomplices, in drunkenness and lust. [7] And so the theater of Venus is also the house of Liber. For they also called other theatrical games, in the strict sense, the Liberalia — apart from those specifically devoted to Liber, which among the Greeks are the Dionysia, likewise instituted in his honor. [8] And plainly, even in the theatrical arts themselves, Liber and Venus hold patronage. What is private and peculiar to the stage — the softness of gesture, the bending of the body — sacrifices to Venus and to Liber: the one through unmanly display, the other through dissolute excess. [9] But what is carried out by voice, by measured rhythm, by instruments, by the written word, has Apollo, the Muses, Minerva, and Mercury as its patrons.
You should hate, Christian, those whose founders you cannot help but hate.
[10] Now we wish to add a further word about the arts, and about those whose founders we curse by name. A dead man's name is nothing, we recognize, and no more is his image; but we are not unaware who it is that operates and rejoices beneath those names and instituted images, and falsely pretends to divinity — wicked spirits, of course: demons. [11] We see, then, that even the arts themselves are dedicated to the honor of those whose names they bear as founders, and are not free of idolatry, since even the founders of these arts are for that reason held to be gods. [12] Indeed, as far as the arts are concerned, we ought to go further back in our case: the demons, foreseeing from the beginning, among their other schemes of idolatry, the pollutions of the spectacles too, by which they might call man away from the Lord and bind him to their own honor, breathed into men the very genius for such arts. [13] For it could not have been managed through others what was meant to reach them, nor would they, in that age, have brought it forth through any other men than those in whose names, images, and legends they arranged to carry out their business of deceitful consecration. To keep the order intact, let us now take up, in turn, a review of the athletic contests.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 11 ========

[1] Their origin lies in the neighborhood of the games. From there, too, these very games — whether sacred or funerary — are instituted either for the gods of nations or for the dead. Correspondingly go the titles: the Olympian games for Jupiter, the Capitoline games (which are held at Rome) likewise, the Nemean for Hercules, the Isthmian for Neptune, and all the other contests for various dead men. [2] What wonder, then, if the very apparatus of the contests is befouled with idolatry — the profane crowns, the presiding priests, the guild-officers, and finally the very blood of the oxen? [3] To fill out the point from a further, common source: on behalf of the guilds of the Musical, Minervan, and Apollonian arts — and also the Martial — men compete by mock combat, by trumpet, in the stadium and circus, which is of course itself a temple, a temple of that very idol whose solemnities it celebrates. [4] But the gymnastic arts, too, are handed down by the disciplines of the Castors, the Herculeses, and the Mercuries.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 12 ========

[1] There remains a review of that most conspicuous and most popular of spectacles. It is called a "munus," a duty-offering, from "officium," since "officium" is also a name for a duty owed. Now the ancients believed they were performing this spectacle as a duty to the dead, after they had tempered its original savagery into something more humane. [2] For long ago, since it was believed that the souls of the departed were propitiated with human blood, people would buy captives or slaves of poor standing and sacrifice them at funerals. [3] Later it was decided to gloss over the impiety with pleasure. And so those they had procured were trained — insofar as they then could be, and however they could be — in the use of such weapons as were available, merely so that they might learn to be killed; then, on the appointed day of the funeral offerings, they were dispatched at the tombs. Thus they consoled death with more murder. [4] Such was the origin of the "munus." But little by little, advanced to as much favor as it had once had cruelty, because it was not enough to satisfy the pleasure of wild beasts unless human bodies too were torn apart for them. So what was offered as a sacrifice to the dead was, in fact, reckoned to their honor-rite; and this class of thing is accordingly a species of idolatry, since idolatry too is a species of honor-rite: the one ministers to the dead as much as the other. [5] But in the idols of the dead, demons take up residence.
And to take the titles into account as well — though this class of exhibition has by now passed from honors paid to the dead into honors paid to the living, I mean quaestorships and magistracies and priesthoods of the flamens and other priesthoods — still, since the dignity of the very name is held fast by the charge of idolatry, whatever is administered under the name of that dignity must necessarily share also in the stains from which it derives its occasions. [6] We shall interpret the trappings the same way, reckoning them among the very furnishings set up for these honors: the purple, the fasces, the fillets, the crowns, and finally the public announcements, the edicts, and even the ceremonial porridge of the day before — none of these is without the pomp of the devil, none without the summoning of demons. [7] What then shall I say of that dreadful place, which not even perjuries can endure? For the amphitheater is consecrated under more numerous and harsher names than the Capitol: it is the temple of every demon there is. As many unclean spirits settle there as it holds men. And to conclude on the arts as well: we know Mars and Diana as the presiding powers of both kinds of contest.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 13 ========

[1] I think we have now sufficiently filled out the list of how many ways, and in what fashion, the spectacles commit idolatry — from their origins, from their titles, from their trappings, from their locations, from their arts — so that we may be certain that none of this, on any count, suits us who have twice renounced idols. [2] It is not that a carved image amounts to anything real, as the Apostle teaches; rather, what happens in these performances is done in service of demons, who of course settle into the consecrated images of idols, be they of the dead or, as people imagine, of the gods. [3] For this reason, then, since both kinds of idols belong to a single condition — the dead and the gods being one and the same thing — we abstain from both forms of idolatry. [4] We spurn temples no less than tombs; we own no altar, bow before no likeness, offer no sacrifice, perform no rite for the dead. Nor, moreover, do we eat of the sacrifice or of the funeral feast, because we cannot eat the table of God and the table of demons. [5] If, then, we keep our gullet and stomach untouched by such pollutions, how much more do we guard our nobler parts — the ears and the eyes — from the delights served up to idols and to the departed, delights that are not worked upon in the bowels, but sink instead into the very soul and spirit, whose purity matters to God far beyond that of the bowels.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 14 ========

[1] Now that the name of idolatry has been set forth — which by itself ought to be reason enough to renounce the spectacles — let us handle the matter, over and above what is needed, on another line of reasoning, chiefly for the sake of those who flatter themselves that this particular abstinence was not prescribed by name. [2] As if it were not pronounced upon clearly enough already, when spectacles fall under the condemnation of the desires of the world! For just as there is a lust for money, or for rank, or for the belly, or for sex, or for glory, so too there is a lust for pleasure; and the spectacles are a species of pleasure. [3] I take it that "lusts," named in general terms, contain within themselves pleasures too; and "pleasures," understood equally in general terms, are worked out, in their particular species, in the spectacles.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 15 ========

[1] Furthermore, we noted above concerning the character of these places, that it is not by themselves that they defile us, but through what is carried on there — through which, once they have soaked up the defilement, they then spit it back out onto everyone else. Let the primary charge, then, as we said, be idolatry; but let us bear all the remaining qualities of the things themselves as likewise opposed to God. [2] God has commanded that the Holy Spirit — being, in keeping with the goodness of its nature, tender and delicate — be treated with tranquility and gentleness and quiet and peace, not disturbed with rage, with bile, with anger, with grief. [3] How, then, will this square with the spectacles? For no spectacle exists without some shaking of the spirit. Where there is pleasure, there is also eager partisanship, through which, precisely, the pleasure gets its savor; where there is partisanship, there is also rivalry, through which the partisanship gets its savor. [4] And further, where there is rivalry, there too are rage and bile and anger and grief, and all the rest that go with these — none of which fits our discipline. [5] For even the man who enjoys the spectacles with restraint and decency, in keeping with his rank or age or even his own natural temperament, is nonetheless not left unmoved in spirit, nor free of some silent passion. [6] No one comes to pleasure without feeling; no one undergoes feeling without being affected by its ups and downs. Those very ups and downs are what fuel the feeling. But if the feeling ceases, there is no pleasure left, and the man who goes on attending, gaining nothing from it, already stands convicted of vanity. [7] I take it, though, that vanity too is foreign to us. And what of the fact that such a man judges himself, standing among people whose likeness, precisely by not wanting it, he confesses himself to detest? [8] It is not enough for us that we ourselves do none of this, unless we also refuse to keep company with those who do. "If you saw a thief," Scripture says, "you ran along with him." If only we did not so much as share this world with such people! But as it is, we are set apart within worldly things, because the world is God's, but worldly indulgences are the devil's.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 16 ========

[1] Since, then, rage is forbidden to us, we are removed from every spectacle — even from the circus, where rage properly reigns as president. Watch the crowd arriving already at that spectacle in a rage, already unruly, already blind, already worked up over their bets. [2] The presiding official is not quick enough to suit them; their gaze spins round and round after the tokens tumbling in his urn. Then, anxious, they hang on the starting-signal — a single frenzy voiced as one by the whole crowd. [3] Learn the madness from its emptiness: "He's dropped it!" they say, and pass the word to each other over what everyone has seen at the same instant. Here is my proof of their blindness: they fail to grasp what has truly fallen; a napkin is what they suppose it, when it is in fact the devil's shape, flung down headlong from above. [4] From this, then, they go off into fits and passions and quarrels — everything that is forbidden to priests of peace. From it come curses, abuse without justice to warrant the hatred, and cheering, too, without merit to warrant the love. [5] For what will they gain of their own, these people who act there and are not their own selves? Unless perhaps this one thing, by which they are not their own: they grieve over another man's misfortune, they rejoice over another man's success. Whatever they wish for, whatever they curse, is foreign to them; so among them love idles pointlessly and hatred rages without cause. [6] Or is it, perhaps, permitted to love without cause, though not to hate without cause? God certainly forbids hatred even where there is cause, since he commands that enemies be loved; God likewise does not allow cursing even where there is cause, since he commands that those who curse be blessed. [7] But what is more bitter than the circus, where not even its own leaders or citizens are spared? If any of the things over which the circus goes mad is somewhere fitting for the saints, then it will be permitted even at the circus; but if it is nowhere fitting, then it is not fitting there either.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 17 ========

[1] In the same way we are commanded to put away all unchastity utterly. On this ground, too, then, we are cut off from the theater, which is the private meeting-hall of unchastity, where nothing wins approval except what would win approval nowhere else. [2] So its supreme charm has been concocted, in the main, out of filth — the filth the Atellan farce-actor mimes in his gestures, the filth the mime-actor even acts out through female roles, banishing all sense of sex and shame, so that they blush more easily at home than on the stage; the filth, finally, that the pantomime actor endures in his own body from boyhood, so that he may become an artist of it. [3] The very prostitutes, victims sacrificed to public lust, are paraded onto the stage — the poor wretches suffering it now in front of women too, before whom alone they used to lie hidden — and are marched before the eyes of every age, every rank. Their place, their price, their billing — even where none is needed — is proclaimed out loud; even (I say nothing of the rest) things that ought to have stayed hidden away in darkness and in their own dens, so as not to pollute the daylight. [4] Let the senate blush, let every order blush! Those very women who murder their own modesty, terrified at their own gestures brought before the light and the people, blush — once a year.
[5] But if every kind of unchastity is to be abhorred by us, why should it be allowed to hear what it is not allowed to speak, when we know that even scurrilous talk and every idle word is marked down by God? Why should it likewise be allowed to watch what it is a crime to do? Why should things that, spoken from the mouth, defile a man, be thought not to defile a man when let in through ears and eyes, since ears and eyes lie open to the spirit, and a man cannot be kept clean whose own doorkeepers are being fouled? [6] There, then, you have the theater's condemnation too, drawn from the condemnation of unchastity. And if we also spurn the learning of secular literature as something reckoned foolishness before God, that already sufficiently rules out for us those kinds of spectacles which secular literature marks off as the stage of comic play or of athletic contest. [7] But if tragedies and comedies are the instigators of crimes and of lusts, bloody and licentious, impious and prodigal, then no recollection of anything either horrible or worthless is any better for us: what is rejected in the deed is not to be received in the telling of it either.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 18 ========

[1] But if you should argue that the stadium is named in the Scriptures, you will indeed carry the point. Still, you will not deny that what goes on in a stadium is unworthy of your gaze — fists and kicks and blows, and every insolence of the hand, and every kind of assault waged on the human face, that is, on the image of God. [2] Nowhere will you approve of empty running and empty throwing and even emptier leaping; nowhere will strength please you, whether it does injury or serves no purpose at all; nor will you care for the cultivation of an artificially built body, since it oversteps God's own modeling of it, and, on account of the leisured tastes of Greece, you will hate men fattened up like livestock. [3] Wrestling, too, is the devil's business: it was the devil who first threw down man. That very grip is the serpent's own force — tenacious in seizing hold, twisting to bind fast, slippery to slide free. You have no use for crowns; why then go hunting for pleasures over crowns?

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 19 ========

[1] Shall we go on now to demand a repudiation of the amphitheater straight from Scripture as well? If we can argue that savagery, that impiety, that ferocity is permitted to us, then let us go to the amphitheater. If the reputation given us is true and this is truly our character, then let us take delight in human blood. [2] "It is a good thing, when the guilty are punished." Who but the guilty will deny it? And yet it is not fitting for the innocent to rejoice at another's punishment; it suits the innocent far better to grieve that a man, his equal, has become so guilty as to be spent so cruelly. [3] But who can guarantee me that it is always the guilty who are condemned to the beasts or to whatever punishment, and that the innocent too are not sometimes made to suffer it — whether through a judge's spite, or a defense too feeble to prevail, or the strain put upon the questioning? How much better, then, not to know when the wicked are punished, so that I need not also know it when the good perish — if, that is, they still have any savor of goodness left in them! [4] Certainly gladiators, innocent men, are sold into the training-school to become victims sacrificed to public pleasure; and even those condemned to it — how does it improve them, to be trained up from a lesser offense into murderers?
[5] But this is my answer to the pagans. For the rest, God forbid that the Christian should need to go on learning, at any greater length, why he must turn away from this spectacle. And yet no one can fully put into words all of this except one who still goes on watching. Better not to fulfill it than to have to remember it.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 20 ========

How vain, then—no, how desperate is the argument of those who, ducking and weaving to keep their pet pleasure, plead that no abstinence from the shows is spelled out anywhere in Scripture, specifically and by name, forbidding a servant of God to be present at such gatherings. Recently I heard a fresh defense of this sweet vice. The sun, they say—indeed God himself—looks down from heaven and is not defiled. True: the sun even sends its rays into a sewer and is not fouled. But would that God looked upon none of the crimes of men, that we might all escape judgment! He watches robberies too, and lies and adulteries and frauds and idolatries and the shows themselves. Shall we then decline to watch, precisely so as not to be seen by him who watches everything? You are comparing, my friend, the accused to the judge: the accused, who is guilty because he is seen; the judge, who is judge because he sees. Do we then run wild outside the boundary lines of the circus, aim our lust outside the hinges of the theater, our insolence outside the stadium, our cruelty outside the amphitheater, simply because God's eyes reach beyond the awnings and the tiers and the gangways too? We are mistaken: nowhere and never is what God condemns excused; nowhere and never is what is always and everywhere forbidden made lawful. This is the integrity of truth, and the full measure of discipline owed to it, and the evenness of holy fear, and the fidelity of obedience—not to shift one's verdict, not to vary one's judgment. What is truly good or truly bad cannot become something else. Everything stands fixed within the truth of God.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 21 ========

The pagans, among whom there is no fullness of truth, because God, the teacher of truth, is not among them, interpret good and evil at their own pleasure and appetite: what is good in one place is bad in another, and what is bad in one place is good in another. So it happens that a man who will scarcely lift his tunic in public, and only under the compulsion of nature, will strip in the circus in no half-measure, thrusting the whole of his shame into everyone's face; and the man who shields his unmarried daughter's ears against any coarse word will lead her himself into the theater, straight to those very voices and gestures. And the man who breaks up or curses a brawl fought hand-to-hand in the street will, in the stadium, cast his vote for still heavier blows; and the man who shudders at the corpse of someone who died a natural death will, in the amphitheater, lean down with the most tolerant of eyes upon bodies gnawed and scattered and caked in their own blood. Indeed, that same fellow who attends the exhibition to watch a murderer justly punished will himself, with whips and rods, drive an unwilling gladiator on to commit murder; and the man who demands a lion for some especially notorious killer will, for a savage gladiator, beg the wooden sword and the cap of freedom as his prize—and will even ask to see that same man's face again once he has been finished off, recognizing up close, and with greater relish, the man he wished dead at a distance, and all the harsher on him if he did not wish it.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 22 ========

No wonder. These are men who mix and swap the standing of good and evil through the unsteadiness of their own judgment and the shifting of their verdicts. For consider: the very sponsors and managers of the shows take those darlings—charioteers, stage-players, wrestlers, beast-fighters—to whom men prostrate their souls and women even their bodies, for whose sake people commit the very acts they condemn—these same managers, out of the very craft by which they exalt them, degrade and diminish them, indeed openly brand them with disgrace and civic death, barring them all at once from the senate-house, the speaker's platform, the senate, the equestrian order, and every other honor and distinction. What perversity! They love the men they penalize, they cheapen the men they applaud; they glorify the art and stigmatize the artist. What kind of judgment is it, that a man is blackened for the very thing that earns him his fame? Rather, what a confession this is that the whole business is rotten—when its own stars, however wildly popular, are never without the mark of disgrace!

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 23 ========

If, then, ordinary human judgment—even with the seductive whisper of pleasure working against it—condemns such men, stripping them of every mark of standing and dashing them onto some reef of infamy, how much more will divine justice take note of such performers? Will God be pleased with that charioteer, disturber of so many souls, minister of so many furies, of so many... statues—crowned or painted like some priest, like a pimp, whom the devil has decked out to be swept off in his chariot against Elijah's own sun-god rivals? Will he be pleased, too, with the man who alters his own face with a razor, unfaithful to his own features—not content to make his face the next thing to Saturn's and Isis's and Bacchus's, he further exposes it to the insult of slaps, as though he were playing by the Lord's own command? So the devil, it seems, also teaches a man to patiently offer his cheek to be struck! So too he has hoisted tragic actors up on their buskins, because "no one can add a single cubit to his own height"—he wants to make Christ a liar. And now I ask further whether the very business of masks pleases the God who forbids every image to be made—how much more the image of himself? The author of truth does not love the false; in his eyes, everything that is feigned is adultery. He will therefore never approve a voice that fakes sex and age, that counterfeits love, anger, groans, and tears—for he condemns all hypocrisy without exception. And since in his law he pronounces a curse on the man who dresses himself in women's clothing, what will he judge of the pantomime dancer, who is even made up like a woman? And will that boxer, too, go unpunished? For those scars from the boxing-strap, those calluses from the fists, those cauliflower ears—he received his ears from God when he was formed precisely so that they might be ruined by being beaten. I say nothing of the man who sets a human being in front of a lion, lest it seem too little a murder compared to the man who cuts that same man's throat afterward.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 24 ========

In how many more ways must we plead our case before it is finished—that nothing counted among the shows is pleasing to God, nor fitting for a servant of God, that is not also pleasing to God himself? If we have shown that everything about them was founded on account of the devil and is furnished out of the devil's own stock—for nothing that is not God's, or that displeases God, belongs to anyone but the devil—then this is the devil's pageant, against which we swore renunciation in the seal of our faith. What we have renounced, we owe no participation in, whether by deed, word, sight, or even a glance. Or do we not renounce and tear up our own seal by tearing up our testimony to it? Is there anything left, then, but to demand the answer from the pagans themselves? Let them announce it to us: whether it is permitted for Christians to make use of the show. Why, it is from this very point, more than any other, that they recognize a man has become a Christian—by his repudiation of the shows! So a man plainly denies his faith who removes the very mark by which he is known as a believer. And what hope is left for a man like that? No one crosses over into the enemy's camp except by throwing down his own weapons, abandoning the standards and the oath sworn to his own commander, and agreeing, at the same moment, to perish with the other side.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 25 ========

Will he really think about God at that moment, planted somewhere where nothing of God is present? He will keep his mind at peace, I suppose, while shouting for a charioteer; he will study chastity, transfixed, in the mime-shows! No, in every kind of show, nothing will strike him as a greater scandal than the studied, provocative dress of the men and women themselves. That very togetherness, that shared enthusiasm—whether joined in cheering or split in rivalry over the business at hand—fans the sparks of lust between them. In short, no one, on entering a show, thinks first of anything but to see and to be seen. Yet let the tragic actor start declaiming, and this same man will replay to himself some prophet's cries of anguish; among the strains of the effeminate flute-player he will privately hum a psalm; and while the athletes are grappling, it is he who will be ready to declare that one ought never to strike back! So can a man really be moved to mercy while riveted on bears mauling flesh and on the sponges of the net-fighters mopping up blood? May God turn such a ruinous appetite for pleasure far from his own people! For what is it, to make for the devil's assembly straight out of the church of God, out of heaven, as they say, into the mud? Those hands you lifted up to God—will you afterward wear them out applauding an actor? From that mouth by which you uttered "Amen" over the Holy One, will you cheer for a gladiator, cry "for ages upon ages" to anyone at all but God and Christ?

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 26 ========

Why, then, should demons not find such places wide open to them too? For there is a case on record, on the Lord's own witness, of the woman who went to the theater and came home with a demon in her. So, indeed, when the unclean spirit was being pressed in the exorcism over how it had dared attack a believer, it answered without flinching: "And I did it with perfect justice," it said, "for I found her on my own ground." It is likewise well attested that another woman was shown a burial shroud in a dream, on the very night of the day she had gone to hear a tragic actor, with that actor's name flung at her in reproach—and she was not among the living five days later. And how many other testimonies, too, have come down concerning those who, by keeping company with the devil at the shows, deserted the Lord's side! "No man is able to be slave to two masters at once." "What common bond has light with darkness? What partnership has life with death?"

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 27 ========

We ought to hate these gatherings and assemblies of the pagans, if for no other cause than this: there God's name suffers blasphemy, there our daily "Lions!" is demanded against us, from there persecutions are decreed, from there temptations are sent out. What will you do, caught in that seething cauldron of ungodly cheering? Not that you have anything to fear there from men—no one there knows you for a Christian—but consider instead what becomes of you in heaven. Do you doubt that in that very moment, while the devil is raging in his own church, all the angels are looking down from heaven, marking each one by name—who spoke the blasphemy, who listened to it, whose tongue, whose ears, served the devil against God? Will you not, then, flee those benches belonging to the enemies of Christ, that chair of plagues, and the very air overhead, fouled by wicked voices? Let it all be sweet if it likes, and pleasant, and simple, even respectable in some part—no one mixes poison with gall and hellebore; it is mixed into seasoned dishes, well-flavored ones, and it is the sweetest food that carries the worst of the harm. So too the devil steeps the lethal draught he brews in the things God finds most welcome and pleasing. Count everything there—however brave, however fine, however resonant, however tuneful, however clever—as nothing but drops of honey trickling from a poisoned jar, and do not prize the pleasure to your palate as highly as you fear the danger lurking in its sweetness.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 28 ========

Let their own guests gorge themselves on such sweets: the place, the time, and the one who invites them are all their own. Our banquet, our wedding feast, has not yet come. We cannot recline at table with them, because they will not recline with us: the matter has been arranged by turns. Now it is their turn to rejoice, ours to be pressed hard. "The world," he says, "will rejoice, but you will grieve." Let us grieve, then, while the pagans rejoice, so that when they begin to grieve, we may rejoice—lest, rejoicing alongside them now, we grieve alongside them later too. You are soft, Christian, if you crave pleasure even in this present age—no, you are far too foolish, if you imagine this is what pleasure really is. Some philosophers have given that name to quietness and tranquility; in that they rejoice, in that they find their retreat, in that they even take their pride. And do you sigh to me over the starting-posts, the platform, the sand, and the arena floor? Tell me, if you would: can we not live without pleasure, we who are meant to die with pleasure? For what else is our great longing, if not what the apostles longed for too—to depart this world and be received by the Lord? There is our pleasure, exactly where our longing is.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 29 ========

Now then, if you think this present span of time is meant to be spent on such delights, why are you so ungrateful as not to find sufficient, or even to notice, all the many splendid pleasures God has already granted you? For what is more delightful than reconciliation with God the Father and Lord, than the unveiling of truth, than recognizing one's own errors, than the forgiveness of so many past sins? What greater pleasure is there than contempt for pleasure itself, than scorn for the whole present age, than true freedom, than an untroubled conscience, than a life that is enough as it is, than having no fear of death at all—than that you trample the gods of the nations underfoot, that you drive out demons, that you work cures, that you seek revelations, that you live for God? Such are the delights, such the entertainments, of Christians—holy, everlasting, free of charge. Read into these your own "circus games": watch the running of the age, its slipping seasons, count off the laps already completed, wait for the finish-line of the world's consummation, defend the fellowship of the churches, spring up at God's signal, rise at the angel's trumpet, glory in the martyr's palm. If it is theatrical learning that delights you, we have literature enough of our own, verses enough, maxims enough, and songs enough besides—words enough—only ours are not fables but truths, not stage-tricks but plain, unadorned things. Do you want boxing and wrestling too? They are here in plenty, and no small matter: watch shamelessness thrown down by chastity, treachery cut down by faith, cruelty crushed by mercy, insolence overshadowed by modesty—these are the contests held among us, and in them we ourselves win the crown. Do you want some blood as well? You have the blood of Christ.

======== De Spectaculis — Chapter 30 ========

But what a spectacle is at hand: the coming of the Lord, now unquestioned, now majestic, now triumphant! What exultation of the angels, what glory of the risen saints! What a kingdom of the righteous thereafter! What a city, the new Jerusalem! But wait—there are other spectacles still: that last and everlasting day of judgment, unforeseen by the nations, mocked by them, when this whole vast antiquity of the world and all its many generations shall be swallowed in a single fire. What breadth of spectacle there will be then! What shall I marvel at? What shall I laugh at? Where shall I rejoice, where exult—watching so many kings, who were announced as received into heaven, now groaning together with Jupiter himself and their own witnesses in the depths of darkness? And governors too, the persecutors of the Lord's name, melting in flames fiercer than those they themselves inflicted, as they rage against Christians? Whom else? Those wise philosophers, blushing before their own disciples as they burn together with them—the same men who taught them that nothing pertains to God, who assured them that souls are nothing, or that they will never return to their former bodies? Poets too, trembling not before the tribunal of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but before an unexpected Christ! Then indeed the tragedians will be worth hearing, far more vocal, surely, in their own calamity; then the actors will be recognized, far more limber through the fire; then the charioteer will be a sight, all red upon his wheel of flame; then the athletes will be there to behold, hurled not in the gymnasium but into the fire—except that I would not wish to see even them at that hour, since I would rather turn my insatiable gaze instead on those who raged madly against the Lord. 'This,' I will say, 'is the carpenter's or the harlot's son, the destroyer of the Sabbath, the Samaritan, the man with a demon. This is the one you bought from Judas; this is the one beaten with a reed and with fists, disgraced with spittle, given gall and vinegar to drink; this is the one his disciples stole away in secret so it could be said he had risen, or the gardener dragged off so the crowds coming and going wouldn't trample his lettuce beds.' To see such sights, to exult in such things—what praetor or consul or quaestor or priest will grant you that out of his own generosity? And yet, in a sense, we already have these things, represented now through faith by the imagining spirit. But what of those things which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man? I believe they are more delightful than the circus and both tiers of the theater and every stadium put together.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 1 ========

Idolatry stands as the chief offense of humankind, the foremost guilt of the present age, the entire basis on which judgment rests. For although every offense keeps its own particular shape, and each is assigned to judgment under its own name, in the crime of idolatry all are canceled out together. Set aside the labels; examine the deeds. The idolater is likewise a murderer. You ask whom he has killed? If it matters for the fullness of the indictment, not a stranger, not an enemy, but himself. By what treachery? His own error's. With what weapon? Offense against God. With how many wounds? As many as his acts of idolatry. Whoever denies that the idolater has perished will also deny that the idolater has committed murder. In the same way recognize adultery and fornication in him too; for whoever serves false gods is beyond doubt an adulterer against the truth, since every falsehood is adultery. So too he is drowned in fornication. For who walks unsoiled and unviolated as a partner of unclean spirits? And indeed the holy Scriptures use the very word 'fornication' in reproaching idolatry. The nature of fraud, I take it, is this: that someone seizes another's property, or denies what is owed him—and certainly, fraud committed against a man already bears the name of the gravest crime. But idolatry defrauds God, denying him his own honors and conferring them on others, so that it joins insult to the fraud. And if fraud, no less than fornication and adultery, brings death, then in these too idolatry is not acquitted of the charge of murder. After crimes so ruinous, so devouring of salvation, the rest of the vices too, each in its own way and set apart, nevertheless display their true condition within idolatry. In it is the world's covetousness—for what solemn rite of idolatry lacks the ambition of pomp and adornment? In it is wantonness and drunkenness, since these rites are thronged chiefly for the sake of feasting and the belly and lust. In it is injustice—for what is more unjust than that which does not even know the father of justice? In it too dwells emptiness, for its entire framework is hollow. In it dwells deceit, for its entire foundation is a fabrication. And so it happens that everything is found within idolatry, and idolatry within everything. But also, since all sins whatsoever savor of offense against God, and nothing that savors of offense against God fails to be credited to the demons and unclean spirits to whom idols are made over, it follows without doubt that whoever sins commits idolatry. For he does what belongs to the agents of idols.
II.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 2 ========

Let all the various names of crimes go their way into the particular character of their own deeds; let idolatry remain what it itself is. Sufficient to itself is a name so hostile to God, so wealthy a substance of crime, stretching out so many branches, spreading so many veins, that now that this very subject has been taken up, we must ask in how many ways the breadth of idolatry must be guarded against by us, since in manifold fashion it overturns the servants of God—not only when unrecognized, but even when deliberately disguised. Most people reckon idolatry should be understood only in these terms: if someone burns incense, or sacrifices, or makes an offering, or binds himself to certain rites or priesthoods—just as if someone supposed adultery were to be judged only in kisses and embraces and the actual union of flesh, or murder reckoned only in the shedding of blood and the taking of a life. But we are certain how much more broadly the Lord extends these matters, since he marks adultery even in desire, if a man has cast a lustful eye and stirred his soul shamelessly, and he counts as murder even a spoken curse or insult, along with any surge of rage, and any failure of affection owed a brother. So John instructs us that a man who hates his brother has committed murder. Otherwise the enemy's craft in wickedness, and God's rule expressed in the training whereby he arms us against the adversary's concealed advances, would count for little, if we were to be judged only in those offenses which even the nations have decreed punishable. How shall our righteousness abound beyond that of the scribes and Pharisees, as the Lord prescribed, unless we have taken the full measure of the abundance of its adversary—that is, of unrighteousness? And if the head of unrighteousness is idolatry, then it follows that we must first fortify ourselves against the full range of idolatry, so long as we recognize it not only in its plain and open forms.
III.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 3 ========

There was a time, some while back, when idols did not exist. Before the craftsmen of this monstrosity had sprung up, there were only temples and empty shrines, just as in some places even today traces of that antiquity remain. Yet idolatry was practiced then, not under that name, but in that very act. For even now it can go on where no shrine stands and no image is present. But once the devil introduced into the world artisans of statues and portraits and likenesses of every sort, that grim enterprise of human misfortune took both its title and its momentum from idols. From then on, whatever craft produces an image by any method at all became the very fountainhead of image-worship. It matters nothing whether a sculptor molds it, an engraver cuts it, or a weaver stitches it into cloth, since the substance is likewise irrelevant—be the image cast in plaster, laid in paint, cut from rock, poured in bronze, hammered from silver, or woven from thread. Given that image-worship can arise even where no image stands, then surely, once an image does stand, its kind, its substance, its shape carry no weight—lest anyone suppose that only what has been consecrated in human form should count as an idol. For this an interpretation of the word is needed. Eidos in Greek means 'form'; from it, by diminutive, eidolon is derived; likewise among us, 'form' has produced 'little form.' Therefore every form or little form claims the name idol for itself. Hence idolatry is every act of homage and servitude paid around any idol whatsoever. Hence too every craftsman of an idol shares in one and the same crime—unless perhaps a people bears less guilt of image-worship because what it consecrated to itself was the likeness of a calf rather than that of a human being.
IV.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 4 ========

God forbids the making of an idol as much as its worship. Since it must first exist before it can be worshiped, it is all the more urgent that it not be made at all, if it is not lawful to worship it once made. For this reason—to root out, that is, the very raw material of idolatry—the divine law proclaims: 'You shall not make an idol,' and joins to it: 'nor the likeness of anything that is in heaven, or on earth, or in the sea'—thus forbidding the servants of God, throughout the whole world, arts of this kind. Enoch had gone before, foretelling that all the elements, the whole substance of the world—whatever heaven, sea, and earth contain—would be turned into idolatry by demons and the spirits of the deserting angels, so that they might be consecrated in God's place, against God. So human error worships everything except the very maker of everything. Their images are idols; the consecration of images is idolatry. Whatever idolatry commits must necessarily be charged to the craftsman of any and every idol. Indeed that same Enoch, in his warning, condemns beforehand the worshipers of the image alongside its craftsmen. And further: 'To you I make this oath, you offenders, that on the day of blood and ruin, grief has been laid up for you—you who bow to stones, you who fashion figures of gold, silver, timber, rock, and clay, and who bow to phantoms, to demons, to spirits of the underworld, and to every deception outside true knowledge; from these you shall obtain no relief.' Isaiah too says: 'You are my witnesses, whether there is a God besides me.' And there were none then who fashion and carve, all of them vain, who make what pleases themselves, which will do them no good. And thereafter follows that whole pronouncement which condemns both the craftsmen and the worshipers alike. Its ending runs: 'Understand that their heart is dust and soil, and none of them can rescue his own soul.' And so too David says of the makers: 'Let those who fashion them come to resemble them.' What more, then, should a man of my slight memory bring forward? What further should I draw out of the Scriptures? As if the utterance of the Holy Spirit did not already suffice, or as if there remained room to argue whether the Lord pronounced his curse and sentence upon the artisans themselves in advance of pronouncing it on those who worship what they made.
V.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 5 ========

I shall answer more pointedly the excuses of craftsmen of this sort, who by rights should never be received within the household of God, if the rule of it is understood. Take first that familiar objection so often thrown out: 'I have no other way to make a living.' It can be countered more sharply still: so you must live, must you? What business have you with God, if you live by your own laws? Then there is the argument they dare to draw from Scripture, that the apostle said: 'Let each one remain in the calling in which he was found'—as though by this reading we could all go on persisting in our sins. For not one of us was found other than a sinner, since Christ came down for no other reason than to free sinners. Likewise they say he commanded, by his own example, that each man should work with his own hands for his living. If this precept is defended by appeal to 'hands' in general, then I suppose bathhouse thieves too live by their own hands, and robbers themselves work with their hands for their living, and forgers too, of course, work their evil letters not with their feet but with their hands, and actors earn their bread not with their hands alone but with their whole bodies. Let the church, then, stand open to all who sustain themselves by their hands and by their labor, if there is no exception among the trades that God's discipline does not admit. But someone objects, against the prohibition of the forbidden likeness: 'Why then did Moses in the wilderness make an image of a bronze serpent?' That instance stands apart, one of those figures constructed toward some hidden arrangement, not toward a relaxation of the law, but for the sake of its own prefigured pattern. Otherwise, if we interpret such things the way the enemies of the law do, shall we too—as the Marcionites do—charge inconsistency upon the Almighty, whom they seek to destroy in just this way, as changeable, since he forbids in one place and commands in another? But if anyone questions whether the bronze serpent's shape, lifted up in that fashion, signified the Lord's cross, which would deliver us out of the grip of serpents—meaning the devil's angels—by nailing up in itself the devil, the serpent, put to death; or whatever alternate reading of that emblem has been disclosed to more capable minds—provided the apostle affirms that all these things happened to the people then as figures. It is well, then, that the same God both forbade by law the making of a likeness and by a special command ordered the likeness of a serpent to be made. If you hold that it is the same God, you have his law: 'You shall not make a likeness.' And if you also weigh the later command to make a likeness—then you too, imitate Moses: make no idol against the law, unless God has likewise commanded you to.
VI.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 6 ========

Even if no law of God had forbidden us to make idols, and no voice of the Holy Spirit threatened the makers of idols no less than their worshippers, we would still work out from our own sacrament that arts of this kind are hostile to our faith. In what sense, then, did we abandon the devil along with his angel-host, if we turn around and fashion them ourselves? What separation have we declared from those — I will not say with whom, but for whose sake — we make our living? What grievance have we lodged against beings to whom our own craft binds us in gratitude? Can your tongue deny what your hand admits? Can a single word tear down what a whole day's labor built? Do you announce one God, yet manufacture a crowd of them? Do you proclaim the genuine deity while shaping counterfeit ones with your own hands? "I only make them," someone protests, "I do not bow down to them" — as though his refusal to kneel had any different root than his willingness to carve, when both acts alike wound God. No: the making is itself the worship, for it is what enables the bowing-down of others. And your worship is offered not through a puff of cheap incense-smoke but through your own labored breath; not at the price of some animal's throat but of your own days. To these things you sacrifice your craft, to these you pour out your sweat like an offering, to these you devote your very skill. Beyond any priest you serve them, because it is your hands that supply the priest his object; your careful workmanship is the source of their godhood. Do you deny that what you make, you worship? But they do not deny it — the gods for whom you slaughter this fatter, more gilded, greater victim every single day: your own salvation.
VII.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 7 ========

On this point the zeal of faith will plead its case with a groan: that a Christian comes from the idols into the church, from the enemy's workshop into the house of God; that he lifts to God the Father hands that are the mothers of idols; that with those hands he worships — the very hands that outside are worshipped against God — bringing to the Lord's body hands that furnish bodies to demons? Nor is even this enough. It is too little that they receive from other hands what they go on to contaminate — they themselves hand on to others what they have already contaminated. Craftsmen of idols are enrolled in the clerical order. What a crime! The Jews laid hands on Christ once; these men assault his body every day. Hands that ought to be cut off! Let them see now whether it was said with this very likeness in mind: if your hand offends you,
cut it off. And what hands more deserve cutting off than those in which the Lord's body is offended?
VIII.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 8 ========

There are also several other kinds of trades that, even though they have no hand in the actual making of idols, are nevertheless implicated in the same crime, since without them idols could do nothing. It makes no difference whether you build or you decorate — if you erect its temple, its altar, its little shrine; if you beat out the gold leaf, or the insignia, or even build the house itself. Work of this sort is in fact the greater offense, since it confers not the mere likeness but the authority. But if the necessity of making a living is stretched this far, there are other trades too that can supply the means of living without straying outside discipline — that is, without fabricating an idol. The plasterer knows how to patch a roof, apply stucco, line a cistern, mold cornices, and work many other decorations into walls besides images. So too the painter, the marble-worker, the bronze-worker, and every kind of engraver
has fields of his own — and considerably easier ones at that. For the man who can sketch a statue, how much more easily can he plaster a sideboard? The man who can carve a Mars out of lime-wood, how much quicker can he knock together a cupboard? There is no craft that is not either the mother or the near relation of another. Nothing stands idle from something else. There are as many branches of the crafts as there are human desires. But there is a difference in the fees and the wages of the hand — and just as much a difference in the labor. A smaller fee is made up for by more frequent work. How many walls need statues? How many temples and shrines are built for idols? But how many houses, and law-courts, and baths, and tenement blocks are there? A slipper or a sandal is gilded every day; Mercury and Serapis are not. Let that be enough to make a living by the crafts. Luxury and ambition are far more constant customers than any superstition. Ambition will want platters and cups far more readily than superstition will. Garlands, too, are dispensed more by extravagance than by religious observance. When, then, we urge these kinds of trades — ones that neither touch the idol itself nor serve what belongs to the idol —
yet since these same things are often common to men and to idols alike, we must also be on guard against this: that anyone, with our knowledge, should demand something from our hands for the service of idols. And if we grant it, and do not act by the remedies already in use, I do not think we are free of the contagion of idolatry — since our hands, and we not ignorant of it, are caught at work, or in honor, or in the service of demons.
IX.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 9 ========

We notice that among the trades there are also certain professions liable to idolatry. Of astrologers there is scarcely need even to speak. But because a certain someone lately came forward to argue that he was entitled to go on practicing that art, let me offer a brief reply. I will not dwell on the fact that astrology does homage to the idols whose names it has stamped across the heavens, handing over to them the entire authority that belongs to God — so that men, supposing there is then no need to search after God, imagine themselves ruled instead by the fixed sentence of the stars. I will urge only this single point: that those very stars are runaways from God, besotted with mortal women, the traitors who first betrayed this prying art, and are for that very reason under God's condemnation. O divine sentence, pursuing its point clear down to earth, to which even the ignorant bear witness! Astrologers are expelled, just as their angels were; the City and Italy are barred to astrologers, just as heaven is barred to their angels. Exile is the same penalty for both pupils and masters. But — it will be said — the magi came from the east, and were astrologers too. We know there is a partnership between magic and astrology. So then, it was the first interpreters of the stars who announced the newborn Christ, the first who brought him gifts. By this act, I suppose, they bound Christ to themselves. What of it? Will the religion of those magi therefore now stand as patron to astrologers as well? Is mathematics today, then, about Christ — does it watch and proclaim the stars of Christ, not of Saturn and Mars and whichever other member of that same company of the dead? But this science, it is said, was allowed only up until the gospel, so that once Christ had appeared, no one thereafter should read anyone's nativity from the sky. For indeed that frankincense and myrrh and gold were offered then to the infant Lord precisely as the closing act of the old sacrificial system and worldly glory — the very thing Christ was about to take away. For that reason,
God's will without a doubt prompted those same magi, by a dream, to go back to their own country by another way, not the one they had come by — that is, so that they would not walk their old path again; not so that Herod would not pursue them, for he did not pursue them, being ignorant even that they had left by a different route, since he did not know the route by which they had come either. So thoroughly ought we to understand "road" as meaning sect and discipline. The magi, then, were commanded to walk differently from then on. So too that other branch of magic, the one that works by miracles — even though it had rivaled Moses — the patience of God dragged it along all the way to the gospel. For from that point on, even Simon Magus, though already professedly a believer, since he still had some notion left over from his charlatan sect — namely, to hawk the Holy Spirit for sale among the miracles of his profession, by the imposition of hands upon them — found himself denounced by the apostles and thrown out of the faith entirely. And that second sorcerer, who set himself against the apostles before Sergius Paulus, paid for it with blindness. Astrologers, I suspect, would tell the same story, had fortune ever thrown them into the apostles' path. But once magic itself is punished — and astrology is only a limb of magic — then plainly the whole family stands condemned along with that one member. Once the gospel had come, nowhere thereafter will you find sophists, Chaldeans, enchanters, diviners, or magicians, save as men openly undergoing punishment. Where, then, is your wise man now, your scholar, your inquirer after this present age? Has God not turned the wisdom of this world into foolishness? You knew nothing, astrologer, if you failed to foresee your own conversion to Christ. And supposing you had foreseen it, you should equally have grasped this further point: that this trade would leave you with no future at all. The very art that foretells other men's fatal turning-points should have warned you of your own danger. You have no part nor lot in this reckoning. No one whose finger or wand traffics in the sky can hope for the kingdom of heaven.
X.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 10 ========

But an inquiry must also be raised about schoolmasters — and, indeed, about teachers of literature generally. In fact there is no doubt that they too are involved in idolatry of many kinds. To begin with, they are obliged to proclaim the gods of the nations — their names, their genealogies, their myths, every one of their honorific titles — and then to observe their solemnities and festivals, since it is by these that they reckon their fees. What schoolmaster will fail to keep the Quinquatria, even without his tablet listing the seven idols? He consecrates his new pupil's very first fee to Minerva, to her honor and her name, so that even if he is not said in so many words to be defiled by having offered something to an idol, he should still be shunned as an idolater. What of it? Is the pollution any less because the profit, invoked in the names and honors of an idol, happens to pay better? The same goes for the Minervalia in honor of Minerva, for the Saturnalia in honor of Saturn — which even the household slaves have to keep during the season of the Saturnalia. The presents of the New Year have to be angled for too, and the Feast of the Seven Hills, and all the tribute-money of the midwinter Bruma and of dear kinship must be exacted; the schools of Flora must be crowned with garlands; the flaminicae and the newly elected aediles offer sacrifice; the school is given a holiday in their honor. The same happens at the idol's birthday: the whole pageantry of the devil is attended in full. Who will think this fitting for a Christian, unless he also thinks it fitting for one who is not a teacher? We know it can be objected: if it is not lawful for God's servants to teach literature, then it will not be lawful even to learn it — and how, in the meantime, is anyone to be trained in ordinary human good sense, or in any kind of perception or action, since literature is the instrument for all of life? How can we reject secular studies, when divine things cannot be had without them? Let us, then, weigh the necessity of a literary education, and consider that in one respect it must be allowed, in another it can be avoided. A believer stands on firmer ground learning literature than teaching it, since the reasoning behind acquiring it differs from the reasoning behind handing it on. Should a believer take up teaching it, then unquestionably, in that very act of instruction, he lends his approval to the gods' pronouncements bound up within it; in handing it on, he affirms it; in rehearsing it, he bears it witness. By that very act he sets his seal on the gods themselves, though the law forbids — as we have said — that gods be so much as named, and that this name be invoked in vain. From this, from the very beginnings of education, the devil's first claim on faith is built up. Ask yourself whether the man who catechizes pupils about idols is not committing idolatry. But when a believer merely learns these things, if he already has the sense to know what they are, he neither accepts nor admits them — all the more so if he has long had that sense. Or if he is only beginning to gain it, he must first have the sense of what he learned earlier, namely, about God and the faith. Accordingly he will spit that material out and not take it in, and will be as safe as a man who, knowing it for poison, takes it from someone who does not, but does not drink it. For him, necessity counts as an excuse, because he cannot learn any other way. But it is so much easier not to teach literature than not to learn it, that a believing pupil will more easily steer clear of the rest of the pollutions of the schools — the public and private solemnities — than a teacher will steer clear of attending them.
XI.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 11 ========

[1] If we run back through the other kinds of sin bred by greed — chiefly covetousness, the root of all evils, in whose snare some have been entangled and made shipwreck of the faith, since the same apostle twice calls covetousness a form of idolatry, and lying, in turn, is covetousness's servant — I say nothing of perjury, since a Christian may not even swear — is trading, then, a fitting business for a servant of God? For if covetousness were removed, what reason would there be left for acquiring anything? And once the reason for acquiring is gone, there is no more need to trade. [2] Suppose now some profit-making could be free and clear of covetousness and lying — I still think it runs aground on the charge of idolatry, in that it touches the very soul and spirit of the idols, which is what fattens every demon. Granted, that is not the
idolatry in its principal sense. But let us see: if the very same wares — I mean frankincense and the other exotic imports for sacrifice to idols — are also used by ordinary people for medicinal compounds, and by us as well for the comforts of burial, well and good. But surely when processions, priesthoods, and sacrifices to idols are kept supplied out of your risks, your losses, your worries, your travels, your dealings — what else are you shown to be but an agent of the idols? Let no one object that on this reasoning every trade could be put on trial. [3] The graver the offense, the more the danger it carries demands a widened vigilance, so that we withdraw not only from such acts themselves but from the means by which they are done. It makes no difference that another does it, if it is done through me. [4] I ought not to be indispensable to another in doing what is not lawful for me. From the very fact that I am forbidden to do a thing, I ought to understand that I must also see to it that it not be done through me. Indeed I observe this same precedent set in another matter, no less serious a charge. For though fornication itself is forbidden to me, in that regard I contribute to others neither service nor complicity. [5] Just as I have kept my own flesh away from brothels, I recognize that I cannot practice pimping or that
sort of trade for another's profit either. So too the prohibition against murder teaches me that a trainer of gladiators is likewise barred from the church: not doing the thing himself does not excuse him if he supplies to another the means of doing it. And here is an even closer precedent. [6] If a contractor for the public sacrificial victims should come to the faith, will you let him stay on in that business? Or if a believer already has taken it up, do you think he should be kept in the church? I think not — unless someone will likewise wink at the incense-dealer. Apparently the charge of blood belongs to some, the charge of fragrant smoke to others! If, before idols existed in the world, this same idolatry — still shapeless then — was carried on by these very wares, and if even in our own day the business of idolatry is mostly carried out, idol or no idol, by the burning of incense, is the incense-dealer's service and devotion to the demons any the less? [7] It is easier, in fact, to have idolatry without an idol than without the incense-dealer's wares. Let us put the question to the conscience of his own faith. With what face does a Christian incense-dealer, if he walks past the temples,
with what face does he spit and blow contempt on the smoking altars — the very altars he himself has stocked? With what confidence will he exorcise creatures he himself boards and feeds? If he does succeed in driving out the demon, let him not flatter himself over his faith — for the enemy is not thereby put to flight. [8] The demon has every reason to grant an easy hearing to the man who feeds it daily. There is, then, no craft, no profession, no trade that furnishes materials for making or shaping idols that can escape the charge of idolatry — unless we are prepared to define idolatry as something other than service rendered to the worship of idols.
XII.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 12 ========

[1] We flatter ourselves badly over the necessities of human survival if, once the seal of faith is set upon us, we say: I have nothing to live on. Here I will answer that reckless claim more fully. It is said too late. The reckoning ought to have been made beforehand, on the model of that most prudent builder who first counts the cost of the work against his resources, so that he need not blush later, once begun, at running short. [2] But already you possess the Lord's own sayings and examples that strip away every excuse. What do you say? I shall be in want. But the Lord calls the poor blessed. I shall have nothing to eat — but do not think about food, he says. And for clothing we have the example of the lilies. Someone needed capital — yet all must be sold and the proceeds given to the poor. But, you say, provision has to be laid up for one's children and heirs — no one who sets his hand to the plow and turns back is fit for the work. But that was conditional, you say — no one can serve two masters. If you wish to be a disciple of the Lord, you must take up your cross and follow the Lord, that is, your own straits and torments, or simply the body, which is itself shaped like a cross. [3] Parents, spouses, children — all must be abandoned for God's sake. Do you still waver over trades and businesses and professions merely on account of children and parents? It was already demonstrated to us that pledges and crafts and businesses alike must be abandoned for the Lord's sake, when James and John, called by the Lord, leave behind their father and their boat, when Matthew is roused up from the tax booth, when even to bury one's father was judged too slow for faith. [4] Not one of those the Lord chose said, I have nothing to live on. Faith does not fear hunger. It knows that hunger, no less than every kind of death, is to be despised for God's sake. It has learned not to look back at life — how much less at food? How many, though, have actually fulfilled this? But what is hard with men is easy with God. [5] Still, let us not so flatter ourselves on God's gentleness and mercy that we indulge our needs to the point of brushing against idolatry, but rather let us shun its every breath, as we would a plague, even from a distance — not only in the matters already mentioned, but through the whole range of human superstition, whether it is enslaved to its gods or to the dead or to kings, since all of it belongs to the same unclean spirits, now through sacrifices and priesthoods, now through spectacles and their like, now through festival days.
XIII.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 13 ========

[1] But why should I say anything of sacrifices and priesthoods? Of spectacles and the pleasures belonging to them we have already composed an entire book. Here it is fitting to take up again the question of festival days and other extraordinary observances, which we sometimes indulge out of frivolity, sometimes out of timidity, against the faith and its discipline, sharing them with the nations in matters that belong to idols. [2] Let me first settle the point: whether one who serves God ought to join the nations themselves in celebrations of this sort, whether in dress, in diet, or in any other form of their rejoicing. To rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn was said by the apostle of brothers, in an exhortation to unity of spirit. [3] But beyond that, light has no partnership with darkness, nor life with death — or else we tear up what stands written: the world will rejoice, but you will mourn. If we rejoice with the world, we must fear that we will also mourn with the world. [4] Let us mourn, then, while the world rejoices, and we shall rejoice later when the world mourns. So too Lazarus, refreshed after death in the lap of Abraham, and the rich man, set opposite him in torment by fire, balance out the alternating fortunes of the wicked and the good by a fitting requital. There are certain days of gift-giving which some mark down to the credit of honor, others to a debt of payment. [5] Now then, you say, I shall collect what is mine, or pay back what I owe another. If men have consecrated this custom to themselves out of superstition, why do you, a stranger to the whole of their vanity, take part in these idol-feast solemnities, as though the calendar were binding on you too, so that you may not settle what you owe another, or receive what another owes you, except on the observance of that particular day? [6] State the terms on which you wish to be dealt with. Why hide at all, when by leaving another in ignorance you stain your own conscience? If it is known that you are a Christian, you are put to the test, and you act against another's conscience by seeming not to be a Christian; but if you conceal it, then, once tested, you stand self-condemned. Either way, you are guilty of putting God to shame. For whoever is ashamed of me before men, he says, I too will be ashamed of him before my Father who is in heaven.
XIV.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 14 ========

[1] Now many have already come round to thinking that some allowance ought to be made, whenever we do what the pagans do, so that the Name not be blasphemed. But the blasphemy we must at all costs avoid is, as I see it, the following: that any of us give a pagan a just cause for blasphemy, through fraud, or wrong, or insult, or any other matter deserving complaint, in which the Name is struck deservedly — so that the Lord too is deservedly angered. [2] But if it means that on account of you my name is blasphemed regardless of the nature of the blasphemy, then we are all lost together, since the whole circus, with its wicked cheering, assails the Name with no cause whatever. Let us stop, and it will not be blasphemed. No — rather, let it be blasphemed while we hold to discipline and do not stray from it, while we are being tested and approved, not while we are found wanting. [3] O blasphemy, kin to martyrdom, which testifies that I am a Christian at the very moment it curses me for it! The cursing of a discipline kept intact is itself a blessing on the Name. If I still wished to please men, he says, I would not be a servant of Christ. Yet elsewhere the same apostle bids us take care to please everyone. As I, he says, please everyone in everything. [4] Was it, I wonder, by celebrating the Saturnalia and the Kalends of January that he pleased men? Or was it by his moderation, his patience, his gravity, his kindness, his integrity? So when he says, I have become all things to all men, that I might win them all — does that mean an idolater to idolaters? A pagan to pagans? A worldling to worldlings? [5] Even though he does not forbid us to associate with idolaters and adulterers and other such offenders, saying instead, otherwise you would have to go out of the world, still he does not let loose the reins of our conduct to such a degree that, because we are of necessity bound to live together and mix
with sinners, we may therefore also sin along with them. Where there is that shared commerce of life which the apostle allows, there is no allowance for shared sinning, which no one permits. It is lawful to live alongside pagans; it is not lawful to die alongside them. Let us live together with everyone; let us rejoice together in what we share by nature, not in what belongs to superstition. We are equals in soul, not in creed; joint-possessors of the world, not of its error. [6] But if we have no right at all to such fellowship with outsiders, how much more shameful is it to indulge in it among brothers! Who can bear or defend that? The Holy Spirit rebukes the Jews for their own feast days: your sabbaths, he says, and new moons and festivals my soul hates. Yet we, for whom sabbaths are foreign things, and new moons and holidays once loved by God are foreign too, keep the Saturnalia, the Kalends of January, the Feast of Winter, and the Matronalia — gifts and presents circulate, games ring out,
banquets clatter on. [7] O the pagans' better faithfulness to their own sect, which lays claim to none of the Christians' own solemn days! Not our Sunday, not our Pentecost — even had they known of them, they would not have shared in them with us; for they would fear being taken for Christians. We, though, are not afraid of being pronounced pagans. If some indulgence must be granted the flesh, you have — I will not say only your own festival days, but
far more of them. For the pagans each have one feast day a year; you have one every eighth day. Pick out, one by one, all the solemnities of the nations and set them in a row: they will not add up to a single Pentecost.
XV.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 15 ========

[1] "But let your works shine," he says. Yet nowadays it is the taverns and our own front doors that shine. You would find more pagan doorways bare of lamps and laurels than Christian ones. And what do we make of this custom in particular? If it is honor paid to an idol, then beyond doubt that honor is idolatry. If it is done for a man's sake, let us reconsider the whole matter — that all idolatry is, at bottom, done for a man's sake. [2] Let us reconsider that all idolatry is, at bottom, worship offered to men, since it is agreed even among the pagans themselves that the very gods of the nations were once men. It therefore makes no difference whether such superstition is paid to the men of an earlier age or of this one. The censure of idol-worship falls not upon whose likeness is honored, but upon the ritual acts turned toward that likeness — acts that in truth serve demons. [3] "Pay back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar." And rightly he went on: "and to God what belongs to God." What, then, belongs to Caesar? Exactly the point being argued just then — whether the tribute-tax was owed to Caesar at all. This is why the Lord had a denarius brought to him and asked whose likeness was stamped there, and upon hearing "Caesar's," replied, "Pay back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God" — meaning: Caesar's likeness, stamped upon the coin, goes to Caesar; God's likeness, stamped upon man, goes to God. Hand over coin to Caesar, then, but hand over your very self to God. [4] Otherwise, what will be left for God, if everything belongs to Caesar? "So," you say, "is it an honor to God to hang lamps before the doors and laurel on the doorposts?" Not that it is an honor to God, of course — but it is an honor to the one who, in place of God, is honored by rites of this kind; and however plain that may seem, the actual operation, hidden from view, still reaches all the way to the demons. [5] We ought to be sure
of this — in case it escapes anyone through ignorance of secular literature — that indeed
the Romans worshipped gods of the doorway too: Cardea, named from hinges, Forculus from the door-leaf, Limentinus from the threshold, and Janus himself from the doorway (ianua). And we surely know that, empty and invented as these names are, once drawn into superstition they attract to themselves demons and every unclean spirit through the binding-force of consecration. [6] Otherwise demons have no name of their own individually, but find a name wherever they find a pledge of devotion. Among the Greeks too we read of Apollo Thyraeus and the Antelii as the demon-guardians of doorways. Foreseeing this from the beginning, the Holy Spirit foretold, through the most ancient prophet Enoch, that doors too would fall into superstition. Indeed we also see other doors being worshipped, in the baths. [7] But if
there really are beings worshipped at doorways, then the lamps and the laurels belong to them too. Whatever you do to the doorway, you do to an idol. On this point I call God's own authority to witness as well, since it is not safe to suppress whatever has been shown to one person, when it concerns everyone. I know a brother who, the same night, was severely rebuked in a vision because his slaves had suddenly crowned his door with garlands on the announcement of a public celebration. [8] And yet he himself had neither crowned it nor ordered it; in fact he had gone out earlier, and on returning had reproached them for what they had done. So exactingly are we, God's household, judged even in a matter of this kind. As for the honors due to kings or emperors, then, we have sufficiently laid down that we ought to be obedient in every observance, as the apostle commands, yielding to magistrates, to rulers, and to authorities — yet staying inside the boundary set by our discipline, provided we remain untouched by idol-worship. [9] That is why the example of the three brothers stands before us: obedient to King Nebuchadnezzar in other respects, they steadfastly refused to honor his image, proving that it is idolatry whenever anything is exalted beyond the human measure of honor into a semblance of divine majesty. [10] So too Daniel remained submissive to Darius in everything else, for just as long as he could keep clear of danger to his discipline; and rather than submit to that, he feared the king's lions no more than those three feared the king's fires. Let them, then, light their lamps daily, lamps that give no light at all,
and hang their laurels on doorposts that are destined later to burn — theirs are the fitting emblems of darkness and the fitting omens of punishment. [11] You are the light of the world, and a tree forever green. If you have renounced temples, do not make your own door a temple. I have understated it: if you have renounced brothels, do not dress your house in the face of a new brothel.
XVI.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 16 ========

[1] As for the observances of private and public solemnities — the donning of the plain toga, betrothals, weddings, naming-days — no danger, I think, need be observed in them from any breath of idolatry. [2] What must be considered is the reason for which the observance is rendered. These, I think, are pure in themselves, since neither male dress, nor a ring, nor the marriage bond descends from honor paid to any idol. Indeed the only style of clothing I find God condemning is female garb worn by a male: "Accursed," scripture says, "is every man who dresses himself in a woman's garment." The toga, on the other hand, is by its very name a man's garment. [3] Nor does God forbid weddings to be celebrated any more than he forbids the giving of a name. But sacrifices do tend to get attached to such occasions. Suppose I am invited, and no title of sacrifice attaches to the occasion — then, as far as lies in my power, my part in it stays
clean. [4] I only wish we could avoid even seeing what it is wrong for us to do. But since idolatry has so thoroughly hemmed in the world with its evil, it will be permissible to be present at certain things which engage us with the man, not with the idol. Plainly, if I am invited to a priesthood or a sacrifice, I will not go — that is the idol's own proper business — but neither will I take part in anything of the kind by advice, by expense, or by any other service. [5] If I am present because I was invited on account of a sacrifice, I become a partner in idolatry; if some other reason brings me together with the one sacrificing, I am merely a spectator of the sacrifice.
XVII.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 17 ========

[1] But what, further, are believing slaves or freedmen to do — and officials likewise — who are attached to masters, patrons, or governors who offer sacrifice? Well: if anyone hands the wine to the one sacrificing, or even helps the sacrifice along by so much as a necessary word, he will be reckoned a servant of idol-worship. Keeping this rule in view, we can nevertheless still perform service toward magistrates and authorities, following the pattern of the patriarchs and the other men of old, who attended idol-worshipping kings right up to the very edge of idolatry itself. [2] From this a debate has recently arisen: whether a servant of God may take up the administration of some rank or power, if he can keep himself untouched by every form of idolatry, whether by some special allowance or even by his own resourcefulness —
just as Joseph and Daniel, clean of idolatry, administered both rank and power, adorned with the robes and the purple of the governorship of all Egypt, or of Babylon. [3] Let us grant, then, that one can succeed to some office in such a way that he walks in it in name of honor alone, and neither sacrifices nor lends his authority to sacrifices; that he does not
contract out the victims, does not delegate the care of the temples, does not administer their revenues, does not
put on games either at his own expense or the public's, or preside over their being put on; that he proclaims or decrees nothing solemn, does not even swear an oath; and further, as regards what belongs to power itself, that he does not judge a man's life or honor — I will let the matter of money pass — does not condemn or pre-condemn, chains no one, imprisons no one, tortures no one — if it is even credible that this could be managed.
XVIII.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 18 ========

[1] Now we must go back and deal separately with the platform and trappings of office. Each rank has its own proper dress, both for daily use and for honor and dignity. So that purple robe, and the gold collar-piece worn at the throat, functioned among the Egyptians and the Babylonians as markers of rank in just the way that, in our own day, the bordered toga or the ceremonial robe or the palm-embroidered gown and the golden crowns of the provincial priests are — but not on the same footing. [2] For among them these were conferred, purely in the name of honor, on those who had earned the king's personal favor. Hence they were called the king's "purple-wearers," from the purple, just as among us men are called "candidates" from the white toga — but not in such a way that the platform itself was thereby bound up with priesthoods too, or with any of the services of idols. For had it been so, surely men of such holiness and constancy would at once have refused the tainted dress, and it would at once have become plain that Daniel had not abandoned the idols and did not worship Bel or the dragon — which in fact became plain only much later. [3] That purple, then, was simple, and marked among the barbarians not rank as such but free birth.
For just as Joseph, once held as a bondsman, and Daniel, whose condition through exile
had been reversed, attained citizenship in Babylon and in Egypt through the dress that marked barbarian free birth — so too, among us, believers may, if ever the need arises, grant the bordered toga to their sons and the stole to their daughters, as tokens of lineage, not of power; of family, not of honor or rank, not of superstition. But apart from that, purple and the other insignia of rank and power, being bound up from their very origin with idolatry proper to those ranks and powers, carry the stain of that profanation — all the more since the idols themselves are dressed in the bordered toga, the ceremonial robe, and the broad purple stripe, and have the rods and axes of office carried before them, and rightly so: for demons are the magistrates of this present age, and the insignia of one and the same guild are the rods and the purple they wear. [4] What, then, will you gain, if you occupy the platform but do not carry out its business? No one can appear clean amid unclean things. If you put on a garment dirty in itself, it may perhaps not be soiled by you — but you cannot stay clean by wearing it. Now, as for arguing from Joseph and Daniel: know that old things and new, rough and polished, things begun and things carried through, servile things and free things, are not always to be measured against one another. [5] For they, besides, were in the condition of slaves; you, however, are no man's slave, insofar as you belong to Christ alone, who has freed you even from the world's captivity, and you are bound to act after the pattern of your Lord. That Lord walked in lowliness and obscurity, with no fixed dwelling — "the Son of Man," he says, "has nowhere to lay his head"; he was plainly dressed, for he would not otherwise have said, "Behold, those who wear soft clothing are found in the houses of kings"; and in face and bearing he was without glory, exactly as Isaiah had foretold. [6] Given that
he claimed no authority of command even over his own followers, whom he served in the humblest way, and given that, aware of his own kingship, he pulled back from being crowned king, then he handed his followers the most complete possible model for giving up every summit and platform, be it of rank or of authority. [7] For who could have drawn more use from these than the Son of God himself? How many rods might have marched ahead of him! What purple might have draped his shoulders! What gold might have glittered on his brow! — had he not deemed this world's splendor alien, both to himself and to his people. And so, what he turned away, he cast off; what he cast off, he denounced; what he denounced, he numbered among the devil's show. For he would not have denounced it unless it belonged to someone else — and it belongs to none but the devil, since God does not own it. [8] If you have renounced the devil's show, then understand: whatever part of it you lay hold of, count it idol-worship. Take this too to heart: every authority and honor of this present age stands not merely apart from God but in open hostility to him, since it is through them that punishments have been devised against God's servants, and through them too that the penalties prepared for the impious remain unknown. 9. But your very birth and standing, too, weigh against you here as regards idolatry. Yet remedies for avoiding it cannot be lacking — and even should they be lacking, there remains that one great remedy, by which a man is made happier, not by holding office on earth, but by holding it in heaven.
XIX.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 19 ========

[1] In this chapter it might seem we should also settle the question of military service, which falls between rank and power. But the question now under debate is this: whether a believer may turn to military service, and whether military service may even be admitted to the faith — even the rank-and-file soldier, or one of even lower standing, who is under no necessity of performing sacrifices or capital judgments. [2] Divine allegiance and human do not agree, nor Christ's banner alongside the devil's banner, nor the encampment of light alongside the encampment of darkness; one soul cannot be owed to two masters, to God and to Caesar. Moses, too, carried a rod, and Aaron wore a clasp; John is girded with a leather belt, Joshua son of Nun leads an army into battle, and the people went to war — if you care to play that game. [3] But how will he go to war — indeed, how will he even serve in peacetime — without the blade, which the Lord has stripped away? For even though soldiers had come to John and received the rule for their conduct, even though a centurion had come to believe, the Lord, by taking away Peter's weapon afterward, disarmed every one of his soldiers. Not a single garment counts as permissible for us once it has been put to some forbidden use.
XX.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 20 ========

[1] But since the conduct proper to divine discipline is put at risk not only by deeds but also by words — for as Scripture has it, "Look upon this man and what he has done," and again, "Your own words will justify you" — we must remember that in words too an incursion of idolatry must be guarded against, whether it creeps in through the fault of habit or through timidity. [2] The law does not, to be sure, forbid the naming of the gods of the nations: we may pronounce their names, since ordinary speech wrings this from us when we must say such things. For it must often be said: "You'll find him at the temple of Aesculapius," or "I live in the quarter of Isis," or "he was made a priest of Jupiter," and many other things of this kind, since names of this sort are even given to human beings. For I do not honor Saturn merely by calling someone by that name — no more than I honor a man named Mark by calling him Mark. [3] But it is said: "Let not the name of other gods be so much as mentioned by you, nor heard from your mouth." By this we are forbidden to style them gods at all. For earlier still, in that same law's opening section, we read, "You shall not utter the name of the Lord your God to no purpose" — meaning, over an idol. Thus whoever pays a graven image the honor due to God's name has slipped into idol-worship. [4] But if we must speak of "gods," some qualifier needs attaching, to show clearly that it is not I who am styling them gods on my own account. For Scripture too names "gods," but adds "their own" or "of the nations" — as David, after naming gods, states elsewhere, "the deities of the heathen are but devils." But I have laid this down chiefly in preparation for what follows. [5] For the rest, it is a fault of habit, by Hercules, to say "Mehercule," and "Medius Fidius," aggravated by the ignorance of some who do not even know that this is swearing by Hercules. Further, what will swearing falsely by those you have forsworn amount to, but a betrayal of faith compounded with idolatry? For who does not honor those by whom he swears?
XXI.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 21 ========

[1] It is timidity, however, when someone else binds you by an oath or some other testimony sworn by his own gods, and you keep quiet so as not to be caught out. For by keeping quiet you likewise confirm the majesty of those gods, on whose account you will appear to have been bound. [2] What does it matter whether you confirm the gods of the nations as gods by speaking or by silently assenting to hear them so named? Whether you swear by idols, or acquiesce when someone else puts you under oath by them? Why should we not recognize the cunning of Satan here, who — unable to accomplish through our own mouth what he wants — works to accomplish it through the mouths of his own people, smuggling idolatry in through our ears? Whoever he is, he binds you either in a friendly encounter or a hostile one. [3] If hostile, you are already summoned to combat and you know you must fight; if friendly, how much more safely will you transfer your pledge to the Lord, so as to dissolve the obligation by which the evil one was seeking to tie you to the honor of idols — that is, to idolatry. [4] Any tolerance of this sort is idolatry. You honor those to whom, once they are put upon you, you have rendered compliance. I know of a man — may the Lord forgive him — who, when someone said to him in public, in the course of a quarrel, "May Jupiter be angry with you," replied, "No, angry with you." What would a pagan who believed Jupiter to be a god have done differently? Even though he did not throw the curse back by the same god's name, nor by any equivalent of Jupiter, he had already confirmed Jupiter as a god by showing, in flinging the curse back, that he had taken it as an insult. [5] For why would you take offense by the name of one you know to be nothing? If you lose your temper, you are already confirming that he is something, and your idolatry will be a confession of your own alarm — all the more so when you curse back by the very same name and thereby pay Jupiter the same honor as the man who provoked you. But the believer in such a case ought to laugh, not lose his temper — or rather, following the precept, not curse back even in God's name, but plainly bless in God's name, so that you both destroy the idols and proclaim God and fulfill the discipline.
XXII.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 22 ========

[1] Likewise, one initiated into Christ will not endure being wished well upon by invoking the deities of the heathen nations, without always rejecting so tainted a blessing and, redirecting it back to God on his own behalf, cleansing it. To have the heathens' gods invoke good things on you is, in truth, to be cursed by God. [2] If
I give someone alms or render some other kindness, and he invokes upon me the goodwill of his own deities, or the tutelary spirit of the colony, then my offering, or my good work, becomes an honor paid to idols — the means by which he repays me the favor of a blessing. [3] But why shouldn't he know that I did it for God's sake, so that God rather is glorified, and the demons not honored in what I did on God's account? If God sees that I did it for his sake, he sees equally that I refused to make that plain — and I have, in a sense, turned his own commandment into meat offered to idols. [4] Many say that no one is obliged to advertise himself; but I think he is equally not permitted to deny himself. For whoever conceals himself, in whatever matter, so as to pass for a pagan, is denying — and every denial, without question, is idolatry, just as every idolatry, whether in deed or in word, is denial.
XXIII.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 23 ========

[1] But there is a certain trick of this kind, in deed and in word, sharpened on both edges and dangerous both ways, though it may flatter you as though it were innocent on either side, since the deed goes unseen because the word is not pinned down. People borrowing money from pagans under pledge give sworn security and, in the very act, deny their faith; naturally they take care to know the season of persecution, the location of the tribunal, and the identity of the governor. [2] Christ prescribes that one must not swear at all. "I wrote it," someone says, "but I said nothing" — as though the tongue, not the letter, were what kills. Here I summon nature and conscience as witnesses: nature, because the hand can write nothing — even while the tongue stays motionless and silent as it dictates — unless the soul has dictated it; though indeed the soul dictates to the tongue itself as well, whether the thought is its own or handed to it by another. [3] Now, lest it be said "someone else dictated it," here I call on conscience: did the soul not take up what the other dictated, and pass it on to the hand, whether the tongue went along with it or stayed still? And it is rightly said that the Lord pronounced guilt to lie already in the intent and the disposition of the heart. "If," he says, "desire or malice has risen up into a man's heart, you are held guilty as for the deed." [4] So you have taken precautions over something that has plainly risen into your heart — something you cannot claim either not to have known or not to have willed. [5] For in taking precaution, you knew; and in knowing, you certainly willed it; and the guilt lies as much in the deed as in the thought. You cannot use a lesser charge to rule out the greater, by claiming that what you plainly bring about by taking precaution against it is somehow not real. "Still, I did not deny, because I did not swear." Why, even if you had done nothing of the kind, you would still be said to have sworn falsely, if you had done it by consent. A voice unspoken carries no weight against ink on a page, nor a mute sound against written letters. [6] But look at Zacharias: punished with a temporary loss of voice, he converses with his mind, bypassing his idle tongue; he dictates from the heart with his own hands and pronounces his son's name without a mouth. He speaks in writing; his hand is heard on the wax more clearly than any sound, its letters more vocal than any mouth. Ask whether the man who is found to have said something did not, in fact, say it. [7] Let us pray the Lord that no necessity of such a contract ever hem us in; and if it should happen, that he grant our brothers the means to act, or grant us the resolve to break off every such necessity entirely — lest those denying letters, standing in for our own mouths, be produced against us on the day of judgment, sealed not now with the seals of our advocates, but of the angels.
XXIV.

======== De Idololatria — Chapter 24 ========

[1] Between these reefs and inlets, through these shoals and straits of idolatry, faith sails on, its sails filled by the Spirit of God — safe if careful, secure if alert. But for those swept overboard the deep is unswimmable, for those who run aground the wreck is inescapable, for those swallowed down the drowning in idolatry leaves no room to breathe. Whoever its waves choke, its every whirlpool sucks down to hell. [2] Let no one say: who can guard against it so safely? One would have to leave the world altogether. As if leaving were not a smaller price than standing an idolater in the world. Nothing could be easier than guarding against idolatry, if the fear of it sits at the head of one's mind. Whatever necessity you name is smaller, set against so great a danger. [3] For this reason the Holy Spirit, when the apostles then took counsel, loosened the bond and yoke laid on us, so that we might be free to avoid idolatry. This will be our law — light enough to be kept the more fully for it — the proper mark of Christians, by which we are recognized and tested by the pagans; this must be set before those approaching the faith and impressed on those entering it, so that those approaching may weigh it, those observing it may persevere, and those not observing it may write themselves off. [4] For we shall see whether, following the type of the ark, the raven and the kite and the wolf and the dog and the serpent will have a place in the church. Certainly the idol-worshipper has no place among the ark's foreshadowing creatures. No beast was cast as a figure standing for the idolater. What was not in the ark, let it not be in the church.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 1 ========

[1] This treatise on the sacrament of our water, by which, our sins of former blindness washed away, we are set free into eternal life, will not be wasted labor — instructing both those who are just now being formed in the faith and those content simply to have believed, who, never having examined the reasoning behind what has been handed down, carry a faith exposed to temptation through sheer ignorance. [2] And indeed, a certain viper, most venomous in her doctrine, lately at large here from the Cainite heresy, has carried off a good many people, above all by destroying baptism. Quite in keeping with her nature: for vipers, adders, and basilisk-serpents themselves generally keep to dry, waterless places. [3] But we, little fish, are born in water after the pattern of our own great Fish, Jesus Christ (ΙΧΘΥΣ), and only by remaining in the water are we safe. And so that thoroughly grotesque creature — possessing no legitimate license to teach in the first place — understood full well how to kill off the little fish, merely by drawing them out of the water.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 2 ========

[1] But how great is the force of perversity for undermining faith, or refusing it altogether, that it should attack faith by means of the very things it is built on! Nothing hardens men's minds so much as the simplicity of God's works, as they appear in the doing, set against the magnificence promised in their effect. And here too: because with such simplicity — without pomp, without any novel apparatus, and in the end without expense — a man is let down into the water and dipped amid a few words, and comes up again no cleaner, or scarcely any cleaner, in body, for that very reason the attainment of eternity through it is judged incredible. [2] I lie if the solemnities and secret rites of idols do not, by contrast, build up their own credit and authority precisely by platform, apparatus, and expense. Shame on wretched unbelief, which strips God of the very qualities that belong to him — plainness and might! Well then? Is it not a marvelous thing, that death should be washed away by a bath? Is it, because it is marvelous, therefore not to be believed? On the contrary, that is all the more reason to believe it: for what should divine works be like, except beyond all wonder? We too marvel at them ourselves — but because we believe. Unbelief, on the other hand, marvels because it does not believe: it marvels at simple things as though they were empty, and at magnificent things as though they were impossible. [3] And let it be, plainly, just as you suppose: the divine word has already anticipated you thoroughly on both scores: "the Lord picked out what is foolish in this world so as to put its wisdom to shame"; and again, "what men find hard, God finds easy." For if God is at once wise and mighty — a point not even his detractors will dispute — he has, not without reason, drawn the substance of his working from the very reverse of wisdom and might, namely from folly and from what seems impossible: for might always finds its occasion precisely in whatever provokes it.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 3 ========

[1] Bearing this pronouncement in mind as a standing rule, we go on to discuss, regardless, just how foolish and impossible it is for a man to be remade by water. Since this material has indeed earned the office of so great a dignity, I think the authority of the liquid element ought to be established. And in fact a great deal is available, going right back to the beginning. [2] For one point is this: that water is one of the things which, before any furnishing of the world at all, still unshaped in appearance, rested with God in the beginning. "In the beginning," it says, "God made heaven and earth; and the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the deep, and the Spirit of God was borne over the waters." Here you have, man, first of all, the age of water to revere, in that it is an ancient substance; and then its dignity, in that it was the seat of the divine Spirit — more favored, clearly, than the other elements at that time. For the darkness was still wholly without the ordering of the stars, shapeless; the deep was dismal, the earth unready, the heavens raw; only the liquid element — always a finished, joyful, simple material, pure in its own right — offered itself as a fit vehicle for God. [3] What of the fact that from that point the ordering of the world was established by God through waters that, in a manner of speaking, set the measure? For to hang the firmament of heaven in the middle, he did it by separating the waters; to spread out the dry land, he accomplished it by parting the waters. [4] Then, once the world had been arranged through its elements and its inhabitants were to be supplied, it was the waters that first received the command to bring forth living souls: the liquid element was the first to produce what would live, so let no one be surprised that in baptism waters know how to give life. [5] For was not the very shaping of man himself, too, completed with water's cooperation? Matter was taken from the earth — well and good — but it was not workable unless moist and sodden, which the waters, separated before the fourth day, had already tempered into mud at their post, the moisture still lingering. [6] If from this point I were to go on rehearsing everything, or even a good deal more, that could be said in praise of this element's authority — how great its force or its favor, how many are its powers, how many its offices, how much service it renders the world — I fear I should seem to be gathering up praises of water rather than an account of baptism. Though it would let me show all the more fully that there is no need to doubt that the matter which God arranged in all his affairs and works, he also made obedient in his own sacraments — that what governs earthly life also serves heavenly things as well.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 4 ========

[1] It will suffice, though, to have skimmed off enough here that the reasoning of baptism can also be recognized in that first thing which even by its very posture was already prefiguring the shape of baptism: the Spirit of God, who from the beginning was borne above the waters, was to abide above the waters of him who does the baptizing. Now what is holy was of course being borne above what is holy — or rather, from the very fact of being borne above, that which was borne beneath was on loan for holiness from it, since whatever underlying matter necessarily seizes upon the quality of what hovers over it, especially when a bodily thing is easily penetrated and settled into by a spiritual one, through the fineness of its substance. Thus the nature of the waters, sanctified from what is holy, itself conceived the power to sanctify. [2] Let no one say, then, 'Surely we are not baptized in those very waters which existed back then at the beginning?' Not in those very ones, no — except insofar as, though the genus is one, the species are many. And what is attributed to the genus overflows into the species as well. [3] And so there is no distinction whether one is washed in sea or pond, river or spring, lake or channel, nor is there any difference between those whom John dipped in the Jordan and those whom Peter dipped in the Tiber — unless perhaps that eunuch too, whom Philip dipped in some chance water found along the road, brought back more or less salvation for it. [4] So then, all waters, by the ancient privilege of their origin, attain the sacrament of sanctification once God is invoked. For the Spirit at once comes down from the heavens and settles upon the waters, sanctifying them from himself, and thus sanctified, they drink in the power of sanctifying. [5] And yet a certain likeness fits the simple act as well: since we are stained by sins the way one is stained by dirt, we are washed clean by waters. But just as sins do not show on the flesh — no one carries on his skin a smear of idolatry, or fornication, or fraud — so too such things are grime upon the soul, whose will originates the wrongdoing: for the soul commands, the flesh obeys. Yet the two share the guilt between them, the spirit for the command, the flesh for the carrying-out. And so, the waters being in a manner medicated by the angel's intervention, the spirit is washed clean bodily in the water, and the flesh is cleansed spiritually in that same water.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 5 ========

[1] But the nations abroad, strangers to all understanding of spiritual powers, furnish the same efficacy to their idols. But they lie to themselves with widowed waters. For they too are initiated by a kind of washing into certain rites of some Isis or Mithras. They even carry out their gods' own funerals with washings. Besides, they purify country houses, town houses, temples, and whole cities by carrying water around and sprinkling it. Certainly at the games of Apollo, and at the Pelusian rites, people are dipped all over the place, and they presume to be doing this for regeneration and for immunity from the penalties of their perjuries. Likewise among the ancients, whoever had stained himself with murder used to go searching for purifying waters. [2] So then, if the idol — through the nature proper to water as a means of washing — flatters people with the auspice of a cleansing, how much more truly will water furnish that through the authority of the God by whom its whole nature was established! If they think waters are medicated by a religious rite, what religion is stronger than the acknowledgment of the living God? [3] Here too we recognize the devil's ambition, aping the things of God, since he too practices baptism among his own. What likeness is there? Does the unclean cleanse? Does the destroyer set free? Does the condemned absolve? He will, of course, be wrecking his own handiwork by washing away sins which he himself breathes into people. These things, indeed, have been set as a testimony against those who reject the faith — that they might believe least of all in the things of God, whose counterfeits they believe in when offered by God's rival. [4] Or is it not also true that elsewhere, without any sacrament at all, unclean spirits brood over waters, aping that original brooding of the divine Spirit? Shadowy springs and out-of-the-way streams are well known for it, and pools in bathhouses, and channels in houses, or cisterns, and wells said to 'snatch' people — through the force, that is, of a harmful spirit. For they call people 'possessed' and 'lymphatic' and 'hydrophobic' when waters have killed them or driven them out of their wits with madness or terror. [5] Why have we brought all this up? So that no one should find it hard to believe that a holy angel of God is present to temper the waters for a man's salvation, when a profane angel of evil so often haunts the commerce of that same element for a man's destruction. If it seems a novelty that an angel intervenes in waters, an example ran ahead as a foretaste of what was to come. An angel, by intervening, used to stir the pool of Bethsaida. Those who suffered from ill health kept watch for it. For if anyone got down into it first, he stopped complaining after the wash. That figure of bodily healing was singing ahead of time of a spiritual healing, following the pattern by which things of the flesh always run ahead, as a figure, of things of the spirit. [6] So then, as the grace of God advanced in all things, still more was added to the waters and the angel: those which used to remedy bodily ailments now heal the spirit; those which used to work a temporary salvation now refashion an eternal one; those which used to set one person free once a year now preserve whole peoples daily, death having been done away with through the washing away of sins. Once the guilt, of course, is removed, the penalty is removed with it. [7] Thus man is restored to God after the likeness of him who had before been made only after his image: the image is reckoned in outward form, the likeness in eternity — for he recovers that very Breath of God, once granted him by God's inbreathing long ago, which sin had afterward stripped away.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 6 ========

[1] Not that we obtain the Holy Spirit in the water, but that, cleansed in the water under the angel, we are made ready for the Holy Spirit. Here too a figure went before. For just as John was the Lord's own forerunner, preparing his ways, so too the angel who presides over baptism levels the paths for that Holy Spirit destined soon to arrive, through the sins wiped away, a cleansing faith secures, ratified under Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. [2] For if every statement is established on three witnesses, how much more the gift of God on a fourth! We hold, through the blessing, these very same witnesses to faith who likewise stand surety for salvation. The count of divine names by itself suffices for the assurance of our hope. Yet since under three both the confirmation of faith and the guarantee of salvation are made firm, mention of the church must necessarily be added too, since wherever the three dwell — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — there also is the church, that body formed of the three.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 7 ========

[1] After that, on coming up out of the wash, we are anointed all over with a blessed anointing, following that time-honored custom by which men were once smeared with oil poured from a ram's horn unto the priesthood, from the day Aaron was anointed at the hand of Moses. Hence he bears the title 'Christ,' drawn from 'chrism,' meaning 'anointing' — a term likewise given to the Lord, made a spiritual anointed one since God the Father anointed him with the Spirit; as Acts records it, 'For in truth, within this city, they had assembled together against your holy Son, whom you had anointed.' [2] So with us too the anointing runs in the flesh but its benefit is spiritual, just as the very act of baptism itself is fleshly — that we are plunged in water — while its effect is spiritual — that we are set free from sins.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 8 ========

[1] After this, the hand is laid on, through a blessing that calls upon and invites the Holy Spirit. Now if human skill can summon a spirit into water and, by hands laid over it, animate the union of the two with another spirit of no such great brightness — shall it not be permitted to God, working through his own instrument, to modulate through holy hands the sublimity of the Spirit? [2] But this too comes from an ancient sacrament, by which Jacob blessed his grandsons by Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh, laying his hands on their heads and crossing them over one another — crossing them, in fact, in such a way, slanted across each other, that even then, by shaping a figure of Christ, they were foreshadowing the blessing that was to be in Christ. [3] Then that most holy Spirit, gladly, from the Father, comes down upon bodies now cleansed and blessed, and settles upon the waters of baptism, recognizing them, as it were, as his former seat: coming down over the Lord in a dove's likeness, in order that the character proper to the Holy Spirit should be made known by way of a creature marked by innocence and gentleness, since even in body the dove lacks that very gall of bitterness. [4] And so he says, 'Be simple as doves' — nor does even this lack the support of a figure that came earlier: for just as, once the deluge had washed away that primeval wickedness — the world's baptism, one might say — the dove released from the ark, coming back bearing an olive twig, brought word to the earth that heaven's wrath had fallen silent into peace (a token that even the pagans still take as peace's emblem) — in that identical pattern, transposed to the spirit, for the earth here means our flesh, as it rises from the wash cleansed of its former sins, the dove that is the Holy Spirit comes flying to it, carrying God's peace, dispatched from those heavens in which the church resides, the figure represented by the ark. [5] 'But the world sinned again — which makes for a bad comparison between baptism and the flood.' And so it is destined for fire — just as the man who, after baptism, builds his sins back up is likewise destined for fire — so that this too should be taken as a sign for our warning.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 9 ========

[1] So then, how many patronages of nature, how many privileges of grace, how many solemn rites of discipline — how many prefiguring figures, how many proclamations — have set in order the religion of water! First of all: when the people, set free from Egypt, cross through the water and escape the might of the king of Egypt, that same water snuffs out the king himself along with all his forces. What figure is plainer than this for the sacrament of baptism? The nations are freed from the world through water, precisely, and leave the devil, their former master, drowned behind them in the water. [2] Likewise, water sick with bitterness is remedied for its own benefit, into sweetness, by the wood of Moses. That wood was Christ, healing from himself the poisoned and once-bitter veins of nature into the most wholesome water — the water, that is, of baptism. [3] This is the water that flowed for the people from the rock that traveled with them: for if the rock was Christ, then without doubt we see baptism blessed in the water that is in Christ. How great is the grace of water before God and his Christ, for the establishing of baptism! [4] Christ is never without water: he himself, indeed, is baptized in water; called to a wedding, he inaugurates the very first display of his power with water; when he preaches, he invites the thirsty to his own everlasting water; when he teaches about love-feasts, he approves, among the works of love, even the cup of water offered to the least; at the well he regains his strength; he walks upon the water; he crosses over the sea gladly; he serves water to his disciples. The testimony of baptism holds firm right up to the passion: when he is handed over to the cross, water steps in — Pilate's hands know it; when he is wounded, water bursts out from his side — the soldier's spear knows it.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 10 ========

[1] We have said as much as our own modest capacity has allowed about everything that builds up the religion of baptism. Now let me proceed, as best I can, to the rest of its standing, by way of a few small questions. The baptism proclaimed by John already, back then, raised a question — put by the Lord himself to the Pharisees — whether that baptism was from heaven or, instead, merely earthly. To this they were unable to give a firm answer, not understanding it, precisely because they did not believe it either. [2] We, for our part, with whatever small measure of faith we have, can with an equally small measure of understanding judge that it was indeed a divine baptism, but not one given by mandate or by full authority — since we likewise read that it was the Lord who dispatched John to this task, though on every other count it stood on merely human footing. For it furnished nothing heavenly, but rather served as an usher for heavenly things — being, of course, set over repentance, which lies in a man's own will. [3] In short, the teachers of the law and the Pharisees, who refused to believe, also refused to undertake repentance. But if repentance is a human thing, then the baptism tied to it must necessarily have been of that same standing: it would have conferred both forgiveness of sins and the Holy Ghost together, had it truly originated from heaven. But no one forgives sins or bestows the Spirit except God alone. [4] Even the Lord himself declared that the Spirit would not come down unless he himself first ascended to the Father. So what the master was not yet bestowing, the servant certainly could not furnish. Indeed, further on, in the Acts of the Apostles, we discover that certain men, holding merely John's baptism, were altogether without the Holy Ghost — they had not so much as caught word that he existed. [5] So then it was not a thing from heaven, since it did not deliver heavenly things — seeing that even what was heavenly in John, the spirit of prophecy, after the whole of the Spirit had been transferred onto the Lord, so utterly failed that the very one he had preached, the very one he had pointed out as he arrived, John later sent to ask whether he was really the one. So the baptism of repentance was being carried out as a kind of candidate awaiting the remission and sanctification that would follow in Christ. [6] For as to what we read, 'He preached a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins' — this was announced as a remission still to come, since repentance comes first and remission follows, and this is what it means to prepare the way: for the one who prepares does not himself carry the thing through, but sees to it that another finishes what he began. [7] He himself professes that what he offers is not from heaven but Christ's, saying: 'He who is of the earth speaks of earthly things; he who comes from above is above all.' Likewise, that he himself baptizes with repentance alone, while one is soon to come who will baptize with Spirit and fire: because, that is, true and steady faith is baptized with the Spirit unto salvation, while a faith that is feigned and weak is baptized with fire unto judgment.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 11 ========

'But look,' they say, 'the Lord came and did not baptize — for we read: "Yet Jesus himself did not baptize, but his disciples did."' As if John had actually predicted that the man himself would baptize with his own hands! That is certainly not how it's to be understood; it's simply said in the common way, as when we say for instance 'the emperor issued an edict' or 'the governor flogged him with rods.' Does the emperor himself post the notice, or the governor himself swing the rods? The one to whom the service is rendered is always said to be the one doing it. So "He will baptize you" is to be taken as meaning "you will be baptized through him," or "into him." Nor should anyone be troubled that he himself did not baptize. Into what, after all, would he have baptized? Into repentance? Then why send a forerunner ahead of himself? Into the remission of sins, which he was already granting by his word? Into himself, whom he was concealing in humility? Into the Spirit of Holiness, who had not at that time ascended to the Father? Into the church, which he had not yet built upon the apostles? And so his disciples baptized as ministers, as John had been the forerunner before him — with that same baptism of John, lest you think it was some other; for none other is on record except, later, that of Christ, which of course could not yet be given by the learners, since the Lord's glory had not yet reached its fullness, nor had the washing's power yet been fitted out through his passion and resurrection — because our death could not be dissolved except by the Lord's passion, nor life restored without his resurrection.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 12 ========

Now since it is laid down that salvation belongs to no one without baptism — chiefly on the strength of that pronouncement of the Lord's, "Unless a man is born of water, he shall not have life" — certain people raise scrupulous, indeed reckless, objections as to how, on this rule, salvation can belong to the apostles, whom we find nowhere on record as baptized, Paul excepted. Indeed, since Paul alone of them put on the baptism of Christ, either the others' peril must be prejudged — that they lack the water of Christ, so that the rule stands intact — or the rule itself must be scrapped, if salvation is granted even to the unbaptized. I have heard this kind of thing, the Lord be my witness, lest anyone suppose me so far gone as to invent, out of some itch for writing, difficulties designed to trouble other people. And now I will answer these people as best I can, who deny that the apostles were baptized. For if they had obtained the merely human baptism of John, why would they still be longing for the Lord's, seeing that the Lord himself had fixed one baptism only, telling Peter, who wanted his whole body washed, "He who has once washed has no need to wash again" — words he certainly would not have spoken to a man not baptized at all? And this is a telling proof against those who would strip the apostles even of John's baptism, in order to demolish the sacrament of water. Or can it seem credible that in the very persons destined to open the Lord's way across the whole world, the way had, in their own case, not been prepared beforehand — that is, John's baptism? The Lord himself, owing no debt of repentance, was baptized; was it not necessary for sinners? So if others were not baptized, they were no longer companions of Christ but rivals of the faith — teachers of the Law and Pharisees. Which is exactly why it is suggested that, when those opposed to the Lord refused to be baptized, those who followed the Lord had been baptized, and did not think as their rivals did — especially since the Lord to whom they clung had praised John with this testimony: "No one," he said, "among those born of women is greater than John the Baptist." Others, straining rather too hard, throw in that the apostles fulfilled their baptism at the moment they were being swamped by the waves in the boat — and that Peter too, wading out into the sea, got thoroughly soaked. But as I see it, being splashed or caught by the violence of the sea is one thing, and being baptized by the rite of religion is quite another. As for that, the boat there was a figure of the church, which, on the sea — that is, in the world — is battered by waves, that is, by persecutions and temptations, while the Lord, as if asleep through patience, waits until, roused at the last by the prayers of the saints, he calms the world and restores tranquility to his own. Whether, then, they had by some means received the washing, or stayed unwashed, so that even that word of the Lord's touching the "single washing," uttered in the person of Peter, is to be applied only to ourselves — it is nonetheless quite reckless to pass judgment on the salvation of the apostles. For to them the privilege of being first chosen, and thereafter of unbroken intimacy with him, might well have supplied a shortcut around baptism, since it was, I think, that same one they were following who promised salvation to every believer: "Your faith," he would say, "has saved you," and, "Your sins are forgiven you" — to a believer, mind you, and not yet a baptized one. If the apostles lacked this, I do not know whose faith is secure. At one word from the Lord the tax-collector rose and abandoned his booth; he left father and boat and the trade that kept him alive; he scorned his father's funeral rites — fulfilling that supreme command of the Lord's, "Whoever puts father or mother before me is not worthy of me," before he had even heard it spoken.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 13 ========

From this, then, those most wicked people press their questions further: 'So then,' they say, 'baptism is not necessary for those to whom faith is enough — for Abraham too pleased God by the sacrament of faith alone, without any water.' But in all things the later stages settle the matter, and what comes after outweighs what came before. Granted that, in the past, salvation lay in bare faith, before the Lord's passion and resurrection; but once faith was enlarged, and came to include belief in his birth, passion, and resurrection, there was added to the sacrament an amplification — the sealing of baptism, a garment, so to speak, thrown over the faith that had before gone naked, which now cannot save without its own law attached. For a law of baptizing has been imposed, and a set form prescribed: "Go," he says, "make disciples of the nations, baptizing them into the Father's name, and the Son's, and the Holy Spirit's." Alongside this law stands that definition, "Unless a man is born again of water and the Holy Spirit, he shall not enter the kingdom of heaven," which binds faith fast to the necessity of baptism. And so, from that point on, all who believed were baptized. Then Paul too — the moment he believed, that moment he was baptized: and this is exactly what the Lord had commanded him in the midst of that blinding blow: "Rise," he said, "and go into Damascus: there you will be shown what you must do" — namely, to be baptized, the one thing still lacking to him. For otherwise he had already thoroughly learned and believed that the Nazarene was the Lord, the Son of God.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 14 ========

But they also turn against the apostle himself the fact that he said, "For Christ did not send me to baptize" — as if this argument could strip away baptism altogether. Then how is it that he baptized both Gaius and Crispus, along with Stephanas's household? And besides, even if Christ had not sent him to baptize, he had nonetheless charged the other apostles to baptize. But this was written to the Corinthians to suit the circumstances of that particular moment, since schisms and quarrels were stirring among them, one man claiming himself for Paul, another for Apollos. That is why the peacemaking apostle, not wanting to seem to be championing his own cause in everything, said his mission was to preach rather than to baptize. For preaching holds the first place and baptizing the second — granted that the preaching came before it. But I think a man who was allowed to preach was also allowed to baptize.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 15 ========

I do not know whether anything more is stirred up on the question of baptism. I will, however, go back and pick up a thread I dropped above, so as not to seem to be cutting off points that still hang over us. There is, altogether, only one baptism for us — both by the Lord's gospel and by the apostle's letters — since there is a single God, a single baptism, and a single church situated in the heavens. But as for how one ought to conduct oneself toward heretics, that is a matter worth a proper discussion of its own, worthily undertaken. As for us, it has been handed down clearly: heretics have no share at all in our discipline; the very withdrawal of communion with them testifies that they are outsiders. I am not obliged to recognize in them what has been prescribed for me, because their God is not our God, nor is their Christ one and the same as ours; and so their washing cannot be reckoned identical with ours, since it is a different thing altogether. Since they do not have it in its proper form, without doubt they do not have it at all, and what is not possessed cannot be counted; and so they cannot receive it, because they do not have it. But on this subject I have already treated more fully in my Greek work. So then: we go down into the washing once, our offenses are washed away once, because these things ought not be repeated. The Jew of Israel, by contrast, washes daily, because he is dirtied daily. And so that this should not become our practice too, it was fixed as a single washing. Happy is the water that washes once — that is no laughingstock to sinners, that is not fouled again and again by the buildup of filth so as to dirty afresh those it has already cleansed.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 16 ========

There is also, for us, a second washing — one and the same as the first — namely, of blood, of which the Lord said, "I have a baptism to be baptized with," though he had already been baptized. For he came by water and blood, as John wrote, so that he might be baptized with water and glorified with blood. And so, to make us the ones called by water and the ones chosen by blood, he sent forth these two baptisms from the wound in his pierced side, so that those who believed in his blood might be washed with water, and those who had been washed with water might, in turn, owe him blood. This is the baptism that serves in place of the washing where the washing was never given, and that gives it back again where it has been lost.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 17 ========

It remains, to round off this little topic, to remind you also about the proper order for giving and receiving baptism. As for giving it, the highest right belongs to the high priest — if there is a bishop present; after him, the presbyters and deacons, though not without the bishop's authorization, out of respect for the church, on whose safety the safety of peace itself depends. Otherwise, laymen too possess this right — for whatever is received on an equal footing can likewise be given on an equal footing — unless already bishops, or presbyters, or deacons, are to be called 'the Lord's disciples' as though no one else were; that is, just as the word ought not to be hidden away from anyone, so too baptism, which is equally God's property, can be administered by everyone. But how much more does discretion and modesty become laymen, when this is a thing that belongs properly to their betters, so that they do not seize for themselves an office reserved for the bishop! Rivalry over the episcopate is the mother of schisms. "All things are lawful," said the most holy apostle, "but not all things are expedient." Let it suffice, in cases of necessity, to make use of it, wherever the condition of place or time or person compels it; for then the boldness of the one coming to the rescue is excused, when the circumstance of the one in danger presses hard upon him — since he will be guilty of the ruin of a man if he holds back from supplying what he was free to give. But the impudence of the woman who has arrogated to herself the right to teach will certainly not also snatch for herself the right to baptize — unless some new beast turns up resembling the old one, so that, just as that first one abolished baptism, some other might likewise confer it on her own authority. But if certain people defend, by appeal to those falsely written 'Acts of Paul,' the example of Thecla as license for women to teach and to baptize, be it known that the presbyter in Asia responsible for compiling that writing, heaping it up out of his own zeal under cover of Paul's name, stood convicted of the fact, and on his own confession that he had done it out of love for Paul, was removed from his position. For how could it seem anywhere near credible that the very man who did not even consistently permit a woman to learn should have given her the power to teach and to baptize? "Let them be silent," he says, "and consult their own husbands at home." 

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 18 ========

As for the rest, those whose office it is know that baptism is not to be entrusted carelessly. "Give to everyone who asks you" has its own heading, belonging properly to almsgiving. Rather, this ought to be kept in view instead: "Do not give what is holy to dogs, or cast your pearls before swine," and, "Do not lay hands hastily on anyone, and do not share in others' sins." But if it be objected that Philip baptized the eunuch so readily, let us reconsider: a plain and unmistakable act of the Lord's own favor had intervened there. The Spirit had ordered Philip to head down that particular road; and the eunuch himself was found to be not idle either, nor a man who suddenly took a fancy to be baptized on a whim, but one who had set out to the temple to pray, and was engrossed in the divine scripture; that was how it was meant to go for a man to whom God had of his own accord sent an apostle — whom, again, the Spirit ordered to run and fall in alongside the eunuch's chariot. The scripture met his very faith exactly on time; he is urged, and taken up; the Lord is shown to him; faith wastes no time; the water is not waited for; the apostle, business finished, is snatched away. Paul too, for that matter, was genuinely baptized quickly — for his host Simon had quickly recognized that this man had been appointed a chosen vessel. God's favor sends its own special privileges on ahead; whereas an ordinary petition is just as liable to mislead as to be misled. Hence, depending on each individual's circumstances, temperament, and age too, putting off baptism proves more beneficial — especially, though, in the case of little children. For what need is there, if it is not strictly necessary, for the sponsors too to be thrust into danger, seeing that they themselves may fail to keep their promises by dying, or may be let down by a child growing up with a bad character? The Lord does indeed say, "Do not forbid them to come to me" — well then, let them come while they are growing up, while they are learning, while they are being taught where it is they are coming to; let them turn into Christians once they are capable of having knowledge of Christ. Why should guiltless childhood hurry to the forgiveness of sins? People act more cautiously in worldly matters — so that one to whom earthly property is not entrusted should be entrusted with the divine? Let them learn to ask for salvation, so that you may be seen to have given it to one who asked. For no less a reason should the unmarried also be made to wait — those in whom temptation lies in readiness, in virgins through their ripening maturity, and in widows through their wandering freedom — until either they marry or are strengthened for continence. Those who appreciate the weight of baptism will fear its attainment more than its postponement. An unbroken faith is secure about salvation.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 19 ========

[1] Passover furnishes a more solemn day for baptism, since then too the Lord's passion, into which we are baptized, was accomplished. Nor will it be a strained reading of the figure that when the Lord was about to keep his last Passover, he sent his disciples ahead to make preparation, saying, "You will meet a man carrying water": by this he indicated the spot marked out for the Passover celebration through that watery token. [2] After that, Pentecost is a most joyful stretch of time for arranging baptisms, since during it the Lord's resurrection was repeatedly attested among the disciples, the grace of the Holy Spirit was inaugurated, and the hope of the Lord's coming was quietly foreshadowed — because then, after his reception back up among the heavenly realms, angels told the apostles he would return exactly as he had gone up on high, which occurred, naturally, at Pentecost. But Jeremiah too, when he says, "And I will gather them from the ends of the earth on the feast day of the Passover," means both that day and Pentecost, which is properly a feast day. [3] For the rest, every single day belongs to the Lord; any hour, any season suits baptism well enough. If solemnity produces a difference, grace produces none.

======== De Baptismo — Chapter 20 ========

[1] Candidates approaching baptism ought to give themselves to prayer, and do so often, along with fastings, kneelings, and vigils, and with confessing every past sin of theirs, so as to reproduce even the baptism of John: "They were baptized," it says, "confessing their sins" — we may congratulate ourselves if we do not have to confess our iniquities or shames in public — for at the same time we settle accounts for our former life through the wrestling match of flesh against spirit, and we throw up defenses against the temptations that are to follow. "Watch and pray," he says, "that you not fall into temptation." [2] And this, I believe, is why they were tempted — because they had fallen asleep — so that they abandoned the Lord once he was seized, and even the one who had stood by him and used the sword denied him three times over. For the saying had already gone before, that no one will attain the heavenly kingdom without having been tempted. [3] The Lord himself, immediately after his washing, was beset by temptations for forty days, which he spent in fasting. "So we too," someone will say, "ought rather to fast right after our washing." And indeed who forbids it — except the compulsion of joy, the thanksgiving for salvation? [4] But the Lord, as far as I can judge, turned back a reproach upon Israel by way of a figure. For that people, having crossed the sea and been led into the wilderness, though fed there for forty years on heaven-sent supplies, kept thinking of their belly and their appetite rather than of God. The Lord, on the other hand, set apart in the desert after his own water and having completed forty days of fasting, showed that a man lives not on bread alone but through God's own utterance, and thus that the temptations aimed at a full and unrestrained belly are struck down by abstinence. [5] Therefore, you blessed ones for whom God's grace waits: when you come up from that most holy washing of the new birth and first spread your hands at your mother's side among your brothers, ask the Father, ask the Lord, that special gifts of grace, distributions of spiritual endowments, be granted you. "Ask, and you shall receive," he says. For you have sought and found; you have knocked, and the door has swung open before you. Only, I ask this — when you make your requests, keep Tertullian, a sinner, in your remembrance too.
HERE ENDS TERTULLIAN'S BOOK ON BAPTISM

======== De Oratione — Chapter 1 ========

God's own Spirit, together with God's Utterance and God's Rationale — Utterance possessing rationale, rationale expressed through the Utterance, and Spirit uniting the pair — Jesus Christ our Lord, marked out for his new disciples of the new covenant a new form of prayer. For it was fitting that in this respect too new wine should be stored in new skins, and a new patch stitched onto a new garment. As for everything that had gone before, it was either changed, as circumcision was; or supplemented, as the rest of the law was; or fulfilled, as prophecy was; or brought to perfection, as faith itself was. [2] The new grace of God has renewed everything from the carnal into the spiritual, by overlaying it with the gospel, which strikes out the whole of the old order — and in this gospel our Lord Jesus Christ was shown to be God's Spirit, God's Utterance, and God's Rationale: Spirit, through which he held power; Utterance, through which he instructed; Rationale, through which he arrived. So then, the prayer Christ instituted was assembled from three elements: from Spirit, from which it draws its power; from Utterance, through which it is voiced; from Rationale, through which it... [3] John too had taught his disciples to pray; but everything of John's was laid down merely to prepare the way for Christ, until, once Christ had grown greater — just as John himself had foretold that Christ must increase and he himself decrease — the whole work of that preliminary ministry, along with the Spirit itself, passed over to the Lord. That is why there is no record of the words in which John taught men to pray: earthly things had to yield to heavenly ones. "He who is of the earth," it says, "speaks earthly things, and he who comes from heaven speaks what he has seen." And what belonging to the Lord Christ is not heavenly — including this very discipline of prayer? [4] Let us then consider, blessed ones, his heavenly wisdom, beginning with the precept to pray in secret, by which he both demanded a man's faith — that he be confident that the sight and hearing of Almighty God reach even indoors and into a hidden place — and required a modesty of faith, so that one who trusts God hears and sees him everywhere should offer his devotion to him alone. [5] The wisdom in the next precept, likewise, bears on faith and the modesty of faith, if we do not think we must approach the Lord with a marching column of words, since we are certain that he takes thought unbidden for his own. [6] And yet this brevity — insofar as it serves a third degree of wisdom — rests upon the weight of a rich and blessed exposition, and the more tightly it is compressed in words, the more it is expanded in meanings. For it embraces not only the proper functions of prayer — reverence of God, or a man's petitions — but almost the whole discourse of the Lord, the whole record of his teaching, so that in truth the prayer contains an abridgment of the entire gospel.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 2 ========

It opens with an attestation of God and the reward due to faith, in the words: OUR FATHER, WHICH ART IN HEAVEN — for by this we both address a prayer to God and lay claim to our faith, of which such an address is itself the recompense. It is written: "To those who believed in him, he gave the power to be called sons of God." [2] Although the Lord repeatedly proclaimed God to us as Father — indeed he expressly forbade our giving any man on earth that title, reserving it for him above — so by praying in this manner we are also fulfilling a precept. [3] Blessed are those who acknowledge the Father! This is what is charged against Israel, what heaven and earth are called by the Spirit to witness against it, when he says: "I have raised children, and they have refused to acknowledge me." [4] But in saying "Father" we are also naming him God. This title carries both devotion and power. [5] Likewise, in the Father the Son is invoked. "For I," he says, "and the Father are one." [6] Nor is our mother the Church passed over, since in the Son and the Father the Mother too is recognized, seeing that from her comes the very possibility of the name of Father and of Son. [7] By one single term, then, and one address, we both honor God together with his own, and call to mind the commandment, and mark those who have forgotten the Father.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 3 ========

The name of God the Father has never been disclosed to anyone. Even Moses, who had inquired after it, was given a different one. But for us that name has been laid open in the Son. For what son is not the name of his father? "I have come," he says, "in the name of the Father," and again, "Father, glorify your name," and more plainly still: "I have made your name manifest to men." [2] We ask, then, that this name be hallowed — not because it would be appropriate for us to wish God well, as though on behalf of some other party, or as though he would go lacking anything unless we did the wishing; obviously it is fitting that God be praised in every place and at every moment, given the debt of gratitude every human owes for his benefits — but this petition, too, functions as a form of praise. [3] Besides, when is God's name ever not holy, and hallowed in its own right, seeing that he sanctifies everything else out of himself? To him that ring of surrounding angels never ceases to say, "Holy, holy, holy!" So then we too, if we bear in mind that we are candidates for the company of angels, are already learning here and now that heavenly cry directed to God, and the office we shall discharge in that future glory. [4] So much for what touches on God's own glory. Yet as regards what we ourselves are asking, in saying HALLOWED BE THY NAME, we request that it be hallowed within us, who are in him, and at the same time in the rest, for whom God's grace still waits — so that we too may obey this commandment by praying for everyone, even for our enemies. And that is why, leaving the wording open, instead of saying "hallowed in us" we say "in all."

======== De Oratione — Chapter 4 ========

On the same pattern we add THY WILL BE DONE, IN HEAVEN AND ON EARTH — not that anyone could obstruct God's will from being done, as if we were praying for his will to succeed, but we are asking that his will be done in all things. On the figurative reading of flesh and spirit, we ourselves are heaven and earth. [2] Yet even if it is to be taken plainly, the sense of the petition remains the same: that God's will be done in us on earth, so that it may then be able to be done in heaven as well. And what does God will, but that we walk according to his teaching? We ask, then, that he furnish us both the matter and the strength for doing his will, so that we may be preserved both in heaven and on earth — since his will, taken as a whole, amounts to the rescue of those he has made his own. [3] There is also that will of God which the Lord carried out by preaching, by acting, by enduring. For if he himself declared that he did not do his own will but the Father's, then without doubt the things he was doing were the Father's will, and to these we are now summoned as to patterns, that we too may preach and act and endure even unto death. And to be able to fulfill these, we need the will of God. [4] Likewise, this phrase "Thy will be done" has us invoking good upon ourselves as well, acknowledging that God's will contains nothing evil — even when something befalls us that runs contrary to what each has deserved. [5] By this same saying, moreover, we brace ourselves in advance for endurance. The Lord himself, too, when under the strain of his passion he chose to display the flesh's weakness in his very own flesh, said, "Father, take this cup away" — then, catching himself: "yet not what I will, but what thou dost." He himself embodied the Father's will and might, and yet, to show what endurance that will demands, he surrendered himself over to it.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 5 ========

THY KINGDOM COME as well belongs to the same thing as "thy will be done" — done, that is, in us. For at what moment does God ever cease to rule, holding as he does the heart of every king within his grasp? But whatever we wish for ourselves, we forecast in him and credit to him, since it is from him that we expect it. So if the coming of the Lord's kingdom is bound up both with God's will and with our own suspended hope, how is it that some people ask for a certain postponement in this present age, when the kingdom of God, whose coming we pray for, tends toward the consummation of the age? We wish for our reign to come sooner, not for our servitude to last longer. [2] Even if the wording of the prayer had not been fixed to ask for the coming of the kingdom, we would have volunteered that very cry on our own, hastening toward the embrace of our hope. [3] The souls of the martyrs cry out under the altar to the Lord, indignant: "How long, O Lord, until you avenge our blood upon the inhabitants of the earth?" For their vindication, of course, is set to be directed only at the end of the age. [4] Rather, Lord, how swiftly may your kingdom come — the wish of Christians, the confusion of the nations, the exultation of angels — for whose sake we are worn down in struggle, or rather, for whose sake we pray.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 6 ========

But how elegantly does heaven's own wisdom lay out the sequence of this prayer, so that only after the heavenly concerns — namely God's name, God's will, and God's kingdom — does it then make space within the petition for what earth requires! For the Lord had already declared: "Seek first the kingdom, and then all these things will be added to you as well." [2] Although GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD ought rather to be taken in a spiritual sense. For Christ counts as our bread, seeing that Christ is our life, and bread stands for life. ("I myself," he declares, "am the living bread," and shortly before that: "the loaf sent down out of the heavens is God's own utterance, alive") — and further, because his own body too is figured under bread ("This is my body"). So in asking for our daily bread we are asking for perpetuity in Christ, and for undividedness from his body. [3] But even taken in the carnal sense in which this phrase is commonly admitted, it cannot be uttered without religious meaning and a spiritual discipline as well. For he bids us ask for bread, which alone is necessary for the faithful; the other things the nations go seeking. So too he drives it home with examples and reworks it in parables, when he says, "Does a father take bread from his children and give it to dogs?" Likewise: "Does he hand a stone to a son asking for bread?" He shows, that is, what sons should expect from a father. And that nighttime petitioner too was knocking for bread. [4] Fittingly, moreover, he added "give us this day," since he had already told us beforehand, "Do not be anxious about tomorrow, what you will eat." To this point he also fitted the parable of that man who, as his crops came in, planned to enlarge his barns and secure himself a long stretch of ease — and died that very night.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 7 ========

Having observed God's generosity, it followed that we should also beg his mercy. What good would food do us, if we were reckoned to him as no better than a bull led to the slaughter? The Lord knew that he alone was without fault. So he teaches us to pray FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS. Confession is the plea for pardon, because whoever asks pardon confesses a fault. In this way, too, repentance is shown to be acceptable to God, since it is what he desires, not the sinner's demise. Now in Scripture, debt is a figure for sin, which in the same way is owed to judgment and exacted by it, and cannot escape the justice of the exaction unless the exaction is remitted — just as that master forgave his servant the debt. That is what the whole parable is aimed at. For the same servant, once freed by his master, does not likewise spare his own debtor, and for that reason, reported to his master, is handed over to the torturer to pay the last farthing — that is, even the smallest debt — and this fits exactly with our profession that WE TOO FORGIVE OUR DEBTORS. Elsewhere, too, in the same vein he says, Forgive, and you will be forgiven. And when Peter asked whether he should forgive his brother seven times, he answered, No — seventy times seven, reforming for the better the law by which, in Genesis, vengeance for Cain was reckoned sevenfold, and for Lamech seventy-sevenfold.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 8 ========

He added, to round out this compact prayer, that we should pray not only about the forgiving of debts but also about averting them altogether: LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION — that is, do not allow us to be led into it, by the one who does the tempting. Far be it from us to think the Lord would appear to put someone to trial, as if he were ignorant of anyone's faith or delighted in bringing people down. Weakness and malice belong to the devil. Even Abraham was not commanded to sacrifice his son to test his faith, but to prove it, so that through him God might make an example for the precept he was about to give, that no one should hold any pledge dearer than God. Christ himself, tempted by the devil, showed who presides over and engineers temptation. He confirms this point later by saying, Pray that you not be tempted. Indeed the disciples were tempted by deserting the Lord, having given themselves to sleep rather than to prayer. The closing clause answers what 'lead us not into temptation' means; for this is what follows: BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 9 ========

In the compass of a very few words, how many pronouncements of the prophets, the gospels, the apostles are touched — the Lord's sayings, parables, examples, precepts! How many duties are summed up at once! God's honor is in 'Father'; the testimony of faith is in 'name'; the offering of obedience is in 'thy will'; the remembrance of hope is in 'thy kingdom'; the petition for life is in 'bread'; the confession of debts is in the plea for pardon; anxiety about temptations is in the request for protection. What wonder? Only God could teach how he wished to be prayed to. So the religious rite of prayer, ordained by him, and animated by his own Spirit from the moment it issued from his divine mouth, rises to heaven by its own special privilege, commending to the Father what the Son taught.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 10 ========

Yet since the Lord, who watches over human needs, said elsewhere, apart from handing down the rule of prayer, Ask, and you shall receive — and there are things to be asked according to each person's circumstances — after the lawful and regular prayer has gone before as the foundation, one has the right to build additional petitions on top of it, so long as the precepts are still kept in mind, lest we be far from God's ears by being far only from his precepts.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 11 ========

The remembrance of the precepts paves the road of our prayers to heaven, and chief among them is this: that we should not go up to God's altar before we have resolved any quarrel or offense we may have incurred with our brothers. For what sort of thing is it to approach God's peace without peace? To seek remission of debts while holding a grudge? How will an angry man appease the Father when he is angry at his brother, since all anger has been forbidden us from the beginning? Even Joseph, sending his brothers off to fetch their father, said, Do not quarrel on the way. Surely he was warning us — for 'the way' is elsewhere the name for our own discipline — not to set out on the way of prayer to the Father while walking in anger. Then the Lord, openly extending the law, ranks anger at a brother alongside murder; he does not even permit it to be discharged by a harsh word; and even if one must be angry, let it not outlast the setting of the sun, as the apostle warns. How reckless it is either to let a day go by without prayer while you delay making it right with your brother, or to ruin your prayer by nursing your anger.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 12 ========

Not only from anger but from every disturbance of mind whatsoever must the intent of prayer be free, sent up from a spirit such as the Spirit to whom it is sent. For a defiled spirit cannot be recognized by the Holy Spirit, nor a sorrowful one by a joyful, nor a hindered one by a free. No one welcomes an adversary; no one admits anyone but his own equal.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 13 ========

But what sense is there in going to prayer with hands washed but a filthy spirit, when it is the hands themselves that need spiritual cleanliness, so that they may be lifted up pure of falsehood, of bloodshed, of cruelty, of sorcery, of idolatry, and of the other stains conceived in the spirit but carried out by the work of the hands? These are the true cleannesses — not the ones that most people fuss over superstitiously, taking water for every prayer even when they have just come from washing the whole body. When I put this to the scrupulous and asked the reason, I found it was a remembrance of Pilate: that he washed his hands when he handed the Lord over. We worship the Lord, we do not hand him over — indeed we ought to oppose the example of the one who handed him over — and we have no reason to wash our hands on that account, except for some stain of ordinary human dealing, for conscience' sake. Otherwise our hands are clean enough, having been washed once, with the whole body, in Christ.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 14 ========

Israel may wash every limb every day and never be clean. Certainly his hands never come clean, forever crusted with the gore of the prophets and of the Lord in person; and so the conscience of those forefathers, heirs to that same guilt, dares not raise them toward the Lord, for fear some Isaiah cry out, for fear Christ shudder. We, however, not only lift them up but spread them wide, and, patterned on the Lord's passion, even while praying we confess to Christ.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 15 ========

But since we have touched on one instance of empty observance, it will not be tiresome to point out the others too, which deserve to be censured as vanity, since they are done without the authority of any precept of the Lord or the apostles. Practices of this kind are to be classed not as religion but as superstition — affected, forced, a matter of fussy scruple rather than of reasoned duty — and are to be checked, if for no other reason, because they make us like the pagans: for instance, some people's habit of praying with their cloaks laid aside, since that is how the nations approach their idols. If this were something that ought to be done, surely the apostles, who instruct us on the manner of prayer, would have included it — unless one supposes that Paul left his cloak with Carpus specifically for praying in. God, apparently, will not listen to men without their cloaks — he who heard the three saints praying in the Babylonian king's furnace, trousers, turbans, and all.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 16 ========

Likewise, that it is the custom of some to sit down once prayer is finished — I cannot see the reason, except a childish one. What then? If Hermas, the man whose book usually goes by the name 'The Shepherd,' had, once his prayer was over, done something other than take a seat on his bed, would we be turning even that into a rule to keep? Certainly not. The passage is simply recording, as it happens: When I had prayed and sat down on the bed — as part of the order of the narrative, not as a model of discipline. Otherwise there would be nowhere to pray except where there happened to be a bed. On the contrary, one would be acting against Scripture by sitting on a chair or a bench. Moreover, since the pagans do the very same thing, sitting down after worshipping their little idols, this custom deserves rebuke among us precisely because it is practiced at idols. And there is a further charge to add, that of irreverence — one that even the pagans, if they had any sense, ought to recognize: for it is irreverent to sit down in the sight of, and facing, the one you are supposed to be revering and honoring above all; how much more irreligious is it to do this in the sight of the living God, with the angel of prayer still standing by! Unless we mean to reproach God that our prayer has worn us out.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 17 ========

Rather, praying with modesty and humility we will commend our prayers to God all the better, not even raising our hands too high, but lifting them in moderation and propriety, not even setting our faces in a bold stare. For that tax collector too, who prayed humbled not only in speech but in countenance, cast down, went away more justified than the brazen Pharisee. We ought to be restrained in the sound of our voice as well — or else what great lungs we would need, if we were to be heard for our volume! God is not a listener to the voice but to the heart, just as he is its watcher. The demon of the Pythian oracle says, I understand even the mute, and hear even the one who does not speak. Do God's ears wait for a sound? How else could Jonah's prayer, from the very belly of the whale, through the innards of so vast a beast, from the depths of the sea itself, through such a mass of ocean, have made its way up to heaven? What more do those who pray more loudly achieve, except to disturb their neighbors? Indeed, by broadcasting their petitions, what less do they do than if they prayed in the public square?

======== De Oratione — Chapter 18 ========

Another custom has now taken hold: those who are fasting, after finishing their prayer with the brethren, omit the kiss of peace, that seal set upon prayer. But when is peace more fittingly exchanged with the brethren than when prayer rises the more commendably from our shared work, so that they too may share in what we have done, by having contributed their own peace to a brother's business? What kind of prayer is whole when severed from the holy kiss? What duty done for the Lord does peace hinder? What sort of sacrifice is it that one leaves without peace? Whatever the reasoning behind it, it will never outweigh the observance of the precept that bids us keep our fasts hidden; for by abstaining from the kiss we are already recognized as fasting. But if there is some reason for it, so that you not become liable under this precept, you can, if need be, put off the exchange of peace at home, among those from whom concealing the fast entirely is not possible. Wherever else you can hide what you are doing, though, you should remember the precept; that way you will satisfy both the discipline abroad and the custom at home. So too on Easter Day, when the observance of the fast is shared and, so to speak, public, we rightly set the kiss aside, with no concern about hiding what we are doing along with everyone else.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 19 ========

Likewise, on station days, most people think prayers should not be joined with the sacrifice, on the ground that taking the Lord's body ends the station. Does the Eucharist, then, undo devoted service to God, or does it instead bind us to him all the more firmly? Will your station not stand the more solemn for your having also stood at God's altar? Once his body has been taken and kept safe, both duties remain intact — both participation in the sacrifice and the carrying-out of the duty. If 'station' takes its name from military usage — for we too are God's soldiery — then surely no joy or sorrow that befalls the camp ever breaks the soldiers' stations. Joy will carry out the duty more gladly, sorrow more anxiously.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 20 ========

As for the dress of women in particular, the variety of observance has resulted in our being, after that most holy apostle, especially reluctant to reopen the question at all — men from nowhere in particular that we are — except that it is not shameless to reopen it if we do so following the apostle. On the modesty of dress and adornment there is an open prescription, even from Peter, who, speaking from the very mouth moved by the very Spirit that also moved Paul, forbids both the glory of fine clothes and the arrogance of gold and the pimping elaborateness of hairstyles.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 21 ========

But since what is observed differently across the churches is treated as though uncertain, this must be reconsidered: whether virgins ought to be veiled or not. Those who grant virgins freedom from covering their heads seem to rest their case on this, that the apostle designated as to be veiled not virgins by name, but 'women' — not the female sex as a whole, as if he meant 'females' generally, but a particular stage of that sex, when he wrote 'women.' For had he intended the whole sex, calling them 'females,' he would have made an absolute ruling about every woman; but since he names one stage of the sex, by his silence he sets apart the other. He could, they say, have named virgins specifically, or, more economically, named females in general.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 22 ========

Those who concede this much ought to reconsider the standing of the very word — what "woman" means, from the earliest letters of the sacred record. For they will find that it is a name of sex, not a grade within sex, since God surnamed Eve "woman" and "female" while she had not yet known a man. [Female as the sex in general, woman as the specific grade of that sex.] So, since Eve, still unmarried, already bore the name "woman," that name became common property of the virgin too. Nor is it strange that the apostle, moved by that same Spirit by which the whole of divine Scripture — including that passage in Genesis — was composed, used the same word, setting down "woman" in a sense that fits the precedent of the unmarried, virgin Eve. [2] And the rest of the argument agrees. For by the very fact that he did not name "virgins" separately — as he does elsewhere when he teaches about marrying — he sufficiently declares that his statement covers every woman and the whole sex, with no distinction drawn between "woman" and "virgin," a word he never uses at all. For the one who elsewhere knows how to distinguish — where a difference in fact is called for, and he does distinguish, designating each kind by its own name — when he does not distinguish, by not naming both, means no difference to be understood. [3] What of this: that in the Greek in which the apostle wrote his letters, the custom is to call women gynaikas rather than to use theleiai, "females"? So if this word is the one regularly used for the name of the sex — being the translation-equivalent of "female" — then in saying gynaika he named the sex. And in the sex, the virgin too is included. [4] But there is also an explicit statement: "Every woman," he says, "praying or prophesying with head uncovered disgraces her head." What is "every woman" but every age, every rank, every condition? By saying "every," he excludes no woman, just as with "man" he excludes no man and no requirement of veiling — for likewise he says "every man." So then, just as in the male sex, under the name "man," even an unmarried lad must go bareheaded, so likewise within the female sex, under the name "woman," the virgin too is commanded to cover her head. Equally in both sexes, let the younger age follow the discipline of the older — or let virgin males also be veiled, if virgin females are not veiled, since they too are not held to it by name. Let there be one rule for man and unmarried youth, if there is a different one for woman and virgin. [5] Indeed, he says the covering is owed on the angels' account, since it was because of the daughters of men that those angels departed from God. Who then would argue that only married women — women already done with virginity — are objects of desire, unless it is not permitted for virgins too to excel in beauty and attract lovers? No — let us rather see that it was not virgins alone whom they desired, since Scripture says "the daughters of men," when it could have said, indifferently, "the wives of men" or "women." [6] Even the phrase "and they took to themselves as wives" points to this — for those are "taken as wives" who are available, so to speak; of those not available it would have spoken differently. So both the widowed and the virgins were available. Thus, by naming "daughters" generally, Scripture blended the species within the genus. [7] Likewise, when he says that nature herself teaches that women ought to be veiled, since she has assigned hair to women as a covering and an adornment, is not that same covering and that same honor of the head assigned to virgins as well? If cropping her hair brings a wife shame, that same shame falls no less on a virgin. [8] In those, then, for whom one condition of the head is reckoned, one discipline of the head is required as well — even for those virgins whom childhood still shields; for from the first, the female was named "woman." And indeed Israel already keeps this practice. Yet even had Israel never kept it, our own rule, being fuller and more complete, would still hold the authority to reach further, laying the veil upon virgins as well. Let that age be excused which does not yet recognize its own sex — let it hold the privilege of innocence, for Eve and Adam too, as soon as it happened that they came to know, at once covered what they had come to recognize — but certainly for those in whom childhood has already given way, age ought to be as generous to discipline as it is to nature; for to women both bodily members and functions are then assigned. No one is a virgin from the moment she is able to marry, since her age has already, so to speak, married her own husband — namely, time itself. [9] "But suppose some woman has vowed herself to God." Even so, from that point she transforms her hair and turns her whole bearing toward that of women. Let her then assert the whole and provide the whole of what belongs to virginity; what she hides for God's sake, let her plainly keep in shadow. It is in our interest to commend to God's awareness alone what is exercised by God's grace, lest what we hope for from God we instead collect as payment from man. Why do you strip bare before God what you cover before men? Will your reserve be greater out in the street than inside the church? "If it is God's grace, and you have received it, why do you boast," he says, "as though you had not received it?" Why do you judge otherwise by the display of yourself? Or does your glory elsewhere invite others to good? And yet you yourself risk losing it, if you boast, and you drive others toward the same dangers. What is assumed out of a longing for glory is easily struck down. Cover yourself, virgin, since a virgin is what you are — a blush is owed from you. Being a virgin, refuse to let many eyes rest on you. Let no one gaze in wonder at your countenance; let no one detect the pretense you are keeping. You do well to feign yourself married, if you veil your head. Indeed, you do not even seem to lie, for you have married Christ. To him you have handed over your flesh: act according to the discipline proper to your husband. If he commands other men's wives to be veiled, how much more, surely, his own. [10] "But let no one think that the practice established by one's predecessor should be disturbed." Many yield their own good sense and their firmness to another's custom. Even if unmarried women cannot be compelled to be veiled, still those who choose to be should certainly not be forbidden — women who cannot even deny that they are virgins should be content to make free with their reputation in the safety of their own conscience before God alone. But about those who are called betrothed, I can, beyond my own small measure, declare and affirm with confidence that they should be veiled from the day on which they trembled at the first touch of a man's body, at his kiss and his hand — for in these acts everything in them has already, so to speak, been married beforehand: age through maturity, flesh through age, spirit through consciousness, modesty through the experience of the kiss, hope through expectation, and mind through will. And Rebecca supplies us a sufficient model — the moment her betrothed was pointed out to her, she covered her head for marriage on the strength of that mere recognition.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 23 ========

As for kneeling too, prayer suffers a variety of observance because of a small number of people who abstain from kneeling on the Sabbath — a disagreement which is currently a matter of dispute among the churches. [2] The Lord will grant his grace, that either they yield, or else hold to their own opinion without giving scandal to others. We, however, as we have received it, ought to guard against this practice — and indeed against every posture and habit of anxiety — only on the Lord's day of the resurrection, putting off even our business, lest we give any foothold to the devil. The same holds for the whole span of Pentecost, which is marked by the same solemnity of rejoicing. [3] But otherwise, on any other day, who would hesitate to fall prone before the Lord, in that opening prayer at least by which we greet the daylight? [4] On fast days, however, and on stations, no prayer should be observed without kneeling and the rest of the manner of humility. For we are not merely praying then, but also entreating and making satisfaction to God our Lord.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 24 ========

As for the times of prayer, absolutely nothing is prescribed except, of course, to pray in every time and place. But how "in every place," when we are forbidden to do so in public? "In every place," he means, that opportunity or even necessity may bring about. Nor indeed is it reckoned as against the precept what the apostles did, praying and singing to God in prison while the guards listened, nor what Paul did, who celebrated the eucharist in full view of everyone aboard ship.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 25 ========

As to time, it will not be a wasted exercise to observe, additionally, certain hours too — I mean those familiar ones marking the day's turning-points — third, sixth, ninth hour — which turn out in the Scriptures to carry the greater solemnity. [2] The Holy Spirit was first poured out on the disciples, gathered together, at the third hour. [3] Peter, on the day he experienced the vision of the whole community's fellowship in that vessel, had gone up to the upper rooms at the sixth hour for the sake of prayer. [4] The same Peter, together with John, was going up to the temple at the ninth hour, where he restored the paralytic to health. [5] Now even if these things stand simply, without the force of any precept of observance, it is nonetheless good to establish some settled practice, one which both enforces a reminder to pray and, as if by law, wrests us away from our business now and then for such a duty — just as we read was observed by Daniel too, following, of course, the discipline of Israel — so that we pray not less than three times a day at least, debtors as we are to the Three, Father and Son and Holy Spirit — apart, of course, from the regular prayers which are owed without any reminder at the entrance of light and of night. [6] But also, believers ought not to take food, nor go to the bath, before prayer has intervened. For the refreshments and nourishment of the spirit are to be reckoned before those of the flesh, since the heavenly comes before the earthly.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 26 ========

A brother who has entered your house — do not let him leave without prayer. "You have seen your brother," it says, "you have seen your Lord" — above all a stranger, lest by chance he be an angel. [2] Nor, once you yourself have been received by the brothers, should you take the earthly refreshments before the heavenly ones — for your faith will at once be judged. Or how, according to the precept, will you say "Peace to this house," unless you also render mutual peace to those who are in the house?

======== De Oratione — Chapter 27 ========

The more scrupulous, in praying, are accustomed to add "Alleluia" to their prayers, and psalms of that sort, at whose closing lines those present with them respond. And it is certainly an excellent custom, to bring a well-fed prayer, like an excellent sacrificial offering, to whatever suits the honoring and preferring of God.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 28 ========

For this is the spiritual sacrifice which has abolished the old-time offerings. "Of what use to me is your great heap of sacrifices," he says. "I am full of the whole burnt-offerings of rams, and the fat of lambs, and the blood of bulls and goats I do not want. For who has required these things at your hands?" [2] What God has sought, then, the gospel teaches. "The hour is coming," he says, "when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth. For God is spirit," and therefore he requires worshippers of that same kind. [3] We are the genuine worshippers, we the genuine priests, who, praying by the spirit, present in spirit a sacrifice fitting and pleasing to God — prayer, the very sacrifice he has required, the very one he has looked for in advance for himself. [4] This sacrifice, devoted from the whole heart, fed by faith, tended by truth, whole through innocence, clean through chastity, crowned with love, we ought to lead to God's altar amid psalms and hymns, with a procession of good works, and it will obtain everything for us from God.

======== De Oratione — Chapter 29 ========

For what has God, who demands prayer that comes from spirit and truth, ever refused to it? We read, and we hear, and we believe how great are the proofs of its power. The old-time prayer, indeed, could rescue from fires and from beasts and from starvation, and yet it had not received its form from Christ. But how much more does Christian prayer accomplish! It does not station an angel of the dew in the midst of the flames, nor stop the mouths of lions, nor transfer to the hungry a countryman's lunch; delegated grace turns aside no sensation of suffering — instead, it equips the suffering, the feeling, the grieving to endure, and amplifies grace through fortitude, so that faith may know what it obtains from the Lord by understanding what it suffers for God's name. [2] And in earlier times, too, prayer used to inflict plagues, rout the armies of enemies, and withhold the benefits of rain. But now the prayer of righteousness turns aside the whole wrath of God; it keeps watch on behalf of enemies, it makes supplication on behalf of persecutors. Is it any wonder that it knows how to wring the waters of heaven, when it could also obtain fire? Prayer alone is what conquers God — yet Christ has taught it to work no evil; he has bestowed on it every power that comes from good. And so it knows nothing except to call back the souls of the dead from the very path of death, to reshape the weak, to heal the sick, to purge the demon-possessed, to open the bars of the prison, to loosen the chains of the innocent. The same prayer washes away sins, repels temptations, extinguishes persecutions, consoles the fainthearted, delights the great-hearted, guides travelers, calms the waves, strikes robbers with astonishment, feeds the poor, governs the rich, raises the fallen, holds up the stumbling, sustains those who stand. [3] Prayer is the wall of faith, our weapons and our missiles against the enemy who watches us on every side. And so let us never go forward unarmed. Let us remember the day-station and the night-watch. Under the arms of prayer let us guard our commander's standard; let us await, praying, the angel's trumpet. [4] All the angels pray too; every creature prays; cattle too and the beasts of the field pray, bowing their knees, and as they emerge from their stalls and lairs they turn their faces upward, mouths never quite still, moving their breath after their own manner. The birds as well, lifting off, rise toward the sky and stretch out the shape of a cross with their wings instead of hands, uttering something that resembles a petition. What further, then, remains to say about this task of praying? Christ the Lord himself engaged in it — his be glory and dominion unto ages of ages.

======== De Patientia — Chapter 1 ========

I confess before the Lord God that it is rash of me, if not downright shameless, that I have ventured to write something on patience — I who am wholly unfit to display it, a man of no goodness at all, when the rule is that anyone who undertakes to demonstrate and commend some quality ought first to be caught practicing it himself, steering the constancy of his exhortation by the authority of his own conduct, lest his words blush at his failing deeds. If only blushing brought some remedy — if the shame of not exhibiting what I am about to urge on others could itself become a kind of schooling! Except that the sheer magnitude of certain goods, like certain evils, is so overwhelming that only the grace of divine inspiration can enable one to grasp and perform them. For whatever is the greatest good belongs above all to God, and no one dispenses it but he who possesses it, giving it to whom he sees fit. So it will be something of a consolation to discuss what one is not granted to enjoy — the way the sick, though they lack health themselves, cannot keep silent about its blessings. So I, most wretched of men, forever feverish with the heats of impatience, unable to secure the health of patience, must sigh and cry out and plead, whenever I recall — turning it over in the contemplation of my own weakness — that the good condition of faith and the health of the Lord's discipline come easily to no one unless patience stands at his side. So preeminent is patience among the things of God that no one estranged from it can carry out a single command, or perform a single work pleasing to the Lord.
Its goodness even those who live in blindness honor with the title of highest virtue; the philosophers, indeed, who are reckoned creatures of some wisdom, subscribe to it so far that, though they quarrel among themselves with the varied lusts of their sects and the rivalries of their opinions, they nevertheless are of one mind about patience alone, entrusting to this one thing alone the peace of all their pursuits: on this they agree, on this they make their pact, toward this, in their affectation of virtue, they strive with one accord; every ostentation of their wisdom they set below patience. Great is the testimony to it when it advances even the vain disciplines of this world to praise and glory! Or is it not rather an injury, when a divine thing gets tumbled about in worldly arts? But that is for them to see to — those who will soon be ashamed of their wisdom, wrecked and disgraced along with the world!

======== De Patientia — Chapter 2 ========

For us, the authority to practice patience is delegated not by any human affectation, shaped by the dull stupor of a dog's equanimity, but by the divine ordinance of a living and heavenly discipline, which shows God himself as the pattern of patience — first of all, he who scatters the flower of this light equally over the just and the unjust, who lets the round of the seasons do their duty, the elements render their service, all creation pay out its dues, falling alike on the worthy and the unworthy, sustaining the most thankless nations even while they bow down to the mockeries fashioned by their own craft and to what their own hands have built, harassing his name and his household, growing daily more insolent with luxury, greed, injustice, and malice — so that their own patience works against them: for the more part do not believe in the Lord precisely because they have not yet learned how long he has been angry at the world.

======== De Patientia — Chapter 3 ========

That, then, is divine patience viewed as it were from a distance, as befits things estimated from on high: but what of the patience that has, in a sense, been taken hold of by hand, openly among men on earth? God allows himself to be born: in his mother's womb he waits, and once born he endures growing up, and grown, he does not clamor to be recognized — no, worse, he treats himself with contempt: he submits to washing at the hands of his own servant, and beats back the tempter's assaults with nothing but speech; when from Lord he becomes a teacher instructing man how to escape death, schooled, that is, in the full pardon owed to an offense against patience — he does not contend, he raises no outcry, no one heard his voice in the public squares; a bruised reed he did not break, a smoldering wick he did not quench (for the prophet had not lied — no, it is God's own testimony that his Spirit rests upon his Son with all patience!). He turned away no one who wished to cling to him, he scorned no one's table or roof — indeed he himself served, washing his disciples' feet; he did not spurn sinners or tax collectors, nor was he even angry at that city which had refused to receive him, though his disciples wanted heavenly fire called down upon that insolent town; he showed care to those who felt no gratitude, he gave way before men plotting against him. That is little, if he did not even keep his betrayer at his side, without once openly denouncing him. But when he is handed over, when he is led like a sheep to the slaughter (for he opens his mouth no more than a lamb under the shearer's hand), he — for whom, had he wished it, legions of angels would have stood ready from heaven at a single word — did not so much as approve the avenging sword of a single disciple. The Lord's patience was wounded in Malchus: and so he cursed the sword's work for all time to come, and by restoring health made amends to the man he himself had not injured, making patience the mother of mercy. I say nothing of his being nailed up, for that was what he had come for — but did the undergoing of death really require insults too? Yet, about to depart, he wanted to be gorged full on the pleasure of patience: he is spat on, scourged, mocked, dressed in filthy garments, crowned with fouler ones still. What astonishing constancy of equanimity — he who had chosen to hide within the shape of a man imitated nothing of man's impatience! By this above all, Pharisees, you ought to have recognized the Lord: no mere man could have carried through patience of this kind! Such and so great are the proofs which — however their magnitude serves the nations as an excuse for refusing faith — for us stand as reason and structure, proving clearly enough, not by words of teaching alone but by the Lord's endurance of his sufferings, to those granted to believe, that patience is the very nature of God, the effect and preeminence of a quality inborn in him.

======== De Patientia — Chapter 4 ========

If, then, we see that good and well-minded servants conduct themselves after the pattern of their master's disposition — since the very art of earning goodwill is compliance, and true discipline of compliance is obedient submission — how much more ought we, who are servants of the living God, be found conformed to the Lord, since his judgment on his own turns not on shackle or freedman's cap, but on the eternity of either punishment or salvation! To avert such severity, or to attract such generosity, requires a diligence of compliance as great as the things which either that severity threatens or that generosity promises. And yet we exact obedience not only from men bound by servitude or owing compliance on some other legal ground, but even from cattle, even from beasts, understanding that they were provided and handed over to us by the Lord for our use. Shall the things God has put in subjection to us, then, be better than we are at the discipline of compliance? Even dumb creatures that obey recognize their master: and shall we hesitate to listen to the one Lord to whom alone we are subject? How unjust, indeed how thankless it is, that what you obtain from others through someone's kindness, you should refuse to repay to that very one through whom you obtained it! Nor need I say much more about the compliance owed by us to the Lord God: the mere acknowledgment of God is enough to make one understand what is incumbent on him. But lest I seem to have dragged in compliance as something foreign to my subject, compliance itself is drawn from patience: no one impatient truly complies, and no one who complies is without patience. Since the Lord, then, both demonstrator and receiver of every good, has borne patience about in his own person, who could treat lightly the good it is? For who can doubt that every good, because it belongs to God, ought to be pursued with the whole mind by those who belong to God? By these considerations, in short compass and as it were by way of a preliminary ruling, both the commendation and the exhortation to patience stand established.

======== De Patientia — Chapter 5 ========

Still, to press the discussion further on matters necessary to the faith is not idle, since it is not fruitless either: talkativeness is never shameful in building up — if ever it is shameful at all. So if the discourse concerns some good, the matter demands that we also review its opposite: since you will illuminate far better what ought to be sought after by also laying out, alongside it, what ought to be shunned. Let us consider, then, impatience — whether, just as patience is found in God, its adversary was born and discovered in our adversary — so that from this it may appear how fundamentally it stands opposed to the faith. For what has been conceived by the rival of God is certainly no friend to the things of God. There is the same discord between things as between their authors: and since God is supremely good and the devil, on the contrary, supremely bad, their very difference from each other testifies that neither can produce what belongs to the other, so that to us it seems no more possible for anything good to come from evil than for anything evil to come from good. I find, then, that impatience was born in the devil himself, precisely at the instant when he could not stomach the fact that the Lord God had put everything he had fashioned under the rule of the being made in his own likeness — that is, under man. For he would not have grieved had he endured it, nor would he have envied man had he not grieved: so thoroughly did he deceive because he had envied, and envied because he had grieved, and grieved because he had certainly not borne it with patience. Which came first in that angel of ruin — malice or impatience — I do not care to inquire, since it is plain enough that either impatience took its start from malice, or malice from impatience, and that thereafter the two conspired together and grew up inseparable in one father's bosom. But indeed, by the very means through which he himself first sensed it, through which he first entered into sin, instructed by his own experience as to what would help toward sinning, he summoned man into the same offense by inflicting the same thing on him. The woman, approached at once — I would not say it rashly — was, through that very conversation of his, breathed upon by a spirit infected with impatience: so entirely would she never have sinned at all had she preserved patience toward the divine prohibition! And what of this: she did not merely fail to hold out when approached alone, but also with Adam — who was as yet no husband of hers, under no obligation yet to lend her his ear — she was so impatient that she could not even keep silent, and made him a channel for what she herself had drunk in from the evil one. So another man perishes through another's impatience — no, he too perishes through his own impatience, committed on both counts, both regarding God's warning and regarding the devil's deception, unable to hold fast to the one or refute the other. Hence the first inkling of judgment, from the source of the offense; hence God's first stirring to anger, from the point at which man was led to give offense; hence, too, the first patience in God, from the point of that first indignation, since he was content then with a curse alone, restraining himself from the onslaught of vengeance even against the devil. Or what crime, prior to this one of impatience, is charged against man? He was innocent, and a close friend of God, and a tenant of paradise: but the moment he once fell into impatience, he ceased to savor heavenly things, ceased to be able to endure them. From then on man, given over to earth and cast out from the sight of God, easily fell prey to impatience in everything that could offend God. For at once, conceived from the devil's seed, by the fruitfulness of malice, impatience bore the son of wrath; once born, it schooled him in its own arts: for the very thing that had plunged Adam and Eve into death, it taught the son to begin with murder. I would ascribe this to impatience in vain, if Cain, that first murderer and first fratricide, had borne the rejection of his offerings by the Lord calmly and without impatience — if he had not been angry at his brother, if in the end he had killed no one. Since, then, he could not have killed except in anger, and could not have been angry except through impatience, this shows that what he carried out through anger must be traced back to the source that suggested that anger. These, then, were in some sense the cradle-days of impatience, still in its infancy. But how great its growth soon after! No wonder: if it sinned first, it follows that, because it was first, it alone is the womb of every offense, pouring out from its own fountain the various veins of crime. Of murder, indeed, we have spoken. But anger, brought forth from the very beginning, refers back to its own origin whatever causes it later devises for itself toward impatience: for whether a man commits that crime out of enmity or for the sake of plunder, it is necessary first that he become impatient, whether of hatred or of greed. Whatever compels a man to act cannot be carried through without impatience with itself: who has ever committed adultery without impatience of lust? And even if it is bought with money from women, that sale of chastity is certainly arranged through an impatience with despising gain. These are, so to speak, the principal offenses against the Lord. Now indeed, to put it in short compass, every sin must be charged to impatience. Impatience is the evil of the good. No unchaste person is other than impatient of chastity, no dishonest person impatient of honesty, no impious person impatient of piety, no restless person impatient of rest — so that every man becomes bad precisely because he could not persevere in being good! Why, then, should such a viper's brood of offenses not give offense to the Lord, who condemns every evil? Is it not plain that Israel too always sinned against God through impatience? Thus, when, forgetful of the heavenly arm by which he had been drawn out from the afflictions of Egypt, he demands gods to lead him from Aaron, when he pours his gold into a molten idol — so impatiently had he taken those delays, so necessary as they were, of Moses meeting with the Lord! After the rain of edible manna, after the watery flow that followed from the rock, they despair of the Lord, unable to endure three days' thirst; for this too is impatience reproached in them by the Lord. And, not to range over every instance, they never perished except by sinning through impatience. How, indeed, did they lay hands on the prophets, if not through impatience of listening? And on the Lord himself, through impatience even of seeing him! Whereas, had they taken up patience, they would have been set free.

======== De Patientia — Chapter 6 ========

It is she alone who both follows faith and goes before it. So Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. But it was patience that proved his faith, when he was ordered to sacrifice his son — not, I would say, as a testing of his faith, but as its type-bearing witness. God, after all, already knew the man he had reckoned righteous: so grave a command, one which the Lord himself did not wish carried through, Abraham heard patiently, and would have fulfilled it had God so willed. Rightly, then, was he blessed, because faithful; rightly faithful, because patient! And so faith, lit up by patience, when it was being sown among the nations through the seed of Abraham — which is Christ — and was superadding grace to the law, set patience over the task of enlarging and fulfilling the law, as her helper, since patience alone had been lacking, till then, to the teaching of righteousness. For in the old days the rule demanded an eye in return for an eye, a tooth exacted for a tooth, and evil was repaid with interest-bearing evil: patience was not yet on earth, because, of course, neither was faith. Meanwhile impatience feasted on the license the law gave it — an easy thing, with the Lord and Master of patience not yet arrived. But once he came and joined patience to the grace of faith, it is no longer permitted even to provoke by a word, or even to say 'You fool,' without risking judgment; anger is forbidden, restraint of spirit required, the hand's petulance suppressed, the venom drawn from the tongue. The law has found more than it lost, since Christ says: Love your enemies, and bless those who curse you, and pray for your persecutors, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. See what a Father patience wins for us!

======== De Patientia — Chapter 7 ========

By this one governing precept the whole discipline of patience is cinched tight, since it is not even permitted to do evil by way of just deserts. Now, as we run through the causes of impatience one by one, the rest of the precepts will fall into line, each in its place. If the mind is stirred up by loss of household property, scripture warns us in almost every passage to hold the world in contempt, and no exhortation to despise money lies more ready to hand than this: that the Lord himself is found among no riches at all. He always vindicates the poor, and condemns the rich in advance. Thus he trained impatience over losses to disdain wealth beforehand, showing by his own rejection of riches that their loss too need not be counted a wound. What we have no business coveting in the first place — since the Lord did not covet it — we ought not to take hard when it is docked or even stripped from us entirely. The spirit of the Lord pronounced through the apostle that covetousness is the root of all evils: let us not construe that as meaning only the coveting of what belongs to another. For even what seems to be ours is another's — nothing is truly ours, seeing that everything belongs to God, and we ourselves belong to him too. So if, when hit by loss, we feel it with impatience, we shall be caught as kin to covetousness even while grieving over what was never truly our own: it is another's property we are chasing after, when we take hard the loss of another's property. Whoever is provoked to impatience by loss, ranking earthly things above heavenly, sins against God at close quarters: he shakes loose the very spirit he received from the Lord, for the sake of a worldly thing. Let us therefore willingly let earthly things go, and hold fast to heavenly ones; let the whole world perish, so long as I turn a profit in patience! And a man who has determined he cannot steadily bear the loss of some small thing, whether to theft, or force, or even his own carelessness — I doubt whether he could easily, or from the heart, lay his own hand to his own property in the matter of almsgiving. For who, unable to bear being cut by another at all, drives the knife into his own flesh himself? Patience in the face of loss is training in generosity and in sharing: the man who does not fear losing is not loath to give. Otherwise, how will the man with two tunics give one to the naked, unless he is the very man who can offer his cloak too to the one who steals his tunic? How shall we make friends for ourselves out of worldly wealth, if we love it so much that we cannot bear to lose it? We shall perish along with what is lost. What do we find here, where all we have is something to lose? It is the way of the pagans to meet every loss with impatience — pagans, who perhaps rank money above the soul itself. And indeed they show it, when for love of gain they run the risky, profit-hungry ventures of trade upon the sea, when for money's sake they do not hesitate to undertake in the courts things that carry the risk of condemnation, when finally they hire themselves out to the arena and the barracks, when along the roads, forgetting they are men, they turn robbers worse than beasts. But we, in keeping with the difference that sets us apart from them, ought to lay down money for the soul's sake, not the soul for money's sake — whether willingly, in giving, or patiently, in losing!

======== De Patientia — Chapter 8 ========

Our very soul and our very body we carry exposed in this world to every kind of injury, and we submit to patience under that injury — shall we then be wounded by the mere nibbling-away of lesser things? Far be it from a servant of Christ to bear such a stain, that patience, trained up for the greatest trials, should collapse over trifles! If someone tries to provoke you with his hand, the Lord's own coinage lies ready: To him who strikes you on the cheek, he says, turn the other also. Let your patience wear his wickedness out: whatever that blow was, bound up as it is with pain and insult, he will be beaten far worse by the Lord; the more you endure his blows, the harder you strike the wicked man — for it is on your account that he will be beaten by God. If the tongue's bitterness bursts out in curse or reviling, recall what stands written: Whenever a curse is thrown at you, take joy in it. The Lord himself, under the law, bore a curse, and yet blessedness belongs to him alone. Let us then, being merely servants, imitate our Master, and endure the curse with patience, so that afterward blessedness may fall to our share too! If I cannot manage to hear some insolent or worthless remark aimed at me without flinching, then I am left with only two options: to return spite for spite, or to be racked by a silent, seething impatience. And if I answer back with a curse of my own, in what sense could it be said that I have kept step with the Lord's teaching, which hands down that a man is defiled not by what is unclean in his vessels, but by what comes out of his mouth — and likewise that we remain liable for every vain and useless word? It follows, then, that the very thing the Lord bars us from doing, he bids us bear calmly when another does it to us. Here now is the true pleasure of patience. For every injury, whether launched by tongue or by hand, once it strikes against patience, will be blunted with the same result as a dart hurled and flattened against a rock of unyielding hardness: it will collapse right there, its effort wasted and fruitless, and sometimes, rebounding, it will fly back in fury against the very one who let it fly. The reason someone wounds you, of course, is to make you grieve, since the wounder's profit lies in the grief of the wounded. So when you overturn his profit by refusing to grieve, he himself cannot help but grieve at the loss of his profit. Then you will not merely walk away unwounded — though that alone would be enough for you — but, over and above, you will have delighted in your adversary's frustration and been avenged by his very pain. This is both the usefulness and the pleasure of patience!

======== De Patientia — Chapter 9 ========

Not even that species of impatience is excused which arises over the loss of our own dead, where some plea of grief seeks to defend it. For the apostle's warning must be given priority, where he says: Do not grieve over the falling-asleep of anyone, as the nations do, who have no hope. And rightly so: for believing in Christ's resurrection, we believe also in our own — that very resurrection for the sake of which he underwent both death and rising again. So, once the resurrection of the dead stands settled, grief over death has no place, and impatience of grief has none either. Why should you grieve, if you do not believe he has perished? Why bear it with impatience that one you believe will return has meanwhile been withdrawn from you? What you think is death is really a journey. He who goes ahead is not to be mourned, but plainly to be missed — and even that longing must be tempered by patience: why should you take it immoderately hard that one has gone on ahead whom you will shortly follow? Besides, impatience in such a case casts an ill omen on our hope and betrays our faith, and we do wrong to Christ himself when we cannot calmly accept that those he has summoned away are, as it were, objects of pity. I long, says the apostle, to be received already, and to be with the Lord. How much better a wish that shows! If, then, we grieve with impatience when others attain it, we are refusing, in effect, the very thing Christians wish for themselves!

======== De Patientia — Chapter 10 ========

There is also another supreme goad to impatience: the itch for revenge, a business tending either to glory or to malice. But glory in this matter is everywhere empty, and malice is never anything but hateful to the Lord — most of all here, where, provoked by another's malice, a man sets himself up as superior in carrying out revenge, and, in paying the wretch back, doubles what was done only once. Vengeance, viewed through the lens of error, looks like a comfort for grief; viewed through the lens of truth, it stands convicted, plainly, as malice. What difference, after all, is there between the provoker and the one provoked, except that the one is caught first in wrongdoing, the other second? Yet both alike are guilty before the Lord of the wronged man, who bars and condemns every wicked act without exception. In wrongdoing there is no reckoning of order, and no distance separates what likeness joins together. It stands laid down, without exception, that evil must never be answered with evil in return: a matching deed carries a matching guilt. How are we to hold to that rule unless we set ourselves decisively above the very notion of getting even? And what honor would we be paying the Lord God, if we claimed for ourselves the right to plead and settle our own cause? We rotten things, mere vessels of clay — when our own lowly household slaves presume to avenge themselves against their fellow slaves, we take it as a grave affront to us; while those who instead offer us their own forbearance, mindful of a servant's humility and jealous for their master's standing, we not only commend, but go on to grant a satisfaction far beyond what they would ever have dared ask for themselves. Shall this same principle, then, remain doubtful for us in the case of a Master so just in judgment and so mighty to enforce it? What, then, do we believe him to be, if not a judge — and, if a judge, not also an avenger? This is what he promises us, saying: Vengeance is mine, and I will repay — that is to say: 'Give me patience, and I will repay patience with patience.' For when he says, Judge not, that you be not judged, does he not, in effect, demand patience? Who, after all, will refrain from judging another, except the man who is patient enough not to defend himself? Who judges precisely in order to forgive? And even if he does forgive, he has still not guarded against the judge's own impatience, and has stolen the honor due the one true Judge, that is, God! And how many disasters has impatience of this kind been in the habit of bringing down, how often has a man regretted his own self-defense, how often has his own insistence turned out worse for his case than the case itself — since impatience never knows how to carry a thing through without a headlong rush, and nothing done in a headlong rush fails either to give offense, or to collapse, or to come to grief! Now if you defend yourself too mildly, you will fret; if too vigorously, you will be burdened with the consequences. What is revenge to me, whose measure I cannot govern through the impatience of grief? But if I settle down into patience, I shall not grieve; and if I do not grieve, I shall not long to avenge myself.

======== De Patientia — Chapter 11 ========

Having gathered up, as best we could, these principal occasions of impatience, why should we go wandering further among the rest, whether at home or abroad? The working of evil is broad and far-flung, hurling its manifold provocations, now trivial ones, now the greatest. But you should hold the trivial ones in contempt for their very smallness, and yield to the great ones in proportion to their weight. Where the injury is smaller, there is no great need of patience; but where the injury is greater, there the remedy for injury — patience — is the more necessary. Let us strive, then, to bear what is inflicted by the Evil One, so that the enemy's rivalrous effort may be baffled by our even temper. But if there are certain things we bring upon ourselves, whether unwittingly or even on purpose, let us face with that same evenness of temper whatever we have no one to blame for but ourselves. And where we believe certain blows are dealt to us directly by the Lord, is there anyone toward whom patience is more owed than toward him? Nay, he even teaches us to be glad and rejoice at the honor of divine chastisement: Those I love, he says, I chastise. O blessed that servant whose correction the Lord presses on, whom he thinks worthy of his anger, whom he does not deceive by pretending not to notice him and so neglecting to warn him!
On every side, then, patience is a debt we owe and must keep paying, since to some degree we are forever entangled either in our own faults, or in the traps laid by the Evil One, or in the corrections sent by the Lord. And the reward for paying it is great: nothing less than happiness. For whom, after all, did the Lord pronounce happy, if not the patient man, when he said: Happy are the poor in spirit, since the kingdom of heaven belongs to them? For surely no one is poor in spirit unless he is humble; and who is humble unless he is patient, since no one can subject himself to another without the prior patience of submission itself? Blessed, he says, are those who weep and mourn. Who bears such things without patience? And so to such as these both advocacy and laughter are promised. Blessed are the meek. By this very word, the impatient cannot possibly be reckoned among them at all. Likewise, when he marks out the peacemakers with the same title of blessedness and calls them sons of God — surely the impatient have no kinship with peace? Only a fool could think so! And where he tells them, Be glad and leap for joy, every time you are cursed and hunted down, since your wages in heaven are great — this certainly does not promise the exultation of impatience, since no one will exult amid adversities unless he has first held them in contempt, and no one holds them in contempt unless he has practiced patience.

======== De Patientia — Chapter 12 ========

[1] As far as concerns the discipline of that most pleasing peace toward God, who — born to impatience — will ever forgive his brother even once, let alone seven times, or seventy times seven? [2] Who, on his way to the judge with his adversary, will settle matters amicably unless he has first cut away anger, grief, hardness, bitterness — the poisons, that is, of impatience? [3] How will you forgive and be forgiven, if through the absence of patience you cling to the wrong done you? No one whose spirit is convulsed against his brother will complete his offering at the altar, unless he has first turned back to patience by being reconciled to his brother. [4] If the sun goes down on our anger, we are in danger: it is not permitted us to spend even one day without patience.
Yet since it governs every form of the discipline of salvation, what wonder that it also serves repentance, whose habit is to come to the aid of the fallen? [5] This patience awaits, this longs for, this pleads for the repentance of those who are one day to enter into salvation. When, after a divorce — but only for that cause which permits either husband or wife to be sustained in perseverance of widowhood — it does not drive the one to a second match, but corrects the other, how much good it confers on both! [6] So too, in those examples of the Lord's parables, patience stands by holy repentance: the patience of the shepherd seeks out the straying sheep and finds it (for impatience would easily have written off a single sheep, but patience takes up the labor of the search), and, carrying it, bears the abandoned sinning sheep home upon its shoulders. [7] That prodigal son too — the father's patience both receives him back and clothes him and feeds him, and excuses him before the impatience of his angry brother. Saved, then, is the one who was lost, because he entered upon repentance; and repentance is not lost, because it has found patience.
[8] For love — the supreme sacrament of faith, the treasure of the Christian name, which the apostle commends with all the strength of the Holy Spirit — by whose discipline but patience's is it trained? [9] Love, he says, is magnanimous: that it takes from patience; it is kind: patience does no evil; it does not envy: that indeed is patience's own property; it savors nothing insolent: it drew its modesty from patience; it is not puffed up, does not act shamelessly: for that has nothing to do with patience; it does not seek its own: it puts up with its own losses, so long as it may profit another; it is not provoked: for what else would be left for impatience? Therefore, he says, love bears all things, endures all things — precisely because it is itself patient. [10] Rightly, then, will it never fail. For the rest will be emptied out and brought to an end: tongues, knowledge, prophecy will be drained dry, but faith, hope, and love remain — faith, which the patience of Christ has instilled; hope, which the patience of man awaits; love, which, with God as its teacher, patience accompanies.

======== De Patientia — Chapter 13 ========

[1] So far we have spoken of patience considered simply and uniformly, and lodged only in the mind — though we have worked hard at that same patience also as it earns merit in the body, seeing that it was produced by the Lord himself in the virtue of the body as well, since the ruling mind readily shares with its own dwelling-place the spirit that has been poured into it. [2] What, then, is patience's business in the body? First of all, the affliction of the flesh — a victim offered to placate the Lord through the sacrifice of humiliation, when it pours out to the Lord a libation of squalor amid privation, content with plain food and pure drink, when it joins fasting to this, when it grows familiar with ashes and sackcloth. [3] This patience of the body commends our prayers, strengthens our entreaties; it opens the ears of Christ, God, disperses his severity, draws out his clemency. [4] So that king of Babylon, when he had offended the Lord, was banished from human form for seven years amid filth and squalor; and when he had offered up the patience of his body as a sacrifice, he both recovered his kingdom and — more desirable still to a man — made satisfaction to God.
[5] Now if we set out the higher and happier stages of bodily patience, that same continence of the flesh also procures holiness: it holds the widow to her state, marks out the virgin, and lifts the voluntary eunuch to the kingdom of heaven.
[6] What comes from the virtue of the mind is carried through to completion in the flesh: the patience of the flesh, in the end, does its fighting in persecutions. If flight becomes urgent, the flesh does the soldiering of the hardships of that flight; if imprisonment overtakes it too, the flesh is in chains, the flesh is on the rack, the flesh is on the bare ground, amid that poverty of light and that want of the world. [7] But when it is brought forward for the test of true happiness, for the occasion of the second baptism, for the very ascent to God's own throne, nothing there counts for more than the patience of the body. Though the spirit be eager, yet the flesh, lacking patience, remains feeble — where then is the rescue of spirit and flesh alike? [8] But when the Lord speaks so of the flesh, calling it feeble, he reveals what must reinforce it — patience, naturally — against every scheme prepared to overturn or punish faith, so that the flesh may endure with utter steadfastness the lash, the fire, the cross, the beasts, the sword, which the prophets and the apostles overcame by enduring.

======== De Patientia — Chapter 14 ========

[1] By these powers of patience Isaiah is sawn in two and does not fall silent about the Lord; Stephen is stoned and begs pardon for his enemies. [2] Oh, most blessed too was that man who wiped out every form of impatience against every force of the devil — whom neither the driven-off herds, nor those riches counted in cattle, nor the sons snatched away in a single ruinous blow, nor finally the torment of a wound in his very body, shut out from the fidelity of patience owed to the Lord — whom the devil struck down with all his strength, in vain! [3] For he was not drawn away from regard for God by so many pains, but stood firm as an example and testimony for us of patience to be carried through as much in spirit as in flesh, as much in mind as in body, so that we should not collapse under worldly losses, nor under the loss of those dearest to us, nor even under the batterings of the body itself. [4] What a trophy God erected over the devil out of that man, what a standard he raised over the enemy of his own glory, when that man, at every bitter piece of news, let nothing pass his lips but 'Thanks be to God' — even while he cursed his wife, by now worn out with troubles and urging him toward wicked remedies! [5] What then — did God laugh, did the evil one writhe, when Job scraped away the filthy overflow of his sores with great equanimity, when he playfully called the little worms bursting out of them back into those same pits and pastures of his dug-over flesh! [6] And so that laborer for God's victory, with every dart of temptation blunted by the breastplate and shield of patience, both recovered soon the wholeness of his body from God and possessed, doubled, what he had lost. [7] And if he had wished his sons too restored, he would have been called a father again. But he preferred to have them given back to him on that final day: so untroubled was he in postponing that joy for the Lord's sake, that he endured that voluntary bereavement, rather than live without some measure of patience!

======== De Patientia — Chapter 15 ========

[1] So fit a broker for patience is God: if you lodge an injury with him, he is its avenger; if a loss, he is its restorer; if a pain, he is its physician; if a death, he is its raiser to life. How much scope is patience given, that it should hold God as its debtor! [2] And not undeservedly. For it guards all his decrees, has a hand in every one of his commandments: it fortifies faith, steers peace, assists love, instructs humility, awaits repentance, ratifies confession, rules the flesh, keeps watch over the spirit, curbs the tongue, holds back the hand, crushes underfoot temptations, drives off scandals, brings martyrdoms to their completion; [3] it consoles the poor man, tempers the rich, does not overstretch the weak, does not wear out the strong, delights the faithful, invites the pagan in; it commends the slave to his master, the master to God, adorns the woman, approves the man; it is loved in the boy, praised in the young man, looked up to in the old man; in every sex, at every age, it is beautiful!
[4] Come now, let us try to grasp its very likeness and bearing. Its face is tranquil and calm, its brow clear, creased by no wrinkle of grief or anger; its eyebrows relaxed into a cheerful cast, its eyes cast down in humility, not in misfortune; [5] its mouth sealed with the dignity of silence, its color that of the untroubled and the innocent, its head turning often against the devil, its smile menacing; and besides, a robe white about the breast and close to the body, befitting one neither puffed up nor restless. [6] For enthroned there sits its spirit, gentlest and most mild, which is not whipped into a whirlwind, does not darken into cloud, but is of a tender serenity, open and simple — the very spirit that Elijah saw the third time. For wherever God dwells, there also is patience found beside him, his own nursling, naturally. [7] So when the Spirit of God descends, patience accompanies him inseparably. If we do not receive her along with the Spirit, will he stay in us forever? No — I doubt he will persist much longer: without his companion and minister he is bound to be troubled at every place and time; whatever his enemy inflicts he will not be able to bear alone, lacking the very instrument of endurance!

======== De Patientia — Chapter 16 ========

[1] This is the reasoning of patience, this its discipline, these its works — heavenly and true, that is, the Christian kind, not that patience of the pagans of this earth, false and shameful. [2] For just as in this matter too the devil apes the Lord, as though they stood on equal terms (except that this very disparity between evil and good is itself matched in scale), so he has taught his own people a patience of their own — [3] I mean that patience which subjects husbands who sell themselves for a dowry, or trade in pandering, to the power of their wives; that patience which, hunting for childless estates, endures every labor of forced compliance with counterfeit affections; that patience which surrenders the workers of the belly to shameful patronage, enslaving their freedom to their gluttony. [4] Such are the pursuits of patience the nations know, and they occupy the name of so great a good with foul dealings: patient toward rivals and the rich and their hosts, they live impatient only toward God. But let them see to their own patience and that of their own overseer — the patience the fire beneath the earth is waiting for. [5] For the rest, let us cherish God's patience, and Christ's patience too; let us return to him what he himself expended for our sake; let us bring forward the patience proper to the spirit and the patience proper to the flesh, we who believe in the resurrection of the flesh and the spirit!

======== De Paenitentia — Chapter 1 ========

Repentance — a thing which we ourselves once were, blind without the Lord's light, know only in a natural way, as a kind of passion of the mind arising from displeasure at a prior choice. [2] But they are as far removed from its true rationale as they are from the very author of reason. For reason belongs to God, since God, the founder of all things, has foreseen, arranged, and ordered nothing without reason, and has willed nothing to be handled or understood except by reason. [3] Therefore whoever does not know God must inevitably fail to know as well what pertains to him, since no man's storehouse stands open at all to outsiders. And so, sailing through the entire course of life bereft of reason's tiller, they do not know how to dodge the storm bearing down on this age. [4] How irrationally they conduct themselves in the very act of repentance may be shown sufficiently by this one point alone: that they apply it even to their good deeds. They repent of faith, of love, of simplicity, of generosity, of patience, of mercy: [5] to the extent that any of these has turned out to their disadvantage, they curse themselves for having done good, and they fix in their hearts — taking care to remember it — above all that brand of repentance that gets inflicted on their best works, so that they may never again perform any good. By contrast, they brood far less over repentance for their evil deeds: indeed, they more readily sin again by that same road than they do right by it.

======== De Paenitentia — Chapter 2 ========

Now if gods — and therefore beings possessed of reason too — behaved this way, they would weigh the merits of repentance first, and never turn it into a tool for enlarging a perverse correction; they would in short keep repentance within its proper measure, precisely because they would keep within the measure of offending, out of fear of the Lord. But where there is no fear, there is correspondingly no correction; and where there is no correction, repentance is necessarily empty, since it is deprived of the very fruit for which God sowed it, the rescue of mankind. For, once such vast and repeated offenses of human rashness had piled up, beginning from Adam, the founder of the race — after man was condemned along with the dowry of this age, after he was cast out of paradise and made subject to death — when he had once again ripened toward his own mercy, from that point on established repentance in himself, rescinding the sentence of his former wrath and undertaking to forgive his own handiwork, his own image. And so he gathered a people to himself and cherished them with many gifts of his goodness, and though he found them ungrateful again and again, he never ceased urging them to repentance, sending out for that preaching the mouths of all the prophets: presently, having promised the favor that in the final age he would pour out through his Spirit over the whole world, he commanded that a baptism of repentance should go ahead of it, so that those whom he would call by grace to the promise destined for Abraham's seed might first be prepared by the pledge of repentance. John does not stay silent about repentance, saying, 'Repent'; for already salvation was drawing near to the nations — the Lord, that is, bringing it as God had promised. To him God assigned repentance as a handmaid, set over the cleansing of minds, so that whatever old error had defiled, whatever ignorance had contaminated in man's heart, repentance might sweep it out, scour it away, and cast it forth, and so prepare the clean house of the heart for the Holy Spirit about to come, that he might gladly bring himself into it along with the goods of heaven. One title among these goods is man's salvation, preceded by the wiping-out of former crimes; this is the business of repentance, this its work, tending to the affairs of divine mercy — which profits man and serves God. As for its rule, once we have come to know the Lord we learn that it holds a fixed form: that no violent hand is ever to be laid on deeds or thoughts that are good. For God does not ratify the rejection of good deeds, seeing they are his own; and since he is their author and their defender, he must also be their approver — and if their approver, then also their rewarder. Let the ingratitude of men see to it, then, if it forces repentance even upon good deeds done; and let self-interested grace see to it too, if the courting of reward is itself an incentive to doing good — both motives are earthly and mortal. For what is the profit if you did good to a grateful man, or the loss if to an ungrateful one? A worthy act makes God its debtor, exactly as a wicked one does, since every judge stands as rewarder of the case set before him. But since God as judge presides over the exacting and guarding of justice, dearest of all things to him, and makes it the sum total of his whole discipline, can it be doubted that, as in all our acts, so also in the matter of repentance, justice is owed by God? And this can indeed be fulfilled only if repentance is applied solely to sins. Now, nothing deserves to be called a sin except a bad deed done, and no one offends by doing good. But if he does not offend, why does repentance — the private penalty of offenders — invade his case? Why does it lay the office of malice upon his goodness? This is what happens when a thing is applied where it has no business, and is neglected where it does belong.

======== De Paenitentia — Chapter 3 ========

Which repentances, then, should be counted just and owed — that is, which are properly charged to an offense — is a point the subject calls for us to mark, though it may seem a waste of effort to belabor. For once the Lord is known, the spirit, of its own accord, looks back to its own Author and rises to a knowledge of the truth; and once admitted to the Lord's precepts, it is instructed straightaway from them as to what is to be reckoned sin — sin from which may God keep us far — since, God being agreed to be a supremely good thing, nothing but evil could displease the good, there being no friendship between contraries. Still, it will not be wearisome to sketch this much: that some offenses are carnal, that is, of the body, and some are spiritual — for since man is put together out of this union of a twofold substance, he can sin from no other source than the source he is made of. But they do not differ from one another simply because body and spirit are two things; rather they are all the more equal for that, because the two make one — lest anyone, on account of the diversity of their materials, should so distinguish their sins as to reckon the one lighter or heavier than the other. Indeed both flesh and spirit are God's handiwork, the one shaped by his hand, the other perfected by his breath; since, then, they belong to the Lord in equal measure, whichever of the two sins offends the Lord in equal measure. Would you really try to separate the acts of flesh and spirit, when in life and in death and in resurrection there is so much fellowship and partnership between them that they are raised together, together, either to life or to judgment — precisely because they have offended together or acted innocently together? We have set this out first so that we may understand that the necessity of repentance presses no less on the one part than on both together, should either offend; the guilt of both is shared, their judge is shared — God, that is — and so the remedy of repentance is shared as well. Hence they are named 'spiritual' and 'bodily' sins according to whether the offense is done or merely thought: bodily, when it lies in a deed, because a deed, being bodily, can be seen and touched; spiritual, when it lies in the mind, because, being spirit, it is neither seen nor grasped. By which it is shown that not only the sins of deed but also the sins of will must be avoided and cleansed by repentance. For even if human mediocrity can judge only the deed, being no match for the hidden places of the will, that is no reason why we, before God, should overlook its crimes as well. God suffices for everything; nothing lies removed from his sight where an offense could occur unnoticed by him; since he neither fails to know nor neglects to bring it to judgment — he is no dissembler, no traitor to his own clear sight! What of the fact that the will is the origin of the deed? Let exceptions stand for whatever is chargeable to chance, necessity, or ignorance; apart from those, nothing is ever sinned except by the will. Since, then, it is the origin of the deed, is it not the more liable to punishment for being the principal party to the guilt? And it is not even released from guilt when some difficulty intercepts its execution; for it is charged to itself, nor can it be excused by that failure to carry through, having already done its own part. Indeed, how does the Lord show that he builds an addition onto the Law, if not precisely by forbidding sins of the will as well? He defines as an adulterer not only the man who has actually fallen into another man's marriage-bed, but also the one who has stained himself with the lust of a look. So dangerously does the mind represent to itself what it is forbidden to carry out, and rashly, by mere will, cancels the deed. Since the force of that will is such that, sating us with its own gratification, it stands in for the deed, then for the deed it will likewise face punishment. It is a hollow plea to claim, 'I meant to, but I never did it'; on the contrary, you ought to carry through, since you will it — or else not even to will it, since you do not carry it through. But in fact you pronounce the confession of your own conscience: for if you desired something good, you would have been eager to accomplish it; and if, being evil, you do not accomplish it, then you ought not to have desired it either. However you place yourself, you are bound to the charge — either for having willed the evil, or for not having fulfilled the good!

======== De Paenitentia — Chapter 4 ========

For all offenses, then, whether committed in flesh or in spirit, in deed or in will, the one who has appointed a punishment through judgment has likewise pledged a pardon through repentance, saying to the people: 'Repent, and I will save you.' And again: 'As I live,' says the Lord, 'I prefer repentance to death.' Repentance, then, is life, set above death. Seize hold of it, you sinner — my equal, or rather my inferior, for I acknowledge my own preeminence in offenses — seize it, embrace it, the way a shipwrecked man clings to some plank he trusts. This will lift you, submerged in the waves of your sins, and haul you safely into the harbor of divine clemency. Snatch the chance of this unlooked-for good fortune, so that you, who once were nothing before the Lord but a drop from the bucket and dust from the threshing-floor and a mere vessel of the potter, may from that point become a tree — that tree which is planted by the waters, and stays green in leaf, and bears its fruit in its season, and will see neither fire nor axe. Repent of your errors now that the truth is found; repent of having loved what God does not love — seeing that we ourselves do not even permit our own slaves to persist in what offends us, for compliance rests on a likeness of minds. To lay out in full the good that repentance brings would be a vast subject requiring, for that reason, a great eloquence; we, however, given our own narrow limits, press home just this one point: that what God commands is good, indeed the very best. I count it a kind of audacity even to argue about the goodness of a divine command; for it is not because it is good that we ought to obey it, but because God has commanded it — in the rendering of obedience, the majesty of the divine power takes precedence, the authority of the one commanding comes before the advantage of the one serving. 'Is it good to repent, or not?' Why do you keep turning it over? God has commanded it! And yet he does not merely command — he even exhorts; he invites with a reward, namely salvation; he even swears, saying 'As I live,' wanting to be believed. O how blessed we are, for whose sake God swears an oath; O how utterly wretched, if we will not even believe the Lord when he swears! And since God recommends this so earnestly that he even attests it, in human fashion, under oath, we surely ought both to undertake and to guard it with the utmost seriousness, so that, remaining steadfast in the assurance of divine grace, we may likewise persevere in its fruit and its reward.

======== De Paenitentia — Chapter 5 ========

What I mean, then, is this: that the repentance which, shown and enjoined on us through God's grace, calls us back into the Lord's favor, once known and undertaken, ought never afterward to be undone by a repetition of the offense. No plea of ignorance can now be your defense, seeing that, once the Lord is acknowledged and his precepts embraced — and repentance for your offenses already performed — you go back and reinstate yourself in offenses all over again. To exactly the degree you have separated yourself from ignorance, to that same degree you are glued fast to obstinacy; for if the reason you repented of offending in the first place was that dread of the Lord had taken hold of you, on what ground do you now unravel what that dread produced, unless the dread itself has faded? For nothing but obstinacy overturns fear. Now, if even those ignorant of the Lord find no exemption from punishment — since it is not permitted to be ignorant of a God set out in the open, comprehensible even from the very goods of heaven itself — how much more dangerous is it to despise him once known? And despise him he certainly does, the man who, having received from him the understanding of good and evil, takes up again what he understands must be fled and has already fled, and so commits an outrage against his own discernment — against, that is, the gift God gave him: he spits back at the giver when he abandons the gift; he denies the benefit when he fails to honor the benefactor! How can he possibly be pleasing to the one whose very gift displeases him? So he shows himself toward the Lord not merely obstinate but actually ungrateful. Moreover, it is no light sin against the Lord for a man who, by his own repentance, had renounced the Lord's rival the devil, and on that ground had subjected him to the Lord, then by his own relapse to raise that same devil up again and make himself the man's occasion for rejoicing, so that the evil one, having recovered his lost prize, may gloat once more against the Lord. Is this not — and it is dangerous even to say it, but it must be said for the sake of edification — is this not setting the devil above the Lord? For the man seems to have made a comparison, having come to know both, and to have pronounced judgment that the one he preferred to belong to again is the better of the two! So then, the man who had set out, through repentance for his offenses, to satisfy the Lord, will instead satisfy the devil through a further repentance of his repentance, and will be all the more hateful to God for being all the more welcome to God's rival. But some say it is enough for the Lord if he is received in heart and mind, even if less is done in act; and so, they say, they sin with their fear and their faith intact — that is, they violate a marriage with their chastity intact, they mix poison for a parent with their filial piety intact! So then they too, with their 'pardon' intact, will be thrust down into hell, all while sinning with their 'fear' intact. What a marvelous example of perversity: they offend because they fear — I suppose they would not offend if they did not fear! So then, a man who does not want to offend God need not revere him at all, if the fear of offending is itself his excuse for offending! But this kind of cleverness springs, as a rule, from a hypocrite's stock — a breed bound to the devil by an unbreakable bond, whose repentance is never genuine.

======== De Paenitentia — Chapter 6 ========

Whatever our modest talent has attempted to suggest about taking up repentance once and holding to it forever applies to all who are debtors to the Lord, since all are petitioners seeking salvation from God — but it bears down especially on these novices, who are just now beginning to steep their ears in the divine words and who, like puppies still fresh from infancy with their eyes not yet fully opened, crawl about uncertainly: they say they renounce their former ways and take up repentance, but neglect to shut it in. [2] For the very ebb of desire itself calls them back to crave something from their old ways — like fruit, which even as it starts to sour and turn bitter with age, still to some degree flatters its own sweetness. [3] Besides, presumption on baptism brings with it every vice of delay and evasion toward repentance. For, sure of the certain pardon of their sins, they steal the time in between and grant themselves a furlough to sin rather than a training in not sinning. [4] How foolish, how perverse, to fail to complete repentance and yet expect pardon for one's sins — that is, to withhold the price and still reach out a hand for the goods! For it is at this price that the Lord has arranged to award pardon; it is by this payment of repentance that he offers impunity to be redeemed. [5] If merchants, before striking a bargain, inspect the coin offered them to make sure it bears no scratch, no clipping, no forgery, shall we not trust that the Lord will likewise scrutinize our repentance before he confers on us so vast a wage — nothing less than life everlasting? [6] 'But let us put off the reality of repentance a while; we may reform, I suppose, once we're absolved.' By no means. Rather, while pardon still hangs in the balance, punishment is what lies in view; while we do not yet deserve release — so that we may come to deserve it — this is the time when God threatens, not when he forgives. [7] For what slave, once he has been changed into a freedman, holds himself to account for his thefts and his flights? What soldier, once discharged from his camp, still bothers over his old marks of service? [8] The sinner must weep for himself before pardon comes, because the time of repentance is the same as the time of danger and fear. [9] I do not deny that the divine benefit — the wiping out of sins — is by all means secured for those about to enter the water; but one must labor to arrive there. For who will lend a single splash of any water to you, a man of such untrustworthy repentance? [10] It is easy enough to steal your way in and deceive the man in charge of this matter with your protestations — but God keeps watch over his treasury, and will not let the unworthy creep in unseen. What, after all, does he say? Nothing hidden that will not be revealed. Pile up as much darkness as you like over your deeds — God is light! [11] Some, however, imagine that God is under some necessity to grant even the unworthy what he has promised, and they turn his generosity into servitude. [12] But if he grants us the seal of death out of necessity, then he does it unwillingly; and who promises that a gift given unwillingly will last? [13] For do not many afterward fall away? Is not the gift taken back from many? These, clearly, are the ones who creep in unnoticed — who, having only pretended faith in repentance, build a house doomed to collapse, upon the sand! [14] Let no one flatter himself because he is still counted among the raw recruits of the hearers, as though this still gave him license to sin. The moment you have come to know the Lord, fear him; the moment you have looked upon him, revere him! [15] Otherwise, what does it matter that you have come to know him, if you still brood over the same things you did back when you were ignorant? What, then, separates you from the full servant of God? Is Christ one thing to the baptized and another to the hearers? [16] Is there a different hope or reward, a different dread of judgment, a different obligation to repent? That washing is the sealing of faith — and that faith is begun, and commended, by faith in repentance. [17] We are not washed in order that we may stop sinning, but because we have already stopped, since we have already been washed in heart: for this is the hearer's first baptism. Whole and unbroken fear follows from having come to know the Lord; sound faith, from a conscience that has once embraced repentance! [18] But if it is only from the water onward that we cease to sin, then we put on innocence by necessity, not by choice. Who, then, excels in goodness — the one for whom it is simply not permitted to be bad, or the one to whom being bad is distasteful? The one who is ordered to keep clear of crime, or the one who delights in doing so? [19] So then, are our hands to stay off plunder only because a stout, bolted door stands in the way, and our eyes to be reined back from seductive lust only because bodily guardians bar the path — if no one owed to the Lord will cease from sin except the man baptism has bound? [20] But if a man really thinks this way, I do not know whether, once baptized, he will be more grieved that he has stopped sinning than glad that he has escaped! Hearers, then, ought to long for baptism, not presume upon it. [21] For the one who longs for it honors it; the one who presumes upon it grows proud. In the one, modesty appears; in the other, insolence. The one takes pains; the other is careless. The one wants to earn it; the other counts it owed to him in advance. The one receives it; the other seizes it. [22] Whom would you judge worthier, but the one who is more reformed? And who is more reformed than the one who is more fearful, and thereby has genuinely performed repentance? For he was afraid to keep sinning, lest he not deserve to receive. [23] But that presumptuous man, promising the gift to himself in advance, was of course free of care and so could not fear — and thus he did not fulfill repentance either, since he lacked repentance's own instrument, namely fear. [24] Presumption is a share of shamelessness: it puffs up the petitioner and looks down on the giver; and so it sometimes ends in disappointment. For it promises itself the thing before it is even owed — and by that the one who is to grant it is always offended.

======== De Paenitentia — Chapter 7 ========

Thus far, Lord Christ, may it fall to your servants to speak and to hear concerning the discipline of repentance — up to the point at which even the hearers ought no longer to sin at all: or else, may they know nothing further of repentance, and seek nothing further from it. [2] I am reluctant to append any mention of a second — indeed now a final — hope, for fear that in discussing the remaining help of repentance we might seem to be pointing out room still left for sinning. [3] Far be it that anyone should interpret it this way — as though the door still stood open to him for sinning simply because it stands open for repenting — and turn the overflow of heaven's clemency into fuel for human recklessness! [4] Let no one be the worse for the Lord being the better, sinning as many times as he is forgiven; for whoever has no end of offending will certainly have an end of escaping. We have escaped once: let that be as far as we throw ourselves back into danger, even supposing we seem likely to escape again. [5] Many who have been rescued from shipwreck afterward renounce both ship and sea, and honor God's kindness — their own deliverance, that is — by keeping the danger in memory. I praise the fear, I esteem the modesty: they do not want to be a burden on divine mercy a second time, they dread seeming to trample on what they have already obtained; out of a wholesome anxiety, at least, they avoid experiencing again what they have once learned to fear. [6] So restraint in recklessness is proof of fear; and a man's fear is God's honor. [7] But that most obstinate enemy never gives his malice a holiday; indeed, he rages most fiercely precisely when he feels a man has been fully set free — he is kindled hottest exactly when he is being put out. [8] He must grieve and groan when pardon is granted for sins, when so many works of death in a man are torn down, so many old titles of his dominion erased. He grieves that this very sinner — once his slave — will one day judge him and his angels together with Christ. [9] And so he watches, he assaults, he besieges — on the chance that he might strike the eyes with fleshly desire, or snare the mind with worldly allurements, or overturn faith through fear of earthly power, or twist a man off the sure path through perverse traditions; he is never short of stumbling-blocks, never short of temptations. [10] Foreseeing these poisons of his, then, God — though he has shut the door of pardon and barred it with the bolt of baptism — has still allowed something to remain open: he has stationed a second repentance in the vestibule, to open to those who knock — but only once more, since it is now the second time; and never again after that, since the next attempt would be in vain. [11] Is not even this single grant enough on its own? You now hold what you no longer merited, seeing that what had been given you was once forfeited. And if it is the Lord's own generosity that supplies you the means to regain what was lost, then be thankful for a kindness doubled, if not multiplied. [12] For to restore is greater than to give, since it is more wretched to have lost than never to have received at all. Still, the soul must not immediately be cut down and undermined by despair, if a man finds himself a debtor to a second repentance. [13] Let it distress you, by all means, to sin again — but let it not distress you to repent again; let it shame you to fall into danger again, but let no one be ashamed to be freed again: for an illness that recurs needs a remedy that recurs. [14] You will show yourself grateful toward the Lord if you do not refuse what he offers you once more. You have given offense, but you can still be reconciled: you have someone to satisfy — and one who is willing, at that!

======== De Paenitentia — Chapter 8 ========

If you doubt this, unroll what the Spirit says to the churches: he charges the Ephesians with abandoning their first love, reproaches the Thyatirans with fornication and eating food offered to idols, charges the Sardians with deeds left unfinished, rebukes the Pergamenes for teaching perverse doctrines, chides the Laodiceans for trusting in their riches — and yet he calls every one of them to repentance, under threats, to be sure. [2] But he would not threaten the one who does not repent if he did not forgive the one who does — this would be doubtful, if he had not shown this overflowing clemency of his elsewhere too: 'Shall not,' he says, 'the one who has fallen rise again, and the one who has turned away, turn back?' [3] He is the one, clearly, he is the one who prefers mercy to sacrifice. The heavens rejoice, and the angels there, over a man's repentance. Take heart, you sinner: you see where your affairs are cause for joy! [4] What do those arguments of the Lord's parables mean for us? The woman who loses a coin, and searches, and finds it, and calls her friends together to rejoice — is this not a picture of the sinner restored? [5] A single little sheep, too, strays from the shepherd — yet it was not that one sheep the flock held dearer; that one alone is sought out, that one alone is missed as though for all the rest, and yet it is found and carried back on the shoulders of the shepherd himself: for it had worn itself out with much wandering. [6] Nor will I pass over in silence that gentlest of fathers, who calls back his prodigal son and gladly welcomes him once he repents after his poverty, and adorns his own joy with a feast, slaughtering the fattest calf. And why not? For he had found again the son he had lost, and felt him dearer for having, as it were, gained him anew. [7] Who is that father we are to understand him as? God, of course: no one is so much a father, no one so devoted. [8] He, then, will receive you as his son — even if you have squandered what you received from him, even if you come back stripped bare — because you have come back; and he will rejoice more over your return than over the other son's steadiness — but only if you repent from the heart, if you compare your hunger with the abundance of your father's hired hands, if you leave behind that unclean herd of swine, if you seek out your father again even though offended, saying: 'I have sinned, father, and am no longer worthy to be called yours.' [9] Confession lightens the offense exactly as much as concealment aggravates it; for confession is the resolve to make satisfaction, concealment the resolve to be defiant.

======== De Paenitentia — Chapter 9 ========

Because this second and final chance at repentance is so restricted, its demonstration must be all the more strenuous — not left to conscience alone, but carried out through some tangible discipline. [2] That practice, which is more commonly expressed and referred to by its Greek name, is exomologesis — by which we confess our offense to the Lord: not, of course, because he does not know it, but inasmuch as satisfaction is arranged through confession, repentance is born of confession, and God is appeased by repentance. [3] Exomologesis, then, is a discipline for prostrating and humbling a man, enjoining a manner of life that entices mercy — extending even to one's dress and diet: [4] it commands one to lie in sackcloth and ashes, to darken the body with squalor, to cast the mind down into grief, to exchange, by grim treatment, whatever in oneself has sinned; for the rest, to take food and drink in their plain form — not, of course, for the belly's sake but the soul's; and, above all, to nourish one's prayers with fasting, to groan, to weep and to bellow day and night to the Lord your God, to fall prostrate before the presbyters, to kneel at God's altars, to charge all the brothers with carrying the embassy of one's own supplication. [5] All this exomologesis does, that it may commend repentance, that it may honor the Lord through fear of danger, that by pronouncing sentence on the sinner itself it may stand in for God's own indignation, and that by temporal affliction it may — I will not say cheat, but blot out — the eternal punishments. [6] So then, the more it casts a man down, the more it lifts him up; the more squalid it makes him, the cleaner it renders him; the more it accuses, the more it excuses; the more it condemns, the more it absolves. To the exact degree that you do not spare yourself, believe me — to that same degree God will spare you!

======== De Paenitentia — Chapter 10 ========

Most people, however, presume either to dodge this task—the public confession of themselves—or to put it off day after day, being more mindful of their shame than of their salvation, like those who, having contracted some affliction in the more embarrassing parts of the body, avoid the physicians' notice of it and so perish along with their own blushing. [2] Intolerable, apparently, that shame should give satisfaction to an offended Lord, that it should be reshaped toward a salvation held out to it! Are you a good man only where shame is concerned—unfolding a bold face for sinning, but drawing it back for begging pardon? [3] I give no room to blushing here, since I gain more from its loss, since the man himself is in a manner exhorted, 'do not look back on me,' when he says, 'it is better for me that you perish.' [4] Certainly the danger in it is burdensome, if it be, only when it falls among mockers amid their jeering talk, where one man is puffed up over another's ruin, where the fallen is trampled further; but among brothers and fellow-servants, where hope, fear, joy, grief, and suffering are shared, because the spirit is shared, from one common Lord and Father, what else do you suppose these to be but yourself? [5] Why do you flee those who share your falls, as if they were mockers applauding? A body cannot rejoice over the affliction of a single member: the whole must grieve together and labor together toward the remedy. [6] In one person and another the church exists, and the church is Christ: therefore, when you stretch yourself out at the knees of the brothers, it is Christ whom you touch, Christ to whom you make your plea; likewise when they weep on your behalf, it is Christ who suffers, Christ who pleads with the Father. What a son asks for is always readily granted. [7] What a grand profit, to be sure, the concealment of a sin promises to one's modesty! As if, once we have withdrawn something from human notice, we thereby hide it from the Lord too! [8] Are the estimation of men and the conscience of God really to be set on a par? Or is it better to lie hidden while condemned than to be absolved openly? [9] 'It is a wretched thing to come to confession in this way.' I grant it—wretched if one comes to it out of love of sinning still; but where repentance is due, wretchedness departs, because the act itself becomes salutary. [10] It is a wretched thing to be cut and burned with the cautery and tormented by the bite of some caustic powder: and yet the things that heal by way of unpleasantness both excuse their own offensiveness by the profit of the cure and commend the present injury for the sake of the benefit that is to come.

======== De Paenitentia — Chapter 11 ========

What if, besides the shame they reckon more important, they also dread the bodily inconveniences—that it is proper to dwell unwashed, grimy, cut off from every merriment, amid the roughness of sackcloth and the horror of ashes, one's face made haggard by fasting? [2] Surely, then, is it fitting for us to make our supplication for our sins wearing scarlet and Tyrian purple? 'Bring me a needlepin to arrange my hair, and powder to whiten my teeth, and some little two-pronged iron or bronze tool to trim back my nails! Should any counterfeit sheen, any forced blush, press itself upon my lips or cheeks?' [3] Beyond that—go seek out more cheerful baths, garden retreats or seaside getaways, add to the expense, hunt down some outsized fattened fowl, drain to the dregs the finest vintage of aged wine: should anyone ask why you're lavishing all this on your soul, say, 'I have sinned against the Lord and I am in danger of perishing forever: so now I am in suspense, and I mortify myself and torment myself, that I may reconcile to myself the God I injured by sinning'! [4] But look at those who canvass for office, seeking to obtain a magistracy: they feel neither shame nor reluctance at the discomforts of soul and body—not discomforts only, but every kind of insult too—in striving for the object of their ambitions. [5] What shabbiness of dress they do not affect, what atriums they do not haunt with nighttime and half-digested morning greetings, cringing lower at every encounter with some person of greater standing, frequenting no banquets, joining no revels, but exiled from the happiness of freedom and gaiety—and all this for one year's fleeting, flitting joy! [6] Shall we, then, hesitate to endure, in the face of a danger that is eternal, what the mere seeking of the axe and the rods sustains, and shrink from offering to an offended Lord the chastening of our food and dress, when the nations impose these very things on themselves though no one has wronged them at all? [7] These are the very people Scripture takes note of: 'Woe to those who tie up their offenses as though with a lengthy cord!'

======== De Paenitentia — Chapter 12 ========

If you hold back from confession, set hell before your mind's eye, the very blaze that confession will douse on your behalf, and first form a picture of how immense the punishment is, so that you will not hesitate about adopting the remedy. [2] What are we to make of that treasury of eternal fire, when certain of its little smoke-vents stir up such blasts of flame that the nearest cities either already exist no more, or from one day to the next expect the same fate? [3] The loftiest mountains split open, big with fire in their bellies, and—here is the sign that shows us how endless the judgment will be—though they split open, though they burn away, they are never used up! [4] Who will fail to count these ongoing torments of the mountains as rehearsals of the judgment now looming over us? Who will not grant that such sparks amount to, so to speak, projectiles flung and warning-shots let loose from some enormous and unfathomable furnace? [5] Since, then, you know that against hell there are, besides those first defenses of the Lord's baptism, still further reinforcements available in a second confession, why do you abandon your own salvation, why do you hold back from taking up what you know can heal you? [6] Even dumb and unreasoning creatures recognize in their own time the remedies divinely allotted to them: the stag, pierced through by an arrow, knows it must eat dittany, so as to expel the iron and its irrevocable lingering from the wound; the swallow, if it has blinded its chicks, knows how to make them see again with its own celandine. [7] Shall the sinner, knowingly, pass by that confession established for his own restoration by the Lord—the very thing that restored the king of Babylon to his kingdom? For a long time he had offered penitence to the Lord like a sacrifice, working out his confession through seven years of squalor, with a wildness like lions' claws and a neglect of hair giving him the fearsome look of an eagle. What a happy outcome from such rough treatment! The one men shuddered at, God took back. [8] By contrast, the Egyptian king, who once pursued the people of God in their affliction, long denied to his own lord, rushed into battle, and after so many object lessons in the plagues, perished when the waters closed back over him at the parting of the sea, which had been passable only to that one people: for he had thrown away repentance and its ministry, confession! [9] Why should I go on further about these two planks, as it were, of human salvation, tending more to the business of my pen than to the duty of my conscience? For being a sinner marked by every stain, and born for nothing but repentance, I cannot easily keep silent about that thing which even Adam himself, first of the human race and first to offend the Lord, did not keep silent about—when, restored by confession, he was set back in his own paradise!

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 1 ========

The state of the present age calls for this warning of ours as well: that we should feel no astonishment over these heresies—not because they exist, for their coming was foretold, nor because they overturn the faith of certain persons, for it is for this very purpose that faith exists: so that in being held it might undergo trial, and thereby also proof. [2] It is vain and thoughtless, then, that so many are scandalized by this very fact, that heresies have such power. As if, were they not powerful, they would ever have come to exist at all. [3] Whatever has drawn the lot of existing in every respect, just as it receives the cause on account of which it exists, so too acquires the force by which it exists; nor can it exist without it.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 2 ========

Take fever, for instance, allotted to man among the other fatal and torturing forms of death: we are not astonished either that it exists—for exist it does—or that it destroys a man—for that is what it is for. [2] Likewise, if heresies have been produced for the sickening and death of faith, and we are terrified that they can do this, we ought first to be terrified that they exist at all—for while they exist, they have the power to do it, and while they have the power, they exist. [3] But fever, an evil in its origin and, notoriously, in its effect alike, we loathe rather than marvel at, and we guard against it as far as lies in us, though we do not have its abolition in our own power. [4] Heresies, however, bringing eternal death and the burning of a greater fire, some prefer to marvel at, for the very fact that they have such power, rather than to shun them, when they can, having the power to shun them. [5] For the rest, they will have no power at all, if people simply refuse to marvel that they have such power. For either, by marveling, men provide the very stumbling-block, or else, because they are scandalized, they marvel—as though the very fact that heresies have such power must come from some truth in them. [6] Marvelous indeed, that an evil should have force—unless it is simply that heresies have great power precisely among those who have no power in their faith. [7] In a contest of boxers and gladiators, more often than not the winner is not the one who is strong, or who cannot be beaten, but rather the one who wins does so because his opponent had no strength at all in him: thus that very same victor, matched afterward against a man in good condition, comes off beaten in his turn. [8] It is no different with heresies: what power they have comes from certain persons' weaknesses—they have no power at all if they run up against a faith in good health.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 3 ========

These wonder-mongers are also in the habit of building themselves up—toward ruin—out of certain persons who have been caught by heresy: [2] 'Why did that man, or that woman, most faithful, most prudent, most well-established in the church, cross over to that party?' [3] Whoever says this is, without knowing it, answering himself: those whom heresies were able to change cannot have been either prudent or faithful or well-established after all. And is it really so strange, do you suppose, that someone once approved should afterward fall away? [4] Saul, good beyond the rest, was later overthrown by envy. David, a man after God's own heart, was later guilty of murder and adultery. Solomon, endowed by the Lord with every grace and wisdom, was led into idolatry by women. [5] Only the Son of God, in fact, was granted the privilege of staying free from sin. What then, if a bishop, a deacon, a widow, a virgin, a teacher, even a martyr, should have lapsed from the rule of faith? Will heresies for that reason appear to hold the truth? [6] Do we measure faith against individuals, or individuals against faith? None is wise but the one who believes, none stands higher than a Christian, and none counts as a Christian save the one who holds out to the very finish. [7] You, being merely human, know each person only from the outside; you think you see what in fact you merely look at, and you see only as far as you have eyes to see. But, it is said, the eyes of the Lord are lofty. Man looks upon the face; God looks into the heart. [8] And for this reason the Lord knows those who are his own, and he roots up the plant he did not plant, and he shows the last from among the first, and he carries the winnowing-fan in his hand to cleanse his threshing-floor. [9] Let the chaff of a light faith fly off wherever it will, at whatever gust of temptation blows—the purer will be the mass of wheat laid up in the Lord's granaries. [10] Did not some of his own disciples turn aside from the Lord himself, scandalized? And yet the rest did not for that reason think they too should depart from his footsteps, but rather those who knew him to be the Word of Life, come from God, persevered in his company right to the end, even though he had calmly offered them, too, the chance to leave if they wished. [11] It is a small thing if some, too, deserted his apostle—Phygelus and Hermogenes and Philetus and Hymenaeus; the very betrayer of Christ was one of the Apostles. [12] Are we to marvel if some desert his churches, when the very fact that we suffer this shows us to be Christians, after the example of Christ himself? [13] 'They went out from among us,' he says, 'yet they did not belong to us; had they truly belonged to us, they would certainly have stayed on with us.'

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 4 ========

Rather, let us be mindful both of the Lord's own pronouncements and of the apostolic writings, which foretold to us that heresies would come and marked out beforehand that they were to be fled; and just as we are not alarmed that they exist, so let us not marvel at the power that makes them things to be fled from in the first place. [2] The Lord instructs us that many will come in sheep's clothing, ravening wolves. [3] What are these sheep's clothes but the outward surface of the Christian name? What are these ravening wolves but treacherous minds and spirits, lurking within to prey upon the flock of Christ? [4] Who are the false prophets but false preachers? Who the false apostles but adulterating evangelists? Who the antichrists, both now and always, but rebels against Christ? [5] Such is what heresies will be, harassing the church no less by the perversity of their new teachings than antichrist himself, at that time, will persecute her with the savagery of persecutions—except that persecution makes martyrs, while heresy makes only apostates. [6] And so heresies too had to exist, that all who were approved might be shown for what they were—both those who stood firm in persecutions and those who did not swerve aside into heresies. [7] For he does not mean us to understand as approved those who alter their faith into heresy, as some interpret it in the opposite sense from what he says elsewhere: 'test all things, hold fast what is good'—as though it were permissible for everyone, having tested badly, to stumble by mistake into the choice of some evil.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 5 ========

Further, if he rebukes dissensions and schisms, which are without doubt evils, and immediately attaches heresies to them, [2] then in attaching them to evils he is certainly professing them to be an evil too—and indeed a greater one, since he says he believed the reports about schisms and dissensions precisely because he knew that heresies too had to exist. [3] For he shows that, in view of the graver evil, he readily believed the lesser reports; certainly he did not believe the evil reports because heresies were something good, but rather so as to give advance warning about temptations of an even worse stamp, saying they tend toward showing up all who are approved—namely, those whom heresy could not corrupt. [4] Finally, if the whole passage has in view the preserving of unity and the checking of divisions, then heresies pull people away from oneness just as much as schisms and dissensions ever do. Without doubt he sets heresies too under that same condition of censure in which he places schisms and dissensions. [5] And by this he does not make approved those who have turned aside into heresies—since he especially rebukes such turning aside, teaching that all should speak the same thing and be of the same mind, which heresies simply do not allow.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 6 ========

No need to labor further over whether this is the same Paul who elsewhere, writing to the Galatians, lists heresies among the sins of the flesh, and who advises Titus that a heretical man, after a first rebuke, is to be rejected, since he is perverse of this kind and sins as one self-condemned. But in almost every letter, hammering on the need to flee adulterous doctrines, he takes aim at heresies, whose products are those adulterous doctrines: 'heresies,' a word taken from the Greek for 'choice,' since the man who follows them either sets them up or takes them up chiefly by his own choosing. That is why he calls the heretic 'self-condemned': because in the very thing for which he stands condemned, he chose for himself. But we are not permitted to bring in anything from our own choosing, nor even to choose what someone else has brought in from his. We have the apostles of the Lord as our authorities, and even they chose to bring in nothing from their own choosing, but faithfully assigned to the nations the teaching they had received from Christ. And so, even if an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than this, let him be accursed by us. The Holy Spirit had already foreseen that a certain virgin, Philumene, would one day play host to an angel of seduction transfiguring himself into an angel of light, by whose signs and tricks Apelles was led on to bring in his new heresy.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 7 ========

These are 'the doctrines of men and of demons,' born to tickle itching ears out of the cleverness of worldly wisdom, which the Lord, calling it folly, chose the world's foolish things to confound — confounding philosophy itself along with it. For that is the very stuff of worldly wisdom: the reckless interpreter of the divine nature and its arrangement. Indeed the heresies themselves are got up by philosophy. From it come the aeons, and I know not what infinite 'forms,' and Valentinus's trinity of man — the man had been a Platonist. From it comes Marcion's god, made better by his tranquillity — that came from the Stoics. And when it is said that the soul perishes, Epicurus is the model followed; and when the restoration of the flesh is denied, that is taken from the common school of all the philosophers; and where matter is set on a level with God, that is Zeno's doctrine; and wherever anything is alleged about a fiery god, Heraclitus steps in. The same material gets turned over between heretics and philosophers, the same questions keep getting tangled up in it: whence evil, and why? whence man, and how? and — the one Valentinus lately proposed — whence God? namely, from Enthymesis and Ectroma. Poor Aristotle! who taught them dialectic, that art of building up and tearing down, that shape-shifter of opinions, forced in its conjectures, harsh in its arguments, a factory of quarrels, a nuisance even to itself, forever taking everything back so as never quite to have settled anything. Hence those endless fables and genealogies, those barren questions, those words that creep like a cancer — against which the apostle, reining us in, expressly warns that philosophy [and empty seduction] must be guarded against, writing to the Colossians: 'See that no one deceives you through philosophy and empty seduction, according to the tradition of men, contrary to the providence of the Holy Spirit.' He had been at Athens, and there, from his encounters, had come to know that human wisdom which apes and corrupts the truth, itself, moreover, split into a hundred heresies by the sheer variety of its warring sects. What, then, does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? What has the Academy to do with the Church? What have heretics to do with Christians? Our own school is the Porch of Solomon, who himself had taught that the Lord is to be sought in simplicity of heart. Let those see to it who have produced a Stoic, a Platonic, or a dialectical Christianity. We, after Jesus Christ, have no need of curiosity; after the gospel, no need of inquiry. Once we believe, we desire to believe nothing further. For this we believe first of all: that there is nothing further we ought to believe.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 8 ========

So I come now to that text which our own people put forward as license to indulge curiosity, and which heretics hammer away at to import their fussy over-questioning. 'It is written,' they say, 'seek and you shall find.' Let us recall when the Lord uttered this saying. I think it was in the very earliest days of his teaching, while everyone still doubted whether he was the Christ, while Peter had not yet declared him the Son of God, while even John had begun to have his doubts about him. Rightly, then, was it said at that time, 'seek and you shall find' — when he who was not yet acknowledged still needed to be sought — and this applies to the Jews. For the whole force of that rebuke belongs to those who had somewhere to seek Christ. 'They have,' he says, 'Moses and Elijah' — that is, the Law and the Prophets — proclaiming Christ, according to what he says elsewhere quite openly: 'Search the scriptures, in which you hope for salvation; for they speak of me.' This is what 'seek and you shall find' amounts to. And what follows plainly applies to the Jews as well: 'knock, and it shall be opened to you.' The Jews had once stood at God's side; then, cast out for their offenses, they began to be outside God; but the nations had never been at God's side at all, save for a drop from the bucket and dust from the threshing floor, and had always been outside. So how shall he who has always been outside knock at a door he never knew, into which he was never once received nor ever cast out? Rather it is the man who knows he was once inside and driven out who will knock, since he knows the door. Likewise 'ask and you shall receive' fits the one who knew from whom to ask, and to whom something had already been promised — that is, by God, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — whom the nations knew no better than they knew any promise of his. So too he spoke expressly to Israel: 'my mission,' he says, 'reaches no one but Israel's stray sheep, the flock now lost.' Not yet was he throwing to the dogs the bread meant for the children; not yet had he ordered the road taken to the nations. It was only at the end that he commanded them to go and teach and baptize the nations, soon to receive the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, who would lead them into all truth. And so it is this that makes them capable of it. But if the apostles themselves, destined as teachers for the nations, were themselves first to receive a teacher, the Paraclete, how much more will 'seek and you shall find' be beside the point for us, to whom the teaching was to come unsought, through the apostles, and to the apostles themselves through the Holy Spirit. All the Lord's sayings, to be sure, are set before everyone, and have come down to us through the ears of the Jews; but many of them, aimed at particular persons, established for us not a rule binding on us as our own but an example.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 9 ========

Let me now, of my own accord, grant that point. Let it be granted that 'seek and you shall find' was said to everyone; even so, this needs to be read with a settled sense, under the guidance of sound interpretation. No divine utterance is so loose and diffuse that only the bare words are defended while the reasoning behind the words goes unfixed. But first of all I lay this down: that one single, definite thing was established by Christ, which the nations are bound to believe in every respect, and it is for this reason that they must seek — so that, once they have found it, they may believe. Now of one single, fixed thing there cannot be an endless inquiry; the search runs its course the moment discovery arrives, belief follows on the finding, and after that nothing remains but to hold fast what has been taken up as true — while also holding this too: that no further object of belief exists, and hence nothing further to hunt for once what Christ laid down has been found and trusted, since he who bids you seek forbids you to seek past his own boundary. If anyone doubts this, it will become clear that what was established by Christ is to be found in our possession. Meanwhile, on the strength of the proof I am about to offer, I get ahead of myself and warn certain people against looking past the very thing their own trust already rests on — that object of trust was what their search should have stopped at — lest they interpret 'seek and you shall find' as license without the discipline of reason.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 10 ========

Now the sense of this saying rests on three points: the matter, the time, and the manner. In the matter, you must consider what is to be sought; in the time, when; in the manner, how far. What Christ established, then, is to be sought only for as long as you have not found it — only until you find it. And the finding is confirmed the moment trust follows. Had discovery not come first, no trust of yours could have followed it; and had finding not been your aim, no search of yours would have begun at all. To this end, then, you seek, that you may find; and to this end you find, that you may believe: by believing, you have fixed the whole process of seeking and finding. This limit was set for you by the very fruit of the search itself. This boundary was marked out for you by the one who does not want you to believe anything other than what he established, and therefore does not want you to go on seeking either. Otherwise — if, because other people have set up other things just as impressive, we ought therefore to go on seeking as far as we are able to find — we will always be seeking and never, ever believing. For where will there be an end of seeking? Where a stopping-place for believing? Where a full stop to finding? At Marcion's? But Valentinus too proposes: 'seek and you shall find.' At Valentinus's, then? But Apelles will come knocking at me with that same pronouncement; and Ebion and Simon, and every one of them in turn, have nothing else with which to work their way into me and win me over to themselves. So it will end nowhere, so long as I everywhere run into 'seek and you shall find,' as though I were nowhere, as though I had never yet grasped what Christ established, what must be sought, and what must necessarily be believed.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 11 ========

One goes astray with impunity only so long as one does not transgress — although to go astray is itself already to transgress; one wanders with impunity, I mean, only so long as one abandons nothing. But if I have believed what I ought to have believed and then think something further must be sought, I must be hoping there is something further to be found — and I could have no such hope at all unless either I had not really believed what I seemed to believe, or I had ceased to believe it. Thus, in abandoning my faith, I stand exposed as one who has denied it. Let me say it once for all: no one seeks except the man who either never had a thing, or has lost it. That old woman had lost one of her ten drachmas, and that is why she searched; but once she found it, she stopped searching. The neighbor did not have bread, and that is why he knocked; but the instant that door swung wide and the loaf was handed over, his knuckles fell still. The widow kept asking the judge to hear her, because she was not being admitted; but once she was heard, that was the end of her insisting. So there is indeed an end to seeking, and to knocking, and to asking. For 'it shall be given to him who asks,' he says, 'and it shall be opened to him who knocks, and he who seeks shall find.' Let him see to it, the man who is always seeking, that he has not found — for he is seeking where he will never find. Let him see to it, the man who is always knocking, that the door will never be opened — for he is knocking where no one is. Let him see to it, the man who is always asking, that he will never be heard — for he is asking of one who does not listen.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 12 ========

But even if we still had to seek, and go on seeking forever, where, all the same, ought the seeking to be done? Among the heretics? Where everything is foreign and hostile to our truth, and whom we are forbidden even to approach? What slave hopes for his rations from a stranger — I will not say from his master's enemy? What soldier looks to unallied powers — I will not say to enemy kings — for a bounty and his pay, unless he is plainly a deserter, a turncoat, and a rebel? Even that old woman went looking for her drachma under her own roof; even that man who knocked was pounding on his neighbor's door; even that widow appealed to a judge who, though harsh, was not her enemy. No one can be instructed by the very source that destroys him; no one is enlightened by the one who plunges him into darkness. Let us, then, seek in our own house, from our own people, out of what is our own — and only insofar as the matter can come into question without prejudice to the rule of faith.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 13 ========

Now the rule of faith is this — so that from this point on I may declare what it is we are defending — the rule, that is, by which we believe: that there is one God only, and none other besides the maker of the world, who brought forth the universe out of nothing through his own Word, sent forth before all things. This Word, called his Son, was seen under the name of God in various forms by the patriarchs, was always heard in the prophets, and at last, carried down by God the Father's power and Spirit acting together, descended into the Virgin Mary, took on flesh within her womb, and, once born of her, went forth to live his life as Jesus Christ. From that point he preached a new law and a new promise of the kingdom of heaven, worked miracles, was fixed to a cross, rose again on the third day, was caught up into the heavens and sat down at the right hand of the Father; he sent, in his place, the power of the Holy Spirit to guide those who believe; he shall return in splendor to gather up his saints into the joy of everlasting life and the heavenly things promised them, while sentencing the wicked to fire without end, once each side has had its flesh raised up and restored. This rule, established by Christ, admits, as will be shown, no questions among us except those which heresies bring in, and which are what make men heretics.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 14 ========

But since the form of the faith remains fixed in its own order, ask and probe it as much as you like, pour out every appetite of curiosity, and if something still seems to you to hang in ambiguity or lie shadowed in obscurity, well, there is surely some brother who teaches, gifted with the grace of knowledge, or someone practiced among the well-trained, or someone at your side who searches more carefully still. In the end, it is better not to know something than to know it in the wrong way — better not to be aware of what you ought not to know, precisely because you already know what you ought to know. "Your faith," it says, "has made you whole" — not your drilling in the Scriptures. Faith is set within a rule; it has its law, and its salvation from keeping that law. Drilling, by contrast, consists in mere curiosity, and its only glory is a reputation for expertise. Let curiosity yield to faith, let glory yield to salvation. At the very least, let them not shout each other down — let them fall silent instead. Against the rule, to know everything is to know nothing. Even if heretics were not, by that very fact, enemies of the truth, even if we were never warned to flee them, what sort of thing is it to sit down and confer with men who themselves confess they are still seeking? For if they really are still seeking, they have found nothing certain yet, and so whatever they seem for the moment to hold, they betray their own uncertainty precisely by the fact that they are still seeking. So you, seeking in step with them, looking to men who are themselves still seeking — doubtful consulting the doubtful, uncertain consulting the uncertain, blind led by the blind — you are bound to be led straight into the pit. But when it is to deceive that they pretend still to be seeking, so as to worm their own arguments into us by injecting anxiety, and then, the moment they have got us, they turn round and defend as settled the very things they had said still needed inquiry — then we must refute them in such a way that they know it is not Christ we are denying to them, but themselves. For as long as they are still seeking, they do not yet hold it; and as long as they do not yet hold it, they have not yet believed; and as long as they have not yet believed, they are not Christians. But even when they do in fact hold it and believe it, they still say it must be sought — in order to defend it. Before they can defend it, then, they deny what they believe, confessing by their very seeking that they have not yet believed. Men who are thus not even Christians to themselves — how much less are they Christians to us? Men who come by trickery — what kind of faith are they arguing for? What truth are they patronizing, when they lead that truth in on the arm of a lie? "But," they say, "they themselves work from the Scriptures, and persuade from the Scriptures." Of course — from where else could they possibly speak about matters of faith, except from the documents of the faith?

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 15 ========

So we come now to the point. This is where we have been steering, this is what we have been laying the groundwork for in this prefatory address: that from here on we may join battle on the very ground where our opponents issue their challenge. They thrust the Scriptures at us, and by this sheer effrontery of theirs they at once unsettle a good many. In the actual encounter, they wear down the strong, capture the weak, and send the middling away with a nagging doubt. It is this move, above all, that we must block: they are not to be admitted to any debate over the Scriptures at all. If this — the Scriptures — is where their strength lies, so that they can wield them, then it must first be examined who has any right to possess the Scriptures in the first place, so that no one is let anywhere near them who has no title to them whatsoever.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 16 ========

I would not have taken this line out of a want of confidence, or a taste for constructing my case some other way, unless the reasoning stood firm — first and foremost this: that our faith owes obedience to the apostle, who forbids entering into disputes, lending an ear to novel phrases, meeting with a heretic after one single rebuke, not after a debate. Indeed he ruled out debate altogether by specifying rebuke as the proper business to be had with a heretic — and one rebuke only, precisely because he is not a Christian, and so ought not to be corrected the way a Christian is, once and then again, and under two or three witnesses — since the very reason he must be corrected is the reason no one ought to be debating with him at all. And besides, no good comes of any clash over the Scriptures, except, plainly enough, an upset stomach or an upset brain for someone.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 17 ========

This heresy does not accept certain Scriptures; and if it does accept some, it does not accept them whole — it wrenches them about with additions and subtractions to suit the shape of its own program; and even where it presents them more or less intact, it nonetheless twists them by concocting divergent interpretations for them. An adulterated sense does just as much violence to the truth as a corrupted text does; empty presumptions necessarily refuse to recognize the very passages by which they stand refuted. Instead they lean on what they have cobbled together out of falsehood and on what they have plucked out of ambiguity. What will you gain, most seasoned expert in the Scriptures, when the point you uphold gets rejected by your opponents, while the point you reject is exactly what they uphold? You for your part will lose nothing but your voice in the shouting-match, and gain nothing but bile from the blasphemy of it.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 18 ========

As for that man, if there is one, for whose sake you go down into this clash of Scriptures — meaning to steady him in his wavering — will he veer toward the truth, or rather toward the heresies? Moved by this very fact, that he sees you have gained no ground, with denial and defense pulled level from each opposing side, standing on equal footing either way, he will leave the argument more uncertain than before, not even knowing which heresy to judge the right one. And note well — they too have this very move to turn back against us. For they must equally claim that it is we, rather, who introduce adulterations of the Scriptures and lying interpretations, defending, as they see it, the truth on their own side.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 19 ========

So the Scriptures are not the ground to which one should appeal, nor should the contest be pitched on soil where the win is impossible, doubtful, or shaky at best. Even granting that setting Scripture against Scripture did not come out so balanced that neither camp could gain footing, the natural sequence of things still required that a prior question — the one that should now be argued exclusively — be settled first: to whom belongs the faith itself, to whom the Scriptures belong, and by whom, through whom, at what point, and to what recipients the teaching was handed down that makes men Christians? For wherever the truth of Christian teaching and Christian faith is shown to reside, there too will reside the truth of the Scriptures and their interpretations and of every Christian tradition.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 20 ========

Christ Jesus our Lord — let anyone say for the moment whatever he likes, whoever he is, son of whatever God, man and God of whatever substance, teacher of whatever faith, promiser of whatever reward — whatever he was, whatever he had been, whatever will of the Father he administered, whatever he determined that man must do, for as long as he walked the earth he himself proclaimed it, whether openly to the people or apart to his disciples — of whom he had picked out twelve in particular to keep at his side, marked out as teachers destined for the nations. And so, one of them having dropped away, he ordered the remaining eleven, as he departed to the Father after the resurrection, to go and teach the nations, plunging them in baptism under the names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit alike. At once, then, the apostles — a name that translates as "those sent" — having taken on by lot a twelfth, Matthias, in Judas's place, on the authority of the prophecy found in David's psalm, and having received the promised power of the Holy Spirit for works of power and for speech, first bore witness to faith in Jesus Christ throughout Judea and founded churches there, then set out into the world and spread that same teaching of that same faith among the nations. And in just the same way they founded churches in city after city, and it is from these that all the other churches thereafter have borrowed the cutting of the faith and the seeds of the teaching, and go on borrowing them daily, in order to become churches at all. And by this very fact they too are reckoned apostolic, as offspring of the apostolic churches. Every family must, of necessity, be reckoned back to its origin. And so, many and great as these churches are, they are that one original church from the apostles, from which they all descend. In this fashion each one counts as original, each one counts as apostolic, and the whole lot of them form a single body. Proof of that unity lies in the exchange of peace, the name of brotherhood, and the mutual hospitality that seals it — rights governed by no other principle than the single tradition of one and the same sacred bond.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 21 ========

From this, then, we draw up our prescription: if the Lord Christ Jesus sent out apostles to preach, then no preachers are to be received except the ones Christ himself appointed — since no one knows the Father except the Son, and whomever the Son has chosen to reveal him to; and the Son appears to have revealed him to no one but the apostles whom he sent to preach, obviously, what he had revealed to them. And as to what they preached — that is, what Christ revealed to them — here too I lay down as prescription that this must be proved in no other way than through those very churches which the apostles themselves founded, by their own preaching to them, as much by living voice, as they say, as afterward by letters. If this is so, then it follows that every doctrine which agrees with those apostolic churches, the wellsprings and originals of the faith, is to be reckoned as truth, holding without question the chain of transmission: the churches got it from the apostles, who in turn got it from Christ, who got it from God; while every doctrine which smells of anything contrary to the truth of the churches and of the apostles of Christ and of God is to be condemned in advance as a lie. It remains, then, for us to demonstrate whether this our doctrine, whose rule we have already set out above, is to be reckoned as descending from the tradition of the apostles, and, by that same token, whether all the others descend from a lie. We hold communion with the apostolic churches on the ground that our teaching differs from theirs in nothing: that is the proof of the truth.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 22 ========

But since this proof is so ready to hand that, once produced, nothing further would need reconsidering — indeed as if it had not even been produced by us at all — let us for the moment give the other side room, in case they think they have something that might weaken this prescription. It is their custom to claim that the apostles did not know everything — driven by that same lunacy that then flips the claim around: that the apostles did in fact know everything, but did not hand everything on to everyone — in either case throwing the reproach back onto Christ, for having sent apostles who were either poorly instructed or none too straightforward. Who, then, in his right mind could believe that these men were ignorant of anything, these men the Lord gave as teachers, keeping them inseparably at his side in company, in discipleship, in daily fellowship, men to whom he explained privately whatever was obscure, telling them it had been granted to them to know the secrets that the people were not permitted to understand? Was anything hidden from Peter, the man called the rock on which the church would be built, the man to whom were handed the keys that unlock the kingdom of the heavens, along with the power to bind and to loose on earth and in heaven? Was anything hidden, too, from John, most beloved of the Lord, who leaned on his breast, the one man alone to whom the Lord pointed out Judas the traitor beforehand, the one he commended in his own place as son to Mary? What did he mean these men to be ignorant of, when he even showed them his own glory, together with Moses and Elijah and, on top of that, the Father's voice from heaven — not as though rejecting the rest, but because "every word shall stand on the testimony of three witnesses"? So then, were even these men ignorant — men to whom, after the resurrection too, on the road, he deigned to expound all the Scriptures? He had indeed said once: "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now" — yet adding: "When that spirit of truth comes, he will lead you into all truth" — thereby showing that these men, whom he had promised would attain to all truth through the spirit of truth, were ignorant of nothing. And he did indeed fulfil that promise, as the Acts of the Apostles prove, with the descent of the Holy Spirit. Whoever refuses to accept that writing cannot belong to the Holy Spirit either, since they are not yet able to acknowledge the Holy Spirit as sent upon the disciples; nor can they even defend the church as theirs, since they have no way of proving when and in what cradle this body was first established. For it matters so much to them not to have proofs for what they defend, precisely so that the pedigrees of what they lie about will not have to be admitted along with them.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 23 ========

To smear the apostles with some charge of ignorance, then, they bring up how Peter, and those with him, were rebuked by Paul. "See," they say, "something was lacking in them" — building on this the further claim that a fuller knowledge could have come along afterward, of the kind that fell to Paul when he corrected his predecessors. Here too I can say to these deniers of the Acts of the Apostles: "First show us who this Paul is — what he was prior to becoming an apostle, and by what path he came to that office" — since on other questions too they lean on him heavily. For it is not enough, when he himself professes to be an apostle turned from a persecutor, for any careful believer simply to take his word for it — seeing that not even the Lord bore witness about himself. Yet they would have us believe without Scripture, so that we may believe against Scripture. Still, let them show, from this very passage they cite about Peter being rebuked by Paul, that Paul introduced some other shape of the gospel beyond the one Peter and the rest had already delivered. And yet — transformed from persecutor into preacher, he is brought by brothers to the brothers as one brother among others, to those very men from whom, in turn, he had received the faith through the apostles. Then, as he himself relates, he went up to Jerusalem to get to know Peter — by the proper office and right, that is, of that same faith and preaching. For those men would not have marveled that a persecutor had become a preacher, nor would they have gone on to glorify the Lord because his former adversary Paul had come over, if Paul had been preaching anything contrary. And so they gave him the right hand of fellowship, a sign of concord and agreement, and arranged between themselves a division of labor — not a splitting of the gospel, and not that one should preach one thing and the other something else, but that one should preach to one group and the other to another: Peter to the circumcision, Paul to the nations. As for the rest, if Peter was rebuked because, having eaten together with the Gentiles, he then began to withdraw from their company out of regard for certain persons, that was plainly a fault of conduct, not of preaching. For this did not mean that a different God than the Creator, or a different Christ than the one born of Mary, or a different hope than the resurrection, was being proclaimed.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 24 ========

I am not so well off — or rather, I am not so badly off — that I need to put the apostles on trial. But since these utterly perverse people drag out that rebuke to cast suspicion on the doctrine handed down earlier, I will answer as if for Peter's sake: Paul himself said he had become all things to all people — a Jew to the Jews, not-a-Jew to those not Jews — so as to win them all. So it was for the sake of times, persons, and circumstances that they rebuked certain things, the very things into which they themselves, equally for the sake of times, persons, and circumstances, fell — just as Peter might have rebuked Paul for circumcising Timothy while himself forbidding circumcision. Let those who sit in judgment on the apostles see to that. It is well that Peter is even matched with Paul in martyrdom. But even if Paul was caught up to the third heaven and carried into paradise and heard certain things there, those things cannot be supposed to have equipped him for some other, more instructed doctrine, since the very condition of their disclosure was that they be revealed to no man. But if that unknown something has leaked out to somebody's private knowledge, and some heresy claims to follow it, then either Paul is guilty of betraying a secret, or someone else was afterward caught up into paradise and ought to be produced, someone to whom it was permitted to speak what Paul was not allowed even to murmur.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 25 ========

But, as I have said, it is the same madness: they grant that the apostles lacked no knowledge and taught nothing conflicting among themselves, yet they will not allow that the apostles revealed everything to everyone. Some things, they say, were entrusted openly to all, other things secretly to a few — because Paul used just this word to Timothy: 'O Timothy, guard the deposit,' and again, 'Keep the good deposit.' What is this deposit? Something kept silent, to be assigned to another doctrine? Or is it that declaration of which he says: 'I commit this charge to you, my son Timothy'? Or perhaps that mandate of which he writes: 'I solemnly enjoin you before God, who gives life to all things, and Christ Jesus, who under Pontius Pilate testified the good confession, that you keep the commandment'? But what commandment, and what charge? From what is written before and after it was possible to understand — not that some hint of a more remote doctrine was being smuggled in, but rather that it was being driven home that no other doctrine was to be admitted besides the one Timothy had heard from Paul himself, and, I think, 'before many witnesses,' as he says. And if they refuse to understand those 'many witnesses' as the church, it makes no difference, since nothing that was delivered before many witnesses could have been kept secret. Nor, again, does the fact that Paul wanted these things entrusted to faithful men, competent also to teach others, give any ground for arguing some hidden gospel. For when he says this, he is speaking about the very people he was writing to at the time; had he meant hidden matters, kept from those not privy to the secret, he would have said something quite different from this.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 26 ========

Further, it followed that the one to whom Paul entrusted the administration of the gospel should administer it neither carelessly nor at random, in keeping with the Lord's own word: 'do not cast the pearl before swine, nor the holy thing before dogs.' The Lord declared his teaching openly, with no hint of any hidden mystery; he himself ordered that whatever came to their ears under cover of night and privacy, they were to announce openly, in daylight, from the rooftops. He himself, through a parable, had shown in advance that they must not hoard even a single mina — that is, a single word of his — unfruitful and out of sight. He himself taught that a lamp is not customarily hidden under a basket but set on a lampstand, so that it may shine on everyone in the house. The apostles either neglected these instructions or scarcely understood them, if they failed to carry them out and hid away some part of the light — that is, of God's word and Christ's mystery. They feared no one, so far as I know — neither the violence of the Jews nor of the pagans. All the more, then, they would have preached freely in the church, they who did not hold their tongues in synagogues and public places. Indeed, they could never have converted Jews or won over pagans unless they set out in full order the very things they wanted believed. Still less, then, would they have withheld anything from churches already believing, only to hand it over separately to a select few. And even granting that they discussed certain matters among their own household, so to speak, we still have no reason to believe these were matters that would introduce another rule of faith, different from and opposed to the one the catholic churches were publicly setting forth — as though they proclaimed one God in the church and a different one at a private lodging, designated one substance of Christ openly and another in secret, announced one hope of resurrection to everyone and a different one to a few — when they themselves, in their own letters, begged that all should say the very same thing, with one voice, and that there be no schisms and dissensions in the church, since Paul and the others preached the same message. Otherwise they would have remembered: 'Let your word be yes, yes, no, no; for whatever is more than this comes from evil' — so that they would not treat the gospel in a manner full of contradictions.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 27 ========

If, then, it is incredible either that the apostles were ignorant of the full content of their preaching, or that they did not deliver the entire order of the rule to everyone, let us see whether it might not rather be that the apostles taught simply and fully, but the churches, through their own fault, received it differently from how the apostles delivered it. All these scruple-mongering provocations you will find the heretics resorting to. They seize on churches the apostle took to task: 'O senseless Galatians, who has cast a spell over you?' and: 'You were running so well — who hindered you?' and that opening itself: 'I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in grace, for a different gospel.' Likewise it is written to the Corinthians that they were still carnal, fed on milk, not yet fit for solid food, thinking they knew something when they did not yet know how one ought to know. When they hold up rebuked churches against us, let them also believe those churches were corrected. But let them also acknowledge those other churches, of whose faith and knowledge and conduct the apostle is glad, and for whom he gives thanks to God — churches which today, all the same, mix the very same rule of instruction with those that were rebuked.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 28 ========

Come now, suppose everyone erred, suppose even the apostle was deceived in bearing witness to certain matters; suppose the Holy Spirit paid no attention to guide him into the truth, though sent by Christ for exactly that purpose, asked of the Father for exactly that purpose, to be the teacher of truth; suppose God's steward, Christ's vicar, neglected his office, letting the churches understand one thing and believe another in the meantime, different from what he himself was preaching through the apostles — is it in any way plausible that so many, and such great, churches should have strayed into a single faith by error? Among many, a single outcome that turns out one way is not the natural result of chance: an error in the churches' doctrine would have had to vary. But whatever turns out identical and unvarying across so many is not error — it is handed-down teaching. Let someone, then, dare to say that those who handed it down erred!

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 29 ========

However the error is supposed to have happened, error in any case reigned only so long as there were no heresies. Liberating truth was waiting for a few Marcionites and Valentinians. Meanwhile the gospel was wrongly preached, wrongly believed, so many countless multitudes received a mistaken baptism, so many deeds of faith accomplished in error, so many powers, so many gifts wrongly worked, so many priesthoods, so many ministries wrongly discharged, and finally so many martyrdoms wrongly crowned! But if not wrongly, and not in vain, then what sense does it make for the works of God to run ahead of the God to whom they belonged being known? For Christians to exist before Christ was found? For heresies to exist before the true doctrine? No — in everything, truth precedes its image; the copy follows after the reality. It is absurd enough, besides, to hold that heresy came first in doctrine — especially since it is that very doctrine which foretold the heresies to come, and warned against them. To the church of that doctrine it is written — or rather, that very doctrine writes to its own church: 'Even if an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached, let him be accursed.'

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 30 ========

Where, then, was Marcion at that time, the Pontic ship-captain, that devotee of the Stoics? Where was Valentinus, that follower of Plato? It is a matter of record that these men were by no means so ancient — they belong roughly to the reign of Antoninus — and that they first believed in catholic doctrine, within the church at Rome, under the blessed bishop Eleutherus, until, on account of their perpetually restless curiosity, which even the brethren kept clear of, they were expelled once and then again. Marcion — along with the two hundred sesterces he had donated to the church — was at last banished into permanent separation, and the two of them went on to spread the poisons of their own doctrines. Later Marcion confessed his repentance and came to terms offered him: he would receive peace back only on condition that he also restore to the church the others whom he had trained up for ruin — but death overtook him first. It was, indeed, necessary that heresies exist. But that does not make heresies a good thing, simply because their existing was necessary — as if evil, too, were not sometimes necessary! For it was necessary that the Lord be betrayed — but woe to the betrayer! Let no one, on that basis, go defending heresies. And if the pedigree of Apelles too must be traced, he is himself no less recent than Marcion, his founder and model, but he lapsed for a woman, deserted Marcionite continence, and withdrew to Alexandria, away from the eyes of his most saintly master. Returning after some years, no better — except that he was no longer a Marcionite — he stumbled into another woman, that virgin Philumena mentioned above, later herself an outright prostitute, by whose 'inspiration' he was taken in, and wrote up the 'Revelations' he learned from her. There are still people alive today who remember them, people who even studied under them personally, disciples and successors of theirs, so that the later heretics cannot deny it. And besides, as the Lord said, they are convicted out of their own works. For if Marcion tore the New Testament away from the Old, he necessarily comes after the thing he tore it from, since he could not have separated what had never been joined. So what was joined before it was separated, and later separated, shows the separator to be the later party. Likewise Valentinus, expounding things differently and, no doubt, correcting them — by that very word 'correcting,' whatever he corrects, he shows to have been earlier, flawed as it stood. These we name as the more prominent and more numerous adulterers of the truth. But there are others too — some Nigidius or other, and Hermogenes, and many more still walking about, perverting the ways of the Lord. I should like them to show me by what authority they came forth. If they preach a different god, how is it they make use of the possessions, the writings, the very names of the God against whom they preach? And if the same God, how is it they preach differently? Let them prove themselves new apostles; let them say that Christ came down again, taught again in person, was crucified again, died again, rose again. For that is how he is accustomed to make apostles — by giving them, besides, the power of working the same signs he himself worked. I want their powers displayed too — except that I recognize their greatest power already: the perverse way they rival the apostles. The apostles used to make the dead live; these men make the living dead.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 31 ========

But let me turn back from this digression to argue the priority of truth and the posteriority of falsehood, drawing support once more from that parable which places the good seed of wheat, sown by the Lord, first, and only afterward has the enemy, the devil, bring in the adulterating weeds of barren grass. For this precisely figures the distinction between the two doctrines, since elsewhere too the word of God is likened to seed. So from the very order of events it is shown that what is the Lord's own and true is that which was handed down first, while that which is foreign and false is that which was introduced later. This principle will stand firm against every later heresy, none of which has the consistency of a clear conscience to defend the truth for itself.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 32 ========

But if there are heresies bold enough to insert themselves into the apostolic age, so as to seem handed down by the apostles merely because they existed under the apostles, we may say this: let them, then, publish the origins of their churches, let them unroll the list of their bishops, running down in succession from the beginning in such a way that their first bishop had for his author and predecessor one of the apostles or apostolic men — one, that is, who persevered with the apostles. For this is how the apostolic churches present their credentials: as the church of the Smyrnaeans records that Polycarp was placed there by John, as the church of the Romans records that Clement was ordained by Peter. In just the same way the other churches too can point to men whom the apostles set up as bishops, offshoots of the apostolic seed. Let the heretics fabricate something of the sort. What, after all, is off-limits to them after blasphemy? But even if they fabricate it, they will get nowhere. For their doctrine itself, compared with the apostolic, will, by its sheer divergence and clash, betray that neither an apostle nor a man of apostolic standing stands behind it as its source; for just as the apostles did not teach things at variance among themselves, so the apostolic men did not put forth things contrary to the apostles — unless indeed those who learned from the apostles went on to preach differently. It is to this standard, then, that they will be summoned by those churches which, even though they can produce no apostle or apostolic man as their own founder — being far later, and indeed some are founded daily even now — are nonetheless reckoned no less apostolic, because of their kinship in doctrine, since they agree in the very same faith. Let all the heresies, then, when challenged by our churches on both counts, prove themselves apostolic in whatever way they think they can. But they are so far from being so, and so far from being able to prove what they are not, that they are not received into peace and communion by any churches that are apostolic in any sense — precisely because, on account of the difference in their mystery, they are in no way apostolic.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 33 ========

On top of this I bring forward a review of the doctrines themselves that existed under the apostles, exposed and sworn against by those very apostles. For they will be more easily convicted this way, once it is caught out either that they already existed then, or that they took their seeds from things that did exist then. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, marks out deniers and doubters of the resurrection: that opinion belongs properly to the Sadducees. A part of it is appropriated by Marcion and Apelles and Valentinus, and by whoever else undermines the resurrection of the flesh. And writing to the Galatians he inveighs against those who observe and defend circumcision and the Law -- that is exactly the heresy of Ebion. Instructing Timothy, he also lashes those who forbid marriage -- so teach Marcion and his follower Apelles. He likewise touches on those who would say the resurrection has already happened: that is precisely what the Valentinians assert of themselves. And when he speaks of interminable genealogies, Valentinus is recognized, in whose system that Aeon, whoever he is -- new and of more than one name -- begets Sense and Truth out of his own Charis; and these in turn beget Word and Life between them, and these again beget Man and Church, from which first eightfold of Aeons ten others and then twelve more Aeons arise under weird names into a sheer fairy-tale of thirty Aeons. That same apostle, when he condemns those who are slaves to the elements, points to something of Hermogenes, who, introducing matter as unborn, compares it to the unborn God, and so, making a goddess of the mother of the elements, is free to serve her while comparing her to God. John, in the Apocalypse, is commanded to castigate those eating food offered to idols and committing fornication: there are others still today who are Nicolaitans, called the Cainite heresy. And in his epistle he calls those above all antichrists who would deny that Christ came in the flesh, and who would not believe that Jesus is the Son of God: the first charge Marcion has claimed for his own, the second Ebion. As for the discipline of Simonian magic, being a servant of angels, it too was of course counted among the idolatries, and was condemned by the apostle Peter in the person of Simon himself.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 34 ========

These, I think, are the kinds of adulterated doctrines that we learn, from the apostles themselves, existed under the apostles. And yet among all these various perversities we find not a single teaching that stirred up controversy about God the creator of all things. No one dared to suspect a second god; it was easier to raise a question touching the Son than to raise one touching the Father, right up to the moment Marcion introduced, beside the Creator, a separate deity of pure benevolence. Apelles made the creator some glorious angel or other of a higher God, the god of the Law and of Israel, asserting him to be fiery; Valentinus scattered abroad his Aeons and traced the flaw of a single Aeon back into the origin of the creator God. To these alone, and to these as the first, the truth of divinity was revealed -- winning, no doubt, a greater dignity and a fuller grace from the devil, who wanted, in this way too, to rival God: so that out of doctrines of poison -- what the Lord refused -- he himself made disciples greater than their master. So let all the heresies, taken together, pick whatever dates they like for themselves -- since it makes no difference when they existed, so long as they are not of the truth -- and in any case, whatever did not exist under the apostles cannot have existed at all. For if they had existed, they would have been named, so as themselves to be reined in; but those that did exist under the apostles stand condemned by that very naming. So then, whether these same heresies now are somewhat more polished versions of the crude ones under the apostles, they carry their condemnation forward from there; or whether some were one thing then and others sprang up afterward, borrowing some opinion from the earlier ones -- by sharing fellowship of teaching with them they must also share fellowship of condemnation, given that the case already made above about their lateness applies beforehand: even if they had no part in the condemned matter itself, they would be prejudged on the ground of date alone, all the more adulterous for not even having been named by the apostles. Hence it stands all the more firmly established that these are the very ones that were even then being announced as still to come.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 35 ========

Challenged and refuted by us on these terms, let all the heresies -- whether later than the apostles or contemporary with them, so long as they differ from them, whether marked out by them generally or specifically, so long as they were condemned in advance -- dare, if they can, to answer with some prescriptions of this same kind against our own teaching. For if they deny its truth, they must prove that it too is a heresy, refuted by the same method by which they themselves are refuted, and show at the same time just where the truth is to be sought that, as is now established, is not to be found among them. Our position is not the later one -- quite the opposite, it is prior to all of them. This will be the testimony of a truth that everywhere holds the first place. It is not condemned by the apostles -- rather, it is defended by them: this will be the proof of its rightful ownership; for what those who condemned everything foreign to them did not condemn, they thereby show to be their own, and therefore defend it.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 36 ========

Come now, if you would rather exercise your curiosity well in the business of your own salvation, run through the apostolic churches, in which the very chairs of the apostles still preside in their own places, in which their own authentic letters are read aloud, sounding out their voice and representing the face of each one. Achaia lies closest to you -- there you have Corinth. Should Macedonia be within reach, Philippi awaits you there; if you can journey on into Asia, Ephesus is yours; and if you are close by Italy, you have Rome, from which authority lies ready at hand for us too. How fortunate is that church, on which the apostles poured out the whole of their teaching along with their own blood, where Peter is made equal to the Lord's own passion, where Paul is crowned with the death of John, where the apostle John, after being plunged into fiery oil and suffering nothing, is banished to an island. Let us see what she learned, what she taught -- in agreement, too, with the churches of Africa: she acknowledges a single God, the Lord who fashioned the whole world, and Jesus Christ, brought forth from the Virgin Mary, Son of the God who is Creator, together with the rising again of our flesh; she blends the Law and the Prophets together with the writings of the Gospels and the apostles, and from that mixture she drinks her faith; that faith she seals with water, clothes with the Holy Spirit, feeds with the Eucharist, exhorts to martyrdom -- and against this rule she receives no one. This is the teaching -- I will not even say now that it merely foretold the heresies to come, but rather the very teaching out of which the heresies came forth. Yet they are not of it, precisely because they arose against it. Even from the pit of the mild and excellent and necessary olive springs the harsh wild olive; even from the poppy-seed of the sweetest and most delightful fig springs the windy and useless wild fig. So too the heresies are of our own stock but not of our own kind -- wild growths from the seed of truth, but by way of a lie.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 37 ========

If matters stand this way, so that the truth is adjudged to belong to us -- all of us who walk by that rule which the churches took over from the apostles, who in turn took it from Christ, who took it from God -- then it stands settled, on the reasoning of our proposed rule, that heretics are not to be admitted to any appeal to the Scriptures, since we prove, without recourse to the Scriptures, that they have no claim on the Scriptures at all. For if they are heretics, they cannot be Christians, since they hold nothing from Christ, having taken up, by their own choosing, the name of heretics that they themselves accept. So then, as non-Christians they acquire no right whatsoever to Christian writings, and it is fair to say to them: 'Who are you? When and from where have you come? What are you doing in what is mine, when you are not mine? By what right, Marcion, do you cut down my forest? By what license, Valentinus, do you divert my springs? By what authority, Apelles, do you shift my boundary-markers? This estate is mine -- what business is it of the rest of you to sow and pasture here to suit your own pleasure? This estate is mine, I have possessed it a long time, I possessed it first, I hold firm titles from the very authors to whom the property belonged. It is the apostles' inheritance that I hold. As they provided in their will, as they entrusted to good faith, as they bound by oath, so I hold it. As for you, they always disinherited you and disowned you, as strangers, as enemies.' And on what other ground are heretics strangers and enemies to the apostles, except through that difference of doctrine which each one, by his own private judgment, has either put forward against the apostles or accepted from someone else against them?

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 38 ========

It is there, then, that the adulteration of both Scriptures and their interpretations is to be reckoned, wherever a difference of doctrine is found. Those whose purpose was to teach differently were driven by necessity to arrange the instruments of their teaching differently. For they could not have taught otherwise unless they had different material to teach from -- just as corruption of the teaching could not have followed for them without corruption of its instruments, so too the integrity of our teaching could not have held together without the integrity of the means by which that teaching is handled. For indeed, what is there in our own texts that runs contrary to us? What have we brought in of our own, so that we then had to patch up some contradiction found in the Scriptures by cutting, or adding, or altering? What we are, that the Scriptures have been from their very beginning; we are of them, and before we were anything other than what we are now, what, pray, were they before you tampered with them? Since every tampering must be believed to be the later thing, coming as it always does from a motive of rivalry -- which is never earlier than, nor native to, the thing it rivals -- it is as unbelievable to any thinking person that we, who are both first and drawn straight from the Scriptures themselves, should seem to have brought an adulterating pen to them, as it is unbelievable that those did not do so, who are both later and hostile to them. One man twists the Scriptures by hand, another twists their sense by way of exposition. For it is no use that Valentinus appears to use an intact text -- he laid hands on the truth with a craft no less cunning than Marcion's. Marcion, for his part, used the sword openly and in plain view, not the pen, since he carried out a slaughter of the Scriptures to suit his own material. Valentinus, however, spared the text, since he did not devise the Scriptures to fit his material, but his material to fit the Scriptures. And yet his subtractions ran deeper still, and his additions likewise, as he stripped from single words their proper sense one after another, and tacked on arrangements of matters that have no existence at all.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 39 ========

These, brothers, are the devices of the spiritual forces of wickedness with which we must wrestle -- rightly to be weighed, necessary to belief, so that those who are approved may be shown plainly and the disqualified laid bare. And so they have both the power and the facility for devising and equipping errors -- a facility not so remarkable as to seem difficult or beyond explaining, since even secular literature offers a ready example of just such facility. You can see today a wholly different story assembled out of Virgil, its material fitted to the verses and the verses fitted to the material. Thus Hosidius Geta drained out of Virgil, down to the last drop, a tragedy on Medea. Some relative of mine, out of that same poet, among the other idle amusements of his pen, worked out the Tablet of Cebes. There are also those commonly called Homer-patchers, who stitch together, in the manner of a patchwork quilt, a single body of their own composition out of many pieces gathered here and there from Homer's poems. And of course divine literature is far more fertile still, adaptable to the demands of any material whatever. Nor do I risk saying too much when I say that the Scriptures themselves have been so arranged by the will of God as to supply material for the heretics, since I read that heresies simply must exist, and cannot exist without the Scriptures.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 40 ========

But the question is asked: by whom is the understanding of the things that serve the heresies twisted awry? By the devil, of course, whose business it is to twist the truth -- who apes the very substance of the divine sacraments in the mysteries of idols. He too baptizes certain of his believers and faithful; he promises the washing away of sins from a bath; and if I still remember Mithras rightly, he marks his soldiers there on their foreheads. He also celebrates an offering of bread, and brings in an image of the resurrection, and buys back a crown under the sword. What of the fact that he even sets up a high priest bound to a single marriage? He has virgins too, he has those who practice continence. For the rest, if we go back over the superstitions of Numa Pompilius -- if we consider the priestly offices and insignia and privileges, the ministries and instruments and vessels of those who offer sacrifice, the elaborate rules of the sacrifices themselves and the expiations and vows -- is it not plain that the devil has imitated that fussy exactness of the Jewish law? He, then, who was so eager to rival and reproduce, in the business of idolatry, the very things by which the sacraments of Christ are administered, was of course equally eager and equally able, by the same cleverness, to adapt the instruments of divine matters and of holy Christians too -- sense for sense, word for word, parable for parable -- to suit a profane and rival faith. And so no one ought to doubt either that the spiritual forces of wickedness, from which even the heresies come, were sent in by the devil, or that the heresies are any different from idolatry, since they belong to the same author and the same working as idolatry does. Either they invent another god set over against the Creator, or, if they confess a single Creator, they discourse of him otherwise than he truly is. And so every lie they tell about God is, in a certain sense, a kind of idolatry.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 41 ========

I will not omit a description of the heretical way of life itself — so trivial a thing it is, so worldly, so purely human in cast, lacking gravity, lacking authority, lacking discipline, fitting its faith to a nicety. [2] To begin with, no one can tell who is a catechumen and who is a believer — they come in together, listen together, pray together; and if pagans should show up as well, they will throw what is holy to dogs and pearls — not real ones — to pigs. [3] What they want to call simplicity is really the collapse of order, and the discipline we take such care over they call flattery. They mix and merge peace with everybody, indiscriminately. [4] It makes no difference to them, however much they differ among themselves, so long as they conspire together to storm the one truth. All of them are puffed up, all of them promise "knowledge." Their catechumens are perfected before they are even taught. [5] And the women among these heretics — how shameless! They dare to teach, to argue, to perform exorcisms, to promise cures, and quite possibly even to baptize. [6] Their ordinations are reckless, casual, inconsistent: now they install men fresh out of the font, now men still bound to the world, now apostates from our ranks — binding them by the lure of rank, since they cannot bind them by truth. [7] Nowhere is promotion easier than in a rebel camp, where the mere fact of being there counts as merit. [8] And so one man is bishop today, another tomorrow; today's deacon is tomorrow's reader; today's presbyter, tomorrow's layman. For they even lay priestly duties on laymen.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 42 ========

As for how they handle the word — what am I to say, when their whole business is not converting pagans but subverting our own people? [2] This is the glory they angle for: not raising up the fallen, but toppling the standing. For their very work does not come from any building of their own but from tearing down the truth; they undermine our structure in order to build theirs: [3] take away from them the law of Moses, the prophets, and God the Creator, and they have no accusation left to make and nothing left to say. [Thus it happens that they find it easier to demolish standing buildings than to construct anything out of the rubble they've made.] [5] And it is only in this business that they act humble and ingratiating and deferential — otherwise they show their own leaders no respect at all. [6] And this is why schisms are practically unheard of among heretics: because although they exist, they go unnoticed — for their whole "unity" is itself a schism. [7] I lie if they do not even vary among themselves from their own rules, each one shaping what he received according to his own private judgment, just as the man who handed it down composed it according to his. [8] The result acknowledges its own nature and follows the manner of its origin. What was permitted to Valentinus was equally permitted to the Valentinians, what to Marcion was permitted equally to the Marcionites — to remake the faith according to one's own private judgment. [9] In the end, when their heresies are thoroughly examined, all of them are caught disagreeing on many points even with their own founders. [10] Most of them have no churches at all — motherless, homeless, orphaned of faith, exiles, wandering about as if under some kind of curse.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 43 ========

It has also been noted that heretics keep company with magicians in great numbers, with charlatans, with astrologers, with philosophers — people, in other words, devoted to idle curiosity. [2] Look and you will find that everywhere they turn up in such company. From the character of their conduct, in fact, the quality of their faith can be judged: their way of life is the index of their doctrine. [3] They deny that God is to be feared — and so, for them, everything is free and unbound. [4] But where is God not feared, except where he does not exist? Where God does not exist, there is no truth either; and where there is no truth, it is only fitting that the moral discipline should be of the same sort. [5] But where God exists, there dwells reverent fear of him, and that dread is wisdom's starting point. Where there is fear of God, there is honest seriousness, and painstaking diligence, and anxious care, and scrupulous selection, and deliberate fellowship, and promotion earned by service, and reverent submission, and devoted attendance, and modest advancement, and a church that is one, and everything belonging to God.

======== De Praescriptione Haereticorum — Chapter 44 ========

Accordingly these marks of a stricter discipline among us add their weight to the proof of the truth, and no one who bears in mind the coming judgment does himself any good by turning away from it — the judgment at which we must all stand before the tribunal of Christ, rendering account, first of all, of our very faith. [2] What then will they say, those who have handed over the virgin given by Christ and violated her in heretical adultery? [3] I suppose they will plead that no warning was ever given them, whether from him or from those he sent out, of the savage and twisted teachings to come, nor any word about being on guard against and detesting such things. [4] Let them acknowledge that the fault is theirs, rather than that of those who failed to give them advance warning. [5] They will add, besides, a great deal about the authority of this or that heretical teacher: that these men confirmed the credibility of their teaching precisely by signs — raising the dead, restoring the crippled, foretelling the future — so that they deserved to be believed as apostles. [6] As if it were not also written that many would come who would even perform the greatest miracles, to reinforce the deception of a corrupted preaching! And so they will earn their pardon. [7] But if, mindful of the Lord's and the apostles' warnings, they had stood firm in the integrity of the faith, then I think they will find themselves in danger of no pardon at all, when the Lord answers them: [8] "I plainly foretold that there would be teachers of deception in my name, and of the prophets, and even of the apostles, and I had instructed my own disciples to preach the same warning to you. [9] Once, and only once, I entrusted the gospel and the teaching of that same rule to my apostles. But since you would not believe, it later pleased me to change some things in it. [10] I had promised a resurrection of the flesh too, but I thought better of it, in case I could not deliver. I had shown myself born of a virgin, but afterward that seemed shameful to me. [11] I had spoken of a Father who made the sun and the rains, but a father better than he later took me in as his own. I had told you not to give heretics a hearing at all — but there I erred." [12] Such is the sort of thing that those who wander off the path, and take no care against the danger to the truth of the faith, must be prepared to imagine. [13] But for now we have dealt with the matter in general, driving back all heresies with fixed, just, and necessary prescriptions from any appeal to the scriptures at all. [14] As for the rest, if God's grace grants it, we will answer certain of them individually as well.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 1 ========

[1] Whatever I have done against Marcion up to now, let it stand or fall for itself; I am starting a new work out of an old one. My first little treatise, written in something of a hurry, I had already scrapped for a fuller edition later. That second version, too, before it had even been properly reproduced, I lost through the treachery of a man who was then a brother and afterward an apostate — he had, it happened, copied out certain parts most inaccurately and put them into circulation. [2] The necessity of correcting it arose from that; and the occasion of doing it over persuaded me to add something further. So this text, now grown from a second edition into a third, and from a third now finally into what stands as its first true completion, must of necessity preface its own history, so that no one is thrown into confusion by its variant forms turning up scattered about. [3] Pontus, called the Euxine — 'hospitable' — belies its own nature and mocks its own name. Do not judge its hospitality by its geography either; it has cut itself off from our gentler seas as if from some shame at its own barbarism. The fiercest tribes inhabit it — if 'inhabit' is the word for people who live in wagons. Their homes are unfixed, their life raw, their lust promiscuous and mostly on open display, and even when they do hide it, they hang their quivers from the yoke as a warning sign, lest anyone approach carelessly — so little shame do they even have of their own weapons. They devour their parents' corpses, slaughtered along with the cattle, at the funeral feast; and anyone who dies in such a way that he is not fit to be eaten is cursed as having died badly. Not even the female sex is softened toward modesty — they cut off their breasts, do their spinning with axes, and would rather go to war than marry. Even the sky is harsh there: the day is never open, the sun never shines willingly, the air is one continuous fog, the whole year is winter, and every wind that blows is the north wind. Liquids return to the fire to be freed, rivers are locked shut with ice, mountains pile up with frost. Everything there is numb, everything is stiff; nothing there is warm except savagery itself — the very savagery that supplied the stage with its legends of Taurian sacrifices, Colchian love affairs, and Caucasian crucifixions. [4] But nothing in Pontus is so barbarous and grim as this: that Marcion first drew breath in that land — a man more revolting than a Scythian, more unsettled than a wagon-dweller, more inhuman than a Massagete, bolder than an Amazon, gloomier than its mists, harsher than its frosts, more crumbling than its packed ice, more faithless than its Danube, more precipitous than its Caucasus heights. And why not? — since in his hands the true Prometheus, God almighty, is torn apart by blasphemies. [5] Indeed, Marcion outdoes even the beasts of that barbarous land. For what beaver is so much a castrator of the flesh as the man who did away with marriage? What Pontic mouse is so much a gnawer as the man who chewed up the gospels? Truly, Euxine, you have produced a more remarkable creature for the philosophers than for the Christians. For that dog-faced Diogenes wanted only to find a man, and went about carrying a lantern at noon for the purpose; Marcion found his god, and then put out the lamp of his own faith and lost him again. [6] His own disciples will not deny that his original faith was the same as ours — his own writings are witness to that — so that he can already be marked out on this basis alone as a heretic: a man who abandoned what he had held at first and later chose for himself what had not been there before. For a thing will be reckoned heresy in exact proportion as it was introduced later, and will be held as truth in exact proportion as it was handed down from the very beginning, from the first. [7] But another book will take up this stage of the argument against heretics — men who can be refuted even without retrying their doctrines on the merits, simply on the ground that this is what they are, by the prescription of novelty. For now, insofar as engaging them at all is permissible — and lest the shortcut of prescription, invoked everywhere, be taken as a sign of lacking confidence — I will first lay out my adversary's own rule of belief, so that no one is left in the dark about where the main battle is going to be fought.
2.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 2 ========

[1] The man from Pontus brings forward two gods, like two clashing rocks to wreck his own ship on: the one he could not deny to be the Creator, that is, ours; and the one he will never be able to prove, that is, his own. He fell victim, poor man, to a headlong impulse born of one simple text of the Lord's teaching — which speaks of men, not of gods — those examples of the good tree and the bad tree, where a good tree bears no bad fruit, nor a bad tree good fruit; meaning that neither a good mind or faith produces bad works, nor a bad one good ones. [2] For, growing faint — as many still do today, heretics especially — over the question of evil, where it comes from, and with his perception dulled by the sheer excess of his own curiosity, he came upon the Creator's own declaration, 'It is I who fashion evil things.' The more he had already assumed, on other grounds too — the sort that easily persuade a mind bent the wrong way — that the Creator himself was the author of evil, the more readily he interpreted him as the bad tree producing bad fruits, namely evils, and so assumed there must be another god on the side of the good tree, to produce good fruits. [3] And so, finding in Christ what seemed to him another dispensation altogether, one of pure and unmixed kindness, as though it were different from the Creator's, he readily argued for a new and foreign divinity revealed in his own Christ, and from that small leaven he soured the whole lump of the faith with heretical bitterness. He also had a certain Cerdo as the one who first shaped this scandal for him, through whom the two blind men imagined they had seen more clearly by seeing two gods. For neither, in fact, had seen the one God whole. Even to bleary eyes a single lamp looks like many. So then: the one god, whom he was forced to acknowledge, he destroyed by branding him with the charge of evil; the other, whom he was straining to invent, he built up by crediting him with all the good. We will show, in our actual replies to him, the joints by which he assembled these two natures.
3.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 3 ========

[1] So then, the main issue, and from it the whole engagement, concerns number: whether two gods may be admitted — or, if you like, by poetic and painterly license, even a third, a heretical one. But Christian truth has flatly declared: if God is not one, he is not at all — since we rightly believe that whatever is not what it ought to be, simply is not. [2] And to grasp that God must be one, pose the question of what God actually is, and you will arrive at no different answer. As far as the human condition can define God at all, I define him — and every conscience will recognize this too — as the supreme and great being, fixed in eternity — begotten by none, made by none, having neither a beginning nor an end. For this must be reckoned the very condition of eternity, which makes the supreme and great God what he is, since this quality is itself present in God; and so with everything else, so that God is supreme and great alike in form and in reason and in power and in might. [3] Since everyone agrees on this (for no one will deny that God is something supreme and great, unless he is prepared to declare, on the contrary, that God is something small and lowly — which is to deny God by stripping away what belongs to being God) — what, then, will be the condition of this supreme and great being? [4] Surely that nothing else be equal to him — that is, that there be no other supreme and great being; because if there were, he would be equaled, and if equaled, he would no longer be supreme and great, the very condition being overturned, and, so to speak, the law abolished that forbids anything to be equal to the supreme and great. [5] So it must be that whatever is supreme and great is unique, having no equal, or it would not be supreme and great at all. It cannot be otherwise than through the very thing by which it has its being, that is, by being altogether unique. Accordingly, since God is the supreme and great, our truth has rightly declared: if God is not one, he is not. Not that we doubt God exists, in saying 'if not one, he is not' — but because we are defining the very thing we are confident he is, namely: that if he is not this — supremely and greatly — he is not God at all. And the supreme and great, moreover, must necessarily be unique. Therefore God too will be unique: he is not God otherwise than as the supreme and great, and he is not the supreme and great otherwise than as having no equal, and he has no equal otherwise than by being unique. [6] Certainly, whatever other god you bring forward, you will be unable to maintain him as god in any other form than by ascribing to him too what is proper to divinity, eternity as much as supremacy and greatness. How, then, will two supreme and great beings coexist, when it belongs to the very nature of the supreme and great to have no equal — and having no equal is compatible only with being one, and could in no way apply to two?
4.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 4 ========

But someone will argue that two supreme greatnesses can perfectly well coexist, distinct and separate within their own boundaries, and will of course summon as proof the kingdoms of the earthâ€”so many of them in number, and yet each one supreme and great within its own territoryâ€”supposing that human affairs can everywhere be measured against divine ones. Well, if this line of argument is allowed any room at all, what is to stop us introducing not merely a second and a third god but as many gods as there are kings of nations? The subject under discussion is God, and it is God's very own and essential property that he admits comparison to no example whatever. Nature herself will proclaim this, even without an Isaiahâ€”or rather God himself proclaims it through Isaiah: 'To whom will you liken me?' Human things may perhaps be compared to divine things; God is not to be compared to anything. God is one thing, the things of God are another. Now then, you who use the example of a king as though he were the 'supreme greatness'â€”watch that you have not just disqualified yourself from using it. A king, even though he is a supreme greatness on his own throne, remains beneath God; set him beside God and he instantly falls from being a supreme greatness, once transferred into comparison with God. If that is so, how can you use as an example, for comparing it to God, a thing that is annihilated the moment it is brought into that comparison? What now, if not even among kings can a 'supreme greatness' be found scattered in many instances, but only one and uniqueâ€”namely in him who, being king of kings by the height of his majesty and the subjection of every lesser rank, is received as the very summit of dominion? Even other types of king, single rulers presiding over the unity of an empire, if they were gathered from every side for examination against the petty kingdoms, so to speak, to see which of them excels in the substance and strength of rule, the pinnacle of greatness would necessarily be distilled down to one, all the others being stripped and excluded step by step in the process of comparison. So it is: even though 'supreme greatness' seems to appear scattered in many places, by its own strength, its own nature, and its own standing it is one. Accordingly, when two gods are set side by side, like two kings and two supreme greatnesses, the unity of the supreme greatness must necessarily fall to the one, by the very verdict of the comparisonâ€”because supremacy consists in victory, in overcoming a rival who, though great, is not supreme, and by the defeat of that rival it possesses, in a kind of solitude, the singularity of its own preeminence, and so is unique. This inescapable knot binds the argument to one conclusion: either deny that God is a supreme greatnessâ€”which no sane person will tolerateâ€”or admit that it can be shared with no one else.
5.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 5 ========

Or what reasoning put together two supreme greatnesses? First I will demand: why not several, if two, since one would expect the substance of divinity to be reckoned richer if number suited it at all? More honest and more generous was Valentinus, who dared at once to conceive twoâ€”Bythos and Sigeâ€”and then poured out, all the way to thirty aeons of offspring, a whole swarm of divinity, like some Aenean sow farrowing. Whatever reasoning refuses to admit several supreme greatnesses equally refuses two, since two are already 'several' following the oneâ€”for number begins after one. Whatever could admit two could equally admit more; for after two comes multitude, unity already exceeded. In short, among us the force of this very reasoning, by its own terminus, does not allow several gods to be believed, since that same rule which will not allow even two, establishing one God, is this: God must be that to which nothing is equal, as the supreme greatness; and unique is that to which nothing is equal. Now then, two supreme greatnesses, two equalsâ€”to whose credit, to whose profit would they be assigned? What would number matter, when two equals differ by not so much as one? For it is one and the same thing that is present identically in both. Even if there were several equals, all of them together would still amount to just the one thing, since none of them differ from anotherâ€”precisely because they are equal. Further, if neither of the two differs at all from the other, then, both being supreme greatnesses, both being gods, neither excels the other, and they display no reason at all for their own number, having no preeminence. Yet the number of divinity, if it existed, ought to rest on some supreme rationaleâ€”if only because the worship owed to it would be thrown into uncertainty. Picture it: gazing on two gods as evenly matched as two supreme greatnessesâ€”what would I do? If I worshiped both, I would fear that the excess of my devotion would be reckoned superstition rather than religion, since, being two so equal, I could honor both in either one, and this very act would itself testify to their equality and unity, in that while venerating the one in the other, I would have two in one. If I worshiped only one, I would equally worry that I seemed to be conniving at the emptiness of a pointless number that makes no differenceâ€”so that I would judge it safer to worship neither than to worship one with scruples, or both in vain.
6.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 6 ========

So far it may look as though we are arguing on the assumption that Marcion sets up two equal gods. For while defending the position that the supreme greatness must be believed unique, and excluding equality from it, we have effectively been dealing all along with two equalsâ€”yet by showing, in the process, that they cannot be equal according to the pattern of the supreme greatness, we have equally well established that there cannot be two at all. Otherwise, of course, Marcion sets up gods that are unequal: one a judge, savage, warlike; the other gentle, mild, and merely goodâ€”the best there is. Let us examine this side too, and see whether difference, at least, can accommodate two, if equality could not. Well, here too the same rule of supreme greatness will come to our aid, since it claims the whole standing of divinity for itself. For it is fittingâ€”and, so to speak, laying a restraining hand on the sense of my opponent, who does not deny that the Creator is Godâ€”that I lay down in advance that there is no room for difference between beings whom he cannot, having confessed them equally gods, then make unequalâ€”not because men, though called by the same name, cannot be very different from one another, but because a being will not be called God, since it will not be believed to be God, unless it is the supreme greatness. Since, then, he is compelled to acknowledge as God the one whose divinity he does not deny, he cannot be allowed to ascribe to that supreme greatness any diminishment that would subject it to another supreme greatness. For it ceases to be supreme, if it is subjected. And it is not proper to God to fall away from his own standing, that is, from being the supreme greatness. Indeed, even in that 'better' god of his, the supreme greatness itself would be put at risk, if it begins to be devalued by comparison with the Creator. So when two gods are pronounced two supreme greatnesses, neither can possibly be greater or lesser than the other, neither more exalted nor more debased than the other. Deny that the god you call worse is God at all; deny that the supreme greatness belongs to the one you believe lesser. But by confessing him a god, you have confessed both to be two supreme greatnesses. You will take nothing away from the one, and add nothing to the other. In acknowledging the divinity you have denied the difference.
7.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 7 ========

You will try, on this point, to shake the argument with the word 'god,' treating it as a term applicable in a general sense and granted to others too, since it is written: 'God stands in the assembly of the gods; in the midst he will judge the gods,' and, 'I have said, you are gods'â€”arguing that this does not entitle those beings to possess the supreme greatness merely because they are termed 'gods'; and so, you say, the same holds for the Creator. I will answer even this folly, which has not stopped to consider that the very same argument can be turned back just as forcefully against Marcion's own godâ€”that he too is called 'god,' and is no more thereby proven to be the supreme greatness than the angels or men are, by being called sons of the Creator. If a shared name prejudges status, then think how many worthless slaves have insolently borne the names of kingsâ€”Alexander, Darius, Holofernesâ€”yet kings are not thereby stripped of what they actually are. Even the idols of the nations are commonly called 'god,' yet no one is God merely by being called so. So it is not to the name 'God,' nor to its sound, nor to the mark of that word, that I attach the supreme greatness in the Creator's case, but to the very substance to which this name has fallenâ€”finding this substance, and this alone, unborn, unmade, alone eternal and the founder of the universe; I ascribe and claim the supreme greatness not for a name but for a status, not for an appellation but for a condition. And so, because it has already become customary to call the substance to which I am ascribing this 'god,' you suppose I am fastening my case to the nameâ€”when in fact it is necessary, by means of the name, that I show to which substance I am ascribing it: namely, the substance by virtue of which the one so called is truly God, and the supreme greatness is reckoned from substance, not from name. In the end, Marcion too, when claiming this for his own god, claims it on the basis of status, not of the word used. This supreme greatness, then, which we ascribe to God on the ground of the law of substance and not the accident of a name, we maintain must be equal in the two beings who consist of that substance by which one is called Godâ€”because to the very degree that they are called gods, that is, supreme greatnesses, by the merit precisely of an unborn and eternal substance, and therefore a great and supreme one, to that very degree a supreme greatness cannot be regarded as lesser and inferior to another supreme greatness. If the felicity, the sublimity, and the integrity of the supreme greatness will stand firm in Marcion's god, it will stand equally firm in ours; and if not in ours, then equally not in Marcion's either. So the two supreme greatnesses will not be equalâ€”since the rule of the supreme greatness, already laid down, forbids it any comparison at allâ€”nor will they be unequal, since another rule of the supreme greatness stands in the way, admitting no diminishment. You are stuck, Marcion, in the middle of the surge of your own sea. Waves of truth close in on you from both sides. You can establish your gods as neither equal nor unequal. For there are not two of themâ€”which is properly a matter belonging to the reckoning of number. Although the whole subject of two gods is fought out at greater length, for the moment we have enclosed it within these lines, within which we shall now come to grips with their individual properties.
8.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 8 ========

First, the Marcionites build up their own astonishment with a raised eyebrow, because they parade a brand-new deity into view—as though the old one embarrassed us. Children, too, get puffed up over new shoes, but once shod by their old tutor they will soon be whipped for their empty vanity. So then: hearing of a new god, in an old world, in an old age, unknown and unheard of under the old God, whom for so many ages past no one had knownâ€”ancient, in fact, precisely by that very ignoranceâ€”a certain Jesus Christ, himself new though bearing old names, is said to have revealed him, and no other before him ever did. I give thanks for this boast of theirs, since it will be my chief support in proving the heresy from this very pointâ€”namely, their profession of a brand-new divinity. This is exactly the kind of 'newness' that has bred gods even among the pagans, each one always getting some new and yet newer title of consecration. What new god is there but a false one? Not even Saturn, for all his present antiquity, will be proven a god today, because he too was once produced by 'newness,' the moment he was first consecrated. But living and genuine divinity is judged neither by newness nor by age, but by its own truth. Eternity has no such thing as time; for it is itself the whole of time. What acts cannot also be acted upon. What may not be born is without age. If God is old, he will cease to be; if he is new, he did not always exist. Newness bears witness to a beginning; oldness threatens an end. But God is as foreign to beginning and end as he is to time itself, since time is merely the arbiter and measurer of beginning and end.
9.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 9 ========

I know quite well in what sense they keep touting a "new" god — they mean, of course, one newly recognized. But it was precisely that shock of novelty that strikes untrained minds, and the natural charm novelty carries with it, that I wanted to strike back at, and from there raise the challenge about the "unknown god." For obviously, when they oppose this god to another by calling him newly recognized, they are thereby proving him unknown before that recognition. Well then, back to the lines, back on your mark. Try to persuade me a god could have been unknown. I do indeed find altars set up for unknown gods — but that is Athenian idolatry. Likewise for uncertain gods — but that is Roman superstition. Now uncertain gods are less known precisely because they are less certain, and therefore unknown to the degree they are uncertain. Which of these two labels shall we pin on Marcion's god? Both, I should think — uncertain now, and unknown before. For just as a known god, the Creator, made him unknown, so a certain god makes him uncertain. But I will not wander off to say: if this god was unknown and lay hidden, some region of hiding-places overshadowed him — itself likewise new and unknown, and likewise now uncertain, some region no doubt immense and indubitably greater than the one it concealed. I will state it briefly instead and pursue it fully, laying down as a rule that a god could neither have gone unrecognized by right of his own greatness, nor ought to have, by right of his own goodness — especially since in both respects he is claimed to surpass our Creator. But since I notice that in certain quarters every proof of a new and formerly unknown god has to be measured against the form of the Creator, I must first establish by reasoned argument that this very method is legitimate, so that I may lean on the authority of that established reasoning with greater confidence. Before anything else: what sense does it make that you, who acknowledge God as Creator and confess him prior in point of recognition, should not know that you must examine any other god by the very standards by which you have already learned to know God at the outset? Whatever came earlier supplies the measure for whatever follows it. Two gods are now set before us, one unknown, one known. About the known one there is no dispute — that he exists is settled, because he would not be known if he did not exist. About the unknown one the argument rages. He may equally not exist, because if he did exist he would be known. So what is in question, for as long as it remains unknown, is uncertain for as long as it is in question, and may well not exist for as long as it remains uncertain. So you have a god certain in that he is known, and uncertain in that he is unknown. If that is so, does it not strike you as sound reasoning that uncertain things should be tested against the norm and form and rule of certain ones? Furthermore, if to settle this case — itself still uncertain — arguments drawn from equally uncertain things are brought in, the chain of questions will tangle itself further, since the very arguments used are themselves equally uncertain and put faith itself at risk through uncertainty, and we shall end up in those endless, undecidable questions the apostle has no love for. But suppose that things certain, indubitable, and settled parts of the rule were to be prejudged by things uncertain, doubtful, and unresolved — well, in cases where a difference of basic standing is found, perhaps the uncertain things need not be summoned before the standard of the certain, since the very difference in their fundamental standing frees them from being dragged into any further comparison. But when two gods are set before us, their fundamental standing is shared. For insofar as each is "god," both are: unborn, unmade, eternal. That will be the fundamental standing. Let Marcion see to the rest, if he has arranged some difference there — those are secondary matters up for reexamination, and indeed will not even be admitted unless the fundamental standing is first settled. Now it is settled, because both are gods; and so, since their standing is agreed to be shared, when under that shared standing they are called forward for proof, if they are uncertain they will have to be tested against the form of those certain gods with whom they are reckoned to share that fundamental standing in common, so that they may likewise share in the proof. On this basis, then, I will steer with the utmost confidence toward this conclusion: a god cannot be one who is uncertain today because unknown in the past, since the very fact that he is agreed to exist follows from the fact that he was never unknown, and therefore never uncertain either.
10.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 10 ========

For indeed, from the very origin of things, the Founder of them was known together with the things themselves, since the things themselves were brought forth for this very purpose — that God might be recognized. Nor, even if Moses appears somewhat later, the first to dedicate God in the temple of his own writings for the world's sake, should the birthdays of that recognition therefore be dated from the Pentateuch — since Moses' whole text does not initiate knowledge of the Creator but narrates it from the very beginning, tracing it back to Eden and to Adam, rather than to Egypt or to Moses. In short, the greater part of the human race, not even acquainted with the name of Moses, let alone his writings, nonetheless knows the God of Moses; even where idolatry casts its vast dominion over things, people still, all the same, speak of him apart, as if by his own proper name, as "god," and "god of gods," and "if God grants," and "what pleases God," and "I commend this to God." Notice — do they not know the one whom they themselves testify can do all things? And they owe none of this to any books of Moses. Soul comes before prophecy. For the soul's awareness of God is its dowry from the very beginning — the same awareness, no different, among Egyptians, Syrians, and the peoples of Pontus. For they call the God of the Jews the God of the soul. Do not, you barbarian heretic, set Abraham up as prior to the world. Suppose the Creator had been god of a single household alone: he would still not rank later than your god, for he was already known to the tribes of Pontus long before your god came along. Take, then, the pattern from your predecessor: uncertain compared to what is certain, unrecognized compared to what is known. God will never lie hidden, God will never be lacking. He will always be understood, always heard, even seen — in whatever way he wishes. God has his witnesses: this whole reality that we are, and the world in which we are. In this way both his existence and his oneness are proved, since he goes unquestioned, while the other still struggles to be proved at all.
11.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 11 ========

"And rightly so," they say. "For who is not as well known to his own as to strangers?" No one. I hold them to that word too. For what sense does it make that anything should be a stranger to God, to whom nothing would be a stranger, if he existed at all? Because this is precisely what it is to be God: that everything belongs to him and everything pertains to him — or else, before I hear from you at once, "What business then has he with strangers?" (an objection he will hear answered more fully in its own place) — for now it is enough that no one is proved who has nothing proved of him. For just as the Creator is God, and undoubted God, precisely because everything is his and nothing is a stranger to him, so the other, for that very reason, is not God, because not everything is his — and therefore some things are strangers to him. In short, if the universe belongs to the Creator, I no longer see any room left for another god. All things are full and occupied by their own author. If any space anywhere were vacant for some other divinity among created things, plainly it would stand vacant for a false one. Truth lies exposed to the lie. Why, with idols wielding such power, should Marcion's god not find some vacancy somewhere? So this too I demand on the pattern of the Creator: that a god ought to be recognized from works — works belonging properly to some world, some humanity, some age of his own — since even the world's error presumed gods for this very reason, gods whom men sometimes confess to be human, simply because something seemed provided by each of them for life's advantages and conveniences. So too it has been believed, on the pattern of God, that it is a divine thing to establish or demonstrate what is fitting and necessary for human affairs. So thoroughly was authority borrowed for a false divinity from the source it had first taken from the true one. Marcion's god ought at least to have produced one little chickpea of his own, so that some new Triptolemus might be proclaimed on his behalf. Or else produce a reason worthy of a god why he created nothing — if he exists — since he would have created, if he had existed, by that very presumption by which our own God, too, is manifest as none other than the one who made all of this. For once this rule stands: they cannot both confess our God as Creator and yet believe the god they want equally to be god without proving him by the pattern of the one whom they too, along with everyone else, call god — so that, since by this very fact no one doubts the Creator is God because he made all of this, by this very fact no one ought to believe that god to be god either who made nothing, unless some reason can somehow be produced. This must appear to fall into one of two cases: either he was unwilling to create anything, or he was unable. A third option is not available. But to have been unable is unworthy of a god. Whether not-willing befits him, that's the point I mean to press. Answer me, Marcion: at some moment did your god desire to become known, or did he not? Did he descend and preach and suffer and rise again for some purpose other than to be known? And without doubt, if he became known, he wished it — nothing would have happened around him unless he had willed it. Why then did he procure recognition of himself with such effort, that he should be put on display in the disgrace of flesh — and indeed a still greater disgrace, if it was false flesh! For this is more shameful still, if he even faked the substance of a body — he who took on himself, hanging from a tree, the very curse pronounced by the Creator! How much more honorably he could have laid the groundwork for being known through some evidence of his own workmanship — especially since he had to be recognized in opposition to one by whom, from the beginning, he was not known from works at all! For what sense does it make that the Creator, not knowing there was another god above him — as the Marcionites would have it, the Creator who under oath asserted himself the only one — should nonetheless have armed the knowledge of himself with such vast works, which he could have bothered with far less, given his presumption of being singular and alone; while that other, loftier one, knowing there was an inferior god so thoroughly equipped, made no provision at all to secure recognition for himself — when in fact he should have created works still more striking and more magnificent, so that a god might be recognized from works after the Creator's own pattern, yet be shown from more honorable works to be the greater and nobler of the two?
12.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 12 ========

Furthermore, even if we could grant that he exists, we would be forced to conclude that he exists without cause. For a thing exists without cause when it has no "matter" — since every matter is the cause for which someone possesses that matter as his own. Now, to the extent that nothing ought to exist without cause, that is, without matter — because if a thing exists without cause it is exactly as if it did not exist, lacking, as it does, matter to be the cause of its own reality — to that same degree I would find it far more fitting to hold that no god is there at all, rather than to hold that one is there lacking any cause. A thing lacks cause precisely when, having no matter, it has nothing to account for it. But God should not be found causeless — that is, without matter. So then, every time I demonstrate him standing "causeless," as though he really did exist, I am in fact showing that he amounts to nothing — since had he truly existed, causelessness would have been impossible for him. In just the same way I say that this very faith itself is grasped at by man without cause, contrary to the usual way of believing in a god shaped by the authority of his works — since he provided nothing of the kind by which man might learn of a god. For even though most people believe in him, they do not believe by reasoned grounds, since they possess no pledge of his godhead — works worthy of a god. And so, on this score, he stands close kin to cessation and default of works, and to shamelessness and malice alike: shamelessness, in that he grasps at a faith owed him by nothing, having provided no foundation for it to rest on; malice, in that he has made a great many guilty of unbelief by procuring no faith at all.
13.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 13 ========

When we drive God out at this level — God, for whom no attribute is so peculiarly his own and so worthy of him as the testimony of being Creator — the utterly shameless Marcionites wrinkle their noses and turn to demolishing the works of the Creator. Of course, they say, the world is a great and God-worthy work. Well then, is the Creator not God at all? Certainly he is God. So the world is not unworthy of God either; since God has fashioned no thing that falls short of his own dignity, even though he made the world for man and not for himself, even though every work is inferior to its maker. And yet, if it is unworthy of God to have made anything at all, how much more unworthy of God is it to have made absolutely nothing — not even something unworthy, from which one might at least hope for an author of worthier things still! So, to say something about this 'unworthy' world of ours — which even among the Greeks bears a name meaning ornament and adornment, not filth — the very professors of wisdom themselves, from whose ingenuity every heresy draws its breath, have pronounced these supposedly unworthy substances to be gods: Thales water, Heraclitus fire, Anaximenes air, Anaximander the whole array of heavenly bodies, Strato heaven and earth, Zeno air and ether, Plato the stars, which he names as a race of gods made of fire — all from contemplating the world's magnitude, power, dominion, honor, beauty, its resourcefulness, faithfulness, and the law governing each element, all of which conspire together to generate, nourish, complete, and renew everything; so that most natural philosophers have shrunk from the idea that the world has a beginning and an end, for fear that substances so vast should be reckoned less than divine — the very substances worshipped by the magi of Persia, the hierophants of Egypt, and the naked sages of India. Even common superstition, that popular idolatry, when it grows ashamed of images named after the fables of dead men of old, takes refuge in interpreting them as natural forces, and shrouds its own disgrace in ingenuity — turning Jupiter into a substance of heat, and his Juno into air, playing on the sound of Greek words, likewise Vesta into fire, the Muses into waters, and the Great Mother into earth stripped of her seed-crops, ploughed by strong arms, watered by lustral washings.
Thus too Osiris, forever buried and sought amid the wet and found again with rejoicing, is argued to represent the returning cycle of crops, the living elements, and the recurring year — just as the lions of Mithras are made to philosophize the mysteries of the dry, burning nature. As for the higher substances by their position or standing, it is easier for them simply to be reckoned gods than to be reckoned unworthy of God. Shall I descend to the lowly things? One little flower from the hedgerows — I won't even say from the meadows — one small shell of any sea — I won't even say the Red Sea — one little feather of a grouse — I say nothing of the peacock — will such a thing declare to you that the Creator is a shabby craftsman? Turn to chapter 14.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 14 ========

But when you sneer even at the smaller animals, which the greatest of craftsmen has deliberately magnified in cleverness or in strength — teaching thereby that greatness is proven in smallness, just as the apostle teaches that virtue is proven in weakness — go on, imitate, if you can, the bee's constructions, the ant's granaries, the spider's webs, the silkworm's threads; endure, if you can, those very creatures that infest your own bed and mat — the beetle's poisons, the fly's sting, the gnat's trumpet and its lance. What will the greater things be, when you are so helped or so hurt by such tiny ones, that not even in small matters should you despise the Creator? Finally, turn your gaze upon yourself: consider man, inside and out; you will find pleasing even this work of our God — a work your own lord, that 'better' God, so fell in love with that he labored to descend from the third heaven into these impoverished elements for its sake, and for whose sake he was even crucified in this little cell built by the Creator. And yet he, up to now, has not spurned the Creator's water, with which he washes his own people, nor the oil with which their bodies are anointed, nor the joint gift of honey and milk by which he nourishes them as newborns, nor the loaf through which he pictures forth his own flesh — needy, even in his own sacraments, of the Creator's charity. But you, a disciple set above your master, a slave set above your lord, know better than he does, destroying what he desires. I want to examine whether you at least act out of conviction, so that you don't yourself crave the very things you destroy. You set yourself against heaven, and yet you scheme for a home in heaven's freedom. You despise the earth — the womb, clearly, of your flesh, now your enemy — and yet you wring out all her marrow for your food. You reject the sea too, but only up to the point of its delicacies, which you count as holier fare. If I offer you a rose, you will not turn up your nose at the Creator.
Hypocrite — to prove yourself a true Marcionite by starving yourself to death, that is, a true repudiator of the Creator (for this is what ought to have been sought among you in place of martyrdom, if the world truly displeased you) — into whatever matter you dissolve yourself, you make use of the Creator's substance. What sheer stubborn hardness is yours! You disparage the very things in which you live and in which you die. Turn to chapter 15.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 15 ========

After this, or rather before it, when you claim that he too has his own creation, his own world, his own heaven — as to that third heaven of his, we shall look into it if we get as far as examining your apostle — meanwhile, whatever this substance is, it surely ought to have appeared together with its own god. But as things stand, how is it that the Lord was revealed in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, while his substance, up to the fifteenth year now of the Emperor Severus, has been discovered by no one at all? Something so far surpassing the Creator's trifling handiwork should surely have stopped hiding once its own lord and author had ceased to hide. And so, if it was unable to show itself within this world, by what means did its lord come to appear here? If this world had room enough for the lord, why should it lack room for the substance — unless perhaps the substance is greater than the lord? Now we come to a question of place, one that bears on that higher world and on its very god as well. For look: if he too has his world beneath himself, above the Creator, then he surely made it in some place, a space that lay vacant between his own feet and the head of the Creator. So then, God himself existed in a place, and made his world in a place, and that place will now turn out to be greater than both God and the world; for nothing that contains is not greater than what it contains. And we must watch that there are no further leftover corners there still vacant, into which some third god as well, along with his own world, might yet be packed. So go ahead, start counting up gods. For place itself will turn out to be a god — not merely in that it is greater than God, but also in that it is unborn and unmade, and therefore eternal and equal to God, since God has always existed within it. Then again, if that god too fashioned his world out of some underlying matter, unborn, unmade, and coeval with God — just as Marcion holds about the Creator — you reduce this too to the majesty of place, which encloses both a god and matter, two gods. For matter too is god, according to the very form of divinity, being of course unborn, unmade, and eternal. Or if he fashioned the world out of nothing, he will be forced to hold the same about the Creator, to whom he attributes matter as the substance of the world's substance. But that other god too will have to have made his world from matter, by the same reasoning, since the same difficulty will confront that god as well, which was raised against the Creator, that he is equally a god. And so, count me up for now three gods of Marcion's — the maker, the place, and the matter. Accordingly he also makes the Creator exist in a place, judging him by exactly the same condition, and he assigns to him too a matter that is his own, unborn and unmade and, for that reason, eternal — as befits a lord. And further, attributing evil to matter, unborn to the unborn, unmade to the unmade, and eternal to the eternal, he has now made a fourth god out of this as well. [6] You have, then, in the higher realm three substances of divinity, and in the lower, four. When to these are added their own Christs as well — one who appeared under Tiberius, another whom the Creator has pledged to send — Marcion already stands caught in an open swindle, exposed by the very people who merely accuse him of setting up two gods, when in truth, unbeknownst to himself, he saddles us with nine.
So then, God himself existed in a place, and made his world in a place, and that place will now turn out to be greater than both God and the world. For nothing that contains is not greater than what it contains. And we must watch that there are no further leftover corners there still vacant, into which some third god, along with his own world, might yet be packed. So go ahead, start counting up gods. For place itself will turn out to be a god — not merely in that it is greater than God, but also in that it is unborn and unmade, and therefore eternal and equal to God, since God has always existed within it. Then again, if that god too fashioned his world out of some underlying matter, unborn, unmade, and coeval with God — just as Marcion holds about the Creator — you reduce this too to the majesty of place, which encloses both a god and matter, two gods. For matter too is god, by the very form of divinity, being unborn, unmade, and eternal. Or if he fashioned the world out of nothing, he will be forced to hold the same about the Creator, to whom he attributes matter as the substance of his world. But then that other god too will have to have made his world from matter, by the same logic, which then confronts that god as well with the same objection raised against the Creator — that matter is equally a god. And so, count me up three gods for Marcion so far: the maker, the place, and the matter. Likewise he makes the Creator exist in a place under exactly the same reasoning, and assigns to him too a matter that is unborn and unmade and, for that very reason, eternal — as befits a lord. And further, attributing evil to matter, unborn to the unborn, unmade to the unmade, eternal to the eternal, he has now made a fourth god out of this. So you have, in the higher realm, three substances of divinity, and in the lower, four. When to these are added their own two Christs — one who appeared under Tiberius, another promised by the Creator — Marcion suffers plain exposure as a fraud at the hands of those who claim he introduces merely two gods, when in fact, though he does not know it, he assigns nine. Turn to chapter 16.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 16 ========

Since, then, no other world appears, any more than its god does, the consequence is that they divide the two categories of things, the visible and the invisible, between two creator-gods, and thereby claim the invisible things for their own god. But who — apart from a heretical spirit — could ever be persuaded that the invisible things belong to one who put forward nothing visible beforehand, rather than to one who, having made the visible things, thereby also earned credit for the invisible — since it is far more just to trust someone with a track record of examples than someone with none at all? We shall see, when we come to examine your apostle too, to which author he assigns the invisible things. For now, it is chiefly by common sense and by fair argument that we lay the groundwork of conviction, ahead of the appeal to scripture that will follow, establishing that this diversity of visible and invisible things is to be assigned to the Creator precisely because his whole operation consists of such diversities — of bodily and incorporeal things, of things that live and things that do not, of things that speak and things silent, of what moves and what stays fixed, of fertile and barren, of dry and moist, of hot and cold.
So too diversity has tempered man himself, both in body and in feeling. Some limbs are strong, others weak; some honorable, others shameful; some come in pairs, others stand alone; some match, others do not. Likewise in feeling: now joy, now anxiety; now love, now hatred; now anger, now gentleness. But if this is so — if the whole universe has been tuned by conditions that rival and answer one another — then invisible things too are owed to the visible, to be assigned to no other author than the one to whom their rivals belong, since it is the Creator himself who marks out these contrasts, commanding what he forbade and forbidding what he commanded, striking down and healing. Why, in this one category alone, do they insist he must be uniform — creator of visible things only — when by the very same logic he must be believed to have made both the visible and the invisible, just as he made both life and death, both evils and peace? And indeed, if those invisible things are greater than the visible creatures, which in their own sphere are already great, then it fits all the more that the greater things belong to him to whom the great things belong — since neither the great, let alone the greater, can suit one to whom not even the modest things can be shown to belong. Turn to chapter 17.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 17 ========

Pressed hard by this, they burst out and say: This one work is enough for our God — that he freed mankind by his own supreme and surpassing goodness, a work to be set above all the locusts in creation! What a greater God indeed, whose work so great could be found nowhere except in the man of a lesser god! But surely you must first prove that he exists by the means by which God ought to be proven — namely, by works — and only then by benefits. The prior question is whether such a being exists at all — only after that comes the question of what kind of being he is. One matter is settled from works, the other from benefits. Now, it is not the case that because he is said to have freed man, therefore it stands proven that he exists; rather, if it is first established that he exists, only then will it also be said that he freed man — so that whether he actually did the freeing depends on that, since it was quite possible for him both to exist and yet not to have freed anyone. How then, just because he is said to have freed man, is his existence to be believed on that basis, when it was entirely possible for him to exist and not to have freed anyone?
Now, on this very point, having been led away from the question of the unknown god, it stands sufficiently established both that he created nothing, and that, had he created anything, he ought to have been recognizable from his works — for supposing he did exist, he should surely have made himself recognized, and that from the very start of all things; for it did not befit God to lie hidden. I must go back of necessity to the origin of the question of the unknown god, so as to shake out its other little branches as well. For it will first have to be asked: this one who later put himself forward into public knowledge — why later, and not from the very origin of things? Since, being God, and indeed being a necessarily better God, he had no business remaining hidden from those very things which needed him. For one cannot say that either the matter or the occasion for knowing God was lacking, since man existed in the world from the very beginning — the very man he now comes to the rescue of — and so did the malice of the Creator, against which, being good, he comes to the rescue. Therefore, he either was ignorant of the occasion and matter of his necessary revelation, or he hesitated, or he was unable, or he was unwilling. All of these are unworthy of God, especially of the best of gods. But this point too we shall fill out elsewhere with a reproach for his late revelation; for now, this bare demonstration is enough. Turn to chapter 18.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 18 ========

[1] Fine, let him come forward into notice, then, whenever he wished, whenever he was able, whenever the fatal hour arrived. Perhaps the ascending node was blocking him, or some malefic star, or Saturn in quadrature, or Mars in trine. For a great many Marcionites are astrologers too, and feel no shame at deriving even the Creator's own business from the stars themselves. Here too we must examine the quality of this revelation — whether he was made known worthily, so that it may be established whether he was made known truly, and only then be believed to be the one it has been worthily established was revealed. [2] For things worthy of God will prove a god to be God. We lay it down that God must first be known by nature, then recognized by doctrine — by nature from his works, by doctrine from what is preached of him. But one who has no nature has no natural instruments at his disposal. He ought therefore to have effected the revelation of himself at least through preaching — all the more so since he needed revealing against a being who, by the works of both creation and preaching, so many and so great, had still scarcely won the belief of mankind. [3] How, then, was he revealed? If by human conjecture, I deny that God can be known in any way other than through himself — and not merely by an appeal to the Creator's form, but to the very condition of a magnitude as divine as it is beyond the reach of human mediocrity; lest man be thought greater than God — a man who has, by his own powers, somehow dragged out into public recognition one who was unwilling of himself to be known, when human mediocrity finds it far easier to fabricate gods for itself, following the experiments of every age, than to pursue the true God whom nature already lets men understand. [4] Otherwise, if man is free to invent God the way Romulus invented Consus, and Tatius Cloacina, and Hostilius Panic, and Metellus the White Horse, and someone not long before our time invented Antinous, will this be allowed to others too? We know Marcion as a shipmaster, not as a king or an emperor.
19.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 19 ========

[1] "No," say the Marcionites, "our god, though not from the beginning, though not through creation, was revealed through himself in Christ Jesus." A whole book will be given over to Christ, on his entire condition. The subjects must be kept distinct, so that they may be handled more fully and in better order. For the present stage it will be enough to meet them thus — to show, briefly, that Jesus Christ was the vehicle of no other god than the Creator. [2] It was in Tiberius's fifteenth regnal year that Christ Jesus condescended to glide earthward out of the heavens, a spirit bringing salvation. As for the salvation of Marcion, who so willed it — in just what year of the elder Antoninus that dog-star breath of his came wafting out of his native Pontus, I have not troubled to investigate. This much, however, is certain: he is a heretic of the Antonine age, an impious man under Pius. Now from Tiberius to Antoninus there are roughly one hundred and fifteen years, and half a year, and half a month besides. That is precisely the span of time they set between Christ and Marcion. [3] Since, then, it was under Antoninus that Marcion first introduced this god of his, as we have shown, the matter is plain at once to anyone with sense. The dates themselves prejudge the case: what first came forth under Antoninus did not come forth under Tiberius — that is, the god of the Antonine empire was not the god of Tiberius's, and so was not revealed by Christ, since it is agreed he was first preached by Marcion. [4] To establish this now, I will take what remains from the adversaries' own camp. The separation of law and gospel is Marcion's own special and principal work; his disciples cannot deny it — it is the very sum and substance of their teaching, the text by which converts are initiated and hardened into this heresy. For these are Marcion's Antitheses, that is, his contrary oppositions, by which he tries to set the gospel at odds with the law, so as to argue, from the disagreement of the two documents' teachings, a corresponding disagreement of gods. [5] Since, then, it is precisely this separation of law and gospel that has smuggled in another god of the gospel over against the god of the law, it is plain that before this separation there was no knowledge of the god who became known only through the argument of separation — and so he was not revealed by Christ, who existed before the separation, but was invented by Marcion, who instituted the separation against the peace of gospel and law. That peace, unbroken and unshaken from Christ's appearing right down to Marcion's audacity, was preserved precisely by the reasoning which held that there was no other god of both law and gospel besides the Creator — against whom, after so long an interval, this separation was launched from Pontus.
20.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 20 ========

[1] This proof, ready-made as it is, still needs from us a defense against the clamorous objections of the other side. For they say that Marcion did not so much invent the rule of separating law and gospel as restore it from corruption, long since adulterated. O Christ, most patient of lords, who endured for so many years the twisting of your own preaching — until, of course, Marcion came along to rescue you! [2] They set before us Peter himself and the other pillars of the apostolate, rebuked by Paul for not walking a straight path toward the truth of the gospel — rebuked, mind you, by that same Paul who was then still raw in grace, trembling lest he had run, or might be running, in vain, when for the first time he was conferring with the apostles who had gone before him. [3] If, then, still hot with the zeal of a new convert, he judged there was something to rebuke in their conduct with respect to Judaism — a merely occasional lapse in practice, mind you — seeing that he himself would later become all things to all men so as to win them all, a Jew to the Jews and, to those under the law, as one under the law — then you want this rebuke, which concerned conduct alone (and which would later please his own accuser), to be regarded as suspect even as evidence of a betrayal of the preaching about God. [4] And yet, on the unity of that preaching — as we read above — they had joined right hands, and by that very division of labor had struck a pact of partnership in the gospel; as he says elsewhere, "Whether I, then, or they, so we preach." And even where he describes certain false brothers who had crept in, wanting to carry the Galatians off to a different gospel, he himself shows that this corruption of the gospel was not aimed at transferring faith to another god and another Christ, but at preserving the discipline of the law — catching those men, that is, defending circumcision and observing days and months and seasons and years of the Jewish ceremonies, which they ought already to have recognized as done away with, in keeping with the Creator's own renewed arrangement, long since announced on this very point through his prophets: as through Isaiah, "The old things have passed away; behold, the new things I now make"; and elsewhere, "And I will establish a covenant, not such as I established with your fathers when I led them out of the land of Egypt." So too through Jeremiah, "Renew for yourselves a new renewal, and be circumcised to your God, and circumcise the foreskins of your hearts." [5] It was this circumcision, then, that the apostle was already insisting on, and this renewal by which he was likewise dissuading them from those old ceremonies — the very ones their own maker had professed, through Hosea, would one day cease: "I will put an end to all her rejoicing, her festal days, her monthly observances, her days of rest, and all her solemn rites." So too through Isaiah: "Your monthly observances and days of rest and the great gathering-day, I cannot bear; my soul loathes your fasts and appointed feasts." [6] But if the Creator himself had long since rejected all these things, and the apostle was proclaiming them already fit to be rejected, then the apostle's own judgment, agreeing as it does with the Creator's decrees, proves that the apostle preached no other god than the one whose decrees he wanted now acknowledged — branding as false apostles and false brothers, in this very matter, those who would drag the gospel of the Creator's Christ away from the newness the Creator had foretold and back to the oldness the Creator had rejected.
21.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 21 ========

[1] But if someone preaching a new god wanted thereby to exclude the old god's law, why does he lay down nothing at all about this new god, but only about the old law — unless it is because, faith in the Creator remaining intact, only his law was meant to lapse? Just as that psalm had already sung ahead of time: "Let us tear apart their fetters, and throw off their yoke from us" — a text which set the nations raging and the peoples scheming empty designs; the rulers of the earth rose in arms and the princes assembled as one in opposition to the Lord and to his Anointed. [2] And certainly, if Paul had been preaching a different god, there would have been no debate at all over whether the law need be kept — since it plainly would have had nothing to do with a new lord who was the law's own rival. The sheer novelty and otherness of that god would have swept away not just the issue of an old, foreign law, but any mention of it at all. But here was the whole state of the question: that since the same god of the law was being preached in Christ, it was his law that was being set aside. [3] Faith, then, stood firm throughout in the Creator and his Christ, while it was conduct and discipline that wavered. Some debated the eating of food offered to idols, others the veiling of women, others marriage or divorce, some even the hope of resurrection — about God, no one. For had this too been a matter of debate, it too would be found in the apostle, and indeed as the chief of all questions. [4] But if truth suffered corruption regarding the rule of God after the time of the apostles, then it follows that apostolic tradition suffered nothing of the kind regarding the rule of God in its own time — and no tradition of the apostles is to be recognized except the one that is set forth today in their own churches. Now you will not find a single church of apostolic pedigree that does not hold to Christian faith in the Creator. And if these were corrupted from the very start, which ones, pray, will be sound? The ones opposed to the Creator, no doubt! [5] Produce, then, some church of your own with apostolic pedigree, and you will have won the point. Since, then, it is established in every way that from Christ down to Marcion there was, within the rule of this mystery, no other god than the Creator, our proof already stands sufficiently fortified, by which we have shown that the heretic's notion of a god took its rise from the separation of gospel and law; and the earlier principle stands established too: that no god is to be believed in whom man has composed out of his own private notions — unless, that is, he plainly speaks as a prophet, that is, not out of his own notions. [6] And if this can be said of Marcion, it must also be proved. There was nothing here that needed reworking. For it is by this very wedge of truth that every heresy is driven out: when Christ is shown to be the vehicle of no other god than the Creator.
22.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 22 ========

But how can antichrist be overturned root and branch, unless room is also made for demolishing his other thrusts as well, once the defense of our preliminary objections has been relaxed? Let us come, then, from here to the very person of God — or rather to the shadow and phantom of him, as Christ presents him according to Marcion — and let this be examined by the very standard by which he is set above the Creator. There will certainly be fixed rules for testing God's goodness. But first I must find that goodness and get hold of it, and only then bring it to the rules. For when I look around at the ages, nowhere from the very beginning of matter and the first entry of causes — the point at which it ought to have been found, since from there it would have had occasion to act — is it to be found acting as it should have acted. For death already existed, and the sting of death, sin, and the very malice belonging to the Creator, a plight to which that alien god's goodness should surely have hastened as rescuer, thereby satisfying this first rule of divine goodness — that if it proved itself natural, it would have rushed to help the moment the cause for it arose. For everything in God ought to be natural and innate, in order to be eternal, in keeping with his own condition, lest it be reckoned as something that merely came upon him from outside, and thereby be temporal and alien to eternity. So too a goodness that is perennial and continual will be required in God — one which, stored up and ready in the treasury of his natural properties, would have anticipated its own causes and materials, and would have seized the very first opportunity, not looked down on it and let it slip, if it really came before it. In short, here too I will ask no less a question than the one I asked about him before — why was his very revelation not from the beginning? Why should his goodness not likewise have operated from the beginning? Why not, indeed, since it was through goodness that he would have been revealed, if there had ever been such a god at all. It is not permitted to say God cannot do something — still less that he cannot exercise what belongs to his own nature. If his properties can be held back from running their course, they will not be natural properties at all. For nature does not know idleness. It is judged by whether it acts; so his goodness will likewise be thought never to have refused to be exercised, so long as it goes under the name of "nature" in the meantime. For nature cannot refuse itself — it directs itself in such a way that if it should ever stop, it ceases to exist. But the goodness of Marcion's god did, at some point, stop its work. Therefore it was not a natural goodness, since it was able at some point to stop — which is not permitted to natural things. And if it will not be natural, then it cannot be believed eternal either, nor equal to God, since it is not eternal, precisely because it is not natural — a goodness which, in the end, establishes no perpetuity for itself, either out of the past or by promise for the future. For indeed it did not exist from the beginning, and without doubt it will not exist at the end either. It can cease to be at some point, just as at some point it did not yet exist. Since, then, it is agreed that the goodness of that god ceased at the very beginning (for he did not free man from the beginning), and that it ceased by choice rather than by weakness, then the will behind the suppression of that goodness will turn out to be, in the end, malice. For what is so malicious as refusing to help when you are able, as torturing away a benefit, as permitting an injury? In the end, the entire indictment of the Creator will be rewritten against the one whose goodness aided his cruelties by its own delay. For whoever holds it in his power to prevent something from happening is already reckoned complicit when it happens. Man is condemned to death for tasting one little tree, and from then on sins keep pace with their punishments, and now all perish who have never known so much as a patch of turf in paradise. And this "better" god either does not know this or tolerates it. If the point of it is that he should be found better precisely to the degree that the Creator is shown worse by comparison, then he is malicious enough in that very design as well — wanting the Creator burdened with the guilt of his own deeds allowed to run their course, and keeping the world in torment the whole while. What would you make of a doctor who nurses a disease along by delaying treatment, and prolongs the danger by putting off the remedy, so as to effect a cure that costs more or wins more fame? Such, too, must be the verdict on Marcion's god: a permitter of evil, a patron of injury, a pimp of his own grace, a betrayer of the kindness he did not display at once when the case called for it — one who would plainly have displayed it, if he were good by nature and not by later accretion, if he were supremely good by disposition and not by training, if he were God from all eternity and not merely since Tiberius — or rather, to put it more truly, since Cerdo and Marcion. For now it seems that god granted to Tiberius the privilege of having divine goodness dedicated on earth during his reign.
23.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 23 ========

I hold out another rule to him: just as all things in God must be natural, so they must also be rational. I demand a reason for his goodness, since nothing may be counted good that is not rationally good — still less should goodness itself be caught being irrational. It will be easier for an evil that has some touch of reason in it to pass as good than for a good deserted by reason to escape being judged evil. I deny, then, that Marcion's god possesses a goodness answerable to reason, and on this very first count: it went forth to rescue a man who was another's property. I know what they will say — that this is precisely the highest and most perfect goodness, when, owed nothing by any tie of kinship, it pours itself out freely and willingly on strangers, the very goodness by which we too are commanded to love even our enemies, who on that very score are already strangers. Since, then, he did not regard man from the beginning — regarded him, from the beginning, as a stranger — by his inaction he prejudged that he had nothing to do with a stranger. Moreover, the discipline of loving a stranger or an enemy comes after the precept of loving one's neighbor as oneself, and although that precept comes from the Creator's law, you too must accept it as something not abolished by Christ but rather built up further by him. For the more you are commanded to love your neighbor, the more you are then commanded to love the enemy and the stranger as well. The exaction of an undeserved kindness is an intensification built upon a kindness that was owed. But the owed kindness comes before the unowed, as the primary one, as the worthier one, with the unowed as its attendant and companion, coming second. Since, then, the first measure of goodness consists in being shown to one's own out of justice, and the second, toward a stranger, out of a justice that overflows beyond that of the scribes and Pharisees — what sense does it make to credit him with the second measure when he is lacking the first, having no man of his own, and therefore being deficient even in the second? For how did a goodness that had nothing of its own overflow onto what belonged to another? Show me the primary measure first, and then claim the one that follows. Nothing can rationally be claimed out of its proper order — reason itself is far from losing its own order in anything. Let goodness now be supposed to begin even from the second rank, that is, toward the stranger — even that second rank will not hold together rationally, for it is undone in another way as well. For that goodness toward a stranger will only be reckoned rational if it operates without injury to the one to whom the property belongs. Whatever goodness the primary justice produces, that justice makes rational. Just as it will be rational at the primary rank when shown toward one's own, provided it is just, so too it could appear rational toward a stranger, provided it is not unjust. But what sort of goodness is it that stands on injury — and injury done on behalf of a stranger, no less? Perhaps an injurious goodness might to some degree be reckoned rational when done on behalf of a member of one's own household. But on behalf of a stranger, to whom nothing was legitimately owed in the first place, by what reasoning will so unjust an act be defended as rational? For what is more unjust, more iniquitous and shameless, than to do good to another man's slave in such a way that he is snatched from his master, claimed for someone else, and set up against his own master's very authority — and, what makes it more disgraceful still, done right there in the master's own house, while the slave still lives off his master's own stores, still trembles under his master's own lash? Such a champion would be condemned even under the laws of this world, to say nothing of being branded a kidnapper of slaves. No different is Marcion's god, breaking into a world that belongs to another, snatching man from God, the son from his father, the ward from his guardian, the servant from his master, so as to make him impious toward God, irreligious toward his father, ungrateful toward his guardian, worthless toward his master. I ask you: if this is what a rational goodness produces, what would an irrational one produce? I could not think of anyone more shameless than one who is baptized in someone else's water for a different god, who stretches his hands toward someone else's heaven for a different god, who lies prostrate on someone else's earth for a different god, who gives thanks over someone else's bread for a different god, who out of someone else's goods, in the name of alms and love, performs works for the sake of another god. What sort of god is this, so good that a man becomes bad because of him, so kindly disposed that he makes another god — and that god the man's very own lord — angry at him?
24.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 24 ========

But God, as he is eternal and rational, is, I think, also perfect in all things: "You shall be perfect, as your Father who is in heaven is perfect." Show me his goodness perfect as well. Even though it is clear enough that it is imperfect, being found to be neither natural nor rational, it will now be traced along another line as well — no longer merely imperfect, but positively deficient, meager and exhausted, falling short in the number of its own materials, since it is not shown toward everyone. For not all are saved, but fewer than all — fewer even than the Jews and Christians of the Creator are saved. But if more perish, how is a "perfect" goodness to be defended, when it is idle toward the greater part, extending something to the few and nothing to the many, yielding them up to perdition, sharing out ruin as its portion? And if more are not going to be saved, then what we have is not goodness but a more perfect malice. For just as it is the working of goodness that saves people, so it is the working of malice that fails to save them. And a goodness that fails to save while saving only a few is more perfect at not helping than at helping. Nor can you shift this failure of goodness toward all onto the Creator's account. For whatever judge you claim him to be, whatever dispenser of goodness you might, perhaps, wish him understood as, you are not free to call him a mere squanderer of it — a title you claim for your own god. To this extent alone do you set your god above the Creator in goodness — a goodness which, if he professes it alone and entire, ought to fail no one. But I do not wish, for now, to convict Marcion's god of imperfect goodness on the score of the greater part who perish. It is enough that even those he does save are found to have an imperfect salvation, and thereby show his goodness to be imperfect — saved, that is, only as far as the soul, while lost as to the flesh, which for him does not rise again. Where does this halving of salvation come from, if not from a deficiency of goodness? What would perfect goodness have done but restore the whole man to salvation — the whole man condemned by the Creator, the whole man won over by the supremely good god? As far as I know, the flesh too is baptized in his rite, the flesh too is withdrawn from marriage, the flesh too rages under torture in the confession of the Name. But even if sins are charged to the flesh's account, the soul's guilt comes first, and the primacy of the fault must rather be assigned to the soul, to which the flesh comes as a mere servant, bearing its name. Flesh, in fact, lacking a soul, cannot sin at all. So here too his goodness is unjust, and thereby imperfect as well, abandoning to ruin the more innocent substance — one that sins by obedience, not by its own choice — and this though Christ, even if he did not (as your heresy would have it) put on its reality, nevertheless deigned to take on its likeness. By the very fact that he counterfeited it, he owed it something as its debtor. But what else is man but flesh, since the very name "man" was given by its author from bodily, not from spiritual, material? "And God made man," it says, "of the slime of the earth" — not of a soul; for the soul came from his breath: "and man became a living soul" — who? clearly the one made of slime. "And God placed man in paradise" — the one he had shaped, not the one he had breathed into; the one who is now flesh, not the one who is soul. If this is so, then with what face will you maintain the title of "perfect" for a goodness that has failed not merely in a special partition of the man to be freed, but in his general nature altogether? If it is a full grace and a solid mercy that saves the soul alone, this present life, in which we enjoy ourselves whole and entire, offers more. But to rise again only in part will be a punishment, not a liberation. This too belonged to perfect goodness: that man, once freed into faith in the supremely good god, should immediately be removed from the dwelling and dominion of the savage god. But as it is, you still run a fever, Marcionite, and the pain of your flesh still serves up to you the rest of the thorns and briars, and you are subject not only to the Creator's lightning bolts, wars, plagues, and other scourges, but even to his scorpions. In what sense do you imagine yourself freed from the kingdom of one whose very flies still trample you underfoot? If you have been rescued as regards the future, why not as regards the present too, so as to be perfectly freed? Our situation before our Maker, before our Judge, before the Ruler of our race whom we have offended, is one thing; you merely set up a good god in preference. But you cannot show him to be perfectly good when you are not perfectly freed by him.
25.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 25 ========

[1] As for the question of goodness, we have drawn these lines to show that it is by no means equal to God — that it is neither unbegotten nor rational nor perfect, but in fact wicked and unjust and unworthy even of the very name of goodness, since it is precisely to the degree that it fits God that it turns out not to be God who is set above such a goodness — and not merely above a goodness of that kind, but above it alone. [2] For this too now needs to be examined: whether God is to be reckoned by goodness alone, with all other attributes denied him — the senses and affections which the Marcionites indeed banish from their god and dump onto the Creator, while we for our part acknowledge them in the Creator as worthy of a god. And on this ground too we will deny the name of god to any being in whom not everything worthy of god is found together. [3] If someone from the school of Epicurus wanted to hang the name of Christ on some god of his own devising — so that, being blessed and incorruptible, he should cause no trouble to himself or to anyone else (for it is by chewing on this doctrine that Marcion stripped him of severity and judicial power) — then he ought either to have conceived of him as utterly immobile and stupefied (but then what has he to do with Christ, who was a trouble to the Jews through his teaching and to himself through the cross?), or else he ought to have granted him the other emotions too (but then what has he to do with Epicurus, who is of no necessary use either to himself or to Christians?). [4] For look: by the very fact that, having been quiet before — not having troubled even to make himself known by some intervening work — he felt, after so vast an age, a concern for man's salvation, and did so, of course, by an act of will, was he not then shaken by this new act of willing, so that he now appears liable to the other emotions as well? And what act of will is without the goad of desire? Who wills something he does not desire? And on top of willing, care too will come along. [5] For who will both will and desire something and not care about it? Therefore, since he both willed and desired man's salvation, he has now made trouble for himself and for others too — much against Epicurus's wishes, with Marcion as his counselor. For he set up as his own adversary the very thing against which he willed and desired and cared — whether sin or death — and, first of all, their very arbiter and lord, the Creator of man. [6] Furthermore, nothing runs its course without rivalry unless it has no adversary at all. In short, by willing and desiring and caring to set man free, he by that very act already rivals the one from whom he sets man free — meaning to free man against him — and rivals also the things from which he frees man, meaning to free him into other things instead. It follows that rivalry must necessarily be attended by its retinue of officials — anger, discord, hatred, disdain, indignation, bile, refusal, offense. [7] If all these attend upon rivalry, and rivalry is what procures man's liberation, and man's liberation is the operation of goodness, then that goodness cannot exist without its proper endowments — that is, without senses and affections, through which it is administered against the Creator — lest it too, in just this way, be convicted of irrationality, if it lacks the senses and affections that are its due. We shall defend these points much more fully when we deal with the case of the Creator, in which they are also thrown at us as reproaches.
26.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 26 ========

[1] But here it is enough to show that this god is utterly perverse in the very proclamation of his solitary goodness, since they refuse to credit him with the very movements of soul which they condemn in the Creator. For if he neither rivals nor grows angry nor condemns nor troubles anyone — being, of course, no judge at all — I cannot see how any rational system of discipline can stand for him, let alone a fuller one. [2] For what sense does it make for him to lay down commandments he will not enforce, to forbid sins he will not punish, since he will never pass judgment — being, naturally, a stranger to every sense of severity and censure? For why does he forbid the admission of something he will not defend once admitted, when it would have been far more sensible for him not to have forbidden what he was not going to defend, than to fail to defend what he had forbidden? Indeed he ought to have permitted it outright, since he was going to forbid it for no reason, seeing he was not going to defend against it. [3] For even now, what is forbidden without any penalty is tacitly permitted. And surely he forbids nothing to be done except what he does not love to see done. So he is the height of stupidity if he is not offended by a deed he does not love to see done, since offense is the companion of a thwarted will. But if he is offended, he ought to grow angry; if he grows angry, he ought to take vengeance. For vengeance is the fruit of anger, and anger is owed to offense, and offense, as I said, is the companion of a thwarted will. But he does not take vengeance; therefore he is not offended either. But if he is not offended, then his will is not injured when what he did not want to happen happens — and so the sin now occurs according to his will, since what does not injure his will cannot be said to occur against it. [4] Or if it is to be a mark of divine power or goodness simply to not want a thing to happen and to forbid its happening, yet not be moved even if it does happen — then we say that the one who did not want it was already moved, and that it is idle to call him unmoved at the deed when he was moved to forbid the deed, precisely because he did not want it to happen. For by not wanting it, he forbade it. Did he not, in not wanting it to happen, thereby judge it, and for that very reason forbid it? He decided the deed should never happen at all, and declared it worthy of prohibition. [5] Therefore he already judges. If it is unworthy of a god to judge, or if it is worthy of a god to judge only to the extent that he merely refuses and forbids, without going so far as to defend against what is admitted — well then, nothing is so unworthy of a god as failing to enforce what he refused and forbade to be admitted: first, because he owes vindication, whatever his verdict or law, to his own authority and to the necessity of obedience; second, because whatever he refused to have admitted, and by refusing forbade, is necessarily his rival — and it is more unworthy for a god to spare evil than to punish it, and this is truer still of the supremely good god, who is not fully good in any other way than by being the rival of evil, so that he may exercise his love of the good through hatred of evil, and fulfill his guardianship of the good by storming evil's defenses.
27.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 27 ========

[1] But plainly he does judge evil, by refusing it, and he does condemn it, by forbidding it — yet he lets it go by not avenging it, and acquits it by not punishing it. O this god, betrayer of truth! Circumventor of his own verdict! He is afraid to condemn what he condemns, afraid to loathe what wins no love from him; he lets happen what he does not let happen; he would rather show what he does not want than prove it. This will be an imaginary goodness, a phantom discipline in itself — commandments that vanish, sins made safe. [2] Hear this, you sinners — and you who are not yet sinners, so that you can become them! A better god has been discovered, one who is neither offended nor angered nor takes vengeance, for whom no fire is stoked in Gehenna, for whom no gnashing of teeth is dreaded in the outer darkness: he is simply good. In fact he forbids wrongdoing — but only in writing. It is up to you, if you care to, to sign your obedience to him, so that you may appear to have paid him honor; for he does not want your fear. [3] And indeed the Marcionites openly boast that they feel no fear at all of their god. "The evil one," they say, "will be feared, but the good one will be loved." Fool — you call him lord, yet deny he is to be feared, when that very name belongs to power, and to power that is already to be feared! But how will you love him, unless you fear not to love him? Clearly he is not even your father, in whom love could rightly join with reverence on account of paternal duty, and fear with reverence on account of power; nor is he your lawful master, whom you would love out of humanity and fear out of discipline. [4] It is this way, in fact, that kidnappers are loved, but never feared. For only a just and lawful dominion will be feared, whereas even an adulteress can be loved; for her hold rests on seduction, not on authority, and on flattery, not on power. And what, after all, is more flattering than refusing to enforce a law against sin? [5] Come now, then — you who do not fear god as though he were good — what do you not boil over into, in every kind of lust, seeing that this is, so far as I know, the crowning fruit of life for all who do not fear god? What solemn pleasure do you not frequent — the raging circus, the savage arena, the wanton stage? In times of persecution, the moment the incense-box is set before you, do you not straightaway profit your soul by denial? "Never," you say, "never!" So then — you already fear sin, and by fearing it you have proved that the one who forbids sin is rightly feared. It is a different matter if, by the same perversity of your god whom you do not fear, you keep observing what he does not avenge though he forbids it. [6] Even more absurd is their answer when asked, "What will become of any sinner on that day?" They reply that he will be cast away, as it were, out of god's sight. And is this not also the working of judgment? For he is judged worthy of being cast away, and certainly by a judgment of condemnation — unless the sinner is cast away for his salvation, so that this too may suit the supremely good god! And what will it mean to be "cast away," except to lose what he would have obtained had he not been cast away — that is, salvation? So then he will be cast away to the loss of his salvation, and this can be decreed by no one except one who is angry and offended and who executes judgment on sin — that is, a judge.
28.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 28 ========

[1] And what becomes of him once cast away? "He will be caught," they say, "by the Creator's fire." Does this god then have not one single element, even reserved for this purpose, by which he might banish his own sinners without such savagery, so as not to hand them over to the Creator? What then does the Creator do? Presumably he has an even more sulphurous Gehenna standing ready for them, on the grounds that they blasphemed against him — unless, perhaps, this jealous god spares the very deserters to his rival! O this god, perverse through and through, irrational on every side, empty in everything — and therefore, in truth, nobody at all! [2] For I can find no standing, no status, no condition, no nature, no order at all that holds together in him — not even the very sacrament of faith in him. For to what purpose is baptism even required in his system? If it is remission of sins, how will he who will not be seen to retain sins appear to remit them? For he would retain them if he judged them. If it is release from death, how will he release from death the one whom he never bound over to death? For he would have bound him over, had he condemned him from the beginning. If it is man's regeneration, how does he regenerate the one he did not first generate? [3] For a repetition does not belong to one by whom the thing was never done even once. If it is the obtaining of the Holy Spirit, how will he bestow the Spirit on one to whom he never first gave a soul? Since the soul is, in a sense, sufficient to make way for the Spirit. So he seals a man never unsealed in his own system, washes a man never defiled in his own system, and in doing so submerges in flesh — flesh excluded from salvation — the whole sacrament of salvation. [4] Not even a farmer will water ground that will bear him no fruit — unless he is as foolish as Marcion's god. Why, then, does he lay upon flesh so weak, or so unworthy, either the burden or the glory of holiness? And what shall I say of the absurdity of a discipline that sanctifies a substance it holds to be holy already? Why does he either burden the weak or adorn the unworthy? Why does he not reward with salvation the flesh he burdens or adorns? Why does he cheat the flesh of the wages of its labor, refusing it salvation in return? And why does he allow it to die still wearing the honor of holiness?
29.

======== Adversus Marcionem 1 — Chapter 29 ========

[1] In his church, flesh is not baptized unless it is virgin, or widowed, or unmarried, or has bought its baptism by divorce — as if some had not also been born of marriage into the eunuch state. Beyond doubt, this doctrine of his will stand or fall on the condemnation of marriage. [2] Let us see whether that condemnation is just — not as men bent on demolishing the glory of holiness, like those Nicolaitan champions of lust and excess, but as men who know holiness without the condemnation of marriage, who follow it and set it above marriage not as good set against evil but as better set against good. We do not throw marriage away, we lay it aside; we do not proscribe holiness, we urge it, keeping both the good and the better each to be pursued according to each person's strength — and then, only then, standing up frankly to defend marriage, when it is maliciously accused under the name of filth for the destruction of the Creator, who for that very reason blessed marriage, for the honor of the institution, toward the increase of the human race, just as he blessed the whole of creation for wholesome and good uses. [3] Foods are not condemned merely because, sought out too elaborately, men commit them to gluttony; clothing is not accused merely because, procured too expensively, it swells into vanity. So too the estate of marriage is not to be spat upon merely because, indulged too intemperately, some are set ablaze into excess. There is a wide difference between a thing's proper use and its abuse, between its natural state and its overstepping. [4] It is the overstepping, then, not the institution, that must be condemned as such — and that by the very standard of the one who instituted it, whose word is as much 'Increase and multiply' as it is 'You shall not commit adultery' and 'You shall not covet your neighbor's wife,' and who punishes with death the incestuous, sacrilegious, monstrous madness of lust that turns to males and to beasts. But even if a limit is now set upon marrying — which indeed among us the spiritual discipline, on the Paraclete's authority, upholds, prescribing one marriage only within the faith — it belongs to that very same God to fix a limit who once let the limit run wide; the one who scattered is the one who gathers, the one who planted the wood is the one who fells it, the one who sowed the crop is the one who reaps it, the one who once said 'Increase and multiply' is the one who now says, 'What remains is this: let those with wives conduct themselves as men who possess none.' The end belongs to the same author as the beginning. [5] Yet the wood is not felled as something to be condemned, nor is the crop cut down as something to be damned, but as something obeying its own season. So too the estate of wedlock does not admit the axe and sickle of holiness as an evil thing, but as a thing ripe to be brought to its close, reserved for holiness itself, to which, by being cut down, it renders its harvest. And so now I will say it: the god of Marcion, when he condemns marriage as an evil and a business of shamelessness, works against the very holiness he seems so zealous for. For he cuts away its material; if there is no marrying, there is no holiness at all. [6] The testimony of abstinence is void once license is snatched away, since certain things are proved only against their opposites. Just as virtue is perfected in weakness, so abstinence from marrying is discerned only where the capacity for it exists. Who, after all, will be called abstinent once the very thing to be abstained from is removed? What temperance of the belly is there in famine? What refusal of ambition in destitution? What reining-in of lust in castration? [7] As for choking off the whole seed-plot of the human race — I do not know whether even this suits the 'supremely good' god. For how will he wish man saved, whom he forbids to be born, by taking away the very source from which man is born? How will he have anything on which to stamp his goodness, when he will not allow it to exist? How does he love a birth whose origin he does not love? [8] Perhaps he fears an overflow of offspring — that he will have to work harder freeing more of them, that he will make too many heretics, that he will have more well-bred Marcionites bred out of Marcionites! Will he not be a crueler Pharaoh, this killer of the unborn? Pharaoh, after all, took away lives; this god does not give them. Pharaoh removed men from life; this god does not admit them into it. Between the two there is no difference at all as to the murder. Under either, a human being is put to death — under the one, already brought forth; under the other, yet to be brought forth. You would have deserved thanks, O heretical god, had you gone along with the Creator's arrangement, who mingled male and female — for indeed your own Marcion himself was born of wedlock! [9] Enough said of Marcion's god, whom both the definitions proper to a sole deity and the conditions of his several claims confirm to be no god at all. And the whole plan of this work in any case moves on to that same conclusion. So if to anyone it seems I have done too little here, let him hope it is reserved for its proper place, just as the examination of the very scriptures Marcion uses is reserved for its own.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 1 ========

[1] The occasion for revising this little work — what happened to its first small edition I have already explained — has also given me this: to distinguish, for the two-gods argument against Marcion I am reworking, its own title and volume for each, according to the division of the material — one defining that his god is simply not a god at all, the other maintaining that our God is worthily God — inasmuch as it pleased the man of Pontus to bring in the one and shut out the other. He could not build his lie without first tearing down the truth. He had to undermine one thing in order to erect what he wanted. So builds a man who has no materials of his own. [2] It would have sufficed, however, to have argued this one point alone — that there is no god, that one who is set up over the Creator — so that once the false god was driven off, and by sure rules prescribing a single, perfect Godhead, nothing further would need be asked about the true God; for the more certain it stood that he existed — even while it was uncertain that another existed — the more fitting it would be to hold him, whatever his character, beyond controversy, an object to be adored rather than judged, to be won over rather than cross-examined, or feared for his severity. [3] For what does a man need more than concern for the true God — into whom, so to speak, he had simply fallen, since there was no other god to be had?
2.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 2 ========

[1] But as things now stand, Almighty God, Lord and Founder of the universe, must stand trial — for this reason only, I suppose: that he has been known from the beginning, that he has never lain hidden, that he has always shone forth, even before Romulus himself, let alone before Tiberius — except that to heretics alone he is unknown, and it is they who put him on trial, presuming another god must exist for the very reason that the one they admit exists they can find fault with more easily than they can deny — weighing God by the whim of their own private judgment, rather like a blind man, or one with wandering eyes, who wants to presume some other, milder and more wholesome sun exists, simply because the one he can see, he cannot see. [2] There is one sun only, my good man, that governs this world, and when you do not think so, it is still the best and most useful — and even when it seems to you too fierce and hostile, even too dirty and corrupted, it remains, all the same, true to its own reckoning. If you cannot work out that reckoning, neither would you have had the power to endure the beams of some different sun, supposing one existed — much less a mightier one. [3] For if you go blind staring at the lower god, what will you do with a loftier one? Better, surely, to spare your own weakness and not stretch yourself into danger, holding to a God who is certain and beyond doubt and, by that very fact, sufficiently seen — once you have grasped this first: that he is a being you cannot know except in the part he himself has chosen to reveal. As one who knows him, you do not deny God; as one who does not know him, you cross-examine him — indeed you accuse him as though you knew him, when, if you truly knew him, you would not accuse him, indeed would not even cross-examine him. Granting him the name, you deny the substance the name stands for — namely, that vastness men term Divinity — refusing to own it as vast as it truly is, since, could a man grasp it down to every particular, vastness it would cease to be. [4] Isaiah, well before the fact an apostle in his own right, foreseeing the hearts heretics would one day have, declared: 'Who has grasped the Lord's purpose, or stood as counsel at his side? With whom did he confer, and who instructed him in the path of insight and discernment?' To this the apostle affixes his own assent: 'O the depth of God's riches and wisdom! How past tracing are his rulings' — his rulings, meaning, as the one who judges — 'and his paths beyond discovery' — the paths, that is, of the insight and discernment nobody ever taught him — unless it was these self-appointed auditors of the Godhead, forever muttering 'God should not have done it in that fashion,' and 'this other way would have suited him better' — as though any creature could fathom what lies within God, save the Spirit of God himself! [5] Yet those possessed of the world's spirit, unable to spot God amid the wisdom that is God's own wisdom, fancy themselves shrewder advisers than God — for exactly as the world's wisdom counts as folly before God, so God's wisdom counts as folly before the world. Yet this we know: what looks like folly in God outstrips the cleverness of men, and what looks like frailty in God outmatches human strength. [6] Thus God stands tallest precisely where man judges him small, is finest precisely where man judges him lacking goodness, is most singularly one precisely where man perceives two or several. But if, from the outset, the man of mere nature, refusing what belongs to the Spirit, judged God's law folly — a law he then failed to keep, so that, faith being absent, even the little he had was stripped from him: the favor of paradise and God's close company, by which, had he obeyed, he would have come to full knowledge of God — what marvel is it that, cast back upon his own raw matter and driven into the toil-yard of ground to be worked, in that very toil, stooped and drawn earthward, he drew up out of it a worldly spirit and bequeathed it to his whole line — that line, at any rate, which is merely natural and given to heresy, unreceptive to what belongs to God? [7] Or who could doubt that Adam's own transgression itself deserves the name of heresy, given he committed it by setting his private judgment above God's? Only Adam never told his Maker, 'You fashioned me without skill.' He confessed the seduction. He did not conceal the seductress. He was, admittedly, a raw beginner as a heretic. He disobeyed, yet he did not blaspheme the Creator, nor find fault with his Maker, whom from the very beginning of his existence he had found good, indeed best — and whom he himself, if anything, had made his judge from the start.
3.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 3 ========

[1] It will be proper, then, for those entering upon this inquiry into the God we already know — if the question is under what conditions he is known — to begin from his works, which exist before man does, so that, once his goodness is discovered along with man himself, and thereby established and set on the record beforehand, it may offer us some means of grasping how the sequence of things that followed later took its shape. [2] Now, Marcion's disciples, in recognizing the goodness of our God as worthy of a god, can recognize it through the very same headings by which we have shown theirs to be unworthy of one. This very fact — that here is the material for knowing him — he found in no one else, but made for himself out of himself. The first goodness of the Creator, then, is this: that God was unwilling to lie hidden forever — that is, that there should be nothing at all by which God might be known. [3] For what is so good as the knowledge and enjoyment of God? Now even though this good was not yet apparent, since as yet there was nothing to which it could appear, still God foreknew what good would come to appear, and therefore committed to the sum of his own goodness the power of producing that future good — a goodness by no means sudden, nor accidental, nor provoked into life, as if it were to be reckoned only from the moment it began to act. [4] For if that goodness itself set the starting-point from which it began to work, then it had no beginning at the moment it acted. But once a beginning was made by it, the reckoning of times was born from that same moment, since it was for marking and distinguishing times that the stars and the lights of heaven were arranged. 'They shall be,' it says, 'for seasons and months and years.' Therefore that which made time had no time before time, just as that which established a beginning had no beginning before the beginning. [5] And so, lacking both an order of beginning and a measure of time, it must be reckoned as belonging to an immense and unbounded eternity, nor can it be counted sudden or accidental or provoked, having nothing by which it could be so reckoned — that is, no trace of time at all — but must rather be presumed eternal, ingenerate in God, and perpetual, and therefore worthy of God — which already, from this point on, puts to shame the goodness of Marcion's god, coming, I do not say merely later than the beginnings and the ages, but later than the very malice of the Creator himself — if indeed malice could ever have been committed by goodness at all.
4.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 4 ========

[1] Well then, since God's own goodness, in providing that man should come to know God, added this too to its own proclamation — that it first devised a dwelling-place for man, some very great mass of matter to begin with, and afterward a still greater one, so that man might rehearse and advance in the great as in the lesser, and so be promoted from the good of God (that is, from the great) to the best of God as well (that is, to the greater dwelling). To this good work he applies as minister his own Word, which is best of all: "My heart," he says, "has belched forth a most excellent word." [2] Let Marcion recognize here the first fruit — the best fruit, surely, of the best tree. The rankest of rustics has grafted a bad shoot onto a good stock. But the cutting of blasphemy will not prevail; it will wither along with its grafter, and so the nature of the good tree will bear witness to itself. Look at the sum of it — what sort of fruit the Word has borne. "And God said, Let it be, and it was, and God saw that it was good" — not as though he did not know it was good until he saw it, but because, seeing that it was good, he was thereby honoring, sealing, and appraising the goodness of the works by the verdict of his gaze. [3] So too he blessed what he had done well, that the whole God might be commended to you — good both in speaking and in doing. The Word did not yet know how to curse, because it did not yet know how to do harm. We shall see the reasons which later exacted this too from God. Meanwhile the world was made up entirely of good things, giving ample foretaste of how much good was being readied for the one for whom this whole was being prepared. Who, in the end, was worthy to inhabit the works of God but his own image and likeness? [4] That too his goodness — and indeed a more active goodness — accomplished, not by an imperial word but by a familiar hand, though even here a coaxing word came first: "Let us make man in our image and likeness." Goodness spoke, goodness fashioned man out of clay into so great a substance of flesh, built up out of one material into so many qualities. Goodness breathed in a soul, not a dead one but a living one. Goodness set him in charge of all things to enjoy and to rule, even to name. Goodness went further and added delights for man, so that, though he possessed the whole world, he might dwell in more pleasant places, transferred into paradise — already then, a passage from the world into the church. That same goodness provided him a helper too, lest anything should be lacking in goodness. [5] "It is not good," he says, "for man to be alone." He knew that this sex would one day benefit Mary, and after her, the church. But even the law you fault, which you twist into controversies, goodness dispensed, taking thought for man, so that he might cleave to God, lest he seem not so much free as cast off, leveled with his own servants, the other animals, who are released by God and free from any such charge — but so that man alone might glory in having alone been worthy to receive a law from God, and so that, being a rational animal capable of understanding and knowledge, he might be constrained even by that same reasoning freedom, answerable to the one who had made all things subject to him. [6] To the observing of this law, goodness likewise appended its counsel: "But on the day you eat of it, you shall surely die." For in his great kindness he revealed beforehand what the transgression would bring, so that unawareness of the peril might not encourage carelessness in obeying. Further, if the reasoning for imposing the law came first, the reasoning for keeping it followed as well, so that a penalty might be attached to transgression — a penalty, however, which he who foretold it beforehand did not wish to come to pass. Acknowledge, then, the goodness of our God, at least this far for now, from his good works, his good blessings, his indulgences, his provisions, and his laws and warnings, good and kindly alike.
5.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 5 ========

[1] From this point, then, to all the questions you raise, you dogs whom the apostle drives outdoors, barking against the God of truth! These are the bare bones of your arguments, which you gnaw at. If God is good, and foreknows the future, and has power to avert evil, why did he allow man — his own image and likeness, indeed his own very substance, by the reckoning of the soul — to slip from obedience to the law into death, ensnared by the devil? [2] For if he is good, and would not wish such a thing to happen, and foreknowing, and so could not fail to know it would happen, and powerful, and so able to prevent it — then in no way could what happened have happened, given these three conditions of divine majesty, under which it could not have happened. But if it did happen, then the opposite conclusion follows of necessity: that God must be believed neither good nor foreknowing nor powerful — since exactly to the extent that nothing of the sort would have happened had God been such (that is, good and foreknowing and powerful), to that same extent it did happen precisely because God is not such. [3] To this I answer: first one must defend, in the Creator, these very attributes that are being called into question — I mean his goodness, his foreknowledge, and his power. And I shall not dwell long on this point, since Christ himself has led the way in defining it: proofs are to be drawn from works. The works of the Creator testify to both — to his goodness, since they are good, as already demonstrated, and to his power, since they are so vast, indeed fashioned from nothing at all. For granted that they were shaped from some already-existing matter, as certain people maintain, nevertheless, even on that view, they came from nothing in this sense: that they were not, before they were what they now are. [4] Finally, they are great even on that view, since they are good; and God is powerful either way, since all things are his — therefore he is termed all-powerful. Yet what am I to say regarding his foreknowledge, which has as many witnesses as it has made prophets? Yet what title to foreknowledge is there in the author of all things but this — that in disposing of the universe he foreknew it, and in foreknowing it he disposed of it? Certainly he foreknew the very transgression itself; had he not foreknown it, he would never have attached to it that warning under threat of death. [5] So then, if these powers were indeed in God, powers by virtue of which no evil could or should have befallen man, and yet it did befall him, let us also look at man's own condition, in case it was rather through that condition that what could not happen through God did happen. I find man instituted by God as free, master of his own choice and his own power, discerning in him no image and likeness of God more than in this very form of his condition. [6] For he was not modeled on a uniform God in face and bodily outline, so various across the human race, but in that substance which he drew from God himself — that is, in a soul answering to the form of God — and he was marked with the freedom and power of his own choice. This condition of his was confirmed even by the law which God then laid down. [7] For a law would not have been laid upon one who did not have it in his own power to render the obedience owed to the law; nor again would the threat of death have been attached to transgression, unless contempt of the law too were reckoned to man's freedom of choice. So too you will find in the later laws of the Creator, setting before man good and evil, life and death — nor, for that matter, is the whole order of discipline arranged through precepts anything other than this, with God calling away and threatening and exhorting, unless man is free and willing both in obedience and in contempt.
6.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 6 ========

[1] But since from this point we are already understood to be building up man's free power of choice in such a way that whatever befell him must be reckoned to his own account rather than to God's, lest you object right away that he should never have been fashioned that way, if freedom and power of choice were bound to end in ruin — I will defend this point too, first of all: that he needed to be fashioned that way, so that I may the more forcefully commend the fact both that he was so constituted and that he was worthily constituted so by God, once the better reason is shown for why he was made so. The goodness of God and his rationality will both stand as advocates for this institution too, agreeing together in everything, as they do in our God. [2] For reason without goodness is no reason, nor is goodness without reason any goodness — unless perhaps, in Marcion's god, goodness runs irrationally, as we have shown. God had to be known. This surely is good, and rational. There had to be something worthy that would know God. What could be conceived so worthy of that as the image and likeness of God? [3] And this too is beyond doubt good, and rational. It was necessary, then, that the image and likeness of God be instituted with freedom of choice and its own power, this very thing being reckoned the image and likeness of God — namely the freedom and power of choice — and for this purpose that substance was fitted to man which belonged to this condition, the breath of God being, of course, free and its own master. But besides, what sort of thing would it be for man, possessing the whole world, not to reign first of all in the possession of his own mind — lord over others, slave to himself? [4] You have, then, both to acknowledge the goodness of God from the honor bestowed, and his reason from the arrangement made. Let goodness alone, for the moment, be credited with having granted man so great a gift, namely freedom of choice; let reason claim for itself the other side of this institution. For God alone is good by nature. He who has what he is without beginning has it not by institution but by nature. Man, however, who owes his whole being to institution, having a beginning, received along with that beginning the form by which he exists, and so was disposed toward good not by nature but by institution — not having his goodness as his own, because he was disposed toward good not by nature but by institution, but rather in accordance with his institutor's goodness, namely the Founder of all good things. [5] So then, that man might now have goodness as his very own, emancipated to him by God, and that it might become a property of goodness in man, and in a certain sense his nature, there was assigned to him out of that institution, as a kind of counterweight for the goodness emancipated from God, freedom and power of choice — which would make goodness, as something now his own, be rendered by man of his own accord, since this too the very nature of goodness required, that it be exercised voluntarily, out of freedom of choice, favoring the institution but not enslaved to it — so that man might at last stand as truly good only if, in keeping with his institution, yet out of his own will, he were found good, as it were out of a property of his own nature; and likewise, so that against evil too (for God foresaw that as well) man might set himself the more strongly, being free, that is, and his own master — because if he lacked this right, so that he would meet even good not by will but by necessity, he would then be liable to be seized by evil as well, out of the very weakness of his servitude, being a slave equally to evil as to good. [6] The whole freedom of choice, then, was granted to him on both sides, so that as his own master he might stand firm, keeping to the good of his own accord and shunning evil of his own accord — since besides, man, set under the judgment of God, had to render that judgment just on the basis of the merits of his own choice, a choice that was free. [7] For otherwise neither the reward for good nor the penalty for evil could rightly be weighed out to one who had been found good or evil by necessity rather than by will. On this point the law too was established — not excluding freedom but proving it, in obedience rendered of one's own accord or transgression committed of one's own accord; thus freedom of choice lay open toward either outcome. If, then, both the goodness and the reason of God are found bound up with the freedom of choice granted to man, one ought not, having set aside that first definition of goodness and reason — which must be established before any discussion — pass judgment afterward, on the basis of the outcome, that God ought not to have instituted man so, simply because he turned out otherwise than would befit God, but rather, once it has been discerned that he had to institute him so, to leave that point settled and go on to examine the rest. [8] For the rest, it is easy for men, stumbling at once upon man's ruin before they have examined his condition, to charge the Author with what happened, simply because the Author's reasoning has not been examined. In sum, the goodness of God, once seen from the very beginning of his works, will persuade us that no evil could have come from God; and man's freedom, upon reconsideration, will show itself the more likely defendant for what it itself committed.
7.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 7 ========

[1] By this definition everything about God stands intact: the nature of his goodness, the reasoning of his arrangement, and the abundance of his foreknowledge and power. Still, you owe God the utmost seriousness and a special trust in the whole of his ordinance, so that you stop asking whether something could have happened against God's will. For once you hold fast to the seriousness and trustworthiness of the good God — while granting that his rational arrangements must be vindicated on their own terms — you will not be amazed that God did not step in against what he did not want to happen, in order to preserve what he did want. [2] For if he had once granted man freedom and power of choice — and granted it worthily, as we have shown — then he had certainly granted it to be enjoyed by the very authority of that grant: enjoyed, insofar as it rested with God himself, in keeping with his own nature, that is, for good (for who would grant anything against himself?); but insofar as it rested with man, in accordance with the stirrings of his own liberty (for who fails to let the one to whom he has once granted the enjoyment of a thing use it as his own mind and preference dictate?). It followed, then, that God should withdraw from the freedom once conceded to man — that is, hold in himself both his foreknowledge and his surpassing power, by which he could have intervened to keep man from attempting to misuse his freedom and so slipping into danger. [3] For if he had intervened, he would have torn up the freedom of choice which he had granted by reason and by goodness. Well then, suppose he had intervened, suppose he had torn up that freedom of choice, calling man back from the tree, keeping that cunning serpent from meeting the woman — would not Marcion cry out, "O fickle, unstable, faithless lord, tearing up what he himself established! Why did he grant free will, if he then interferes? Why does he interfere, if he granted it?" Let him choose where to brand him with error — in the granting, or in the revoking. [4] Would he not then seem all the more deceived by ignorance of the future, if he had stood in the way — and would not everyone say he had indulged man as though not knowing how it would turn out? But if he had foreknown that man would misuse his own institution, what is more worthy of God than seriousness, than fidelity to his institutions, whatever they might be? Man would have seen — had he not badly squandered what he had well received — that he himself stood guilty before the law he had refused to obey, not that the lawgiver himself had cheated his own law by not letting its prescription be carried out. [5] These are the very speeches you would most deservedly deliver against the Creator, if he had stood in the way of man's free will with the providence and power you demand of him. As it is, whisper instead on the Creator's behalf of his seriousness, his patience, his fidelity — he who discharged his own institutions both rationally and well.
8.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 8 ========

[1] For he had not brought man forth merely to live, but to live rightly — that is, with regard to God and his law. So then, God himself had granted man life, by making him a living soul; but living rightly he had entrusted to him by charging him to obey the law. Thus he proves that he did not institute man for death, since he now wishes him restored to life, preferring the sinner's repentance to his death. [2] So then, just as God brought upon man a state of life, man drew upon himself a state of death — and this not through weakness, any more than through ignorance, lest anything be laid to the Author's charge. For even the angel who seduced him was free and his own master, and the one seduced was the image and likeness of God, stronger than an angel, and breathed on by a breath of God nobler than the material spirit of which angels are made. "He who makes," it says, "spirits his angels, and a flame of fire his ministers." For God would not have subjected the whole created order to a man weaker and less potent than angels, when he subjected nothing of the kind to them. [3] So too he would not have imposed the burden of the law, if the law were too heavy for a helpless creature to bear; nor would he have bound by the sentence of death one whom he knew could plead the excuse of weakness. Finally, it was not by freedom or by power of choice that he made him weak, but rather by their failure. And thus this same man, this same substance of soul, this same condition of Adam, this same freedom and power of choice makes him today a victor over that same devil, when he conducts himself in obedience to God's laws.
9.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 9 ========

[1] "Yet somehow or other," you say, "the Creator's own substance turns out capable of sin, since the breath of God — that is, the soul — sinned in man, and the corruption of the part cannot but reflect back on the original whole." To answer this, we must examine the quality of the soul. First we must hold fast to what the Greek scripture indicated, calling it a "breathing," not a "spirit." [2] For some, translating from the Greek without weighing the difference or attending to the precise meaning of the words, put "spirit" for "breath," and so give heretics the occasion to smear the Spirit of God — that is, God himself — with sin. And this question has already been raised. Understand, then, that the breath is lesser than the spirit, even though it derives from the spirit — as its little breeze, so to speak, but not the spirit itself. For a breeze is thinner than wind, and though the breeze comes from the wind, the breeze is not the wind. It can also aptly be said that "breath" is the image of "spirit." [3] This is exactly why man bears God's image, which is to say, the image of spirit — since God is himself spirit. Breath, accordingly, is the image spirit casts. But an image will never in every respect be equal to the truth; it is one thing to exist according to the truth, another to be the truth itself. So too the breath, though it is the image of spirit, cannot match the image of God so completely that, because the truth — that is, the spirit, that is, God — is without sin, the breath too, that is, the image, must therefore be incapable of admitting sin. [4] In this the image will fall short of the truth, and the breath be inferior to the spirit, though it possesses those outlines, so to speak, of God: that it is an immortal soul, that it is free and its own master, that it is largely prescient, that it is rational, capable of understanding and knowledge — yet in these too it remains an image, not reaching to the very force of divinity, and so not reaching either to complete immunity from sin, because that belongs to God alone, that is, to the truth, and this alone is not permitted to the image. [5] For just as an image, though it reproduces all the lines of the truth, still lacks that very force, having no motion of its own, so too the soul, the image of spirit, was unable to reproduce the one thing that is its force — namely, the happy incapacity to sin. Were it otherwise, it would count as spirit rather than soul — not a man endowed with a soul, but God outright. [6] And besides, not everything that belongs to God will be reckoned God, so that you should demand of the breath — because it is God's breath — that it be void of sin, as if it were God. For you yourself, if you blow into a flute, do not make the flute a man, even though you blew from your own soul, just as God blew from his own spirit. Finally, since Scripture plainly says that God breathed into man's face, and that man turned into a soul that lives, rather than a spirit that gives life, it thereby set the soul apart from the condition proper to its Maker. [7] For a work must of necessity be something other than its maker — that is, inferior to the maker. A jug made by a potter will not itself be a potter; no more will a breath made by spirit therefore be spirit. Consider, too, whether the very fact that it is called a "breath" — "soul" — does not show that it passed from the condition of breath into some still lesser quality. "So then," you say, "you have granted the soul a weakness you earlier denied it." Certainly — when you demand it be equal to God, that is, immune from sin, I call it weak. But when it is set against an angel, I must defend it as the stronger, being the Lord of the whole created order, whom even the angels now serve, and who will one day judge the angels too, if it stands firm in God's law — which in the beginning it refused to do. [8] This, then, is precisely what the breath of God was able to admit; it was able, but it was not bound to. For it had the ability through the thinness of its substance, being breath and not spirit; but it was not bound to, through the power of choice, by which it was free, not a slave — attended, moreover, by the further demonstration of a command not to sin, backed by the threat of death, by which the thinness of its substance might be shored up and the freedom of its judgment kept in check. So then, it can no longer be thought that the soul sinned through that which it shares in common with God — that is, through the breath — but through that which was added to its substance, that is, through free will: granted by God, indeed, rationally, but set in motion by man just as he chose. [9] If this is how things stand, then the whole of God's arrangement stands cleared of the reproach of evil. For the freedom of choice will not throw its own fault back upon the one who gave it, but upon the one who did not administer it as he ought. And after all, what wrong will you lay at the Creator's door? Where the fault is man's own, it cannot also be God's, precisely because it is man's; and whoever turns out to be its forbidder, indeed its condemner, cannot at the same time be counted its author. If death is the evil, death will bring reproach not on the one who threatened it, but on the one who despised the warning — on him as its author. For man made death by despising it; it would certainly not have come to be, had he not despised the warning.
10.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 10 ========

[1] But even if you shift the charge of wrongdoing off man and onto the devil, as instigator of the sin, so as to aim the accusation at the Creator by this route too, as the devil's maker — "he who makes his angels spirits" — then whatever was made by God, that is, an angel, belongs to the one who made it; but whatever was not made by God, that is, the devil, that is, the slanderer, remains to be explained as having made himself, by slandering God — and falsely too: first, that God had barred them from eating of any tree whatsoever; next, that they would supposedly not have died, had they eaten; third, as though God had grudged them divinity. [2] Where, then, did the malice of lying and deceit toward men, and of slander toward God, come from? Certainly not from God, who instituted the angel, too, as good, out of the form of his good works. In fact he is brought forth as the wisest of all before he became the devil — unless wisdom is an evil! And if you unroll the prophecy of Ezekiel, you will readily observe that this angel was good by institution and corrupted only by his own will. [3] For under the person of the prince of Tyre the word is pronounced against the devil: "And the word of the Lord came to me, saying: Son of man, raise up a dirge over the prince of Tyre, and say: Thus says the Lord: You are the seal of likeness" — meaning, you who have broken the seal of the integrity of your image and likeness — "a crown of beauty" (this, as the most eminent of angels, as archangel, as wisest of all) "you came to be amid the delights of your God's paradise" — for it was there that God, in the second forming of the shape of living creatures, had made the angels. "You were clothed with every precious stone: sardius, topaz, emerald, carbuncle, sapphire, jasper, ligure, agate, amethyst, chrysolite, beryl, onyx, and you filled your barns and your treasuries with gold. From the day you were created, when I set you as a cherub on the holy mountain of God, you were in the midst of fiery stones, you were blameless in your days, from the day you were created, until your wounds were found; out of the abundance of your trading you filled your storehouses, and you sinned" — and so on, all of which plainly belongs properly to the reproach of an angel, not of that human prince, since no human being ever came into existence within God's paradise — not even Adam, who instead was carried there afterward — nor was any man set as a cherub on the holy mountain of God, that is, in the heavenly heights, from which the Lord himself testifies that Satan too fell, nor did any man dwell among fiery stones, among the gem-like, blazing rays of the stars — whence Satan too was cast down like lightning. [4] No, it is the very author of the sin who was being marked out under the person of the sinful man — blameless, indeed, from the day of his creation, made good by God for good, as befits blameless conditions from a good Maker, adorned with every angelic glory, and established with God, good beside the Good — but afterward, by his own act, turned aside into evil. "From the day," it says, "your wounds appeared" — reckoning to him those wounds by which he wounded the man cast out of obedience to God — [5] and from that day he sinned, from the day he sowed sin, and from then on carried on the abundance of his "trading," that is, of his malice — the tally, so to speak, of his sins — he too having been made no less free in will, as a spirit. For God would not have ordained anything so close to himself without such freedom. Yet by condemning him in advance God bore witness that he had strayed of his own accord from the form of his institution into the wickedness he had conceived by his own lust, and by measuring out the space allowed for his operations he acted according to the reasoning of his own goodness — deferring the destruction of the devil by the same design as the restoration of man. [6] For he gave time for the contest, so that man too, by that same freedom of choice by which he had been cut down, might strike down his enemy, proving his own fault, not God's, and so recover salvation deservedly, through victory; and so that the devil, once victor, might be punished the more bitterly by the one he had earlier cast down; and so that God might be found all the more good, sustaining man to be all the more glorious, on his way back to the paradise where he would once again have license to pluck the tree of life.
11.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 11 ========

So then, up until man's transgression, God was from the beginning only good — thereafter he becomes judge, and severe, and (as the Marcionites would have it) savage. At once the woman is condemned to bear children in pain and to be subject to her husband — she who before had heard, without a trace of sorrow, the blessing of increase for her race: "Increase and multiply" — she who had been appointed to be a help to the man, not a servant. At once the earth too is cursed, though before it had been blessed. At once thorns and thistles, though before there was grass and herbs and fruit-bearing trees. At once sweat and toil for bread, though before food was free from every tree and sustenance secure. Thereafter man is destined for the earth, though before he was made from the earth; thereafter destined for death, though before destined for life; thereafter clothed in skins, though before naked without a qualm. So the goodness of God comes first, according to nature; the severity comes after, according to a cause. The one is innate, the other incidental; the one proper to him, the other adapted to circumstance; the one original, the other applied as needed. For nature ought not to have kept goodness inoperative, nor should a cause have let severity go by unexercised. God gave the one to himself, the other to the situation. Begin now, then, to make out a case against the standing of the judge, as an accomplice of evil — you who for that very reason dreamed up another god, only good, simply because you cannot stomach a judge. And yet we have shown that even that other god is a judge as well; or if not a judge, then certainly the founder of a discipline that is perverse and pointless, since it is never enforced — that is, never judged. You cannot disapprove of God as judge without approving a god who is not a judge; and beyond doubt you will then have to indict justice itself, since it is justice that produces the judge — or else you must count it among the varieties of malice, that is, list injustice under the titles of goodness. For now, on your reckoning, justice becomes evil, if injustice is good. Further, once you are forced to pronounce injustice the worst of things, that same yoke compels you to reckon justice the best. For nothing that rivals evil is anything but good, just as nothing that rivals good is anything but evil. So then, in the same measure that injustice is evil, justice is good. And it must be reckoned not merely a species of goodness but its guardian, because goodness stripped of the rule of justice, left unable to be just, forfeits its own name as goodness — an unjust goodness is no goodness at all. For nothing is good that is unjust, but everything is good that is just.
12.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 12 ========

So then, if the partnership and mutual concord of goodness and justice cannot admit of their being pulled apart, with what face will you establish a duality of gods, assigning in separate compartments a good god here and a just god there? Where the good stands, there the just stands too. From the very beginning, indeed, the Creator was as good as he was just. Both proceeded together. His goodness worked the world into being; his justice gave it measure and proportion — the very justice that even then judged the world worthy of being made from good things, because it judged in accordance with the counsel of goodness. It is justice at work when a dividing line gets drawn: light on one side, shadow on the other; daytime set apart from nighttime; sky marked off from ground; the waters above kept distinct from those beneath; the gathered seas parted from the dry land now exposed; the greater luminary distinguished from the lesser, each ruling its own stretch of hours; male set opposite female; the tree bearing the knowledge that brings death set opposite the tree bearing life; the present world set opposite paradise; and creatures shaped from the deep set opposite creatures formed from the soil. Everything that goodness conceived, justice marked out and distinguished. All this was arranged and set in order by an act of judgment. Every position, every disposition of the elements, every effect, every motion, every state, every rising and every setting of each single thing — these are the judgments of the Creator. Do not imagine, then, that he is to be defined as a judge only from the point where evil began, and so smear justice with the taint of evil's cause. By these arguments we have shown that justice came forth together with goodness, the source of all things, so that justice itself must be reckoned innate in God and natural to him, not something acquired from outside — justice that has been found in the Lord to be the arbiter of his own works.
13.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 13 ========

But, they say, once evil had erupted, and from that point God's goodness began to have to deal with an adversary, that same justice of God took on a further task as well: now that things had turned adversarial, it had to direct goodness accordingly — setting aside its freedom, by which God is good of his own accord, and weighing it instead by what each person has earned — granted to those who merit it, withheld from those who do not, revoked from those who show no thanks — and so on every count defended against its rivals. So this whole work of justice is a stewardship of goodness: what it condemns by judging, what it punishes by condemning, what you call its savagery — all of it, in fact, serves the good, not the evil. In short, fear of judgment contributes to good, not to evil. It was not enough for the good to be commended purely on its own merits, laboring as it already was under an adversary. For even granting that it is commendable on its own account, it is not thereby preserved, since it is already assailable through that adversary — unless some force of dread stood over it, compelling even the unwilling to seek out and guard the good. Besides, with so many enticements of evil laying siege to the good, who would pursue a good he could despise with impunity? Who would guard something he could lose without any risk? You know the way of evil is broad and far more crowded — would not everyone slide down it, if there were nothing to fear along it? We shudder at the terrible threats of the Creator, and even so we are scarcely torn away from evil. What if he threatened nothing at all? Will you call this justice evil, when it gives no favor to evil? Will you deny this is good, when it looks out for the good? What sort of god, tell me, would you want? What sort would actually suit you better? One under whom sins could rejoice, and the devil could mock at will? Would you judge that god good who could make man more evil still by giving him security in his wrongdoing? Who is the author of good, if not the one who also exacts it? So too, who is a stranger to evil, if not the one who is also its enemy? Who is its enemy, if not the one who also fights it? Who fights it, if not the one who also punishes it? Thus God is wholly good, in that he is everything for the sake of the good. Thus, finally, he is almighty, because he has power both to help and to harm. It would be a lesser thing merely to do good, as if he were capable of nothing but doing good. With what confidence could I hope for good from a being like that, if that is all he can do? How could I strive after the reward of innocence, if I did not also have cause to dread the reward of guilt? I would inevitably lose confidence, fearing that a god who had no power over the one side would not reward the other either. To this extent justice is even the very fullness of divinity itself, exhibiting God as perfect, both Father and Lord — Father through mercy, Lord through discipline; Father through a gentle power, Lord through a strict one; Father to be loved out of devotion, Lord to be feared out of necessity — to be loved because he would rather have compassion than burnt offering, and to be feared because he has no wish for sin; to be loved because he prefers a sinner's repentance to his death, and to be feared because he does not want sinners who, even now, refuse to repent. That is why the law lays down both commands: "You shall love God," and, "You shall fear God." One is set before the obedient, the other before the wayward.
14.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 14 ========

For everything you throw at me, God meets you — the same one who strikes and also heals, who kills and also gives life, who humbles and also exalts, who creates evils and also makes peace — so that I may answer the heretics on this ground too. For look, they say, he himself declares that he is the maker of evils, saying, "I am he who makes evils." Seizing upon the shared use of a single word that leaves two kinds of evil confused in ambiguity — since "evils" is said both of wrongdoings and of punishments — they want him to be understood everywhere as the maker of evils, so that he can be denounced as the author of wickedness. We, however, drawing the distinction between the two senses, separating the evils of wrongdoing from the evils of punishment, the evils of guilt from the evils of penalty, assign to each category its own proper author: the devil as author of the evils of sin and guilt, God the Creator as author of the evils of punishment and penalty — so that the one class is charged to malice, the other to justice, the evils that a judgment creates set against the evils of the offense it judges. Of these evils, then, the ones that suit a judge, the Creator declares — evils, certainly, to those on whom they are visited as payment, but in their own right good, inasmuch as they are just, and defenders of the good, and enemies of wrongdoing, and in this respect worthy of God. Either prove those evils unjust, so as to prove them chargeable to malice — that is, the evils of injustice — because if they belong to justice, they will no longer be evils at all, but goods; evils only to those to whom they come, and even then goods handed out directly in place of evils. Go on, then, and maintain that it was unjust for man, the willing despiser of the divine law, to be deprived of what he had chosen to be without; unjust that the wickedness of that age was cut down first by rains, then by fires; unjust that Egypt, foulest and most superstitious of nations, ever more a tormentor of a people who were its guests, was struck with a tenfold chastisement. "He hardens Pharaoh's heart." But he who had already denied God, who had already time and again in his arrogance thrown off God's ambassadors, who had already piled further labor onto the people's toil, deserved to be handed over to destruction; and finally, as an Egyptian, he had long since stood guilty before God of a nation's idolatry, worshiping ibis and crocodile sooner than the living God. He struck the people too, but they were ungrateful. He sent bears against children too, but they were disrespecting a prophet.
15.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 15 ========

Examine, then, first of all whether the judge's justice is sound; and once that reasoning stands firm, the severity too, and everything through which that severity runs its course, will be credited to reason and to justice. And, not to linger over too many cases, make out the rest of the charges as well, so that you may condemn his sentences — offer excuses for the wrongdoings, so that you may reject his judgments. Do not find fault with the judge; refute the evil judge instead, if you can. For even granting that he exacted the sins of the fathers from the children, it was the people's own stubbornness that had forced such remedies, so that, out of concern at least for their own descendants, they would be brought to keep the divine law. For who does not care more about his children's welfare than about his own? But then, if the blessing of the fathers was likewise destined for their offspring, with no merit of their own as yet involved, why should not the guilt of the fathers overflow onto the children too? As with favor, so with offense — favor and offense alike were to run through the whole line — reserving what was afterward to be decreed, that men would no longer say that the fathers ate the sour grape and the children's teeth were set on edge; that is, the father would not bear the son's wrongdoing, nor the son the father's, but each would be held guilty of his own wrongdoing, so that, once the people's stubbornness had been tamed by the stubbornness of the law, justice would thereafter judge not the family line but the individual persons. And yet, if you take the true gospel on its own terms, you will see exactly who ends up under the ruling that charges children with the wrongs of their fathers — namely, those who of their own accord were about to call this very ruling down upon their own heads: "His blood be upon our heads and upon our children's." This, then, is what the whole providence of God had already decreed, because it had already heard it said.
16.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 16 ========

[1] So severity too is good, because it is just, provided the judge is good — that is, just. Likewise all the other qualities through which a good work of good severity runs its course are good, whether wrath or jealousy or fierceness. All of these are owed to severity, just as severity itself is owed to justice. The insolence of an age that owed reverence had to be avenged. And so nothing that attaches to a judge as judge can be thrown in the judge's face — these things are themselves free of blame, exactly as the judge is. What, after all — if you say a man must be a doctor, will you then accuse his instruments because they cut, cauterize, amputate, and bind, when a doctor cannot be a doctor without the tools of his art? [2] No — accuse him for cutting badly, amputating recklessly, cauterizing carelessly, and then find fault with his instruments too, as bad servants of a bad hand. It comes to the same thing when you admit that God is indeed a judge, yet demolish the very impulses and faculties by which he judges. It is from the prophets and from Christ that we are schooled concerning God, not from philosophers, and certainly not from Epicurus. [3] We who believe that God has even acted on earth and taken on the lowliness of human form for the sake of human salvation stand very far from the opinion of those who deny that God bothers with anything at all. From this comes that definition the heretics too have arrived at: if God grows angry and jealous and is roused and provoked, then he can also be corrupted, and therefore he can also die. But it is the very mark of Christians to believe that God has even died, and yet lives forever and ever. [4] Fools they are, who prejudge divine things by human ones — reasoning that because such passions, in man, belong to a corruptible condition, therefore they must be reckoned of the same standing in God. Distinguish the substances, and assign to each the sensibilities proper to it, as different as the substances themselves require, even though they may seem to share a common vocabulary. Scripture speaks of God's hand at his right side, and of his eyes, and of his feet, yet these are not therefore to be equated with human members merely because they share a name. As great as the difference will be between a divine body and a human one under the same names of members, just as great will be the difference between the divine mind and the human under the same words for its faculties — faculties which the corruptibility of human substance makes as corruptible in man as the incorruptibility of the divine substance makes them incorruptible in God. [5] You surely confess God to be Creator? Surely, you say. How then do you reckon anything in God to be human, and not everything divine? The God you do not deny, you confess to be not human — since in confessing him God, you have already ruled him utterly distinct from every quality of human conditions. Furthermore, since you likewise acknowledge that man was breathed by God into a living soul, and not God by man, it is quite perverse to establish human traits in God rather than divine traits in man, and to clothe God in man's image rather than man in God's. [6] And this, then, must be reckoned the image of God in man: that the human mind possesses the same impulses and faculties as God, though not of the same kind as God's — for in substance, both their condition and their outcome differ. Indeed, why do you claim as divine their opposite sensibilities — gentleness, I mean, patience, mercy, and their very source, goodness? And yet we do not possess even these perfectly, because God alone is perfect. So too we do not undergo those other forms — wrath, I mean, and exasperation — as happily, because God alone is happy in the property of incorruptibility. [7] For he will be angry, but not shaken; he will be provoked, but not endangered; he will be moved, but not overturned. He must, of necessity, bring all his faculties to bear for all his purposes — as many sensibilities as there are causes: wrath for the wicked, bile for the ungrateful, jealousy for the proud, and whatever the wicked deserve. So too mercy for those who err, patience for those who do not yet repent, generosity for the deserving, and whatever the good require. All of which he undergoes in his own manner, the manner that befits him to undergo it — for the sake of the very man who undergoes the same things equally in his own manner.
17.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 17 ========

[1] These points, once weighed, show the whole order of God the judge to be the workman — and, to put it more worthily, the guardian — of that catholic and supreme goodness which the Marcionites refuse to acknowledge in this same God, wanting it kept separate from any judicial sensibilities and pure in its own isolated state: the goodness that rains on the good and the bad alike and makes its sun rise on the just and the unjust — something the other god provides not at all. For even though Marcion dared to strike this very testimony to Christ's Creator out of the Gospel, the world itself stands inscribed with it and is read by every conscience. [2] And this very patience of the Creator will stand in judgment against Marcion — that patience which awaits a sinner's turning back rather than longing for his death, and which favors mercy over sacrifice; which turned aside the destruction already decreed for the Ninevites, and granted Hezekiah's tears a span of extra life, and restored the kingdom of Babylon to its tyrant once he had done penance — that same mercy, I say, which granted Saul's doomed son to a people's devotion, and freed David, once he confessed his sin against the house of Uriah, by pardon, and restored Israel itself as many times as it judged it, and revived it as many times as it rebuked it. [3] So do not merely look at the judge and be converted also to the model of the supremely good. Note him when he punishes, but consider him also when he forgives. Weigh his gentleness against his severity. Once you have discovered both meeting together in the Creator, you will also discover in him that very quality on account of which you put faith in another god. Come, finally, to an inspection of his teachings, his disciplines, his precepts and counsels. You will say, perhaps, that these too are fixed by human laws. But before the Lycurguses and Solons of the world, there was Moses, and there was God. No posterity fails to receive from its beginnings. [4] Yet it was not from your god that my Creator learned to prescribe: You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall not covet what is another's, honor your father and mother, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. To these principal counsels of innocence, chastity, justice, and piety are added prescriptions of humanity as well — such as freedom granted to slaves once every seven years, with the land likewise given its rest in that same season, yielding its place to the poor, and even the ox treading out the grain has the muzzle loosed from its mouth so as to enjoy the fruit of its present labor — so that this premeditated humanity, practiced first on beasts, might the more readily be schooled toward the relief of men.
18.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 18 ========

[1] But which of the law's good points shall I defend first, rather than the one heresy has been most eager to tear apart — the rule of retaliation, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a bruise repaid for a bruise? This does not sanction the mutual license of doing injury, but looks entirely to restraining violence altogether: since to a people so hard-hearted and faithless toward God it would have seemed a long wait, even an incredible one, to expect vengeance from God — vengeance to be proclaimed only later, through the prophet, in the words 'Vengeance is mine, and I will repay, says the Lord' — in the meantime the commission of injury was to be uprooted by the fear of an immediate reprisal, and the license of retaliation itself served as a check on provocation, so that the seething of wickedness would subside, since the second wrong permitted deterred the first, and the first, once deterred, meant the second was never committed — the fear of the like-for-like being all the easier to feel through that same taste of suffering. Nothing is more bitter than suffering the very thing you have done to others. [2] And if the law withholds certain foods and pronounces unclean certain animals that had once been blessed, understand it as counsel toward the exercise of self-restraint, and recognize the bridle placed on that appetite which, even while eating the bread of angels, still craved the cucumbers and melons of Egypt. Recognize too the foresight shown toward gluttony's companions — lust, of course, and luxury — which generally cool under the discipline of the belly. For the people had eaten and drunk and risen up to play. So too, in order to curb the ardor for wealth on the side that pleads the necessity of sustenance, the pursuit of expensive foods was cut away — and finally, so that man could more readily be trained by God toward fasting, he grew accustomed to sparse and plain fare, with nothing more sumptuous left to hunger after. [3] The Creator is indeed to be blamed — for taking foods away from his own people rather than from the still more ungrateful Marcionites! Let no one find fault, either, with the burdens of sacrifices and the fussy business of rites and offerings, as though God had desired such things for his own sake, seeing that he cries out so plainly, 'What are your many sacrifices to me?' and 'Who required these things at your hands?' — but let him instead perceive that industry of God by which he wished to bind a people prone to idolatry and that sort of transgression to his own worship through observances of the very kind by which the world's superstition operated, so as to call them away from it, bidding them, as if he desired it, to do for him what would keep them from sinning by making idols.
19.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 19 ========

[1] But even in the very transactions of life and human intercourse, at home and abroad, down to the care of household vessels, he marked out every kind of distinction, so that with these legal disciplines meeting them at every turn, people would never for a moment be free of regard for God. For what could make a man more blessed than that his will should be in the law of the Lord, and that he should meditate on the law of the Lord day and night? A law which was not promulgated by the harshness of its author, but by the reasoning of the highest kindness — one that tamed the people's hardness rather than caused it, and hammered a raw faith into obedience through laborious observances — not to touch here on the law's hidden meanings, its spiritual and prophetic sense, figured almost throughout in every argument. [2] For now it suffices to say, put simply, that it joined man to God in obligation, such that only one who takes no delight in serving God would have cause to condemn it. And to assist this benefit of the law — not burden — that same goodness of God appointed the prophets as well, teaching what is worthy of God: to remove wickedness from the soul, to learn to do good, to seek out judgment, to give judgment for the orphan and justify the widow, to love inquiry, to flee the touch of the wicked, to release the oppressed unbroken, to tear up the unjust bond, to break bread for the hungry and bring the homeless into your house, to cover the naked when you see him, and not to despise your own kin, to restrain the tongue from evil and the lips from speaking deceit, to turn from evil and do good, to seek peace and pursue it, to be angry and not sin — that is, not to persist in anger or grow savage — not to enter into the counsel of the wicked, nor take a stand in the path of sinners, nor take a seat among the scornful. But where instead? [3] Behold how good and how pleasant a thing it is for brothers to live together as one, pondering the Lord's law by day and by night — for it is indeed better to rely on the Lord than to rely on man, and to place one's hope in the Lord rather than in man. What recompense, after all, can a man gain from God? He becomes like a tree set beside flowing streams, bearing its fruit each season, its leaves never withering, and everything he undertakes comes to fruition. But whoever is innocent and clean of heart, who has not invoked God's name for nothing nor sworn falsely against his neighbor, that one shall obtain a blessing from the Lord and mercy from God his deliverer. [4] The Lord keeps watch over those who fear him and who place their hope in his compassion, so as to rescue their souls from death — eternal death, that is — and sustain them through famine — the famine, that is, of everlasting life. Numerous are the trials of the just, yet the Lord rescues them from every one. Costly, in the Lord's regard, is the passing of those devoted to him. He guards every bone of theirs, so that not a single one is shattered. He will ransom the souls of those who serve him. These few citations we have brought forward out of so many scriptures of the Creator, and I think nothing further is now lacking to the testimony of God the best — since these already sufficiently seal both the precepts of his goodness and its promised rewards.
20.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 20 ========

But these cuttlefish — whose very shape is one of those fishy foods the law itself refused — sensing their own exposure, spew their darkness of blasphemy from that quarter, and so, by flinging about and insisting on charges that would tarnish the shining goodness of the Creator, they scatter each man's attention just as it draws near the point. Yet even through these murks we shall track down their malice, and drag the machinations of darkness into the light — chiefly the charge they level at the Creator over that plundering — the swindling away of golden and silver vessels — which he ordered the Hebrews to carry out against the Egyptians. Come now, you most unlucky heretic, I call on you yourself as arbiter: examine the case of each nation first, and only then pass judgment on the author of the command. The Egyptians demand back their vessels of gold and silver from the Hebrews. The Hebrews, for their part, lodge a counter-claim, pleading — on the authority of the same book of Scripture and in the name of those same fathers — that wages are owed them for that servile labor: for the bricks they made, deducted; for the cities and villas they built. What will you decide, elector of the best of gods? That the Hebrews must own up to fraud, or that the Egyptians owe compensation? For they say the matter was actually handled through envoys on both sides — the Egyptians demanding back their vessels, the Jews demanding back the value of their labor. And even so, on the question of the vessels, the Egyptians there conceded the justice of it. Today the Hebrews argue still further against the Marcionites, denying that all that gold and silver could possibly suffice as compensation, if the labor of six hundred thousand men over so many years were reckoned at even a single coin a day. And which was the greater party — those demanding back vessels, or those who had inhabited villas and cities? Which then is the greater grievance — that of the Egyptians, or that of the Hebrews' claim to gratitude? So that, by the sheer verdict of the wrongs done, the Hebrews might strike back at the Egyptians — free men reduced to the slave-pen; so that their scribes might display before their own tribunals nothing but their own shoulders, lacerated by the insulting savagery of the lash — it would have been declared that the Hebrews were owed satisfaction not from a few platters and cups (and those belonging to a few of the wealthiest at that), but from the entire resources of the Egyptians themselves and from collections taken up among the whole populace. So then, if the Hebrews' case is good, then good too is the case — that is, the command — of the Creator, who both made the Egyptians generous without their knowing it, and who eased his own people's plight in the narrow straits of their hasty departure with some quiet compensation. In fact he ordered less to be exacted than was due — the Egyptians ought to have restored the Hebrews their very children as well.
21.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 21 ========

So too in other matters you reproach him with contradictory commands, as though fickle and unsteady — forbidding work on the Sabbath, and then ordering the Ark to be carried around for eight days running, that is, including a Sabbath, during the siege of Jericho. But you fail to look closely at the law of the Sabbath, which forbids human works, not divine ones. For it says: 'Six days shall you labor and do all your work, but on the seventh day is the Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall do no work on it.' What kind of work? Yours, obviously. For it follows that what was being removed on the Sabbath was precisely the work he had enjoined for the six days before — that is, your work, human and everyday work. But carrying the Ark around can hardly be counted as everyday work, nor as human work at all — it was rare, sacrosanct, and, coming as it did from God's own command at that moment, plainly divine. What it signified I would explain, were it not too long a task to unfold the figures underlying all the Creator's arrangements — figures which perhaps you would not even accept anyway. But it is more telling if you are refuted out of plain, settled facts, by the simplicity of truth rather than by fine-spun inquiry — as here too there is a clear distinction: the Sabbath forbids human work, not divine. That is why the man who went out to gather sticks on the Sabbath was put to death: he had done his own work, forbidden by the law. But those who carried the Ark around on the Sabbath did so with impunity: for they were performing not their own work but God's, acting, of course, on his own express command.
22.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 22 ========

Likewise, when he forbids the making of any likeness of things in heaven, on earth, or in the waters, he also shows his reasons — namely, to cut off the very substance of idolatry. For he adds: 'You shall not worship them nor serve them.' As for the bronze serpent, which Moses was later commanded by the Lord to make, that had nothing to do with sanctioning idolatry, but with curing those who were being ravaged by serpents. And I say nothing here of the figure of that remedy. So too the golden cherubim and seraphim, fashioned on the Ark as a plainly simple ornament suited to its furnishing, having reasons entirely different from the condition of idolatry on account of which the making of likenesses is forbidden, cannot be seen as clashing with the law against forbidden images, since they are not caught in that same status of image-making on whose account images are forbidden. We have already spoken of the rational purpose behind the institution of sacrifices — namely, to call people away from idols to God through those very rites — which, when he cast them off again, saying, 'What are your countless sacrifices to me?' he meant precisely this: that he had never demanded them for himself as such. 'I will not drink the blood of bulls,' he says — for elsewhere too he says, 'The eternal God will not hunger nor thirst.' For even though he had regard to Abel's offerings, and gladly smelled the sweet savor of Noah's burnt offerings, what pleasure could there be in the entrails of rams or the reek of burning victims? No — it was the plain, reverent disposition of the ones bringing what had come to them from God in the first place — the food itself and its pleasant aroma — that God reckoned as pleasing to him; not the acts he was demanding for their own sake, but that for the sake of which they were done, namely the honoring of God. If a client, offering a rich man or a king who wants for nothing some tiny, worthless little gift, does so anyway — will the paltriness and poor quality of the gift offend the rich man or the king, or will the gesture of homage please him? But if a client offers gifts freely, or even at command, in due order, and observes the king's high days, yet not out of good faith, nor with a pure heart, nor with wholehearted service in everything else either — will not the king or rich man rightly cry out, 'What are your countless gifts to me? I am full!' — and, 'Your feasts and your holy days and your sabbaths?' By calling them 'yours,' he means: things they had come to celebrate according to their own whim, not according to reverence for God, and had thereby made their own, no longer God's — thus showing that his refusal of what he himself had prescribed to be performed was conditional and reasoned.
23.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 23 ========

If, further, you want us to think him fickle even in his dealings with persons — rejecting men he once approved, or careless in approving men later to be rejected, as if either condemning his own past verdicts or ignorant of the future — in fact nothing suits a good judge so well as to reject and to choose according to merits actually present. Saul is chosen while he has not yet turned scornful toward Samuel the prophet. Solomon, by contrast, is cast off, but not before he has fallen under the spell of foreign wives and had become enslaved to the deities worshipped by Moab and Sidon. What was the Creator to do, to escape the reproach of the Marcionites? Condemn men in advance while they were still behaving well, on account of sins yet to come? But it was not the way of a good God to condemn men in advance who had not yet earned it. Well then, should he refuse now to punish sinners because of their past good deeds? But it was not the way of a just judge to let past good works cancel out present crimes. Or is there any man without fault, such that God should always choose him, being never able to reject him? Or again, any man without some good deed, such that God should always reject him, being never able to choose him? Show unbroken goodness, and you will never be rejected; show unbroken evil, and you will never be chosen. But if the same man, being now this and now that according to the times, is weighed by God — both good and judge — in each case accordingly, that is no fickleness or carelessness in reversing verdicts, but the gravest and most far-seeing scrutiny, weighing each man's merits as they stand at the time.
24.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 24 ========

So too you twist his 'repentance' to a bad sense, as though he repents out of fickleness or lack of foresight — indeed, as if out of the very memory of a fault — since he did say, 'I repent that I made Saul king,' laying down, as you would have it, that repentance implies confession of some evil deed or error. But that is not always so. For it can happen that the confession of repentance, even over good deeds, arises from indignation and reproach against someone who has proved ungrateful for a kindness done — just as here, in the case of Saul, whose honoring is being announced by the Creator, who had done no wrong when he took Saul up into the kingship and enlarged him with the Holy Spirit; for he had chosen a man supremely good — 'such as,' it says, 'there was none among the sons of Israel' — most deservedly. Nor had he failed to foresee how it would turn out. No one will grant you the right to charge with lack of foresight the very one whom you yourself, without denying he is God, confess to be provident — for that is a property proper to his divinity. No, it was Saul's evil deed, as I said, that he was burdening with the confession of his own 'repentance' — a repentance which, given that there was no fault in the choosing of Saul itself, ought rather to be understood as expressing indignation, not accusation. 'But look,' you say, 'I see it plainly meant as a crime in the case of the Ninevites, where the Scripture of Jonah says, "And the Lord repented of the evil he had said he would do to them, and did not do it," just as Jonah himself said to the Lord, "Therefore I fled beforehand to Tarshish, because I knew that you are merciful and compassionate, patient and abounding in mercy, one who repents of evils."' Well then, it is well that he put first the title of the best of gods — namely, most patient toward the wicked and most abounding in mercy and compassion toward those who acknowledge and lament their sins, such as the Ninevites were then. For if he is 'best' who is such as this, you ought first to grant on this point that a rush of malice does not befit such a one — that is, one who is best. And because Marcion himself maintains that a good tree may not produce bad fruits either, yet Scripture named it 'malice' all the same — something the 'best' god, as you conceive him, cannot admit — is there then some interpretation available by which these 'evils' can be understood in a sense that could indeed befall the 'best'? There is. We say, in short, that what is meant here by 'malice' is not something to be traced back to the nature of the Creator, as though he were evil, but to his power, as of a judge; in that sense he declared, 'I am he who forms evils,' and, 'Behold, I send evils upon you' — not sins, but punishments, whose ill repute we have already sufficiently cleared as befitting a judge. And just as, though called 'evils,' they are not blamed in a judge, nor do they by this name show the judge himself to be evil, so too this 'malice' now under discussion must be understood as that which, reckoned among those judicial 'evils,' belongs together with them to the judge. For among the Greeks too, 'malice' is sometimes used for afflictions and injuries, not for wickedness of character — just as it is used here. And so, even granting that the Creator 'repented' of this malice — as though of a creature deserving rejection and due for destruction — even so no crime whatsoever will be charged against the Creator, who had justly and deservedly decreed the destruction of a most iniquitous city. Thus what he had justly determined he did not determine wickedly; he determined it out of justice, not out of malice — but he named the punishment itself 'malice,' from the evil and desert of that very suffering. So, you will say, if you excuse the 'malice' under the name of justice — because he had justly decreed ruin for the Ninevites — then by the same token he must be blamed for having felt repentance over a justice that needed no repenting of. No, I say, God will not repent of justice; and it remains now only to grasp what God's 'repentance' actually is. For if a man repents, it is often out of memory of some great fault, and sometimes even out of resentment over some good deed unappreciated — but it does not follow that God does so in the same way. For to the degree that God neither commits evil nor condemns good, to that same degree there is, with him, no room for repentance either of good or of evil. For Scripture itself settles this for you elsewhere, where Samuel says to Saul: 'The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from your hand this day, and will give it to your neighbor, better than you, and Israel shall be split into two, and he will not turn back nor repent, for he is not as man, to repent.' This statement, then, establishes for every case a wholly different form of divine repentance — one to be reckoned neither from lack of foresight, nor from fickleness, nor from any condemnation of a good or evil deed, as with human repentance. What, then, will be the manner of divine repentance? It is already plain, if you refuse to measure it by human conditions. Nothing else will be understood by it than the simple reversal of an earlier verdict — one that can be admitted even without any blame attaching to the one who makes it, even in a man, let alone in God, whose every verdict is free of fault. And indeed in the Greek sound of the word, 'repentance' [metanoia] is compounded not from the confession of a fault, but from a change of mind — which is exactly how we have shown it to be governed in God's case, in response to the shifting turn of events.
25.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 25 ========

Now, to settle all these matters at once, let me press on to interpret and clear away the rest of the petty faults, weaknesses, and inconsistencies you allege. God cries out, 'Adam, where are you?' — as if, of course, he didn't know where Adam was, and asked in doubt, on the pretext of Adam's shame at his nakedness, whether he had eaten from the tree. But in fact he was neither uncertain of the deed nor ignorant of the place. Rather, it was fitting that Adam, cowering in the consciousness of his sin, should be summoned to come forth into the Lord's sight — not by the bare calling of his name alone, but with some rebuke of the deed already implied. Indeed, 'Where are you, Adam?' is not to be read in the plain interrogative tone, as a question, but with emphasis, as a blow, as an accusation: 'Adam — where are you!' — that is, you are in ruin, that is, you are no longer here — so that the utterance ends in reproach and lament. Besides, he who grasps the whole world in his hand as in a nest, whose throne is heaven and whose footstool is earth — could any corner of paradise possibly have escaped his eyes, so that Adam, wherever he was before being summoned, should not have been as visible to him hiding as he had been eating the forbidden fruit? A wolf or a petty thief does not escape the watchman of your vineyard or garden. I think God, looking down from the heights, can hardly miss anything beneath him. Foolish is the man who turns so great a proof of divine majesty and human instruction into a matter for a sneer. God asks as though uncertain, precisely so that here too, proving man's free will, he might give him, in the matter of either denial or confession, the chance to confess his fault of his own accord and so find relief by that very confession. Just as he inquires of Cain where his brother is — as if he had not already heard Abel's blood crying out from the ground — but so that Cain too might have, by that same power of free choice, the option of denying his crime of his own accord and thereby making it worse; and so that examples might be established for us of confessing our faults rather than denying them, so that even then the gospel teaching might be inaugurated: 'By your own mouth you will be justified, and by your own mouth you will be condemned.' For even though Adam, by reason of the law's sentence, was given over to death, his hope remained intact, since the Lord said, 'Behold, Adam has become as one of us' — meaning, of course, man's future adoption into divinity. And what follows? 'And now, lest he reach out with his hand and take fruit from the tree of life as well, and go on living without end.' By inserting 'and now,' a word of present time, he shows that he made the delay of death only temporary, only for the present. That is why he did not curse Adam and Eve themselves — as candidates for restoration, relieved by their confession. Cain, however, he both cursed and, though Cain was eager to pay for his crime by death, forbade him for the time being to die, so that, beyond his crime, he might also be burdened with the weight of his denial of it. Such was the 'ignorance' of our God — feigned for this very reason, so that the sinner might not be left ignorant of what he must do. But when he comes down to Sodom and Gomorrah, he says, 'I will go down and see if what they have done matches fully the outcry that has reached me, and if it does not, I will find out.' Was he here too, then, uncertain out of ignorance and eager to learn? Or is this the necessary tone of speech, expressing not doubt but menace, under the guise of inquiry? But if you mock God's 'coming down' too, as though he could not otherwise carry out judgment without descending — take care you are not striking a blow against your own god as well. For he too came down, in order to accomplish what he wished.
26.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 26 ========

But, you say, God even swears an oath. By the god of Marcion, perhaps? No, he says, something far more absurd: by himself. What would he mean by that, if there were no other god present to his own consciousness — swearing, at the very moment of swearing, that there is absolutely no other god besides himself? So do you catch him committing perjury, or swearing an empty, meaningless oath? But he cannot be judged guilty of perjury who, as you claim, did not know there was another god — for what a man swears in ignorance is no lie. Nor, on the other hand, is his oath that there is no other god an empty one. It would only be empty if there had never been people who believed in other gods — as there were then, worshippers of idols, and as there are now, heretics. He swears, then, by himself, so that you might at least believe, on the strength of a swearing God, that there is absolutely no other god. It was you, Marcion, who forced God to do this — for even then you were foreseen and provided against! Accordingly, if he also swears in his promises or his threats, wringing out from the start a difficult faith, there is nothing unworthy of God in whatever it takes to make people believe in God. Enough already that even in his fiercest anger our God shows himself petty — when, enraged at the people over the golden calf, he demands of his servant Moses: 'Let me alone, and in my wrath I will destroy them, and I will make you into a great nation.' This is why you are so fond of declaring Moses better than his own god — an intercessor, indeed a restrainer of his wrath. For Moses said, 'Do not act this way — or else wipe me out together with them.' You and your people alike deserve pity, for you fail to recognize Christ prefigured in the person of Moses — the intercessor with the Father, the one who offers his own soul for the salvation of the people. But it is enough that the people were, for the moment, granted specifically to Moses himself. What that servant managed to request of his Lord, the Lord had already requested from himself beforehand. For it was to this end that he said to his servant, 'Let me alone, and I will destroy them' — so that Moses, by his asking and by offering himself, would not let him alone — and so that you might learn just how much a faithful man and a prophet is permitted before God.
27.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 27 ========

Now, to wrap up the rest in brief, whatever else you gather up as petty, weak, and unworthy for the destruction of the Creator, I will lay out on one simple and certain principle: God could not have entered into human dealings without taking on human feelings and human passions, through which he might temper the force of his majesty — intolerable, of course, to human mediocrity — by humility: unworthy of himself, indeed, but necessary for man, and therefore already worthy of God, since no cause is more fitting to God than the rescue of mankind. On this point I would argue at greater length if I were dealing with pagans; though even with heretics the engagement is not so very different. Since you yourselves already believe that God appeared in human form and went about in the rest of the fashion of human life, you can hardly demand any further persuading that God conformed himself to humanity — you stand convicted by your own faith. For if God — and indeed a higher God — laid low the summit of his majesty with such humility that he even subjected himself to death, and death on a cross, why should you not think it fitting that our God too should have accepted a few pettinesses — more tolerable ones, at that, than Jewish insults, gibbets, and tombs? Or are these the very pettinesses that ought, from this point on, to prove that Christ, exposed to human sufferings, belongs to the very God whom you reproach for his humanities? For we too profess that Christ has, from the start, always acted on behalf of God the Father, under his name — that it was he himself who conversed with mankind from the beginning, that he himself met with the patriarchs and prophets, being the Son of the Creator, his Word, whom by uttering him from himself he made his Son, and from then on set over the whole arrangement of his will, diminishing him a little beneath the angels, as it is written in David. By virtue of this diminishment he was also disposed by the Father to those things which you condemn as too human — learning them from the very beginning, being clothed from the very beginning in that manhood which he was to become in the end. He it is who came down, he who asks questions, he who makes requests, he who swears oaths. As for the Father, that he has never been seen by anyone, the common gospel itself will bear witness, Christ saying, 'No one has known the Father except the Son.' For he himself had also declared in the Old Testament, 'No one will see God and live' — marking out the Father as invisible, in whose authority and name he himself, the Son of God, was the God who was seen. But among us too, God is understood in the person of Christ, since in this way he is our God as well. So then, whatever you demand as worthy of God will be found in the invisible, unapproachable, tranquil Father — the god, if I may put it so, of the philosophers. But whatever you condemn as unworthy will be assigned to the Son, the one who was seen, heard, and encountered — the Father's agent and minister, mingling in himself man and God: God in his powers of might, man in his pettinesses — so that he might confer as much on man as he withholds from God. In short, the whole of what you count as disgrace in my God is the very mystery of human salvation. God lived among us in a human way, so that man might be taught to act in a godly way. God dealt with man on equal terms, so that man might be able to deal with God on equal terms. God was found small, so that man might become supremely great. If you scorn such a God as this, I doubt you truly believe, in faith, in a crucified God. How great, then, is your perversity toward both aspects of the Creator's character! You cast him as a judge, and then reproach as savagery the judge's severity that fits the merits of the case. You demand of him supreme goodness, and then, when his gentleness, fitting his kindness, condescends to the measure of human mediocrity, you dismiss it as pettiness. Neither greatness pleases you, nor modesty; neither judge nor friend. What if these very same charges were now discovered in your own god? We have already demonstrated from his own book that he too plays the judge — and a judge must of necessity be stern, and, being stern, is by that same token also harsh, if 'harsh' is indeed the right term.
28.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 28 ========

Now, on the subject of pettinesses and malicious traits and the rest of these accusations, let me raise a matching set of counter-charges against Marcion myself. If my God did not know there was another god above him, then your god certainly did not know there was another below him either — for as that dark saying of Heraclitus goes, the road up and the road down are the same. Indeed, if he had not been ignorant of it, he would have run into it from the very beginning. Sin and death, and the devil himself, the author of sin, and every evil that my God allowed to exist — your god allowed too, since he allowed that God to suffer them. Our God changed his mind — well, so did yours. For the one who took so long to look with favor on the human race changed, by that very act, the mind he had held for so long an age in not favoring it. Our God repented of some evil — but so did yours. For in that he finally turned his attention to man's salvation, he made a repentance owed for his former neglect, a debt for a past wrong done. And that past wrong will be counted as neglect of human salvation, corrected in your god's case only by repentance. Our God commanded a fraud — but only of gold and silver. Yet the more precious man is than gold and silver, the more fraudulent your god is, since he steals man away from his own Lord and Maker. Our God demands an eye for an eye — but your god, by forbidding retaliation, actually makes injury worse, and repeatable. For who will not strike again if he is not struck back? Our God did not know what sort of men he was choosing. Well, neither did yours. He would not have chosen Judas the betrayer, if he had foreseen it. And if you say the Creator lied somewhere, a far greater lie is found in your Christ, whose body was not real. My God's severity has destroyed many. Your god, too, by failing to save some, is effectively consigning them to destruction. My God ordered someone put to death. Yours wanted to have himself put to death — no less a murderer against himself than against the one by whom he wished to be killed. But I will prove to Marcion that his god has killed many as well. For he made a betrayer — bound, of course, to perish — unless you say the people did nothing wrong against Christ. But the unadorned power of truth wins few friends; a lie needs a great deal of help.
29.

======== Adversus Marcionem 2 — Chapter 29 ========

[1] As for Marcion's Antitheses themselves, I would have closed with them hand to hand, if the defense of a creator both good and just needed a more laborious demolition of them, given the examples on both sides that we have shown to be congruous with one God. But if both sides together make up the full measure of goodness and justice worthy of an all-powerful divinity, I can for the moment blunt the antitheses with a shortcut: they are eager to distinguish, on the basis of qualities of temperament, laws, or virtues, and so to alienate Christ from the creator — the best from the judge, the mild from the fierce, the saving from the destroying. [2] But in fact they join together the very things they set apart in these diversities that suit God so well. Strip away Marcion's title and the whole aim and design of his work, and it would prove nothing else than the demonstration of one and the same God, both best and judge — since these two qualities belong to God alone. Indeed, the very zeal to set Christ against the creator by means of these examples tends rather toward unity. [3] For the substance of the divine was itself one — good and severe at once — displayed in the same examples and by like arguments, so that God chose to reveal his goodness precisely in the cases where he had first shown severity; nor is it strange that there should be a difference over time, if a God who was harsher toward the untamed grew gentler afterward toward those he had subdued. Thus by means of the antitheses it can be shown, far more easily, that the creator's order was reformed by Christ rather than struck down, restored rather than shut out — especially since you exempt your god from every harsher motion, and therefore from any rivalry with the creator too. [4] For if that is so, how do the individual antitheses show him rivaling the several traits of the creator? I will then recognize, through these very antitheses, my own jealous God — who by rational rivalry safeguarded, in their beginnings, the ripening of his creatures, still rough as they were, good as they were, by his own right; whose antitheses even his own world will acknowledge, from the very opposition of the elements, tuned nonetheless by the highest reason. For this reason, Marcion, most heedless of men, you ought to have shown one god of light and a different one of darkness — that would have made it easier to persuade us of one god of goodness and another of severity. As it is, the antithesis belongs to whoever also owns the world in which it appears.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 1 ========

[1] Following the traces of my earlier work, which was lost and which I persevere in reconstructing, the order of the argument now turns to Christ — though this comes as a kind of surplus, after running the full course of the defense of the one Godhead. For it has already been sufficiently established beforehand that Christ is to be understood as belonging to no other god than the creator, since it has been determined that no other god is to be believed in besides the creator; that it was he, accordingly, whom Christ proclaimed; and that the apostles thereafter announced no other Christ than the one belonging to the God whom Christ proclaimed — that is, the creator — so that there was no mention of any other god, and hence of any other Christ, before Marcion's scandal arose. [2] This is most easily proved by a review of the apostolic churches and the heretical ones: it is there, obviously, that the corruption of the rule is to be pronounced, wherever a later origin is found. I wove this argument into my first book as well. But now too this engagement, examining Christ on his own separate ground, will certainly accomplish this much — that in proving Christ to belong to the creator, we thereby also exclude the god of Marcion. Truth does well to use all her own strength, not as one struggling for breath; still, in the shortcuts of prescription she wins outright. But since it is our decision to meet the adversary at every point where he is eager for a fight — so frenzied that he would sooner presume that the Christ who was never announced is the one who came, rather than the one who was always foretold —
2.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 2 ========

[1] Hence, then, I take up the next step: whether he ought to have come so suddenly. First, because he was himself the son of his god. For the natural order would have been for the father to acknowledge the son before the son acknowledged the father, and for the father to bear witness about the son before the son bore witness about the father. Next, because he was sent — quite apart from the title of son. The sponsorship of the one who sends ought to have preceded, as testimony on behalf of the one sent, since no one coming on another's authority defends that authority for himself by his own say-so; rather, he expects his defense to come from that authority itself, preceded by the endorsement of the one who furnishes it. [2] But neither will he be acknowledged as son whom a father has never named as such, nor will he be believed to be sent whom a commissioner never designated — a father who would have named him, a commissioner who would have designated him, had there been one. Everything that strays from the rule will be held suspect, and the order fundamental to things does not allow the father to be recognized after the son, the one who commissions after the thing commissioned, or God after Christ. [3] Nothing is prior to its own origin in our recognition of it, because nothing is prior to it in the actual arrangement of things. Suddenly a son, suddenly one sent, suddenly a Christ! Yet I should think nothing is sudden with God, because nothing is undisposed by God. But if it was disposed beforehand, why not also foretold, so that it might be proved both disposed, from the preaching, and divine, from the disposing? [4] And in any case so great a work — one, namely, being prepared for the salvation of mankind — would not have been sudden even to the degree that it was meant to profit through faith. For precisely insofar as belief was required before it could do any good, its groundwork likewise needed to render such belief possible — built up on the foundations of prior arrangement and prior preaching, so that, by this order, faith once properly formed might rightly be both required of man by God and rendered to God by man, man being obliged to believe, out of recognition, because he was able to — having, that is, learned to believe it from the preaching.
3.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 3 ========

[1] There was no need, you say, for that kind of order, because he was going at once to prove himself, by the facts themselves, to be son, and sent, and God's Christ, through the evidence of mighty works. But I will deny that this alone was sufficient testimony for him — a proof which he himself later stripped of its authority, forewarning that a great many would arise afterward, performing signs and producing mighty portents to lead even the chosen astray, and that on that account they were not to be trusted; thereby showing that trust placed rashly in signs and wonders is all too easy to win, even on behalf of false Christs. [2] Or what sense does it make, if he wished to be proved, recognized, and received by that means — I mean by mighty works — yet was unwilling that others, coming just as suddenly and heralded by no prior authority, should be judged the same way? If it is because he came before them and was first to display evidence of mighty works, and so, as though claiming a spot at the baths, seized faith first and forestalled all comers after him — take care that he himself is not caught in the very condition of a latecomer, found to be later than a creator already known beforehand, whose mighty works had likewise already been performed, and who had already declared, on that very ground, that no others were to be believed — meaning, of course, those who came after him. [3] So then, if the very fact that he came first, and pronounced beforehand about those who would come later, is enough to exclude their claim to faith, then he too stands already condemned in advance by the one to whom he is found to be posterior; and the authority to establish this rule over later claimants belongs solely to the creator, who could be posterior to no one. Now, since it is my purpose here to demonstrate that the creator himself accomplished these very same mighty works — the only ones you claim as grounds for faith in your Christ — sometimes in earlier times through his servants, and sometimes as destined to be performed through his own Christ, I can with good reason take a shortcut from this alone: Christ ought all the more not to have been believed on the strength of mighty works alone, precisely because people could have interpreted him as belonging to none other than the creator, seeing that his works corresponded to the creator's works, both those already performed through his servants and those promised beforehand in his Christ. [4] Even if other evidences were found in your Christ, new ones, we would more readily believe that these new things, too, belong to the same one whose old things they are, than that they belong to one who has only new things, lacking the proof that comes from the tried and victorious ancient record — so that in this way too he ought to have come already foretold, faith being built for him as much by his own prior preachings as by his mighty works — especially since he was to come as an adversary of the creator's Christ, fortified with his own signs and prophecies, so that this rival of Christ might shine through in every kind of contrariety. But how could the Christ of a never-foretold god be foretold himself? This, then, is what your position demands — that neither your god nor your Christ be believed, since the god ought not to have remained unknown, and the Christ ought to have been recognized through his god.
4.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 4 ========

[1] He disdained, I suppose, to follow the order of our God, as though it displeased him, as though it were most in need of refutation. Being new, he wished to come in a new way — a son before any acknowledgment by a father, one sent before any authority from a commissioner — so that he himself might introduce a most monstrous kind of faith, one in which Christ was believed to have come before it was even known that he had existed. This too calls for examination: why did he not come after Christ? [2] For when I consider that his god was so very patient, through so long an age, of the bitterest of creators, all the while announcing his own Christ among men — for whatever reason he deferred both his own revelation and his own intervention — by that same reasoning I say he ought to have shown patience toward the creator in the matter of his Christ as well, letting him carry out his own arrangements, so that only once the whole business of that opposing deity and his opposing Christ had run its full course would he then have laid his own arrangements over it. [3] But as it stands, it was a change of heart over so much patience that made him fail to persevere to the very end of the creator's dispensation. He endured, pointlessly, having his Christ proclaimed, when he could not endure having him actually appear! Either it was without cause that he cut short the passage of that time which belonged to another, or it was without cause that he refrained so long from cutting it short. What held him back, or what threw him into confusion? Yet he is guilty on both counts: revealed so tardily after the creator, yet in such haste before the creator's own Christ. [4] He ought to have transferred authority from the one long ago, but not yet from the other. He should not have tolerated that one raging for so long, nor disturbed this one while it was still at rest! On both counts he falls short of the title of the best of gods — inconsistent and unsteady indeed, lukewarm toward the creator and hot toward Christ, and futile on both fronts. He held the creator back no more than he obstructed Christ. The creator stands exactly as he has always stood; Christ shall arrive precisely as the scripture concerning him has set down. Why show up after a creator he lacked the power to amend? Why be disclosed ahead of that creator's own Christ, whom he was unable to summon back? [5] Or if he did correct the creator, then he was revealed after him precisely so that what needed correcting could come first — in which case he ought likewise to have waited to correct that creator's Christ, becoming, in due course, that Christ's later corrector too, just as he was the creator's. It is another matter if he himself is to come again after that Christ — so that in his first coming he advanced against the creator, destroying his law and his prophets, but in a second coming advances against his Christ, refuting his kingdom. Then, at last, closing out his own order of events, then, perhaps, he might be believed in. But if his work is already complete as things stand, then he comes in vain, having nothing left, evidently, to accomplish.
5.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 5 ========

[1] Let this serve as a kind of preliminary skirmish, still at the first stage, so to speak, fought from a distance. But since from this point on I see myself coming to close, decisive combat, I see that a few more lines must be drawn out in advance, along which the battle will be fought — namely, concerning the scriptures of the creator. For it is by these that I mean to prove Christ to belong to the creator, so that they may then be shown fulfilled in his own Christ; and for that I must first set out the form, and, if I may put it so, the very nature of these scriptures themselves — lest, once drawn into controversy when they are brought to bear on the case, the defense of the scriptures and the defense of the case get tangled together and blunt the reader's attention. [2] I therefore point to two causes of prophetic speech that our opponents need to recognize from here on. One is that future events are sometimes announced as though already accomplished. For it belongs to divinity to reckon as complete whatever it has decreed, since with God, for whom eternity itself governs a uniform state of all times, there is no difference of tense. And it is likewise proper to prophetic foresight to show what it foresees, even while it is foreseeing it, as already seen and thus already fulfilled — that is, as certain to happen in every respect — just as through Isaiah: 'I set my back to the scourges, my cheeks to blows, and I did not turn my face away from spitting.' [3] For whether Christ was already then speaking of himself, according to us, or whether the prophet was speaking of himself, according to the Jews, in either case something not yet done was being uttered as though already past. There is another kind, in which many things are foreshadowed figuratively through riddles, allegories, and parables, to be understood otherwise than as they are written. For we read that the mountains will drip sweetness, yet you are not to expect actual syrup from rocks or must from crags; and we hear that the land flows with milk and honey, yet you are not to believe that you will ever gather honeycakes from clods of earth — since God did not, after all, promise straightaway to be a well-digger and a farmer when he said, 'I will set rivers in a thirsty region, and box and cedar in the wilderness.' Likewise, when he foretells the conversion of the nations, saying, 'The beasts of the field will bless me, sirens and daughters of sparrows,' he surely does not mean to relay these good omens from the chicks of swallows, little foxes, and those monstrous, fabled songstresses. [4] And why should I say more about this kind of language? — when even the apostle of the heretics themselves interprets that very law which lets the ox tread out the grain with unmuzzled mouth as speaking not of oxen but of us, and claims that Christ was the companion rock supplying drink; teaching, further, that the two arguments about the sons of Abraham ran allegorically for the Galatians too, and suggesting to the Ephesians that what was foretold at the beginning about man, who would leave father and mother, and about two becoming one flesh, he recognizes as referring to Christ and the church.
6.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 6 ========

[1] If these two properties of Jewish literature are for the moment sufficiently established, remember, reader, that they were established so that when we bring such a point to bear, the question is not reopened about the form of the text but about the state of the case. Since, then, the heretic's madness presumed that the Christ who came was one who had never been foretold, it followed that he had to contend that the Christ who had always been preached had not yet come; [2] and so he was forced to make common cause with the Jewish error and build his argument from it — as though the Jews, being certain themselves that a different Christ had come, had not merely spurned him as a stranger but killed him as an enemy, when they would surely have recognized him and paid him every religious honor had he been their own. [3] Apparently that shipmaster's law bound them — not Rhodian law, but Pontic — decreeing that Jews could not possibly err about their own Christ, when even if nothing of the sort had been foretold against them, the mere fact of being human, liable to deception, would have been enough to persuade us that Jews could err, being men, and no verdict should be assumed straight off against the judgment of people whom it was credible had erred. [4] Further, since it was also foretold that they would not recognize the Christ and would therefore kill him, it follows that he must be one who was both unrecognized and killed by those who were foretold to do just that to him. If you demand this proved, I need not unroll the scriptures that, in declaring Christ killable, thereby also affirm him knowable-by-ignorance (for unless he could be unrecognized, he obviously could not suffer); it will suffice for the present, reserving those texts for the discussion of the sufferings, to bring forward those prophecies which meanwhile prove Christ would go unrecognized — and briefly, since they show that all power of understanding was taken from the people by the Creator. [5] 'I will take away,' he says, 'the wisdom of their wise, and the understanding of their prudent men I will hide'; and, 'Hearing you will hear and not understand, and seeing you will see and not perceive; for this people's heart is grown fat, and their ears are dull of hearing, and they have shut their eyes, so that their ears would not catch the sound nor their eyes take in the sight nor their heart grasp the meaning and turn back, that I might restore them.' [6] For they had earned this dulling of their saving senses, honoring God with their lips while their heart was far from him. So if Christ was indeed being announced by the Creator who fixes the thunder fast and shuts up the wind and proclaims to men his own Christ, as the prophet Joel has it, and if all the hope of the Jews — not to mention even of the Gentiles — was fixed on the revelation of Christ, then without doubt it was foretold that they would fail to recognize and fail to understand, robbed of the powers of recognition and understanding, of wisdom and prudence, in the matter of what was announced, that is Christ — their leading wise men, that is the scribes, going astray over him, and their prudent men, that is the Pharisees, likewise, and the people too, set to catch the sound with their ears yet never hear — meaning, of course, Christ teaching — and to take in the sight with their eyes yet never see — meaning, of course, Christ working signs — in keeping with what is said elsewhere: 'And who is blind but my servants? and who is deaf but they that rule over them?' [7] And again, when through the same Isaiah he reproaches them: 'I have begotten and raised up sons, and they have rejected me; the ox knows its owner and the ass its master's stall, but Israel has not known me, and my people has not understood' — we for our part hold it certain that Christ has always spoken in the prophets, namely the Spirit of the Creator, as the prophet testifies: 'The person of our Spirit is Christ the Lord' — he who from the beginning, as the Father's stand-in acting in God's name, was both heard and seen; we know that his were the very words that even then reproached Israel for what they were foretold to do against him: 'You have forsaken the Lord and provoked the Holy One of Israel to wrath.' [8] But if you would rather refer all this reckoning of ancient Jewish ignorance to God himself rather than to Christ — unwilling even to grant that back then it was the Word and Spirit, that is the Creator's Christ, whom they despised and failed to recognize — even so you will be refuted. For since you do not deny that the Son and Spirit and substance of the Creator is his Christ, you must grant that those who did not recognize the Father could not have recognized the Son either, by reason of their sharing the same substance — of which, if the fullness was not understood, still less would a mere portion be, even though it is a partaker of that fullness. [9] With these points thus examined, it now becomes clear both how the Jews rejected Christ and how they killed him — not because they took him to be a stranger, but because they could not recognize him as one of their own. For how could a man be grasped as a stranger, if concerning him nothing had ever once been proclaimed, seeing that they could not even grasp him though he had always been proclaimed beforehand? For being understood or not understood is only possible for something that, by having the substance of a prior announcement, will have material for either recognition or error. What lacks such material admits no outcome of wisdom or its lack. [10] And this is exactly why they turned away from and persecuted Christ — not as a different god, but only as a man, one they judged a charlatan in his signs and a rival in his teaching; so that, precisely as their own — that is, as a Jew, but one who strayed from and destroyed Judaism — they brought that very man to judgment and punished him by their own law, certainly not about to condemn a stranger. So far is it from the truth that they seem to have understood Christ as a stranger, seeing that they did not even judge his humanity as that of a stranger.
7.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 7 ========

[1] Let the heretic now learn, in full measure, along with the Jew himself if he wishes, the very reasoning behind that error — since, borrowing his guidance in this argument, he has fallen, blind led by blind, into the very same pit. We say that two conditions of Christ were shown by the prophets, foretelling as many comings of him: one in lowliness — the first, of course — when he was to be led like a sheep to slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer without a voice, so opening not his mouth, not even comely to look at. [2] 'We brought word of him,' it says, 'like an infant, like a shoot planted in parched soil, having neither shape nor splendor; and when our eyes fell on him, he possessed no shape and no comeliness, but his appearance was stripped of honor, lesser than the sons of men, a man familiar with grief and no stranger to the bearing of sickness' — set by the Father as a stumbling-stone and an offense-rock, brought a little below the angels, styling himself a worm rather than a man, the scorn of men and the object of the people's contempt. [3] These marks of lowliness fit the first coming, just as marks of loftiness fit the second, when he will no longer be the stone of stumbling or the rock of offense, but the very topmost cornerstone, taken up after rejection and exalted to complete the temple — that is, the church — and indeed that very rock in Daniel cut from the mountain, which will crush and grind to powder the image of the kingdoms of this world. [4] Of this coming the same prophet says: 'And behold, one coming with the clouds of heaven like a son of man; he came all the way to the Ancient of Days, he stood in his presence, and those who attended brought him near, and dominion was granted to him, together with every people of every land arrayed by their tribes, and all splendor rendered in his service, and his dominion endures without end, incapable of being stripped away, and his reign incapable of ruin' — [5] then indeed he shall have an honorable form and undying beauty beyond the sons of men. 'Ripe with beauty,' it says, 'beyond the sons of men, grace is poured upon your lips, therefore God has blessed you forever. Gird your sword upon your thigh, mighty in your ripeness and your beauty' — for the Father too, having set him briefly beneath the rank of angels, will encircle him with honor and splendor and place all things beneath his feet. [6] Then also those who pierced him shall know him, and tribe by tribe shall beat their breasts, precisely because earlier they failed to know him amid the humbleness of his human state: 'And he is a man,' says Jeremiah, 'and who shall know him?' And again, 'His generation,' says Isaiah, 'who shall declare it?' So too in Zechariah, in the person of Jesus — indeed in the very mystery of the name itself — the true high priest of the Father, Christ Jesus, is sketched in a double dress for the two comings: first clothed in filthy garments, that is, in the indignity of suffering, mortal flesh, when the devil too opposed him — the instigator, of course, of Judas the traitor, not to mention the tempter even after his baptism — then stripped of his old filth and adorned with the robe and the miter and the clean turban, that is, with the glory and honor of the second coming. [7] For if I were also to interpret the two goats offered on the Fast, do not they too picture the two orders of Christ? Alike and matching, because it is the same Lord who will be seen, since he is not to come in another form, so that he may be recognized by those who wounded him. One of them, wrapped in scarlet, cursed and spat upon and torn and pierced, was driven out of the city by the people to destruction, marked with the plain tokens of the Lord's passion. The other, offered for sins and given as food to the priests of the temple, signified the marks of his second appearing, in which, once every sin has been atoned away, those who serve the spiritual sanctuary — namely the church — partake of the Lord's grace, as it were, in a meal of flesh, while everyone else goes hungry for salvation. [8] Since, then, the first coming was sung of largely veiled in figures and cast down in every dishonor, but the second was foretold both plain and worthy of God, it is no wonder that, easily grasping and believing what they could — namely the second, fixing their gaze on that alone — they were deceived about the more obscure, certainly the less exalted, that is the first. And so even now they refuse to admit that their Messiah has already arrived, since he did not arrive in splendor, not grasping that he was equally destined to arrive in humbleness.
8.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 8 ========

[1] Let the heretic now stop borrowing his poison from the Jew — the asp, as they say, from the viper — and let him instead spit out at last the venom of his own invention, claiming Christ was a phantom. Except that even this notion will have other authors before him — precocious and, so to speak, abortive Marcionites, whom the apostle John pronounced antichrists, who denied that Christ had come in the flesh, and yet did not thereby set up the claim of a different God — for they too would have been marked down for that — but only because they had assumed it incredible that God should take on flesh. [2] All the more, then, has Marcion the antichrist snatched up that assumption for himself, being better fitted to deny the bodily substance of Christ, since his god was never made out by him to be either the author of flesh or its raiser from the dead — best, no doubt, in that respect too, and utterly unlike the Creator's lies and deceptions! And so his Christ, in order not to lie, not to deceive, and thus perhaps be taken for the Creator's own — was not what he seemed, and what he was, he pretended not to be: flesh and not flesh, man and not man, and so, God as Christ, not God either.
[3] For why should he not also have worn a phantom of Godhead? Am I to trust him about his inner substance when he was found a fraud about his outer one? How shall he be held truthful in what is hidden, when he is discovered so deceptive in what is open? And how, confounding in himself the truth of the Spirit with the deceit of the flesh, did he bring about that fellowship of light — that is, of truth — with deceit — that is, with darkness — which the apostle denies is possible? [4] Now once Christ's flesh is caught out as a lie, it follows that everything done through the flesh of Christ was done by lying too — his meetings, his touches, his companionship, even his miracles themselves. For if by touching someone he freed him from an ailment, or was touched by someone, what was done bodily cannot be believed truly done without the truth of the body itself. Nothing solid can be produced from what is empty, nothing full from what is void. A supposed dress, a supposed act; an imaginary agent, imaginary works. [5] So neither will his sufferings deserve belief. For nothing has truly suffered that has not truly existed; but a phantom cannot truly suffer. The whole work of God is thus overturned. The entire burden and yield of what it means to bear the Christian name — the death of Christ — is thereby denied, that death which the apostle so insistently hands down to us as genuine, making it the cornerstone of the gospel, of our deliverance, and of what he himself proclaimed: 'For among the first things I passed on to you,' he says, 'was this: Christ perished on account of our offenses, was laid in a tomb, then on the third day was raised up again.' [6] Further, if his flesh is denied, how can his death be affirmed — a suffering proper to flesh alone, through the death whereby it goes back to the ground out of which it was drawn, in keeping with the ordinance set by its own maker? But once death is denied — because flesh is denied — the resurrection too will not stand firm. For by the same reasoning he did not rise, by which he did not die — namely, for lack of the substance of flesh, to which both death and resurrection belong. Accordingly, once the resurrection of Christ is undermined, ours too is overthrown. For that too will have no force — the very thing for which Christ came — if Christ's does not. [7] For just as those claiming the dead do not rise are overturned by the apostle through pointing to Christ's own rising, in the same way, should Christ's rising fail to hold, the rising of the dead falls along with it. And so our faith is empty, empty is the preaching of the apostles. We are shown up, besides, as liars testifying about God, for claiming, so to speak, that he brought Christ back to life when in truth he never revived him. And we are still in our sins. And those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished — bound to rise again, no doubt, but perhaps only as a phantom, just like Christ.
9.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 9 ========

[1] In this question, if you think the Creator's angels should be set against us — as though they too dealt with Abraham and Lot in mere semblance of flesh, phantom flesh, and yet were truly there, truly ate together, truly did what they were commanded — first of all, you are not entitled to the precedents of the very god you are trying to demolish. For the more excellent and perfect a god you make yours out to be, the less his precedents suit him, since he could not be better and more perfect at all unless he were, in every particular, different. [2] Next, know that even this much will not be granted you: that the flesh in the angels was merely apparent. It was true, solid, human substance. For if it was no trouble for him to display true senses and true acts in flesh that was merely apparent, it was far easier for him to have given a true substance of flesh to true senses and true acts — he being, after all, its proper author and craftsman. [3] Your god, on the other hand, since he has never produced any flesh at all, perhaps had good reason to bring in a phantom of the very thing whose reality he had no power to supply. My God, however, who reshaped that flesh taken from the mud into this quality it now has — flesh not yet from marital seed, and yet flesh all the same — could just as easily have fitted the angels with flesh out of whatever matter he chose, he who fashioned the cosmos itself from nothingness, shaping it into such countless varied forms, merely by uttering a word. [4] And certainly, if your god one day promises human beings a true substance belonging to angels — 'They shall be as the angels,' he says — why should not my God likewise have fitted angels out with a true substance of humanity, drawn from whatever source? Since you will not tell me where you think the angelic substance in your scheme is drawn from, it is enough for me to lay down what befits God: namely, the truth of the very thing he set before three witnesses — sight, touch, hearing. [5] It is harder for God to lie than to produce the reality of flesh from any source whatever, even flesh not born. As for the other heretics, who insist that the flesh in the angels must have been born of flesh if it was truly human, we answer them with a sound principle by which it was both truly human and yet unborn: truly human because of God's truthfulness, which is a stranger to lying and deceit, and because it could not have been humanly handled by human beings except in a human substance; unborn, because Christ alone was destined to be born into flesh out of flesh, so that he might reshape our birth by his own birth, and so likewise dissolve our death by his own death, rising again in the very flesh in which he was born so that he could also die. [6] For this reason he himself, when he appeared with the angels then at Abraham's tent, appeared in flesh that was indeed real, but not yet born — because not yet destined to die — flesh only just learning to move among men. All the more, then, the angels, who were not appointed to die for us, had no need to take on flesh by being born for its brief errand, since they were not going to lay it down again by dying either; [7] but flesh taken from wherever, and put off again in whatever way entirely, was still no lie on their part. If the Creator makes his angels spirits, and his ministers a flaming fire, then just as truly as he made them spirits and fire, that same power truly made them flesh — so that we may now recall, and remind the heretics, that it is the promise of the very God who once shaped angels into men, to shape men into angels in his own time.
10.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 10 ========

[1] So then, since you are not admitted to a share in the Creator's precedents — precedents belonging to another and having their own causes — I would like you to produce, for your part, the plan of your own god by which he refused to display his Christ in true flesh. If he scorned that flesh as earthly and, as you put it, stuffed with dung, why did he not likewise despise its image? No image of a thing unworthy of respect deserves respect itself. A likeness follows the standing of its original. [2] But how was he to move among men except through the image of a human substance? Why, then, not rather through the reality — so as truly to move among them, if moving among them was necessary at all? How much more fittingly would necessity have furnished faith than a trick? [3] You make out a wretchedly poor god indeed, by this very fact — that he could not display his Christ except in the likeness of an unworthy thing, and one belonging to someone else at that. It might suit some to use what is unworthy if it is at least their own, just as it does not suit them to use what belongs to another, even if it is worthy. So why, then, did he decline to appear clothed in some different, more dignified substance — beginning with one properly his own — so that he might avoid seeming dependent on something both beneath him and belonging to another? [4] If my Creator, who later met man through cloud and through globe of fire, also once did so through the burning bush, and made use of elemental bodies to represent himself, these instances sufficiently show that God had no need of a preparation of either false or even true flesh. But if we look to what is fixed, there is no substance worthy for God to put on. [5] Whatever he puts on, he himself makes worthy — without any need for a lie. Why then think it a disgrace to prefer the truth of flesh to the lie of it? On the contrary, he honored it by fashioning it for real. How great, then, must that flesh be, whose mere phantom was thought necessary by the god above!
11.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 11 ========

[1] Marcion took up this whole conjuring trick of a merely apparent bodiliness in Christ with this aim: that the nativity too might not be defended from the testimony of a human substance, and so Christ be claimed for the Creator, as one who would be proclaimed capable of birth and, by that very fact, fleshly. Our man of Pontus is at his stupidest here too — as if it were not easier to believe that flesh existed in God unborn than that it was false, when this very faith is above all buttressed by the Creator's angels, who moved about in true flesh, yet flesh that was not born. [2] Indeed that woman Philumene rather persuaded Apelles and the rest of Marcion's deserters that Christ carried about real flesh, but flesh of no birth whatsoever, having been borrowed, so they say, from the elements. But if Marcion was afraid that belief in the flesh would drag belief in the birth along with it, then certainly whoever looked like a man was, without question, believed to have been born. [3] For a certain woman cried out, 'Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts you sucked.' And how is it said that his mother and brothers stood outside? [4] We shall look at these chapters in their proper place. Certainly, since he himself proclaimed himself Son of man, he was thereby professing that he had been born. For now, though I put off all this to the examination of the Gospel, still — as I laid down above — if anyone who looked like a man was bound in every way to be believed born, then it was pointless of Marcion to think the belief in the birth could be erased by contriving imaginary flesh. [5] What good did it do that what was taken for real was not really so — both the flesh and the birth alike? Or if you say, 'let human opinion see to that' — then you are honoring your god with the title of deceiver, if he knew himself to be other than what he had made men suppose. In that case you might as well have fitted him out with a merely apparent birth too, and so escaped landing in this very question. [6] For little women sometimes fancy themselves pregnant, swollen either by an excess of blood or by some ailment. And surely he ought to have played out the whole phantom charade to the end, so as not to leave the origin of the flesh undanced, once he had taken on the part of that very substance. Clearly you have refused to grant the lie of the birth — because you have granted the flesh itself as real. Yet, apparently, even a real birth is the most shameful thing for a god! [7] Go on, then, declaim against those most holy and reverend works of nature; rail against everything you are made of: destroy the origin of flesh and soul alike; call the womb a sewer, the workshop for producing so great an animal — that is, man; pursue with your scorn the unclean and shameful torments of childbirth, and the filthy, anxious, absurd business of the delivery itself. Yet when you have torn down all this, to make good your claim that it is unworthy of God, birth will be no more unworthy than death, infancy no more unworthy than the cross, nature no more unworthy than punishment, flesh no more unworthy than condemnation. [8] If Christ truly suffered these things, it was a lesser thing for him to have been born. If he suffered them as a lie, as a mere phantom, then he could equally have been born as a lie. These, in sum, are Marcion's arguments by which he makes Christ into another — and I think we have shown well enough that they do not hold together at all, while we teach that truth suits God far better than the lie of that condition in which he displayed his Christ. [9] If it was truth, it was flesh; if it was flesh, he was born. For the very things this heresy attacks are thereby confirmed, once the means by which it attacks them are themselves destroyed. And so, if he is to be held fleshly because born, and born because fleshly, then — since he was no phantom — he must be recognized as none other than the one announced by the Creator's prophets to come in flesh and by birth: none other, that is, than the Creator's own Christ.
12.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 12 ========

[1] Now go ahead, as is your habit, and summon up this comparison with Isaiah's Christ, arguing that it matches ours in nothing. For first, you say, Isaiah's Christ is to be called Emmanuel, and then to seize the power belonging to Damascus, together with what Samaria had plundered, confronting the Assyrian king. But this one who has come was neither published under any such name nor performed any warlike deed. [2] But I will remind you to take note of the connection of the two passages as well. For an interpretation of Emmanuel is added: 'God with us' — so that you look not only at the sound of the name but at its sense. The sound, Emmanuel, being Hebrew, belongs to that particular nation; but its sense, 'God with us,' translated, belongs to everyone. Ask, then, whether that phrase, 'God with us' — which is Emmanuel — has been in operation in Christ from the moment he shone forth. [3] I doubt you would dare deny it, given that you yourself admit, 'God is called to be with us' — which is exactly what Emmanuel means. Or if you are foolish enough to say that, because among your people it is said 'God with us' and not 'Emmanuel,' therefore you refuse to admit that the one has come whose proper name is to be called Emmanuel — as though this were not the very same as 'God with us' — you will find that the Hebrew Christians, indeed even the Marcionites, say 'Emmanuel' when they mean to say 'God with us'; just as every nation, in whatever tongue it says 'God with us,' has in effect pronounced 'Emmanuel,' stripping away the sound while keeping the sense. [4] But if Emmanuel means 'God accompanies us,' and it is Christ who accompanies us as God — present in us as well (since all of you baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves in Christ) — then Christ belongs just as rightly to what the name signifies, 'God accompanies us,' as to how it is pronounced, 'Emmanuel.' And so it stands proven that the one already announced under the name Emmanuel has indeed come, since what Emmanuel signifies has come — that is, God with us.
13.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 13 ========

[1] You are equally led astray by the mere sound of names, when you seize on "the strength of Damascus," "Samaria's spoils," and "the Assyrian king" as though these portended a warrior-Christ belonging to the Creator — failing to notice what the prophecy sets down beforehand: that before the child can even say "father" and "mother," he will carry off Damascus's might and seize Samaria's plunder in the face of the Assyrian king. [2] For you must first look at what the demonstration of age allows — whether it could even present a grown man as Christ, let alone a commander. Was the infant, presumably, going to summon men to arms with his wailing, announce battle not by a trumpet-blast but by the shake of a rattle, and take aim at the enemy not from a horse or a chariot or a city wall, but from the neck or back of his nurse or nanny — subduing Damascus and Samaria, so to speak, between the nursing-breasts? [3] It is another matter if, among the Pontic tribes of some barbarous nation, infants burst into battle — anointed, I suppose, facing the sun, then armed in swaddling-clothes and paid their wages in butter, boys who know how to hurl a lance before they can tear meat with their teeth. But if nowhere does nature allow this — to soldier before one can live, to take up the strength of Damascus before one knows the words "father" and "mother" — it follows that the utterance must be read as figurative. "But," he says, "nature does not allow a virgin to give birth either, and yet the prophet is believed." And rightly so. [4] For he built up faith in an incredible matter by giving the reason: that the thing would come to pass as a sign. "Therefore," he says, "the Lord in person shall grant you a token: look, a maiden shall conceive in the womb and shall bring a son into the world." But a sign given by God, unless it were some monstrous novelty, would be no sign at all. Indeed, when the Jews on occasion dare to lie to us in order to bring us down, pretending that the scripture speaks not of a virgin but of a young woman who will conceive and bear, they are refuted on this very point: nothing ordinary — a young woman's pregnancy and delivery — could possibly look like a sign. So it is rightly believed that the virgin-and-mother was appointed as a sign; the warrior-infant, however, is not believed in the same way, for here there is no logic of a sign at work. But once the sign of the new birth has been recorded, from that point a further stage of the infant's life is announced — one who will eat butter and honey. [6] This too is not meant as a sign — it belongs to infancy, not to a refusal of evil — but as the one destined to take Damascus's strength for himself and win Samaria as spoil before the Assyrian king. Keep the limits of age in view, and look for the sense of the prophecy — better, restore to the gospel of truth what you have subsequently stripped from it, and the prophecy will be understood exactly as it is proclaimed once the excision is undone. Let those Magi from the east remain, then, presenting to the infant Christ in his cradle their gifts of gold and frankincense, and let the infant lay hold of Damascus's strength with no battle fought and no weapon lifted. [7] For besides the fact that everyone knows the strength of the East — that is, its power and resources — customarily consists of gold and spices, it is certainly the Creator's practice to make gold stand for the power of other nations too, as through Zechariah: "And Judah shall encamp before Jerusalem and shall gather together all the might of the peoples round about — gold and silver." [8] And of that gift of gold, David too says at the time: "And gold out of Arabia shall be presented to him"; and again, "Sheba's and Arabia's kings will bring him their offerings." For the East generally had Magi as its kings, and Damascus was formerly reckoned to Arabia, before it was reassigned to Syrophoenicia by the division of the Syrias — and it was its strength that Christ then received, receiving its emblems, namely gold and spices; while the spoils of Samaria were the Magi themselves, who, once they had recognized him and honored him with gifts and, kneeling, worshiped him as God and King on the testimony of the star that pointed him out and led them, became, in effect, Samaria's plunder — plunder taken from idolatry itself — by, plainly, coming to believe in Christ. [9] For he marked idolatry by the name of Samaria, since it was disgraced on account of the idolatry into which it had then fallen away from God under King Jeroboam. Nor is this anything new for the Creator — to use, figuratively, the transfer of names drawn from a comparison of crimes. For he also calls the rulers of the Jews "rulers of Sodom," and calls that very people "the people of Gomorrah." And elsewhere the same one says, "Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite," because of a like impiety — the very people he had once even called his own sons: "I have begotten and raised up sons." [10] So too Egypt is sometimes understood in him as the whole world, under the reproach of superstition and cursedness. So too Babylon, even in our own John, is a figure for the city of Rome — being likewise great, proud in her dominion, and the destroyer of God's saints. By this same usage, then, he also labeled the Magi with the title "Samaritans," stripped, as we have said, of the idolatry they had shared with the Samaritans. And by "against the king of the Assyrians," understand "against Herod" — against whom, in fact, the Magi did resist at that time, by not reporting back concerning the Christ whom he sought to seize.
14.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 14 ========

[1] This interpretation of ours will be reinforced when, elsewhere too, in reckoning Christ a warrior on the strength of certain words for weapons and expressions of that sort, you are shown to be wrong by comparison with the rest of the sense. "Gird your sword," says David, "upon your thigh." But what do you read of Christ just above? "Fairer in beauty than the sons of men, grace is poured out on your lips." [2] I laugh, if the one he was girding with a sword for war is the one he was flattering about the comeliness of his form and the grace of his lips! So too, when he goes on to add, "and stretch forth, and prosper, and reign," he appended "for the sake of truth and gentleness and justice." For who accomplishes those things with a sword, and not rather their opposites — deceit and harshness and injustice, the very stock-in-trade of warfare? Let us look, then, at whether this is not some other sword, one whose working differs entirely. [3] For the apostle John too, in the Apocalypse, pictures a blade issuing from God's mouth, two-edged and honed keen — and this must be taken as the divine utterance: two-edged, on account of the two covenants, Law and Gospel; keen through its wisdom, opposed to the devil, equipping us to face down the spirit-enemies of wickedness and every lust, and severing us even from those dearest to us for the sake of God's name. [4] But should John not persuade you, there is our shared teacher Paul, who girds our loins with truth and the breastplate of uprightness, and fits our feet with readiness to carry the good news of peace — not of combat — telling us to raise up faith as a shield, by which every burning missile the devil hurls can be doused, and to don salvation as a helmet, and to wield the Spirit's blade, which, in his words, is God's own utterance. [5] This is the very blade the Lord himself came to cast upon the earth — not peace. If this is your own Christ, then he too counts as a soldier. If he is no soldier, yet still wields a sword taken figuratively, then it was equally permitted for the Creator's Christ in the psalm to be girded, without any warlike business, with the figurative sword of the word — a Christ to whom the aforesaid comeliness and grace of the lips fit well, the very one who was then already being girded upon the thigh in David's time, one day to cast that sword upon the earth. [6] For this is what is meant by "stretch forth, and prosper, and reign" — stretching the word over all the earth for the calling of all nations, prospering by the success of the faith, by which it was received, and thenceforth reigning, in that he conquered death by resurrection. "And your right hand shall lead you on wondrously," he says — namely, the power of spiritual grace, by which the recognition of Christ is brought about. [7] "Your arrows are sharp" — his precepts flying everywhere, and his warnings and his exposures of the heart, piercing and transfixing every conscience. "The peoples shall fall beneath you" — worshiping, that is. So the Creator's Christ is mighty in war and bearer of arms in this way, and even now he goes on gathering plunder — no longer Samaria's alone, but drawn from every nation. Recognize, then, that the spoils too are figurative, just as you have already learned the weapons are allegorical. And so, since both the Lord speaks and the apostle writes in this figurative manner, it is not without warrant that we use interpretations of this kind — examples of which even our opponents themselves admit — and thus, to that very extent, the Christ of Isaiah will be the one who has come, precisely insofar as he was not a warrior, because no such figure is foretold by Isaiah.
15.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 15 ========

[1] So much, for now, on the question of the flesh, and, through it, of the birth, and of the single name Emmanuel. But as for the other names, and above all the name "Christ" — what will the opposing side answer? If among you the name "Christ" is common in the way the name "God" is — so that just as it suits calling the son of both gods "Christ," so both may equally be called "Father" and "Lord" — then reason will certainly refute this line of argument. [2] For the name "God," being as it were the natural name of divinity, can be shared with all to whom divinity is ascribed — as with idols too, the apostle saying, "For indeed there are those who are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth." But the name "Christ," coming not from nature but from a particular arrangement, becomes the property of the one to whom, upon investigation, that arrangement is found to belong. Nor is it subject to being shared with another god — least of all a rival god, one having his own dispensation, to whom, accordingly, private names of his own are owed. [3] For what sort of thing is it, that those who have devised two gods with distinct dispensations should nonetheless admit a partnership of names amid a discord of dispensations, when no proof would more clearly establish two rival gods than if a corresponding diversity of names were also found in their dispensation? For no state of distinctness is ever established except by properties of designation. [4] And when such proper names run short, it is now the Greek "catachresis" — the abuse of what belongs to another — that comes to the rescue. But with God, I take it, nothing ought to run short, nor should his dispensations need to be furnished from what belongs to someone else. Who is this god who claims for his own son as well names taken from the Creator — not, I say, foreign names, but old and common ones, which even so would hardly suit a new and unknown god? [5] How, then, does he teach that a new patch is not to be sewn onto an old garment, nor new wine trusted to old wineskins, when he himself is sewn on and clothed in the old age of names? How does he cut the gospel loose from the Law, while he is wholly clothed in the Law — namely, in the very name of "Christ"? Who kept him from being called something else, while preaching something else, coming from somewhere else — since it was for this very reason that he did not even take on a true body, so as not to be believed to be the Creator's Christ? [6] But it is pointless that he did not want to be seen as the one he wanted to be called; for even if he had truly had a body, he would all the more not be taken for the Creator's Christ if he were not so called. But as it now stands, he rejects the substance while accepting the name — a name that was meant to prove the substance as well! For if "Christ" means "anointed," then to be anointed is necessarily an affair of the body. One who had no body could not be anointed at all; and one who could not be anointed at all could in no way be called Christ. It is another matter if he laid claim even to a phantom of the name. [7] "But how," he says, "was he to creep into the faith of the Jews except through a name familiar and customary among them?" You are describing a god who is inconstant, or underhanded; and it is the counsel either of distrust or of malice to advance one's cause by deceiving. The false prophets acted far more freely and openly against the Creator, coming in the name of their own god. But I do not even find that this scheme achieved its purpose, since it was easier for people to believe him either their own promised Christ, or rather some impostor, than the Christ of another god — as the Gospel will show.
16.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 16 ========

[1] Now if he snatched at the name "Christ" the way a petty thief snatches at a purse, why did he also want to be called "Jesus" — a name far less expected among the Jews? For even if we, by God's grace, have come to understand his mysteries and recognize that this name too was destined for Christ, it does not follow that the matter is known to the Jews, from whom wisdom has been taken away. In fact, to this very day they hope for a Christ, not a Jesus, and they take "Christ" to mean Elijah sooner than Jesus. [2] He, then, who came under a name in which no "Christ" was presumed could only have come under the one name that alone was presumed. But since he mixed the two — the hoped-for and the unhoped-for — both parts of his design are defeated. For either "Christ" was assumed so that he might slip in, as it were, under the Creator's guise, and then "Jesus" clashes with that, since Jesus was not hoped for in the Creator's Christ; or "Jesus" was assumed so he might be taken for belonging to the other god, but "Christ" will not permit it, since Christ was hoped for as belonging to none but the Creator. [3] Which of these can hold together I do not know. But both will hold together in the Creator's Christ, in whom "Jesus" too is found. How so, you ask? Learn it here, alongside the Jews who share your error. When Hoshea son of Nun was appointed Moses' successor, was he not transferred from his former name and begun to be called Jesus? [4] "Certainly," you say. We say this was a figure of what was to come. For since Jesus Christ was to lead a second people — namely us, born in the deserts of this age — into a promised territory streaming with milk and honey — a figure for gaining eternal life, sweeter than anything else — and given that this outcome was not to arrive by way of Moses, not by the Law's discipline, but through Jesus, through the grace of the gospel, once we had been circumcised with a flint blade, that is, with the precepts of Christ [5] — for the rock was Christ — for this reason the man who was being prepared as an image of this mystery was also inaugurated with a figure of the Lord's own name, and surnamed Jesus. That this name was already Christ's own, Christ himself testified when he spoke to Moses. For who was speaking, if not the Creator's Spirit, who is Christ? So when, giving his charge, he said to the people, "Look, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, to keep watch over your journey and lead you into the land I have made ready for you; heed him and follow his word, do not resist him, for he will conceal nothing from you, seeing that my own name rests upon him" — a messenger is what he termed him, on account of the magnitude of the powers he would go on to display, and because of the office of a prophet announcing the divine will; but he called him Jesus because of the future mystery of his own name. [6] Again and again he confirmed that this name — which he himself had given him — was his own, since he had ordered him thenceforth to be called not "angel," nor "Hoshea," but "Jesus." Therefore, if both names belong to the Creator's Christ, so much the more do neither belong to a Christ who is not the Creator's — no more than the rest of the sequence does. From this point, then, a fixed and fair prescription must be laid down between us, binding on both sides alike: namely that not a single point ought to be shared by the christ belonging to the alien god and the Christ who belongs to the Creator. [7] For you, on your part, must likewise defend the difference, just as I must resist it: you will not be able to prove that the Christ of another god has come unless you show him to be utterly unlike the Creator's Christ; nor will I be able to vindicate him as the Creator's unless I show him to be exactly such as the Creator ordained. On the matter of names, then, I have already closed the case. I claim Christ for myself; I defend Jesus as my own.
17.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 17 ========

[1] Let us now compare the rest of his career with the scriptures. Whatever that little body of his was — since it had a bearing and a look — if it was inglorious, ignoble, without honor, then he will be my Christ, for it is exactly in such bearing and appearance that he was announced. Isaiah steps forward again: "We have announced concerning him," he says, "in his sight, that he is like an infant, like a shoot out of parched soil; there is no fair form in him, nor any splendor, and our eyes rested on him, and he possessed no beauty nor loveliness, but his aspect was without honor, lesser than that of every man." So too the Father's voice above to the Son: "As many will be appalled at you, so without glory shall your form be among men." [2] For even though at David's hands he is called comely beyond the sons of men, that is spoken of that other, allegorical condition of spiritual grace, when he girds himself with the sword of the word, which truly is his comeliness and beauty and glory. [3] But in his bodily state, according to the same prophet, he is even "a worm, and no man, the reproach of man and the scorn of the people." Nor does the prophet announce his inward quality to be otherwise. For if the fullness of the Spirit rested upon him, I recognize the rod out of the root of Jesse. Its flower will be my Christ, on whom, as Isaiah says, came to rest a breath of insight and discernment, a breath of resolve and strength, a breath of understanding and reverence, a breath of the fear owed to God. [4] For such a diversity of spiritual endowments could belong to no man except to Christ — reckoned as the flower for the grace of the Spirit, yet accounted of the stock of Jesse, to be reckoned thence through Mary. But I press my point further: if you grant him the whole bent of humility and patience and tranquility, then from these very words of Isaiah he will be Christ — the man "in affliction," who "knows how to bear weakness," who "was led like a sheep to slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer opened not his mouth," who "neither strove nor cried out, nor was his voice heard outside," who "did not break the bruised reed" — that is, the shaken faith of the Jews — and "did not quench the smoking flax" — that is, the momentary ardor of the Gentiles — such a man can be nobody else than the one the prophets foretold. [5] His conduct ought to be examined by the rule of the scriptures, distinguished, unless I am mistaken, by a twofold activity: preaching and power. But of both headings I shall so dispose that, since it has pleased us also to examine Marcion's own gospel, we shall defer the particular kinds of teachings and signs to that discussion, as being the proper ground for them; here, however, let us settle in general the sequence we have begun, showing that Christ is announced as a preacher through Isaiah: "Who among you," he says, "stands in fear of God and gives ear to the utterance of his Son?" And equally in the role of one who heals: "For it is he," the text says, "who lifted away our infirmities and carried the burden of our diseases." 
18.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 18 ========

[1] Regarding the manner of his death, I gather, you try to draw a distinction, denying that the cross's suffering was foretold of the Creator's Christ, and going on to argue that one cannot credit the Creator with handing his own son over to precisely the death he himself had pronounced accursed. "Cursed," it says, "is everyone who hangs on a tree." But I shall put off the meaning of this curse, reserving it for the discussion of the cross alone, which is now our chief question, since in other matters too the proof of the fact comes before the explanation of it. Let me first instruct you in the figures. [2] And indeed it was fitting above all that this mystery be figured in the preaching: the more incredible it was, the more of a scandal it would prove if announced nakedly; and the more magnificent it was, the more it needed to be veiled, so that the difficulty of understanding it might send men seeking the grace of God. And so, first of all, Isaac — handed over by his own father to be a sacrifice, while he himself bore the wood meant for his own offering — already sketched in advance the fate of Christ, handed over as a sacrifice by the Father and bearing the timber of his own suffering. [3] Joseph too prefigured Christ — and not only in this, not to delay the course of my argument, that he suffered persecution from his brothers because of God's favor, just as Christ suffered from the Jews, his brothers according to the flesh — but when his father pronounces this blessing over him: "The majesty of a bull is his, and he bears the horns of a wild ox; with these he shall gore the nations, driving them together to the far corners of the earth" — certainly no rhinoceros was intended by that "wild ox," nor some twin-horned minotaur, but it was Christ who was signified in that figure: a bull for his twofold disposition, fierce to some as judge, gentle to others as savior, whose horns were the outermost tips of the cross. [4] For on the crossbeam too — which is a part of the cross — the extremities are called "horns"; and the "unicorn" is the upright post standing alone in the middle. By this very power and by this appearance, horned, he now tosses all nations through faith, lifting them from earth to heaven; and then, by judgment, he will toss them down, casting them from heaven to earth. [5] The same figure of the bull occurs elsewhere in the same scripture, when Jacob is interpreted spiritually of Simeon and Levi — that is, of the scribes and Pharisees, for from those two the lineage of these is derived: "Simeon and Levi have completed iniquity out of their own sect" — namely the sect by which they persecuted Christ — "let my soul not enter their council, nor my inward parts rest in their assembly, for in their fury they slew human beings" — meaning the prophets — "and in their willfulness they hocked an ox" — meaning Christ, against whom, having already murdered the prophets, they vented their rage with nails, hamstringing him, so to speak, by nailing him up. Otherwise it would be a pointless thing, after acts of manslaughter, to reproach them merely for butchering some ox. [6] Then again, Moses — why, precisely when Joshua was fighting against Amalek, did he pray sitting with hands outstretched, when in such an agitated crisis he ought surely rather to have knelt, and beaten his breast with his hands, and rolled his face upon the ground to press home his prayer — unless it was because there, where the Lord's name was doing battle in advance for the one who would one day fight against the devil, the very posture of the cross was also necessary, the posture through which Jesus was to bring back the victory? [7] The same Moses again — after the making of any likeness of anything had been forbidden — why did he set up a bronze serpent, mounted on a piece of wood, in the attitude of one hanging, as a saving spectacle? Was he not here too pointing to the power of the Lord's cross, by which the serpent, the devil, was publicly exposed, and by which anyone wounded by spiritual serpents, if only he looked upon it and believed, was thereby proclaimed healed of the bites of sin, and saved?
19.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 19 ========

[1] Come now, if you have read in David, "The Lord has reigned from the tree," I wait to hear how you understand it. Unless perhaps you think some king of wood is meant among the Jews, and not Christ, who from the moment of his passion on the tree, having conquered death, has reigned ever since. For even though death has reigned from Adam until Christ, why should it not be affirmed of Christ that he has ruled "out of the wood," given that from the timber of the cross, once he had died, he brought death's dominion to a close? [2] So too Isaiah: "For unto us," he says, "a child is born." What novelty is there in that, if he does not mean the Son of God? "And given to us, whose government is placed upon his shoulder." What king at all bears the emblem of his power upon his shoulder, rather than a diadem upon his head or a scepter in his hand or some mark upon his own robe? [3] But only the new king of the new ages, Christ Jesus, carried the power and the loftiness of his new glory upon his shoulder — that is, the cross — so that, according to the prophecy above, the Lord might thenceforth reign "from the tree." This wood Jeremiah too points out to you, foretelling the very words the Jews would one day say: "Come, let us cast wood into his bread" — that is, into his body. [4] This much God disclosed even within the gospel you yourselves favor, terming bread his body, so that from that too you might grasp that he had long since granted bread the figure of his flesh — the very flesh the prophet had already prefigured in bread, a mystery the Lord himself would later unfold. [5] If you still want a further announcement of the Lord's cross, psalm twenty-one is amply sufficient, holding within it the entire suffering of Christ, who even there gave voice to his own coming glory: "They have bored through," it says, "my hands and my feet" — exactly that harsh particular of crucifixion. And once more, as he begs his Father to rescue him: "Deliver me," he says, "out of the lion's jaws" — meaning death — and "from the horns of the wild oxen," my low estate — [6] that is, from the tips of the cross, as I have shown above. This cross neither David himself suffered, nor any king of the Jews, lest you think the passion of anyone else was foretold than of him who alone was so conspicuously crucified by the people. Now even if heretical stubbornness rejects and mocks all these interpretations, I will grant that no cross of Christ was signified by the Creator — but even by this he will not prove that the one who was crucified is someone else, [7] unless he can show that this very outcome of his was foretold by his own god, so that the difference in the manner of death — and thereby in the persons as well — may be vindicated by a difference in what was foretold. Otherwise, even without his Christ being foretold at all, let alone his cross, a mere prophecy of death, unqualified, suffices for my Christ. For since the manner of death was not specified, it could well have come about by crucifixion, only then to be assigned to some other Christ if it had been foretold of some other. [8] Unless he will deny that even the death of my Christ was foretold — all the more to his own embarrassment, since he announces his own Christ as having died though he denies he was born, while he denies mine, whom he confesses to have been born, could have died. But death and burial and resurrection alike I want to show, of my Christ, in that one utterance of Isaiah: "His burial has been taken away from the midst." [9] For he could not have had his burial taken away unless he had first been buried, nor could his burial have been taken away from the midst except through resurrection. Accordingly he adds: "Therefore he shall possess many as an inheritance, and shall divide the spoils of many, because his soul was given over to death." For the reason for this grace has been shown: namely, as a recompense for the wrong of death. And it has likewise been shown that he was to obtain these things after death — that is, through resurrection.
20.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 20 ========

[1] It is enough for the present to have run through the course of Christ on these points thus far, so that one so attested in the manner in which he was announced need be taken as none other than the one who was so announced — so that now, from this consonance between his facts and the Creator's scriptures, faith may be restored even to those matters which the prejudice of the greater part twists into different meanings, or calls into doubt, or denies outright. I now build further, adding also those parallel texts from the Creator's scriptures which foretold things to come after Christ. [2] For the arrangement would not be found erased, if the one after whom it was due to happen had not come. Look at all the nations emerging from the whirlpool of human error to the God the Creator, to the God Christ — and, if you dare, deny that this was prophesied. [3] But at once the Father's promise in the Psalms confronts you: 'You are my Son, today I have begotten you; ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession.' You cannot claim these 'ends of the earth' for David's son any more than for Christ — nor can you claim they were pledged instead to David, sovereign merely over the one nation of the Jews, rather than to Christ, who has already seized the whole world by the faith of his gospel. [4] So too through Isaiah: 'Behold, I have given you for the covenant of the race, for a light of the nations, to open the eyes of those without sight' — that is, of those in error — 'to loose the bound from their chains' — that is, to free them from their sins — 'and from the prison-house' — that is, from death — 'those sitting in darkness,' namely of ignorance. [5] If these things come to pass through Christ, they cannot have been prophesied of anyone but the one through whom they come to pass. Again elsewhere: 'Behold, I have appointed him as a witness to the nations, a leader and commander of nations; nations that do not know you shall call upon you, and peoples shall flee to you.' You cannot interpret this of David, since it goes on to say, 'And I will ordain for you an everlasting covenant, the sure mercies of David.' [6] But rather you ought to understand Christ here — reckoned from David by fleshly descent, on account of the census of the Virgin Mary. For it is of this promise that the psalm swears to David: 'Of the fruit of your womb I will set one upon your throne.' Whose womb is this? David's own? Certainly not — David was not about to give birth. [7] Nor his wife's either. For it would not have said, 'of the fruit of your womb,' but rather 'of the fruit of your wife's womb.' By naming the womb as his own, it remains that it points to someone of his line whose flesh — the flesh of Christ, which blossomed from Mary's womb — was to be the fruit of that womb. And so it named only the fruit of the womb, as belonging to the womb properly, as it were of the womb alone, not also of the man, and referred that very womb back to David, as the founding father of the line and household. [8] For since it could not reckon a virgin's womb to a husband, it reckoned it to the father instead. So then, the new order found in Christ today is the very one which the Creator was then promising, calling it the sure mercies of David — things that belonged to Christ, because Christ is of David: indeed, that flesh itself will be his sure and faithful mercy toward David, now made holy by religion and faithful through the resurrection. For the prophet Nathan too, in the first Book of Kings, makes the promise to David concerning his seed, which, he says, shall be 'from his own belly.' If you were to explain this plainly of Solomon, you would provoke me to laughter — for it would seem that David gave birth to Solomon! Or is Christ signified here too, the seed of David from that womb which was of David — that is, of Mary? [9] For it is Christ, rather, who was to build the house of God — a holy man, that is, in whom the Spirit of God should dwell as in a better temple — and it is Christ, rather, who ought to be reckoned Son of God, more than Solomon the son of David. Finally, the throne forever and the kingdom forever fit Christ better than Solomon, who was after all only a temporal king. And God's mercy never departed from Christ, whereas upon Solomon God's wrath came, after his luxury and idolatry. [10] For God raised up against him an Edomite enemy. Since, then, none of these things fits Solomon but rather Christ, our interpretations stand on sure ground — confirmed even by the very outcome of the events which appear to have been foretold of Christ. And so in him will be fulfilled the 'holy and faithful mercies of David.' God set this one as a testimony to the nations, not David; a leader and commander of nations, not David, who commanded Israel alone. It is Christ whom the nations invoke today, who did not know him before; it is to Christ that the peoples flee today, whom formerly they did not know. What you see happening cannot still be called something yet to come.
21.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 21 ========

[1] So neither can you sustain that thrust of yours toward a difference between two Christs — as though the Jewish Christ were destined by the Creator solely for a people to be gathered back from dispersion, while yours was granted by the Good God for the deliverance of all mankind — when, in the end, it turns out that Christians of the Creator existed before Marcion's, once all peoples had been called into his kingdom from the moment God began to reign from the wood of the cross, with no Cerdo yet in sight, let alone Marcion. [2] But once refuted on the calling of the nations, you now turn to proselytes. You ask which of the nations pass over to the Creator, since proselytes are named by the prophet separately, as a different and distinct category: 'Behold,' says Isaiah, 'proselytes shall come to me through me' — showing that even proselytes themselves were to come to God through Christ. And the nations — which is what we are — likewise had their own designation, hoping in Christ: 'And in his name,' he says, 'shall the nations hope.' [3] But proselytes, whom you would substitute into the prophecy of the nations, are not accustomed to hope in the name of Christ, but under the order of Moses, from which their whole institution derives. Besides, the drawing-in of the nations arose only in the last days. In the same passage Isaiah states: 'It will happen in the final days that the Lord's mountain shall be revealed' — that is, the loftiness of God — 'and the house of God upon the tops of the mountains' — that is, Christ, the catholic temple of God, in whom God is worshipped, set up above every eminence of powers and authorities — 'and all nations shall come to it, and many peoples shall go and say, Come, let us ascend to the Lord's mountain, to the house of Jacob's God, and he shall teach us his path, and in it we will walk; for out of Zion the law shall issue forth, and the Lord's word out of Jerusalem.' This will be the path of the new law — the gospel, the new word — found in Christ, not any longer in Moses. 'And he shall render judgment between the nations' — concerning their error, that is — 'and shall convict a great people' — the Jews and proselytes foremost among them — 'and their swords they shall hammer into plowshares, their spears into sickles' — that is, they will turn the instincts of harmful minds and hostile tongues and every kind of malice and blasphemy into pursuits of gentleness and peace — 'and nation shall not take up sword against nation' — the sword of discord, that is — 'nor shall they train for war any longer' — that is, practice enmities — so that here too you may learn that Christ was promised not as a warlord, but as a peacemaker. [4] Either deny these things were prophesied, when you see them plainly before your eyes, or deny they are fulfilled, when you read them — or, if you deny neither, then they must be fulfilled in the one of whom they were prophesied. Consider, further, the very entrance and course of the calling of the nations, coming to the God the Creator from the last days onward — not proselytes, whose recruitment belongs rather to the earliest days. For it was this very faith that the apostles introduced.
22.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 22 ========

[1] You have too the work of the apostles as it was foretold: 'How timely are the feet of those who bring good news of peace, who bring good news of good things' — not of war, nor of evil. The psalm answers likewise: 'Into all the earth their sound has gone out, and to the ends of the world their words' — carrying, that is, the law that issued from Zion and the Lord's word from Jerusalem — so that what is written might come to pass: 'Those far from my righteousness have drawn near to my righteousness and to my truth.' [2] When the apostles girded themselves for this task, they brought their report before the elders, the rulers, and the priests of the Jews. Was it not, you say, precisely as preachers of another god? On the contrary — it was of that very same God whose scripture they were, at that very moment, fulfilling to the letter: 'Depart, depart,' cries Isaiah, 'go out from there, and touch nothing unclean' — blasphemy against Christ, that is — 'go out from the midst of her' — that is, of the synagogue; 'separate yourselves, you who carry the vessels of the Lord.' [3] For already, according to what was written above, the Lord had revealed his holy arm — that is, his power, Christ — before the nations, so every nation and the remotest ends of the earth might see the salvation that came from God. So too, departing from Judaism itself, as they exchanged the law's bonds and burdens for gospel freedom, they were carrying out the psalm: 'Let us break their bonds and cast off their yoke from us' — this after, indeed, the nations had raged and the peoples plotted vain things; the kings of the earth took their stand, and the rulers assembled in opposition to the Lord and to his Christ. [4] What did the apostles then suffer? Every kind of unjust persecution, you say, at the hands of the men of the Creator, as though they were his enemies since they preached against him. And why, then, does the Creator not merely foretell that his own apostles would suffer this, but actually reproach it? [5] For he would neither have foretold the order of another god, whom on your view he did not even know, nor would he have reproached what he himself had brought about: 'See how the righteous man perishes, and no one lays it to heart; and just men are carried off, and no one takes notice; for the just man is carried off from before the face of injustice.' Who but Christ? 'Come,' they say, 'let us take away the righteous man, for he is of no use to us.' By foretelling both, then, and by adding afterward that Christ too would suffer, he likewise prophesied that his righteous ones — the apostles first, and after them all the faithful — would suffer the same, marked with that very sign of which Ezekiel speaks: 'The Lord says to me, Pass through the midst of the gate, through the center of Jerusalem, and set the mark of the Tau on the foreheads of the men.' [6] For this is the Greek letter Tau, and in our alphabet T — the shape of the cross — which he foreshadowed as destined to be on our foreheads in the true and catholic Jerusalem, in which the brothers of Christ, the sons of God, would render glory to God the Father, as the twenty-first psalm sings in the person of Christ himself to the Father: 'I will declare your name to my brothers; in the midst of the assembly I will sing a hymn to you.' For what was to happen today in his name and Spirit, he rightly foretold as his own future act. And a little further on: 'From you comes my praise in the great assembly.' And in the sixty-seventh: 'In the assemblies bless the Lord God' — so that Malachi's prophecy might likewise coincide with this: 'It is not my will,' says the Lord, 'and I will not accept your sacrifices; for from the rising of the sun to its setting my name has been glorified among the nations, and in every place a sacrifice is offered to my name, and a clean sacrifice' — that is, the rendering of glory, and blessing, and praise, and hymns. [7] Since all of this is found present in you as well — the sealing of foreheads, and the sacraments of the assemblies, and the purity of the sacrifices — you ought by now to burst out and say that it was the Spirit of the Creator who prophesied all this of your Christ.
23.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 23 ========

[1] Now, since along with the Jews you deny that their Christ has come, consider also the outcome they were foretold to meet after Christ, on account of the impiety by which they both despised and killed him. For from the very day when, according to Isaiah, man cast away his gold and silver abominations, which he had made for worshiping vain and harmful things—that is, from the moment when, the truth having been made clear through Christ, the human race cast away its idols—see whether what follows has been fulfilled to the letter: [2] For the Lord of Sabaoth took away from Judea and from Jerusalem, among other things, the prophet and the wise master-builder—that is, the Holy Spirit, who builds the church, which is the temple and house and city of God. For from that time on the grace of God ceased among them, and orders went out to the clouds that no shower should fall upon the vineyard of Sorech—that is, that heavenly blessings should no longer come upon the house of Israel. [3] For it had produced thorns—the very ones with which it crowned the Lord—and not justice, but the shout with which it wrung his crucifixion out of Pilate. And so, with the dew of the charisms withdrawn, the law and the prophets lasted only until John. Then, since with that same persistence of fury the Lord's name went on being blasphemed through them—as it is written, 'Because of you my name is blasphemed among the nations' (for the slander began with them)—and since through the whole span from Tiberius to Vespasian they had understood nothing of repentance, their land was made a desert, their cities burned, strangers devour their territory before their very eyes, the daughter of Zion is abandoned, left like a watchman's hut in a vineyard or a shed in a cucumber-patch—all from the moment Israel failed to recognize the Lord, and the people, lacking understanding, abandoned him and stirred the Holy One of Israel into indignation. [4] So too the conditional threat of the sword—'If you will not and will not hear me, the sword shall devour you'—proves that it was Christ whom, by not hearing, they perished for. He it is who in Psalm fifty-eight asks the Father for their dispersal: 'Scatter them in your might.' And again, pleading through Isaiah about their burning, he says: 'Because of me these things have happened to you; you shall lie down in anguish.' [5] Quite pointlessly, if they suffered these things not on account of him who had foretold they would suffer on his own account, but on account of the Christ of some other god. And yet you say, I note, that this other god's Christ was driven to the cross by the Creator's own powers and authorities, as though by rivals. But look—he is shown to be defended by the Creator: the worst men were doled out as the price for his burial, namely those who claimed his body had been stolen, and the wealthiest as the price for his death—those, that is, who bought the betrayal from Judas, and bought from the soldiers the false testimony that the corpse had been stolen. [6] So then: either none of this befell the Jews because of him—but you stand refuted, since the sense of the Scriptures agrees with the outcome of events and the order of the times—or, if they did happen on his account, the Creator could only have been avenging his own Christ, since he would rather have rewarded Judas if the Jews had really killed an enemy of their own lord. Certainly, if the Creator's Christ has not yet come—the one on whose account these sufferings are foretold—then they will suffer them when he does come. But where, then, is the daughter of Zion left to be abandoned, seeing she does not exist today at all? [7] Where are the cities left to be burned, when they already lie in ruins? Where is the nation's dispersion left to happen, when it has already been exiled? Give me back the state of Judea intact, for the Creator's Christ to find, and then argue that a different Christ came. Besides, what sense would it make for him to let in through his own heaven the very one he was going to have killed on his own earth—letting the nobler and more glorious region of his kingdom be violated, his own court and citadel trampled underfoot? Or did he actually want that? A jealous god, to be sure—yet he was beaten. Blush for shame, you who put your faith in a beaten god! What can you hope from one who could not even protect himself? Either he was overpowered through weakness by the Creator's powers and men, or through sheer malice, simply to fasten the guilt of that crime on them all the more firmly.
24.

======== Adversus Marcionem 3 — Chapter 24 ========

[1] 'No,' you say, 'what I hope for from him is precisely what proves the difference: an eternal kingdom of God, a heavenly possession.' Whereas your Christ promises the Jews their former condition back, through the restoration of their land, and after this life is over, refreshment in Abraham's bosom among the dead. What a fine 'best' god, if, once appeased, he gives back what in his anger he had taken away! O your god, who both wounds and heals, who forms evils and makes peace! O a god merciful even down to the underworld! [2] But more of Abraham's bosom in its proper place. As for the restoration of Judea—which the Jews themselves, misled by the names of places and regions, hope for exactly as it is described—how an allegorical interpretation applies it spiritually to Christ and the church and its condition and its fruit is a long story, and one I have set out in another work, which I entitle ON THE HOPE OF THE FAITHFUL; and here it would in any case be beside the point, since our question concerns not an earthly but a heavenly promise. [3] We do indeed acknowledge that we have a kingdom pledged to us upon the earth, prior to heaven, though in a different mode of being—that is to say, once the resurrection has come, spanning a thousand years, within that city of divine construction, Jerusalem, lowered out of the sky, the very one the apostle also singles out as the mother above us; and when he declares that our citizenship—our politeuma, that is—is in the heavens, he clearly assigns it to some heavenly city. [4] This city Ezekiel also knew, and the apostle John saw; and the utterance of the fresh prophecy that belongs to our own faith gives testimony to the same thing, foretelling as a sign that an image of the city would appear to view before its actual manifestation. And indeed this was just fulfilled to the letter, in the recent eastern campaign. For it is attested even by pagan witnesses that in Judea, for forty days, at the moments of morning, a city hung suspended from the sky, its entire wall-work fading away as the day advanced, and at no other time nearby was any such thing seen. [5] This city, we say, has been made ready by God to receive the saints at the resurrection and to refresh them with an abundance of every good thing—spiritual goods, of course—as compensation for what we have either scorned or lost in this present age. For it is both just and worthy of God that his servants should exult in the very place where they were also afflicted for his name's sake. Such is the plan of the heavenly kingdom, [6] after whose thousand years—within which span the resurrection of the saints is completed, some rising sooner and some later according to their merits—then, once the world's destruction and the conflagration of judgment have taken place, we shall be changed in an instant into angelic substance, by that overgarment of incorruption, and carried across into the heavenly kingdom. And it is precisely this kingdom that is now being called into question, as though it had never been foretold by the Creator, and as though this proved a different Christ, by whom alone and for the first time it was supposedly revealed. [7] Learn, then, from this very point, both that it was foretold by the Creator and that, even without being foretold, it ought to be believed as belonging to the Creator. What do you make of this: when Abraham's seed, after the first promise in which it is likened to the multitude of the sand, is also destined to be like the stars—are these not tokens of both an earthly and a heavenly arrangement? When Isaac, blessing his son Jacob, says, 'May God give you of the dew of heaven and of the richness of the earth'—are these not examples of both kinds of favor? [8] Notice, too, the very structure of this blessing. In the case of Jacob, who is a figure of the later and preferred people—that is, of us—the first promise is of heaven's dew, the second of earth's richness. For we are first invited to heavenly things, when we are torn away from this present age, and only afterward do we find that we obtain earthly things as well. Your own gospel says as much: 'Seek the kingdom of God before all else, and these other things will be granted to you besides.' [9] But to Esau he promises an earthly blessing and puts the heavenly one second, saying, 'Of the richness of the earth shall be your dwelling, and of the dew of heaven.' For the Jewish arrangement, figured in Esau—the sons who were first by birth but last in favor—is first steeped in earthly goods through the law, and only afterward led on to heavenly things through believing the gospel. And when Jacob dreams of a ladder planted upon the ground and stretching up into the sky, with angels moving both up and down it, and the Lord bending over it from on high—would it be too bold, perhaps, to interpret this ladder as showing the road to heaven, by which some arrive and from which others fall, all set by the Lord's own judgment? [10] But why, when he awoke and was first shaken with dread at the place, does he turn to interpreting the dream? For after saying, 'How dreadful is this place!' he goes on, 'It is nothing other than the house of God, and this the gate of heaven.' For what he had seen was the Lord Christ, who is at once the temple of God and the very gateway by which one passes into heaven. And he certainly would not have called it the gate of heaven if heaven were not something entered under the Creator. But there is both a gate that receives and a road that leads there, already paved by Christ. Of whom Amos says: 'He who builds his ascent into heaven'—and not for himself alone, but for his own, who will be with him. [11] 'You shall wrap them around you,' he says, 'like a bride's ornament.' So too the Spirit marvels at those pressing on by that ascent toward the heavenly kingdoms, saying: 'They fly like kites, like clouds they fly, and like the young of doves to me'—that is, simply, like doves. For we are, on the apostle's word, to be snatched up amid the clouds so as to meet the Lord (this being that same Son of man who arrives amid clouds, per Daniel), and thus shall we remain with the Lord forever—as long, that is, as we remain both on earth and in heaven; and against those thankless for both kinds of promise, he summons the very elements as witnesses: 'Listen, heaven, and lend your ear, earth.' [12] And I, for my part, even if Scripture were not so often holding out to me the hand of heavenly hope, would have enough grounds, even so, to anticipate this further promise, from the fact that, already holding an earthly favor, I would expect something from heaven as well, from a God of heaven just as of earth. So I would believe that the one promising the loftier things is the very one who had already promised the humbler ones—who had made his tests of the greater things by means of the smaller, and who had, perhaps, reserved this proclamation of an unheard-of kingdom for Christ alone, so that earthly glory should be announced through his servants, but heavenly glory through God himself. [13] But you, from this very fact, argue for a different Christ, on the ground that he announces a new kingdom. First produce some precedent of such generosity, so that I am not right to doubt the credibility of so great a promise, which you tell me to hope for; or rather, before anything else, you must prove that the one you claim promises heavenly things actually has some heaven of his own. But as it is, you invite me to a banquet without showing me the house; you dangle a kingdom without pointing to any palace. Or is it that your Christ promises a heavenly kingdom while having no heaven, just as he presented himself as a man while having no flesh? O utter phantom! O illusion of even so great a promise!

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 1 ========

[1] Every opinion and every piece of equipment belonging to the impious and sacrilegious Marcion we now call to account before his own gospel — the one he made his own by interpolating it. And to furnish it with credentials, he composed for it a kind of dowry, a work put together out of oppositions of contraries, entitled Antitheses, and forced into service to separate the Law from the Gospel; by which, splitting the two gods apart — and therefore making them different, the one belonging to one instrument (or, as it is more usual to say, testament), the other to the other — he meant thereby to win a patron, too, for his gospel understood according to the Antitheses. [2] I might have felled those Antitheses in close combat on their own ground, thrust by single thrust across the Pontic's darts, had it not been far more to the purpose to beat them down within the very gospel they mean to defend, and along with it. And yet it is easy enough to meet them by simple prescription — indeed so easy that I could grant them, allow them as valid, even say they work in our favor, so that the blindness of their own author should the more shame them: our own antitheses now, set against Marcion. [3] I confess, then, that one order ran its course under the old dispensation with the Creator, another under the new with Christ. I do not deny a difference between the records of speech, the precepts of virtue, the disciplines of the law — provided the whole diversity comes together in one and the same God, the very one, evidently, by whom it stands established that it was both arranged and foretold. [4] Long ago Isaiah proclaimed that out of Zion a rule would issue, with the Lord's utterance coming out of Jerusalem — plainly another rule and another utterance. He shall judge, it says, among the nations, and shall convert a great people — not, clearly, of the one nation of the Jews, but of the nations who, by that fresh rule of the gospel and that fresh utterance carried by the apostles, are judged and converted within themselves from their former error, at the very moment they believe; and thereupon their blades are hammered down into plough-blades, and their spear-shafts (a kind of hunting-lance) into pruning-hooks — that is, they turn minds once fierce and savage into upright sensibilities and workers of good fruit. [5] And again: Hear me, hear me, my people, and you kings, give ear to me, for a rule shall issue out from me, and my sentence to be a beacon for the nations — by which he had already judged and decreed that the nations too should be lit up by that same rule and utterance of the gospel. This shall likewise be the rule set out through David, without blemish, which, once perfected, turns the soul back — back, that is, from idols to God. This too shall be that utterance of which Isaiah himself declares: for the Lord shall bring a saying to a swift close upon the earth. [6] For the new testament is abridged, and freed from the law's tangled burdens. But why multiply proofs, when the newness to come is proclaimed by the Creator himself more plainly and clearly than daylight? Remember not the former things, and think not upon the things of old: what was old has now departed, fresh matters are rising up: behold, I fashion new things, which shall now spring up. Likewise through Jeremiah: Renew for yourselves a new renewal, and sow not among thorns, and cut away the uncircumcision covering your heart. And elsewhere: Behold, the days come, says the Lord, when I will accomplish for the house of Jacob and the house of Judah a new testament, not according to the testament which I arranged with their fathers on the day when I took hold of their arrangement to lead them out of the land of Egypt. [7] So plainly does the former testament signal something temporal — since it shows itself changeable — even while it promises, for what comes after, something eternal. For through Isaiah: Hear me and you shall live, and I will arrange for you an eternal testament, adding the holy and faithful things of David, so as to show that this testament was to run its course in Christ. The same one, of David's line, according to Mary's lineage — [8] he foretold him too, in figure, as coming forth as a rod from the root of Jesse. If, then, he said that other laws and other words and new arrangements of testaments were to come from the Creator, so that he even destined other and superior forms of the very sacrifices themselves — and destined them for the nations — Malachi saying, My will is not in you, says the Lord, and I will not accept your sacrifices from your hands, for out where the sun climbs to where it sinks, my name has been glorified among the nations, and in every place a sacrifice is offered to my name, and a pure sacrifice — that is, plainly, simple prayer from a clean conscience — then it is necessary that every alteration arising from renewal enter into diversity with the things it replaces, and into contrariety by way of that diversity. [9] For just as nothing is altered that is not made different, so nothing is different that is not, in some sense, contrary. The contrariety arising from the diversity, then, will be reckoned to belong to the same one to whom belongs the alteration arising from the renewal. He who arranged the alteration, the same instituted the diversity too; he who proclaimed the renewal, the same foretold the contrariety too. [10] Why do you interpret a difference of things as a distance of powers? Why do you twist antitheses of examples against the Creator, when you can recognize the same pattern in his own feelings and dispositions? I, he says, will strike, and I will heal; I, he says, will kill, and I will make alive — creating evils, that is, and making peace; for which you are also in the habit of charging him with fickleness and inconstancy, forbidding what he commands and commanding what he forbids. Why then have you not reckoned the antitheses too as belonging to the natural workings of a Creator ever at odds with himself? Nor, unless I am mistaken, could you even conceive of a world — even among your Pontics — except as built up out of the diversities of rival substances contending with one another. [11] You ought, then, first to have determined one god of light and another of darkness, so that on that basis you could then have asserted one god of the law and another of the gospel. As it is, it stands prejudged from what is plain: that the very forms whose works and character are established through the antitheses are the same forms in which the sacraments too stand established.
2.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 2 ========

[1] You now have from us a ready answer to the Antitheses. I pass now to demonstrating the corruption — meanwhile — of the gospel, which is certainly not Jewish but Pontic, and to laying out the order in which I mean to proceed. We establish, in the first place, that the evangelical instrument has the apostles as its authors, upon whom this office of promulgating the gospel was laid by the Lord himself; and if also apostolic men, these not alone, but along with the apostles and after the apostles — since the preaching of mere disciples might become suspect of ambition for glory, were it not backed by the authority of the masters, or rather of Christ, who made the masters apostles. [2] Thus, then, John and Matthew instill faith in us from among the apostles; Luke and Mark renew it from among the apostolic men — all setting out from the same rules, so far as concerns the one God the Creator and his Christ, born of a virgin, the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets. As for whether the arrangement of the narratives varies, that may be seen to, so long as they agree on the substance of the faith — on which point there is no agreement with Marcion. [3] Marcion, by contrast, assigns no author at all to his gospel — as if it were not permitted him to forge even a title, when it was no crime for him to overturn the very body of the work! And I might here already plant my foot, contending that a work deserves no recognition which cannot lift its own head, which offers no consistency, which promises no credibility through the fullness of a title and the due profession of an author. [4] But I prefer to engage on every front, and I do not conceal what can be understood from our own case. For among the commentators we possess, it appears Marcion chose Luke to mutilate. Now Luke was not an apostle but a man of apostolic standing, no master but rather one taught — certainly less than his master, and indeed as much later as he was a follower of a later apostle, Paul without doubt; so that even if Marcion had brought forward his gospel under the very name of Paul, the singularity of the document, deprived of the patronage of predecessors, would not suffice for its credibility. [5] For that gospel too would be required which Paul found, to which he gave his assent, with which he was soon eager to have his own agree — since it was for this very reason that he went up to Jerusalem to become acquainted with the apostles and to consult with them, lest by chance he should have run, or be running, in vain — that is, lest he should not have believed according to them, and not be preaching the gospel according to them. In the end, when he had conferred with the authorities and they had agreed on the rule of faith, they joined right hands, and thereupon divided the offices of preaching, so that those should go to the Jews, and Paul to the Jews and to the nations. If, then, the very one who gave Luke his light chose to have the authority of his predecessors back both his faith and his preaching, how much more should I demand that same authority for Luke's gospel, which was necessary even for the gospel of Luke's own master?
3.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 3 ========

[1] It would be another matter if, so far as Marcion is concerned, the sacrament of the Christian religion began only with his own discipleship under Luke. But if it ran its course well before that too, then it certainly had authentic equipment of its own, by means of which it reached all the way down to Luke — and by whose testimony, standing behind him, Luke too can be admitted. [2] But Marcion, having got hold of Paul's letter to the Galatians — a letter that even rebukes the apostles themselves for not walking with a straight foot toward the truth of the gospel, and at the same time accuses certain pseudo-apostles of perverting the gospel of Christ — strains every nerve to demolish the standing of those gospels which are published as their own, under the name of the apostles, or even of apostolic men, so that he may transfer to his own the credit he strips from theirs. [3] But even granting that Peter and John and James, who were reputed pillars, were reproved, the reason is plain: out of regard for persons they seemed to vary in their table-fellowship. And yet, since Paul made himself, of his own accord, everything by turns to every sort of person, so as to gain the lot of them, it was quite possible for Peter too to have had it in mind to act somewhat otherwise than he taught. [4] Likewise, if pseudo-apostles too had crept in, their character has also been published: men championing circumcision and Jewish observances. So it is clear that Paul was marking them out not for their preaching but for their conduct — and he would just as readily have marked them out for any error concerning God the Creator or his Christ. Distinctions, then, must be drawn one by one. If Marcion complains that the apostles are to be held suspect of hypocrisy and dissembling to the point of corrupting the gospel, then he is already accusing Christ, by accusing those Christ chose. But if the apostles delivered the gospel whole and entire, reproved only for an inconsistency of table-fellowship, while it was the pseudo-apostles who interpolated their truth — and it is from these that our copies are drawn — then what will that genuine instrument of the apostles turn out to be, the one that suffered corrupters, the one that gave Paul his light, and through him Luke? Or if it has been so utterly wiped out — as though by some flood, blotted out by an inundation of forgers — then Marcion too, by that reckoning, no longer has the true one. [5] Or if the true one is that of the apostles — the one Marcion alone possesses (and how then does it agree with ours, which is credited not to the apostles but to Luke?) — or if what Marcion uses need not straightaway be assigned to Luke, simply because it agrees with ours — corrupted, that is, even as to its title, but belonging to the apostles nonetheless — then by the same token ours too, which agrees with his, equally belongs to the apostles, only corrupted as to its title as well.
4.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 4 ========

[1] The rope of the contest, then, must be pulled, with equal strain surging from both sides. I say mine is true, Marcion his. I affirm Marcion's is corrupted, Marcion mine. Who is to settle it between us, except the reckoning of time — which grants authority to what is found to be earlier, and prejudges as corruption what is proved to be later? For to the same degree that falsehood is a corruption of the truth, to that same degree must truth necessarily precede falsehood. [2] The thing must exist before it can be tampered with, and the material before there can be rivalry over it. Otherwise, how absurd it would be, that if we prove ours the earlier and Marcion's the later, ours should nonetheless be thought false before it had any material of truth to be false about, and Marcion's should be believed to have undergone our rivalry before it was even published — and that, finally, the more recent thing should be judged the truer, after so many and such great works and monuments of the Christian religion had already been published to the world — works which certainly could not have been produced without the truth of the gospel, that is, before the truth of the gospel! [3] As far, then, as concerns the gospel of Luke in the meantime — insofar as it is shared between us and Marcion that the dispute over its truth turns on it — that version which is ours is so much earlier than his that even Marcion, at one time, gave it his own belief, since he even contributed money, in the first warmth of faith, to the catholic church — money that was afterward thrown back at him, once he had fallen away from our truth into his own heresy. What now, if the Marcionites should deny that he ever held our faith in the beginning — and deny it even against his own letter? What if they should refuse to acknowledge the letter at all? [4] Certainly the Antitheses are not merely acknowledged as Marcion's, they are actually put forward by his own people. From these alone my proof is enough. For if that gospel which is credited to Luke among us (we shall see whether also among Marcion) is the very one which Marcion, through his Antitheses, charges with having been interpolated by defenders of Judaism so as to weld it to the Law and the Prophets, and so fabricate a Christ out of that combination — then certainly he could not have brought the charge except against something he had found already there. [5] No one reproves as future what he does not know to be future; correction does not precede the fault. The corrector of the gospel — a gospel overturned, as he tells it, all the way from the times of Tiberius down to those of Antoninus — turns out to be Marcion, and Marcion alone, and the first; long awaited, it seems, by Christ, who must by now regret having been in such a hurry to send the apostles on ahead without the safeguard of Marcion! Except that heresy is the business of human rashness, not of divine authority, and it always 'corrects' the gospels in the very act of corrupting them: for even if Marcion is a disciple, he is still not above his master; and even if Marcion is an apostle, Whether it be I, says Paul, or they, so we preach; and even if Marcion is a prophet, the spirits granted to prophets must themselves stay in submission to the prophets, since they are not spirits that stir up overthrow but ones that bring peace; and even if Marcion is an angel, he ought sooner to be pronounced accursed than an evangelist, because he preached a different gospel. And so, in the very act of correcting, he confirms both: ours as the earlier, since what he corrects he found already there; and his own as the later, since by his correction of what he found he has produced something of his own, and new.
5.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 5 ========

[1] In sum, if it is agreed that what is truer is what is earlier, what is earlier is what is from the beginning, and what is from the beginning is what is from the apostles, then it will equally be agreed that what has been held sacrosanct in the churches of the apostles is what was passed down from the apostles. Consider, then, what nourishment the Corinthians received as milk from Paul, what standard called the Galatians back to order, what the Philippians read, along with the Thessalonians and the Ephesians; let us hear too what the Romans, close at hand, sound out — the Romans, to whom Peter and Paul left the gospel sealed even with their own blood. [2] We have also the churches that John fostered. For even though Marcion rejects his Apocalypse, the succession of bishops traced back to its origin will still come to rest on John as its author. So too is the noble pedigree of the other churches recognized. I say, then, that among those churches — and by now not only the apostolic ones, but all those bound to them in fellowship of the same sacred trust — it is Luke's gospel, from the very first issuing of it, that has stood its ground, the very one we now defend to the utmost; whereas Marcion's is unknown to most of them, and known to none without being condemned by all as the same. [3] To be sure, that gospel too has its churches — but its own, as much later births as adulterous ones — and if you demand a census of them, you will more easily find one traceable back to an apostate than to an apostle: Marcion, of course, being their founder, or someone out of Marcion's own school. Wasps too build combs; Marcionites too build churches. That very authority belonging to the apostolic churches will likewise stand as patron for the remaining gospels, which we likewise hold through them and according to them — I mean John's and Matthew's — although the gospel Mark issued is credited to Peter, whose interpreter he was. And Luke's compilation men are accustomed to ascribe to Paul. [4] It is natural for what disciples publish to be regarded as belonging to their masters. So on this score too Marcion must be pressed: why, passing these others over, did he fix rather on Luke, as though these too had not existed in the churches from the beginning, just as Luke's has? Yet it is more credible that these existed from the beginning even more than Luke's, being earlier as apostolic writings, dedicated together with the very churches themselves. Besides, what sense would it make if the apostles published nothing, so that it was rather the disciples who published, when the disciples could not even have existed as disciples without some teaching from their masters? [5] Since, then, it stands agreed that these too existed in the churches, why did Marcion not touch these as well — either to correct them, if corrupted, or to acknowledge them, if sound? For it would be fitting that if any were perverting the gospel, they would take more care to pervert those whose authority they knew to be more widely received. That, after all, is why there were pseudo-apostles — because they were counterfeiting real apostles through falsehood. So then, to the extent he would have corrected what needed correcting, had it been corrupt, to that same extent he confirmed that what he did not think needed correcting was not corrupt. [6] In the end, he corrected what he judged corrupt. But not rightly even in this case, because it was not corrupt. For if the apostolic gospels have come down whole and entire, and the Gospel of Luke, the one according to us, agrees so closely with their rule that it remains alongside them in the churches, then it is already established that Luke's too has come down whole and entire — right up to Marcion's act of sacrilege. In short, from the moment Marcion laid hands on it, it became something different from, and at odds with, the apostolic gospels. [7] I will therefore give his disciples some advice: either let them convert even those other gospels — late as it is — to their master's shape, so that they may at least appear to agree with the apostolic ones (and indeed they do reshape his gospel daily, as we daily catch them out), or else let them blush for a master exposed on both counts, since he sometimes hands down the truth of the gospel out of a guilty conscience and sometimes overturns it out of sheer effrontery. These, roughly, are the shortcuts we use when we are settling questions of the gospel's authenticity against heretics — appealing both to the order of dates, which disqualifies latecomer forgers before posterity, and to the authority of the churches, which stands patron to the apostles' tradition, because truth must necessarily come before falsehood, and must proceed from those by whom it was handed down.
6.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 6 ========

[1] But now we move on from here to a further stage, challenging, as we promised, Marcion's own gospel itself, so as to prove that it too has been corrupted. For certainly the whole labor he expended in constructing even his Antitheses is bent on this single aim: to establish a difference between the old and the new testament, and thereby to separate his own Christ from the Creator, as belonging to another god, as a stranger to the Law and the Prophets. [2] For that very reason he erased whatever statements were at odds with his own position, as being in agreement with the Creator — as though they had been woven in by his defenders — while he kept whatever statements suited his own position. These we shall agree to, these we shall embrace, if they are found to be more on our side, if they strike down Marcion's presumption. Then it will also be established that those other statements were erased by the same fault of heretical blindness by which these were kept. [3] So this will be the plan and shape of our little work, on the condition, of course, agreed on from both sides. Marcion holds that there is one Christ, revealed in the time of Tiberius by a hitherto unknown god, for the salvation of all nations; and another Christ, destined by the Creator god for the restoration of the state of the Jews, still to come at some future time. Between these two he draws a vast and total distinction — as great as that between the just and the good, as great as that between law and gospel, as great as that between Judaism and Christianity. [4] From this, then, will follow our own prescriptive rule as well, by which we lay it down that Christ, belonging to that other god, ought to have nothing in common with the Creator — but must otherwise be declared to belong to the Creator, given that he has carried out the Creator's arrangements, if he has fulfilled the Creator's prophecies, if he has upheld the Creator's laws, if he has made good the Creator's promises, if he has restored the Creator's mighty works, if he has reshaped the Creator's pronouncements, expressing his character, expressing his very qualities. Of this agreement and of this rule, I ask you, reader, to be mindful throughout, and begin now to recognize, at every turn, either Marcion's Christ or the Creator's.
7.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 7 ========

[1] In the fifteenth year of Tiberius's reign, Marcion proposes that he came down into Capernaum, a city of Galilee — down, of course, from the Creator's heaven, into which he had earlier come down from his own. What order of events was this, I ask, that he should first be described as descending from his own heaven into the Creator's, before descending further? For why should I not likewise take issue with details that fail to fill out the credibility of an orderly narrative — a narrative that keeps falling short in falsehood? Let it be said just this once, since we have already gone over elsewhere whether, in descending through the Creator's territory — and indeed against the Creator himself — he could have been admitted by him and from there sent on down into a land equally the Creator's own. [2] But now I press the matter of the rest of the order of this descent as well, holding him to having descended. He may, of course, simply have "appeared" wherever it is so stated. To appear suggests a sudden thing, out of the blue, striking the gaze of someone who has fixed his eyes without delay on what has appeared instantly. But "to descend," while it is happening, is something seen and comes gradually before the eyes. Being a deed, it also has a sequence of its own, and so it forces us to ask: in what manner, by what conveyance, with what force or pace, and at what time of day or night did he descend? Further, who saw him descending, who reported it, who vouched for a thing that not even the one vouching for it could easily be believed about? [3] It is disgraceful, in short, that Romulus had Proculus to affirm his ascent into heaven, while Christ, god's own descent from his heaven, found no one to announce it — as if Romulus too had not ascended by those same rungs of falsehood by which this Christ is said to have descended. But what business had he with Galilee at all, had he no connection to the Creator, to whom that region was destined, on the eve of his entry into his preaching? — as Isaiah says: "Drink this first, do it quickly, land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, and the rest along the sea and the Jordan, Galilee of the nations, people sitting in darkness, see a great light: you who dwell in the land, sitting in the shadow of death, a light has risen upon you." [4] And it fits well that even Marcion's god is claimed as an illuminator of the nations — all the more reason he should have descended from heaven, and, if he really did, descended into Pontus rather than into Galilee. Yet given that the location together with the deed of illumination both align with the prophecy at Christ's coming, we begin to recognize in him one already prophesied, showing at his first entrance that he came, not to dissolve the Law and the Prophets, but instead to bring them to fulfillment. This is exactly what Marcion erased, as though it were an addition. [5] But it will do him no good to deny that Christ said this, when Christ did it at once, in part. For he fulfilled the prophecy about the place straightaway: from heaven, at once to the synagogue. As the saying goes, "to what we came for" — go on then, Marcion, strike this too out of the gospel: "I was sent to none but the stray sheep belonging to Israel's house," and, "It is not fitting to take the bread meant for children and toss it to the dogs" — lest, of course, Christ should be seen to belong to Israel. [6] Deeds are enough for me in place of words. Strip away the sayings of my Christ; the facts will still speak. Look: he enters the synagogue — surely among the stray sheep belonging to Israel's house. Look: he offers the bread of his teaching first to the Israelites — surely as preferring the children. Look: he has not yet shared it with others — surely as passing over the dogs. Yet to whom would he sooner have shared it than to those outside the Creator's family, if he himself had not, first of all, belonged to the Creator? [7] And yet how could someone so sudden, so unknown, be admitted into the synagogue — someone about whom no one yet had any certainty of tribe, of people, of household, or even of Augustus's census, which the Roman archives keep as the most faithful witness of the Lord's birth? Surely they would have remembered — unless they knew him to be circumcised — that he ought not to be admitted into the holy of holies. But even granting that the synagogue was open to all comers, still no one was permitted to teach there unless first well known, examined, and approved — already commended for this very office beforehand, from some quarter or other, along with this charge. "And all were amazed at his teaching." Certainly. "Because," it says, "his word had authority" — not because he was teaching against the Law and the Prophets. Indeed, his divine utterance displayed both power and grace, building up rather than tearing down the substance of the Law and the Prophets. [8] Otherwise they would not have been amazed but appalled; they would not have marveled but would instantly have turned away from a destroyer of the Law and the Prophets, and, above all, from a herald of another god — since he could not have taught against the Law and the Prophets, and hence against the Creator, without first announcing a profession of a different and rival divinity. Since, then, Scripture gives no hint of any such thing, but only that it was the sheer power and authority of his speech that was the object of wonder, it more readily shows that he taught in accordance with the Creator — since it says nothing against it — than that he taught against the Creator, since it gives no indication of that at all. [9] And so he must either be acknowledged as belonging to the one according to whose teaching he taught, or judged a turncoat, if he taught in accordance with the very one against whom he had supposedly come. There in that same place the spirit of a demon cries out: "What have we to do with you, Jesus? You have come to destroy us: I know who you are, the Holy One of God." [10] Here I will not go back over whether this title too fit one who ought not even to be called Christ, supposing him unconnected to the Creator — that question of names has already been dealt with elsewhere. But now I ask how the demon came to know him by this name, when no proclamation had ever before gone out concerning him from the unknown god — a god mute up until that very moment — who could not even have had the demon attest him as holy, since he was unknown even to his own Creator, so to speak. And what, in any case, had he by then done to reveal his new divinity, by which he might be recognized as the Holy One of some other god? [11] Only this — that he had entered the synagogue, and had not, even by his speech, achieved anything against the Creator? Just as, then, he could in no way have recognized as Jesus and Holy One of God someone he did not know, so he recognized the one he did know. For the demon recalled that a prophet had foretold a Holy One of God, Jesus being the name in which God dwelt within the son of Nun. This, too, he had picked up from the angel, according to our own gospel: "Therefore that which will be born in you shall be called holy, the Son of God"; and, "You shall call his name Jesus." [12] But he also had, of course, some sense — demon though he was — of the Lord's own arrangement, more so than of one foreign and not yet properly known. For he began by saying, "What have we to do with you, Jesus?" — not as to a stranger, but to one to whom the spirits of the Creator belong. He did not, in fact, phrase it as “What business do you have with us?” but rather “What business do we have with you?” — bewailing his own state and reproaching his own lot; and seeing that lot clearly, he adds, "You have come to destroy us." [13] So thoroughly had he recognized Jesus as the son of a judge and avenger, a god who, if I may put it so, is stern — not that other, "supremely good" god who knows nothing of destroying and punishing. Why have we brought up this passage? To show that Jesus was recognized as none other, even by the demon, and confirmed by himself to be none other, than the Creator's own. But, you say, Jesus rebuked him. Certainly — as being tiresome, brash even in his very confession, and flattering him in a bad way; as though it were the summit of Christ's glory to have arrived for demons' ruin rather than for humanity's salvation — he who did not even want his disciples to boast of subduing spirits, but rather of the shining glory of salvation. [14] Or why did he rebuke him? If as one who had lied outright, then he was not Jesus at all, nor in any sense the Holy One of God; if as one who had lied only in part — in supposing him to be Jesus and Holy One of God, yes, but the Creator's — then he rebuked most unjustly one who was thinking exactly what he ought to have thought, and failing to suppose only what he had no way of knowing he ought to suppose: another Jesus, the Holy One of another god. [15] But if the rebuke has no more plausible explanation than the one we give, then the demon told no lie at all, and was not rebuked for a lie; for he indeed was Jesus, and the demon could have recognized no other besides him, and Jesus confirmed the very one the demon had recognized, in rebuking the demon for something other than a lie.
8.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 8 ========

According to prophecy the Creator's Christ was destined to be called a Nazarene. That is precisely why the Jews, through him, call us Nazarenes. For we are indeed the ones of whom it was written: "Her Nazarites were whiter than snow" — men once discolored by the stains of sin and blackened by the shadows of ignorance, now made white. But the title "Nazarene" was going to attach itself to Christ from the hiding-places of his infancy, where he went down to Nazareth to escape Archelaus, Herod's son. I have not passed over this point for nothing: Marcion's Christ ought to have renounced every connection, even with the places familiar to the Creator's Christ, seeing that Judea had so many towns not so obviously made over to the Creator's Christ by the prophets. But wherever Christ is found matching the prophets, he belongs to the prophets. And in any case nothing new is recorded of him at Nazareth beyond being run out of town, and deservedly, over a single proverb. Since this is the first place I find hands actually laid on him, I need to settle in advance the question of his bodily substance — for a mere phantom could hardly be believed to have submitted to being seized, gripped with real violence, and dragged all the way to the edge of a cliff. Yet even though he slipped away through their midst, this came only after he had already borne real force, and only then was he let go: the crowd's uproar, as commonly happens, either dissolving on its own or being forced apart — he was not eluding them as some vapor might, a thing that no touch could ever have laid hold of, had it truly been such.
For nothing can touch or be touched except a body —
a maxim worthy even of secular wisdom. In short, he himself soon afterward touched others, laying hands on them — hands that could certainly be felt — and conferring the benefits of healing, benefits as real and unimaginary as the hands that conferred them. He, then, is the Christ of Isaiah, the healer of infirmities: "He," it says, "takes away our weaknesses and bears our sicknesses." The Greeks, incidentally, commonly use "bear" to mean "take away." For the moment the general promise is enough for me: whatever Jesus healed, he is mine. But we shall come to the particular healings too. Now, deliverance from demons is also a form of healing sickness. And so the wicked spirits, as if following the pattern of an earlier precedent, would depart crying out their testimony: "You are the Son of God!" Of which God, let even this witness make plain. But they were rebuked, all the same, and ordered to be silent. For Christ wanted to be recognized as the Son of God by men, not by unclean spirits — that Christ, at least, to whom this recognition was fitting, because he had sent ahead men through whom he could be known, and worthier heralds at that. It belonged to that Christ to reject the proclamation of unclean spirits, since he had holy ones in abundance. But a Christ who had never before been announced — and if he did want to be recognized (though his coming was pointless if he did not) — would hardly have spurned testimony from any substance at all, however alien, seeing he had none of his own, having descended into what belonged to another. And now, precisely as the destroyer of the Creator, nothing would have suited him better than to be recognized and broadcast by the Creator's own spirits, out of fear — except that Marcion denies his god is to be feared at all, insisting that the good god is not feared, only the judge, in whom alone reside the materials of fear: wrath, savagery, judgments, vengeance, condemnation. And yet the demons plainly gave way out of fear. So they were confessing the Son of a God who is to be feared, which would give them every reason not to yield if fear were not the issue — and he, expelling them by command and rebuke rather than by persuasion, as a "good" god would, was showing himself as one to be feared. Or was he rebuking them precisely because they feared him, not wanting to be feared? And how did he expect them to leave, when nothing but fear made them do it? So he fell into the necessity of acting against his own nature, when as a good god he could simply have spared them outright at a stroke. And he fell into another mark of inconsistency, by allowing himself to be feared by demons as though he were the Son of the Creator — expelling them not by his own authority any longer, but by the Creator's. He went out into the wilderness. Such a region is characteristically the Creator's own. It was fitting that the Word be seen there too in the body, in the place where he had once acted even in the cloud. The setting suited the gospel, since it had already suited the Law. Let the wilderness, then, take on its gladness — this is what Isaiah had promised. Detained by the crowds, he says, "To the towns beyond, too, I am bound to announce the reign of God." Had he shown his God anywhere yet? I do not think so, up to this point. Was he speaking, then, to people who also knew some other god? I do not believe that either. So then: if he had not yet revealed another god, and they knew none but the Creator, the kingdom he was announcing was that of the very God whom alone his hearers knew.
9.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 9 ========

Out of so many kinds of work, why on earth did he turn to fishing, to take Simon and the sons of Zebedee from that trade into the apostolate? — for so telling an act as this cannot look like a mere accident. To Peter, trembling at the huge catch of fish, he says, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men." By this saying he was suggesting to them the understanding of a fulfilled prophecy: that he was the one who had proclaimed through Jeremiah, "Behold, I will send many fishermen, and they shall fish them" — namely, men. And so, leaving their boats, they followed him, recognizing him as the very one who had begun to do what he had announced beforehand. It would be a different matter if he had wanted to enroll a member of the boatmen's guild, meaning to have Marcion someday as an apostle-shipmaster.

We have already shown against the Antitheses that Marcion gains nothing from his supposed contrast between Law and Gospel, since this contrast too was arranged by the Creator, and indeed was foretold in the promise of a new law, a new word, and a new covenant. But since he argues more pointedly, invoking some "sympathy," as he calls it — that is, fellow-suffering — and "agreement," that is, harmony, of his god, in the matter of the cleansing of the leper, it will be worth meeting him and first pointing out the force of the figurative Law, which in the case of forbidding contact with — indeed, banishing altogether from company — the leper, was prohibiting association with a man stained by the marks of sin, with such persons even the apostle forbids sharing food; for the stain of sins is thought to be contracted, as if by contagion, by anyone who mixes with a sinner. So then, the Lord, wanting the Law to be understood at a deeper level as signifying spiritual things through carnal ones — and by this very fact not destroying it but rather building it up higher, since he wanted it recognized in its truer bearing — touched the leper; and though a man might have been defiled by such contact, God certainly could not be defiled, being of course incapable of contamination. Thus no rule could be laid against him that he ought to have kept the Law and not touched an unclean person, since he was not the kind of being that contact with uncleanness could defile. I show this fits my Christ all the better by demonstrating how it fails to fit yours. For if he touched the leper as a rival of the Law, treating the Law's precept with contempt for defilement, how could he be defiled who had no body capable of being defiled? A phantom cannot be defiled. So then, if he could not be defiled because he was a phantom, his immunity from contamination is no longer a divine power but merely the emptiness of a phantom; nor can he be said to have despised defilement, when he had no substance for defilement to touch; and so he did not really set aside the Law either, having escaped uncleanness by the accident of being a phantom, not by any display of power. Now, if Elisha, a prophet of the Creator, cleansed one leper — Naaman the Syrian — out of so many lepers in Israel, this does nothing to establish a difference in Christ, as though this proves him better because, being a foreigner, he cleansed a leprous Israelite whom his own Lord had failed to cleanse; rather, the Syrian's easier cleansing signified, through the nations, the cleansing accomplished in the light of Christ for those disfigured by the seven blemishes of deadly sin — the worship of idols, blasphemy, murder, adultery, fornication, bearing false witness, and fraud. And that is why he washed seven times in the Jordan, once for each count, as it were, both to sing the expiation of a whole week, and because the power and fullness of a single washing was reserved for Christ alone, who would perform on earth, just as he compressed his word, so too his washing. For Marcion raises this objection too: Elisha needed material means, used water, and that seven times over, whereas Christ, using word alone, and that only once, produced the cure instantly. As though I would not dare claim the word itself for the Creator's own substance! No one is a better author of anything than the one who came first. It is simply incredible that the Creator's power should have needed a word to work the cure of a single ailment, when by a word it once brought forth the entire mass of the world. By what better mark is the Creator's Christ recognized than by the power of the word? But no — he must be a different Christ, because he did it differently from Elisha, because a Lord is more powerful than his servant! What do you mean to establish, Marcion, by claiming that things are done by servants the same way they are done by masters themselves? Are you not afraid this will turn to your own disgrace, if you deny that Christ belongs to the Creator on the grounds that he was more powerful than the Creator's servant — a Christ recognized as "greater" only by comparison with the smallness of Elisha, if indeed he is greater at all? For the healing is equal, though the operation differs. What did your Christ accomplish beyond what my Elisha did? Indeed, what great thing did your Christ's word accomplish, when it achieved no more than the Creator's river achieved? On these same lines other points follow too. As far as concerned turning aside human glory, he forbade the man to spread the news; but as far as concerned the Law's safeguarding, he ordered the proper procedure fulfilled: "Go, show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded." For he was still upholding the figurative arguments of the Law he had prophesied, still in their images — images which signified that a man once a sinner, now suddenly cleansed by the word of God, ought to offer a gift to God at the temple: that is, prayer and thanksgiving offered in the church through Christ Jesus, the catholic priest of the Father. And so he added, "that it may be a testimony to you" — undoubtedly to bear witness that his coming was not meant to dissolve the Law, but rather to bring it to fulfillment, and to attest that he himself was the one foretold, the one destined to take up their diseases and infirmities. This fitting and proper interpretation of the testimony, Marcion, flatterer of his own Christ, tries to exclude under cover of gentleness and mildness. "He was good," Marcion says, "and also knew that everyone healed of leprosy would go on to perform the Law's customary rites, and that is why he gave the command." What then? Did he go on persevering in goodness — that is, in permitting the Law — or not? For if he did persevere in goodness, he will never be the destroyer of the Law, nor will he be reckoned the god of another, since the destruction of the Law through which another god is claimed has ceased. But if the good one did not persevere, since he afterward destroyed the Law, then he set up a false testimony earlier, at the healing of the leper; for he abandoned goodness the moment he destroyed the Law. He was already evil, then, once he became the overturner of the Law, if he was good while he was its indulger. Yet by the very fact that he indulged obedience to the Law, he confirmed the Law as good — for no one allows obedience to something evil. So then, on this reasoning he is evil either way: evil if he indulged obedience to an evil law, and worse if he came as the destroyer of a good one. Furthermore, if — as one who knew that everyone cleansed of leprosy would do this anyway — he therefore commanded the offering of the gift, he could equally well have not commanded something he knew would happen on its own regardless. His descent, then, was pointless, as though meant to destroy the Law, when he yields to those who observe it. And yet, if he knew their custom, he ought all the more, if this was his mission, to have moved to turn them away from it beforehand. Why did he not simply stay silent, letting the man obey the Law purely on his own initiative? Then, at least, he might in some sense be seen to have deferred to the man's own patience. But instead he adds his own authority, reinforced by the weight of testimony. Testimony to what, if not to the Law's validity? Certainly it makes no difference how he came to confirm the Law — whether out of goodness, or superfluity, or patience, or inconsistency — so long as I dislodge you, Marcion, from your position. Look: he commanded the Law to be fulfilled. However he commanded it, on the same grounds he could equally well have uttered that earlier saying too: "My arrival is not meant to overturn the Law, but rather to complete it." What reason, then, did you have for erasing from the Gospel what actually stands intact? For you have admitted that, out of goodness, he did what you deny he said. It follows, then, that he did say it, since he did do it — and that it is you, rather, who have torn the Lord's word out of the Gospel, not we who put it in.
10.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 10 ========

[1] The paralytic too is healed—and in an assembly, with the people watching. For, he says, the people shall see the loftiness of the Lord and the glory of God. What loftiness, and what glory? "Be strong, hands that hang down, and knees that are feeble"—this will be the cure of paralysis. "Be strong, and fear not." Isaiah does not idly repeat "Be strong," nor vainly add "Fear not," since together with the restoration of the limbs he was promising also the return of their strength: they were about to say, at the words "Rise and take up your bed," "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" [2] So you now have a pointed prophecy both of this particular healing and of what followed upon it. Recognize likewise, in the same prophet, the Christ who forgives sins: "For," he says, "he will forgive them their many sins, and he himself takes away our sins." And earlier, in the very person of the Lord: "Even if your sins be like scarlet, I will make them white as snow; even if like crimson, I will make them white as wool"—by the scarlet marking out the blood shed by the prophets, and by the crimson signifying that of the Lord himself, as the deeper hue. Micah too speaks of the pardon of sins: "Who is God like you, taking away iniquities and passing over the injustices of the remnant of your inheritance? He did not hold on to his anger as a witness against them, because he willed to show mercy; he will turn again and have compassion on us; he will sink our sins, he will sink our sins in the depths of the sea." [3] But even if nothing of this sort had been foretold of Christ, I would still have examples of this same kindness in the Creator, promising me in the Son the very affections of the Father. I see the Ninevites obtaining pardon for their crimes from the Creator—not to say that, already then, it was Christ acting, seeing he had from the outset conducted himself under the Father's authority. I read too that the prophet Nathan, when David confessed his sin against Uriah, said to him, "And the Lord has taken away your sin, and you shall not die"; and likewise that King Ahab, wed to Jezebel and stained both with idol-worship and with Naboth's murder, won pardon under the heading of repentance; and that Jonathan, son of Saul, wiped away the guilt of a broken fast by his plea. [4] Why should I rehearse how the people themselves were restored, time and again, by the indulgence shown to their sins—by that God, no less, who prefers mercy to sacrifice, and a sinner's repentance to his death? So then, you must first deny that the Creator ever pardoned sins, and only then can you go on to show that he never foretold any such thing of his own Christ; and thus you will prove this supposedly "new" kindness belongs to a new Christ only if you can prove it neither equal to the Creator's kindness nor foretold by the Creator. [5] But whether the forgiving of sins can belong to one who is said not to hold them, and whether the power to absolve belongs to one who has no power to condemn, and whether it is fitting for him to forgive a wrong committed against no one of his—these points we have already met elsewhere, and I would rather remind you of that than go over it again. [6] As to the Son of Man, our argument has a double edge: Christ cannot have lied in declaring himself Son of Man if he really was not one, nor can one be constituted Son of Man who was not born of a human being, whether father or mother—so we must ask through which human parent his sonship is properly reckoned, through the father or through the mother. If he is of God the Father, then certainly he is not of a human father; and if not of a human father, it remains that he is of a human mother; and if of a human mother, it is now plain that he is of a virgin. For a man to whom no human father is assigned cannot have a husband assigned to his mother either; and a woman assigned no husband is thereby a virgin. [7] Otherwise he will have two fathers, God and a man, if the mother is not a virgin. For she will have had a spouse, and so will fail to be a virgin, and through that spouse she will supply two fathers, God and man, to one meant to be son of both alike. Such a birth, if you like, the fables attribute to Castor or to Hercules. If these distinctions hold—that is, if he is son of man because not of a human father, but son of a virgin mother because not of a human father either—then this is the Christ of Isaiah, whom he foretells a virgin shall conceive. [8] By what reasoning, then, you can admit "Son of Man," Marcion, I cannot see. If son of a human father, you deny him Son of God; if of both, you turn Christ into a Hercules out of a fable; if of a human mother only, you concede my case; and if of neither human father nor mother, then he is son of no human being at all, and he must be convicted of a lie in calling himself what he was not. [9] One thing alone could rescue you from this tight corner—if you were bold enough either to call your God, the Father of Christ, also "Man" (as Valentinus did with his Aeon) or to deny that the virgin is a human being (which not even Valentinus did). Now then, what if Christ is designated by this very title, "Son of Man," in Daniel? Is that not enough to prove Christ was foretold by the prophets? [10] For when he calls himself what had been foretold of the Creator's Christ, he undoubtedly shows himself to be understood as the very one of whom it was foretold. It might seem a mere coincidence of names, and yet we maintain—holding firm to the principle of distinguishing between the two—that he ought not even to have been called Christ or Jesus at all under your theory. But the title "Son of Man," precisely because it arises by way of an attribute rather than a mere name, is all the harder to dismiss, since it too converges with the coincidence of the name. For what belongs by way of an attribute is properly one's own, especially when the reason by which it comes into common use does not itself coincide. [11] And indeed, if Marcion's Christ too were said to be born of a man, then he too could lay claim to a share in the title, and mankind would then have two Sons of Man on its hands, exactly as it would have two Christs and two Jesuses on hand. Given this, since the title belongs properly to the one in whom it has its cause, if it is claimed also for another in whom there is only a sharing of the name, not of the title, then the sharing of even the name becomes suspect in the case of the one to whom the sharing of the title is claimed without cause; and it follows that the one and the same person must be believed to be the one found more capable of bearing both the name and the title, while the other is excluded, since he lacks a share in the title, having no cause for it. And no one is more capable of bearing both than he who first received both the name of Christ and the title of Son of Man—Jesus, that is, of the Creator. [12] This was he who appeared to the king of Babylon in the furnace with his martyrs, a fourth, like a son of man. The same one, revealed directly to Daniel himself, is that same Son of Man arriving amid heaven's clouds as judge, exactly as Scripture likewise attests. [13] I have said this could have sufficed as far as the prophetic naming of "Son of Man" goes. But Scripture furnishes me still more—namely, the Lord's own interpretation of it. For when the Jews, looking only at his humanity, not yet certain that he was God as well, rightly objected—on the ground that he was the Son of Man—that a man cannot forgive sins, but God alone can, why did he not answer them, according to their own line of thought about his manhood, that the Son of Man has the power to forgive sins—seeing that in naming himself Son of Man he would be naming himself a man—unless it was because he meant, by that very title "Son of Man" drawn from the record of Daniel, to strike back at them, so as to show that it was God and man together who forgave sins? [14] For it was that one alone, the Son of Man in Daniel's prophecy, who obtained the power of judging, and by that power, of course, the power of forgiving sins too (for the one who judges also acquits)—so that, once this stumbling block was cleared away by recalling the Scripture, they might more readily recognize that he himself was that Son of Man, precisely from his forgiving of sins. In fact, nowhere before this had he yet professed himself Son of Man except in this very passage, where he first forgave sins—that is, where he first judged, in the act of acquitting. [15] Look now and see what sort of case the other side is arguing here. For it is bound to run into this madness: defending him as Son of Man so as not to make him a liar, while denying he was born of a man so as not to grant him a son of a virgin. But since divine authority, the nature of things, and common sense alike will not tolerate this heretical insanity, this is also the occasion to interject, as briefly as I can, a word about the substance of the body, against Marcion's phantoms. [16] If he was born of a man, so as to be Son of Man, then body comes from body. Indeed, sooner will you turn up a man born lacking a heart, or lacking a brain—Marcion is proof enough of that—than a body of the kind Marcion's Christ possesses, born lacking one altogether. So go ahead and examine the heart, or the brain, of our man from Pontus.
11.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 11 ========

[1] He brings forward the tax collector chosen by the Lord as his proof text, as though the man had been chosen by an adversary of the Law, an outsider to the Law, a stranger profane to Judaism. He has forgotten Peter — a man of the Law, and yet not merely chosen but rewarded with the testimony of a recognition granted by the Father. Nowhere had he read that Christ was to be heralded as the beacon and the hoped-for anticipation of the nations. On the contrary, he actually proved the Jews right, by saying that the physician is not needed by the healthy but by those who are ill. [2] For if by the sick he meant to signify the pagans and tax collectors whom he was choosing, then he was confirming that the Jews were the healthy ones, for whom he denied that a physician was necessary. If this is so, he came down badly to destroy the Law, as though curing a sickness, when in fact those who kept it were in good health and had no need of a physician. [3] But what sort of thing is it, to propose the simile of the physician and then not carry it through? For just as no one calls a physician for the healthy, so too no one calls one for those as utterly foreign as man is to the god of Marcion — a man who has his own author and protector, and from that one, rather, his own physician, Christ. This is exactly what the simile prejudges: that the physician is supplied, rather, by the one to whom the sick belong. [4] But where, then, does John come into the picture? Suddenly Christ, and suddenly John too. Everything is like this in Marcion's scheme — things that in fact have their own full and proper order under the Creator. But of John I shall say more elsewhere; for now the points immediately at hand must be answered. Here I shall maintain this: that I will show both John suits Christ and Christ suits John, precisely as the Creator's prophet suits the Creator's Christ — and so let the heretic blush, for having frustrated himself in vain over the order of John. [5] For if John had administered nothing at all — if he were not, as Isaiah foretold, the voice shouting out in the desert, readying the Lord's paths by his announcement and his praise of repentance; if he had not even baptized Christ himself along with the rest — then no one would have challenged the disciples of Christ, who ate and drank, by comparison with the pattern of John's disciples, who fasted and prayed constantly. Because, if there had stood some real difference between Christ and John and each one's flock, there would have been no basis for demanding a comparison, and the whole point of the challenge would fall away. [6] For no one would have been surprised, and no one would have been troubled, if the preachings of rival, distinct divinities failed to agree also in their disciplines — when they had not first agreed on the authority behind those disciplines. So true is it that Christ was John's and John was Christ's in turn, each belonging to the Creator, both preachers and teachers out of the Law and the Prophets. Otherwise Christ would have rejected John's discipline as belonging to a different god, and would have defended his own disciples as rightly walking a different way — initiated, that is, into a different and opposing divinity. But as it is, he humbly gives the reason why the sons of the bridegroom cannot fast so long as the bridegroom is with them, while promising that they will fast afterward, once the bridegroom has been taken from them. He does not defend his disciples so much as excuse them, as men not unreasonably rebuked; nor does he reject John's discipline, but rather concedes it — allotting it to John's own time, just as he assigns his own discipline to his own time — a discipline he would otherwise have rejected, and John's rivals he would have defended, had it not already been, from the start, his own. [7] I hold fast to my Christ, even under the name of bridegroom, of whom the Psalm says: He himself comes forth like a bridegroom from his chamber; his going forth is from the height of heaven, and his circuit reaches to its farthest height. He it is, too, who through Isaiah rejoices toward the Father: Let my soul exult in the Lord, he says, for he has wrapped me in the robe of deliverance and the mantle of rejoicing, and set a turban about me as on a bridegroom, and adorned me as a bride. For in himself he reckons the church also, of which the same Spirit says to him: And you shall put them all about you like a bride's ornaments. [8] This bride Christ summons to himself through Solomon too, by the calling of the nations — for you have read: Come, my bride, from Lebanon — with the mention of Lebanon aptly thrown in, the mountain that among the Greeks lends its name to frankincense; for it was from idolatry that he was betrothing the church to himself. Deny now, if you dare, most demented Marcion, that you are demented. Look — you are attacking the Law even of your own god. He does not join marriages, does not admit those already joined, baptizes no one who is not celibate or a eunuch, reserves baptism for death or for divorce. Why, then, do you make Christ his bridegroom? That name belongs to the one who joined male and female, not to the one who separated them. [9] You have also gone wrong over that saying of the Lord in which he appears to distinguish new things from old. You have been puffed up over the old wineskins, and had your brains knocked out by the new wine, and so you have sewn a patch of heretical novelty onto the old — that is, the earlier — gospel. In this, I would like to learn, where is there room for a second creator? When through Jeremiah he commands, Make yourselves a new newness, does he not turn them away from the old things? When through Isaiah he declares, The old things have passed away, and behold new things which I am making, does he not turn them toward new things? Long ago we established this position: that the fulfillment of the old promises, promised rather by the Creator, is displayed by Christ, beneath the rule of a single self-same God, who owns both what is old and what is new. [10] For neither does a man put new wine into old wineskins who does not also have old wineskins, nor does anyone sew a new patch onto an old garment unless he also happens to have the old garment. A man does not do a thing that need not be done, when he has the means to do it if it did need to be done. And so, if he directed the comparison toward this end — to show that he was separating the newness of the gospel from the oldness of the Law — he was thereby demonstrating both that the newness was his own, and that the oldness from which he was separating it need not be marked out as belonging to a stranger, since no one joins what is his own to what belongs to another simply in order to separate it from what belongs to another. [11] Separation presupposes a joining, out of which it arises. So too, the thing he was separating he was showing to have once been joined in one, just as it would not have been separated if it had not first been so. And yet we grant this kind of separation — by way of reformation, of enlargement, of advancement — just as fruit is separated from seed, though the fruit comes from the seed: so too the gospel is separated from the Law, while it is advanced out of the Law — other than it, but not alien to it; different from it, but not contrary to it. [12] Nor is the form of speech in Christ something new. When he puts forward similitudes, when he refutes questions by argument, he is drawing on the seventy-seventh Psalm: I will open my mouth, it says, in a parable — that is, a similitude; I will utter dark sayings — that is, I will expound questions. If you had wanted to prove him a man of some other nation, you should certainly have proved it from the distinctive character of his speech.
12.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 12 ========

[1] On the sabbath too I put this point up front: the question could never even have arisen unless Christ went about as lord of the sabbath. There would have been no dispute over why he was destroying the sabbath, if he were bound to destroy it. But he would have been bound to destroy it only if he belonged to another god — and in that case no one would have marveled at his doing what suited him. So they marveled precisely because it did not suit the creator-god to go about, and to attack his own sabbath. [2] And to knock down at the outset every such point, so we needn't retread the same ground every time my opponent leans his argument on some novelty of Christ's institution, let this be laid down once for all as the rule: the novelty of each institution was disputed only because up to that point nothing had been published about a novelty of divinity — nor was it disputed, nor can it be twisted from the mere novelty of some institution that a divinity other than the creator's has thereby been sufficiently demonstrated in Christ, once it is established that the very novelty pronounced by the creator was, in Christ, nothing to marvel at. In any case, one would first have had to set out this other god before introducing his teaching, since it is the god who lends authority to the teaching, not the teaching to the god — unless of course Marcion learned his letters, so perversely, not from a master, but learned his master from letters. [3] The rest of the sabbath question I steer as follows. If Christ overturned the sabbath, he did it following the creator's own precedent; for at the siege of the city of Jericho, when the ark of the covenant was carried around the walls for eight days, sabbath included, by the creator's own command the sabbath was broken by that very operation — as those suppose who think the same of Christ, not knowing that neither Christ nor the creator ever destroyed the sabbath, as I shall soon show. And yet even then, through Joshua — note the name — the sabbath was shaken, so that this too might be referred forward to Christ. [4] Even if it was out of hatred that he pursued the most solemn day of the Jews, so that Christ might be shown not to be the Jews' god, still it was out of hatred of the sabbath that the creator too spoke, so that Christ would merely be following him, echoing the cry from Isaiah's mouth: 'Your new moons and sabbaths my soul hates.' But however these words are to be taken, we know that in a case of this kind a blunt defense is called for against a blunt attack. [5] Now let me argue the actual matter itself, in which Christ's teaching looked as if it were destroying the sabbath. The disciples were hungry that day; they had plucked ears of grain with their hands and rubbed them out; by preparing food they had broken the holiday. Christ excuses them, and stands accused of violating the sabbath; the Pharisees accuse him, and Marcion seizes on the status of the controversy (if I may play a little with my Lord's own truth) — a question of both scripture and intent. For from scripture is drawn the creator's color of defense, and from Christ's intent his own — as in the example of David, who entered the sanctuary on a sabbath day and boldly ate the loaves set out before the presence, breaking them in doing so. [6] For David remembered that this privilege had been granted to the sabbath from the very beginning on which that day was first established — I mean, permission from fasting. For when the creator had forbidden the gathering of manna on two successive days, he permitted it only on the day of preparation, so that the day's provision gathered beforehand might free the following sabbath's holiday from fasting. [7] Well then, the Lord followed that same rationale in his so-called 'destruction' of the sabbath; well then, he expressed the very same disposition of the creator, in the honor of not fasting on the sabbath. In short, he would only then have destroyed the sabbath — and the creator with it — if he had commanded his disciples to fast on the sabbath, against the standing rule of both scripture and the creator's intent. [8] But since he did not defend the disciples outright, but excused them; since he pleaded human necessity as an advocate on their behalf; since he holds the honor of the sabbath's not being made sorrowful in higher regard than its being kept idle; since he puts David and his companions on the same footing of guilt and pardon as his own disciples; since it pleases him precisely because the creator allowed it, and since it is by that very example that he himself is so good — is he, for all that, a stranger to the creator? [9] Next the Pharisees watch to see whether he would perform healings on the sabbath, so as to accuse him — certainly as a breaker of the sabbath, not as the preacher of some new god; indeed I may as well keep hammering this one point everywhere: nowhere was any other Christ ever preached. But on the whole the Pharisees were wrong about the law of the sabbath, not noticing that it forbade rest from works only conditionally, under a specific category of works. For when it speaks of the sabbath day, 'You shall do no work of yours on it,' by saying 'of yours' it defined it as human work, whatever a man does by his own craft or business, not divine work. [10] But the work of salvation and wholeness belongs not to man but properly to God. Just as, again, the law says, 'You shall do no work on it, except what shall be done for any soul' — that is, in the case of freeing a soul; because a work of God can be done even through a man, for the salvation of a soul, yet it comes from God — the very thing Christ the man was going to do, because he was also God. It is with this sense of the law in mind that, wishing to bring them round to it, he questions them, through the healing of the withered hand: 'Is it lawful on the sabbaths to do good, or not? To save a life, or to destroy it?' [11] — so that, by allowing that particular work which he was about to do for a soul, he might remind them which works the sabbath law forbade, namely human ones, and which it commanded, namely divine ones, done for any soul whatsoever. He is called Lord of the sabbath because he was guarding the sabbath as his own property. Even if he had destroyed it, he would have had every right to, as the one who instituted it in the first place. [12] But in fact he did not destroy it at all, precisely as its lord — from which it can now already be seen that not even in the carrying of the ark around Jericho was the sabbath destroyed by the creator. For that too was a work of God, which he himself had commanded, and which he had arranged for the sake of the souls of his people caught in the peril of war. [13] And if somewhere he professed hatred of sabbaths, saying 'your sabbaths,' he was reckoning them as belonging to men, not to himself — the sabbaths kept by a people full of transgressions without fear of God, honoring God with their lips and not their heart, on their own sabbaths — that is, on whatever observances of his discipline they carried out, he made a different case altogether; observances which, through that same prophet afterward, he pronounces true and delightful and not to be profaned. [14] So Christ did not abolish the sabbath outright at all; he upheld its law both earlier, in the matter of the disciples, working on behalf of a soul (for to the hungry he granted the comfort of food), and now too, in curing the withered hand, everywhere driving it home by his deeds, 'I have not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it' — if Marcion has not already stopped his own mouth with that saying. For he fulfilled the law here too, in interpreting its condition, in illuminating the distinction between kinds of work, in doing what the law excepts from the sabbath's holiday-rest, in making that very sabbath day — holy from the beginning by the father's blessing — holier still by his own good deed, on which day, precisely, he administered divine relief, something the adversary's god would have had to do on other days instead, for fear of adorning the creator's sabbath, for fear of rendering to the sabbath the works owed it. [15] On which day, if Elisha the prophet also restored the Shunammite woman's dead son to life, you can see, Pharisee — and you too, Marcion — that it was long ago the creator's practice to do good on sabbaths, to save a life and not destroy it, and that Christ brought nothing new that was not already in keeping with the creator's own pattern, gentleness, mercy, and even preaching. For here too he re-enacts the prophecy of a particular kind of healing: withered hands grow strong again, just as withered knees do in the paralytic.
13.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 13 ========

[1] Certainly he 'brings good news' to Zion and Jerusalem — peace and every good thing; certainly he goes up on a mountain and spends the night there in prayer, and is duly heard by the Father. Unroll the prophets, then, and trace the whole sequence. 'Go up on a high mountain,' says Isaiah, 'you who bring good news to Zion; lift up your voice with strength, you who bring good news to Jerusalem.' They were still astonished, freshly, at his teaching; for he taught as one having authority. And again: 'So on that day my people will come to recognize my name.' What name is meant, if not Christ's? 'That I am he who speaks.' For it was he, even then, who was speaking in the prophets — the Word, the Son of the creator. [2] 'Here I am, when the hour comes, on the mountains, bringing good news, a hearing of peace, bringing good news, good things.' Likewise Nahum, one of the twelve: 'For behold, swift are the feet on the mountain of the one bringing good news of peace.' And as for the voice of nighttime prayer to the Father, the psalm says plainly: 'My God, I will cry out by day, and you will hear; and by night too, and it will not be in vain for me.' And elsewhere, of the same place and the same voice, the psalm: 'With my voice I cried out to the Lord, and he heard me from his holy mountain.' [3] There you have the reenactment of the name, there you have the act of bringing good news, there you have the place, the mountain, the time, the night, the sound of the voice, and the Father's hearing — there you have the Christ of the prophets. But why did he choose twelve apostles, and not some other number? Even from this I could argue that it is my Christ who was foretold, not only by the voices of the prophets, but by the very shape of events. [4] For I find figures of this number already present with the creator: the twelve springs of Elim, the twelve gems on Aaron's priestly breastplate, and the twelve stones that Joshua chose from the Jordan and laid up in the ark of the covenant. For just so many apostles were being foreshadowed — as springs and rivers destined to water a world of nations formerly dry and untouched by knowledge (as also through Isaiah: 'I will set rivers in a waterless land'); as gems destined to illuminate the sacred vestment of the church, which Christ, high priest of the Father, wears; and as stones made solid by faith, whom the true Joshua chose out of the washing of the Jordan and received into the sanctuary of his own covenant. [5] What comparable case, on the strength of a number, can be made for the Christ of Marcion? A thing cannot simply be judged as done without design by that god, when it can be shown to be done not without design by mine. The matter belongs to the one in whom the preparation for that matter is found. He also changes Peter's name from Simon, just as the creator remade the names of Abraham, Sarah, and Hosea — calling this one Jesus, and adding syllables to the others. But why 'Peter'? [6] If it was for strength of faith, plenty of solid, weighty material could have supplied a name from its own resources. Is it because Christ too is 'rock' and 'stone'? For indeed we read that he was appointed 'a stumbling-stone and an offense-rock.' I pass over the rest. So then he chose to share, with the dearest of his disciples, a name drawn specifically from his own figures — closer, I think, than from figures that were not his. Crowds gather to him even from across the sea, from Tyre and other regions. This is what the psalm was looking toward: 'And behold, the Philistines and Tyre together with the Ethiopian folk — these were there: a man will say, Mother Zion' — and a man was made in her (since God was born man) — 'and he built her by the will of the Father'; so that you may know that the Gentiles gathered to him then because God, having been born man, was going to build the church by the Father's will, out of the Philistines as well. [7] So too Isaiah: 'Behold, these come from far away, and these come from the north and the sea, and others from the land of the Persians.' Of whom again: 'Lift up your eyes round about and see, all are gathered together.' And of whom, further on, seeing them as strangers and outsiders: 'And you will say in your heart, Who bore these for me? Who, then, raised these up for me? Where were these for me?' Will this be the Christ of the prophets? And who will be the Christ of the Marcionites? — if it pleases him to be perverse enough to be the Christ of none of the prophets.
14.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 14 ========

[1] I come now to his standard sayings, by which he tries to establish the distinctive character of his teaching — to what I might call the edict of Christ: "Blessed are the beggars" (for that is what the interpretation of the Greek word demands), "for theirs is the kingdom of God." Now the very fact that he begins with blessings belongs to the Creator, who dedicated the whole of his creation, as he brought it forth, with no other word than blessing. "For my heart," it says, "has belched forth a very good word." [2] This will be that very good word — a word of blessing, of course — the same word that is recognized as the initiator of the new testament too, on the model of the old. What wonder, then, if he began from the affections of the Creator by using language of this sort, since the Creator has always loved, comforted, championed, and avenged beggars and the poor and the lowly and widows and orphans? So that you might believe this seeming private kindness of Christ's is a rivulet from the springs of the Savior. [3] Truly I do not know where to direct myself amid such a crowd of such expressions, as though wandering through a wood, or a pasture, or an orchard. I must seek out the matter wherever it happens to fall. The psalm cries out: "Give judgment for the orphan and the beggar, and deal justly with the lowly and the poor; free the poor, and rescue the beggar from the hand of the sinner." [4] Likewise the seventy-first psalm: "He will judge the beggars of the people with justice and will save the children of the poor." And further on, of Christ: "All nations shall serve him." But David ruled over one nation only, the Jewish, lest anyone think this was said of David simply because he too took up the lowly and those laboring under hardship: "For he will free," it says, "the beggar from the tyrant; he will spare the beggar and the poor, and will save the souls of the poor, and will redeem their souls from usury and injustice, and their name shall be honored in his sight." [5] Again: "Let sinners be turned back into hell, all the nations that forget God, for the beggar shall not be forgotten forever, nor shall the endurance of the poor perish forever." Again: "Who is like our God, who dwells on high and looks down on the humble things in heaven and on earth, who raises the beggar from the earth and lifts the poor from the dung heap, to seat him with the princes of his people" — in his own kingdom, surely? [6] So too, long before, in the Book of Kingdoms, Hannah, mother of Samuel, rendering glory to God in the Spirit, said: "He who raises the poor from the earth and the beggar, to seat him among the mighty of the people, within his own realm, upon seats of splendor" — royal seats, to be sure. Through Isaiah, too, see how he inveighs against those who oppress the needy: "But you — why do you set my vineyard on fire, and why is the plunder of the beggar found in your houses? Why do you injure my people and put the faces of beggars to shame?" And again: "Woe to those who write wickedness, for as they write they write what is worthless, turning aside the cause of beggars and snatching away the judgments due to the poor of my people." [7] These same judgments he demands also for orphans and widows, that they too, the needy, might have their consolation: "Render judgment for the orphan, act rightly toward the widow; approach, and let us settle our dispute, says the Lord." To the one who has such great affection for every condition of the Creator's lowly ones, to him also belongs the kingdom that is promised by Christ — a kingdom to whose affection those to whom it is promised have long since already belonged. [8] Now if you suppose that the Creator's promises were earthly ones while Christ's were heavenly, well and good — for it appears that heaven belongs to no other god so far except the one to whom earth also belongs; and well and good that the Creator promised even the lesser things first, so that I might more readily believe him also about the greater, rather than believe one who has never yet, in lesser matters, built up any credit for his generosity. [9] "Blessed are the hungry, for they shall be filled." I might have folded this heading into the previous one, since the hungry are none other than the poor and the beggars — except that the Creator had specifically aimed this promise, too, as a foreshadowing of his own gospel. For through Isaiah, speaking of those whom he would summon out of earth's farthest reaches — the nations, that is — he says: "Behold, they will come swiftly and lightly" — swiftly, in that they hasten under the limits of the appointed times; lightly, in that they come without the burdens of the old law. "They shall not hunger nor thirst." [10] Therefore they shall be filled — a promise, surely, made to none but the hungry and thirsty. And again: "Behold, those who serve me shall be filled, but you shall hunger; behold, those who serve me shall drink, but you shall thirst." We shall see later whether these contraries too are meant to serve as a preface to Christ. Meanwhile, the fact that he promises fullness to the hungry belongs to God the Creator. "Blessed are those who weep, for they shall laugh." [11] Run through the sentence of Isaiah: "Behold, those who serve me shall exult in gladness, but you shall be put to shame; behold, those who serve me shall take delight, but you shall cry out for the anguish of your heart." Recognize these same contraries again in Christ. Certainly delight and exultation in gladness are promised to those in the opposite condition — the sorrowful, the sad, the anxious. [12] So too the hundred twenty-fifth psalm: "Those who sow in tears shall reap in exultation." Further, laughter comes to those who exult and take delight, just as weeping comes to those who mourn and grieve. Thus the Creator, in foretelling the materials of laughter and weeping, spoke first of the weeping who would laugh. [13] Accordingly, he who began with the consolation of the poor and the lowly and the hungry and the weeping immediately set himself eager to present that very figure whom he had already shown forth through Isaiah: "Upon me rests the Spirit of the Lord, since he has anointed me to announce good tidings to the poor" — "Blessed are the beggars, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" — "he has sent me to heal the brokenhearted" — "Blessed are those who hunger, for they shall be filled" — "to call the weak" — "Blessed are those who weep, for they shall laugh" — "to give to the mourners of Zion glory, and beauty for ashes, the oil of gladness, and a garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness." [14] If Christ, the moment he was admitted, carried these things out, then either he himself is the one who foretold that he would come to do them, or — if the one who foretold them has not yet come — then, ridiculous as it is to say, but necessary, Marcion's Christ has perhaps simply taken his orders from him. "Blessed shall you be when men hate you and reproach you and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man." [15] By this declaration he is without doubt exhorting to endurance. What less does the Creator say through Isaiah? "Fear not the reproach of men, and be not dismayed at their scorn." What reproach, what scorn? That which was to come on account of the Son of Man. Which Son of Man is this? The one who belongs to the Creator. How shall we prove it? [16] From the hatred that was likewise foretold against him — as through Isaiah, addressed to the Jews, the authors of that hatred: "Because of you my name is blasphemed among the nations"; and elsewhere: "Sanctify him who circumscribes his own soul, who is held in contempt by the nations, by servants and by rulers." For if the hatred foretold was against that Son of Man who belongs to the Creator, and if the gospel testifies that the name "Christian" — a name surely derived from Christ — was to be hated on account of the Son of Man, that is, on account of Christ, then it sets up as the object of that hatred the very Son of Man who belonged to the Creator, against whom the hatred was foretold. [17] And surely, supposing he had not yet appeared, the loathing directed at the name — a loathing still practiced in our day — could not have gone before the man who bears that name. For indeed the name is sanctified among us, and each of us circumscribes his own soul by staking it on that name, and it is held in contempt by the nations. And the one who was born is precisely that Son of Man because of whom our own title is likewise despised.
15.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 15 ========

[1] "According to these things," he says, "their fathers used to treat the prophets." O the shape-shifting Christ, now the destroyer, now the champion of the prophets! He destroyed them as a rival, winning over their disciples to himself; he claimed them as a friend, mocking their persecutors. But to the exact degree that Marcion's claim that Christ championed the prophets he had come to destroy would not fit Christ, to that same degree it fits the Creator's Christ that he should mock the persecutors of the prophets — prophets he was fulfilling in everything — whether because it belongs more to the Creator to lay the fathers' wrongdoing upon their children, or because it belongs to a god who does not even punish a man's own offenses to do no such thing. [2] "But he was not immediately defending the prophets," you say, "if he wanted the wickedness of the Jews confirmed, on the ground that they had not dealt piously even with their own prophets." Yet here there was no wickedness in the Jews to be reproached — rather they deserved praise and approval, if they mocked the men whose destruction, after so long an age, the supremely good god was at last moved to bring about. But I suppose, by now, he is not "supremely good" any longer — by now he has struck some deal with the Creator, and is no longer wholly the god of Epicurus. [3] For look: he turns to cursing, and shows himself to be one who knows how to be offended and to grow angry. For he says "Woe!" But we are given a puzzle about the quality of that word, as though it were not so much a curse as a warning. And what difference does it make, when even a warning does not come without the sting of a threat, especially once made bitterer by that "Woe"? Both the warning and the threat belong to one who knows how to be angry. For no one warns and no one threatens against someone doing a thing unless he means to punish the deed; and no one punishes unless he knows how to be angry. [4] Others do acknowledge the word as a curse, but want Christ to have pronounced this "Woe" not, strictly speaking, out of his own judgment, but because the "Woe" belongs to the Creator, and he meant to set the Creator's harshness against his own earlier gentleness in the blessings, so as to commend by contrast his own forbearance. As if it were not entirely fitting for the Creator — who furnishes both roles, being both a good god and a judge — that, having led off with kindness in the blessings, he should follow with severity in the curses, the full range of discipline being needed to teach both the pursuit of blessing and the avoidance of cursing. [5] For thus he had already declared beforehand: "Look, before you I have placed a blessing and a curse" — words which even foreshadowed this very arrangement of the gospel. Otherwise, what sort of person is this, who, in order to insinuate his own goodness, sets the Creator's harshness against it? Weak indeed is the commendation that props itself up by tearing another down. [6] Yet by opposing the Creator's harshness to him, he has only confirmed that the Creator is to be feared. And if he is to be feared, then he is surely more to be obeyed than ignored — and now Marcion's Christ is starting to teach obedience to the Creator! Then, if the "Woe" against the rich belongs to the Creator, it follows that Christ was not offended by the rich, but the Creator was; and Christ endorses the Creator's case against the rich — I mean their pride, their vanity, their worldly pursuits, and their neglect of God, through which they earn a "Woe" from the Creator. [7] But how can it not belong to the very same one to condemn the rich who has just above approved the poor? No one condemns the opposite of what he has approved. So then, if the curse against the rich is credited to the Creator, the blessing on the poor must be defended as belonging to the same one — and the whole of Christ's work is now the Creator's. And if the blessing on the poor is assigned to Marcion's god, then the curse against the rich must be laid on him too, and now the Creator becomes his equal — as much good as he is just — and there is no longer room for the distinction by which two gods are made; and once the distinction is removed, what remains is that one god must be proclaimed the Creator. [8] So then: if "Woe" is indeed the voice of cursing, or of some rather stern rebuke, and it is aimed by Christ at the rich, I am bound to prove the Creator likewise a scorner of the rich, just as I have proved him the advocate of the poor, so as to show Christ, even in this saying, to be the Creator's Christ. He did indeed enrich Solomon — but because, given the choice, Solomon preferred to ask for what he knew was pleasing to God, wisdom and understanding, and had thereby also earned the right to riches, though he had not wished for them any the more. And yet it is not incongruous for God to grant riches either, since through them the rich are also aided in giving comfort, and many works of justice and love are carried out by their means. [9] But the vices that accompany riches are what the gospel too assigns its "Woe" to the rich for: "For," he says, "you have received your consolation" — that is, from riches, from their glory and worldly fruits. So too in Deuteronomy Moses says: "Lest, when you have eaten and are full, and have built great houses, and your flocks and herds and silver and gold have multiplied, your heart be lifted up and you forget the Lord your God." So too he strikes at King Hezekiah, puffed up with his treasures and glorying in them rather than in God, before the envoys who had come from Persia, through Isaiah: "Behold, the days are coming, and all that is in your house shall be taken away, and what your fathers have amassed shall be carried off to Babylon." [10] So too, through Jeremiah he likewise decrees: "Let the wealthy not exult over their wealth, but let the one who exults, exult in God." So too he inveighs against the daughters of Zion through Isaiah, puffed up with finery and the abundance of riches, thundering there too against the noble and the proud: "Hell has enlarged its soul and opened wide its mouth, and the renowned and the great and the rich shall go down" (this will be Christ's "Woe" over the rich), "and man — the man exalted by riches — shall be humbled, and the man honored for his wealth shall be dishonored." [11] Of these again it is said: "Behold, the Lord of hosts shall throw the glorious into confusion along with their strength, and the lofty shall be brought low, and the exalted shall fall by the sword." Who more than the rich? Since it is they, of course, who have received their consolation — glory, honor, loftiness — from their riches. And turning us away from them, in the forty-eighth psalm he says: "Do not fear when a man grows rich, and when the glory of his house is increased, for when he dies he takes nothing with him when he departs, nor does his splendor descend along with him." Likewise in the sixty-first: "Do not set your desire on riches, and if they shine, do not set your heart on them." [12] Finally, that very same word "Woe" was long ago aimed by Amos at the rich awash in luxuries. "Woe," he says, "to those who sleep on beds of ivory and lounge in luxury on their couches, who eat lambs from the flock and fattened calves from the herd, clapping along to the sound of instruments" — as though these things would last, and not as though they were passing away — "who drink strained wine and anoint themselves with the finest ointments." [13] So then, even if I could show the Creator only warning against riches, without also condemning the rich in advance, in the very same word Christ himself uses, no one would doubt that the threat against the rich pronounced through Christ's "Woe" was added by the very one from whom the warning against those same things — riches — had already gone before. For a threat is simply the sequel to a warning. He heaps "Woe" too on the well-fed, because they shall hunger; on those currently laughing, since mourning is what awaits them. Answering these stand the words set opposite the blessings, spoken earlier by the Creator: "Behold, those who serve me shall be filled, but you shall hunger" — precisely because you are filled now; and "Behold, those who serve me shall rejoice, but you shall be put to shame" — you who now laugh shall surely weep. For just as the psalm has it: "Those sowing amid tears shall gather a harvest amid joy," so in the gospel, those sowing in laughter — that is, out of joy — shall reap in tears. These the Creator long ago set down together; Christ has only renewed them by distinguishing them, not by changing them. [14] "Woe to you, when men shall bless you! According to these things did their fathers treat the false prophets." Just so does the Creator, through Isaiah, charge the followers of human blessing and human praise: "My people, those who call you blessed lead you astray, and they confound the paths of your feet." He forbids elsewhere any trust at all in man, and so too any trust in the praise of man, as through Jeremiah: "Cursed is the man who puts his hope in man." [15] And indeed in Psalm 117: "It is better to trust in God than to trust in man, and it is better to hope in God than to hope in princes." So the Creator has rejected everything that is courted from man, let alone praise of it. And to reproach false prophets praised and blessed by their fathers belongs to him just as much as to reproach prophets harassed and rejected — for just as the injuries done to the prophets were not unconnected to their God, so too the favors shown to the false prophets would not have displeased him, unless he were the God of the prophets.
16.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 16 ========

[1] "But I say to you who hear," he says (thereby showing that this was commanded long ago by the Creator: "Speak in the ears of those who hear"), "love your enemies, and bless those who hate you, and pray for those who slander you." The Creator wrapped all this up in a single pronouncement through Isaiah: "Say, You are our brothers, to those who hate you." For if those who are enemies, who hate, curse, and slander are to be called brothers, then surely he who commanded them to be reckoned as brothers also commanded that those who hate be blessed and that prayer be made for slanderers.

[2] Christ, it is granted, teaches a new patience, even restraining the repayment of injury that the Creator permitted, who demanded eye in exchange for eye and tooth in exchange for tooth; Christ, by contrast, commands that the other cheek be offered as well, and that the cloak be surrendered along with the tunic. Very well -- let it be said that Christ has added these things as supplements consistent with the Creator's own discipline. But this must be settled at once: is a discipline of patience proclaimed under the Creator or not?

[3] He did, through Zechariah, command that no one call to mind the malice of his brother, nor even of his neighbor. Indeed elsewhere he says, "Let none of you plot the malice of his neighbor." Far more, then, has he imposed patience toward injury, seeing that he imposed forgetfulness of it. And when he says, "Retribution belongs to me; I myself will render it," he is likewise teaching a patience that waits upon vengeance.

[4] So then, to the very degree that it is unbelievable that the same God who forbids not only repayment but even the very remembering and rehearsing of an injury should demand tooth for tooth and eye for eye as repayment in kind, to that same degree it becomes clear to us how he intended eye for eye and tooth for tooth -- not to license a second injury by way of retaliation, since he had already forbidden vengeance outright, but to check the first, by setting retaliation over against it, so that each man, foreseeing the license granted to the second injury, would restrain himself from committing the first.

[5] He knew that violence is more easily checked by the immediate prospect of retaliation than by the mere promise of a future vengeance. Both provisions had to be laid down to suit the nature and the faith of men: the man who trusted God would await vengeance from God, the man of weaker faith would fear the laws of retaliation. This intent of the law, laboring under misunderstanding, the Lord -- Christ, lord of the sabbath, of the law, and of all the Father's dispositions -- both revealed and brought to fulfillment, by commanding that the other cheek too be offered, so as all the more thoroughly to extinguish the repayment of injury which the law by its talion had only meant to restrain, and which prophecy had already plainly suppressed, forbidding the very memory of injury and referring vengeance to God alone.

[6] So then, whatever Christ introduced, he introduced with a precept that assists, not opposes; he did not destroy the Creator's discipline. Indeed, if I weigh the very rationale of the command to patience -- and so full and perfect a patience at that -- it will not hold together unless it belongs to the very God who promises vengeance, who furnishes the judge. Otherwise, if such a weight of patience is laid on me -- not merely not striking back but offering the other cheek, not merely not cursing back but blessing, not merely not keeping the tunic but yielding the cloak as well -- by one who is not going to defend me, then he has commanded patience in vain, giving me no reward for the precept, I mean no fruit of my patience, which is vengeance -- vengeance he ought to have granted me himself if he does not execute it himself, or, if he would not let me execute it myself, then it is because it belongs to his own discipline that injury be avenged.

[7] For it is by fear of vengeance that all wrongdoing is held in check. Let that fear be released unchecked and wickedness will rule everywhere, gouging out both eyes and knocking out every tooth, secure in its impunity. But this, apparently, is the way of the good god, the god who is so very good: to do violence to patience itself, to fling wide a gateway for aggression, to abandon the honest man defenseless while the villain goes unchecked.

[8] "Give to everyone who asks of you" -- certainly to one in need, and all the more to one in need even if he already has abundance. But that no one should be in need in the first place, you have, in Deuteronomy, the Creator's own instruction laid upon the giver: "There shall be no one in need among you," he says, "so that the Lord your God, in blessing, may bless you" -- that is, may bless the giver, who has thereby made sure there is no one in need.

[9] And here he goes even further. He does not merely command giving to one who asks; he says, "Let there be no one in need among you" -- that is, see to it, unasked, that there is none; which settles all the more firmly that one who does ask must be given to. And further on: "But if there is a needy man among your brothers, you shall not turn your heart away, nor close your hand against your needy brother: you shall open, yes, open your hand to him, and lend him whatever he needs."

[10] For a loan, by its nature, is not given except to one who asks for it. But of lending, more later. Now, if someone wishes to argue that the Creator commanded giving to brothers only, while Christ commands giving to all who ask, and that this makes the two teachings new and different -- on the contrary, this will be one more instance of the Creator's law living on in Christ. For Christ commands nothing toward all men other than what the Creator commanded toward brothers. True, the goodness that works toward strangers is the greater goodness -- but it is not prior to the goodness that was owed first to one's neighbors.

[11] For who could possibly love strangers who had not first learned to love his neighbor? And if goodness toward strangers is the second stage of a goodness whose first stage is toward one's neighbors, then the second stage must belong to the same author as the first -- far more readily than a second stage could belong to someone who never produced a first. So the Creator, following the order of nature itself, first taught kindness toward neighbors, meaning afterward to release it upon strangers; and, following the plan of his own arrangement, first toward the Jews, afterward toward the whole race of mankind.

[12] Therefore, so long as the mystery was confined within Israel, he rightly enjoined mercy on brothers alone; but once he gave to Christ the nations as inheritance, and the ends of the earth as possession, and the word spoken through Hosea began to be fulfilled -- "her who was Not-my-people shall be called My-people, and she who had not obtained mercy shall obtain mercy," namely the nations -- from that point Christ extended the law of the Father's kindness to all men, excluding no one from mercy, just as none had been excluded from the call. And so, if he taught anything further, he received this too as part of the nations' inheritance.

[13] "And as you wish men to do to you, so do also to them." In this precept, of course, its other half is understood along with it: "And as you do not wish men to do to you, so do not do to them either." Now if this precept comes from a new god, one previously unknown and not yet plainly disclosed, one who had never before shaped me by any prior training by which I might first know what I ought to want or not want for myself, and so do to others what I would want for myself and not do what I would not want for myself -- then he has simply left my judgment adrift, without binding me to any correspondence between what I will and what I do, so that I do to others what I want for myself and refrain from doing to others what I do not want for myself.

[14] For he never defined beforehand what I ought to want or not want for myself and for others, so as to bring my conduct into line with a law of the will -- and so I might just as well fail to render to another what I would want rendered to me by another (love, deference, comfort, protection, and goods of that kind), and just as readily do to another what I would not want done to me by another (violence, injury, insult, fraud, and evils of that kind). And indeed it is exactly this mismatch between will and deed that marks the conduct of pagans not yet instructed by God.

[15] For even though good and evil are known by nature, they are not known as the discipline of God; and it is only once that discipline is known that the correspondence between will and deed is finally carried out from faith, that is, under the fear of God. And so the god of Marcion, however newly revealed -- if indeed he is revealed at all -- could not have issued this precept we are discussing in so terse, so obscure, so still-unlit a form, a form more readily interpreted by my own private judgment than by any rule, since he had laid down for it no prior definition at all.

[16] But my Creator, long ago and everywhere, commanded that the needy poor, orphans, and widows be protected, helped, and refreshed; so too through Isaiah: "Break your bread for beggars, and bring the homeless into your house, and if you see one naked, cover him." Likewise through Ezekiel, of the righteous man: "He will give his bread to the hungry, and cover the naked." So he had already, long before, taught me sufficiently to do for others what I would want done for myself.

[17] And likewise, in proclaiming "You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness," he taught me not to do to others what I would not want done to me; and so this precept in the gospel belongs to none other than the one who long ago laid its foundation, spelled out its distinctions, ordered it according to the judgment of his own discipline, and only now, rightly, has drawn it together into a summary -- since it was foretold that the Lord, that is, Christ, would one day make on earth "a word cut short.
17.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 17 ========

[1] Here now, when he brings up interest, "And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive back, what credit is that to you?" — run through what follows in Ezekiel about that same just man: "His money," he says, "he did not give at interest, and what has been excess he will not take" — that is, the surplus of interest, which is usury. So it was arranged first that he should root out the fruit of usury, so as more easily to accustom man to usury itself, in case, by losing it, he might learn to give up the profit he had grown used to. [2] For we say this was the law's work, making provision for the gospel. It was shaping the faith of certain people then, still stammering under the earliest precepts of a kindness only gradually being formed toward the polished perfection of Christian discipline. For above too: "and you shall return the pledge to the debtor" — surely if he is not solvent, since the pledge must certainly be restored to one who is about to pay: could a mere man have written that? [3] Much more plainly in Deuteronomy: "You shall not sleep upon his pledge; you shall by all means return to him his cloak by sunset, and he will sleep in his own cloak." Even clearer above: "You shall release every debt that your neighbor owes you, and you shall not demand it back from your brother, because the release of the Lord your God has been proclaimed." [4] Further, when he orders a debt to be released — surely to one who is not going to repay it (it is even more when, though he is going to repay it, he forbids demanding it back) — what else does he teach but that we should lend to one who will not repay, since he attached such a penalty to interest itself? "And you will be sons of God." Nothing more shameless — if that god is going to make us his sons who forbade us to make sons for ourselves, by abolishing marriage! How is he going to enroll his own people under a name he has already erased? [5] A eunuch cannot possibly be my father, seeing above all that I share one father with the whole of creation. For he is as much the father of all who is the maker of the universe, as the other is a eunuch, maker of nothing. And had the creator not paired man and woman together, had he further declined to grant offspring to every kind of animal besides, I would still have been his even before paradise, before the sin, before the exile, before the two became one. I was made a son afresh the very moment he brought me forth with his own hands, when he stirred me with his own breath. [6] He is the one who now again calls me son, no longer bringing me forth into a soul but into a spirit. "For he himself," it says, "is kind toward the ungrateful and wicked." Well done, Marcion — cleverly enough you stripped him of rains and suns, so he wouldn't look like the creator! But who is this "kind" one, who up to now has not even been known? [7] How is he kind, when no benefits of this kind of kindness — the kind that belongs to the sun and rain — had ever preceded from him, who lent them out without expecting to get anything back from mankind? Whereas the creator, who despite such generosity of the elements still to this day puts up with men who more readily render thanks to idols than to himself, is truly kind even in spiritual benefits: "How sweet unto my throat are your words, O Lord, beyond honey and the honeycomb to my mouth." He, then, is the one who rebuked the ungrateful, since he deserved to find them grateful — his sun and his rain you too, Marcion, enjoyed ungratefully. As for your god, he could hardly complain of ingratitude, since he had never prepared any grateful people to begin with. [8] He also enjoins mercy: "Be merciful," he says, "as your Father has had mercy on you." This comes to: "Break your bread for the hungry, and bring the homeless into your house, and if you see someone naked, cover him," and, "Judge for the orphan, and do justice for the widow." I recognize the old teaching of the one who prefers mercy to sacrifice. Or if it is some other god now commanding mercy, because he too is merciful, why has he shown me no mercy for so long an age? [9] "Do not judge, that you may not be judged. Do not condemn, that you may not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you — good measure, pressed down and running over, will be poured into your lap. With the same measure you measure, it will be measured back to you." As I take it, these words ring of a repayment summoned according to deserts. From whom, then, does this repayment come? [10] If from men only, then he is teaching a merely human discipline and reward, and we shall be obeying men altogether; but if from the creator, as from a judge and reckoner of deserts, then he is urging obedience toward the very one with whom he has fixed a repayment to be either courted or feared, according as each has judged, or condemned, or forgiven, or measured; and if from Christ himself, then he too already judges — which Marcion denies. [11] So let the Marcionites choose — whether it is really worth so much to fall away from their master's rule, as to have Christ teaching in the service of either men or the creator. But the blind leads the blind into the pit. Some put their trust in Marcion; yet no pupil ranks higher than his teacher. Apelles ought to have remembered this — Marcion's would-be corrector, once his own disciple. Let the heretic first haul the plank out from his own eye, only then go hunting whatever speck he imagines lodged in a Christian's eye. Likewise a good tree does not bring forth bad fruit, since truth does not bring forth heresy, nor does a bad tree bring forth good fruit, since heresy does not bring forth truth. So neither did Marcion bring forth anything good from Cerdo's evil storehouse, nor Apelles from Marcion's. [12] For it is far more fitting that we apply to these men themselves what Christ figuratively applied to mankind, and not — following Marcion's scandalous reading — to two gods. I think I have not been standing without cause on this line all along, by which I maintain that no other god at all has ever been revealed by Christ. On this one point alone I am amazed that even Marcion's adulterating hand has faltered — except that even thieves get frightened. No crime is without its dread, because none is without a conscience of itself. For just as long, then, the Jews knew no other god than the one besides whom they had as yet known no one, nor did they call any other "god" than the one they alone knew. If that is so, who could be understood as saying, "Why do you call me, Lord, Lord..."? [13] Was it the one who had never before been called that, since he had not yet been revealed anywhere — or the one who had always been held as Lord, as known from the beginning, namely the god of the Jews? Likewise, who could have added, "and do not do what I say"? Was it the one who was, for the very first time, trying to teach them — or the one who from the beginning had committed to them the words of the law and the prophets? Who could reproach them for disobedience, even had he never reproached them before? Moreover, the one who, before Christ, proclaimed, "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me," was surely charging them with a long-standing stubbornness. Otherwise how absurd it would be for a novel deity, a fresh Christ, the illuminator of so great and new a religion, to pronounce stubborn and disobedient people he could never have put to the test!
18.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 18 ========

[1] So too, praising the centurion's faith — hardly surprising if he declared he had found no such faith even in Israel, to whom Israel's faith did not even belong. But indeed it could not yet belong to him either, being still too raw to be tested or compared — I might almost say, not yet existing at all. But why should he not have been allowed to use the example of another's faith? Because if that were the point, he would have said that such faith had never existed in Israel at all; but instead, saying that he ought to have found such faith in Israel — he who indeed had come for the very purpose of finding it, being of course the god and Christ of Israel — he was not mocking Israel's faith except as its exactor and pursuer. [2] A rival god, however, would rather have preferred to find such faith existing precisely in the one he had come chiefly to weaken and destroy, not to confirm. He also raised the widow's dead son to life. Not a new kind of proof — the prophets of the creator had produced this too; how much more the Son? [3] Indeed, up to that very moment Christ had introduced no other god, so much so that all the people gathered there ascribed the glory to the creator, exclaiming, "A great prophet has risen up in our midst," and, "God has visited his people." Which god? Surely the one whose people they were, and from whom their prophets came. And if they were glorifying the creator, while Christ — hearing and knowing it — did not correct them, even in the face of so great a proof, a raised corpse, they still honoring the creator — then without doubt either he was proclaiming no other god than the one he allowed to be honored in his own benefits and mighty works, or else what sense would it make for him to put up with people erring so long, when he had come precisely to cure their error? [4] But John is scandalized on hearing of Christ's mighty works, as if at another god's. Well, let me first work out the reason for the scandal, so as more easily to dismiss the heretics' scandal. Since the Lord of powers himself was already at work on earth by word and by the Father's spirit, and preaching, it had to happen that whatever share of the Holy Spirit, measured out on the prophetic scale, had been at work within John to make ready the Lord's paths, would now be drawn back out of John, dissolving, one might say, into the Lord as into its own full sum. [5] And so John, now a common man, one of the crowd, was indeed scandalized — but as a man, not as one hoping for or understanding another Christ, since he had no ground for such hope: Christ was teaching and doing nothing new. No one is in doubt about someone he knows does not exist; he neither hopes for him nor imagines him. But John was certain there was no god except the creator — even as a Jew, indeed as a prophet. Rather, he was, so to speak, hesitating more over whether the one he knew existed was in fact the very one now present. [6] It was from this fear, then, that John also said: "Are you the one who is coming, or are we to expect another?" — simply asking whether the very one he was expecting had now come. "Are you the one who comes," that is, who is to come, "or are we to expect another?" — that is, is the one we are expecting someone else, if you are not the one whose coming we expect? For he was hoping, as everyone supposed, that from the similarity of the proofs it might be that a prophet had meanwhile been sent, distinct from — that is, less than — the one actually expected to come, namely the Lord himself. And this indeed was John's scandal, that he doubted whether the very one they were expecting had already come, whom they ought to have recognized by the very works being proclaimed, since it was through those same works that the Lord announced himself to be recognized by John. [7] Since these things, then, stand established as proclaimed concerning the creator's Christ, as we have shown point by point, it would be quite perverse for Christ not to be understood as declaring himself the creator's Christ through the very deeds by which he was compelling people all the more to recognize the creator's Christ. Far more perverse still, if it is Christ — not John's Christ — who bears witness to John, confirming him as a prophet, indeed as more than that, an angel, even quoting scripture concerning him: "Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way" — fittingly recalling, in line with the sense given above of John's scandal, this prophecy, so that by confirming that the forerunner John had already come, he might dissolve the difficulty behind that question, "Are you the one who comes, or are we to expect another?" For the forerunner having now discharged his office, the way of the Lord having been prepared, it was the one to whom the forerunner had ministered who was to be understood — [8] greater indeed than all born of women; yet not for that reason is he made subject to the one who will be least in the kingdom of God, as though the kingdom in which some lesser person will be greater than John belonged to a different god, or as though the John who is greater than all born of women belonged to a different god. For whether by "the least" he means someone else, out of humility, or himself, since he was regarded as less than John — everyone, of course, flocking to John in the wilderness rather than to Christ ("What did you go out into the wilderness to see?") — it fits the creator equally well both that John is greater than those born of women, and that Christ, or whoever the least one is, will be greater than John in the kingdom of that same creator, and greater than so great a prophet, precisely because he was not scandalized in Christ, which is what diminished John on that occasion. [9] We have already spoken of the forgiveness of sins. As for the argument from that sinful woman — that when she fastened kisses on the Lord's feet, drenched them with tears, wiped them with her hair, and anointed them with ointment, she was handling the reality of a solid body, not an empty phantom, and that the penitence of a sinner earned pardon according to the creator's own principle, which is accustomed to set penitence above sacrifice. But also, if the goad of penitence had come to her from faith, then it was through a penitence justified by faith that she heard from him, "Your faith has saved you" — from him who, through Habakkuk, had proclaimed, "The just shall live by his faith."
19.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 19 ========

[1] That rich women clung to Christ, and even ministered to him out of their own means — among them she who was wife to the king's household steward — this too fulfills prophecy. For it was such women whom he called through Isaiah: "Rich women, arise and hear my voice": so as to show them first as disciples, then as workers and ministers: "Daughters, hear my words in hope: remember the day of the year, with labor, in hope" — for it was with labor that they followed him, and it was for hope that they ministered. [2] As for the parables, let it suffice once for all that this manner of speech was proved to have been promised by the Creator. But now that other pronouncement of his to the people too — "By hearing you shall hear and not hear" — gave Christ occasion to hammer home again and again, "He who has ears, let him hear": not as though Christ were granting a hearing which the Creator had taken away, out of some opposing intent, but because the exhortation followed on the threat. First: "By hearing you shall hear and not hear"; then: "He who has ears, let him hear." [3] For those who had ears were not hearing of their own accord; he was showing that ears of the heart were needed — the very ears the Creator had said they would not hear with. And so, through Christ, he adds: "Take heed how you hear, and not-hear" — meaning, not hearing with the heart but only with the ear. If you fit a sense worthy of the pronouncement to the intent of the one who was rousing them to listen, then even in saying "Take heed how you hear" he was threatening those who would not hear. And yet that gentlest of gods threatens — he who neither judges nor grows angry! [4] The sense that follows proves this too. "To him who has, it shall be given; but from him who has not, even what he thinks he has shall be taken away." What shall be given? An increase of faith, or of understanding, or salvation itself. What shall be taken away? Precisely what will be given. By whom is it given and taken away? If it is taken away by the Creator, it is also given by him. If it is given by Marcion's god, it is also taken away by him. [5] Whatever name you put on the threat of taking-away, it will not belong to a god who cannot threaten, since he does not know how to be angry. And I marvel that he denies a lamp is ever hidden — he who had hidden himself, a light so much greater and more necessary, for so long an age — he who promises that all things hidden shall be brought out into the open, and yet even now keeps his own god in the shadows, waiting, I suppose, for Marcion to be born! [6] We come now to the most persistent argument of all those who dispute the Lord's birth. He himself, they say, testifies that he was not born, by saying, "Who is my mother, or who are my brothers?" This is always the way of heretics: either they seize on bare, unqualified sayings and drag them by conjecture wherever they please, or else they dissolve conditional and reasoned statements out of the very condition that gives them their simplicity — as here. [7] We reply, on the contrary, first, that it could not have been announced to him that his mother and brothers were standing outside seeking to see him, if he had had no mother and no brothers at all — since the one who brought the news obviously knew them, either from before or from having just then learned of them there, while they were desiring to see him or sending in word to him. To this first point of ours the usual answer from the other side is: What if it was announced to him merely to test him? But Scripture does not say this — and Scripture, which is accustomed to signal so plainly when something is done by way of testing ("Behold, a teacher of the law rose up, tempting him"; and concerning the question of tribute, "And the Pharisees came to him, tempting him") — Scripture, precisely because it makes no mention of testing here, does not allow the interpretation of testing to be smuggled in. [8] And yet, out of sheer generosity, let me press the question of motive: for what purpose would they have tested him by naming his mother and brothers? If it was to establish whether or not he had come into the world by birth — at what point was that ever in dispute, such that they needed this so-called test to settle it? [9] Who, indeed, could doubt he had been born, when they saw a man, when they had heard him profess himself Son of Man — men who, from the plain sight of every human trait, doubted whether to believe him God or Son of God, judging it easier to suppose him some prophet, however great, but in any case born? Even if he had needed to be tested on the question of his birth, any other proof would have suited the test better than mentioning persons whom, even if born, he might not have had. [10] Tell me — does every man who is born have a living mother? Are brothers born to every man who is born? Might one not rather have a father, or sisters, or indeed no one at all? Besides, it is well established that a census was carried out under Augustus, then in Judea, through Sentius Saturninus — a record in which they could have looked up his lineage. So there is no way this pretext of testing holds together, and truly his mother and brothers were standing outside. It remains to examine the sense of the one who was not simply declaring, "Who is my mother, or my brothers?" as though he were denying kinship and birth altogether, but speaking out of the necessity and reasoned circumstance of the moment. [11] For it was because those closest to him by blood were standing outside while strangers sat fixed within, hanging on his words, and were further trying to call him away from his solemn work, that he took rightful offense. He did not so much deny them as disown them for the moment. And indeed, having said first, "Who is my mother, or who are my brothers?" he goes on to add, "except those who hear my words and do them" — thereby transferring the names of blood-kinship to others, whom he judged nearer to him by reason of faith. [12] But no one transfers something unless he actually possesses the thing he transfers. If, then, he made those his mother and brothers who were not, how could he have denied those who were? Clearly it was on the ground of merit, not by denying the kinship itself — teaching, in his own person, that whoever puts father or mother or brothers ahead of the word of God is not a worthy disciple. In fact, by this very act he was confirming, all the more, that they were his mother and brothers — precisely because he was refusing, for the moment, to acknowledge them. [13] By adopting others, he was confirming those he had, out of momentary displeasure, disowned — substituting the newcomers not as truer kin but as worthier ones. In short, it is no great thing if he ranked faith above blood-kinship — kinship he did in fact possess.
20.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 20 ========

[1] But who is this who commands both winds and sea? Surely not some new ruler and owner of the elements, now that the Creator has been subdued and shut out! It is not so. Rather, the elements recognized their own Author — elements that had always been accustomed to obey even his servants. Look at Exodus, Marcion; behold, at the Red Sea, vaster than every pool of Judea, the rod of Moses giving its command, so that the sea, split clean through and fixed on both sides in equal astonishment at the breach, let the people cross dry-shod along an inland road — and then, at the nod of that same rod, as nature flowed back, overwhelmed the Egyptian army in the concord of the returning waves, a work in which the south winds too lent their service. [2] Read how, at the drawing of lots to divide the tribes at the crossing of the Jordan, there was a sword — whose onrush and downward flow, at any rate, Jesus [Joshua] had plainly taught to stand still, while the prophets passed through. What is there to say to this? If this is your Christ, he will be no more powerful than the Creator's own servants. But I would rely on these examples alone, were it not also true that the prophetic announcement of this very seafaring expedition preceded Christ. [3] For when he crosses the water, the Psalm is fulfilled to the letter: "The Lord," it says, "is above many waters." When he scatters the waves of the strait, Habakkuk is fulfilled: "Scattering," it says, "the waters in his path." When the sea shrinks back at his rebuke, Nahum too is discharged in full: "Rebuking," it says, "the sea and drying it up" — along with the winds, of course, by which it had been stirred. From whom do you want my avenger Christ to come — from examples, or from the prophets, of the Creator? [4] Come now — you who suppose that a soldier and armed warrior is being foretold, not figuratively or allegorically, but one who was going to wage spiritual war against spiritual enemies with spiritual troops and spiritual weapons, spiritually — when you find in a single man a multitude of demons professing themselves a legion (unmistakably a spiritual host), learn to understand Christ likewise as the conqueror of spiritual enemies, spiritually armed and spiritually warlike, and understand that he is the very one who was going to do battle with a legion of demons as well — so that the Psalm may be seen to have spoken of this very war too: "The Lord mighty, the Lord powerful in battle." [5] For indeed, in his final combat, he fought against death itself and triumphed through the trophy of the cross. But whose son did the legion testify Jesus to be? Beyond doubt, son of that god whose torments and pit they dreaded and had knowledge of. Nor does it seem they could have been unaware, even then, that the power of a new and unknown god was at work on earth — for it is not plausible that the Creator was unaware of it. Even if he had once, long ago, been ignorant of some god above himself, he would certainly, by then, have learned of one operating beneath his own heaven. [6] But whatever the Lord had come to know, the whole household would already have learned as well, within that same world and within the compass of the same heaven under which the foreign divinity was moving about. So, to the extent the Creator would have known of this deity — and of its very substance, had it existed — to that same extent (which is to say, not at all, since there was no such substance) the demons knew no other Christ than the Son of their own god. For they would not have begged of another for what they remembered they must beg of the Creator — namely, pardon for the abyss that belonged to the Creator. And in the end they obtained it! [7] On what grounds? Because they had lied — because they had made him the son of a savage god? And what sort of god would he be, to come to the aid of liars, to put up with slanderers? No — it was rather because they had not lied, because they had recognized the god of the abyss as their own god, that he himself confirmed that he was indeed the one the demons had recognized: that same Jesus, judge and offspring of the god who avenges. Here, then, is something more, drawn from those very "pettinesses" and "weaknesses" of the Creator supposedly showing up in Christ. I am even willing to grant him ignorance — allow me this, against the heretic! A woman with a flow of blood touches him, and he does not know who it was. [8] "Who touched me?" he says. Even as the disciples try to excuse it, he persists in his tone of ignorance: "Someone touched me" — and he backs this up with proof: "For I perceived power going out from me." What does the heretic say to this? Did he know who the person was? Then why did he speak as though he did not? So as to draw out her confession, to test her fear. In just this way Adam too, at one time, had asked as though not knowing: "Adam, where are you?" So you have both the Creator excused alongside Christ, and Christ made equal to the Creator! [9] But might it also be — since he is the adversary of the Law — that, precisely because the Law bars contact with a bleeding woman, he was eager not merely to permit her touch but even to grant healing for it? A god who is not naturally kind, but only out of rivalry! But look: if we find that it was the woman's faith that earned this, since he says, "Your faith has made you well" — who are you, to read the rivalry of the Law into this deed, when the Lord himself shows it to have been granted as the reward of faith? [10] But you want to make this the very faith by which she had scorned the Law. And is it credible that a woman, as yet unacquainted with any god, as yet uninitiated into any new law, should break the very law she was still bound by? By what faith, in fact, did she break it? Believing in which god? Spurning which? The Creator? For she certainly touched him out of faith. If it was out of faith in the Creator — a faith that knew nothing of any other god — how then did she break his law? For if she broke it at all, she broke it precisely by faith in the Creator. [11] How, then, can both things fit together — that she broke it, and that she broke it out of a faith on whose account she ought not to have broken it? I will explain. This was her faith, first: that she trusted her God preferred mercy to sacrifice itself; that she was certain this same God was at work in Christ; that this was why she touched him — not as a holy man, nor as a prophet whom she might suppose could be defiled, being of human substance, but as God himself, whom she had presumed no uncleanness could possibly pollute. [12] And so she did not rashly reinterpret the Law for herself, which meant that things capable of defilement would be defiled — not God, whom she trusted was present in Christ. But she had also considered this: that it was the ordinary and regular flow of menstrual or post-partum blood that the Law taxed with impurity — blood that comes from the office of nature, not from a defect of health. Hers, however, was flowing from a defect of health, one for which she knew she needed, not the mere passage of time, but the help of divine mercy. [13] And so it can be seen that she did not break the Law but rather distinguished within it. This will be the faith that had also conferred understanding: "Unless you believe," he says, "you will not understand." In approving the faith of this woman — who believed simply in the Creator — Christ declared himself, in his answer, to be the God of the very faith he approved. Nor will I pass over this: that while his garment was being touched — a garment, mind you, fitted to a real body, not a phantom — a body was thereby also being demonstrated; not that we need retrace that question here, but because it bears directly on the one now before us. [14] For if there had been no reality of body, a phantom, being an empty thing, simply could not have been touched and defiled. How, then, could one who cannot be defiled, for want of any real substance, have even wished to appear so? As a rival of the Law, he would have been lying, pretending to be truly polluted when he was not.
21.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 21 ========

[1] He sends out his disciples to proclaim the kingdom of God. Did he here, if nowhere else, publish whose kingdom it was? He forbids them to carry provisions or clothing for the road. Who could have given such an order but the very one who feeds the ravens and clothes the lilies growing wild in the field, who had already, in an ancient precept, decreed that the ox treading out the grain should have its mouth left unmuzzled to snatch a mouthful from its own labor, because the laborer deserves his wage? Let Marcion strike out these words, provided the sense survives intact. But when he bids them shake the dust from their feet against those who did not receive them, he ordains that this too be done as a testimony. [2] No one bears testimony to something not destined for judgment; whoever orders inhumanity reduced to a legal deposition is threatening a judge's sentence. And that no new god was ever vouched for by Christ, the common opinion of everyone declared as well — since some told Herod that Jesus Christ was John, others Elijah, others one of the old prophets come again. Whichever of these he was supposed to be, he was certainly not raised from the dead in order to preach, after his resurrection, some other god. He feeds the people in the wilderness — plainly after the old custom. [3] Or if the majesty is not the same, then he is already less than the Creator, since he sustained them not for a single day but for forty years, and not on inferior stuff like bread and fish but on manna from heaven, and not some five thousand but six hundred thousand men. [4] Indeed such was that majesty that it willed not merely to make a meager ration suffice, but even to make it overflow, following the old precedent. For in the same way, in the time of famine under Elijah, the widow of Zarephath's scant and final provisions overflowed for the whole span of the famine through the prophet's blessing. There you have your third Book of Kingdoms. [5] And if you unroll the fourth as well, you will find this whole pattern already belonging to Christ, in that man of God who ordered the ten barley loaves brought to him distributed among the people, and whose servant, reckoning the size of the crowd against the smallness of the provisions, answered, "What, am I to set this before a hundred men?" "Give it," he said, "and they shall eat, for so the Lord has spoken: they shall eat, and there will be some remaining" — just as that Lord had promised. O Christ, even amid your new works, still the same ancient one! [6] And so Peter, who had seen these things and set them beside the ancient ones, and had recognized not only the deeds done long ago but even now the things then already prophesying the future — when the Lord asked who they thought he was, and Peter answered on behalf of them all, "You are the Christ" — he cannot have understood by "Christ" some new figure, but only the one he already knew from the scriptures, whom he was already recognizing in these deeds. And the Lord himself confirms this by his patience up to that point — indeed by enjoining silence. For if Peter could not have confessed him as anyone other than the Creator's Christ, and yet the Lord commanded that they tell no one this, he certainly did not want what Peter had perceived to be broadcast. [7] "No," you say, "it was because Peter had perceived wrongly that he did not want the lie spread abroad." But he gave another reason for the silence: that it was necessary for the Son of man to undergo great suffering, and to be spurned by the elders, the scribes, and the priests, and to be put to death, and to rise again on the third day. Since these things had been foretold — and foretold, as I will show in their proper places, of the Creator's Christ — in this way too he shows himself to be the one of whom they were foretold. [8] Certainly, even if they had not been foretold, the reason he gave for enjoining silence was not one that exposed an error of Peter's, but the necessity of undergoing his sufferings. "Whoever wishes to save his life," he says, "will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will save it." This is certainly a sentence pronounced by the Son of man. Look, then, yourself, at the burning furnace of the Babylonian king, and you will find there, so to speak, a Son of man (though not yet actually one — not yet, that is, brought forth of a woman) already at that time setting up this same principle. He rescues the souls of the three brothers who had resolved to forfeit them on God's behalf, yet he destroys the souls of the Chaldeans, who chose to preserve theirs through idol-worship. What sort of new doctrine is this, whose evidences are old? [9] And indeed the preachings of martyrdoms, both those yet to come and those that would receive their reward from God, have already run their course. "Behold," declares Isaiah, "the just man is perishing, and there is no one who lays it to mind; and just men are being carried off, and no one gives it thought." When does this come to pass more fully than during the hunting-down of his own saints? This is assuredly no trifling affair, no ordinary law of nature, but that notable, soldierly law of the faith, in which whoever loses his life for God's sake preserves it — so that here too you may recognize a judge, one who rewards the loss of the soul as its evil gain, and the soul's preservation as its harmful loss. [10] But he shows himself to me also as a jealous God, repaying evil with evil: "Whoever is ashamed of me," he says, "of him I too will be ashamed." And when could there be occasion for shame except in the case of my Christ, whose condition is so much more shameful that it lies open even to the taunts of heretics — all the ugliness of his birth and upbringing, and the very indignity of his flesh, all declaimed with such bitterness as they can muster? [11] But how could that other Christ be liable to shame, who does not even admit of it? He was not congealed in a virgin's womb — yet still a woman's — not indeed from seed, yet still by the law of bodily substance, from a woman's fluid; he was not flesh given shape before form, not called a lump before it was figured, not deliberated over through ten months of anguish, not poured out onto the ground through the sewer of the body amid the sudden shock of birth-pangs after so long a mire, nor did he greet the light at once with tears at the first wound of his own confinement, nor was he washed in wine, nor seasoned with salt and honey, nor wrapped in the swaddling-cloths that are the first shroud, nor thereafter tumbled amid filth between a mother's breasts, a nuisance at the nipple, an infant long, a boy slow to grow, a man later still — no, he was set forth from heaven, at once full-grown, at once entire, at once Christ, spirit and power and nothing but God. But just as he was not truly real, since he was not truly seen, so too he had no cause to blush at the curse of the cross, since he was without the reality of it, being without a body. [12] He therefore could not have said, "Whoever is ashamed of me." It was ours who had to pronounce this — he who was made lower than the angels by a little, by the Father's will, a worm and no man, the reproach of men and the scorn of the people — inasmuch as he so willed that by his bruise we might be healed, that our salvation might rest on his disgrace. And rightly did he lay himself down for his own man, for his own image and likeness, not another's — so that, since man had not blushed to worship stone and wood, with that same boldness, unashamed of Christ, he might, by the very shamelessness of faith, make sufficient amends to God for the shamelessness of idolatry. Which of these fits your Christ, Marcion, as grounds for shame? Clearly you ought to be ashamed, since you fashioned him yourself.
22.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 22 ========

[1] For this above all should have made you blush: that you allow him to be seen with Moses and Elijah in the privacy of the mountain — men whose destroyer he had supposedly come to be. This, clearly, is what that voice from heaven meant to convey: This is my beloved Son, hear him! — that is, not Moses any longer, and not Elijah. A voice alone, without the display of Moses and Elijah, would have sufficed. For in defining whom they were to hear, it forbade the hearing of any others whatsoever. [2] Or did it perhaps permit Isaiah and Jeremiah and the rest, whom it did not show, to be heard, while forbidding those it did show? Now even granting that their presence was necessary, they certainly would not have been shown conversing with him — for that is a mark of intimacy — nor sharing in his glory — for that is a token of favor and grace — but rather in some squalid state, which would be the proof of their destruction; or better, in the darkness of the Creator, which he had been sent to dispel, kept at a wide remove from the brightness of Christ, since he was going to strip their very words and letters out of his gospel. [3] Does he show them to be strangers by keeping them at his side? Does he teach that they are to be abandoned, by joining them to himself? Does he destroy them, by building them up with his own rays of glory? What would Christ have done with his own prophets? I suppose, true to form, he would have shown them looking exactly as Marcion's Christ ought to have shown any others he might have kept with him besides his own prophets! But why should the Creator's Christ show off preachers who are his own no more than they are the Creator's? Why appear to the very men to whom he had already appeared in revelations? Why converse with the very men who had once spoken his words? Why share his glory with those by whom the Lord of glory had been named? Why appear with his own chief officers — the one who was once the instructor of the people, the other its reformer in due time; the one who inaugurated the old covenant, the other who was to complete the new? [4] So Peter, rightly recognizing his own Master's fellowship in this unbroken continuity, offers his counsel: How good it is that we are present here (fitting indeed, seeing that Moses and Elijah are here too!), and let us build here three shelters, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah — but he spoke without grasping what he uttered. How, 'without grasping'? Was it simple confusion, or was it, as we argue in the case of the new prophecy, that ecstasy — that is, a going-out of the mind — belongs properly to grace? [5] For when a man finds himself placed within the Spirit, most of all as he gazes upon God's own splendor, or as God utters words through him, he cannot help but lose his everyday awareness, overshadowed as he is by divine power — a point on which there is dispute between us and the 'psychics.' Meanwhile it is easy enough to prove Peter's loss of mind. For how could he have recognized Moses and Elijah except in the Spirit — since the people had possessed no images or statues of them, likenesses being forbidden by the Law — unless he saw them in the Spirit? And thus, what he said while set in the Spirit and not in his ordinary senses, he could not properly have known he was saying. [6] But if he was mistaken here in the sense of being in error — supposing Christ belonged to Moses and Elijah — then it is already established, going back to when Peter was asked by Christ whom they took him to be, that he answered as of the Creator, You are the Christ; because if he had at that time recognized him as belonging to another god, he would not have erred here either. But if he erred here for the same reason he erred there, then it is certain that, all the way down to that particular day, Christ had disclosed no divinity previously unknown, and Peter had not yet erred, Christ having as yet revealed nothing of the kind; and Christ was, for that whole span, to be reckoned none other than the Creator's, whose entire order he expressed here as well. [7] He takes three of his disciples as witnesses of the coming vision and voice. This too belongs to the Creator. In the mouth of three witnesses, it says, every word shall stand. He withdraws onto a mountain. I recognize the pattern of the place. For the Creator had also initiated his former people at a mountain, with both vision and voice of his own. It was fitting that on that same kind of height the new covenant should be sealed, in the very place where the old had been written, under that same enveloping cloud too — which no one will doubt was gathered from the Creator's own sky, unless he had brought his own clouds down there as well, since he had also broken through the Creator's heaven to make his own way! Or else he made free, uninvited use of the Creator's cloud-cover. [8] So the cloud was not silent even now, but the familiar voice came from heaven, and the Father's fresh testimony over the Son — the same voice as in the first psalm: You are my Son, today I have begotten you. Of whom also, through Isaiah: Who, fearing God, will hear the voice of his Son? [9] And so now, presenting him, This is my Son — obviously to be understood as, whom I promised. For if he had once promised, and afterward says, This is he — it belongs to the one who once made the promise to use the voice of one now producing what was promised, not to one to whom the reply could be made, But who are you, to say, This is my Son — of whom you announced nothing beforehand any more than you revealed yourself as what you formerly were? [10] Hear him, then, whom from the beginning he had proclaimed must be heard under the title of prophet, since he was also destined to be reckoned a prophet by the people. A prophet, said Moses, God will raise up for you from among your own brothers, according, that is, to a fleshly reckoning — as you have heard me, so shall you hear him; and whoever will not hear him shall be cut off from among his people. So too Isaiah: Whoever among you stands in fear of God, let that one give ear to the Son's own voice. Which the Father himself was about to commend; for, it says, setting forth the words of his Son, by saying, precisely, This is my beloved Son, hear him. [11] So even if the hearing was transferred from Moses and Elijah to Christ, it was not as from one god to another, nor to some other Christ, but from the Creator to his own Christ, according to the passing away of the old covenant and the succession of the new. Not an envoy, says Isaiah, nor a messenger, but God himself shall save them — he himself now preaching and fulfilling the Law and the Prophets. [12] The Father, then, handed over new disciples to the Son, having first shown him together with Moses and Elijah in the privilege of that glory, and then having dismissed them, as though their office and honor had already been discharged — so that this very fact should confirm, against Marcion, that there is fellowship even of Christ's glory with Moses and Elijah. And we find the whole pattern of this vision in Habakkuk too, where the Spirit, speaking at times in the person of the apostles, says: Lord, I have heard your report, and I was afraid. What report, if not that heavenly voice declaring: This is my dearly loved Son, listen to him? I considered your works, and I was struck out of my mind. When, if not at that moment, gazing on his glory, when Peter spoke without grasping what he uttered? Between two living creatures shall you be made known — Moses and Elijah. Of whom Zechariah too saw a figure, in the two olive trees and the two olive branches. [13] For these are the ones of whom it was said, Two sons of fatness stand by the Lord of all the earth. And again the same Habakkuk: His power covered the heavens — that same cloud, no doubt — and his brightness shall be as the light — the very brightness with which he too was clothed and shone. And if we recall the promise made to Moses, we shall find it here fully paid in full. [14] For when Moses had desired to see the Lord's face, saying, If then I have found grace in your sight, show yourself to me, that I may see you knowingly — desiring that vision in which he would be acting as man, as the prophet well knew. But he had already been told, No human being shall look upon God's face and remain alive. And this word which you have spoken, he says, I will do for you. [15] And again Moses: Show me your glory. And the Lord likewise, of the future: I will go before you in my glory, and so on. And at the last: And then you shall see my hinder parts — not loins, not calves, but the glory he had desired, to be revealed in the latter times. In this, he had promised himself to him visible face to face — as he also said to Aaron, Should there be a prophet raised up in your midst, it is to that one I shall make myself known through a vision, addressing him by means of a vision, but not so with Moses: mouth to mouth I will converse with him, openly and plainly (that is, of course, of the man's form he was going to bear), not in riddles. [16] For even if Marcion did not wish him shown conversing with the Lord, but only standing, still, even standing, he stood mouth to mouth and face to face with him — with him, mind you, not outside him — in his very glory, let alone merely in his sight. And from that glory he departed no less radiant from Christ than Moses used to be from the Creator, striking, then as now, the eyes — then of the children of Israel, now of the blinded Marcion, who failed to see that this argument too tells against himself.
23.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 23 ========

[1] Let me put on the mask of Israel. Let Marcion's Christ stand up and cry: O generation without faith, for what length of time must I stay among you? For what length of time must I put up with you? He would at once have to hear from me: Whoever you may be, newcomer, first give an account of your identity, tell where it is you hail from, and state what right you hold over us. Up to now, everything about you belongs to the Creator. If it is plainly from him that you come and for him that you act, we admit the rebuke. [2] But if you come from another, tell me, if you please, what you ever committed to us of your own that we ought to have believed, that you should now reproach us for unbelief — you who have never even once revealed yourself to us? How long ago did you begin dealing with us, that you complain of the time? In what regard has your endurance of us run so deep that you'd claim credit for patience? You're that donkey from Aesop's fable-well, popping up only now — and bawling already. Let me put on, further, the mask of the disciples, on whom he sprang this same complaint. O nation lacking faith, for what length of time must I stay among you, for what length of time must I put up with you? This outburst of his I would most justly beat back in exactly this way: Whoever you may be, newcomer, give your identity first, say where you hail from, name what claim you hold over us. [3] Up to now, I take it, you belong to the Creator, and that is why we have followed you, recognizing in you everything that is his. But if it is from him that you come, we admit the rebuke. If, however, you act for another, I beg you, tell me — what have you ever, at any time, committed to us that was truly your own, that we ought already to have believed, that you should reproach us for unbelief, when you have not to this day even disclosed your author? How long ago did you begin your dealings with us, that you should now even bring up the time? And in what regard has your endurance of us run so deep that you should boast of your patience too? The ass has only just appeared out of Aesop's well — and already it is braying. [4] Who would not have beaten back the injustice of such a complaint in just this way, if he had believed it came from one who had no business complaining yet? Except that he would never have sprung this on them at all, had he not — long resident among them in the Law, in the Prophets, in mighty works and kindnesses — always found them unbelieving. But look: Christ loves little children, teaching that those who wish to be greatest must always be like them. The Creator, on the other hand, sent bears against boys, avenging the prophet Elisha for the abuse he suffered from them. [5] A shameless piece of antithesis-mongering, this, setting such unlike things side by side — little children, still innocent in age, and boys already capable of judgment, who were able to hurl abuse, not to say blasphemy. So then: the just god, sparing not even impious boys, exacts honor for greater age, and rather more from the lesser; while the good god so loves little ones that in Egypt he rewarded the midwives who protected the endangered Hebrew births against Pharaoh's edict. [6] So this very affection belongs to Christ together with the Creator. Now then, how can Marcion's god — who is hostile to marriage — be thought a lover of little children, when the whole cause of children is marriage? Whoever hates the seed must of necessity curse the fruit as well. He must be reckoned crueler even than the Egyptian king. [7] For Pharaoh only refused to let the infants be raised; this one refuses even to let them be born, snatching away the life of children still ten months in the womb. But how much more credible is it that the affection for little ones should be assigned to him who, by blessing marriage for the propagation of the human race, thereby promised, in blessing it, the very fruit of marriage — the fruit whose first stage is infancy?
24.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 24 ========

[1] He chose also another seventy apostles besides the twelve. For why twelve, corresponding to the twelve springs at Elim, if not also seventy corresponding to the seventy palm trees there? It was chiefly the diversity of the occasions that produced these antitheses, not any diversity of powers. But whoever failed to notice the diversity of occasions readily supposed it a diversity of powers. When the Creator led the children of Israel out of Egypt, he sent them off loaded with the spoils of gold and silver vessels and garments, on top of the burdens of their kneading-troughs; but Christ forbade his disciples to carry even a staff on the road. [2] The reason is this: they were being sent forward into the wilderness, these into the cities. Weigh the difference of the occasions, and you will understand it is one and the same power that arranged the expedition of its own people according to scarcity and abundance — cutting away what would abound as they passed through cities, just as it had provided what was needed as they went through the wilderness. He forbade them, too, to carry sandals. For it was he himself under whom, in the wilderness, the people had for so many years worn out no sandals at all. Greet no one along the road, he says. [3] O Christ, destroyer of the prophets — from whom he took this very instruction! When Elisha dispatched his servant Gehazi along that road to bring back the Shunammite woman's son from death's grip, this, I believe, is how he charged him: Gird your loins, take my staff in your hand, and go; whomever you meet on the road, do not bless him — that is, do not greet him — and whoever blesses you, do not answer him — that is, do not return his greeting. For what is a blessing exchanged on the road, if not a mutual greeting at meeting? [4] So too the Lord bids them, on entering a house, to speak peace to it. It is the very same pattern. For Elisha likewise ordered this, when he had gone in to the Shunammite woman, that Gehazi should say to her, Peace to your husband, peace to your son. These, rather, are the true antitheses that ought to concern us — the ones that liken Christ to the Creator, not the ones that separate them. The laborer is worthy of his hire — who could pronounce that more fittingly than a god who is judge? For this very thing is itself an act of judgment: to make a laborer worthy of his hire. No repayment stands apart from a judgment. Now here too the Creator's law is confirmed, since he judges even oxen at work worthy of their hire: You shall not muzzle the ox that treads out the corn, he says. [5] Who could be so generous toward men, if not one who is so even toward beasts? But if Christ too pronounces laborers worthy of their hire, he has thereby excused that command of the Creator's about carrying off the gold and silver vessels of the Egyptians. For those who had built the estates and cities of the Egyptians were certainly laborers worthy of their hire; they were instructed not to commit fraud but to exact compensation, which they could not otherwise have obtained from their masters. Nor is the kingdom of God shown to be new or unheard-of by being announced as having drawn near. For what was once far off can be said to have drawn near. [6] But if it had never existed before it drew near, it could not even be said to have drawn near — since what had never been distant could not draw near to anything. Everything new and unknown is sudden. Everything sudden, once announced, only then first takes on a form, only then first receives a beginning in time. Yet it cannot have been delayed all the while it was not being announced, nor can it be said to have drawn near only from the moment it began to be announced. [7] He adds, further, that to those who would not receive them they should say, Know nevertheless that the kingdom of God has drawn near. If this is not commanded also by way of threat, it is a wholly empty command. For what would it matter to them that the kingdom was drawing near, unless it draws near together with judgment — that is, for the salvation of those who received its announcement? And since a threat cannot exist without its execution, you have in the one who threatens a god who executes, and in both a judge. So too he bids that the dust itself be knocked off as a witness against them — dust clinging to their feet, to say nothing of any closer contact. [8] For if such cruelty and refusal of welcome were to draw no retribution at all from him, why does he send this witness on ahead, one that surely signals coming threats? Furthermore, since the Creator too, in Deuteronomy, forbids the Ammonites and Moabites to be received into the assembly, because they had inhumanly and inhospitably cheated the people coming out of Egypt of supplies, it will therefore be established that the ban on fellowship flowed into Christ's teaching from that same source, where it takes the form: He who despises you despises me. This too the Creator said to Moses: They have not despised you, but me. For Moses was as much an apostle as the prophets were apostles. [9] The authority of both offices must be reckoned equal, since they belong to one and the same Lord of both apostles and prophets. Who now will give the power to tread upon serpents and scorpions? The Lord of all animals — or a god who is not even lord of a single lizard? But it is well that the Creator promised this very power even to little children, through Isaiah — to put a hand into the viper's den and into the nest of the viper's young, and take no harm at all. [10] And we know well enough — without prejudice to the plain sense of Scripture, for the beasts themselves have indeed been unable to harm where there was faith — that scorpions and serpents are figures portending the spiritual forces of malice, whose very prince is reckoned, under the names of serpent and dragon and every most fearsome beast, as belonging to the Creator, who granted this power to his own Christ beforehand, just as the ninetieth psalm says of him: You shall tread upon the asp and the basilisk, and trample the lion and the dragon. So too Isaiah declares: on that appointed day the Lord God will wield a sword both holy and mighty in strength — meaning his own Christ — against that twisting, dragon-like serpent, and will put him to death on that same day. [11] But since the same prophet says, It shall be called a clean way and a holy way, and nothing unclean shall pass along it, nor shall there be any unclean way there; but those who are scattered shall walk in it and shall not go astray, and there shall no longer be a lion there, nor shall anything of the most evil beasts come up onto it, nor be found there — since the way signifies the faith through which we come to God, he was already promising, for that same way, that is, for faith, this very clearing away and subjection of the beasts. [12] You will find, in fact, that the times of the promise correspond, if you read what comes before it: Take courage, hands grown weak, and knees gone feeble: then shall the eyes of those without sight be unshut, and ears once deaf shall come to hear: then shall the lame man bound like a stag, and the tongue of him who cannot speak shall talk plainly. So then, having first granted these gifts of healing, he went on to place scorpions and serpents likewise under the feet of his saints — he who had himself been the first to obtain this authority from the Father, so as afterward to hand it on to others too, showing it forth in the sequence proper to his preaching.
25.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 25 ========

[1] Who can be invoked as Lord of heaven who has not first been shown to be its Maker? "I thank you," he says, "and I confess, Lord of heaven, that you have revealed to little children the things that were hidden from the wise and prudent." What things are these? Whose are they? Hidden by whom, and revealed by whom? If they were hidden and revealed by Marcion's god, who had dispatched nothing beforehand within which anything at all might lie concealed — not one prophecy, not one parable, not one vision, not a single fact or saying or name veiled under allegory or figure or riddling obscurity — [2] but had hidden nothing but his own sheer greatness, which he was now, of all things, revealing through Christ, that is quite unjust. What had the wise and prudent done wrong, that God should be hidden from them — a god whose wisdom and prudence were not even sufficient to know him by? He gave no path through any preaching of works, no footprints by which the wise and prudent might be led. And yet even if they had done some wrong against a god still unknown — suppose him known now — they still ought not to have found him jealous, since he is introduced as unlike the Creator. [3] So then: if he had sent nothing ahead in which he could have hidden anything, and had no guilty parties from whom to hide it, and ought not to have hidden it even if he had — then he cannot be the revealer either, since he was never the hider; and so he is neither Lord of heaven nor Father of Christ, but that other one, the one all these things fit. For that other did hide — by sending ahead the instrument of prophetic obscurity, whose meaning only faith would earn (for "unless you believe, you will not understand") — and he did have guilty parties: the wise and prudent, who from so many and such great works failed to seek out an intelligible God, or philosophized wrongly about him, and supplied heretics with their raw material — and finally, he is jealous. [4] Indeed, this is exactly what he was long ago proclaiming through Isaiah, the very thing Christ now rejoices over: "I shall bring to nothing the wisdom of those who are wise, and I shall shroud the discernment of those who discern." And elsewhere too he signals both that he has hidden and that he will reveal: "And I will give them hidden treasures, I will open to them things unseen." And again: "Who else scatters the signs of ventriloquists and the divinations of the heart, turning the wise back and making their thoughts foolish?" [5] But if he also designated his own Christ as the light of the nations — "I have set you as a light for the nations" — nations which we interpret under the name of "little ones," in the sense that they were once small in understanding and infants in prudence, and now again small in the humility of faith — then we will all the more readily believe that the very one who once hid things, and through Christ promised their revelation, is the one who has now revealed them, through Christ, even to little ones. [6] Or if Marcion's god has laid open the things once hidden by the Creator, then he has already gone into business on the Creator's behalf, expounding the Creator's own affairs. "But," you say, "he did it in order to demolish them, to expose them to shame." Then he ought to have exposed them precisely to those from whom the Creator hid them — the wise and prudent. For if he acted out of kindness, the recognition he owed was to those from whom it had been withheld, not to little ones, from whom the Creator had grudged nothing. [7] And yet up to this point, I think, we have been proving that what is found in Christ is the building-up of the Law and the Prophets rather than their demolition. He says all things have been handed over to him by the Father. Believe it, if Christ belongs to the Creator, to whom all things belong: for the Creator handed over to the Son — no lesser than himself — all the things he founded through him, namely through his own Word. But otherwise, if he is that "coming one" of theirs, what are these "all things" that were handed to him by the father? Do they belong to the Creator? [8] Then whatever the Father passed on to the Son must be good — and the Creator, to whom all such good things properly belong, is already good — and that other one, who invaded goods not his own in order to hand them to his son, is no longer good. He who teaches us to keep off what belongs to another turns out to be the most destitute beggar of all, having nothing with which to enrich his own son except what he stole from someone else. Or, if nothing of the Creator's was handed to him by his father, how does he claim for himself the Creator's man? Or if only man was handed to him, man is not "all things." But scripture proclaims that the handing-over of "all things" was made to the Son. [9] But even if you interpret "all things" as the races of men, that is, all the nations, it is still the Creator who handed these over to the Son: "I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession." Or if he too has some things of his own which, together with the Creator's man, he handed over entirely to the Son, then show me just one of these "all things," for proof, as an example — so that I do not, with equally good reason, disbelieve that all things belong to a god of whom I see nothing, as I rightly believe that even the things I do not see belong to the one to whom all the things I do see belong. [10] "But no one knows who the Father is, except the Son, nor who the Son is, except the Father, and anyone to whom the Son has chosen to reveal him." And so, they say, Christ preached an unknown God. This is where other heretics too find their footing, setting the Creator up as known to everyone — known to Israel by familiarity, and to the nations by nature. But how then does the Creator himself testify that even Israel did not know him? "But Israel has not known me, and my people has not understood me" — and not the nations either? [11] For look, he says, not even among the nations is there a single one who knows. That is why he reckoned even them as a mere drop from a bucket, and left Zion like a watchman's booth in a vineyard. See, then, whether this is not confirmation of the prophetic voice reproaching humanity's ignorance of God — an ignorance that lasted right up until the Son. For that is precisely why Christ went on to add that the Father is known only by the one to whom the Son reveals him: because he himself was the one set up by the Father and announced as the light of the nations — a light, of course, about the God who was to enlighten them, Israel included, precisely through a fuller knowledge of God. [12] So then, arguments that can equally well fit the Creator will do nothing to establish belief in another god — only what does not fit the Creator could possibly do that work. And if you look at what follows — "Blessed are the eyes that see what you see; for I tell you that the prophets did not see what you see" — it descends from the same point made above: that no one had known God as he deserved to be known, since not even the prophets had seen what was now being seen under Christ. [13] For if Christ were not mine, he would not have brought in a mention of the prophets at this very point. What wonder is it, after all, if they had not seen the affairs of an unknown god revealed only so long an age later? But what blessedness would there have been for those who then saw what others could rightly not have seen, unless they had failed to reach the actual presentation of things they had never even foretold? No — the point can only be that men who were equally able to see the affairs of their own God, things which they had even foretold, nevertheless had not seen them. This, then, will be the blessedness of others: that they saw what the first group had only foretold. [14] In the end we shall show — and have already shown — that the things foretold were indeed seen in Christ, yet were hidden even from the prophets themselves, precisely so that they would remain hidden from the wise and prudent of this age too. In the true Gospel, a teacher of the Law approaches the Lord: "What must I do," he says, "to obtain eternal life?" In the heretic's version only "life" is set down, with no mention of "eternal," so that the teacher appears to be asking about that long life which is promised in the Law by the Creator, and so that the Lord's answer according to the Law — "You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your whole soul and all your strength" — seems fitted to a man who was inquiring about the Law's kind of life. [15] But surely a teacher of the Law already knew how to obtain the Law's kind of life, and would not have asked about the very thing whose rules he himself taught. No — because the dead were already being raised by Christ, and he had been roused, by these examples of return to life, to a hope of eternal life, he asked about the attaining of eternal life, in case that loftier hope should demand some further observance beyond the Law. So the Lord — being no other than the God of the Law himself, and introducing no new precept, but only the one that lies at the very root of all salvation and of both kinds of life — sets before him the very head and summit of the Law: to love the Lord your God with your whole being. [16] So then, if the man was asking about the long life that belongs to the Creator, and Christ answered about that very thing — not about the eternal life that belongs to Marcion's god — how does he go on to obtain eternal life? Certainly not by the same means as the long life. For where the wages differ, the work required must be believed to differ as well. So the Marcionite will not obtain eternal life by loving your god, in the way that the Creator's lover obtains long life by loving the Creator. [17] But how absurd is it that the one who promises eternal life should not be loved all the more, if the one who promises only long life is to be loved at all? Then both kinds of life must belong to the same God, since the very same discipline must be pursued to gain either one. What the Creator teaches is precisely what must be loved if Christ is to grant it — with that further rule stepping in here too, that the greater gifts are more readily believed to belong to the one with whom lesser gifts have already gone before, than to the one for whom no lesser gifts prepared any credibility for the greater. [18] Let it be seen to now, whether our side has added the word "eternal." It is enough for me that this Christ, the one who invites us to eternal — not merely long — life, when consulted about the long life he was supposedly demolishing, urged the man instead toward eternal life rather than bringing it up on his own. What, I ask you, would the Christ of the Creator have done, had the man whom he was raising up in love of the Creator not himself been the Creator's own? He would, I imagine, have forbidden any love of the Creator whatsoever.
Chapter 26.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 26 ========

[1] When he had prayed in a certain place to that "higher" father of his, lifting his eyes to the creator's heaven with quite shameless and reckless nerve — the very heaven from which he might have been struck down by hail so harsh and savage, and by lightning, just as Jerusalem could be pinned down by it — one of his disciples came up to him and said, "Lord, show us how to pray, in the way John instructed those who followed him," evidently supposing that a different god had to be prayed to differently. Whoever presumes this must first prove that a different god had been made known by Christ. [2] For nobody would have cared to learn the manner of prayer before first learning to whom the prayer was addressed. So if he had learned it, let Marcion prove it. If he still nowhere proves it, let him understand that the disciple was asking for a form of prayer directed to the creator, the very one to whom John's disciples also prayed. But since John too had introduced some new order of prayer, his disciple not unreasonably presumed to ask the same of Christ, on the strength of his own master's practice — that they too should pray to God not differently, but not to a different God. [3] Accordingly Christ would not have given his disciple knowledge of prayer before knowledge of God himself. So he taught prayer directed to the very God the disciple had known all along. Now examine the sense of the prayer, to see which God it savors of. To whom shall I say, "Father"? To one who did not make me at all, from whom I trace no origin, or to one who by making and forming me begot me? [4] From whom shall I ask the Holy Spirit? From one who does not even supply the spirit of this world, or from one by whom even the angels are made spirits, whose Spirit from the beginning was borne over the waters? Shall I long for the arrival of the reign of one I never heard styled King of Glory, or of one who holds in his grasp the very hearts of kings? Who will give me my daily bread — one who does not even provide me millet, or one who furnished his people daily bread from heaven, the bread of angels? Who will forgive my sins — one who, by not judging them, does not even hold them against me, or one who, if he does not forgive, will hold them to judge them? [5] Who will keep us from being led into temptation — one whom the tempter need never fear, or one who from the beginning condemned the tempting angel in advance? On this reckoning, whoever supplicates a different god instead of the creator is not praying to him but slandering him. Well then, from whom shall I ask, that I may receive? With whom shall I seek, that I may find? At whose door am I to knock, so that entry will be granted me? Who has anything at all to hand over to the petitioner, save him to whom everything belongs, and to whom I too, the petitioner, belong? What, moreover, have I lost with that other god, that I should seek with him and find? [6] If it is wisdom and prudence, the creator hid these; with him, then, I shall seek them. If it is salvation and life, these too are with the creator. Nothing will be sought elsewhere to be found than where it lay hidden to be revealed. Nor shall I knock anywhere else than whence I was driven out. Finally, if receiving and finding and being admitted are the fruit of the labor and persistence of the one who asked and sought and knocked, understand that these very things are commanded and promised by the creator. [7] For that "supremely good" god, coming of his own accord to give benefits to a man not his own, would never have imposed on him any labor or persistence — for he would no longer be supremely good if he did not give without being asked, and grant finding without being sought, and open without being knocked at. But the creator was able to impose these conditions through Christ, so that, since man by sinning had offended his God, he should labor, and by persistence in asking receive, and by seeking find, and by knocking enter in. [8] So too the preceding parable makes the midnight petitioner for bread a friend, not a stranger, and has him knocking at a friend's door, not an unknown one's. Now a friend, even when he gives offense, belongs to the creator's man more than to the god of Marcion. And so he knocks at the door where he had a right to knock, whose door he knew, whom he knew to have loaves, already lying down with the children he had willed to be born. Even the fact that he knocks late at night belongs to the creator's time — his is the evening, whose is the age and the setting of the age. No one would have knocked late at a new god — only at first light. It is the creator who once closed the door to the nations — the door that used to be knocked on by the Jews; [9] he it is who rises and gives, though not now as to a friend, yet not as to a stranger either, but, he says, as to one who is being a nuisance. But no one could have been a nuisance so quickly to a god just newly arrived. Recognize, then, the Father you also call "creator." He is the one who knows what his children ask for. For to those asking for bread he gave manna from heaven, and to those craving meat he sent quail — not a serpent instead of a fish, nor a scorpion instead of an egg. It belongs to one who has both to refrain from giving evil for good; but Marcion's god, having no scorpion, could not claim he would not give what he did not have — rather it is the one who, having a scorpion, does not give it. [10] So too it is he with whom the spirit is holy who will give the Holy Spirit — not one with whom it is not holy at all. When he had cast out a demon of deafness (so that in this very kind of healing he might fulfill Isaiah), and was said to cast out demons by Beelzebub, he replied, "If I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your own sons cast them out?" What does this remark point to, if not that he expels them through the identical power their own sons employ for casting them out — that is, the creator's power? But suppose you would rather read it thus, [11] "If I by Beelzebub, by whom do your sons?" as though he were mocking them for casting out by Beelzebub — the earlier meaning tells against you: a divided Satan cannot stand opposed to himself. So they were not expelling by Beelzebub either, but rather, as already noted, through the creator's might — and to drive the point home he continues, "But if I cast out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you." For before Pharaoh those sorcerers, set against Moses, called the creator's power "the finger of God." "Finger of God" was meant to signify something small yet immensely powerful. And Christ, showing this — recalling, not erasing, his own ancient acts — called the power of God "the finger of God," meaning none other than the God to whom it was already ascribed by that name. So the kingdom that had drawn near belonged to the very one whose power was called a finger. [12] Fittingly, then, he applied the parable of the strong armed man overpowered by one stronger — the prince of demons, whom he had earlier called Beelzebub and Satan — implying that it was God's own finger which had overpowered him, rather than some other, alien deity bringing the creator down. Besides, how could his kingdom still stand within its own borders and laws and offices, if that stronger god of Marcion's could plausibly be thought to have overcome him even now, with the world still whole — unless, according to that god's law, Marcionites too went on dying, sinking into the earth, and often were taught by a scorpion's sting that the creator had not been overcome? [13] A woman cries out from the crowd, calling blessed the womb that bore him and the breasts that nursed him. And the Lord says, "Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and do it" — because he had also earlier rejected his mother or brothers in this same way, preferring the hearers and doers of God. For not even here was his mother present with him. So neither had he denied her before as his mother. When he hears this again, he again transfers the blessedness from the womb and breasts of his mother to his disciples — a transfer he could not have made had he not truly had a mother.
27.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 27 ========

[1] Elsewhere it is my preference to clear away what the Marcionites find fault with in the creator. Here it is enough if the same traits turn up in Christ. Look — he too is unequal, inconsistent, fickle, teaching one thing and doing another: he commands giving to everyone who asks, yet himself refuses a sign to those who ask for one. For so long an age he hides his own light from mankind, yet he forbids hiding a lamp — insisting instead it be set on a lampstand, so that it may shine for everyone. He forbids returning a curse for a curse — still more, then, cursing outright — and yet he hurls "Woe!" at the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. Who is as like my God as this Christ is, if not that very God himself? [2] We have already fixed it firmly, more than once: he could in no way be branded a destroyer of the law if he had proclaimed a different God. That is why, on that occasion too, the Pharisee who had invited him to dinner turned over in his mind why he had not first washed before reclining at table, as the law required — a man who bore about him the God of the law. And Jesus went on to interpret the law for him, saying that they clean the outside of cup and dish, while their inward parts are full of robbery and wickedness — meaning that the cleanliness of vessels is to be understood, before God, as the cleanliness of men; for the Pharisee too had been reasoning within himself about the man, not about the unwashed cup. "So then," he says, "you scrub the exterior of the cup" — meaning the flesh — "yet leave what is within unpurified" — meaning the soul; and he adds, "Did not the one who fashioned the exterior" — the flesh — "likewise fashion what lies within?" — the soul? [3] By this saying he plainly showed that the cleanliness of man's outer and inner self belongs to the one God to whom each of them belongs — a God who ranks mercy above not only the washing of a man but even sacrifice. For he goes on: "Give as alms what you have, and everything will be clean for you." But even if some other god could have commanded mercy, it was certainly not before he was known. Furthermore, it is plain even here that they were not being rebuked concerning God, but concerning the discipline of the very God by whom, figuratively, the cleanliness of vessels, and, plainly, works of mercy, were being enjoined upon them. [4] So too he chides them for tithing their little garden herbs while passing over the call and the love of God. Whose call and love, if not that of the very God for whom, by the pattern of the law, they offered rue and mint out of their tithes? For the whole force of the reproach lay in this: that they took pains over trifles, owed, of course, to the one to whom they were not rendering the greater things, the one who said, "You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and your whole soul, and your whole strength" — the one who called you out of Egypt. Besides, the time would not yet have allowed Christ to demand a love so premature — indeed so bitterly premature — for a god so new and recent, not to say not yet even made public. [5] When he rebukes those grasping after the chief seats and the honor of greetings, he is likewise administering the creator's own doctrine — the very one who calls such rulers "archons of Sodom," who forbids trusting in princes, and even pronounces utterly wretched the man who places his hope in man. But if someone courts a position of primacy in order to boast over the services of others, then the one who forbade this kind of hoping and trusting in man has likewise rebuked those who court primacy. [6] He also inveighs against the teachers of the law themselves, for loading others with unbearable burdens which they themselves would not so much as touch with a finger — not thereby disparaging the burdens of the law, as though he detested it. For how could he be its detester, when at the very moment he was rebuking them for passing over the weightier matters of the law — mercy, and the call, and the love of God — not even calling these burdensome, let alone the tithing of rue and the cleaning of dishes? Indeed, he would rather have judged them excusable if they could not bear unbearable loads. But what burdens is he taxing them for? [7] Those which they themselves were piling up out of their own resources, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men, joining house to house for their own profit, so as to seize what belonged to their neighbors, extorting the people, loving gifts, chasing after payoffs, plundering the cause of the poor, so that the widow became their prey and the orphan their spoil. Of these same men Isaiah says: "Woe to those who are mighty in Jerusalem"; and again: "Those who demand tribute of you lord it over you." Who more than the teachers of the law? If these men displeased Christ, it was because they displeased their own — for he would never have gone knocking at teachers of a law not his own. [8] But why do they hear "Woe" also because they build monuments to the prophets slain by their own fathers — an act rather deserving praise, since by this work of piety they testified they did not consent to their fathers' deeds — unless he was not, after all, the "jealous" God whom the Marcionites accuse of visiting the guilt of ancestors upon their descendants down to the fourth generation? [9] But what "key" did the teachers of the law hold, if not the interpretation of the law? To its understanding neither did they themselves come near — not believing, evidently (for "unless you believe, you will not understand") — nor did they let others in, teaching, of course, the precepts and doctrines of men instead. So the one who rebuked them for neither entering themselves nor granting others entrance — is he to be reckoned a detractor of the law, or its champion? If a detractor, then those who shut the law's door ought to have pleased him too; if a champion, then he is no longer a rival of the law. [10] But all this he was piling up to blacken the creator, as though he were savage, since those who sinned against him would be liable to "Woe." Yet who would not rather fear to provoke a savage God by falling away from him? All the more, then, was he teaching that this God, whom he was representing as one to be feared, deserved to be all the more deeply owed. This is how Christ ought to have behaved — as the creator's Christ.
28.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 28 ========

So it's no wonder he had no use for the hypocrisy of the Pharisees — lips that loved God, not hearts. 'Watch yourselves,' he tells the disciples, 'against that Pharisee leaven — hypocrisy itself' — not a rejection of the Creator's preaching. The Son hates the defiant of the Father; he does not want his own people turning out that way toward him — nor toward some other god into whose service hypocrisy might have crept, whose example the disciples would need warning against. So it's the Pharisees' example he's forbidding. He was warning them off admitting into service to him the very thing the Pharisees admitted into service to their own object of worship. Since, then, he had just been indicting their hypocrisy — concealing the secrets of an unbelieving heart, papering over them with a veneer of official duty, holding the key of knowledge and neither going in himself nor letting others in — he adds: 'Nothing is covered that will not be uncovered, and nothing hidden that will not be known.' No one should imagine he's threatening some revelation and recognition of a hitherto unknown, hidden god here, since he goes right on to what they were muttering and debating among themselves — namely, saying of him, 'This man drives out demons only by Beelzebub' — words destined to come out into the open and onto the lips of men once the gospel got published. Then, turning to the disciples: 'I say to you, my friends, do not be afraid of those whose power stops at killing the body, leaving them nothing further they can do to you afterward. But I will show you whom to fear: fear the one who, after he has killed, has power to cast into hell' — plainly meaning the Creator; 'so I tell you, fear him.' At this point it would be enough for me that the one he commands us to fear is also the one he forbids us to offend, and the one he forbids us to offend is also the one he commands us to please — and whoever gives these orders belongs to the very god by fearing, not offending, and by pleasing whom, one attends to one's own interest. But I have more to draw from what follows. 'I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before men, I will acknowledge before God.' Now those who acknowledge Christ will be killed in the sight of men, with nothing further to suffer at their hands after the killing. These, then, are the very people he warned above not to fear being merely killed; that's why he put the 'killing not to be feared' first, so as to follow it with 'confession to be endured': 'And whoever denies me before men will be denied before God' — before that same God, obviously, who would have been about to acknowledge him had he confessed. For if it's the acknowledger he will acknowledge, it's the very same one who will deny the denier. Further, if the confessor is the one who has nothing to fear after being killed, the denier must be the one who has something to fear even after death. So since it is the Creator's business to be feared after death — the penalty of hell, that is — the denier is therefore a denier of the Creator. But if he's a denier of the Creator, then the confessor — who after being killed has nothing further to suffer from man — is plainly going to suffer something from God if he denies. And so Christ belongs to the Creator, since he shows that anyone denying him has good cause to dread the Creator's hell. After scaring off denial, there follows a warning about a blasphemy to be dreaded even more: 'Whoever speaks against the Son of Man will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.' Now if both the forgiving and the withholding of an offense smack of a God who is Judge, then this must be the Spirit not to be blasphemed against — since it will not forgive blasphemy — just as, above, he must be the one not to be denied, since he will go on to kill even into hell. But if Christ keeps blasphemy itself away from the Creator, I do not see how he could have come as his adversary. Or if by these very words — not going to forgive blasphemy, and going to kill even into hell — he is blackening the Creator's severity, then it follows that the other, different god's spirit may be blasphemed with impunity and Christ denied, with no difference at all between worshipping him and despising him — and just as there's no penalty for contempt, so no reward should be hoped for from worship either. Having brought them before the authorities, he forbids them to fret in advance about their answer: 'For the Holy Spirit,' he says, 'will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.' If a lesson of this kind belongs to the Creator, then the command belongs to the one whose example came first. The prophet Balaam, in Numbers, was called on by Balak the king to put a curse on Israel — a people that king was set on fighting — yet at that very instant a spirit took hold of him and produced, in place of the curse he had come to deliver, the blessing the spirit prompted then and there, after he had first told both the messengers sent by the king and, later, the king in person that he would utter nothing but what God set in his mouth. These are the 'new teachings' of the 'new Christ' — teachings the Creator's own servants had already initiated long ago! Look, here's a plainly opposite example — Moses against Christ. Moses, on his own initiative, steps between quarrelling brothers and rebukes the one in the wrong: 'Why are you striking your neighbor?' And he gets thrown back at him: 'Who made you a ruler or judge over us?' Christ, on the other hand, when asked by a certain man to settle a division of inheritance between him and his brother, refused his help — in a cause that was, moreover, thoroughly just. So my Moses already comes off better than your Christ, caring about peace between brothers, stepping in against injustice. But no — this is supposedly the Christ of the good God who is not a judge: 'Who made me a judge over you?' He could find no other excuse to use — except the very one by which a wicked man and an impious brother had once shaken off an advocate for right and duty. In using that line, he thereby endorsed both the bad line and the bad deed — the refusal to settle peace between brothers. Or did he perhaps take it badly that Moses had been driven off with that very saying, and so, faced with a parallel case of brothers in dispute, chose to embarrass them with a reminder of that same saying? Just so. For it was that very Spirit — the Creator's Spirit — who had been in Moses when he heard those words, and was now the one hearing them again. I think I have already sufficiently shown elsewhere that our God condemns the glory of riches, pulling the powerful down off their thrones and lifting the poor up out of the dunghill. To him, then, belongs the parable of the rich man congratulating himself on the yield of his fields, to whom God says, 'Fool, this very night they will demand your soul back; and the things you have prepared — whose will they be?' In just the same way, the king who boasted through Isaiah of his treasuries and storehouses of luxuries among the Persians got a bad hearing for it.
29.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 29 ========

[1] Who would refuse to take care that we have food for the soul and clothing for the body, except the one who provided these things for man beforehand, and who therefore, having every right to the credit, guards their care as a rival to his own generosity? He who fitted the very substance of the soul to be worth more than food, and shaped the very stuff of the body to be worth more than a tunic — he whose ravens neither sow nor reap nor store in barns, and yet are fed by him; whose lilies and grass neither weave nor spin, yet are dressed by him nonetheless, by whom even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. [2] But nothing is so preposterous as for one god to supply a thing while another orders men to rely confidently on that supply — and does so while actually running down the giver! Now if, playing the role of the giver's detractor, he refuses to have men think about such trivial matters as ravens and lilies never trouble themselves over — creatures which, of their own lowliness, are provided for without asking — that will become clear soon enough. Meanwhile, why does he rebuke them for little faith — faith in whom, exactly? [3] Was it faith in the one they could not yet fully render to a god only now being revealed, while they were still in the process of learning who he was? Or was it faith that they owed the Creator precisely on this title — that they should believe he freely supplies these things to the human race, and not fret about them? For when he adds, 'For these things the nations of the world seek after' — meaning, by not believing in the God who founded and provides all things, whom he did not want them made equal to the nations in this respect — he was rebuking the same God of little faith in whom he was branding the nations as unbelieving. Further, when he adds, 'But your Father knows that you need these things,' I want to ask first which Father Christ intends this to be understood as. [4] If he means their own Creator, then he is also affirming him good, since he knows what his children need. But if he means that other god, how does that god know that food and clothing are necessary for man, when he has supplied neither? For if he had known, he would have supplied them. But if he knows what is necessary for man and still has not supplied it, then he failed to supply it either out of malice or out of weakness. Yet by declaring these things necessary for man, he has certainly confirmed them good — for nothing necessary is evil. And he will no longer be depreciating the Creator's works and kindnesses, so as to cancel out what I set aside above for later discussion. [5] Further, if it is another god who knows what is necessary for man and provides and supplies it, how can this one promise the same things himself? Is he generous with what belongs to someone else? 'Seek first the kingdom of God,' he says, 'and these things will be added to you' — added, obviously, by the same one whose kingdom it is. But if by him, then what kind of person supplies what belongs to another? If it is the Creator's kingdom, since it is his, who is this that promises what is not his own? If these things are added along with the kingdom, restored on the second rank, then the one to whom the second rank belongs is the one to whom the first belongs too; the food and clothing belong to the one the kingdom belongs to. [6] So the entire promise stands on the ground of the Creator — that is the state of his parables, the balance of his similitudes, if indeed they point to no one other than the one they match at every turn. We are servants, for we have God as our master. We must gird our loins — that is, be unencumbered by the tangling entanglements of a dissolute life. Likewise we must keep our lamps burning — that is, keep our minds kindled by faith and shining with works of truth — and so wait for our lord, that is, Christ. Returning from where? If from a wedding, it belongs to the Creator, whose weddings these are; if not the Creator's, then Marcion's own Christ would never have gone to a wedding when invited, given that he keeps his eye on a god who detests marriage. So the parable collapses in the person of the lord, if there is no one to whom weddings are fitting. [7] In the following parable too, anyone badly errs who casts that thief — whose hour, had the master of the house known it, he would not have let his house be broken into — in the role of the Creator. How can the Creator possibly look like a thief, he who is lord of the whole man? No one steals or breaks into what is his own; rather it is the one who invades another's property, alienating a man from his own master. Now since he shows us that the thief is the devil — whose hour, had man known it even at the beginning, he would never have been broken into by him — for this reason he bids us be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour we do not expect: not as though he himself were the thief, but rather the judge of those who have not made themselves ready and have not been on guard against the thief. [8] So then, granting that he is the Son of Man, I take him for judge, and in that judge I am defending the Creator; but if it is Christ of the Creator that he is showing under the title 'Son of Man' in this passage, precisely to cast him as the thief whose coming-time we do not know, you already have it established above that no one is a thief of his own property — with the added point that the more he impresses on us fear of the Creator, the more the business he is transacting is the Creator's own. [9] And so when Peter asked whether he had spoken this parable to them alone or to all, he sets before them, and before everyone destined to preside over the churches, the parable of the stewards: whoever treats his fellow servants well will, when the lord returns after his absence, be put in charge of everything; but whoever behaves otherwise will, when the lord returns on a day he did not expect and at an hour he did not know — the Son of Man himself, the Christ of the Creator, not as thief but as judge — be cut off, and his portion set with the unfaithful. [10] So then, either here too he sets forth the lord as judge, and is catechizing his hearer into that Creator, or, if this is meant to be the supremely good god, he too is now confirmed as judge, however much the heretic wishes it otherwise. For they try to soften the sense here, on the score that it belongs to their god, as though it were merely a matter of calm and gentle temperament to segregate a man and set his portion with the unfaithful — as if he had not been called at all, so that he is merely being returned to his prior state! As though this were not itself the result of a judgment! What folly! What will be the outcome for those who are segregated? Is it not the loss of salvation, seeing that they are being segregated from those who will obtain salvation? What, then, is the state of the unfaithful? Is it not condemnation? [11] Or if the segregated and unfaithful suffer nothing, then by the same logic those retained and faithful gain nothing either. But if the retained and faithful do obtain salvation, then necessarily the segregated and unfaithful lose it. This will be the judgment — and whoever intends judgment belongs to the Creator. Whom else am I to understand as the one who beats servants with few or many stripes, exacting from each according to what he committed, except a God who renders to each his due? Whom does he teach me to obey but the one who rewards? [12] Your Christ proclaims: 'I have come to cast fire upon the earth.' Is this the supremely good one, lord of no hell, who a little before had checked his disciples with the harshest rebuke when they wanted to call down fire on that most inhospitable village — when it was that other one who burned Sodom and Gomorrah with a fiery storm, of whom it is sung, 'Fire shall go before him and burn up his enemies,' who through Hosea threatened, 'I will send fire upon the cities of Judah,' and through Isaiah, 'A fire has been kindled in my anger'? Let him not lie about it. If it is not the same one who also sent forth his voice from the burning bush, then let him work out for himself what fire he means to argue for. [13] Even if it is a figure of speech, by this very fact — that he draws the arguments for his meaning from my element — he belongs to me who makes use of what is mine. The comparison of fire will belong to the one to whom the reality of fire belongs. He himself will explain the quality of this fire better, when he adds: 'Do you suppose that I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division.' The text actually reads 'sword' — but Marcion has edited it! [14] As though division were not the sword's own work! So then, the one who denied peace also intends the fire of overthrow. As the battle, so the conflagration; as the sword, so the flame — neither fitting for his lord. Finally: 'The father,' he says, 'shall stand split from the son, and likewise the son from the father; the mother set against her daughter, and the daughter against her mother; the bride opposed to her husband's mother, the husband's mother opposed to the bride.' If this battle among kinsfolk was sounded by the prophet's trumpet in these very words, I fear that Micah may have been proclaiming Marcion's Christ. [15] And that is why he was calling them hypocrites — men skilled at reading the face of sky and earth, yet unable to discern that particular time, in which, obviously, he was fulfilling all that had been foretold about him — nor could he have been recognized had he taught otherwise. But who could know the times of one who had nothing by which to prove them? He rightly rebukes them, too, for not judging what is right of their own accord. He had long since commanded this through Zechariah: 'Judge a righteous and peaceable judgment'; through Jeremiah: 'Do judgment and justice'; through Isaiah: 'Judge the fatherless, and do justice for the widow' — charging the vineyard of Sorek precisely with this, that it produced no justice but only an outcry. [16] So then, the one who had taught them to act on command was also the one demanding that they act on their own judgment. The one who had sown the precept was also the one pressing for its overflow. Now how absurd would it be for him to command just judgment while destroying the just judge, God! For as to the judge who casts into prison and does not release from it until the last farthing is paid, they argue, using that as a reproach, that this is the Creator being represented. To this I must respond on the same footing. For on every occasion the Creator's harshness gets flung at him as a reproach, on that very occasion it is his own Christ who is driving men to obey through terror.
30.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 30 ========

[1] How, again, did he handle the question raised over the healing done on the Sabbath? 'Which of you fails, on a Sabbath day, to untie his own ox or donkey from its stall and bring it to drink?' So then, by acting according to the very terms of the law, he confirmed the law rather than dissolving it — a law that forbids any work being done except what would be done for any living creature, and how much more, then, for a human being? Everywhere I recognize the consistency demanded of the parables. 'The kingdom of God,' he says, 'resembles a mustard seed, which a certain man picked up and planted within his garden plot.' [2] Whom are we meant to picture as that man? Christ, surely — since Marcion's own text still names him Son of Man — for it was he who accepted the kingdom's seed from the Father, that is, the gospel's message, and set it growing in a garden that was his own, meaning the world, or if you prefer, within mankind itself. But given his words 'within his garden plot,' and given that neither the world nor mankind is property of that alien god but of the Creator, it must follow that whoever planted it in ground belonging to himself stands revealed as the Creator. Or supposing they dodge this trap by shifting the man's identity away from Christ, making him instead the man who accepts the kingdom's seed and plants it deep in the soil of his own heart — even on that reading the material fits no one except the Creator. For how could it be the kingdom of the mildest of gods, when it is followed by the tearful austerity of the fervor of judgment? [3] I suspect, indeed, that the next parable too points to the kingdom of a different god. For he compares it to leaven, not to unleavened bread, which is more properly the Creator's. This conjecture fits well enough with men who go begging for arguments. And so I too will drive out vanity with vanity, and say that fermentation likewise fits the Creator's kingdom, since after it comes the oven or furnace of hell. [4] How many more times will he show himself as judge, and in the judge, the Creator? How many more times does he cast out and condemn by rejecting? As here too: 'When the master of the house has risen up' — risen to do what, if not what Isaiah said: 'When he rises to shatter the earth'? — 'and has shut the door,' shutting it, of course, to exclude the unrighteous. To those knocking he will answer, 'I do not know where you are from.' And when they list all they ate and drank in his presence, and how he taught in their streets, he will add: 'Depart from me, all you workers of iniquity. In that place there will be wailing, and the grinding together of teeth.' Where? [5] Outside, obviously, where the excluded will be, the door shut against them by him. So there will be a punishment consisting precisely in exclusion, when they see the righteous entering into the kingdom of God while they themselves are held outside. Held by whom? If by the Creator, then who is it inside taking the righteous in under the kingdom's roof? The good god? What business, then, does the Creator have there, detaining outside as punishment those whom his adversary has already expelled — men who ought to be taken up by that adversary rather, and all the more to that adversary's chagrin? [6] But also, the one who is about to exclude the unrighteous must either know that the Creator will detain them in punishment, or not know it. So then, either they will be detained against his will — in which case he who does the detaining is lesser than the one who yields to him unwillingly — or, if he wishes it done this way, then he himself has decreed it be so, and the very author of the Creator's alleged infamy will be no better than the Creator. If none of this holds together on any rational ground — the notion that one punishes while another liberates — then judgment and kingdom alike belong to one and the same; and since both belong to one, the one who also judges is the Creator.
31.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 31 ========

[1] Whom does he order to be invited to lunch or dinner? The very people he had already pointed out through Isaiah: "Break your bread for the hungry, and bring the beggars and the roofless into your house" — people, obviously, who cannot pay you back for such kindness in kind. If Christ forbids angling for return favors, promising repayment instead at the resurrection, that is the Creator's own pattern, the God who has no love for gift-seekers chasing a payback. Consider too which party the parable of the man who issues the invitations really fits. "A certain man gave a dinner and invited many." [2] Clearly the preparing of the dinner figures the full provision of eternal life. Now, I say first: strangers with no claim of kinship are not normally invited to dinner — household and family are the usual guests, and far more readily so. So the inviting was the Creator's doing, since those invited belonged to him — through Adam as men, and through the patriarchs as Jews — not to one to whom they belonged neither by nature nor by any prior claim. [3] Next, if the man who prepared the dinner sends for his guests, the dinner is the Creator's on this count too — he sent to remind guests already invited long before through the patriarchs, and now reminded through the prophets. He is not one who sent nobody to give warning, who did nothing beforehand to summon them, but who instead came down suddenly himself, only just making himself known while already inviting, only just inviting while already compelling them to the feast, making the hour of dining and the hour of invitation one and the same. "The invited began to make excuses." [4] If this is from some other god, fair enough — because the invitation was sudden; but if it is not fair, then it was not sudden either. And if it was not a sudden invitation, then it comes from the Creator, from whom it came long ago, from whom, in fact, they had turned away the summons — saying to Aaron at the outset, "Fashion gods for us who will march ahead of us," and thereafter hearing with their ears yet failing to hear — that is, the calling of God, who most fittingly speaks to this very parable through Jeremiah: "Hear my voice," he says, "and I will be to you a lord, and you to me a people, and you shall walk in all my ways, whatever I command you." Behold, the invitation of God. "And they did not listen," he says, "and did not incline their ear." Behold, the people's refusal. "But they went off after the things their evil heart desired." "I have purchased a field, and I have acquired five yoke of oxen, and I have taken a wife." [5] And he presses further: "And I sent to you all my servants the prophets" (here will be the Holy Spirit, the one who reminds the guests) "day and before daylight. And my people did not listen, and did not attend with their ears, and stiffened their neck." When this was reported to the head of the household, he was moved — moved, note well (for Marcion denies that his god is ever moved; so this, too, is mine) — and orders a rounding-up to be done from the town's boulevards and alleyways. Let us examine whether this carries the same sense as, once more through Jeremiah: "Have I turned into a desert for the house of Israel, or a territory left barren?" that is, do I not have people to summon, or a source from which to summon them? "Since my people said, We will not come to you." [6] So he sent for others to be called, still from the same city. Then, room still remaining, he ordered a gathering also from the highways and hedges — that is, now from us, from the outside nations; with just the same jealous rivalry as in Deuteronomy: "I will turn my face away from them, and I will reveal to them what awaits them in the final days" — meaning, others shall possess their place — "for it is a perverse generation, children in whom there is no faith. They have provoked me to jealousy with what is no god, and stirred me to wrath with their idols; so I will provoke them to jealousy with what is no nation, and with a foolish nation I will stir them to wrath" — with us, plainly, whose hope the Jews carry, though the Lord denies they shall ever taste it, Zion being abandoned, left "like a watchman's hut in a vineyard, and a shed in a cucumber field," after they had also refused the last invitation, the one to Christ. [7] Going through this whole sequence according to the Creator's own arrangement and his prophets' preaching, what part of it can possibly suit that other god, who has neither sequence nor arrangement to match the parable's design — he who did the whole work in a single stroke? What would his first calling be, and what would count as the second act of reminder? Some must first make excuses, and only afterward must others come in. But as it stands, he comes inviting both parties at once — city and hedgerows together — against the very mirror the parable holds up. [8] Nor can he now judge as disdainful people he never invited before, people he is approaching for the very first time. Or if he judges them as future rejecters of the invitation, then he is likewise foretelling, as a future event, the rounding-up of others from the nations to take their place. Clearly, then, he is to come a second time to preach to the nations. Yet even if he is to come, I think it will not be as one still summoning guests but as one already seating them. Meanwhile, you who read this dinner's invitation as the heavenly banquet of spiritual fullness and joy — remember also that the earthly promises of wine and oil and grain, and of the city itself, are equally figured by the Creator as spiritual realities.
32.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 32 ========

[1] Who goes looking for the lost sheep and the lost coin? Isn't it the one who lost them? And who lost them? Isn't it the one who had them? And who had them? Isn't it the one to whom they belonged? If, then, man is no other's property than the Creator's, then it was he who had him, to whom he belonged; he who lost him, who had him; he who sought him, who lost him; he who found him, who sought him; he who rejoiced, who found him. [2] So the argument of both parables falls flat when applied to one who owns neither the sheep nor the coin — that is, man. He did not lose him, because he never had him; he did not seek him, because he never lost him; he did not find him, because he never sought him; he did not rejoice, because he never found him. And indeed, the rejoicing over a sinner's repentance — that is, over the recovery of what was lost — belongs to the one who once declared he would rather have a sinner's repentance than his death.
33.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 33 ========

[1] As for the two masters he denies can be served — because offending one is bound to mean defending the other — he himself makes clear who they are, setting God against mammon. As for who he means by mammon, if you have no interpreter, you can learn it from him directly. Warning us to secure, by worldly means, the support of friendships, on the model of that servant who, removed from his post, relieves his master's debtors by cutting down their bills, to provide himself a fallback — "And I," he says, "say to you, make yourselves friends out of the mammon of unrighteousness" — out of money, obviously, the very thing that servant dealt in. [2] We all know that money is the author and master of the whole world's unrighteousness. Seeing the Pharisees' greed enslaved to it, he aimed this saying at them: "You cannot serve God and mammon." And indeed the Pharisees, lovers of money, laughed at him for it — having plainly understood that "mammon" meant money — lest anyone suppose the Creator is meant by "mammon," and that Christ was calling them back from servitude to the Creator. What then? Learn from this, rather, that a single God is shown here by Christ. He named two masters, God and mammon — the Creator and money. And note: "you cannot serve God" — obviously the one they appeared to be serving — "and mammon," the one to whom they were in fact more devoted. [3] Now if he himself were acting as some other god, he would have shown not two masters but three. For the Creator too is a master, being God, and indeed more a master than mammon, and more to be heeded, precisely because more a master. What sense would it make for one who had called mammon a master, and coupled him with God, to pass over in silence the true master of them both — the Creator? Or did his silence amount to conceding that he, too, must be served, if all he denied was that one could serve himself and mammon together? So then, in setting up one God, he would have named the Creator too, had he been someone else — but instead he named the Creator, whom he set up as master without any other god beside him. [4] And this too will become clear — how the saying runs: "If you have proved unfaithful with the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust to you what is true?" — meaning, in unrighteous money, not in the Creator, whom even Marcion makes out to be just. "And if you have not been found faithful in what belongs to another, who will give you what is mine?" For whatever is unjust should have no place among the servants of God. But how was the Creator "another's" to the Pharisees — he who is the very own God of the Jewish nation? If, then, these words do not fall on the Creator but on mammon, then "Who will trust you with what is truer?" and "Who will give you what is mine?" cannot have been spoken by one who was, as it were, someone else, on behalf of some other god's grace. [5] For that is how it would seem, if, in branding them faithless toward the Creator rather than toward mammon, he had drawn the distinctions of another god by mentioning the Creator — refusing to entrust his own truth to men who had proved disloyal to the Creator. How can he then seem to be someone else here, unless the point is precisely to detach him from the very matter under discussion? [6] Again, if the Pharisees, justifying themselves before men, were setting their hope of reward on man, he was rebuking them in the very sense of the prophet Jeremiah: "Wretched is the man who puts his hope in man." And when he adds, "God knows your hearts," he was recalling the power of that God who called himself a lamp, examining the innermost thoughts and the heart. And when he touches on pride — "What is exalted among men is loathsome before God" — he sets Isaiah before our eyes: "For the day of the Lord Sabaoth is against every reviler and every proud man, against every high and lofty one, and they shall be brought low." [7] I can now gather why Marcion's god remained hidden for so long an age. He was waiting, I suppose, to learn all this from the Creator first. So he learned it, right up to the time of John, and only then set out to proclaim the kingdom of God, saying: "Until John it was the law and the prophets; from that point on, the kingdom of God is announced as good news." [8] As though we ourselves did not likewise recognize John as a kind of boundary marker set between old and new, at whom Judaism was to cease and from whom Christianity was to begin — yet not as though the closing of the law and prophetic writings, and the dawning of the gospel in which lies the kingdom of God, Christ himself, were the work of some other power. For if we have already shown that the passing of the old and the coming of the new are both preached by the Creator, and if John is shown to be the forerunner and preparer of the ways of the Lord who was to bring in the gospel and proclaim the kingdom of God, then from the very fact that John came, the one who was to follow John — as his forerunner — will himself be the Christ; and if the old things ceased and the new began with John standing between them, it will be no wonder that this belongs to the Creator's own design, so that it may be all the more surely proved by the very fact that the kingdom of God rises at the setting of the law and the prophets in John, and sets out from there. [9] "Let heaven and earth pass sooner" then, as the law and the prophets shall, "than one stroke of a letter" of the Lord's words. "For the word of our God," says Isaiah, "remains forever." For since Christ — that is, the Word and Spirit of the Creator — had already in Isaiah foretold John, that voice calling out amid the desert, "Make ready the way of the Lord," to the end that at his coming the order of the law and the prophets should thereafter cease — through fulfillment, not through destruction — and the kingdom of God be announced by Christ, he therefore added, all the more readily, that the elements would pass away sooner than his own words, confirming as well what he had said about John: that it had not passed away.
34.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 34 ========

[1] But Christ forbids divorce, saying: Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery; and whoever marries a woman divorced by her husband is likewise an adulterer. In forbidding divorce this way, he makes marriage to a divorced woman unlawful. Moses, however, permits divorce in Deuteronomy: If a man takes a wife and lives with her, and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because some indecency has been found in her, he shall write for her a certificate of divorce, place it into her grasp, and dismiss her from his household. Do you now perceive the clash pitting Law against Gospel, Moses against Christ? [2] Plainly you do not, for you have not accepted that other Gospel of the same truth and the same Christ, in which, forbidding divorce, he settles the very question at issue himself: Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, commanded a bill of divorce to be given; yet at the outset things stood otherwise, for the one who fashioned them as male and female declared, The two shall be one flesh; what therefore God has joined, let no man put asunder. [3] By this answer he both protected Moses' ordinance, as his own, and set the Creator's institution straight, as being his own too, since he is the Creator's Christ. But since you are to be refuted from the very texts you have accepted, let me meet you on your own ground, as though I were arguing with your Christ. Did not he too, in forbidding divorce, while acknowledging as his Father the one who joined male and female, rather excuse than destroy Moses' ordinance? But suppose your Christ is teaching something contrary to Moses and the Creator; unless I can show he is not contrary, let him be mine. [4] For I say that he made this prohibition of divorce conditional — applicable to the case where a man divorces his wife in order to marry another. Whoever divorces his wife, he says, and marries another, commits adultery, and whoever marries a woman divorced by her husband is likewise an adulterer — precisely because she was divorced on grounds that made the divorce unlawful, namely so that another might be married; for a man who takes to wife one unlawfully divorced, treating her as though not divorced at all, is an adulterer. [5] For the marriage that has not been rightly dissolved still stands; and to marry while a marriage still stands is adultery. So then, if he forbade the divorcing of a wife only conditionally, he did not forbid it absolutely, and what he did not forbid absolutely, he permitted in other cases — wherever the reason for which he forbade it does not apply. And now he is teaching nothing contrary to Moses, whose precept he preserves at least in some measure, though I do not yet say he confirms it. Or, if you flatly deny that Christ permits divorce at all, how is it that you yourself dissolve marriages — neither joining male and female, and refusing the rite of baptism together with the eucharist to couples already wed elsewhere, unless together they plot against marriage's fruit — which is to say, against the Creator himself? Indeed, what does a husband do in your church if his wife commits adultery? Will he keep her? Surely not — for your very own apostle forbids that Christ's members be united to a harlot. [6] So then, even Christ has justice on his side as the champion of divorce's legitimacy. And thereby Moses stands confirmed by him, since he forbids divorce on the very same ground as Christ — except where indecency is found in the woman. For in the Gospel of Matthew too: Whoever divorces his wife, except for the cause of adultery, makes her commit adultery. And equally, whoever marries a divorced woman is reckoned an adulterer. But except for the cause of adultery, not even the Creator separates what he himself joined, since this same Moses elsewhere established that a man who took a wife by force could not divorce her for all time. [7] But if a marriage entered by compulsion holds, how much more one entered by mutual consent? — just as, on the authority of the prophet: You shall not divorce the wife of your youth. So then you have Christ everywhere freely following in the Creator's footsteps, both in permitting divorce and in forbidding it. You also have him, however you try to hide it, as the guardian of marriage, unwilling either to see it broken by forbidding divorce, or to see it kept with disgrace by then permitting divorce. Blush, you who refuse to join those whom your own Christ joined. Blush also, you who separate without the very cause for which even your Christ was willing that separation be made. [8] I must now also show from what source and toward what end the Lord drew this teaching. For it will then appear more fully that he did not aim at overturning Moses by this sudden interposing of the topic of divorce — since it was not, in fact, sudden, but rooted in the same mention of John. For John, rebuking Herod because, against the Law, he had married his dead brother's wife, who had a daughter by him (the Law not merely permitting but even commanding this, in the case of a brother who died childless, that seed be raised up for him by his brother, from his brother's own flesh) — John had been thrown into prison by that same Herod, and afterward put to death. [9] So then, having made mention of John, and certainly of the outcome of his fate, the Lord aimed the figure of unlawful marriages and adultery at Herod, pronouncing an adulterer even the man who marries a woman divorced by her husband, so as to weigh all the more heavily upon Herod's impiety — who had taken from her husband, by death no less than by divorce, a woman whose husband's own brother had a daughter by her, and on that account too unlawfully, from the prompting of lust and not of the Law, and had for that reason also killed the prophet who stood up for the Law. [10] This discussion of mine will also serve for the argument that follows, of the rich man tormented among the dead alongside the beggar taking his rest within Abraham's embrace. For that story too, so far as the surface of the text goes, is introduced abruptly, but as regards the intent of its meaning, it too hangs together with the mention of John ill-used and Herod ill-married and rebuked, shaping the fate of each — Herod's torments and John's refreshments — so that Herod might now hear: They have Moses and the prophets there; let them hear them. [11] But Marcion twists this elsewhere, so as to fix both rewards, whether torment or refreshment, in the world below as belonging to the Creator, assigned to those who obeyed the Law and the prophets, while reserving for his Christ and his god the heavenly bosom and haven. To this we shall answer, with the very Scripture opening his eyes, which distinguishes Abraham's bosom from the world below. For the world below, I take it, is one thing, and Abraham's bosom another. For it says a great gulf lies between those regions, forbidding passage from either side. [12] Nor indeed would the rich man have lifted up his eyes, and that from a distance, unless toward something above him, and from a great distance below toward a great height, across that immense gap of loftiness and depth. From this it is plain to anyone with sense, who has caught wind of the Elysian Fields, that a particular, bounded location exists, termed Abraham's embrace, meant to receive the souls of his offspring — even from among the nations, seeing that he stands as father of a multitude of nations counted to Abraham's credit, and this by the same faith by which Abraham believed God, under no yoke of the Law and no mark of circumcision. [13] That region, then, I call Abraham's bosom — not heavenly, indeed, but higher than the world below, meanwhile granting the souls of the just their repose, until all things reach their consummation fulfills the resurrection with the fullness of its reward, when that heavenly promise which Marcion claims for his own — as though it had not been proclaimed by the Creator — will then appear. [14] To that place Christ is building his own ascent into heaven, according to Amos — his own people's ascent, surely, where too is the eternal place of which Isaiah speaks: Who will announce to you the eternal place? — none other, surely, than Christ, walking in righteousness, speaking the straight way, hating injustice and iniquity. But if an eternal place is promised, and an ascent into heaven is being built by the Creator, who also promised that Abraham's seed would be like the stars of heaven — and that surely in view of a heavenly promise — then, that promise being kept intact, why should it not admit that Abraham's bosom is spoken of as a temporary receiving-place for the souls of the faithful, in which the image of the future is already sketched out, and a kind of bright foretaste of both judgments may already be seen? [15] I would also remind you heretics, while you are still in this life, that Moses and the prophets proclaim one God as Creator, and proclaim one Christ as his, and that both judgments — of punishment and of eternal salvation — rest with the one and only God, who kills and makes alive. No, you say, the voice of our god from heaven bade not Moses and the prophets be heard, but Christ: Hear him. And rightly so. For by then the apostles had already heard Moses and the prophets quite sufficiently, since it was by believing Moses and the prophets that they had come to follow Christ. [16] For never could Peter have declared, You are the Christ, had he not first heard and trusted Moses and the prophets, the sole heralds by whom Christ had thus far been made known. This faith of theirs, then, had deserved to be confirmed even by a voice from heaven, commanding that he be heard whom they had already recognized as the one announcing peace, announcing good things, proclaiming the eternal place, building for them their ascent into heaven. [17] But of them it was said, in the realm of the dead: They have Moses and the prophets there, let them hear them — of those, that is, who did not believe, or did not believe in this way at all: that after death there awaited the torments of pride in riches and glory in luxury, as announced by Moses and the prophets, and decreed by that God who casts the mighty down from their thrones and raises the poor up from the dung-heap. So then, since this difference of pronouncement on both sides fits the Creator perfectly well, no gulf need be set up between two divinities — only between the two conditions themselves.
35.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 35 ========

[1] Turning there to his disciples, he says "Woe" to the author of stumbling-blocks, saying it would have been better for him if he had never been born, or if a millstone had been hung about his neck and he had been pitched into the deep, than that he should cause one of these little ones—his disciples, that is—to stumble. Consider what a punishment he is threatening that man with. And indeed no one else is going to avenge the wronging of his disciples but he. [2] Recognize, then, both the judge and the very feeling with which he pronounces this care for his own—the same feeling the Creator once had: "Whoever touches you touches the apple of my eye." It is one and the same sentiment. He commands that a sinning brother be rebuked; whoever fails to do this has certainly done wrong himself, either out of hatred wanting his brother to persist in his fault, or out of favoritism sparing him—having Leviticus before him: "You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall reprove, yes reprove, your neighbor"—your brother, of course—"and you shall not bear sin because of him." [3] No wonder he teaches this, seeing that he also forbids you to look away and neglect bringing back even your brother's stray animals if you find them wandering on the road, let alone your brother himself. But he also commands you to grant your brother pardon when he sins against you—even seventy times seven. And that is little enough. For the Creator goes further: he sets no limit at all, declaring without end, "Do not remember your brother's malice," and he commands you to grant this not only to the one who asks but even to the one who does not ask. For he does not want you merely to forgo pressing the offense, but to forget it. [4] As for the law concerning lepers—how much interpretation it calls for regarding the particular species of the affliction and the high priest's inspection of it—this is something we must know for ourselves, in order to throw Marcion's own touchiness about the law back at him, since here too he will claim Christ as its rival, anticipating the law's own solemn rites even in the healing of the ten lepers. These he simply instructed to present themselves before the priests, and along the way he cleansed them, without a touch even then and without a word, by silent power and sheer will alone; [5] as if it were necessary, once the healer of sicknesses and vices has been announced as Christ and proven by his effects, to go back and quibble over the manner of his cures, or to summon the Creator before Christ's bar of the law, on the ground that Christ accomplished on his own something other than what the law had prescribed—when in fact it stands to reason that the Lord operates one way through himself or through the Son, and another way through the prophets, his servants, giving especially those demonstrations of power and virtue which, being more brilliant and more forceful precisely because they are his own, must rightly be set apart from those given through deputies. But things of this sort have already been said elsewhere, in an earlier proof. [6] Now, even though he has stated beforehand that lepers abounded throughout Israel during the time of the prophet Elisha, and that not one of them was cleansed apart from Naaman the Syrian, that hardly amounts to a difference between two gods, to the destruction of the Creator who cured only one and to the elevation of him who cleansed ten. For who will doubt that more could be cured by one who had cured even a single man than by one who, ten times over, had never before cured even one? [7] But by this very declaration he is chiefly striking at Israel's lack of faith, or rather its arrogance, in that though many lepers were there and a prophet was not lacking, even after the proof had been given, not one of them ran to the God who was working through the prophets. So then, since he himself was the true high priest of God the Father, he examined them according to the hidden meaning of the law, signifying that Christ is the true examiner and refiner of human blemishes. And what stood in the open text of the law he also enjoined: "Go, present yourselves before the priests." Why, if he was going to cleanse them before they arrived? As though mocking the law, so as to show, once they were healed along the way, that the law amounted to nothing, priests and all? [8] Well, let that be as it will, if to anyone Christ is going to look so much like a schemer. Rather, we ought to interpret this in the way most worthy of him and most fitting to faith: they were healed precisely because, in accordance with the law's command to go off to the priests, they obeyed; for it is not credible that observers of the law should earn healing from a destroyer of the law. But why did he give the leper of old no such command? Because Elisha gave none such to Naaman the Syrian either; and yet that does not mean he was not acting for the Creator even so. I have answered enough; but whoever has faith understands something deeper still. [9] So learn the reasons too. The business was taking place in the territory of Samaria, whence, incidentally, came one of the lepers. Now Samaria had broken away from Israel, having that schism arising from the nine tribes which Jeroboam, torn away through the prophet Ahijah, had settled at Samaria. But the Samaritans were also otherwise always pleased with themselves over the mountains and wells of their fathers, as in the Gospel of John, where that Samaritan woman says in conversation with the Lord at the well: "Surely you are not greater than...", [10] and so on; and again: "Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you people say that one must worship at Jerusalem." And so he who through Amos had said, "Woe to those who trust in the mountain of Samaria," now deigns of set purpose to restore that very region, ordering the Samaritan to show himself to the priests—priests who of course existed nowhere but where the temple was—thereby subordinating the Samaritan to the Jew, since salvation is from the Jews, though both Israelites and Samaritans exist. For the whole promise made to the tribe of Judah was Christ; so that they might know that at Jerusalem was to be found both priests and temple and the very source and fountainhead of religion—a spring of salvation, not a mere well. [11] And so, once he saw that they acknowledged the law which was to be discharged at Jerusalem, he healed them, already to be justified by faith apart from the law's order. Hence too, marveling at that one man loosed from the ten, the Samaritan mindful of the grace he had received from God, he issues no command that the man present the offering the law prescribes, because he had already offered something sufficient, rendering glory to God—this too being, by the Lord's own will, an interpretation of the law. And yet to which god did the Samaritan render thanks, when not even the Israelite up to that point had learned of any other god? To whom else but to him by whom all had earlier been healed—Christ? And so he heard, "Your faith has saved you," because he had understood that he owed a true offering—that is, an act of thanksgiving—to the true almighty God, in his genuine sanctuary and before Christ, his genuine high priest. [12] Nor again can the Pharisees be thought to have consulted the Lord about the coming of some other god's kingdom, seeing that no god other than Christ had yet been brought forward, nor can he be thought to have answered about any kingdom but the one concerning which he was being consulted. "The kingdom of God," he says, "does not come with observation, nor will they say, 'Look, here it is,' or 'There it is'; for take note, the reign of God is inside you." Who will fail to read this as meaning: "inside you"—that is, within your grasp, in your own power, provided you listen, provided you do what God commands? [13] But if the kingdom of God consists in a commandment, then set against this, according to our method of antitheses, the words of Moses, and it is one and the same sentence. "The commandment," he says, "is not too high, nor far from you. It is not up in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will climb up to heaven and carry it down so we can listen to it and keep it?' Nor is it across the sea, that you should say, 'Who will sail across the sea and bring it back so we can listen to it and keep it?' No—the word is close beside you, in your mouth, in your heart, and in your hands, ready to be kept." This comes to the same thing as: "Not there, nor there either; for take note, the reign of God is inside you." [14] And lest heretical impudence argue that the Lord answered them about the kingdom of the Creator—the one about which he was being asked—rather than about his own, what follows stands against it. For in saying that the Son of man must endure much suffering and rejection first, before that coming of his in which the kingdom will be tangibly revealed, he shows that it was his own kingdom he had been speaking of when he answered, since it looked forward to his own sufferings and rejection. As for being rejected, and afterward being acknowledged and taken up and exalted, he drew that very word "rejected" from the place where, under the riddle of the stone, both his revelations were sung of by David—the first to be refused, the second to be honored. [15] "The stone," he says, "which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner: this was the Lord's doing." For it would be pointless, if we believed that God prophesied about someone's disgrace or, equally, someone's glory, without that prophecy pointing to the very one he had already foreshadowed under the figure of a stone, a rock, and a mountain. But if this passage speaks of his own coming, why does the gentle and mild one liken it to the harsh, dreadful days of Noah and Lot? Why does he tell them to remember Lot's wife, who did not despise the Creator's command with impunity, unless he comes with a judgment to avenge his own commands? [16] Even granting that he avenges as that other one does—if he judges me—he ought not to have shaped his own proofs on the model of the one he is destroying, lest he seem to be shaping himself after me. But if here too he is not speaking of his own coming but of the Jews' coming for their Christ, let us even now wait and see whether he proclaims anything of his own, meanwhile believing him to be the very one he everywhere proclaims.
36.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 36 ========

[1] For when he enjoins persistence and urgency in prayer, he sets out the parable of the judge compelled to hear a widow by the urgency and persistence of her pleading. So he shows that it is the judge who is God to be prayed to — not himself, unless he himself is the judge; he further added that vengeance would be executed by God for his elect. If then he who will be judge is also the avenger, he has proven the Creator the better God, since it is he whom he shows to be the avenger of his elect who cry to him day and night. And yet, when he introduces the Creator's own temple, and portrays a pair of men worshipping within it with opposite dispositions — the Pharisee in pride, the tax collector in humility — and so has the one go down condemned and the other justified, then by teaching precisely the discipline by which one ought to pray, he has established as the one to be prayed to here too the very God from whom they were to receive that discipline of prayer, whether it condemns pride or justifies humility. [2] I find in Christ neither the temple, nor the worshippers, nor the tribunal of any other god — only the Creator's. It is him he bids men worship in humility, as the one who lifts up the humble, not in pride, as though he cast down the proud. What other god does he show me to be worshipped? By what discipline? By what hope? None, I think. For the very prayer he taught, we have proven belongs to the Creator. It is another matter if he even refuses to be worshipped, on the ground that he is a supremely good God, generous of his own accord and unasked. [3] But 'who is good,' he says, 'but God alone?' — not as though, out of two gods, he had shown one to be the best, but that there is one God alone who is good, being good precisely as he is the only God. And good he certainly is, he who rains on the just and the unjust, and makes his sun rise on the good and the bad, sustaining, feeding, and even helping the Marcionites. [4] Finally, when asked by a certain man, 'Good Master, what must I do to possess eternal life?' he demanded whether the man knew — that is, kept — the Creator's precepts, so as to bear witness that eternal life is acquired by the Creator's precepts. And when the man affirmed that he had kept all the chief ones from his youth, he said, 'One thing you lack: sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me.' [5] Come now, Marcion, and all you heretics who now share his pity and his shame — what will you dare say? Did Christ rescind the earlier precepts — not to kill, not to commit adultery, not to steal, not to bear false witness, to honor father and mother? Or did he both keep those and add what was lacking? Yet even this precept of generosity to the needy is spread everywhere through the Law and the Prophets, so that this most glorious keeper of the commandments was being led on to hold money far dearer than he should. [6] So this too stands firm in the gospel: 'I did not arrive to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but instead to bring them to completion.' At the same stroke he freed everything else from doubt, by making it plain that the title 'God' and the title 'the good one' both attach to a single being, and that eternal life, the heavenly treasure, and his own person all belong to that same one whose precepts, by supplementing them, he both preserved and increased — a point to be recognized here too from Micah, who says: 'If it has been told you, O man, what is good, or what the Lord requires of you, except to practice justice, to cherish mercy, and to walk humbly, ready in step, with the Lord your God?' [7] For Christ too, being man, announces what is good: knowledge of the Law — 'You know the commandments,' he says; to do judgment — 'Sell what you have,' he says; to cherish mercy — 'and give to the needy,' he says; to walk humbly alongside the Lord — 'and come, follow me,' he says. [8] The Jewish people had from the beginning been so distinctly divided by tribes and clans and families and households that no one could easily be unaware of his own lineage, even apart from the recent Augustan census, perhaps still pending at that time. But Marcion's Jesus — even granting, since he seemed a man, that no one doubted he was born — since on Marcion's showing he was not really born, could have had no public record of his lineage at all, but must have been reckoned as simply one of those whose origin, one way or another, was unknown. [9] When, then, the blind man heard him passing by, why did he cry out, 'Jesus, Son of David, take pity on me!' — unless it was that, without rash guesswork, he was reckoned Son of David — that is, of David's family — through his mother and brothers, from whom this had at some point plainly reached him by report? Now those going ahead rebuked the blind man, that he should be silent. Rightly so — because he was shouting, not because he was lying about being son of David. Or else show me that those who rebuked him knew Jesus was not the son of David, so that we might believe that was why they told the blind man to be silent. [10] But even if you could show that, it would be far easier to suppose they were simply ignorant than that the Lord could have let a false proclamation about himself stand unchecked. But the Lord is patient. Yet he is no confirmer of error — indeed he is the very one who unmasks the Creator's truth — for he refrained from lifting the man's blindness until after the man could still go on regarding Jesus as David's son. Instead, to keep you from slandering his patience, and from foisting on him some pretext of pretended silence, and from denying him to be son of David, he confirmed the blind man's proclamation in the plainest way possible — by the very reward of healing and by his testimony to faith. 'Your faith,' he said, 'has saved you.' [11] What do you want the blind man to have believed? That Jesus had come down from that other god to overthrow the Creator, to tear down the Law and the Prophets? That it was not he who was the promised one sprung from Jesse's stock and born of David's own line, who likewise rewards the blind? But I think the blind of that day were not yet blind in Marcion's fashion, that this should have been the faith of that blind man — a faith he believed on hearing the cry, 'Jesus, Son of David.' [12] And he who both recognized this in himself and wished it recognized by all, granted the man's faith — though it already saw better than eyes, though it already possessed the true light — the outward sight as well, so that we too might learn both the rule and the reward of faith at once. Whoever wishes to see Jesus must believe him David's son through the census of the virgin's line. Whoever does not so believe will not hear from him, 'Your faith has saved you,' and so will remain blind, plunging into the antithesis, and that very antithesis plunging down with him. For so does one blind man lead another. [13] For if once, at the recovery of Zion, blind men had opposed David and resisted his admission — in figure of a people, likewise blind, who would one day refuse to admit Christ, David's son — then Christ, acting in the opposite way, came to the aid of a blind man instead, precisely so as to show by this that he was not the one who is not the son of David — being good to the blind, by the very opposite of that spirit, whom David had ordered to be struck down. And why did he grant favor to faith, and indeed to what you'd call a mistaken faith? Why, because in this too he is son of David — let me hurl the antithesis back where it belongs. [14] For those who had opposed David were blind men; but here, a man of that same flesh had presented himself as a suppliant to the son of David. So, being in a manner satisfied by his plea, the son of David, now appeased, restored his sight, together with the testimony of the faith by which the man had believed this very thing — that the son of David was the one to be entreated. And yet, I think, it was men's insolence that had offended David, not his health.
37.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 37 ========

[1] Next follows the salvation that comes to the house of Zacchaeus. On what ground? Did that man too believe Christ had come from Marcion's god? Yet the cry of that blind man, 'Have mercy on me, Jesus, Son of David,' was still ringing in everyone's ears, and the whole crowd was giving praise to God — not Marcion's god, but David's. And indeed Zacchaeus, though a foreigner by race, had perhaps caught some breath of the scriptures through contact with Jews — or rather, even without knowing Isaiah, he had already fulfilled his precepts. 'Break your bread,' it says, 'for the hungry, and bring the homeless into your house': this he was doing at that very moment, taking the Lord into his own house and feeding him. 'And if you see one naked, clothe him': this he was at that very moment promising, offering half his substance to every work of mercy, dissolving the bonds of his harsher contracts and releasing the oppressed into relief, and tearing up every unjust record, saying, 'And if I have extorted anything from anyone by false charge, I restore it fourfold.' And so the Lord said, 'Today salvation has come to this house.' [2] He bore witness that the very things the Creator's prophet had commanded are the things that bring salvation. But when he says, 'For the Son of Man has come to save what was lost,' I no longer dispute merely that he came to save what had been lost — whose it had been, and to whom it belonged when lost, is the very thing he had come to save — but I direct the question to another stage of the argument entirely. That the question concerns man is beyond doubt. [3] Since man consists of two substances, body and soul, we must ask from which kind of substance he appears to have been lost. If from the body, then the body was lost, not the soul. What had been lost, the Son of Man saves; therefore the flesh too has salvation. If it was lost from the soul, then the soul's loss is what salvation is aimed at; the flesh, which was not lost, is already safe. If the whole man was lost, from both substances together, then it follows necessarily that the whole man is saved, and the heretics' claim denying the flesh's salvation is shattered. And at the same stroke, the Christ of the Creator is confirmed, since it is in accordance with the Creator that he was promising the salvation of the whole man. [4] The parable of the servants too, who are judged according to the reckoning of their master's invested money, shows God to be a judge — even on the side of severity — not merely honoring the man who was found to have gained, but stripping away even what a man seemed to possess. And if here too the heretic wants to make out the Creator as harsh, taking up what he did not lay down and reaping what he did not sow, here too he only instructs me in the very Master whose money he teaches me to put to interest.
38.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 38 ========

[1] Christ knew where John's baptism came from. So why did he ask as though he didn't know? He knew the Pharisees would not answer him. So why ask at all, to no purpose? Was it so as to judge them out of their own mouths, or out of their own hearts? Refer this too, then, to the Creator's defense and to a comparison with Christ, and consider now what would have followed if the Pharisees had actually answered the question. Suppose they had declared John's baptism merely human — they would have been stoned on the spot. Some Marcion-against-Marcion would then arise to say: O best of gods, O god so unlike the Creator's ways — knowing full well that men were about to rush headlong, he himself pushed them over the cliff! This is precisely the treatment the Creator receives regarding the tree's commandment. Yet John's washing had its origin in heaven. And why, Christ asks, did you not believe him? So the one who had wanted John believed, and was about to rebuke them for not believing him, was the very one whose sacrament John was administering. Certainly, when they refused to declare what they thought, since he too returns the trick — I will not tell you either by what authority I do these things — he paid them back evil for evil. [3] Render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's. What will be God's? Whatever bears the likeness of Caesar's coin — namely his image and likeness. He therefore commands that man be rendered to the Creator, since it is in the Creator's image and likeness, name and material, that man is stamped. Let the god of Marcion go find himself a coinage of his own; Christ orders that the denarius bearing man's image be rendered to man's own Caesar, not to a stranger's — unless, of course, one who has no denarius of his own is exempt of necessity. [4] It is a just and worthy rule that in every question the sense of the answer ought to bear on the point of the question; to answer one inquiry with something else altogether is the mark of a madman. All the more, then, let that be far from Christ which does not even suit an ordinary man. The Sadducees, deniers of the resurrection, questioning him on that very point, had put to the Lord a case drawn from the law: a woman who, by the law's own command, had married seven brothers in succession as each died — whose wife was she to be reckoned in the resurrection? [5] This was the substance of the question, this the very matter of the inquiry. To this Christ necessarily replied. He feared no one, so that he cannot be seen either to have dodged the question or to have used the occasion to hint at something he did not otherwise teach openly. He answered, then, that the children of this age marry. See how exactly this bears on the case. Since the question concerned the age to come, in which he was about to rule that no one marries, he laid down here where marrying and being given in marriage belong — in this present life where people also die. But those whom God has judged worthy of possessing that age and of rising up from among the dead do not take spouses, nor are wed to one another, because they are no longer going to die, once they have become like the angels, made children of God and children of the resurrection. [6] Since, then, the sense of an answer must be directed at nothing other than the point of the question, if that sense fully resolves the very thing asked, the Lord's answer means nothing other than what settles the question. You have here both the times when marriage is permitted and when it is forbidden — not as a matter in its own right but arising strictly from the question about resurrection. You have too a confirmation of the resurrection itself, and the whole of what the Sadducees were asking, without their inquiring about some other god or about their own particular marriage-law. [7] But if you make Christ answer questions he was not asked, you are saying he could not have answered the question he actually was asked — caught out, that is, by the cleverness of the Sadducees. Now, beyond the point already established, I will go back over the arguments that hang together against this. Having gotten hold of the text of scripture, they have gone through it in reading like this: 'But those whom the god of that age has judged worthy.' They attach 'of that age' to 'god,' so as to make out another god of that age; whereas it should be read: 'But those whom God has judged worthy' — so that, with the pause made here after 'God,' 'of that age' belongs to what follows: 'worthy of possessing that age and the resurrection.' [8] For the inquiry was not about God, but about the condition of that age — whose wife a woman would be after the resurrection, in that age. So too they twist the answer about the marrying itself, as if 'The children of this age marry and are given in marriage' were said of men whom the Creator permits to marry, while they themselves, whom the god of that age — a different one, of course — has judged worthy of the resurrection, already, even now, do not marry, because they are not children of this age; whereas, having been asked about the marriages of that age, not of this one, he had denied precisely those he was asked about. [9] And so those who caught the full force of both the wording and the pronunciation and the pause understood nothing other than what bore on the matter under inquiry. Hence the scribes said: Teacher, you have spoken well. For he had confirmed the resurrection by setting out its form, against the opinion of the Sadducees. In the end, he did not reject the testimony of those who had assumed he had answered in this way. [10] But if the scribes reckoned Christ the son of David, while David himself calls him Lord, what has this to do with Christ? David was not correcting the scribes' error; he was securing honor for Christ, confirming him as Lord rather than merely son of David — which would not suit one bent on destroying the Creator. But how fitting an interpretation this is on our side! For the one who had once been called son of David by that blind man — a title he then let pass, having no scribes present at the time — now, of his own accord, deliberately brought it up in front of them, so as to show that he whom the blind man, following the scribes' teaching, had proclaimed only son of David, was also his Lord — rewarding, indeed, the blind man's faith, by which he had believed him son of David, while striking at the scribes' tradition, by which they did not also know him as Lord. Whatever added luster to the Creator's Anointed — that alone, and nothing besides, is the ground on which the Creator's own Anointed would find his defense.
39.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 39 ========

[1] It has long since been settled, on the evidence of the propriety of the names, that it belongs to him who was first to announce his own Christ to mankind and first to rename him Jesus. It will equally be settled, then, how shameless it is of him to say that many will come in his own name, when that name is not properly his at all — unless Christ and Jesus belong to the Creator, to whom the propriety of the names actually pertains — and, further, to forbid that such men be received, when he himself is in exactly the same case, coming as he does under a borrowed name. For if it was not the Creator's business to put his disciples on guard beforehand against the lie of the Name — he who, by owning the name properly, owned its truth — then whose business was it? [2] They will come, after all, saying 'I am the Christ.' Will you receive them, you who have received one just like them? For he too came in his own name. Then what of it, that the very Lord of the names will himself come, the Christ and Jesus of the Creator? Will you reject him? How unjust, how unfair, how unworthy of your excellent god, that you should refuse this one who arrives under a name properly his own, while you welcomed that other fellow, whose borrowed name was never truly his! [3] Let us look, too, at what signs he attaches to the times. Wars, I take it, kingdom rising against kingdom and nation clashing with nation, along with pestilence, and famines, and earthquakes, and terrors, and portents from heaven — all things that fit a stern and savage god to perfection. When he adds that these things must needs happen, what does he show himself to be — the destroyer of the Creator's arrangements, or their guarantor? By confirming that the Creator's dispositions must be fulfilled — dispositions which, being as grim as they are savage, the Best God would have abolished rather than established, had they not been his own to begin with. [4] Before all this, moreover, he foretells persecutions and coming sufferings for them, leading to martyrdom, and so to salvation. Take the prophecy in Zechariah: 'The Lord Almighty,' he says, 'will shield them, and they will devour and sling them down with slingstones, and drink their blood like wine, and fill the bowls as at the altar; and the Lord will save them in that day like sheep, his people, because holy stones roll.' [5] And lest you think this is foretold of sufferings of the kind that so many wars waged by foreign nations held in store for them, look at the particulars. No one, in foretelling wars fought with regular weapons, counts stoning among them — stoning belongs rather to mob violence and unarmed riot. No one measures such rivers of blood in war by the capacity of sacrificial bowls, or likens it to the bloodshed of a single altar. No one calls 'sheep' men who fall armed in battle, themselves fighting with the same ferocity as their foes — 'sheep' fits rather those who, true to their own character and patience, give themselves up rather than avenge themselves, and so are butchered. [6] Note, finally: 'because holy stones roll' — not 'because soldiers fight.' For stones, and foundations too, are what we are built up out of — built, as Paul says, upon the foundation of the apostles, who were the holy stones set up as a stumbling-block for all, and so were rolled about. And here too this same one forbids his followers to premeditate what answer to give before the tribunals — he who put into Balaam's mouth what Balaam had not premeditated, indeed the very opposite of what he had premeditated, and who promised speech to Moses even as Moses pleaded slowness of tongue. And that same wisdom, which none could resist, he showed forth through Isaiah: 'This one will say, I am the Lord's, and will cry in the name of Jacob, and another will be inscribed in the name of Israel.' [7] For what is wiser, what harder to gainsay, than the plain, open confession made in the martyr's name, growing strong with God — which is exactly what 'Israel' means? Nor is it strange that he restrained forethought, he who had himself received from the Father the gift of speaking in due season: 'The Lord gives me a tongue of instruction, that I may know when I ought to speak a word' — unless, that is, Marcion makes his Christ answer to no father at all. [8] That persecutions would come from their own kinsmen, and that blasphemy against the Name would be preached out of sheer hatred, I need not go on to demonstrate again. But 'by your endurance,' he says, 'you will save your souls' — of which endurance, of course, the psalm says, 'The endurance of the just will not perish forever.' Since elsewhere too: 'Precious is the death of the just' — through endurance, no doubt, since Zechariah also says, 'and there will be a crown for those who have endured.' [9] But do not presume to argue that the apostles, as heralds of some other god, were harassed by the Jews; remember that the prophets too suffered the very same things at the Jews' hands, and yet were not apostles of any god other than the Creator. But then, having pointed out the time of the city's overthrow, when Jerusalem should begin to be hemmed about with armies, he goes on to relate the signs of the very last end — portents of sun and moon and stars, and on earth the anguish of nations bewildered as at the roar of the surging sea, in dread expectation of the evils overhanging the world. That the very powers of the heavens will be shaken, take from Joel: 'And I will give portents in heaven, and on earth blood and fire and vapor of smoke; the sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the great and glorious day of the Lord comes.' You have Habakkuk too: 'The earth will be torn apart by rivers; the peoples will see you and writhe; you will scatter the waters as you go; the deep gave forth its voice, the height of its dread was lifted up; the sun and moon stood still in their place; your lightnings will go forth to give light, your flashing spear to give brightness; in your rebuke you will diminish the earth, and in your wrath you will bring down nations.' [10] The pronouncements of the Lord and of the prophets agree, I think, on the shaking of the world and the earth, of the elements and the nations. After this, what does the Lord say? 'And then shall they behold the Son of man arriving amid the clouds, clothed in great power.' 'But when these things begin to happen, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near' — namely, at the time of the very kingdom to which the parable that follows refers. [11] 'So you too, when you see all these things happening, know that the kingdom of God is near.' This will be the great and glorious day of the Lord, when the Son of man comes from the heavens, according to Daniel: 'Behold, one coming with the clouds of heaven like a son of man,' and so forth — 'and royal power was given to him,' the very power that in the parable he goes off to seek, leaving money with his servants to trade with; and 'all the nations,' which the Father had promised him in the psalm: 'Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance' — 'and all glory serving him, and his power everlasting, which will not be taken away, and his kingdom, which will not be destroyed' — since in it they neither die nor marry, but are as the angels. [12] Of this same coming of the Son of man, and its fruit, we read in Habakkuk: 'You went forth for the salvation of your people, to save your anointed' — namely those who will then rise up and lift their heads, redeemed at the time of the kingdom. Since, then, these promises fit the case just as well as those shakings and terrors do — by the very consonance of the prophetic and dominical pronouncements — you will find no way here to draw a line, crediting the convulsions to the Creator, as though he were some god of savagery whom the Best God ought never to have permitted, let alone expected, while crediting the promises to the Best God, promises which the Creator, knowing nothing of him, could never have prophesied. Or if he did prophesy his own promises, in no way distinct from the promises of your Christ, then he stands on equal footing of freedom with your Best God, and your Christ will be found to promise no more than my Son of man does. [13] Trace the whole run of the gospel narrative, from the disciples' question down to the parable of the fig tree, and you will find it woven throughout in a single continuous sense clinging to the Son of man from beginning to end, so that he binds together in himself both the grim and the glad, both the convulsions and the promises — nor can you cut one part away from him. [14] For since the coming of one and the same Son of man is established between the two outcomes, the convulsions and the promises, it follows of necessity that to one and the same Son of man belong both the distress of the nations and the longing of the saints — he stands set in the middle as the common terminus for both outcomes, about to close one with his coming, the distress of the nations, and to open the other, the longing of the saints. So that, whether you grant the coming of the Son of man to my Christ — in which case you must assign him the evils which precede his coming, [15] you will also be forced to credit him with the blessings that arise from his coming — or whether you prefer him to be your Christ's, to whom you assign the blessings arising from his coming, you will likewise be forced to load onto him the evils that precede his coming. For the evils cling to the coming of the Son of man by preceding it, just as the blessings cling to it by following after. Ask yourself, then, which of your two Christs you will set up in the single person of this one Son of man, to whom both dispensations must be referred. Either you have given the Best Creator's character to the harsher, or you have given your harsh god the Creator's goodness. [16] Consider, in sum, the example in the parable itself: 'Consider the fig tree, together with the rest of the trees: once they put forth fruit, men recognize that summer is near; so you too, when you see these things happening, know that the kingdom of God is close at hand.' For if the fruiting of the little trees is a sign of the summer season, preceding it, then in just the same way the convulsions of the world are a foretoken of the kingdom, preceding it. Now every sign belongs to the very thing of which it is a sign, and every sign is imposed by the one to whom the thing signified belongs. [17] So then, if the convulsions are signs of the kingdom, just as the fruiting is a sign of summer, then the kingdom too belongs to the Creator, since the convulsions credited to him are the very signs of that kingdom. The Best God had, after all, foretold beforehand that these things — so dreadful, so terrible — must happen, foretold, to be sure, by the prophets and the Law; thus he was so far from destroying the Law and the Prophets that he confirms that what they had foretold must come to pass. [18] Further, he insists that heaven and earth will not pass away until all these things are accomplished. Which heaven and earth is this? If they belong to the Creator, then his elements will rightly hold out until his own order of things is worked out to the end; but if they belong to the Best God, I hardly see how heaven and earth could hold out to see fulfilled what a rival deity had decreed. If the Creator would tolerate that, then he is no jealous god after all. Let heaven and earth pass away now, if you like — for so their own Lord decreed: 'while my word abides forever' — for so Isaiah too had foretold. Let the disciples also be warned, lest at any time their hearts be weighed down with surfeiting and drunkenness and the cares of this life, and that day come upon them suddenly like a snare — meaning, of course, those forgetful of God amid the fullness and preoccupation of the world. This will be the warning of Moses. So far is it true that he alone will free men from the snare of that day who was the one who gave this same warning long before. [19] There were other places near Jerusalem for teaching, and places outside Jerusalem for withdrawing. And indeed by day he taught in the temple — he who through Hosea had foretold, 'In my temple they found me,' and there the argument was carried on with them. But toward night he would withdraw to the Mount of Olives. For so Zechariah had foreshown: 'And his feet will stand upon the Mount of Olives.' There were also hours proper to the audience. One had to gather at dawn, since through Isaiah, after saying, 'The Lord gives me a tongue of instruction,' he added, 'He wakens my ear morning by morning to hear.' If this is to dissolve the prophecies, what would it take to fulfill them?
40.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 40 ========

So he also knew when it was fitting for him to suffer, whose passion the law prefigures. Of all the Jewish feasts he chose the day of Passover. For it was in this sacrament that Moses had proclaimed, "It is the Lord's Passover." And he showed his own longing for it too: "With longing have I longed to share this Passover meal at your side ere my suffering comes." O destroyer of the law—wanting even to keep the Passover! Surely it wasn't mutton he was craving? Or was he not the one who, like a sheep led to slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer opens not its mouth, was eager to fulfill the figure of his own saving blood? [2] He could have been handed over by any outsider at all—not to mention that this too would cancel out that psalm: "He who eats bread with me has lifted up his heel against me." He could have been betrayed without payment too. What great labor did the betrayer really put in, given that a man who openly confronted the people in public could hardly have been "betrayed" rather than simply seized? But that would have suited some other Christ, not the one fulfilling prophecies. For it is written: "Because they sold the righteous one." As for the amount and the outcome of the price—later returned by the repentant Judas and spent on the potter's field, as the Gospel of Matthew records—Jeremiah foretold it: "And they seized the thirty silver coins, that sum set as the value placed on him who was appraised, and paid them out for the field of the potter." [3] Having declared, then, that he had desired with desire to eat the Passover as his own (for it would be unworthy of a god to crave something not his own), he took the bread, gave it out among the disciples, and turned it into his body by declaring, "This is my body"—which is to say, my body's figure. But it could not have served as a figure unless there were a true body behind it; an empty thing, a mere phantom, cannot be turned into a figure of anything. Or if he pretended the bread was his body simply because he lacked a real body, then he ought to have handed over bread for us. That would have played right into Marcion's absurdity—that bread was crucified! Why then does he call bread his body, rather than a melon, which is what Marcion apparently used in place of a heart? Marcion fails to see that this figure of Christ's body is an old one, spoken by Jeremiah: "They plotted a plot against me, saying, Come, let us cast wood into his bread"—that is, the cross into his body. [4] So the illuminator of ancient things made sufficiently clear what he had meant the bread to signify all along, by calling his body bread. Likewise, in the mention of the cup, establishing the covenant sealed with his own blood, he confirmed the substance of his body. For no body's blood can exist except that of flesh. And even if some quality of body not made of flesh could be brought against us, it certainly could not have blood unless it were fleshly. [5] So the proof of the body rests on the testimony of the flesh, and the proof of the flesh rests on the testimony of the blood. And so that you may also recognize the ancient figure of blood in wine, Isaiah is at hand: "Who is this that comes from Edom, his garments red from Bozrah, so splendid in his stately robe, marching in the greatness of his strength? Why are your garments red, and your clothing like one who treads the winepress?" [6] The prophetic spirit, already contemplating the Lord as he came to his passion, clothed in flesh so as to suffer in it, marks out the bloodied garment of his flesh in the redness of these garments, trodden and pressed out by the force of the passion as in a winepress; because from it men descend, as it were, bloodied with the redness of wine. Genesis is far more explicit still, in the blessing of Judah, from whose tribe the fleshly lineage of Christ was to proceed—already sketching out Christ in Judah: "He will wash his robe in wine," it says, "and his garment in the blood of the grape"—robe and garment signifying flesh, and wine signifying blood. So now he consecrated his blood in wine, he who then had prefigured wine in blood.
41.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 41 ========

"Woe," he says, "to that one through whom the Son of man meets betrayal." So it is settled that this "Woe" must be understood as a cry of imprecation and threat, to be charged to one who is angry and offended—unless Judas was going to get away scot-free with so great a crime. But if he was to go unpunished, the "Woe" is pointless; if he was not to go unpunished, then plainly he must be punished by the one against whom he committed the crime of betrayal. Furthermore, if he knowingly allowed a man he had himself taken into his own company to rush into so great a crime, then stop reproaching the Creator over Adam with charges that boomerang right back onto your own god as well: either he was ignorant, since he did not block by foreknowledge the man who was about to sin, or he was unable to stop it if he was ignorant, or he was unwilling even though he both knew and could—and so he must be judged malicious, for allowing his own man to perish through wrongdoing. [2] I advise you, then, to recognize the Creator in this too, rather than making your "good god" out to be his equal, against your own thesis. For Peter too, presumptuously blurting something out only to be marked down instead for denial, shows you a jealous God. Christ, being the prophesied one, had to be betrayed with a kiss, precisely because he was the son who was loved by the people with their lips. Brought before the assembly, they demand of him whether he is indeed the Christ. Which Christ would the Jews have been asking about, if not their own? Why then did he not at that point reveal a different one to them? "So that he might suffer," you say. That means the "good" god was still, at that point, plunging the ignorant deeper into crime! And yet, even had he declared it to them plainly, he would still have suffered: [3] "For if I tell you," he says, "you will not believe"—meaning that, not believing, they would have persisted in his murder regardless. And why would he not have suffered all the more, if he had declared himself to belong to another god, and thereby the Creator's adversary? So it was not for the sake of securing his own suffering that he held back, on that occasion too, from revealing himself as "another"; rather, because they were seeking to wring a confession out of his own mouth, and would not have believed him even if he had confessed—when they ought to have recognized him already from the works fulfilling the scriptures—it was proper to him to conceal himself from those to whom recognition was, by their own default, owed. [4] And yet, still reaching out a hand to them, he says: "From this time forward the Son of man shall sit at God's mighty right hand." For he was suggesting that he was the "Son of man" of Daniel's prophecy, and the one seated at God's right hand from David's psalm. So then, enlightened by this saying and by comparison with the scriptures as to whom he meant himself to be understood as, they say, "So you are the Son of God?" Whose God, if not the one they alone knew? Whose God, if not the one they remembered from the psalm saying to his Son, "Sit at my right hand"? But he answered, "You say so"—as if to say, not I. [5] And yet by this he confirmed that he was exactly what they had said, seeing that they ask again. And how will you prove that they had said it as a question rather than a statement—"So you are the Son of God?"—so that, since he had obliquely shown that he should be understood as the Son of God through the scriptures, they took it this way: "So you are indeed the Son of God, which you will not say outright"—and he, in just the same way, by saying "You say so," answered in the affirmative; and his pronouncement had exactly that force, so much so that they persisted in taking it in the sense his pronouncement carried.
42.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 42 ========

Having brought him to Pilate, they began to load him with the charge that he called himself Christ, a king—unmistakably the Son of God, destined to sit at God's right hand. Otherwise they would have weighed him down with some other charge, being unsure whether he had really called himself the Son of God—had he not, by saying "You say so," affirmed that he was exactly what they said. So too, when Pilate asked him, "Are you the Christ?" he likewise said, "You say so"—so as not to seem to have answered any further out of fear of the authorities. [2] The Lord, then, stood for judgment; and he took his stand in judgment over his people. The Lord himself enters judgment together with the people's elders and its rulers, according to Isaiah. And from that point he fulfilled every scripture concerning his passion. "The nations raged there together, and the peoples devised empty things: earth's kings rose up in array, and the rulers massed themselves as one against the Lord and against his Anointed." The "nations" are the Romans who were with Pilate; the "peoples" are the tribes of Israel; the "kings," in Herod; the "rulers," in the chief priests. [3] For to Herod too, sent as a kind of gift from Pilate, he made good on the words of Hosea; for it had been prophesied of Christ, "And bound, they will lead him as a gift to the king." Herod, indeed, was delighted at the sight of Jesus, and heard not a single word from him. For like a lamb before its shearer, thus did he keep his mouth shut, since the Lord had granted him "a disciplined tongue, so that he would know how to speak forth a word in season"—that very tongue which, in the psalm, he was then proving "cleaved to his throat" by not speaking. [4] And Barabbas, guiltiest of all men, is granted his life as though he were the good one, while Christ, most righteous of all, is demanded for death as though he were a murderer. And two criminals are fixed up on crosses around him, so that he should indeed be reckoned among the wicked. As for his clothing, divided among the soldiers—partly given over by lot—Marcion has done away with that, in spite of the psalm's prophecy staring him in the face: "They divided my garments among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots." So take away the cross itself too, while you're at it! For the same psalm does not stay silent about that either: "They pierced my hands and my feet." The whole outcome is read there. "Dogs surrounded me; the synagogue of evildoers encircled me; all who watched me sneered with their noses; they spoke with their lips, and wagged their heads: He put his trust in God; let God rescue him now." So much, now, for the testimony about the garments—take the spoils of your own falsehood, for the whole psalm is Christ's garments! [5] But look, the elements too are shaken. For the Lord was suffering at their hands. If it had been the Creator's adversary who was injured, the sky, on the contrary, would have blossomed with lights, the sun would have exulted all the more in its rays, the day would have stood still all the more, gladly watching Marcion's Christ hanging on the gibbet! These proofs, too, would have suited my case even if they had not been foretold. "I will clothe the heaven," says Isaiah, "in darkness." This will be that day of which Amos also speaks: "And it will happen on that day, declares the Lord, that the sun will set while it is still midday" (there, too, is disclosed what the sixth hour signifies), "and I will darken the earth in broad daylight." The veil of the Temple, too, was torn, the angel bursting forth from it, abandoning the daughter of Zion like a watchman's hut in a vineyard and a shed in a cucumber-field. [6] Oh, how the thirtieth psalm persists in giving back Christ himself! He cries out to the Father, so that even dying, with his very last word, he might fulfill the prophets. Having said this, he breathed his last. Who did the breathing? The spirit itself? Or was it the flesh that breathed out the spirit? But the spirit cannot be the one to breathe itself out. One thing does the breathing-out, another is breathed out. If the spirit is what is breathed out, it must necessarily be breathed out by another. But if there had been nothing but spirit, it would be more accurate to say it "departed" than that it "breathed its last." So who, then, breathes out the spirit, if not the flesh—which both breathes, when it has the spirit, and thus breathes it out when it loses it? [7] Finally, if there was no flesh, but only a phantom of flesh, and the phantom too was only spirit, and the spirit breathed itself out and, in breathing out, departed—then without doubt the phantom departed along with the spirit, since the spirit that was the phantom departed, and phantom and spirit vanished together, nowhere to be seen. So nothing at all was left on the wood, nothing hung there even after the last breath, nothing was requested from Pilate, nothing taken down from the gibbet, nothing wrapped in a linen shroud, nothing laid in a new tomb. And yet it was not nothing. What, then, was it? If a phantom, then Christ was still present in it. If Christ had departed, then it was a phantom he had carried off with him. [8] It remains for heretical shamelessness to claim that what was left there was a phantom of a phantom! But if even Joseph knew it to be a real body, which he handled with such complete reverence—that Joseph who had refused to join the Jews' crime, "Blessed is the man who has not gone about following the counsel of the impious, nor taken his stand along the path of sinners, nor settled himself down among the seats of scoffers."
43.

======== Adversus Marcionem 4 — Chapter 43 ========

[1] It was fitting that even the Lord's burial be prophesied and there and then rightly blessed, since prophecy does not pass over even the office of those women who came before dawn to the tomb with their prepared spices. For of this, through Hosea, he says: "That they may seek my face, before dawn they will watch for me, saying, Let us go and turn back to the Lord, for he has struck and will heal us, he has smitten and will have mercy on us, he will heal us after two days, on the third day we shall rise again." [2] Who could fail to believe that this was turning over in the minds of those women, tossed between the grief of their present bereavement, by which they felt themselves struck down by the Lord, and the hope of his resurrection, by which they rightly reckoned they would be restored? And since the body was not found, its burial had been lifted clean away, according to Isaiah. And indeed two angels appeared there too — God's word customarily standing on the strength of two witnesses, much as it does on a pair of parties in court. The women too, returning from the tomb, and from that vision of angels — Isaiah had foreseen it: "Women," he says, "coming from a vision, come" — to bring word, of course, of the Lord's resurrection. [3] And it was well that the disciples' unbelief persisted, so that to this day our defense might stand firm: that Christ Jesus showed the disciples no other self than the one the prophets had described. For when two of them were on the road and the Lord had joined them, not revealing that it was he, even feigning ignorance of what had happened, they said: "But we were hoping that he was the redeemer of Israel" — his Christ, that is, the Creator's. [4] So thoroughly had he not shown himself to them as someone else. Otherwise they would not have taken him for the Creator's; and had they taken him for the Creator's while he was not in fact the one so taken, he would never have tolerated that opinion of himself — unless he were the author of error and a traitor to truth, set against the title of the good God. But not even after the resurrection did he show himself to them as anyone other than the one they had already taken him to be. Indeed he rebuked them roundly: "O foolish and slow of heart to believe all that he has spoken to you." What he had spoken proves him no other god's, but the same God's. [5] For the angels said the same thing to the women: "Remember what he spoke to you in Galilee, saying that the Son of Man must be delivered up and crucified and rise on the third day." And why "must" — unless because so it was written by God the Creator? He rebuked them, then, for stumbling merely over the passion, and for doubting the report of the resurrection brought them by the women — through which very disbelief they showed they had not believed him to be who they had taken him for. And so, by wanting them to believe just what they had already supposed, he was confirming himself to be the very one they had supposed: the Creator's Christ, that is, the redeemer of Israel. [6] And as for the reality of his body, what could be plainer? When they wavered, fearing it was a ghost — indeed believing it a ghost — he said: "Why are you shaken, and why do questionings climb up into your hearts? Look upon these hands, these feet of mine — recognize that it is I in person, since a ghost has no bones the way you can see I possess them." [7] And Marcion — some things that told against him, out of what I take to be sheer calculation, he declined to scrape out of his gospel, so that from what he could have erased and did not, one might either deny that he erased what he did erase, or grant that he was right to erase it. He spares nothing except what he can subvert by misreading no less thoroughly than by deleting. So he wants it read as though "a spirit does not have bones as you see me having" refers to the spirit — "as you see me having," meaning, not having bones, as a spirit does not either. And what point could such a twist possibly serve, when he could simply have said: "For a spirit does not have bones, as you see that I do not"? [8] But why does he hold out to their inspection his hands and feet — limbs made of bone — if he had no bones? Why does he add, "and know that it is I," the very one they had formerly known in the flesh? Or if he was a ghost through and through, why rebuke them for believing him a ghost? And yet, since they still did not believe, he then asked for food, precisely to show that he even had teeth. [9] We have, I think, made good our pledge. We have exhibited Jesus Christ through the prophets' teachings, sayings, feelings, senses, powers, sufferings, and even his resurrection, as no other than the Creator's — since indeed, in sending out his apostles to preach to all nations, he was fulfilling the psalm that decreed: their voice would carry out across every land, and their sayings reach the farthest edges of the earth. I pity you, Marcion: you have labored in vain. For the Christ Jesus in your own gospel is mine.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 1 ========

[1] Nothing is without an origin except God alone. Whatever precedence a thing holds in the order of things generally, it must hold that same precedence when those things come under review, so that its status may be established — since you cannot properly judge what a thing is like unless you are first certain that it is, and you cannot be certain that it is until you know where it comes from. And so, having arrived by the order of this little work at this next matter, I want to know, from Marcion, the origin of his apostle too — some novel disciple, pupil of no one else — I who for now believe nothing except that nothing should be believed rashly, and that whatever is believed without acknowledgment of its origin is believed rashly; and I who am most entitled to press this inquiry seriously, since I am assured of an apostle whom I cannot find on the roll of apostles in the Gospel. [2] Then, hearing afterward that he was recruited by the Lord, who was already at rest in the heavens, I take it either as a lapse of foresight — if Christ had not known beforehand that this man was necessary to him — or, with the apostolic office already arranged and dispatched to its work, he judged it necessary to add him on as an afterthought rather than by foresight, out of necessity, so to speak, rather than intention. So then, Pontic skipper, if you have never taken smuggled or illicit cargo aboard your ships, if you have never diverted or adulterated a single consignment, being — one supposes — all the more careful and trustworthy in the business of God, do please tell us under what seal you took the apostle Paul on board, who stamped him with the mark of his title, who handed him over to you, who loaded him aboard — so that you may confidently produce him, lest he turn out to belong to the one who can produce all the documentation of his apostleship. [3] "He himself," Marcion says, "professed himself an apostle, and indeed not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ." Certainly a man can profess himself whatever he likes; but his profession is only made good by someone else's authority. One man writes, another countersigns, another seals, another enters it in the record. No one is both his own advocate and his own witness. Besides, you have surely read that many will come saying, "I am the Christ." [4] If there can be one who falsely claims to be Christ, how much more one who falsely proclaims himself an apostle of Christ? I am still speaking here in the person of the disciple and the inquirer, so as, right from this point, to blunt your confidence — you who have no way to prove it — and to cover with shame your presumption — you who claim him for your own without any right to claim him. Let him be Christ, let him be an apostle — as belonging to another — so long as they are proved only by the documentation of the Creator. [5] For as for me, Genesis long ago promised me Paul too. Among those figures and prophetic blessings upon his sons, when Jacob turned to Benjamin, he said: "Benjamin is a ravening wolf; in the morning he will still be devouring, and at evening he will give out food." For he foresaw that Paul would arise from the tribe of Benjamin, a ravening wolf devouring in the morning — that is, in his early years ravaging the Lord's flock as a persecutor of the churches — and afterward, at evening, giving out food — that is, in his declining years feeding the sheep of Christ as teacher of the nations. [6] And indeed Saul's initial harshness in pursuing David, followed by his repentance and amends, repaying evil with good, foreshadowed nothing other than Paul in Saul according to the tribe, and Jesus in David according to the virgin's lineage. But if these figurative mysteries do not satisfy you, at any rate the Acts of the Apostles have handed down to me this very account of Paul's history — a book you too cannot deny. From it I show the apostle to have been a persecutor, called neither from men nor through man; from it I am led to believe in him myself; from it I evict you from any defense of him — nor am I troubled if someone objects, "So then you reject Paul as an apostle?" I speak no slander against the man I am defending. I deny him — in order to force you to prove him. [7] I deny him — in order to establish that he is mine. Or if you have regard for our faith, produce what supports it. If you appeal to your own, bring forward what underpins it. Either prove that what you believe exists, or, if you cannot prove it, how can you believe it? Or what sort of believer are you in one whose very existence is vouched for only by the one you say you disbelieve? [8] Well then, take from me an apostle too, just as you took a Christ — as much mine as Christ is. On these same lines we shall fight this battle too; at this very same step we shall raise our plea of prescription — namely, that an apostle who is denied to be the Creator's, indeed who is put forward against the Creator, must teach nothing, hold nothing, will nothing in accordance with the Creator, and above all must proclaim another god with as much consistency as he broke away from the Creator's law. For it is not plausible that in turning people from Judaism he would fail equally to show into whose god's faith he was turning them, since no one could cross over from the Creator, not knowing to whom he was meant to cross. [9] For either Christ had already revealed another god, in which case the apostle's testimony had to follow suit — or else he could not rightly be called the messenger of that god whom Christ himself had already made known, since it was not allowed to conceal what Christ had already disclosed by way of an apostle; or else Christ had revealed nothing of the kind about God, in which case it was all the more incumbent on the apostle to reveal it — since an apostle could no longer draw on any other source, and would surely not be believed at all if he too revealed nothing. And I have laid this groundwork so that from this point on I may declare that I will go on to prove that no other god was carried about by the apostle either, just as I have proved none was by Christ — from the very letters of Paul himself, which, precisely because of that, the heretic's gospel, already mutilated in its very number and shape, ought to have prejudged as tampered with.
2. ON THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 2 ========

[1] We too acknowledge that the letter to the Galatians is the principal one directed against Judaism. We embrace the entire abolition of the old law there set out, holding that it too proceeds from the Creator's own arrangement, just as we have already argued repeatedly in this treatise regarding the new order of things foretold by the prophets of our God. For if the Creator himself promised that the old things would give way, obviously to make room for new things about to arise, and Christ marked out the moment of that transition ("law and prophets ran their course up to John"), setting in John the boundary line between the two orders — the old ceasing from that point and the new beginning — then it follows of necessity that the apostle too, in Christ revealed after John, weakens the old and confirms the new, and in doing so serves no other god's cause than the Creator's, at whose hands the passing of the old things had itself been foretold. [2] So then, both the destruction of the law and the construction of the gospel work in my favor even in this letter, bearing as they do on that presumption of the Galatians by which they had presumed to believe in Christ — the Creator's own Christ, naturally — while keeping the Creator's law intact, because it still seemed unbelievable that its own author would ever set the law aside. Now if they had heard of some altogether different god from the apostle, they would of their own accord have known straightaway that they must depart from the law of the god they had abandoned in favor of the other. For who would wait any longer to be taught that he must follow a new discipline, once he had already accepted a new god? [3] No — precisely because the same divinity was being preached in the gospel that had always been known in the law, though the discipline was not the same, this was the whole state of the question: whether the Creator's law ought to be excluded from the gospel of the Creator's own Christ. Remove this question and the whole controversy evaporates. And if the question had not existed — if everyone had readily agreed that they must depart from the Creator's order through faith in some other god — the apostle would have had no occasion at all to teach so pointedly what faith itself would have dictated on its own. [4] So the whole thrust of this letter teaches nothing other than the law's departure coming by the Creator's own arrangement, as we have been suggesting all along. Likewise, if it makes no mention anywhere of any new god — which it would have done nowhere more readily than here, so as to offer, as the reason for dismissing the law, this single and utterly sufficient definition of a new divinity — then it becomes clear what he means when he writes: "I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by grace for a different gospel" — different in conduct, not in religion; in discipline, not in divinity. For the gospel of Christ was meant to call people away from the law to grace, not away from the Creator to another god. [5] For no one had moved them away from the Creator, such that they could be seen as deserting to a "different gospel" as if they were being carried off to the Creator in the process. Indeed, by adding that there is no other gospel at all, he confirms as the Creator's the very gospel he defends as existing. For if the Creator too promises a gospel, saying through Isaiah: "Go up on a high mountain, you who bring good news to Zion; lift up your voice with strength, you who bring good news to Jerusalem" — and again, of the persons of the apostles: "How timely are the feet of those who bring good news of peace, who bring good news of good things" — good news, of course, to the nations too, since it also says, "In his name," namely Christ's, to whom it says, "I have set you as a light for the nations," "the nations will hope" — then there is a gospel belonging to the new god too, the one you claim was being defended by the apostle at that point. So now we have two gospels answering to two gods, and the apostle would stand a liar for saying there is no other at all, when in fact there is another — when he could instead have defended his own gospel by demonstrating it, rather than by insisting there is only one. But perhaps, to dodge this, you will say he goes on to add: "Even if an angel from heaven should preach a different gospel, let him be accursed" — because he knew the Creator too was going to preach one. [6] Then you only entangle yourself the more. This is exactly the point that binds you. Confirming two gospels is not the act of a man who just finished denying any other exists. Still, the sense is plain enough from the one who put his own person forward first: "But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach a different gospel." For this was said by way of illustration. But if he himself was not going to preach differently, then certainly neither would an angel. He named an angel precisely so that men would be all the less to be believed — since if not even an angel, and not even an apostle, were to be trusted, still less would he be referring "the angel" to the Creator's gospel. [7] Going on from there, tracing the course of his own conversion from persecutor to apostle, he confirms the account given in the Acts of the Apostles, in which this very letter's subject matter is likewise recognized — namely, that certain people had come in claiming that circumcision was necessary and that the law of Moses must be observed, and that the apostles, consulted on this question, had by the authority of the Spirit declared that burdens must not be laid on men which even their own fathers had not been able to bear. And if the Acts of the Apostles agree with Paul on this point too, it is now clear why you reject them — namely, because they preach no other god than the Creator, and no other Christ than the Creator's, since the promise of the Holy Spirit is proved from no other source than the record of the Acts. And it is hardly likely that they would agree with the apostle in part — as they show, on his own testimony, the sequence of his career — and yet differ from him in part, by proclaiming the divinity in Christ to be the Creator's, as if Paul had not followed the preaching of the apostles from whom he received the very pattern for unteaching the law.
3.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 3 ========

[1] Then he writes that he went up to Jerusalem after fourteen years to seek out Peter and the other apostles for their backing, to lay before them about the rule of his gospel, lest he should have been running, or should be running, in vain for so many years, in case he were preaching anything at variance with their pattern. So eager was he to be approved and confirmed by those men whom you would rather have us suppose, whenever it suits you, more attached to Judaism. [2] But when he says that not even Titus was circumcised, he is already beginning to show that the whole question was one of circumcision alone, stirred up by a lingering defense of the law on the part of those he therefore calls false and smuggled-in brothers — men bent on establishing nothing other than the law's continued force, out of a faith in the Creator that was, no doubt, otherwise sound, and thereby perverting the gospel — not by tampering with the text so as to fashion a different Christ for the Creator, but by clinging to the old discipline in a way that shut out none of the Creator's law. [3] "Because of false brothers, smuggled in," he says, "who slipped in to spy out our freedom, which we have in Christ, so that they might reduce us to slavery — we did not yield to that subjection, not even for a moment." Let us attend to the sense itself and to its occasion, and the tampering with the text will become apparent. When he says first, "But not even Titus, who was with me, though a Greek by birth, was forced into circumcision," and then goes on, "because of false brothers, smuggled in," and so on, he is plainly beginning to give the reason for a contrary course of action, showing why he did what he did — something he would neither have done nor explained, had the reason for doing it not arisen. [4] Now tell me, if you will — had those false brothers not slipped in to spy out their freedom, would they have yielded to subjection? I think not. So they yielded because there were men on whose account they yielded. This was appropriate for a faith still raw and still hesitating over the observance of the law, with the apostle himself under suspicion of having run, or of running, in vain. [5] And so those false brothers, spying out Christian liberty, had to be thwarted, lest they drag it off into Jewish servitude before Paul knew he had not run in vain, before the earlier apostles had given him their right hands, before he undertook, by their assessment, the task of preaching to the nations. He therefore yielded of necessity for the time, and on this basis his circumcising of Timothy and bringing shaved men into the temple, as recorded in the Acts, makes good sense — so much so that it agrees with the apostle's own admission that he became a Jew to the Jews to win the Jews, and lived under the law for the sake of those under the law, and likewise for the sake of those smuggled-in brothers, and became all things to all men in the end, that he might win them all. [6] If they insist that this passage too be read in that light, no one will doubt this either: that Paul was a preacher of that God and that Christ whose law, though he was excluding it, he had nonetheless for a time admitted, to suit the times — a law he would have had to sweep away at once had he been putting forward a new god. It is a good sign, then, that Peter and James and John gave Paul their right hands, and struck an agreement over the division of labor — Paul to the nations, they to the circumcision — only asking that he remember the poor, and this too according to the law of the Creator, who cherishes the poor and needy, as we already established earlier in dealing with your gospel. [7] So it stands proved that the question concerned the law alone, in the very passage that shows what was fitting to keep from the law. But he rebukes Peter for not walking uprightly toward the truth of the gospel. Certainly he rebukes him — but for nothing other than an inconsistency of conduct, which he varied according to the standing of the people present, out of fear of those who were of the circumcision — not for any perversity regarding the divinity, a matter on which he would have opposed him to his face just as he opposed others; and this against Peter himself, for so much smaller a matter as ambiguous conduct, he did not spare him. So how do the Marcionites expect this to be believed? [8] Let the apostle go on, then, denying that a man is justified by works of the law, but by faith — yet faith in the same God to whom the law also belongs. For he would not have troubled himself to distinguish faith from the law, had a difference of divinity itself already made the distinction, if such a difference had existed. Rightly did he not rebuild what he had torn down. And the law had been due for tearing down ever since the voice of John cried out in the wilderness: "Prepare the ways of the Lord," so that the valleys and hills and mountains might be filled and leveled, and the crooked and rough places made straight and level — that is, the hardships of the law turned into the ease of the gospel. He had also remembered by then that the psalm's own hour had arrived: "Let us tear apart their chains, and throw off their yoke from us" — the psalm out of which the nations raged and the peoples schemed emptily, the kings of the earth took their stand and the rulers banded in a single plot to oppose the Lord and oppose his Anointed — so that now man might be justified by the freedom of faith, not by the servitude of the law, because the just man lives by faith. [9] And if the prophet Habakkuk foretold this, you have the apostle too confirming the prophets, just as Christ did. The faith, then, by which the just man will live belongs to that same God whose law does not justify the laborer. Accordingly, if there is a curse in the law and a blessing in faith, you have both set forth by the Creator: "See," he says, "I have set before you a curse and a blessing." You cannot claim a difference of authors just because there is a difference of things, when both are set forth by one and the same author. And why Christ was made a curse for us, on the apostle's own teaching, makes it plain how much he sides with us — that is, in accordance with the Creator's faith. [10] For it is not the case that, because the Creator pronounced, "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree," Christ must therefore be thought to belong to another god, and to have been cursed by the Creator already, then, in the law. And how could the Creator have cursed beforehand one he does not even know? Why is it not rather more fitting for the Creator to have given his own Son over to his own curse, than for that god of yours to have subjected him to a curse — and on behalf of a man not his own, at that? In short, if this seems harsh in the Creator, in the case of his own Son, it is just as harsh in your god's case too; but if it is reasonable in your god's case, it is just as reasonable in mine — indeed more so in mine. [11] For it is easier to believe that the blessing meant for man through Christ's curse belongs to the one who had already, at some point, set before man both curse and blessing, than to believe it of one who never professed either, on your account. "We have received," he says, "the spiritual blessing through faith" — the faith, of course, by which the just man lives, according to the Creator. This, then, is what I am saying: that the faith belongs to that God to whom the form of grace of that faith belongs. And when he adds, "for you are all children of faith," he shows what heretical industry has erased above — namely, the mention of Abraham, by which the apostle elsewhere affirms us to be children of Abraham through faith, and in line with that mention he here too marks us as children of faith. But how else could we be children of faith, and whose faith, if not Abraham's? [12] For if Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness, and on that ground earned the title of father to many nations, and we too, by believing God, are justified all the more, just as Abraham was, and likewise obtain life, just as the just man lives by faith — then it follows that just as he pronounced us above to be sons of Abraham, in respect of the father's faith, so here too he calls us children of faith, through which Abraham had been promised as father of nations. The very fact that he was calling faith back from circumcision — was he not seeking to establish as sons of Abraham, who had himself believed while still uncircumcised in the flesh? In short, the faith of one god cannot be admitted to the pattern of a different god, in such a way that it reckons believers for righteousness, makes the just live, and calls the nations children of faith. All of this belongs to the one with whom it was already known beforehand.
4.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 4 ========

[1] Right under this same mention of Abraham — where by the very sense of it he is refuted — Paul says, "I am still speaking after the manner of men: while we were children, we were kept under the elements of the world, in bondage to them." But that is not something said "after the manner of men." It is not a mere illustration; it is the plain truth. For what child, in the sense meant, is not subject to the elements of the world, which is exactly what the nations are — worshipping the elements as their god? No, the point is this: though he said "after the manner of men," nobody either despises or overrides a human will once it is made. [2] By the illustration of a standing human will he was defending the divine one. The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed — he did not say "seeds," as though of many, but "seed," as of one, which is Christ. Let Marcion's sponge blush for shame! Except that it does me a favor when I go back over what he wiped away, since it is a stronger thing to refute him from what he did keep. "But when the fullness of time came, God sent forth his son" — and this is the very God who is also the god of those times of which the age consists, who ordained the signs of the times too, sun, moon, star-clusters, and heavenly lights, who moreover both arranged and foretold the revelation of his son for the very end of the times: "In the last days the mountain of the Lord shall be made manifest," and, "afterward, in those closing days, I will pour a portion of my own spirit upon all flesh," as Joel has it. It belonged to him to have waited for the time to be fulfilled, whose it was also to set the end of time, as he set its beginning. [3] But that idle god of Marcion's, who does nothing and preaches nothing, and therefore has nothing to do with any time at all — what exactly did he do that made the time need fulfilling, and need waiting for its fulfillment? If he did nothing, it is quite absurd for him to have waited on the times of the Creator, as though serving him. And to what end did he send his son? "That he might redeem those who were under the law" — that is, to straighten out the crooked paths and to level the rugged ground, per Isaiah's wording, so that the old things might pass and new things arise, a fresh law issuing from Zion, the Lord's utterance going forth from Jerusalem, and "that sonship, as adopted heirs, might come to us" — meaning us, the nations, who were not sons before. [4] For indeed "he shall be a light of the nations, and in his name shall the nations hope." And so, to make it certain that we are sons of God, "he dispatched his spirit into our hearts, calling out, Abba, Father." For, he says, "afterward, in those closing days, I will pour a portion of my own spirit upon all flesh." And whose grace is that, if not the grace of the very one who promised it? [5] Who is the father, if not also the maker? After such riches, then, there was no going back to weak and beggarly elements. Now among the Romans too the "elements" are commonly the term for the first letters of the alphabet. So it was not by way of disparaging the elements of the world that he wanted to turn them away from God — even though, in saying earlier, "if then you serve those who by nature are not gods," he was rebuking the error of physical, that is natural, superstition, which treats the elements as God — yet even so he was not thereby impugning the God of the elements. What elements he means, he himself declares: namely, the first letters of the law. [6] "You observe days and months and seasons and years" — Sabbaths, I take it, and pure suppers and fasts and high days. For it was right to stop these things too, just as with circumcision, by the Creator's own decrees, who says through Isaiah, "Your new moons and Sabbaths and the great day I will not endure; my soul hates your fasting and your feast-days and your ceremonies"; and through Amos, "I hate, I have rejected your ceremonies, and I will not smell a savor in your assemblies"; likewise through Hosea, "I will put an end to all her gladness, her feasts, her new-moon rites, her rest-days, and every one of her solemn gatherings." [7] "So he erased," you say, "what he himself had established?" More than any other could — or if another did it, then that other only assisted the Creator's own sentence, taking away what the Creator himself had already condemned. But this is not the place to ask why the Creator broke his own laws. It is enough that I have shown he was going to break them, so as to confirm that the apostle has determined nothing against the Creator, since the very abolition of the law comes from the Creator himself. [8] But as it is common for thieves to drop some piece of the loot as evidence against them, so I believe Marcion likewise left behind this last mention of Abraham — nothing more deserving of removal, even though he did tamper with part of it. For if Abraham had two children, one by the slave woman and one by the free woman — but the one by the slave was born according to the flesh, while the one by the free woman was born through the promise: these things are allegorical, that is, they signify something else — for they are the two testaments, or the two showings-forth, as we find it interpreted: one from Mount Sinai, bearing children into bondage for the synagogue of the Jews according to the law; the other bearing children above every rule, authority, and power, and above every title that can be spoken, whether in the present age or in the age still to come — which is our mother, the holy church, to which we have been promised. That is why he adds, "For this reason, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman but of the free" — thereby plainly showing that the noble birth of Christianity, in the son of Abraham born of the free woman, holds the sacrament of allegory, just as the legal bondage of Judaism does in the son of the slave woman; and thus both dispositions belong to the one God in whom we find the outline of both dispositions drawn. [9] As for his saying, "With the freedom with which Christ has set us free" — does this not make Christ the manumitter who was also the master? For no one, not even Galba, manumits another man's slaves — he would sooner free his own. So freedom is granted by the one under whom there was the servitude of the law. And rightly so. It hardly suited one set free to be shackled once more beneath a servile yoke — the law's yoke, that is — seeing the psalm's words had by then reached fulfillment: "Let us break their bonds and cast their yoke from us," after "the rulers were gathered together in one against the Lord and against his Christ." [10] Having exempted them from servitude, then, he persisted in erasing the very mark of that servitude — circumcision — on the authority precisely of prophetic preaching, remembering what was said through Jeremiah, "Circumcise the foreskins of your hearts"; for Moses too said, "You shall circumcise your hardness of heart," that is, not the flesh. Now if it was a god other than the Creator who excluded circumcision, why does Paul also say that uncircumcision counts for nothing in Christ, exactly as circumcision does? [11] He ought to have preferred the rival practice to the one he was fighting against, if it really came from a god who was the rival of the god of circumcision. No — because both circumcision and uncircumcision were assigned to the one God, both alike became void in Christ, in favor of faith — that faith of which it was written, "And in his name shall the nations believe," that faith which, by saying it is made perfect through love, he thereby shows to belong to the Creator as well. For whether he speaks of the love that is toward God, that too is the Creator's: "You shall love God with your whole heart, and with your whole soul, and with your whole strength"; or of the love toward one's neighbor, "and your neighbor as yourself," that too is the Creator's. [12] "He who troubles you shall bear his judgment." From what god? From the good one? But he does not judge. From the Creator? But he will not condemn a champion of circumcision either. But if there is to be no judge but the Creator, then he will condemn none but the defenders of a law that he himself has ordained to cease. What now, if Paul also confirms the law in the part it deserves? "For the whole law," he says, "is fulfilled in you: You shall love your neighbor as yourself." [13] Or if he wants "fulfilled" to be understood as meaning it no longer needs fulfilling, then he does not want me to love my neighbor as myself, so that this too has ceased along with the law. But no — this precept must always be kept. So the Creator's law is even approved by the adversary, and it has come off from him not with loss but with gain, its whole sum reduced now to one single precept. But this fits no one better than its own author. And indeed, when he says, "Bear one another's burdens, and so you shall fulfill the law of Christ," if this cannot be done except by loving one's neighbor as oneself, it becomes clear that "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," through which is heard "Bear one another's burdens," is the law of Christ — which is the Creator's law — and so Christ belongs to the Creator, since the law of Christ is the Creator's law. [14] "Be not deceived, God is not mocked." Well, Marcion's god certainly can be mocked, seeing he knows neither anger nor vengeance. "For whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap." This proclaims a God of requital and of judgment. "And let us not grow weary in well-doing," and "While we have time, let us do good." Deny that the Creator commanded the doing of good, and you have made different teachings belong to different divinities. But further, if Paul preaches requital, then from the same God comes both the harvest of corruption and the harvest of life. [15] "For in due season we shall reap," since Ecclesiastes too says, "There is a time for everything." But as for me, servant of the Creator, the world has been crucified to me — though not the god of the world — and I to the world, though not to the god of the world. For he set "the world" in terms of its manner of life, and in renouncing that, we are mutually transfixed and die to one another. He calls them persecutors of Christ. And when he adds that he bears the marks of Christ in his own body — surely bodily marks are meant — he has confessed a flesh of Christ that is not putative but real and solid, since it is bodily marks of it that he shows.
5. On the First Epistle to the Corinthians.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 5 ========

[1] My discussion of the preceding letter proceeded on the understanding that I would not go back over its title, being certain that I could revisit it elsewhere -- it being, after all, common to and identical in all the letters. That it does not, in fact, prescribe "health" to those he writes to, but rather "grace and peace," I need not say again. What has this destroyer of Judaism still to do with the Jewish manner of speech? For even today the Jews use the word "peace" as a greeting, and in times past they saluted one another so in the scriptures. But I understand that he was, in the performance of his own office, defending the preaching of the Creator: "How timely are the feet of those who preach good things, who preach peace." [2] For the one who preaches good things -- that is, the grace of God -- knew that peace was to be set before all else. Since, in announcing these things as coming from God our Father and the Lord Jesus, he uses names common to us as well, appropriate to our own confession too, I do not think it can be doubted which God is preached as Father and which Lord Jesus, once we attend to what accompanies the names and to whom they more properly belong. [3] First, then, I lay it down that the Father-Lord must be acknowledged as none other than the creator and founder both of man and of the universe: further, that the title "Lord" attaches to the Father precisely on account of power, a power which the Son also receives through the Father: and then, that "grace and peace" belong not only to him by whom they were preached, but to him who had been offended. For grace does not occur except toward an offense, nor peace except after a war. [4] Now the people, through transgression of the Law, and the whole race of men, through the suppression of nature, had thus both offended in sin and revolted against the Creator. But Marcion's god, being unknown, could not have been offended, and, knowing no anger, cannot give grace. What grace, then, from one never offended? What peace from one never rebelled against? [5] Paul says the cross of Christ is folly to those who are perishing, but the power and wisdom of God to those who are attaining salvation; and to show where this comes from, he goes on: "For scripture says, I shall bring to ruin the cleverness of the clever, and set aside the discernment of the shrewd." If these words belong to the Creator, and he reckons as folly the things pertaining to the cause of the cross, then both the cross and Christ through the cross will belong to the Creator, by whom what pertains to the cross was foretold. [6] Or if the Creator, out of rivalry, took away wisdom precisely so that the cross of Christ -- his rival's cross -- might be reckoned folly, how could a Creator have pronounced anything at all about the cross of a Christ not his own, whom he did not even know when he was prophesying? But further, why, under a Lord who is supremely good and of boundless mercy, do some ascribe salvation to themselves, believing the cross to be the power and wisdom of God, while others count it their ruin, reckoning the cross of Christ folly -- unless it belongs to the Creator to have fined some offense of both people and human race with the loss of wisdom and prudence? [7] This the following words confirm, when he says, "Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?" -- and here too he adds the reason: "Since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know the Lord, it pleased God, through the foolishness of the preaching, to save those who believe." But first I will settle the matter of "the world," since it is exactly here that the subtlest of heretics interpret "world" as meaning the world's own Lord, whereas we understand it to mean the man who is in the world, following the simple form of ordinary human speech, by which we very often put the container for the thing contained. The circus shouted, and the forum spoke, and the basilica roared -- meaning those who did business in these places. So then, since it was man, not God, who in his wisdom did not know God, whom he ought to have known -- the Jew in the wisdom of the scriptures, and every nation in the wisdom of its works -- for that reason the same God who had not been known in his own wisdom determined to strike back at the wisdom of men with foolishness, saving those who believe through the very preaching of the cross that is reckoned foolish. [8] "Since the Jews demand signs" -- they who ought already to have been certain about God -- "and the Greeks seek wisdom" -- setting up, that is, their own wisdom, not God's. But if it were a new god being preached, in what had the Jews sinned by demanding signs to believe in, or the Greeks by pursuing the wisdom in which they would rather believe? So too the very manner of the reward, dealt out to Jews and Greeks alike, confirms this God as jealous and as judge, since it is by a rewarding that is both jealous and judicial that he has made foolish the wisdom of the world. But if the causes belong to the one to whom the scriptures cited belong, then the apostle, discoursing about the Creator, teaches -- even though he was not recognized -- that it is precisely the Creator who must be recognized. [9] Again, in preaching Christ as "a stumbling-block to the Jews," he seals this with the Creator's own prophecy about him, spoken through Isaiah: "See, I am placing in Zion a stumbling-stone and an obstacle-rock." Now that Rock was Christ -- even Marcion preserves this. And what is "the foolishness of God, wiser than men," if not Christ's cross and his dying? What is "God's weakness, mightier than men," if not God's nativity and his taking of flesh? But if Christ was not truly born of a virgin, nor truly built up of flesh, and therefore did not truly suffer either cross or death, then there was nothing foolish and nothing weak in him; nor did God select "the world's foolish elements so as to put wisdom to shame," nor did God select "the world's feeble elements so as to shame what is strong," nor "its lowly, discounted, despised elements, the things that are not" -- that is, which are not truly -- "to confound the things that are," that is, the things that truly are. For nothing arranged by God is truly petty, ignoble, and contemptible -- only what comes from man is that. But with the Creator, even old things can be reckoned to folly and weakness and dishonor and smallness and contempt. [10] What is more foolish, what more weak, than God's demand for bloody sacrifices and reeking whole burnt offerings? What more weak than the cleansing of vessels and pallets? What more dishonorable than the disfigurement, in various ways, of flesh that already blushes to name it? What so humble as the imposing of a law of retaliation? What so contemptible as dietary restriction? The whole of the Old Testament, so far as I know, every heretic mocks. "For God selected the world's foolish elements so as to put wisdom to shame" -- Marcion's god does nothing of the kind, since he has no rivalry with which to refute the contrary by the contrary -- "so that no flesh should glory," so that, as it is written, "he who glories, let him glory in the Lord." In whom? Surely in him who gave this command -- unless it was the Creator who commanded that one should glory in Marcion's god.
6.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 6 ========

[1] So then, through all of this he shows whose god's wisdom he is speaking of among the perfect — namely the wisdom of the one who took away the wisdom of the wise and brought the prudence of the prudent to nothing, who made the wisdom of the world foolish, choosing what is foolish in it and arranging it for salvation. This, he says, is the wisdom that was hidden — hidden among the foolish and the lowly and the disreputable, hidden even under figures, allegories, and riddles — to be revealed only later in Christ, set as a light to the nations by the Creator who promised through the voice of Isaiah that he would lay open treasures invisible and hidden. [2] For that a god who did absolutely nothing should be thought to have hidden something in what he did — this is hardly credible. If he existed at all, he could not stay hidden, let alone any mysteries of his. The Creator, on the other hand, is himself as well known as his mysteries are — mysteries that ran their course openly enough among Israel, yet were shadowed over in their inner meanings, in which the wisdom of God lay concealed, to be recounted among the perfect in its own time, though set forth in God's purpose before the ages. [3] And whose are the ages, if not the Creator's? For if the ages are constructed from stretches of time, and every stretch of time is composed of days, months, and years — and these, the days, the months, the years, are in turn measured out by the Creator's sun, moon, and stars — set there by him for exactly this purpose ("And let them be," he says, "for signs of months and years") — then it is plain the ages too belong to the Creator, and whatever is said to have been purposed before the ages belongs to no one but the one to whom the ages themselves belong. [4] Let Marcion prove that his god has ages of his own; let him produce the very world in which the ages are to be reckoned, a kind of vessel of the times, and any signs or ordering of them. If he can show nothing, I come back to my question: why then did he purpose our glory before the ages belonging to the Creator? He might seem to have purposed it before the ages if he had then revealed it by introducing an age of his own. But since he does this only after nearly the whole span of the Creator's ages has already run out, he purposed it before the ages pointlessly — he ought rather to have purposed it within the ages, seeing that he was going to reveal it almost after the ages were over. [5] It is not in his character to have been in a hurry to purpose something and slow to reveal it. Both belong properly to the Creator: to have purposed before the ages and to have revealed at the end of the ages, since what he purposed and what he revealed he was, in the meantime, already administering through the whole span of the ages, in figures and riddles and allegories. But because the apostle adds, of our glory, that none of the rulers of this age knew it — for had they known, they would never have nailed the Lord of glory to the cross — from this the heretic argues that the rulers of this age crucified that Lord, meaning the Christ belonging to the other god, and so tries to make even this recoil onto the Creator. [6] But since we have already shown above in what sense our glory is to be reckoned as belonging to the Creator, it should already be settled beforehand that a thing which lay hidden with the Creator would rightly be unknown even to all the Creator's virtues and powers — for servants are not permitted to know the counsels of their masters, still less those apostate angels and that very prince of transgression, the devil, whom I would rather argue were kept all the more outside, on account of their guilt, from any knowledge of the Creator's dispositions. [7] But in fact it is not even my business to interpret the "rulers of this age" as the Creator's virtues and powers, since the apostle assigns ignorance to them, whereas Jesus — according to our own Gospel — was recognized even by the devil in the temptation, and according to the shared text the unclean spirit knew him to be the Holy One of God, knew he was called Jesus, and knew he had come for their destruction. Even the parable of the strong armed man, overpowered by one stronger who seized his goods, if taken by Marcion as referring to the Creator, means the Creator could no longer be said to be ignorant of the God of glory even while being overpowered by him — nor could he have nailed to the cross one against whom he had no power. It remains, then, that on my reading it is credible that the virtues and powers of the Creator crucified the Christ, the Lord of glory, knowingly — the very desperation and overflow of malice with which the most wicked slaves do not hesitate to murder their own masters. For it is written, in my text, that Satan entered into Judas. [8] But according to Marcion, the apostle does not, in this passage, allow ignorance to be assigned to the Creator's virtues in respect of the Lord of glory, precisely because he does not want those to be understood as "the rulers of this age." But if it does not seem that he spoke of spiritual rulers, then he spoke of worldly ones — of the ruling people, though certainly not among the nations, of its own archons, of King Herod, and of Pilate too, and of the Roman authority that presided as the greater power of this age still above them. [9] And so, even as the arguments of the opposing side are being demolished, our own exposition is being built up. But you still want our glory to belong to your god, and to have lain hidden with him. Then why does your god still lean on the same text as the apostle? What business has he with the sayings of the prophets, everywhere? "For who has known the mind of the Lord, and who has been his counselor?" That is Isaiah. What business has he even with the examples of our God? [10] For when Paul names himself a skilled master-builder, this, we discover, points to the man who uncovers God's own discipline, foretold by the Creator through Isaiah: "I will take away," he says, "from Judea, among other things, the wise master-builder." And was not Paul then destined to be taken away from Judea — that is, from Judaism — in order to be taken up into the building of Christianity, there to lay the one foundation, which is Christ? For the Creator says of this very thing through the same prophet, "Behold, I lay in the foundations of Zion a precious stone, a stone to be honored, and whoever believes in it shall not be put to shame." [11] Unless, that is, God was declaring himself a builder of some earthly work, rather than pointing to his own Christ, who was to be the foundation of those who believe in him — on which, according to what each man builds, sound doctrine or unsound, if his work is tested by fire, if his reward is repaid him by fire, that belongs to the Creator: for it is by fire that your building on top is judged — certainly the building on top of his own foundation, that is, of his own Christ. "Do you not know that you are God's temple, and that God's Spirit dwells in you?" If man, and the matter, and the workmanship, and the image, and the likeness, and the flesh from the earth, and the soul from the Creator's breath are all his, then Marcion's god dwells entirely as a stranger in another's house — if we are not the Creator's temple. [12] But "if anyone destroys God's temple, he will be destroyed" — by the God of the temple, of course. Threaten an avenger, and you threaten the Creator. "Become fools, that you may become wise." Why? "For the wisdom of this world is folly with God." With which God? If nothing else has already prejudged this point in our favor, it is well that here too he adds proof: "for it stands written, He seizes the clever in their own cunning"; and once more, "The Lord is aware of the reasonings of the clever, that they come to nothing." [13] In short, it will already stand proven, on our showing, that he could not have used a single saying belonging to the very God he was supposed to be demolishing, unless that God were his teacher. "Therefore," he says, "let no one boast in man." And this too follows the Creator's own teaching: "Wretched is the man who puts his hope in man!" and, "It is better to trust in God than to trust in men" — and so too, better to boast in him.
[7.]

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 7 ========

[1] And he himself will illuminate the hidden things of darkness -- through Christ, of course, since it is Christ who promised illumination, and who also declared himself a lamp, one who searches hearts and minds. From him too will come praise for each person, and from him the opposite of praise, as from a judge. Surely, you say, here at least he means by "world" the god of this world, when he says, "We have become a spectacle to the world, and to angels, and to men" -- because if "world" had meant merely "men of the world," he would not afterward have named "men" separately. On the contrary, so that you not argue that way, the providence of the Holy Spirit has shown precisely why he said, "We have become a spectacle to the world," meaning to the angels who minister to the world, and to the men to whom they minister. [2] No doubt a man of such firmness -- not to say the Holy Spirit itself -- was afraid, especially in writing to sons he had begotten through the gospel, to name the god of this world openly, since he could not seem to be preaching against him except explicitly. I am not defending the point that, under the creator's law, the man who had his father's wife displeased him. He was simply following the discipline common to public religion generally. But when he condemns that man to be handed over to Satan, he is the herald of the god who condemns. Consider, too, how he put it: "unto the wasting away of the flesh, so that his spirit might be kept safe on that day when the Lord comes" -- thereby pronouncing sentence at once on the flesh's ruin and on the spirit's deliverance, and, in ordering that evil be removed from their midst, echoing a sentence repeated over and over by the creator: [3] "Purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, as you are unleavened." So then the unleavened loaves were figures of us, in the creator's own scheme. So too "our Passover is sacrificed, even Christ." Why is Christ called Passover, if the Passover was not a figure of Christ, through the likeness of the saving blood of that sacrificial animal and of Christ's own? What have we and Christ to do with the images of the creator's solemn feasts, if they were not ours to begin with? [4] Then, turning us away from fornication, he makes plain the resurrection of the flesh: "The body," he says, "was not made for whoring, but belongs to the Lord, just as the Lord belongs to it, so that it stands as a shrine to God, and God dwells within that shrine." Will the temple perish for God, and God for the temple? But no -- you see, "He who raised up the Lord will raise us up too" -- will likewise raise our very bodies, seeing that the body belongs to the Lord and he in turn to it. And he does well to press further: "Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?" What will the heretic say? That the members of Christ will not rise again, because they are no longer ours? For "we were bought with a great price." [5] Plainly with nothing at all, if Christ was a phantom and had no bodily substance to pay out on behalf of our bodies. So then Christ too had something with which to redeem us, and if he redeemed these bodies at some great price, bodies into which fornication may no longer be committed as though they were members of Christ and no longer ours, he will surely preserve safe for himself what he purchased at so great a cost. Now then -- how are we to honor, how are we to carry about, a God in a body doomed to perish? [6] Next comes the subject of marriage, which Marcion, more rigid than the apostle, forbids to the faithful. For the apostle, though he prefers the good of continence, nonetheless allows marriage to be contracted and to be made use of, and urges rather that it be kept than dissolved. Now Christ, plainly, forbids divorce, while Moses permits it. Marcion, sweeping away all intercourse from the faithful -- his catechumens can look to their own case -- ordering divorce before marriage even begins, whose ruling does he follow here, Moses's or Christ's? [7] But Christ too, when he commands that a wife not depart from her husband, or if she has departed, that she stay single thereafter or else make peace again with her husband, has both allowed divorce -- which he did not forbid absolutely -- and confirmed marriage, which he first forbade to be dissolved, and which, if by chance dissolved, he wished restored. But what reasons for continence does he give? [8] "Because the time is drawn together." I had supposed there was a different god in Christ; and yet the one from whom comes the drawing-together of time will also be the one to whom what suits that drawing-together belongs. No one legislates for a time not his own. You make your god a petty thing, Marcion, if the creator's time can hem him in on any point. Certainly, in ordering that marriage take place "only in the Lord," so that no believer contract a marriage with a pagan, he is upholding the creator's own law, which everywhere forbids marriages with foreigners. [9] But as for "even if there are those called gods, whether in heaven or on earth" -- it is clear why he put it that way: not as though they truly existed, but because there are beings so called, though they do not exist. For he had begun the passage speaking of idols, about to discuss meat offered to idols: "We know that an idol is nothing." Even Marcion does not deny that the creator is a god; so the apostle cannot be seen as placing the creator too among those who are called gods and yet are not, since, even granting they existed, still "for us there exists but a single God, who is Father." "from whom all things come to us" -- and whose could all things be, if not his to whom all things belong? What things are these? You have it in what came before: "Everything is at your disposal -- be it Paul, Apollos, Cephas, the world, life, death, whatever now stands, or whatever is still to arrive." [10] So he makes the creator the god of all things -- from whom come both world and life and death, which cannot belong to a different god. From him, then, among all things, is Christ too included. Teaching that each man ought to live from his own labor, he had already given examples enough beforehand from soldiers, shepherds, farmers; but he lacked divine authority for it. So he sets against the ungrateful the creator's own law -- the very law he was supposedly demolishing; for his own god had no such law to offer. "You shall not muzzle the ox that treads out the grain," he says, and adds, "Does God take care for oxen?" -- meaning, is it also, for man's sake, kindly meant even concerning oxen? "For it was written for our sakes," he says. [11] So then he has proven that the law is to be read allegorically, in our sense, and that it supports, out of the gospel, those who live by it -- and for this very reason those who preach the gospel belong to none but the one whose statute already looked to their needs, since he says, "It was set down on our account." But he chose not to make use of the law's right, because he preferred to labor free of charge. This he counted to his own glory, which he denied anyone would nullify -- not to the destruction of the law, whose right he proved another would use. For see, blind Marcion stumbles even against the rock, from which our fathers drank in the wilderness. For if that rock was Christ, it was certainly the creator's rock, since the people too were his -- whose figure does he then make this to be, by his interpretation of it as belonging to a foreign mystery? Or was it rather to teach precisely this, that the old things were figures pointing forward to Christ, to be reckoned as belonging to that same order? For, about to run through the rest of the people's fate as well, he prefaces it: "Now these things happened to them as examples." [13] Tell me -- were these made examples for men by the creator, on behalf of some other, unknown god? Or would one deity fetch its warnings from another -- and a competing one, no less? I am alarmed on his behalf, this god to whom he transfers my faith. Will this adversary make me a better man? Now then, if I should sin as that people sinned, will I suffer the same, or not? But if not the same, he is proposing to frighten me groundlessly with things I shall never suffer. And suffer at whose hand shall I? If at the creator's, what sort of things is it in his character to inflict? And what sense would it make for a jealous god to punish the sinner of his rival more severely than, on the contrary, a zealous god would cherish him? If at the hand of that other god -- but he does not know how to punish. So this whole proposition of the apostle stands on no reasoning at all, unless it belongs to the creator's own discipline. [14] Finally, in the closing words he answers his own opening. "These things befell them as a pattern, and they stand recorded to instruct us, on whom the closing periods of the ages have fallen." O the creator, already foreknowing and already admonishing Christians not his own! I pass over cases already covered elsewhere, and briefly strike out a few others. A great argument for another god is his permission of all kinds of food, over against the law. As though we ourselves did not also confess that the burdens of the law have been lifted -- but lifted by the very one who imposed them, who also promised renewal. So too with the foods he took away: he gave back what he had granted from the beginning. As for the rest -- if there had been some other god, a destroyer of our God, nothing would have kept his own people further from living off the resources of his adversary.
8.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 8 ========

The head of the man is Christ. Which Christ? The one who is not the man's author? For he set down “head” to mean authority, and authority belongs to none but the author. Whose head, in fact, is meant? Certainly the one of whom he goes on to say, “A male must not veil his head, seeing he bears the likeness and glory of God.” So then, if it is the Creator's likeness he bears (for the Creator, looking upon Christ his Word, the man yet to be, said, “Let us fashion man after our likeness and image”), how could I answer to some head other than the one whose likeness marks me? Bearing as I do the Creator's own likeness, no rival headship can find a place in me. But then why should the woman be obliged to have power set over her head? If it is because she was made from the man and for the man's sake, according to the Creator's own institution, then the apostle has likewise taken care of her discipline out of that very institution from which he explains the grounds of the discipline. He adds too, “Because of the angels.” Whose angels? That is, whose? If they are the Creator's apostates, then rightly so — that her face, which once scandalized them, should now bear some mark of humble dress and dimmed beauty. But if they are angels of some other god, why the caution — when not even the Marcionites themselves go chasing women? We have already shown many times that the apostle lists heresies among evils, and that those are to be reckoned sound who flee heresies as an evil. Likewise, by the sacrament of bread and cup we have already proved, back in the Gospel, the reality of the Lord's body and blood, against Marcion's phantom. And that every mention of judgment belongs to the Creator, as the God who judges, has been argued through nearly the whole work. Now I speak of the spiritual gifts — that these too were promised to Christ by the Creator, under this rule, which I think most fair: that no fulfillment is to be credited to any other than the one whose promise has been proved. Isaiah declared: “There shall come forth a rod from the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise from the root, and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.” Then he catalogues its several forms: “Upon him shall rest a breath granting insight and discernment, a breath of counsel joined to strength, a breath bringing knowledge together with reverence, and he shall be filled with a breath of awe toward God.” He shows Christ arising in the figure of a flower, sprung from a rod that came from the root of Jesse — that is, from the virgin of David's line, the son of Jesse — in whom Christ the whole substance of the Spirit was to reside, not as something to come upon him afterward, as though he who had always been the Spirit of God, even before taking flesh, had somehow lacked it — lest from this you argue that the prophecy pertains to some Christ who, merely as a man descended from David's stock, was afterward to obtain his God's Spirit — but rather because, from the moment he flowered forth in flesh taken from David's line, every working of spiritual grace was to rest in him, and to cease and come to an end, so far as the Jews were concerned; just as the fact itself testifies, since from that point the Creator's Spirit breathes among them no more, wisdom and the skilled architect and counselor and prophet having been taken away from Judea, so that this is fulfilled: “The Law and the prophets, until John.” Now hear how he declared, too, that once Christ had been received up into heaven, spiritual gifts would follow. “He went up to the heights” — meaning heaven; “he took captivity itself as his captive” — meaning death, or our bondage; “he distributed gifts to mankind's sons” — meaning the freely-given endowments we term charisms. Aptly he writes “to mankind's sons,” rather than plainly “to men,” pointing us toward those sons of men — that is, men in the fullest sense, the apostles. For in the Gospel, he says, “I have begotten you,” and, “My little children, of whom I travail in birth again.” Now too there is that further promise of the Spirit, made outright through Joel: “And in those final days it shall come to pass, says the Lord, that I will pour forth my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and daughters will speak as prophets, and on my menservants and my maidservants alike I will pour forth of my own Spirit in those days.” And certainly, if the Creator promised the grace of the Spirit for the last days, and Christ, the dispenser of spiritual gifts, appeared in the last days — the apostle saying, “Yet once the appointed time had run its course, God dispatched his own Son,” and elsewhere, “For the season now stands compressed, drawing to its close” — it is plain, from the very proclamation about the last times, that this grace of the Spirit belongs to Christ the preacher. Compare, finally, the apostle's list of gifts with Isaiah's. “One person,” he says, “receives by the Spirit a message of wisdom” — and Isaiah too, at the very outset, named a breath granting wisdom. “Another gets a message bearing on knowledge” — match that to the breath of discernment joined with counsel. “Another, faith, worked by the identical Spirit” — match that to the breath of reverence and awe toward God. “Another receives powers to heal, another the working of miracles” — match that to the breath of strength. “Another prophecy, another the testing of spirits, another the various tongues, another their interpretation” — match all these to the breath of knowledge. See how the apostle, both in distributing the gifts of the one Spirit and in expounding the prophet's particulars, agrees with him. I might add this too: the very fact that he likened the unity of the varied charisms to the framework of our body, joined together through its many diverse members, shows that the same Lord governs both the human body and the Holy Spirit — the one who was unwilling that the excellences of the charisms should exist in the body of the Spirit which he had not likewise placed in the human body; who also instructed the apostle, by that chief commandment which Christ himself endorsed, that love is to be set above all the charisms: “You shall love the Lord with all your heart and all your strength and all your soul, and your neighbor as yourself.” And if he recalls something written in the Law — that the Creator would speak in other tongues and other lips — by this recollection he confirms the charism of tongues; nor here either can he be seen to have confirmed, by his preaching, a charism belonging to some alien god. So too, when he prescribes silence for women in the church — that they should not speak, at least for the sake of learning (though he has already shown that they too have the right to prophesy, since he places a veil even upon the woman who prophesies) — he draws the authority for the woman's subjection from the Law, a Law which, let me say once for all, she ought to have known only for her own undoing. But let us now step back from spiritual matters, and let the facts themselves prove which of us claims his own God rashly, and whether it can be turned against my side, that the Creator promised these gifts for his Christ not yet revealed, as though destined for the Jews alone, to have their proper workings in their proper time, in their proper Christ, and among their proper people. Let Marcion, then, produce the gifts of his god — some prophets who nonetheless spoke not from human sense but from the Spirit of God, who both foretold things to come and laid bare the secrets of the heart; let him bring forth some psalm, some vision, some prayer — spiritual, at least, uttered in ecstasy, that is, in a trance, if some interpretation of tongues has attended it; let him prove to me as well that some woman prophesied among his people, some grand claim from those more sanctified females of his. If all these things are more readily produced by me — and certainly in agreement with the rules and arrangements and disciplines of the Creator — then without doubt the Christ, the Spirit, and the apostle will belong to my God. Whoever wishes to press the claim has my declaration to hand.
9.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 9 ========

[1] Meanwhile the Marcionite will produce nothing of this kind, since he is already afraid to declare whose Christ it more likely is who has not yet been revealed. Just as it is mine who must be looked for, because he was preached from the beginning, so it is not his, for the very reason that he was not from the beginning. We do better believing in a Christ who is to come than the heretic does believing in none at all. [2] How some in that day denied the resurrection of the dead must first be examined. Certainly in the same way they deny it now too, since the resurrection of the flesh is always what gets denied. As for the rest, most people, even the learned, claim the soul as divine and promise it safety, and the common crowd itself worships its dead on the very assumption that it is confident their souls survive; but their bodies, it is plain, are either consumed at once by fire or by wild beasts, or, however carefully laid away, are in time destroyed all the same. If, then, it is people rejecting any rising again of the flesh whom the apostle refutes, then he is certainly defending, against those very people, what they were denying — namely, that the flesh does rise. There you have the answer in brief. [3] The rest follows from that abundantly. For the very phrase "resurrection of the dead" requires us to press the proper sense of the words. Now nothing is called "dead" except what has lost the soul by whose power it lived. It is the body that loses the soul, and by losing it becomes dead; so the word "dead" applies to the body. Further, if resurrection is of the dead, and the dead is nothing other than the body, then the resurrection will be of the body. [4] So too the word "resurrection" claims nothing other than the thing that fell. For something can be said to "rise" even if it never fell at all, if it has simply been lying there all along. But to "rise again" belongs only to what has fallen; it is called rising again precisely because, having fallen, it rises a second time. The prefix RE- is always attached to signify repetition. We say, then, that the body falls to the earth through death, as the fact itself attests, by God's own law. For it was said to the body, "Earth you are, and to earth you shall go." So what is of earth will go into earth. What falls into the earth is what rises again. [5] Because through a man came death, and through a man, resurrection. Here Christ's body too is shown to me under the name of "man," who consists of a body, as we have already often taught. But if we are all thus made alive in Christ just as we are put to death in Adam, then since we are put to death in Adam in the body, it must follow that in Christ we are made alive in the body. Otherwise the parallel does not hold, unless the being-made-alive in Christ occurs in the same substance as the being-put-to-death in Adam. But something further about Christ has intervened, and it must not be passed over, given the present dispute. [6] The resurrection of the flesh will be proved all the more forcefully the more clearly I show that Christ belongs to that God with whom the resurrection of the flesh is believed. When it says, "For he must reign until he puts his enemies under his feet," it already, from this alone, proclaims God as an avenger, and further, that it is this same God who made this promise to Christ: "Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet: the Lord will send forth the rod of your strength out of Zion, and you shall rule in the midst of your enemies." [7] But it is necessary, for my argument, that I defend those very scriptures which the Jews too try to snatch away from us. They say, in fact, that this psalm was sung about Hezekiah, because he sat at the right of the temple and God turned back and destroyed his enemies; and therefore that the rest of it too, "Before the morning star I begot you from the womb," applies to Hezekiah, to Hezekiah's birth. We, however, present the gospels (whose reliability we should by now, after so great a work, have already established well enough for these people), which declare that the Lord's birth was at night, so that this is "before the morning star" — understood also from the star, and from what the angel bore witness to, proclaiming by night to the shepherds that it was Christ, precisely, who had just come into the world, and from the place of the birth, since it is at night that people gather at an inn. [8] Perhaps it was even done mystically, that Christ should be born at night, he who was to be the light of truth against the darkness of ignorance. But God would not have said, "I have begotten you," except to a true son. For though he says of the whole people, "I have begotten sons," he did not add "from the womb." But why add "from the womb" so pointlessly, as if it were ever doubted that any human being was born from a womb, unless he wanted it understood, more pointedly, of Christ: "From the womb I have begotten you" — that is, from the womb alone, without the seed of a man, assigning to flesh what comes from the womb, and to spirit what comes from himself. To this is added, "You are a priest forever." But Hezekiah was no priest, nor was anything about him "forever," even if he had been. "According to the order," it says, "of Melchizedek." [9] What has Hezekiah to do with Melchizedek, priest of the Most High, and one moreover uncircumcised, who blessed the already-circumcised Abraham after receiving from him the offering of tithes? But the order of Melchizedek will suit Christ perfectly, since Christ is God's own true and lawful high priest, pontiff of an uncircumcised priesthood, established first among the nations — by whom he was more readily to be received — while the circumcision, and Abraham's own people, he will one day, when he comes at the last, deign to recognize and to bless and accept. There is also another psalm that begins: "O God, give your judgment unto the sovereign" — meaning, to Christ, the one destined to rule — "and your righteousness to the sovereign's offspring" — meaning, to those who belong to Christ. [10] For his sons are those who are reborn in him. Yet this psalm too will be said to be sung about Solomon. But will people be able to teach that the rest of it, things that fit Christ alone, apply not to Solomon but to Christ? "He shall come down," it says, "like rain upon a fleece, and like drops falling gently upon the earth" — describing his gentle and imperceptible descent from heaven into flesh. But Solomon, even if he descended from somewhere, did not descend like rain, since he did not come from heaven. But let me set out the simpler proofs. [11] "He shall rule," it says, "from one sea unto another, and from the river all the way to the earth's furthest edge." This has been granted to Christ alone; Solomon, for his part, ruled over one small country, Judea. "All kings shall worship him." Whom, if not Christ? "And all nations shall serve him." Whom, if not Christ? "Let his name endure forever." Whose name, if not Christ's, is eternal? "Before the sun his name shall remain." For before the sun was the Word of God, that is, Christ. [12] "And in him all the nations shall be blessed." In Solomon no nation is blessed; in Christ, every one is. What now, if this psalm even shows him to be God? "And they shall pronounce him blessed: for blessed be the Lord, Israel's God, he alone who works wonders: and blessed be the name of his majesty forever, and let the whole earth be filled with his majesty." [13] Against this, Solomon, I dare say, even lost the glory he had in God, dragged as he was into idolatry by a woman. And so, since in the middle of the psalm this too is set down: "His enemies shall lick the dust," put, in other words, beneath his feet — that will bear on the point for which I have brought forward this psalm and defended it for my argument: to establish both the glory of the kingdom and the subjection of the enemies according to the arrangement of the Creator, one who is bound to result, of necessity, in belief in none other than the Creator himself.
10.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 10 ========

[1] Let us now come back to the resurrection, a subject we have already dealt with fully enough elsewhere, in a treatise of its own, standing against every heretic there; but we will not skip it here either, for the sake of those who don't know that little work. "What," he says, "will those who are baptized for the dead do, if the dead do not rise?" Let that practice answer for itself. The Kalends of February, if it comes to that, will answer for petitioning on behalf of the dead. So don't be quick to brand the apostle the inventor or endorser of some novelty here — the point is rather that he establishes the resurrection of the flesh all the more firmly, precisely because people who got themselves baptized for the dead in vain were doing it out of faith in the resurrection. [2] We have him elsewhere insisting there is only one baptism. So then, to be baptized "for the dead" is to be baptized for bodies — since it is a dead body we point to. What will those who are baptized for bodies do, if bodies do not rise? And indeed we are right to plant our foot on this step, since the apostle brings in his second line of argument likewise about the body. But, some will say, "How do the dead rise? With what body do they come?" [3] Having defended the resurrection itself, which was being denied, it followed naturally that he should go on to discuss the quality of the body, since that was not so obvious. But that is a matter to take up with others. Marcion, after all, rejects any resurrection of the flesh whatsoever and promises salvation to the soul alone — his quarrel is not with its quality but with its very substance. And yet from this very passage he stands most plainly convicted, since the apostle is discussing the quality of the body precisely for the sake of those who say, "How do the dead rise? With what body do they come?" He has already, after all, proclaimed that the body will rise, the moment he starts discussing what kind of body it will be. [4] Then again, when he sets out examples — a grain of wheat, or something of that sort, to which God gives a body as he wills; when he says that each of the seeds has its own proper body, so that the flesh of men is one thing, of cattle another, of birds another, that there are heavenly bodies and earthly ones, one glory for the sun, another for the moon, another for the stars — does he not thereby point to a resurrection that is fleshly and bodily, since he commends it through fleshly and bodily examples? Does he not also pledge it as coming from the very God from whom those examples come? "So too," he says, "is the resurrection." [5] How so? Just as with the grain: it is sown a body, it rises a body. He calls the dissolving of the body into the earth its "sowing," because it is sown in corruption, in dishonor, in weakness, and rises in incorruption, in honor, in power. Whatever order held for it in dissolution holds for it too in resurrection of the body — "just as with the grain," precisely. But if you strip from the resurrection the very body you granted to the dissolution, where is the difference between the two outcomes supposed to lie? Likewise, if it is sown a natural body and rises a spiritual body — even granting that soul or spirit has some body proper to it, so that a "natural body" might be taken to mean the soul, and a "spiritual body" the spirit — he is not thereby saying the soul will become spirit at the resurrection, but that the body, which by being born with the soul and living through the soul earns the name "natural," will become "spiritual" once it rises into eternity through the spirit. [6] Furthermore, since what is sown in corruption is the flesh, not the soul, as it dissolves into the earth, then the "natural body" was never the soul in the first place, but the flesh that was called a natural body — since it is precisely what was natural that becomes spiritual, exactly as he goes on to say below: "What is spiritual did not come first." Indeed he lays this same foundation from the case of Christ himself: [7] "The first man, Adam, became a living soul; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit" — though our thickest of heretics has refused to let it stand that way, and has put "the Lord" in place of "the last Adam," clearly out of fear that if Adam too had a "last" counterpart, we would go on to defend that this same Christ, as "the last Adam," belongs to Adam, whose "first" he also is. [8] But the falsification shows through plainly. Why, after all, call him "the first Adam," unless there is also "the last Adam"? Only things that match — sharing name, or substance, or maker — stand in sequence with one another. True, in different orders of things there can be one "first" and another "last" belonging to a single maker; but if the maker is different, then that thing too could, on its own account, be called "last." Yet whatever such a thing turns out to be, it is a first, not a last — a last only if it matches a first. And it does not match the first, precisely because it is not of the same maker. The same argument convicts him on the word "man" as well. [9] "The first man," he says, "came from dust of the ground; the one who comes second is the Lord, out of heaven." Why call him "the one who comes second" unless he too is a man, as the first one was? Or is the first one "the Lord" too, if the second is? It is enough that in the Gospel Christ applies to himself the title "Son of Man" — he will not be able to deny that he is a man, and, in being man, that he is Adam. [10] What follows also pins him down. For when the apostle says, "As is he who is of the earth" — a man, of course — "so also are those who are earthy," that is, men; then likewise, "as is he who is of heaven," a man, "so also are those who are of heaven" — men. He could not have set heavenly men in contrast to earthly men without meaning men in both cases, precisely so as to distinguish their condition and their hope all the more sharply within their shared designation. It is by condition and by hope that he calls some earthy and some heavenly, while all alike remain men — reckoned, according to their outcome, either to Adam or to Christ. And so, going on now to exhort us to the heavenly hope, he says: "Just as we carried the likeness of the man of dust, so let us carry too the likeness of the man of heaven" — referring this not to any substance of the resurrection, but to the discipline proper to the present age. [11] For he says "let us bear," not "we shall bear" — a command, not a promise — wanting us to walk just as he himself walked, and to leave behind the image of the earthy, that is, the old man, which consists in the works of the flesh. And indeed, what does he add next? "This I say, brothers, that flesh and blood will not possess the kingdom of God" — meaning, of course, the works of flesh and blood, the very phrase he also uses, writing to the Galatians, to strip people of God's kingdom, since it is his habit elsewhere too to put "substance" for "the works of that substance," as when he says that those existing "according to flesh" are unable to give God pleasure. When, after all, could we ever please God, except while we are in this flesh? [12] I know of no other time for acting. But if, though established in the flesh, we flee the works of the flesh, then in that sense we are no longer "according to flesh" — not because we stop existing in flesh's substance, but because we cease to be in its guilt. And if it is under the name "flesh" that we are told to renounce its works, not its substance, then what is barred from God's kingdom under that name "flesh" is flesh's deeds, not flesh's substance. [13] For what is condemned is not the thing in which wrong is done, but the wrong that is done. To administer poison is a crime, yet the vessel that holds the dose bears no blame for it. So too the body is the vessel of the flesh's works, while it is the soul that mixes the poison of some evil deed within it. What sense would it make for the soul, the instigator of the flesh's works, to earn the kingdom of God through atonement for what it committed in the body, while the body, its mere instrument, remains stuck forever in condemnation? Once the poisoner is acquitted, is the cup still to be punished? And yet in any case it is not the flesh's claim to God's kingdom that we are defending, but the resurrection of its substance, as the door of the kingdom, through which one enters. [14] For the resurrection is one thing, the kingdom another. Resurrection comes first, then the kingdom. So we say the flesh rises, but attains the kingdom only once changed. "The dead will rise incorruptible" — that is, those who had been corrupted, their bodies collapsed into ruin. "And we shall all be transformed, in a moment, quicker than an eye can blink." For "this decaying thing" — and by that the apostle plainly meant his own flesh, which he still held — "is bound to clothe itself with the imperishable, and this dying thing with deathlessness," so its substance may be rendered fit to enter God's reign. "For we shall be as the angels are." This will be the transformation of the flesh, but of flesh that has been raised. For if there were no flesh at all, how could it "put on" incorruption and immortality? [15] So it is one thing, made other through this transformation, that will then obtain the kingdom of God — no longer flesh and blood as such, but whatever body God gives to it. And so the apostle rightly says: "Flesh and blood shall not obtain the kingdom of God," ascribing that to the transformation which accompanies the resurrection. [16] And if it is then that the word written in the Creator's scripture will come true — "O death, where is your victory, or your struggle? O death, where is your sting?" (and this word is the Creator's own, spoken through the prophet) — then to him also belongs the reality, that is, the kingdom, whose word will likewise come true in that kingdom. Nor does he give thanks to some other god for granting us victory over death, than to the very one from whom he received that taunting, triumphant word against death.
11. ON THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 11 ========

[1] If "god" has become a common noun through the fault of human error—inasmuch as many gods are spoken of and believed in throughout the world—the "blessed God" of our Lord Jesus Christ will nonetheless be understood to be none other than the Creator, who blessed the whole of things: you have that in Genesis; and who is blessed by the whole of things: you have that in Daniel. So if the Father can be called a barren god, it is under no name more than the Creator's; yet he will still be the very "Father of mercies" who is called merciful and compassionate and abounding in mercy. [2] You have that in Jonah, together with the very instance of mercy he granted when the Ninevites pleaded; easily bent, too, by Hezekiah's tears, and ready to forgive Ahab, Jezebel's husband, the blood of Naboth when he begged, and to pardon David at once when he acknowledged his sin—preferring, clearly, the sinner's repentance to his death, out of sheer feeling of mercy. If Marcion's god has produced or pronounced anything of that kind, I will acknowledge him as "Father of mercies." [3] But if he assigns him this title only from the moment he was revealed—as though he became "Father of mercies" only from the point he set about liberating the human race—well, we too deny that he is God from that very point at which he is said to have been revealed. He cannot, therefore, assign anything to one whom he is only then showing to exist, at the very moment he assigns it to him. For only if it were already established that he existed could the title then be assigned to him. What is assigned is an accident, and accidents presuppose the prior demonstration of the very thing to which they attach—all the more so when what is assigned belongs, in fact, to someone else, seeing he had not previously been shown to exist. The more his existence is affirmed by what is assigned him, the more it will be denied him, precisely because that by which it is affirmed belongs to one already shown to exist. [4] So too the New Testament will belong to none other than the one who promised it—not in the letter, perhaps, but in its spirit; that will be its newness. After all, the very one who had carved the letter on tablets of stone also pronounced concerning the spirit: "I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh." And if the letter kills but the spirit gives life, both belong to the one who says, "It is I who bring death, and I who restore to life; I wound, and I am the one who heals." We long ago vindicated the Creator's twofold power—both judge and good—killing by the letter through the Law and giving life by the spirit through the gospel. These things, though different, cannot be made into two gods when they were shown from the start to belong to one reckoning. [5] He also brings up the veil of Moses, with which he covered his face, unbearable to look upon, from the children of Israel. If this was meant to defend the greater glory of the New Testament, which abides in glory, over the Old, which was destined to be done away with, this suits my faith too, which sets the gospel above the Law—and see whether it does not suit it even better. For there can only be something "superimposed" where the thing it is superimposed upon also exists. But when he says, "But the minds of the world were blunted," he certainly does not mean the Creator, but the people who are in the world. For of Israel he says, "To this very day that same veil remains on their heart." He shows that the veil on Moses's face was a figure of the veil on the people's heart, because even now Moses is not perceived by them in the heart, just as then he was not seen in the face. [6] What, then, is still veiled in Moses that could concern Paul, if the Christ preached by Moses—the Creator's Christ—has not yet come? How could the hearts of the Jews still be described as covered and veiled, when the very things Moses preached—that is, concerning Christ, in whom they ought to have understood him—have not yet been made manifest? What is it to an apostle of some other Christ, if the Jews did not understand the mysteries of their own God, unless it be that the veil on their heart pertained to the blindness by which they had failed to see the Christ of Moses? [7] Then again, what follows—"But when it shall turn to God, the veil shall be taken away"—he says this specifically of the Jew, with whom the veil of Moses still lies; who, once he has passed over into faith in Christ, understands that Moses had been preaching of Christ. But how else could the veil be taken away from the Christ of a different god, whose mysteries the Creator could not have veiled, being unknown things of an unknown god? [8] He says, then, that we, with unveiled face—that is, of the heart, which remains veiled among the Jews—beholding Christ, are transfigured by the same image from glory, the very glory by which Moses too was transfigured from the glory of the Lord, into glory. Thus, setting forth Moses's bodily radiance from his encounter with the Lord and the bodily veil arising from the people's weakness, and superimposing spiritual revelation and spiritual splendor in Christ—"as from the Lord," he says, "of the spirits"—he testifies that the whole arrangement of Moses was a figure of the Christ unrecognized among the Jews but acknowledged among us. [9] We know that certain meanings can suffer ambiguity from the sound of the reading or from where the pause falls, when a double sense is possible. Marcion seized on this, reading it thus: "In whom the god of this age"—as if to point to the Creator, suggesting that "the god of this age" is a different god from the god "of another age." We, on the contrary, say it must be punctuated thus: "In whom God"—full stop, then—"of this age blinded the minds of the unbelieving." "In whom"—that is, in the unbelieving Jews, in whom the gospel remains hidden to some, still under the veil of Moses. For to them, God—whose lips honored him while their heart stayed far from him—had threatened: "With your ears you shall hear and not hear, with your eyes you shall see and not see," and: "Unless you believe, you shall not understand," and: "The cleverness of the clever I will bring to ruin, and the discernment of the shrewd I will cast down to nothing." [10] These threats, at any rate, were certainly not made about hiding the gospel of some unknown god. So then, even granting he is "the god of this age," it is the hearts of the unbelievers of this age that he blinds, because they would not of their own accord recognize his Christ as he is to be understood from the Scriptures. Having taken up the matter within the bounds of the ambiguous punctuation only so far as to keep it from helping my opponent—being content with the victory—I might well have passed over this whole dispute altogether. [11] A simpler answer lies ready to hand: to interpret "the lord of this age" as the devil, who said, as the prophet reports, "I shall make myself equal to the Most High, I shall place my seat above the clouds"—just as the whole superstition of this age is enslaved to him who blinds the hearts of unbelievers, and first and foremost of the apostate Marcion. In any case, he failed to notice the clause that meets him head-on in the very sense of the passage: "For it is God, who commanded brightness to shine forth from the gloom, that has shed his light within our hearts, so as to make radiant the recognition of his glory, present in Christ's own countenance." [12] Whose word bade the light into being? And who was it that spoke to Christ, touching the enlightening of the world, saying, "I have appointed you a light for the nations"—for those, evidently, seated in darkness and beneath death's shadow? To this the Spirit responds in the psalm, foreknowing what was to come: "The light of your face, Lord, has been stamped upon us." Now this "face" of God is none other than Christ the Lord. For which reason the apostle, earlier, names him "the image of God." If, then, Christ bears the very identity of the Creator who spoke the word bidding light into being, then Christ, together with the apostles, the gospel, the veil, and Moses—the whole chain of them—belongs, by the testimony of that closing phrase, to the Creator, the god of this age, and by no means to one who at no time spoke that bidding of light. I pass over here also the other letter, which we hold to be addressed to the Ephesians, but which the heretics address to the Laodiceans. [13] For he says that the nations should remember that at that time, when they were without Christ, strangers to Israel, without covenant and without the hope of the promise, they were even "without God" in the world—albeit, that is, without the Creator. So then, if he says the nations were without God, and it was the devil who served as their god rather than the Creator, it is plain that "the lord of this age" must be understood as the one whom the nations took for a god, not the Creator, whom they did not know. [14] But how could it be that the same treasure is not held to belong to the same one whose vessels our earthen vessels are? For if the glory of God consists in holding so great a treasure in earthen vessels, and the earthen vessels belong to the Creator, then the glory too belongs to the Creator, whose vessels give the flavor of the surpassing power of God—and that power is itself his, since it was committed to earthen vessels precisely so that its surpassing greatness might be proved. [15] Otherwise it will no longer be the glory of some other god, and so not his power either, but rather disgrace and weakness, if his surpassing greatness were captured by earthen and, what is more, alien vessels. But if these are the "earthen vessels" in which he says we suffer such great things, in which we even carry about the "mortification" of God, then God is thoroughly ungrateful and unjust if he is not going to raise up again this very substance in which, for the sake of faith in him, so much is endured, in which the death of Christ is carried about, and in which the surpassing greatness of his power is consecrated. But indeed he goes on to say: "That the life of Christ also may be manifested in our body"—manifestly, just as his death also is carried about in the body. Of what life of Christ, then, does he speak? The one by which we now live in him? [16] And how, in what follows, does he not exhort us toward the invisible and the eternal rather than the visible and temporal—that is, toward the future rather than the present? But if he speaks of a future life of Christ, saying it will appear "in the body," he has openly preached the resurrection of the flesh, while saying that our outward man is being corrupted—not as though by eternal destruction after death, but by labors and hardships, about which he had already said, adding, "And we do not lose heart." For in saying that our inward man is being renewed day by day, he shows both things here at once: the corruption of the body from the buffeting of trials, and the renewal of the soul from the contemplation of the promises.
12.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 12 ========

[1] He does not say that we have an eternal home not made with hands, in heaven, in place of our earthly dwelling, because the thing made by the Creator's hand is to perish, dissolved entirely after death. No — Paul, reconsidering this to console us against the fear of death and against the grief of that very dissolution, makes it even clearer through what follows, when he adds that we groan under this tent of an earthly body, longing to be clothed over with what is from heaven; since indeed, once stripped, we shall not be found naked — that is, we shall receive back what we were stripped of, namely the body. And again: "For we who are in this tent groan, being weighed down, not wishing to be unclothed but to be clothed over." [2] Here he has spelled out what he compressed in the first epistle: "And the dead will rise incorruptible" — those who have already died — "and we shall be changed" — we who shall be found still in the flesh by God. For those will rise incorruptible, having received back their body, and indeed whole, so that from this they are incorruptible; while these, because of the last moment of time and because of the merits of their trials — the shortcut of death, sparing them Antichrist — but changed, will attain rather to being clothed over with what is from heaven than to being stripped of the body. [3] So if these are to put on that heavenly garment over the body, then certainly the dead too will receive back the body, over which they in turn will put on incorruption from heaven; since of them too he says, "This decaying thing must be clothed with what cannot decay, and this thing bound to die must be clothed with what cannot die." Those put on once they have received back the body; these put on over, because they have not lost the body — and that is precisely why he did not say lightly "not wishing to be stripped of the body" but "to be clothed over," that is, not wishing to undergo death but to be overtaken by life, so that this mortal thing might be swallowed up by life, snatched from death by the overgarment of transformation. [4] So, to show that this is better — that we not grieve over death, should it perhaps overtake us first — he says that we have the earnest of the Spirit from God, as a kind of pledge toward that same hope of the overgarment, and that while we remain in the flesh we are away from the Lord, and that for this reason we ought to judge it preferable to be away from the body instead and to dwell with the Lord, so that we may even welcome death gladly. And so, he says, we must all be made manifest before the tribunal of Christ, so that each may receive back what he has done through the body, whether good or evil. [5] For if the requital of merits is still to come then, how can some already be reckoned as with God? By naming a tribunal, and by marking off the distinct sentence for good and for evil deeds, he shows the judge of each verdict, and he confirms the reappearance of all bodies. For what was done in the body cannot be judged apart from the body. God would be unjust if a man were not punished or rewarded through the very thing by which he acted. [6] If, then, there is some new order in Christ, "the old things have passed away, behold, all things are made new" — Isaiah's prophecy is fulfilled. If he also bids us cleanse ourselves from the defilement of flesh and blood, he is not denying the substance but the works of the substance a share in the kingdom of God. If he also appoints the holy virgin, the church, to be presented to Christ — as a bride to a bridegroom, surely — then an image cannot be joined to the enemy of the very truth it images. If he also calls the pseudo-apostles "deceitful workers, transfiguring themselves," he charges them, through hypocrisy, with corrupting their conduct, not their preaching. [7] So the dispute was over discipline, not over divinity. If Satan transfigures himself into an angel of light, this cannot be twisted to apply to the Creator. For God is not an angel — he is the Creator; Paul would have said Satan transfigures himself into the God of light, not into an angel, if he had not meant by it the very Satan whom both we and Marcion know as an angel. [8] Of paradise he has his own pen ready for whatever question arises. Here perhaps I might wonder — if God could have a paradise of his own, belonging to no earthly arrangement, unless he too has borrowed the Creator's paradise on loan, as he has borrowed the world. And yet the taking up of a man to the Creator's heaven has its precedent in Elijah. But I shall wonder still more at this "best of all" gods, a stranger to striking and raging, applying to his own apostle — for buffeting — not even an angel of his own but the Creator's angel of Satan, and, thrice begged, refusing to remove it. So even Marcion's god corrects those puffed up in imitation of the Creator, deposing the proud from their thrones, as it were. Or is it not the same one who gave Satan power over Job's body, that virtue might be proved in weakness? What of the form of the law still held by the castigator of the Galatians, laying down that every word shall stand on the testimony of three witnesses? What of his threat not to spare sinners — this preacher of the gentlest of gods? Indeed he even affirms that the power to act harshly in the present was given him by the Lord. Deny now, heretic, that your god is feared — the god whose apostle was feared!
13. ON THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 13 ========

[1] As the little work runs to its close, some points that keep recurring must now be briefly gone over again, while others, having come up rather too often already, may be passed by. I am weary of engaging further over the law, having so many times already proved that its very concession affords no argument for a second god in Christ — a law, that is, preached and promised toward Christ by the Creator himself — so that this very epistle seems, more than most, to exclude the point. [2] But we have also shown often enough already that the apostle constantly speaks of God as judge, and behind the judge one who punishes, and behind the one who punishes, the Creator. So here too, when he says, "For I am not ashamed of the gospel; for in it lies God's power leading to salvation for every believer, the Jew before all and the Greek as well, since in it God's righteousness stands revealed, out of faith unto faith" — without doubt he assigns both gospel and salvation to the just God, not to the "good" one, if I may put it in the heretic's own terms — the God who carries a man across from the faith of the law to the faith of the gospel, both being, of course, his own law and his own gospel. For he also says that wrath is revealed from heaven against the impiety and injustice of men who hold the truth captive in injustice. [3] Whose wrath is this? The Creator's, surely. Then the truth too will belong to the one whose wrath it is, the wrath that is to be revealed as vengeance for the truth. And he adds further: "We know that God's judgment is according to truth" — thereby proving both that this very wrath, from which judgment for the sake of truth proceeds, and, again, the truth of that same God whose wrath he has just proved by proving the judgment. It is one thing if the Creator, angered, avenges some other god's truth, held captive in injustice — quite another if it is his own. [4] What pitfalls Marcion has dug in this epistle above all, by stripping out what he pleased, will be plain from the integrity of our own text. For me it is enough to take up what he simply failed to notice needed erasing, as if by carelessness or blindness. For if God will judge the hidden things of men — both of those who sinned under the law and of those without the law, since these too, ignorant of the law, do by nature the things of the law — then surely the God who judges is the one to whom both the law and that very nature belong, nature standing in for the law to those ignorant of it. And how will he judge? [5] "According to my gospel," he says, "through Christ Jesus." Then both gospel and Christ belong to the very one to whom law and nature belong, since through the gospel and through Christ they will be vindicated by that God's judgment, which is, as above, "according to truth." So the reasoning by which wrath is defended as revealed from heaven can belong to none but the God of wrath; and here too the sense, coherent with what went before, in which the Creator's judgment is proclaimed, cannot be referred to some other god who neither judges nor grows angry, but to that God to whom — since these things, judgment I mean and wrath, are his — the means by which they are carried out, the gospel and Christ, must also of necessity belong. [6] And so he inveighs against transgressors of the law, men who teach "do not steal" and steal, speaking as a man of God's law, not touching the Creator himself in this way — the Creator who, in forbidding theft, nonetheless commanded the plundering of the Egyptians' gold and silver, as they twist other passages back against him in the same fashion. Did the apostle really fear to bring open reproach on a God from whom he did not fear to have defected? [7] Yet he attacked the Jews so hard that he flung at them the prophetic rebuke: "Because of you the name of God is blasphemed." How perverse, then, that he himself should blaspheme the very God for whose blaspheming he reproaches the wicked! He also sets circumcision of the heart above uncircumcision; with the God of the law, circumcision of the heart is what counts, not of the flesh — by spirit, not by letter. And if this is the circumcision of Jeremiah — "be circumcised in the foreskins of your heart" — as also of Moses — "circumcise your hard-heartedness" — then the spirit that circumcises the heart belongs to the very one whose letter reaps the flesh, and the Jew who is one in secret belongs to the very one whose Jew is one openly, since the apostle would not even wish to call a man "Jew" unless he were the servant of the Jews' own God. [8] "Then, law; now, the righteousness of God through faith in Christ." What is this distinction? Did your god serve the Creator's arrangement, giving him a time and a law of his own — or was the God of that time the same as the God of now? The law belongs to the one to whom the faith of Christ belongs too; what separates them is a change of administration, not a change of deity. [9] He counsels those made righteous through faith in Christ, and not through the law, to hold peace toward God. Toward which God? One toward whom we were never enemies — or the one against whose law and nature we rebelled? For if peace applies to the one with whom there was war, then it is to him we shall be justified, and Christ, by whose faith we are justified, will belong to him, since it is to peace with him that his enemies must at some point be reduced. [10] "But the law came in besides," he says, "that the trespass might abound." Why? "That grace might abound the more," he says. Whose grace, if not the very one whose law it is? Unless the Creator inserted the law on purpose to arrange business for the grace of some other god — a rival god, not to say an unknown one — so that, just as sin had reigned in death under him, so grace too might reign in righteousness unto life through Jesus Christ, his own adversary! [11] Was it for this that the Creator's law shut up everything under sin, and brought the whole world under guilt, and stopped every mouth, so that no one might boast through it — all so that grace might be reserved for Christ's glory — not the Creator's glory, but Marcion's? [12] Here too I can lay groundwork on the substance of Christ, in view of the question to come. "For you have been made dead to the law," he says, "through the body of Christ." So: the body of Christ — and "body" can be argued, granted, not to mean flesh outright. But whatever the substance, when he names the body of the one he goes on to say rose from the dead, no body can be understood but that of flesh, the very flesh to which the law of death was pronounced. [13] But look — he also speaks up for the law, laying the blame instead on sin as the true culprit. What then shall we say? "Is the law sin? Certainly not." Blush, Marcion. Certainly not. The apostle abhors this charge against the law. "But I did not know sin except through the law." [14] What a supreme commendation of the law is this — that through it sin was not allowed to lie hidden! So it was not the law that seduced, but sin, through the occasion given by the commandment. Why do you lay to God's charge what his law's own apostle does not dare lay to the law's charge? Indeed he piles it on further: "The law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good." [15] If he venerates the Creator's law like this, I do not see how he can be tearing him down. Who separates two gods, one just, one good, when the one whose commandment is both good and just must be believed to be both? And if he also affirms that the law is spiritual, then he affirms it prophetic too, and figurative too. From this too I must establish that Christ was preached figuratively in the law — which is exactly why he could not be recognized by all the Jews.
14.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 14 ========

[1] If the Father sent him "in the likeness of sinful flesh," the flesh seen in him is not therefore to be called a phantom. For he had earlier assigned sin to the flesh, and made it "the law of sin" residing among its members and battling against the mind's own law. The Son, then, was dispatched bearing a likeness to flesh of sin for this reason: that he might redeem the flesh of sin by a substance like it — that is, fleshly — a substance resembling sinful flesh, though not itself sinful. For this too will be the power of God: to accomplish salvation in a matching substance. [2] It would be no great thing if a spirit of God healed flesh — the great thing is that flesh like sinful flesh, while being flesh, is not flesh of sin. So the "likeness" pertains to the label of sin, not to a lie about the substance. Had he meant the likeness of the substance itself — meaning to deny its reality — he would not have added "of sin"; he would simply have said "flesh," not "of sin" as well. But since he framed it as "flesh of sin," he confirmed the substance — namely, the flesh — and applied the term "likeness" to that substance's flaw, namely, sin. [3] Suppose, for argument, that "likeness" were said of the substance itself — even then the substance's reality would not thereby be denied. How, then, can a "likeness" be real? Because it is real indeed, but not from the seed: in condition it is like and real; in origin, not unreal but unlike. Besides, there is no "likeness" between opposites. Spirit would not be called a likeness of flesh, since flesh could not take on a likeness of spirit; it would rather be called a phantom, if what was seen was not what it appeared to be. "Likeness," however, is said where the thing itself exists. A thing is, so long as it matches another. A phantom, by contrast, being only that — appearance — is no likeness at all. [4] And when he himself explains that he does not want us "in the flesh," though we are in the flesh — meaning, not amid fleshly deeds — he reveals that he composed this on the principle: "Flesh and blood cannot obtain the kingdom of God," condemning not the substance but its works; and since these works can be excluded even by us who are still placed in the flesh, they belong not to the substance's guilt but to conduct's manner. So too, granted that "the body is indeed dead on account of sin" — then it is precisely the body's death, not the soul's; while "the spirit is life because of righteousness," death having come upon that which sinned, namely, the body. [5] For nothing is restored to anyone except what he has lost; and so there will be a resurrection of the dead only insofar as it is a resurrection of bodies. For he adds: "He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies." Thus he confirmed the flesh's resurrection — apart from which nothing else could be termed a body, nothing else understood as mortal — and he proved the bodily substance of Christ; for our mortal bodies will be made alive in just the same way that he was raised, and in no other way than because it happened in a body. [6] Here too I leap over a vast breach in the text he has cut, but I seize on the apostle's testimony concerning Israel, that they have a zeal for God — for their own God, certainly — but not according to knowledge. "For not knowing God," he says, "and seeking to establish their own righteousness, they did not submit to God's own righteousness; for Christ stands as the law's culmination, bringing righteousness to every believer." [7] Here will be the heretic's argument — as though the Jews were ignorant of the higher god, setting up their own righteousness (that is, the law's) against him, refusing Christ, the end of the law. But then why does he attest their fervor toward their own God, if he is not also charging them with ignorance regarding that very same God? For they were driven by zeal for God, yes, but not according to knowledge — that is, they were ignorant of him precisely in being ignorant, in Christ, of the arrangements by which he was to bring the law to its consummation; and so they defended their own righteousness against him. [8] And indeed the Creator himself testifies to their ignorance of him: "Israel has not known me, and my people has not understood me"; and that they preferred to establish their own righteousness, "teaching as doctrines the precepts of men," and moreover "assembled in opposition to the Lord and to his Anointed" — out of ignorance, precisely. Nothing, then, can be applied to another god that fits the Creator so exactly, since otherwise the apostle would have unjustly reproached the Jews with ignorance of an unknown god. [9] For what had they done wrong, if they were erecting their own god's righteousness against one they failed to know? Yet he cries out: "O the depth of the riches and wisdom of God, and how unsearchable are his ways!" Where does that outburst come from? From his recollection of the scriptures he had been turning over, from his contemplation of the mysteries he had discussed above, of the faith in Christ arising out of the law. If Marcion deliberately erased all this, why does his apostle cry out — seeing no riches of a god so poor and destitute, one who founded nothing, proclaimed nothing, indeed possessed nothing, coming down as he did into another's estate? But the wealth and riches of the Creator were once hidden, now unlocked. For so he had promised: "And I will give them hidden treasures, I will open to them things unseen." [10] It was from that, then, that the cry went up: "O the depth of the riches and wisdom of God!" — whose treasures already lay open. That is Isaiah's; and what follows too is from that same prophet's book: "For who has grasped the Lord's intent, or who has served as his adviser? Who has given to him first, that repayment should be owed him?" You, who tore so much away from scripture — why preserve these lines, as though they too did not belong to the Creator? [11] Well then, let us look at the precepts of this "new god." "Hating what is evil," he says, "and cleaving to what is good." Is that not the very thing the Creator says: "Put away evil from among you," and "Turn from evil and do good"? "Affectionate to one another in brotherly love" — is that not the same as "You shall love your neighbor as yourself"? "Rejoicing in hope" — hope in whom but God? "It is good to hope in the Lord rather than to hope in rulers." "Enduring in tribulation": "for the Lord will hear you in the day of tribulation" — there's your psalm. "Bless, and do not curse": who could teach that but the one who made everything with blessings? [12] "Not haughty in mind, but agreeing with the humble; do not be wise in your own estimation" — for through Isaiah they hear a "Woe!" for that very thing. "Render to no one evil for evil": "and do not remember the wrong of your brother." "Not avenging yourselves": "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." [13] "Have peace with all men": so too the law's principle of retaliation was never meant to license repayment of injury, but to check the very starting of it, through fear of that repayment. Rightly, then, he summed up the Creator's whole discipline in his chief precept: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." If this "supplement" of the law comes from the law itself, then I no longer know whose god is the god of the law — I'm afraid it may be Marcion's! But if the gospel of Christ is fulfilled by this very precept, and Christ is not the Creator's — then what exactly have we been arguing about all this time? [14] Whether or not Christ declared, "I did not arrive to abolish the law, but rather to complete it," the man from Pontus has labored in vain trying to deny that saying. If the gospel did not fulfill the law, well then — the law has fulfilled the gospel! And it is well done that in his closing he threatens the "judgment-seat of Christ" — the seat, that is, of a judge and an avenger, that is, of the Creator — thereby establishing as one to be earned the very one he presents as one to be feared, even while preaching him as another god.
15. ON THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIANS.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 15 ========

[1] Nor will it be tiresome to attend to the shorter letters too — there is flavor even in a few words. "The Jews had killed their prophets." I might well ask: what is that to the apostle of another god — and indeed the best of gods — who is not even said to condemn the sins of his own people, and who, by rejecting those same prophets, in a sense destroys them himself? What wrong, after all, did Israel commit in his eyes, if it killed men whom he too had already rejected, if he himself had first pronounced a hostile sentence against them? No — their offense was against their own God. It is the one whose injured party it is who charges the wrong; certainly it is anyone but the adversary of the one injured. Nor would he have burdened them further by charging them also with the Lord's murder, saying, "who both killed the Lord... and their own prophets" — though "their own" may well be the heretic's insertion. [2] For what is so bitter about it, if men who had already butchered their own god's prophets went on to kill Christ, the preacher of a different god? The whole point of the aggravation is that they had killed both the Lord and his servants. But if they killed one god's Christ and another's prophets, he has merely equated two impieties, not aggravated one by the other. Yet they were not on a level to be equated; so the charge could only be an aggravation if both crimes were committed against one and the same Lord under two headings. Therefore Christ and the prophets belong to the same God. [3] As for what he calls "our sanctification," which is "the will of God" — you can recognize it from the very things he forbids. "That you abstain," he says, "from fornication" — not from marriage; "that each one know how to possess his own vessel in honor." How? "not in the passion of lust, as the Gentiles do." Now lust is not attributed even by the Gentiles to marriage itself, but to excesses that are unnatural and monstrous forms of self-indulgence... Sanctity, then, stands opposed also to shamefulness and impurity — not excluding marriage, but excluding lust; it treats our "vessel" with the honor due to marriage. This passage I would handle without prejudice to a deeper, more complete holiness — favoring continence and virginity over marriage, yet not thereby prohibiting it. For it is destroyers of marriage, not devotees of chastity, that I am here beating back. [4] He says that those who remain until the coming of Christ, together with those who died in Christ and rise first, will be caught up in the clouds into the air to meet the Lord. I recognize in this the very thing the heavenly substances themselves — Jerusalem herself, who is above — marveled at long before, foreseeing it; and Isaiah proclaiming: "Who are these that fly here like clouds, like doves with their young, to me?" If Christ has prepared this ascent for us, then he is the Christ of whom Amos speaks: "who builds his ascent into the heavens" — for himself, certainly, and for his own. From whom, then, shall I now hope for this, if not from the one from whom I have heard it foretold? [5] What spirit does he forbid to be quenched, and what prophecies does he forbid to be counted as nothing? Not the Creator's spirit, surely, nor the Creator's prophecies, according to Marcion — for what he himself destroys, he has already quenched and made nothing of, and one cannot forbid the quenching of what one has already reduced to nothing. It falls to Marcion, then, to produce today, in his own church, a spirit of his god that need not be quenched, and prophecies that are not to be counted as nothing. And if he does produce what he imagines he has, let him know that we will put whatever it is to the test of the true form of spiritual and prophetic grace and power — that it foretell the future, reveal the secrets of the heart, and expound the mysteries. [6] Since he can produce and prove nothing of the kind, we will bring forward the Creator's own spirit alongside his prophecies, proclaiming him in his own words. And so it will be established what the apostle meant — namely, the things that were to come in the church of that God who, since he exists, has a spirit that is also at work, and a promise that is still being fulfilled. [7] Come, then — you who reject the flesh's deliverance, and who, whenever "body" appears in such passages, insist on reading it as something other than fleshly substance — how do you explain that the apostle distinguished all our substances by their proper names, and set them all together in a single prayer for salvation, wishing that "our spirit and body and soul be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord and Savior Christ"? [8] For he set down both soul and body — two things, as distinct as they are two. Although both soul and body have each their own particular quality, as does spirit too, still, when body and soul are named distinctly, the soul has its own proper name, needing no borrowing of the common word "body"; that word is left for the flesh, which, having no proper name of its own here, must of necessity use the common one. Indeed, besides spirit and soul, I know of no further substance within a person to which the label "body" might be applied, other than the flesh — understanding it under the name "body" every time it is not named outright; and all the more so here, where the thing called "body" is called by its own name.
16. ON THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIANS.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 16 ========

[1] We are forced to repeat certain points again and again, so as to confirm what follows from them. Here too we say the Lord is proclaimed by the apostle as the one who repays according to each side's deserts — either the Creator, or (what Marcion refuses) an equal of the Creator — with whom it is just to repay affliction to those who afflict us, and rest to us who are afflicted, at the revelation of the Lord Jesus coming from heaven with the angels of his power and in flaming fire. But the heretic, by deleting 'flame' and 'fire,' has only put out his own case, lest, of course, he should make this our God. Yet the vanity of his erasure still shows through. [2] For when the apostle writes that the Lord is coming for vengeance, to be exacted from those who do not know God and who do not obey the gospel — who, he says, will pay the penalty of destruction, eternal, cast out from the presence of the Lord and away from the splendor of his strength — it follows that he is bringing in 'flame' and 'fire' precisely because he is coming to punish. So here too, whether Marcion likes it or not, Christ belongs to the God who burns, and that is the Creator's mark — that he also takes vengeance on those who do not know the Lord, that is, on the pagans. [3] For he set them apart separately: 'those not obeying the gospel' — whether sinning Christians or Jews. But to exact penalties from pagans, who perhaps have never even known the gospel, does not belong to that god who is by nature unknown, and who is revealed nowhere except in the gospel, and is not knowable by everyone. To the Creator, however, even a natural recognition is owed, understood from his works, and from there sought out toward a fuller knowledge. It is his prerogative, then, to punish even those who do not know God — since it is not permitted to be ignorant of him. And that very phrase — 'cast out from the presence of the Lord and away from the splendor of his strength' — echoing Isaiah's wording, on that very basis smacks of the same Lord who 'rises up to shatter the earth.' [4] But who is this 'man of sin, son of perdition,' who must be revealed before the Lord's coming, exalting himself above everything called god and every object of worship, taking his seat in the temple of God and proclaiming himself god? On our side, of course, this is Antichrist, as both the old prophecies and the new teach — as the apostle John, who says that already many antichrists have gone out into the world, forerunners of the spirit of Antichrist, denying that Christ has come in the flesh, and dissolving Jesus — namely, in the Creator God. But on Marcion's side, I hardly know whether there even is a Christ of the Creator's. On his view, he has not yet come. Whichever of the two he is, though, I ask: why does he come 'with every kind of power, and signs, and wonders that deceive'? [5] 'Because,' says Paul, 'they refused to embrace a fondness for the truth, so that they could be kept safe, and for this reason he will send upon them a working of deceit,' so that all may be judged who did not believe the truth but consented to wickedness. So then, if Antichrist belongs to the Creator's side too, the Creator will be the God who sends him, to lead astray in delusion those who withheld belief from the truth for their own saving — and to the same one, then, will belong both the truth and the deliverance, since he punishes their refusal of it by handing them over to error; that is, this belongs to the Creator, to whom it is entirely fitting that his very jealousy should deceive by error those he could not win by truth. But if he is not our Antichrist, then, on Marcion's own reckoning, he is the Creator's Christ! [6] And what sense would it make for the Creator's Christ to be sent to avenge his own truth? But even if he grants that this is about Antichrist, I would say just the same: what sense does it make that Satan, an angel of the Creator, should be necessary to him, and be slain by him, if it takes an agent of the Creator to carry out this work of deceit? In short, if there is no doubting that the angel, and the truth, and the deliverance are owed to the one to whom also are owed the wrath, the jealousy, and the sending of deceit against the scornful and the deserters — and even against those who are simply ignorant (so that even Marcion may at last step down and admit that his own god too is 'jealous') — then who has the better claim to anger? [7] I should think: the one who, from the very beginning of things, laid the groundwork for the recognition of himself through nature, through works, through kindnesses, through blows, through preachings, through witnesses — and yet was not recognized; rather than the one who has been brought forward only once, through a single, and that an uncertain, instrument of a gospel — a gospel that does not even openly proclaim a different god! So then, to whomever vengeance belongs, to him also belongs the matter of vengeance — I mean the gospel, and the truth, and the salvation. And it belongs to the discipline of him who bids men work in order to eat, that he also 'commanded that the ox treading out the grain should not be muzzled.'
17. ON THE EPISTLE TO THE LAODICEANS.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 17 ========

[1] By the true reading of the church we have this letter sent to the Ephesians, not to the Laodiceans; but Marcion at some point took it into his head to tamper with the title, as though he were the most painstaking of investigators even in this. But the titles make no difference, since the apostle wrote to all even while writing to some in particular — certainly proclaiming as God the one in Christ to whom the things proclaimed properly belong. To whom then will it belong, according to the good pleasure he set forth in the mystery of his will, in the plan for the fulfillment of the times (to render the Greek word as it sounds) “to sum up” — that is, to bring back to the beginning, or to review from the beginning — all things in Christ, both things in heaven and things on earth, except to him whose all things will be, from the beginning, even the beginning itself, from whom come both the times and the plan for the fulfillment of the times, on account of which all things are reviewed and summed up in Christ? [2] But of the other god, what beginning — that is, from where — whose work is nothing? What times without a beginning? What fulfillment without times? What plan without fulfillment? In short, what deed has he to his name anywhere upon the earth, such that some protracted design for fulfilling the times could be credited to him, for the summing up of all things in Christ, even the things in heaven? [3] Nor shall we suppose that the things in heaven, whatever they are, were done by another than the one by whom it is agreed the things on earth were done as well. But if it will not do to reckon all these things as belonging to any other from the beginning than the Creator, who will believe that they are summed up by another into another Christ, and not by their own author into their own Christ? If they are the Creator's, they must of necessity be different from a different god; and if different, then certainly opposed. How then are opposites to be summed up in the very one by whom, in the end, they are destroyed? For what Christ do the words that follow proclaim, when he says, ‘that we should be unto the praise of his glory, we who had hoped beforehand in Christ’? For who could have hoped beforehand — that is, hoped in God before he came — except the Jews, to whom Christ was foretold from the beginning? [4] The one who was foretold, then, is the one who was hoped for beforehand. And indeed he applies this to himself — that is, to the Jews — so as to draw a distinction when he turns to the nations: ‘In whom you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel, in which you believed and were sealed with the Holy Spirit of his promise.’ Whose promise? The one made through Joel: ‘In the final days, from my own Spirit I will pour forth a portion onto all flesh’ — meaning, onto the nations as well. So both the Spirit and the gospel will belong to that very Christ who was hoped for beforehand, when he was being proclaimed. [5] But the father of glory is also the one whose Christ is sung as king of glory in the psalm, ascending: ‘Who is he, this glorious king? The Lord of the armies — he is that glorious king.’ From him is sought the spirit of wisdom, in whom this same class of spiritual gifts is also enumerated among the seven spirits through Isaiah. He will give enlightened eyes of the heart, he who also endowed the outward eyes with light, who is displeased by the blindness of his people: ‘And who is blind but my servants?’ and, ‘The servants of God have been blinded.’ [6] With him too are the riches of the inheritance among the saints, he who promised that inheritance from the calling of the nations: ‘Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance.’ He exerted his mighty strength in Christ, when he brought him back up from among the dead and placed him at his own right hand, subjecting all things beneath him — he who also said, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool’; since elsewhere as well the Spirit addresses the Father on the matter of the Son, saying, ‘You have laid all things beneath his feet.’ If from these words we are to infer a different god and a different Christ from the ones acknowledged as belonging to the Creator, then let us go looking for the Creator. [7] Well, I think we have found him, when he speaks of those dead in their trespasses, in which they once walked according to the age of this world, according to the ruler who wields authority over the air, and who is now active in the sons of disbelief. But not even here can Marcion twist “world” to mean the world's own god. For the created thing is not like its creator, the made thing like its maker, the world like God. Nor, indeed, will he who is prince of the power of the ages be styled prince of the power of the air. [8] For the ruler of higher things is never denoted by lower things, though the lower things too are reckoned as belonging to him. Nor can he be seen as the worker of unbelief, since he himself rather suffers it, from both Jews and nations. It is enough, then, if these things do not fall upon the Creator. But if there is one to whom they apply more fittingly, the apostle certainly knew this better than we do. Who is he? Without doubt the one who has cut off the sons of unbelief from the Creator himself, having taken possession of this very air, just as the prophet reports him as saying: ‘I will set my throne among the clouds, I will be like the Most High.’ [9] This will be the devil, whom elsewhere too — if indeed they wish the apostle to be read that way — we shall recognize as ‘the god of this age.’ For he has filled the whole age with the lie of divinity. But if he plainly had not existed, then these words could have been taken as aimed at the Creator. But the apostle had also lived his former life in Judaism. It is not because he mentioned the trespasses in which we all once lived that the lord and prince of this air should therefore be understood as the Creator, but because in Judaism he himself had once been one of the sons of unbelief, having the devil as his agent, when he was hounding the assembly and its Creator's own Christ, for which reason he likewise states, ‘We were by nature children of wrath’; [10] but “by nature,” lest, because the Creator called the Jews sons, the heretic should claim that wrath has the Creator for its lord. For when he says, ‘We were by nature children of wrath,’ the Jews are not sons of the Creator by nature but by the election of the fathers; he refers the sons of wrath to nature, not to the Creator, and finally adds, ‘even as the rest,’ who certainly are not sons of God. It appears that trespasses and the desires of the flesh and unbelief and wrath are reckoned to the common nature of all men, the devil nonetheless preying upon that nature, which he himself has already infected by sowing the seed of sin. [11] ‘We are his handiwork,’ he says, ‘shaped in Christ.’ To fashion is one thing, to create another. But he gave both to one and the same. Man, however, is the workmanship of the Creator. The same one, then, who made him also created him in Christ. As far as substance goes, he made; as far as grace goes, he created. [12] Look too at the connection of thought. ‘Remember that you, the nations, were once in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by that which is called the circumcision in the flesh made by hand, that at that time you were without Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and outsiders to the covenants and to their promise, holding no hope, godless within the world.’ But without what god were the nations, and without what Christ? Surely without the one to whom the commonwealth of Israel, the covenants, and the promise all belonged. ‘But now,’ he says, ‘in Christ you who were once far off have been made near by his blood.’ Far off from whom, previously? From those very things he named earlier — the Creator's Christ, Israel's commonwealth, the covenants, the promise's hope, God himself. [13] If this is so, then the nations, who were once far from these things, are now brought near to them in Christ. But if we have been made close, in Christ, to the commonwealth of Israel, which consists in the religion of the Creator God, and to the covenants and the promise and to their very God, then it is quite ridiculous to say that the Christ of a different god has drawn us near, from far off, to the Creator. [14] The apostle recalled how it was foretold that the nations would be called from far off: ‘They who were far from me have drawn near to my righteousness.’ For both the righteousness and the peace of the Creator were being announced in Christ, as we have already shown many times. And so, he says, ‘he himself is our peace, who has made the two one’ — that is, the Jewish people and the gentile — ‘the near and the far, breaking down the middle wall of enmity, in his flesh.’ But Marcion removed “his,” so as to give enmity to “the flesh,” as if by some fleshly fault, rather than the flesh being Christ's own rival. So, as I have said elsewhere, and say here too — not a Marrucine but a Pontic — you who confessed the blood above now deny the flesh here. [15] If he emptied the law of the sentences of its precepts, certainly by fulfilling the law (for ‘You shall not commit adultery’ is already emptied out when it is said, ‘Nor shall you look with lust’; ‘You shall not kill’ is emptied out when it is said, ‘Nor shall you speak evil’), you cannot make him the adversary of the law when he is really its ally. ‘That he might create the two in himself’ — the same one who made them, creating them, as already stated before (‘we are indeed his handiwork, shaped in Christ’) — ‘into one new man, making peace’ (if truly new, then truly man too, not a phantom — new indeed, and newly born of a virgin by God's Spirit), ‘that he might reconcile both to God’ — and to the God whom both peoples, Jewish and gentile, had offended — ‘in one body,’ he says, ‘having slain the enmity in himself through the cross.’ So here too the flesh is the body in Christ, which was able to suffer the cross. [16] So then, this one, announcing peace to those who were near and those who were far off, having together gained access to the Father, we are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens of the saints, members of the household of God (of that God, surely, from whom we showed above we had been strangers and set far off), built up on the foundation of the apostles. The heretic removed ‘and of the prophets,’ forgetting that the Lord set both apostles and prophets in the church. He was afraid, no doubt, that our building in Christ might also be shown resting on the foundations of the old prophets, since the apostle himself never ceases anywhere to have us built up out of the prophets. For where else did he get the idea of calling Christ the topmost cornerstone, if not from the sense of the psalm: ‘The very stone the builders threw aside has now become the corner's head’?
18.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 18 ========

[1] I am not surprised that a heretic who cuts off with his hands should also make off with syllables, when he generally makes off with whole pages as well. "Grace was given to me," says the apostle, "the least of all, to enlighten all men as to what is the dispensation of the mystery hidden from the ages in God who created all things." The heretic has snatched away the preposition "in," and made it read instead: "hidden from the ages, of the God who created all things" — as though the hiding were done to God, not in God. But the falsehood gives itself away. [2] For the apostle goes on: "that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places." Whose principalities and powers is he speaking of? If the Creator's, how could God have willed to display his wisdom to the Creator's principalities and powers, yet not to the Creator himself — when powers could know nothing at all apart from their own prince? Or if he did not name God here because God himself is reckoned among them as their prince, then he would have pronounced the mystery hidden in the very principalities and powers of the God who made all things, thereby counting God among them. [3] But if he says it was hidden "to" them, he ought rather to have said it was manifest to them. So it was not hidden from God, but hidden in God the maker of all things — hidden, that is, from his principalities and powers: "For who has grasped the Lord's own thinking, or who has served as his counsellor?" Here the heretic, caught out, will perhaps shift ground and say his own deity chose to reveal to his own powers and principalities the dispensation of this mystery, one the creator-God had never grasped. And what point would there be in pretending ignorance on the part of a Creator who is foreign and set apart by so vast a gulf, when even the household servants of the superior god did not know it either? [4] All the same, it was to become known to the Creator too. Was it not, after all, bound to be revealed to him, since it concerned what lies under heaven and on his own earth? So this confirms exactly what I established above. For if the Creator was one day to come to know that hidden mystery of the superior God, then the text ought to have run: "hidden from the God who made all things," and gone on: "so that its manifold wisdom would be revealed to him," and then "to the powers and principalities of whatever god" with whom the Creator was to come to know it. So it is quite clear the preposition was suppressed, and even so the truth holds its own. [5] Now let me pick a quarrel of my own with you over the apostle's allegories. What forms could this new god have had among the prophets? "He led captivity captive," it says. With what weapons? In what battles? By laying waste to which nation? By toppling which city? What wives, what boys, what petty kings did the victor chain and drag along? For when Christ is sung of in David as "girded with a sword upon his thigh," or in Isaiah as carrying off "the plunder of Samaria and the strength of Damascus," you are here forced to construct a warrior who can actually be seen. [6] Recognize, then, both his armor and his spiritual campaign — now that you have learned there is such a thing as a spiritual captivity — and recognize this one too as belonging to the same Christ, if only because the apostle took his very mention of this captivity from the prophets, from whom he also took his commands: "Putting away lying, speak the truth each to his neighbor," and "Be angry, yet do not sin" (in the very words with which the psalm explains its own meaning), "do not let the sun set while your anger lasts." "Take no part in the deeds done in darkness." "With the just you shall be just, and with the crooked you shall be made crooked," and "Put away evil from among you," and [7] "Go out from the midst of them," and "Touch no unclean thing; be separate, you who carry the vessels of the Lord." So too, "Be not drunk with wine, for that is disgraceful" comes from the same source as the rebuke of those who make the saints drunk: "and you gave my holy ones wine to drink" — the very thing the priest Aaron and his sons were forbidden to drink when approaching the sanctuary. And to teach singing to God "in psalms and hymns" belongs to the very one who knew that people who drink wine to the sound of timbrels and harps rather than psalteries stand accused by God. So then, whoever's precepts, or the seeds and increase of whose precepts, I find here — his apostle I recognize. [8] But as for wives being subject to their husbands — on what does he ground that? "Because," he says, "the husband stands as head over the wife." Tell me, Marcion: does your deity ground his own law's authority upon a work belonging to the Creator? And this next point is plainer still, for he draws the very standing of Christ himself and his church from the same source: "as Christ also is the head of the church." Likewise when he says, "He who loves his wife loves his own flesh, as Christ also loved the church" — you see your Christ and your church compared to the Creator's own handiwork. What honor is paid to flesh, under the name of the church! [9] "No one," he says, "ever hated his own flesh" (except, clearly, Marcion alone), "but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ also does the church." But you alone have hated it, robbing it of the resurrection. You ought to hate the church too, then, since it is loved in exactly the same way by Christ. But no — Christ loved the flesh just as he loved the church. No one fails to love even the mere image of his bride; indeed he keeps it, honors it, crowns it. A likeness shares in the honor due to the reality. I shall now undertake to prove that the same God belongs to male and to Christ, to woman and to church, to flesh and to spirit, with the apostle himself invoking — indeed expounding — a sentence of the Creator's: "For this cause a man shall leave father and mother, and the two shall become one flesh": is this a great mystery? [10] It is enough, amid all this, that the Creator's mysteries are great in the apostle's eyes, however small they may be in the heretics'. "But I speak," he says, "in reference to Christ and the church." There you have an interpretation of the mystery, not a separation of it. He is showing that the figure of the mystery was supplied in advance by the very one whose mystery it in fact was. What does Marcion make of that? The Creator could not have prefigured the shapes of an unknown god — and even less those of an adversary, if known. The higher god had no business borrowing anything at all from the lower one, least of all for the purpose of tearing him down. [11] "Let children also obey their parents." For even though Marcion has cut it out, the law itself declares: "This is the first commandment with a promise," "Honor your father and mother," and "Parents, bring up your children in the discipline and correction of the Lord." For you have heard that it was said also to the ancients: "You shall tell these things in the ears of your children, and your children likewise in the ears of their children." What need have I now of two gods, if the discipline is one? And even if there are two, I will follow the one who taught first. But if we must wrestle against "the world-rulers" — how many creator-gods we suddenly have! [12] For why should I not press this point too — that there ought to have been only one "world-ruler" named, if it meant the Creator, to whom the powers he had just listed belonged? Moreover, since above he bids us put on the armor in which we are to stand against the machinations of the devil, he has already shown that what he links to the devil belongs to the devil — the powers and world-rulers of this darkness — which we too attribute to the devil. But if the devil is the Creator, then who could possibly play the devil's role within the Creator's own household? Or are there, just as there are two gods, also two devils, and, in the plural, both powers and world-rulers? [13] But how can the Creator, the devil, and God be the same, when the devil is not identically both God and devil? For either both are gods, if both are now devils too, or else whichever one here is God and not devil, the devil likewise is not God. I ask by what accusation the very name "devil" could ever fit the Creator. Perhaps he laid some charge against an intention of the superior god — the very thing he himself is said to have suffered at the archangel's hands, and falsely at that: for God had not forbidden the taste of that little tree so that men should not become gods, but so that they should not die by transgression. Nor, again, do "the spiritual forces of wickedness" point to the Creator merely because he added "in the heavenlies": [14] for the apostle too knew that spiritual wickedness had done its work in the heavens, in the angels who were scandalized by the daughters of men. And how likely is it that a man in chains — for the very freedom of his preaching, for constancy in making the mystery plain "in the opening of his mouth," which is exactly what he there begs of God on the church's behalf — should go after the Creator through riddles and I-know-not-what ambiguities?
19. ON THE EPISTLE TO THE COLOSSIANS.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 19 ========

[1] In my prescription against all heresies I habitually strike a shortcut from the testimony of dates, claiming for our rule priority over every heretical afterbirth. This the apostle will now prove too, when he speaks of the hope laid up in the heavens, which you heard proclaimed in that trustworthy message, the gospel now come to you, as also into the whole world. For if by that early date the evangelical tradition had already flowed everywhere, how much more now? [2] Furthermore, if it is ours that has flowed everywhere — more than any heretical version, let alone the recent-vintage Marcion's — then ours will be the apostolic faith. As for Marcion's, even once it has filled the whole world, it still will not be able to defend itself as apostolic. For it will be established as apostolic only in the sense that it was the version which first filled the world — namely, the gospel of that god who also sang this of his own preachings: Their voice has traveled across every land, and their sayings unto earth's farthest reaches. [3] He terms Christ the image of the unseen God. But we too say that Christ's Father is unseen, knowing that the Son has always in the past been seen, whenever he was seen, in God's name, as his image — lest anyone carve out of this passage some distinction between a God who can be seen and one who cannot, when it has long been settled as a definition of our God: No man shall see the Lord and live. [4] If Christ is not the firstborn of creation, as the Word of the Creator by whom every thing was fashioned, apart from whom not a single thing came to be; if it was not in him that the universe was founded, in the heavens and on the earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones, dominions, rulers, or authorities; if it is not through him and in him that all things were founded (for these are the very things that should have displeased Marcion) — then the apostle would surely not have stated so baldly, And he is before all things. For how is he before all things, if not before all created things? How before all created things, if not the firstborn of creation, if not the Word of the Creator? On what ground will he be proved to have existed before all things, when he only appeared after all things? Who knows that someone was prior, when he does not even know that he existed? [5] How, likewise, did it please that it should be the good god in whom all fullness dwells? For to begin with, what is this fullness, if not made up precisely of those things Marcion has stripped away — the things founded in Christ, in the heavens and on the earth, angels and men, the invisible and the visible, thrones and dominions and principalities and powers? Or if our pseudo-apostles and Jewish gospel-peddlers have smuggled these in on their own authority, then let Marcion produce the fullness of his own god, who founded nothing. Besides, how does it make sense that the rival and destroyer of the Creator's fullness should wish that very fullness to dwell in his own Christ? And to whom, after all, does he reconcile all things in himself, making peace through the blood of his cross, if not to the one whom all things had offended, against whom they had rebelled by transgression, whose they had originally been? For one can be conciliated with a stranger, but reconciled only with one's own. [6] So too us — once we were alienated and hostile in mind through evil works — he restores to favor with the Creator, whose offense we had incurred by worshiping the creation instead of the Creator. And wherever he also says that the church stands as Christ's body, as here where he says he fills up in his flesh what is lacking of the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church, that does not mean you may transfer every mention of 'body' away from the substance of flesh across the board. For above, too, he says we are reconciled in his body through death — surely in that body in which he was able to die through flesh; he died, that is, not through the church but plainly on behalf of the church, exchanging one body for another, the fleshly for the spiritual. [7] But when he warns us to beware of hairsplitting talk and philosophy, as an empty deception, that which is according to the elements of the world — not meaning by that heaven or earth, but rather worldly literature and human tradition, that is, the tradition of hairsplitters and philosophers — it would take too long, and be the business of another work, to show that every heresy stands condemned by this sentence, since all of them are built out of the resources of hairsplitting and the rules of philosophy. But let Marcion at least acknowledge that the founding tenet of his faith comes from the school of Epicurus, representing the Lord as inert, so that he cannot be said to be feared; and that he pairs matter with the Creator-god straight out of the Stoic porch, denying the resurrection of the flesh — a doctrine, incidentally, on which no philosophy agrees with him. [8] From the cleverness of such minds our truth is so far removed that it does not shrink from stirring up God's wrath, and confidently holds that he brought all things out of nothing, and promises that he will restore this very flesh, and is not ashamed that Christ was born from a virgin's womb — while philosophers and heretics and pagans themselves laugh. For God selected the foolish things of the world so as to put the wise to shame — that same God, no doubt, who from the vantage of this very plan of his was foretelling that he would bring the wisdom of the wise to nothing. By this simplicity of the truth, set against hairsplitting talk and philosophy, we are incapable of any perverse cleverness. [9] Finally, if God gives us life together with Christ, forgiving us our transgressions, we cannot believe that transgressions are forgiven to one against whom none had ever been committed, as though he were previously a stranger to sin. Come now: when he says, Let no one judge you in food or drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath, which are a mere shadow of what was coming, whereas the body belongs to Christ — what do you make of that, Marcion? We need not go back over the law again, except that here too he teaches how it has been set aside, precisely by being transferred from shadow to body, that is, from figures to the truth, which is Christ. Therefore the shadow belongs to the one to whom the body also belongs — that is, the law belongs to the very one to whom Christ belongs. Go ahead, assign the law to one god and Christ to another, if you can manage to separate any shadow from the body which casts it. Christ plainly belongs to the law, if he is the substance of which the law is only the outline. [10] But if he is also rebuking certain people who, on the strength of angelic visions, said that certain foods must be abstained from — 'do not touch, do not taste' — wanting to walk about in a show of humility of mind, not holding fast to the head, that does not mean he is thereby striking a blow at the law and Moses, as though he had established the prohibition of certain foods on the basis of some angelic superstition. [11] For it is agreed that Moses received the law from God. In fact this very discipline he assigns, according to the precepts and doctrines of men, to those who do not hold the head — that is, the very one in whom everything is summed up, in Christ, back to whom even the indifference of foods is being recalled at its origin. As for the rest of the precepts, it is enough that I have already shown elsewhere, as being the same precepts, that they flow from the Creator, who, in proclaiming that the old order would pass away and that he would fashion all things anew, and even commanding, Make for yourselves a fresh renewal, was already at that time teaching men to strip off the old self and clothe themselves with the new.
20. ON THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 20 ========

[1] When he lists the variety of preaching — that some, emboldened by trust in his chains, proclaimed the word more boldly, others out of envy and rivalry, some indeed out of a wish to be well thought of, most out of love, a few out of jealousy, and by now some even preached Christ out of sheer spite — this would certainly have been the place to criticize the preaching itself for its diversity of opinion, if such diversity had produced so great a variety even of doctrines. But in laying out this diversity he proposes only differences of temperament, not of the rule of the sacraments, and confirms that one Christ and one God of his was preached whatever the motive behind the preaching; and so he says, It makes no difference to me whether Christ is announced out of rivalry or out of truth, because one and the same Christ was being announced, whether out of rivalry or out of a genuine faith. [2] For he applied the mention of 'truth' to the sincerity of the preaching, not to the rule itself — since the rule was indeed one, but the faith of some of the preachers was true, that is, straightforward, and of others overly learned. Since this is so, it is clear that the Christ preached was the one who had always been announced. For if a wholly different Christ had been introduced, far from the apostle's own, the innovation involved would surely have produced real diversity. Nor, indeed, would there have been lacking people to interpret the gospel preaching as pointing nonetheless to the Christ of the Creator, since even today our view holds the larger share everywhere over the heretical one. On this point too the apostle would not have kept silent about denouncing and rebuking such diversity. So, since the diversity is not even singled out for criticism, the novelty is not established either. [3] Now, on the subject of Christ's substance, here too the Marcionites think the apostle backs them up — that there was a phantom of flesh in Christ — when he says that, though he was constituted in the form of God, he did not think it robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant — not the reality of one — and being made in the likeness of men — not in a man — and found in the shape of a man — not in substance, that is, not in flesh. [4] As if 'shape' and 'likeness' and 'form' did not also apply to substance! It is worth noting, though, that elsewhere he likewise styles Christ the image of the unseen God. Surely, then, here too, where he sets him in the 'form' of God, will Christ not truly be God, if likewise he was not truly man when constituted in the 'shape' of man? On both counts the reality would have to be excluded, if 'form' and 'likeness' and 'shape' are to be claimed for a phantom. But if in the 'form' and 'image' by which he is the Son of the Father he is prejudged to be truly God, then equally in the 'form' and 'image' by which he is the Son of man he must be found truly man. [5] Indeed he set down 'found' deliberately, as denoting a most certain man. For what is found is agreed to exist. Just so, God too was found, through his power, as man was found through his flesh — since Paul would not have pronounced him subject to death had he not been constituted in a mortal substance. And it is more telling still that he adds, even the death of the cross. He would not have magnified the atrocity by extolling the greatness of this submission, had he known it to be an illusion produced by a phantom — a submission that merely tricked death rather than truly underwent it, that performed no real act in the suffering but only a piece of playacting. [6] As for the things he had once counted gain — which he also lists above: the glory of the flesh, the mark of circumcision, his lineage as a Hebrew of Hebrews, his status of the tribe of Benjamin, the shining rank of a Pharisee — these he now counts as loss; not loss of God, but the folly of the Jews. He reckons them as so much dung by comparison with the knowledge of Christ, not by way of rejecting the Creator-God, holding a righteousness that is no longer his own, the one that comes from the law, but the one that comes through him — that is, through Christ, from God. So, you say, by this very distinction the law was not of Christ's God. Rather subtle of you. Well then, take something subtler still. When he says, not the righteousness that is of the law, but the one that is through him, he would not have said through him of anyone other than the one whose law it was. [7] Our citizenship, he says, is in the heavens. I recognize here the ancient promise of the Creator made to Abraham: And I will make your seed as the stars of heaven. That is also why star differs from star in glory. But if Christ, coming from the heavens, will transfigure the body of our humiliation to be conformed to the body of his glory, then this body of ours will indeed rise again — this body which is humbled in its sufferings, and cast down into the earth under that very law of death. For how will it be transfigured, if it will not exist at all? Or if this is said only of those who, at God's coming, are found still alive in the flesh and are to be changed, what then will happen to those who rise first? Will they have nothing left to be transfigured from? And yet he says, Together with them we shall be snatched up amid the clouds to greet the Lord. If we are caught up together with them, then we are transfigured together with them too.
21. ON THE EPISTLE TO PHILEMON.

======== Adversus Marcionem 5 — Chapter 21 ========

[1] This letter alone had its very brevity to thank for escaping Marcion's forging hand. Yet I am amazed that, having accepted a letter written to a single individual, he rejected the two written to Timothy and the one to Titus, composed on matters of church order. He was aiming, I suppose, to tamper even with the tally of the epistles. [2] Remember, reader, that we have already proved, from what was treated earlier concerning the apostle as well, the very points at issue here, and that whatever in this work had been deferred we have now cleared up — so that you neither judge this a superfluous repetition, by which we have confirmed our original hope, nor regard as suspect that earlier postponement, by which we have now dug these matters out in due time. If you survey the whole little work, you will find neither redundancy here nor diffidence there.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 1 ========

[1] The devil has counterfeited the truth in various ways. At times he has tried to shake it by seeming to defend it. He claims there is a single Lord, the almighty maker of the world, so that he can turn even this oneness into a heresy. He claims that it was the Father in person who descended into the virgin's womb, was himself born from her, he himself suffered — in short, that he himself is Jesus Christ. But the serpent trips over himself here, because when he tempted Jesus Christ after John's baptism, he attacked him as the Son of God, certain — even on the evidence of the very scriptures he was then using to construct his temptation — that God had a Son: [2] "If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become loaves"; and again, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here; for it is written that he has commanded his angels concerning you" — the Father, of course — "that they will lift you in their hands, so that you never strike your foot against a stone." [3] Or will he now accuse the Gospels of lying, saying: "That was Matthew's and Luke's affair; as for me, I went straight to God himself, I tempted the Almighty face to face — that is exactly why I approached him, and exactly why I tempted him; otherwise, if he really were the Son of God, would I ever have condescended to bother with him?" No — the devil himself has been a liar from the beginning, and if he has ever suborned some man to be his tool, Praxeas is such a man. [4] For this fellow was the first to bring this brand of perversity out of Asia to Rome — a restless character to begin with, and further puffed up by boasting of his martyrdom, on the strength of nothing but a short, plain spell of discomfort in prison; even had he handed over his body to be burned, he would have gained nothing by it, since he lacks God's own love, the very gifts of which he went on to assault. [5] For this same man, when the bishop of Rome had already acknowledged the prophecies of Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla, and, on the strength of that acknowledgment, was bringing peace to the churches of Asia and Phrygia, forced him — by lying about those prophets and their churches, and by pleading the authority of his predecessors — to recall the letters of peace he had already sent out and to abandon his plan of admitting the gifts. So it was that Praxeas did the devil's business twice over at Rome: he drove out prophecy and brought in heresy, he put the Paraclete to flight and crucified the Father. [6] The Praxean weeds sown here too had sprouted, while most people slept in the simplicity of their doctrine; but they were later exposed by the one through whom God willed it, and seemed even to have been pulled up. In fact their teacher had by then guarded himself with a recantation of his error, and the signed document is still kept among the "psychics," among whom the affair was then transacted. [7] After that, silence — until, later still, our acknowledgment and defense of the Paraclete separated us from the psychics. But those weeds had by then scattered their seed everywhere; and so for a good while it lay low under a cover of hypocrisy and stubborn vitality, and now it has broken out again. But it too will be uprooted again, if the Lord wills it, in this present campaign; if not, on his own day all the adulterated crops will be gathered together and burned, along with every other stumbling-block, in the unquenchable fire.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 2 ========

[1] And so, in their scheme, in due course the Father came to birth and the Father endured suffering — he himself, God, the Almighty Lord, is announced as Jesus Christ. We, however — both always, and now more fully, being better instructed through the Paraclete, that guide into all truth — believe in one God only, but under the following administration, which we call the oikonomia: that the one God also has a Son, his Word, who proceeded from him, by whom all things came to be and apart from whom nothing came into being; that this Word was sent by the Father into a virgin and was born of her, man and God, Son of Man and Son of God, and was named Jesus Christ; that he suffered, died, and was buried according to the scriptures, and was raised up by the Father and taken back into heaven, where he sits at the right hand of the Father, and will come to judge the living and the dead; and that from there, according to his promise, he sent forth from the Father the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, who sanctifies the trust of all who put faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. [2] That this rule has run down from the very beginning of the gospel — even before any earlier heretics, let alone before yesterday's Praxeas — will be proved both by the sheer lateness of all heretics and by the sheer novelty of yesterday's Praxeas. By this rule, equally applicable against every heresy, it has already been settled in advance that whatever is first is true, and whatever comes later is a corruption. [3] But even with that principle safely in place, room must still be left everywhere, for the sake of instructing and fortifying certain people, for further discussion — if only so that no particular error should seem to be condemned without a hearing rather than simply prejudged, especially this one, which imagines it alone possesses the plain truth, on the ground that it will not believe in the one God unless it can say that the very same being is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all at once: [4] as though he were not, in this very sense, still one — since all things come from one — through unity of substance, and the mystery of the oikonomia is nonetheless still preserved, which arranges the unity into a trinity, setting forth Father, Son, and Spirit as three — three, yet not in condition but in sequence, not in essence but in appearance, not in might but in aspect — though of a single essence, a single condition, and a single might, since it is one God from whom these degrees, forms, and aspects are reckoned under the names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. How they admit of number without division, the discussion that follows will show.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 3 ========

[1] Simple people — I will not say imprudent and uneducated ones, who nevertheless always make up the greater part of believers — since the very rule of faith itself leads them away from the many gods of this world to the one true God, and since they do not understand that this "one" is to be believed in together with his own economy, take fright at the economy itself. They assume that the trinity's number and arrangement splits the unity apart, whereas the unity, by producing a trinity from itself, is not destroyed thereby but administered thereby. And so they keep going about saying that we preach two gods, or even three, while they themselves imagine they are the worshippers of one God — as if a unity irrationally assembled did not itself make a heresy, and a trinity rationally reckoned did not itself constitute the truth! [2] "We hold to the Monarchy," they say — and even the Latin-speakers among them mouth the very sound of the word so skillfully that you would think they understood "monarchy" as well as they pronounce it! But while the Latins are eager to sound out "monarchy," even the Greeks are unwilling to understand "economy." Yet I, if I have picked up anything of either language, know that "monarchy" signifies nothing other than a single, sole rule; it does not, however, rule out the idea that the one whose rule it is might also have a son, or that he might not have made himself his own son, or that he might not administer his own monarchy through whomever he pleases. On the contrary, I say that no single power belongs so entirely, so exclusively, so much as a monarchy to one person alone that it cannot also be administered through other persons closely attached to it, whom it has itself appointed as its officials: [3] and if there should indeed be a son belonging to the one whose monarchy it is, that does not mean the monarchy is at once divided and ceases to be a monarchy, just because a son is taken in as a sharer in it; rather, it belongs, first and foremost, to the one from whom it is shared with the son, and while it remains his, it is still a monarchy, since it is held jointly by two who are so united. [4] So then, if the divine monarchy is itself administered through so many legions and armies of angels, as it is written — "a thousand thousands ministered to him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him" — and it did not for that reason cease to belong to one alone, so that it should cease to be a monarchy because it is managed through so many thousands of powers, [5] how can it be imagined that God undergoes partition and scattering in a Son and a Holy Spirit, who are allotted second and third place, sharers as they are in the very substance of the Father — a thing he does not suffer to happen even with such a vast number of angels, alien as they are to the Father's substance? Do you reckon the overthrow of his monarchy to consist in his own members, pledges, instruments, and indeed the whole force and total wealth of that monarchy? Not rightly so. [6] I would rather you train yourself to attend to the sense of the matter than to the mere sound of the word. For the overthrow of a monarchy is properly understood by you to occur when another power of its own separate standing and status is set up as a rival to it — when another god is brought in against the Creator, as with Marcion, or several gods, as with the followers of Valentinus and Prodicus: that is the overthrow of a monarchy, precisely because it is the destruction of the Creator.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 4 ========

[1] As for me, since I derive the Son from nowhere else but the substance of the Father, doing nothing without the Father's will, having been given the whole of that power by the Father — how, then, could I be tearing down, through such a faith, a monarchy which I hold to have been passed by the Father to the Son, and kept safe in the Son? Let this apply equally, for me, to the third degree, since I hold that the Spirit comes from nowhere else but the Father, through the Son. [2] So look rather to whether it is not you yourself who destroys the monarchy, by overturning its arrangement and administration, established under as many names as God willed. And indeed it so remains in its own condition, even though a trinity is introduced, that it must even be given back to the Father by the Son, since the apostle writes concerning the end: "when he hands over the reign to God the Father himself." For "he is bound to rule until God places his foes beneath his feet" — as the psalm has it: "Take your seat at my right hand, until I make your enemies a stool for your feet." "And once everything has been made subject to him — apart, of course, from the one who subjected everything to him — then the Son himself will likewise submit to the one who subjected everything to him, so that God may become all things in all." [3] We see, then, that the Son does no harm to the monarchy, even though today it resides with the Son, since it remains in its own condition with the Son, and, with that condition intact, will be restored by the Son to the Father. So no one will destroy it on this ground, once he admits a Son to whom, it is agreed, the monarchy was handed down by the Father, and by whom it will one day be restored to the Father. [4] From this single passage of the apostle alone we could already have proven the Father and the Son to be two, not one and the same — quite apart from the names "Father" and "Son" — from the very fact that the one who hands over the kingdom and the one to whom it is handed over, and likewise the one who subjects and the one to whom things are subjected, must necessarily be two.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 5 ========

[1] But since they want the two to be one, so that the Father and the Son should be taken to be the very same person, the whole question of the Son must be examined — whether he exists, who he is, and how he exists — and so the matter itself will vindicate its own shape, with the support of the scriptures and their interpretations. Some say that Genesis, in the Hebrew, actually opens: "At the outset God fashioned a Son for himself." That this may not stand as certain, I am led to think by other arguments, drawn from God's own arrangement of things, from before the founding of the world right up to the generation of the Son. [2] For before all things, God was alone — he was, to himself, both world and place and everything. Alone, however, only in the sense that nothing else existed outside him. Yet even then he was not, strictly speaking, solitary: he had at his side that which he possessed within — namely his own Reason. For God is a rational being, and Reason resided in him from the very start, and so all things spring from him; and this Reason is nothing other than his own awareness. [3] The Greeks call this logos, a word by which we also mean "word" or "speech." That is why it has already become the practice among our people, out of a naive way of translating, to say that "the Word" was with God in the beginning, when it would be more fitting to hold that "Reason" is the more ancient, because God was not from the beginning a speaker but was rational even before the beginning, and because the Word itself, consisting in reason, thereby shows that reason is prior to it, as its own substance. [4] Even so, though, it makes no real difference. For even though God had not yet sent forth his Word, he nevertheless had that Word with him, in that very Reason, within himself — silently thinking and arranging within himself what he was shortly to say through the Word; for by thinking and arranging things with his own Reason, he was making that Reason into the very Word which he was handling in speaking. [5] And so that you may grasp this more easily, look first to yourself, seeing that you were fashioned after God's own image and likeness — for you too, a rational creature, possess reason within yourself, since you were made by a rational Maker not merely as his creature but even animated out of his own substance. Notice, when you silently confer with yourself in your own reason, that this very thing is happening within you: reason meets you together with a word, at every movement of your thought, at every impulse of your perception. [6] Whatever you have thought is a word, whatever you have perceived is reason; you cannot help but utter it within your mind, and even as you speak it, you find the word acting as a kind of conversational partner, in which this very reason is present, by which you converse with it in thinking, through which, while speaking, you think. In this way there is, in a certain sense, a second within you — a word through which you speak while thinking and through which you think while speaking; the word itself is something distinct. [7] How much more fully, then, does this take place in God, whose image and likeness you yourself are counted, that he should have within himself, even while silent, both reason and, within that reason, a word? So I may, without rashness, lay down in advance that even then, before the founding of the universe, God was not alone, having within himself, thus, Reason, and within Reason, a Word, which he would make into a second alongside himself by setting it in motion within himself.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 6 ========

This same force, this same disposition of the divine mind, is displayed in the scriptures under the name of Wisdom as well. For what is wiser than God's Reason, or his Word? So hear Wisdom too, then, as a second Person already set forth: first, "The Lord fashioned me at the outset of his undertakings, the first of his deeds, prior to his shaping the earth, prior to the mountains being set firm; and before any hill he brought me into being" — begetting and founding her, that is, within his own mind. Next, recognize her standing at his side, marked off by her own distinctness: "When he prepared the heaven," she says, "I was present with him; and how he made the winds above strong, and the clouds on high, and how he set safe the fountains that are under heaven, I was with him, fitting all together; I was the one in whom he delighted; and day by day I took my delight in his presence." For as soon as God willed to bring forth into their own substances and proper forms the things he had arranged within himself in company with Wisdom and Reason and the Word, he first of all put forth that very Word, possessing in himself his own undivided reason and wisdom, so that through him — through whom all things had been conceived and arranged, indeed already made, so far as lay within God's own mind — the universe might come into being; for this alone they still lacked: to be known and grasped openly, each in its own proper form and substance.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 7 ========

Then, therefore, the Word himself too takes on his own shape and adornment, sound and voice, when God speaks the command, "Let light come to be." This marks the Word's full and proper birth, when he proceeds forth from God — first laid down by him as a thought, under the title of Wisdom ("The Lord established me at the start of his paths"), then brought forth into genuine effect ("As he set the sky in order, I stood there beside him") — from which point God makes himself a father, and by proceeding from him the Word becomes a Son, firstborn as begotten before all things, and only-begotten as alone begotten of God, properly from the womb of his own heart, as the Father himself testifies: "My heart has belched forth a good word." Then, rejoicing over him and he rejoicing correspondingly in the Father's presence: "You are my Son, today I have begotten you," and, "Before the morning star I begot you." So too the Son, in his own person, acknowledges the Father under the name of Wisdom: "The Lord established me at the start of his paths, the first of his deeds; and before any hill he brought me into being." For if in this passage Wisdom seems to say she was founded by the Lord for his works and his ways, while elsewhere it is shown through the Word that everything came to be through him, and apart from him not one thing came to be — as again, "By his Word the heavens were made firm, and by his spirit all their power" (that spirit, of course, which was inherent in the Word) — it is plain that one and the same power is meant, now under the title of Wisdom, now under the label of Word: the power that had the start of its paths in God's deeds, and that made the heavens firm, the one through whom everything came into existence and apart from whom nothing came into existence. No need to dwell longer on this, as though this were not the very same Word who carries the title of Wisdom, of Reason, and of the entire divine mind and spirit, who was made the Son of God, and who by proceeding from him was begotten. "So, then," you say, "you grant that the Word is some sort of substance, built up out of spirit and wisdom and reason?" Plainly I do. For you refuse to let him have a real, substantive existence by way of a proper substance, so that he might appear as a distinct thing and person, and so that this second one, set up by God, might make two — Father and Son, God and Word. "But," you object, "what is speech except a sound and utterance from the mouth, or, as the grammarians teach, air struck so as to be intelligible to the ear — and for the rest, some empty, vacant, incorporeal thing?" But I say that nothing empty and vacant could have come forth from God, so that what was uttered was not uttered from emptiness and vacancy; nor does that lack substance which proceeded from so great a substance and made such great substances of its own — for the Word himself made the things that were made through him. How could he who is the one without whom nothing was made himself be nothing — an empty thing working solid things, a vacant thing working full things, an incorporeal thing operating on bodies? For although something can, at times, come to be different from that through which it comes to be, still nothing whatever can come to be through that which is empty and vacant. Is the Word of God, who is termed Son and who is himself named God, an empty and vacant thing — "the Word was present alongside God, and the Word was himself God"? It is written, "You shall not take the name of God in vain." This is surely he who, though existing in the shape of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be seized. In what shape of God? In some definite shape, certainly — not in no shape at all. For who will deny that God is a body, even though God is spirit? For spirit possesses a body proper to its own kind, cast in its own shape. But if even those invisible things, whatever they are, have with God both their own body and their own form, through which they can be seen by God alone — how much the more, then, must what was sent forth from his own substance possess substance too. Whatever, then, the substance of the Word was, that I call a Person, and to it I claim the name of Son, and while granting the Son I maintain him as a second, distinct from the Father.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 8 ========

If anyone should suppose that by this I am introducing some probole — that is, a putting-forth of one thing out of another, the sort of thing Valentinus does when he produces one aeon after another out of an aeon — I will say to you first of all that the truth does not fail to make use of a term and its reality and its proper sense merely because heresy also makes use of it; rather, heresy has taken from the truth the very thing it uses to build up its lie. Did the Word of God proceed forth, or did he not? Stop with me right here, on this exact point. If he was put forth, then recognize this as the truth's own probole, and let heresy see for itself whether it has imitated anything of the truth. The question now is who uses a given thing, and its name, and how. Valentinus marks off his "putting-forths" and separates them from their author, setting them so far apart from him that the aeon does not even know the Father; indeed it longs to know him and cannot, and is very nearly swallowed up and dissolved back into the rest of substance. In our case, though, only the Son has knowledge of the Father, and he alone has disclosed what lies in the Father's bosom, and has heard and seen everything in the Father's presence, and speaks whatever the Father has enjoined upon him, and has carried out, not what he himself willed, but what belonged to the Father, a thing known to him at close quarters — indeed from the very beginning. For who knows the things that are in God, except the Spirit who is in him? Now the Word is composed of spirit, and, so to speak, the Spirit forms the body of the Word. The Word, accordingly, dwells forever within the Father, as he states, "I abide within the Father"; and remains forever alongside God, as scripture has it, "the Word was present with God"; and is at no time cut off from the Father, nor situated anywhere apart from the Father, since "the Father and I are a single thing." This, then, will count as the truth's own probole — the guardian of unity — by which we say the Son was put forth from the Father, but not separated from him. For God put forth the Word, just as the Paraclete himself teaches, in the way a root puts forth a shoot, and a spring a river, and the sun a ray; for these forms too are "puttings-forth" of the substances from which they proceed. Nor would I hesitate to call the Son now the shoot of the root, now the river of the spring, now the ray of the sun, since every source is a parent, and everything that is brought forth from a source is its offspring — much more so the Word of God, who has even properly received the name of Son. And yet the shoot is never severed from its root, nor the stream from its wellspring, nor the ray from its sun, any more than the Word is from God. So then, following the pattern of these examples, I profess that I profess two exist — God together with his Word, the Father together with his Son. For root and shoot are two things, but linked; spring and river are two forms, yet unsplit; sun and ray are two aspects, yet bound together. Whatever proceeds from another thing must of necessity rank second to the source it proceeds from, without on that account being cut away from it. But wherever a second exists, that makes two; and wherever a third is added, that makes three. For the Spirit holds third place, proceeding from God and the Son, in the same way the fruit put forth by the shoot ranks third from the root, and the channel drawn off from the stream is third from the spring, and the point of light is third from the ray, from the sun. Yet nothing is alienated from the source from which it draws its own properties. So it is that the threefold Godhead, descending from the Father through linked and joined stages, in no way disturbs the Monarchy, and yet safeguards the order of the Economy.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 9 ========

Having professed this rule, by which I maintain that Father, Son, and Spirit cannot be pulled apart from one another, keep this always before you, and so you will understand in what sense each statement is made. For observe: I say that the Father is one, the Son another, and the Spirit another — a phrase every ignorant or perverse person misconstrues, as though it meant diversity, and as though from that diversity it implied a separation of Father, Son, and Spirit. I say this out of necessity, since there are those who, in order to flatter the Monarchy, contend that Father, Son, and Spirit are one and the very same thing, working against the order of the Economy. The Son is other than the Father not by diversity but by distribution; not by division but by distinction — because the Father and the Son are not one and the same, though each differs from the other not in kind but in degree. For the Father is the whole substance, while the Son is a derivation and portion of the whole, as he himself declares: "Because the Father is greater than I." By him, too, he is sung as made lower, in the psalm: "A little lower than the angels." So too the Father is other than the Son, in that he is greater than the Son; in that the one who begets is other than the one who is begotten; in that the one who sends is other than the one who is sent; in that the one who acts is other than the one through whom it is done. And it is well that the Lord himself used this same word in speaking of the Paraclete's person, signifying not division but arrangement: "For I will ask the Father," he says, "and he will send you another Advocate, the Spirit of truth." Thus he showed the Paraclete to be other than himself, in the same way we say the Son is other than the Father — so as to show a third rank in the Paraclete, just as we show a second in the Son, on account of the order that governs the Economy. Indeed, the very fact that they are called Father and Son — is that not itself a case of one being other than the other? Certainly whatever things are, will be called by what they are called, and will be what they are called; and there can be no confusing the diversity of their names at all, because there can be no confusing the diversity of the realities they name. Let your "yes" be yes, and your "no," no; for whatever is more than this comes from evil.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 10 ========

So he is one or the other, Father or Son -- daylight and darkness are never the identical thing, nor can the Father be reckoned identical with the Son, as though the pair collapsed into a single being who is simultaneously its own opposite -- which is exactly what those most vacant of men, the Monarchians, are after. He fashioned himself, on their telling, into his own son. Yet begetting runs from a father toward a son, and a son back toward a father: things that arise reciprocally from each other can never arise from themselves alone, so that a father might turn himself into a son for his own benefit, or a son set himself up as father to himself. Whatever arrangement God laid down, he himself abides by. A father cannot be a father without possessing a son, nor a son a son without possessing a father. Yet possessing something and being that thing are two separate matters: take, for instance, my being a husband -- that requires possessing a wife, and I could hardly serve as my own wife. In the same way, my being a father requires possessing a son -- I cannot double as my own son; and my being a son requires possessing a father -- I cannot double as my own father. These relations are what constitute me as what I become: possess them, and I become something -- a father through possessing a son, a son through possessing a father. But should I myself try to occupy one of these roles outright, I forfeit the very thing possession requires -- no longer a father, since I have become the father myself, nor a son, since I have become the son myself. To the extent that I must have the one and be the other, to that extent, if I were to be both, I would not be the other so long as I do not have it. For if I myself am to be the son who is also the father, I no longer have a son, but am myself the son. But not having a son while I am myself the son, how shall I be father? For I must have a son in order to be father: I am therefore not a son, since I do not have a father who makes a son. Likewise, if I myself am the father who is also the son, I have lost any father to possess, since I have become the father in my own right. But not having a father while I am myself the father, how shall I be son? For I must have a father in order to be son: I shall not, then, be father, since I do not have a son who makes a father. This will be the whole cleverness of the devil: to exclude the one by the other, while, shutting both up into one under the pretext of monarchy, he makes neither of them actually had at all -- so that there is no father, since plainly he has no son, and no son, since equally he has no father: for while he is father, he will not be son. This is how they hold their 'monarchy' -- by containing neither father nor son. 'But nothing is difficult for God.' Who does not know that? And who is unaware that things impossible with the world are possible with God? And 'God picked out what the world counts foolish, so as to put its wisdom to shame.' We have read the whole of that. Therefore, they say, it was no difficulty for God to make himself both father and son, against the pattern he handed down for human affairs: for it was no more difficult for God to make a barren woman bear, against nature, than a virgin. Granted, nothing is difficult for God: but if we use this maxim so recklessly in our presumptuous arguments, we shall be able to invent anything at all about God, as though he had done a thing simply because he could have done it. But it does not follow that, because he can do all things, we must therefore believe he has done even what he has not done -- rather, we must ask whether he has done it. God could, had he wished, have equipped man with wings for flying, as he granted to kites: yet it does not follow that, because he could, he did so at once. He could likewise have wiped out Praxeas and all the heretics together on the spot: yet it does not follow that, because he could, he did. For kites had to exist, and heretics had to exist -- and the Father had to be crucified. On this reckoning there will indeed be something even difficult for God: namely, anything he refrained from doing -- and that refusal comes not from incapacity but from unwillingness. For with God, to be able is to will, and to be unable is to be unwilling: and what he willed, he both was able to do and showed that he did. So then -- 'because if he had willed to make himself his own son, he could have,' and 'because if he could have, he did' -- you will only prove that he both could and willed it, if you first prove that he actually did it.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 11 ========

You will need to prove as plainly from the Scriptures as we prove that he made his Word his son. For if he names a son, and the son can be none other than the one who proceeded from him, and the Word is what proceeded from him, then it is the Word that will be the son, not the one from whom it proceeded: for its source of proceeding was not itself. You, however, who claim Father and Son are one and the same, thereby make that single person both the one issuing forth from himself and the one who has issued -- that is, God himself. He could have done that. But he did not. Or else produce a proof to match what I demand -- that is, show the Scriptures presenting the same person as both Son and Father in the very way we show Father and Son distinctly: distinctly, I say, not divided. As I quote God's own words, 'My heart has belched forth a most excellent word,' you in turn should set against me some place where God said, 'My heart has belched me forth as a most excellent word' -- so that he would be both the one who belched and the thing belched forth, both the one who put forth and the one put forth -- if indeed he is both the Word and God. Look, I set before you the Father saying to the Son, 'You are my son, today I have begotten you.' If you want me to believe that he is father and son at once, show me somewhere it is likewise said: 'The Lord said to himself, I am my own son, today I have begotten myself'; and again, 'Before the daystar I begot myself'; and, 'The Lord founded me as the first of his paths, meant for what he would accomplish; before every hill he brought me forth' -- or any other wording to that effect. Whom, after all, was the Lord God of the universe afraid of, that he should not have put it that way, if that is how things really stood? Or was he afraid he would not be believed, if he had simply declared himself to be both father and son? There was one thing, however, he did fear: that the author of truth should lie against himself and against his own truth. And so, believing God to be truthful, I know he pronounced nothing other than what he had ordained, and ordained nothing other than what he pronounced. You, on the other hand, would make him a liar, a deceiver, a betrayer of this very faith -- if, while he himself was his own son, he handed the role of son to someone else. Whereas all the Scriptures display both a demonstration and a distinction of the Trinity -- and it is from these that our own rule of argument is drawn -- that one and the same person cannot be seen to be the one who speaks, the one spoken of, and the one spoken to; since neither perversity nor deceit befits God, that, when he himself was the one being addressed, he should instead address another rather than himself. Take, then, further words of the Father concerning the Son, spoken through Isaiah: 'Here is my son, the one I have picked out, my dear one, in whom my soul delights; I shall lay my spirit upon him, and he will make judgment known to the nations.' And take also words addressed to him directly: 'It is too small a thing for you to be called my son, to restore the tribes of Jacob and turn back the dispersion of Israel; I have set you as a light to the nations, that you may be salvation to the ends of the earth.' Take now, too, the Son's own words concerning the Father: 'The Lord's spirit rests on me, since he has anointed me to bring good tidings to men.' Likewise in a psalm, addressed to the Father about that same anointing: 'Do not forsake me, until I proclaim your arm to the whole generation yet to come.' And in another: 'Lord, how they are multiplied who oppress me!' Indeed, almost all the psalms that carry the person of Christ present the Son speaking to the Father -- that is, Christ addressing God. Note too the Spirit speaking, in the third person, about the Father and the Son: 'The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet.' Likewise through Isaiah: 'Thus says the Lord to my Lord, the Christ.' And again through the same prophet, addressed to the Father about the Son: 'Lord, who has believed our report, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? We announced concerning him -- as it were a little child, as a root in thirsty ground; he had no form nor glory.' These are a few examples out of many: I have no ambition to unroll the whole of Scripture, since, even taking each passage as bearing witness to the full majesty and authority of the point, a larger engagement still awaits us further on. Even from these few, though, the distinction of the Trinity is plainly set out: since here is the Spirit in person doing the speaking, the Father as the one addressed, and the Son as the one described. So too with everything else that is pronounced -- now by the Father about the Son or to the Son, now by the Son about the Father or to the Father, now by the Spirit -- each instance establishes each person in his own proper character.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 12 ========

If the number of the Trinity still scandalizes you, as though it were not bound together in a simple unity, let me ask: how does the one and only, the singular, speak in the plural -- 'Let us make man in our image and likeness' -- when, being one and singular as you claim, he ought to have said, 'I will make man in my image and likeness'? And further on too, 'Behold, Adam has become as one of us' -- is he deceiving us, or playing games, speaking in the plural when he was one, alone, and singular? Or was he perhaps speaking to angels, as the Jews interpret it, since they too refuse to recognize the Son? Or was it because he himself was Father, Son, and Spirit all at once, that, presenting himself as plural, he spoke to himself in the plural? No -- it is rather because the Son already stood beside him, a second one alongside, his very own Word, and beyond that a third, the Spirit residing in that Word, that he used the plural in speaking: 'Let us make,' 'our,' 'to us.' For with whom was he making man, and to whose likeness was he making him like? To the Son's, indeed, who was one day to clothe himself in manhood; and to the Spirit's, who was to sanctify man. He was speaking, as it were, with ministers and witnesses drawn from the unity of the Trinity. Then again, the Scripture that follows distinguishes between the persons: 'And God made man, he made him after the image of God.' Why does it not say 'his own' image, supposing a lone maker acted with no other being to supply the pattern he worked from? But there was indeed one to whose image he was making him -- namely, the Son's; who, being destined to become man in a truer and more certain sense, had already caused his own image to be called 'man,' at the moment when man was being formed from clay -- an image and likeness of the true one. But how is it written of the earlier works of the world? First, before the Son had yet made his appearance: 'And God declared, Let light come to be, and so it happened' -- this being the Word himself in that moment, the genuine light that gives light to every man entering the world, and, by his agency, the light of the world besides. From there on, however, it is within the Word -- Christ present and directing the work -- that God decreed a thing into existence, and God brought it about: 'And God declared, Let a vault come to be, and God fashioned the vault'; 'And God declared, Let lights come to be, and God fashioned the greater light and the lesser.' Everything else likewise came from that identical one responsible for what preceded -- namely, God's own Word, the agent through whom every single thing was fashioned, apart from whom not one thing came to be. And if this same one is God, as John states -- 'the Word was God' -- then you have a pair: the one who declares, 'let it come to be,' and the one who accomplishes it. But how you ought to take this 'other' I have already stated: in the name of person, not of substance, marking a distinction, not a division. For the rest, even though I hold everywhere to a single substance cohering in three, still, by the sheer necessity of the sense, I must call the one who commands and the one who carries out the command 'another.' For he would not be commanding at all, if he himself were the one doing the thing even while commanding it to be done. Yet he did command -- through him; he would hardly have been going to command himself, were he only one, or have acted without any command at all; for he would never have waited around to give himself an order.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 13 ========

[1] "So," you say, "if God said and God made, and one God said and another made, then two gods are being preached." If you're really so thick-headed, humor yourself for a moment. And to convince yourself of this still further, take note that the psalm also names two gods: "Your throne, O God, is forever; the scepter of your kingdom is a scepter of righteousness; you have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore God, your God, has anointed you." [2] If he's speaking to God, and calls the anointed one "God" by God, then this passage too asserts two gods — "for the scepter of your kingdom." So too Isaiah, speaking of the person of Christ: "And the men of Seboim, arrogant men, will cross over to you and follow after you in chains, and will worship you, because God is in you; for you are our God and we did not know it, God of Israel." Here too, by saying "God is in you" and "You are God," he sets forth two — the one who was in Christ, and Christ himself. [3] More telling still is what you find in exactly so many words in the Gospel: "At the very origin the Word already existed, and that Word was present alongside God, and the Word himself was God" — one party existing, and another alongside whom he existed. And I read the name "Lord" applied to two as well: "The Lord declared to my own Lord, Take your seat at my right side." And here is Isaiah's cry: "O Lord, who has put faith in what we proclaimed, and to whom has the Lord's arm now been laid bare?" He would not have said "your arm," meaning the Lord's, unless he meant us to understand both a Lord who is Father and a Lord who is Son. [4] Genesis is older still: "And the Lord poured down upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone, a fire sent by the Lord out of the sky above." Either deny these things are written, or else — who are you, not to take them as they are written, especially since they carry their sense not in allegories and parables but in plain, definite statements? But if you're one of those who back then could not stomach the Lord when he showed himself the Son of God, for fear of believing him Lord, then recall that it is written of the same people: "I said, You are gods, and sons of the Most High," and, "God stands in the assembly of the gods" — so that if Scripture was not afraid to pronounce men made sons of God by faith "gods," you should know it conferred the name of "God" and "Lord" all the more rightly upon God's true and only Son. [5] "So," you say, "I challenge you to preach, on this same scriptural authority, two gods and two lords openly, today as well." Never. For we, who by God's grace examine both the times and the reasons behind these scriptures — disciples of the Paraclete, not of men — do indeed distinguish two, Father and Son, and even three with the Holy Spirit, according to the principle of the economy that produces number; not so that (as your perversity infers) the Father himself should be taken as one who underwent birth and endured suffering — a thing we are forbidden to hold, since that is not how it has been handed down. [6] All the same, we never let "two gods" and "two lords" pass our lips — not because Father is not God, and Son is not God, and the Holy Spirit is not God, and each is God — but because back then two gods and two lords were indeed being preached, so that when Christ came he might both be recognized as God and called Lord, being the Son of God and of the Lord. For if a single person of "God" and "Lord" had been found in the Scriptures, Christ would rightly have been refused admission to the name of God and Lord — since no other besides the one God and one Lord was being preached — and it would have followed that the Father himself seemed to have come down, because "one God" and "one Lord" was what was read, and his whole economy — devised and dispensed as the very substance of faith — would have been thrown into shadow. [7] But once Christ came and was known by us to be the one who had made the number back then, ranking second after the Father, and, together with the Spirit, third in order — the Father too being now more fully revealed through him — the name "God" and "Lord" was drawn back together into unity: so that, as the nations passed from a multitude of idols to the one God, a distinction might be established between worshippers of the one and worshippers of many divinities. [8] For it was fitting for Christians to shine in the world as sons of light, worshipping and naming one light, one God and one Lord, and none besides. Otherwise, if out of the very knowledge by which we know the name "God" and "Lord" fits Father, Son, and Spirit alike, we went about calling them "gods" and "lords," we would have snuffed out our own torches — grown timid even at martyrdom, since there would then lie open, for those swearing straight off "by the gods and lords," an easy way to escape, the way certain heretics do, who have many gods. [9] And so I will not say "gods" at all, nor "lords" — I will follow the apostle: if Father and Son must be named together, I will call the Father "God" and name Jesus Christ "Lord." Christ alone, though, I can call God, just as the same apostle does: "Of whom is Christ, who is," he says, "God over all, blessed forever." [10] For I will also call a ray of the sun, taken by itself, "sun" — yet naming the sun to which the ray belongs, I will not therefore straightaway call the ray "the sun." For even if I were to make two suns, still I would count sun and its ray as two things and two forms of one undivided substance, exactly as I count God and his Word, exactly as Father and Son.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 14 ========

[1] Yet another rule stands by us as we claim two, Father and Son — the rule that fixed the invisibility of God. For when Moses, in Egypt, longed to see the Lord face to face, saying, "If then I have found favor before you, show yourself to me, that I may see and know you plainly," he was told: "You cannot see my face; for no man shall see my face and live" — that is, whoever sees it will die. [2] Yet we find that God was seen by many, and none of those who saw him died: God was indeed seen, but according to the capacity of men, not according to the fullness of his divinity. For the patriarchs are said to have seen God — Abraham, for instance, and Jacob — and the prophets too, Isaiah, Ezekiel — and yet they did not die. So then, either they ought to have died, if they had seen him — for "no one shall see God and live" — or, if they saw God and did not die, Scripture is lying when it says God said, "If a man sees my face he shall not live"; or Scripture is lying when it presents God as seen [after saying he cannot be seen]. [3] So then it must be someone else who was being seen, since the very one defined as invisible cannot be the one who was seen: and it follows that we must understand the Father as invisible, in the fullness of his majesty, while we recognize the Son as visible, in the measure of his derivation — just as we are not permitted to gaze upon the sun itself, in the full substance it has in the heavens, yet we can bear its ray upon our eyes, tempered to the portion of it that reaches down to earth. [4] At this point someone will, from the opposite side, want to argue that the Son too is invisible, as Word, as Spirit — and in claiming one and the same condition for Father and Son, will instead be confirming that Father and Son are one and the same. [5] But we have said that Scripture supports the distinction through the difference between "visible" and "invisible." They add this to their argument too: that if it was the Son who was speaking to Moses then, he himself would be declaring his own face invisible to anyone — since, on their view, the invisible Father was present under the name of "Son." And by this they mean the same one to be taken as both visible and invisible, just as they take Father and Son to be the same one — since a little earlier, before he refused Moses his face, it is written that the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend, no less than Jacob, who said, "I have seen the Lord face to face." [6] "So then," they say, "visible and invisible are the same; and because both belong to the same one, the Father too is invisible in the same way the Son is visible." As though the exposition of Scripture which we make concerning the Son — leaving the Father aside — did not perfectly fit the Son in his own visibility. For we do say that the Son too, under his own name, is invisible in the sense that he is the Word and Spirit of God, by the very condition proper to that substance [and inasmuch as he stands as God, being both Word and Spirit belonging to God]; yet he could still be seen prior to his taking on flesh, in the manner in which it is said to Aaron and Miriam: "Should there arise among you one who prophesies, I will disclose myself to that person through a vision, conversing with him by means of a dream — unlike my converse with Moses, mouth to mouth, openly" (that is, in truth) "and not in a riddle" (that is, not in an image) — just as the apostle says, "Now we see as through a mirror, in a riddle, but then face to face." [7] So then, since with Moses he reserves his own appearance and face-to-face converse for a future time (for this was later fulfilled on the mountain in seclusion, as we read in the Gospel, where Moses is seen conversing with him), it is clear that all along, before that, it was in a mirror and a riddle and a vision and a dream that God — that is, the Son of God — was seen, both by the prophets and patriarchs and by Moses himself, up to that point. [8] And even the Lord himself, if perhaps he spoke face to face, was not thereby seen in his face the way a man is seen, except perhaps as in a mirror and in a riddle. In fact, if the Lord spoke to Moses in such a way that Moses already knew his face at close range, how is it that he immediately, on that very occasion, longs to see his face — a face he would not have longed for if he had already seen it? And how, equally, does the Lord deny that his face can be seen, when he had just shown it — if indeed he had shown it? Or what is this "face of God" whose sight is denied? If there was one that was seen — "I have seen God face to face," says Jacob, "and my soul was saved" — then the face that kills, if seen, must be a different face. [9] Or was it in fact the Son who was being seen — in a face, yes, but this very thing occurring in a vision and a dream and a mirror and a riddle, because Word and Spirit cannot be seen except in some imagined form — while he calls the Father's face invisible, calling it "his own face"? For who is the Father? Will he be "the face of the Son," by the title of authority which the begotten one receives from the Father? For is it not equally fitting to say, of someone ranked above another, "That man stands as my face," or "He presents my likeness on my behalf"? [10] "The Father," he says, "is greater than I": so the Father would then be the Son's face. And what does the text tell us? "Breath drawn from that presence — Christ, our Lord." If Christ, then, is the breath belonging to the Father's own presence, it follows that this breath — belonging as it did to that presence, namely the Father's — declared that presence's countenance to be its own, by virtue of their oneness. It is remarkable, truly, whether the Father might be reckoned the Son's face, seeing he is head over the Son: since, as it is written, God stands as head over Christ. 

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 15 ========

[1] If I cannot settle this point from the questions raised in the old scripture, I will draw confirmation of our interpretation from the new testament, so that whatever I attribute to the Son you do not simply defend as belonging to the Father instead. For indeed in the gospels and in the apostles I find the invisible and the visible God laid hold of under a plain and personal distinction of the two conditions. [2] John cries out, in a manner of speaking, 'No one has ever seen God' — not even in the past, of course, for by saying God was never seen he has ruled the question of time out of court altogether. The apostle confirms the same about God, 'whom no man has seen, nor can see' — obviously because whoever sees him will die. Yet those very same apostles bear witness that Christ had truly been seen by them and touched by their own hands. [3] Now if Christ himself is both Father and Son, how is he both seen and unseen? Whoever will argue this contrary point from the opposite direction, to bring the difference between seen and unseen into one, will tell us — correctly — that each is truly said: visible in the flesh, invisible before the flesh, so that the same one is the Father invisible before the flesh who is also the Son visible in the flesh. [4] But if the same one was invisible before the flesh, how is he found to have been seen even earlier, before the flesh? Equally, if the same one is visible after the flesh, how is he now pronounced invisible by the apostles — unless it is because the one who was seen before, however dimly, in a riddle, was made more fully visible by the flesh, namely the Word who was made flesh, while the other, whom no one has ever seen, is of course the Father, whose Word he is? [5] Let us then look closely at whom the apostles saw. 'What we have seen,' says John, 'what we have heard, we have seen with our eyes, and our hands have handled — concerning the Word of life.' For the Word of life was made flesh, and was heard and seen and handled because he was flesh — he who, prior to the flesh, was simply the Word, existing from the outset alongside God who is the Father, not the Father as such. For though the Word is God, he is 'with God,' because he is God from God, because he is with the Father while being alongside the Father. [6] 'And we have seen his glory, as of the only-begotten from the Father' — the glory, that is, of the visible Son, glorified by the invisible Father. And therefore, since he had called the Word of God 'God,' lest he lend support to his opponents' presumption that they had actually seen the Father himself, so as to keep separate the unseen Father and the Son who can be seen, he further adds, 'No one has ever seen God.' Which God? The Word? But it had just been said, 'We have seen and heard and handled — concerning the Word of life.' Which God, then? The Father, of course, with whom the Word, the only-begotten Son, was God — the Son who himself has laid open the Father's bosom. [7] He himself was both heard and seen, and — so that he would not be taken for a phantom — he was even handled. Paul too caught sight of this same one, yet did not thereby see the Father: 'Have I not seen Jesus?' he says. And he himself calls Christ God: 'whose are the fathers, and from whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever.' He too thereby shows the visible Son of God — that is, the Word of God — since the one who was made flesh was called Christ. [8] But of the Father he writes to Timothy: 'whom no man has seen, nor can see' — and heightens it further: 'who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light' — of whom he had also said above, 'to the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God.' So that we might ascribe to the Son himself the opposite qualities: mortality, approachability. He testifies that this one died, according to the scriptures, and was seen at last by himself — and that, indeed, by an approachable light, though even that light he did not experience without danger to his sight; nor did Peter and John and James experience it without reeling near derangement — and if these men, not yet destined to suffer, had seen not the Son's glory but the Father, I believe they would have died on the spot: for 'no one will see God and live.' [9] If this is so, it follows that the one who was seen at the end had always been seen from the beginning, and that the one who was not seen at the end had likewise never been seen from the beginning — and thus there are two: the seen and the unseen. The Son, then, has always been seen, the Son has always conversed with men, the Son has always worked — by the Father's authority and will, since 'the Son can do nothing of himself unless he sees the Father doing it' — 'seeing,' that is, in the sense of the Father's mind. For the Father acts by his mind, while the Son, seeing what is in the Father's mind, carries it out. Thus 'all things were made through the Son, and without him nothing was made.'

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 16 ========

[1] And do not suppose that only the works of the world's making were done through the Son, but also whatever God has since accomplished. For the Father, 'who loves the Son and has given all things into his hand,' has loved him and given to him from the very beginning — since already from the outset 'the Word existed alongside God, and the Word himself was God' — the very one to whom 'all authority' was granted 'by the Father, in heaven and upon earth'; 'the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son' — and this from the beginning. [2] For in saying 'all power,' and 'all judgment,' and 'all things made through him,' and 'all things given into his hand,' scripture allows no exception of time, since 'all things' would not be all if they had not belonged to every span of time. It is the Son, then, who has judged from the beginning — flattening the most arrogant of towers and scattering its tongues, punishing the whole world with the violence of waters, raining fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah, 'the Lord from the Lord.' [3] He it is who has always come down to converse with men, from Adam through the patriarchs and prophets, laying out beforehand, in vision, in dream, in mirror, in riddle, from the very start, the pattern he was to pursue to the end. So it was always God himself, learning by practice, so to speak, to dwell on earth with men — none other than the Word who was one day to be flesh. And he was practicing it so as to lay a foundation of faith for us, that we might the more readily trust that God's own Son had descended into the world, once we already knew that a like thing had occurred long ages earlier. [4] For it was for our sake that these things were both written and done, running down to us across the boundary-lines of the ages. So too he already knew human feelings then, being destined himself to take up the very substances of man, flesh and soul: questioning Adam as though not knowing — 'Adam, where are you?' — repenting that he had made man as though he had not foreseen it, testing Abraham as though ignorant of what was in the man, being offended and then reconciled with the same people — and whatever else the heretics seize on as unworthy of God, to demolish the Creator, not realizing that these things belong to the Son, who was likewise to undergo human sufferings — thirst, hunger, tears, and birth itself and death itself — for which he was 'made a little lower than the angels' by the Father. [5] But the heretics will not even allow that what you make the Father do himself — as if he had lowered himself for our sake — could fittingly belong to the Son of God instead, though scripture says one was lowered by another, not that he lowered himself by himself. What if it is likewise one who was crowned with glory and honor, and another who crowned him — the Father crowning the Son, of course? [6] But how could it be that Almighty God — that invisible one 'whom no man has seen nor can see,' who 'dwells in unapproachable light,' who 'does not dwell in houses made with hands,' at whose sight 'the earth trembles' and 'the mountains melt like wax,' who 'grasps the whole world in his hand as though it were a bird's nest,' for whom 'the sky serves as a seat and the ground as a footrest,' in whom every place exists, while he himself occupies none, who is the outermost boundary line of the universe, the Most High — should have walked in the garden toward evening looking for Adam, and shut the ark's door after Noah went in, and refreshed himself under the oak with Abraham, and called Moses from the burning bush, and appeared as a fourth man in the Babylonian king's furnace — even though there he was called 'a son of man'? And all this in image and mirror and riddle, of course — things that scarcely anyone would credit even about God's own Son, had they not been set down in writing, and perhaps would not be believed of the Father even though they are written, this Father whom these men then drag down into Mary's womb, set up on Pilate's tribunal, and shut away in Joseph's tomb. [7] Hence, then, their error becomes plain. For not knowing that the whole order of the divine arrangement has run its course through the Son from the very beginning, they believe it was the Father himself who was seen and who met with men and who worked and who suffered thirst and hunger — against the prophet who says, 'The eternal God will not thirst nor hunger at all' — how much less, then, will he die or be buried! — and so they suppose that one God, namely the Father, has always been the sole actor in what was in fact done through the Son.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 17 ========

[1] They have found it easier to suppose the Father acted under the Son's name than the Son under the Father's — though the Lord himself says, 'I have come in my Father's name'; and again, to the Father himself, 'I have made your name known to men'; and scripture agrees, saying, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord' — meaning, of course, the Son in the Father's name. [2] And the Father bears the titles 'Almighty God,' 'Most High,' 'Lord of Hosts,' 'King of Israel,' 'He Who Is.' Insofar as the scriptures teach this, we say that the Son too has shared in these titles, and that in bearing them the Son has come, and in them has always acted, and so has revealed them to men in himself. [3] 'All things that are the Father's,' he says, 'are mine' — why not the names as well? So when you come across 'Almighty God,' 'Most High,' 'the God of Hosts,' 'King of Israel,' and 'He Who Is,' ask whether the Son is not equally shown, in his own right, to be God — almighty, as Word of the Almighty God and as one entrusted with power over all; most high, as one 'lifted up at God's right hand,' according to Peter's proclamation in Acts; lord of hosts, since 'everything has been made subject to him' by the Father; King of Israel, since that nation's lot has fallen to him in particular; and likewise He Who Is, since 'many are called sons' who are not truly sons. [4] But if they wish the name 'Christ' also to belong to the Father, they will hear my answer to that in its own place. For now, let me have ready here an answer to what they also bring forward from John's Apocalypse: 'I am the Lord, who is and who was and who is coming, the Almighty' — and to their claim that nowhere else does the title 'God Almighty' suit the Son as well: as though the one who is to come could fail to be almighty, when the Son of the Almighty is every bit as almighty as God the Son of God.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 18 ========

[1] But this sharing of the Father's titles by the Son they find hard to see clearly, because scripture unsettles them whenever it asserts that God is one — as if the same scripture had not also, as we showed above, set out two, both gods and lords. 'Since, then,' they say, 'we find two and yet one, therefore the two are one and the same — Son and Father alike.' [2] But scripture runs no risk here, such that you need to rush to its rescue with your own arguments lest it seem to contradict itself: it has its own logic both when it asserts one God and when it shows two, Father and Son, and it is quite sufficient unto itself. That it names the Son is plain: for with the Son intact, it can rightly determine one God, of whom the Son is the Son. Having a Son does not stop him from remaining the only one, under his own title, on those occasions when he is spoken of apart from the Son. And he is spoken of apart from the Son whenever he is identified chiefly, as the primary person, whose name must be given before that of the Son, since the Father is recognized first and the Son named afterward. [3] Therefore, 'one God, the Father, and besides him there is no other' — and in saying this he does not deny the Son, but another god; for the Son is not another besides the Father. Look, in fact, at what usually follows such declarations, and you will find that they are directed mostly against the makers and worshippers of idols, so that the oneness of the Godhead may drive out a multitude of false gods — though he still has a Son, who, the more undivided and inseparable he is from the Father, the more he is to be reckoned as within the Father, even when not named. [4] But had he named him, he would have set him apart, saying instead, 'There is none other than I, save my own Son' — for that would have turned even the Son into a separate other, singled out from the rest. Suppose the sun declared, 'I alone am the sun, and beside me exists no other, save my own ray'— would you not have noticed how absurd that sounds, as though the ray were not itself counted as part of the sun? So then, that there is no other god besides himself is said on account of idolatry, as much the nations' as Israel's — and also on account of the heretics, who, just as the nations fashion idols with their hands, fashion them just as much with their words, that is, another god and another Christ. [5] So, then, even when he pronounced himself one, the Father was securing the Son's own claim — so that Christ should not be believed to have come from some other god, but from that very one who had said beforehand, 'I am God, and there is no other besides me' — the one who shows himself unique, yet together with the Son, with whom, alone, he 'stretched out the heavens.'

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 19 ========

[1] Why, they will even seize on this saying of his as proof of a bare singularity: "I alone," he says, "stretched out the heaven" — alone, that is, with respect to the other powers, prefacing his case against the guesswork of the heretics, who want the world built by angels and by rival powers, and who make the Creator himself either an angel or someone kept in the dark about other things too, such as the works of the world, and suborned into the job. [2] But if he alone stretched out the heaven in that sense, how do these heretics presume, perversely, that as though it were a bare singular, that Wisdom is not admitted who says, "When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him"? And if he said, "Who has known the mind of the Lord, and who has been his counselor?" — he certainly means someone other than Wisdom, who was present with him. Yet it was in him and with him that he was framing the universe, not ignorant of what he was doing. And besides Wisdom, he also means besides the Son — that is Christ, God's own might and skill, as the apostle puts it — alone knowing the mind of the Father: for who knows the things that are in God except the spirit that is in him? — not one outside him. There was therefore one who kept him from making God alone, except in the sense that he was alone as against all the others. [3] But then let the Gospel be repudiated too, which says the whole universe came into being through the Word issuing from God, and apart from him not a single thing came into being. For unless I am mistaken, it is written elsewhere as well: "By his word the heavens were established, and by his spirit all their powers." And the Word, moreover — power and wisdom — will be the very Son of God. [4] So if all things exist through the Son, then in stretching out the heaven too, the Son did not stretch it out alone — except by that same reckoning by which he was alone as against the others. And indeed he goes straight on to speak of the Son: "Who else brought down the signs of the ventriloquists and the divinations of the heart, turning the wise back and making their counsel foolish, setting up the words of his own son?" — meaning, by saying, "This is my beloved Son, hear him." [5] So by adding the Son he is himself the interpreter of how he stretched out the heaven alone — namely, alone with the Son, just as with the Son he is one. Accordingly it will be the Son's voice too that says, "I stretched out the heaven alone," because by the Word the heavens were established. Since Wisdom, standing by in the Word, is how the heaven was prepared, and all things were made through the Word, it is fitting that the Son too alone stretched out the heaven, since he alone served as minister to the Father's undertaking. [6] The same one will be speaking when he says, "I am the first, and in what is coming I am" — first, that is, of all things, the Word: "In the beginning was the Word," in which beginning he was brought forth from the Father. As for the Father, having no beginning, as one brought forth by none, as unbegotten, he cannot be seen as "first": he who alone has always been could not have any order about him. [7] So then, if for that reason they have thought the same person must be believed to be both Father and Son, in order to claim one God, his unity stands safe, since he who is one has a Son too, equally comprehended by those same scriptures. If they refuse to have the Son reckoned second from the Father, for fear a second should make two gods spoken of, we have shown that two gods, and two lords, are indeed reported in scripture. [8] And yet, so they may not be scandalized on that score, we give the reasoning by which two are not called gods, nor lords, but by which Father and Son are two — and this not by separation of substance but by disposition, since we hold that the Son remains undivided from, and never severed from, the Father, distinct from him not in rank but in measure; who, even if he is called god when named as a singular, does not thereby make two gods but one, by this very fact — that he too has the right to be called god out of the unity of the Father.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 20 ========

[1] But their arguments still need to be broken down, effort must be given to it, if they excerpt anything from the scriptures to suit their own opinion, refusing to look at everything else, which itself likewise keeps the rule, and indeed with the union of the godhead and the ring of the monarchy kept safe. For just as in the Old Testament they hold to nothing but "I am God and besides me there is no other," so in the Gospel they hold fast to what the Lord told Philip in reply, "I and the Father are one thing," and "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father too," and "I dwell in the Father, and the Father dwells in me." [2] They want the whole instrument of both testaments to give way to these three little clauses, when it is proper for the fewer to be understood in light of the many. [3] But this is characteristic of all heretics. Because there are only a few passages to be found in the thicket, they defend the few against the many, and take up the later against the earlier. But the rule, established from the beginning for every matter, sets a precedent in the earlier things over the later ones — and certainly in the more numerous ones over the fewer.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 21 ========

[1] Look then how much they lay down against you, even in the Gospel, before Philip's question and before any argument of yours. And right at the outset, the very preface of John the evangelist demonstrates at once what he had been before ever taking on flesh: "At the origin there existed the Word, and that Word was present with God, and that Word was itself God; this one, from the origin, stood together with God; through him every single thing came into existence, and apart from him nothing whatever came into existence." [2] For if these things are not to be taken any other way than as they are written, it is shown beyond doubt that one thing was he who existed from the beginning, another he with whom he existed: one thing the Word of God, another God — though the Word too is God, yet as God's Son, and not as the Father — one thing he through whom all things exist, another he from whom all things exist. [3] How we may call him "other," we have already often set out. In whatever sense we call him other, it must not be as though he were the same — and yet "not the same" does not mean as though separated: other by disposition, not by division. This one, then, was made flesh, not the one whose Word he was. His glory was seen as that of an only Son from a Father, not as of the Father himself. This only Son unfolded the Father's bosom, not the Father his own bosom; for it precedes, "No one has ever seen God." [4] Hence too, if he is designated by John as the Lamb of God, it is not the one whose beloved he is. Certainly he is always the Son of God, but not the one whose Son he is. This is what Nathanael sensed at once, as Peter did elsewhere too: "You are the Son of God." And he himself confirms that they had rightly sensed this — answering Nathanael, "Because I said, I saw you under the fig tree, therefore you believe"; and pronouncing Peter blessed, to whom it was not flesh and blood that had revealed what he had also perceived about the Father, but the Father who is in heaven. [5] By this saying he established the distinction of both persons — the Son on earth, whom Peter had recognized as the Son of God, and the Father who is in heaven, who had revealed to Peter what Peter recognized, the Son of God, Christ. [6] When he went into the Temple, he calls it his Father's house, as a Son does. When he says to Nicodemus, "For in this way God cherished the world: he handed over his one and only Son, so that everyone who trusts in him would not be lost but would hold everlasting life"; and again, "For God did not dispatch his Son into the world in order to condemn the world, but so the world might be rescued through him; whoever trusts in him faces no condemnation; whoever refuses to trust stands condemned already, for he has refused trust in the name of God's one and only Son." [7] And John, when asked about Jesus while he was baptizing, said, "The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand; whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not believe in the Son of God will not see God, but the wrath of God remains upon him." [8] And whom did he show to the Samaritan woman? If it was the Messiah, who is called Christ, then he showed himself to be the Son, certainly not the Father — since elsewhere too Christ is called the Son of God, not the Father. [9] Then to his disciples he says, "It is mine to do the will of him who sent me, to finish his work." And to the Jews concerning the healing of the paralytic, "My Father works until now, and I work" — Father and I, the Son says. In fact this is precisely why the Jews wanted the more to kill him — not only because he was breaking the Sabbath, but because he was calling God his own Father, making himself equal to God. [10] Then he said to them, "On his own the Son is capable of nothing, save what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does likewise; for the Father loves the Son, and has shown him all things that he himself does, and will show him greater works than these, so that you may marvel; for as the Father raises the dead and gives life, so the Son too gives life to whom he wills. For neither does the Father judge anyone, but has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father; he who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. [11] Amen, amen, I say to you, that he who hears my words and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life. [12] Amen I say to you, a moment is approaching, in which the dead shall hear the summons of the Son of God, and those who heed it shall live; for as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself; and he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man" — through the flesh, that is, just as he is the Son of God through his spirit. [13] He adds further, "But I have testimony greater than John's; for the works which the Father gave me to finish, these very works that I do bear witness of me, that the Father has sent me; and he who sent me, the Father, has himself borne witness of me." [14] And when he goes on, "At no point have you caught his sound, nor glimpsed his shape," he confirms that it was the Son, not the Father, who in earlier ages was heard and beheld. [15] Then again he says, "I have come in my Father's name, and you did not receive me" — so constantly was the Son in the name of God and King and almighty and most high Lord. [16] And when they asked what they ought to do, he answered, "That you believe in him whom God has sent." [17] He also affirms himself to be that bread which the Father would supply out of heaven; and so all that the Father entrusts to him would arrive at him, and he would turn none of it away, seeing that his descent from heaven was undertaken not for the sake of his own wish but for the wish of the one who sent him; and this was the Father's wish — that whoever beholds the Son and puts trust in him should gain life and rising again; and further, that no one could come to him except one whom the Father drew, and that everyone who had heard and learned from the Father comes to him — not as though anyone had seen the Father — adding this too, to show that it is the Father's own Word through whom people are taught. [18] But when many withdrew from him, and he offered his apostles the chance to withdraw too if they wished, what did Simon Peter answer? "To whom shall we go? You have the words of life, and we believe that you are the Christ" — was that the Father, or the Father's Christ?

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 22 ========

[1] But whose teaching does he say they marveled at — his own, or the Father's? While they were debating among themselves whether he himself might be the Christ, at that very point it was not the Father speaking but the Son: "You know me," he says, "and you know where I am from, and I have not come of my own accord, but he who sent me is true, whom you do not know; I know him, since I come from his presence." [2] He did not say, "For I am he myself," or "I sent myself," but, "He sent me." Likewise, when the Pharisees had sent men to seize him, he said, "Yet a little while I am with you, and I go to him who sent me." And when he denies that he is alone — "But I," he says, "and he who sent me, the Father" — does he not point to two, as much two as they are inseparable? Indeed this whole teaching came down to just this: that the two are inseparable. [3] For when he sets out the law which establishes proof by the testimony of two men, he adds, "I bear witness of myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness of me." But if he were a single being, simultaneously Son and Father, he would not have invoked the backing of a law that grounds credibility not in the testimony of one but of two. [4] Again, when asked where the Father was, answering that neither he nor the Father was known to them, he named two as unknown; for had they known the Father, they would have known him also — not as though he himself were both Father and Son, but because through their inseparability neither can be known nor unknown apart from the other. [5] "He who sent me," he says, "is true, and I speak to the world the things I have heard from him" — Scripture interpreting from outside that they had not recognized what he had said of the Father, since of course they ought to have recognized that the Father's words are in the Son, reading in Jeremiah, "And the Lord spoke to me thus: See, I have set my words within your mouth"; and in Isaiah, "The Lord gives me a tongue of instruction, to know when it is right to speak a word"; just as he himself says elsewhere, "Then you will recognize that it is I, and that nothing I say issues from myself, but I speak precisely as he has instructed me, for the one who sent me remains beside me" — and this too is testimony to the inseparability of the two. [6] Again, in his dispute with the Jews, reproaching them for wanting to kill him, he says, "I speak what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have seen with your father"; and, "Now you seek to kill a man who has told you the truth which he heard from God"; and, "If God were your father, you would love me, for I came forth from God and have come" (and yet they are not thereby separated, even though he says he 'came forth' — as some seize on this word as their opportunity — for he came forth from the Father as a ray from the sun, as a stream from its spring, as a shoot from its seed); and, "I do not have a demon, but I honor my Father"; and, "If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing; it is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, He is our God, and you do not know him; yet I am acquainted with him, and were I to claim ignorance of him, I would be a liar just as you are; but I am acquainted with him and hold fast to his word." [7] But when he adds, "Abraham saw my day and rejoiced," surely he makes plain that long ago it was the Son who appeared, not the Father. Likewise, over that blind man, he says it is necessary for him to perform his Father's works; and to him, after his sight was restored, he says, "Do you believe in the Son of God?" And when the man asked who this was, by pointing to himself he plainly pointed to the Son whom he had said must be believed in. [8] Then he states that the Father recognizes him and he recognizes the Father, and that he is therefore loved by the Father because he lays down his soul, since he had received this command from the Father. [9] And when asked by the Jews whether he himself were the Christ (that is, God's Christ — for to this very day the Jews look for the Christ of God, not for the Father himself, since the Father was never written to be the one who was to come), he says, "I tell you, and you do not believe; the works which I do in my Father's name, these bear witness of me." Witness to what? Plainly to the very thing they were asking about — that he is the Christ of God. [10] Of his sheep too, that no one shall snatch them from his hand, he says, "For what my Father has given me is greater than all"; and, "I and the Father are one." Here now fools — no, blind men who cannot see — want to plant their flag, failing to notice, first, that "I and the Father" signifies two; then that, in the last word, "We are" is not spoken of a single person, since it is put in the plural; and further, that he says "One thing we are," not "One person we are." [11] For had he said "One person we are," he might have lent support to their view; for "one" in the masculine seems to signify singularity. But when he applies to two masculine subjects a neuter predicate — "one thing," which points not to singularity of person but to unity, likeness, conjunction, to the love of a Father who loves his Son and the obedience of a Son who obeys his Father's will — by saying "One thing we are," I and the Father, he demonstrates two beings whom he equates and unites. [12] Accordingly he goes on to add that he has shown them many works from the Father, none of which deserved stoning. And lest they should think they must stone him as though he had meant himself to be understood as God himself, that is, the Father, because he had said, "I and the Father are one" — showing thereby the Son of God to be God, not showing himself to be God the Father — he says, "If it is written in the Law, 'I said, You are gods,' and Scripture cannot be broken, do you say of him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, 'You are blaspheming,' because he called himself 'God's Son'? Should I fail to perform my Father's works, do not put faith in me; but if I do perform them, and you refuse to believe me, believe at least on account of the works, and recognize that the Father dwells in me and I in the Father." [13] Through the works, then, the Father dwells in the Son, and the Son within the Father, and it is through the works that we understand Father and Son to be one; so persistently did he keep pressing home this whole point — that the two should nevertheless be believed in as one power, since the Son could not be believed in at all unless the two were believed in together.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 23 ========

[1] After this, when Martha confessed him Son of God, she erred no more than Peter and Nathanael did — though even had she erred, she would have been corrected at once. For see: when the Lord, on the verge of raising her brother out of death, looks up to heaven and to the Father, he says, plainly as a Son, "Father, I thank you that you always hear me; I said this because of the crowd standing around, that they may believe that you sent me." [2] And also in the trouble of his soul: "And what words shall I speak? Father, rescue me out of this hour? Yet it was for this very hour that I came; nevertheless, Father, glorify your name." In this it was the Son speaking: "I have come," he says, "in my Father's name." [3] Then — as though the Son's voice to the Father had not sufficed — see, out of his abundance the Father answers the Son from heaven, testifying, "This is my Son, dearly loved, in whom I take delight; listen to him"; so too here, "I have glorified it, and will glorify it again." [4] How many persons does this seem to you, most perverse Praxeas, if not one for every voice heard? You have a Son on earth, you have a Father in heaven. This is no separation, but a divine arrangement. For the rest, we know that God is present even within the depths and consists everywhere, but by power and might the Son too, being inseparable, is with him everywhere. Yet within this very economy the Father willed the Son to be found on earth, and himself in heaven; and it was to this heaven that the Son himself looked up both to pray and to make request, teaching us too to lift our eyes and pray, "Our Father who art in heaven," though he is everywhere as well. This the Father willed to be his own seat: "Heaven," he says, "is my throne." [5] From here too he lowered the Son a little below the angels by sending him down to earth, only to crown him again with glory and honor by taking him back up into the heavens. This he was already granting him when he said, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." [6] The Son makes request from earth, the Father promises from heaven. Why do you make liars of both Father and Son? If the Father was speaking from heaven to the Son while the Father himself was the Son present on earth, or if the Son was praying to the Father while the Son himself was the Father present in heaven, how could the Son be making a request of himself by requesting it of the Father, if the Son were the Father — or the Father again be promising himself something by promising it to the Son, if the Father were the Son? [7] So that even if we were to call them two divided beings, as you people keep chattering, it would be more tolerable to preach two divided beings than one shape-shifting God. And so the Lord now declares to men like you: "This voice did not come for my sake, but for yours, that both these people may believe" — believe both Father and Son, each in his own names, persons, and places. [8] Still Jesus cries out and says, "He who believes in me does not believe in me but in him who sent me" — because it is through the Son that belief reaches the Father, and the ground of believing in the Son is the Father: "And he who sees me sees him who sent me." [9] How so? Because, evidently, "I have not spoken from myself, but he who sent me, the Father, commanded me as to what I ought to declare and what I ought to utter" — "For the Lord gives me a tongue of instruction, to know when it is right to speak" — "the word which I speak, just as the Father told me, so I speak." [10] How these words are to be taken, the evangelist — and indeed that beloved disciple — John knew better than Praxeas does; and so he says in his own words, "But before the feast of the Passover, Jesus, knowing that all things had been given to him by the Father, and that he had issued from God and was returning to God..." [11] But Praxeas would have it that the Father himself came out from himself and went back to himself — as if the devil had put into the heart of Judas not the Son's betrayal but the Father's own. That serves neither the devil well nor the heretic, since the devil did not work this betrayal even against his own good Son. For it was the Son of God who was betrayed, the one who was in the Son of Man, as Scripture goes on to say: "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and in him God has been glorified." [12] Which God? Not the Father certainly, but the Father's own Word, present within the Son of Man — that is, within the flesh he bore — in which he was already glorified, though in power and Word he had also been glorified before, when Jesus said, "And God will glorify him in himself" — that is, the Father the Son, whom he holds within himself, even while stretched out toward the earth, until soon, through the resurrection, having conquered death, he glorified him.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 24 ========

[1] There were plainly people even then who did not understand: for even Thomas, incredulous for a while, said, "Lord, we do not know where you are going, and how do we know the way?" And Jesus: "I myself am the road, and the truth, and the life too; nobody arrives at the Father unless it is through me; had you recognized me, you would likewise have recognized the Father; but from here on you know him, you have already looked on him." [2] Next in order comes Philip, stirred by the hope of setting eyes on the Father, unable to grasp how a Father he had merely heard spoken of could also be seen, and he said, "Show us the Father, and it is enough for us." And the Lord: "Philip, have I been with you all this time and you have not known me?" Whom does he say ought to have been known by them? For this alone needs to be sorted out: known as the Father, or known as the Son? If as the Father, let Praxeas show us that Christ, after living with them so long, could ever have been — I will not even say understood, but merely supposed — to be the Father at any point. [3] For us, all the Scriptures, old and new alike, mark Christ out beforehand as God's Son. This was proclaimed of old, this was declared by Christ himself, indeed even by the Father in person, openly from heaven, professing the Son and glorifying the Son: "This is my Son"; and, "I have glorified, and I will glorify again." This the disciples believed, this the Jews refused to believe; and wanting this very thing believed by them, he named the Father every hour, put the Father forward, honored the Father. [4] If that is so, then they had not, all that time in his company, been ignorant of the Father but of the Son; and the Lord, reproaching them for not knowing the one they did not know, obviously wanted acknowledged the very one whose non-acknowledgment he had been reproaching for so long — that is, the Son. And now it can appear how the saying "Whoever sees me sees the Father also" is to be taken: in the same sense as the earlier "I and the Father are one." [5] Why? Because, "I came forth from God and have come"; and, "I am the way, no one comes to the Father except through me"; and, "No one comes to me unless the Father draws him"; and, "Everything has been entrusted to me by my Father"; and, "Just as the Father raises up the dead and gives them life, so the Son too gives it"; and, "If you have known me you have known the Father also." [6] According to these, he had shown himself the Father's stand-in, through whom the Father was both seen in his deeds and heard in his words and recognized, the Son administering the Father's deeds and words in himself — because the Father is invisible, a thing Philip had learned in the Law and ought to have remembered: "No one shall see God and live." And so he is rebuked for wanting to see the Father as though visible, and is instructed that the Father becomes visible in the Son through his mighty works, not through any display of his own person. [7] Finally, if by saying "Whoever sees me sees the Father" he intended the Father to be taken for one and the same person as the Son, why does his next sentence run, "Do you not trust that I abide in the Father and the Father abides in me?" He ought rather to have appended, "Do you not believe that I am the Father?" Or toward what conclusion was he building, if he had not clarified precisely the point he wanted grasped — namely, that he was the Son? Indeed, in saying, "Do you not trust that I abide in the Father and the Father abides in me," he was steering toward the very opposite conclusion, precisely so that, having said "whoever has seen me has seen the Father also," he would not be mistaken for the Father — which he never wished to be thought, he who was always professing himself the Son and one who had come from the Father. [8] So he made plain the conjunction of the two persons, so that the Father should not be sought apart as visible in his own right, and so that the Son should be held to be the Father's representative. And all the same he accounted even for this — the manner in which the Father dwelt within the Son and the Son within the Father: "The sayings," he tells them, "which I speak to you are not my own" — meaning, they are the Father's — "but the Father, dwelling within me, performs the works." [9] So then, through both mighty works and teaching's words, the Father dwelling within the Son becomes visible through the very means by which he dwells and through the one in whom he dwells — each person's distinct property showing itself exactly here, where it is said, "I abide in the Father, and the Father abides in me." And so comes the word "Believe." Believe what, precisely? That I am the Father? Nowhere, I think, is that written down; rather, "believe that I abide in the Father and the Father abides in me" — or, failing that, "believe on account of the deeds themselves" — the very works through which the Father was seen in the Son, not by sight but by understanding.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 25 ========

[1] After Philip, and through the whole substance of this question, right down to the end of the Gospel, the same manner of speech persists, by which the Father and the Son are distinguished each in his own property. He promises that he will ask the Paraclete from the Father when he has ascended to the Father, and that he will send him — and, moreover, another one. But we have already shown in what sense "another." Yet, "He will take," he says, "of mine, just as I take of the Father's." Thus the chain that binds the Father within the Son and the Son within the Paraclete produces three bound together, each proceeding out of the last — who are three, one thing, not one person, in the sense already stated: "I and the Father are one" — one in unity of substance, not in singularity of number. [2] Read further, and you will find the one you believe to be the Father called instead the Father's vine, and the Father the vinedresser — so that the very one you suppose was on earth is again, in heaven, acknowledged by the Son, when, looking up there, he committed his disciples to the Father. But even if in this Gospel it is not disclosed, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" and, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit," nevertheless, after the resurrection and the glory of death conquered, once the whole necessity of his lowliness had been discharged, when he could now have shown himself as the Father to that most faithful woman who came to touch him out of love, not out of curiosity or the unbelief of Thomas, he said, "Stop clinging to me, since I have not risen yet to my Father; go instead to my brothers" (and in this too he shows himself the Son — for he would have called them sons had he been the Father) "and tell them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, my God and your God." [3] Father to the Father, and God to God? Or rather Son to the Father, and Word to God? [4] And the very close of the Gospel — to what end does it seal these things as written, if not, "that you may believe," he says, "that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God"? So then, whatever of these things you should think capable of serving your case for the Father and the Son being one and the same, you will be straining against the Gospel's own concluding sentence: for these things were not written that you should believe Jesus, the Christ, to be the Father, but that he is the Son.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 26 ========

[1] On account of one saying of Philip's and the Lord's answer to it, we seem to have run right through the Gospel of John — lest a single saying overturn so many things stated plainly, both before and after, a saying which ought rather to be interpreted in line with the whole, than against the whole, even against its own sense. [2] But without bringing in the other Gospels, which confirm the faith by the Lord's nativity, it is enough that he who was to be born of a virgin was, by the angel himself, announced beforehand as marked out as Son of God: "The Spirit of God will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore also what is born of you, being holy, will be called the Son of God." [3] They will want to argue even here, but the truth will prevail. "Surely," comes their objection, "the Son of God must be God himself, and the power of the Most High must be the Most High himself." And they are not ashamed to insinuate that, if it were so, it would have been written so. For whom was he afraid of, that he did not say plainly, "God will come upon you and the Most High will overshadow you"? But by saying "the Spirit of God," though the Spirit is God, he did not name God directly, meaning to have understood a portion of the whole which was going to pass over into the name of "Son." [4] This Spirit of God amounts to nothing other than the Word. Just as, when John writes that "the Word was made flesh," we grasp that the Spirit is bound up in that mention of the Word, so also here we can make out the Word beneath the label "Spirit." For Spirit furnishes the underlying stuff of the Word, while Word is how the Spirit acts and functions — the pair forming a single reality. [5] Otherwise John will be professing one thing became flesh, and the angel will be foretelling a different thing to become flesh, unless Spirit is also Word and Word also Spirit. Just as, then, the Word of God is not the very one whose Word it is, so neither is the Spirit — even though called God, he is not himself the one of whom he is called God. Nothing that belongs to someone is that person himself. Plainly, when something comes from someone, and is his precisely by coming from him, it can be of such a kind as the one from whom, and to whom, it belongs. [6] And so Spirit is God and Word is God, because each is from God, yet is not itself the one from whom it is. But if the Spirit of God, being a substantive thing, is not itself God but is God only to this extent, that it is of the very substance of God himself — being a substantive thing, as though it were one share of the totality — all the more, then, the power of the Most High cannot itself be equated with the Most High, since what is called Spirit is not even a substantive thing, any more than wisdom or providence are: for these are not substances but accidents of some substance. [7] Power is an accident of Spirit, and will not itself be Spirit. These realities, then — call them what you will, the Spirit of God, the Word, the Power — having converged together upon the virgin, that which she bears is God's Son. [8] This he himself also attests in these same Gospels, from the time he was a boy: "Did you not know," he asks, "that I have to be occupied with my Father's affairs?" This too Satan acknowledges in the temptations: "If you are the Son of God." This too the demons confess from then on: "We know who you are, the Son of God." He himself worships the Father. He does not deny that he is confessed by Peter as the Christ of God. Exulting in the Spirit, to the Father: "I confess to you, Father," he says, "that you have hidden these things from the wise." [9] Here too he affirms that the Father is known to no one except the Son, and that the Son will confess those who confess him before the Father, and deny those who deny him — bringing in the parable of the son, not the father, sent into the vineyard after several servants and killed by the wicked tenants, and defended by the father. He himself does not know the last day and hour, known to the Father alone; he assigns a kingdom to his disciples just as he says a kingdom was assigned to himself by the Father; he has the power to ask the Father for legions of angels to help him, should he wish; he cries out that God has forsaken him; he places his spirit into the Father's hands; and after the resurrection he promises to send his disciples the Father's promise; and at the very last he directs that they be baptized under the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit — not a single name, for it happens not once but thrice, once for each name, into distinct persons, that our baptism proceeds.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 27 ========

Why should I linger over what is already so obvious, when I have to move on to matters these people work hard to make obscure? On every side they are hedged in by the distinction of Father and Son, which we lay out — while keeping the two joined — on the model of sun and ray, spring and stream, through an undivided number of two and yet three; and still they try to twist it back to their own opinion, distinguishing the two, Father and Son, within a single person, by claiming that the Son is flesh, that is, the man, that is, Jesus, while the Father is spirit, that is, God, that is, Christ. And these people, who insist that Father and Son are one and the same, are actually beginning to split them apart rather than unite them. For if Jesus is one thing and Christ another, then the Son will be one thing and the Father another, since the Son bears the name Jesus while the Father carries the name Christ. This sort of "monarchy" they perhaps borrowed from Valentinus, who also makes Jesus and Christ two. But this maneuver of theirs has already been demolished by what we argued earlier, since it is God's own Word, or God's own Spirit, together with the Power of the Most High, that gets the title Father in their scheme — yet a thing is never identical with that of which it is called, but comes from it and belongs to it. And there is another angle from which they will be refuted on this very chapter. "Look," they say, "the angel proclaimed: 'Therefore that which is born shall be called holy, the Son of God' — so it was flesh that was born, therefore flesh is what will be the Son of God." No — it was said of the Spirit of God. Certainly the virgin conceived by the Holy Spirit, and what she conceived is what she bore. So what was to be born was what had been conceived and was to be delivered, namely the Spirit — whose name shall also be called Emmanuel, which is translated "God with us." But flesh is not God, such that it could be said of flesh, "That which is holy shall be called Son of God"; rather it is he who was born in that flesh who is God, of whom the psalm also says, "For God was born a man in her, and built her by the will of the Father." Which God was born in her? The Word, and the Spirit who was born together with the Word by the Father's will. So then, the Word in the flesh — though even here we must ask how the Word became flesh: whether by being transfigured into flesh, or by putting flesh on. In fact, by putting it on. For the rest, God must be believed unchangeable and unformable, since he is eternal. Yet transfiguration amounts to the ruin of whatever existed before: whatever is transfigured into something else stops being what it was and begins to be what it was not. God, though, can neither cease existing nor turn into anything else. But the Word is God, and "what the Lord has spoken remains forever" — that is, by persevering in its own form. And if the Word cannot admit of being reconfigured, it follows that it must be understood to have "become flesh" in the sense that it came to be within flesh, and was made manifest, and was seen, and was touched, through the flesh — since everything else demands to be taken the same way. For supposing the Word turned into flesh through a transfiguration and change of substance, then Jesus will now be a single substance made out of two, flesh and spirit — a sort of blend, like electrum made from gold and silver — and it will begin to be neither gold, that is spirit, nor silver, that is flesh, since the one is changed by the other and a third thing results. In that case Jesus will not be God at all, since the Word will have ceased to be, having become flesh; nor will he be human flesh, since the flesh is no longer flesh in its own right, because it was the Word. So out of the two, neither remains: something else entirely, a third thing, quite different from either. But in fact we find him set out directly as both God and man, this very psalm suggesting it: "For God was born a man in her, and built her by the will of the Father" — plainly, through and through, Son of God and Son of Man, God and man beyond doubt, each remaining, according to its own substance, distinct in its own property, since the Word is nothing other than God, and the flesh is nothing other than man. So too the apostle teaches concerning both his substances: "Who was made," he says, "of the seed of David" — here he is man, Son of Man — "who was proclaimed Son of God according to the Spirit" — here he is God, and the Word of God is Son: we see a double condition, not fused but conjoined, God and man in one person, Jesus. Of Christ, however, I say more later. And the property of each substance is so intact that the Spirit carried out its own business in him — that is, powers and works and signs — while the flesh performed its own sufferings: hungering under the devil's testing, thirsting by the Samaritan woman, weeping for Lazarus, distressed to the point of death, and finally, dying too. But if he were some third thing blended out of both, like electrum, the evidence for each substance would not stand out so distinctly; rather the spirit would have performed fleshly acts and the flesh spiritual ones, by cross-transfer, or else neither fleshly nor spiritual acts at all but those of some third form arising from the mixture. Indeed, either the Word would have died, or the flesh would not have died, if the Word had been converted into flesh; either the flesh would have been immortal, or the Word mortal. But because both substances, each in its own condition, were acting distinctly, therefore each encountered its own operations and its own outcomes. Learn, then, along with Nicodemus, that what is born of flesh is flesh, and what is of the Spirit is spirit. Flesh does not become spirit, nor spirit flesh: the two can plainly coexist in one being. Out of these Jesus was constituted — from the flesh, man; from the Spirit, God — whom the angel then, from the side of him that was of Spirit, pronounced Son of God, while reserving for the flesh the title Son of Man. So too the apostle, calling him "mediator of God and men," confirmed both substances. Lastly, you who interpret "Son of God" as flesh — produce for me who the Son of Man is. Will he be spirit, perhaps? But you want the Spirit to be identified with the Father himself, on the grounds that God is spirit — as if the Spirit did not also belong to God, just as the Word is God, and yet is God's Word.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 28 ========

So then you make Christ the Father, you utter fool, without even considering the force of this very name — if indeed "Christ" is a name at all, and not rather a designation: for it signifies "anointed." And "anointed" is no more a name in itself than "clothed" or "shod" is — these are things that happen to a name, not the name itself. Would you, if on some argument Jesus were also called "clothed," go on to say — just as you call him "Christ" from the sacrament of anointing — that Jesus was Son of God while believing "clothed" to be the Father? Now, on to Christ. If the Father is Christ, the Father is anointed — and certainly by another; or if by himself, prove it. But that is not what the Acts of the Apostles teaches, in that cry of the church to God: "For truly they gathered together in this city against your holy Son whom you anointed — Herod and Pilate along with the nations." So they testified both that Jesus is Son of God and that the Son was anointed by the Father: therefore it is Jesus who is the same as the Christ who was anointed by the Father, not the Father who anointed the Son. So too Peter: "Let the whole house of Israel therefore know most assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, that is, anointed — this Jesus whom you crucified." John, moreover, brands as a liar the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ, and conversely declares born of God everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ; for which reason he also urges us onward to trust in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, so that we may hold fellowship with the Father and together with his Son Jesus Christ. So too Paul, throughout, sets forth God the Father alongside Jesus Christ our Lord: writing to the Romans, he offers thanks to God through Christ Jesus our Lord; writing to the Galatians, he insists he is an apostle neither from men nor by a man, but rather through Jesus Christ, and through God the Father. And across his whole body of letters you find passages proclaiming matters in just this fashion, laying out two — God the Father, and Jesus Christ our Lord, the Son of the Father — and that Jesus himself is the Christ, under the other name as well, Son of God. For from that point on, by the same right by which both names belong to one person — that is, the Son of God — the one, even without the other, belongs to that same person: whether "Jesus" alone is used, "Christ" is understood as well, since Jesus is anointed; or whether "Christ" alone, it is likewise Jesus, since Jesus is the one who is anointed. Of these two names, the one is his own, given by the angel; the other is something that happens to him, arising from the anointing — while all the while it is the Son, not the Father, who is Christ. Finally, how blind is he who does not even grasp, in the very name "Christ," that another God is being pointed to, if he assigns the name of Christ to the Father! For if Christ, who says, "I ascend to my Father and your Father, and my God and your God," is the Father-as-God, then plainly he points to another Father and God above himself. Likewise if the Father is Christ, then it is someone else who "establishes the thunder and creates the wind and announces to men his own Anointed." And if "the kings of the earth took their stand, and the rulers gathered together as one against the Lord and against his Christ," then the Lord against whose Christ the kings and rulers gathered will be someone else again. And if "the Lord said to my Lord, the Christ" — the Lord who speaks will be someone else than the Father-Christ he speaks to. And when the apostle writes, "that the God of Christ Jesus our Lord may grant you the spirit of wisdom and revelation," the God of Christ Jesus, the giver of the spiritual gifts, will be someone else again. Indeed — not to wander through every text — the one "who raised up Christ" will also raise our mortal bodies, as though there will be someone other doing the raising than the Father who died and the Father who was raised, if it is the Father who is the Christ that died.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 29 ========

Let that blasphemy be silenced, let it be silenced. It is enough that Christ the Son of God is said to have died, and this simply because it is so written. For the apostle too, pronouncing that Christ died — not without a certain weight in the saying — adds "according to the Scriptures," so as to blunt the severity of the assertion through the authority of Scripture, and to remove the hearer's offense. And yet, since two substances are reckoned in Christ Jesus, the divine and the human, and it is agreed that the divine is immortal while the human is mortal, it is clear in what respect he is said to have died — namely as flesh, as man, as Son of Man, not as Spirit, Word, and Son of God. In short, by saying "Christ died" — that is, "the Anointed" — the statement shows precisely that it was the anointed thing that died, that is, the flesh. "So then," you say, "we too, saying the same thing by the same reasoning as you, are not guilty of blasphemy toward the Lord God regarding the Son; for we do not claim he died in his divine substance but in his human one." But no — you do blaspheme, not only because you say the Father died but because you say he was crucified. For the curse of crucifixion, which under the Law falls upon the Son — since "Christ was made a curse for us," not the Father — you turn into blasphemy against the Father by converting Christ into the Father. We, on the other hand, saying that Christ was crucified, do not curse him but merely report the Law's curse-formula, just as the apostle, saying the same, did not blaspheme by saying it. For just as anything may be said without blasphemy of one to whom it is applicable, so it is blasphemy to say of one to whom it does not apply. So then, neither did the Father "suffer with" the Son. Fearing, evidently, a direct blasphemy against the Father, they hope to soften it this way — conceding, in the process, that Father and Son are already two, if the Son indeed suffers while the Father merely "co-suffers." Foolish here too. For what is it to "suffer with" another except to suffer along with him? Further, if the Father is impassible, he is surely also incapable of co-suffering; or if capable of co-suffering, he is surely passible. You gain nothing for him even by this timid evasion of yours. You are afraid to call him "passible," and yet you call him "co-passible." But the Father is every bit as incapable of co-suffering as the Son himself is incapable of suffering, by that very condition in which he is God. But in what way then did the Son undergo suffering, given that the Father did not co-suffer alongside him? He is set apart from the Son, not from God. For if a river is polluted by some turbulence, though it runs down as one and the same substance from the spring and is never cut off from the spring, still the river's injury does not reach back to the spring; and though the water in the river is the very water of the spring, still, while it does not suffer in the spring but in the river, it is not the spring that suffers but the river that flows from the spring. So too could the Spirit of God suffer in the Son? Because it would not have suffered in the Father but in the Son, would the Father appear to have suffered? But it is enough that the Spirit of God, under its own name, suffered nothing at all — because if it suffered anything in the Son, it would in that sense have been possible for the Father to suffer along with the Son in the flesh. In fact, when this point is examined, no one will deny it: for even we cannot suffer for God's sake unless the Spirit of God is in us, who indeed speaks in us the things of confession — yet not itself the one suffering, but the one enabling the capacity to suffer.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 30 ========

[1] Otherwise, if you press on, I can answer you more harshly still and pit you against a pronouncement of the Lord himself — let me put the question to you this way: you have him crying out in his passion, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" So either the Son was suffering, forsaken by the Father, and the Father who forsook the Son did not himself suffer — or, if it was the Father who suffered, to what God was he crying out? [2] But this cry belongs to flesh and soul, that is, to man, not to the Word nor to the Spirit — that is, not to God — and it was uttered precisely to show that God is incapable of suffering, since he "forsook" the Son only in the sense that he handed over the Son's manhood to death. [3] This is what the apostle meant when he wrote, "If the Father did not spare his own Son." This is what Isaiah announced beforehand: "And the Lord handed him over for our offenses." So he "forsook" him by not sparing him; so he "forsook" him by handing him over. [4] Yet the Father did not abandon the Son, into whose hands the Son placed his own spirit. Indeed, he placed it there, and at once he died — for while the spirit remains in the flesh, the flesh cannot possibly die outright. Thus for the Son "to be forsaken by the Father" meant simply to die. So the Son both dies and is raised again by the Father, according to the scriptures. The Son ascends into the higher heavens — the very one who also descended into the lower parts of the earth. [5] It is he who sits at the right hand of the Father, not the Father at his own right hand. This is the one Stephen sees, as he is being stoned, standing still at God's right hand, ready from that moment to sit until the Father puts all his enemies under his feet. This is the one who will also come again upon the clouds of heaven, in the same manner as he ascended. It is he who, meanwhile, having received the gift from the Father, poured out the Holy Spirit — the third name of the Godhead and the third degree of majesty, the preacher of the one sovereign rule, yet also the interpreter of the divine economy if anyone will admit the utterances of his new prophecy, and the guide into every truth abiding in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit alike, in keeping with the Christian sacrament.

======== Adversus Praxean — Chapter 31 ========

[1] But this — believing in one God in such a way that you refuse to count the Son alongside him, and after the Son, the Spirit — is a piece of Jewish faith. What, after all, would be left to distinguish us from them, except just this difference? What would be the point of the gospel, what the substance of the New Testament establishing the Law and the Prophets "up to John," if the Father, Son, and Spirit are not, from that point forward, believed as three yet reckoned one God? [2] This is why God willed to renew the covenant: so that he might now be believed as one in a new way, through the Son and the Spirit, so that God might at last be known openly under his own proper names and persons — the very God who, previously proclaimed through the Son and Spirit, was not understood. [3] Let the antichrists take note, then, who deny Father and Son alike: they deny the Father by naming him the Son, and deny the Son by supposing him the Father, crediting each with what he is not and stripping each of what he is. But whoever confesses Christ as God's Son, and not as the Father, has God dwelling within, and dwells in God himself. We trust the witness God has borne about his Son: "Whoever does not have the Son does not have life either." And he does not have the Son who believes him to be someone other than the Son.

======== De Anima — Chapter 1 ========

[1] Having already joined battle with Hermogenes on the single question of the soul's origin — since he presumed that it too was formed rather from a supply of matter than from the breath of God — I now turn to the remaining questions, and it will be seen that I have most of my fighting still to do, with the philosophers. [2] Skirmishing over the state of the soul went on even in Socrates' prison cell — I am not sure whether this was the first such debate, or simply held at a convenient moment for the master, though the place makes no difference either way. For what could Socrates' soul have known with any clarity at that point, with the sacred ship already back from its voyage, the hemlock of his sentence already drained, death itself now present and certainly disturbing it into some motion in keeping with nature, or else driving it wild, should that motion not be in keeping with nature? For however calm and composed it was — a soul that neither the sudden tears of his soon-to-be-widowed wife nor the sight, right after, of his fatherless children by the law of natural affection had bent — even in this very steadiness, so as not to be shaken, its own constancy was rattled by resisting the shock of inconstancy. And what else could any man condemned by injustice know, besides the mere consolation of that injustice — let alone a philosopher, that creature bred for glory, for whom an injustice is not to be consoled but rather flaunted? [3] Indeed, after the verdict, when his wife met him and cried out in womanly fashion, "You have been condemned unjustly, Socrates!" — he had already answered, almost gloatingly: "Would you rather I'd been condemned justly?" No wonder, then, that in prison too, eager to break the birdlimed palms of Anytus and Meletus, he claims immortality for the soul face to face with death itself, out of the necessary assumption needed to frustrate the injustice done him. [4] So all of Socrates' wisdom at that moment came from a deliberate policy of composed calm, not from confidence in truth already found. For who has found truth without God? Who has known God without Christ? Who has fathomed Christ without the Holy Spirit? To whom has the Holy Spirit been granted without the sacrament of faith? In fact Socrates was quite readily moved by a different spirit altogether — they say a demon clung to him from boyhood, a thoroughly wretched tutor, even though among the poets and philosophers demons rank right after the gods, and alongside them. [5] For the proofs of Christian power had not yet come forward — the power that alone unmasks that most pernicious force, never good, but rather the artisan of every error and the enemy that draws men away from every truth. But if Socrates counted as wisest on the strength of the Pythian demon's own vote too — that demon simply doing business on behalf of its own kind — how much worthier and more solid is the claim of Christian wisdom, before whose very breath the whole force of demons gives way? [6] This wisdom, schooled by heaven, is freer in denying the gods of this age — it does not compromise itself by ordering a cock owed to Aesculapius; it brings in no new demons but drives out the old ones; it does not corrupt the young but shapes them in every good form of modesty; and so it endures an unjust verdict not from one city only but from the whole world, for the sake of the name of truth — hated in exact proportion to how fully it is possessed — so that it does not merely swallow death from a cup, wearing the appearance of good cheer, but drains it from the gallows and the burning stake through every device cruelty can invent. Meanwhile, in this far darker prison that is the world, among its own Cebeses and its own Phaedos, whenever anything about the soul needs examining, this wisdom will steer by God's own rules, certain that no one can point the way to the soul better than its Maker. Let it learn from God what it has from God — or from no one, if not from God. For who will reveal what God has kept covered? From where, then, is one to inquire? From the very place where not knowing is safest. It is better to not know, through God, because he has not revealed it, than to know, through man, because man has simply presumed to.

======== De Anima — Chapter 2 ========

[1] Of course we will not deny that the philosophers have sometimes thought along the same lines as we do; even the outcome itself is a kind of testimony to the truth. Sometimes, in a storm, with the tracks of sky and sea both scrambled, some harbor is struck upon by a lucky mistake; sometimes, too, in the dark, some entrance or exit is found by blind good fortune; and besides, a great deal is simply supplied by nature, as if from some common sense which God saw fit to endow the soul with. [2] Once philosophy got hold of this, it puffed it up for the glory of its own craft, out of sheer eagerness — no wonder, if I put it this way — for eloquence, trained as it is to build up and tear down whatever it likes, persuading more by speaking well than by teaching. It imposes shapes on things, now leveling them out, now stripping them bare; it prejudges the uncertain from the certain; it appeals to precedents as though everything were comparable; it lays down the law on everything, even where the properties differ among things otherwise alike; it reserves nothing to God's own prerogative; it has turned the laws of nature into its own opinions. I could bear that, if philosophy itself were natural enough to be proved a partner in nature's own condition. [3] Philosophy has indeed fancied that it drew even from what it takes to be sacred writings, since antiquity reckoned most of its authorities as gods outright, not merely as divine figures — Mercury the Egyptian, for instance, whom Plato in particular attended closely; Silenus the Phrygian, to whom Midas, once led to him by shepherds, surrendered his own enormous ears; Hermotimus, honored with a shrine raised by the citizens of Clazomenae once he had died; Orpheus; Musaeus; Pherecydes, the teacher of Pythagoras. But what does it matter if the philosophers also raided those writings which we, by our own confession, condemn as apocryphal, when we are certain that nothing is to be accepted that does not agree with the genuine prophetic equipment already brought forth in its own proper age — remembering, as we do, the false prophets, and long before them the apostate spirits, who furnished the whole face of the age with cunning of just this kind of talent? [4] Finally, even if it is credible that every seeker after wisdom, driven by mere curiosity, approached the prophets themselves too, you would still find more disagreement among the philosophers than agreement — since even within their agreement their disagreement can be caught out, seeing that whatever is true in them and consonant with the prophets they commend on other grounds, or twist to other ends, doing the truth the gravest injury by making it look either propped up by falsehoods or dependent on their patronage. [5] So this, on this subject especially, is what has entangled us with the philosophers: that sometimes they dress up opinions we hold in common in arguments of their own devising, arguments that in places run contrary to our rule; and sometimes they buttress opinions that are entirely their own with arguments we hold in common, arguments that in places agree with our rule — so that truth is almost squeezed out of philosophy by philosophy's own poisons worked upon it. And so, under both headings of this partnership with truth's adversary, we are pressed to free the shared opinions from the philosophers' arguments and to separate the shared arguments from their opinions, calling the questions back to God's own writings — excepting, of course, whatever can be taken up as simple testimony without the snare of any prejudicial baggage, since even from rivals a testimony is sometimes necessary, provided it does not serve the rivals' cause. [6] Nor am I unaware how vast a forest of material this subject makes among the philosophers, given even just the number of their commentators — how many varieties of opinion, how many wrestling-grounds of argument, how many offshoots of questions, how many tangles of resolutions. But I have also looked into medicine, philosophy's sister, as they call it, which lays its own claim to this same territory. And why not? The theory of the soul might well seem to belong to it even more, through its care of the body. Hence it also frequently contradicts its sister, on the grounds that, by dealing with the soul face to face in its own dwelling, it knows the soul better. But let the two of them fight out their rival claims to superiority between themselves. Philosophy had the freedom of pure intellect, and medicine the compulsion of its craft, both stretching out their inquiries into the soul: uncertainties are hunted far and wide, and presumptions argued still more widely. As great as the difficulty of proving, so great the labor of persuading — so that the shadowy Heraclitus himself, rightly noting the vaster darkness closing in on those who examine the soul, declared out of sheer weariness with the questions that he had not found the limits of the soul by traveling every road. [7] The Christian, however, needs only a few things to gain knowledge of this matter. For certainty always lies in the few, and it is not permitted him to seek further than what may lawfully be found — for the apostle forbids endless questionings. Further still, it is not permitted to find more than what is learned from God; and whatever is learned from God is the whole of it.

======== De Anima — Chapter 3 ========

[1] Would that no heresies had ever needed to exist, so that men of proven worth might simply shine forth on their own! Then we would have no business at all with the philosophers over the soul either — those patriarchs, so to speak, of the heretics — seeing that already back then the apostle foresaw philosophy as a threat to truth. For having sampled that chattering city, Athens, and tasted every huckster of wisdom and eloquence to be found there, he came away and framed that warning decree of his. [2] And indeed the theory of the soul has likewise been shaken by these philosophized doctrines of men who water down the wine: some deny the soul is immortal, some claim it is more than immortal; some dispute over its substance, others over its form, others over its every last disposition; some trace its origin from one source, others lead its departure off toward another, exactly as the prestige of Plato, or the vigor of Zeno, or the steady drone of Aristotle, or the torpor of Epicurus, or the gloom of Heraclitus, or the frenzy of Empedocles happened to persuade them. [3] Divine teaching went wrong, I suppose, in rising from Judea rather than from Greece! And Christ, too, made his mistake in sending out fishermen to preach rather than some sophist. So if things of this sort, smoking up out of philosophy's kitchen, cloud over the clear, clean air of truth, then Christians must clear that fog away, striking at the arguments from their very roots — that is, the philosophical ones — and setting against them the definitions that come from heaven, that is, the Lord's own, so that both the snares by which pagans are caught up in philosophy may be destroyed, and the ones by which the faithful are shaken loose by heresy may be blunted. [4] One engagement has already been settled against Hermogenes, as I said before, since we claim the soul from the breath of God, not from matter — and there too we stood fortified by the unclouded rule of God's own determination: "and God breathed the breath of life into the face of man, and man became a living soul" — from the breath of God, unmistakably. On that score there is nothing more to turn over; it has its own heading and its own heretic already dealt with. From here I will open my case against the rest.

======== De Anima — Chapter 4 ========

ON THE SOUL'S UNBORN STATE. [1] After settling its origin, the question of its status has to be faced. It follows, of course, that having professed the soul comes from the breath of God, we must also assign it a beginning. Plato rules this out, wanting the soul to be unborn and uncreated. We, on the other hand, teach that it is both born and made, from the very establishment of its beginning. Nor do we err at once in calling it both, since "born" is naturally one thing and "made" another — the latter fitting things without life, the former things with it. But these distinctions, while each keeping its own place and time, also sometimes share a common ground of being acted upon. So "made" can also stand for "brought into being," since everything that in any way receives being is generated. Indeed the maker himself can be called the parent of the thing made — Plato himself uses the word this way. So then, as far as our faith is concerned, whether the soul is made or born, the philosopher's opinion is driven off, backed also by the authority of prophecy.

======== De Anima — Chapter 5 ========

[1] Let them summon some Eubulus, and Critolaus, and Xenocrates, and — since we're in the neighborhood — Aristotle, Plato's friend. Perhaps they'll be more forcefully driven to strip the soul of its bodily substance, if they take a look at the other side too — and there are plenty on that side claiming the soul for a body. [2] And I don't mean only those who fashion it out of some obvious material thing, the way Hipparchus and Heraclitus make it out of fire, Hippo and Thales out of water, Empedocles and Critias out of blood, Epicurus out of atoms (if atoms even can compress into a body by their own collision), Critolaus and his Peripatetics out of some fifth substance or other (which is a body too, if it takes up room like one) — I bring in the Stoics as well, who, in proclaiming the soul a breath — nearly agreeing with us, since breath and spirit are next-door neighbors to each other — will nonetheless have no trouble persuading you that the soul is a body. [3] Zeno, in fact, defines the soul as 'implanted breath,' and builds the case this way: 'That whose departure causes an animal to die is a body; but the departure of implanted breath causes an animal to die; therefore implanted breath is a body; therefore the soul is a body.' [4] Cleanthes wants it that not only the features of the body but also the marks of the soul reproduce in children the likeness of their parents — the mirror, of course, of character, temperament, and feeling — and that likeness and unlikeness are properties a body can take on; the soul, then, being subject to likeness or unlikeness, is a body. [5] Again: bodily and incorporeal things, they say, don't share sensations with each other; but in fact the soul suffers along with the body — when the body is hurt by blows, wounds, sores, the soul aches right along with it — and the body suffers along with the soul, sickening through the loss of its partner's vigor when the soul is afflicted by worry, anguish, love, and betraying that soul's shame or fear by blushing or going pale. Therefore the soul is a body, on the evidence of this shared traffic in bodily suffering. [6] And Chrysippus lends a hand too, laying it down that bodily things simply cannot be abandoned by incorporeal things, since incorporeal things cannot even make contact with them (hence Lucretius: 'nothing but a body can touch or be touched') — whereas when the body is abandoned by the soul, it is affected by death. Therefore the soul is a body, since nothing but a body could abandon a body.

======== De Anima — Chapter 6 ========

[1] The Platonists stir all this up with cleverness rather than truth. Every body, they say, must be either animate or inanimate. If inanimate, it will be moved from outside; if animate, from inside. But the soul is moved neither from outside, since it isn't inanimate, nor from inside, since it is itself rather the thing that moves the body. And so the soul doesn't appear to be a body, since it isn't moved, from any quarter, in the manner bodies are. [2] To this we shall first marvel at the sheer incoherence of a definition that drags in terms that don't even apply to the soul. For the soul cannot be called an animate or an inanimate body, since it is precisely the soul that makes a body animate by being present, or inanimate by being absent from it. So what does the making cannot itself be the thing made, such that it could be called animate or inanimate — the soul, after all, is named for its own substance. But if what is soul cannot even admit of being called an animate or inanimate body, how can it be summoned to answer to the mold of animate and inanimate bodies at all? [3] Next: if it belongs to a body to be moved from outside by something else, and we've shown above that the soul too is moved by another — when it prophesies, when it rages — and certainly from outside, since by another, then by the very terms of their own proposed example I am entitled to recognize as a body whatever will be moved from outside by another. But if being moved by another belongs to a body, how much more does moving another belong to one! And the soul moves the body, and its efforts are plainly visible from outside. It is the soul that drives the feet into walking, the hands into touching, the eyes into seeing, the tongue into speaking — as if some puppeteer's motion stirred the surface from within. Where does this incorporeal power of the soul get its force? Where does an empty thing get the strength to push solid things around? [4] But then how, they ask, do bodily and intellectual senses appear divided in a human being? The qualities of bodily things, they say — earth, fire — are reported by bodily senses, touch and sight; but the qualities of incorporeal things — kindness, malice — are grasped by intellectual senses. Therefore, they conclude, the soul, whose qualities are grasped not by bodily but by intellectual senses, must plainly be incorporeal. [5] Certainly — if I fail to knock out the very first rung of this definition. But look: I can show incorporeal things subject to bodily senses — sound to hearing, color to sight, smell to smell — and it's by their example that the soul, too, has access to the body; don't tell me these are reported through bodily senses just because they happen to touch bodily things. Well then, if it's agreed that incorporeal things too are grasped by bodily senses, why shouldn't the soul, though a body, likewise be reported by incorporeal senses? The definition, clearly, has been ruled out of court. [6] Among their more impressive arguments will also be this one: that every body, they judge, is nourished by bodily things, while the soul, being incorporeal, is nourished by incorporeal things — namely, the pursuits of wisdom. But this rung won't hold up either, since Soranus, that most accomplished authority of the Methodic school of medicine, answers that the soul too is nourished by bodily things — indeed that a soul failing from lack of food is generally propped back up by it. Of course! Take that away entirely and it slips clean out of the body. So even Soranus himself, having written on the soul most exhaustively in four volumes and tested every philosopher's opinion, claims a bodily substance for the soul — though he cheats it of immortality. Not everyone, after all, is prepared to believe what belongs to Christians. [7] So then, just as Soranus shows by the facts that the soul is nourished by bodily things, let the philosopher likewise produce evidence that it feeds on incorporeal ones. But no one, ever, hesitating on the brink of death, has had honeyed water poured down him out of some quotation from Plato, or crumbs stuffed in from some morsel of Aristotle's fine print. And what will become of all those countless souls of hillbillies and barbarians, who have none of wisdom's rations and yet, untrained, are strong in good sense — living without academies, without the porticoes of Athens, without Socrates' prison cell, fasting, in short, from philosophy their whole lives long, and living just fine? For it isn't the substance itself that these studies feed, but the discipline; they don't fatten the soul, they merely dress it up. And it's convenient, too, that the Stoics themselves declare the arts to be bodies — so on that reckoning too the soul is a body, if it's believed to be nourished even by the arts. [8] But philosophy's overreaching concentration is often apt not even to watch its own feet (so Thales fell down his well), and is apt, failing to grasp its own conclusions, to suspect them of being some derangement of health (so Chrysippus reached for hellebore). Something like that, I think, happened to him when he denied that two bodies could occupy one — a man out of touch with the sight and the reflection of pregnant women, who carry, not one body a day, but two, three, in the compass of a single womb. There is even a case on record in civil law of a Greek woman who gave birth to five at once — one mother of all her sons at a single stroke, a single litter's parent of many, a single womb's mother of a crowd — who, packed with that many bodies, I might almost say a whole population, was herself a sixth body. [9] The whole of nature will bear witness that bodies destined to come from bodies are already there, where they come from. Whatever comes from something else must, of necessity, be a second thing. And nothing comes from something else unless, at the moment of being begotten, there are two.

======== De Anima — Chapter 7 ========

[1] As far as the philosophers go, this is enough, since as far as our own people go it's more than enough — for them the soul's corporeality will shine out from the gospel itself. A certain man's soul, in the underworld, suffers, is punished in flame, is tormented in his tongue, and begs, from the finger of a happier soul, the comfort of a drop of water. [2] Do you suppose that scene of the poor man's rejoicing exit and the rich man's grieving one is only an image? And what is that name Lazarus doing there, if the thing isn't real? But even if we are to take it as an image, it will still stand as testimony to the truth. For if the soul had no body, the image of the soul could not accommodate the image of a body, nor would Scripture be lying about bodily limbs if there were none there to lie about. [3] And what, in fact, is that thing which is carried off to the underworld after its divorce from the body, which is detained there, which is kept in reserve for the day of judgment, to which even Christ, in dying, descended (to the souls of the patriarchs, I take it) — if the soul is nothing beneath the earth? For it is nothing, unless it is a body; incorporeality is exempt from every kind of custody, immune both to punishment and to comfort. Whatever it is that is punished or comforted — that will be a body; I'll come back to this more fully and at a better moment. [4] So then, if the soul experiences in advance any torment or comfort in that prison or wayside inn of the underworld, be it amid flame or resting against Abraham's chest, the soul's corporeality will stand proven. Incorporeality suffers nothing, having nothing through which it could suffer; or if it does have something through which to suffer, that something will be a body. For to the exact degree that everything bodily is capable of suffering, to that same degree whatever is capable of suffering is bodily.

======== De Anima — Chapter 8 ========

[1] It would otherwise be an abrupt and absurd thing to strike something off the roll of bodily things merely because it doesn't match the other bodily examples point for point. And where, then, would be the private distinctions of properties, through which the Creator's grandeur is stamped by the very diversity of his works, so that they might be as distinct as they are alike, as friendly as they are also rivals? Even the philosophers themselves declare that the universe is composed of opposites, following Empedocles' friendship and enmity. [2] So then, even if bodily things stand opposed to incorporeal ones, the bodily things themselves also differ so among themselves that the difference enlarges their species without changing their genus — so that they remain bodily, and yet there is such variety in the glory of God: varied as they are diverse, diverse as they have different senses for their qualities — some for these, others for those — different foods, some for these, others for those, these invisible, those visible, these heavy, those light. [3] They argue, moreover, that this further point proves the soul must be declared bodiless: that once it has departed, the bodies of the dead become heavier — when they ought to grow lighter, one body's worth of weight having been removed, if the soul were a body. 'What,' says Soranus, 'if people should deny the sea is a body, because outside the sea a ship becomes motionless and heavy?' How much stronger, then, must the body of the soul be, which afterward carries around so heavy a body with the lightest of motions! [4] As for its being invisible, that too is in keeping with the condition of its own body, the property of its substance, and even the nature of those to whom it happens to be invisible. Owls don't know the sun with their eyes; eagles endure it so well that they judge the true breeding of their own chicks by the boldness of their eyesight — and otherwise they won't rear the one who, as a degenerate, turns away from the sun's ray. [5] So a thing can be invisible to one creature and not to another, without that making it incorporeal, simply because its force doesn't act with equal strength on every eye. The sun is a body, being fire; but what the eagle will confess, the owl will deny, without thereby prejudicing the eagle's claim. Just so the soul's body may be invisible to flesh, perhaps, yet visible to spirit. That is how John, made in spirit of God, catches sight of the souls of the martyrs.

======== De Anima — Chapter 9 ========

ON THE SHAPE OF THE SOUL. [1] Since we assert that the soul is a body of its own particular quality and its own kind, this condition of its distinctness already prejudges the matter of every other accident of corporeality — either that these accidents, which we show belong to body, belong to it too, though each after its own kind in keeping with the soul's own bodily nature, or, even if they are not present in it, that this very absence is itself a mark of its distinctness: that the properties which attach to other bodies do not attach to the body of the soul. And yet we shall not be inconsistent in professing that the more customary and altogether necessary attributes of corporeality belong to the soul as well — such as shape, such as boundary, and that threefold spatial extent — namely a stretch in length, in breadth, and in height — by which philosophers take the measure of bodies. [2] What then of our giving the soul a shape, against Plato's will, as though the soul's immortality were thereby put at risk? For he maintains that everything shaped is composite and constructed, and that everything composite and constructed is dissoluble; but the soul is immortal, and therefore indissoluble — and, insofar as immortal, also unshaped, insofar as indissoluble; whereas, if shaped, it would be composite and constructed after all — as though, forming it in another way, he were shaping it with intellectual forms, beautiful through justice and the disciplines of philosophy, but ugly through the opposite arts. [3] But we, for our part, trace bodily lines on it too — not merely out of confidence in its corporeality reached by inference, but also from the sure warrant of grace received by revelation. For since we recognize spiritual gifts, we too, after John, have been found worthy to attain the gift of prophecy. [4] There is among us today a sister who has been allotted gifts of revelations, which she experiences in the church during the Sunday services through ecstasy in the Spirit; she holds conversation with angels, and on occasion with the Lord Himself, and she both sees and hears hidden things, and discerns the hearts of certain people, and dispenses remedies to those who ask for them. And indeed, according as the scriptures are read, or psalms are sung, or addresses are delivered, or petitions are offered, so material for visions is supplied to her from these. It happened once that we had been discoursing about the soul, of all things, while that sister was in the Spirit. After the service was over and the congregation dismissed, she — as is her custom — reported to us what she had seen (for these things are most carefully sifted, so that they may also be tested), and said: 'Among other things, a soul was shown to me in bodily form, and it appeared as a spirit, but not one of empty and vacant quality — rather, one that promised it could even be grasped: tender, and luminous, and of the color of air, and human in shape through and through. This was the vision.' And God is witness, and the apostle a sufficient guarantor of the gifts yet to come in the church; so even if the fact itself has not yet persuaded you of every particular, you may still believe. [5] For if the soul is body, then without doubt, along with the other attributes we have already professed above, a distinct color too will belong to it, as to every body. What color, then, will you reckon the soul's, other than airy and luminous? Not that air is its very substance — though this was Aenesidemus's view, and Anaximenes's, and I think according to some, Heraclitus's too — nor that it is light, though that was the opinion of Heraclides of Pontus. [6] For fiery gems are not made of a fiery substance merely because they flash with a ruddy glow, nor are beryls made of a watery substance merely because they shimmer with a clear brilliance (for color unites many things that nature keeps distinct) — but because everything fine and translucent has an affinity with air, and this the soul will be, since breath and spirit are derived from it, seeing that on account of its very fineness of texture its claim to corporeality is itself called into question. [7] So too, form a notion of the soul's shape from your own perception, one to be attributed to the human soul and no other than the human — indeed, the very shape of the body each person has carried about. Let contemplation of that first origin lead us to grasp this for the present. Consider: when God had blown into the face of that first man the breath of living, and the man was thereby turned into a living soul, the whole of him, surely, through the face that breath was at once carried into his inner parts and diffused through the entire extent of the body, and at the same moment, condensed by the divine inbreathing, it was stamped throughout with every inner line which, once condensed, it had filled, and, as it were, congealed into a shape. [8] From this, then, the soul's corporeal substance was solidified by condensation, and its shape was formed by the impression. This will be the inner man, distinct from the outer, one man in two forms, having eyes and ears of his own, by which the people ought to have heard and seen the Lord, and having the other limbs too, through which he functions both in thoughts and in dreams. So too the rich man in the underworld has a tongue, and the poor man a finger, and there is Abraham's bosom. Through these same outlines the souls of the martyrs under the altar are understood as well. For from the beginning, in Adam, the soul was formed and shaped together with the body, so that, as it furnished the seed of the whole substance, it furnished also the seed of this very condition.

======== De Anima — Chapter 10 ========

ON THE SIMPLICITY OF ITS SUBSTANCE, AND THAT THE SOUL ITSELF IS SPIRIT. [1] It belongs to the standard of the faith to define the soul, along with Plato, as simple — that is, uniform, at least in respect of the name 'substance.' Let the arts and disciplines see to that, and let its shape see to that too. [2] For some want it to have breath as another, natural substance distinct from it, as though living, which comes from the soul, were one thing, and breathing, which is done by breath, were another. For not all animals have both, they say: most merely live, without also breathing, because they lack the organs of breath, lungs and windpipes. [3] But what sort of thing is it, in examining the human soul, to look to the evidence of the gnat and the ant, when God the craftsman has fitted out every living thing with vital equipment proper to its own kind and disposition, such that no inference can properly be drawn from it? For neither will a man, just because he is furnished with lungs and windpipes, therefore breathe from one source and live from another, nor will an ant, just because it lacks limbs of that sort, be denied the power of breathing, as though it merely lived. [4] But to whom has so much of God's workmanship been laid open that he should presume some creature lacks these things? That Herophilus, the physician or rather the butcher, who dissected six hundred bodies to search out nature, who hated man in order to know him — I doubt he examined clearly all of man's inner parts, since death itself changes what had been alive, and not a simple death either, but one made erratic amid the very techniques of dissection. [5] Philosophers have declared for a certainty that gnats and ants and moths lack lungs and windpipes. Tell me, most curious inspector: do they have eyes to see with? Well, they go where they wish, and avoid and pursue what they know by sight — so point out their eyes, mark out their pupils. And moths gnaw things too — show me their jaws, produce their molars. And gnats buzz, not even blind of ear in the dark — show me likewise the trumpet and the lance of that mouth of theirs. Any living creature, even one the size of a mere point, must be fed by something — exhibit the organs for taking in food, digesting it, and expelling waste. [6] What then shall we say? If it is by these organs that life is lived, then they will certainly be present in all things that live, even if they are not seen, even if they cannot be detected because of their smallness. You will believe this the more readily if you consider that God is as much the craftsman in small things as in the greatest. [6b] But if you do not think God's skill capable of grasping such minute bodies, then acknowledge His greatness on this count instead — that He has equipped the smallest creatures to live nonetheless without the necessary organs, sight preserved without eyes, eating without little teeth, digestion without a gut, just as some creatures move without feet — by a flowing thrust, as serpents do, by a rising effort, as worms do, and by a foaming crawl, as slugs do. [7] So too, why should you not suppose that breathing happens without the bellows of lungs and without the pipes of windpipes — rather than embracing as a great argument the claim that breath is added to the human soul because there exist creatures that lack breath, and that these lack breath because they are not built with breathing apparatus? Do you reckon it something to live without breath, yet not believe it possible to breathe without lungs? What, I ask you, is 'to breathe'? To drive breath, I suppose, out of oneself. What is 'to live'? To not drive breath out of oneself, I suppose — for that is the answer I would have to give, if breathing and living were not the same thing. But surely it belongs to the dead not to drive breath: therefore it belongs to the living to drive breath. But it also belongs to the one breathing to drive breath: therefore breathing too belongs to the living. If either of these could run its course without the soul, then breathing would not belong to the soul but merely be a moistening. But as things stand, living amounts to drawing breath, and drawing breath amounts to living; so this entire activity, both the drawing of breath and the living, belongs to that one thing which owns the living — namely, the soul. [8] Finally, if you separate breath from the soul by nature, separate their operations too: let each act on its own, apart — the soul by itself, breath by itself; let the soul live without breath, let breath breathe without soul; let one leave the body while the other remains, and let death and life coincide. For if soul and breath are two things, they can be divided, so that by their division — one departing, the other remaining — death and life would occur together. But this never happens in any way; therefore they are not two things which cannot be divided, when they could have been divided had they truly been two. [9] 'But,' you say, 'two things can also be conjoined.' But they will not be conjoined, if living is one thing and breathing another: operations distinguish substances. And how much more solid is it now for you to believe them one, when you allow no distance between them, so that the soul itself is breath, since breathing belongs to that very thing to which living belongs? What, after all, if you wanted day to be one thing and light, which is added to day, another, when day itself is light? Clearly there will be other kinds of light too, as from the service of fires. So too there will be other species of spirit, as from God, as from the devil. Thus, when we are dealing with soul and spirit, the soul itself will be spirit, just as day itself is light. For that by which a thing is, is the very thing itself.

======== De Anima — Chapter 11 ========

[1] But that I call the soul 'spirit,' the logic of the present question compels, because breathing is assigned to another substance. While we claim this for the soul, which we recognize to be uniform and simple, we must call it spirit under a particular condition — not as a title of its state, but of its action; not under the heading of substance, but of operation — because it breathes, not because it properly is spirit. For to blow, too, is to breathe. So the soul, which we defend as breath by its own proper nature, we now call spirit out of necessity — while, against Hermogenes, who contends that it comes from matter rather than from the breath of God, we properly maintain that it is breath. [2] For he, against the very authority of scripture, turns 'breath' into 'spirit,' so that, since it is incredible that the spirit of God should fall into sin and then into judgment, the soul might rather be believed to come from matter than from the spirit of God. For this reason we too, there, defend it as breath, not spirit, in accordance with scripture and in accordance with the distinction of spirit; and here we pronounce it spirit, against our preference, in accordance with the common ground of breathing and blowing. There the question concerns substance; for to breathe is an act of substance. [3] I need say no more on this, except on account of the heretics, who stuff into the soul I know not what spiritual seed, conferred from the hidden bounty of their mother Sophia, unbeknownst to the Maker — although scripture, which knows its own Maker, its own God, far better, has published nothing more than this: that God blew into man's face a living breath, and man was made into a soul that lives, by which he ever after both lives and draws breath — the difference between spirit and soul being made sufficiently clear in the later scriptures, God Himself declaring: 'A spirit shall issue from before me, and every breath I have made.' For the soul too is breath, made from spirit. And again: 'Who gave breath to the people upon the earth, and spirit to those who tread it.' For first, soul — that is, breath — is given to the people walking on the earth, that is, acting after the flesh in a fleshly way; afterward, spirit is given to those who tread the earth underfoot, that is, to those who bring the flesh's works into subjection — since the apostle too says that it is not the spiritual that comes first, but the animal, and afterward the spiritual. [4] For even though Adam at once prophesied that great mystery concerning Christ and the church — 'here at last is bone out of my bones, and flesh out of my flesh; for this a man will forsake his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the pair will become a single flesh' — he underwent this as an accident of the spirit: for ecstasy fell upon him, the operative power of the Holy Spirit that works prophecy. [5] For an evil spirit too is a thing that comes as an accident. Thus the spirit of God later turned Saul into another man, that is, into a prophet, when it was said, 'What is this that has happened to the son of Kish? Is Saul too among the prophets?' — just as an evil spirit later turned him into another man again, namely into an apostate. Judas too, for some time counted among the elect, even to the office of the money-bag — though already a cheat, not yet a traitor — only afterward had the devil enter him. [6] Therefore, if neither the spirit of God nor the spirit of the devil is woven into the soul from birth, it is established that the soul alone exists before the coming of either spirit; and if alone, then simple and uniform too, under the name of substance, and thus breathing from no other source than the lot of its own substance.

======== De Anima — Chapter 12 ========

ON THE MIND. [1] Accordingly, when we speak of “animus” or “mind” — which among the Greeks is nous — we mean nothing other than a faculty of the soul, inborn, implanted, and native to it, by which it acts, by which it thinks, which it carries with itself and by which, out of itself, it moves itself within itself — so that it seems to be moved by that faculty as by a separate substance, in the way those hold who make “mind” the mover of the universe itself: that god of Socrates, that Only-Begotten of Valentinus sprung from father Depth and mother Silence. [2] How muddled is Anaxagoras’s theory here! For after devising Mind as the origin of all things and hanging the whole spinning universe from its axle, and asserting it to be pure and simple and unmixable — by this very title above all he separates it from any commingling with soul — and yet elsewhere he flatly declares that same Mind to be soul. [3] Aristotle too marked this failing — though I do not know whether he is readier to fill out his own theories than to empty other men’s. In the end, even as he was hedging his own definition of mind, he meanwhile pronounced a second kind of mind, the divine kind, which, in turn hinting that it is impassible, he thereby took away from any partnership with soul. For since it is agreed that soul is subject to whatever it has been allotted to suffer, either it will suffer through mind and along with mind, if it is fused with mind — in which case mind cannot be represented as impassible — or, if soul suffers neither through mind nor with mind, then it is not fused with mind, since with mind it suffers nothing and for mind it is nothing. Further, if soul suffers nothing through mind and with it, then it will not even perceive nor think nor be moved through mind, as they would have it. [4] For Aristotle himself makes sensations passions. And why not? For to perceive is to suffer, since to suffer is to perceive. So too, to think is to perceive, and to be moved is to perceive. Thus every part of it amounts to suffering. Yet we observe that none of this happens to the soul without being credited to mind as well, since it passes through mind and along with mind. [5] So then mind is, against Anaxagoras, commixable, and, against Aristotle, subject to suffering. But if a distinction is granted, so that mind and soul are two things by substance, then to the one will belong all suffering and sensation and thought and act and motion, and to the other, idleness and rest and stupor and no function left at all — and either mind will stand empty or soul will. [6] But if it is agreed that all these things are to be reckoned to both, then the two will be one, and Democritus will carry the point, abolishing the distinction — and it will be asked how the two are one: out of the confusion of two substances, or out of the disposition of a single one. We, for our part, say that mind is thus fused with soul, not as another substance, but as the office of that one substance.

======== De Anima — Chapter 13 ========

[1] What remains to examine is where the primacy lies — that is, which governs which — so that whichever proves to have the primacy may be reckoned the bulk of the substance, while that which the bulk of the substance governs is to be reckoned a natural function of the substance. Now who will not give the whole sum to the soul, in whose name the whole person is entitled and named? [2] “How many souls do I feed,” says the rich man — not “minds.” And the helmsman prays for souls kept safe — not minds. And the farmer at his labor and the soldier in battle both declare they stake their soul — not their mind. Whose dangers, whose vows, are named more often — the mind’s or the soul’s? And what are the dying said to give up — mind, or soul? Even the philosophers themselves, even the physicians themselves, though they mean to argue about mind as well, each still headed and fronted his treatise “On the Soul.” [3] And that you may learn this from God too: it is always the soul that God addresses; the soul he summons and calls, so that it may turn its mind toward him. It is the soul that Christ came to save; the soul he threatens to destroy in hell; the soul he forbids us to value too dearly; the soul, once more, is what the Good Shepherd himself surrenders on behalf of his flock. There you have the primacy of the soul; there too you have, within it, the union of substance, of which the mind, you should grasp, serves merely as tool, not master.

======== De Anima — Chapter 14 ========

[1] The soul, moreover, is singular and simple and wholly its own; it is no more built up from outside elements than it is divisible out of itself, because it cannot be dissolved. For if it were built up and dissolvable, it would no longer be immortal. Therefore, since it is not mortal, it is neither dissolvable nor divisible. For to be divided is to be dissolved, and to be dissolved is to die. [2] Yet it is divided into parts — now into two by Plato, now into three by Zeno, now into five by Aristotle and into six by Panaetius, into seven by Soranus, even into eight in Chrysippus, even into nine in Apollophanes, and even into twelve according to some of the Stoics, and into more than two according to Posidonius, who, starting from two headings — the governing part, which they call the hegemonikon, and the rational part, which they call the logikon — then cut it into seventeen further; and so one school after another divides the soul into ever more species. [3] But things of this sort should be reckoned not so much parts of the soul as its powers, capacities, and functions, as Aristotle himself judged of some of them. For these are not limbs of the animate substance but faculties — the motive, the active, the cogitative, and whatever else is distinguished in this manner, just as those five well-known senses themselves — sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell. And though for all of these fixed dwellings in the body have been assigned individually, that distribution nonetheless does not amount to a sectioning of the soul, since not even the body itself is divided into limbs the way these men would have the soul divided. [4] And yet it is out of a multitude of limbs that one body is made, so that the very division is, rather, a fusing-together. Consider the most astonishing generosity of Archimedes’s device — I mean the water-organ: so many parts, so many pieces, so many joints, so many channels for the voices, so many shortcuts for the sounds, so many minglings of the modes, so many ranks of pipes — and it is all one single mass. So too the breath which pants there out of the water-driven mechanism is not thereby separated into parts merely because it is administered part by part; it is solid in substance, though distributed in operation. [5] This example is not far from the view of Strato and Aenesidemus and Heraclitus; for they too maintain the unity of the soul, which, diffused through the whole body and itself everywhere present, flashes out through the organs of sense in various ways — as breath through the holes of a reed-pipe — not so much cut apart as dispensed. Under what names all these things are to be called, and by what divisions of their own they are to be held apart, and into what regions of the body they are to be assigned — physicians, together with the philosophers, may work that out better than we; a few points will suffice for us.

======== De Anima — Chapter 15 ========

ON THE HEGEMONIKON. [1] First of all: is there some highest grade in the soul, vital and rational — what they call the hegemonikon, that is, the ruling part? For if this is denied, the whole standing of the soul is put in peril. In short, those who deny a ruling part have already, before that, judged the soul itself to be nothing. [2] Some, like Dicaearchus of Messene, and among the physicians Andreas and Asclepiades, have thus done away with a ruling part, by wanting the senses to reside in the mind itself, to which they then claim the primacy belongs. Asclepiades even rides on this argument: that most animals, once the parts of the body in which the ruling part is supposed chiefly to reside have been removed, nonetheless go on living to some degree and perceiving all the same — as flies and wasps and locusts, if you cut off their heads; as goats and tortoises and eels, if you tear out their hearts. Therefore, he says, there is no ruling part — since, had there been one, the vigor of the soul would not have survived the loss of its seat. [3] But against Dicaearchus stand more philosophers — Plato, Strato, Epicurus, Democritus, Empedocles, Socrates, Aristotle — and against Andreas and Asclepiades stand physicians too — Herophilus, Erasistratus, Diocles, Hippocrates, and Soranus himself — and now, outnumbering them all, the Christians, who are led by God on both counts: that there is a ruling part in the soul, and that it is consecrated to a fixed seat in the body. [4] For if we read that God is the searcher and scrutinizer of the heart, if his prophet too is proved by disclosing the heart’s hidden things, if God himself, in reviewing the heart, gets ahead of the people — “Why do you think evil things in your hearts?” — and if David likewise says, “Fashion in me a pure heart, O God,” and Paul teaches that faith unto righteousness resides in the heart, and John says that each man is reproved by his own heart, and if, finally, whoever has looked at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery in his heart — then both points are made clear at once: that there is a ruling part in the soul, upon which the divine attention converges — that is, the rational and vital power (for what thinks is alive) — and that it is kept in that treasury of the body to which God looks. [5] So that you should not suppose this ruling part to be stirred from outside, as Heraclitus holds, nor blown through the whole body, as Moschion holds, nor shut up in the head, as Plato holds, nor rather presiding at the crown, as Xenocrates holds, nor bedded in the brain, as Hippocrates holds — nor even, as Herophilus holds, around the base of the brain, nor, as Strato and Erasistratus hold, in the little membranes, nor, as Strato the Physicist holds, in the space between the eyebrows, nor, as Epicurus holds, throughout the whole breastplate of the chest — but rather where the Egyptians reported it to be, and those who were reckoned commentators on divine matters, as also that verse of Orpheus, or of Empedocles: “For in man, blood around the heart is thought.” [6] Protagoras too holds this view, and Apollodorus and Chrysippus as well — so that even Asclepiades, blunted by these authorities, may go looking for his goats bleating without a heart and drive off his flies buzzing without a head, and let everyone now know that it is rather those who would model the constitution of the human soul on the condition of beasts who are living without heart and without brain.

======== De Anima — Chapter 16 ========

[1] There is also this point, which bears on the faith: that Plato divides the soul in two, into the rational and the irrational. This distinction we too applaud — but not so as to reckon both parts to nature. For the rational must be believed natural, since it was inborn in the soul from the beginning, from its rational Author, of course. For what is not rational, that God has produced even by mere command — let alone what he specifically breathed out from himself? The irrational, on the other hand, must be understood as later: something that came about from the serpent’s prompting — that very commission of the transgression itself — and thereafter took root and grew up together with the soul, to the point that it now looks like a piece of its nature, because it occurred right at the very outset of that nature. [2] But since this same Plato says that only the rational is “natural,” as belonging to the soul of God himself, then if we too assign the irrational to nature — the nature our soul has received from God — the irrational will equally have to be from God, being, as it were, natural, since God is the author of nature. But no: the introduction of sin is from the devil, and every sin is irrational; therefore the irrational is from the devil, from whom sin also comes, a stranger to God, from whom the irrational is likewise a stranger. Accordingly, the sins differ precisely because their authors are so distant from one another. [3] Further, when this same Plato, setting the rational apart for God alone, subdivides the irrational into two kinds — the indignant part, which they call the thumikon, and the desiring part, which they call the epithumetikon — so that the one is shared by us with lions, and the other with flies, while the rational, in turn, is shared with God — I see that I must reconsider this point too, on account of what is found in Christ. [4] For behold, this whole trinity is present even in the Lord: the rational, by which he teaches, by which he reasons, by which he lays out the paths of salvation; the indignant, by which he inveighs against the scribes and Pharisees; and the desiring, by which he desires to eat the Passover with his disciples. [5] Therefore, among us, indignation and desire are not always to be reckoned as belonging to the irrational — since we are certain that in the Lord they ran their course rationally. God will be indignant rationally, at whatever, of course, he ought to be; and God will desire rationally, whatever is worthy of himself. For he will be indignant at evil, and he will desire the salvation of the good. [6] The apostle, too, grants us desire: “If anyone desires the office of bishop, he desires a good work” — and by calling it a good work, he shows this to be rational desire. He allows indignation as well. And why not, since he took it up himself? “Would that they were even cut off,” he says, “who unsettle you.” Rational, too, is that indignation which springs from zeal for discipline. [7] But when he says, “We were once by nature children of wrath,” he is branding the irrational indignant part — as not belonging to that nature which is from God, but to that which the devil introduced, he himself, too, being called lord of his own order: “You cannot serve two masters”; he himself, too, is named father: “You are of your father the devil” — lest you shrink from assigning to him the properties of another, later and adulterated, nature: him whom you read of as the sower of tares over the seed and the nocturnal tamperer with the wheat-bearing crop.

======== De Anima — Chapter 17 ========

ON THE FIVE SENSES. [1] Even the question of those five senses we learn about in our first schooling comes our way, since heresy draws something from it too. There is sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. [2] Their reliability the Academics condemn rather harshly, and according to some so do Heraclitus and Diocles and Empedocles, and certainly Plato in the Timaeus, pronouncing sense-perception irrational and entangled with mere opinion. So sight is charged with lying, because it insists the oars in water are bent or broken, against the plain fact of their soundness, because it persuades us that a square tower seen from a distance is round, because it slanders a perfectly even colonnade as narrowing at its far end, because it joins the sky, hung at such a height, to the sea. [3] Hearing stands accused in the same way, as when we take a heavenly rumble for a cart, or, anticipating thunder, believe for certain that the sound came from a cart. So too smell and taste are indicted, since the same perfumes and the same wines lose their savor with later use. So too touch is faulted, since the same pavements are judged rougher to the hands and smoother to the feet, and in the baths the same tub of hot water is reported scalding at first and then, later, merely comfortable. [4] So, they say, we are deceived by our senses even as we go on changing our judgments about them. The Stoics are more moderate: they do not charge every sense, nor at every time, with falsehood. The Epicureans more boldly defend an equal and constant truthfulness in all of them, but by another route — not that sense lies, but that opinion does; for sense undergoes, it does not opine, while the soul is what opines. Thus they cut opinion off from sense, and sense off from soul. [5] But where does opinion come from, if not from sense? Unless sight had perceived the tower as round, there would be no opinion of roundness at all. And where does sense come from, if not from soul? A body without a soul is a body without sense as well. So sense comes from soul, and opinion comes from sense, and the soul underlies the whole. It will, however, be granted at best that there is something that causes a thing to be reported otherwise by the senses than it stands in reality. But if something can cause a report of what is not in the object, why should something not equally cause a report by means of what is not in the senses themselves, but in those circumstances that intervene under their own name? [6] And indeed we may examine these circumstances one by one. That the oar appears bent or broken in water — the water is to blame; take the oar out of the water, and it is whole to the sight. The very thinness of that substance by which a mirror is made out of light means that, as it is struck or stirred, it likewise sets the reflected image trembling and throws the straight line off. Again, that the tower's shape deceives us is forced by the condition of distance in the open air: the evenness of the surrounding air, clothing the angles with equal light, blots out their outlines. So too the uniform colonnade is narrowed toward its end, because the line of sight, hemmed in within an enclosed space, is thinned out there even as it is stretched out. So too the sky is joined to the sea, at the point where vision is used up — vision, which distinguishes things only so long as it retains its strength. [7] And what will deceive the hearing but the similarity of sounds? And if afterward a perfume smells fainter, or a wine tastes weaker, or a bath feels less scalding, in almost every case the whole force of the impression lay in the first encounter. As for rough and smooth, the hands and the feet reasonably disagree, being respectively tender and calloused members. [8] So then, in this way, no failure of the senses will lack its cause. But if it is the causes that deceive the senses, and through the senses the opinions, then the fault of deception must be located neither in the senses, which follow their causes, nor in the opinions, which are guided by the senses that follow theirs. [9] The insane see one person as another — Orestes sees his mother in his sister, and Ajax sees Ulysses in a flock of cattle, as Athamas and Agave see wild beasts in their own children. Will you lay this lie at the door of the eyes, or of the Furies? Those whose bile runs to excess find everything bitter with jaundice. Will you then charge the taste with treachery, or the illness? So every sense is overturned or circumvented for a time, in such a way that it is cleared of the peculiar charge of deceit. [10] Indeed, not even the causes themselves ought to be branded with the accusation of deceit. For if these things happen by reason, reason does not deserve to be called deceitful. What must happen as it does is not a lie. So if even the causes themselves are acquitted of the charge, how much more the senses, which the causes freely precede — since it is above all from this that truth and reliability and integrity must be vindicated to the senses, namely, that they report nothing other than what that same reason has commanded, the reason that causes a thing to be reported otherwise by the senses than it stands in reality! [11] What are you doing, Academy, most shameless of schools? You overturn the entire condition of life, you throw all the order of nature into confusion, you blind the very providence of God, who has set false and lying masters over all his works, for their understanding, cultivation, management, and enjoyment — the senses! Is it not through these that the whole of creation is put at our service? Is it not through these that a second furnishing has been added to the world — so many arts, so many talents, so many pursuits, occupations, duties, trades, remedies, counsels, comforts, foods, refinements, adornments, all of which have seasoned the entire savor of life — since it is by means of these senses alone that man, of all living creatures, is recognized as a rational animal, capable of understanding and knowledge, and capable even of the Academy itself? [12] But Plato, so as not to concede any testimony to the senses, in the Phaedrus, speaking as Socrates, denies that he can know even himself, as the Delphic inscription bids him do; and in the Theaetetus he denies himself the power to know and to perceive; and in the Phaedrus he puts off judgment about the truth until after death — a posthumous verdict indeed — and yet, not being dead yet, he went on philosophizing all the same. [13] It is not permitted, it is not permitted us to call these senses into question, lest the same doubt be turned on the reliability of the senses concerning Christ — lest it be said that Satan was falsely seen falling from heaven, or that the Father's voice testifying of him was falsely heard, or that he was deceived when he touched Peter's mother-in-law, or that he later perceived one kind of spirit in the ointment which he accepted for his burial, and a different taste again in the wine that he blessed as a remembrance of his own blood. [14] For this is exactly why Marcion preferred to believe him a phantom, disdaining the truth of a real body in him. And yet not even in his apostles was his nature made a mockery: sight and hearing were trustworthy on the mountain, the taste of that wine was trustworthy too, though water before it, at the wedding in Galilee, and touch was trustworthy afterward for doubting Thomas. Read out John's testimony: 'what we have seen,' he says, 'what we have heard, we have seen with our own eyes, and our hands have handled, concerning the word of life.' A false testimony indeed, if the nature of the senses of eyes and ears and hands is a liar.

======== De Anima — Chapter 18 ========

ON THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. [1] I turn now to the intellectual part, to the way Plato has commended to the heretics a knowledge separate from bodily things, attained before death. For he says in the Phaedo: 'And what then of the possession of wisdom itself? Will the body be a hindrance or not, if one takes it on as a partner in the inquiry? I mean something like this: do sight and hearing hold any truth for men? Or do not even the poets keep murmuring this to us endlessly, that we neither hear anything certainly nor see anything certainly?' He was remembering, of course, Epicharmus the comic poet too: 'mind sees, mind hears; the rest is deaf and blind.' [2] So again he says that the man who is truly wise is the one who is wise chiefly in mind, proposing no seeing, drawing on no sense of that kind for the soul, but using the mind itself in its purity when it reconsiders things, in order to grasp each thing in its own purity — above all if he has gone forth from the eyes and the ears and, one might as well say, from the whole body, as something that disturbs and does not allow the soul to possess truth and wisdom, whenever it has dealings with it. [3] We see, then, that against the bodily senses another equipment is being put forward as far more suitable — namely, the powers of the soul, working out that understanding of truth whose objects are not present, nor lie subject to the bodily senses, but are far removed from common awareness, hidden away, in the higher realms, and with God himself. For Plato wants there to be certain substances, invisible, incorporeal, above the world, divine and eternal, which he calls ideas — that is, forms, patterns, and causes of these visible things of nature that lie subject to the bodily senses; and he holds that those are the true realities, and these are their images. [4] Do the heretical seeds of the Gnostics and the Valentinians not already gleam through here? For this is where they seize their distinction between bodily senses and intellectual powers, a distinction they even bend to suit the story of the ten maidens, casting the five foolish maidens as emblems of the bodily senses — foolish, of course, because easily deceived — while the wise virgins express the mark of the intellectual powers, wise, naturally, because they attain to that hidden and heavenly truth established within the Pleroma, the sacraments of the heretics' 'ideas'; for this is exactly what their aeons and their genealogies are. [5] So they divide up sense itself as well, assigning the intellectual faculties to their own 'spiritual seed,' and the sensory ones to the 'animal' seed, on the ground that it can in no way grasp spiritual things; and they hold that the objects of the one are invisible, while those of the other are visible, lowly, and temporal, things that are engaged by sense as constituted in mere images. It was for these reasons, then, that we established earlier that the animus is nothing other than a furnishing and structure built into the soul, and that the spirit is nothing foreign to it beyond what the soul itself produces by breathing — everything else being credited to an addition, whether God or the devil later breathed something further in. [6] And now, as to the distinction between the sensory and the intellectual, we admit nothing more than a difference of objects — bodily and spiritual, visible and invisible, public and hidden — such that the former are assigned to sense, the latter to intellect, while it is the soul, nonetheless, that both are credited to as their servant, the soul which perceives bodily things through the body just as it understands incorporeal things through the mind, provided that it is also understood that it perceives even while it understands. [7] For is not to perceive also to understand, and to understand also to perceive? Or what will sense be, but the understanding of the thing that is sensed? What will understanding be, but the perception of the thing that is understood? Where do these torments come from, torturing plain simplicity and holding truth in suspense? Who will show me a sense that does not understand what it senses, or an understanding that does not perceive what it understands, so as to prove that one can exist without the other? [8] If bodily things are perceived and incorporeal things are understood, then the kinds of things are distinct, but not the dwelling-places of sense and understanding — that is, not the soul and the mind. Well then, by whom are bodily things perceived? If by the mind, then the mind is already sensory too, not merely intellectual, for in understanding it perceives — since if it does not perceive, it does not understand either; and if bodily things are perceived by the soul, then the soul's power is already intellectual too, not merely sensory, for in perceiving it understands — since if it does not understand, it does not perceive either. By the same token, by whom are incorporeal things understood? If by the mind, where will the soul be? If by the soul, where will the mind be? For things that are distinct ought to be absent from each other when each operates in its own office. [9] You will perhaps suppose that at some moment the mind is not present within the soul, since it does happen that we do not know we have seen or heard something, because the mind was elsewhere. I would go further and contend that the soul itself neither saw nor heard, because it was elsewhere along with its own power, that is, its mind. For even when a man is out of his senses, it is the soul that is out of its senses, not because the mind has wandered off but because it is then sharing the soul's condition — though the collapse belongs, in the first instance, to the soul. [10] On what is this established? On the fact that when the soul departs, the mind is not found in the man either; so closely does the mind follow the soul that it does not even linger behind at the end. But when it follows and is bound to the soul, then understanding likewise is bound to the soul, which the mind follows, and to which the mind is bound, understanding being bound to it too. Let understanding, for now, even be granted superior to sense, and the better knower of the sacraments — provided that it, too, is itself simply a power of the soul, exactly as sense is. It makes no difference to me, except that understanding is preferred to sense precisely so that, on this basis, it may be held all the more separate, the more superior it is claimed to be. Then, after the distinction, I will have to beat back the claim of superiority as well, since it will end by reaching all the way to a persuasion about a superior god. [11] But we shall test that question about their god on its own ground, along with the heretics. For now the subject is the soul, and this is not the place to be slyly preferring intellect over it. For even granting that the things attained by intellect, being spiritual, are superior to the things attained by sense, being bodily, the superiority will belong to the objects — the loftier over the lowlier — not to intellect over sense. For how could intellect be preferred to sense, when it is by sense that intellect is furnished with the material for knowing truths? [12] For if truths are apprehended by means of images — that is, if invisible things are known by means of visible ones, since the apostle too tells us that 'his unseen realities, ever since the world was founded, are perceived plainly, grasped through the things he has fashioned,' and Plato tells the heretics that 'the visible things are the face of the hidden things,' and that 'this world must of necessity be some image of another,' — does it not seem to you that intellect uses sense as its guide, its author, its foundational principle, and that truths cannot be attained without it? How then will intellect be superior to that through which it exists, that which it needs, that to which it owes everything it attains? [13] So both conclusions follow together: intellect must not be preferred to sense — for that through which a thing subsists is beneath that thing itself — nor must it be separated from sense — for that through which a thing exists remains together with it.

======== De Anima — Chapter 19 ========

UNDERSTANDING IS ALWAYS PRESENT IN THE SOUL. [1] But those must not be passed over either who strip the soul, even for some small span of time, of understanding. For in doing this they are simply paving the way to introduce it later — understanding, that is, along with the mind from which, of course, they suppose understanding to arise. [2] They want infancy to be contained by soul alone, so that it merely lives, not that it likewise has wisdom, since not all things that live are wise. After all, trees live and yet, according to Aristotle, do not have wisdom — and if anyone shares the animal substance out across the universe generally, which among us is a private possession in man alone, not merely as God's handiwork (which the rest also is) but as God's own breath, which is this alone, which we say is born complete with its whole equipment. [3] And if we are challenged by the case of trees, let us embrace the example — since even in them, not yet saplings but still mere stems and twigs, freshly sprung from the seed-bed, there is already a soul-power of their own. But it lingers, growing together and maturing along with the plant's own strength, in proportion to time, until age fills out the form which its nature is to fulfill. Or how else do shoots soon graft themselves onto them, and leaves take shape, and buds swell, and little flowers put on their ornament, and saps season themselves, unless the whole equipment of their kind lies dormant within them and grows greater as it is advanced part by part? [4] From this, then, they have wisdom from the very source they have life, with the same peculiar property belonging to living as to being wise — and indeed from infancy, each after its own kind. For I see even a vine, still tender and unripe, nevertheless already understanding its own business and wanting to cling to something, leaning on which and entwined with it, it may thrive. In fact, without waiting for the countryman's training, without a reed or a forked stake, if it touches anything at all it will love it unbidden, and will embrace it more passionately by its own instinct than by your direction. It hurries to make itself secure. [5] I see ivy too — press it down as hard as you like, it strains at once toward the heights and, with no one leading it, hangs suspended, since it would rather invade the walls with its woven foliage than be trampled on the ground by an unwanted injury. And on the other hand, where it fares badly against a building, does it not, as it grows, draw back — does it not flee? You can sense its branches aimed elsewhere, and understand the tree's animation from its divorce from the wall. It is content with the smallness it learned from the very outset of its most provident shrub-nature, fearing even its own collapse. [6] Why should I not claim these as the wisdoms and sciences of trees? Let them live, as the philosophers will have it, let them be wise, as the philosophers will not — let even the infancy of wood understand, all the more the infancy of man, whose soul, like a slip taken from the stock of Adam and drawn down into a cutting and committed to the generative hollows of the woman, has sprouted, complete with its whole equipment, in understanding as much as in sensation. [7] I am lying, if the infant does not, the very moment it greets life with a cry, thereby testify that it has felt and understood the very fact that it has been born — dedicating all its senses there and then together: sight to the light, hearing to sound, taste to moisture, smell to air, touch to earth. So that first cry is wrung out of the first stirrings of the senses and the first throbs of understanding. [8] More than that — some interpret that tearful voice, from its foresight of a life given to weeping, as an augury of coming troubles, on the ground that it must already have foreknowledge from the very entrance into birth, let alone understanding. From then on the infant tests its mother by instinct, examines its nurse by instinct, recognizes its nurse-maid by instinct, shunning strange breasts and refusing unfamiliar cradles, seeking no one except by habit. [9] Where does it get this judgment of the new and the customary, if it has no wisdom? Where does it get being offended and being soothed, if it does not understand? It is remarkable enough that infancy should be naturally spirited without possessing a mind, and naturally affectionate without possessing understanding. But as for Christ pronouncing praise 'out of the mouths of babes and sucklings' — that was by way of demonstration, not a verdict that childhood or infancy is dull-witted, since the one, meeting him with acclamation, was able to offer him testimony, and the other, slaughtered on his account, certainly felt the violence.

======== De Anima — Chapter 20 ========

ON THE NATURAL ENDOWMENTS. [1] And so here too we conclude that all the natural endowments of the soul, being substantive to it, are present in it and advance and progress along with it, from the very source by which the soul itself is reckoned. As our own Seneca so often says: the seeds of all arts and of all ages are implanted in us, and God, the hidden schoolmaster, brings forth our talents — from seeds, that is, implanted and hidden through infancy, which are also understanding. For it is from these that talents are produced. [2] Further, in the seeds of crops there is one form for each kind, yet the outcomes vary: some turn out true to type, some answer even better, some degenerate, depending on the condition of sky and soil, on the manner of cultivation and care, on the outcome of the seasons, on the license of chance events. So too the soul may be permitted to be uniform in its seed, multiform in its yield. For here too place makes a difference. [3] It is recorded that at Thebes people are born dull and brutish, at Athens the sharpest at wisdom and speech, where, in the district of Colyttus, the children speak with precocious tongue a full month sooner — since Plato too, in the Timaeus, affirms that Minerva, when she was founding that city, was looking to nothing else than the nature of the region, which promised talents of just this kind; hence in the Laws also he himself instructs Megillus and Clinias, when founding a city, to see to the choice of the site. But Empedocles locates the cause of a keen or a dull disposition in the quality of the blood, and derives its perfecting and advancing from teaching and discipline. All the same, the properties of nations are by now common knowledge. The comic poets mock the Phrygians as cowards; Sallust strikes at the Moors as fickle and the Dalmatians as ferocious; the apostle himself, for his part, marks the Cretans down as habitual liars. [4] Perhaps something is also owed to the body and to health. Corpulence hinders wisdom, leanness assists it; paralysis wastes the mind, consumption preserves it. How much more, then, will things be attributed to accidents that, quite apart from bodily bulk and vigor, either sharpen or dull! Teaching, discipline, the arts, experience, effort, study sharpen; ignorance, sloth, idleness, lust, inexperience, leisure, and vices dull — and beyond these, if certain powers are also in charge. [5] Indeed they are in charge — according to us, God the Lord and the devil his rival; according to common opinion, providence and fate and necessity and fortune and freedom of will. For these the philosophers distinguish too, and we for our part have already promised to discuss them, according to the faith, under their own proper heading. [6] It is plain how great is the set of things that have distributed the single nature of the soul so variously that they are commonly credited to nature, when in fact they are not distinct species but lots cast upon a nature and substance that is one — that very nature, of course, which God conferred upon Adam and made the matrix of all. And so they will be lots, not species, of a substance that is one; that is to say, this moral variety, however great it now is, would not have been so great in Adam himself, the prince of the race. For all these things ought to have been present in him as in the fountainhead of our nature, and so flowed out from there with the whole of their variety — if the variety had belonged to nature.

======== De Anima — Chapter 21 ========

[1] But if the soul's nature was uniform from the start, in Adam, prior to all these many talents, then it is not multiform, precisely because it is uniform, throughout all these talents — and not even threefold, so that the Valentinian trinity, still not to be found even in Adam, may at last be cut down. [2] For what was spiritual in him? If it is that he prophesied that great mystery touching Christ and his church — 'Here at last is a bone out of my own bones, flesh cut from my own flesh; woman shall be her name; and for this cause a man will forsake father and mother to be joined to his own wife, and the pair will become a single body' — this came upon him only afterward, when God cast a trance upon him, a spiritual force, by which prophecy is achieved. [3] And if evil too appeared in him, in the sin of the transgression committed, this likewise must not be reckoned natural, seeing that he worked it at the serpent's instigation — no more natural than material, since we have already ruled out any claim on behalf of matter. But if neither the spiritual nor what is called the material was properly his (even granting that the seed of evil came from matter), it remains that the only single thing in him reckoned natural was the animal, which we maintain is simple and uniform in its condition. [4] On this point, plainly, the question remains whether what is called natural ought to be believed changeable. For our opponents deny that nature is convertible at all, precisely so as to fix their 'trinity' in separate, unalterable properties — on the ground that a good tree does not bear bad fruit nor a bad tree good, and no one gathers figs from thorns or grapes from briars. Well then, if that is so, God will not be able to raise up children of Abraham from stones either, nor make vipers' brood bring forth fruits of repentance — and the apostle was mistaken when he wrote: 'you too were once darkness'; and, 'we too were once by nature children of wrath'; and, 'such were some of you also, but you have been washed.' [5] But the holy sayings will never disagree with one another. A tree will not give bad fruit unless it goes ungrafted, and a good tree will give bad fruit unless it is tended; stones will become children of Abraham if they are shaped into Abraham's faith; and vipers' brood will bear the fruit of repentance if they spit out the venom of their malice. [6] This will be the power of divine grace, more potent, certainly, than nature, holding under it, within us, the free power of choice — what is called to\ au)tecou&sion — which, being itself also natural and mutable, turns with nature wherever it turns. That the au)tecou&sion is present in us naturally, we have already shown against both Marcion and Hermogenes.
[7] What, then, if the condition of nature must also be defined in this twofold way — one for what is begotten and what is not, one for what is fashioned and what is never fashioned? For in that case whatever proves to be born and made, its nature will be capable of change: it will be able both to be reborn and to be remade. But what is unborn and unmade will stand immovable. Since this belongs to God alone, as the only one unborn and unmade, and therefore alone immortal and unconvertible, it follows for all the rest that, being born and made, their nature is convertible and changeable — so that, even if a 'trinity' were to be attributed to the soul, it would have to be reckoned a matter of the change of an accident, not of the founding constitution of its nature.

======== De Anima — Chapter 22 ========

[1] The remaining natural endowments of the soul I have already set before Hermogenes in an earlier work, together with the defense and proof of them, by which the soul is recognized to be akin to God rather than to matter. Here they will only be named, lest they seem passed over. For we granted the soul both freedom of will, as we wrote above, and mastery over things, and, at times, the power of divination — setting aside what comes by God's grace through prophecy. And so I shall now withdraw from this treatment of its disposition, so as to close out its ordering. [2] We define the soul as born of God's breath, immortal, corporeal, possessing form, simple in substance, wise of its own accord, proceeding in various ways, free in will, subject to accident, changeable through the talents, rational, dominant, prophetic, overflowing from one source. It follows now that we consider how it overflows from that one source — that is, from where, and when, and by what process it is taken.

======== De Anima — Chapter 23 ========

WHERE THE SOUL COMES FROM. [1] Some believe they have descended from the heavens, with a conviction as great as the certainty with which they also promise they will return there again — as Saturninus, the disciple of Menander the Simonian, taught, asserting that man was made by angels, and that at first, a useless, weak, unsteady piece of work, he flopped about on the ground like a worm, lacking the strength to stand upright; then, out of the mercy of the supreme power, to whose likeness — though not even fully glimpsed — he had been rashly constructed, he obtained a little spark of life which roused him and set him upright and animated him more firmly, and which, at the departure of this life, will be carried back to its source. [2] But Carpocrates claims just as much for himself from the higher realms, so that his disciples set their souls on a level with Christ — let alone the apostles — and, whenever they please, rank them above, souls which they suppose were conceived, in just the same way, from a sublime power, as despisers of the principalities that rule the world. [3] Apelles reports that souls were lured down to earthly food from their supercelestial seats by a fiery angel — the God of Israel and ours — who then, in consequence, molded around them this sinning flesh. [4] The swarm of Valentinus stuffs the soul with the seed of Sophia, by means of which they recognize the storybook romances of their Aeons drawn from images of things visible. [5] I grieve, in good conscience, that Plato has become the caterer to all the heretics. For it is his doctrine, in the Phaedo, that souls go from here to there, and from there back here; likewise in the Timaeus, that the offspring of God, having been assigned the begetting of mortal beings, received the immortal soul at its outset and froze around it a mortal body; and further, that this world is the image of some other. [6] To lend all this credibility, and to establish that the soul, in an earlier state on high, once kept company with God amid the intercourse of the Ideas, and thence crosses over to here, and here recalls, from the exemplars, what it knew before, he worked up a novel argument — maqh&seij a)namnh&seij, that is, that learnings are recollections; that souls, coming from there to here, forget the things among which they formerly existed, and then, taught afresh by these visible things, remember them. Since, then, it is by an argument of this sort that Plato smuggles in the doctrines the heretics borrow, I shall sufficiently strike back at the heretics if I demolish Plato's argument.

======== De Anima — Chapter 24 ========

AGAINST PLATO'S "LEARNING IS RECOLLECTION." [1] To begin with, I will not concede that the soul is capable of forgetting, because Plato has granted it so great a divinity that it is made equal to God. He makes it unborn — which alone would have been enough to arm his case for a full divinity — and he adds that it is immortal, incorruptible, incorporeal (since this too he believed of God), invisible, without shape, uniform, sovereign, rational, intellectual. What more could he claim for the soul short of calling it God outright? [2] We, however, who ascribe nothing to God by way of increase, by this very fact rate the soul as far beneath God: we acknowledge that it was born, and therefore that its divinity is a thinner thing and its blessedness a slighter one — a breath, not the Spirit; and if it is immortal, that is a mark of its divine side, yet it is also capable of suffering, which is a mark of its being born; and therefore from its very origin it is capable of deviation, and from that, akin to forgetting as well. Enough on this point — I settled it with Hermogenes. [3] But whatever, by the sum of all its properties, could rightly be reckoned God, will be subject to no passion whatever — and so not to forgetting either, since forgetting is as great an injury as the glory of that which it injures is great — namely memory, which Plato himself proclaimed the health of the senses and the intellect, and Cicero the treasury of all our pursuits. Nor is the question now whether so divine a soul could lose its memory, but whether, having lost it, it can recover it again. For a thing which ought not to have forgotten — if it has forgotten — I do not see how it can be supposed able to remember. So both halves of the case fit my soul, not Plato's. [4] On a second front I raise this objection: do you make the soul possessed by nature of the knowledge of those Forms, or not? "Yes, by nature," you say. No one, then, will grant that natural knowledge of natural things can lapse; the knowledge of arts may lapse, of studies; of teachings, of disciplines; perhaps even of talents and dispositions, which look like nature but are not, because, as I said before, these are made up out of accidents — place, upbringing, bodily constitution and health, ruling powers, and the freedom of the will. [5] But knowledge of natural things fails not even in beasts. Granted, a lion will forget its wildness, tamed by training, and with its whole mane spread out will become the pet whose cheeks some Queen Berenice's tongue is licking clean. Habits the beast will abandon; the knowledge of natural things will remain. That same lion will not forget its natural food, its natural remedies, its natural terrors; offer it fish, offer it pastries from the queen's own table, and it will still crave flesh; compound it a theriac for its sickness, and the lion will still want a monkey; deny it every hunting spear, and it will still be frightened of a rooster. [6] In the same way, in man too — though he is perhaps the most forgetful of all living things — the one thing left unerased is precisely the knowledge of natural things, being, of course, the only truly natural knowledge: always remembering to eat when hungry and drink when thirsty, to see with the eyes, hear with the ears, smell with the nostrils, taste with the mouth, and handle with the hand. These, certainly, are the very senses that philosophy cheapens by preferring the intellectual faculties over them. [7] If, then, natural knowledge of the things of sense persists, how can the knowledge of intellectual things — which is held to be the superior — perish? And where, in fact, does the very force of this alleged prior forgetting, that precedes recollection, come from? "From the great span of time," he says. Not a very careful answer! For a quantity of time can have no bearing on a thing said to be unborn, and therefore believed above all to be eternal. For whatever is eternal — precisely because it is also unborn — admitting neither beginning nor end of time, suffers no measure of time at all; and what has no measure of time is subject to no change through time, and its power owes nothing to any great span of time. [8] If time is the cause of the forgetting, why does memory slip away only from the moment the soul is introduced into the body — as if from that point the soul first began to sustain time, when without doubt it existed before the body, and therefore without time? And once it has entered the body, does it forget at once, or only after some interval? If at once, what quantity of time could there even be yet to reckon — infancy, presumably? If after some interval, then in that interval, before the forgetting sets in, the soul is still, by hypothesis, remembering. And what sort of thing is it that forgets afterward and then, still later, remembers again? And at whatever moment the forgetting rushed in, what measure of time will even that be reckoned to have? The whole course of a lifetime, I think, will hardly suffice to overturn the memory of so vast an age spent before the body. [9] But then Plato shifts the cause again, onto the body — as though this too deserved credence — that a substance which is born should be able to snuff out the faculty of one that has no birth at all. But bodies differ greatly and in many ways — by race, by size, by constitution, by age, by health. Are we then to suppose differences of forgetting to match? But forgetting is uniform; therefore a multiform bodily condition cannot be the cause of a uniform outcome. [10] Many proofs likewise, on Plato's own testimony, establish the soul's power of divination — proofs I have already set out against Hermogenes. And indeed there is no human being who has not at some time or other felt his own soul foreknowing something, prophesying an omen, a danger, or a joy. If the body does not obstruct divination, then, I think, it will not hinder memory either. Certainly within one and the same body souls both forget and remember. If some property of the body induces forgetting, how does that same body admit the opposite — recollection (since recollection after forgetting is itself a second memory, a memory reborn)? What tells against the first memory, why does it not equally tell against the second? [11] Finally, who ought to remember more than little children — as being the freshest souls, not yet submerged in domestic and public cares, given over to their studies alone, whose very learning consists in this "recollecting"? Better still, why do we not all remember equally, since we all forget equally? But only philosophers do — and not even all of them. Plato alone, apparently, in so vast a forest of nations, in so wide a meadow of wise men, both forgot and recollected the Forms. [12] So then, even if this famous argument stands on no footing at all, the whole structure it was built to support collapses along with it — the notion that souls, being unborn and having dwelt among the heavenly bodies, privy there to things divine, and then brought down from there and here recollecting them, were to be believed — plainly furnishing occasions enough for heretics to exploit.

======== De Anima — Chapter 25 ========

THAT SOUL AND FLESH ARE CONCEIVED TOGETHER. [1] I will now go back to the origin of this digression, so as to explain how souls overflow from the one, and when and where and by what process they are taken up — a question on which it makes no difference whether it comes up from a philosopher, a heretic, or the common crowd. [2] It matters nothing to the professors of truth from which adversaries the question arises, especially ones as bold as these first ones, who assume that no soul takes shape together with the womb's conception, nor is fashioned and brought forth alongside the forming of the flesh, but that only when the birth is already delivered is it, while the infant is not yet alive, stamped in from outside; that the rest, the seed, once separated off from intercourse into the woman's parts and set moving by a natural impulse, thickens into the substance of flesh alone; that this, once brought forth, still steaming from the furnace of the womb and loosened by heat — like heated iron plunged straightaway into cold water — is struck in just that way by the harshness of the air, and so seizes the vital force and lets out its first vocal sound. This is the Stoic view, shared by Aenesidemus, and Plato too at times, when he says that the soul, foreign and exiled from the womb until then, is drawn in with the newborn infant's first breath, just as it is led out again with its last exhalation. We shall see whether he really meant it that way. Not even among the physicians was Hicesius wanting — a betrayer both of nature and of his own art. [3] They were ashamed, I think, to lay down what women themselves could tell them was so. And how much more shameful the outcome, to be refuted by women than to be proved right by them! For in this matter no one is so fit a teacher, judge, and witness as the female sex itself. Answer, mothers — you who are pregnant, you who have given birth (let the barren and the men be silent) — the truth of your own nature is being asked, the honest report of your own experience is being called for: do you feel in the womb some living vitality not your own, from which the flanks throb, the sides quiver, the whole swelling of the belly is agitated, the seat of the weight shifting from place to place? Are these movements your joy and your sure reassurance that the child is alive and at play within you? And if its restlessness should stop, are you not the first to be afraid for it? Does it not already hear within you, when it startles at a strange sound? Do you not crave, on its behalf, certain foods, and loathe others, also on its behalf? Do you not share your illnesses with it in turn — indeed even your bruises, by which it too, inside, is marked through the same members, taking on the injuries of its mother as its own? [4] If the discoloration and flush of blood are a form of feeling, then blood does not exist without a soul; if all health is an added condition, then health does not exist without a soul; if nourishment, hunger, growth, wasting, fear, movement, and sensitivity to touch are functions of the soul, then whoever performs them is alive. In short, whoever stops performing them stops living. In short, the dead too are delivered — how, unless they were also alive? And who is "dead" except one who was first alive? And indeed even while still in the womb an infant is sometimes slaughtered, by a necessary cruelty, when, lying crosswise at the moment of exit, it denies its own birth, matricide that it would be did it not die itself. [5] And so among the instruments of physicians there is one, along with an implement, by which the hidden parts are first forced open by a twisting adjustment — the ring-knife, with which the limbs are cut apart inside by an anxious deliberation, and the blunt hook, by which the whole grim business is dragged out in a violent delivery. There is also a bronze spike, by which the very act of killing is carried out, a blind assassination; they call it the embryo-slayer, from its office of infanticide — plainly a device for destroying a living infant. Hippocrates had this instrument, and Asclepiades, and Erasistratus, and Herophilus too, the dissector of the ancients, and even the gentler Soranus, all certain that what was conceived was a living creature, and so taking pity on an infancy so wretched that it must be killed first, lest it be torn apart alive. [6] And Hicesius, I believe, had no doubts about the necessity of this crime either, since he supposes the soul is superinduced only after birth, from the strike of cold air — because, he says, the very word "soul," among the Greeks, corresponds to a term for cooling. Are barbarian and Roman peoples, then, animated differently, because they have called the soul by some other name than psyche? And how many nations are reckoned to live under the blazing equator, baked to their very color? Where do they get their soul, who have no harshness of air at all? I say nothing of the heat of the birthing chamber and all the apparatus of warmth necessarily kept blazing there, which it is actually dangerous to expose the newborn to directly. In the very baths, almost, the child slips out, and at once its cry is heard. [7] But if the harshness of the air is the treasury of the soul, then no one ought to have been born outside Germany, Scythia, the Alps, and the Caucasus. And yet the more populous nations, and the readier wits, are found under an eastern and southern climate, while all the Sarmatians are dull of mind despite their cold. Indeed minds ought to grow sharper the colder the climate, if souls came from chilliness — since substance and power go together. [8] With this established, we may also reconsider those who drew breath alive after being cut from their mother's womb — a Liber or two, and the Scipios. And if anyone, following Plato, supposes that two souls cannot come together into one, any more than two bodies can, I would show him not only two souls heaped together into one, just as two bodies are, in the case of twins in the womb, but many other things besides interwoven with a soul — the substance, namely, of a demon, and not just a single one, as in Socrates himself, but a spirit sevenfold, as in Mary Magdalene, and one of legion's number, as in the Gerasene — so that a soul is more readily interwoven with a soul, from a shared community of substance, than an evil spirit with it, given their difference of nature. [9] Yet this same Plato, within the Laws' sixth book, cautions that care be taken lest a defect of the seed, arising from some baseness in the intercourse, should impose a blemish on body and soul alike — and I do not know whether he has here forgotten his earlier position, or that one this. For he shows that the soul is brought in with the seed, which he advises be kept sound, and not with the newborn's first breath. Whence, I ask, do we too, by likeness, correspond to our parents in disposition — on Cleanthes' own testimony — if we are not drawn as well from the seed of the soul? And why, too, did the old astrologers cast a man's horoscope from the moment of his conception, if it is not from that moment that the soul as well exists — to which, if it is anything at all, breath equally belongs?

======== De Anima — Chapter 26 ========

[1] But every disagreement among human opinions runs only as far as God's own boundary-lines. Let me now draw the argument back within our own lines, so that what I answered the philosophers and the physicians I may prove afresh to the Christian. Build your faith, brother, on your own foundation: look at the living wombs of the holiest women, and see infants there not merely breathing already but even prophesying. [2] Look — the bowels of Rebecca are thrown into turmoil, and the birth is still far off, and no breath of air has yet stirred there. Look — a double offspring is already brawling in the mother's quarters, and there are as yet nowhere two peoples. One might call it some freakish petulance of infancy, fighting before it is even damp, spirited before it is even ensouled — if it had merely disturbed its mother with kicking. But when the birth is laid open and the order is examined and the divination is confirmed, then, I think, it is no longer merely the souls of the infants that stand proved, but their battle as well. [3] The one who had gotten ahead in being born was being held back by the one he'd gotten ahead of — not yet fully delivered, only born as far as a hand. And if that first one was already drinking in a soul from his first gasp of breath, Plato's way, or catching one from the chill of the air, the Stoic way, what of the one who was still waiting, still held back inside while already, from outside, holding the other back? Not breathing yet, I suppose, and already he had seized his brother's heel — still warm from the mother, and already wanting to have come out first. What a baby — a rival already, and a strong one, and, I'll wager, a quarrelsome one from the start, precisely because he was alive. [4] Look too at those singular conceptions, and monstrous ones at that — of the barren woman and of the virgin — which, precisely on that account, might have been expected to produce imperfect offspring, as a kind of overturning of nature, one womb dulled by age, the other untouched by seed. It would have been fitting, if ever, for children not properly conceived to be born without a soul — yet each of these two lives in her own womb. Elizabeth leaps for joy — John within had given the push; Mary glorifies the Lord — Christ within had stirred her to it. The mothers recognize each other's offspring, recognized in turn by the offspring themselves — beings who were, quite plainly, alive, and were not merely souls but spirits. [5] So too you read God's voice to Jeremiah: 'Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.' If God forms in the womb, he also breathes into that first shaping — for 'God shaped the man out of clay and blew into his face the breath of life.' And God could not have known man in the womb unless he knew the whole man: 'and before you came forth from the womb, I sanctified you.' A body, and still dead? By no means — for he is the God of the living, not of the dead.

======== De Anima — Chapter 27 ========

[1] How, then, is a living being conceived? Are the two substances, body and soul, fused together at once, or does one of them come first? No — we say both are conceived together, and wrought together, brought to completion together, just as they are also brought forth together, and that no interval intervenes in the conceiving where some order could be arranged. [2] Reason it out, in fact, from the last things backward to the first: if death is defined as nothing other than the separation of body and soul, then life, being the opposite of death, must be defined as nothing other than the conjunction of body and soul; and if the separation befalls both substances at once through death, then the very pattern of their union must have decreed that they came upon each other equally, at the same time, through life. [3] Further, we recognize life as beginning from conception, precisely because we claim the soul begins from conception; life follows the soul from that same point. Things which are separated together in death, then, must equally be compacted together into life. But if you grant primacy to the one and secondary rank to the other, then the timing of the seeds too must be distinguished according to this order of rank. And when, pray, will the seed of the body be deposited, and when the seed of the soul? [4] Indeed, if the times of the seeds are to be divided, then different matters too will have to be assigned, on the strength of that difference in timing. For even if we grant two kinds of seed, bodily and psychic, still we maintain they are indistinguishable, and in this sense contemporaneous, of one and the same moment. So let no one be ashamed of an explanation that necessity requires. Nature is to be revered, not blushed at. It is lust that has defiled the sexual act, not the institution itself; excess is shameful, not the state as such — since the state itself is blessed by God: 'increase and multiply' — while the excess is cursed: adulteries and fornications and brothels. [5] In this solemn office of the sexes, then, which joins male and female — in ordinary intercourse, I mean — we know that soul and flesh perform their function together: the soul with desire, the flesh with the act; the soul with the impulse, the flesh with the doing. So by one single thrust that shakes the whole man in both his parts, the seed of the whole man is foamed forth, carrying moisture from the bodily substance and heat from the substance of the soul. And if the Greeks' word for soul (psyche) means 'cold,' why does the body go cold the moment the soul is withdrawn from it? [6] Finally — though here I risk offending modesty more than I secure proof — in that very heat of the ultimate pleasure by which the seed of generation is expelled, do we not sense that something of the soul, too, is going out of us? Is that not why we grow faint and slack afterward, with a diminishment of light in us? This, then, will be the psychic seed, distilled directly from the soul; just as that other fluid, the bodily seed, is strained off from the flesh. [7] Most faithful are the models of our first origin. 'From clay,' in Adam, came flesh — and what is clay but a rich, thickened liquid? From that will come the generative fluid. From God's breath came the soul — and what is God's breath but a vapor of spirit? From that will come what we breathe forth through that fluid. [8] When, therefore, at the beginning two diverse and separate things, clay and breath, were compacted into one man, both substances, now fused into one, mingled their seeds together too, and from that point handed down the pattern for propagating the race — so that even now the two, though diverse, flow forth united and equally, and, sown equally into their furrow and field, together sprout a man from both substances at once — a man in whom, in turn, his own seed is present according to its kind, as has been ordained for every generative condition from the start. [9] So it is from one man that this whole overflowing abundance of souls has come, nature simply obeying God's decree: 'increase and multiply.' Indeed, even in the very preface to that single work — 'let us make man' — the whole of posterity was proclaimed in the plural: 'and let them rule over the fishes of the sea and the birds of the sky.' No wonder the promise of the harvest lies folded already in the seed.

======== De Anima — Chapter 28 ========

AGAINST PLATO: THE LIVING ARE NOT MADE OUT OF THE DEAD. [1] What is this now, this old story circulating under Plato's name about the souls' back-and-forth traffic — that departing from here they go there, and then come back here again, and are made, and so it happens over and over, that living men are made out of dead ones? Pythagorean, some say; a divine teaching, Albinus reckons, perhaps traceable to the Egyptian Hermes. But there is no divine speech except that of the one God, through whom the prophets thundered, through whom the apostles thundered, through whom Christ himself thundered. Moses is far more ancient — older than Saturn himself by some nine hundred years, let alone Saturn's great-grandsons — and certainly far more divine, he who set down the whole descending course of the human race from the founding of the world, generation by generation, name by name, date by date — the divinity of the work sufficiently proved by the divinatory power of its record. [2] But if it really is the Samian sophist who supplied Plato with this notion of souls endlessly recycling, forever replacing the dead with the living and the living with the dead in turn — well, that Pythagoras, admirable as he may have been in other respects, in constructing this particular doctrine committed a lie not merely shabby but downright reckless. Learn it, whoever does not know it, and believe it along with me. He fakes his own death, hides away underground, condemns himself to seven years' patience down there; meanwhile, whatever he intends to report as news of the dead, to make it credible, he learns from his mother, his sole confidante and accomplice. When he judged he had sufficiently worn down his flesh to match the full horror of a long-dead corpse, he emerges from the den of his fraud as though returned from the underworld. [3] Who would not believe that a man had come back to life whom he had believed dead — hearing from his own mouth, no less, things about the dead which, it would seem, could only have been learned in the underworld itself? So it is that this notion of the living made from the dead is an old story. And what if it were a younger one instead? Truth does not need antiquity, and falsehood does not shrink from novelty. I hold, plainly, a falsehood — noble, perhaps, for its age; but why should it not be a falsehood, when its very evidence is drawn from a falsehood? How am I to believe that Pythagoras was not lying when he lied in order to be believed? How is he going to persuade me that Aethalides and Euphorbus and Pyrrhus the fisherman and Hermotimus had all, in earlier times, been himself — enough to persuade me the living are made from the dead — when he has already perjured himself once over, claiming to have been Pythagoras again? Indeed, the more credible it would have been for him to have come back to life once, out of himself, the more he stretched credulity claiming it so many times over, as one man after another — and the harsher the tests he failed, the softer the lies he told. [4] 'But he recognized the shield of Euphorbus, long ago dedicated at Delphi, and called it his own, and proved it by signs unknown to the crowd.' Go look into his underground den instead, and, if you can manage it, believe that. For the man who devised such a trick, at the cost of his own good health, by fraud — after a seven-year ordeal of life spent underground in starvation, idleness, and shadow — a man to whom the sky itself had become so tiresome — what recklessness would he not have risked, what curiosity would he not have pursued, in order to arrive at the identifying mark on that shield? [5] But what if he found it in some more obscure histories? What if he caught some faint surviving breath of a fading tradition? What if he learned it from the temple-keeper, having bought a secret viewing on the sly? We know, too, that magic is permitted to explore hidden things through spirits summoned from below, familiars, and pythonic spirits. Did not Pherecydes, Pythagoras's own teacher, perhaps divine — I will not say dream — by these very arts? What if the same demon that had once been in Euphorbus was now in this man too? And finally — the man who proved himself Euphorbus by the evidence of the shield — why did he not equally recognize a single one of his Trojan comrades-in-arms? For they too would already have come back to life by now, if the living really were made out of the dead.

======== De Anima — Chapter 29 ========

[1] That the dead are made from the living is settled; it does not follow that the living are made from the dead. From the beginning, the living came first — and hence, equally from the beginning, the dead came after, and from nowhere else than from the living. The living, then, had a source from which they could arise more readily — but not from the dead. The dead, on the other hand, had no source from which they could be drawn — except from the living. [2] So if from the beginning the living were not made from the dead, why should they be afterward? Has that fountainhead of origin, whatever it is, run dry? Or has it repented of its own pattern? And how, in that case, does that pattern still hold good among the dead? Is it not rather that, since it was from the living that the dead first arose at the outset, it is from the living they must go on arising ever after? For either the pattern of the beginning would have had to persist on both sides, or it would have had to change on both — so that if it were now proper for the living to be made from the dead afterward, it ought equally to be proper for the dead to be made from something other than the living. [3] If the logic of the original arrangement need not hold uniformly, still it does not follow that contraries are regularly reshaped out of contraries by turns in every case. We too could set up such pairs of opposites — born and unborn, sight and blindness, youth and old age, wisdom and folly — and yet it does not follow that the unborn arises from the born just because one contrary can arise from another, nor that sight arises again from blindness just because blindness befalls sight, nor that youth blooms afresh out of old age just because old age withers out of youth, nor that folly is sharpened anew out of wisdom just because wisdom is dulled out of folly. [4] These very distinctions Albinus himself, out of anxious loyalty to his Plato, tries subtly to draw among the kinds of contraries — as if these pairs were not set in opposition just as absolutely as the ones he interprets in his master's favor, namely life and death. And yet life is not restored out of death, any more than death is brought on out of life.

======== De Anima — Chapter 30 ========

[1] But what shall we answer to the rest? To begin with: supposing it true that, just as the dead are drawn from among the living, the living are likewise drawn back out of the dead, then one and the same fixed tally of human beings would have persisted throughout—namely, whatever number first stepped into life. For the living preceded the dead, the dead then sprang from the living, and afterward the living sprang once more from the dead. And because this cycle always draws on the identical stock, the sum never varies, since it is forever the same set of people cycling through. No more, and no fewer, would ever depart than would return. [2] But we find, even in the records of human antiquity, that the human race has gradually multiplied, as aboriginal peoples, or wanderers, or exiles, or the ambitious of every stripe, seize new territories—as the Scythians took the lands of Parthia, the Temenids the Peloponnese, the Athenians Asia, the Phrygians Italy, the Phoenicians Africa—while regular emigrations too, which they call ‘colonies,’ discharge swarms of a people into other territories on purpose to relieve overcrowding at home. For indeed the mother-stocks still remain in their own seats, and have besides lent out their numbers more richly elsewhere. [3] Certainly the world itself is plainly more cultivated and better furnished today than it was of old. Everything now lies open, everything is known, everything does business; famous wildernesses have been erased by the most delightful farms, forests have been tamed into ploughland, wild beasts routed by flocks, sands are sown, rocks are built upon, marshes are drained off, and there are now cities as great as cottages once were. Islands no longer bristle with menace, nor do reefs strike terror; everywhere there is a house, everywhere a people, everywhere a commonwealth, everywhere life. [4] The supreme proof of human crowding: we are a burden to the world, the elements can scarcely support us, our needs press tighter, and complaints arise on every side, since nature can no longer bear us. In truth, plague and famine and war and the swallowing-up of cities must be reckoned as a remedy, a kind of pruning-shears for the unchecked growth of the human race; and yet, though axes of this sort cut down the greatest mass of mortals time and again, the world has never once been terrified by a restitution that, a thousand years later, brought the living back out of the dead. And this indeed would have made itself felt, had the balance of loss and restitution been equal—had the living really come from the dead. [5] But why a thousand years afterward, and not straightaway, the living from the dead—since, if what is spent is not immediately replenished, the whole stock runs the risk of being used up entirely before the restitution overtakes the deficit, because this supply-line of life, so much shorter than a thousand-year term, would not have kept pace, and would therefore have been snuffed out more easily than it could be rekindled? Therefore, since a process that would have collapsed in this fashion, had the living come from the dead, has in fact not collapsed, we must not believe that the living come from the dead.

======== De Anima — Chapter 31 ========

[1] Now further, if the living come from the dead, they must surely come one by one from one by one. The souls of individual bodies, then, ought to return, each single soul, into a single body. But if two, or three, or five souls at once are drawn back into one and the same womb, then the living do not come from the dead, since it is not one from one. And by this very fact the pattern of the original creation is stamped anew, seeing that even now several souls are produced from a single act. [2] Again, since souls depart at every different age, why do they all return at one and the same age? For all are steeped from infancy, so that it is an infant that returns. But how can it be that a man who died an old man comes back an infant? If the soul, reversing its age, dwindles once it is outside the body, how much more should it come back, a thousand years later, further advanced—or at the very least, of the same age it was when it died, so as to recover the span of years it had left behind? [3] But even granting that the very same souls were always cycling back—though not, admittedly, into the same bodily shapes, nor admittedly into the same allotments of fate—they ought at least to carry back with them their former traits of character, pursuits, and affections; otherwise it would be an idle claim that they are the same souls, lacking as they would the very marks by which their sameness could be proved. ‘How do you know,’ you say, ‘whether this in fact happens secretly, but the condition of the thousand-year span destroys the capacity for recognition, since they return to you unrecognized?’ But I do know it does not happen so, since you throw Pythagoras-as-Euphorbus in my face. [4] For look: it is plain enough, even from the very glory of the shields dedicated to him, that Euphorbus was a soul made for soldiering and war. Pythagoras, on the other hand, was so sedentary and unwarlike that he actually shunned the battles then raging in Greece, preferring the quiet of Italy, devoted to geometry and astronomy and music—a stranger to Euphorbus's pursuits and passions entirely. Moreover, that Pyrrhus, I mean Euphorbus, made his living by deceiving fish, whereas Pythagoras, quite the opposite, abstained even from eating them, along with all living creatures. Aethalides, again, and Hermotimus tucked into the common bean along with the rest of the diet, while Pythagoras forbade his disciples to so much as walk through a bean-field. [5] How, then, can these be recovered as the same souls, when they will be proved the same neither in character, nor in habits, nor even now in diet? Out of the whole vast population of Greece, only four souls, as it happens, are on record! But why speak only of Greece's population—why do metempsychosis and metensomatosis not occur daily out of every nation, every age, every rank, indeed every sex? Why does Pythagoras alone recognize himself as someone else, and not I as well? [6] Or if it is a privilege of philosophers—and of Greek philosophers at that, as though Scythians and Indians did not also philosophize—why does Epicurus remember no former self, nor Chrysippus, nor Zeno, nor even Plato himself, whom we might otherwise have supposed to be Nestor reborn, on account of the honeyed eloquence?

======== De Anima — Chapter 32 ========

ON METEMPSYCHOSIS AND METENSOMATOSIS. [1] But Empedocles, since he had gone quite mad enough to imagine himself a god, disdained, I suppose, to remember himself as any mere hero, and so declared: ‘I was once a bush, and a fish.’ Why not a pumpkin too—just as tasteless—or a chameleon, just as puffed up with wind? Clearly, being a fish, and not wanting to rot away in some more seemly burial, he chose instead to be roasted, by hurling himself into Etna. And there, from that point on, his metensomatosis came to its end—like a summer dinner, after the roast. [2] So, accordingly, here too we must do battle against an even more monstrous presumption, one that rolls beasts out of men and men out of beasts. Let the bushes see to themselves, and the sorrel too, lest we be forced into more laughing than teaching. We say that the human soul can in no way be transferred into beasts, even granting the philosophers' claim that it is composed of elemental substances. [3] For whether the soul is fire, or water, or blood, or breath, or air, or light, we must in each case think through the creatures that are the opposite of each such species: to fire belong those creatures that are cold-blooded—snakes, lizards, salamanders, and whatever else is bred of the rival element, namely water; likewise the opposite of water are the dry and sapless creatures—locusts, little moths, chameleons delight in dryness; likewise the opposite of blood are creatures that lack its crimson—snails, worms, and the greater part of fishkind; the opposite of breath are creatures that seem not to breathe at all, lacking lungs and windpipe—gnats, ants, moths, and that whole tribe of tiny things; likewise the opposite of air are creatures that live forever underground or underwater and never draw a breath of it (you will know the things better than their names); likewise the opposite of light are creatures wholly blind, or that have eyes only for darkness even in sunlight—moles, bats, owls. This much I teach from substances that are plain and evident. [4] But were I also to take up Epicurus's atoms, and eye Pythagoras's numbers, and run into Plato's Ideas, and lay hold of Aristotle's entelechies, I would doubtless find, even among these kinds of substance, creatures I could set against them by way of contrariety. For my whole contention is this: whatever substance, of those named above, the human soul might be supposed to consist of, it could not be reshaped into creatures so utterly contrary to that substance in every one of them, nor could it confer upon them its account by way of transfer—creatures which would be more likely to exclude and reject it than to admit and receive it, on the mere ground of this primary contrariety, which sets at odds the very diversity of substantial condition; and then, following on from that, the rest of each creature's nature in due order. [5] For the human soul has been allotted its own particular haunts, its own diet, furnishings, senses, affections, mating, and offspring; likewise its own capacities, and then its works, joys, weariness, vices, desires, pleasures, states of health, remedies, and finally its own manner of living and its own kind of death. [6] How, then, will that soul which clung to the earth, having no head for heights nor for depths, exhausted even by climbing a staircase, choked even by sinking into a swimming-pool, afterward go leaping through the air as an eagle, or afterward go plunging through the sea as an eel? Likewise, how will a soul raised on a rich and delicate, carefully tended diet chew—not merely straw, but thorns, and the bitter wildness of shrub-leaves, and dungheap vermin, even poisons—if it passes into a she-goat, or a quail; or indeed, still mindful of itself, into carrion, or even into a human corpse, as a bear or a lion? So too you may reduce all the rest to absurdity. And not to labor over every single case: whatever the measure, whatever the scale of the human soul itself, what will it do inside creatures far larger, or far tinier, than itself? For every body must necessarily be filled entirely by its soul, and every soul must be entirely wrapped round by its body. How, then, will a human soul fill an elephant? How, again, will it be wrapped round inside a gnat? If it can only stretch or shrink to fit, it will certainly be put at risk in the process. [7] And so I add this: if it is by no reckoning capable of such a transfer into creatures matched to it neither in bodily scale nor in any of the other laws of its own nature, will it then be changed to suit the qualities of these various kinds and their manner of life, which is the very opposite of human life—made, by that very transformation, the opposite of itself? But surely, if it undergoes such a change, losing what it was, it will no longer be what it was; and if what it was no longer exists, then metensomatosis itself has been dissolved—certainly not to be credited to that soul which, if it changes, simply ceases to be. For it is only of a soul that endures unchanged in its own condition that any ‘transmigration’ could properly be spoken. [8] So then, if it can neither change without ceasing to be itself, nor remain as it was, since it cannot take on such contraries, I still ask for some credible reason for a transfer of this sort. For even though some men are likened to beasts on account of the qualities of their character, disposition, and passions—since God himself has said, ‘Man, when he was in honor, became like the beasts that have no understanding’—it does not follow that kites are made out of rapacious men, or dogs out of the filthy, or panthers out of the savage, or sheep out of the upright, or swallows out of the chattering, or doves out of the chaste, as though one and the same substance of soul, wherever it went, kept repeating its own nature in the special traits of these animals. But a substance is one matter, and the nature belonging to that substance quite another; for substance is peculiar to each particular thing, while nature may be shared in common. [9] Take an example. Stone is a substance, so is iron; the hardness of stone and of iron is the nature of that substance. Hardness they share in common; substance sets them apart. The softness of wool, the softness of a feather: their natural qualities agree, their substances do not. So too, if a man is called a savage beast, or an upright one, it is not because he has the same soul: for it is precisely then that a likeness of nature is noted, when a dissimilarity of substance is plain to see. In the very fact that you judge a man to be like a beast, you confess that the soul is not the same—by calling it ‘like,’ not ‘identical.’ [10] So too runs the sense of the divine utterance, likening man to cattle in nature, not in substance. Indeed, God himself would not even have marked man out in this way, had he known him to be of the same substance as the beast.

======== De Anima — Chapter 33 ========

[1] Even when this doctrine is claimed under the name of "judgment" — that human souls are allotted animal bodies according to their life and merits, the murderous to be butchered in slaughterhouses and the tyrannical to be broken in as beasts of burden, the lazy to be worked to exhaustion as laborers and the filthy to be defiled among unclean creatures, while correspondingly the honorable are to be honored, the lovable loved, the careful cared for, and the admirable sought out among the loveliest, finest, most useful, and most refined of animals — even here I will say: if they are changed, then it is not the very souls that earned the sentence who are being paid out. [2] The whole rationale of judgment is emptied if the sense of one's own deserts is lost. And lost it will be, if the soul's status is altered. And altered the soul's status is, if the souls do not remain themselves. But if they do remain themselves for judgment — which even the Egyptian Hermes knew, saying that the soul, once departed from the body, is not merged again into the world-soul but keeps its own separateness, "in order," he says, "that it may render account to the Father of what it did in the body" — then I insist we weigh the justice, the gravity, the majesty, the dignity of that divine judgment, and ask whether it does not preside from a loftier height than human courts, with fuller honor paid to both verdicts, punishments and rewards alike, sterner in avenging and more generous in bestowing. [3] What do you suppose becomes of a murderer's soul? Some beast, I suppose, destined for the abattoir and the butcher's stall, to have its own throat cut just as it cut another's, to be flayed just as it stripped its victims, to be served up as food just as it made food of those it slaughtered in the woods and byways for wild beasts. [4] But if that is how it will be judged, will not that soul come away with more comfort than punishment — finding its funeral among the finest cooks, being interred in Apician and Lurconian sauces, borne to Ciceronian tables, carried out on Sulla's most splendid platters, its funeral rites a banquet, devoured by its own kin instead of by hawks and wolves — with the result that, entombed in a human body and returned to its own kind, it seems to have risen again, exulting over human judgments if it has had that experience! [5] For as it stands, our courts tear the murderer apart with beasts of every exotic and specially trained savagery, and that while he is still alive — indeed, since he does not die easily, they contrive delay to bring the penalty to its full measure. And if the soul escapes ahead of the final sword-stroke, lest even the body cheat the blade, they still exact payment for his crime by stabbing both throat and ribs alike. Then he is given to the fire, so that even his burial is made a punishment. Otherwise, indeed, it is not permitted. Nor is there even that much care for his pyre, that other beasts should not find the remains; certainly his bones are not spared nor his ashes granted the covering they deserve. [6] Such is the vengeance men exact for murder — matching the very magnitude of the nature that is avenged. Who would not prefer the justice of this age — which even the apostle, not without reason, attests is armed with the sword, a savagery that is itself an act of devotion on man's behalf? And if we consider the wages of other crimes as well — the gibbet, the burning alive, the sack for parricides, the hook, the cliff — who would not rather take his sentence from Pythagoras and Empedocles? [7] For those to be punished with labor and servitude will, of course, be given new bodies as donkeys and mules — how they will congratulate themselves, when they recall the millstones and water-wheels, compared with the mines and the workhouses and the public works gangs and the prisons themselves, idle as those are! And likewise those who lived uprightly and commended their lives to the judge — I look for their rewards, but instead I find punishments. A fine reward indeed, for the good, to be restored as some animal or other! [8] Homer remembered being a peacock, in Ennius's dream — but I will not trust poets even when they are awake. And granted the peacock is the most beautiful of birds and decked in whatever color it pleases, still its feathers are silent, its voice displeases, and poets want nothing so much as to sing. Homer, then, was condemned to the peacock, not honored by it. He will take far more delight in this world's reward — being called the father of the liberal arts — preferring the ornaments of his own fame to a peacock's tail. [9] Come now — granting that poets pass into peacocks or even swans, if indeed the swan's voice is lovely — what animal will you clothe the just Aeacus in? What beast will you make of chaste Dido? What bird will inherit patience, what sheep holiness, what fish innocence? All these creatures are man's servants, all subject to him, all his property. If he is to become one of them, then diminished is the man to whom, for the merits of his life, images, statues, and inscriptions are paid, public honors and privileges rendered, to whom the senate house and the people offer their votes as sacrifice. [10] O divine judgments, more mendacious after death than human ones — contemptible in their punishments, unappealing in their rewards, judgments that neither the worst men fear nor the best desire, toward which the wicked will hasten rather than the holy: the wicked, so as to escape this world's justice all the sooner; the holy, so as to put off receiving it as long as possible! Well do you teach, philosophers, and helpfully do you counsel, making the punishments and rewards after death lighter than those of this life — when, if any judgment does await souls, it ought to be believed far weightier at the settling of accounts for a whole life than in its ordinary administration, since nothing is more complete than what comes last, and nothing more final than what is most divine. [11] God, therefore, will judge more completely, because more finally — by an eternal sentence, of punishment as much as of refreshment, with souls returning not into beasts but into their own bodies, and this once only, and on that day which the Father alone knows — so that, kept in suspended expectation, faith's earnestness may be tested, always watching for the day even while always ignorant of it, fearing daily what it daily hopes for.

======== De Anima — Chapter 34 ========

AGAINST THE OPINION OF SIMON THE HERETIC. [1] No such madness has yet, down to our own day, broken out under any heretical name as would reshape human souls into beasts — but we have had to bring in this case too and rule it out, as belonging with those already examined, so that Homer might be knocked down out of his peacock just as Euphorbus was knocked out of Pythagoras, and so that this same transmigration or transembodiment, once beaten back again, might strike down the doctrine that has furnished heretics with some of their material. [2] For Simon the Samaritan, in the Acts of the Apostles the would-be buyer of the Holy Spirit, after being condemned by the apostle himself and weeping in vain over his money as it perished with him, turned to attacking the truth — as though for the comfort of revenge — and, backed by the powers of his own art, in a kind of magical stunt bought back, with that same money, a certain Helen of Tyre out of a house of public prostitution: a fitting price for the Holy Spirit! [3] He makes himself out to be the Supreme Father, and her his first Emanation — the very impulse by which he had first conceived of making angels and archangels; that she, in possession of this design, leapt forth from the Father and plunged down into the lower regions, and there, forestalling the Father's own design, brought forth the angelic powers, ignorant of the Father, the makers of this world; that these, in turn, did not hold on to her — lest, once she had departed, her offspring should be seen as another's — and so subjected her to every indignity, so that, degraded, she might never be free to leave, and finally cast her down even into human shape, shut up there as though bound within the fetters of the flesh; [4] and that thus, tossed for many ages through one female body after another, she was in fact that same Helen who proved so ruinous to Priam, and later to the eyes of Stesichorus, whom she struck blind for his slanderous verse, and then restored to sight for his poem of amends; that migrating so from body to body, she at last, in the ultimate disgrace, stood on display under the very name "Helen," a cheaper Helen still. This, then, is the lost sheep, to whom the Supreme Father — Simon, that is — came down, and having first recovered her and carried her back up, on his shoulders or, I don't know, on his thighs, then turned his attention to the salvation of mankind, as though by way of ransoming men from those same angelic powers — to deceive whom he too took on their shape, and, passing himself off as a man among men, appeared in Judea as the Son, but in Samaria as the Father. [5] O Helen, put through her paces by poets and heretics alike — infamous now for adultery, now for prostitution, except that she is dug up out of Troy more gloriously than out of a brothel: a thousand ships were launched for the Troy version, but perhaps not a thousand pence for the brothel one. Blush, Simon, slower to search for her, less steady in bringing her back. Menelaus, by contrast, pursues his lost wife at once, at once demands the return of the stolen one, and wrests her back in a ten years' war — no hiding, no deceiving, no quibbling. I am afraid that he was the truer "father," who labored more watchfully, more boldly, and longer over the recovery of his Helen.

======== De Anima — Chapter 35 ========

AGAINST THE OPINION OF CARPOCRATES. [1] But it was not for you alone that transmigration built this fable: Carpocrates too makes use of it — equally a magician, equally a fornicator, if less devoted to a "Helen." Why not? Since, in order to overturn every rule of divine and human conduct, he has asserted that souls are re-embodied; for, he says, no one's life here counts as settled until every charge that can be brought against it has been struck off — since nothing is evil by nature, only by opinion. Hence transmigration necessarily looms over anyone who does not, in this single passage through life, satisfy every forbidden indulgence (so crimes, apparently, are simply life's dues!); otherwise the soul is recalled again and again, as often as it has fallen short in what it "brought in," still owing on its debts, until it pays the very last penny, thrust back time and again into the prison of the body. [2] It is to this end that he twists that whole allegory of the Lord which shines with quite definite meanings of its own, and is, first of all, to be taken simply. For the pagan too is our adversary, walking the same road of common life. Still, we would have had to leave this world altogether, if we could have no dealings at all with such people. So the Lord bids you show him goodwill ("love your enemies," he says, "and pray for those who curse you"), lest, provoked by some injury in the course of business dealings, he drag you off to his own judge, and you be handed over to custody until you have paid off the whole debt down to the last coin. [3] Then, if by an accompanying application "adversary" is transferred to the devil, you are likewise advised to come to terms with him too — terms defined by the covenant of faith; for you have pledged to renounce him, his pomp, and his angels. On this you have an agreement between you. This will be your "friendship": keeping the terms of that pledge, so that you never afterward reclaim anything you have foresworn, anything you have handed back to him — lest he denounce you before God the judge as a cheat, a breaker of covenant, just as we read of him elsewhere as the accuser of the saints, informer against them by the very meaning of his name "devil" — and lest the judge hand you over to the punishing angel, who then locks you away in the dungeon below, from which you will not be released until you have paid off, in the delay of your resurrection, even your smallest fault. What could fit these words better? What interpretation could be truer? [4] But back to Carpocrates: if the soul is debtor for every crime, who is to be understood as its enemy and adversary? I should think, the better mind, which drives it toward some measure of innocence, forcing it back again and again into the body until it is caught guilty of no good life at all. This is what it means to recognize a good tree by its bad fruit — that is, to recognize the doctrine of truth by the worst possible instructions. [5] I expect heretics of this stripe fall also upon the example of Elijah, as represented in John, supposing that the Lord's own statement supports transmigration: "Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him," and elsewhere: "and if you are willing to hear it, this is Elijah, who is to come." Did the Jews, then, question John out of some Pythagorean notion — "Are you Elijah?" — and not rather out of divine prophecy: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the Tishbite"? [6] But transmigration, as they mean it, is the recall of a soul long since finished with death and repeated in another body; whereas Elijah is to come not by the departure of life but by translation, and is to be restored not to a body he was never removed from, but to the world from which he was translated — not by any return from death, but by the fulfillment of prophecy, the very same man, in his own name and his own person. But how, then, is Elijah "John"? You have the angel's own words: "he," it says, "will go before them in the presence of the people, in the power and spirit of Elijah" — not in his soul, nor in his flesh. For these substances belong strictly to each man himself, but spirit and power are conferred from outside, by the grace of God; and so they can likewise be transferred to another by God's will, as happened long ago with the spirit of Moses.

======== De Anima — Chapter 36 ========

ON THE SEX OF SOUL AND FLESH ARISING TOGETHER. [1] It is to these questions, I think, that we must now return, from which we digressed. We had established that the soul is sown in man, and out of man, by man himself, and that there is one seed from the beginning — of soul as much as of flesh — for the whole muster of the race; this against the rival opinions of philosophers and heretics, and that stale old speech of Plato's. Now let us weave the order of the discussions that follow from it. [2] The soul, sown in the womb together with the flesh, receives its sex together with the flesh, and in such a way that neither substance can be credited alone with the cause of sex. For if the conception of the two substances allowed any gap between them, so that either flesh or soul were sown first, then it would follow that the property of sex belonged to one substance alone, through a temporal gap in the seeds — so that either flesh stamped sex on the soul, or soul on the flesh — [3] just as Apelles (not the painter, the heretic), positing souls male and female before bodies, as he learned from Philumena, necessarily makes the flesh, as the later thing, receive its sex from the soul. And those who bring the soul in after birth to a flesh already formed, necessarily let the flesh — made male or female beforehand — prejudge the sex for the soul. [4] But the seeds of both substances are undivided, and their commingled outpouring undergoes one common event of generation, tracing whatever lines the reason of nature has drawn. Certainly the very form of our first origin bears witness to this: the male is fashioned earlier (Adam is first), the woman somewhat later (Eve is second). Thus the flesh remains for a long while unformed, just as it was plucked from Adam's side — yet it is already a living thing even then, since I recognize that portion of Adam, too, as soul already. And indeed God's breath would have ensouled that portion as well, had there not been, in the woman, a soul-transmission from Adam just as there was a flesh-transmission.

======== De Anima — Chapter 37 ========

ON THE AGE OF THE SOUL. [1] Now the whole business of sowing, building, and shaping a human being in the womb is governed, at every point, by some power that serves the divine will — whatever the reasoning it has been allotted to work by. Estimating this, Roman superstition even fashioned a goddess Alemona to nourish the fetus in the womb, and Nona and Decima named from the anxious months, and Partula who presides over the delivery, and Lucina who brings the child into the light. We, however, believe these are the offices of angels. [2] From the moment, then, that the fetus in the womb is fully formed, it is a human being. For the law of Moses judges an abortion punishable by retaliation exactly from the point when the case is already that of a human being — when its status of life and death is already assigned to it, when it is already written into its fate, even though, still living within the mother, it shares its lot very largely with the mother. [3] Let me say something too about the times of the soul's being born, to run through the sequence in order. Lawful birth is normally the entry of the tenth month. Those who calculate by numbers honor the number ten as, from that point, the parent of all the rest — indeed as the perfecter of human birth. [4] I, however, will argue this span of time by reference to God rather: that ten months should consecrate a human being by the Decalogue, so that we are born in the very number of months by which we are reborn in the number of the discipline. But also, when birth is complete in the seventh month more readily than in the eighth, I recognize the honor of the Sabbath in it: that in the month in which the founding of God's creation was consecrated, the image of God is sometimes brought forth. It is granted for a birth to hasten, and yet to arrive fittingly within the week — into the auspices of resurrection and rest and the kingdom. That is why the number eight does not make us: for then there will be no marrying. [5] We have already, long since, established the partnership of flesh and soul, from the gathering of their very seeds all the way to the completion of the forming; in the same way we now maintain it from birth onward — first of all because they grow together, though on a divided reckoning suited to the condition of each kind: flesh by measure, soul by capacity; flesh in bearing, soul in perception. But it must be denied that the soul grows in substance — lest it also be said to diminish in substance, and so be believed capable of failing altogether; rather, its power — in which its natural endowments lie stored — while the measure of substance stays fixed, the same as when it was first breathed in, is gradually brought forward together with the flesh. [6] Set before yourself a fixed weight of gold or silver, still a rough lump: it has a compact shape, smaller for now than what it will become, yet containing within the limit of its measure the whole of what is, by nature, gold or silver. Then, when the lump is beaten out into a sheet, it becomes larger than its original size through the spreading of a fixed weight, not through any addition — while it is stretched, not while it is increased; though in this sense too it is increased while it is stretched, for it is allowed to increase in extent while it is not allowed to increase in mass. [7] Then too the very brilliance of the gold or silver is brought forward — brilliance that was indeed present even in the lump, but duller, not, however, nonexistent. Then, too, one shape after another accrues to it, according to the pliancy of the material, in whatever direction the craftsman who works it may lead it, contributing nothing to the fixed measure except the outward form. So too the growth of the soul must be reckoned — not as an increase of substance, but as a drawing-forth into view.

======== De Anima — Chapter 38 ========

ON HOW FOODS BEAR UPON THE SOUL. [1] Although we have already established earlier that all natural faculties belonging to sensation and understanding are present in the soul's own substance from its innate endowment, yet advancing gradually through the stages of age and diversifying through accidents according to skills, upbringing, places, and the powers that dominate — which nonetheless bears on the partnership of flesh and soul now proposed — we say that the puberty of the soul, too, coincides with that of the flesh, and that the one rises with the prompting of the senses and the other with the growth of the limbs, from about the fourteenth year; not because Asclepiades reckons wisdom from that point, nor because the civil laws adjust the conduct of legal business from then on, but because this too is a principle reaching back to the beginning. [2] For if Adam and Eve, from the knowledge of good and evil, felt the need to cover their shameful parts, then from the moment we feel the same, we are confessing the same knowledge of good and evil. From these years onward, the sex becomes both more suffused with blood and more clothed; desire employs the eyes as witnesses and communicates its pleasure and understands its own objects, and, like the sting of a fig-leaf's touch, girds its own boundaries with an itch, and drives the man forth from innocence's garden — and from there the itch spreads even to other faults, sins of a kind not natural, since they now spring not from nature's ordinance but from vice. [3] But the one desire that is properly natural is that for food alone, which God supplied even at the beginning: 'Of every tree,' he says, 'you shall eat'; and at the second begetting, after the flood, he made a further allowance: 'Behold, I have given you all things to eat, as the green herbs of the field' — provided not so much for the soul as for the flesh, though for the soul's sake too. For the pretext must be taken away from the arguer who, because the soul seems to desire food, wants it understood from this that the soul is therefore mortal — sustained by food, and accordingly weakening when food is withheld, and finally perishing when it is cut off. [4] Further, one must ask not only who desires these things, but for whom; and if for its own sake, then also why, and when, and to what point; then again, one thing is desired by nature, another by necessity, another according to a thing's own property, another for the sake of an end. The soul, then, will desire food for itself out of the cause of necessity, but for the flesh out of the nature of its own property. For the flesh is, assuredly, the soul's dwelling, and the soul is the lodger within that dwelling. [5] The tenant, then, will desire, from the cause and necessity implied by that very name, things that will profit the house for the whole span of its tenancy — not that the tenant himself needs to be built up, or armored, or propped with scaffolding, but only kept intact, since he cannot otherwise be kept intact than by being upheld by the house. [6] Otherwise, should the house collapse, it will be permitted to the soul, once stripped of its former supports, to depart unharmed, possessing its own foundations and the nourishments proper to its own condition: immortality, rationality, sensibility, intellect, freedom of will.

======== De Anima — Chapter 39 ========

[1] All these gifts conferred on the soul from birth, the same one who envied us in the beginning now likewise overshadows and corrupts, so that they are neither foreseen of their own accord nor administered as they ought to be. [THAT SCARCELY ANY SOUL IS WITHOUT A DEMON.] For to which of men will an evil spirit not cling, lying in wait for souls from the very doorway of birth itself, invited in by that whole superstitious apparatus of childbirth? [2] Thus all are born with idolatry as their midwife, while the very wombs, still wreathed with ribbons made up at the idols' shrines, proclaim their offspring, even in the making, as candidates of the demons — while at the birth Lucina and Diana are wailed for, while through the whole first week a table is set out for Juno, while on the last day the Fates of Writing are invoked, while even the infant's first setting-down upon the ground is a rite sacred to the goddess Statina. [3] Who does not, from that point, either vow his son's whole head to the guilt of some cult, or set aside a lock of hair, or shave it all off with a razor, or bind it by a sacrificial vow, or seal it with a sacred rite — for the sake of the nation, or the family, or the public or private devotion? So too the demonic spirit found Socrates while he was still a boy; so too all men are assigned their 'genii,' which is only another name for demons. To such a degree is scarcely any birth clean — certainly not among the pagans. [4] Hence the apostle says that children are born holy from a parent of either sex once sanctified — as much from the privilege of the seed as from the discipline of upbringing. Otherwise, he says, they would be born unclean — meaning, evidently, that the children of believers are to be understood as marked out for holiness, and through this for salvation as well, so that by the pledge of this hope he might defend those marriages which he had judged should be kept. Besides, he remembered the Lord's own pronouncement: whoever is not brought forth from water and spirit cannot pass into God's kingdom — that is, cannot be counted holy.

======== De Anima — Chapter 40 ========

HOW THE FLESH IS CALLED SINFUL. [1] Thus every soul is reckoned as being in Adam until it is reckoned anew in Christ; unclean for as long as it is not so reckoned anew, and sinful precisely because unclean, taking on disgrace too from its partnership with the flesh. [2] For although the flesh is called sinful — the flesh whose course we are forbidden to walk, whose works, lusting against the spirit, stand condemned, on account of which men are branded 'carnal' — the flesh is not, on that account, disreputable in its own name. For it neither thinks nor perceives anything on its own account, so as to persuade or to command sin. And why should it? It is a service — and a service not of the kind a slave is, or a lesser friend, terms that belong to living beings, but of the kind a cup is, or any similar thing: a body, not a soul. For a cup, too, is in the service of one who thirsts; yet unless the thirsty man has applied the cup to himself, the cup will serve nothing at all. [3] To such a degree does the man of earth possess no property of his own, nor is the flesh 'man' in the sense of being one power of the soul and one person alongside another; rather it is a thing of a wholly different substance and a wholly different condition, assigned to the soul nonetheless as furniture, as an instrument for the offices of life. The flesh, therefore, is reproved in Scripture because the soul does nothing without the flesh in the working of lust, gluttony, drunkenness, cruelty, idolatry, and the rest of the carnal things — carnal not in their sensations, but in their effects. [4] Finally, the very sense of transgressions, even without their effects, is regularly imputed to the soul. 'Whoever has looked with desire has already committed adultery in his heart.' But on the other hand, what is the flesh, without the soul, in the working of honesty, justice, endurance, chastity? Further, what sort of thing is it, to charge someone with crimes to whose credit you will not enter even its own good evidence? But that through which the offense is committed is arraigned, so that the one by whom the offense is committed may be burdened as well — even to the point of an accusation against the very service rendered. The graver resentment falls on the one in command, when the offices under him are struck at; the one who gives the order is beaten more, since the one who merely obeys is not excused either.

======== De Anima — Chapter 41 ========

ON THE EVIL AND THE GOOD OF THE SOUL. [1] The evil of the soul, then — apart from what is built up on top of it by the encounter with the evil spirit — precedes from the fault of its origin, natural, so to speak, in a certain sense. For, as we have said, the corruption of a nature is itself another nature, having its own god and father — namely, the very author of the corruption — yet in such a way that the good of the soul is still present within it: that primary, that divine and native and properly natural good. [2] For what comes from God is not so much extinguished as overshadowed. It can be overshadowed, because it is not God; it cannot be extinguished, because it is from God. And so, just as light, obstructed by some barrier, remains even though it does not appear — if the density of the obstruction is great enough — so too the good in the soul, oppressed by evil, either lies wholly empty of any visible salvation, given the quality of that evil, or, where it is granted, shines out once its freedom is found. [3] Thus there are those who are, in a sense, the very worst and those who are the very best, and yet all souls are nonetheless one single kind; thus in the worst there is some good, and in the best no little of the worst. For God alone stands apart from sin, and the sole sinless man is Christ, seeing that Christ is God too. So too the divinity of the soul bursts out in premonitions from that prior good, and the conscience of God breaks forth in testimony: 'God is good,' and 'God sees,' and 'I commend it to God.' For this reason no soul is without fault, because none is without the seed of good. [4] Accordingly, when the soul comes to faith, reformed through a second birth from water and a power from above, the veil of its former corruption drawn back, it beholds its whole light. It is also received now by the Holy Spirit, just as at its first birth it was received by a profane spirit. The flesh follows the soul as it weds itself to the Spirit, like a dowered bondmaid — no longer the soul's servant, but the Spirit's. O blessed marriage, if only it commits no adultery!

======== De Anima — Chapter 42 ========

ON DEATH. [1] What remains now concerning death is that our subject should come to rest exactly where the soul itself is brought to its consummation. And yet Epicurus, on a fairly popular assumption, has denied that death has anything to do with us. "What is dissolved," he says, "lacks sensation; what lacks sensation is nothing to us." But it is not death itself that is dissolved and lacks sensation — it is the man who undergoes it. Yet Epicurus assigned the suffering to the very one to whom the acting belongs. But if it belongs to man to suffer death, the dissolver of the body and the destroyer of sensation, how strange, then, to claim that a power of such magnitude has nothing at all to do with man! [2] Seneca, arguing rather more forcefully, says that after death everything ends, even death itself. If that is so, then death will already have something to do with itself, if it too comes to an end — and all the more to do with man, in whom, amid the ending of all things, death itself is also ended. "Death is nothing to us" — very well, then life too is nothing to us. For if that by which we are dissolved lies outside us, then so does that by which we are put together. If the removal of sensation is nothing to us, neither is the acquiring of sensation anything to us. [3] But whoever does away with death let him do away with the soul as well; as for us, we shall treat of death, to which we ourselves belong even if it does not belong to us, just as we shall treat of the afterlife and of the soul's other province. And indeed, sleep is death's own mirror, no material foreign to it.

======== De Anima — Chapter 43 ========

ON SLEEP. [1] Let us discuss sleep first, and afterward how the soul makes its way through death. Sleep is by no means something outside of nature, as certain philosophers hold, seeing that they trace it to causes which appear to lie beyond the natural order. [2] The Stoics call sleep a slackening of sensory vigor; the Epicureans, a diminishment of the animal spirit; Anaxagoras and Xenophanes, a weariness; Empedocles and Parmenides, a cooling; Strato, a separation of compacted spirit; Democritus, a want of spirit; Aristotle, a languishing of the heat around the heart. I, for my part, cannot recall ever having slept in a way that let me recognize any of these. Nor should we believe sleep to be weariness — it is rather the opposite of weariness, since it removes weariness, seeing that a man is restored by sleep rather than fatigued by it. Besides, sleep does not always arise from fatigue, and when it does, the fatigue is by then already gone. [3] Nor will I admit any cooling or languishing of heat, seeing how thoroughly bodies grow warm in sleep, and how the digestion of food would not proceed smoothly, with heat too quick and cold too slow, if we were chilled by sleep. More than that: sweat itself is a sign of digestive heat at work. Indeed we speak of "concocting" food, and concoction is the operation of heat, not of cold. [4] Likewise, the immortality of the soul will not allow us to believe in any diminishment of the animal spirit, or want of spirit, or separation of compacted spirit. The soul perishes if it is diminished. [5] It remains, perhaps, that with the Stoics we define sleep as a slackening of sensory vigor, on the ground that it procures rest for the body alone, not for the soul as well. For the soul, being ever mobile and ever in exercise, never sinks into rest — rest being foreign, of course, to the condition of immortality; nothing immortal admits an end to its own work, and sleep is the end of a work. In short, it is only to the body, to which mortality belongs, that rest can flatteringly promise an end of labor. [6] Whoever, then, doubts whether sleep is natural has the dialecticians themselves to call into doubt the whole distinction between the natural and the unnatural, so that he may know that even what he judged to fall outside nature can be claimed by the very nature from which it derives its being in such a way as to appear to lie outside it — and in any case either everything belongs to nature or nothing does. But with us, that alone can be heard which the contemplation of God suggests, God being the author of everything in question. [7] For we believe that whatever exists by nature is some rational work of God. Now sleep is preceded by reason — so fitting, so useful, so necessary that no soul could do without it: the restorer of bodies, the renewer of strength, the tester of health, the pacifier of labors, the physician of fatigue, to whose lawful enjoyment day yields, while night makes the law, taking away even the color of things. If sleep is thus vital, salutary, and helpful, nothing of that kind is other than rational, and nothing rational is other than natural. [8] So too physicians relegate everything contrary to what is vital, salutary, and helpful to outside the hinges of nature. For by judging as unnatural those disorders which rival sleep — the frenzy of delirium and the collapse of heart-failure — they have already prejudged natural sleep to be natural; and in noting that lethargy is unnatural they bear natural witness in favor of sleep, when it keeps its own proper measure. For every natural thing is undone either by deprivation or by excess, and preserved by the proper measure. Thus a thing remains natural in its due state, even though it can be rendered unnatural by falling short of or overrunning that state. [9] What if you should also try to strip eating and drinking out of the lot assigned to nature? For in these too there is much preparation for sleep. Certainly man was imbued with them from the very origin of his nature. If you will learn it from God, that fountainhead of our race, Adam, drank down slumber before he thirsted for rest, slept before he labored — no, before he even ate, no, before he even spoke a word — so that we might see natural sleep set as the foremost of all natural things. [10] From this we are led to conclude that even then he was rehearsing an image of death. For if Adam bore the figure of Christ, then Adam's sleep prefigured Christ's dying, for Christ too would be laid low in the slumber of death, so that out of the wound opened in his side there might be shaped the true mother of the living, the church. That is why sleep, so wholesome, so reasonable, is even fashioned as the pattern of that public and common death which is to come. [11] For God willed — and in nothing else in his ordering has he ever worked without patterns — after the Platonic paradigm, to trace out for us daily, and more fully, the lines of man's beginning and end, reaching out a hand to make faith easier to assist through images and parables, both of words and of things. He sets before you, then, a body struck down by the friendly force of slumber, laid low by the winning compulsion of rest, motionless in its posture — resembling how it lay before this life began, and foreshadowing how it shall lie once this life is over — offering thereby a proof of both its molding and its burial, while it waits for the soul as though not yet bestowed and as though already snatched away. [12] But the soul, meanwhile, so behaves as though it were active elsewhere, rehearsing by this dissembling of presence its future absence (we shall learn of this from the case of Hermotimus), and yet all the while it dreams — whence, then, come dreams? It neither rests nor grows idle nor at all surrenders the nature of its immortality into slumber's servitude. It proves itself ever mobile: it travels by land and sea, does business, is stirred to action, labors, plays, grieves, rejoices, pursues things lawful and unlawful, showing that it can do a great deal even without the body, that it is also equipped with its own members, but that nonetheless it retains the need to set the body in motion once again. And so, when the body wakes and is restored to its offices, it assures you of the resurrection of the dead. This, then, will be both the rational account of sleep's nature and the natural rationality of sleep. Through this image of death, too, you are initiated into faith, you rehearse hope, you learn to die and to live, you learn to keep watch even while you sleep.

======== De Anima — Chapter 44 ========

ON HERMOTIMUS. [1] As for Hermotimus. His soul, they say, would go missing during sleep, as though seizing the chance to slip out of a man who was, so to speak, on holiday, leaving his body behind. His wife made this known. His enemies caught him sleeping and, taking him for dead, cremated him. When the soul returned — rather too late, I should think — it had only itself to blame for the murder. The citizens of Clazomenae consoled Hermotimus in his temple. His wife did not come near, on account of her ill repute. [2] What is the point of this story? Simply this: lest, because it is easy for the crowd to suppose that sleep is the soul's temporary withdrawal, credulity should also enlist the case of Hermotimus as its argument. It was rather a case of an especially heavy sort of slumber, of the kind presumed in nightmare-possession — or that flaw of health which Soranus counters by ruling out the incubus altogether — or some such disorder as also drove Epimenides into legend, sleepy for nearly fifty years. Suetonius, too, denies that Nero ever dreamed at all, and Theopompus says the same of Thrasymedes — except that Nero, perhaps, dreamed once, at the very end, after his terrors had overtaken him. [3] What if Hermotimus, too, was such a case, that the soul's idleness, doing nothing in his sleep, was mistaken for a divorce from the body? You should suspect anything sooner than this license of a soul playing truant without dying — and doing so, moreover, as a regular habit. For if such a thing were said to happen only once, like an eclipse of the sun or moon, so too of the soul, I should readily be persuaded it happened by divine agency; for it would fit that a man be either warned or terrified by God, as though by a swift lightning-stroke, with the blow of a momentary death — unless it were nearer the truth to believe it a dream, which ought rather to have happened to him while awake — unless, I say, it were rather to be believed a dream.

======== De Anima — Chapter 45 ========

ON DREAMS. [1] Here too we are bound to set forth the Christian position on dreams, as one of the events of sleep and among the soul's more considerable exertions — a soul we have already argued is perpetually active and perpetually at work, on account of its unresting motion, which is the very definition of divinity and immortality. So then, when rest comes to bodies, for whom rest is a proper solace, the soul, having no share in that solace which is not its own, does not rest — and if it is deprived of the work of the bodily members, it makes use of its own. [2] Picture a gladiator without weapons, or a charioteer without a chariot, going through all the motions and efforts of his craft: he fights, he competes, but it is an empty display. All the same, things appear to happen which nonetheless are seen not to happen; they occur in the acting of them, but not in any actual effect. [3] This power we call ecstasy — a stepping-outside of the senses, akin to madness. So it was that from the very first, sleep was paired with this ecstasy: "and the Lord cast a trance over Adam, and he was made to sleep." For rest comes upon the body, while ecstasy befalls the soul in opposition to rest; and from that point on, a single pattern has blended sleep with ecstasy, and nature has taken its form from that pattern. [4] Hence we are both delighted and saddened and terrified in our dreams, and how deeply we feel it, how anxiously, how passively — even though nothing has actually moved us — mere empty images though they be, if we dreamed with our full faculties intact. Hence too, good deeds performed in dreams are without merit, and offenses committed there are without guilt; we shall no more be condemned for a vision of fornication than we shall be crowned for one of martyrdom. [5] "But how," you ask, "does the soul remember its dreams, seeing that it cannot be said to be in full possession of itself?" This will be the peculiar mark of this kind of madness: that it does not arise from any corruption of sound health, but from the very reason of nature; for it does not banish the mind but merely calls it away. To shake is one thing, to move another; to overturn is one thing, to stir up another. [6] So then, that memory remains available is a mark of a sound mind; that a sound mind, with memory intact, should nonetheless be stunned, is a kind of madness. That is why we are said not to rave but to dream; and that is also why we are sometimes, even then, sensible. For our wits, though overshadowed, are not extinguished — except that this too can seem, at such a time, to lie idle, while ecstasy for its own part still works upon it, so as to bring us images of wisdom in just the same way as it brings us images of error.

======== De Anima — Chapter 46 ========

[1] Behold, we are pressed once again to spell out, from a review of dreams themselves, how the soul is tossed about by them. And when shall we arrive at death? Here too I would say: when God gives it; there is no long delay for what is to come. [2] Epicurus judged dreams wholly vain, freeing divinity from business and dissolving the order of things, scattering everything into passivity, as though exposed to chance and accident. But if that is so, there must also be some outcome of truth, since it cannot be that truth alone is exempted from the outcome owed to everything. Homer divided two gates for dreams, one of horn for truth, one of ivory for deceit; for, they say, to see through horn is to see clearly, while ivory is blind. [3] Aristotle, while reckoning the greater part a lie, still acknowledges the true. The Telmessians void no dreams at all, blaming instead the weakness of interpretation. But who is so alien to humanity as never to have felt some vision come true? Touching briefly on the more notable cases, I will put Epicurus to shame. [4] Astyages, king of the Medes, dreamed — Herodotus reports — that a flood poured from the bladder of his daughter Mandane, still a virgin, over all Asia; and again, a year after her marriage, that a vine sprang from the same place and overshadowed all Asia. Charon of Lampsacus, earlier than Herodotus, hands down the same story. Those who interpreted it of her son did not err, since Cyrus did indeed both flood and crush Asia. [5] Philip of Macedon, not yet father of Olympias's child, had dreamed that he sealed his wife's womb with a ring: the seal was a lion. He believed her fertility thereby closed off — I suppose because a lion fathers only once. Aristodemus, or Aristophon, reckoned instead that nothing is sealed in vain, and that a son of the greatest force was portended. Those who know Alexander recognize the lion of the seal. Ephorus records it. [6] But also a certain woman of Himera dreamed of the tyranny of Dionysius of Sicily — Heraclides has handed this down. And Laodice, mother of Seleucus, foresaw the kingdom of Asia before she had even borne him — Euphorion published this. I also learn from Strabo that Mithridates gained Pontus through a dream, and from Callisthenes that Bardylis ruled Illyricum from the Molossians all the way to Macedonia through a dream. [7] The Romans too have known dreams of this kind of truth. Marcus Tullius already knew, from a dream, the reformer of the empire — still a boy then, and a private citizen, merely "Julius Octavius" and unknown even to himself — both as Augustus and as the one who would bury the whirlwinds of civil war. This is recorded in the memoirs of Vitellius. [8] Nor will this kind of vision be the herald only of supreme powers, but of dangers and destructions too: as when Caesar, sick in the battle against the rebels Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, was about to face a greater crisis from the enemy still, and yet escaped his abandoned tent because of a vision seen by Artorius; as when Samos's Polycrates had a daughter who foresaw his crucifixion, drawn from the sun's smearing of him and Jove's rinsing him with rain. [9] Honors and talents too are revealed through sleep, cures are granted, thefts are exposed, treasures are disclosed. Cicero's own greatness, indeed, his nurse had already glimpsed while he was still a small child. The swan slipping from the bosom of Socrates, caressing men, is Plato the disciple. Leonymus the boxer is healed by Achilles in dreams. When the Athenians had lost the golden crown from their citadel, Sophocles the tragedian found it again by dreaming. Neoptolemus the tragic actor, warned in a dream by Ajax himself at the tomb near Rhoeteum in the Troad, freed him from the rubble and, when he lifted the burden of stones off the old man, came back rich in gold. [10] And how many commentators and witnesses stand behind this matter? Artemon, Antiphon, Strato, Philochorus, Epicharmus, Serapion, Cratippus, Dionysius of Rhodes, Hermippus — the whole literature of the age. I will laugh only, if at all, at the man who thought he could persuade us that Saturn dreamed before anyone else — unless, that is, he also lived before anyone else. Aristotle, forgive my laughter. [11] For the rest, Epicharmus, along with Philochorus of Athens, raised dreams to the very summit among the modes of divination. For this whole world too is thronged with oracles of the same kind: Amphiaraus's at Oropus, Amphilochus's at Mallus, Sarpedon's in the Troad, Trophonius's in Boeotia, Mopsus's in Cilicia, Hermione's in Macedonia, Pasiphae's in Laconia. The rest, with their origins and rites and reporters, along with the entire history of dreams besides, Hermippus of Berytus will exhibit to satiety in his five volumes. The Stoics, too, prefer to hold that God, most provident of human welfare, has among the other safeguards of the divining arts and disciplines instilled dreams as well — a peculiar comfort of natural oracle. [12] So much, then, on the credit due to dreams — which we too must acknowledge, though interpret differently. As for the other oracles, where no one even sleeps, what else shall we pronounce them but the demonic working of those spirits who already then dwelt in the men themselves, or courted their memories, for the whole stage-play of their malice — feigning divinity under that same guise, and by the same industry deceiving even through benefits, through cures and warnings and predictions, so as to injure all the more by helping, drawing men away, through the very things that help them, from the search for the true divinity by insinuating the false? [13] And certainly this power is not confined, nor is it bounded within the limits of shrines; it is roaming and flitting and, for the time, free. Hence no one should doubt that houses too lie open to demons, and that men are surrounded by their apparitions not only in inner sanctuaries but in their own bedrooms.

======== De Anima — Chapter 47 ========

[1] We hold, then, that dreams are for the most part inflicted by demons — even if sometimes true and welcome, yet, as we said, pursued and courted out of that same design — how much more so the empty, deceptive, troubled, mocking, and unclean ones. No wonder, since the images belong to those whose business they are. [2] But from God — who has pledged that the Holy Spirit's grace would be poured out upon all flesh, and that his male and female servants would not merely prophesy but also see dreams — those dreams will be reckoned which are matched to that same grace: whatever is honorable, holy, prophetic, revelatory, edifying, calling — the generosity of which is wont to drip down even on the profane, God equalizing his rains and his suns upon the just and the unjust alike, since even Nebuchadnezzar dreamed by divine gift, and nearly the greater part of mankind learns of God through visions. So then, just as God condescends even toward the heathen, so too the temptation of the evil one reaches even the saints, from whom it does not withdraw even by day, so that it may creep up on them at least while sleeping, by whatever way it can, if it cannot while they wake. [3] A third kind will be those dreams which the soul seems to produce for itself out of the intensity of its circumstances. Yet since dreaming is not a matter of choice (for Epicharmus too holds this view), how could the soul be the cause of some vision to itself? Must this kind, then, be left to natural form, on the ground that the soul, even in ecstasy, keeps enduring its own concerns? [4] But whatever seems to happen neither from God nor from a demon nor from the soul, and falls outside opinion, outside interpretation, outside the power of narration — these will be assigned properly to ecstasy itself and to its own logic.

======== De Anima — Chapter 48 ========

[1] They claim that dreams are more certain and more refined toward the end of the night, as if the soul's vigor were by then emerging, drawn out by prolonged sleep. As for the seasons of the year, spring is said to be quieter, because summer dissolves souls, winter in a way hardens them, and autumn — otherwise a tempter of health — dissolves them with the most winey juices of its fruits. [2] Likewise from the very posture of rest: whether one lies neither on the back nor on the right side, nor with the inner organs turned back on themselves, as if the seat of the senses were spilled out and set adrift, or whether the mind's dwelling is disturbed by a liver overloaded and compressed. But I think these things are ingeniously conjectured rather than firmly proven, even though Plato is the one who conjectured them; and perhaps they turn out this way by chance. Otherwise, dreams would be a matter of choice, if they could be steered at will. [3] As for the question of choosing or forgoing certain foods, which now presumption, now superstition, prescribes as a discipline for dreams — this must be examined: superstition, as when a fast is enjoined on those about to sleep in the temple to induce ritual purity; presumption, as when the Pythagoreans, for this same reason too, reject the bean as a burdensome, wind-inducing food. And yet that trio of brothers with Daniel, content with pulse alone so as not to be defiled by the king's dishes, won from God, beyond all their other wisdom, the special grace of dreams — both of obtaining them and of expounding them. [4] As for me — fasting, I don't know whether I alone dream so much and so deeply that I don't even sense that I have dreamed. "So then," you say, "sobriety has nothing to do with this matter?" On the contrary, all the more with this than with anything else; if it matters even for superstition, how much more for true religion. For even the demons demand it of their own dreamers, to serve, of course, as a pimping-out of divinity, because they know it is familiar to God — just as Daniel, again, dried himself out with three weeks of fasting, though he did so to entice God by acts of humbling himself, not to build up in his soul, about to dream, any sense or wisdom, as though it were not to act in ecstasy. So then, sobriety will not serve to banish ecstasy, but to commend that very ecstasy — so that it may happen in God.

======== De Anima — Chapter 49 ========

[1] As for infants, who are thought not to dream, since everything in the soul is worked out in proportion to the age of life — let people take note of their starts, their nods, their little smiles in sleep, so that from this evidence they may grasp that the movements of a dreaming soul easily break through to the surface, given the tenderness of the flesh. [2] But as for the Libyan tribe said to pass their lives, the Atlantes, in blind sleep — this at any rate is charged against the nature of their soul. Either Herodotus's report has, as sometimes happens, lied slanderously about barbarians, or some great force of demons of this kind holds sway in that climate. For if Aristotle also notes a certain hero of Sardinia who deprives the incubants of his shrine of visions, then this too will fall among the caprices of demons — to take away dreams as much as to send them — just as the mark of Nero, likewise a late dreamer, and of Thrasymedes, arose from that very source. [3] But we also trace dreams back to God. Why then should the Atlantes not dream from God as well, seeing that no nation is any longer a stranger to God, over the whole earth and to the ends of the world, now that the gospel shines out? So then, has Herodotus's report lied to Aristotle, or is there still some working of demons here? — provided no one believes any nature of soul to be exempt from dreaming.

======== De Anima — Chapter 50 ========

ON THE FORCE OF DEATH, AND ON MENANDER THE HERETIC. [1] Enough has been said about the mirror of death, that is, about sleep, along with the business of sleep, that is, dreams; now to the origin of this departure, that is, to the order of death — since not even death itself is free of questions, though it is the end of all questions. [2] It is the public verdict of the whole human race that we declare death the debt owed to nature. God's voice has affirmed this; everything that is born has pledged it — so that from here on, it is not Epicurus's stupor that should overtake us, denying that this debt pertains to us, but rather the frenzy of the heretic magician Menander the Samaritan that should be spat upon, who says that death not only does not pertain to his followers but does not even reach them: for, he claims, he was sent for this very purpose by a supreme and hidden power, that those who have put on his baptism might become immortal, incorruptible, and instantly in possession of the resurrection. [3] We read, indeed, of many wondrous kinds of waters: the wine-dark vein of the Lyncestae makes men drunk, or the demonic spring of Colophon drives them mad, or the poisoned water of Nonacris in Arcadia killed Alexander. Judea, too, had a healing lake even before Christ. Of course the poet tells of the Stygian marshes as dissolving death, yet Thetis also mourned her son. And even if Menander plunges people into the Styx, one must still die nonetheless in order to reach the Styx — for it is said to be among the dead. [4] Where, then, and what, is this happiness of waters, which neither John the Baptist provided in advance nor Christ himself ever showed to his disciples? What is this bath of Menander's? A comic invention, I believe. But why so rare, so hidden, that so very few wash in it? I will make this great scarcity itself suspect, in what is supposed to be the safest and most secure of sacraments — one for which it is not even the law to die for God himself, whereas, on the contrary, all the nations now are climbing toward the Lord's mountain and toward the dwelling belonging to Jacob's God, a God who exacts death even by way of martyrdom — a death he exacted of his own Christ as well. Nor will anyone credit magic with so much power as to remove death, or to replant life the way one replants a vine, its age renewed. For not even Medea was allowed this with a man, though she was allowed it with a ram. [5] Enoch and Elijah were translated, and their death has not been found — deferred, that is; for the rest, they are kept in reserve to die, so that they may extinguish the antichrist with their own blood. John too died, whom it had been vainly hoped would remain until the Lord's coming. For heresies, as a rule, leap forward using our own examples, drawing from them the very weapons with which they fight. In short, here is the summing-up: where are those whom Menander himself drenched, whom he plunged into his own Styx? Let the apostles, who abide forever, come and stand forth; let my Thomas see them, hear them, handle them — and then he will believe.

======== De Anima — Chapter 51 ========

That Nothing of the Soul Remains Behind in the Body. Death's task, meanwhile, stands in the middle: the separation of body and soul. Yet certain people, in defense of the soul's immortality — which, not having learned it from God, they hold onto rather feebly — beg such arguments from every quarter that they would have us believe that even after death some souls still cling to their bodies. Plato, for instance, though he is quick enough to send off the souls he chooses straight to heaven, nevertheless in the Republic sets before us the corpse of a certain unburied man kept for a long time without any decay, thanks, apparently, to the soul's individuality still lodged in it. Democritus, likewise, points to the growth of nails and hair in graves over a certain stretch of time. But in fact the quality of the air could well have been the body's protector. What if the air was drier and the ground saltier? What if the substance of the body itself was less moist? What if the very kind of death had already spent, beforehand, the matter that causes decay? As for nails, since they are the outgrowths of the sinews, it is only natural that, as the sinews slacken in dissolution, they appear to lengthen and to be pushed out day by day as the flesh wastes away. Hair, too, feeds off the brain, which for some while manages to hold its private fortress intact; indeed, even in the living, hair thickens or thins depending on the brain's abundance. There you have your doctors' answer. But it is not even the case that some small remnant of the soul lingers in the body only to depart later, once time has struck the whole stage-set of the body from the scene. This too is somebody's opinion; and that is why they say the body should not be burned, out of sparing regard for this "surplus" of soul. But there is another reason for that scruple — not flattery toward the soul's remains, but revulsion from cruelty even where the body is concerned, since a man, precisely as a man, does not deserve to be spent on a punitive death. As for the rest: the soul, being indivisible, since it is immortal, must, by the same logic, undergo an indivisible death — not as though death fell on an immortal soul, but as an indivisible event befalling an indivisible soul, indivisibly. But death too will be divided, if the soul is, since some remnant of soul will, on this view, be superfluously left to die at some later point; and so a portion of death will remain alongside a portion of soul. Nor am I unaware that this opinion has some trace of fact behind it. I learned it from my own experience. I know of a certain woman, born into the church's own household, who died whole in beauty and years after a brief, single marriage; and while she lay at peace and the burial was still delayed, and the presbyter's prayer was in the meantime being said over her as she was laid out, at the very first breath of the prayer she moved her hands from her sides into the posture of supplication, and then, once the prayer was done, restored them again to their place of rest. There is also that story current among our own people, of a body which, laid next to another body in the cemetery, made room by shifting aside for its neighbor's approach. If something of the sort is reported even among the pagans, it only shows that God everywhere sets up signs of his power — for the comfort of his own, and as a testimony to outsiders. And I would sooner believe it a testimony wrought by God than the work of any leftover fragments of soul; for if such fragments were really present, they would have moved the other limbs as well, and not the hands only — and even the hands not merely into a posture of prayer. That body, too, would not simply have yielded room to its fellow, but would, by shifting its own position, have made itself more comfortable as well. Whatever the source of such things, in any case, they are to be reckoned as signs and portents, not as proof that nature herself can act so. Death, if it is not wholly complete all at once, is not death at all; if any part of the soul remains, that is life — and life will no more mix with death than day mixes with night.

======== De Anima — Chapter 52 ========

This, then, is death's task: the separation of flesh and soul. Setting aside the question of fate and chance, human feeling has drawn a line between two kinds of death, the ordinary and the extraordinary — reckoning the ordinary as belonging to nature, the death of anyone who dies peacefully, and judging the extraordinary to be against nature, the end of anyone who dies violently. But we who know the origins of man state boldly that death did not come upon man from nature, but from guilt — and not even from a "natural" guilt at that; it is easy enough to misuse the name of "nature" for things which only seem, from birth, to have attached themselves to us as if by accident. For if man had been set up straight for death from the start, then indeed death might be credited to nature. But that he was not instituted for death is proved by the very law that hung the matter on a conditional threat and left the outcome of death to man's own free choice. In short, had he not transgressed, he would never have died. Therefore what results from an exercise of choice, through the will, is not "nature" — as opposed to what follows from the authority of an original decree, through necessity. Accordingly, even granting the varied exits death takes — as multiform as the causes that produce them — we say that none is so gentle that it is not, in fact, a use of force. That very mechanism which brings about death, simple though it looks, is itself violence. What else could it be? It tears apart and dissolves so great a partnership of soul and flesh, so great a concretion of sister substances joined from the moment of conception. For even though a man may breathe out his spirit for sheer joy, as Chilon the Spartan did while embracing his son, victor at Olympia; or for glory, as Clidemus the Athenian did on being crowned in gold for the excellence of his historical style; or in his sleep, as Plato; or through laughter, as P. Crassus — a far more violent death is that which stalks through outward accidents, which drives the soul out through pleasant circumstance, which brings its blow precisely when life is sweetest, amid rejoicing, honor, ease, delight. It is violence, too, in the case of ships, when, far from the rocks of Caphereus, battered by no storm, shaken by no towering wave, with a coaxing breeze and a smooth run and a joyful crew, they suddenly go down from some inner shock, in the midst of perfect safety. The wrecks of life are no different, even when death's arrival looks calm. It makes no difference whether the ship of the body goes down whole or in pieces, so long as the soul's own voyage is capsized.

======== De Anima — Chapter 53 ========

On the Departure of Souls. Where, then, the soul goes once stripped bare and cast out — this we shall pursue in due order, without question. But first let us finish what belongs here, so that no one, because we have listed death's various exits, should expect from us an account of each one, matters better left to the doctors, who are the proper judges of all things lethal, whether causes or the bodily conditions themselves. Still, for the further defense of the soul's immortality, let me, while on the subject of death, insert something about that kind of exit in which the soul slips away little by little, bit by bit; for it is dragged off while still holding the posture of failing, even as it appears to be consumed, and it offers, by the temper of its departure, a mere conjecture about its actual extinction. But the whole account here is bound up in and derived from the body. For whatever the manner of death's exit, it is without doubt an overthrow either of the body's matters, or of its regions, or of its vital pathways: of matters, such as bile or blood; of regions, such as the heart or liver; of pathways, such as the veins or arteries. As long as these are being laid waste, each by its own particular kind of injury, right up to the final overthrow and rending of the vital — that is, the natural — limits, positions, and functions, the soul too, of necessity, as its instruments and dwellings and spaces collapse bit by bit, is itself compelled to migrate bit by bit, and is drawn down into the very picture of failing — no differently than the way the charioteer himself is presumed to have failed once his horses' strength has given out from exhaustion: which is a matter of the man's helpless situation, not of any real personal collapse. Just so the charioteer of the body, the animal spirit, fails as the name of the vehicle fails, not by its own power; it departs from its work, not from its vigor; it grows faint in action, not in condition; it wastes away in steadiness, not in substance, because it ceases to appear, not because it ceases to be. So too any swift death — such as the harvest of the neck, opening once and for all so vast a gate; such as a stroke that in one blow crushes every vital function, like apoplexy, an inward collapse — allows the soul no delay, and does not torture its departure moment by moment. But where death is a long-drawn affair, the soul, in proportion as it is abandoned, itself abandons the body in turn; yet it is not thereby chopped up, only drawn out — and in being drawn out, it makes its last remaining part appear to be the whole of it. Not every part, however, is instantly a severed part merely because it comes last, nor, merely because it is small, does it therefore perish first. Its own end follows the sequence, and the intermediate is dragged along by the sum, and the remainder, still clinging to the whole, is awaited by that whole, not abandoned by it. And so I would dare to say: the last of the whole is itself whole, because, though smaller and later, it still belongs to it. Hence it often happens that the soul, at the very moment of parting, is stirred to greater activity, with a keener gaze, with extraordinary eloquence, as, from its now-higher vantage, already established in freedom, it declares, through the surplus that still lingers in the body, what it sees, what it hears, what it is beginning to know. For if this body is, in Plato's phrase, a prison, yet, in the apostle's, a temple of God when it is in Christ — still, meanwhile, it walls the soul in within its own enclosure and darkens it, staining it with the concretion of flesh, so that, as through a pane of horn, the light of things reaches it dimmer than it is. But without doubt, when by the force of death it is squeezed out of its concretion with the flesh, and is itself refined by that very squeezing, then indeed it breaks forth from the body's covering into the open, into pure, unmixed light that is its own; and at once it recognizes itself in the unrestricted freedom of its own substance, and, by that very liberty, comes to its senses again in the presence of divinity — as one emerging from a dream passes from images to realities. Then it speaks out and sees; then it exults or trembles, according to how it senses the lodging being prepared for it — reading this at once from the face of that very angel, the summoner of souls, the poets' Mercury.

======== De Anima — Chapter 54 ========

On the Soul's Reception. Where, then, the soul is brought — this we now report from here on. Nearly all the philosophers who claim the soul's immortality in one fashion or another — Pythagoras, say, Empedocles, Plato — and those who grant it only a fixed stretch of time, from its departure up to the world's final conflagration, such as the Stoics, assign only souls belonging to themselves — namely those of persons deemed wise — to the upper regions. Plato, in fact, does not grant this lightly even to the souls of philosophers, but only to those who, shall we say, have "adorned" philosophy with the love of boys. So great, even among philosophers, is the privilege that impurity enjoys! And so, in his system, the wise souls are lifted up into the ether; in Arius's, into the air; among the Stoics, they go only as far as the moon. And I confess I marvel at this: that they cast the unwise souls down around the earth, when they claim these very souls are to be instructed by the wise from so much loftier a station. Where, in such a vast distance between lodgings, will the schoolroom even be located? By what method will the pupils gather to their teachers, separated by so great a gap? And what use or profit is there in this posthumous schooling for souls that are, in any case, about to perish in the coming conflagration? The remaining souls they cast down to the underworld. This Plato describes, in the Phaedo, as a kind of "lap of the earth," into which all the filth of the world's grime drains and settles, and there breathes out — and, as it were, stews in — a thicker draught of its own muck, choking off a private air peculiar to itself.

======== De Anima — Chapter 55 ========

We do not believe the underworld to be a bare hollow, nor some sewer of the world open to the sky, but a vastness sunk within a trench of the earth, and, in its very bowels, a depth hidden away — since we read that Christ, during his three days of death, was "within the earth's very core" -- meaning tucked into its innermost, interior chamber, concealed inside the ground itself, enclosed there, and positioned above still deeper pits below. And if Christ, God — because he was also man — died according to the Scriptures and was buried according to the same, then he too satisfied this law, undergoing the form of a human death, discharged among those below; nor did he ascend to the heights of the heavens before he had descended to the depths of the earth, so that there he might grant the patriarchs and prophets a share in himself. So you have both a subterranean region of the dead to believe in, and grounds enough to nudge with your elbow those who, with rather too much arrogance, think it beneath the faithful's souls to be found among the dead — servants above their Lord, disciples above their Master — scorning, it would seem, to find, in Abraham's bosom, the comfort of awaiting the resurrection. "But," they say, "it was for this that Christ went down to the dead: so that we might not have to. Otherwise, what difference is there between pagan and Christian, if the same prison holds both dead alike?" Well then — to what heaven will you go breathing out your soul, while Christ is still enthroned yonder at the Father's right, the archangel's trumpet not yet blown at God's summons, and those whom the Lord's coming will find still in the world not yet caught up to meet him in the air, along with those who died in Christ and rise first? No one has access to heaven while the earth still stands — not to say, still locked. For it is only with the passing away of the world that the kingdoms of heaven will be thrown open. Shall our sleep, then, be up in the ether with Plato's favorite boys, or out in the sky with Arius's crowd, or circling the moon among the Stoics' Endymions? No — you say — in paradise, to which even now the patriarchs and prophets, as attendants on the Lord's resurrection, have already migrated from the underworld. And how is it, then, that when the region of paradise was revealed to John in the spirit — the place set beneath the altar — it showed no other souls there but those of the martyrs? How is it that Perpetua, that bravest of martyrs, on the day of her passion, in a revelation of paradise, saw only martyrs there — unless because the sword that guards the gate of paradise yields to none but those who have died in Christ, not in Adam? A new kind of death, undergone for God, an extraordinary death undergone for Christ, is received into a separate and private lodging of its own. Recognize, then, the difference between the pagan and the believer in death — if you die for God, as the Paraclete counsels, not amid soft fevers on a sickbed, but in martyrdoms; if you take up your cross and follow the Lord, as he himself commanded. The whole key to paradise is your own blood. You have, besides, a small treatise from us on paradise, in which we establish that every soul, without exception, is held in reserve among the dead until the day of the Lord.

======== De Anima — Chapter 56 ========

WHETHER SOULS LINGER HERE AFTER DEATH. [1] A dispute arises: does this happen immediately upon departure, or does some rule detain certain souls here for a while, and once received below, are they later permitted, by their own choice or by command, to intervene up here again? [2] Arguments for these opinions are not lacking. It has been believed that the unburied are not admitted to the underworld until they have received their due rites, following the Homeric Patroclus, who in a dream demands burial from Achilles, on the ground that he cannot otherwise pass the gates of the dead, the souls of the buried barring him far off. But we know that, apart from the poet's license, there was also Homer's zeal for piety. He laid so much stress on the care of burial precisely because he charged its delay with wronging the soul, and at the same time warned that no one should keep a corpse at home and waste away with it further, feeding his grief on an extravagant show of comfort. So he framed the complaints of the unburied soul to serve both ends at once: that the urgency of burial and the honor due to bodies be preserved, and that the excess of feeling be tempered. [3] But how empty, that a soul should suffer the rites owed to a body, as though it carried something of them down to the underworld! Far emptier still, if the postponement of burial is to be reckoned an injury to the soul, when it ought rather to welcome it as a favor. Surely a soul that did not even want to die will prefer to be dragged down to the underworld more slowly; it will love the undutiful heir through whom it still feeds on daylight. Or if there is indeed some real injury in being thrust under the earth later, and the mark of that injury is the delay of burial, then it is monstrously unjust that the injury should fall on the soul, when the delay of burial, plainly, is the business of the survivors, not of the dead. [4] They say too that those cut off by an untimely death wander about here until the remainder of the years they would have lived out is completed. But either fixed terms are set for each person - and I will not believe that what is fixed can be snatched away early - or, if terms are indeed fixed, yet are curtailed by God's will or by some power, then they are curtailed for nothing if they are still made to run their full course; or, if they are not fixed at all, there will be no "remainder" of terms that were never fixed. [5] I will add further: suppose, for example, an infant dies at the breast - or say now a boy not yet grown, or one just come of age - who nevertheless would have lived to eighty. That his soul should spend out here, after death, the years thus snatched from him - what sense does that make? For it cannot take on age without a body, since ages are transacted through bodies. And let our own people also bear this in mind: that souls will receive back in the resurrection the very bodies in which they departed. [6] The same measures of body, then, and the same ages that produce those measures, are what we must expect. How, then, can an infant's soul spend out here the snatched-away years, so as to rise again at eighty in a body one month old? Or if it will be necessary that those destined years be filled out here, must the soul likewise run through here, in step with those years, the whole order of a life that was fixed to run alongside them - so that, assigned to boyhood from infancy, it takes up study; roused from adolescence to youth, it does military service; weighed down from youth to old age, it takes stock; and it must draw interest and work a farm, sail, litigate, marry, labor, fall sick, and go through whatever sorrows and joys awaited it along with those years? [7] But how will all this be transacted without a body? Life without living? No - these will be empty stretches of time to be filled merely by running their course. What, then, prevents them from being filled out among the dead, where equally there is no use for any of that? So we say that every soul, whatever age it departed at, remains in that same state until the day appointed, when that perfect state is promised, tempered to the measure of angelic fullness. [8] Accordingly those souls will be reckoned exiles from the underworld which men suppose to have been torn away by force, especially through the savagery of executions - I mean the cross, the axe, the sword, the beast; nor, further, are those violent ends which justice decrees, avenging violence itself, of that kind. And so, you will say, all criminal souls are banished from the underworld. Then choose one or the other, I press you: is the underworld good, or is it bad? If you hold it bad, then the very worst souls ought to be flung down there all the sooner; if good, why then do you judge souls cut off young, unmarried, and pure and innocent for the time being by reason of their age, meanwhile unworthy of the underworld?

======== De Anima — Chapter 57 ========

[1] Either it is best to be kept here, following the doctrine of the "ahoroi" (the untimely dead), or worst, following that of the "biaeothanatoi" (the violently dead) - to use the very terms in which the magic that fathers these opinions makes its noise: Ostanes, joined by Typhon, Dardanus, Damigeron, Nectabis, and Berenice. [2] It is now common literature, promising to summon up even souls put to rest at their full age, even released by a decent death, even dispatched with prompt burial, out of their dwelling among the dead. What, then, shall we call this magic? What almost everyone calls it: a fraud. But the reasoning behind the fraud escapes no one but Christians, who know the spirits of wickedness - not by complicit acquaintance but by hostile knowledge - and handle them not by an inviting operation but by a conquering mastery, this many-shaped plague of the human mind, artificer of every error, wrecker alike of salvation and of the soul; so too with magic, a second idolatry of sorts, in which demons feign themselves to be the dead just as, in the other idolatry, they feign themselves to be gods. And why not, since the gods too are dead? [3] And so the "ahoroi" and "biaeothanatoi" are the ones invoked, under this pretext of plausibility: that it seems credible that it is above all those souls that turn to violence and injury which a savage and untimely end has itself wrenched away by violence and injury, as though by way of retaliation for the wrong done them. [4] But it is demons who work behind the show of such souls, and especially those demons who were present in the very persons concerned while they were still alive, and who had driven them into ends of that kind. For we have already pointed out that scarcely any man is free of a demon, and it is known to many that untimely and atrocious deaths too are the work of demons, deaths which people attribute to mere accident. [5] This fraud too, of an evil spirit lurking under the guise of the dead, we prove, unless I am mistaken, by actual instances - since in exorcisms a spirit sometimes claims to be one of the man's own kin, sometimes a gladiator or a beast-fighter, just as elsewhere it claims to be a god, caring about nothing so much as excluding the very thing we preach, so that we should not readily believe that all souls are consigned to the underworld, and thereby have our faith in judgment and resurrection thrown into confusion. And yet that very demon, once it has tried and failed to entrap the bystanders, overcome by the pressure of divine grace, confesses against its will what is in fact true. [6] So too in that other kind of magic, believed to pluck resting souls up out of the underworld and display them to view, the force behind the fraud is no different - only more elaborate, since a phantom is produced, and a body is even counterfeited; and it is no great feat for one who can easily blind the inner eye of the mind to deceive mere outward eyes as well. [7] After all, the dragons of the magic wands appeared as real bodies to Pharaoh and the Egyptians; but Moses's truth swallowed up the lie. Simon and Elymas too worked much magic against the apostles; but the stroke of blindness did not come from their tricks. What wonder, then, that the unclean spirit rivals the truth in something new? Look - today the heretics of that same Simon boast such presumption in their art that they even pledge to move the souls of the prophets up from the underworld. [8] And I believe they can - by lying; for the python-spirit at that time was no less free to counterfeit Samuel's soul, when Saul, having deserted God, sought out the dead for guidance. Far be it from us, in any case, to believe that the soul of any saint, let alone a prophet, can be dragged up by a demon, taught as we are that Satan himself transforms into an angel of light, let alone into a man of light, and will one day even claim to be God and produce more monstrous signs still, to overturn the elect, if that were possible. Should we doubt, then, that he then dared to claim to be a prophet of God - and indeed Saul's own prophet, since he himself was already dwelling in that man? [9] Do not suppose that one spirit was staging the phantom and another was vouching for it; rather it was one and the same spirit, in the false prophetess and in the apostate alike, that lied with ease to make credible what it had already contrived - the very spirit through whom Saul's treasure lay where his heart also lay, where, that is to say, God was not. And so, through the one by whom he believed he would see, he saw - because through the one by whom he saw, he had already believed. [10] If it is also objected that in nocturnal visions the dead are often seen, and not without cause (for the Nasamones, as Heraclides or Nymphodorus or Herodotus writes, catch their own oracles by lodging at their ancestors' tombs, and the Celts, as Nicander affirms, spend the night at the graves of brave men for the same reason) - even so we no more truly experience the dead in dreams than we experience the living, but by the same reasoning in the case of the dead as in the case of the living and of everything else that is seen. For things are not true because they are seen, but because they come to pass. The credibility of dreams is pronounced from their fulfillment, not from their appearance. [11] But that the underworld lies open to no soul at all, the Lord has sufficiently established in that account, told through the person of Abraham, of the beggar finding rest while the wealthy man moaned - that no reporter of the arrangement of the underworld could be sent back from there, which could indeed have been allowed even then, so that Moses and the prophets might be believed. [12] But even if the power of God did recall certain souls into bodies, as proofs of his own authority, that is no reason it should be lumped together with the audacity and presumption of magicians, the deceit of dreams, and the license of poets. Rather, in the examples of resurrection, when the power of God, whether through the prophets or through Christ or through the apostles, presents souls again in bodies, it has been established, by a solid, tangible, and fully satisfied truth, that this is the true form of reality - so that you should judge every bodiless appearance of the dead to be mere trickery.

======== De Anima — Chapter 58 ========

WHETHER SOULS ARE PUNISHED IN THE UNDERWORLD. [1] "So every soul, then, belongs to the underworld?" you ask. Like it or not, there are already torments there, and refreshments too: you have the poor man and the rich man. And since I have put off something bearing on this point, let me now fittingly deliver it in closing. [2] For why should you not think that the soul, meanwhile, is both punished and comforted in the underworld while awaiting either judgment, in a kind of foretaste and preview of it? "Because," you say, "its case ought to be kept whole for the divine judgment, without any anticipation of the verdict; and besides, the restoration of the flesh must be waited for, as the flesh's partner in its works and its wages." [3] What, then, will happen across that stretch of waiting? Do we simply slumber? Souls, however, never fall asleep, not even within the living; sleep is a property of bodies, whose very mirror-image is death itself, along with its sleep. Or do you suppose nothing is transacted there, toward which the whole of humanity is being drawn, toward which all hope is deferred? Do you think judgment is being sampled in advance, or merely begun? Anticipated, or only prepared for? How monstrously unfair would be the idleness of the underworld, if the guilty are already well off there and the innocent not yet! What more would you want to come after death - a confused hope playing with uncertain expectation, or a soul already reviewing its life and trembling before the ordering of judgment? [4] But does the soul always wait for the body in order to grieve or rejoice? Does it not have enough of its own resources for either mark of suffering? How often is a soul tormented by bile, anger, or weariness, often unknown even to itself, while the body remains untouched? How often, likewise, when the body is afflicted, does the soul seek out for itself a stolen joy and withdraw then from the body's unwelcome company? [5] I am lying, if the soul has not always been used to glory and rejoice, on its own, over the very torments of the body. Consider the soul of Mucius, as he releases his own right hand into the flames; consider that of Zeno, as Dionysius's tortures pass over it without effect. The bites of wild beasts are ornaments of youth, as the bear-scars were on Cyrus. So thoroughly does the soul know how to rejoice and grieve even in the underworld without flesh, since even in the flesh it grieves, untouched, if it wills, and rejoices, wounded, if it wills. And if it can do this by its own choice in life, how much more by God's judgment after death? [6] Nor, indeed, does the soul share all its works, even its best ones, with the service of the flesh; for the divine scrutiny pursues mere thoughts and bare intentions alone. Whoever has looked so as to lust has already committed adultery in his heart. It is therefore entirely fitting that the soul, though it need not wait upon the flesh, should answer in penalty for whatever it did apart from any bodily partnership. So too, for pious and kindly thoughts, in which it had no need of the flesh, it will be refreshed without the flesh. [7] What further, if even in matters of the flesh it is the soul that is first to conceive, to plan, to command, to drive? And if sometimes unwillingly, still it is first to handle what it is about to carry out through the body; and conscience, in short, will never come after the deed. So it fits this same order too, that the one who is first should be first to weigh out the rewards owed to whoever comes first. [8] In sum, when we understand that prison which the Gospel points to as the underworld, and interpret the "very last farthing" as even a small offense to be paid off there by the delay of the resurrection, no one will doubt that the soul pays something out in the underworld, without prejudice to the full restoration of the resurrection through the flesh as well. The Paraclete, too, has repeatedly urged this very point, for anyone who has accepted his sayings on the strength of acknowledging the promised gifts of the Spirit. [9] We have, I think, joined issue with every human opinion about the soul, drawing on the teaching of the faith, and have satisfied a curiosity that is just and, indeed, necessary; but to the excessive and merely idle curiosity, there will remain to learn exactly as much as it pleases to keep inquiring.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 1 ========

[1] Those who are eager to unsettle the faith in the resurrection — a faith that, before these close relatives of the Sadducees came along, had rested undisputed — do so by denying that this hope pertains to the flesh at all; and to the same end they drag the flesh of Christ himself into their disputes, as though it had been either no flesh whatsoever, or some flesh other than human — for fear that, if it were established to be human, it would stand as a prior judgment against them: that the very flesh which rose in Christ rises in every case, without exception. So then, at the point where they set about demolishing the flesh's claims, that is precisely where we must lay our own foundations. [2] Let us examine the bodily substance of the Lord — his spiritual substance is not in question. It is his flesh that is in dispute: its reality and its character are under review — whether it existed, and where it came from, and what sort it was. The verdict on it will lay down the law for our own resurrection. Marcion, in order to deny the flesh of Christ, denied his birth as well; or else, in order to deny the birth, he denied the flesh too — so that birth and flesh would not stand as mutual witnesses against him, since there is no birth without flesh and no flesh without birth. [3] As if he, with that same heretical license, could not equally have admitted the flesh and denied the birth — as Apelles did, his own pupil and later his deserter — or confessed both flesh and birth and simply interpreted them differently, as did his fellow-pupil and fellow-deserter Valentinus. [4] But the man who introduced a merely apparent flesh for Christ could just as easily have invented a phantom birth to match — so that the conception, the pregnancy, the delivery of the virgin, and the whole sequence of the infant's growth thereafter, would all have been mere seeming; the same eyes and the same senses that were deceived by the notion of flesh would have been deceived by these as well.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 2 ========

[1] Plainly the birth is announced by Gabriel: what business has this messenger with the Creator's angel? And a conception is introduced in a virgin's womb: what business has this womb with Isaiah, the Creator's own prophet? He hates delay, this man who was bringing Christ down from heaven all at once. 'Away with them,' he says, 'those tiresome things — Caesar's census, the cramped lodgings, the filthy rags, the hard manger: let the multitude of angels see to honoring their God by night; let shepherds mind their flocks instead, and let the magi not be wearied by so long a journey — I'll spare them their gold.' [2] Better that Herod too should be dispensed with, so Jeremiah has nothing to boast of; but let the infant not be circumcised either, so he feels no pain, nor carried to the temple, so his parents are not burdened with the expense of the offering, nor handed over into Simeon's arms, so the old man is not saddened at the point of death; and let that old woman hold her tongue too, so she doesn't cast a spell on the boy. It was with these designs, I suppose, Marcion, that you dared to erase so many of the original documents of Christ's history — so that his flesh could never be proved. [3] So, I ask you: produce your credentials. If you are a prophet, prophesy something. If an apostle, preach it openly. If a follower of the apostles, agree with the apostles. If you are merely a Christian, believe what has been handed down. If you are none of these, then I say, rightly: die. [4] For you are already dead, since you are not a Christian — not believing what belief makes Christians. And you are dead all the more, the less a Christian you are, since you were one once and fell away, cutting out what you had previously believed — as you yourself confess in a certain letter of yours, as your own people do not deny, and as ours can prove. [5] So then, in cutting out what you believed, you no longer believe, having cut it out; yet it was not because you had stopped believing that you were right to cut it out — rather, by cutting out what you had believed, you prove that before you cut it out, it was otherwise. What you believed differently had been handed down that way; and what had been handed down was true, precisely because it was handed down by those whose business it was to hand it down. Therefore, in cutting out what had been handed down, you cut out what was true. You have done this with no right at all. [6] But we have already made fuller use of these very prescriptions against all heresies elsewhere; and it is after them that we now, out of sheer abundance, take the matter up again — wanting to know your reason for supposing that Christ was not born.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 3 ========

[1] It must be, insofar as you think you had the right to your own opinion here, that you judged birth either impossible or unbecoming for God. But nothing is impossible for God except what he does not will. So let us weigh whether it was his will to undergo birth — for once he willed it, capacity followed, and birth resulted. I'll take the shortcut. If God had not willed to be born, for whatever reason, he would not have let himself be seen as a man either; for who, seeing him as a man, would deny that he was born? So whatever he had not willed to be, he would not have willed to appear to be at all. [2] Even the mere appearance of anything displeasing is condemned, since it hardly matters whether some thing exists or not, once, in its very non-existence, it gets taken for real; what does make a difference is this: that what truly is not should not be allowed to pass for false. 'But,' you say, 'his own conscience was enough for him: let men think what they like — if they saw a man, let them suppose him born.' [3] How much worthier, then, how much more consistent, would it have been for him to bear the estimation of humanity by actually being born, than to be subject to that same estimation without being born, and thus in violation of his own conscience! How much confidence do you credit him with, that, unborn, he could bear to be thought born, against his own conscience? Explain to me — what could possibly have been worth so much that Christ, knowing what he was, should present himself as what he was not? [4] You cannot say, 'If he had truly been born and truly put on manhood, God would no longer be God, having forfeited his former self in taking on what he was not before' — for God's own standing is in no danger whatsoever. 'But,' you say, 'that is exactly why I deny that God was truly turned into man, so as to be born and given a body of flesh — because whatever is without end must also be incapable of change; to be changed into something else is the end of what one was before. [5] Change, then, is not fitting for one to whom an end is not fitting.' Quite true — the nature of changeable things is under this law: that they do not remain in that state into which they change, and so, by not remaining, they perish, losing through the change what they had been. But nothing is on a par with God: his nature stands apart from the condition of all other things. If, then, things that stand apart from God — from which God himself also stands apart — lose what they were when they change, where would the distinctness of divinity from all else lie, unless in exactly the opposite: that God can be turned into anything at all and still remain what he is? [6] Otherwise he would be on a par with things that, when changed, lose what they were — and God is on a par with nothing, in anything, not even at the far end of a transformation. You yourself have read, and given credit to, the accounts of the Creator's angels being at times changed into human shape, bearing such genuine bodily reality that Abraham washed their feet, and Lot was snatched from the men of Sodom by their very hands, and an angel, wrestling with a man, longed to be released, so weighed down was he by the full solidity of a body. [7] So what was permitted to the angels of the inferior god — being turned into human bulk while still remaining angels — will you deny to the more powerful God, as if Christ, once truly clothed in a man, could not have gone on being God? Or did those angels too appear as mere phantoms of flesh? You will not dare say so — for if angels are, on your view, real in the way that Christ is not, then Christ belongs to whatever god has angels like that. [8] If you had not deliberately rejected some scriptures and corrupted others, on this very point the Gospel of John would have confounded you, proclaiming that the Spirit came down in dove-shaped bodily form and came to rest upon the Lord. That Spirit, being what it was, was as truly a dove as it was Spirit, and did not destroy its own substance by assuming a foreign one. [9] But you ask where the dove's body went, once the Spirit had withdrawn into heaven. The same question applies equally to the angels, and by the same logic: it was taken back exactly as it had been produced. If you had watched it being brought forth from nothing, you would understand it being withdrawn back into nothing. If there was no visible beginning, there is no need for a visible end. All the same, there was bodily solidity at whatever moment the body was seen — what is written cannot not have been.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 4 ========

[1] So then, since you reject embodiment for God neither as impossible nor as dangerous, it remains that you dismiss and denounce it as unworthy of him. Starting from birth itself, held in contempt, go on and rehearse the filth of the genitals in the womb, the foul curdling of fluid and blood, the flesh to be nourished for nine months out of that same muck. Describe the womb swelling day by day, heavy, anxious, unsafe even in sleep, at the mercy of cravings for disgust and appetite alike. Go on and attack the very modesty of the woman in labor — a thing to be honored for its danger, or held sacred by its very nature. [2] You shudder, no doubt, at the infant too, cast out amid all its mess, and, no less, forgotten. You scorn the fact that he is wrapped in swaddling bands, shaped by anointing, mocked with baby-talk. This reverence owed to nature you spit upon, Marcion — and yet how were you born? You hate the man being born, and yet how do you love anyone? You certainly never loved yourself, given that you tore yourself loose from the assembly and from trust in Christ. But look to yourself, whether you are displeased with your own person, or were born some other way. [3] Certainly Christ loved that man conceived in filth in the womb, that man brought forth through shameful parts, that man raised amid the indignities of infancy. For him he came down, for him he preached, for him he cast himself down in every kind of humility, even to death — death on a cross. He surely loved the man he purchased back at such enormous expense. If Christ belongs to the Creator, he loved his own rightly; if he is from some other god, he loved all the more, since he was redeeming what belonged to another. So along with the man he loved that man's birth too, and his flesh — for nothing at all can be loved separately from the very means by which it exists as itself. [4] Either strip away the birth and show me the man, or take away the flesh and produce the one God redeemed. If these things — birth, flesh — are the man whom God redeemed, then you are making shameful and unworthy the very things that the Redeemer would never have redeemed unless he had loved them. He reshapes birth, from death, by heavenly regeneration; he restores flesh from every affliction — cleanses the leper, gives light to the blind, makes whole the paralyzed, purges the possessed, raises the dead — and is he ashamed to be born into it? [5] If he had truly chosen to come forth from a she-wolf, or a sow, or a cow, and, clothed in the body of a beast or a farm animal, had preached the kingdom of heaven, your censure, I imagine, would prescribe against it as shameful for God and unworthy of God's Son, and foolish, therefore, for anyone to believe such a thing. Let it be foolish, then! Let us judge God by our own standard of sense! But look around, Marcion — unless you've already erased it — 'God picked out what the world counts foolish, so as to shame its wisdom.' [6] Now what are these foolish things? Bringing men over to reverence for the one true God, casting off error, the discipline of righteousness, chastity, mercy, patience, and every kind of innocence? These, surely, are not foolish. Ask, then, what he was speaking of — and even if you presume you have found it, will it prove as foolish as believing that God was born, and born of a virgin at that, and in flesh at that, wallowing through all those indignities of nature? [7] Let someone say these things are not foolish, and that there are other things God has chosen to shame the wisdom of the world — and yet, even so, in that world's own judgment it is easier to believe that Jupiter turned into a bull or a swan than that Christ, in Marcion's reckoning, was truly a man.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 5 ========

[1] There are, plainly, other things too so foolish that they touch on the indignities and sufferings of God: perhaps he'll call it "prudence" to say God was crucified. Away with this too, Marcion -- or rather, this above all. For what is more unworthy of God, what more to be blushed at, being born or dying, bearing flesh or the cross, being circumcised or being nailed up, being nursed or being buried, being laid in a manger or shut up in a tomb? You will be wiser if you refuse to believe these things too. Yet wisdom will elude you unless you first turn foolish in the world's eyes, giving credence to what God has made foolish. [2] Or did you fail to cut off the sufferings from Christ because, being a phantom, he was exempt from any feeling of them? We said before that he could just as well have undergone the empty mockeries of an imaginary birth and infancy too. But answer me here now, murderer of the truth: was God not truly crucified? Did he not truly die, exactly as he was truly crucified? Was he not truly raised, exactly as he had truly died? [3] Did Paul settle it falsely among us that he knew only Jesus crucified? Did he falsely insist that he was buried, falsely hammer home that he was raised? Then our faith too is false, and everything we hope for from Christ becomes an illusion -- most criminal of men, you who excuse the murderers of God: for Christ suffered nothing at their hands if he suffered nothing in truth. Spare the one hope of the whole world: why do you tear away the shame that faith actually needs? Whatever is unworthy of God is to my advantage: I am secure only when I do not blush at my Lord. "Whoever," he says, "is ashamed of me, of him I too will be ashamed." [4] I find no other grounds for shame that prove me, through my contempt of blushing, gloriously shameless and happily a fool. The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed of it -- precisely because it is shameful. And God's own Son perished: this too is credible -- precisely because it is absurd. And buried, he rose again: it is certain -- because it is impossible. [5] But how will these things be true in him if he himself was not true, if he did not truly have in himself what could be pierced, what could die, what could be buried and raised -- namely this flesh, drenched with blood, propped up on bones, woven through with sinews, threaded with veins, flesh that knows how to be born and to die, human beyond doubt as born of a human? And so this flesh becomes mortal in Christ precisely because Christ is human, a son born of man. [6] Or why is Christ man, and son of man, if there is nothing of man and nothing from man in him -- unless a man is something apart from flesh, or a man's flesh originates from something other than man, or Mary is something other than a human being, or Marcion's God is a human being? Otherwise "man" could not be said of Christ without flesh, nor "son of man" without some human parent, just as "God" cannot be said without the Spirit of God, nor "Son of God" without God the Father. [7] So the reckoning of each substance displays both man and God: born on the one side, unborn on the other; fleshly on the one side, spiritual on the other; weak on the one side, mighty on the other; dying on the one side, living on the other. This distinctness of the two conditions, divine and human, was marked out by an equal truth of each nature, with the same fidelity of both spirit and flesh: the powers proved the Spirit to be God, the sufferings proved the flesh to be man. [8] If the powers do not exist without the Spirit, then likewise the sufferings do not exist without flesh: if the flesh with its sufferings was a fiction, then the Spirit with its powers was a fraud as well. Why would you split Christ in two through falsehood? He was truth entire. [9] He preferred, I suppose, to be born rather than to lie in any respect -- and indeed to lie against himself -- so that he might carry flesh that was hard without bones, solid without muscles, bloody without blood, clothed without a garment, hungry without hunger, gnawing without teeth, uttering words with no tongue -- with the result that his voice was but a phantom to the ear, a mere echo-image of speech. So it was a phantom even after the resurrection, when he offers his hands and feet to the disciples to inspect, saying, "Look and see that it is I, because a spirit does not have bones as you see that I have" -- [10] hands and feet and bones, without doubt, which a spirit does not have, but flesh does. How do you interpret this saying, Marcion, you who derive Jesus solely from a God who is supremely good, simple, and kind? Look: he cheats and deceives and circumvents the eyes of everyone, the senses of everyone, everyone's approach and touch. So then you ought not to have brought Christ down from heaven at all, but out of some troupe of street conjurers -- not a God alongside a man, but a magician in the guise of a man; not the high priest of salvation, but the performer of a show; not the raiser of the dead, but the one who lures away the living. Except that even if he was a magician, he was still born.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 6 ========

[1] But some pupils of that Pontic heretic, forced to be wiser than their master, grant Christ the reality of flesh, yet without prejudice to their continued refusal of his birth: "Let him have had flesh," they say, "provided it was altogether unborn." So we have arrived, as the saying goes, from the frying pan into the fire -- from Marcion to Apelles, who, after slipping in the flesh from Marcion's school into a woman, and then being overturned in spirit by the virgin Philumene, took up from her the preaching of a solid body for Christ, but one without birth. [2] To that angel of Philumene's the apostle will answer in the very same words with which he had already, back then, foretold him, saying: "Even if an angel from heaven should preach a gospel to you other than the one we preached, let him be accursed." But the further points they argue beyond this, we will now resist. [3] They confess that Christ truly had a body. From what material, if not from that quality in which it was seen? Whence a body, if flesh is not a body? Whence flesh, if not born? Because to be born it would have to become that which is born. "From the stars," they say, "and from the substances of the upper world he borrowed his flesh" -- and, of course, they propose that a body without birth is nothing to marvel at, since even among us angels have been able to appear in the flesh without any labor of a womb. [4] We acknowledge, indeed, that it is so recorded; but even so, what sort of thing is it for the faith of one rule to borrow, for its own arguments, from the very scripture it attacks belonging to the faith it opposes? What has he to do with Moses, who rejects the God of Moses? If it is a different God, let his affairs be different too. But let all the heretics use the scriptures of the God whose world they also use -- this too will stand as evidence against them at the judgment, that they build their blasphemies out of his own examples -- it is easy for the truth to prevail against them even without laying down any special rule of its own. [5] So then, those who propose the flesh of Christ on the model of the angels, saying it was flesh but unborn, let them compare, if you please, the reasons both of Christ and of the angels for which they came forth in the flesh. No angel ever descended in order to be crucified, in order to undergo death, in order to be raised from death. If that was never the reason for the angels taking on bodies, then you have your reason why they received flesh without being born: they had not come to die, and so they had no need to be born either. [6] But Christ, sent to die, necessarily also had to be born, so that he could die. For nothing is accustomed to die except what is born: birth and mortality are mutual debts owed to one another; the manner of dying is the reason for being born. [7] If Christ died because of that which dies, and that which dies is also that which is born, then it follows -- indeed it comes first -- that he was born, likewise, because of that which is born, since for that very reason he had to die, because being born he dies. It would not fit that he not be born, for one to whom it was fitting to die. And yet at that other time too, among those very angels, the Lord himself appeared to Abraham without birth -- with flesh, to be sure -- for the same difference in the reason. [8] But you do not accept this, since you do not accept that this was the Christ who was already then, in the guise of flesh, learning how to address, to free, and to judge the human race -- flesh not yet born, because not yet destined to die, until its birth and its mortality should first be announced. [9] So then, let them prove that those angels conceived flesh from the stars: [10] if they cannot prove it -- since it is nowhere written -- then Christ's flesh will not come from there either, the source to which they fit the example of the angels. It is agreed that the angels bore no flesh of their own, being by nature of a spiritual substance -- even if of some sort of body, still of their own kind -- but that they were transformable for a time into human flesh, able to appear and consort with men. [11] So then, since it is not recorded where they took their flesh from, it is left to our understanding not to doubt that this is a property peculiar to angelic power: to take a body for itself from no material at all. "How much more," you say, "from some material" -- that is certain to you; but nothing about this is certain to us, because scripture does not present it. [12] Besides, those who are able to make themselves what by nature they are not -- why should they not be able to make it out of nothing at all? If they become what they are not, why should they not become it out of that which is not? And what is not, when it comes to be, comes to be out of nothing. That is why it is neither asked nor shown what afterward became of their bodies: what came from nothing became nothing again. Those capable of turning themselves into flesh could equally well turn nothingness into flesh: transforming one's own nature is a bigger feat than fashioning matter out of nothing. [13] But even if it were necessary that the angels took flesh from some material, it is certainly more credible that it was from earthly material than from any kind of heavenly substance, since it turned out to be of so earthly a quality that it was fed on earthly food. Granted, then; let heavenly flesh too, in the same way, now be fed on earthly food, on the principle that earthly flesh was once fed on heavenly food when it was not yet earthly -- for we read that manna was food for the people: "Man ate," it says, "the bread of angels" -- yet the condition of the Lord's flesh, once and for all set apart, is not thereby breached, on account of a different arrangement for a different case. [14] Since he was truly going to be man all the way to death, he had to put on that flesh to which death also belongs; and further, the flesh to which death belongs is preceded by birth.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 7 ========

[1] But whenever the nativity comes into dispute, all who reject it, as prejudicing the truth of Christ's flesh, want to make the Lord himself deny that he was born, on the ground that he said, "Which one is my mother, and which ones count as my brothers?" Let Apelles, then, hear what we have already answered Marcion in that treatise in which we challenged him on his own gospel -- the matter of this pronouncement needs weighing. [2] In the first place, no one would ever have announced to him that his mother and his brothers were standing outside unless it were plainly settled that he possessed a mother and brothers at all, and that these very people were the ones then being announced -- either already known beforehand, or just then discovered to be there on the spot. This is true even though the heresies have accordingly stripped this out of the gospel: that his father was believed to be Joseph the carpenter, and his mother Mary, and his brothers and sisters were very well known to those who marveled at his teaching. [3] "But they had announced to him, by way of testing him, a mother and brothers he did not have." Scripture does not say this -- and it is not one to keep silent when something is done to test him: "Behold," it says, "a teacher of the law rose up, testing him"; and elsewhere, "And the Pharisees came to him, testing him." No one forbids supposing that this too was done by way of a test. But I do not accept what you import beyond what Scripture says. [4] Furthermore, the matter of the test would need some basis. What did they think there was to test in him? "Surely it was whether or not he had come into the world by birth -- for had his answer denied it, that is precisely what the tempter's announcement was fishing for." But no temptation aimed at exposing his self-knowledge on a point it doubts by testing arises so suddenly, without some prior question already raising the doubt that forces the temptation. [5] Moreover, if there was never anywhere any stirring of debate about Christ's nativity, on what ground do you argue that they meant, by this test, to probe into a question they never actually raised? We add further: even if he were to be tested about his birth, he certainly would not be tested this way, by the announcement of persons who could exist even if Christ had not been born. We are all born, and yet not all of us have either brothers or a mother; [6] one may even have a father more readily than a mother, and uncles more readily than brothers. So a test of his nativity simply does not fit, since it could stand quite well without any mention of mother or brothers at all. It is far easier to suppose that, being sure he had both mother and brothers, they were testing rather his divinity than his birth -- whether, acting from within, he would know what was happening outside, when tested with the lie of announcing the presence of people who were not actually present. Except that even so the cleverness of the test would have come to nothing: [7] for it could well have happened that those they announced as standing outside he knew to be actually absent, on some prior information of illness, or business, or travel. No one tests in a manner where he knows he risks the blush of being caught out. [8] So, with no fitting basis for a test available, the plain honesty of the announcer stands cleared: his mother and brothers really had arrived. But let Apelles also learn the reasoning behind an answer that denies mother and brothers only for the present moment. [9] The Lord's brothers had not believed in him, as is recorded even in the gospel published before Marcion's time; and his mother is likewise nowhere shown to have clung to him, while the other Marys and Martha are frequently found in dealings with him. Indeed, their unbelief is plain right here: while Jesus was teaching the way of life, while he was preaching the kingdom of God, while he was at work healing sicknesses and afflictions, with strangers riveted on him, his own nearest kin kept their distance. [10] In the end they arrive and stand outside, not even coming in -- giving no thought, evidently, to what was going on inside, nor even waiting patiently, as though they had something necessary to bring, at the very moment he was most occupied; instead they interrupt all the more and want him called away from so great a work. I ask you, Apelles -- or you, Marcion -- if, by chance, while playing at the board or arguing about actors or charioteers, you got summoned away on account of some such report, would you have failed to say, "Which is my mother, which are my brothers?" [11] Christ, preaching and proving God, fulfilling the law and the prophets, dispersing the darkness of so many past ages -- did he use this saying unworthily, to strike the unbelief of those standing outside, or to shake off the interruption of those calling him away from his work? Besides, for denying his birth there would have been a different place, time, and turn of speech than one that could just as well be uttered by someone who did have both a mother and brothers: when indignation disowns parents, it is not denying them but rebuking them. [12] Finally, he made others preferred, and in showing the merit of that preference -- namely, attentiveness to the word -- he demonstrates on what terms he denied mother and brothers: by the very standard by which he adopted as his own those who clung to him, he disowned those who kept apart from him. Christ is in the habit of practicing what he teaches others. [13] What sort of thing would it have been, then, if, while teaching others to rate neither mother nor father nor brothers above the utterance of God, he himself, the Word of God, should abandon that same teaching the moment mother and brotherhood were announced to him? He disowned his kin, then, in the very manner he taught them to be disowned, for the sake of God's work. But there is also, besides, a figure here: the synagogue set apart in the mother, and the unbelieving Jews in the brothers. Israel stood outside in them; but the disciples, new ones, hearing and believing within, clinging to Christ, sketched out the outline of the church, which, refusing the fleshly kin, he named a better mother and a worthier brotherhood. In the same sense, finally, he answered that other exclamation too -- not denying the womb and breasts of his mother, but marking out as more blessed those who hear the word of God.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 8 ========

[1] These chapters alone, on which Marcion and Apelles chiefly think themselves well equipped, once rightly interpreted according to the truth of the whole, uncorrupted gospel, ought to have sufficed as proof of the human flesh in Christ, by defending his nativity. [2] But since these Apelleians also make a great show of the disgrace of the flesh -- which they want built up out of that fiery ruler of evil out of souls he had seduced, and therefore unworthy of Christ, and therefore claim his substance came instead from the stars -- I must beat them back with their own equipment. They name some famous angel who set up this world, and having set it up, admitted to repentance. [3] We have dealt with this elsewhere in its proper place -- for we have a treatise against them too -- namely, whether a being endowed with Christ's own spirit, purpose, and power could have done anything in its works deserving of repentance. This same angel they also interpret by the figure of the straying sheep. So then, on the very testimony of its founder's repentance, the world will turn out to be a sin, since every repentance is a confession of wrongdoing, for it has no place except where there is wrongdoing. [4] If the world is a wrongdoing, then in the same way a body and its members will be a wrongdoing, and equally heaven and the heavenly things along with heaven; and if the heavenly things are, then so is whatever has been conceived and brought forth from them. A bad tree must needs bear bad fruit. Christ's flesh, then, if built out of heavenly things, consists of the elements of sin, sinful by its very sinful pedigree -- and it will already be part of that very substance, namely ours, which, as sinful, they disdain to bring into Christ. [5] So then, if the disgrace makes no difference either way, let them either think up some purer sort of material for Christ, one which our flesh displeases them by comparison to, or let them acknowledge the very substance which even a heavenly one could be no better than. We read plainly, "The first man was from the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven"; [6] yet this does not bear on a difference of material, but only sets the heavenly substance of the second man, that is Christ, drawn from spirit, against the prior earthly stuff belonging to the flesh of the first man, that is Adam. And it refers "heavenly" to spirit, not to flesh, to such a degree that those he compares to him are agreed to become heavenly in this very earthly flesh, namely by the spirit; [7] whereas if Christ were heavenly according to the flesh as well, those others would not be compared to him as not being heavenly according to the flesh. If, then, those who become heavenly, of the same sort as Christ, carry an earthly substance of flesh, this in turn confirms that Christ himself too was heavenly in earthly flesh, just as those are who are made equal to him.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 9 ========

[1] We have so far claimed nothing that was taken from something else in such a way that it is other than that from which it was taken, while yet being other in the sense that it does not betray the source it was taken from. No matter exists without testimony to the origin from which it came, even if it is transformed into a new property. [2] Take this very body of ours, which even the myths of the nations, following the truth, hand down as fashioned from clay: it confesses both elements of its origin, earth in the flesh, water in the blood. For although the character of its quality differs, this is precisely what happens when one thing becomes another out of something else. And after all, what is blood but a reddened liquid, what is flesh but earth turned into its shapes? [3] Consider each quality one by one: muscles like clods of earth, bones like stones, and even around the nipples something like little pebbles; look at the tenacious knots of the sinews, like the runners of roots, and the forking channels the veins trace out, like the windings of streams, and the fine down like moss, and the hair like turf, and the very treasures of the marrow hidden away like veins of ore in the flesh. [4] All these are marks of earthly origin, and they were in Christ too, and these are exactly what concealed him as the Son of God, so that he was reckoned to be nothing other than a man possessed of a merely human bodily substance. Or else produce for me something heavenly in him, begged and borrowed from the Wain, or the Virgin's stars, or the Hyades: for what we have listed are, in fact, tokens of earthly flesh, and as much so in his as in ours. But I detect nothing new and nothing foreign there. [5] In the end, it was by his words and deeds alone, by his teaching and power alone, that they marveled at Christ as a man; but had there been anything novel about the flesh in him as well, it would have been noted as a miracle in its own right. But it was precisely the unremarkable condition of his earthly flesh that made everything else about him marvelous, when they said, "Where did this man get this teaching, and these signs?" [6] Even the voice of those who despised his appearance said as much: so far from having the body of even ordinary human comeliness, let alone heavenly splendor. And even where your prophets keep silent about his lowly aspect, the sufferings themselves and the very insults speak: the sufferings proved a human flesh, and the insults proved a dishonored one. [7] Would anyone have dared to graze that new-fangled body with the tip of a fingernail, to defile that face with spittle, unless it deserved it? What do you mean, calling it heavenly flesh, when you have no way to grasp how it could be heavenly, while denying it is earthly when you have every way to recognize that it is? He hungers under the devil's temptation, thirsts before the Samaritan woman, weeps over Lazarus, trembles at death -- "for the flesh," he says, "is weak" -- and finally sheds blood: [8] these, I suppose, are the heavenly signs! But how, I ask, could it have been despised and could it have suffered, as he himself said, if anything of heavenly nobility had shone out in that flesh? From this, then, we prove that nothing of the heavens was in it -- precisely so that it could be despised and could suffer.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 10 ========

[1] I turn now to others, equally clever in their own eyes, who assert that Christ's flesh is "animal" -- soul-flesh -- on the ground that the soul was made flesh: so that flesh, in turn, is soul, and just as the flesh is "animal," so the soul is fleshly. Here too, then, I ask for reasons. If Christ took a soul into himself in order to save the soul, because it would not have been saved except through him while it was in him, I do not see why he needed to make that flesh "animal" by putting on flesh at all -- as if he could not otherwise have saved the soul unless it had been made flesh. [2] For since he grants salvation to our souls not only when they are not fleshly but even when they are separated from the flesh, how much more could he have brought the soul he himself took on to salvation without making it fleshly either. Likewise, since they assume that Christ came forward for the sake of liberating not the flesh but our soul alone, in the first place, how absurd it is that, meaning to liberate the soul alone, he should have made it into the very kind of body he did not mean to liberate. [3] Next, if he had undertaken to liberate our souls by means of the one he himself bore, then the one he bore ought also to have been ours in form -- that is, of our shape, whatever shape our soul secretly has, though certainly not a fleshly one. Otherwise, he did not liberate our soul if the one he had was fleshly, for ours is not fleshly. [4] Further, if he did not liberate ours, because he liberated a fleshly one, that is nothing to us, since he did not liberate ours. But then again, one that was not ours -- being, as it were, fleshly -- did not need liberating in the first place: for it was in no danger if it was not ours, that is, not fleshly. Yet it is agreed that the one he had was liberated. Therefore it was not fleshly, and it was ours, if it was the one that was liberated, since it was in danger. So now, if the soul in Christ was not fleshly, neither can the flesh have been "animal."

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 11 ========

[1] But let us meet another of their arguments, and ask why, by undergoing animal flesh, Christ should be thought to have had an animal soul. 'For God,' they say, 'was eager to display the soul visibly to men by making it a body — the soul which before had been invisible, by nature seeing nothing, not even itself, on account of the hindrance of this flesh — so that it might even be debated whether a soul is born or not, mortal or not: and so the soul was made body in Christ, so that we might see it being born and dying and, more than that, rising again.' [2] But what sort of thing will this be, that the soul should be demonstrated to itself or to us by means of flesh — the soul which could not be known through flesh — so that the thing might be shown by the very act in which lay concealed the one doing the showing, namely the flesh? Darkness, apparently, was taken on so that light might shine. Well then, let us first examine whether the soul needed to be shown in this fashion at all, and then whether they in fact claim it was wholly invisible before — whether as something incorporeal, or as possessing some kind of body of its own. [3] And yet, when they call it invisible, they are making it corporeal, since it possesses something that is invisible: for how can a thing that possesses nothing invisible be called invisible? Indeed it cannot even exist, having nothing by which it is; but since it exists, it must necessarily have something by which it exists. [4] If it has something by which it exists, that will be its body. Everything that is a body is of its own proper kind: nothing is incorporeal except what does not exist. Since the soul, then, has an invisible body, the one who undertook to make it visible ought surely to have made visible, more fittingly, that very thing of it which was held to be invisible — since neither lying nor incapacity befits God: lying, if he showed the soul to be something other than what it was; incapacity, if he was unable to show what it actually was. [5] No one wishing to display a man puts a helmet or a mask on him — yet this is exactly what was done to the soul, if, converted into flesh, it put on a surface not its own. But even supposing the soul is reckoned incorporeal, so that by some hidden force of reason it is indeed a soul, yet whatever a soul is, is not a body — even so it was not impossible for God, and it would have suited his purpose far better, to display it by some new kind of body proper to itself rather than by this one common to everyone else, one requiring no further explanation — rather than being eager, for no reason, to make the invisible soul visible by means of a defense so conveniently supplied by human flesh for exactly these controversies. [6] 'But Christ could not appear among men except as a man.' Then give Christ back his own good faith: let him who chose to walk as a man have shown the soul, too, in a human condition — not by making it flesh, but by clothing it in flesh.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 12 ========

[1] Let it be granted, then, that the soul was shown by means of flesh — supposing it is established that it needed showing at all, that is, that it was unknown to itself and to us: though on this point the distinction is an empty one, as if we were something separate from the soul, when the whole of what we are is soul. Indeed, without a soul we are nothing — not even entitled to the name of man, but only of a corpse. Well, if we ourselves have no acquaintance with the soul, then plainly the soul lacks acquaintance with itself. [2] So it remains only to examine this one point: whether the soul is so ignorant of itself that it had to be made known in some way. My own view is that the very nature of the soul is sensation: nothing animate is without sense, nothing sensitive is without soul, and — to put it more pointedly — the soul's soul is sensation. [3] Since, then, the soul supplies sensation to everything else, and itself perceives the sensations, not to mention the qualities, of everything, how is it plausible that it alone should not have received, from the start, a sense of itself? How would it know what is at times necessary to it, out of the necessity of its own nature, if it does not know its own quality — for a thing to which anything is necessary must know itself? This much, I say, is to be recognized in every soul: self-knowledge, without which no soul could ever have managed itself. [4] I hold, further, that man especially — the only rational animal — has been allotted a soul, master of itself, which makes him a rational animal, being itself rational first and foremost. But how could it be rational, the thing that makes man a rational animal, if it did not know its own reason, being ignorant of itself? Quite the reverse: it recognizes its own maker, its own judge, and its own state well enough. [5] Though taught nothing yet of God, it names God; admitting nothing yet of his judgment, it says it commends itself to God; and though the claim it hears repeated most is that death leaves no further hope, it nevertheless pronounces blessing or curse over every dead man, whether he was good or wicked. This subject we have treated at greater length in our small treatise entitled ON THE TESTIMONY OF THE SOUL. [6] Otherwise, if the soul had been ignorant of itself from the beginning, it ought to have learned nothing from Christ except what sort of thing it was. But as it is, it did not learn its own likeness from Christ, but salvation. That is why the Son of God came down and took on a soul — not so that the soul might come to know itself in Christ, but so that it might know Christ within itself: for it was not by its ignorance of itself that its salvation was endangered, but by its ignorance of the Word of God. [7] 'The Life,' Scripture says, 'was manifested' — not the soul; and again, 'I came,' he says, 'that the soul might be rescued' — nowhere does he say, that it might be exhibited. We would indeed be ignorant that the soul, invisible though it is, is born and dies, unless it were shown to us bodily. We would plainly be ignorant that it is to rise again with flesh. This is what Christ made manifest — but even this, no differently in his own case than in the case of a Lazarus, whose flesh was no more animal-soul than his soul was fleshly. What more, then, has been made known to us about the soul's supposed prior condition of ignorance? What was invisible in it that needed visibility through flesh?

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 13 ========

[1] 'The soul was made flesh so that the soul might be displayed.' Was the flesh, then, likewise made soul so that the flesh might be manifested? If flesh amounts to soul, then soul has vanished and only flesh remains; if soul amounts to flesh, then flesh has vanished and only soul remains. So where has the flesh gone, and where the soul, once each was converted into the other — or rather, if neither is what it is, so long as each becomes the other? Surely it is utterly perverse that, naming flesh, we should understand soul, and meaning soul, we should interpret it as flesh. [2] Everything runs the risk of being taken as other than it is, and of losing what it is, the moment it is understood otherwise than it is — if it is called by another name than its own. Fidelity to names is the safeguard of properties. Even when qualities change, they take on the ownership of new names. For example, clay once fired takes the name of a potsherd, and no longer shares the name of its former kind, because it no longer shares that kind itself. [3] Likewise the soul of Christ, made flesh, cannot fail to be what it was made, and to cease being what it had been — having become, that is, something else. And since we have just used a convenient example, let us press it further. A potsherd made of clay is certainly a single body, with a single name for that single body: [4] nor can it be called both potsherd and clay, because what it was, it no longer is, and what it no longer is, no name clings to. So too the soul, made flesh, would be a uniform solidity, a total singularity, an undivided substance. But in Christ we find soul and flesh spoken of under plain, unmixed names — that is, soul called soul, and flesh called flesh — never soul-flesh or flesh-soul, though that is exactly how they ought to have been named if that is what they had become; but rather each substance is pronounced by him separately, precisely to mark the distinction of the two qualities — soul apart, and flesh apart. [5] Consider: 'My soul,' he says, 'is sorrowful even unto death'; and again, 'The bread that I am to hand over on behalf of the world's living is my own flesh.' Now if soul had been flesh, there would be in Christ one single thing — either a fleshly soul or an ensouled flesh; but since he divides the two species, flesh and soul, he shows two things. [6] If two, then no longer one; if not one, then neither a fleshly soul nor an ensouled flesh — for soul-flesh, or flesh-soul, is a single thing. Unless, of course, he carried about a separate soul besides the one that was flesh, and a separate flesh besides the one that was soul. But if it is one flesh and one soul — the one sorrowful unto death, and the other the bread for the world's salvation — then the number of the two substances stands intact, each distinct in its own kind, and this rules out any single hybrid species of fleshly soul.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 14 ========

[1] 'But,' they say, 'Christ also carried an angel.' On what grounds? 'On the same grounds as he carried a man.' Then the reason is the same. Christ carried a man because the salvation of man was the reason — namely, to restore what had perished. Man had perished; man had to be restored. But there is nothing of the kind as the reason for Christ carrying an angel. [2] For even though destruction is indeed reserved for angels, namely the fire made ready for the devil together with his angels, no promise of recovery has ever been extended to them; Christ received no commission from the Father concerning the salvation of angels. What the Father neither promised nor commissioned, Christ could not administer. For what purpose, then, did he also carry an angel — unless perhaps as a mere companion, to help him bring about man's salvation? [3] For was the Son of God not sufficient by himself to free man alone, cast down as he was by a single, solitary serpent? Then there is no longer one God, nor one author of salvation, but two artisans of salvation, and each in need of the other, no less. Or was it perhaps that he might free man through the angel? Then why did he descend himself, to accomplish what he was about to carry out through an angel? If through the angel, what need of himself? If by himself, what need of the angel? Indeed he bears the title 'angel of great counsel' — meaning envoy — a name describing a function, not a nature; for he was about to announce to the world the Father's great design, namely, the restoration of man. He is not, however, to be understood as 'angel' in the sense of some Gabriel or Michael. [4] For the son, too, is sent by the lord of the vineyard to the tenants, just as the servants were, to demand the fruits — yet the son is not on that account reckoned one of the servants merely because he took up the servants' office. I would sooner say, then, if need be, that the Son himself is the angel (that is, the messenger) of the Father, than that an angel dwells in the Son. But since it stands written concerning the Son himself, 'You have set him a short degree beneath the angels,' how could he be supposed to have clothed himself in an angel, when it was precisely by turning man — in flesh and soul, a Son of man — that he was set beneath them? [5] Whereas, as the Spirit of God and the power of the Most High, he cannot be reckoned lower than the angels — being, that is, God and the Son of God. So by however much he was made lower than the angels while carrying a man, by that much he was not so while carrying an angel. This opinion might well suit Ebion, who makes Jesus out to be a bare man, and merely of the seed of David — that is, not also the Son of God — though certainly more glorious than some prophet — so that it might be said an angel was in him in the same way as, say, in Zechariah: [6] except that Christ never said, 'And the angel who spoke in me said to me.' Nor did he ever use that everyday formula of all the prophets, 'Thus says the Lord' — for he himself was the Lord, speaking in his own presence and on his own authority: 'But I say unto you.' What more is needed on this point? Hear Isaiah crying out: 'Not an angel, nor a messenger, but the Lord himself saved them.'

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 15 ========

[1] Valentinus, too, availed himself of a heretic's privilege and invented a spiritual flesh for Christ. Anyone who refused to believe it human could shape it into whatever he pleased — though, and this applies to them all, if it was not human, not taken from man, I fail to see from what substance Christ himself declared both that he was a man and that he was the Son of Man: "But now you seek to kill a man who has spoken the truth to you"; and, "The Son of Man holds lordship over the Sabbath." Isaiah calls him, "A man of stripes, acquainted with bearing weakness"; Jeremiah asks, "He is a man — yet who has known him?"; and Daniel foresees "one like a son of man arriving amid the clouds." And the apostle Paul, "Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus"; likewise Peter in the Acts of the Apostles, "Jesus of Nazareth, a man marked out for you by God" — a man, in short. [2] These alone ought to have sufficed, standing in as a prescription, to prove the flesh human, taken from man, and not spiritual, any more than it was animal, sidereal, or imaginary — if only heresies could exist without the deliberate machinery of contention. [3] For, as I have read in the writings of one of Valentinus's little faction, first they suppose Christ was not formed with an earthly, human substance, lest the Lord be found inferior to the angels, who never had earthly flesh; then, that if he had a flesh like ours, it ought to have been born like ours — sprung not from the Spirit or from God, but rather from a man's own will. "And why," they ask, "was it not born of incorruption rather than corruption? And why, just as that flesh rose again and was taken back up into heaven, is not ours, being equal to it, taken up at once as well? Or why was that flesh, being equal to ours, not equally dissolved into the earth?" [4] The pagans mull over the same things: "So the Son of God was drained down to such an abasement?" and, "If he rose again as a pledge of our hope, why has nothing like it been proven of us?" The pagans say such things, and rightly — but the heretics say them too, and just as rightly. For what difference is there between them, except that the pagans, by not believing, believe, while the heretics, by believing, do not believe? [5] Then they read, "You set him a little beneath the angels," and deny that this points to an inferior substance in Christ; they insist the text is not calling him a man but a worm, one who had neither form nor comeliness, but whose form was ignoble, deficient beyond all other men — "a man of stripes, who knows how to bear weakness." [6] They acknowledge a man mixed with God, and deny the man; they believe he died, yet insist that what died was born of incorruption — as if corruption were something other than death. "But then," they say, "our flesh too ought to have risen at once." Wait. Christ has not yet crushed his enemies underfoot, so that he may triumph over them together with his friends.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 16 ========

[1] Beyond this, driven by a lust for argument that is the very stamp of the heretical mind, the notorious Alexander has carved out a niche for himself, as though we asserted that Christ put on flesh of earthly origin precisely in order to abolish in himself the flesh of sin. Even if we said that — and whatever grounds we might use to support our position — we would still be far from the sheer madness by which he supposes we bury the very flesh of Christ, imagining it abolished as sinful in him, all the while remembering that this same flesh now is seated at God the Father's right hand within the heavens, and proclaiming that it will come from there in the seat of the Father's glory. [2] Just as we cannot say it has been abolished — the flesh that is now in the heavens — so too we cannot call it sinful, since in it there was no deceit. What we maintain is not that the flesh of sin was abolished in Christ, but the sin of the flesh; not the material, but the nature; not the substance, but the fault — relying on what the apostle affirms, namely that "he did away with sin within the flesh." [3] Elsewhere too he says Christ existed "in the likeness of sinful flesh" — not meaning he received a mere likeness of flesh, an image of a body and not the reality, but that we should understand the likeness of sinful flesh in this sense: that the flesh of Christ, though itself not sinful, was of the same kind as the flesh whose sin it was — matched to it by kinship, not by Adam's fault. [4] From this we further establish that the flesh in Christ was of the same nature which in man is sinful, and that in that flesh sin was abolished, since it was found in Christ without sin what in man is never found without sin. Otherwise it would serve no purpose for Christ's aim of abolishing the sin of the flesh, unless he undid it within that same flesh where sin's nature had its residence; nor would it serve his glory — for what great thing is it if, in a better flesh, one of a different, non-sinful nature, he wiped out the blemish of sin? "So then," you say, "if he put on our flesh, the flesh of Christ was sinful." [5] Do not squeeze a meaning that admits of unfolding into a single knot: in taking up our flesh as his own, he thereby, by that very act of appropriation, rendered it free of sin. As for the rest — and this applies to all who suppose our flesh was not in Christ because it was not from the seed of a man — let them remember that Adam himself was made into this flesh not from a man's seed: just as the earth was converted into this flesh without a man's seed, so too the Word of God could pass, without human generative agency, into the material of that same flesh.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 17 ========

[1] But let us set Alexander aside, along with the syllogisms he twists in his arguments, and also the psalms of Valentinus, which with enormous impudence he inserts as though from some qualified author, and turn now to a single line of engagement: did Christ receive his flesh from a virgin? For it is chiefly by this that his flesh will be established as human, if it drew its substance from a human womb — although we might already have established its humanity from the man's name, the condition of his status, the character of his conduct, and the manner of his suffering. [2] But before all else we must explain why it was fitting for the Son of God to come into being through a virgin's womb: he who was to dedicate a new kind of birth had to be born in a new way, and it was of this very birth that the Lord, through Isaiah, was foretold to give a sign. What is that sign? "Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb and bear a son." And so the virgin conceived and bore Emmanuel, God with us. [3] This is the new birth: a man is born in God, from whom, in a man, God was born, having taken on flesh of the ancient seed without the ancient seed itself — so that he might reshape that flesh with a new seed, that is, a spiritual one, cleansed and purged of the filth of its old origin. But this whole novelty, as with everything else, was prefigured out of the old order, by that rational arrangement in which man, as Lord, was born through a virgin. The virgin was still the earth, not yet pressed by cultivation, not yet subdued by sowing, when man was made from it — we are told — by God, into a living soul. [4] So then, if the first Adam is handed down this way, it is fitting that the second, or last, Adam, as the apostle called him, should likewise be brought forth by God from the earth (that is, the flesh) — flesh not yet given over to human generation — into a life-giving spirit. And yet, lest I leave unaddressed the difficulty raised by the name "Adam" — how could the apostle call Christ "Adam" if the man in him were not of earthly origin? — here too the reasoning defends us: God, by a rival operation, recovered his own image and likeness, which had been seized by the devil. [5] For it was into a virgin that the word which built up death had crept, in Eve's case; so too into a virgin the word of God which builds up life had, in like manner, to be introduced — so that what had gone to ruin through that sex might, through the very same sex, be led back to salvation. Eve believed the serpent; Mary believed Gabriel. What the one destroyed by believing, the other, by believing, wiped away. "But Eve," you say, "conceived nothing then in her womb from the devil's word." [6] On the contrary, she did conceive. For from that moment when she was cast out to give birth, and to give birth in pain, the devil's word became a seed within her: in the end she bore a devil, a killer of his own brother. Mary, by contrast, brought forth one who would one day save her fleshly brother, Israel, the very one who destroyed him. Into that womb, then, God carried down his Word, the good brother, so as to erase the memory of the evil brother: from there Christ had to come forth for the salvation of man, entering by the same gate through which condemned man had already gone in.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 18 ========

[1] Now let us answer more simply. It would not have suited the Son of God to be born from human seed, lest, being wholly a son of man, he would also fail to be the Son of God, possessing no more than Solomon or than Jonah — which is what Ebion would have us believe. So then, the Son of God already existed, from the seed of God the Father, that is, from the Spirit; [2] and in order for him to be also the Son of Man, flesh alone had to be taken from man's flesh, and that without a man's seed — for the seed of a man was superfluous in one who already possessed the seed of God. Thus, just as before his birth of the virgin he could have God as Father without a human mother, so too, once born of the virgin, he could equally have a human mother without a human father. [3] Thus, in short, man was joined with God: flesh of man together with the Spirit of God — flesh without seed, from man; Spirit with seed, from God. So then, if there was a rational design behind the Son of God's being brought forth from a virgin, why should he not have taken his body from the virgin — the very body he brought forth from her — merely because there was something else which he received from God? "Because," they say, "the Word was made flesh." [4] That very phrase attests and declares what the flesh was made from, and yet there is no danger in supposing that "made flesh" and "the Word" are somehow two separate things, provided that if the Word was made flesh out of flesh, it remains the Word made flesh — or, if it was made out of itself alone, let Scripture say so. Since Scripture says only that it was made, and not out of what it was made, it thereby implies it was made out of something else, not out of itself. [5] And if not out of itself but out of something else, then draw from this the conclusion that it is far more credible the Word was made flesh out of nothing other than the flesh in which it was made — especially since the Lord himself pronounced, as a formal, defining statement, "That which is born of flesh is flesh, because it is born of flesh." But if he was speaking only of man there, and not of himself as well, then go ahead and deny Christ was a man, and defend the claim that the statement does not apply to him either. "But," they press, "he adds, 'and what is born from the Spirit is itself spirit, since God himself is spirit,' and 'born of God' — [6] and this, surely, applies all the more to him, if it applies even to believers in him." If, then, this too applies to him, why should the former statement not apply to him as well? For you cannot split it, applying this one to him and that one only to the rest of mankind, when you do not deny that Christ possessed both substances, flesh and spirit alike. [7] Moreover, if he had flesh as much as spirit, then when he pronounces on the condition of the two substances he carried within himself, he cannot be understood to have defined the one, the spirit, as his own, and yet not the other, the flesh, as his own as well. And so, since he is himself born of the Spirit of God (and the Spirit is God) — born of God — he is likewise born of the flesh of man, a man generated in the flesh.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 19 ========

[1] What then is the meaning of, "Who came into being neither from blood, nor from bodily desire, nor from a husband's decision, but from God"? This very chapter I will rather use once I have caught out its corrupters: for they contend that it is written thus — "who came into being neither from blood, nor from bodily desire, nor from a husband's decision, but from God" — in the plural, as though it designated the aforesaid believers in his name, to show that there exists that secret seed of the elect and the spiritual, which they steep themselves in. [2] But how will that be so, when all who believe in the name of the Lord, by the common law of the human race, come into being from blood and from bodily desire and from a husband — even Valentinus himself? So it is uniquely, just as it is written of the Lord: "But of God he was born." And rightly, because he is God's own Word, and alongside that Word of God stands the Spirit, and in the Spirit of God the power, and whatever is of God is Christ. As for his flesh, it did not spring from blood nor from bodily craving nor from a husband, for it was God's own resolve that turned the Word into flesh: [3] for it is to the flesh, not to the Word, that the formal denial of our ordinary birth pertains, since it was the flesh that was to be born in the usual way, not the Word. "But if he likewise denies that he came into being through fleshly desire, why did he not also deny sharing in the substance of flesh?" For indeed, in denying that he was of blood, he did not thereby refuse the substance of flesh, but merely the raw stuff of the seed — which, as everyone knows, is heated blood, changed by a kind of skimming-off into a clot of the woman's blood: [4] for from that clot, as in cheese, there is a certain force of substance which curdling binds together — that is, of milk. We understand, then, that the Lord's birth is denied to have come from intercourse, in the sense proper to the will of a man and of the flesh, not that it is denied to have come by participation of the womb. And indeed, why did he insist so pointedly that his coming into being excluded blood and bodily desire and a husband, unless because this was precisely the kind of flesh that no one would doubt was born of intercourse? In denying that his origin lay in intercourse, he did not thereby deny that his origin lay in flesh — indeed he confirmed that he was of flesh, because he did not deny the flesh in the same way that he denied the intercourse. [5] I ask you: if God's Spirit descended into the womb without meaning to take flesh from the womb, why did he descend into the womb at all? For spiritual flesh could have been made outside the womb far more simply than within it. It would have been pointless for him to enter a place from which he took out nothing. But it was not pointless that he descended into the womb. Therefore he received something from it — for if he received nothing from it, it was pointless for him to descend into it, especially since the flesh he was going to have would then be of a quality the womb does not supply, namely spiritual.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 20 ========

[1] But what a piece of twisting on your part, to try to strip away the very preposition "ex" — "of" — assigned to do its proper job, and to press into service instead some other word not found in this form in the sacred Scriptures! You say he was born "through" a virgin, not "of" a virgin, and "in" the womb, not "of" the womb, because — you point out — the angel, in his dream to Joseph, said, "For that which is born in her is of the Holy Spirit," and did not say "of her." [2] Yet surely, even if he had said "of her," he would have said "in her" all the same: for what was "of her" was precisely what was "in her." So it comes to the same thing whether he says "in her" — it harmonizes with "of her," because what was "in her" was precisely what was "of her." But it is well that the same Matthew, tracing the Lord's lineage down from Abraham to Mary, says: "And Jacob begot Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Christ was born." And Paul too silences these grammarians: "God sent his Son," he says, "made of a woman." Was he made through a woman, or in a woman? [3] This is in fact the more forceful phrase, in that he says "made" rather than "born." He might have said more simply "born"; but by saying "made," he both confirmed "the Word was made flesh" and asserted the reality of flesh made of a virgin. On this very point the Psalms too will come to our aid — not indeed the apostate, heretical, Platonizing Valentinus, but the most holy and most received of prophets, David: he sings of Christ among us, through whom Christ himself once sang. [4] Take up the twenty-first psalm and hear the Lord conversing with God the Father: "For it was you who tore me from my mother's womb" — note one phrase. "And my trust, ever since my mother's breasts, was cast upon you out of the womb" — note another. "And from my mother's womb you are my God" — note yet another way of putting it. Now let us fight it out over the very meaning of the words. [5] "You tore me," he says, "from the womb." What is torn away except that which clings, which is fixed, which is knit into the thing from which it is torn in order to be removed? If he had not adhered to the womb, how was he torn from it? And if he who was torn away had adhered, how could he have adhered except by being, through that umbilical cord, attached as it were to a shoot of his own bag, to the origin of the womb? Even when something foreign is glued to something foreign, it becomes so fleshed and enfleshed with that to which it is glued that when it is torn away it drags with it, from the body it is torn from, a kind of sequel of a broken unity and a shoot of a mutual coupling. [6] Furthermore, when he names his mother's breasts — the breasts, no doubt, from which he sucked — let midwives and physicians and natural philosophers answer as to the nature of breasts: whether they are wont to flow otherwise than after the genital travail of the womb, with the veins drawing up that sink of infernal blood into the breast, and by the same transfer cooking it down into the sweeter matter of milk — whence it happens that during the season of nursing the monthly flow of blood ceases. But if the Word turned itself into flesh unaided, with no dealings with the womb — the womb doing nothing, performing nothing, suffering nothing — how did it transfuse its own source into breasts, which change their nature only by giving birth? And it could not have had blood to supply for milk if it did not have the very causes of that blood, namely, the tearing away of its own flesh. [7] What was the novelty in Christ's being born of a virgin is plain: this alone, namely, that it was of a virgin, according to the reasoning we have set out — so that our own regeneration too might be virginal, spiritually, sanctified from every stain through Christ the virgin, and even carnally, in that it too is, so to speak, of a virgin's flesh.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 21 ========

[1] If, then, they contend that this suited the novelty — that just as flesh was not from the seed of a man, so neither was it from the flesh of the virgin that the Word of God became flesh — why should not the whole novelty rather consist in this: that flesh not born of seed should nevertheless have proceeded from flesh? [2] Let them come to closer quarters still. "Behold," it says, "a virgin shall conceive in her womb." Conceive what? The Word of God, to be sure, not a man's seed. And certainly, so as to bring forth a son — for "she shall bring forth a son," it says. So then, just as it was hers to conceive, so it was hers to bring forth; and just as what she brought forth was hers, even though what she conceived was not from her. On the contrary, if the Word made itself flesh of itself, then it already conceived and brought forth itself, and the prophecy is empty: [3] for the virgin neither conceived nor brought forth, unless what she brought forth from the Word's conception is her own flesh. And will only this word of the prophet be emptied out? Or also the angel's, announcing the virgin's conceiving and bearing? Or indeed all of Scripture as well, wherever it declares her the mother of Christ? For how is she a mother, unless because he was in her womb? And how was he in the womb, if she drew nothing from her womb that would render her a mother, given that his dwelling was in that womb? Alien flesh has no claim to this title: no flesh calls a womb "mother's womb" unless it is the daughter of that womb; and it is not a daughter of the womb if it was born of itself. [4] Elizabeth too, then, will fall silent — she who carried within her a prophet, already aware of his Lord, and moreover filled with the Holy Spirit: for it would be idle of her to ask, "And how does it happen that my Lord's own mother visits me?" if Mary carried in her womb not a son but a guest, Jesus. How does she say, "Blessed is the fruit of your womb"? What fruit of a womb is this, that did not sprout from the womb, that did not root in the womb, that does not belong to the one whose womb it is? And is Christ truly the fruit of the womb? [5] Or is it because he is himself the flower sprung from the rod that comes forth from the root of Jesse — the root of Jesse being the line of David, the rod from that root being Mary sprung from David, the flower from the rod being Mary's child, the one named Jesus Christ — will he also be the fruit? [6] For the flower is the fruit, since it is through the flower and from the flower that every fruit is trained on into fruit. What then? Do they deny the fruit its flower, and the flower its rod, and the rod its root — refusing to let the root, through the rod, claim as its own what belongs to it as coming from the rod, namely the flower and the fruit? [7] For every step of a lineage is reckoned back from the last to the first, so that even now they may know that the flesh of Christ clings not only to Mary but to David through Mary, and to Jesse through David. To such a degree does God swear that this fruit from the loins of David — that is, from the posterity of his flesh — shall sit upon his throne. If from the loins of David, how much more from the loins of Mary, on whose account he was in the loins of David.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 22 ========

[1] Let them, then, cross out the testimonies of demons proclaiming Jesus "son of David" as well — but they will not be able to cross out the testimonies of the apostles, if the demons' are unworthy. Matthew himself first of all, the most faithful recorder of the gospel, as the Lord's companion, began his work for no other reason than to make us sharers in the carnal origin of Christ, thus: "The record of the lineage of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham." [2] With these springs of his origin flowing from his stock, as the line is traced step by step down to Christ's birth, what else is being traced out but the actual flesh belonging to Abraham and to David, passing generation by generation down into the virgin, and bringing in Christ — nay, Christ himself coming forth — from the virgin? [3] And Paul too, being both a disciple and a teacher of that same gospel, and a witness to it, because an apostle of that same Christ, declares Christ to be sprung from David's seed as far as the flesh is concerned — his very own flesh, that is. Therefore the flesh of Christ is of the seed of David. Yet it is precisely through Mary's flesh that he descends from David's seed: therefore he shares Mary's flesh, seeing that he shares David's seed. [4] Twist the statement however you like: either what is of David's seed is of Mary's flesh, or what is of Mary's flesh is of David's seed. The same apostle settles this whole controversy once and for all by defining him as the seed of Abraham himself — since if of Abraham's, then all the more of David's, as being the more recent line. [5] For, unfolding the promise of the blessing of the nations in the seed of Abraham — "And in your seed shall all nations be blessed" — he says: "He did not say 'seeds,' as of many, but 'seed,' as of one, which is Christ." [6] We who read and believe these things — what quality of flesh, then, must we and can we recognize in Christ? Assuredly no flesh but Abraham's, seeing Christ is Abraham's offspring; no flesh but Jesse's, seeing Christ is the bloom sprung from Jesse's root; no flesh but David's, seeing Christ is the yield borne of David's loins; no flesh but Mary's, seeing Christ came from Mary's womb; and tracing further back, no flesh but Adam's, seeing Christ stands as a second Adam. It follows, then, that either they must maintain that those men too had spiritual flesh, so that the same condition of substance may be carried down into Christ, or else they must concede that Christ's flesh was not spiritual, since it is not reckoned from a spiritual stock.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 23 ========

[1] But we recognize the fulfillment of Simeon's prophetic word, spoken over the Lord while still a newborn infant: "Look, this little one is appointed for the downfall and the uprising of a great many within Israel, a mark set up to be argued against." For the sign of Christ's birth, according to Isaiah, is this: "So then the Lord in his own person will grant you a token: a maiden, still untouched, shall carry a child within her and bring forth a son." [2] We recognize, then, the contradictable sign in the conceiving and bearing of the virgin Mary — about which these Academics of ours say, "She bore, and did not bear; a virgin, and no virgin." As if — even granting that this is how it ought to be put — it would not suit us far better to say it: she bore, because it was of her own flesh; she did not bear, because it was not of a man's seed; and virgin as regards the man, no virgin as regards the birth — [3] not, however, as though she who bore did not bear simply because it was not of her own flesh, nor as though the virgin who is no virgin was so because she was not a mother from her own womb. Among us, though, nothing is left doubtful, nothing bent into a two-faced excuse: light is light, darkness is darkness, yes is yes and no is no — anything beyond that is from the evil one. She who bore, bore; and if she conceived as a virgin, she was married in the very act of bearing: [4] for she was married by the very law of the opened body, in which it made no difference whether it was by the force of a male admitted or emitted — the same act unsealed that sex. This, indeed, is that same womb because of which scripture states regarding others: "Whatever male first parts the womb is to be reckoned consecrated to the Lord." Who is truly holy but that holy Son of God? Who, in the proper sense, opened a womb, but he who threw open one that was shut? [5] In all others, marriage is what opens the womb. So hers was opened all the more, because it had been shut all the more. In every sense she is to be called no-virgin rather than virgin, becoming a mother by a kind of leap before becoming a bride. And what more is there to argue about this? On this very reasoning the apostle proclaimed God's Son as fashioned, not from a maiden, but from a female — recognizing the nuptial event of an opened womb. [6] We do read in Ezekiel of that heifer which bore and did not bear; but take care lest the Holy Spirit, foreseeing even then, marked this saying against the day you would dispute over Mary's womb. In any case he would not have spoken so equivocally against his own plain sense elsewhere, where Isaiah states, "She will carry a child and bring one forth."

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 24 ========

[1] For what Isaiah also hurls elsewhere as a rebuke against these very heretics — and above all, "Woe to those who make the sweet bitter and darkness light" — marks out exactly these people, who will not keep even the words themselves within the light of their proper meanings, so that soul is nothing other than what is called soul, flesh nothing other than what is seen, and God nothing other than what is preached. [2] So too, with an eye toward Marcion, he declares, "I myself am God — no other stands beside me"; and elsewhere, in the same vein, "Before me there was no God" — striking down those genealogies of Valentinian aeons, whatever they are. And "brought forth not from blood, nor from fleshly desire, nor from a husband's will, but from God" answers Ebion. Likewise, "Even if an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel other than what we preached, let him be accursed" is aimed straight at the energumen offspring of Apelles' virgin Philumene. [3] Certainly, "Whoever will not own that Christ arrived clothed in flesh is an antichrist" strikes at every one of that flesh's disputers, proclaiming its nature naked, absolute, in one simple name; just as, in defining Christ himself as one, it also shatters the arguers for a many-formed Christ — those who make one Christ, another Jesus; one who slipped away from the crowds, another seized; one bright on the mountain's retreat, wrapped in a cloud before three witnesses, another passible before the rest; one noble, another ignoble; one great-souled, another trembling; and last of all, one who suffered, another who was raised — through which they also assert their own resurrection into some other kind of flesh. [4] But it is well that the very one who suffered is the one who will come from heaven; the very one who was raised is the one who will appear to all; and they will see and recognize — those who ran him through — the very flesh they savaged, without which he can neither exist nor be recognized: so that those may be put to shame who claim that his flesh sits empty of sense in heaven, like a scabbard with the sword drawn out; or that flesh and soul are of equal weight; or that only the soul is there and flesh no longer at all.

======== De Carne Christi — Chapter 25 ========

[1] But enough on this present matter. I think the proof is now sufficiently built up that the flesh in Christ was born of a virgin and was human. That alone, discussed by itself, might have sufficed — apart from engaging every opposing opinion one by one, which I have taken up out of abundance, using both their own arguments and the scriptures they themselves employ — so that, along with what we have proved as to what Christ's flesh was and where it came from, we might also have prejudged against them all what it was not. [2] But so that this closing word may serve as a reminder from the preface: the resurrection of our own flesh, to be defended in another volume, will find its foundation laid here, since it is now plain from this what sort of thing it was that rose again in Christ.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 1 ========

[1] The confidence of Christians is the resurrection of the dead: believing this, we are what we are. Believing this is compelled by truth; and truth is unveiled by God. [2] Yet the common crowd mocks, reckoning that nothing survives after death — and all the while they hold funeral rites for the dead, and with the most lavish devotion too, matched to the departed's habits and to the season's delicacies, so that those they deny have any feeling at all are presumed, even so, to have appetites. [3] But I shall laugh at the crowd all the harder when they burn the very dead most savagely whom afterward they feed most gluttonously — earning credit and giving offense with the same fires. O piety playing at cruelty! Does it sacrifice, or does it insult, when it burns even as it burns the burned? [4] Plainly the wise sometimes join their opinion to the crowd's. That there is nothing after death is the school of Epicurus; and Seneca too says that everything ends after death, even death itself. [5] Yet it is enough that the opinion of Pythagoras is no less weighty, and Empedocles and the Platonists insist, on the contrary, that the soul is immortal — indeed, they go further still and affirm that it returns even into bodies, though not the same bodies, and not always human ones, so that Euphorbus is counted as returning in Pythagoras, and Homer in a peacock. [6] At any rate they declared the soul's return in bodily form, tolerable enough in having changed its quality rather than denied it outright — grazing the truth, even if never quite arriving at it. So the world, even when it errs, does not fail to know the resurrection of the dead.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 2 ========

[1] But if there is, even before God, some sect more akin to the Epicureans than to the prophets, we shall know what they hear from Christ, as the Sadducees did. For it was reserved to Christ to strip bare all that had lain hidden till then, to set straight what had been in doubt, to fill out what had only been tasted in advance, to make present what had been foretold — and, not least, to prove the resurrection of the dead not merely through himself but in himself. [2] But now we must ready ourselves against other Sadducees, partners in that same opinion: they acknowledge only half a resurrection, that of the soul alone, having as much contempt for the flesh as for the very Lord of the flesh. No one else, in fact, grudges salvation to the bodily substance except the heretics of that other divinity. [3] And so, being forced to arrange Christ differently as well, so that he may not be taken for the Creator's own, they went wrong first about his very flesh — either denying it any reality at all, in the manner of Marcion and Basilides, or granting it some peculiar quality of its own, after the heirs of Valentinus and Apelles. [4] And from this it follows that they exclude from salvation the very substance whose fellowship with Christ they deny — quite certain that it stands equipped with the strongest prejudgment in favor of the resurrection, if flesh has already risen in Christ. [5] For this very reason we dispatched beforehand a book concerning Christ's flesh, where we establish it as substantial, against the emptiness of a phantom, and vindicate it as human against claims of some special quality — since its very condition inscribed Christ as both man and son of man. [6] For in proving him fleshly and bodily, we thereby also lay down, by way of prescription, that no other god is to be believed but the Creator, while we show a Christ of exactly the kind promised by the Creator, in whom God is recognized. Having thus established both the God who authored the flesh and the Christ who redeemed the flesh, we shall now go on to establish also the resurrection of the flesh — fitting, of course, both the God who authors flesh and the Christ who redeems it. [7] This, roughly, is how we say the dispute with the heretics must be entered: for order always demands that the argument be drawn from first principles, so that it is settled first who it was that is said to have ordained the very thing in question. [8] And indeed the heretics, from an awareness of their own weakness, never proceed in orderly fashion. Well aware how hard a labor it is to insinuate a second divinity against the God of this world, whom all men know by nature from the testimony of his works — known even more surely from the sacraments handed down beforehand and made even more plain in the preachings — they take up the pretext of a more urgent cause, namely, the very salvation of man, which must be sought before all else, and begin instead from questions about the resurrection, because the resurrection of the flesh is harder to believe than a single divinity. [9] And so, having stripped the argument of the strength of its proper order and loaded it instead with scruples that devalue the flesh, they gradually tune the hearer, through the very shaking and reshaping of his hope, toward a sense of the other divinity. [10] For anyone thrown down, or merely shifted a step, from the hope he had held with the Creator, is easily inclined toward embracing, even unbidden, the author of some other hope: for through a difference of promises a difference of gods insinuates itself. Thus we see many entangled, because they are first shaken loose from the resurrection of the flesh before they are shaken loose from the unity of the Godhead. [11] We have shown, then, so far as concerns the heretics, at which wedge-point we must meet them. And we have already met it, each under its own heading: on the one and only God, and his Christ, against Marcion; on the flesh of the Lord, against four heresies, laid down chiefly to prepare the ground for this very question — so that now the resurrection of the flesh alone should be handled just as if, among us too, it were uncertain — that is, uncertain in respect of the Creator (for many are untrained, and most are shaky in their faith, and many more simple, all of whom need to be instructed, guided, fortified) — because it is on this very flank that the unity of the Godhead is defended: for just as it is shaken when the resurrection of the flesh is denied, so it is confirmed when the resurrection is vindicated. [12] The soul's salvation, I believe, needs no further argument: for nearly all heretics, however they wish to construe it, still do not deny it. There is perhaps that one fellow, Lucan, who spares not even this substance — dissolving it after Aristotle's fashion and substituting some third thing in its place, something that is to rise neither soul nor flesh, that is, no man at all, but perhaps a bear, as far as Lucan is concerned. [13] This subject too has had our fullest pen devoted to it, on the whole state of the soul: holding it above all to be immortal, we recognize decay as belonging to the flesh alone, and it is precisely its restoration that we most assert — its matter reduced to its ordinary bodily state — insofar as, elsewhere, pressed by the course of the argument, we have deferred certain points. [14] For just as it is customary for some things to be tasted in advance, so it is also necessary that some be deferred — provided only that what was tasted in advance is completed in its own body, and what was put off is restored under its own name.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 3 ========

[1] There is indeed some wisdom to be had from common human perceptions in matters of God — but as testimony to the truth, not as a prop for falsehood; provided it agrees with the divine arrangement, not stands against it. For certain things are known naturally: the immortality of the soul, to most; our God, to all. [2] I will use, then, even the judgment of some Plato, pronouncing, "Every soul is immortal"; I will use also the common conscience of the people bearing witness to the God of gods; I will use, too, the rest of the common perceptions that proclaim God as judge — "God sees" and "I commend it to God." [3] But when they say, "The dead is dead," and "Live while you live," and "After death everything ends, even death itself," then I shall remember that the crowd's very heart has been reckoned by God as ashes, and the very wisdom of this age pronounced foolishness — and then, if a heretic takes refuge in the vices of the crowd or the cleverness of the age, I will say: "Step aside, pagan — I am speaking to the heretic now: though the two of you are one, all of you who fashion your own god, still, since you do this in the name of Christ, since you fancy yourself a Christian, you are other than the pagan. Give back to him his own opinions, for he was not trained on yours: [4] why lean on a blind guide, when you can see? Why wrap yourself in someone stripped bare, when you have already clothed yourself in Christ? Why make use of another's shield, when you are armed by an apostle? Let him rather learn from you to confess the resurrection of the flesh, than you learn from him to deny it — because if it were right for even Christians to deny it, it would be enough for them to be instructed from their own knowledge, not from the crowd's ignorance." [5] So thoroughly will no one be a Christian who denies what Christians confess, and denies it by the very arguments that non-Christians use. [6] Strip from the heretics, then, whatever wisdom they share with the pagans, so that they must stand or fall on the scriptures alone — and they will not be able to stand. For common perceptions commend themselves by their very simplicity, by a fellow-feeling of opinions, by a familiarity of views, and are reckoned more trustworthy precisely because they define things bare, open, and known to all: but divine reasoning lies in the marrow, not on the surface, and is very often at odds with what is plain to see.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 4 ========

So this is exactly where the heretics start, and exactly what they build on from the outset, and go on interweaving throughout — because they know how easily minds are captured by an appeal that flatters the senses. What do you hear sooner or more insistently from a heretic than from a pagan — and always, everywhere, the same tirade against the flesh? Against its origin, its raw material, its fall, every exit it makes: unclean from the start, being made of the dregs of the earth; uncleaner still afterward, from the slime of its own seed; frivolous, feeble, criminal, troublesome, burdensome — and after the whole catalogue of its disgrace, doomed to collapse back into the earth it came from and take the name of a corpse, and then even that name is to perish, into no name at all, into the death of every word for it. 'Do you really mean to persuade us, wise sir, that this thing — snatched away from your own sight, your own touch, your own memory — will one day get itself back whole from corruption, solid from collapse, full from emptiness, something at all from nothing — and that too when fires and floodwaters and the bellies of beasts and the gizzards of birds and the guts of fish, and time's own appetite besides, will all have to hand it back? Will the very thing that fell apart really be hoped for again just as it was — so that the lame man, the one-eyed man, the blind man, the leper, the paralytic all come back exactly as they were, making the return unwelcome? Or will they come back whole, only to dread suffering the same things all over again? And what then of everything that comes attached to flesh? Will it all be necessary again — food and drink first of all? Must the lungs go back to breathing and the bowels to churning, the private parts go back to their shame, and every limb to its labor? Are sores and open wounds, fevers and gout, to be longed for again along with it? These, surely, will be the prayers of a flesh restored — to want, all over again, to escape from it.' We ourselves put this rather more decently, out of respect for our pen; but as for how far this filthy talk actually goes, let anyone find out who cares to sit in on the debates of pagans and heretics alike.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 5 ========

Since, then, the uninstructed generally reason from common sensation, and the doubtful and the simple are unsettled again and again through those same senses, and this is everywhere the first battering-ram trained on us, by which the standing of the flesh is meant to be shaken down, we too must first of all fortify the standing of the flesh, clearing away both the abuse and the false praise of it: for the heretics provoke us to play the rhetorician just as the philosophers provoke the philosophers to play theirs. This trifling, worthless little body — which they do not even shrink from calling evil outright — even if it were the handiwork of angels, as Menander and Marcus would have it, or the construction of some fiery angel, as Apelles teaches, would still have grounds enough for the dignity of a second-rank divine patronage: we know angels come after God. But now, whoever this supreme god of any given heretic may be, I would not be wrong to derive the dignity of the flesh from that very god, since it was his will that brought the flesh into being: for he would surely have forbidden its making, once he knew it would be made, had he not wanted it made. So even on their own terms the flesh is just as much God's property: nothing is not the work of him who allowed it to come to be. And it is well that the majority, even of the harsher schools, concede to our God the entire shaping of man. You know well enough how great he is, you who believe in one God alone. Let the flesh begin, then, to please you — flesh whose maker is so great. 'But this world too,' you say, 'is God's work, and yet the fashion of this world passes away, on the Apostle's own authority, and no one on that account prejudges the restoration of the world simply because it is God's work: so if the universe, once it has departed, is beyond reshaping, what of a mere part of it?' Granted — if a part is on the same footing as the whole. For we appeal precisely to the differences between them. In the first place: the whole of it came to be through the speaking of God, and apart from that speech not one thing came to be; but flesh had, besides the speaking, an act of shaping behind it too, and for good reason — so that speech should stand behind everything without exception — 'Let us make man' was announced ahead of time — and, further, it came by hand, on account of its preeminence, so it should not be lumped in with the rest of the universe — 'And God fashioned man,' the text says. This surely reflects an important distinction, corresponding to the standing of the things concerned: for the lesser things were made for the sake of the one for whom they were made, since it was for man that they were made, and were straightaway made subject to him by God. Rightly, then, the rest of creation came forth like a servant, by mere command and order and the sheer power of a spoken word; man, by contrast, as their lord, was built by God himself precisely so that he could be lord, even while being made by his Lord. Remember, too, that 'man' is properly said of the flesh, which was the first to claim the name 'man.' 'And God fashioned man, dust taken from the ground' — already called 'man' while still merely dust. 'And into his nostrils he blew the breath of life, and the man came to be' — that is, the dust — 'a living being,' 'and in paradise God set the man whom he had fashioned.' Thus man is, first, a shape given form, and only afterward the whole person. I would stress this so that you may know that whatever God has in view and has promised for man at all is owed not to the soul alone but to the flesh too — if not by shared nature, then at least by right of the name.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 6 ========

I shall press on with my case, then, if only I can claim for the flesh no more than what its maker actually bestowed on it — that speck of dust already glorying, back then, in having come into the hands of God, whatever those hands are, blessed enough merely to have been touched. What, after all, if no further work had followed, and that shaped thing had simply stood as it was from the moment of God's touch? So great a matter was in play, that such material should be built up at all. And so it is honored precisely as often as it undergoes the hand of God — while it is touched, while it is plucked out, while it is drawn along, while it is shaped. Consider that the whole of God was engaged and given over to it — hand, sense, effort, plan, wisdom, foresight, and above all that very affection which was dictating its features: for whatever was being pressed out of the clay, it was Christ, the man to be, who was being thought of — Christ, who would likewise be clay, and the Word who would be flesh, as the clay was then earth. For this is how the Father spoke beforehand to the Son: 'Let us make man according to our image and likeness'; 'and God made man' — precisely what he had shaped — 'according to the image of God he made him,' namely, of Christ. For the Word too is God, who, though established in the very form of God, did not think equality with God something to be seized. So that clay, already wearing the likeness of the Christ who would one day be clothed in flesh himself, was not merely God's handiwork but his promissory note besides. What good does it do them, then, to wave about the name 'earth' to blacken the origin of the flesh, as though of some squalid, low-lying element, when even if some other material had suited the shaping of man, we would still have to reckon with the majesty of the craftsman, who not only judged that material worthy by choosing it but made it so by working it? The hands of Phidias, working ivory, produced the Olympian Zeus — and it is worshipped: no longer is it the tooth of a beast, and a rather stupid one at that, but the highest deity of the age — not because it is elephant, but because Phidias is so great. Would the living and true God, then, not have purged whatever cheapness lay in his material, and healed it of every weakness, by his own working? Is this what remains — that man should more nobly shape a god than God shaped a man? Now, even granting that dust is a scandal, that is a different matter altogether. It is flesh I am now holding, not earth: though flesh too may hear the words, 'Earth you are, and to earth you shall return,' that recalls its origin, it does not summon back its substance. It is given to a thing to be something nobler than its origin and happier through its transformation: gold, too, is earth, because it comes from earth, yet it remains earth only up to the point it becomes gold — a wholly different material after that, more splendid and more noble, drawn from a duller womb. So too God was free to refine the gold of the flesh out of whatever filth of clay you imagine, its base origin excused.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 7 ========

But lest the dignity of the flesh should seem watered down on the ground that the divine hand did not properly handle it in itself, as it handled the clay — well, in handling the clay for this very purpose, that it should afterward become flesh out of clay, God was in fact already transacting business with the flesh. But I want you now to learn further when and how the flesh actually flowered out of the clay. For it is not, as some would have it, that those hides of skin, put on by Adam and by Eve once they had lost paradise and were left bare, marked the moment flesh was reshaped out of clay — since well before that, Adam had already recognized, in flesh, the cutting taken from his own substance now present in the woman: 'This one, at last, is bone out of my bones, flesh out of my flesh' — and that very extraction of the man's rib, built up into woman's flesh, must surely, I take it, have been built up out of clay too, seeing Adam himself was still clay at that point. So the clay was swallowed up and lost in the flesh. When? When man became a living soul from God's breath — a breath that was, so to speak, a warm and fitting blast baking the clay, as it were, into a different quality, into flesh, much as into pottery. Just so the potter too, tempering his clay with a blast of fire, is able to re-embody it into a sturdier material and press one shape into another out of it, better suited than the original and now bearing its own kind and name. For though it is written, 'Shall the clay say to the potter' — meaning, man to God — and though the Apostle speaks of 'earthen vessels,' still man is called clay because he was clay before, and flesh is called earthenware because it came from clay by way of the blast of the divine breath. That flesh was afterward clothed over by the coats of skin, that is, the outer hide — so much so that if you strip off the skin, you lay the flesh bare. So what today counts as stripping, if you take the skin off, was, when it was first laid on, a garment. Hence, too, the Apostle, calling circumcision a stripping of the flesh, confirms that the skin is its tunic. Since this is so, both stand ennobled: the clay, dignified by the touch of God's hand, and the flesh, dignified still further by the breath of God — through which the flesh set aside its beginnings as clay and put on instead the adornments proper to a soul. Are you more careful than God — you who, for Scythian and Indian gems and the gleaming grains of the ruddy sea, will not have lead or bronze or iron, no, not even silver as a setting, but only the choicest and most laboriously mined gold; who take pains, for your wines and your costliest perfumes, to match the vessel to what it holds; who match the worth of the scabbard to the polished steel of the sword within — while God, by contrast, has lodged the very reflection of his own soul, the outbreathing of his own spirit, the craft-work of his own mouth, inside some altogether cheap sheath, and stands accused of housing it so unworthily? Or did he rather lodge it — or rather graft it in and blend it with the flesh? With such thoroughgoing fusion, indeed, that it can be left uncertain whether the flesh carries the soul about or the soul the flesh, whether it is the flesh that appears to belong to the soul or the soul that appears to belong to the flesh. But even granting that the soul is to be believed the more prominent partner and the ruler, as standing nearer to God, this too redounds to the glory of the flesh — that it holds within itself the one nearest to God, and furnishes that very rule with its instrument. For what use of nature, what fruit of the world, what savor of the elements does the soul not taste through the flesh? Of course — for it is through the flesh that it is furnished with every instrument of sense: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch; through the flesh it is sprinkled with divine power, foreseeing nothing without speech going silently ahead of it. For speech, too, comes from the organ that is flesh. The arts are through the flesh, study and talent are through the flesh, works and business and duties are through the flesh; indeed, living itself belongs so entirely to the soul-and-flesh together that for the soul not to live is nothing other than to part from the flesh. So too dying itself belongs to the flesh, just as living does. Further, if all things lie subject to the soul through the flesh, they lie subject to the flesh as well: whatever instrument you use, you necessarily use along with the one you use it through. So the flesh, though reckoned the servant and handmaid of the soul, turns out to be its partner and co-heir: if in things temporal, why not in things eternal too?

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 8 ========

[1] So much, then, I have contributed on the general pattern of the human condition, as a vote cast in the flesh's favor. Let us now look at the pattern peculiar to the Christian name itself — how great a privilege before God belongs to this frivolous, sordid substance. [2] Even if it were enough that no soul at all can obtain salvation except while it is in the flesh that it believed, so thoroughly is the flesh the hinge of salvation: it is by the flesh, when the soul is bound to God, that the soul itself comes to be capable of being chosen by God. [3] But more: the flesh is washed so that the soul may be made spotless; the flesh is anointed so that the soul may be consecrated; the flesh bears the sign so that the soul as well may be strengthened by it; hands are laid upon the flesh in the overshadowing rite so that the soul in turn may have the Spirit's light poured into it; the flesh takes as its nourishment the body and blood of Christ so that the soul likewise may grow fat on God. Things that works have joined cannot, then, be separated in their reward. [4] For sacrifices pleasing to God — I mean the soul's struggles, its fastings, its late and dry meals, and the grime that is the appendage of this service — the flesh makes good out of its own discomfort. Virginity too, and widowhood, and the modest concealment of marriage kept discreetly private, and the sole knowledge of it, court God's favor from the flesh's own goods. [5] Come now — what do you think of the flesh when it fights it out in the open for loyalty to the Name, thrust into public hatred, wasted in prisons by the foulest exile from the light, worn down by the world's want, filth, grime, insult — not even free in sleep, chained as it is to its very pallet, torn even on its own straw bedding — when in broad daylight it is mangled by every engine of torture devised, when finally it is paid out to the executioners, straining to render Christ the like for like by dying for him, and often by that very same cross, not to speak of crueler devices of punishment still? [6] Should that flesh — most blessed, most glorious, able to pay Christ the Lord so great a debt that this alone it owes him: that it has ceased to owe him — be, the more bound, all the more set free?

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 9 ========

[1] So, to sum up: this flesh which God fashioned, his own two hands shaping it after his own image, which he quickened with the breath he himself breathed, giving it a likeness of his own life, which he set over the dwelling-place, the fruit, and the dominion of the whole of his handiwork, which he clothed with his own sacraments and disciplines, whose cleanliness he loves, whose chastisements he approves, whose sufferings he prizes at his own cost — shall this not rise again, this thing so many times over God's own? [2] Far be it, far be it, that God should abandon to eternal ruin the work of his own hands, the object of his own care, the sheath of his own breath, the queen of his own workmanship, the heir of his own generosity, the priestess of his own religion, the soldier of his own testimony, the sister of his own Christ! [3] We know God is good; only from his Christ do we learn that he is best of all. He who commands love of neighbor, second only to love of himself, himself does what he commands: he loves the flesh, which is his neighbor in so many ways. [4] Weak, yes — but power is made perfect in weakness. Feeble, yes — but only the sick have need of a physician. Dishonorable, yes — but we surround the less honorable members with the greater honor. Lost, yes — but 'I have come,' he says, 'to save what was lost.' Sinful, yes — but 'I desire,' he says, 'the salvation of the sinner rather than his death.' Condemned, yes — but 'I,' he says, 'will strike and I will heal.' [5] Why do you reproach the flesh with these things, when it waits for God, when it hopes in God? Those whom he comes to help are honored by him. I would dare say: if these things had not befallen the flesh, God's kindness, grace, mercy — the whole beneficent power of God — would have been left idle.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 10 ========

[1] You hold the scriptures by which the flesh is blackened; hold also those by which it is illuminated. You read where it is brought low — fix your eyes too on where it is raised up. [2] 'All flesh is grass' — this is not the only thing Isaiah pronounced, for he also said, 'every creature of flesh shall look upon the deliverance that comes from God.' It stands written in Genesis, where the Lord says, 'My spirit shall not remain in these men forever, for they are flesh' — but it is also heard through Joel, 'I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh.' [3] Nor should you take the Apostle to write with one pen only whenever he jabs at the flesh: for even though he denies that anything good dwells in his flesh, even though he insists that people who live according to the flesh are unable to gratify God, on the ground that flesh sets its desire against spirit, and though he sets down other statements of that kind, the point in all of them is that it is not flesh as a substance but flesh as conduct that stands accused, we shall say elsewhere that nothing is properly to be cast up against the flesh except as a rebuke to the soul, which subdues the flesh to its own service. [4] But meanwhile, in those very letters too, it is Paul who carries the marks of Christ in his own body, who forbids our body to be defiled as God's temple, who makes our bodies members of Christ, who urges us to lift up and magnify God in our body. [5] So if it is the flesh's disgraces that they use to expel its resurrection, why not rather bring in its dignities as grounds for it? Since it is more fitting for God to restore to salvation what he sometimes disapproved, than to hand over to ruin what he also approved.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 11 ========

[1] So much for the flesh's praises against its enemies — who are nonetheless its dearest friends. For no one lives so much after the flesh as the man who denies that the flesh will rise: by denying it, they despise both its punishment and its discipline. [2] Of these the Paraclete has spoken plainly through the prophetess Prisca: 'They are flesh, and they hate the flesh.' [3] But if so great an authority protects this flesh, sufficient to patronize its claim to the merit of salvation, need we even review God's own power and authority and license — whether he is great enough to rebuild and restore this tabernacle of flesh once it has collapsed, been devoured, and snatched away by whatever means? [4] Has he not, moreover, given us examples of this very prerogative of his, publicly proclaimed in the order of nature, in case anyone should still thirst to know God — one who is to be believed in on no other terms than that he is believed capable of all things? [5] To be sure, among the philosophers you will find some who maintain that this world is unborn and indestructible. But it is much better that almost all the heresies, admitting that the world was born and made, thereby credit our God with its founding. [6] Trust, then, that he brought forth this whole world out of nothing, and know God by trusting that God alone is capable of so much. For some, being weaker in their faith, prefer to hold — after the philosophers — that he dedicated the universe out of some underlying matter. [7] Yet even if that were the true account, since he would still be said to have produced substances and forms utterly different from what that matter itself had been, by reshaping it, I would no less maintain that he produced them out of nothing — if what he produced had, in that form, simply never existed before. [8] For what does it matter whether a thing is brought forth out of nothing or out of something, so long as what did not exist comes to exist — since 'not having been' is itself a kind of nothing? So too, on the other side, 'having been' is not nothing. [9] Now, though it makes a difference either way, both accounts favor me equally. For if God fashioned everything from nothingness, then flesh reduced to nothingness is likewise within his power to call back from nothingness; or if instead he shaped the rest of creation from some pre-existing matter, then flesh drained away, in whatever fashion, can equally be summoned by him out of that same matter. [10] And surely the one who made a thing is fit to remake it — since it is a greater thing to have made than to have remade, to have given a beginning than to have given it back. So you may believe the restoring of the flesh easier than its original founding.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 12 ========

[1] Look now also at the very examples of divine power. Daylight expires into nightfall, laid to rest on every side beneath the dark; the world's glory is put into mourning, its whole substance blackened: all things grow filthy, fall silent, stand stunned; everywhere there is a stoppage of business, a stillness of things — so is the lost light mourned. [2] And yet again, with its full array, its dowry, its sun, that same day, whole and entire, comes back to life for the whole world, killing its own death, night, tearing open its own burial-place, the darkness, becoming its own heir — until night too comes back to life, with its own retinue restored. [3] The stars' rays are rekindled, though the morning blaze had put them out; the stars' absences, which the passage of time had removed, are brought back; the moon's mirror-faces, worn down by the monthly count, are refurbished. [4] Winters and summers, springs and autumns, roll round again, each with its own strengths, habits, fruits. Indeed the earth too takes its lesson from heaven: to clothe the trees again after their stripping, to color the flowers anew, to set the grasses up once more, to bring forth again the very seeds that were consumed — and not to bring them forth until they have been consumed. [5] A wondrous logic: out of the defrauder, a preserver; it intercepts in order to give back, it destroys in order to keep, it kills in order to make alive, it damages in order to make whole, it first squanders in order even to increase — since indeed it restores things richer and more cultivated than it had wiped out: truly a usury made of ruin, a profit made of loss and injury. [6] Let me say it once for all: the whole created order is a thing of recurrence. Whatever you meet with has already been; whatever you lose will be again. Nothing is not repeated: all things return to their state once they have departed, all things begin again once they have ceased; they are ended only so that they may come to be; nothing perishes except into salvation. [7] This whole revolving order of things is, then, a testimony to the resurrection of the dead: God prescribed it first in works before he did in letters, proclaimed it first in powers before he did in words. [8] He sent nature ahead of you as a schoolmistress, meaning later to send prophecy as well, so that you might the more readily believe prophecy, being already nature's pupil — so that the moment you hear it you might accept at once what you have already seen everywhere — and not doubt that the God whom you know to be the restorer of all things is also the reviver of the flesh. [9] And surely, if everything comes back to life for man's sake, since it was for him that all this was supplied — and they were provided for no one but man, that is, for the flesh as well — how can it be that this very flesh should perish utterly, the flesh for whose sake, and to whom, nothing else is allowed to perish?

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 13 ========

[1] If the whole of creation figures the resurrection too faintly for you, if nothing in its order signals such a thing — because its individual creatures are said not so much to die as to cease, and are thought not to be reanimated but merely reshaped — then take the fullest and firmest specimen of this hope: a thing that is itself a living creature, subject to life and to death. [2] I mean that bird peculiar to the East, famous for being unique, monstrous in its manner of reproducing itself, which gladly buries itself and so renews itself, departing and succeeding at the very close of its own life, becoming a phoenix again where a moment ago there was none, itself again where a moment ago it was no more — another, yet the same. [3] What could be more explicit, more clearly a sign pointing to this very question, or what other thing could furnish such a proof? God too, in his own scriptures, says, 'For you shall flourish like the phoenix' — that is, out of death, out of a funeral — so that you may believe that the substance of the body can be recovered even out of fire. [4] The Lord has declared that we outrank many sparrows: if we do not outrank phoenixes too, that is no great matter. But shall men perish once for all, while the birds of Arabia are secure of their resurrection?

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 14 ========

[1] Having sketched, then, this much of the outlines of the divine powers — a god who works in parables no less than one who speaks in them — let us come now to his very edicts and decrees, since it is exactly here that we mark off this next division of our subject. [2] For having begun from the authority of the flesh — whether it is such that the recovery of what has decayed falls within its competence — and having then pursued the power of God — whether it is such as habitually confers recovery on a thing dissolved — [3] now, if we have proved both points, I would have you inquire further into the cause: whether some cause exists substantial enough to establish the flesh's rising as a necessity and, on every reckoning, a debt owed to reason. Because it remains to be said: even if the flesh is capable of being restored, even if divinity is competent to restore it, still a cause for the restoration must stand in front of both. [4] Take, then, the cause too — you who learn of God that he is as thoroughly good as he is just: good from his own nature, just from the necessity of ours. For had man not sinned, he would have known God only as good, purely from the property of his nature; but as it is, man suffers him also as just, from the necessity of man's own case — and yet even in this God remains good precisely by being just. [5] For in aiding the good and punishing the wicked, exhibiting justice on both counts, he offers both verdicts in service of goodness, avenging the one on this side, rewarding the other on that. [6] But you will learn more fully, against Marcion, whether this is the whole of God. For now, ours is such a God: judge deservedly, because Lord; Lord deservedly, because author; author deservedly, because God. [7] Hence that heretic of theirs — whoever he is — is deservedly no judge, for he is no Lord; deservedly no Lord, for he is no author; and I no longer know whether he is even God, since he is neither author by virtue of being God, nor Lord by virtue of being author. [8] If, then, it is entirely fitting for a God who is Lord and author to appoint judgment upon man over this very question — whether man took care to acknowledge and observe his Lord and author, or did not — and if the resurrection is what settles that judgment, then this will be the whole cause — indeed the necessity — of the resurrection: a judgment's appointment perfectly fitting to God. [9] As to its disposition, consider whether the divine tribunal presides over both human substances alike when it comes to judging — soul as much as flesh: for whatever is fitting to be judged is equally entitled to be raised again. [10] We say that God's judgment must be believed full and perfect from the first — since it is final and, from that point, everlasting — and thus just in this respect too, that it falls short in nothing; and thus worthy of God in this respect too, that, answering to his great patience, it is full and complete. And so the fullness and perfection of the judgment can consist in nothing but the presentation of the whole man. [11] The whole man, further, is produced by the union of both substances, and it is therefore in both that the man who must be judged whole has to be presented — since he did not live except as a whole. As he lived, then, so must he be judged, because it is for what he lived that he is to be judged. For life is the ground of judgment, to be reckoned through as many substances as it was lived through.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 15 ========

[1] Come now, let our opponents first tear apart the union of flesh and soul in the conduct of life, before they presume to sunder it likewise where life's wages are paid out; let them disown the fellowship of their toils, so that afterward, and rightly, they may disown the fellowship of their pay. [2] Let the flesh have no part in the verdict, if it had none in the cause; let the soul alone be summoned back, if it alone departs. But it no more departs alone than it alone ran the course from which it departs — I mean this life. [3] So far indeed is it from being the soul alone that transacts life, that we cannot even strip from the flesh's fellowship its very thoughts — though they be only thoughts, though never carried through into deed by the flesh — because whatever the soul enacts in the heart is enacted inside flesh, alongside flesh, and by means of flesh. [4] This very stronghold of the soul, the flesh, the Lord himself indicts in his rebuke of thoughts: 'Why do you think evil in your hearts?' and, 'Whoever has looked to lust after has already committed adultery in his heart' — so true is it that even without a deed, even without an effect, a thought is an act of the flesh. [5] But even if the ruling principle of the senses is enthroned — as the philosophers would have it — in the brain, or at the meeting-point between the brows, or wherever else they please, that which they call the hēgemonikon, the flesh will still be the whole workshop of the soul's thinking. The soul is never parted from flesh for as long as flesh houses it; it performs nothing apart from that apart from which it could not even subsist. [6] Ask further whether thoughts too are carried out through the flesh, seeing that they are recognized from the outside through the flesh: let the soul turn something over, and the face performs the telltale sign; the countenance is the mirror of every intention. Let them deny the partnership in deeds, then, to one to whom they cannot deny the partnership in thoughts. [7] And indeed they themselves catalogue the offenses of the flesh: therefore it will be held for punishment as a sinner. But we, for our part, set the virtues of the flesh against theirs: therefore it will also be held for reward as a doer of good. And if it is the soul that acts and drives everything forward, the flesh is still its instrument of compliance. [8] But God may not be believed either an unjust judge or a lazy one — unjust, if he shuts out from reward a partner in good works; lazy, if he lets a partner in evil ones slip free of punishment — since human judgment itself is reckoned the more perfect the more it demands accomplices of every deed as well, sparing none and begrudging none the sharing, with the principals, of the fruit whether of punishment or of favor.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 16 ========

[1] But now that we have parceled out command to the soul and compliance to the flesh, we must take care that our opponents do not overturn even this by another line of argument, wanting to place the flesh in the soul's service in such a way that they are not forced to acknowledge it as a partner, but only as a servant. [2] For they will say that servants and partners have the right to choose whether to serve and to join, and a power over their own will in either direction — being, after all, themselves men too; and it is for that reason that they share the merit with the principals to whose work they lent their effort of their own accord. [3] The flesh, on the other hand — knowing nothing, feeling nothing of itself, having no will and no won't of its own — appears rather in the character of a vessel to the soul, an instrument rather than a service; [4] and so it is the soul alone that presides over the judgment as to how it used the vessel of the flesh, while the vessel itself is not liable to sentence — since no one condemns the cup because someone mixed poison in it, and no one hands the sword over to the beasts because someone committed robbery with it. [5] So then the flesh stands innocent on that count, since its evil labors will not be charged to it, and nothing prevents it from being saved on the score of innocence. For though it be credited neither with good works nor with bad, it still better suits the divine kindness to set the innocent free — since kindness owes it to benefactors, but it is the mark of the very best to bestow even what is not owed. [6] And yet — a cup, I will not even say one that has held poison, from which some death has belched up, but one merely tainted by the breath of a whore, or a priest of Cybele, or a gladiator, or an executioner — I ask you, do you condemn it any less than you condemn their very kisses? Even over our own filth we are apt to smash a cup that comes to us clouded, or mixed carelessly, so as to vent our anger the more at the slave-boy. [7] And the sword drunk on highway robbery — who would not banish it from the whole house, let alone the bedroom, let alone the service of his own neck, presuming, of course, that he would dream of nothing else than the resentment of the souls it had harassed and disturbed, that unwelcome bedfellow of their blood? [8] But then again, a cup well aware of its own good conscience, and commended by the care of a careful steward, will also be decked with garlands from the drinker it served, or honored with a scattering of flowers; and a sword nobly bloodied in war, itself the better slayer, will pay itself its due praise by dedication. [9] 'Is there room, then, to fix a sentence even on vessels and instruments too, so that they too may share in the merits of their owners and authors?' [10] I will satisfy even this argument, though the diversity of the cases leaves the analogy short. For every vessel or instrument comes into use from elsewhere, its material entirely foreign to man's own substance; the flesh, however, sown and formed and congenital with the soul from the very outset of the womb, is mingled with it in every operation as well. [11] For even granting that the apostle names it a 'vessel,' bidding it be handled with honor, that very thing is called by the very same author 'the outer man' — that clay, that is, which was first inscribed with the title of man, not of a cup, a sword, or any vessel whatever. [12] For a thing is called a vessel from its capacity, by which it holds and contains the soul; but man is so called from the community of nature, by which the flesh offers itself to the soul in its operations not as an instrument but as a service. And so a service will be held liable to judgment, even though it has no wisdom of its own, because it is a portion of the one that has wisdom, not mere furniture. [13] Knowing this, the apostle too, though he holds that the flesh does nothing by itself that is not charged to the soul, nonetheless judges the flesh a sinner — lest, on the ground that it seems only driven by the soul, it be thought acquitted by that verdict. [14] So too, when he assigns certain works of praise to the flesh — 'Glorify God, carry him in your body' — though certain that these efforts too are driven by the soul, he still charges them to the flesh as well, because to the flesh too he promises a reward. [15] Otherwise neither the rebuke would have applied to a fault not its own, nor the exhortation to a glory not its own; both rebuke and exhortation toward the flesh would be empty, if the reward sought in the resurrection were empty too.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 17 ========

[1] The simpler sort of advocate for our position will suppose that the flesh must be presented at judgment for this reason too: that otherwise the soul could not take in the experience of torment or of refreshment, being, as it is, incorporeal — for that is what the common crowd supposes. [2] We, however, both profess here, and have proved in our own treatise on the subject, that the soul is corporeal, possessing its own kind of substance and solidity, by which it is able both to feel and to suffer something. Indeed, that souls even now are tormented and cherished among the dead — naked though they be, exiles still from the flesh — the example of Lazarus will prove. [3] I have, then, granted our opponent the right to say: 'So then, a thing that has a bodily density of its own will find that sufficient, from its own resources, for the capacity to suffer and feel, so that it has no need of the flesh's presentation.' On the contrary — it will need it precisely to the degree that, while it is not that it cannot feel anything at all without the flesh, it is nonetheless necessary that it feel along with the flesh as well. [4] For whatever suffices of its own for acting, that same amount suffices also for suffering. But for acting, its own resources suffice for less: for it has, of its own, only to think, will, desire, plan — but for the accomplishing, it waits on the work of the flesh. [5] And so, for suffering too, it demands the flesh's partnership, that it may suffer through the flesh as fully as, without it, it could not act fully. And so, for those things which its own resources do suffice — desire, and thought, and will — it holds its verdict in suspense for the meantime. [6] Furthermore, if these were enough to make up the fullness of merits, so that deeds were not also required, the soul alone would suffice for the perfection of judgment, to be judged on those very things which it alone had sufficed to do. [7] But since deeds too are bound up with merits, and deeds are transacted through the flesh, it is no longer enough for the soul to be cherished or tormented alone, apart from the flesh, on account of the works of the flesh as well — even though it has a body, even though it has members there among the dead, which nonetheless do not suffice it to feel fully any more than they sufficed it to act perfectly. [8] And so for what it did in a given manner, in that same manner it also suffers among the dead, tasting judgment first, just as it led the way in the offense first — but still awaiting the flesh as well, that through it too it may settle accounts for the deeds it had entrusted to thought. [9] In short, this will be the rationale in the final, appointed judgment: that the whole divine tribunal can be brought to completion only through the presentation of the flesh — otherwise what the souls even now cull among the dead would not be sustained to the end, if the judgment were destined for souls alone.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 18 ========

[1] Up to this point I have been laying groundwork to fortify the sense of all the scriptures that promise the flesh its return. And since so many authorities of just support attend it — I mean the honor of the substance itself, the power of God, the precedents that back it, and the reasoning and requirements of judgment — it will certainly be necessary to understand the scriptures according to the precedent set by so many authorities, not according to the cleverness of heretics that comes from sheer unbelief, because it is held incredible that a substance carried off by destruction should be restored — not because that is either inconceivable for the substance itself, or impossible for God, or beyond the reach of judgment. [2] It would indeed be incredible if it had not also been proclaimed by God. Though even if God had not proclaimed it, it ought still to have been presumed on its own account — so that it is not "not proclaimed" simply because it has already been prejudged by so many authorities. [3] But since it also resounds in divine utterances, there is all the less room to understand it otherwise than those very authorities desire, which persuade even without divine utterances. [4] Let us look, then, first at this: under what heading is this hope posted? There hangs, I think, one edict of God for all: THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD — two words, plain, decisive, unambiguous. Let me examine them, discuss them, and see to which substance they commit themselves. [5] When I hear that resurrection threatens man, I must necessarily ask what has fallen to its lot, since nothing will expect to rise again except what has first fallen. Whoever does not know that flesh falls through death cannot even know it as it stands in life. [6] Nature pronounces God's sentence: "Dust you are, and to dust you shall return." And whoever does not hear it, sees it: no death occurs without the ruin of the members. This lot of the body the Lord too expressed when he himself put on that very substance: "Destroy this temple," he said, "and I will raise it up again in three days." [7] For he shows whose it is to be destroyed, whose to be struck down, and whose also to be raised up and revived again — though he also carried about a soul that trembled unto death but did not fall through death — for scripture too says, "He had spoken of his own body." [8] And indeed it is the flesh that is undermined by death, so much so that from its falling it is thereafter called a corpse. The soul, on the other hand, does not fall even in name, because it does not collapse in condition; rather it is the soul itself that brings ruin upon the body when it is breathed out, just as it is the soul itself that raised that body up from the earth when it was breathed in. What raised it by entering cannot itself fall; what strikes it down by departing cannot itself collapse. [9] Let me put it more precisely: not even in sleep does the soul fall along with the body, not even then is it laid low with the flesh; rather it is stirred and tossed about in dreams — whereas it would be at rest if it lay prone, and it would lie prone if it fell. So the soul, which does not even collapse in the mere image of death, does not fall in the reality of death either. [10] Now consider likewise the following word, "of the dead," and to which substance it belongs. Though in this matter we sometimes grant, for argument's sake, that heretics assign mortality to the soul, so that if the soul, being mortal, is to obtain resurrection, this becomes a precedent for the flesh, no less mortal, also sharing in resurrection — still, for now the proper meaning of the word must be claimed for its rightful lot. [11] Indeed, by the very fact that resurrection belongs to a thing that has fallen — that is, to the flesh — the same will hold also in the word "of the dead": for resurrection, which is called "of the dead," belongs to a thing that has fallen. [12] So too we learn through Abraham, father of faith, man of God's own intimacy: when asking of the sons of Heth a place to bury Sarah, he said, "Give me, then, a possession for a burial-place among you, and I will bury my dead" — meaning, of course, the flesh; for he would not have needed room to bury a soul, even if the soul were believed mortal, even if it deserved to be called "dead." But if "dead" means the body, then the resurrection, properly speaking, when it is called "of the dead," will belong to bodies.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 19 ========

[1] This scrutiny, then, of the heading and of the proclamation itself, defending as it does the plain sense of the words, ought to serve this end: that if the opposing side stirs up trouble by appeal to figures and riddles, the plainer texts should prevail, and should settle beforehand what is uncertain by what is more certain. [2] For some, having found the most familiar shape of prophetic speech — allegorical and figurative for the most part, though not always — twist even the resurrection of the dead, though plainly announced, into a merely imaginary meaning, asserting that death itself must be understood spiritually: [3] that the real death is not that which lies before us, the separation of flesh and soul, but ignorance of God, through which a man dead to God lies no less in error than in the tomb; [4] and that the resurrection to be vindicated is that by which a man, having come to the truth, is reanimated and brought back to life for God, and, ignorance's death having been shaken off, bursts forth, as it were, from the tomb of his old self — for the Lord too likened the scribes and Pharisees to whitewashed tombs. [5] From this, then, they conclude that those who have attained resurrection through faith are already with the Lord, whom they put on at baptism. [6] By this same cleverness they are also accustomed to deceive our people in conversation, as if they too admitted the resurrection of the flesh: "Woe," they say, "to him who does not rise again in this flesh" — so as not to be struck down at once if they were to deny resurrection outright. But privately, according to their own conscience, this is what they mean: "Woe to him who, while still in this flesh, does not come to know the heretical mysteries" — for this, among them, is what resurrection is. [7] And many, claiming resurrection to mean the soul's departure, interpret "coming out of the tomb" as escaping the world — since the world, too, is the dwelling-place of the dead, that is, of those ignorant of God — or else interpret it of the body itself, since the body too, in place of a tomb, holds the soul locked up in the death of this worldly life.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 20 ========

[1] Against conjectures of this sort, then, I will knock down first their opening premise, by which they want all the prophets to have spoken entirely through images: for if that were so, not even the images themselves could be distinguished, unless truths that had also been proclaimed existed, from which the images could be sketched. [2] And indeed, if everything were figure, what would be the thing of which it was a figure? How will you hold up a mirror if a face is nowhere to be found? So far, in fact, is it from being the case that everything is images and not also truths, that everything is shadow and not also bodies, that even concerning the Lord himself the more striking things were proclaimed in language clearer than daylight. [3] For the virgin conceived in her womb, not figuratively, and bore Emmanuel, God with us [Jesus], not obliquely — even though it was obliquely that she would seize the strength of Damascus and the plunder of Samaria, but it was plainly foretold that he would come in judgment alongside the elders and leaders of that nation. [4] For the nations too raged, in the person of Pilate, and the peoples plotted vain things, in the person of Israel: the kings of the earth took their stand — Herod — and the rulers gathered together as one — Annas and Caiaphas — against the Lord and against his Christ; [5] and he too was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer — namely Herod — without a voice, so he opened not his mouth, setting his back to the scourges and his cheeks to the blows, and not turning his face away from the darts of spitting; he was numbered too among the wicked, pierced through hands and feet, suffered the casting of lots over his garment and bitter drink and the mocking nods of heads, priced at thirty pieces of silver by the traitor. [6] What figures are these in Isaiah, what images in David, what riddles in Jeremiah — did they not proclaim even his mighty works other than through parables? Or were the eyes of the blind not really opened, did the tongue of the mute not really speak clearly, did withered hands and weakened knees not really regain their strength, did the lame not really leap like a deer? [7] These things, though we are also accustomed to interpret them spiritually, by comparison with the animal vices healed by the Lord, nevertheless, since they were also fulfilled in the flesh, show that the prophets spoke in both modes — allowing that most of their utterances, bare and simple and free of every cloud of allegory, can be defended as such: [8] as when the downfalls of nations and cities resound — of Tyre and Egypt and Babylon and Idumaea and the ships of Carthage — and when they proclaim at length the plagues or the pardons of Israel itself, its captivities, its restorations, and the outcome of its final dispersion. [9] Who will interpret these things rather than simply recognize them? The facts are held fast in the letters, the letters are read in the facts. So it is not always, nor in every case, that the prophetic word takes an allegorical form, but only now and then, and in certain instances.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 21 ========

[1] "If, then," you will say, "now and then, and in certain instances, why not also in the edict of the resurrection, which is to be understood spiritually?" Because, in fact, a great deal of reasoning stands against it. For first, what will become of so many other divine instruments, so openly attesting a bodily resurrection that they admit no suspicion of figurative meaning? [2] And it is surely only fair, as we also urged above, that uncertain things be judged in light of certain ones, and obscure things in light of what is manifest — lest, amid discord between the certain and the uncertain, the manifest and the obscure, faith be torn apart, truth be endangered, and divinity itself be branded inconsistent. [3] Furthermore, it is not plausible that this particular form of the sacred mystery, in which the whole of faith is invested, on which the whole discipline strains, should appear announced ambiguously and set forth obscurely — since the hope of resurrection, unless made manifest as to its danger and its reward, would persuade no one to a religion so exposed, above all others, to public hatred and hostile sentence. [4] No work is certain when its wage is uncertain; no fear is just when its danger is doubtful — and both the wage and the danger hang on the outcome of the resurrection. [5] But if, in fact, God's temporal and local and personal decrees and judgments against cities and nations and kings have been hurled forth by prophecy so openly, how is it conceivable that his eternal and universal dispositions, for the whole race of mankind, should have fled from the light that is properly theirs? The greater they are, the clearer they ought to be, so that, being greater, they might be believed. [6] And I think that neither envy nor deceit nor inconsistency nor seduction can be ascribed to God — the very things by which the promulgation of great matters is generally mocked.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 22 ========

[1] After this we shall say that we must also look to those scriptures which do not allow the resurrection, according to these people who are animal-minded — I will not say spiritual — to be presumed already now, in the recognition of the truth, or claimed at once upon departure from this life. [2] For since the very times of the whole hope are fixed by the most sacred pen, and it is not permitted to set that hope earlier, it will equally not be permitted to interpret the scriptures concerning it in such a way that it could be set earlier. Our vows, I think, sigh for the coming of Christ, for the close of this age, toward the great day of the Lord, the day of wrath and retribution, the last and hidden day known to none but the Father, and yet foretold by signs and portents and the shaking of the elements and the clashing of nations. [3] I would unroll the prophecies, if the Lord himself had kept silent — except that the prophecies too were the Lord's own voice — but it means still more that he seals them with his own mouth. Asked by his disciples when those things would come to pass which he had just then burst forth concerning the fall of the temple, he lays out the order of the times — first the Jewish times, down to the destruction of Jerusalem, then the times common to all, down to the closing of the age. [4] For after he declared, "And then shall Jerusalem be trodden down among the nations until the times of the nations are fulfilled" — meaning, of course, the nations to be gathered in and chosen by God together with the remnant of Israel — [5] from that point he goes on to foretell, for the whole world and the whole age, according to Joel and Daniel and the entire council of the prophets, the signs to come in sun and moon and stars, the closing-in of the nations amid the roar of the sea's astonishment, and men fainting for fear and for expectation of what is about to come upon the whole earth. [6] "For the powers of the heavens," he says, "shall be shaken, and then they shall behold the Son of Man arriving amid the clouds of the sky with great power and glory. But when these things begin to happen, look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near." [7] And yet he said that it "draws near," not that it is already present, and "when these things begin to happen," not "when they have already happened" — because when they have already happened, then our redemption will be present, which up to that point is only said to be drawing near, meanwhile rousing and stirring souls toward the fruit of hope now close at hand. [8] To this is attached the parable of trees growing tender in the branch, the forerunner of blossom and then of fruit. "So you too, when you see all these things happening, know that the kingdom of God is near. Watch, then, at every season, that you may be worthy to escape all these things, and to stand in the presence of the Son of Man" — through the resurrection, of course, once everything else has passed. So while it buds already in the recognition of the mystery, it flowers and comes to fruit only in the Lord's own appearing. [9] Who, then, has so untimely, so harshly, roused the Lord already from the right hand of God to shatter the earth, according to Isaiah — a text, I think, still untouched? Who has already put the enemies of Christ beneath his feet, according to David, faster even than the Father, while the whole crowd of the populace still cries out, "Christians to the lion"? Who has seen Jesus descending from heaven in the very form the apostles saw him ascending, according to the angels' own appointment? [10] To this day no tribe has beaten its breast, mourning before tribe in recognition of him whom they pierced; no one yet has welcomed Elijah; no one yet has fled the antichrist; no one yet has wept over the fall of Babylon; [11] and is there already one who has risen — unless he is a heretic? He has plainly already come out of the tomb of the body — while still, even now, subject to fevers and sores; and he has already trodden down his enemies — while still, even now, having to wrestle with the powers of this world; and of course he already reigns — while still, even now, owing to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 23 ========

[1] The apostle, indeed, teaches the Colossians in writing that we had formerly been dead, estranged and hostile in mind toward the Lord, back when we walked amid our vilest deeds — buried with Christ, then, in baptism, and raised up together with him through faith in the working power of God who raised him from the dead: [2] "And you, when you were dead in your trespasses and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, he made alive together with him, forgiving you all your trespasses"; and again, "If you have died with Christ away from the basic principles of this world, then how is it, as if you still belonged to worldly life, that you subject yourself to its regulations?" [3] But since he makes us dead in this way spiritually while still acknowledging that we are one day to die bodily too, he certainly, in reckoning us likewise raised spiritually, does not thereby deny that we shall also rise bodily. [4] Again: "If you have risen together with Christ," he says, "seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at God's right hand: set your mind on the things above, not on the things below." Here he shows that we rise in mind — the only way we can as yet touch the things of heaven, which we would neither seek nor set our minds on if we already possessed them. [5] He adds too: "For you are dead" — dead, that is, to your sins, not to yourselves — "and your life is hidden with Christ in God." What is hidden, then, has not yet been laid hold of: [6] and John says the same: "It is not yet made manifest what we shall be; we know that if it is made manifest we shall be like him." So far are we from already being what we do not yet know — for we would surely know it already, if we already were it. [7] So then in this present span it is a contemplation of hope through faith, not a present possession — not ownership but expectation. Of this hope and expectation Paul writes to the Galatians: "For through the Spirit, by faith, we wait for the hope of righteousness" — he does not say "we hold it"; and by "the righteousness of God" he is pointing to that outcome which the coming judgment, by which our reward shall be weighed, will bring about. [8] Hanging on that same hope, he himself writes to the Philippians: "If somehow I might arrive at the resurrection that comes from among the dead — not that I have already received it, or am already made perfect." And yet he had believed, and knew all the mysteries, chosen vessel and teacher of the nations that he was — and still he adds: "But I press on, if indeed I may lay hold of that for which I was also laid hold of by Christ." [9] Still more: "Brothers, I do not reckon myself yet to have laid hold of it: one thing I do — forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal, for the prize" of that summons by which I might attain — attain, that is, to the resurrection from the dead, but each in its own time: [10] as to the Galatians: "Let us not grow weary in doing good, for in its own season we shall reap"; and likewise to Timothy, of Onesiphorus: "May the Lord grant him to find mercy on that day." [11] For that day and that season he charges Timothy himself to keep the commandment spotless, beyond reproach, until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which in his own seasons he will show, he who is blessed and the only Sovereign, King of those who reign — speaking there of God. [12] Of these same seasons Peter too speaks in Acts: "Repent, therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, so that seasons of refreshing may come to you from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ who was appointed for you beforehand, whom heaven must receive until the times of the restoration of all things which God spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets."

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 24 ========

[1] What these seasons are, learn from the Thessalonians. For we read: "How you abandoned your idols to become slaves of a God who is living and genuine, and to await his Son out of the skies, the one he brought back from among the dead — Jesus": [2] and again: "For what else is our expectation, delight, or victor's wreath, except yourselves, before our Lord Jesus in his presence at his arrival?" And again: "Before our God and Father, when our Lord Jesus arrives, together with every one of his holy ones." [3] Teaching them against excessive mourning for those who sleep in death, he lays out, at the same moment, the sequence of the rising: "For since we hold that Jesus perished and stood up alive again, God will likewise bring along with him those who fell asleep by way of Jesus: [4] this much we declare to you on the Lord's own authority, that we, the living, still remaining when the Lord arrives, shall not go ahead of those already asleep: [5] since the Lord in person will come down out of heaven with a shout of command, an archangel's voice, and God's own trumpet-blast, and it is the dead who belong to Christ who will rise first: [6] afterward we, the living, the ones left behind, shall be swept up together with them among the clouds, to greet the Lord Christ in mid-air, and thus we shall remain with the Lord forever." [7] Whose ear has yet caught this archangel's voice, this trumpet of God — outside, perhaps, of some heretic's private chamber? Even granting that God's trumpet might mean the gospel-preaching already summoning them, still, either their bodies must have already died in order to have already risen — in which case how are they still breathing? — or they have already been carried off among the clouds — in which case how are they still standing here among us? [8] Truly the most pitiable of men, as the apostle declares, are those who have hope only in this life — for by grasping ahead of time they cut themselves off, seizing now what is promised only after this life, and are cheated of the truth no less than Phygelus and Hermogenes were. [9] And so the majesty of the Holy Spirit, keen-sighted about exactly this kind of thinking, adds in that same letter to the Thessalonians: "Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, there is no need to write to you: [10] for you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night: [11] when they are saying 'Peace' and 'All is safe,' then sudden destruction will fall upon them." [12] And in the second letter, with fuller concern, to the same church: "Now we ask you, brothers, in view of our Lord Jesus Christ's arrival and our being gathered together to him, [13] that you not be quickly shaken in mind, nor be troubled, whether by a spirit, or by a word" — meaning of false prophets — "or by a letter" — meaning of false apostles — "as though from us, alleging that the day of the Lord is already at hand: [14] let no one deceive you in any way, for it will not come unless the falling away comes first" — the falling away, that is, from this present empire — "and the man of lawlessness is revealed" — that is, the antichrist — "the son of destruction, [15] who sets himself against and lifts himself over everything termed divine or an object of reverence, so that he enthrones himself within God's temple, proclaiming himself God: [16] do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? [17] And now you know what restrains him, so that he may be revealed in his own time: [18] for the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only let him who now restrains it go on restraining it, until he is taken out of the way" — and who is that, but the Roman state, whose breaking-up, scattered into ten kings, will bring on the antichrist? — [19] "and then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will slay with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the mere appearance of his coming: [20] whose arrival follows Satan's own operation, with every kind of force, and wonders, and deceptive marvels, and with all wickedness's trickery, for those headed toward ruin."

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 25 ========

[1] In John's Revelation, too, an order of times is laid out — the very order that the martyred souls, crying beneath that altar for retribution and judgment, have come to endure: that first the world must drain the plagues from the angels' bowls, and that prostituted city must receive from the ten kings the fate it deserves, and the beast antichrist, with his false prophet, must wage war against the church, [2] and only then, once the devil has meanwhile been bound in the abyss, is the privilege of the first resurrection ordered from thrones — and only after that, once fire has been sent, is the reckoning of the universal resurrection made from the books. [3] Since, then, the scriptures mark out the very order of these last times, and place the whole harvest of the Christian hope at the world's exodus, it is plain either that everything promised us by God is fulfilled then, and that what the heretics now claim for the present is empty — or, if the recognition of the mystery is itself the resurrection, then that resurrection which is preached for the very last day is surely safe and certain too: [4] and it follows that, precisely because this spiritual resurrection is claimed there, the bodily one is thereby made the more certain: because if no bodily resurrection were then to be announced, this spiritual one alone, and only this one, would rightly be claimed — but since a bodily one is proclaimed for that final time, that shows that no spiritual one is announced then. [5] For why would a resurrection of the same kind, the spiritual, be announced again, when it would befit it either to be settled now, with no distinction of times at all, or else there, under the seal that closes all times? [6] So it suits us all the better to defend the spiritual resurrection as beginning from the entry of faith — we who recognize its fullness only at the world's exit.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 26 ========

[1] I will make one further reply to the earlier objection about the allegorical scriptures — that we too may claim the bodily resurrection on the strength of that same figurative prophetic speech. [2] For see: the divine sentence, in the very beginning, pronouncing man "earth" — "Earth you are, and to earth you shall go" — referring, of course, to the substance of the flesh, which was taken from the earth, and which the first man, as we have shown, was named after — gives me a rule for interpreting "flesh" wherever "earth" appears, whenever God decrees wrath or grace upon the earth; for the earth is not, strictly speaking, itself liable to his judgment, having done nothing good or bad — cursed, indeed, for having drunk blood, but even that as a figure of the murderer's flesh. [3] For if the earth is capable of being helped or harmed, that too is for man's sake, so that he may be helped or harmed through the outcome of his own court, and weigh all the more what the earth too will suffer on his account. [4] And so, when God threatens the earth, I would rather say he is threatening the flesh, and when he promises something to the earth, I understand him rather to be promising it to the flesh — as in David: "The Lord has reigned, let the earth rejoice" — that is, the flesh of the saints, to which belongs the fruit of the divine kingdom: [5] then he adds, "He looked, and the earth was shaken, the mountains melted like wax before the face of the Lord" — the flesh, that is, of the profane — "for they shall see him whom they pierced." [6] And indeed, if both sayings were to be reckoned simply of the element earth, how would it fit for it both to be shaken and to melt before the face of the Lord, under whose reign, just above, it was rejoicing? [7] So too in Isaiah: "You shall eat the good things of the earth" — meant as the good things of the flesh, which await it, reformed and made angelic in the kingdom of God, and destined to attain "what eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man." [8] Otherwise it would be a rather hollow enticement for God to solicit compliance through crops from the ground and the provisions of this current life — things he shares in common, by the single ordinance of creation, even with the irreligious and the blasphemous, raining on the just and the unjust and making his sun rise on the good and the evil. [9] A fine faith, to be sure, if the thing to be won is something God's and Christ's very foes not merely relish but pervert — worshipping the very creation against its Creator! Will you count bulbs and truffles among the good things of the earth, when the Lord himself declares that man shall not live by bread alone? [10] So it is that the Jews, by hoping for earthly things only, lose the heavenly — not knowing the bread promised from heaven, and the oil of the divine anointing, and the water of the Spirit, and the wine that stirs the soul from the vine that is Christ: [11] just as they reckon that holy land itself to be, strictly, Jewish soil — when it ought rather to be understood as the flesh of the Lord, which, from him and in all who have put on Christ, is a holy land — truly holy through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, truly flowing with milk and honey through the sweetness of its own hope, truly Judaea through its intimacy with God: "For the true Jew is not the man who appears so on the surface, but rather the one who is such inwardly, unseen": [12] so that the temple of God is this same thing, and so is Jerusalem, hearing from Isaiah, "Awake, awake, Jerusalem, put on the strength of your arm, awake as at the beginning of the day" — that is, in that wholeness it had before the sin of transgression. [13] For to which Jerusalem could words of such exhortation and summons apply, but to one that killed the prophets and stoned those sent to her, and finally did away with her own Lord? But no, salvation is not promised to any earth at all, since every earth, along with the whole fabric of the world, is destined to pass away. [14] Even if someone should be bold enough to argue that the holy land is really paradise, since it is called that of the fathers — of Adam and Eve, that is — then a restoration to paradise would seem promised to the flesh as well, since it was the flesh that was allotted to dwell there and keep it, so that man might be called back to it just as he was when he was driven out of it.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 27 ========

[1] We have too, in the scriptures, a mention of garments that we may allegorize toward the hope of the flesh, since the Apocalypse of John says, "These are they who have not defiled their garments with women" — meaning, of course, virgins, and those who have castrated themselves for the kingdom of heaven. [2] So they shall be in white robes, that is, in the brightness of unwedded flesh. And in the gospel the wedding garment can be recognized as the holiness of the flesh. [3] So too Isaiah, teaching what fast the Lord has chosen, adds concerning the reward of goodness: "Then your light shall break forth early, and your garments shall rise quickly" — meaning, surely, not a silk gown or a cloak but flesh, he foretold the rising of the flesh that is to be resurrected out of the setting of death. [4] Well then, we too have an allegorical defense of bodily resurrection ready to hand. For when we read, "My people, go into your storerooms for a little while, until my wrath pass by," the storerooms will be tombs, in which those who at the end of the age fall under the last wrath by the violence of antichrist will have to rest a little while. [5] Or why did he use the word "storerooms" rather than the name of any other receiving-place, unless because in storerooms salted flesh is kept laid up for use, to be brought out from there in its own time? For in just the same way bodies dosed with the seasonings of burial are set apart in mausoleums and monuments, to come forth from there when the Lord gives the order. [6] And that this is the fitting way to understand it — for what refuges will save us from the wrath of God except these? — is shown by this very phrase, "until the wrath pass by" — the wrath which will destroy antichrist — he shows that after the wrath the flesh will come forth from the tomb into which it had been carried before the wrath: for nothing else is brought out of storerooms than what was put into them, and after the uprooting of antichrist the resurrection will be set in motion.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 28 ========

[1] We know, moreover, that prophecy comes as much through deeds as through words: the resurrection is preached as much by what is said as by what is done. When Moses thrusts his hand inside the fold of his garment and pulls it forth dead, then tucks it back and reveals it living once more, does this not signify something concerning the whole of man? [2] For a threefold power of God was marked out by those three signs in their order: first, that it would subdue the devil — the serpent — however terrifying he might be, to man; then, that it would recall the flesh out from death's embrace; and so, that it would finally exact a reckoning for all blood. [3] Of which, through the same prophet: "For your blood too," says God, "will I require of all the beasts, and of the hand of man and of the hand of his brother will I require it." [4] Now nothing is required except what is demanded back, nothing is demanded back except what will also be restored, and certainly what is demanded and required under the name of vengeance will be restored. For nothing can be avenged that has utterly ceased to exist; but it will exist again once it is restored, so that it may be avenged. So whatever is proclaimed in terms of blood points straight to the flesh, without which there is no blood. The flesh will be raised, so that the blood may be avenged. [5] There are also certain sayings pronounced in such a way that, while they lack the cloud of allegory, they still thirst for an interpretation of their own plain sense — such as this from Isaiah: "I put to death, and I bring to life." Surely after he has put to death he brings to life: so by death he slays, and by resurrection he restores to life. [6] Now it is the flesh that is killed by death: so it is the flesh, too, that will be made alive by resurrection. [7] Certainly, if to kill is, for the flesh, to have the soul torn away, then to make alive — its opposite — is to give the soul back to the flesh; the flesh must rise, since it is to it that the soul, torn away by the killing, must be restored by the making alive.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 29 ========

[1] If, then, both allegorical scriptures and the logic of things and plain statements shed light on the resurrection of the flesh, even without naming that substance outright, how much more must those texts not be called into question which fix this hope upon the actual bodily substances by explicit mention? [2] Take Ezekiel: "A hand of the Lord," so he tells it, "fell upon me, and by the Spirit the Lord bore me out and set me down amid a valley thick with bones. [3] And he took me around them on every side, and see, there was a great multitude across the face of the valley, and see, they were utterly parched. And he asked me, Son of man, can these dry bones come to life? [4] And I answered, Lord God, you alone know. [5] And he told me, Prophesy concerning these bones and declare: Withered bones, listen to the word of the Lord: [6] so speaks the Lord God to these bones — see, I am sending breath into you and life will return, [7] and sinews I will lay upon you and flesh I will restore to you and skin I will draw over you and breath I will give you, and you shall live and recognize that I am the Lord. [8] And I spoke the prophecy just as I was told, and see, as I prophesied there came a sound, and see, a rattling, and the bones drew together, each bone to its bone: [9] and I watched, and see, sinews and flesh rose upon the bones, and skin covered them over above, yet no breath was in them still. [10] And he told me, Prophesy to the breath, son of man; prophesy, and tell the breath: Thus speaks the Lord God — approach from the four winds, O breath, and blow upon these who were slain, so life returns to them. [11] And I prophesied to the breath just as he directed me, and the breath came into them, and life returned, and they rose upright on their feet, a vast and mighty army. [12] And he told me, Son of man, this multitude of bones stands for the entire household of Israel; they themselves declare: Our bones have withered and our hope is gone, we are utterly severed. [13] So prophesy to them: See, I am throwing open your tombs and drawing you up from your tombs, my people, and guiding you into Israel's land, [14] and you shall recognize that I am the Lord once I have thrown open your tombs and drawn you up from your tombs, my people, [15] and my breath I will give you and you shall live, and I will plant you in a land of your own, and you shall recognize that I, the Lord, have both spoken and accomplished it, declares the Lord.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 30 ========

[1] I know how they try to shake this prophecy too into an allegorical argument, on the grounds that, by declaring "this multitude of bones stands for the entire household of Israel," he has turned them into a figure of Israel and lifted them out of their own literal condition, so that the preaching of the resurrection becomes figurative rather than real: for, so they claim, the condition of the Jewish nation is here somehow being pictured as lifeless, withered, and strewn across the world's expanse; [2] and so the image of rising again is being applied to that national condition as an allegory, since it is to be drawn back together and bone rejoined to bone — that is, clan matched to clan and kin to kin — and re-embodied with the flesh of resources and the sinews of a kingdom, and so drawn out of tombs, that is, out of the most miserable and squalid quarters of captivity, and made to breathe again under the label of relief, living thereafter once more in its native land of Judea. And after that, what? [3] Death, no doubt, awaits them. And after death, what then? No rising again, I should suppose, unless this very passage revealed to Ezekiel supplies it. Yet resurrection is proclaimed elsewhere too: so this same rising will come to pass, however rashly they twist the text to confine it to the fortunes of Jewish affairs alone — or, should the resurrection we are defending prove to be a different one, that matters nothing to me, so long as bodies rise again just as Jewish fortunes are said to. [4] Finally, by the very fact that the revival of Jewish standing is pictured in terms of the re-embodying and re-animating of bones, this itself proves that the same thing will happen to bones: for no figure could be built out of bones unless that very thing were going to happen to bones. [5] For even if the fiction lies in the image's likeness to the truth, the image itself is true to its own nature: a thing must first be true of itself before it can be made a figure for something else. A likeness cannot be drawn from an empty thing; a parable cannot fit something that is nothing. [6] So it must be believed that a revivifying and rebreathing of bones — of the very kind spoken of — will indeed occur, one from which the reshaping of Jewish fortunes, as pictured, could be expressed. [7] But it is more devout that the truth be defended on its own authority and plain sense, as the meaning of the divine statement demands. For if this vision had regard to Jewish affairs, he would have added at once, upon revealing the state of the bones, "this multitude of bones stands for the entire household of Israel," and so forth. [8] But instead, once the bones are shown, he first speaks about their own hope before Israel is even named, and tests the prophet's faith: "Son of man, can these dry bones come to life?" — so that he too might answer, "Lord, you alone know." God would surely not have tested the prophet's faith about a matter that was not going to happen, that Israel would never have heard of, that ought not to be believed. [9] But since the resurrection of the dead was indeed being proclaimed, and Israel, distrustful through its unbelief, was scandalized, and, looking at the aspect of an aging burial-ground, despaired of resurrection — or rather did not fix its mind on that at all but on its own circumstances — for that reason God, by revealing the order of the resurrection, first built up the prophet himself, who shared that doubt, into steadfast conviction, and then bid the multitude give credence to what had been disclosed to that prophet, declaring that they themselves were the very bones that were to rise, they who did not believe they would rise. [10] Finally, in the closing words, "And you shall know," he says, "that I the Lord have spoken and have done it" — meaning, surely, that he was going to do exactly what he had said, for he would not be doing what he said if he were going to do it otherwise than he said.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 31 ========

[1] Plainly, if the people were only allegorically muttering about their bones dried up and their hope lost, complaining of the outcome of their dispersal, it might reasonably seem that God consoled a figurative despair with a figurative promise. [2] But since the injury of dispersal had not yet befallen the people at that time, while the hope of resurrection had very often collapsed among them, it is plain that he is shoring up confidence in the resurrection that was faltering because of the destruction of bodies: so God was rebuilding the very faith the people were tearing down. [3] And even if Israel was at that time grieving over some conflict in present affairs, that is no reason to take the intent of the revelation as a parable rather than as testimony to the resurrection, meant to lift them up into that hope — namely, of eternal salvation and of a restoration far more necessary than the other — and to turn them away from looking at present circumstances. [4] To this end the prophet says elsewhere, "You shall go out" — from your graves — "like calves loosed from their bonds, and you shall trample your enemies"; and again, "Your heart shall rejoice, and your bones shall spring up like grass" — since grass too is re-formed out of the dissolution and decay of seed. [5] In short, if the image of the rising bones is claimed to apply strictly to the condition of Israel, why is that same expectation proclaimed not to Israel by itself but indeed to every nation — the expectation of remains re-embodied and re-animated and of the dead roused up out of their graves? [6] For it is said of all: "The dead shall live and shall rise from their graves: for the dew that comes from you is healing for their bones." [7] So too elsewhere: "Before me shall every kind of flesh come to bow down, declares the Lord." At what point? Once this world's present order has begun passing away — [8] for earlier he had said, "Just as the new heaven and new earth I am fashioning shall endure before me, declares the Lord, so shall your offspring endure." [9] Then, therefore, what follows will also be fulfilled: "And they shall go out" — from their graves, surely — "and shall see the corpses of those who acted impiously, for their worm shall not die and their fire shall not be quenched, and it shall be a spectacle to all flesh" — namely, the flesh that, raised and come forth out of its graves, will worship the Lord for this grace.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 32 ========

[1] But lest the resurrection be thought to be preached only of those bodies committed to tombs, you have it written: "And I will command the fish of the sea, and they shall vomit up the bones that have been eaten, and I will make joint fit joint and bone fit bone." [2] "So," you say, "the fish too will be raised, and the other beasts and the flesh-eating birds, that they may bring back up those they devoured -- since even in Moses you read that blood is to be required of every beast?" Not at all: rather, beasts and fish are named in this restitution of flesh and blood precisely to make the point more forcefully -- that even devoured bodies will rise, since a reckoning is demanded even from the devourers themselves. [3] And I think Jonah furnishes an apt proof of this same divine power, when he is disgorged uncorrupted, both flesh and soul, from the belly of the sea-beast -- and surely three days would have sufficed the whale's insides to digest that flesh, more readily than a coffin, a tomb, or the slow decay of any burial laid to rest. [4] Never mind that the beast also pictured, in savage men, those who rage most fiercely against the Christian name -- or even the angels of iniquity themselves -- from whom blood will be exacted in requital owed. [5] Who, then, is more fit to learn than to presume, more careful to believe than to argue, more devoted to divine wisdom than indulgent of his own -- when hearing something appointed by God for flesh and skin and sinew and bone, and yet dreams up some other meaning, as though what is proclaimed for these substances were not meant for man? For either nothing at all is destined for man -- not the largess of the kingdom, not the severity of judgment, not whatever the resurrection is -- or, if it is destined for man, it must necessarily be destined for those very substances out of which the man to whom it is destined is built. And this too I ask of those most subtle re-molders of bones and flesh and sinews and tombs: why is it that whenever something is pronounced of the soul, they interpret it as nothing but the soul and do not twist it into a figure for something else, while whenever something is stated about some bodily form, they insist it means anything rather than what it names? [6] If bodily things are parables, then so are things of the soul; if things of the soul are not, then neither are bodily things. For man is as much body as soul, so that one kind cannot be allowed riddles while the other is barred from them.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 33 ========

[1] Enough on the prophetic instrument. Now I turn to the evangelical, and here too I must first meet the same cleverness of those who likewise contend that the Lord spoke everything in parables, on the ground that it stands written, "All these matters Jesus uttered in parables, and apart from a parable he addressed them not at all" -- meaning the Jews. [2] For the disciples likewise inquire, "Why do you address them by way of parables?" and the Lord replies, "For this cause I use parables toward them, so that looking they should fail to perceive, and listening they should fail to grasp, just as Isaiah foretold." [3] But if parables were the mode he used toward the Jewish nation, then it was not toward every hearer; and if not toward every hearer through parables, then not on every occasion, nor is every utterance a parable -- rather, certain matters at certain moments, addressed to certain people, and above all to the Jewish nation; whereas on other occasions, evidently, he spoke so also to his own disciples. [4] But consider how Scripture reports it: "And he told them also a parable." So he also spoke without a parable -- for it would not have been noted that he was speaking a parable, if he always spoke that way. [5] Indeed you will find not a single parable that is not either expounded by the Lord himself, as with the sower in the administration of the word, or illuminated beforehand by the evangelist's comment, as with the proud judge and the widow who persists in prayer, or reasoned out further, as with the fig tree given a reprieve in the hope of a harvest, on the pattern of Jewish barrenness. [6] But if not even the parables cloud the light of the gospel, how much less do the plain statements and definitions -- whose nature is open -- mean something other than what they say. And it is by definitions and plain statements that the Lord pronounces on judgment, or the kingdom of God, or the resurrection. [7] "More endurable will it go," he declares, "for Tyre and for Sidon at the judgment-day"; and, "Announce to them that God's reign has come near"; and, "Recompense shall be yours when the righteous rise again." [8] If the very names of these matters -- judgment, that is, God's reign, and rising again -- stand as fixed realities, so that none of them can be squeezed into a parable, then neither will those things be forced into parables which are proclaimed concerning the arrangement, the transaction, and the passing-away of the Jewish kingdom, and the resurrection; and so bodily things will be defended as meant for bodies -- that is, not spiritual, because not figured. [9] For this very reason we established beforehand that the body is as much bound to rewards for their common labor as the soul is, lest the soul's bodily quality, by supplying an occasion for figures, exclude the bodily quality of the flesh, since both must be believed to share in the kingdom, the judgment, and the resurrection alike. [10] And now we proceed to this end: to show properly that fleshly corporeality is what the Lord means in every mention of resurrection, while granting the soul's own resurrection too, though few have accepted even that.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 34 ========

[1] To begin with, when he says he has come for this, that he might save what was lost, what do you say was lost? Man, without doubt. Wholly, or in part? Wholly, of course, since the transgression -- which is the cause of man's ruin -- was committed as much by the soul's prompting through desire as by the flesh's act through tasting, and so it wrote the whole man into the indictment of transgression, and thereby rightly filled him up with ruin. [2] Wholly, then, will he be saved who was wholly ruined by sinning -- unless that sheep too is lost without a body and called back without a body. For if its flesh as well as its soul -- which is the whole animal -- gets borne home upon the herdsman's own shoulders, then this is surely an example of man's restoration in both substances at once. [3] Or how unworthy of God, to reduce half a man to salvation -- to do practically less than a man would do, when even among worldly rulers full pardon is always the mark of clemency! Will the devil be reckoned mightier in his wrong against man, crushing him whole, while God is proclaimed weaker, not raising him whole? And yet the apostle himself suggests that where sin abounded, grace abounded still more. [4] How, in the end, will he be held saved who could also be called lost? Lost in the flesh, saved in the soul, you say -- except that the soul too must then be reckoned among the lost, if it is to be capable of being made saved: for what will need to be made saved is precisely what was lost. [5] Further: either we grant the soul's immortality, so that when lost it is believed not to perish but to be punished -- that is, sent to Gehenna -- and if so, then salvation will no longer look to the soul, which is saved of its own nature by its immortality, but rather to the flesh, which everyone agrees is capable of perishing; [6] or, if the soul too is perishable, that is, not immortal, as the flesh is, then that same form of salvation will have to apply equally to the flesh, which is likewise mortal and perishable, insofar as it is what the Lord will save when it perishes. [7] I do not wish now to drag the matter back and forth on a contentious rope, over which substance ruin properly claims -- since salvation, on either side, marks the man out in both substances equally. For look: from whichever substance you presume man to have perished, he has not perished from the other; he will therefore be saved already in respect of the one from which he did not perish, and he will nonetheless be made saved in respect of the one from which he did perish. [8] There you have the restoration of the whole man, since the Lord will save whatever of him is lost, and whatever of him is not lost he certainly will not let be lost. [9] Why then do you still doubt the security of both substances, when the one is bound to attain salvation and the other is not bound to lose it? And yet the Lord still further spells out the sense of the matter, saying, "I have descended not to enact my own wish but the wish of him who dispatched me, the Father." What wish is that, I ask? "That of everything he has entrusted to me, I should let nothing slip away, but bring it back to life on the final day." [10] What had Christ received from the Father except what he had also put on? Man, without doubt -- the fabric of flesh and soul together. Neither of these, then, which he received, will he suffer to perish -- indeed not any part of either, indeed not the smallest part; for if the flesh is a small part, then he will lose no flesh either, because it is no small part -- nothing at all, because it is nothing at all. But if he will not also raise the flesh on the last day, then it is no small part of man he will suffer to perish, but I would say almost the whole, for so great a share it is. [11] Pressing further, "This is the Father's will, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should possess life everlasting, and I myself will bring him back to life on the final day" -- he rounds out the complete measure of rising again: for he apportions to each element, through its own function, its fitting reward of salvation -- to the flesh, through which the Son was looked upon, and to the soul, through which he was believed in. [12] "So," you say, "the promise belongs to those by whom Christ was actually seen." Let it be exactly so -- for the same hope has flowed from that to us as well: since if the works of flesh and soul were then fruitful for those who saw and therefore believed, how much more for us! For more blessed indeed are those who never saw and nevertheless trust -- and even if the resurrection of the flesh had been denied to those who saw, it would certainly still belong to us who are more blessed. For how could they be blessed if in part doomed to perish?

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 35 ========

[1] But he also bids us fear rather the one who can destroy both body and soul in Gehenna -- that is, the Lord alone -- and not those who can kill the body but have no power to harm the soul -- that is, human authorities. [2] By this we recognize both that the soul is of an immortal nature, incapable of being killed by men, and that the flesh is what is mortal, capable of being killed; and thus the resurrection of the dead too belongs to the flesh, which cannot be destroyed in Gehenna unless it has first been raised. [3] But since here too some quibble is raised over how "body" is to be interpreted, I for my part will understand the human body as nothing other than this whole mass of flesh, however it is composed and varied by whatever kind of materials -- what is seen, what is touched, what men, in the end, are able to kill. [4] So too I will admit no other "body" of a wall than mortar, stones, bricks. If anyone brings in some mysterious hidden body, let him show it, reveal it, prove that it too is a thing that can be killed by man -- and then the statement will apply to it. [5] Likewise, if a "body" is set up in opposition to the soul, the cleverness collapses of itself: for when both are put forward -- body and soul -- as being destroyed in Gehenna, the body is thereby distinguished from the soul, and we are left to understand by "body" what lies plainly at hand, namely the flesh -- which will indeed be destroyed in Gehenna if it has feared to be destroyed by God too little, and will likewise be brought to life into eternal life if it has chosen rather to be killed by men. [6] Accordingly, if anyone seizes on the destruction of body and soul in Gehenna as meaning the ruin and ending of both substances rather than their punishment -- as though they were to be consumed rather than punished -- let him recall that the fire of Gehenna is proclaimed eternal, for eternal punishment, and that the eternity of this human destruction is spoken of precisely so that it should be feared the more because it is not merely temporal. [7] In that case he will also have to believe the substances eternal, whose destruction in punishment is itself eternal. Certainly, since after the resurrection the body along with the soul is to be destroyed by God in Gehenna, this settles both points sufficiently -- both the resurrection of the flesh and the eternal destruction. [8] It would otherwise be utterly absurd, if the flesh, once raised, were destroyed in Gehenna merely in order to be ended -- which it would have suffered just the same without being raised at all: refashioned, that is to say, for the sole purpose of not existing, when not existing was already its lot. [9] To bolster this same hope for us he adds also the example of the sparrows, that not a single one of the pair drops earthward apart from God's own decree -- so that you may trust that the flesh as well, once it has dropped to the earth, can in the same way rise once more by the decree of that identical God. [10] For even if this is not granted to sparrows, yet we surpass many sparrows in this: that, having fallen, we rise again -- and indeed, affirming that the very hairs of our heads are all numbered, he thereby promises that they too will assuredly be kept safe. [11] For what reckoning would have counted things doomed to perish? Unless this is the very meaning of "that of all the Father has given me I should lose nothing" -- not a hair, any more than an eye or a tooth. [12] Besides, where will the weeping and gnashing of teeth come from, if not from eyes and from teeth -- the body, that is, having likewise been destroyed in Gehenna and thrust down into outer darkness, which are torments proper to the eyes? -- and if anyone at the wedding is found clothed in works too unworthy, he is at once to be bound hand and foot, as one who will rise again with a body. [13] So too, taking one's place at table within God's reign, and being seated upon the twelve seats of judgment, and standing thereafter at his right or his left, and partaking of the tree that gives life, are the surest tokens of a bodily arrangement.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 36 ========

[1] Let us see now whether, in demolishing the cunning of the Sadducees, he did not rather raise up our own position all the more firmly. The occasion for the question, I think, was an attempt to destroy the resurrection, since the Sadducees admit no salvation either for the soul or for the flesh; and so, from the very point at which faith in the resurrection is most shaken, they framed their argument to fit their problem — that is, from the pretext of the flesh, whether it marries or not after the resurrection, under the guise of that woman who, having been married to seven brothers, was left in doubt as to which of them she would be restored. [2] Now let the meaning of both the question and the answer be kept intact, and the controversy is met head-on. For if the Sadducees indeed rejected the resurrection, while the Lord affirmed it — rebuking them as ignorant of the scriptures, namely those that had proclaimed the resurrection, and as unbelievers in the power of God, which is certainly equal to raising the dead — [3] and then, adding at the end, But that the dead rise, without doubt both confirming that what was denied does exist, that is, the resurrection of the dead before the God of the living, and affirming it to be of the very kind that was denied — that is, of both human substances together. [4] For it does not follow that, because he denied they would then marry, he thereby showed they would not rise: quite the contrary, he called them children of the resurrection, as being in a manner born through it, after which they will not marry but, being raised, [5] will be like the angels — not in the sense that they will not marry because they will not die, but in the sense that they will pass over into the angelic state, through that garment of incorruptibility, by a transformation of substance, though the substance itself has been raised. [6] Besides, the question of marrying or dying would never have been raised at all, were it not that the restoration of that very substance was being called into doubt which is properly subject to both death and marriage — that is, the flesh. [7] So there you have the Lord, against the heretics of the Jews, confirming the very thing that is now denied among the Sadducees of the Christians: the resurrection whole and solid.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 37 ========

[1] So too, if he says the flesh profits nothing, the sense must be steered by the subject matter of the saying. For because they had judged his words harsh and unbearable — as though he had truly determined that they should eat his own flesh — and in order to redirect their thinking toward the spiritual condition of salvation, he prefaced it with, It is the spirit that gives life, and only then added, The flesh profits nothing — profits nothing, that is, toward giving life. [2] He goes on to spell out what he wants understood by spirit: The words that I have spoken to you are spirit, they are life — just as above, He who hears my words and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and will not come into judgment but will pass from death into life. [3] So then, having established the word as the life-giver — since word is spirit and life — he then also called his own flesh word, because the Word was made flesh; and so it too is to be sought after for the sake of life, to be devoured by hearing, chewed over by understanding, and digested by faith. [4] Indeed, a little before this he had pronounced his own flesh also the bread from heaven, pressing home throughout, by way of allegory, the memory of the necessary food of the fathers, who had preferred the loaves and meats of Egypt over the divine calling. [5] So then, turning to reconsider their reactions, since he had perceived they were about to scatter, he says, The flesh profits nothing. What has that to do with destroying the resurrection of the flesh? As if it were not possible for a thing which, though it profits nothing of itself, might still be profitable to something else. The spirit profits, for it gives life; the flesh profits nothing, for it is put to death. [6] And so he has, if anything, arranged the two statements more in our favor. For in showing what profits and what does not, he equally illuminated what profits what — namely, that the spirit profits the flesh, being the life-giver of that which is put to death. [7] For, he says, a moment approaches in which those now dead will catch the sound of God's Son, and, having caught it, will live. What is dead, if not the flesh? And that sound of God — what else is it but the word? And the word — what else but spirit — fittingly destined to raise up the flesh, since he himself became that very flesh, and from the death he himself suffered, and from the tomb into which he himself was laid? [8] Finally, when he says, Do not be astonished that a moment is approaching in which every one lodged within the tombs will catch that same sound of God's Son and step forth — those whose deeds were good, unto life's resurrection; those whose deeds were wicked, unto the resurrection of condemnation — no one can any longer interpret the dead who are in the tombs as anything but bodies and flesh, since the tombs themselves are nothing but stalls for corpses. [9] Since indeed those very old men — that is, the sinners, that is, the dead through ignorance of God, whom the heretics argue are to be understood as the tombs — are openly proclaimed as about to come forth from tombs to judgment. [10] But how, in that case, could tombs come forth from tombs?

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 38 ========

[1] Once we have the Lord's own words, what must we suppose his deeds signify as well — those raisings of the dead from biers, from tombs? What was the point of it? If it was for the mere display of power, or for the immediate benefit of restoring them to life, it was not, after all, so very great a thing that they should have to die all over again. [2] But if it was rather to secure faith in the future resurrection, then that bodily resurrection too is laid down as the pattern from the very form of its own proof. [3] And I will not put up with those who say that the resurrection then was destined for the soul alone, and only ran its course in the flesh as well because the resurrection of the invisible soul could not otherwise be demonstrated except through the raising up of a visible substance. [4] Those who do not believe God can do what they do not believe he can, know him badly. And yet they know he could have — if they know the record of John: for he who displayed to view the souls of the martyrs alone, still resting beneath the altar, could certainly also have shown them to the eyes as risen, without flesh. [5] But I prefer to think God incapable of deceiving — weak only in the matter of trickery — lest it seem that he set forth his proofs otherwise than he had arranged the actual event; or rather, lest, if the example of resurrection failed to be persuasive without flesh, all the more he should be unable to display the fullness of the example without that same substance. [6] Yet no illustration ever outweighs the very reality it stands for. But it would be greater if souls were to be raised along with bodies as proof of a rising without body, so that the whole salvation of man might be made to answer for half of it — when the very nature of examples would demand rather the lesser thing, that is, I mean, the resurrection of the soul alone, as a mere foretaste of the flesh that is also to rise in its own time. [7] And so, according to our own truth, those examples of the dead raised up by the Lord commended both the resurrection of the flesh and of the soul, lest this gift be denied to either substance. Yet as examples they demonstrated all the less: for they were not raised into glory nor into incorruptibility, but into another death.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 39 ========

[1] That Christ delivered this resurrection the apostolic writings also bear witness: for the apostles, at least among Israel, had no other business than to unseal the old testament, to seal the new, and, rather, now to proclaim God in Christ. [2] So on the resurrection too they brought forward nothing new, except that they announced this very resurrection as bound up with the glory of Christ, receiving it otherwise as a plain matter already familiar to the faith, without any question as to its nature — the only ones contesting it being the Sadducees; so much easier was it found to deny the resurrection of the dead outright than to understand it differently. [3] You have Paul, before the high priests, under the tribune, among Sadducees and Pharisees, professing his faith: Men, brothers, he says, I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees; it is concerning hope, and concerning the resurrection, that I am on trial before you — a resurrection shared in common, no doubt, lest, since he already appeared a transgressor of the law, he should be thought, on the chief article of the whole faith, that is, on the resurrection, to side with the Sadducees. Thus, by not wishing to seem to be undoing faith in the resurrection, he was in fact confirming it, siding with the Pharisees and repudiating the Sadducees who denied it. [4] Likewise before Agrippa he says he offers nothing beyond what the prophets had announced. So he was upholding the resurrection too, of just the kind the prophets had announced. [5] For also, in recalling what was written in Moses concerning the resurrection of the dead, he knew it to be a bodily one, in which, namely, a man's blood will be required back. [6] So then he was preaching a resurrection of the very kind that the Pharisees had accepted, and the Lord himself had defended, and the Sadducees — precisely so as not to believe in that kind either — had refused to admit at all. [7] Nor did the Athenians understand anything different from what Paul was proclaiming: indeed, they laughed him to scorn — and they would not have laughed at all had they heard from him only a restoration of the soul; for a mere renewal of the soul is exactly what they would have embraced, since it only confirmed their own native philosophy. [8] But once the nations were shaken by the very novelty of this unheard-of proclamation of resurrection, and a fitting incredulity began to twist faith in so great a matter into questions, then the apostle, through practically the whole of his writings, took care to strengthen faith in this hope — showing both that it exists and that it has not yet taken place, and — what was more in question — that it is bodily, and — what was doubted still further — bodily in no other sense than this.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 40 ========

[1] It is no wonder if arguments are also snatched from the apostle's own writings, since heresies have to exist — and they could not exist unless the scriptures could also be wrongly understood. [2] So heresies, having got hold of the two men that the apostle set forth, the inner, that is, the soul, and the outer, that is, the flesh, have assigned salvation to the soul, that is, to the inner man, but ruin to the flesh, that is, to the outer — because it is written to the Corinthians, For though our outer man is being decayed, yet the inner is being renewed day by day. [3] But then, the soul by itself is not the man — it was inserted afterward into the thing already fashioned and already called man — nor is flesh without soul the man, for after the soul's exile it is written off as a corpse. So the word man is, in a manner, the pin joining two substances knit together, and under that name they cannot exist except cohering with each other. [4] Further, the apostle prefers the inner man to be understood not so much as the soul, but as the mind and disposition — that is, not the substance itself but the flavor of the substance — since, writing to the Ephesians about Christ dwelling in the inner man, he plainly means the Lord to be brought home to the senses. [5] Finally he adds, Through faith, and In your hearts, and In love — placing faith and love, not as substantial properties of the soul, but as things conceived within it; while by saying In your hearts — hearts being a substantial property of the flesh — he has already assigned this very inner man to the flesh, since he locates him in the heart. [6] Now observe how he speaks of the outer man being decayed, but the inner being renewed day by day — not so that you should take this as that decay of the flesh which, from the day of death onward, it suffers to its everlasting undoing, but rather the decay it undergoes, within the span of this present life, before death, through the vexations and pressures, the torments and punishments, endured for the sake of the Name. [7] For this inner man too will certainly have to be renewed here — advancing by faith and discipline, day by day, through the prompting of the spirit — not there, that is, not after the resurrection, where he will certainly not need renewing day by day but once, all at once, in full. [8] Learn this from what follows: For our present light and momentary affliction, he says, works for us, through excess upon excess, an eternal weight of glory — we not looking at the things that are seen — that is, the sufferings — but at the things that are not seen — that is, the rewards: for the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal. [9] The pressures and injuries, then, by which the outer man is decayed, he affirms are to be despised precisely as light and temporal, setting the weight of eternal, unseen rewards and of glory against the labors by which the flesh here is worn down through suffering. [10] So then that is not the decay which men assign to the outer man as the everlasting destruction of the flesh, meant to rule out the resurrection. [11] So too elsewhere he says, If indeed we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him: for I count the hardships belonging to this present season as nothing weighed against the glory about to be unveiled in us. And here again he shows the lesser hardships set against their own rewards. [12] Now if it is by way of the flesh that we share his suffering — since it properly belongs to the flesh to be worn down by sufferings — then it will also belong to that same flesh to receive what is promised in return for that shared suffering. And so, assigning to the flesh the very property of these pressures, as also above, he says, For once we had reached Macedonia, our flesh found no rest whatever: [13] and then, so as also to give the soul its share in that suffering, he says, We were pressed on every side — fightings without (that is, battering the flesh), fears within (that is, afflicting the soul). [14] So then, even though the outer man is decayed, this is to be understood not as one losing the resurrection, but as one enduring vexation — and this not without the inner man as well. Thus it will belong to both alike to be glorified together, just as to suffer together: for the fellowship of rewards must run its course to match the partnership of labors.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 41 ========

[1] He is still pursuing the same argument, setting the rewards above the afflictions: For we know, he says, that even if the earthly house of our tent is dissolved, we possess a dwelling not built by hands, everlasting among the heavens: that is, for this flesh of ours which will be dissolved through sufferings, we shall obtain a home in the heavens. [2] He remembered the gospel saying, Blessed are those persecuted on account of justice, since the kingdom of the heavens belongs to them. He did not, however, deny the restitution of the flesh by setting the compensation of reward against it, since the compensation is owed to the very thing to which the dissolution is reckoned — namely, to the flesh. [3] But because he had earlier named the flesh a house, he chose, elegantly, to keep using the word 'house' in the comparison of the reward as well, promising to that very house which will be dissolved through suffering a better house through resurrection. For the Lord too promises many mansions, as it were houses, with the Father. [4] Though this can also be understood of the dwelling of the world, at whose dissolution an eternal seat is promised in the heavens, since what follows, plainly pertaining to the flesh, shows that the earlier words were not about the flesh. [5] For the apostle draws the distinction when he adds, For in this also we groan, longing to be clothed over with our dwelling which is from heaven, since indeed we shall be found not naked even when unclothed: that is, we wish to be clothed over with the heavenly virtue of eternity before we are unclothed of the flesh. [6] For the privilege of this grace awaits those who at the Lord's coming will be caught still in the flesh, and who, on account of the hard times of Antichrist, will earn the right, by a shortcut of death worked through transformation, to run together with those rising, as he writes to the Thessalonians: [7] On this point we tell you, on the Lord's own word, that we the living, surviving until the Lord's arrival, will not go ahead of those already fallen asleep: since the Lord himself will come down from heaven at a shout, with an archangel's voice, and God's trumpet blast: and those dead in Christ will rise first, then we the living will be snatched up along with them into the clouds to meet Christ, and thus we shall be with the Lord forever.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 42 ========

[1] He gives an account of this transformation to the Corinthians, saying: We shall all indeed rise, but we shall not all be changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, at the final trumpet call: only, naturally, those still surviving in the flesh: And the dead, as he puts it, will rise, and we shall be changed. [2] Once this ordering is grasped first, you will refer the rest back to the earlier sense. For when he adds, For this perishable thing must clothe itself with imperishability, and this mortal thing must clothe itself with deathlessness, this will be that dwelling from heaven which, groaning in this flesh, we long to be clothed over with — over the flesh, that is, in which we shall be caught, since he says we who are in this tent are burdened, and we do not wish to be unclothed but rather clothed over, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life — that is, while it is transformed by being clothed over with what is from the heavens. [3] For who, while still in the flesh, will not desire to be clothed over with immortality, and to prolong life, having gained death as profit through a substitute transformation, so as not to experience the underworld which will exact the very last farthing? Yet even after resurrection one who has already experienced the underworld will still undergo transformation. [4] For from this point we have already established that the flesh will rise in every case, and that through the coming transformation it will take on an angelic condition. [5] Or, if it is only in those still found within the flesh that this change must occur so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life — that is, the flesh by that heavenly and eternal overgarment — then those who are found dead will not attain life, having already been deprived of the matter, and, so to speak, of life's nourishment, namely the flesh: or otherwise they too must necessarily receive it back, so that in them too what is mortal can be swallowed up by life, if they are to attain life. [6] But you say: in the dead, this mortal element will already have been swallowed up. Not in all cases, surely: for how many will be found, say, dead only a day, corpses so fresh that nothing in them can be seen to have been swallowed up? [7] For surely you do not suppose 'swallowed up' means anything other than intercepted, abolished, snatched from every sense, ceased to appear in every respect. Nor is it established that the most ancient corpses of the giants have been swallowed up, whose skeletons still survive — we have already spoken of this elsewhere. [8] Moreover, quite recently in this very city, when the foundations of a temple were being laid sacrilegiously over so many old graves, the people shuddered at bones nearly five hundred years old still moist and hair still giving off its smell. It is established that not only bones endure but even teeth remain incorrupt over the ages — kept, as it were, like seeds of the body that will one day bear fruit in the resurrection. [9] Finally, even if the mortal element is found already swallowed up in all the dead, this is certainly by death, certainly by the passage of time, certainly through age — but is it by life, is it by the overgarment, is it by the infusion of immortality? [10] Further, one who says the mortal is swallowed up by these means has denied it is by others: and it will certainly be agreed that this is accomplished and supplied by divine powers, not by the laws of nature. [11] Therefore, since what is mortal must be swallowed up by life, that life must in every way be present for the swallowing to occur, and be swallowed up in order to be transformed: if you say a fire must be kindled, you cannot claim that the thing by which it is kindled is necessary in one place and not in another. [12] So too when he adds, Since indeed we shall be found not naked even when unclothed — speaking, of course, of those who will not be caught in life, in the flesh, on the day of the Lord — he did not deny that those he had foretold as 'unclothed' would be naked except in this sense: he wanted them understood as reclothed with the same substance of which they had been stripped. [13] For they will be found naked in the sense of having laid the flesh aside, or partly torn away or worn down — for this too can be called nakedness — and then they will receive it back, so that being reclothed in flesh they can also be clothed over with immortality: for to be 'clothed over' cannot apply to anyone but one already clothed.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 43 ========

[1] Accordingly, when he says, Therefore, always confident, and knowing that while we sojourn in the body we are exiled from the Lord: for it is by trust that we walk, not by direct vision — it is clear that this too has nothing to do with some dimming of the flesh as though it were separating us from the Lord. [2] For here too it is an exhortation to disdain this life that is being turned to, since we are exiled from the Lord as long as we live, advancing by faith and not by sight, that is, by hope and not by the reality itself. [3] And so he adds, But confident, and counting it better rather to be exiled from the body and to sojourn with the Lord — that is, so that we might advance by sight rather than by faith, by the thing itself rather than by hope. [4] You see how here too he refers contempt of the body to the excellence of martyrdoms: for no one who is exiled from the body immediately sojourns with the Lord except by the special privilege of martyrdom, bound, of course, for paradise, not for the underworld. [5] But had the apostle run short of words for signifying departure from the body, or does he also speak this way for a reason, in a novel sense? Wishing to signify a temporary absence from the body, he said we are exiled from it, since one who is exiled will also return to his dwelling. [6] From there he moves to all alike: We are eager, he says, whether exiled or sojourning, to be pleasing to God: for we must all be laid bare before the tribunal of Christ Jesus. If every one, then whole persons: if every one, then both the inner and the outer, that is, both souls and bodies as well. So that each one, he says, may receive back the things done through the body according to what he has done, whether good or evil. [7] How, I ask, are we to read this passage now? For he has constructed it, as it were confusedly, by a hyperbaton: is it 'the things to be received back through the body,' or 'the things done through the body'? [8] But whether it is 'the things to be received back through the body,' bodily resurrection is beyond doubt; or whether it is 'the things done through the body,' then certainly they are to be weighed through the body by which they were also done. [9] So this whole discussion of the apostle, from its beginning, woven together with such a conclusion by which the resurrection of the flesh is shown, must be understood according to what is consistent with that conclusion.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 44 ========

[1] For if you look back further still to the point where the mention of the outer and inner man was introduced, will you not find the dignity and hope of the flesh intact? [2] For when, speaking of the light which God has made to dawn within our hearts, so as to illuminate the knowledge of his glory as found in the person of Christ, he says we have this treasure in earthen vessels — that is, in the flesh — is it because it is earthen by its origin from clay that it is to be destroyed, or is it exalted because it is the storehouse of a divine treasure? [3] But if that very light of God, the genuine light, that which resides in the person of Christ, holds life within itself, and that life is entrusted along with the light to the flesh, is the thing to which life is entrusted going to perish? Plainly, if it perishes, the treasure itself perishes too: for perishable things are entrusted to what is perishing, as new wine to old wineskins. [4] So too when he adds, Always carrying about the dying of Christ Jesus in our body — what sort of thing is this, which can now be called both the temple of God and the tomb of Christ? [5] But why do we carry about the Lord's dying in our body? So that the life too, he says, may be made manifest. Where? In the body. In what kind of body? In a mortal one. Therefore in the flesh — plainly mortal on account of guilt, but also vital by grace — see how great a life is meant, that in it the life of Christ should be made manifest. [6] Then in an alien matter of salvation, in a substance destined for perpetual dissolution, will the eternal, continuous, incorrupt life of Christ — now even the life of God — be made manifest? Or of what period is the Lord's life that will be made manifest in our body? [7] The life he lived up to his passion was not only made manifest among the Jews, but has now been proclaimed to all the nations as well. Clearly it signifies that life which broke the adamantine gates of death and the bronze bars of the underworld, which is henceforth now ours. [8] Finally, it will be made manifest in the body. When? After death. How? When we rise in the body, just as Christ did. For lest anyone argue that the life of Jesus is already made manifest now in our body through the discipline of holiness and patience and righteousness and prudence, wherein the life of the Lord was manifest, the apostle's most far-sighted intent suggests: [9] For if we who live are handed over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life too may be made manifest in our mortal body — clearly he says this will happen in our body once we are dead. But if then, how, unless he is raised? [10] Accordingly, in the conclusion too, Knowing, he says, that he who raised up Jesus will raise us up also together with him — since he has already risen from the dead — unless 'together with him' means 'just as he himself was raised.' But if indeed just as he himself, then certainly not without flesh.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 45 ========

[1] But again, on yet another blind reading, they run headlong into two men — an old one and a new — because the apostle warns us to strip away the old man, corrupted by deceitful desires, and to be made new in the disposition of our mind, clothing ourselves instead with the new man, fashioned after God in righteousness and genuine holiness — so that here too, splitting man into two substances, they can pin perpetual corruption on the "old" one, meaning the flesh. [2] But if we go by substances, the soul is no more the "new man" for being later, nor is the flesh the "old" for being earlier: for how little time separates the hand of God from the breath he blew into it? [3] I would even dare say that even if the soul is far earlier than the flesh, the very fact that the soul was waiting to be filled makes the flesh the earlier one: for every completion and perfection, even though it comes last in order, is first in effect — that thing is more truly "first" without which the earlier things cannot exist at all. [4] If the flesh is the "old man," at what point did it turn old? Right from the start? Yet Adam was, at that point, wholly new, and nothing brand-new has ever counted as old. And in fact, from the moment of the blessing on procreation onward, flesh and soul come into being together, with no reckoning of time between them, since they are sown together in the womb — as I have shown in my treatise on the soul: [5] they share one conception, one birth. These two men, distinct indeed in substance but not in age, are thus brought forth as a single being, since neither one exists before the other. It is far quicker to say that we are wholly old or wholly new all at once than to explain by what means we could be one without the other. [6] But the apostle plainly identifies what the "old man" is: "Put off," he says, "the old man according to your former manner of life" — not according to the age of some substance. For he does not tell us to put off the flesh, but — as he shows elsewhere too when he calls certain things "fleshly" — he is accusing deeds, not bodies. [7] Of these very deeds he goes on here to say: "Lay aside falsehood, and let each of you speak what is true to the person next to him, since we belong to one another as parts of a single body." [8] "Feel anger if you must, but do not sin by it; do not let the sun set while your rage still burns, and give the devil no foothold." [9] "Whoever was in the habit of stealing must steal no longer; let him labor instead, doing honest work with his own hands, so he has something to hand over to whoever is in want." [10] "No rotten word should pass your lips — only what serves to build others up as the occasion demands, so that it does good to those listening." [11] "Do not bring sorrow to God's Holy Spirit, by whom you carry the seal that marks you for the day you are ransomed." [12] "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and clamor, and blasphemy be taken away from you, along with all malice: [13] but be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God also in Christ forgave you." [14] So then, those who reckon the flesh to be the "old man" — why do they not hasten their own death, so that, the old man having been put off, they might at last meet the apostle's commands? [15] For we, who hold that our entire practice of faith must be carried out through the body — indeed, through the flesh, whose mouth speaks only the best of words, whose tongue refrains from blasphemy, whose heart refrains from resentment, whose hands work and give — we maintain that both the "oldness" and the "newness" of man refer to a moral, not a substantial, difference. [16] And so we recognize equally that the man who, according to his former manner of life, was "old," is the same man said to be "corrupted according to the lusts of deceit" — just as he is called "old according to his former manner of life," not according to the flesh through everlasting destruction — but rather that this same man, his flesh kept safe, is saved just as he is, having been stripped, as it were, of a vicious way of life, not of bodily substance.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 46 ========

[1] You will find the apostle everywhere of this same character: denouncing what the flesh does in a manner that makes it look as though he condemns the flesh as such — but you must not think so merely on the prompting of other, loosely connected impressions. [2] For when he states that those existing "according to the flesh" are unable to satisfy God, he immediately steers that skewed reading back toward the full truth by adding, "But you do not exist according to the flesh, rather according to the spirit." [3] By refusing to those he had just termed "according to the flesh" the claim that they truly stood "according to the flesh," he was making clear he meant they were not living "by the deeds proper to the flesh" — and that, ultimately, it is not people existing in bodily form who are unable to satisfy God, but those conducting themselves in a carnal fashion; while those who, though placed in the flesh, walk according to the spirit, do please God. [4] And again he says the body indeed is dead — but on account of transgression, just as the spirit is life on account of righteousness: and by opposing life to death, both located in the flesh, he undoubtedly promised life there from righteousness in the very place where he had marked out death from transgression. [5] For it would be pointless for him to oppose life to death unless that life exists exactly where the thing he opposed it to exists, in order precisely to drive that death out of the body. Further, if life drives death out of the body, it cannot accomplish this unless it penetrates into the very place where the thing it is expelling resides. [6] Why should I tie myself in knots when the apostle states it so plainly? "If the Spirit of him who raised up Jesus dwells in you, he who raised up Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies, because of his Spirit who dwells in you": [7] so that even if someone insists the "mortal body" here means the soul, since he cannot deny that this applies to the flesh as well, he is forced to admit the resurrection of the flesh too, in keeping with its shared condition. [8] And the passage that follows still teaches you that it is the flesh's deeds standing condemned, not the flesh in itself: "So then, brothers," he says, "we owe nothing to bodily existence, that we should conduct ourselves by its standard: for if you conduct yourselves by the standard of the flesh you are bound to die, yet if through the Spirit you put an end to the practices of the body, you will live." [9] Further — to answer point by point — if salvation is promised to those placed in the flesh who nevertheless live by the spirit, then it is no longer the flesh that stands opposed to salvation, but the activity of the flesh; and once that activity of the flesh, the cause of death, is excluded, the flesh itself is shown to be safe, free of the cause that brings death. [10] "For the rule of the life-giving spirit found in Christ Jesus," he says, "has released me from the rule of wrongdoing and of death" — the very law which, he had already told us, dwells in our members. So then our members will no longer be held by the law of death, since they are no longer held by transgression, from which they have been set free. [11] "For what the law was unable to accomplish, hindered as it was by the weakness of the body, God did — sending his own Son bearing a form like our sin-tainted flesh, and, on account of sin, passed sentence on sin within the flesh" — not the flesh in sin: for a house is not condemned along with its occupant; indeed, he said that sin "dwells" in our body. [12] But once sin is condemned, the flesh is acquitted — just as, had it not been condemned, it would have been held bound to the law of death and to transgression. Thus even where he called "the mind of the flesh" death, and further, "enmity against God," he never called the flesh itself that. [13] "To whom, then," you will ask, "is 'the mind of the flesh' to be charged, if not to the substance itself?" Certainly — if you can prove that the flesh has any thinking of its own. But if without the soul there is no sensation at all, you will understand that "the mind of the flesh" must be referred to the soul, only sometimes attributed to the flesh because it is exercised on account of the flesh and through the flesh. [14] And that is why he says sin "dwells" in the flesh: because the soul too, the source from which sin is introduced, is a tenant of the flesh — a flesh that has indeed been put to death, but under sin's name, not its own. [15] For elsewhere too he says, "How is it that you pass judgment as though still living in the world?" — writing not to the dead, but to those who ought to stop living according to the ways of the world.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 47 ========

[1] For this is exactly the "worldly life" which he says was crucified with Christ as the "old man" — not our bodily substance, but our moral character. If we do not take it this way, then our bodily substance was not crucified at all, and our flesh did not suffer the cross of Christ — but rather, as he goes on to add, "that the body of sin might be done away with," through the reform of a life, not through the destruction of a substance: just as he says, "that we should no longer be enslaved to sin," so that on this reasoning we might believe that, having died together with Christ, we shall also live together with him. [2] "So," he says, "you too must consider yourselves dead." Dead to what? To the flesh? No — to sin. So they will be saved in the flesh, but alive to God in Christ Jesus, precisely through the flesh — to which they will not be dead, but to sin, to which they die. [3] For he goes further still: "Let not sin, then, reign in your mortal body, to make you obey it, and do not offer your members as weapons of unrighteousness to sin: but offer yourselves to God as people brought back to life out of death" — not simply "as living people," but "as people restored to life out of death" — "and offer your limbs to him as tools of righteousness." [4] And again: "Just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, leading to holiness: for when you were slaves of sin, you were free with regard to righteousness: [5] what fruit, then, did you have from the things you are now ashamed of? [6] For their end is death. But now, having been set loose from sin and enrolled instead as God's servants, the harvest you reap is holiness, and its outcome, life without end: [7] for what sin pays out is death, whereas God's own gift, freely given, is life without end in Christ Jesus our Lord." [8] So, all through this entire chain of reasoning, tearing our members away from unrighteousness and sin and joining them to righteousness and holiness, and moving them from the wages of death to the free gift of eternal life, he unquestionably promises the flesh a share in salvation: [9] for it would be utterly pointless to command it to a discipline all its own, of holiness and righteousness, if that discipline's reward were not likewise its own — and baptism itself would never be entrusted to it, if it were not also, through regeneration, being inaugurated into a restoration — [10] as the apostle presses further still: "Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried with him, then, through baptism into death, so that just as Christ rose from the dead, we too might walk in newness of life." [11] And lest you think this refers only to the life which, after baptism, is to be lived in newness through faith, he adds with the greatest foresight, "For if we have grown into one with him through a death resembling his, we will likewise share the form of his rising": [12] for it is by likeness that we die in baptism, but it is in truth that we rise again in the flesh, just as Christ did: "so that, just as sin held sway through death, grace too might hold sway through righteousness, leading to life without end through Jesus Christ our Lord." How could this parallel hold, unless it were equally in the flesh? [13] For where death is, there too is life after death, since life was there before, in the very place where death later came. For if the reign of death accomplishes nothing but the dissolution of the flesh, then likewise the life that opposes death must accomplish the opposite thing — that is, bringing the flesh back — such that just as death, growing strong, had devoured, so too, once the mortal is devoured, it may hear from immortality: "O death, where is your sting? O death, where is your victory?" [14] For grace, too, will there abound in overflowing measure where sin abounded: so too shall power be made perfect in weakness — saving what was lost, giving life to what was dead, healing what was struck down, curing what was sick, redeeming what was seized, freeing what was enslaved, calling back what was led astray, raising up what was cast down — [15] and indeed, raising it from earth to heaven, where our own citizenship is, as the Philippians too learn from the apostle, and from which we await our savior, Jesus Christ, "who will transform the body of our lowliness to be conformed to the body of his glory" — without doubt after the resurrection, since even Christ himself was not glorified before his passion. [16] These are the bodies he begs the Romans to present as "a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God." How could it be "living," if bodies are destined to perish? How "holy," if they are unclean? How "acceptable," if they are condemned? [17] Come now, take what he wrote to the Thessalonians — as clear, I would say, as the very ray of the sun itself; how will these enemies of light manage to read it? "May the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly." Is that not enough? [18] But he goes further: "And may your spirit and soul and body, kept whole, be found without fault at the coming of our Lord." There, laid out entire, is the full substance of man marked for salvation — and at no other time than at the Lord's coming, which is the very key that unlocks the resurrection.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 48 ========

But flesh and blood, you say, cannot possess the kingdom of God as an inheritance. We know that this too is written; but we have deliberately put it off until now, so that whatever the adversaries throw up as a barricade in their very front line we might overturn in the last engagement, once all the other questions — so many auxiliary troops of theirs — have been scattered ahead of it. But even now let us ask that what precedes be recalled, so that the origin of the passage may govern its sense. As I understand it, the apostle, having laid out for the Corinthians the whole order of church discipline point by point, summed up both his own gospel and their faith in the announcement of the Lord's death and resurrection, so that he might draw the rule of our own hope from the very source on which it stands. And so he goes on: 'Now if it is proclaimed of Christ that he was raised up from among the dead, how can some of you be claiming there is no rising of the dead? Yet if that were so, then Christ himself was never raised. And if Christ was never raised, our proclamation amounts to nothing, and your trust amounts to nothing either. We would then stand exposed as liars about God, since we bore witness that he brought Christ back to life — one he never brought back, if indeed the dead do not truly rise. For if the dead do not rise, Christ too remains unraised; and if Christ remains unraised, your trust is worthless, you are yet trapped in your sins, and those who died within Christ are simply gone.' What point does he seem, through all this, to be building toward? The resurrection of the dead, you say — the very thing being denied. Certainly, wanting it believed on the model of the Lord's own resurrection? Certainly, you say. Now is a model built out of unlikeness, or out of likeness? Out of likeness, obviously, you say. But how did Christ rise — in the flesh, or not? If without doubt you hear that he died, that he was laid in a tomb, 'just as the Scriptures had foretold,' in no other way than in the flesh, then you must equally grant that he was raised again in the flesh: for the very thing that fell in death, that lay in the tomb, is the very thing that rose — not so much Christ existing in flesh as flesh existing in Christ. If, then, we are to rise after the pattern of Christ, who rose in the flesh, then we shall no longer be rising after the pattern of Christ if we ourselves rise without flesh. 'For through a man came death, and through a man the resurrection,' he says — distinguishing the authors, Adam of death, Christ of resurrection, yet establishing that resurrection shares its substance with death itself, since he sets their two authors side by side under the shared title of 'man.' For inasmuch as, in Adam, everyone dies, so too, in Christ, everyone will be brought to life, then they will be made alive in the flesh in Christ, just as they die in the flesh in Adam. But 'each in his own order' — that is, because each also in his own body. For the order of the merits, arranged as it were by name, will be arranged accordingly. But since merits are also credited to the body, the order of bodies must necessarily be arranged too, so that there can be an order of merits. As for the fact that some are even 'baptized on behalf of the dead' — we shall see whether reasonably. At least it points to their having instituted this practice on the presupposition by which others too supposed that a vicarious baptism would be of profit even to the flesh, toward the hope of resurrection — a hope which, unless it is corporeal, could hardly be pledged in a corporeal baptism in any other terms. Why, he says, are they even being baptized 'if the dead do not rise' — that is, if the bodies that are baptized will not rise? For the soul is not consecrated by washing, but by its own response. 'Why,' he says, 'do we also stand in peril every hour?' — through the flesh, obviously. 'I die daily' — through the perils of the flesh, surely, the flesh with which he also fought wild beasts at Ephesus — those beasts, that is, of the Asian affliction, of which he speaks in his second letter to the same church: 'We do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, of our affliction which came upon us in Asia, that we were weighed down beyond measure, beyond our strength, so that we even despaired of life.' All this, unless I am mistaken, he enumerates for this purpose: that in refusing to have the struggle of the flesh believed vain, he means, without question, to have the resurrection of the flesh believed — for the struggle of a thing that will have no resurrection must be reckoned vain. But someone will say, how do the dead rise? With what body do they come? At this point he takes up the qualities of bodies — whether the very same bodies are resumed, or others. But since that question belongs later, it will suffice for now that from this passage too a bodily resurrection is defined, in the very fact that the question raised concerns the quality of bodies.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 49 ========

Now we come to flesh and blood, the true hinge of the whole question — under what conditions, and which substances, the apostle disinherited from the kingdom of God; this too is best learned from what precedes. 'The first man,' he says, 'comes from the ground and is earthen' — meaning fashioned of clay, meaning Adam; 'the second man comes from heaven' — meaning the Word of God, meaning Christ — and yet he is not 'a man,' heavenly origin notwithstanding, except because he too is flesh and soul, which is what 'man,' what 'Adam,' means. For above he was also called 'the last Adam' — he took the sharing of the name from the sharing of the substance, since not even Adam's flesh came from seed, and neither did Christ's. As is the earthy one, then, such also are the earthy; and as is the heavenly one, such also are the heavenly. Alike in substance? Or first in discipline, and then in the rank that discipline has won? And yet the earthy and the heavenly can in no way be separated in substance, once the apostle has called them both, alike, 'men.' For if Christ too — alone truly heavenly, indeed more than heavenly — is nonetheless 'man' insofar as he is flesh and soul, he is in no way set apart, on the score of that condition of substance, from the earthy quality; and so those who, following him, are called 'heavenly,' must be understood to be so named not from their present substance but from a future glory — because earlier too, whence this very distinction arose, it was shown, from a difference of rank, that there is one glory of the heavenly bodies and another of the earthly, one glory of the sun, another of the moon, another of the stars — for star differs from star in glory, yet not in substance. Finally, having set out beforehand this difference of rank — within one and the same substance, to be pursued now and attained then — he adds an exhortation besides, that here we should follow Christ's pattern through discipline, and there attain the summit through glory: 'Just as we have carried the likeness of the earthen man, let us likewise carry the likeness of the heavenly one' — for we carried the earthen likeness by our share in the transgression, by our kinship with death, by our banishment from paradise. For if, even now, Adam's likeness is carried 'in the flesh,' we are not thereby told to strip off the flesh; if not the flesh, then our manner of life — so that we may likewise carry within us the image of the heavenly one, not now of God, nor now established in heaven, but walking according to the lines of Christ's likeness, in holiness and righteousness and truth. And indeed he directs the whole of this toward discipline, in that he says here that the image of Christ is to be borne in this very flesh and in this present time of discipline — for in saying 'let us bear it,' in the imperative mood, he is speaking to this present time, in which man is no other substance than flesh and soul, so that even if this faith looks toward some other substance, namely the heavenly one, it is nonetheless to this present substance that the promise is made, the substance which is commanded to labor toward that other. Since, then, he sets up the image both of the earthy and of the heavenly in terms of conduct — the one to be renounced, the other to be pursued — he then adds: 'Now this I say' (that is, 'on account of what I have said above' — 'for' is a connective, giving a sense that supplements what came before) 'that flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom of God as an inheritance.' He means nothing else by 'flesh and blood' than the aforementioned image of the earthy one; and if that image is reckoned as belonging to the conduct of the old life, and the conduct of the old life does not take hold of the kingdom of God, then it follows that flesh and blood, in not taking hold of the kingdom of God, are being reduced to the conduct of the old life. Clearly, if the apostle never elsewhere put 'substance' for 'works,' he is not using it that way here either; and if, in denying that those still established in the flesh were 'in the flesh,' he was denying that they were in the works of the flesh, then you have no right to undermine its form by supposing it means not the works of the substance that alienates one from the kingdom of God, but the substance itself. And to the Galatians, in laying these very matters open, he professes that he foretells, and has foretold, that those who do such things will not obtain the kingdom of God as an inheritance — evidently not bearing the image of the heavenly one, as they had once borne that of the earthy, and therefore, out of their old manner of life, to be reckoned nothing else than flesh and blood. For even if the apostle had burst suddenly into this pronouncement excluding flesh and blood from the kingdom of God, without any prior groundwork of sense, would we not still interpret these two substances as meaning the old man given over to flesh and blood — that is, to eating and drinking — the very man whose motto, against the faith of the resurrection, is: 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die'? For this too the apostle, driving the point home, branded flesh and blood by their own fruits of eating and drinking.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 50 ========

But even setting aside interpretations of this kind, which apply 'flesh and blood' to their works, it will still be possible to vindicate for the resurrection the very substances themselves, understood in no other than their plain sense. For resurrection is not denied outright to flesh and blood; what is denied to resurrection is the kingdom of God — for there is also a resurrection unto judgment. Indeed the general resurrection of the flesh is confirmed precisely in the exception made of a special case: for in the very statement of the condition into which it will not rise, the condition into which it will rise is implied. And so, while the distinction of resurrections, made according to merits, concerns the deeds of the substance and not its kind, it becomes clear from this too that flesh and blood are barred from the kingdom of God in the name of guilt, not of substance, yet rise again in the name of their form, to judgment, precisely because they will not rise to the kingdom. I will say it again: 'Flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom of God as an inheritance' — rightly, when alone and by themselves, to show that spirit is still necessary within them. For it is the Spirit who gives life unto the kingdom of God; the flesh profits nothing — yet something else can profit it — namely the spirit, and, working through that spirit, the deeds the spirit produces as well. All flesh and blood, then, rise equally, each in its own quality; but those destined to enter the kingdom of God must clothe themselves with the strength of incorruption and immortality, lacking which no one can enter the kingdom of God, before they are able to lay hold of it. Rightly, then, flesh and blood, as we have said, fail on their own to lay hold of the kingdom of God. But since this corruptible thing — the flesh — must be swallowed up by incorruption, and this mortal thing — the blood — by immortality, after the resurrection, by way of transformation, then rightly, once transformed and swallowed up, flesh and blood can possess the kingdom of God as an inheritance — yet not without first having been raised. There are those who would have 'flesh and blood' taken to mean Judaism, on account of circumcision — itself likewise a stranger to the kingdom of God, both because it is reckoned to the old order and because it is marked with this very label elsewhere too by the apostle, who, after the Son of God was revealed in him for preaching him among the nations, did not immediately confer with 'flesh and blood' — that is, with circumcision, that is, with Judaism — as he writes to the Galatians.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 51 ========

[1] But now, to cover all the ground at once, let us bring up what we saved for the close — a point that will do service even for the apostle himself, actually convicting him of the grossest carelessness if, as some would have it, he shut his eyes, as the saying goes, and with no distinction and no qualification simply drove all flesh and blood, indiscriminately, out of the kingdom of God — that is, out of the very palace of the heavens itself — when Jesus even now sits enthroned at the Father's right side: man, though God; the last Adam, though the primal Word; flesh and blood, though purer than ours, yet still the same in substance and in the very form in which he ascended, and destined, as the angels affirm, to come down again in that same form — recognizable, of course, even to those who pierced him. [2] This mediator, called of God and men, keeps in himself, as a deposit entrusted by both parties, the deposit of flesh too, the down payment on the whole sum. For just as he left us the down payment of the Spirit, so he took from us the down payment of flesh and carried it up to heaven — a pledge that the entire sum will one day be brought back there. [3] Rest easy, flesh and blood: you have laid claim to heaven and the kingdom of God, in Christ. If anyone denies you a place in Christ, let him deny Christ a place in heaven too — the very ones who have denied you heaven. [4] So when it says, 'Corruption shall not have incorruption for its inheritance,' this does not mean you should reckon flesh and blood themselves to be corruption — since they are rather liable to corruption, namely through death, seeing that it is death that not merely corrupts flesh and blood but consumes it outright. [5] Rather, since he had declared that the works of flesh and blood cannot obtain the kingdom of God, all the more, to drive the point home, he stripped the inheritance of incorruption from corruption itself — that is, from death, the very thing to which the works of flesh and blood contribute. [6] For shortly after he expressed, in a manner of speaking, the death of death itself, saying, 'Death is swallowed up in the contest: death, where is your sting? Death, where is your power?' Now the sting of death is transgression — that will be the corruption; and the strength of transgression is the law — that other thing, of course, which he set up as warring in his members against the law of his mind, namely the very power of transgressing against one's will. [7] For if he also says that death, the last enemy, is to be abolished, then in this way too corruption will not obtain incorruption as its inheritance — that is, death will not persist. [8] When and how will it come to an end? 'In a moment, quick as an eye can blink, when the final trumpet sounds' — 'and the dead shall rise incorrupt.' Who are these but those who were formerly corrupted — that is, their bodies, that is, flesh and blood? 'And we shall be changed' — from what condition, if not the one in which we shall be caught? For 'what is subject to decay must clothe itself with the imperishable, and what is subject to death must clothe itself with the deathless' — what is subject to death but flesh? What is subject to decay but blood? [9] And lest you think the apostle means something else, taking care to make you understand he is laboring over the flesh, when he speaks of 'what is subject to decay' and 'what is subject to death,' he speaks while holding his very own skin: certainly he could not have said 'this' except of a subject present before him, standing there to be pointed at — it is the language of bodily demonstration. [10] Now the corruptible will be one thing, corruption another; the mortal one thing, mortality another — for one is that which suffers, the other is that which causes the suffering. So the things that suffer corruption and mortality, namely flesh and blood, must necessarily also be the ones that receive incorruption and immortality.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 52 ========

[1] Let us now look at what sort of body he argues the dead will come with. And it is good that he broke straight in to show it, as if someone were asking that very question. 'Fool,' he says, 'what you sow is not brought to life unless it dies.' [2] So this much is now settled, from the example of the seed: it is not some other flesh that is brought to life than the very one that has died, and the rest will fall into place in that light. [3] For nothing may be understood contrary to the rule the example sets, so that, because the next words are, 'And what you sow is not the body that is to be,' you should therefore reckon that a different body will rise than the one sown in death. [4] Otherwise you have stepped clean outside the example: for grain of wheat, once sown and dissolved in the earth, never sends up barley — it is the very same kind of grain, the same nature, quality, and form. In the end, where else would it come from, if not from itself? For even the decay is its own, precisely because it belongs to it. [5] Nor, indeed, does he even suggest that some other body than the one to come is what gets sown, when he says, 'But a bare grain, of wheat perhaps or of some such thing; but God gives it a body as he wills' — surely to that very grain which he says is sown bare? Surely, you say. [6] So then it is preserved, this thing to which God is to give a body. But how is it preserved if it is nowhere, if it does not rise, if it is not the very same thing that rises? If it does not rise, it is not preserved; if it is not preserved, it cannot receive a body from God. [7] But in fact it is agreed on all sides that it is preserved. To what end, then, will God give it a body as he wills, seeing that its own naked body is already there before him, unless it is precisely so that it may rise up no longer naked? So the body will be something added, built onto the body — and the thing it is built onto is not destroyed but enlarged. [8] And what is enlarged is preserved. For the grain is sown all alone, with no covering husk, no foundation of an ear, no defense of a beard, no pride of stalk; but what rises up is a wealth multiplied, a structure built joint by joint, an order raised course by course, a fortification adorned, and, in every part, clothed. [9] These things are for it a body from God that is other, into which it passes not through destruction but through growth; and to each of the seeds he has assigned its own body — not its former body, that is, not the identical one — so that it, too, may then be its own, the very thing it acquires from outside, from God. [10] Serve, then, the example, and keep for the flesh its mirror-image, believing that the very flesh that was sown will bear fruit — the same flesh, even if more full, not a different flesh even if returning in a different fashion; for it too will receive an added splendor and adornment, whatever kind God chooses to lay over it according to its merits. [11] Beyond doubt this is the point of, 'Not all flesh is the same flesh' — not meant to deny the flesh's community of substance, but to level out the ranking of privilege, reducing it to a difference of honor, not of kind. [12] To this end he adds figurative examples too, of animals and of the elements: 'One is the flesh of man' — that is, of the servant of God, who is truly man; 'another of beasts' — that is, of the pagan, of whom the prophet also says, 'Man became like the beasts that have no understanding'; 'another the flesh of birds' — that is, of the martyrs, who strive for the heights; 'another of fishes' — that is, of those for whom the water of baptism suffices. [13] So too he draws his argument from the heavenly bodies: 'One splendor belongs to the sun' — namely, Christ's; 'a different one to the moon' — namely, the church's; 'and yet another to the stars' — namely, Abraham's offspring; 'for star differs from star in glory' — and 'earthly bodies and heavenly,' namely the Jews and the Christians. [14] But if this were not figurative, it would be quite pointless of him to set the flesh and bodies of mules and kites and the bodies of the heavenly lights alongside human bodies — things having no bearing either on comparison of condition or on the attainment of resurrection. [15] Finally, having by these examples confined the difference to glory, not to substance, he says, 'Such, too, is the resurrection of the dead.' In what respect? In nothing except that splendor alone. [16] For again, recalling the resurrection to that same substance, and looking once more to the grain, he says: 'Sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; sown weak, it is raised strong; sown an animal body, it is raised a spiritual body.' [17] Certainly nothing rises but what was sown, nothing is sown but what is broken down in the earth, and nothing is broken down in the earth but flesh — for it was this that the sentence of God struck down: 'Earth you are, and to earth you shall go,' since it was from earth that it was taken. [18] From this the apostle too conceived of speaking of it as 'sown' when it is given back to the earth, since the earth is the storehouse for seeds too, where they are laid down and from which they are later fetched back; and that is why he seals the point again, pressing it home: 'for so it is written' — lest you should suppose anything else is being sown than, 'To earth you shall go, from which you were taken.' So it is nothing but flesh either: for so it is written.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 53 ========

[1] But some argue the 'natural body' is the soul, so as to withdraw resurrection from the flesh altogether. Yet since it is settled and fixed that the body which rises is the one that was sown, they will be called to produce that very thing in evidence. [2] Either let them show the soul as sown after death — that is, dead, that is, cast down and scattered and dissolved in the earth (which is a fate never decreed upon it by God) — let them put forward its corruption and its dishonor, its weakness, so that it too may then rise in incorruption and glory and power. [3] But indeed, in Lazarus, that preeminent example of resurrection, it was flesh that lay in weakness, flesh that all but rotted away into dishonor, flesh that in the meantime stank with corruption — and yet it was flesh that Lazarus rose as, along with a soul, to be sure, but an uncorrupted soul, one that no one had bound with linen wrappings, no one had laid in a tomb, no one had ever smelled decaying, no one had seen sown for four days. [4] The whole condition, the whole outcome of Lazarus, is what everyone's flesh experiences to this day — but no one's soul does. So whichever nature the apostle's pen is describing, whichever one it is agreed he is speaking of, that is the one that will be a 'natural body' when it is sown and a 'spiritual body' when it is raised. [5] For, to make you understand it this way, he still holds out his hand, unrolling once more, on the authority of the same scripture, the fact that Adam, the first man, became 'a living soul.' [6] If Adam is the first man, and flesh comes before soul in the order of man's making, then without doubt it was flesh that became soul; and being made into soul, since it was a body, it thereby became a natural — 'ensouled' — body. [7] What else would they want it called, this thing that was made through the soul, that did not exist before the soul, that will not exist after the soul except when it rises? For once the soul is received back, it becomes once more a natural body, so that it may then become a spiritual one — for nothing rises except what already was. [8] So the very reason 'natural body' fits the flesh is the very reason it in no way fits the soul. For flesh existed before it was a natural body — it was only made a natural body once ensouled afterward. [9] But the soul, even though it is itself a body, is nevertheless a body not ensouled but rather en-souling; it cannot be called a natural — that is, 'ensouled' — body, nor can it become what it itself produces. [10] For it is by coming to another that a thing is made 'natural'; how could a thing make itself 'natural' by not coming to another? So then, just as flesh was a natural body before, by receiving soul, so afterward it will be a spiritual body by putting on spirit. [11] Laying out this order, the apostle rightly draws the distinction in the cases of Adam and Christ as well, as the two heads of that very distinction. [12] But since he calls Christ also the last Adam, from this recognize that he has been working, with the whole force of his teaching, toward the raising of the flesh, and not the soul. For if Adam, the first man, was flesh before he was soul — becoming only afterward 'a soul that lives' — and the last Adam, Christ, counts as Adam precisely because he is man, and as man precisely because he is flesh and not because he is soul, [13] then he goes on to add, 'Not first what is spiritual, but what is natural, and afterward what is spiritual' — applying to both Adams alike. Does it not seem to you that he is distinguishing natural body and spiritual body within one and the same flesh, whose distinction he has laid the groundwork for in both Adams, that is, in both men? [14] For from what substance do Christ and Adam agree with one another — namely, from flesh, though also from soul; but under the name of 'flesh' both of them are man, for flesh is the prior man — and it was from that substance that they were able to admit of an order at all, such that one might be ranked earliest and the other final in the name Adam. [15] For things that differ cannot otherwise be arranged in a sequence — not, at least, on the score of substance; on the score of place, or time, or condition, perhaps they could. But it is on the score of the substance of flesh that they are styled first and last, exactly as, once more, the earlier man is 'earthly' and the later one 'heavenly' — because though he is heavenly as regards spirit, he remains man as regards flesh. [16] And so, since order belongs to flesh in both Adams, not to soul — the first man being distinguished as made into a living soul, the last as made into a life-giving spirit — their distinction likewise settles beforehand the distinction that belongs to flesh, so that it was of flesh that it was said, 'Not first what is spiritual but what is natural, and afterward what is spiritual'; [17] and thus the same must be understood above as well, both what is sown a natural body and what rises a spiritual body, because 'not first what is spiritual but what is natural' — because the first Adam became soul and the last Adam became spirit: it is all about man, all about flesh, whenever it is about man. [18] What then shall we say? Does not flesh even now have the Spirit, through faith, so that one might well ask how it can be said to be sown a natural body? Clearly the flesh has here received the Spirit, but only as a down payment; the soul, on the other hand, has not a down payment but the full sum. And that is precisely why, in respect of substance, it is called a natural body in the state in which it is sown — bound to become, through the fullness of the Spirit besides, a spiritual body in the state in which it is raised. What wonder, then, if it is named rather from what it is destined to be filled with than from what it was merely sprinkled with?

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 54 ========

So a great many disputes are manufactured from occasions offered by mere words, just as from the shared meanings of terms. For because the apostle has written that 'the mortal may be swallowed up by life' — meaning the flesh — they seize on that word 'swallowing' to mean destruction, specifically the destruction of the flesh, as if we did not also speak of swallowing bile and grief, that is, hiding, covering, and holding them within ourselves. Again, since Scripture also states, 'let this mortal frame be clothed with immortality,' it is shown how the mortal is swallowed up by life: while, clothed with immortality, it is hidden and covered and contained within — not yet consumed and lost. 'So then,' you say, 'death too will be safe, once it has been swallowed up.' No — distinguish the shared meanings of the words according to their senses, and you will understand rightly. Death is one thing, the mortal another; and so death will be swallowed up in one way, the mortal in another. Death cannot receive immortality, but the mortal can. Again, Scripture states that this mortal frame is destined to be clothed with immortality. How then does it receive it? By being swallowed up by life. And how is it swallowed up by life? By being taken in, absorbed, and enclosed within it. Death, on the other hand, is rightly swallowed up into destruction, because it is death itself that does the swallowing in that case. 'Death,' it says, 'swallowed by growing strong' — and so it was swallowed up in its turn, in the contest: 'Death, where is your sting? Death, where is your contest?' Accordingly life too, death's rival, will by that same contest swallow up into salvation what death, by its own contest, had swallowed up into destruction.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 55 ========

Although, then, in proving that the flesh will rise, we thereby prove no other flesh will rise than the very flesh now under discussion, still each question and its grounds demand their own separate engagement, even where already cut down elsewhere. We shall therefore explain more fully both the force and the logic of 'change,' which is generally what furnishes the presumption that a different flesh will rise — as though ceasing to be the same in the change meant ceasing to exist altogether and perishing from one's former state. But change must be distinguished from every argument for destruction: change is one thing, destruction another. And it would be no different only if the flesh were so changed as to perish. But a changed thing will perish only if it does not itself endure in the change that is displayed at the resurrection. For just as a thing is lost when it fails to rise, so too, if it does rise but is spirited away in the change, it likewise perishes: it will equally not exist, exactly as if it had not risen at all. And how absurd, if it rises for this very purpose — not to exist — when it could simply have not risen and so not existed, since it had already begun not to exist! Change and destruction will never be conflated as one thing, being utterly different even in their operations: the one destroys, the other changes. So just as what has been destroyed has not been changed, so what has been changed has not been destroyed. For to have perished is to have wholly ceased to be what one was; to have been changed is to exist differently. But while it exists differently, it can still be the very same thing. For it retains existence, since it has not perished altogether — it has undergone change, not destruction. Indeed, a thing can be changed and yet remain, nonetheless, itself — just as a whole man, in this present age, remains the same substance even while changing in many respects: in demeanor, in physical bulk, in condition of health, in station, in rank, in years; in pursuit, occupation, and trade; in property, dwelling, laws, and morals — and yet loses nothing of being a man, nor is so turned into another that he ceases to be the same man; indeed he is not made another man, but simply other. Divine examples too bear witness to this pattern of change. Moses' hand is changed, made in the likeness of a dead thing, bloodless, white, and cold — yet with warmth recovered and color restored, it is the same flesh and blood. Afterward his very face is changed with an unbearable brightness — yet it was still the same Moses, only now not recognized by sight. So too Stephen had already put on an angelic radiance, yet it was no other knees that buckled beneath him at his stoning. The Lord too, in the retreat on the mountain, changed even his garments with light, yet kept his features recognizable to Peter — where Moses and Elijah also appeared, the one in the image of flesh not yet resumed, the other in the reality of flesh not yet laid down in death, and both taught that the same bodily condition persists even in glory. Instructed by this very example, Paul too says: 'He will transfigure the body of our lowliness, conformed to the body of his glory.' But if you maintain that both transfiguration and transformation amount to a substance passing over into something else, then Saul too, turned into another man, must have left his own body behind, and Satan himself, when he transfigures himself into an angel of light, must lose his own nature. I think not. So too, at the event of the resurrection, changing, turning, and reshaping will be permitted — with the substance kept intact.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 56 ========

For how absurd — indeed how unjust, and both together how unworthy of God — that one substance should do the work and another be paid the wage: that this flesh should be torn apart in martyrdoms while another is crowned, and conversely that this flesh should wallow in filth while another is condemned! Is it not better to strip away all faith at once from the hope of resurrection, than to trifle with God's seriousness and justice — Marcion raised up in Valentinus's place? — seeing that it is not credible that today's man's mind, memory, or conscience should be wiped out by that transforming garment of immortality and incorruption, leaving the reward and fruit of the resurrection void, and the standing of the divine judgment on both sides empty? If I do not remember that I am the one who earned it, how shall I give glory to God? How shall I sing him a new song, not knowing that I am the one who owes him the thanks? And why is only the flesh's change singled out, and not the soul's along with it, when the soul has presided over the flesh in everything? What sense would it make for the very soul that, in this flesh, ran the whole course of its life, that in this flesh learned God, put on Christ, and sowed the hope of salvation, to reap its harvest in some other, unknown flesh? A most fortunate flesh indeed, to have life come to it free of charge! But if the soul too is not going to be changed, then the soul's resurrection likewise falls away — for it too will not be believed to have risen, unless it is another soul that has risen.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 57 ========

From here comes that stock witticism of unbelief. 'If,' they say, 'the very same substance is called back, with its own shape, outline, and quality, then it comes back with its remaining marks too — so the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed will rise as such, and whoever died marked will return marked just the same.' And what if it were so? Do you disdain to receive so great a grace from God, whatever form it takes? For do you not, even now, admitting salvation to the soul alone, assign it to men cut in half? What is it to believe in resurrection, except to believe in a whole one? For if flesh can be restored from dissolution, far more easily can it be recalled from mere impairment. The greater cases give the rule to the lesser. Is not the severing or maiming of any limb the death of that limb? If universal death is undone by resurrection, why not a partial one? If we are changed into glory, how much more into soundness? Bodily disfigurement is an accident; wholeness is proper to us. We are born to it. Even if we are disfigured in the womb, it is still the suffering of a man — the kind comes before the mishap. As life is bestowed by God, so it is returned: such as we receive it, such we get back. We are restored to nature, not to injury; we come back to life as we were born, not as we were maimed. If God does not raise men whole, he does not raise the dead at all. For what dead man is whole, even if he died whole? Who is sound who is lifeless? What body is unharmed once it has been killed, once cold, once pale, once stiff, once a corpse? When is a man more helpless than when he is entirely so? When more paralyzed than when wholly motionless? So the raising of the dead is nothing other than being made whole again, lest a man remain dead in that very part in which he has not risen. God is fit to restore what he made. He has already promised this power and generosity of his sufficiently in Christ — indeed he has shown himself not only the reviver of flesh but its restorer to wholeness. And so the apostle too says: 'And the dead will rise incorrupt' — how, unless whole, they who before were corrupted both by the ravages of sickness and the decay of the grave? For when he laid down both conditions above — that this corruptible nature is to be clothed with incorruption, and this mortal one with immortality — he was not repeating himself but marking a distinction: assigning 'immortality' to the undoing of death and 'incorruption' to the erasing of decay, tempering the one to resurrection, the other to restoration of wholeness. And I think he made the same promise of the complete wholeness of every substance to the Thessalonians too. So in the future no bodily blemishes need be feared: wholeness, whether preserved or restored, can admit nothing amiss, since even what had been lost is given back. For in laying down beforehand that the flesh which is to die must rise again subject to the same sufferings, you are rashly defending nature against its own Lord, and impiously asserting law against grace — as if God were less free both to change nature and to keep it safe without regard to law! Why then do we read: 'What is impossible with men is possible with God,' and 'God has selected the world's foolish things so as to put to shame the wisdom of the world'? I ask you: if you set your slave free, since the same flesh and soul remain that were once subject to the whip, the fetters, and the branding-irons, must they therefore suffer the same things still? I think not — rather he is honored with the sheen of a white robe, the dignity of a gold ring, the name and tribe and table of his patron. Grant this same power to God — by the force of that transformation, to reshape condition, not nature — so that sufferings are removed while defenses are conferred. So the flesh will remain, even after the resurrection, capable of suffering only insofar as it is itself, the same flesh, and yet incapable of suffering, because it has been set free by its Lord for this very purpose — that it may suffer no more.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 58 ========

'Joy without end,' Isaiah declares, 'shall crown their heads' — nothing is without end except after the resurrection: 'pain and grief and groaning,' he says, 'have fled away from them.' So too the angel says to John: 'And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes' — from those same eyes, of course, that had wept before and could still have wept, had not divine indulgence dried up every shower of tears. And again: 'For God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more' — and so decay shall be no more either, put to flight by incorruption just as death is put to flight by immortality. If pain and grief and groaning, and death itself, arise from injuries to both soul and flesh, how can they be removed unless their causes cease — namely, the injuries of flesh and soul? Where, in God's presence, are hostile mishaps? Where, before Christ, are ruinous assaults? Where, before the Holy Spirit, are demonic onslaughts, now that the devil himself, with his angels, has already been plunged into the fires? Where is necessity, or what men call fortune or fate? What plague remains for the risen once pardon is granted? What wrath for the reconciled once grace is given? What weakness after strength, what feebleness after salvation? Recall how the garments and sandals of the children of Israel, through those forty years, remained unworn and unfaded; how, in their very bodies, justice fixed the easy growth of nails and hair within a measure fit for their standing and dignity, so that even this would not be reckoned a form of decay; how the Babylonian flames did no harm to the turbans or trousers of the three brothers, foreign as those were to Jews though they wore them; how Jonah, swallowed by the sea-monster, in whose belly shipwrecks were digested day by day, was spat out unharmed after three days; how today Enoch and Elijah, not yet crossed off by resurrection since they have not yet undergone death, but having nonetheless been translated from the world and thereby already candidates for eternity, are learning the flesh's immunity from every flaw, every harm, every injury and insult — of what faith do these stand as tokens, except the faith by which we ought to believe these are proofs of that coming wholeness? For, on the apostle's authority, these things were written as figures for us, that we might believe God more powerful than every law governing bodies, and, above all, the preserver of the flesh — he who protected even its garments, even its sandals.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 59 ========

[1] But, you say, the age to come belongs to a different, an eternal, arrangement — and therefore the substance of this present age, not being eternal, cannot possess a share in that different one. Fair enough — if man exists for the sake of the arrangement, and not the arrangement for the sake of man! [2] Yet the apostle, writing 'be it the cosmos, or life, or death, or matters now at hand, or matters yet to come — all of it is yours,' makes the same people heirs of the future as of the present. Isaiah grants you nothing when he says, 'Every body is but grass,' and, in another place, 'and every body will look upon the deliverance wrought by God': he is distinguishing outcomes, not substances. [3] For who does not know that God's judgment stands in a double sentence — of salvation and of punishment? So every body counts as grass, namely the flesh destined for burning, while every body will behold the Lord's deliverance, namely the flesh set apart for rescue. I myself know that I have committed no adultery in some other flesh, and that it is in no other flesh that I now strive toward continence. [4] If a man happens to carry a pair of privy members about with him, then let him by all means cut away the grass of the unclean flesh and keep for himself only the flesh that shall see the Lord's salvation! [5] But since the same prophet also shows the nations at one moment reckoned as dust and spittle, and at another as destined to hope and believe in the Lord's name and arm — are we to be misled about the nations too, and say that some are destined to believe and others reckoned as dust, on account of a difference of substance? [6] No: Christ, within the ocean, and under this sky that arches over us, shone the true light on the nations — and even the Valentinians themselves learned their error right here: there will be no different shape to the believing nations than to the unbelieving, as regards flesh and soul. [7] Therefore, just as he distinguished these same nations not by kind but by lot, so too he separates the flesh — which in these very nations is one and the same substance — not by matter but by merit.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 60 ========

[1] But look — to pile the dispute even higher against the flesh, and against this same flesh above all, they argue also from the functions of its members, claiming either that these too must endure along with their operations and their fruits, as things written into that same corpulence, or else — since it is agreed that the members' functions are due to cease — that they will erase the corpulence as well, on the ground, presumably, that its persistence cannot be credited apart from members, since members cannot be credited apart from functions. [2] For what use then, they ask, will there be for this cave of mouth and station of teeth, this slide of the gullet, this crossroads of the stomach, this whirlpool of the belly, this tangled length of the intestines, once there is no place left for eating and drinking? What use for the members that admit, work over, roll down, divide, digest, and expel such things, what use for the hands themselves and the feet and every laboring limb, once the very concern for sustenance has ceased? [3] What use for the kidneys, accomplices of the seed, and the rest of the genital parts of both sexes, and the stables of conception and the fountains of the breasts, once intercourse and childbearing and nursing are gone? And finally, what use for the whole body, since the whole of it will plainly stand idle? [4] To this we have already laid down beforehand that the arrangements of the future must not be confused with those of the present, since a transformation will then intervene; and now we build further: that these functions of the members answer to the necessities of this present life only until this very life itself is carried over from temporality into eternity — just as the animal body passes into the spiritual, while this mortal thing puts on immortality and this corruptible thing puts on incorruption. [5] And when life itself is then set free from its necessities, the members too will be freed from their functions — but that does not mean they will cease to be necessary: for even though released from duties, they are held for judgment, so that each may give account, through the body, of what he has done. [6] For God's tribunal demands the man whole; and he cannot be whole without members, since it is of these, not of their functions, but of their very substances, that he consists — unless perhaps you will also declare a ship 'whole' without a keel, without prow, without stern, without the soundness of its entire frame! [7] And yet we have often seen a ship, scattered by a storm or rotted through with decay, have all its parts recovered and repaired, and still glory in the very name of 'restored' — shall we then quibble over God's craftsmanship, God's will, God's right to do the same? [8] Further: if a rich and generous owner, to indulge his own affection or his own glory, undertakes only to restore the ship — will you, on that ground, deny that its original framework was necessary to him, on the plea that it will thereafter stand idle, since it is only the ship's soundness, not its operation, that such an owner cares about? [9] So then it is enough to learn only this: whether God, in destining man for salvation, destined the flesh for it too, or whether he wills the same flesh to exist all over again. And you must not conclude, from the future idleness of the members, that it cannot exist again: for a thing can exist again and still lie idle. But it cannot be said to lie idle if it does not exist at all. Whereas if it does exist, it can also be something other than idle: for nothing will lie idle before God.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 61 ========

[1] But — you were given a mouth, man, to gorge and to drink with. Why not rather to speak with, so that you might be set apart from the other animals? Why not rather to proclaim God with, and so stand as a priest even to other men? Adam, after all, pronounced the names of the animals before he plucked from the tree; he even prophesied before he ate. [2] But — you were given teeth to gnaw the butcher's stall with. Why not rather to crown the whole gape and grin of your mouth, why not rather to keep the pulses of the tongue in tune, to mark the joints of the voice with their proper strokes? Consider, too, the toothless: both listen to them and look at them, and you will see that the honor belongs to the mouth, and the teeth are its instrument. [3] Openings, too, have been bored below in man and woman, no doubt so that lusts might flow through them — why not rather so that the runoff of drink might be drained there? Woman, too, still has within her a place where seeds are gathered — or is it rather a place where the burdens of blood, which the sluggisher sex cannot manage to disperse, may withdraw? [4] These things must be said, inasmuch as our opponents, in whatever way and to whatever degree and however they please, mockingly and deliberately drag the functions of the members forward to smear the resurrection with ridicule, without stopping to consider that the very causes of the necessity in question will then themselves have ceased — hunger for food, thirst for drink, the begetting drive of intercourse, and the toil of labor for a living. For once death is abolished, neither will the props of sustenance be needed to support life, nor will the heavy business of propagating the race weigh on the members. [5] Besides, even today it is possible for the bowels and the privy parts to lie idle: Moses and Elijah, in a forty-day fast, were fed by God alone — for even then it was already being taught, 'Man shall not live by bread but by the word of God.' Behold the outlines of the coming power! [6] We too, so far as we are able, excuse the mouth from food, and withdraw sex itself from intercourse. How many voluntary eunuchs, how many virgins wedded to Christ, how many of both natures made barren, their genitals built for no fruit! [7] For if even here already there is idleness — both of the functions and the profits of the members — through a temporary suspension answering to a temporary arrangement, and man is none the less saved for it, then, man being saved, all the more then — as befits an eternal arrangement — we shall not miss what we have already made a habit of not missing here.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 62 ========

[1] But an end will be put to this whole dispute by the Lord's own pronouncement: 'They shall be,' he says, 'as the angels' — not marrying, because not dying either, and so subject to no further necessity of bodily condition; since the angels too, at one time, existed as men do, eating and drinking and offering their feet to be washed: they had put on a human surface while their own substance remained safe within. [2] So then, if the angels, made as it were men, took on, in the same substance of spirit, a fleshly manner of dealing, why should not men also, made as it were angels, take on, in the same substance of flesh, a spiritual arrangement — [3] no more bound to the customary practices of flesh under their angelic dress than the angels were bound to the customary practices of spirit under their human dress; and just as it does not follow that the angels ceased to abide in spirit merely because they did not abide in the customary practices of spirit, so it does not follow that men will cease to abide in flesh merely because they do not abide in the customary practices of flesh. [4] Note, finally, that he did not say, 'they shall be angels' — lest he deny that they are men — but 'as the angels,' so as to preserve them as men: he did not remove the substance to which he attributed the likeness.

======== De Resurrectione Carnis — Chapter 63 ========

[1] The flesh, then, will rise — and indeed all of it, and indeed this very flesh, and indeed whole and entire. It is held in deposit, wherever it may be, in God's keeping, by way of Jesus Christ, that go-between of utter trustworthiness standing between God and mankind, who will render man to God and God to man, spirit to flesh and flesh to spirit — who has already, in his own person, joined the two together, and matched bride to bridegroom and bridegroom to bride. [2] For even if one should insist that the soul is the bride, then flesh will follow soul as her dowry, so to speak: the soul will not go a prostitute, to be received naked by her bridegroom — she has her trousseau, her adornment, her own handmaid: the flesh; the two were foster-sisters, and they will go together. [3] But it is the flesh that is the bride — the flesh that, in Christ Jesus, suffered by its blood on behalf of the spirit its bridegroom. Whatever destruction you imagine for it, know it to be a mere withdrawal. It is not the soul alone that is set apart: the flesh too has, meanwhile, its own withdrawals — in the deep waters, amid flames, inside birds, within wild beasts. [4] When it seems to dissolve into these, it is, as it were, only poured into vessels. And if even these vessels should give out, and it should flow out from them too into its own womb, the earth, it will be reabsorbed there as if by a detour, so that it may be brought forth again out of that same earth as Adam once was, to hear from the Lord: 'Behold, Adam has become as one of us' — truly master, then, of the evil he has escaped and of the good he has laid hold of. Why then, O soul, do you begrudge the flesh? [5] No one is so close to you, whom you love next after God; no one is more your brother than she who is born with you, even in God. [6] You, rather, ought to have prayed her resurrection into being: through you, if anything, she went astray. But it is no wonder if you hate the one whose very author you have also rejected — the one you have made a habit of denying or altering, in Christ too, along with that same Word of God made flesh, whom you corrupt now with your pen and now with your interpretation, dragging in besides the secrets of your apocryphal books, those fables of blasphemy. [7] But almighty God, against these wits of unbelief and perversity, has, in his most provident grace, poured out in the last days of his own Spirit upon all flesh, upon his menservants and his maidservants, and has quickened the struggling faith in the resurrection of the flesh, and has cleansed the original writings, by the clear light of unambiguous words and meanings, from every obscurity of doubt. [8] For heresies were bound to exist, so that the tested might be shown for what they were; and these could not have dared what they dared without some occasions drawn from the scriptures — and so the original writings seem to have supplied them with certain materials, materials, however, refutable by those very same letters. [9] But since it was not fitting that the Holy Spirit should be hidden either, lest he fail to overflow even into such utterances as no cunning of the heretics could sow seeds against — indeed, so as to pull up their old turf by the roots — he has now, through a fresh prophecy poured out from the Paraclete, dispersed all the old ambiguities and as many parables as they please, by an open and transparent proclamation of the whole mystery. [10] Whoever has drunk from that spring can thirst after no other doctrine; no fever of questions will burn him up; and by drinking of it everywhere, he will be refreshed even on the resurrection of the flesh.

======== Ad Martyras — Chapter 1 ========

[1] Among the provisions for the flesh, blessed martyrs-designate, which our lady mother the Church supplies to you from her own breasts, and each of the brothers from his own resources, into the prison — take also something from us, something to nourish the spirit as well. For it does no good to fatten the flesh while starving the spirit. Indeed, if what is weak is tended, what is weaker still must not be neglected all the more.
[2] Not that I am so great a man that I should presume to address you; and yet even the most perfect gladiators are cheered on from a distance not only by their trainers and managers, but even by amateurs and bystanders of no account — so often has a word tossed out by the crowd itself proved of use.
[3] First of all, then, blessed ones, 'do not grieve the Holy Spirit,' who entered the prison along with you. For if he had not entered with you now, you would not be there today either. See to it, then, that he remains there with you, and so leads you on from there to the Lord.
[4] The prison, to be sure, is the devil's own house, where he keeps his household. But you have come into the prison precisely so as to trample him even in his own house. For you had already met him in the open and trampled him there.
[5] Let him not say, then: 'They are in my domain now — I will test them with petty hatreds, with defections, with quarrels among themselves.' Let him flee your sight, and cower shrunken and torpid in his deepest lair, like a snake charmed out or smoked out. Let him not have it so easy in his own kingdom that he can pit you against one another — let him find you fortified instead, armed with concord: for your peace is war to him.
[6] It is this peace that some within the church, lacking it themselves, have grown accustomed to beg from the martyrs in prison. And so you ought, for that very reason too, to hold and cherish and guard this peace among yourselves, so that, if occasion should arise, you may be able to grant it to others as well.

======== Ad Martyras — Chapter 2 ========

All the other burdens on the spirit have escorted you only as far as the threshold of the prison, exactly as your own parents did. From that point you have been set apart from the world itself — how much more, then, from this age and its business! And do not let it unsettle you that you have been set apart from the world. For if we stop to think it through, the world itself is the real prison, and you have emerged from confinement rather than stepped into it; once we grasp that, all becomes clear.
The world holds a deeper darkness, one that blinds the very hearts of men. The world fastens heavier chains, ones that bind the souls of men themselves. The world breathes out fouler filth — the lusts of men.
The world, finally, holds more prisoners: the entire human race, no less. And it is not the proconsul's court it awaits, but God's.
So think of yourselves, blessed ones, as merely transferred from one holding-cell to another, if you must think of it that way at all. It has darkness, but you are the light. It has chains, but you are free — in God. It breathes out gloom, but you are a fragrance of sweetness. A judge is expected there, but you are the ones who will pass judgment on the judges themselves.
Let the man grieve there who sighs after the fruits of this present age. The Christian has already renounced the world outside the prison; in the prison he simply renounces the prison too. It makes no difference where you are within the world, once you stand outside the world.
And if some of life's comforts are now behind you — well, "it is good business to lose a little in order to gain a great deal more." I say nothing yet of the reward to which God invites his martyrs. Let us simply, for now, weigh life in the world against life in prison, and see whether the spirit does not gain more in prison than the flesh loses.
Indeed, the flesh does not even lose what is rightfully its due, thanks to the church's care and the love-feast of the brothers; and beyond that, the spirit gains everything that is ever useful to faith. You do not see strange gods; you do not run into their images; you do not, by mixing in the crowd, take part in the high holy days of the nations; you are not battered by their filthy incense-smoke, not by the roar of the arena, not struck down by the savagery or frenzy or shamelessness of those who celebrate it; your eyes do not stumble into the haunts of public lust. You are free from scandals, from temptations, from ugly memories — and now, at last, even from persecution.
Prison gives the Christian what the desert gave the prophets. The Lord himself spent his time more often in retreat, so that he might pray more freely, so that he might step back from the world. It was, in fact, in solitude that he showed his glory to his disciples. Let us drop the word "prison" — let us call it retreat.
Even though the body is shut in, even though the flesh is held fast, everything lies open to the spirit. Wander in spirit, roam in spirit — setting before yourself not dim running-tracks or long colonnades, but that road which leads to God. As often as you walk it in spirit, that often you will not be in prison.
The leg feels nothing in the stocks when the mind is in heaven. The mind carries the whole man about with it, and takes him wherever it wishes. And where your heart is, there your treasure will be also. Let our heart, then, be there where we wish to keep our treasure.

======== Ad Martyras — Chapter 3 ========

Granted, then, blessed ones — let the prison still be hard on Christians too. We were called to the service of the living God already back when we answered the words of the oath. No soldier comes to war pampered, nor marches from his bedroom straight to the battle-line; he comes from the field-tents, stripped down and tightened for action, where every kind of hardship, discomfort, and roughness has already settled in.
Even in peacetime men train themselves to endure the sufferings of war through labor and hardship — marching under arms, running the drill-field, digging the trench, packing the tortoise-formation shield to shield. Everything is built on sweat, so that bodies and minds do not flinch — from shade into sun, from sun into frost, from tunic into breastplate, from silence into battle-cry, from stillness into uproar.
So then, blessed ones, whatever hardship this is, count it toward drilling the virtues of both mind and flesh. A fine contest awaits you, one in which the president of the games is the living God, the master of the training-ground is the Holy Spirit, the crown is eternity itself, the prize is a share in the nature of angels, citizenship is in the heavens, and the glory is forever and ever.
And so your trainer, Christ Jesus, who anointed you with the Spirit and led you out onto this training-floor, chose to draw you apart, before the day of the contest, from a softer way of life into harder discipline, so that your strength might be built up in you. For athletes too, of course, are set apart for a stricter regimen, so that they can devote themselves entirely to building their power. They are kept from indulgence, from richer food, from sweeter drink. They are driven, strained, worn down — and the harder they labor in training, the more confidently they hope for victory.
"And they do it," says the Apostle, "to win a perishable crown." We, who are to win one that lasts forever, should read the prison as our training-ground, so that, once well-conditioned by every hardship, we may be led out fit for the arena of the tribunal — because virtue is built up by hardship, but torn down by softness.

======== Ad Martyras — Chapter 4 ========

We know, from the Lord's own teaching, that flesh is feeble while spirit is eager. So let us not flatter ourselves simply because the Lord admitted that flesh is feeble. He declared beforehand that spirit is eager, precisely to show which of the two owes obedience to which — namely, that the flesh must serve the spirit, the weaker the stronger, so that it, too, might draw strength from the spirit's strength.
Let the spirit take counsel with the flesh about their shared salvation — thinking now not of the discomforts of prison, but of the contest and the battle itself. The flesh will perhaps be afraid: of the heavy sword, of the towering cross, of the fury of beasts, of the ultimate torment of fire, of every device the torturer's ingenuity can supply.
But let the spirit set this against itself and against the flesh: bitter as these things are, still many have met them with an even mind — indeed have sought them out unasked, for the sake of reputation and glory; and not men only, but women too, so that you, blessed women, might likewise measure up to your own sex.
It would take too long to list one by one all those who have finished themselves off with the sword, driven by their own resolve. Among women, close at hand is Lucretia, who, having suffered the violence of rape, drove a knife into herself before the eyes of her kinsmen, to secure the glory of her chastity. Mucius burned his own right hand on the altar, so that this deed of his would be remembered.
Philosophers did no less: Heraclitus, who smeared himself with cow-dung and shook it off into death; likewise Empedocles, who leapt into the fires of Mount Etna; and Peregrine, not long ago, who threw himself onto his own pyre — and women too have despised fire: Dido, so as not to be forced to marry after her beloved husband; likewise Hasdrubal's wife, who, as Carthage was already burning, rather than see her husband beg mercy from Scipio, flung herself with her children into the flames of her homeland.
Regulus, a Roman commander taken captive by the Carthaginians, refused to be traded, one man, for many Carthaginian prisoners, and chose instead to be returned to the enemy — where, packed into a kind of chest studded all around on the outside with spikes, he felt as many crosses as there were nails. A woman went willingly to meet wild beasts — and not just any beasts, but asps, serpents more terrible than bull or bear, which Cleopatra set upon herself, rather than fall into the hands of her enemy.
"But," you say, "the fear of death is nothing next to the fear of torture." Did the Athenian courtesan, then, yield to the executioner? She, aware of the conspiracy, was tortured for it by the tyrant; she did not betray her fellow conspirators, and in the end bit off her own tongue and spat it, chewed, into the tyrant's face — to let him know his torments could achieve nothing against her, however much further he carried on.
For it is no secret that among the Spartans today the greatest festival is the diamastigosis — that is, the flogging. In this sacred rite, before the altar, the noblest young men are beaten with whips, while their parents and kinsmen stand by, urging them on to hold out. It is counted a badge of honor and glory — the higher honor, indeed, if the soul yields to the blows before the body does.
Well then: if earthly glory is granted this much power over the vigor of body and soul — to make a man despise sword, fire, cross, beasts, torments, all for the reward of human praise — I can fairly say these sufferings are a modest price for winning heavenly glory and the reward of God. If glass fetches this much, what should a true pearl be worth? Who, then, would not most gladly pay as much for the true thing as others pay for the false?

======== Ad Martyras — Chapter 5 ========

I set aside, for now, the matter of glory. All these same contests of savagery and torment have already, among men, been trampled underfoot by mere showing-off — a kind of disease of the mind. How many idle men does the mere craving for weapons drive to the sword? Men go down against wild beasts themselves purely out of vanity, and count themselves the handsomer for the bites and the scars. Some have even hired themselves out to the flames, to endure a set stretch of time in a burning tunic. Others have walked, with most patient shoulders, among the huntsmen's bull-hide scourges.
None of this, blessed ones, did the Lord let loose upon the world without a reason — but so that we might now be spurred on by it, and, on that day, put to shame if we shrink from suffering for the truth unto salvation, when others have courted the very same for vanity unto ruin.

======== Ad Martyras — Chapter 6 ========

But let us set aside these examples of resolve that come from mere showing-off. Let us turn instead to a plain look at the human condition itself, so that it, too, may instruct us — if there is anything that must be faced with steadiness, something that has a habit of happening even to the unwilling. How often has fire burned people alive! How often have wild beasts, slipping loose both in their own forests and in the middle of cities, devoured men out of their cages! How many have been finished off by the sword of bandits, or by the cross at the hands of enemies — first tortured, indeed, and stripped of every last shred of dignity!
There is no one who cannot also suffer for a mere man's sake, when he hesitates to suffer for God's. Let even the present age stand as proof enough of this to us: how many people of what rank, contrary to every expectation of their birth, their standing, their bodies, their years, meet unlooked-for ends for a man's sake — either at that man's own hand, if they have acted against him, or at his enemies' hands, if they have stood by him.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 1 ========

Proof of your ignorance — which, even as it mounts your defense, convicts you of injustice — lies ready to hand: everyone who, alongside you, once did not know, and, alongside you, once hated, the moment they come to know, stop hating; those who stop being ignorant stop hating — indeed, they themselves become the very thing they hated, and begin to hate what they themselves once were. So it is that day after day you groan over the growing number of Christians; you cry out that the city is under siege, that there are Christians in the fields, in the outposts, on the islands; you grieve, as though it were some loss to you, that every sex, every age, every rank without exception is deserting to us. And yet even this does not move your minds to reckon there might be some hidden good behind it; you refuse to suspect anything more honest, you have no wish to look into it more closely — on this one point alone human curiosity goes numb. You love not knowing what others rejoice to have found; you would rather stay ignorant, because you already hate — as if you were certain you would not hate it, once you knew. And yet if no ground for the hatred can be found, then clearly the best course is to abandon a prior injustice; but if a real cause should turn up, nothing is taken from the hatred — if anything, it only grows, now backed by a clear conscience of justice. Unless, that is, it shames you to correct yourselves, or irks you to have to explain.
I know very well the answer with which you generally meet this evidence of our ever-growing numbers: it proves nothing good, you say, simply because it converts and sweeps along so many. I am familiar enough with a change of mind for the worse. How many deserters from the good life are there? How many turncoats gone over to perversity? Many change in good faith, no doubt — more still, these days, given the state the times are in. But the comparison you are drawing simply does not hold up. For everyone agrees about what is bad — so much so that not even the guilty parties themselves, the ones who cross over to evil and turn from good to wrong, dare defend evil as though it were good. They treat their shameful acts as things to fear, their impious acts as things to be ashamed of. In the end they are eager to hide, they avoid being seen, they panic when caught, they deny it when accused; even under torture they do not easily or consistently confess, and once condemned, they are certainly not happy about it. In fact they reproach themselves for what they had become, and blame their fall from innocence into a corrupted mind on chance, or on fate. They refuse to own it as truly theirs, precisely because they cannot deny that it is evil.
But what of this sort does a Christian ever do? No one is ashamed, no one regrets it — except only his former life. If he is denounced, he glories in it; if he is dragged off, he does not resist; if he is accused, he does not mount a defense; questioned, he confesses; condemned, he glories in that too. What manner of wickedness can this be, where the very character of wickedness collapses?
II.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 2 ========

[1] In this you judge even against the very form of judging the wicked. For when the guilty are brought in, if they deny the charge, you press them with tortures to a confession; but when Christians confess of their own accord, you constrain them with tortures to denial. [2] What perversity is this, that you fight against a confession, that you invert the very function of torture — willing that the guilty escape, forcing the unwilling to deny? Governors, in extorting the truth from us alone you hunt for a lie, that we may say we are not what we are. [3] It would seem you have no wish for us to be counted wicked, and so you are eager to strike us off that name. Do you really aim at this with everyone else too, and put them on the rack, that they may deny what they are said to be? Yet when they deny it you do not believe them: us, if we deny, you believe at once. [4] If you are certain we are the most guilty of criminals, why in this one matter are we treated differently from the guilty? I do not even mention that you give no room either for accusation or for defense (you are used to condemning the unaccused and undefended without much scruple): [5] but, for example, if the question concerns a murderer, once he has confessed, the case is not closed nor the inquiry satisfied by the mere name of "murderer" alone (though you find confessions themselves hard to believe), [6] no — you demand, besides, all the particulars: how many killings he committed, with what weapons, in what places, with what spoils, with what accomplices and receivers, so that nothing at all of the man's wickedness may lie hidden or be missing to furnish the truth needed for sentencing. [7] But in our case, whom you charge with more numerous and more atrocious crimes, you draw up briefer and lighter indictments: it would seem you have no wish for further charges piled onto us, though you want us ruined by every possible accusation — or you think there's no need to look into what you already "know." [8] This then is more perverse still: that you force us to deny what you claim to know for certain — indeed, the more it suited your hatred, once the ordinary form of trial was set aside, to strive by your own special zeal not for denial (lest you free those you hate), but for the confession of each separate crime, so that your enmity might be glutted the more by a heaping-up of penalties, while it is reckoned how many of those infamous banquets each man has already attended, how often he has rushed into incest in the dark. [9] What of this — that the inquiry, meant to root out our whole race, ought to have been spread wider, the investigation extended to accomplices and confederates? The baby-killers and the cooks should have been produced, the very dogs that serve as pandars — the matter would have been cleared up. Even the public shows would have gained an attraction: with what eagerness would people flock to the arena to watch some fighter who had devoured a hundred infants! [10] For if such horrifying, such monstrous things are reported of us, they surely ought to have been dragged into the light, lest they seem incredible and the public hatred of us cool off. For indeed most people already temper their belief in such tales, out of respect for nature, which has shut off from the human race even the appetite for beastly food, let alone intercourse with it.
III.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 3 ========

[1] You, then, otherwise most diligent and most persistent investigators of crimes far smaller than these, when it comes to matters so horrendous, surpassing every kind of wickedness, abandon that diligence — neither accepting the confession, though judges should always labor to secure it, nor sorting out the inquiry, though condemners should always consult it. It is now plain that the whole charge against us is directed not at any crime, but at a name. [2] So true is this that, if the truth of the charges were established, the very names of the crimes would be attached to the condemned, so that sentence would be pronounced against us thus: "that murderer," or "that incestuous man," or whatever we are accused of — "let him be led out, crucified, thrown to the beasts." But your sentences mark nothing except a confessed Christian; no name of any crime appears — unless the crime is the name itself.
[3] This, indeed, is the real reason for the whole hatred against us: the name is the issue, because some hidden force, working through your ignorance, fights against it, so that you refuse to know for certain what you are certain you do not know for certain, and therefore you neither believe what is not proved, nor, so that it not be too easily proved, are you willing to inquire — so that a hated name may be punished under the mere presumption of crimes. [4] So much so, that once the hated name is dropped, we are then compelled to deny it, and then, once we deny it, we are set free, with complete impunity for our past — no longer bloody, no longer incestuous, simply because we have given up that name.
[5] But while this reasoning is being laid out in its proper place, tell me, you who pursue this name to destroy it: what crime lies in the name? What offense, what fault? [6] For you are debarred from bringing charges that neither the indictment specifies, nor the proof assigns, nor the sentence enumerates: whatever is brought before the governor, whatever is inquired of the accused, whatever is answered or denied, whatever is read out from the record of the trial — that I acknowledge as the charge. [7] So then, as to the merit of the name itself — if there is any guilt in names, any accusation belonging to words — I judge that no word or name can be at fault, except when it sounds barbarous, or bodes ill, or is indecent, or is otherwise unfit for the speaker to utter or unpleasant for the hearer to receive. [8] These are the "crimes" of words and names, just as barbarism, solecism, and clumsy figures of speech are faults of language and diction. But the name "Christian," so far as its meaning goes, is derived from "anointing." [9] Even when you mispronounce it "Chrestian" (for you are not even quite certain of the name itself), still it is formed from a word meaning sweetness or goodness. [10] You are therefore persecuting, in innocent men, even a name that is itself innocent — a name that gives no trouble to the tongue, that is not harsh to the ears, that harms no one, that is hostile to no one's peace, and that, besides being Greek like many others, is pleasant both in sound and in meaning. And surely names are not to be punished with the sword, the cross, or the beasts!
IV.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 4 ========

[1] But you say the sect is punished under the name of its founder. Now, first, that a sect should take its name from its founder is a perfectly proper and common practice — philosophers too are named after their founders, Pythagoreans and Platonists, just as physicians are called Erasistrateans and grammarians Aristarcheans. [2] So then, if a sect is bad because its founder was bad, the taint of a bad name is what is being punished. But that would be presuming rashly. It was necessary first to know the founder, in order to know the sect, rather than to hold an inspection of the founder based on the sect. [3] But as it is, since you are necessarily ignorant of the sect, because you are ignorant of its founder — or fail to examine the founder, because you likewise fail to examine the sect — you strike at the bare name alone, as though in it you had hold of both sect and founder, whom in fact you do not know at all. [4] And yet philosophers enjoy the freedom to pass over from you to their sect and its founder and its own name, and no one stirs up hatred against them for it — even though, openly and publicly, they bark out every bitterness of speech against your morals, your rites, your worship, and your way of life, with contempt for the laws, without respect of persons, so that some of them even hurl their liberty unpunished against the very emperors themselves.
[5] But truth, most hateful of all things to this age, the philosophers merely court, while Christians possess it; and so those who possess it are the more disliked, because he who merely courts a thing plays at it, while he who possesses it defends it. [6] In the end, Socrates was condemned precisely on that point where he had come closest to the truth, by pulling down your gods: even though the Christian name did not yet exist on earth at that time, truth was always condemned all the same. [7] And you will not even deny that he was wise — your own Pythian god himself bore witness to him: "Of all men," he said, "Socrates is the wisest." Truth conquered even Apollo, so that he pronounced against himself; for he confessed that he was no god, while affirming as the wisest of all the very man who denied the gods. Yet among you he is less wise for that very reason — for denying the gods — when in fact he was accounted wise precisely because he denied the gods.
[8] In just this way you are accustomed to speak of us too: "Lucius Titius is a good man — pity he's a Christian." And another: "I'm amazed that Gaius Seius, so serious a man, has become a Christian." [9] Out of the blindness of their folly, they praise what they know and denounce what they do not know, and corrupt what they know by what they do not know. [10] It occurs to no one that a man might be good and prudent precisely because he is a Christian, or a Christian precisely because he is good and prudent — though it is more reasonable to judge the hidden by the evident than to prejudge the evident by the hidden. [11] Others, who used to know these people, before they bore this name, as vagrant, worthless, wicked, are astonished at their sudden reform — yet they know how to marvel at it without knowing how to follow it; others fight with such stubbornness that they battle against their own advantages, the very benefits they could gain from association with this name. [12] I know of a husband, more than one, previously anxious about his wife's conduct, who could not bear even a mouse creeping into the bedroom without a groan of suspicion — yet once he discovered the cause of her new diligence and unaccustomed seclusion, he offered his wife every possible patience, renounced his jealousy, and preferred to be the husband of an adulteress rather than of a Christian; he himself was allowed to twist his own nature for the worse, but his wife was not permitted to be reformed for the better. [13] A father disinherited a son of whom he had ceased to complain; a master threw into the workhouse a slave whom he had otherwise found indispensable — the moment either learned the person was a Christian, he preferred him guilty. [14] For indeed our very discipline is itself its own betrayer, and we are exposed by nothing else than our own good conduct. Do the wicked, too, then, shine forth from their own wickedness? Or are we alone, contrary to the order of nature, marked out as worst on account of what is good? [15] For what indeed do we display that is remarkable, except that supreme wisdom by which we do not worship the trivial products of human hands; that self-restraint by which we abstain from what belongs to another; that chastity which we do not stain even with our eyes; that mercy by which we are moved toward the needy; that very truth for which we give offense; that very liberty for which we know how to die? Anyone seeking to grasp what a Christian actually is need only take up exactly these marks as the measure.
V.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 5 ========

[1] As to what you say — "the worst and most disgraceful people, for greed, luxury, dishonesty" — we will not deny that some are so; even this serves as testimony to our name, provided it is not all of us, not most of us. [2] It is inevitable that in a body, however sound or pure you like, either some blemish sprouts up, or some little wart rises, or some freckle mars the skin. [3] The sky itself, however clear its serenity, is never so thoroughly purged that it is not marked by the wisp of some little cloud; a small blemish on the forehead, in one part, serving as the very sample by which the whole is seen to be clean. The greater portion of good uses a small portion of evil as testimony to itself. [4] Yet when you point to some of ours as bad, by that very fact you are proving them not Christians. Go look for the sect to which such wickedness belongs. [5] You yourselves, in conversation, whenever you argue against us, say: "Why is that man a cheat, if Christians are supposed to be abstinent? Why is he pitiless, if Christians are supposed to be merciful?" In doing so you yourselves testify that such men are not true Christians, even while you throw back at us the question of why those who are called Christians should be such.
[6] There is a great difference between a crime and a name, between opinion and truth. For names are so instituted that they have their own boundaries between being called something and actually being it. [7] How many, after all, are called philosophers and yet do not fulfill the law of philosophy? [8] All bear a name derived from their profession: if they bear the name without living up to the excellence the profession requires, they who under the surface of the word bring truth into disrepute are not what they are called merely because they are called it — rather, precisely because they are not what they are called, they are called it in vain, and they deceive those who attach the reality to the name, when it is the reality that ought to determine the standing of the name. [9] And yet such people neither assemble nor share fellowship with us, having become, through their own offenses, once again yours — since we do not even mix with those whom your violence and savagery have forced merely into denial. [10] For it would certainly be easier to keep among ourselves unwilling deserters of our discipline than willing ones. In any case, you have no reason to call "Christians" those whom Christians themselves disown — men who do not even know how to disown themselves.
VI.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 6 ========

[1] Confronted with these arguments and replies of ours, which truth supplies out of its own resources, whenever your conscience — the silent witness of its own ignorance — is pressed and hemmed in, you flee, in your agitation, to a little altar of refuge, namely, the authority of the laws — as though they surely would not punish this sect, had it not been established on its merits before the framers of the laws. [2] What, then, prevented the same certainty from holding among the executors of the laws as well, when, in the case of other crimes likewise restrained and punished by the laws, the penalty is withheld unless inquiry is made first? [3] For example: the law forbids murder, adultery — yet the circumstances of the act are still examined, and still the nature of the deed is known to everyone.
[4] The laws punish the Christian. If there is some deed of the Christian, it ought to be dragged out. No law forbids inquiry; on the contrary, inquiry serves the laws — for how will you observe a law by guarding against what the law forbids, if the diligence needed to guard against it is taken away through a failure to recognize what you are guarding against? [5] No law owes to itself alone the verdict of its own justice, but owes it to those from whom it seeks obedience. Besides, a law that refuses to prove itself is under suspicion. [6] Rightly, then, for so long the laws against Christians are reckoned just and worthy of respect and observance, only as long as it is unknown what it is they are persecuting; rightly, once recognized, they are found utterly unjust and are spat upon along with their swords and gibbets and lions. [7] There is no honor in an unjust law: and indeed, if I may say so, the injustice of certain laws is hardly even in doubt, seeing that every day you temper their harshness and iniquity with new decrees and enactments.
VII.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 7 ========

"Where then," you ask, "did Rumor get such license to speak of you — Rumor, whose testimony might perhaps have sufficed even for the founders of your laws?" Who, I ask, ever vouched for the reliability of Rumor, either to them then or to you since? Is this not she—
"Rumor, an evil than which nothing else is swifter"?
Why an evil, if it is always true? Is it not mostly lying? Even when it does report the truth, it never stops lusting after falsehood — weaving in the false with the true, adding, subtracting, confusing everything with variation. What's more, its very condition is that it survives only by lying. It lives only so long as it proves nothing; once a thing is confirmed, it falls, and having as it were discharged its office of announcing, it steps aside. From then on the fact is grasped, the fact is named, and no one says, for instance, "they say this happened at Rome," or "rumor has it that he drew that province," but rather, "he drew that province," and "this happened at Rome." No one names Rumor except someone still uncertain, because no one becomes certain by rumor but by knowledge; and no one believes Rumor except a fool, because a wise man does not believe the uncertain.
However widely Rumor spreads through its own ambition, it must have started at some point from a single mouth; from there it creeps along a kind of graft of tongues and ears, and the small flaw of its origin is obscured by the rumor's own spread, so that no one stops to consider whether that first mouth sowed lies — which often happens either from the cleverness of rivalry, or the whim of suspicion, or even the sheer novel pleasure of lying. But it is well that time reveals everything, as your own maxims and proverbs testify, and nature herself, which is so ordered that nothing stays hidden, not even what Rumor never disclosed. See, then, what a squanderer you have suborned against us: what she once reported, and has kept propped up as credible for so long a time, she has still not been able to prove.
The name arose under Augustus's principate, our discipline came to light under Tiberius, condemnation of it took hold under Nero — so that from the very person of our persecutor you may already weigh us: if that prince was pious, then Christians are impious; if just, if chaste, then Christians are unjust and incestuous; if he was not a public enemy, then we are the public enemies. What sort we are, our very condemner has shown — punishing, of course, what rivaled himself.
"And yet, of all Nero's edicts, when all the rest were struck down, this alone survived — fitting enough, since it is so unlike its own author." Well then, our people have not even two hundred years behind them. In that time, so many wicked deeds, so many crosses that have won divine honors, so many slaughtered infants, so many blood-soaked loaves, so many riots of lamps put out, so many wanderings of illicit weddings — and still it is Rumor alone that decides the case against Christians! This much rests on a solid foundation of the vice of human nature: it lies more successfully about bitter and atrocious things. The more prone you are to malice, the readier you are to believe evil; indeed, a false evil is believed more easily than a true good. Yet if any room for good sense had been left to you by your own unfairness, then simple justice would have demanded, before testing Rumor's reliability, that you look into who could have set Rumor loose among the crowd and so across the whole world. Not from the Christians themselves, I think — since even by the form and law governing every mystery-cult, silence is owed, how much more in matters whose disclosure would not spare the discloser instant punishment at human hands? If, then, they are not betrayers of themselves, it follows they must be outsiders. But how would outsiders come to know, when even lawful and permitted mysteries bar every outside judge — unless it is the unlawful ones they scorn less? And yet it suits outsiders just as well to exaggerate as to invent. "But," you say, "the curiosity of household members stole through cracks and crannies." What then, when it is household members who betray you to yourselves, betraying everyone? By no one are we betrayed more readily — all the more so, if the outrage is as great as you claim, since indignation at such justice would burst every bond of intimacy. The mind that shuddered, the eye that recoiled in horror, could not have held its tongue. It is also strange that the one who leapt forward with such impatient urgency to inform did not also trouble himself to prove it, and that the one who heard did not trouble himself to see — since the profit is the same for the informer, if he proves what he reported, and for the hearer, if he believes even for himself what he heard. "It was then," you say, "first informed on, and put on display; heard, and inspected, and only then handed over to rumor." This surpasses all wonder — that a thing caught once should be a thing constantly repeated, unless perhaps we have by now stopped doing such things. And yet we are still called by the same name, still reckoned among the same charges, and our numbers grow daily: the more of us there are, the more hateful we are to the many. Hatred grows as the subject-matter grows; as the multitude of the accused increases, why does the multitude of informers not increase along with it?
As far as I know, our way of life has become quite well-known: you even know the days of our meetings; and so we are besieged, we are surprised, we are caught in the very act during our secret gatherings. Yet who has ever come upon a half-eaten corpse? Who has ever found tooth-marks in a blood-soaked loaf? Who, when a sudden light broke in upon the darkness, ever recognized any filthy sign there — I will not say incestuous? If it is by bribery that we manage never to be dragged into public exactly as we are caught, we could just as well manage never to be dragged out at all: for who sells or buys off the betrayal of a crime without the crime itself existing?
But why should I discredit outside spies and informers, when you yourselves level charges of the kind that are not even publicized by us with the loudest outcry — either as soon as they are heard, if they can first be demonstrated, or once discovered later, if meanwhile they were being concealed? For no doubt it is the custom for would-be initiates to first approach the master of the rites, or the "father." Then he will tell them: you need an infant, still crawling, to be sacrificed, and some bread to be soaked in its blood; besides that, lamp-stands, which tethered dogs are to knock over, and scraps of meat to lure those same dogs; and you also need a mother or a sister. And what if there are none? I suppose, then, you cannot become a proper Christian. Now, I ask you, can charges like these bear being reported by others first? "But," you say, "it isn't necessary for the initiates to know beforehand. First the deception is carried out: the feast and the wedding are sprung on the unwitting, since they had never before heard anything about Christian mysteries." Yet afterward they must find out — or else those others they draw in must be briefed in advance. Besides, how absurd it is for outsiders to know what the priest himself does not! So they keep silent, and take it as received truth, and never burst out with the tragedy of Thyestes or Oedipus, and never drag the ministers and masters of the faith before the public, and do not snatch from those already initiated the choicer bite that is theirs. If nothing of the sort can be proved, then some great mystery, I know not what, must be reckoned to exist, whose compensation lies in the endurance of such atrocities.
Wretched and pitiable nations, here we set before you the pledge of our discipline: it promises eternal life to those who follow and keep it, and, on the contrary, threatens eternal punishment in eternal fire to the profane and its rivals; for both parties alike, the resurrection of the dead is proclaimed. We shall look into the credibility of these claims when we treat them in their proper place; for now, believe them just as we do. So this is what I would like to learn: are you yourselves ready to approach such matters through crimes of this kind, just as we are alleged to do? Come, whoever you are — plunge the blade into the infant, or, if that task falls to someone else, simply stand watching while the soul departs a body that has not yet begun to live; either way, gather up the still-warm blood, drench your loaf in it, and feast without hesitation; meanwhile recline at table, count off the places where a mother or a sister has pressed the couch; note them carefully, so that when the darkness falls in — testing, of course, each person's diligence — you do not blunder and fall on the wrong woman: you will have committed a sin, unless it is incest!
"Once you have carried these out, you will live forever." I would love to hear your answer, if you value eternity as much as that. But no — that is precisely why you do not believe it; and even if you did believe it, I deny that you would want to; and even if you wanted to, I deny that you could. But why should others be able to do it, if you cannot? Why should you not be able to, if others can? At what price do you imagine impunity, or eternity, is bought? Do you think these things must be purchased by us in every conceivable way? Do Christians have some other set of teeth, some other cavern of a throat, some other sinews bent toward incestuous lust? I think not: it is enough for us to be distinguished from your position by the truth alone!
VIII.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 8 ========

Plainly, we are called the "third race." Are some people Dog-headed Feather-folk, or Shade-footed men, or some subterranean Antipodeans? If there is any logic at all to this on your side, I would like you to produce for me the first and second races, so that the third may then make sense. Psammetichus, in fact, thought he had discovered by clever experiment the earliest proof of which race came first. The story goes that he had newborn infants handed over to be raised apart from all human contact by a nurse whom, for that very purpose, he had had struck dumb, so that, wholly cut off from the sound of human speech, the children would form their own language not by hearing it but by bringing it forth from themselves — and so mark out the first nation, whose speech nature herself had dictated. The first sound reported was "beccos"; its meaning, in the Phrygian tongue, is the word for bread. The Phrygians, accordingly, have ever since been reckoned the first race.
But this is just one instance of your fables' vanities that deserves our attention, not idly, since we are eager to show that your credulity is given over to fictions rather than to truths. Is it in the least credible that, with such an organ cut away — the very instrument of the soul laid waste, torn out by the root — with the throat mutilated (an area dangerous enough to wound even from outside), and the resulting discharge flowing back into the chest, and finally food withheld for some time besides, that nurse should nevertheless have gone on living? Come now — suppose she survived by some remedy, as they say Philomela did, whom the more sensible interpreters explain was struck dumb not by the cutting of her tongue but by the blush of her outraged modesty. Well then, if the nurse lived, she could still have babbled something: a dull, disjointed sound, a mere buzzing without any shaping by the lips, could certainly still be forced from an open mouth and a numbed tongue out of the throat alone. Perhaps, then, it was this that the infants — since it was the only sound they had — more readily picked up in a somewhat more articulate form, and, being little chatterers, stumbled upon what someone then interpreted as a discovery.
Well then, let the Phrygians be first — Christians are still not third. For how many other lines of nations came after the Phrygians? But consider this: those you call the third race may in fact hold first place, since there is no nation that is not Christian. So whichever nation was first, it is nonetheless Christian: it is ridiculous madness to call us the last and yet name us third.
But it is with regard to superstition that we are reckoned the third race, not with regard to nationality — as though there were Romans, Jews, and then Christians. Yet where do the Greeks fit into this scheme? Or granting that they are folded into Roman superstition, since Rome did indeed also import the gods of Greece, then where at the very least do the Egyptians stand, who, as far as I know, have their own peculiar and curious religion? Furthermore, if those who hold third place are so monstrous, what must be thought of those who come before them in first and second place?
IX.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 9 ========

But why should I marvel at your absurdities, when malice and stupidity are so bound together, fused into a single body, by the same shared master, error? Well, since I do not marvel, I must instead catalogue them, so that by recognizing them you may marvel yourselves at just how deep a stupidity you fall into when you insist we are the cause of every public disaster or injury. If the Tiber floods, if the Nile fails to flood, if the sky stands still, if the earth quakes, if a summer plague ravages, if famine strikes, at once the cry goes up from everyone: "It's the Christians' fault!" As if those who fear no god had little else, or nothing else, to fear! I suppose it is because we scorn your gods that we invite these missiles of theirs. As we have already stated, our age is not yet two hundred years old. Yet how many disasters, before that span, fell upon the whole world, upon individual cities and provinces — how many wars, foreign and civil? How many plagues, famines, fires, chasms of the earth, and earthquakes has history recorded across the ages? Where were the Christians then, when the annals of Rome supplied so many chronicles of her own troubles? Where were the Christians then, when Hiera, Anaphe, Delos, Rhodes, and the island of Cos went down with many thousands of men, or when — as Plato records — a landmass greater than Asia or Africa was swallowed in the Atlantic Ocean? When fire poured down from the sky on Volsinii, and from their own mountain upon the people of the Tarpeian Rock? When an earthquake tore the Corinthian sea apart? When a flood wiped out the entire world? Where then — I will not say the despisers of your gods, the Christians — but your own gods themselves, whom the places and towns founded after that disaster attest, the very places in which they were born, lived, and were buried, and even the cities they founded? For they could not otherwise have survived to this day, except as survivors left over from that calamity. Should you be unwilling to look back over and weigh again the record of bygone ages, laid out for you from a different angle, then above all you are bound to declare your gods thoroughly unjust, since on account of their despisers they injure even their own worshipers; and you thereby also prove yourselves mistaken, in that you hand yourselves over to gods who cannot tell you apart from the profane whom you claim to hate. But if, as one fool or another says, they are angry at you as well precisely because you neglect to stamp us out, then that settles the matter as to their weakness and mediocrity: gods who would not be angry at your inaction if they were able to carry out the punishment themselves. Though indeed you admit as much elsewhere, whenever you seem to think you are avenging them through our punishment. If one party needs defending by another, it is the lesser being defended by the greater. Shame, then, on gods who must be defended by man!
X.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 10 ========

[1] Pour out all your poisons now, hurl every weapon of slander at this name — I will not stop repelling them, though soon enough they will be blunted by the exposition of our entire discipline. [2] But for the present I will wrench those very same charges off our own body and turn them back upon you; I will expose those same wounds of crime buried deep in you, so that you fall by your own swords and your own thrusts.
[3] First, then, as to the general accusation you level at us — desertion of the institutions of our ancestors — look again, and look harder, lest you find yourselves sharing that very crime with us. [4] For behold: throughout the whole of life and custom I recognize antiquity in you as corrupted — no, obliterated. Of your laws it has already been said above that you have buried them under fresh decrees and resolutions made from one day to the next. [5] As for the rest of the arrangement of human intercourse, it lies open for all to see how far you have departed from your forefathers — in dress, in bearing, in style, in diet itself, in speech itself; for the old ways you dismiss as rancid and cast aside. [6] Antiquity is shut out everywhere, in business, in office: your own authority has toppled the whole authority of your ancestors. [7] And what is more shameful still, you are forever praising the old times and nonetheless refusing them. By what perversity ought the ways of your ancestors to have been proved worthy of surviving among you, when you reject the very things you approve? [8] But even the one thing you seem to preserve and defend most faithfully as handed down from your forefathers — the very thing for which you chiefly demand us guilty of transgression, the thing that fuels the whole hatred of the Christian name, I mean the worship of the gods — even that, I will show, is being destroyed and despised by you in just the same way. [9] Except that it is not quite the same: for there is no reason to count us despisers of gods, since no one despises what he knows does not exist at all. What truly exists can be despised; what is nothing suffers nothing: so whatever gods do exist must, of necessity, suffer contempt at the hands of those who have them. [10] All the more are you burdened, then, believing and despising, worshiping and spitting upon, honoring and provoking, all at once.
[11] One can recognize this from the very start: first, since you worship some gods and not others, those you do not worship you certainly despise. Preferring one god cannot happen without insulting another, and no choice is ever made without a rejection; whoever picks one out of many has thereby scorned the one he did not pick. [12] "But so many and so great gods cannot possibly be worshiped by everyone." Well then, you despised them from that very first moment, not troubling yourselves, it seems, to set things up so that all of them could be worshiped.
[13] But surely, you say, those wisest and most prudent ancestors of yours, whose institutions you claim you cannot renounce, especially where your gods are concerned — even they are caught out as irreligious. [14] Call me a liar if they never once decreed that no general should dedicate a shrine he had vowed in war until the senate had approved it — as happened to Marcus Aemilius, who had vowed a temple to the god Alburnus. [15] For surely it is the height of impiety, indeed the height of insult, to make the honor of divinity hang on the whim and caprice of a human vote — so that a being is no god unless the senate permits him to be one! [16] Often, too, the censors leveled temples without even consulting the people; certainly the consuls, acting on the senate's authority, drove Father Liber and all his rites out — banishing him not merely beyond the city walls but clear across the whole Italian peninsula. [17] Varro records, moreover, that Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates and Anubis were banned from the Capitol, and their altars torn down by the senate, only to be rebuilt by the sheer force of the mob. [18] Yet even so, the consul Gabinius, on the Kalends of January, when he could scarcely get the victims approved amid the crowd of the people, still gave more weight to the senate's ruling than to the pressure of the mob, and forbade the setting up of altars to Serapis and Isis because the senate had decreed nothing about them.
[19] So then, in your own ancestors, even if not under the name, you have the Christian sect all the same — men who neglected the gods. If I found you at least consistent in the honors you pay, I might grant you innocent of the charge of wounded religion; but instead I find that among you superstition and impiety have conspired together from the start. [20] For in what way are you found less religious? Your private gods, whom under the name Lares and Penates you consecrate in your homes, you subject to domestic license all the same — pawning them off, pledging them for sale, as need or whim dictates. [21] These sacrileges of household defiance would be more tolerable, were it not that their very smallness makes them all the more insulting. But the complaint against your private and domestic gods finds some small comfort in this: that in public you treat divinity even more shamefully and insultingly. [22] To begin with, the gods you have relegated to the auction spear you have handed over to the tax-farmers, listed among your public revenues and put out to bid every five years. So the temple of Serapis, so the Capitol itself, is put up for sale; divinity is auctioned off, leased out, by the very same auctioneer's cry, the very same collector's demand. [23] Yet fields burdened with tribute are counted cheaper, and men's heads assessed for tax are reckoned less noble — for these are the marks of captivity, of punishment; but the gods who pay more tribute are held more holy — no, rather, the holier they are held, the more tribute they pay! [24] Majesty is prostituted for profit, religion put up for sale in trade, sanctity begs for a lease; you exact a fee for the ground the temple stands on, for entry to the shrine, for the offerings, for the sacrificial victims; you sell divinity whole — it may not be worshiped for free; and in the end more comes back to the tax-farmers than to the priests!
[25] The insult of taxing your gods was not enough for you — an insult, of course, to be measured by the contempt it betrays — nor were you content merely to withhold honor from your gods; you must also cheapen whatever honor you do give them with some further indignity. [26] For what, exactly, do you do to honor them that you do not equally offer to your own dead? [27] You build temples for the gods — you build temples for the dead just the same. You raise altars for a god — you raise altars for the dead just the same. You inscribe the same lettering on their titles, you cast the same shapes onto their statues, according to whatever trade or business or age the person had: an old man is fashioned as Saturn, a beardless youth as Apollo, a maiden as Diana, a soldier is consecrated as Mars, and a blacksmith as Vulcan. [28] So it is no wonder that you slaughter the same victims for the dead as for the gods, and burn the same incense for both.
[29] Who could excuse such an outrage, one that in effect ranks the dead alongside the gods? Kings, indeed, even have priesthoods assigned to them, along with all the rest of the apparatus — ceremonial cars and chariots, couches spread for the gods and couches spread for the dead, holy days and games. [30] Clearly, since heaven is said to lie open to these men, this too is done not without insult to the gods — first, because it is unfitting that others be numbered among them, as though it were granted to these men to become gods after death; [31] second, because no man who watched such a thing openly and plainly before the people could swear it without perjury... unless indeed he held in contempt those very gods by whom he swore, taken up into heaven though they be — he no less than those who let him swear falsely by them. [32] For they themselves agree there is nothing behind their oaths — indeed, they go further and reward the man who openly scorns the avengers of perjury. [33] Yet how many among you are ever free of perjury? No, by now the danger of swearing falsely by the gods has simply vanished, since swearing by Caesar is held the more binding oath — which itself amounts to a further eclipse of your gods, since it is easier for those who swear falsely by Caesar to be punished than for anyone who swears falsely by Jupiter!
[34] Yet contempt is the more honorable thing, carrying with it a certain glory of pride; for it sometimes arises from confidence, or from an untroubled conscience, or from a natural loftiness of soul; but mockery — the more wanton it is, the more it marks itself out for the bite of insult. [35] Consider, then, how you are found to be mockers of your own divinities. I do not even speak of how you conduct your sacrifices — how you slaughter whatever beast is half-dead and wasting away, while from the fat and healthy ones you offer up the useless bits, the heads and hooves, the plucked-off feathers and bristles — scraps you would have thrown out at home anyway. [36] I pass over what will seem the doings of a greedy belly or a sacrilegious throat, matters that come close to your ancestors' own religion; and yet your most learned men, your most weighty men — weighty and wise, so far as weight and wisdom are thought to come from learning — are also invariably the most irreverent toward your gods, and their literature never tires of heaping upon the gods things either shameful, or empty, or false. [37] Let me begin with your own poet himself — he from whom all things flow, and every sea — to whom you have granted such honor that you have taken it directly out of your gods, by glorifying the man who made sport of them. [38] We still remember Homer: he, I think, is the one who treated divine majesty as a merely human affair, steeping the gods in human accidents and passions, pitting them against one another in what amount to gladiatorial matches decided by favoritism; [39] he wounds Venus with a mortal's arrow, he keeps Mars chained for thirteen months, very nearly to perish there; the same poet parades Jupiter as all but overwhelmed by the common rabble of heaven, or wrings tears from him over Sarpedon, or shows him wallowing in the filthiest indulgence with Juno, his lust further dressed up by a whole catalogue and recitation of his mistresses. [40] After him, is there a single poet who has not, on his master's authority, taken liberties against the gods, whether by reporting the truth or by inventing lies? Nor did the tragic or comic poets spare them either, never failing to put miseries and punishments into the gods' own mouths. [41] I say nothing of the philosophers, whom the pride of their austerity and the rigor of their discipline free from all fear — some even driven by a genuine breath of truth to rise up against the gods. [42] Socrates, for one, swears by the oak and the dog and the goat, precisely to insult them. And though he was condemned for this, the Athenians later repented of the condemnation and even punished his accusers, so that his testimony now stands restored — and I can turn that very fact against you: what is now condemned in us was, in his case, proved right. [43] Diogenes too made some sort of sport of Hercules, I forget what; and Varro, the Roman pen also called Diogenes, parades three hundred Jupiters — or should I say Jupiter-figures — without heads.
[44] The rest of your wanton wits carry on your amusements at the expense of the gods' disgrace as well. Just look among yourselves at the sacrilegious wit of the Lentuli and Hostilii — whether it is your mimes or your gods you are laughing at in their turns and jokes; and you take up the scripts of the stage with the greatest relish, scripts that spell out every filthiness attributed to the gods. [45] Majesties are debauched before your eyes in a polluted body; some infamous, degraded head puts on the mask of whatever god you please. The Sun mourns a son struck down by lightning while you sit there rejoicing; Cybele sighs after a disdainful shepherd while you feel no shame; and you sit through the singing of Jupiter's own funeral dirges.
[46] You are plainly more devout in the gladiators' arena, where, over human blood, amid the filth of punishments, your gods dance out their myths and their histories, doled out to condemned criminals — or where, in the persons of the gods themselves, the guilty are punished. [47] We have often seen Attis, the god from Pessinus, castrated; and a man who was burned alive had put on the role of Hercules; we have laughed at the noonday games' sport made of the gods, in which Dis, father and brother of Jupiter, drags off the corpses of gladiators with his mallet, in which Mercury, winged at the scalp and fitted with a fiery brand on his staff, tests with a hot iron the bodies already dead or only feigning death. [48] Every one of these things — and whoever could track down all the rest — if they disturb the honor owed to divinity, if they level the height of majesty, must surely be reckoned as contempt: contempt on the part of those who make a habit of doing them, and contempt on the part of those who sit and enjoy them. [49] I hardly know, then, whether your own gods have more cause to complain of you than of us. ... on the other side you flatter them, you buy back whatever offense you commit, and in the end you are free to do as you please with the gods you chose to invent. We, for our part, turn away from all of it entirely.
XI.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 11 ========

[1] Nor is it only that we stand accused, in this name, of deserting the common religion — no, we stand accused of importing some monstrous superstition besides. For, as some of you have dreamed up, our god is supposed to have the head of a donkey: this suspicion Cornelius Tacitus set going. [2] In book four of his Histories, setting out the war against the Jews from that nation's beginnings and holding forth, as suited him, on both their origin and the name of their cult, he reports that the Jews, on campaign in a vast waterless country and struggling with thirst, followed wild asses, supposing that the beasts, in search of water after grazing, would lead them to a spring, and so escaped; and that out of gratitude for this the Jews worship, under that guise, the likeness of that very animal. [3] From there, I suppose, it was assumed that we too, as kin to the Jewish religion, are initiated into the same image. And yet this same Cornelius Tacitus — that most talkative of liars, mind you — forgetting his own claim, reports further on that Pompey the Great, once he had beaten down the Jewish forces and taken Jerusalem, went into the temple to search it top to bottom, and turned up no image of any sort there. [4] Where, then, would this god of ours have been? Surely nowhere more fittingly than in so memorable a temple, especially one closed to everyone but the priests, where they would have had no reason to fear an outsider's eye.
[5] But why should I even bother defending the point, when in the meantime I have simply confessed, as a matter of the moment, that all such charges apply equally to you? Suppose our god really were given some donkey's shape: you at any rate could not deny that you worship the same thing along with us. [6] For you people worship whole donkeys outright — along with your goddess Epona — and every beast of burden and flock and herd besides, which you likewise consecrate together with their very stalls. And perhaps this is the very charge you level at us: that among all these worshipers of animals, we alone worship the donkey-keeper's god.
XII.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 12 ========

But the one who claims we are priests of a cross will also be a priest of ours. The nature of a cross is a sign made of wood — and you too worship wood, in the form of an image, among your own gods. Though your image has a human shape, so does ours, in its own way. Let them look now to the outlines, so long as the substance is one; let them look to the form, so long as it is itself the body of a god. But if there is a difference here, how much more is Attic Pallas and Pharian Ceres set apart from the stock of a cross — she who is represented, formless, by a rough stake and nothing more than a shapeless wooden post standing upright? Part of a cross — indeed the greater part — is simply any solid timber fixed upright in a straight stance. But the whole cross is charged to our account, crossbeam and all, down to that outward jut of the seat. This makes you the more inexcusable, you who condemn as a mutilated, truncated log what others have consecrated whole and fully built!
For the rest, your religion is thoroughly devoted to the whole cross, unmutilated, as I will show. But you don't even realize that the very origin of your gods comes from this same gibbet. For every image, whether carved from wood or stone, or cast in bronze, or produced from any richer material besides, must first pass through a sculptor's hands. And the sculptor sets up a wooden cross as the very first thing, because in our own body too there lies a silent, secret line in the shape of a cross: the head juts up, the spine runs straight, the shoulders slant out — <...> — set a man up with his arms spread wide, and you have made the image of a cross. So onto this framework, this scaffold if you like, clay is worked and layered over little by little, filling out the limbs, building the body, and whatever shape suits the clay is forced inside, onto the cross. From there, with compass and lead templates, the model of the image is prepared for its migration into marble, or clay, or bronze, or silver, or whatever material one has decided the god should become. From cross to clay, from clay to god: in a sense the cross passes into the god by way of the clay.
So it is a cross you consecrate, since it is from a cross that the consecrated thing begins. To give an example: from an olive stone, a peach kernel, a peppercorn worked into the earth, a tree rises up into branches, into foliage, into the very likeness of its kind. If you transplant it, or take a shoot from its branches to graft elsewhere, to what will the resulting growth be credited? Not to that stone, that kernel, that seed? For when a third stage is reckoned to the second, and the second equally to the first, the third is thereby traced back to the first through the second. There is no need to argue this point further, since by a rule of nature every kind whatsoever refers its lineage to its origin, and the more a kind is defined by its origin, the more that origin is bound up with the kind. If, then, among the kind of gods you worship a cross as the origin, here is the kernel, the primordial seed, from which the whole forest of your idols has sprung.
Now to plainer matters. You worship Victories as divinities — and indeed with greater reverence the more joyful they are. So that the act of consecration should elevate nothing better than this: those Victories are, in a sense, crosses turned inside out, trophies too. And so in the Victories the army's religion worships crosses as well. It adores standards, it swears by standards, it ranks standards above Jupiter himself: but that whole framework of images and all that cult of gold is nothing but necklaces hung on crosses. So too on the banners and flags, which the army guards with no less reverence, those streaming cloths are the garments of crosses. You blush, I suppose, to worship plain, undressed crosses!
13.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 13 ========

Others, more civilized about it, reckon that the Christians' god is the sun, since it has become known that we pray facing east, or that we make a festival of Sunday. Yet what do you do that is any different? Don't a good many of you, out of a fondness for worship, move your lips even toward the sun's rising when you address the heavenly powers? You, certainly, are the ones who have granted the sun a place in the roster of the seven days, and out of those days you have singled one out to determine on which you should skip the bath, or put it off till evening, or arrange for leisure and a proper meal. And in doing this you are straying, and straying from your own religions into foreign ones — for the Sabbath-feast, the pure meal, the Jewish rites of lamp-lighting and fasting with unleavened bread, and prayers by the shore, all belong to the Jews, and are certainly foreign to your gods. So, returning now from this detour — you who fault us over the sun and its day, mark how closely we stand nearby: we are not far removed from Saturn and your Sabbaths!
14.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 14 ========

A fresh piece of gossip has recently been circulating about our God — some utterly worthless character in this city, himself a deserter from his own religion, a Jew only by the loss of a bit of skin, and that mostly since he took to hiring himself out to the beasts and gets torn up daily, whole body and all — this man has put up against us a picture with the caption: 'Onocoetes.' It showed a figure with donkey's ears, wearing a toga, holding a book, one foot hoofed. And the mob believed the Jew . . . for what other seedbed is there for slander against us? So all over the city 'Onocoetes' is being proclaimed. Well, stale as it is, and lacking any weight of age, and weak besides for the poor character of its author, I will gladly take it up, eager to turn it back on you. Let us see, then, whether you too are not caught in this same charge. For it makes no difference what shape it takes, so long as we're talking about disgraceful images. Among you there are gods with dog's heads, with lion's heads, with the heads of oxen and rams and goats, horned, whether goat-born or serpent-born, and winged ones with the feet, brow, and back of birds. So why single out ours as unique? Plenty of Onocoetae are found right there among you!
15.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 15 ========

If we come out equal on the matter of gods, it follows that there should be no difference either in our sacrifices, or in what is held sacred between us — so that the comparison is satisfied from another angle too. We, they say, offer or consecrate through infanticide. As for you — if it has slipped your memory that you stand convicted of transactions involving murder and the killing of infants, you will recall it soon enough in its proper place; for now I am postponing most of this, so as not to seem to go over the same ground everywhere. Meanwhile, as I said, from another quarter the balance is not lacking. For even if our supposed crime differs, you are no less infanticides yourselves — you who, though forbidden by law to smother infants once born, evade no laws more completely, with more impunity, more securely, under the whole community's knowing eye, than these, by the paperwork of a single temple-keeper. Nor does it change anything that you don't kill them with a ritual blade. In fact this is the crueler way — by cold and starvation, or to the beasts if you expose them, or by a slower death in water if you drown them. And if in some respect your practice seems less alike, add this to the account: that you are destroying your own offspring, and it will more than make up, indeed it will heap up beyond measure, whatever fell short of matching by reason.
But we are also said to feast on this impious sacrifice. Well, once this too is recognized as happening among you, where it is more conveniently placed, we are not much set apart from your own voracity. If that practice of yours is shameless and ours cruel, then we are joined together — perhaps by nature, since savagery and shamelessness always keep company. Though really, what do you do less of — or rather, what do you not do more of? Is it a small thing that you gape after human flesh, since you devour the living and the grown? Is it a small thing that you lap up human blood, since you draw out blood that has yet to be shed? Is it a small thing to feed on an infant, since you drink down an infant entire before it is even born?
16.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 16 ========

We have arrived at the hour of the lamps, at the service of the dog, and the inventions of darkness. Here I am afraid I may fall short: for what comparable thing can I hold against you? Well then, go ahead and praise the scheme of our modest incest — how we contrived a treacherous, adulterous night, so as not to defile either daylight or a genuine night; how we thought it right to spare even earthly lamps their part in it; how we even trick our own conscience, since whatever we do, we suspect it too, if we choose. But your incestuous acts, by your own freedom, enjoy full daylight and full night and the whole conscious witness of heaven — and, more fortunate still, while you mingle your incest openly with the whole sky looking on, only you yourselves remain in the dark about it; whereas we can recognize our own crimes even in the dark.
Clearly the Persians, as Ctesias records, freely have relations with their mothers, both knowingly and without any horror of it. And the Macedonians too plainly make a public practice of what they approve — for when the drama of Oedipus first came onstage, his eyes gouged out, they greeted it with laughter and mockery. The startled tragic actor, pulling off his mask, said, 'What, my lords, have I displeased you?' The Macedonians answered, 'No, indeed, you did splendidly — but the playwright was an utter fool if he made this up, or Oedipus was out of his mind if he really did it' — and then one turned to another and said, 'Drive him — into his mother.' But what is one nation, or two, against the whole world's stain? For we have polluted every land, we have fouled every ocean. Show me, then, some nation free of the vices that drag the whole human race into incest — if any nation, by the very necessity of intercourse, of age and sex, not to mention lust and excess, is free of it, that will be the one that lacks incest; if any is set apart from the human condition by some special nature, so that it is exposed neither to ignorance, error, nor accident, that alone will be able to stand more firmly in answer to Christians.
Consider, then, how lust drifts among your errors and your winds, if you lack peoples whom the broad shoals and rough seas of error might drive into this crime. To begin with, when you expose your own infants to a stranger's pity, or hand them over in adoption to better-off parents, do you forget how much material for incest you are furnishing, how much opportunity you are opening up for accidents? Surely, by some rule of stricter discipline, or at least out of regard for such outcomes, you restrain your lust wherever you are, at home or abroad, so that the scattering of your seed and lust's leaping about does not, in ignorance, produce children whom either the parents themselves afterward, or other children, might encounter — since even the ordinary restraint of age has been shut out by lust? However many adulteries, however many seductions, however many acts of public lust under a settled or a roving label, so many minglings of blood, so many entanglements of kin, so many pathways from there into incest. This is exactly the source from which the mimes and comic playwrights draw their endless supply of plots; from this source, too, that very tragedy — no mere fiction — broke out, the one judged by Fuscianus, prefect of the city.
A boy, honorably born, through his companions' chance carelessness, wandered past the doorway; a passerby, in transit, drew him along the road, and he was lost from home. A little Greek who had raised him, or perhaps had caught him at the threshold in the usual Greek fashion as he wandered in, took him in. From there, his age disguised, he was carried off to Rome and put up in a slave market. An unsuspecting father bought him and made use of the Greek; then, as is customary, once he was grown, the master assigned the young man to the fields and to chains. There, meanwhile, his old tutor and nurse were themselves paying a penalty of servitude. The whole affair is laid out before them; they compare, in turn, how each had come to this end — the one, that his foster son had perished in boyhood; the other, that he too had been lost since boyhood, though by the same turn of events: born at Rome, in an honorable house — and perhaps he recognized certain marks as well. And so, by God's will, it came about that so great a stain was exposed to the world; the spirit is shaken by daylight, the dates line up with the ages; the eyes, too, recall something of the features, certain distinguishing marks are noted on the body. The masters — or rather, by now, the parents — are driven on only by the diligence of an inquiry carried further; the slave-dealer is tracked down, and found, to their misfortune. Once the crime was uncovered, the parents took their own lives by the noose; the estate the prefect assigned to the son, wretchedly surviving — not as an inheritance, but as wages for his violation and incest. One example alone should be enough of this public eruption of the sort of crimes that lie hidden among you. Nothing in human affairs happens only once; only a single instance can, plainly, be dug up and exposed. As for the sacraments of our religion, which you level accusations at, I think, you have your own equivalents even among what are not sacraments at all!
17.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 17 ========

As for the obstinacies or presumptions you charge us with, none of these escape a fair comparison either. The first "obstinacy" is this: your religion ranks the majesty of Caesar second only to the gods, and we are called irreligious toward the Caesars because we neither propitiate their images nor swear by their genii. We are named enemies of the state. Yet see how it stands: from among your own nations new Caesars are made every day, Parthian, Median, German — let the Roman people look to that, seeing what untamed and foreign stock supplies them. "But you conspire with our own people against our own people!" We know well enough what Roman loyalty to the Caesars amounts to: no conspiracy has ever broken out, no blood of a Caesar has ever stained the Senate house or the very palace, no province has ever grasped at the throne — of course not! Syria still reeks with the stench of corpses, the Gauls still refuse to wash in their own Rhone! But I pass over crimes of sheer madness, since even Rome's own name will not own them; let me instead recall the sacrileges of your vanity, the irreverence of your own native people, the mocking pamphlets the statues could tell you about, and those sly digs and curses tossed about in council chambers, that echo round the circus: if not in arms, you are forever rebels at least in tongue. But I suppose there is some further point in refusing an oath sworn upon Caesar's genius: for the crime of false swearing is itself questionable at law, given that you do not even keep faith when swearing by your own gods. But we do not call the emperor a god: at such a claim we simply — as the saying goes — pull a face. No, it is you who, in calling Caesar a god, deride him as something he is not, and do him an injury, since he declines to become what you name him: for he would sooner go on living than be turned into a god!
XVIII.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 18 ========

The rest of the "obstinacy" you lump into that same chapter: that we refuse, out of sheer hardness and contempt of death, neither your swords nor your crosses, your beasts, nor fire, nor tortures. But surely all these things, among your own ancestors and forebears, were learned to be not merely endured without complaint but even weighed and praised as great virtue. How many men, and how great, has the sword sent forth as volunteers! I am ashamed to list them. As for the novelty of the cross — countless, obscure men have embraced it gladly; your own Regulus dedicated himself to it freely; the queen of Egypt made use of her own snakes; fire, after that Carthaginian woman — Dido herself, more resolute in her country's last hour than her husband Hasdrubal — had taught men to walk into it willingly. And torments were endured to exhaustion by an Attic woman who refused the tyrant, and at the last, so that neither body nor sex should yield, spat out her own bitten-off tongue, the whole ministry of her sworn confession performed by her mouth alone. Yet all this you credit to yourselves as glory, and to us as mere stubbornness. Go on, then — tear down the glory of your ancestors, so that you may tear down ours as well! Be content, for the moment, to strip even your own forebears' praises bare, so as to leave no room for ours! Perhaps you will say that the temper of those times demanded harder natures from a sterner antiquity; but now, in the calm of peace, tempers have grown gentler, and men's hearts kindlier even toward outsiders.
"Very well," you say, "compare yourselves to the ancients if you like; but we have to go after you for the hatred you show us, which we ourselves do not practice, because it is not even found among us." Answer, then, point by point. Do I not recognize the very same examples among you? If it is contempt of death that has made legends of the sword among your ancestors, then surely it is not love of life that binds you to the gladiator's oath, nor fear of death that enrolls you as soldiers. If for some woman a famous death by wild beasts is glorious, well, every day, in the midst of peace, men go to the beasts of their own free will. If none of you has yet, like Regulus, bargained with the cross, that engine for piercing the body, still, contempt of fire has already been achieved, since someone not long ago hired himself out to be clothed in a burning tunic and walk to a fixed spot regardless. If a woman's defiance under the lash impressed you, well, that too has just been matched by a man who, running the gauntlet of the beast-hunters' ranks, retraced his steps — not to mention the famous endurance of the Spartans.
XIX.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 19 ========

So far, I think, go the terrifying "obstinacies" of the Christians. Now that we have shown these are shared in common with you, it remains to compare the laughable — as you call them — persuasions. And yet our whole "obstinacy" is really built on our persuasions: we presume the resurrection of the dead. Hope of resurrection is contempt for death. Laugh, then, as much as you like, at minds you think utterly stupid, who die in order to live; but so that you may laugh more easily and cackle more freely, first take a sponge, or a moistened tongue, and erase for the moment your own writings, which likewise assert that souls return into bodies. And yet how much more acceptable our presumption is, which maintains that souls return into the very same bodies; while how much emptier is what has been handed down to you — that a man's spirit might come to lodge in a dog, a mule, or a peacock! Likewise we proclaim a judgment appointed by God according to each man's deserts after death; you assign this to Minos and Rhadamanthus, having rejected the far juster Aristides altogether. By that judgment we say the wicked will spend eternity in unending fire, and the pious and innocent in a place of delight; among you too, the arrangement of Pyriphlegethon and Elysium is disposed no differently. Nor is it only the myth-makers and poets who sing of such things; the philosophers too affirm the migration of souls and the apportioning of judgment.
XX.

======== Ad Nationes 1 — Chapter 20 ========

How much longer, then, most unjust nations, will you fail to recognize — indeed, will you go on cursing — your own selves, if there is no real difference between us, if we amount to a single, identical people? Given that you do not hate what you yourselves are, then join hands instead, exchange kisses, mingle embraces — the bloodstained with the bloodstained, the incestuous with the incestuous, the conspirators with the conspirators, the obstinate and vain with their own equals. Together we have offended the divine powers, together we provoke their anger. You too have your "third race," though not from a third cult — rather from a third sex, one more aptly formed by joining men to men and women to women. Or do we perhaps offend you by our very fellowship? Equality tends to breed the material of rivalry: so potter envies potter, and craftsman craftsman!
No — enough now of this pretended confession! Conscience drags the truth back, forces it to stand firm in the truth. For all these charges will exist in you alone, and are refuted by us alone — the very people they were brought against — simply by our recognizing the other side's case; from which knowledge is built, judgment formed, and a verdict properly governed. Indeed it is your own maxim that no one should judge a case without hearing both sides — a rule you neglect only where we alone are concerned. You indulge a flaw of nature: you refuse to condemn in yourselves what you condemn in others, or you fling at others the very guilt you remember in yourselves.
This is the injustice: that the informed are judged by the ignorant, the acquitted by the guilty. Take the splinter out of your own eye before you go pulling the splinter out of someone else's. Correct yourselves first, before you punish Christians! Except that, if you correct yourselves, you will no longer punish us — indeed you will become Christians; or rather, if you become Christians, you will already be corrected. Learn what it is you actually accuse in us, and you will stop accusing; recognize what you fail to accuse in yourselves, and you will start accusing yourselves instead! By now it is plain to you how much we have been able to lay open from these few small pamphlets — an inspection of error and a recognition of truth. Condemn the truth, if you can, once you have inspected it; approve error, if you think you have found it! But if you are bound by your own rule to love error and hate truth, why not at least come to know what it is you love and hate?

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 1 ========

Now, pitiable nations, our defense must join issue with you concerning your gods, calling on your own conscience to examine whether they are truly gods, as you wish, or falsely so, as you refuse to know. For this is the very stuff of human error, kept alive by its own craftsman, lest ignorance of the error should ever be lifted — the better to keep you guilty. Eyes are open, yet they do not see; ears gape, yet do not hear; the heart beats, yet lies stunned; the mind does not know what it perceives! In short, if this whole perversity could be dismissed by a single ruling, the case would be quickly closed, since you yourselves do not deny that all these gods were instituted by men — and from that admission alone, belief in true divinity must collapse, because nothing that had a beginning at some point in time can rightly be thought divine. And yet there are many things by which the tenderness of conscience is hardened into the callus of willful error. Truth is besieged by a mighty force — and yet is secure in her own strength! Why not? Whomever she pleases, she takes from the very ranks of her enemies and makes into allies and defenders for herself, and lays low that whole conquered multitude.
Against all this, then, our fight is joined: against the institutions of your ancestors, the authority of received tradition, the laws of those in power, the arguments of the clever; against age, custom, necessity; against precedents, prodigies, and miracles — all of which have propped up this adulterated divinity of yours. So, matching you point by point in your own handbooks, drawn from every branch of theology you have ever accepted — since among you the authority of the written word carries more weight than that of the facts themselves — I have chosen, for the sake of brevity, the works of Varro, who, having compiled his Antiquities of Divine Matters out of everything gathered before him, has made himself a fitting target for us to aim at.
If I question him as to who first introduced the gods, he names either philosophers, or peoples, or poets. For he distinguishes a threefold classification of the gods: one physical, which philosophers examine; another mythical, which is tossed about among the poets; a third civic, which each people has adopted for itself. So then, since the philosophers patched together the physical kind out of conjectures, the poets drew the mythical kind from fables, and the peoples simply took up the civic kind on their own initiative — where, pray, is truth to be located? In conjectures? But that is an uncertain business. In fables? But that is a shabby account. In adoptions? But that is a merely local, municipal sort of adoption. In short: among the philosophers it is uncertain, because it varies; among the poets everything is unworthy, because shameful; among the peoples everything is passively received, because merely a matter of will. Now true divinity, if you examine it rightly, is by definition such that it cannot be pieced together from uncertain arguments, nor tainted by unworthy fables, nor decided by passive adoptions; it must be held, as it truly is, certain, whole, and common — common, that is, to all. But then, whom am I to believe is a god? One that mere guesswork has reckoned up? One that legend has trumpeted? One that a city simply willed into being? Far worthier to believe in none at all than in one I must doubt, or blush for, or that was merely adopted!
II.

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 2 ========

But the philosophers' physical theory relies on their authority as sworn slaves of wisdom. A marvelous wisdom indeed, whose feebleness is attested from the outset by this very variety of opinions — a variety born of ignorance of the truth! But who can be wise while a stranger to truth, ignorant as he is of God, the father and lord of wisdom and truth themselves? For Solomon too declared, by divine utterance elsewhere, "The beginning of wisdom is fear of God." And the origin of fear is knowledge: who, after all, fears what he does not know? So then — once he has feared God, having gained knowledge of the God whom all else is ignorant of, and pursued the full and perfect knowledge and truth of God — he will attain wisdom whole and entire. But this is precisely what philosophy has never clearly achieved. Granted, in their curiosity to inspect literature of every kind, the philosophers may seem to have dipped even into the divine scriptures, as being the older writings, and to have lifted a few things from them; yet since they reject other parts of them, they prove either that they never examined the whole, or that they did not believe the whole (for indeed elsewhere too the simplicity of truth wavers in its credit through human over-scrupulousness) — and so, driven on by the itch for a reputation of their own, they reworked what they took into productions of their private genius. And through this process even what they had found went astray into uncertainty, and there arose a flood of arguments out of one or two mere drips of truth.
For once they had found God — not the way they had actually found him, but as they then set him forth — they went on to dispute about his quality, his nature, even his dwelling-place. The Platonists make him one who cares for things, arbitrates, and judges; the Epicureans make him idle and unemployed, and, so to speak, nobody at all; the Stoics place him outside the world, the Platonists inside it. Since they had never fully admitted him, they could neither know him nor fear him nor draw wisdom from him — straying, of course, from the very beginning of wisdom, which is the fear of God. There survive testimonies to a divinity both unknown and doubted among the philosophers. Diogenes, when asked what goes on in the heavens, said, "I have never gone up there." Likewise, asked whether there were gods, he said, "I don't know — except that it's expedient there should be." Thales of Miletus, questioned by Croesus about his opinion of the gods, after several rounds of deliberation, finally reported back: "Nothing." Socrates himself denied those gods as though certain of it — and the very same man, as though equally certain, ordered a rooster's throat cut in sacrifice to Aesculapius. And so, given that philosophy is caught being so uncertain and undefined about God, what fear could a man have of a being he could not even clearly pin down?
We say that gods are made out of the world. This is how they force theology into a species of physics — those who have handed elements over as gods, as Dionysius the Stoic does, who splits the gods three ways: one kind that is plainly visible, like the Sun and Moon; another that does not show itself, like Neptune; and the rest, said to have passed over from being human to being divine, like Hercules and Amphiaraus. Arcesilaus likewise introduces a threefold form of divinity: the Olympians, the Stars, and the Titans, born of Heaven and Earth — and from these, from Saturn and Ops, Neptune, Jupiter, and Orcus, and the rest of the succession. Xenocrates the Academic divides them two ways, Olympians and Titans, the latter born of Heaven and Earth. Most of the Egyptians believe in four gods: Sun and Moon, Sky and Earth. Democritus supposes the gods were born along with the rest of the fire from on high, and Zeno wants nature to be of the same stuff. Hence Varro too makes fire the soul of the world, so that fire governs everything in the world just as the soul does in us. But how utterly empty a claim! "When it is present in us," he says, "we ourselves exist; when it departs, we die." So then, when fire departs from the world by way of lightning, the world must die too.
III.

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 3 ========

With these matters thus dispatched, we can see that this physical theory has been rigged up for the sole purpose of arguing that the elements are gods, while at the same time claiming that other gods were born from them — although a god can only be born from a god. Since we will examine these gods more fully in their proper place, in the section on mythology, still, as regards what needs to be reconsidered about them for the present purpose — and simultaneously turning from the present purpose back to them — we intend to show that the beings said to be born of the elements cannot in any way be seen as gods, so that it will already stand pre-judged from this point on that the elements are not gods, since those said to be born from the elements are not gods; and likewise, by demonstrating that the elements are not gods, we will lay the groundwork for rightly defending that their offspring, so called, are not gods either — since their parents, that is, the elements, are not gods.
We know that god is born from god, just as non-god is born from non-god. So then, as to what elements this world of ours contains (to treat the matter summarily, dealing with the universe as a whole before its parts — for whatever condition applies to the whole will certainly apply also to the elements, as its members) — either the world was necessarily set up by someone, as Plato's humane view has it, or by no one, as Epicurus in his hard-nosed way holds; and if it was set up, then having had a beginning it will also have an end. And so, what did not exist at some point before its beginning, and will at some point not exist after its end, simply cannot be seen as god, lacking as it does the substance of divinity — that is, eternity, which by definition has neither beginning nor end. But if it truly was not set up at all, and is therefore to be held a god, since as a god it suffers neither beginning nor end — then how is it that some people assign generation to the elements, wanting them to be gods, when the Stoics themselves deny that anything is born of god? Likewise, how can they wish those things reckoned to have sprung from the elements to be counted gods, when they deny that god is ever born at all? So then, whatever belongs to the world will be ascribed to the elements — I mean sky, earth, stars, and fire — which Varro, and those who taught Varro that sky and stars are living creatures, have vainly proposed you should believe to be gods and parents of gods, against the very denial of divine generation and birth.
But if that is so, they must also be mortal, following the pattern proper to living creatures; for even granting that the soul is immortal, that privilege belongs to the soul alone, not also to that to which it is attached — that is, the body. Now nobody could dispute that the elements possess a bodily nature, given that we make contact with them and in turn are affected by their contact, and we can clearly observe solid matter breaking off from them. Therefore, if they are living creatures, subject — once you set aside the soul — to the same condition as bodies, namely mortality, then they are certainly not gods.
And yet where does Varro get the idea that the elements are living creatures? "Because," he says, "they move." And to forestall the objection that many other things move too — wheels, wagons, machines of every sort — he heads it off in advance by saying that these are believed to be living creatures because they move by themselves, with no mover or initiator of their motion appearing from outside, unlike the case where we can plainly see someone driving the wheel, turning the wagon, or operating the machine. So then, unless they are living creatures, they are not self-moving.
Furthermore, in appealing to what does not appear, he shows precisely what he ought to have sought instead — namely, the craftsman and arbiter of the motion; for it does not follow that, because we do not see something, we therefore do not believe it exists. Quite the opposite: the deeper the search must go into what is not seen, precisely so that we can know the true nature of what is seen. Otherwise, if things visible are believed to exist simply because they are visible, how is it that you also accept as gods those which are not visible at all? And if beings that do not exist can be believed to exist because they are seen, why should beings that are not seen not also exist? I mean the mover of the heavenly bodies. So then, let the elements be living creatures, because they move by themselves; and let them be self-moving, because moved by no other — yet just as they are not therefore gods merely because they are living creatures, so they are not gods merely because they are self-moving either; or else what is to stop every self-moving living creature whatsoever from being counted a god? Which, by another sort of folly, is exactly what the Egyptians allow.
IV.

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 4 ========

Some say the gods are so called because theein, that is, to run, is the interpretation for "to be moved" and "to run." So then this word carries no majesty at all: it was formed from running and motion, not from any dominion of power. But since even that one God whom we worship is called theos, and yet no motion or running of his ever appears — because he is not visible to anyone at all — it is plain that this word was borrowed from elsewhere and is his own proper word, being native to himself, an invention proper to divinity. And so, setting aside the cleverness of that etymology, it is more likely that theoi was not named from running and motion, but instead took its name from the title belonging to the one true God — with the aim that you could apply the label theoi indifferently to whatever gods you happen to be manufacturing. In fact, proof enough is at hand: you call the whole lot of your gods theoi in common, even those in whom no function of running or motion whatsoever is to be found. So then, if the theoi are equally motionless, the etymology of the word and the notion of divinity part ways together, since the derivation shaped from running and motion is cut off from it. But if this name is the proper and simple name of divinity and not derived by interpretation at all — a point not disputed in the case of that one God — but is transferred to all the rest whom you wish to be gods, then show us that there is a fellowship of quality among them too, so that a title held in common might rightly imply a community of substance as well. Furthermore, that theos already stands apart, by this fact alone — that he is not in plain view — from comparison with those who are in plain view, exposed to sight and sense. But it is sufficient testimony to the senses, for the difference between the hidden and the manifest, that things are reported this way: if the elements are set plainly before everyone, while god, on the contrary, is before no one, how will you be able to bring together, from that side which you have never seen, that which you do see? So then, since you cannot join them by sense or by reason, why do you join them by name, so as to join them also in power?And look — even Zeno separates the world's matter from god, or else says that god passes through it the way honey passes through the honeycomb. So then matter and god are two names, two things: by the distinction of the names the things too are separated, and even the condition of matter follows from its name. But if matter is not god — since the very name forbids it — how can the things that are in matter, that is, the elements, be held to be gods, when parts cannot be alien to the body they belong to?
But why do I bother with arguments of physical theory? The mind ought to have climbed upward from the condition of the world, not descended into uncertainties. Plato gives the world a round shape; others have invented a squared, angular one — devised, I suppose, with a round compass, since it strains to be believed without even a head. But Epicurus, who had said, "whatever is above us is nothing to us," when he too felt the urge to inspect the sky, discovered the sun's disk to be a foot wide. Frugality, it seems, was still the order of the day even up in the heavens. Then, as ambition made progress, the sun's own reach expanded too — thus the Peripatetics reckoned it larger than its actual orb. I ask you, what sense is there in this lust for guesswork? What does it prove, this leisurely fussiness dressed up in elaborate eloquence, all backed by such presumptuous assertion? It was well deserved, then, that Thales of Miletus, while examining the whole sky and walking it with his eyes, fell disgracefully into a well — much mocked by that Egyptian woman who said, "Seeing nothing on the earth, do you suppose you can survey the sky?" And so his fall marks, in figure, the philosophers themselves — namely those who exercise a stupefied curiosity about the works of nature before first examining its maker and overseer, and so are destined to end up in emptiness.
V.

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 5 ========

[1] Why not turn, then, to a somewhat more humane opinion, one that appears to be drawn from everyone's common sense and simple conjecture? [2] For Varro too recalls it, saying that the divinity of the elements is believed in for this reason: that nothing at all can be born, nourished, or brought forward for the preservation of human life without their support, [3] since not even bodies or souls themselves could have sufficed without the tempering of the elements, by which this habitation of the world is furnished, bound together by the conditions of its circling courses — except where the excess of cold or heat has denied habitation to men, [4] and that for this reason the sun is believed to be a god, who heaps up the day from his own store, ripens the crops with his heats, and keeps the year by its stations; the moon, the comfort of the nights, the patroness of the months, its guide; [5] likewise the stars, certain markers of the seasons for noting the times of farm-work; and finally the sky itself, beneath which all things are, and the earth, upon which all things stand, and whatever among them conspires together for human advantage; [6] and that credit for divinity accrues to the elements not only from their benefits, but also from the various things that tend to befall as if from their anger and displeasure — thunderbolts, hailstorms, blazing heats, pestilential winds, likewise floods, likewise chasms and quakings of the earth; [7] and that it is right to believe them gods, whose nature is to be honored in good fortune and feared in bad — mistress, that is, of both helping and harming. [8] Now, if this is how people feel in ordinary life, they do not, correspondingly, render thanks or lodge complaints against the very things by which they are helped or hurt, but against those under whose right and power the operation of these things runs its course. [9] For even in matters of pleasure, you award the crown as prize not to the flute or the lyre, but to the artist who tempers the flute and lyre with the power of sweetness. [10] Equally, when someone is in poor health, you do not remember your gratitude toward the wool-dressings or antidotes or poultices themselves, but toward the physicians, by whose skill and judgment the remedies come about. [11] Likewise in misfortunes: those wounded by the sword do not blame the pain itself or the spear, but the enemy or the robber; and those crushed by a collapse do not accuse the tiles or the roof-slates, but old age, just as shipwrecked men do not lay the blame on rocks and waves, but on the storm. [12] And rightly so: for it is certain that whatever happens is to be credited not to the means by which it happens, but to the one by whom it happens, since he is the source of the deed who determined both that it should happen and the means by which it should happen (and in all things there are these three headings: what it is, by what means it is, and by whom it is) — because there must first be someone who wills a thing to happen, and then a means that can be found for it. [13] And so you act rightly in all other matters by taking the author into account; but in physics — contrary to nature — you depart from that very rule which in other matters you judge to be wisdom, by stripping away the highest rank, that of the author, and crediting what is done not to the one by whom it is done. [14] Thus it comes about that you believe to be powers and wills of the elements what are in fact servitudes and functions. We, in this investigation, posit some artisan and lord within them, but we maintain that the elements are servitudes — as their very work shows — which you turn into powers. [15] But gods do not serve; therefore what serves is not god. Or else let them show us a common case where, from license of being acted upon, freedom is proven, and from freedom, dominion, and from dominion, divinity is inferred. [16] For if all these things above us are recalled to run their fixed courses, their lawful circuits, their own intervals, their equal turns, established after the manner of a law, as the times revolve and their guidance of the seasons is carried out, [17] by this very observance of their own conditions, by the reliability of their workings, by their persistence, by their care in the changes, by their memory in the returning cycles — let them persuade you that some dominion presides over them, to which the whole business of the world appears to answer, arriving at the benefit of the human race. [18] For you cannot say that the elements do these things for themselves and look after themselves, arranging nothing for man's sake, when the very reason you defend divinity for the elements is that you feel yourself helped or harmed by them; for if they do it for themselves, you owe them nothing.
VI.

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 6 ========

[1] Come now, do you not grant that divinity ought not merely to avoid running in servile fashion, but above all to stand whole, and must be neither diminished, nor cut off, nor corrupted? Otherwise all its blessedness is gone, if it ever suffers anything at all. [2] But look — the stars themselves suffer eclipse, and testify by that very eclipse to their own failing; and the moon confesses how much she has lost, when she takes it up again. [3] Indeed, you are accustomed to observe her greater losses in the mirror of water — so much so that I need not credit any further point which the magicians know. The sun himself, too, has often been assailed by eclipse. [4] Invent whatever explanations you like for these heavenly mishaps — a god will not wish either to become lesser or to cease to be. Let the champions of human learning look to it, then, who by the artifice of guesswork counterfeit both wisdom and truth. [5] Is nature perhaps such elsewhere, that whoever speaks more elegantly is thought to have spoken more truly? Rather, is it not whoever speaks more truly who speaks better? [6] But to whoever weighs the matter, it will certainly seem more probable that these elements are ruled by someone than that they wear themselves away on their own; therefore they are not gods, since they are under someone. [7] But if error is made here, it is better to err simply than to err, as the natural philosophers do, with elaborate diligence. Yet if you look to the mythic sort, mortality errs better in the physical sort, in awarding divinity to what it supposes felt above man in position and force and magnitude and duration: for whatever is above man, you take to be next to god.
VII.

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 7 ========

[1] But to pass now to the mythic sort, which is assigned to the poets — I hardly know whether it amounts to much for our modest purpose, or whether such figures are confirmed by proofs of divinity of such weight as Mopsus the African or Amphiaraus the Boeotian. For now this class must only be sampled; its full account will be given in its proper place. [2] Meanwhile, that these figures were merely men is evident from a single fact: you refrain from styling them gods outright, calling them instead heroes. [3] What, then, are we arguing? If divinity were to be awarded to the dead at all, it certainly should not go to such as these. [4] Look — you, when with that same license of presumption you disgrace heaven with the tombs of your kings, do you not honor with the comfort of that sort of consecration only those approved by justice, courage, piety, and every good quality of the kind — content, for such men, even to be laughed at as you swear falsely by them, [5] while, on the other hand, you strip the impious and the shameful even of the earlier rewards of human glory — tearing up their decrees and titles, pulling down their images, restamping their coinage? [6] But shall he who watches over all, who approves — indeed exacts — good deeds, prostitute the ordering of so great an indulgence of his to the common crowd? And shall men be allowed to have more scrupulousness and justice than he in distributing honors? Will the retinues of kings and princes be more discriminating than those of the supreme god? [7] And yet you shudder at and turn away from vagrants, exiles, the weak, the crippled, the lowborn, the disreputably raised; while on the other hand the incestuous, adulterers, ravishers, and parricides — men your own laws mark out for punishment. Is it a matter for laughter or for outrage, that such should be believed gods as men ought not even to be?
[8] But indeed, in this mythic class that the poets hand down, how inconsistent you are about the modesty of your own conscience and its defense! [9] For as often as we reproach you with the wretched, shameful, or savage doings of your gods, you defend them as fables, pleading the license of the poets; [10] but whenever such things are simply passed over in silence, you not only do not burden poetry with blame, but honor it as well, and count it, indeed, among the essential arts: in fact you bring your children's education forward through it as the very initiatress of letters. [11] Plato judged that poets who slander the gods should be banished, and that Homer himself, crowned though he be, should be driven from the city. [12] But since you receive and keep them, why do you not believe them when they weave such tales about your gods? [13] So then, if you place faith in the poets, why do you worship such gods? If instead you worship them precisely because you give the poets no credence, why do you lavish honor upon liars, and why take no care to avoid insulting those whose slanderers you revere? Clearly, no reliability is to be demanded of poets. [14] Do you not, in saying that they became gods after death, thereby confess that they were men before death? What novelty is it, then, if those who were men are stained by human mishaps, or crimes, or tales? [15] Do you not believe the poets — and yet you have instituted certain sacred rites on the basis of their very accounts? Why is the priestess of Ceres seized by force, if Ceres suffered nothing of the sort? Why are other men's children sacrificed to Saturn, if he spared his own? [16] Why is a male castrated for the Idaean goddess, if no disdainful youth was ever gelded by the pain of frustrated desire on her account? [17] Why do the women of Lanuvium not taste of the sacrificial feast of Hercules, if he did not perish on account of a woman? [18] The poets do indeed lie — but not in having attributed such deeds to men who never performed them, nor in having assigned divine foulness where none existed; and yet meanwhile it has seemed more credible to you that they were gods, though not of that sort, than that they were of that sort, but not gods.
VIII.

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 8 ========

[1] There remains that national class of gods among the various peoples, whom private local knowledge — not any necessity of truth — teaches us were adopted out of mere caprice. [2] I hold that god must be known everywhere, present everywhere, ruling everywhere, to be worshiped by all, to be deserved well of by all. [3] But if even those gods whom the whole world worships in common fail the test of true divinity, how much more must these, whom not even their own townsmen know? [4] For what fitting authority has gone before to establish a theology of this sort, one that even rumor abandons? [5] How many are there who know, by sight or by hearsay, Atargatis of the Syrians, the Heavenly Goddess of the Africans, Varsutina of the Moors, Obodas and Dusares of the Arabians, Belenus of Noricum, [6] or those Varro lists: Deluentinus of the people of Casinum, Visidianus of Narnia, Numiternus of Atina, Ancharia of Ausculum, and — whichever else comes to mind first — Nortia of Volsinii, whose very names carry no more dignity than ordinary human surnames? [7] I laugh outright, indeed, at gods who are mere town-councilmen of their respective municipalities, whose honor is bounded by their own city walls.
[8] How far this liberty of adopting gods has advanced, the superstitions of the Egyptians teach us, who worship even their own private beasts — ibises, crocodiles, and their sacred serpent. [9] It is not enough that they have even consecrated a man — I mean the one whom not Egypt or Greece alone, but the whole world now worships, and by whom the Africans swear; and what can be conjectured about his true status is, as seems probable, recorded in our own scriptures. [10] For this Serapis was once, in fact, called Joseph, of the race of the holy men — younger than his other brothers, but of higher standing, and out of envy he was sold by those same brothers and handed over into Egypt to serve in the household of Pharaoh, king of the Egyptians. [11] He was desired by a queen of less than modest character, but because he would not comply, he was, on the contrary, denounced by her and thrown into prison by the king. [12] There, by rightly interpreting the dreams of certain men, he showed the power of his spirit. [13] Meanwhile the king too dreamed certain terrifying things; and when those he had summoned failed to explain them, Joseph — brought up out of prison — proved equal to the task, and laid the dream open to the king: [14] that those seven exceedingly fat cattle signified an equal number of years overflowing with abundance, while the seven that followed, wasted and starved, foretold the want of the seven years after them; and that it was therefore wise to store up reserves from the earlier plenty against the coming famine. [15] The king believed him; and the outcome of events proved him ever prudent, holy, and indispensable. So Pharaoh set him over the whole of Egypt, both to supply it with grain and thereafter to administer it.
[16] They called him Serapis after the headdress with which his head was adorned; and the bushel-shaped form of that headdress seals the memory of his grain-supply, while the ears of corn that mark its rim make plain that the care of the crops rested upon his head. [17] For this reason they also dedicated at his right hand the dog which they assign to the underworld, because under his hand the crowd of Egyptians was kept in check. [18] And they add to him Pharia, whom the derivation of her name shows to be Pharaoh's daughter. For at that time, too, Pharaoh, among his other honors and rewards, had given him his daughter in marriage. [19] But since they had taken to worshiping both beasts and men, they combined both faces into one, Anubis — in whom this quarrelsome people might rather be seen to have consecrated proof of their own nature and condition: rebellious against their own kings, groveling before foreigners, indeed the equal of dogs in gluttony and filth, and equal too in sheer servility.
IX.

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 9 ========

[1] We have set out these things according to the threefold division of divinity as a whole, whichever facts were better known or more striking, so it may seem we have answered enough on the physical class of gods, the poetic, and the national. [2] But since all this superstition no longer belongs to the philosophers, nor the poets, nor the peoples who handed it down, but to the ruling Romans, who seized it and built their own authority on it, we must now enter another, wider tract of human error — indeed, cut down a whole forest, one that truth has been overshadowed in on every side by seeds and vices of superstition sown thick. [3] Now Varro divided the gods of the Romans three ways: into the certain, the uncertain, and the select. What vanity! For what business did they have with the uncertain, if they already had the certain? [4] Unless perhaps they wanted, with Athenian stupor, to hedge their bets — for at Athens too there is an altar inscribed "To the unknown gods." Does anyone, then, worship what he does not know? [5] Then again, if they had the certain, they ought to have been content with them and not craved the select as well — in which very fact they are caught out as irreligious: for if gods are picked out like so many onions, then those not picked are pronounced rejects.
[6] We, for our part, recognize two classes of Roman gods: the common and the proper — that is, those they share with everyone else, and those they have invented entirely for themselves. [7] And are these not called the "public" gods and the "imported" ones? Their very altars teach it: the imported ones at the shrine of Carna, the public ones on the Palatine. [8] Since the common gods are already covered, whether under the physical or the mythical heading, we have already dealt with them under those descriptions. [9] If it please us to speak of the proper gods, the Romans' own, we must marvel at that third class — the home-grown gods — since no other nation has ever invented so much superstition purely for itself. [10] We divide these into two kinds: some taken up from men, others conceived purely in the mind. [11] Since, then, the same pretext of consecrating the dead serves them here too — as though for merits of life — we must, of necessity, throw back the same answer: that not one of these was ever worth so much.
[12] They believed Aeneas, whom they call "the Needy Father," a soldier never once glorious, crippled by a stone. And as common and doglike as that weapon was, just so ignoble was the wound. But Aeneas is found out, moreover, as a traitor to his own country — Aeneas quite as much as Antenor. [13] And if they refuse to admit this, then certainly Aeneas, with his fatherland in flames, abandoned his comrades — a man to be measured against a Punic woman, who did not desert her husband Hasdrubal when, through Aeneas's cowardice, he was on his knees begging mercy of the enemy, but instead, snatching up her children, judged it wiser to keep her looks and her father to herself not by flight, but by throwing herself into the flames of burning Carthage, as into the embrace of her dying homeland. [14] Aeneas the Dutiful — for the sake of one small boy and one decrepit old man, while Priam and Astyanax were left to their fate? Yet by that very measure he ought to be more detested by Romans, who swear their oaths against their own children and wives and every pledge of their own, for the safety of their rulers and rulers' houses. [15] They consecrate the son of Venus, and Vulcan knowingly allows it, and Juno concedes it. [16] If the porters of their own parents get to sit in heaven, why are the young men of Argos not counted gods instead, seeing that, so their mother might commit no sacrilege at the sacred rites, they hauled her cart yoked to it more than humanly? [17] Why is she not rather the goddess — she who was more devoted — the daughter who nursed her own father from her own breasts as he starved in prison? [18] What else is there to Aeneas's glory, except that he was nowhere to be seen at the battle of Laurentum? Or perhaps, true to his usual habit, he simply fled the field like a deserter once again.
[19] Romulus too became a god after death. If it is because he founded a City, why are not other founders of cities made gods too, right down to women who founded them? Indeed, Romulus both killed his own brother and stole other men's virgins by trickery. Is that why he is a god, why he is Quirinus — because that is when the parents of the raped got to wail?
[20] What did Sterculus do to deserve divinity? If he was so diligent in enriching the fields with dung, Augeas supplied more manure than he ever did. [21] If Faunus's son Picus was being hauled into court, having been struck out of his mind, he deserved treatment rather than consecration. [22] If Faunus's daughter excelled in chastity, to the point that she would not even keep company among men — whether from savagery, or awareness of her own deformity, or shame at her father's madness — how much more worthy is Penelope of the title "Good Goddess," who, lodged among so many worthless suitors, kept her besieged chastity intact and defended it? [23] There is also Sanctus, who won a shrine from King Plotius for his hospitality: Ulysses too could have granted you one more god, out of the most generous Alcinous.
X.

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 10 ========

[1] Now I hurry on to filthier matters. Your own authors were not ashamed to make Larentina public knowledge. This woman was a hired harlot — whether while she was Romulus's nurse (and so called "the she-wolf," because she was a harlot), or while she was Hercules's mistress, and by then Hercules already dead, that is, already a god. [2] For they say that his temple-keeper, playing dice alone by chance in the shrine, to conjure up for himself a partner he did not have, played with one hand in Hercules's name and the other in his own: [3] if he himself won, he would take a little dinner and a little harlot out of Hercules's collection box; but if Hercules won — that is, the other hand — he would offer the same to Hercules. [4] Hercules's hand won: that too could be added as a thirteenth labor to his list of twelve. [5] The temple-keeper paid out the dinner to Hercules, and hired Larentina the harlot; the fire dined — the very fire that dissolves even Hercules's own... the whole altar consumed everything. [6] Larentina slept alone in the shrine; and the woman, straight out of the brothel trade, boasts that she was serviced by Hercules in a dream — and no doubt she could suffer that much in a dream, given what she was dwelling on in her mind. [7] As she came out of the shrine early the next morning, a certain lad — a kind of second-hand "Hercules," one might say — fell for her, [8] ...that this had been told to him by Hercules himself, that indeed... a centaur — for it was not permitted to go unpunished... he even writes her down as his heir. [9] Soon she... having pursued through Hercules... a field... divinity, and to her own daughters as well, whom she also made heirs... [10] the divine Larentina, worthy of the Romans' own divine powers... alone dear to Hercules out of all his wives, for she alone was rich... like Ceres, who found favor once dead!
[11] With so many precedents and... who could not be affirmed a god? Who, in the end, ever raised a controversy over Antinous's divinity, on the grounds that Ganymede was handsomer, or dearer to his lover? [12] Among you heaven lies open to the dead; you drive a highway from the underworld clear up to the stars; harlots climb up there right and left — lest you think you are granting your kings any great favor!
XI.

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 11 ========

[1] Not content, however, with declaring gods out of beings who were once seen, heard, and touched in the flesh, whose likenesses were drawn, whose doings were recorded, whose memory was handed down, [2] they also decree as gods certain bodiless, lifeless shades, demanding names to match their functions, parceling out every stage of a man's existence to individual powers, starting from the very conception in the womb: [3] so there is a god Conseuius, who presides over the acts of intercourse, and Fluvionia, who nourishes the infant in the womb; [4] then Vitumnus and Sentinus, through whom the infant comes alive and first gains sense; then Diespiter, who brings the child through to birth, [5] along with... and Candelifera, since women used to give birth by candlelight, and those... called... [6] Those born wrongly... but rightly the province belongs to Prosa Carmentis [7] ...and from the first utterance, Farinus, and another from speaking... supplies for taking precaution... and Albana and one Runcinia. A wonder... that they left nothing unprovided for! [8] Then, for taking the first food and the first drink, Potina and Edula, and for the infant's first standing, Statina. [9] From going to, Adeona; from going away, Abeona. They even have a goddess who leads one home, and one for good will and bad, likewise Volumnius and Voleta for the will. [10] They have Paventina over dread, Venilia over expectation, Volupia over delight, and Praestitia standing for merit; likewise, from doing, Peragenor, and from deliberating, Consus. [11] There is also Juventas for young men newly in the toga, and Fortuna Barbata for men already bearded. [12] If I should go on to the gods of the wedding-bed, there is Afferenda, appointed over the bringing of dowries; and there are — for shame! — Mutunus and Tutunus and the goddess Pertunda and Subigus and Mother Prema. [13] ...spare us, you shameless gods: no one interrupts a bridal couple wrestling in bed; it is the gods themselves, whose whole business this is, who blush with pleasure outside the door.
XII.

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 12 ========

[1] And how far do the gods go... since it must be discussed, what sort of gods you have taken on? How much you ought to blush! Shall I laugh at the vanity or reproach the blindness? There is quite enough... let me set it out. [2] How many gods, and which ones, am I to bring forward? The greater or also the lesser? The old or also the newly-minted? Males or also females? Bachelors or also lawfully married? Skilled craftsmen or also idlers? Country folk or also city folk? Citizens or also foreigners? [3] For so many households, so many nations, in good faith go hunting for a census of them, that they cannot be sorted and distinguished and catalogued. [4] But the more sprawling the matter is, the more we must draw it in tight; and so, holding to this one aim in this whole department — to demonstrate that all of them were men (not, of course, that you may come to know it, since you carry on as though you had forgotten it) — I will take the shortcut: by tracing back from the very top the origin of their race. For the origin is the origin of the whole line that follows. [5] That origin of your gods is marked, I think, by Saturn. For even if Varro reckons Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva the most ancient gods, it must not slip our minds that every father is older than his children — Saturn older than Jupiter, just as Heaven is older than Saturn; for Saturn came from Heaven and Earth.
[6] And yet I pass over the origin of Heaven and Earth; they existed from wherever they existed, bachelors and childless for a long time, before they were husband and wife: clearly it took them a long age of growing to reach so great a height! [7] At last, once Heaven's voice began to break and Earth's breasts began to bud with little stones, they made a marriage between themselves: I suppose either Heaven came down to the bride, or Earth climbed up to the groom. [8] Earth, however, conceived by Heaven and bore that "godless god," Saturn — by some marvelous arithmetic: which parent did he take after? [9] But even though she bore him, certainly before Saturn they had produced no one, except one child after Saturn, Ops; after that, the breeding stopped. [10] For Saturn, indeed, castrated Heaven while he slept (we read of Heaven in the masculine gender — but then how is he a father unless male? [11] But where, at that period, did he even get a sickle to castrate him with? For Vulcan, the metal-craftsman, did not yet exist), while Earth, robbed of her mate, refused — though still of youthful age — to marry anyone else. [12] "But she had no one better than Heaven." Yet whom but her does the Sea embrace? But he reeks of brine — she was used to fresh water.
[13] So Saturn was the one and only male child of Heaven and Earth. But he himself, on reaching puberty, is joined to his own sister: there were not yet laws to forbid incest, nor any to punish parricide. [14] And so he used to swallow his sons of the male sex — better him than wolves, if he had exposed them instead! He was afraid, evidently, that one of them might have learned something from his father's sickle. [15] When Jupiter was born and then smuggled away, he swallowed a stone got up to look like the infant. By this ruse he was safe for a long time, until at last, overpowered by the son he had never digested, who had grown up in the shadows, he was stripped of his kingdom. [16] This is the patriarch of your gods whom Heaven and Earth begot for you, with the poets acting as midwives. [17] But some people fancy they are being quite clever, interpreting Saturn "scientifically" through allegory to mean Time — and so Heaven and Earth are his parents, since they too have no origin of their own; and so he is armed with a sickle, because time cuts everything short; and so he devours his own children, because time consumes back into itself everything it has produced. They even drag in the evidence of the name: "Kronos" is said not to be the Greek word — meaning it is not "Chronos." [18] Likewise they derive the reasoning of the Latin word from "sowing" (sationes), guessing him to be the one who procreates, through whom the seeds of heaven are carried down into the earth. [19] They attach Ops ("Resources") to him, on the ground that Resources supply the seeds of living, and also that seeds come out through work (opus). [20] What, I ask, is the logic of this transposing? I would really like you to explain it. Either Saturn was Saturn, or he was Time. If he is Time, how is he Saturn? If he is Saturn, how is he Time? For you cannot hold him to be both bodily and bodiless at once. [21] But what stopped Time from being worshipped in its own character, not dressed up in a human's fables, or the human's fable from being told for what it plainly is, not smuggled off into the ages? [22] What is the point of this fine interpreting, except to paint over ugly material with made-up arguments? [23] You cannot both call Saturn a man and, on that very account, want him to be Time — nor, in making him Time, can you still want him to have been a man. [24] ...altogether, Saturn is recorded among the ancient records as a man, of human condition, on earth. Anything that never existed at all can be imagined as bodiless; there is room to imagine only where there is no truth. [25] But since it is agreed that Saturn actually lived, it is pointless for you to keep changing your story: you are not permitted, having granted that he lived, to deny that he was a man — a man who can be defended neither as a god nor as Time.
[26] A full census of Saturn is to be found throughout your own literature. We read it in Cassius Severus, in the Corneliuses, in Nepos and Tacitus, and among the Greeks too in Diodorus, and in whatever other collectors of the gray-haired records of antiquity there are. [27] Nor are there more reliable traces of him than those marked out in Italy itself. For after many lands and after being a guest in Attica, he took up residence in Italy — Oenotria, as the land was then named — welcomed there by Ianus, or Ianes, as the Salii style him. [28] The mountain he had dwelt on is called the Saturnian mount; the city he had laid out with boundary-stones is Saturnia to this day; and finally all Italy used to be named after Saturn. [29] With such a witness as this land, which now rules the world, even if there is doubt about Saturn's origin, it is nonetheless established from his career that the man existed. [30] So if Saturn was a man — beyond doubt from a man, indeed precisely because he was a man — then he did not come from Heaven and Earth at all, but, having some parents unknown, it was easy for him to be called the son of those in whom we can all recognize ourselves. [31] For who does not, out of reverence, call heaven and earth "father" and "mother"? Or is this not simply the human habit by which any unknown persons who turn up, born of some obscure family, are said to have come down from heaven? [32] Accordingly Saturn, being a foreigner, at once and everywhere sprang up as talk of "a heavenly one"; for we too commonly toss around the phrase "sons of the earth" for people of uncertain birth. [33] I bring up nothing about the state of antiquity, in which the eyes and minds of men were then so unrefined that they would be stirred as if by something divine at the mere sight of any new man at all — let alone a king, and the first king at that.
[34] I will linger a little longer over Saturn, so as to lay up a shortcut for dealing with the rest, once I have had my fill of arguing over origins — and I will not pass over the weightier testimonies of the divine writings, to which trust is owed on account of their superior antiquity. [35] For the Sibyl comes before the whole of your literature — that Sibyl, that is, the true prophetess of the true God, whose very name you have dressed your demons' prophets up in. [36] She, in verse of six feet, sets out this account of Saturn's lineage and his affairs: "In the tenth generation of men," she says, "counting from when the flood struck those who came before, Saturn reigned, and Titan, and Iapetus, the mightiest sons of Earth and Heaven." [37] If, then, there is credit owing — even on the word of your own authors and your own earlier writings, but all the more on the nearer ones, since they belong to that same age — enough has been proven about Saturn and his lineage: that they were men. [38] We hold in hand a shortcut for the rest, a prescription against tracing their origin, so that we need not wander through them one by one. The character of the descendants is shown by the founders of the race: mortal things from mortal beings, earthly things from earthly beings; [39] rank corresponds to rank; marriages, conceptions, births run in step; homelands, dwellings, kingdoms, monuments... Let those who cannot deny they were born, believe they died; let those who admit they died, stop thinking they are gods!
XIII.

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 13 ========

[1] Yet its own power stands there in plain view. Those from the beginning could not [...] deity, by asserting that these men became gods after death — Varro says so, and those who have dreamed the same dream along with him. [2] Here, then, is where I take my stand: if your gods have been admitted into this rank and this divine standing the way men are enrolled into the senatorial order, [...] you must then grant that there exists some supreme ruler who holds the power of admission, a kind of Caesar of the gods; for no one can confer a rank on others in which he does not himself hold sovereign authority. [3] (But if they were able to make themselves gods after death, why then did they choose to be of an inferior condition from the beginning?) [4] Or if there is no one who makes gods, by what right are they called "made," seeing that they could only have come into being through another's hand? So you are left no room to deny that there is some contractor of divinity.
[5] Let us then examine closely the grounds on which mortality gets promoted into heaven. Of these, I believe, you will offer a twofold account. [6] Either the one responsible does it so as to have auxiliaries, or defenses, or even ornaments for his own high estate; or he confers it out of the necessity of rewarding merit wherever it is found. [7] No other explanation is available to imagine: no one bestows a gift on someone except for his own advantage or for the recipient's sake. [8] But it cannot suit a divine power to have such power that he actually makes gods out of dead men — and if such generosity is granted because he is in need of the service or even the protection of certain persons, and dead ones at that — how strange, when he could have made others immortal from the start! [9] No need to spend more time on [...] who compared human things to divine ones. Indeed this later opinion ought to be examined, whether a god, out of remembrance of merits, [...] bestowed it, [10] whether heaven lay open to men of old for their merits — one must then reconsider the fact that since then no one has been worthy of that honor. Unless the place can no longer hold any more: apparently antiquity earned [...] so much. [11] Well then, let us reconsider whether it was earned. Let the one who says it was earned set out the merits themselves. [12] If any [...] of that sort count toward a vote for divinity, then you have admitted into heaven Ops and Saturn, brother and sister stained by incest. [13] Your Jupiter was a stolen infant, unworthy of both roof and human breast — deservedly, since so wretched a nurse awaited him in Crete. [14] Grown up, he finally drives out his father, whoever he was — that most fortunate king of the golden age, as they say, under whom the peace of freedom from toil and want rested undisturbed, under whom
"no farmers subdued the fields; the earth itself, unasked, brought forth all things."
[15] "But he hated his incestuous father, [...] his castrator." And yet look — he himself mates with his own sister, so that I think that saying was first made about him: "the child of his own father." What a dutiful father, what a dutiful son! [16] But if the laws had already been in force then, Jupiter deserved to be sewn into two sacks! After this, why would he hesitate, his lust already hardened by incest, to spill over into lesser things — that is, adulteries and seductions? [17] The poets have amused themselves over this in such a way that, as when in a little book about a runaway slave his exploits are made public, we are accustomed to hawk the account of his services for the use and abuse of others — [18] sometimes portraying him as the price of luxury, since he actually paid the price of an ox, or the value of an ox, and rained a shower of gold onto rooftops — that is, bought his way in with money; sometimes in likenesses of the deeds themselves, as the eagle who carried off the boy, the swan who sang.
[19] So far are these from being mere fables about fa[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]sit, whether it is or is not wanton[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]na of men whom[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] long since let loose from the faith through[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ], that we need not pursue the matter at greater length. [20] For if indeed[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] and on behalf of their own sowers the same populace lingered[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] by nature, elsewhere authority demanded a likeness of character. How much the worse is he who is not the better? For by a private title you call him Jupiter the Best, and it is Vergil's phrase, "a just Jupiter." [21] So then, all of them are incestuous with their own kin, shameless with strangers, impious, unjust: the one whom no fable has left without some conspicuous disgrace — he was not fit to be made a god!
14.

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 14 ========

[1] But since they want some others admitted separately into divinity from among men, and distinguished between those born divine and those made divine, following Dionysius the Stoic, I shall add something on this category too. [2] As for Hercules himself, the sum of the answer is this: was he worthy of heaven and of divinity? For it is on the strength of such merits that they grant divinity. [3] If it is for his courage, because he steadily dispatched wild beasts, what is so remarkable in that? Do not condemned men in the arena, or even the cheapest sand-pit fighters, dispatch a great many beasts together — and more zealously at that? [4] If it is for having traveled the whole world, how many wealthy men has the sweet love of travel granted the same thing, or philosophers their beggarly servitude? Do they not remember that Asclepiades the Cynic, on a single little cow — on whose back he rode, and whose udder, whenever he needed, fed him — surveyed the entire world with his own eyes? [5] If Hercules also went down to the underworld, who does not know that the road to the underworld lies open to everyone? [6] [...] very many [...] that Pompey [...] who did not even save Ostia [...] into one corner of Carthage's Byrsa [...]. All the more is Scipio credited with divinity for so many slaughters, more than Hercules. [7] Add rather to Hercules' titles the rapes of virgins, of married women, the bands of Omphale, and, for the loss of a pretty boy, the shamefully abandoned campaign of the Argonauts. [8] Add to his glory, after that disgrace, his fits of madness too; go worship the arrows that killed his sons and his wife! [9] The man who then, in his grief over that slaughter of kin, more rightly should have thrown himself onto the pyre — the man who, ensnared by poisons through his wife's wanton jealousy, deserved that fate more than an honorable death — him you have lifted from the pyre up into heaven, with the same easy generosity by which you also promoted another man, consumed by fire — but a divine fire — who was said to have invented a few clever tricks of experience and to have brought the dead back to life. [10] That one, though son of Apollo, as much a man as grandson of Jupiter, great-grandson of Saturn — (unless he must be counted a bastard of uncertain father, as Argive Socrates reported) — whom, once exposed and found again, more shamefully reared than Jove himself, on a dog's udder no less, no one can deny was a man — was struck down by a thunderbolt. [11] Jupiter the Best turns out bad again here, impious toward his own grandson, jealous of a mere craftsman! [12] And indeed Pindar did not conceal his true merit: he sings of the man's greed and love of gain being condemned in him, by which, in fact, through the corrupt sale of his medicine, he drove the living to death rather than bringing the dead back to life. [13] They say his mother too perished in the same fashion — deservedly [...] had brought forth a beast [...] burst up to heaven by the same sort of ladder, so to speak. [14] "And yet the Athenians, everyone knows, sacrifice to gods of that sort; for they hold funeral rites among the dead for Asclepius and his mother." As if they themselves did not also worship their own Theseus, a god by merit no less. And why not, if he abandoned his savior on a foreign shore, through that same forgetfulness — or rather madness — that had caused his own father's death?
15.

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 15 ========

[1] It would take too long to go through all those you have buried among the stars and boldly assigned to serve as gods. Worthy of heaven, I suppose, are the Castors, and Perseus, and Erigone — no less than Jupiter's own catamite! But why be surprised at that? You have transplanted even dogs, and scorpions, and crabs into the sky!
[2] I pass over for now those whom you [...] in oracles, and the divine testimony found there. You want gods to preside even over sorrow, so that there is Viduus, who widows the soul of the body — whom you have condemned by not permitting him to be enclosed within the city walls — likewise Caeculus, who strips the eyes of sense, likewise Orbana, who blights the seed into childlessness; and Death herself is a goddess. [3] To fly past the rest, you even regard the very locations of the city as gods: Janus the father of arches (and there is a goddess Diva Arquis for the arches too), and Montinus of the seven hills. [4] [...] those do this, who have altars or shrines in those same places, [...] rather than [...] dwelling in another's territory for pay. [5] I say nothing of Ascensus, from the climbing of steps, and Clivicola, from slopes; I say nothing of the gods Forculus, patron of the door itself, and Cardea, guardian of the pivoting hinge, and Limentinus, watching the threshold — or whatever other porter-gods are venerated among you and your neighbors. [6] For what is so remarkable, when they even have their own divinities in brothels, in kitchens, and down in the depths of the prison [...]? [7] Since, then, these functions belong specifically to these and the other Roman gods, among whom the duties of the whole of life are so parceled out that no other gods are needed for them — indeed, since they are reckoned privately among the Romans, the ones we have marked above, and are not easily known abroad — how is it that all those things which they wished these gods to preside over occur throughout the whole human race and every nation, where their presiding deities lack not only honor but even the least acquaintance?
16.

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 16 ========

"But certain men," you say, "discovered fruits and the necessities of life." I ask you: when you say they "discovered" them, are you not admitting that these things already existed before they were discovered? Why then do you not honor the Author instead, whose gifts these are, but transfer the Author's glory onto the discoverers? [3] <...> and whoever discovered a thing gave thanks to the Author for it, surely felt that this was God, <...> the service of the one who established it, by whom the very discoverer, and the very thing discovered, were themselves established. [4] Rome knew no green African fig until Cato brought one before the senate, to show how near lay the hostile province he was forever pressing to be subdued. [5] Gnaeus Pompey was the first to make the cherry-tree of Pontus known to Italy. Could these men too, discoverers of new fruits among the Romans, have deserved to be proclaimed as gods?
This is as empty a claim as the notion that men are made gods on account of the invention of the arts. If our own age's craftsmen were compared to them, how much more fittingly would consecration belong to their successors than to their forerunners! [7] I lie if antiquity has not by now been outdone in virtually every art, daily practice everywhere schooling novelty to surpass it. And so, in the very arts for which you deify certain men, you wrong them, and you provoke unbeaten rivals against them.
XVII.

======== Ad Nationes 2 — Chapter 17 ========

[1] In short, <...> to their own founders and benefactors <...>, you do not deny it with regard to all those whom antiquity was willing to call gods, and whom posterity, following that same willingness, went on believing to be gods <...> and you go on granting them worship still <...> [2] Well, this is a towering presumption of superstitions -- one by which we are asked to believe <...> that it is for this very reason, namely, that the Romans have deserved so long-lasting a mastery over the whole world through their scrupulous, dutiful observance of religious rites, that they now prevail and go on prevailing over all the other nations who might otherwise rival or even surpass them in power <...> as though piety, and piety alone, had built their empire and kept it standing.
No doubt it was Sterculus and Mutunus and Larentina who advanced this empire, admitted into Roman law! [4] For I would not suppose that foreign gods favored a foreign people rather than their own, as though they became, so to speak, deserters and abandoners -- nay, betrayers -- of their native soil, where they were born, grew up, dwelt, and were buried. [5] Surely not even Jupiter would have allowed Crete to be crushed under the Roman rods, forgetting that cave of Ida, the Corybantic cymbals, and the most delightful fragrance of his nurse! Would he not have set his own tomb above the whole Capitol, that the land which covers Jupiter's ashes might rather hold the kingship? [6] Would Juno have wished her own city, "loved though Samos be set beneath it," to be burned by the fires of Aeneas's descendants? As far as I know:
here were her arms, here her chariot; that this should be a kingdom for the nations, if the fates in any way allow, even then she both aimed for it and cherished it.
Poor goddess -- she held no sway whatsoever over the fates! Yet even so, destiny granted Rome no greater distinction, when Carthage yielded herself to Rome, than it granted to Larentina!
[8] If these gods have the power to bestow empire -- <...> for after all Jupiter held sway in Crete, while Saturn ruled Italy, and Isis governed Egypt <...> where each reigned, and to whom, besides, many are recorded to have offered worship? [9] So then <...> makes men masters, and turns the surrendered subjects of Admetus into citizens whose empire he enlarges, all while cheating Croesus, his own generous worshipper, out of his kingdom by ambiguous oracles. Did the god fear to foretell plainly and steadily the truth about the ruin of that kingdom?
[10] <...> with power to reign <...> as though they could have guarded their own cities <...> If they had the power to grant it to the Romans, why did Minerva not defend Athens from Xerxes, or Apollo rescue Delphi from the hand of Pyrrhus?
Let those gods who lost their own cities go on protecting the city of Rome, if that is what Roman religion has earned! And yet was not superstition sought out only after supreme power was already won, once wealth had already increased? [12] Even though sacred rites were introduced by Numa, your affairs were not yet cheated by images or temples of the divine. [13] Frugal was their religion then, and poor their superstition; the altars were makeshift, the vessels plain, the smoke from them thin, and the god himself nowhere to be found. Therefore they were not religious before they were great; nor were they great because they were religious.
But how can it seem that empire came to the Romans on account of religion and the most profound care of the gods, when it was rather increased by wronging the gods? [15] Unless I am mistaken, every kingdom or empire is sought by wars and enlarged by wars. And in wars, <...> both cities and the gods of cities suffer alike. For the same devastation destroys both walls and temples, the same slaughter kills both citizens and priests, the same plunder seizes both the profane and the sacred. [16] There are as many sacrileges of the Romans as there are trophies, and as many gods as there are triumphs over nations. And their captive images do not love <...>. But since they feel nothing, harming them costs nothing, and because harming them costs nothing, they are worshipped all in vain. [17] And so those whose greatness has grown from sacrilege cannot be seen to have increased by the merits of religion, <...> but rather to have grown by their very wrongdoing.
Whole nations have held empire, each in its own time -- Assyrians, then Medes, then Persians, then Egyptians; some hold it still, and yet those who lost it did not lack religion, worship, and the propitiation of their gods while they held it, until almost the whole dominion passed to the Romans. [19] So the lot of the times has turned <...>. Ask who has ordered the changing of the times: the same one dispenses kingdoms, and now he has gathered into Roman hands that total sum, as if collecting into one strongbox money exacted from many accounts. What he has decided to do with it, those nearest to him know!

======== De Corona — Chapter 1 ========

[1] It happened just recently. A donative from our most gracious emperors was being distributed in camp, and the soldiers came forward wearing laurel crowns. One man was there, more truly a soldier of God, more steadfast than the rest of his brothers who had presumed they could serve two masters. He alone stood out, his head uncovered, his crown-garland idle in his hand -- for by now the custom of wearing it had spread even to Christians. [2] At once the others began pointing him out, jeering at him from a distance, gnashing their teeth at him up close. A murmur ran through them; word was carried to the tribune, and the man's identity along with it: he had, in fact, already stepped out of the ranks. The tribune at once demanded, "Why are you so differently dressed?" He replied that it was not lawful for him to do as the rest did. When pressed to explain, he declared, "I am a Christian." O soldier, glorious before God! From there the votes were cast, the case was blown up larger, and the defendant was brought before the prefects. [3] There on the spot he laid down his heavy military cloak, took his first taste of relief, unlaced the tight-fitting soldier's boot from his feet, and began to stand instead on holy ground; he handed back the sword, unnecessary anyway for the Lord's defense; and the laurel shone out of his hand for what it was. And now, flushed red with expectation of shedding his own blood, his feet fitted instead with the readiness of the gospel, girded about with the keener sword of God's word, armed from head to foot after the apostle's pattern, and crowned -- better than with laurel -- with the white wreath of martyrdom, he waits in prison for the gift Christ will give. [4] From there judgments were passed upon him -- I hardly know whether they were the judgments of Christians, for they were surely not those of pagans -- that he was reckless, headlong, eager to die, a man who, being merely asked about his dress, made trouble over a name; the only brave one, forsooth, among so many brother soldiers, the only Christian. Clearly it only remains for men who reject the prophecies of that same Holy Spirit to think of refusing martyrdoms too. [5] They mutter, in short, that so good and so long a peace is now put at risk on his account. And I do not doubt that some are already packing up the scriptures, gathering their bundles, girding themselves to flee from city to city. For that is the only memory of the gospel they trouble to keep. I know their shepherds too: lions in peacetime, deer in battle. But I will teach elsewhere on the subject of confessions. [6] For now, though, since they also raise this very objection -- "But where is it that wearing crowns stands forbidden?" -- I will attack the more local substance of the present case, so that those who ask out of anxious ignorance may be instructed, and those who press the point in defense of their own fault may be refuted -- Christians, of all people, wearing laurel, for whom this alone is in question, as if the offense they are undergoing an inquiry about could be either nonexistent or at least uncertain. That it is neither nonexistent nor uncertain I shall now show.

======== De Corona — Chapter 2 ========

[1] I say that none of the faithful has ever known a crown on his head, except at a time of such testing. All observe this, from catechumens up to confessors and martyrs -- or deniers. You may ask where the authority for the custom comes from; that is precisely what is now chiefly in question. But when the question is why a thing is observed, its being observed at all is meanwhile established as fact. Therefore an offense which is committed against an observance already claiming vindication under its own name, and sufficiently authorized by the patronage of general consent, cannot be seen as either nonexistent or uncertain. [2] Clearly, a reason ought to be sought -- but with the observance left intact, not for its destruction but rather for its edification, so that you may keep it all the more once you are also secure about the reason for it. But what sense does it make for a man to call an observance into question only once he has already abandoned it? To ask where he got the observance only once he has stopped keeping it? For even if he wants it to look as though he is raising the question in order to show that he did nothing wrong in abandoning the observance, it will nonetheless be plain that he did something wrong earlier, back when he was presuming to keep it. [3] For if he did no wrong today in accepting the crown, then he did wrong at some earlier time in refusing it. And so this discussion is not meant for those to whom the question does not even apply, but for those who, out of a zeal for learning, bring not a question but a genuine inquiry. For it is not always a matter of dispute, and I commend the faith that believed an observance ought to be kept before it ever learned why. [4] And it is easy enough to demand at once, "Where is it written that we should not wear crowns?" But then, where is it written that we should? For those who demand the patronage of Scripture for the opposing side thereby presuppose that their own side, too, ought to have the patronage of Scripture. For if it will be said that crowning is permissible because Scripture does not forbid it, it can equally be turned around that crowning is not permissible because Scripture does not command it. What, then, will discipline do? Accept both, as though neither were forbidden -- or reject both, as though neither were commanded? -- "But what is not forbidden is thereby freely permitted." -- On the contrary: what is not freely permitted is thereby forbidden.

======== De Corona — Chapter 3 ========

[1] And how long shall we keep sawing back and forth along this line, when we hold an observance grown old, one that by preceding it has established the very state of the question? If no Scripture has settled it, custom, surely, has confirmed it -- and custom without doubt flowed from tradition. For how can anything be practiced by usage if it was not first handed down? "But even in claiming a tradition," you say, "written authority ought to be required." [2] Very well, let us ask whether a tradition, unless it is written, ought not to be accepted at all. We will certainly say it should not be accepted, unless examples from other observances prejudge the case in its favor -- observances which we defend without the support of any written text, on the sole title of tradition and thereafter on the patronage of custom. Take baptism, for a start: when we are about to go down into the water, and even somewhat earlier, in the church, under the bishop's hand, we solemnly declare that we renounce the devil, his pomp, and also his angels. [3] Then we are plunged into the water three times, giving a rather fuller answer than the Lord determined in the gospel. Once lifted up from the water, we first taste a blended draught of milk and honey; from that day forward we go without the customary bath for a full week. We partake of the sacrament of the Eucharist -- a rite the Lord established for mealtime and enjoined upon all alike -- even at gatherings held before dawn, and from no hand but that of those presiding. We make offerings for the dead, for birthdays, on their yearly anniversary. [4] On the Lord's Day we consider it wrong to fast, or to pray on bent knees. We rejoice in that same exemption from the day of Easter clear through to Pentecost. We are anxiously troubled if any bit of the cup or the bread, even our own, falls to the ground. At every step and every movement, at every coming in and going out, in putting on footwear, in taking a bath, in reclining for a meal, as we kindle the lamps, whether on couches or on seats -- whatever activity keeps us occupied -- we mark our forehead with the sign of the cross.

======== De Corona — Chapter 4 ========

If you demand a written law for this and other disciplines of the same kind, you will read none in Scripture. Tradition will be put forward as its author, custom as its confirmer, faith as its keeper. That reason stands behind tradition, custom, and faith you will either see for yourself or learn from someone who has seen it; meanwhile you will believe that some obedience is owed to it. I add one further example, since it is fitting to teach from ancient cases too. Among the Jews it is so much the settled practice for their women to veil the head that they are recognized by it. I ask for the law; I defer the apostle. If Rebecca, catching sight of her betrothed in the distance, snatched up a veil, private modesty could not make a law — or if it did make one for her own case, then let only virgins be veiled, and only when coming to be married, not before they have met their bridegrooms. If Susanna too, unveiled at her trial, furnishes an argument for veiling, I can say: here too the veil was a matter of choice. She had come as a defendant, blushing at her disgrace, rightly hiding her beauty, or else already afraid of pleasing. But I do not suppose that in the arena of marriage a woman who wished to please walked veiled. Suppose her veiled always — even there I still ask for a law of the practice, in her case or in any other. If nowhere do I find a law, it follows that tradition gave custom this habit, a habit destined one day to acquire apostolic authority through the interpretation of reason. By these examples, then, it will have been shown that even an unwritten tradition can be defended in its observance, confirmed by custom, with the persistence of the observance itself standing as competent witness that the tradition was once approved. Custom, moreover, is received as law even in civil affairs when statute is lacking, and it makes no difference whether it rests on writing or on reason, since reason too commends a law. Further, if a law stands on reason, then everything that stands on reason will already be law, from whatever quarter it is produced. Or do you not think it permitted to every believer to conceive and establish — provided only that it agree with God, serve discipline, and profit salvation — what the Lord means when he says: "And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?" And it is not only of judgment but of every verdict in matters under examination that the apostle too speaks: "If you are ignorant of anything, God will reveal it to you" — he himself being accustomed to supply counsel when he had no command from the Lord, and to pronounce on his own authority, having the Spirit of God as guide into all truth. And so his counsel has already obtained the standing of a divine precept, under the patronage of divine reason. Demand this reason now, while preserving your regard for tradition, whoever the one who handed it down is credited to be — and attend not to whose hand delivered it but to the weight of authority behind it, and above all to that of custom itself, which is to be honored precisely because it may be reason's interpreter — so that, if God has given this too, you may then learn not whether custom is to be observed by you, but why.

======== De Corona — Chapter 5 ========

The case grows stronger for Christian observances when even nature defends them — nature, which is the first discipline of all. And so it is nature that first lays down that a crown does not suit the head. I hold, moreover, that God, the God of nature — our God — who shaped man and, for the desiring, judging, and obtaining of the fruits of things, ordained in him fixed senses, each with its own organ of the members in a manner of speaking: he dug out hearing in the ears, kindled sight in the eyes, shut taste up in the mouth, set smell astir in the nostrils, and valued touch in the hands. Through these services of the outer man, ministering to the inner man, the fruits of divine gifts are conducted from the senses to the soul. What fruit, then, comes from flowers? Their proper substance, certainly their chief substance as the material of garlands, is the flowers of the field. Their fragrance, you say, or their color, or both together. What senses register color and fragrance? Sight, I take it, and smell. What members have drawn those senses as their lot? The eyes, unless I am mistaken, and the nostrils. Use flowers, then, by sight and by smell — the senses whose fruit they are — use them through the eyes and the nostrils, which are the organs of those senses. The substance was handed you by God; the fashion was handed you by the world. And yet not even an unusual fashion clashes with the ordinary use: let flowers be yours strung and woven, on thread or on rush, yet free, yet unbound — objects, that is, for the eye's delight and the nostril's. Call a crown, if you like, a bundle of flowers gathered in a row, so that you may carry many at once and enjoy them all equally. Go further — tuck them into your bosom, if your fastidiousness runs that far; scatter them on your couch, if your softness runs that far; steep them in your cup, if your innocence runs that far. Enjoy them in as many ways as you have senses for enjoying. But on the head, what taste has a flower, what sensation has a crown, but that of a mere binding, in which neither is color discerned, nor fragrance drawn in, nor tenderness appreciated? To chase after a flower with the head is as much against nature as to hunt for nourishment with the ear, or for noise with the nostril. And everything against nature earns, in everyone's judgment, the mark of a monstrosity — and for us in particular, even the further charge of sacrilege against God, the Lord and author of nature.

======== De Corona — Chapter 6 ========

Will you ask, then, for God's law? You have it in common, posted openly in the world, in the tables of nature — the very tables to which the apostle himself is accustomed to appeal, as when, on the matter of a woman's veil, he says: "Does not nature herself teach you?" — and as when, writing to the Romans, he says the nations do by nature the things of the law, suggesting both a natural law and a lawful nature. And in his earlier letter, affirming that men and women exchanged the natural use of their condition for the unnatural, in requital of their error, in place of a penalty, he is certainly pleading the cause of natural things. God himself, indeed, we first came to know according to nature — calling him, that is, the God of gods, presuming him good, and invoking him as judge. Do you ask whether nature ought to go ahead of us in the enjoyment of his creation? Yes — so that we not be swept along by that force by which the rival of God corrupted, together with man himself, the whole of creation that had been placed at man's disposal for fixed uses; whence the apostle too says it was subjected to vanity against its will — first to vain uses, and then overturned to shameful, unjust, and impious ones. So it is too that creation has been dragged into disrepute over the pleasures of the shows by those who do indeed feel, by nature, that everything the shows are furnished from belongs to God, but lack the knowledge to grasp this further point — that everything has been twisted by the devil. But on this subject too, on account of our lovers of sweet entertainments, I have already had my say in a Greek treatise as well.

======== De Corona — Chapter 7 ========

Let these garland-wearers, then, meanwhile acknowledge the authority of nature under the name of a wisdom common to all men — but let them acknowledge, too, under the pledge of their own particular religion, that we worship God as nature's near neighbor — and so, as it were from this surplus, let them also examine the other arguments that forbid crownwork of any kind, without exception, to our own heads in particular. For we are pressed to move on from the ground held in common with natural discipline to the defense, now in full, of what is properly Christian, across the other varieties of crowns as well — crowns that seem designed for other uses and built of other materials, lest, because they are not made of flowers (whose use nature has marked out, as this very military laurel is not), people refuse to believe that they too fall under the sect's prohibition, on the ground that they have escaped nature's own rule. I see, then, that the matter must be handled more carefully and more fully, from its origins right down to its developments and its excesses. Secular letters are needed for this; for secular matters must be proved from their own records. The little I have touched on, I trust, will suffice. If there ever was a Pandora — whom Hesiod records as the first of women — then hers was the first head ever crowned, by the Graces, when she was endowed with gifts by them all, whence "Pandora," the all-gifted. But for us Moses, a prophetic shepherd, not a poetic one, describes Eve, the first woman, as sooner wrapping her shame in leaves than binding her brow with flowers. So there was no Pandora. But just as the crown's origin ought to blush at being traced to a fable, let it now blush at its true history as well. For it is certain that others were the inventors of the thing, or its popularizers. Pherecydes reports Saturn as crowned before all others; Diodorus reports Jupiter honored with this gift by the rest after the Titans were defeated. The same author gives Priapus his ribbons, and Ariadne her wreath of gold and Indian gems, Vulcan's handiwork, later Bacchus's gift, and afterward a constellation. Callimachus put the vine on Juno; so too the statue of her at Argos displays her, wreathed with a vine-branch, a lion's hide underfoot, trampling as stepmother on the spoils of both her stepsons. Hercules now wears the poplar on his head, now the wild olive, now parsley. You have the tragic legend of Cerberus as witness; you have Pindar, along with Callimachus, who likewise records Apollo, after killing the dragon of Delphi, putting on laurel — as a suppliant; for among the ancients suppliants wore crowns. Bacchus — identified by the Egyptians with Osiris — Harpocration contends was crowned with ivy for a particular reason: that ivy's nature is to guard the brain against drunkenness. But elsewhere the common people too recognize Bacchus as the chief patron of the crown — of the laurel, that is, in which he triumphed over the Indies — since they call his festival days the Great Crown. And if you unroll the writings of Leon the Egyptian, Isis was the first to carry ears of grain about her head — a matter, that, more of the belly. To those wanting more, the finest commentator on this very subject, Claudius Saturninus, will supply everything: for there exists a book of his on crowns, laying out their origins, their causes, their kinds, and their observances so thoroughly that you will find no grace of a flower, no gladness of a leaf, no sprig of turf or vine-branch that has not been consecrated to somebody's head. From which we may be sufficiently instructed how alien we ought to judge the institution of the crowned head to be, brought forward as it was by those very figures, and thereafter dispensed in honor of those whom the age believed to be gods. For if the devil works the lie of divinity, then in this department too — a liar from the beginning — he had without doubt already marked out those in whom that lie of divinity would be enacted. What standing, then, ought this to have among the men of the true God — something introduced by the devil's candidates as they went about their business, dedicated from the start to those same figures, by which idols even then were being initiated into their own idol-worship, from idols and among idols still living? Not that an idol is anything, but because whatever is done for idols by others belongs to demons. Further, if what others do for idols belongs to demons, how much more what the idols did for themselves, while they still lived among the living? They procured demons for themselves, that is, through the very men in whom, before this, they had gone hungry for what they were now procuring.

======== De Corona — Chapter 8 ========

Hold on to this conclusion for the moment, while I shake out the assault of the objection. For I already hear it said — and much else besides — brought forward by those whom the age believed to be gods, yet found today, all the same, in our own uses, and in the affairs of the saints of old, and in the things of God, and in Christ himself, since he too, once he lived as a man, could function in no other way than through these common instruments of human existence. Granted, let it be so; I will not now go arguing further back into origins. Mercury, they say, was the first to devise letters: I will grant they are necessary, both for the business of the world and for our own service of God. And if the same god was the first to draw strings taut into sound, I will not deny that this skill of his has served holy men too, and ministered to God — witness David. Aesculapius, they say, was the first to explore remedies: Isaiah too, remember, prescribed a medicinal remedy for the ailing Hezekiah, and Paul knew that a little wine is good for the stomach. Minerva, they say, was the first to build a ship: I shall picture Jonah sailing, and the apostles too. More than that — Christ wears clothing; Paul too shall have his cloak. If you name some god of the age as the inventor of each piece of furniture and of every single vessel, then I am bound to recognize the same in Christ reclining on a couch, and in his offering a basin to his disciples' feet, and in his pouring water from a pitcher, and in his being girded round with a towel — Osiris's own garment. To a question of this kind I make the same answer everywhere: I grant, indeed, a common use of such implements, but I call it to account by distinguishing the rational use from the irrational, since mere passive sharing deceives, veiling the corruption of a condition that has been subjected to vanity. For we say that only those things have suited — our own uses, and those of our forebears, and the things of God, and Christ himself — which supply plain utilities, sure resources, and honest comforts for the necessities of human life, given, as they are, by the inspiration of God himself, who first foresaw, equipped, and, where fitting, delighted his own creature, man; but that whatever has overstepped this order does not suit our uses — especially since it is precisely for that reason that it is to be recognized as belonging to no saint, nor to the things of God, nor to the conduct of Christ's life.

======== De Corona — Chapter 9 ========

Now which patriarch, which prophet, which Levite or priest or ruler, or even later which apostle or evangelist or bishop, is ever found wearing a crown? Not even, I think, the temple of God itself, nor the ark of the covenant, nor the tent that housed the testimony, nor its altar, nor its lampstand — every one of which surely merited a wreath, at their original dedication no less than at the second, glad rededication, had that been agreeable to God. But suppose these objects stood as emblems of ourselves — since it is we who are God's true temples, altars, lamps, vessels — then this too was being shown ahead of time in figure: that God's own people were not meant to wear crowns. The image must yield to the reality it foreshadows. Should you press the objection that Christ himself wore a crown, hear this brief reply for now: "By all means, be crowned as he was; go ahead." Yet even that crown of insulting cruelty was never one the people themselves put on. It was a Roman soldiers' invention, drawn from worldly custom — a custom the people of God never adopted, either for the name of public rejoicing or for any native extravagance, returning more readily from the Babylonian captivity with tambourines and pipes and harps than with crowns, and rising after food and drink to dance without crowns. For neither the description of their rejoicing nor the denunciation of their excess would have passed over the glory or disgrace of the crown in silence. So too Isaiah: "For," he says, "they drink wine with tambourines and harps and pipes" — and he would have said "with crowns" too, had that ever been the custom, even in matters of God.

======== De Corona — Chapter 10 ========

So then, when you set forth the inventions of the pagan gods as things found even in the service of God, in order to claim among them the crown for the head as common usage too, you are yourself already laying down the rule: nothing is to be admitted to common use among us that is not also found among the things of God. For what is so unworthy of God as what is worthy of an idol? And what fits an idol so well as what fits a corpse just as well? For it is also the custom to crown the dead, since they too at once become idols, in both the trappings and the ritual of consecration — which among us is a second idolatry. Those, then, who lack sense may as well make use of a thing whose sense they lack, as if they wished to abuse it while still having sense; there is no difference in abusing a thing once the reality of using it rightly has ceased — for once nature's power of proper feeling has stopped, who is there to abuse what he no longer has the means to use? But for us it is not permitted even to abuse it, since the apostle teaches the easier course of not using it at all. Except that those who feel nothing do not really "abuse" it either, but are simply absent from the whole business, and the very object itself is dead, so far as concerns idols — though very much alive, so far as concerns the demons to whom the superstition properly belongs. "The nations' idols," declares David, "are gold and silver, works of men's hands: eyes have they, yet they do not see; noses, yet cannot smell; hands, and cannot feel." For this is exactly what enjoying flowers amounts to. But if he pronounces that those who make idols will become just like them, then those who now make use of them in the idols' own style of adornment are already just like them. "All things are pure to the pure"; so too all things are impure to the impure. And nothing is more impure than idols. As for pure substances — being things of God — they remain, by their own condition, common to use; but the manner of that use matters too. I myself, for instance, sacrifice a rooster for my own table no less than Socrates did for Aesculapius, and if some place's smell offends me, I burn a bit of Arabian incense — but not in the same rite, not in the same dress, not with the same apparatus as is done before idols. For if a bare word is enough to pollute a thing's condition — as the apostle teaches: "If anyone says, this has been offered to an idol, do not touch it" — how much more, when you have actually pranced about in the very dress and rite and apparatus of things sacrificed to idols, are you contaminated? So the crown too becomes something "offered to an idol." For by this rite and dress and apparatus it is sacrificed to idols as its own authors, whose property this use most especially is — so that nothing found nowhere among the things of God can be admitted into our fellowship. That is why the apostle cries out: "Flee idolatry!" — the whole of it, entirely. Consider the forest, and how many thorns lie hidden in it. Nothing is to be given to an idol; so neither is anything to be taken from an idol. If it is foreign to the faith to recline at a meal in an idol's temple, what of appearing in an idol's very dress? "What fellowship has Christ with Belial?" And therefore, flee. A long divorce is what is commanded from idolatry. In nothing is one to come close to it: even the earthly dragon draws men in with its breath from a distance. John goes further still: "Little children," he says, "guard yourselves from idols!" — no longer merely from idolatry as a practice, but from idols themselves, that is, from their very image. For it would be a disgrace for you, who bear the likeness of the living God, to turn instead into the likeness of a lifeless idol. Up to this point we have claimed the distinctive character of this particular dress for idols alone, both from the record of its origin and from the practice of superstition — and further, because so long as it is not counted among the things of God, it is counted more and more among the things of those in whose ancient rites and festivals and offices it is used. Even the doorways themselves and the sacrificial victims and altars, and their very ministers and priests, are crowned. You have the crowns of every priestly college recorded under Claudius. But we have also already laid out that distinction between rational and irrational cases, for the benefit of those who defend common practice across the board on the strength of a few examples. For this part, then, it remains to examine the actual grounds given for wearing crowns, so that, by showing them to be foreign to — indeed, contrary to — our discipline, we may prove none of them propped up by any support of reason, by which such a practice could be claimed for our fellowship, as some claim by throwing certain examples at us.

======== De Corona — Chapter 11 ========

To take up the actual question of the military crown itself: I think we must first inquire whether military service suits Christians at all. What use is it, after all, to quibble over the incidentals, when the fault lies already in the antecedents? Do we believe it lawful to lay a human oath of allegiance on top of a divine one, and to pledge answer to another master after Christ, and to renounce father and mother and every kinsman — whom the law commanded to be honored, and to be loved next after God, and whom the gospel too, prizing Christ alone above all, likewise honored? Will it be lawful to busy oneself with the sword, when the Lord declares that whoever uses the sword will perish by the sword? And will the son of peace, for whom it is not even fitting to go to law, take part in battle? Will he administer chains and prison and torture and executions, he who is not even to avenge his own wrongs? Then again, will he stand guard duty for others more than for Christ, or even on the Lord's Day, when he would not do so even for Christ? And will he keep watch over temples he has renounced? And will he dine there, where the apostle disapproves? And will he, by night, defend those he drove off by day with exorcisms — leaning and resting upon the very spear that pierced the side of Christ? Will he carry a standard, too, as rival to the standard of Christ? Will he ask a watchword from his commander, when he has already received one from God? Will even his dead body be disturbed by the trumpeter's blast, he who expects to be roused by the trumpet of an angel? And will the Christian be cremated by the custom of the camp — he to whom burning was not even permitted, since Christ has spared him the merits of the fire? How many other things, besides, could be found among the duties of camp life to count as transgression! The very name itself — carrying it over from the camp of light into the camp of darkness — is a transgression. Of course, if faith comes later to find some already caught up in military service, that is a different case — like those whom John used to admit to baptism, or like that most faithful centurion whom Christ approves and whom Peter catechizes — provided that, once faith has been received and sealed, either the man withdraws at once, as many have done, or else he must be endlessly on his guard in every way, lest he commit against God what is not permitted even outside the army, or, last of all, that he suffer for God what a pagan's own loyalty would equally have exacted of him. For military service promises neither impunity for sins nor exemption from martyrdom. The Christian is never anything other than a Christian, anywhere: one gospel, and the same one everywhere — Jesus about to deny every denier and to confess every confessor, about to save the soul lost for his name's sake, and about to destroy, on the other hand, whatever gain was won against his name. To him, the faithful soldier is no more and no less than the faithful pagan is a soldier. The state of faith does not admit of pleas of necessity. There is no necessity to sin for those whose one and only necessity is not to sin. For someone may indeed be pressed by the necessity of torture or of penalties, to sacrifice or flatly deny; but even so discipline does not connive at that necessity, because the necessity of fearing denial and of undergoing martyrdom outweighs the necessity of escaping suffering and fulfilling one's duty. Besides, an argument of this sort undermines the whole substance of the sacrament, loosening even the clasp on voluntary sins — for the will too could then be made out to be a necessity, having, that is to say, its own compulsion. I have set this out in advance for the other cases of official crowns as well, to which the plea of necessity is most familiar — since either the offices are to be fled so we do not fall into sin, or martyrdoms are to be endured so we may break with the offices. On the first point of the question — the unlawfulness of military service itself — I will say no more, so that the second point may have room to be answered; otherwise, if I drove out military service altogether by every possible argument, it would be pointless to have raised the question of the military crown at all. Suppose, then, for the sake of argument, that military service is permitted, right up to the question of the crown.

======== De Corona — Chapter 12 ========

But let us speak first about the crown itself. That laurel is sacred to Apollo or to Liber — to the former as god of weapons, to the latter as god of triumphs. So Claudius teaches, when he also says that soldiers used to be crowned with myrtle: for myrtle belongs to Venus, mother of the Aeneadae, and thus a lover of Mars too, and, through Ilia and the Romuli, Roman. But I do not for my part believe Venus is Roman on this side, in league with Mars — that is a lover's grievance, not a claim of mine. When military service is also crowned with olive, the idolatry belongs to Minerva, likewise a goddess of arms, but also crowned with that tree for the peace struck with Neptune. In all these the superstition of the military wreath lies hidden, polluted everywhere and polluting everything. And it is already polluted, too, by its occasions. Consider the annual declaration of vows: what does it look like? First at the standards, then on the Capitol. Take note, after the places, of the words too: "Then to you, Jupiter, we vow that there shall be an ox with gilded horns." Whose utterance is that? Certainly one of denial. Even if the Christian is silent there in speech, crowned on the head he has already given his answer. That same laurel is proclaimed too in the distribution of the donative. Clearly this is no cost-free idolatry, selling Christ for a few gold coins, as Judas did for silver ones. Will this be "You cannot serve God and mammon" — handing your hand over to mammon and standing apart from God? Will this be "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" — and yet not rendering the man to God while stripping the coin from Caesar? Is the triumphal laurel woven from foliage, or built up out of the slain? Is it trimmed out with ribbons, or with funeral pyres? Is it scented with perfume, or steeped in the weeping of wives and of mothers? Perhaps even the tears of some Christians — for Christ is found even among the barbarians. Whoever wears this crown upon his head, has he not, by that very fact, fought too? There is also another kind of military service, that of the royal households — for these too are called "of the camp," and they too pay their dues to the solemn festivities of the Caesars. But you too, in the same way, are a soldier and a servant of another — and if of two, of God and of Caesar, then in that moment you are surely not Caesar's, seeing that it is God to whom you owe your whole self — even, I would say, in the matters the two share, since God's claim is the greater one.

======== De Corona — Chapter 13 ========

[1] Public orders are crowned with laurel for public occasions, magistrates too, but with gold ones besides — so at Athens, so at Rome. Etruscan crowns rank higher still: that is the name for crowns of gold set with gems and oak leaves, marked with Jupiter's own emblem, which men wear when they lead out the sacred chariots, together with the palm-embroidered toga. There are also provincial gold crowns, competing for the greater number of imperial busts they can carry. But your orders, your magistracies, the very name of your senate-house, is the church of Christ. It is there you are enrolled, in the books of life. [2] There your purple is the Lord's blood, and the nail driven wide, into his cross; there are the axes, already laid to the root of the tree; there the rods sprung from the root of Jesse. Let others keep their public horses and their crowns. Your Lord, when he chose to enter Jerusalem according to the scripture, did not even own a donkey of his own. — 'Some in chariots and some on horses, but we will call on the name of the Lord our God.' — [3] From that very dwelling of Babylon in John's Apocalypse we are called away — let alone from the speaker's platform. The common crowd too gets crowned, now over the triumphs of the great, now for the special festivals of the towns. All public rejoicing, after all, is a kind of predatory extravagance. [4] But you — stranger to this world, citizen of the Jerusalem above — 'our citizenship,' it is said, 'is in heaven' — you have your own census-rolls, your own reckoning of days; this age's revelries are simply no concern of yours, and indeed you owe it quite the reverse. 'For the world will rejoice, but you will mourn.' And I think he calls the mourners blessed, not the crowned. Marriages, too, crown their bridegrooms. And that is exactly why we do not marry pagans, lest they lead us all the way to idolatry, which is where their marriages begin. [5] You have a law for this from the patriarchs themselves, you have the apostle commanding marriage 'in the Lord.' Worldly freedom crowns a man too. But you have already been redeemed by Christ, and at a great price. How will the world manumit a slave that belongs to someone else? Even if it looks like freedom, it will turn out to be slavery all the same: everything in this age is illusion, nothing is real. For at the time you were still a free man, you were a slave already redeemed by Christ; and now, though a man has set you free, you are Christ's slave. [6] If you take the world's freedom for the real thing, so far as to seal it with a crown, you have gone back into slavery to a man — thinking it freedom — and thrown away the freedom of Christ, thinking it slavery. Are we even going to argue the case of the athletic games, which their very titles already condemn — 'sacred' games, and 'funeral' games? For this much remains: that Olympian Jupiter, and Nemean Hercules, and poor little Archemorus, and unlucky Antinous, should be crowned on a Christian head, so that he himself becomes the spectacle he has no business watching. [7] We have, I think, run through every case, and not one belongs to us: all are foreign, profane, forbidden, all forsworn already, once for all, in the pledge of our sacrament. For these all belonged to that procession got up by the devil and his angels: the offices of this age, its honors, its festivals, its popularity contests, its false vows, its servilities to men, its empty praises, its shabby glories; and idolatry runs through all of it, present even in the mere matter of crowns, since it is with crowns that all these things are garlanded. [8] Claudius will no doubt bring up the fact that in Homer's poems heaven itself is crowned with stars — by God, certainly, or at least by a man; therefore man himself, he will say, deserves to be crowned by God. But then again, this age crowns brothels too, and latrines, and mills, and prisons, and gladiatorial schools, and amphitheaters themselves, and the very rooms where corpses are stripped, and the undertakers' shops. How sacred and holy, how honorable and clean this custom is — don't judge it by one poet's heaven, judge it by the traffic of the whole world. [9] But surely, a Christian will say, I will not disgrace my own doorway with laurel — if only he knew how many gods the devil has grafted onto doorposts too: Janus from the door (ianua), Limentinus from the threshold (limen), Forculus and Carna from the doorleaves and hinges, and among the Greeks Apollo of the Door and the spirits called Averters-of-Evil.

======== De Corona — Chapter 14 ========

[1] So far is it from bringing an offering of idolatry to his own head — or rather, I should now say, to Christ's, since Christ is the head of the man — that his head is as free as Christ is, not even subject to a veil, let alone a binding. And further, that which is subject to a veil, the woman's head, is by that very fact already occupied and has no room left for a binding besides. It carries the burden of its own humility. [2] If a woman ought not to be seen bare-headed, because of the angels, far less crowned. Perhaps then it is the crown, not the bareness, that would scandalize them. For what is a crown on a woman's head but a pimp for her looks, a badge of the height of wantonness, the final abolition of modesty, a distillation of allurement? That is exactly why, on the apostle's own reckoning, a woman is not to be got up too elaborately either — not even crowned with an artful arrangement of her hair. [3] And yet he who is both the head of man and the face of woman — Christ Jesus, the bridegroom set over the church — what sort of garland, I ask you, did he put on, for the sake of both sexes? Thorns, I think, and briars: a picture of the sins that our earthly flesh yielded up, sins which the cross's own might then stripped away, dulling death's every sting in the Lord's head as he endured it — a picture only, mind you; the outrage itself stands plain before the eyes, along with the disgrace, the shame, and the cruelty woven through it. [4] And are you now going to crown yourself with laurel and myrtle and olive and whatever showier greenery, and — more to your taste — with roses by the hundredweight picked from the garden of Midas, and lilies of both kinds, and every violet there is, gems too perhaps, and gold — those very things that once defiled and tore apart the Lord's temples — as if to rival that other crown of Christ's, the one that came to him afterward? And yet he tasted the honeycomb only after the gall, and was not hailed king of glory by the powers of heaven until, on the cross, the placard first named him 'king of the Jews' — he having been made, before that, a little lower than the angels by the Father — and only afterward crowned with glory and honor. If it is on this account that you owe him your head, then pay him back, if you can, in kind — the kind he offered for you; or else do not crown yourself with flowers if you cannot bear thorns for him, since by flowers you cannot repay him at all.

======== De Corona — Chapter 15 ========

[1] Keep God's property untainted for him. He will crown it himself, if he chooses. Indeed he does choose — he even invites it: 'To the one who conquers,' he says, 'I will give the crown of life.' Be faithful yourself, even unto death; fight the good fight yourself, the very fight whose crown the apostle confidently reckons already laid up for him. The angel of victory receives a crown too, riding out on a white horse to conquer; another is adorned with the sweep of a rainbow, heaven's own green. The elders sit crowned as well, and at the same moment the Son of Man himself gleams above the cloud. [2] If such are the images shown in the vision, what must the realities be that they represent? Look at those, worship those. Why do you condemn your head to a headband or a snake-shaped ornament, when a diadem awaits it instead? For it is Christ Jesus who has made us kings before God his Father. What have you to do with a flower that is going to die? You have a flower from the rod of Jesse, on whom the whole grace of the divine Spirit came to rest — a flower incorruptible, unfading, everlasting. [3] It is this flower the good soldier advances toward, by choosing it, in the enrollment of heaven. Blush for shame, fellow-soldiers of his, that judgment on you should come not from him but from some enlisted man of Mithras. When such a man is initiated in the cave — in the true camp of darkness — a crown is offered to him, a sword interposed, as though miming martyrdom; then it is fitted onto his head, and he is instructed to push it off with his hand, and, if he is able, move it across onto his shoulder instead, declaring that Mithras is his crown. [4] From that moment he is never crowned again, and keeps this as the proof-token of his rank, should his oath ever be put to the test: casting down the crown and naming it his god's is taken straightaway as evidence that he serves Mithras. Let us recognize the devil's cunning, laying claim to certain things that belong to God, precisely so that he can shame us and stand in judgment over us by the loyalty of his own followers.

======== Scorpiace — Chapter 1 ========

[1] A great evil festers in the earth out of a small creature, the scorpion. It has as many poisons as it has kinds, as many forms of death as forms of body, as many pains as colors. Nicander both describes and paints them. And yet, in every kind, the one violent gesture comes from the tail, not the mouth — whatever grows from the hindmost part of the body serves as the tail, and lashes. [Text defective here.] ...just so with scorpions: that chain of knots, poisoned within by a fine little vein, rising in an arching thrust, in the topmost point, by the mechanics of the torment, clenches into a hooked barb. [2] That is why they even name a siege-engine 'scorpion,' one that gives its missile life by drawing back. That barb is also a channel, open in a fine bore, and it pours its venom, at the point where it strikes, into the wound. Its dangerous season is chiefly summer; the south wind and the southwest wind fill its savagery like sails. As remedies, natural ones are the most numerous; a little magic is also wrapped around it; medicine meets it with the knife and the draught. [3] Some, indeed, will drink a preventive first, in their haste; but intercourse drains it off, and then they are thirsty again. For us, faith is the defense — if it is not itself struck down by a failure of nerve — the defense of at once making the sign, and adjuring, and setting the heel on the beast. [4] It is by this means, in fact, that we often come to the rescue even of pagans, given by God that same power the apostle proved true when he shook the serpent's fangs off unharmed. What, then, does this little treatise of mine offer, if faith already stands secure on its own footing? Why, that it may be safe elsewhere too, on its own account, when it suffers its own scorpions. These, too, come in a savage but limited variety, and they are armed in one way only and mustered only at one season, and that season is no other than the season of persecution's heat. [5] Among Christians, this heat is persecution. So then, when faith is aflame and the church is on fire, in the figure of the burning bush, out come the Gnostics, out crawl the Valentinians, out boil up all who argue against martyrdom, hot themselves, and eager themselves to wound, sting, kill. For they know well that many are simple and untaught, many weak, and a good number Christians only for show, if it comes to that — and they judge there is no better moment to approach than when fear has loosened the soul's defenses, especially once some fresh atrocity has already crowned the faith of martyrs. [6] So, first, still dragging their tail behind them, they apply it to the feelings, or lash out as it were at nothing: 'Can innocent people really be made to suffer like this?' — so that you might take a pagan for a brother, or even for something better. [7] 'Is this really how a sect that troubles no one is to be treated?' Then they drive the point home: 'People are dying for nothing.' 'Dying' — and 'for nothing' — that is the first stab. Next they cut deeper still: but simple souls do not know what is written, how, where, when, and before whom confession is to be made — except that this is not simplicity at all but vanity, worse, madness, to die for a God who is supposed to save me. [8] Is this how the one who is meant to save kills? Christ died for us once; he was killed once, so that we would not be killed. If he demands it again in turn, does he really expect his salvation to come from my death too? Or does God crave human blood, when he refuses even the blood of bulls and goats? Surely he wants the sinner's repentance far more than his death. And how could he not desire the death of sins? [9] These arguments, and whatever other poisoned inventions the heretics have devised, is there anyone they do not at least prick, if not destroy, or at least embitter, if not kill? But you, if your faith is on watch, tread the scorpion underfoot there and then like a sandal, curse it, and leave it to die in its own venom. [10] But if the sting has had its fill, the poison works its way in and hurries toward the vital organs; at once all the old feelings go numb, the blood of the spirit turns to ice, the flesh of the spirit wastes away, even the name turns the stomach with nausea. Then the mind itself starts looking for some way to be sick, and so the weakness, once struck, breathes out its wounded faith either into heresy or into the world. And just now the very middle of this burning is upon us, the dog-star fever of persecution itself, coming, of course, from that dog-headed one himself. [11] Some Christians have been proved by fire, some by the sword, some by beasts; others meanwhile, having tasted a foretaste of martyrdom under clubs and claws, go hungry in prison. We ourselves, like hares, marked out as game, are besieged from far off, and the heretics, true to form, run wild among us. [12] So the time has called for tempering, with my pen, a home remedy against these homegrown little beasts of ours. Whoever reads this will be drinking a cure. Nor is the potion bitter. If the Lord's sayings are sweeter than honey and the honeycomb, then these ingredients of mine are drawn from there. If God's promise flows with milk and honey, then whatever leads there tastes the same. But woe to those who make the sweet bitter and turn light to darkness! [13] For that is exactly what those who argue against martyrdom do, when they interpret salvation as ruin — rendering the sweet bitter, the light dark — and so, by putting this most wretched life ahead of that most blessed one, set bitter in the place of sweet and darkness in the place of light.

======== Scorpiace — Chapter 2 ========

[1] But we must not yet speak of martyrdom as a good — first as a debt owed — nor take up its usefulness before its necessity. Divine authority comes first: whether God has willed and commanded some such thing, so that those who deny it is good may at least be brought round to admitting it is expedient, once they have been forced to it. It is fitting that heretics be compelled to duty, not coaxed into it. Stubbornness is to be conquered, not persuaded. [2] And in any case it will be judged more than sufficiently good once it is shown to have been established and commanded by God. For the moment the Gospels can stand aside while I extract their taproot, the Law, and draw out from it the will of God — the very fountain from which I know God himself: "I am," he says, "the Lord your God, the one who led you forth out of Egypt's land. You shall have no other gods before my face. You shall not fashion for yourself any likeness of what is in the sky above, or upon the earth below, or in the waters beneath the earth. Do not bow before them, and give them no service; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous one." So too in the same book of Exodus: "You have yourselves seen that I spoke with you out of the heavens. Make for yourselves no gods of silver, and gods of gold you must not make." [3] So likewise in Deuteronomy: "Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God is one Lord, and you must love him — the Lord your God — with your whole heart, your whole strength, and the entirety of your soul." And further: "Do not put out of mind the Lord your God, who led you out from Egypt's land, out from that house of slavery. Fear the Lord your God, and him alone shall you serve; hold fast to him, and swear only by his name." [4] "You shall not go after strange gods, gods of the nations round about you, for the Lord your God is a jealous god in your midst, lest he grow angry and indignant and wipe you off the face of the earth." [5] And setting before them blessings and curses: "Blessings," he says, "if you hearken to the commandments of the Lord your God, all that I command you today, and do not stray from the way I have laid down for you, so as to go off and serve other gods, whom you do not know." [6] And on rooting these out in every quarter: "You shall utterly destroy," he says, "all the places where the nations you shall possess as an inheritance served their gods — on the high mountains and the hills and under the leafy trees; you shall dig up their altars, overturn and shatter their standing stones, cut down their sacred groves, and burn the carved images of their very gods with fire, and blot out their name from that place." [7] He presses further: once they had entered the promised land and destroyed its nations — "Take heed to yourself, that you do not follow after them once they have been destroyed before your face, that you do not seek out their gods, saying, 'As these nations serve their gods, so will I do likewise.'" [8] And further: "Should a prophet rise up in your midst, or one given to dreams, and offer you a sign or a portent, and it should happen just as he foretold, and he then says, 'Come, let us follow and worship other gods you have not known' — pay no heed to what that prophet or that dreamer proclaims, for the Lord your God is putting you to the test, to see whether you hold him dear — the Lord your God — with your whole heart and your entire soul. Walk instead behind the Lord your God; hold him in reverence, keep what he commands, heed his voice, serve him, and stay bound to him. As for that prophet or dreamer, death shall be his end, since he spoke so as to draw you away from the Lord your God." [9] And under yet another heading: "If your brother, by father or by mother, or your son or your daughter, or the wife who lies in your bosom, or the friend who is as your own soul, entices you in secret, saying, 'Come, let us go and worship other gods,' ones neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods belonging to the nations around you, be they close by or distant — give him no consent, and pay him no heed. [10] Your eye shall not spare him, nor shall you pity him or shield him; you shall surely denounce him. Your hands shall be the first against him to put him to death, and afterward the hands of all the people, and you shall stone him, and he shall die, because he sought to turn you away from the Lord your God." [11] He adds further, concerning cities: if it should be found that any of them, persuaded by wicked men, had gone over to other gods, then all its inhabitants were to be put to the sword, and the whole of it given over to destruction, and all its plunder heaped up in the open square and set ablaze, together with every vessel and every soul in it, before the eyes of the Lord God himself — "and it shall never again be inhabited," he says, "nor rebuilt, nor shall anything of that accursed thing cling to your hands, so that the Lord may turn from the fury of his wrath." [12] He also opened the list of curses with the execration of idols: "Cursed is the man who makes a carved or a molten abomination, the work of a craftsman's hands, and sets it up in a hidden place." And in Leviticus: "Do not turn toward idols," he says, "nor cast yourselves molten gods — I, the Lord your God, forbid it." And elsewhere: "The children of Israel belong to me, my own servants; these are the ones I led forth out of Egypt's land — I am their Lord and God. You shall make for yourselves no handcrafted thing, set up no graven likeness, and place no engraved stone within your territory — I am the Lord your God." [13] These, then, were the first words spoken through Moses, pertaining certainly to all whom the Lord God of Israel likewise led out of Egypt — that most superstitious of ages — and out of the house of human bondage. [14] And after that, every prophetic mouth thenceforward rings with the voice of that same God, heaping up the same law by renewing those same precepts, and proclaiming nothing else so emphatically as this first thing: to beware of every making and worshiping of idols. As through David: "The idols of the nations are but silver and gold, fashioned by human hands; they have eyes, yet cannot see; ears, yet cannot hear; noses, yet cannot smell; a mouth, yet cannot speak; hands, yet cannot feel; feet, yet cannot walk. Their makers shall come to resemble them, as will everyone who puts trust in them."

======== Scorpiace — Chapter 3 ========

[1] Nor, I think, need we argue over whether God has good reason to forbid his name and honor from being lent out to a lie, whether he has good reason not to want those he has torn free from the error of superstition to slide back again into Egypt, whether he has good reason not to allow those he has chosen for himself to break away from him. So neither should it be expected that we go back over whether he willed the discipline he set out to institute to be observed, and whether he justly avenges its abandonment when he willed it observed — since it would have been pointless to institute it if he had not willed it observed, and pointless to will it observed if he had not been willing to vindicate it. [2] It follows, then, that I should prove these determinations of God against acts of superstition — determinations both established as binding and actually enforced — since on these the entire logic of martyrdom rests. Moses was away from the people, up on the mountain with God, when the people, unable to bear so necessary an absence, sought to produce gods for themselves — the very move by which they ruined themselves all the more thoroughly. [3] Aaron is pressed, and orders the earrings of their women to be thrown into the fire. For they were about to lose, to their own judgment, their true ornaments of the ear — the words of God. The clever fire poured out for them the shape of a calf, mocking those who kept their heart where their treasure was — in Egypt, that is — among whose other animals a certain ox, too, had its own consecratress. [4] And so three thousand men, cut down by their nearest kin — because they had offended so near a Kinsman as God — dedicated, in themselves, both the beginnings and the deserts of that transgression. In Numbers, when Israel had turned aside and camped at Shittim, they went off to fornicate with the daughters of Moab, and were invited to idols, so that they might play the harlot in spirit as well; they even ate of things polluted by them, and then worshiped the gods of that nation and were initiated into Baal of Peor. [5] For this idolatry, sister of adultery, twenty-three thousand were cut down by the swords of their own households and offered up to appease the divine wrath. When Joshua son of Nun had died, they abandoned the God of their fathers and served the idols of the Baals and the Astartes, and the Lord, in anger, handed them over into the hands of plunderers, and they were plundered by them and sold to their enemies, and could not so much as stand their ground before their enemies' faces. [6] Wherever they went out, the hand of the Lord was against them for evil, and they were sorely crushed. After this God raised up over them Judges — whom we understand as Censors. But not even to these did they persist in giving heed. As soon as each judge had died, they turned to wrongdoing worse than their fathers, chasing after gods not their own, giving them service and homage. [7] And so the Lord, in his anger, said: "Since this people has transgressed my covenant, which I laid down for their fathers, and has not listened to my voice, I too will no longer trouble myself to drive out before them a single man of the nations that Joshua left behind when he died." And so, through nearly the whole record of the judges and, afterward, of the kings, Israel — the strength of the surrounding nations having been kept in reserve — paid out God's wrath by war and captivity and the yoke of foreigners, every time it strayed from him, above all into idolatry.

======== Scorpiace — Chapter 4 ========

[1] If, then, it is established that this sin was forbidden from the very beginning, by so many and such great precepts, and was never committed with impunity, as so many and such great records attest, and that no crime is reckoned before God so arrogant as a transgression of this kind, then we ought of our own accord to understand that the intent of God's warnings and of their enforcement had already, even then, taken up the cause of martyrdoms — martyrdoms not merely to be accepted without doubt, but actually to be endured — since it was precisely by forbidding idolatry that he had opened the way for them. Otherwise martyrdoms would never come about at all. And clearly he had laid the groundwork for his own authority beforehand, willing that these things should happen, for which he had made room. [2] For now we are being goaded on the question of God's will, and the scorpion doubles its sting, both denying this will and accusing it — so as either to insinuate some other god, to whom this will does not belong, or, failing that, to tear down our God, to whom such a will does belong, or else, if he cannot manage to deny God himself, to deny that he has a will at all. [3] But we, who fight over the question of God elsewhere, and over the rest of the body of heretical doctrine in general, now in this one engagement draw our battle lines with precision, defending the will — belonging to no other god than the God of Israel — that made room for martyrdoms, both by the precepts that always forbade idolatry and by the judgments that always punished it. For if, in keeping a precept, I suffer violence, this will in a certain sense be the precept's own precept for keeping it: that I should suffer, through that very suffering, the means by which I will be able to keep the precept — namely whatever violence threatens me that I must guard against by avoiding idolatry. [4] And certainly whoever imposes a precept extorts obedience by it. He could not, then, have been unwilling for the very things to happen through which that obedience would be established. It is prescribed to me that I name no other god, that I fashion no god — no less by tongue than by hand — nor worship or reverence anyone in any way except that one alone who so commands, whom I am also bidden to fear, lest I be abandoned by him, and to love with all my substance, so that I might die for him. [5] Bound by this pledge of service, I find myself confronted by the adversary. I am his equal — unless I surrender my arms to him. In defending this I fight it out in the battle line; I am wounded, cut down, killed. Who willed this outcome for his soldier, if not the one who signed him up under just such an oath?

======== Scorpiace — Chapter 5 ========

[1] So there you have my God's will. This blow has been met. Now let us weigh another stroke, on the quality of that will. It would take too long to show my God is good — the Marcionites have already learned that lesson from us. For now it's enough to call him God, since it's then necessary to believe him good. [2] Whoever presumes to call God evil cannot hold both positions at once: he must either deny that the being he judged evil is God, or admit that the being he called God is good. So his will too must be good, since only a good being can be God at all. [3] The very goodness of the thing which God has willed — martyrdom, I mean — will prove this, because only a good being wills what is good. I maintain martyrdom is a good in the eyes of the very God by whom idolatry is both forbidden and punished. Martyrdom resists and opposes idolatry. But nothing can resist and oppose an evil except a good. [4] Not that I deny there's rivalry among evils themselves as much as among goods, but this contest is a different case. Martyrdom does not compete with idolatry in some shared campaign — it fights on its own grounds, its own gift: it frees from idolatry. And what frees from evil, who will not call good? What else is the opposition of idolatry and martyrdom but the opposition of death and life? [5] Life will be credited to martyrdom in exactly the measure that death is charged to idolatry. Whoever calls life an evil owns a death he must call good. And it's a saving perversity in men to reject the wholesome, embrace the ruinous, seek out the dangerous, dodge the medicine, and finally prefer to die quickly rather than be cured. [6] Many indeed flee the aid of medicine — many are fools, many are cowards, many are sick with false shame. And there's plainly something like savagery in medicine's scalpel, its cautery, its burning mustard-plaster; yet cutting, cauterizing, stretching, and biting are not therefore evil, because they inflict useful pain — nor will they be refused merely because they cause distress, but applied precisely because that distress is necessary. [7] The dread of the operation is excused by its fruit. That man howling, groaning, moaning under the doctor's hands will later heap those same hands with fees, proclaim them the finest of craftsmen, and deny they were ever cruel. So too do martyrdoms rage — but toward salvation. God too may be allowed to cure unto eternal life through fires and swords and every bitterness. [8] But you will marvel at the doctor precisely in this: that he applies remedies of nearly matching quality against the qualities of the complaints, as though helping perversely, coming to the rescue through the very means that cause the suffering. He checks heat by loading on more heat, quenches burning by making one thirstier still, gathers an excess of bile with bitter little potions, and recalls a flow of blood by draining a vein besides. [9] You will judge God — indeed a jealous God — blameworthy, if he willed to contend with the cause itself and to help by rivaling the injury, dissolving death with death, scattering slaughter with slaughter, shattering torments with torments, boiling away punishments with punishments, conferring life by taking it, aiding flesh by wounding it, saving the soul by snatching it away. [10] What you think perversity is reason; what you judge savagery is grace. So does God, by curing eternal things through momentary ones, magnify your God for your own good; you have fallen into his hands, but happily fallen. And he too has fallen upon your sicknesses. Man always makes the first business for the doctor — in the end, he drew the danger of death upon himself. [11] He had received from his Lord, as from a physician, a discipline sufficiently useful for the rule of living: that he might eat everything, but abstain from one small tree alone — which the physician himself already knew, meanwhile, to be troublesome. [12] He listened instead to the one he preferred, and broke his abstinence. He ate the forbidden thing, and glutted with transgression, sickened unto death — most deserving to perish outright in good faith, because he chose to. But the Lord, holding the fever of the offense in check until, in time, a remedy could be tempered, gradually compounded his cures: all the disciplines of faith, themselves rivals to the vice, cutting away the word of death with the word of life, filing down the hearing of transgression with the hearing of devotion. So even when that physician commands one to die, he shuts out the lethargy of death. [13] Why now does man balk at suffering from a remedy, when he did not balk then at suffering from a fault? Does it displease him to be killed unto salvation, when it did not displease him to be killed unto ruin? Will he gag at the antidote, who gaped wide for the poison?

======== Scorpiace — Chapter 6 ========

[1] But if God had set martyrdoms before us under the name of a contest, so that through them we might grapple with our adversary — so that the man who once let himself be gladly knocked down by him might now knock him down for good — here too generosity, more than harshness, governs God's design. Having wrenched man out of the devil's jaws, God wanted him, through faith and through courage, to become the very one who tramples his jailer — not merely to have escaped his enemy, but to have conquered him. [2] The one who had called man to salvation loved to invite him to glory as well, so that we who rejoice at being freed might exult also at being crowned. Consider those contests — the contentious festivals and superstitious games of the Greeks, of their religions and their pleasures — with what enthusiasm the world, and now Africa too, has been allowed to celebrate them. Even now individual cities keep pestering Carthage with their congratulations, since she was granted the Pythian games after the long old age of the stadium. [3] So from time immemorial it has been thought most fitting to stage a trial of one's pursuits, to weigh the excellence of bodily and vocal arts, with the prize as judge, the spectacle as arbiter, sentence rendered by pleasure. In these contests the fighting is bare-fisted, yet the wounds are real: fists pound, heels crash, the caestus tears flesh, whips lash it to shreds. [4] Yet no one will disgrace the president of the games by charging him with men's violence. Suits for injury stop at the edge of the stadium. But consider how much business is done in those bruises and that blood and those welts: crowns, that is, and glory and a dowry, public privileges, civic stipends, portraits, statues, and — as much eternity as the world can offer — fame from renown, resurrection from memory. [5] The boxer himself does not complain that he's in pain, for he wants this; the crown presses down on his wounds, the palm-branch hides his blood; victory swells him more than injury. Will you count as harmed the man you see rejoicing? And even the loser will not reproach the games' president for his fall. [6] Will it be beneath God to bring his own arts and disciplines out into public view, onto this stage that is the world, as a spectacle for men and angels and every power there is? To test flesh and soul for constancy and endurance? To give this one the palm, that one honor, another citizenship, another a stipend? Even to reject some, and dismiss the disgraced with ignominy? You are, no doubt, prescribing to God at what times, in what manner, in what places he may judge his own household — as though it were not fitting even for a judge to pre-judge. [7] What now, if it were not under the name of a contest that he set forth faith for martyrdoms, but for the sake of one's own advancement? Should not that faith have had some peak of hope to draw toward, on which to fix its zeal and hang its longing, some height it might strain to climb — since even earthly offices burn with ambition for higher rank? Or how could there be many mansions with the Father, if not corresponding to the variety of merits? How could star differ from star in glory, except by the difference of their rays? [8] Further, if it suited faith's exaltation and clarity to have some kind of advancement, that gain ought to be something that cost dearly: labor, torture, torment, death. But look at the balance struck, when flesh and soul are paid out — than which nothing in man is dearer, the one the hand of God, the other his breath — that these very things are paid out for the advancement of those whose advancement it is, that the very things spent become profit, the same price doubling as reward. [9] Moreover, God had foreseen other weaknesses of the human condition, the enemy's ambushes, the deceptions of circumstance, the world's snares — that faith would be endangered even after baptism, that many, once saved, would perish again, having let their wedding garment grow shabby, having failed to store oil for their lamps, needing to be sought out through mountains and ravines and carried home on shoulders. So he set in place a second comfort, a last defense: the combat of martyrdom, and the baptism of blood to follow it. [10] Of this happiness David speaks, when he pronounces fortunate those whose wrongdoings have been released and whose offenses lie hidden from view, and calls that man fortunate against whom the Lord will reckon no fault. For to martyrs properly speaking nothing more can be reckoned, since in that baptism life itself is laid down. [11] So love covers a multitude of sins — the love, that is, by which a man loves God with all his strength, the strength he spends fighting in martyrdom, with all his soul, which he lays down for God — and hammers out of that a martyr-man. Will you call these remedies, these counsels, these judgments, even these spectacles of God, savagery? Does God crave the blood of man? And yet I would dare to say — if man craves the kingdom of God, if man craves certain salvation, if man craves a second birth. No exchange is grudging where the reckoning of either grace or injury is shared by both sides.

======== Scorpiace — Chapter 7 ========

[1] Let the scorpion still strike, brandishing his murderous god — I will shudder, plainly, at that foul blast of blasphemy stinking from a heretic's mouth; and yet I will embrace even such a God on the confidence of reason — the very reason by which he pronounced himself more than a murderer, out of the mouth of his own Wisdom, in the voice of Solomon. Wisdom, he says, has slaughtered her sons. Wisdom is sophia. She has slaughtered them wisely, since it is unto life, and rationally, since it is unto glory. [2] O the genius of that parricide! O the artistry of that crime! O the argument of a cruelty that killed for this very reason — so that the one she killed should not die! And so what follows? Wisdom is sung with hymns at the exits — for the exit of martyrs too is sung. Wisdom, in the open squares, discourses on constancy — for it is well that she slaughters her sons. [3] Trusting, upon the highest walls, she speaks — for according to Isaiah one man there cries out, 'I belong to God'; and a second calls himself 'by the name Jacob'; and a third writes upon his own hand 'unto Israel.' What a mother, this! I too long to be numbered among her children, that she might put me to death; I long for that death, so as to be made her child. Yet does she merely put her children to death, or does she likewise refine them? For elsewhere too I hear God declaring: I will melt them down as one melts gold in fire, and try them as silver is tried. [4] Through the torments of fires and punishments, no doubt — through the assaying trials of faith's martyrdoms. The apostle too knows what sort of God he has described, when he writes: if God did not spare his own Son, but handed him over for us, how will he not also, along with him, freely give us all things? See how divine Wisdom slaughtered even her own son, her firstborn and only-begotten — a son certain to live again, indeed to bring the rest back to life as well. [5] I may say, borrowing God's own wisdom, that Christ is the one who delivered himself up on account of our transgressions. Wisdom has now even butchered herself. Words like this savor not merely by sound but by sense, and are meant to be heard not only by the ears but by the mind. He who does not understand and yet believes calls God cruel. And yet a sentence stands even for one who fails to understand it, meant precisely to check the rashness of understanding it any other way. [6] For, it says, who has grasped what the Lord intends? Or who ever served as his adviser, so as to teach him, or who ever pointed out to him understanding's path? Yet the world was permitted to appease the Diana of the Scythians, or the Mercury of the Gauls, or the Saturn of the Africans, with a human victim, and even today in Latium, in the middle of the city, human blood is tasted for Jupiter — and no one objects, or fails to presume some rationale, or grants that his god's will simply cannot be weighed. [7] If our God too had demanded martyrdoms for himself under the name of his own sacrifice, who would have reproached him for a deadly religion, for mournful rites, an altar turned pyre, a priest turned undertaker — and would he not rather have counted more blessed the man whom God had eaten?

======== Scorpiace — Chapter 8 ========

[1] We take our stand, then, on a single step, and press only this one question: are martyrdoms commanded by God? For you will believe them reasonable once you know they are commanded, since God commands nothing without reason. It is true that in his sight the death of his devout ones is honored, as David sings — not, I think, that common death which is the debt of everyone (indeed that other death is disgraceful too, on the charge-sheet of transgression and the desert of condemnation) — but that death which is approached for the sake of testifying to religion and the battle of confession, on behalf of righteousness and of the sacrament. [2] So too Isaiah: "Behold," he says, "how the just man dies, and none lays it upon his mind; and just men are gathered away, and nobody marks it; for the just man is snatched from before the presence of iniquity, and his burial shall be with peace." Here too you have both the preaching and the reward of martyrdoms. For from the very beginning righteousness suffers violence. [3] As soon as God began to be worshiped, religion drew envy as its lot. The man who had pleased God is killed — and by his own brother, no less. So that impiety might more readily hunt down the blood of strangers, it took its first hunting-trip on its own kin — and in the end it pursued not only the righteous but the prophets too. David is hounded, Elijah is driven to flight, Jeremiah is stoned, Isaiah is sawn in two, Zechariah is butchered between the altar and the temple, marking the stones forever with the stains of his own blood. And the very seal of the Law and the Prophets — called not a prophet but an angel — is cut down by an insulting death, all for a dancing girl's lamp-oil. [4] And of course those who were driven by the Spirit of God were directed by that same Spirit into martyrdoms, suffering the very things they had foretold. So too the trio of brothers: when the dedication of the royal image pressed the crowd into compliance, they did not fail to recognize what faith — the one thing in them that captivity had not taken captive — demanded, namely, that they must die rather than commit idolatry. [5] For they remembered Jeremiah's letter to those on whom that captivity was closing in: "And now you will see the gods of the Babylonians, of gold and silver and wood, carried on shoulders, displaying terror to the nations. Beware, then, lest you too become like the foreigners and be seized by fear, when you see the crowds worshiping before and behind them; instead say in your heart: You, Lord, we must worship." [6] And so, with confidence conceived from God, they spoke — with what vigor of soul they shook off the king's conditional threats! "There is no need for us to give you a reply touching this order of yours. Our God, the one we serve, has power to pull us free from the blazing furnace and out of your grasp, and once that is done you will see clearly that we mean neither to bow to your idol nor to adore the golden statue you have raised." [7] O martyrdom, perfect without the suffering! They had suffered enough, been burned enough — God covered them precisely so that his power would not seem to have been a lie. And Daniel too, a suppliant of no one but God, and therefore denounced and demanded by the Chaldeans, would certainly have been devoured on the spot by the lions' habitual and confined savagery, if Darius's worthy confidence in God had been meant to be disappointed. [8] But it was fitting that every preacher and worshiper of God who, when challenged to idolatry, had refused compliance, should suffer — in keeping with that same principle by which the truth had to be commended, both to those then present and to all who came after, a truth for which the suffering of its own defenders would vouch, since no one would have chosen to be killed for nothing unless he possessed the truth. Such precepts and such examples from the very beginning show that faith owes martyrdom as a debt.

======== Scorpiace — Chapter 9 ========

[1] It remains to consider whether antiquity happens to have had a sacrament of its own, and to review Christian novelty as though it belonged to some other God, and so too to some rival discipline — whose wisdom would not know how to have its own children slaughtered. Clearly, then, in Christ there is a different divinity, a different will, a different school — one that commanded martyrdoms not to be understood at all, or to be understood otherwise; one that urges no one toward such a crisis; one that promises nothing to those who suffer for it, because it does not want them to suffer — and this though, laying down the very first principles of his precepts, he says: "Happy are those hounded on account of what is right, since the reign of the heavens belongs to them"? [2] That, indeed, applies to everyone without qualification; but next, specifically to the apostles themselves: "Happy shall you be whenever men heap scorn on you and hound you and utter against you every kind of lie for my sake; be joyful and exult, since your recompense stands great in the heavens — for their forebears used their prophets the same way" — so that he was also prophesying that they themselves would be killed, after the pattern of the prophets. [3] And even if he had aimed this whole conditional persecution at the apostles alone at that time, still, through them, along with the whole sacrament, along with the propagation of the Name, along with the transmission of the Holy Spirit, the discipline of undergoing persecution must have looked ahead to us too, as heirs among the disciples and offshoots of the apostolic seed. [4] For again, when he addresses the apostles: "Look, I am sending you out like lambs among ravening wolves," and "Watch out for men, since they will deliver you up to their councils and flog you within their synagogues, and you will be haled before rulers and monarchs on my account, as a witness against them and the nations" and so on — but then he adds: "Brother will hand over brother to death, and father his child, and children will rise up against their parents and put them to death" — plainly he pronounced this iniquity against others beyond the apostles, a thing we do not find happening to the apostles. [5] For none of them suffered betrayal at the hand of a brother or a father — a text most of our own people nowadays go on to apply back to the apostles: "And every man will hold you in hatred because of my very name." How much the more, then, must this reach us, seeing we stand to be handed over even by the ones who bore us? So by this very interweaving — now addressing the apostles, now everyone — he pours out one and the same outcome of the Name upon all in whom that Name has taken up residence, together with the law of hatred against it. "But he who endures to the end, he shall be saved." Endures what, if not persecution, betrayal, execution? For to endure to the end is nothing other than to suffer the end. [6] And so: "The disciple is not above the master," he immediately continues, "nor the servant above his lord" — because, since the Master and Lord himself underwent persecution and betrayal and execution, all the more must servants and disciples weigh the same fate, lest they seem to be exempted from that iniquity as though they were somehow superior — when this very thing ought to be glory enough for them: to be leveled with the trials borne by their own Master and Lord. And building toward the endurance of these things, he warns that they should not fear those who can kill only the body but have no power to destroy the soul, but should instead set apart their fear for the one who has the power to ruin soul together with body by casting both into hell. [7] Who, then, are these destroyers of the body alone, if not the governors and kings mentioned above — mere men, I take it? And who is the master of the soul, if not God alone? Who is this threatener with fire, if not the one without whose will not even a sparrow falls to the ground — that is, neither of the two substances of a human being, flesh or soul? For even the number of the hairs on our heads is recorded with him. [8] "Fear not, then," he adds further, "you are worth more than many sparrows" — promising that they will not fall to the ground "not without cause," that is, not without reward, if we choose rather to be killed by men than by God. "So then, every man who owns me in front of others, him will I likewise own in front of my Father, he who dwells above the skies; and whoever disowns me in front of others, him will I likewise disown in front of my Father above the skies." Here, I think, is a plain definition and rationale both of confession and of denial, even though the arrangement of the two differs. [9] Whoever confesses himself a Christian bears witness that he belongs to Christ; and whoever belongs to Christ must needs be in Christ. If he stands within Christ, then surely his very act of naming himself a Christian is itself a confession made in Christ — for the one could not hold true apart from the other. Furthermore, in confessing in Christ he also confesses Christ, who is in him, since he himself is likewise in Christ, being a Christian. For if you name the day, you have thereby pointed to the thing that furnishes the day — the light — even though you have not named the light. So, even though he did not directly say "whoever has confessed me," the act of everyday confession is no different from the sense of the Lord's own pronouncement. [10] For what a man confesses himself to be — namely, a Christian — is also, through that very act, a confession of that by which he is one, namely, Christ. Likewise, whoever has denied himself a Christian has denied in Christ, by denying that he is in Christ when he denies being a Christian; and by denying Christ in himself, in that he denies himself in Christ, he will also deny Christ. So too whoever denies in Christ will deny Christ, and whoever confesses in Christ will confess Christ. It would thus have sufficed for the Lord to have spoken only concerning confession. [11] For from the pattern of confession its opposite too — denial — would have been prejudged, namely, that the Lord answers denial with denial, in the same measure that he answers confession with confession. And therefore, since within the pattern of confession the condition of denial too is already understood, it is clear that his separate pronouncement on denial, phrased differently from that on confession, must refer to some other mode of denial — for he says "whoever denies me," not "whoever denies in me." [12] For he had foreseen that this force too would generally follow in the assault upon the Name: that one who had denied being a Christian would also be compelled, by blaspheming, to deny Christ himself as well. Just as, not long ago, in a certain contest fought — under compulsion, as though for an omen — against the faith of some, we shuddered at this very thing. So it will be idle to say: "Though I have refused the name Christian, Christ will not refuse me in turn, since it was not he whom I refused." [13] From that denial he will be held liable all the same, because in denying himself a Christian he denies Christ in himself, and so has denied Christ himself as well. But there is more — for he threatens shame with shame in return: "Whoever blushes on my account in front of others, of that one will I likewise blush before my Father above the skies." For he knew that denial is formed above all from shame, that the state of the mind settles first in the face, and that the wound to one's sense of shame comes before the wound to the body.

======== Scorpiace — Chapter 10 ========

[1] But those who think the confession is not made here — not within this circuit of earth, not in the course of this life, not in the presence of men who share this common nature — what colossal presumption is that against the whole order of things to be tested here on this earth, in this life, under human powers? No doubt: once souls have quit their bodies and been sighted, floor by floor through the heavens, on their way up for admission, and the secret sacraments of the heretics have been demanded of them, then the confession is to be made before the true powers and the true men — Valentinus's Perfected Ones, his Immovable Ones, his Undefiled Ones, no less! [2] 'Our own people,' they say, 'not even the Demiurge himself consistently approved as men — he rated them a drop from a bucket, dust off a threshing floor, spittle, locusts, and put them on a level with dumb animals.' Quite so, it is written. But that does not mean we are to understand some other race of men besides ourselves — men who, precisely because they undeniably exist, could be clothed in that comparison without losing either the properties or the singularity of their kind. [3] For if a life is depraved, so that being judged contemptible it gets compared to contemptible things, that does not instantly abolish the nature, so that some other thing gets registered under its name. No — the nature is kept intact even while the life is smeared, and Christ knows no other men than those of whom he says: 'Who do men say that I am?' and 'As you wish men to do to you, so do you to them.' [4] Notice whether he has kept the race intact — the very race from which he expects testimony to himself and to which he assigns the office of justice. As for those 'celestial men' — if I demand they be shown to me, Aratus will sooner sketch Perseus and Cepheus and Erigone and Ariadne among the stars for me. And who forbade the Lord to specify plainly that the confession of men was to be made right there, where he openly declared his own future confession would be made, so that it should stand thus: 'Whoever confesses me before men, him will I also confess before my Father who is in the heavens'? [5] He ought to have rescued me from this earthly error of confession — one he would not have wanted taken up — if he had prescribed a heavenly one instead, since I know of no other men besides the inhabitants of earth, no man having yet been seen in the heavens even now. And besides, what proof of anything would it be, if, having been lifted to the realms above after my departure, I were then approved there — where I could only be installed once already approved — and examined there for admission, where I could not even arrive unless already fit to be let in? [6] For the Christian, heaven lies open before the road does; because there is no road to heaven except for the one to whom heaven already lies open — and whoever has reached that point will simply walk in. What doorkeeping powers are you asserting to me — after the Roman superstition — some Barnus, and Forculus, and Limentinus? What powers do you rank at the hinges? [7] If you happen to recall that passage of David's — 'Throw wide your gates, you rulers, swing open, you doors that stand forever, that the King of glory may enter in' — and remember too the words of Amos, that he builds his stairway up into the sky and pours his flood down over the ground — then know that from that moment the ascent has been leveled by the footsteps of the Lord, and the entrance unbarred by the strength of Christ, and no delay or interrogation will meet Christians at the threshold, since they will not need to be identified there, but recognized; not questioned, but admitted. [8] For even if you still think heaven shut, remember the Lord left its keys here, with Peter and through him with the church — keys which each person, once questioned and having confessed here, carries with him. But the devil insists the confession happens there, precisely so as to persuade us to deny it here. Fine documents I'd be sending on ahead, wouldn't I — a fine set of keys to be carrying with me — the fear of those who kill only the body but can do nothing to the soul! I would be commending myself by deserting this commandment; I would stand honorably among the heavenly things, I who could not stand among the earthly; I would hold out against the greater powers, I who caved to the lesser; I would surely deserve admission — once already shut out! [9] There is still more to say: if confession must be made in the heavens, then denial must happen here. For where one is, so is the other; rival things converge in pairs. Persecution too, then, must be staged in the heavens, since persecution is what supplies the material for confession or denial. So why hesitate, most reckless heretic, to transplant the whole apparatus of Christian upheaval to the world above, and above all to install the very hatred of the Name there, where Christ presides at his Father's right hand? [10] There too you'll have to set up the synagogues of the Jews, those fountains of persecution, where the apostles suffered their floggings, and the crowds of the nations with their own circus, ready to chant, 'How much longer, this third race?' [11] But you'll also have to produce our brothers and fathers and sons and mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law and household members up there, the ones through whom betrayal gets arranged; likewise kings and governors and armed powers, before whom the case must be fought. There will surely be a prison in heaven too, sunless, or else insufferably bright, and chains perhaps made of belts, and the rack will be the very axis that tortures. [12] So then: should a Christian face stoning, hailstones will be on hand; if burned, thunderbolts are ready to serve; if slaughtered, the hand of armed Orion will do the work; if to be finished off by beasts, the Bear will be let loose from the north, the zodiac will supply bulls and lions. Whoever holds out to the end under these — he shall be saved! [13] So the end, too, happens in the heavens, and the suffering, and the killing, and the first confession? And where, in all this, is the flesh so necessary to it all? Where is the body — the one thing men are actually able to kill? These absurdities have been handed us by a logic so tight it borders on farce, and there is no barrier of this argument that will not be knocked flat, forcing them to drag the whole order of persecution — every cause, every form, every apparatus of it — up to that place where they've given confession its courtroom. [14] For confession is drawn out by persecution, and persecution finds its end in confession, and the two cannot help but travel together, since together they mark out its threshold and its close — its start-point and its finish. Now, the hatred of the Name happens here, and persecution breaks out here, and betrayal is produced here, and interrogation compels here, and the executioner rages here; but the whole of this sequence on earth is settled, once for all, by confession or denial. [15] So then: if the rest happens here, confession does not happen elsewhere; and if confession happens elsewhere, the rest does not happen here. But in fact the rest does not happen elsewhere — therefore confession does not happen in heaven either. Or if they insist on some other scheme for a heavenly interrogation and confession, then they will have to build an entirely different apparatus for it too, one quite unlike the arrangement marked out in the Scriptures. [16] And we can simply say: let them see to that — provided this earthly order of interrogation and confession, running its course out of the raw material of persecution and public conflict, remains wholly intact, on the terms of its own faith, so that it is to be believed exactly as it is written, and understood exactly as it is heard. We hold to the whole sequence here, since the Lord himself assigns no other region of the world for it. For what does he add right after fixing the terms of confession and denial? [17] 'Do not suppose that I have come to send peace on the earth; I have come to send not peace but a sword' — on the earth, mark you. 'For I have come to set a man at odds with his father, and a daughter at odds with her mother, and a woman at odds with the wife of her son, so that a man's own household will turn into his enemies.' For this is how it works out: brother will betray brother to death, and a father his son, and children will rise up against their parents and have them put to death. 'And he who endures to the end, he shall be saved.' So the entire sequence of the Lord's sword — sent not into heaven but onto the earth — fixes even confession there, on earth, where confession, by enduring to the end, is going to suffer death.

======== Scorpiace — Chapter 11 ========

[1] By this same pattern we maintain that everything else, too, belongs to the condition of martyrdom. 'He who has valued even his own life more than me,' he says, 'is not worthy of me' — that is, the man who would rather live by denying than die by confessing; and 'whoever keeps hold of his life shall forfeit it, while he who forfeits it on my account shall keep it safe.' [2] For the man who denies, buying his life at a profit, finds it in just the same sense as the man who loses it in hell, thinking he has turned a profit by denying. But the one who confesses and is killed loses it for the present — and is going to find it again in eternal life. [3] Indeed, the governors themselves, when they urge denial, say exactly this: 'Spare your life! Don't throw your life away!' How could Christ have spoken as he did, unless the Christian were going to be treated exactly as he describes? Yet when he forbids rehearsing a defense for the tribunal, he is coaching his own servants, promising that the Holy Spirit will answer for them; and when he wants a brother visited in prison, he is ordering care for the confessor; and when he affirms that God will execute vengeance for his elect, he is consoling their sufferings; even in the parable of the seed, scorched after the green blade, he is picturing the heat of persecutions. [4] If these things are not to be taken as they are stated, then without question they carry a meaning other than their surface, so that the wording says one thing while the sense intends another — as happens with allegories, parables, riddles. So then, whatever gust of argument these scorpions may conjure up, whatever point they may drive themselves onto, there is one single line to test it on: are they to be settled by appeal to the actual facts, in agreement with the Scriptures? [5] Because at that point the Scriptures will be shown to mean something else only if that same thing is not found to match the facts. What is written must, of necessity, come to pass; and what is written will only come to pass if it does not come to pass otherwise. But look — we are hated by all men because of the Name, exactly as it is written; and we are betrayed even by our own kin, exactly as it is written; and we are hauled before the powers, and questioned, and tortured, and we confess, and we are butchered, exactly as it is written. So the Lord declared it. [6] If he declared these things meaning something other than this, why do the very things he declared not turn out otherwise — that is, exactly as he declared them? But in fact they turn out exactly as he declared; therefore, as they turn out, so he declared, and as he declared, so they turn out. For it would not have been permitted to turn out otherwise than he declared, nor would he himself have declared it otherwise than he intended it to turn out. [7] So these Scriptures will signify nothing other than what we recognize in the facts — unless, of course, the events foretold have not yet happened, in which case, how can the events that ARE happening be the ones foretold? For these present events are not the foretold ones if the foretold events are something else, and not these. But as things stand, since the very things believed to be figuratively expressed in words are found, as they are, in the facts, what would be the case if they were found to have happened otherwise? [8] But this will be a perversity of faith — refusing to believe what is proven, and presuming upon what is not. And against that perversity I will set this further point too: if these things, which are happening exactly as they were written, are not to be taken as the very things foretold, then other things likewise ought not to happen as they are written, lest they too, on this same precedent, run the risk of being ruled out — since, on this logic, the wording would carry one import and the actual events another, leaving it uncertain whether things will even be recognized as fulfillments, once they happen, if they were foretold in some sense other than how they are to happen. And how will things be believed as fulfillments which will not count as fulfilled — since they were not foretold in the way they in fact come to pass? That is exactly how the heretics come to believe things that were never even foretold, by refusing to believe, as proven, the things that plainly are.

======== Scorpiace — Chapter 12 ========

[1] Who now would know the marrow of the scriptures better than Christ's own school? Those the Lord adopted as his disciples he trained in everything, without exception, and appointed to us as teachers who would in turn teach everything, without exception. To whom would he sooner have revealed the shape of his voice than to the one to whom he unveiled the very likeness of his glory — Peter, John, James, and afterward Paul, whom he also made a partaker of paradise before his martyrdom? Or do these men, teachers of falsehood rather than of truth, write other than they think? [2] Peter indeed, to the Pontians: "For what glory is it, if when you sin and are buffeted for it you endure it patiently? But this is thankworthy, and to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving you an example, that you should follow his steps." [3] And again: "Beloved, do not be startled at the burning ordeal now under way in your midst to prove you, as though some alien thing were befalling you. But rejoice, to the degree that you share Christ's sufferings, so that at the unveiling of his glory you may rejoice with exultation. If you are reproached in the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the glory and Spirit of God rests upon you — provided none of you suffers as a murderer, or a thief, or an evildoer, or a meddler in others' affairs; but should it be as a Christian, let him feel no shame over it, but glorify God under that name." [4] John, meanwhile, urges that we surrender our very lives on behalf of our brothers, denying that fear has any place in love: "Perfect love casts fear outside, because fear carries punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love." [5] What fear should we understand this to mean, if not the fear that fathers denial? What love does he call perfect, if not the love that puts fear to flight and gives birth to confession? With what punishment does he threaten fear, if not the one the denier will pay, to be destroyed body and soul in Gehenna? And if we must lay down our lives for our brothers, how much more does he teach that we must die for the Lord — well enough instructed for that persuasion, too, out of his own Apocalypse? [6] For the Spirit had commanded the angel of the church of the Smyrnaeans: "Behold, the devil will cast some of you into prison, that you may be tried ten days. Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life." [7] Likewise to the Pergamenes, concerning Antipas, that most faithful martyr, killed in the very dwelling-place of Satan. Likewise to the Philadelphians, that they would be delivered from the final trial, because they had not denied the Lord's name. [8] From there he promises to each of the victors, now the tree of life and pardon of the second death, now hidden manna with a white stone bearing an unknown name, now dominion over the nations wielded with an iron rod, together with the gleam of the morning star, now to be arrayed in white and never struck from the roll of the living, and to become a pillar within God's sanctuary, engraved with the title of God, of the Lord, and of Jerusalem-from-above, now to sit beside the Lord upon his throne — a seat once refused even to the sons of Zebedee. [9] Who, then, are these so-blessed victors, if not the martyrs properly so called? For theirs are the victories whose battles are theirs also, and theirs the battles whose blood is theirs also. And meanwhile, under the altar, the souls of the martyrs rest in peace, feeding their patience on confidence in vengeance, and claiming, clothed in white robes, the brightness that belongs to them, until others too fill up the fellowship of their glory. [10] For again a countless multitude, robed in white and marked with the palms of victory, is revealed — plainly triumphing over Antichrist — as one elder puts it: "Here are those who have emerged from that vast affliction, and who rinsed their garment and bleached it in the Lamb's blood." For the flesh is the soul's garment: baptism rinses away its stains, while martyrdom bleaches out its blemishes. Isaiah too pledges that from scarlet and crimson it shall turn snow-white, like wool. [11] Great Babylon too, when she is pictured intoxicated on the blood of the saints, is without doubt made drunk from the very cups the martyrdoms fill — and it is equally shown what terror is going to pay for. For among all the condemned — indeed before all of them — come the fearful. "But to the fearful," it says, "and to the rest," a share follows in the lake of fire and brimstone. So fear — in that same letter — the fear that love casts outside, carries its own punishment.

======== Scorpiace — Chapter 13 ========

[1] Paul the apostle, on the other hand, once a persecutor who was the first to spill the church's blood, later exchanged sword for pen and turned his blade into a plowshare — a ravening wolf of Benjamin who thereafter, like Jacob, himself brings the food — how he commends martyrdoms as now desirable even for himself! [2] Exulting over the Thessalonians, he writes: "such that we ourselves boast of you among God's assemblies, for the patience and trust you show through every persecution and hardship you bear, evidence of God's just verdict, that you might be reckoned fit for his kingdom, on whose behalf you now suffer." [3] Likewise to the Romans: "nor is that all — we glory too in our hardships, aware that hardship works out patience, patience a tested character, and tested character, hope; and hope does not leave us disgraced." [4] And further: "and if we are children, we are heirs too — heirs of God indeed, sharing the inheritance with Christ, provided we suffer alongside him, so that we might likewise share his glory. As I weigh it, what we endure in this present season cannot measure against the glory soon to be disclosed in us." And later still: "Who, then, will pry us loose from Christ's love? Hardship, or anguish, or hunger, or destitution, or danger, or the blade? As Scripture has it: 'For your cause we face death the whole day through; we are treated like sheep marked for slaughter.' Yet through all this we come out more than victors, thanks to the one who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither powers nor heights nor depths, nor any other force whatever, has the strength to pry us loose from the love God has shown in Christ Jesus our Lord." [5] To the Corinthians too, listing his own sufferings, he plainly settled it that suffering is our lot: "in labors more abundant, in prisons more frequent, in deaths often; of the Jews five times I received forty stripes save one; three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned" — and so on. [6] And if these seem to be mere hardships rather than martyrdoms, still, elsewhere again, he states: "so I find contentment in weaknesses, in slights, in privations, under persecution, amid hardship, all for Christ." [7] And earlier yet: "hemmed in on all sides, we are not crushed; unsure what to do, we are not despairing; hunted, we are not abandoned; struck down, we do not perish — bearing about in our body always the marks of Jesus' dying." And even should, as he puts it, "our outer self" — meaning the flesh, worn thin under the weight of persecution — "waste away, our inner self is refreshed day upon day" — meaning the soul, sustained by hope in what has been promised. [8] For "this slight, passing burden works for us a weight of glory beyond all reckoning and without end, since our gaze rests not on what can be seen but on what cannot." What can be seen, he means the hardships, passes with time; what cannot be seen, where he pledges the rewards, endures forever. [9] Writing to the Thessalonians about his chains, he plainly declared blessed those to whom it was granted not merely to believe in Christ, but also to suffer for him. "You witnessed," he says, "the very contest I wage, and hear now that it continues. For though I am already being poured out like a drink-offering upon the altar, I am glad, sharing that gladness with you all; so let it be with you, glad and sharing gladness with me." [10] Notice how he locates the joy of martyrdom, making of shared rejoicing its own celebration. And indeed, once he stood at last near the fulfillment of his own longing, how triumphantly he writes to Timothy, anticipating it: "for already I am being poured out as a drink-offering, and the moment of my leaving draws near; I have waged the noble contest, I have run out the course, I have kept faith intact; a crown now awaits, which the Lord will award me on that day" — the crown, namely, earned through suffering. [11] And still earlier he had already made his case: "Trustworthy is this word: if we perished with Christ, we shall likewise live with him; if we hold firm, we shall likewise rule with him; should we disown him, he too will disown us; if we prove faithless, he remains true, since he cannot disown his own nature. So then, feel no disgrace over the witness borne to our Lord, nor over me his captive" — for he had already foretold: "since God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but one of strength, of love, and of self-mastery." [12] Through strength we suffer, moved by love toward God; and with self-mastery, when what we suffer is for our own innocence. And wherever he urges endurance, on what does he set his sights more than on sufferings? Wherever he tears men away from idolatry, what does he hold before them more than martyrdoms?

======== Scorpiace — Chapter 14 ========

[1] Plainly he warns the Romans to be subject to all authorities, "because there is no authority except from God," and because it does not bear the sword without cause, and because it is "God's minister," yes, and "an avenger," he says, "for wrath against him who does evil." For he had already said beforehand: "Rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to evil. Do you wish to have no fear of authority? Do good, and you will have praise from it. It is God's minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid." [2] Thus he does not command you to be subject to the authorities as an occasion for evading martyrdom, but as an incitement to live rightly, even with an eye to their office — as helpers of justice, as it were, as ministers of divine judgment, passing sentence here and now even on the guilty. Then he goes on to explain how he wants you subject to the authorities, bidding: "Render to whom tribute is due, tribute; to whom custom, custom" — that is, "the things that are Caesar's to Caesar, and the things that are God's to God"; but man belongs to God alone. [3] Peter, of course, had likewise laid it down that the king is indeed to be honored — but only so far as the king is honored while he keeps to his own province, and stays far from claiming divine honors; because "father and mother, too, are to be loved," yet not set on a level with God. But to love even one's own soul above God will never be permitted.

======== Scorpiace — Chapter 15 ========

[1] Are the letters of the apostles, then, mere shifting things? And are we simple souls through and through, mere doves, happy to wander astray? I suppose, out of a lust for living! Let it really be so — that their meaning drops away from their letters. Yet what the apostles are shown to have suffered is plain teaching. This alone I understand, running through the Acts; I ask for nothing more. [2] There, prisons and chains and floggings and stonings and swords, the assaults of the Jews and the mobs of the nations, the formal charges of tribunes, the courtrooms of kings and the tribunals of proconsuls, and the name of Caesar himself — these need no interpreter. That Peter is beheaded, that Stephen is crushed under stones, that James is slain as a sacrifice, that Paul is torn apart — these things are written in their own blood. [3] And if the heretic wants faith in a mere record, the archives of the empire will testify, and so will the ruins of Jerusalem's own stones. We have the Caesars' biographies before us: Nero was first to mark the newborn faith with blood at Rome. Then Peter is girded by another, when he is fastened to the cross. Then Paul attains the citizenship of the city of Rome, when there he is reborn into the nobility of martyrdom. [4] Wherever now I read these things, I learn to suffer; nor does it matter to me which masters of martyrdom I follow, the apostles' meaning or their end — except that I recognize their meaning in their ends. For they would have suffered nothing that they had not first known they must suffer. When Agabus had, by gesture too, prophesied chains for Paul, the disciples, weeping and praying that he not commit himself to Jerusalem, had prayed in vain. [5] For he, animated as he had always taught, said: "Why this weeping, this breaking of my heart? As for myself, I would gladly bear not only chains at Jerusalem, but even death itself, for my Lord Jesus Christ's own name." And so they gave way, saying: "Let the Lord's will stand" — trusting, plainly, that sufferings belong to the will of God. [6] For they had not tried to hold him back on the counsel of dissuasion, but out of love — as men longing for the apostle, not as men arguing against martyrdom. But if some Prodicus or Valentinus had already been standing by then, whispering that confession before men on earth is unnecessary, I fear far less that God thirsts for human blood, or that Christ demands the return of his own suffering as though he too were to win salvation from it thereby, than that he would at once have heard, from a servant of God, the very words that once fell on the devil's ears from the Lord himself: "Go behind me, Satan — you are a stumbling-block to me. It is written: you shall worship the Lord your God, and him alone shall you serve." [7] But even now he ought to hear it, since it is he who has since poured out those poisons, which will do no easy harm to any of the weak — unless one who has not first drunk deep, or even drunk to excess, of this our draught of faith.

======== De Fuga in Persecutione — Chapter 1 ========

You asked me recently, brother Fabius, whether one ought to flee in persecution or not, on account of some report that was being announced. On that occasion I made some remarks suited to the place and the moment, and — given the pressing insistence of certain people — I carried the subject off with me only half-treated, intending now to render it more fully in writing, since your inquiry had commended it to me and the condition of the times had by its very name already laid it on me as a duty. For the more frequent persecutions loom, the more this examination must be undertaken, as to how faith ought to receive them. And the examination must be undertaken particularly by you people, who — if perhaps by not receiving the Paraclete, the guide into all truth, you are still to this day struggling with other questions besides. So I have given your inquiry an order too, observing that it is necessary first to settle the status of persecution itself — whether it comes from God or from the devil — so that its outcome may the more easily be established; for the inspection of any matter is clearer once its author is known.
It is enough, indeed, to lay down as a rule that nothing happens without God's will; but we shall not therefore straightaway grant this position free rein over all other questions, lest we be dragged away from the point now before us, if someone should answer: "Then evil too is from God, and sin too is from God — there is nothing left in the devil, nothing even in ourselves." We are inquiring now about persecution; concerning it, for the moment, let me say that nothing happens without God's will, having regard first of all to the fact that it is worthy of God and, so to speak, necessary — necessary, that is, for the proving or the disproving of his servants. For what is the outcome of persecution, what other effect does it have, than the proving and disproving of faith, by which the Lord in every case puts his own to the test? Under this name persecution is a judgment, through which a person is judged either approved or rejected; and judgment belongs to God alone. This is that winnowing-fan which even now cleanses the Lord's threshing-floor — that is, the church — tossing the confused heap of the faithful and separating the wheat of the martyrs from the chaff of the deniers; this too is that ladder which Jacob dreams of, showing to some an ascent to the heights, to others a descent to the depths. If persecution can also be understood as a contest, by whom is the fight proclaimed except by the one who sets forth the crown and the prizes? You read the proclamation of this contest in the Apocalypse — with what prizes it invites to victory, and above all those who have truly conquered by conquering in persecution, having wrestled not really against flesh and blood but against the spiritual forces of wickedness; so you will recognize that the judging of the contest belongs to the very one who presides over the games, the one who invites to the prize. The whole business carried on in persecution is God's glory — the glory of the one who proves and disproves, who lifts up and casts down; and whatever pertains to God's glory will surely come about by his will. But when is God believed in more, if not when he is feared more — and when is that, if not in time of persecution? The church stands in suspense: then faith too is on campaign, more anxious and more disciplined in fastings and vigils and prayers and humility, in mutual diligence and mutual love, in holiness and sobriety; for nothing then has leisure for anything but fear and hope. And by this very fact it is shown to us that what makes God's servants better cannot be reckoned to the devil's account.
II.

======== De Fuga in Persecutione — Chapter 2 ========

If, because iniquity is not from God but from the devil, and persecution in turn consists of iniquity — for what is more unjust than that the ministers of the true God, the followers of all truth, should be treated in the manner of the most vicious criminals? — persecution therefore seems to come about from the devil, from whom the iniquity comes by which persecution stands, we must know how far this goes: that neither can persecution occur without the devil's iniquity, nor can the proving of faith occur without persecution — persecution being necessary for the proving of faith — so that iniquity supplies persecution not its patronage but its service; for God's will regarding the proving of faith, which is the rationale of persecution, comes first, while the devil's iniquity, which is the instrument of persecution, follows as the rationale of the proving. For elsewhere too, to the degree that iniquity rivals righteousness, to that same degree it becomes material for testifying to the very thing it rivals, so that righteousness is perfected through iniquity in the same way that strength is perfected in weakness. For the weak things of the world were chosen by God to put to shame the strong, and its foolish things to put to shame the wise. So too iniquity is employed so that righteousness may be proved by putting iniquity to shame. Therefore, since this is a service not of choice but of servitude — for the choice belongs to the Lord, persecution being for the proving of faith, while the service belongs to the devil's iniquity, for the furnishing of persecution — we believe that persecution comes about, if you like, through the devil, but not from the devil. Nothing will be permitted to Satan against the servants of the living God unless the Lord allows it — either so that Satan may destroy himself through the victorious faith of the elect under trial, or so that he may parade as his own trophies those men who have fallen away to him. You have the example of Job: the devil could not inflict any trial on him unless he had received power from God, nor even touch his property, until the Lord had said, "See, all that is his I give into your hand — but on the man himself do not lay a hand." And indeed he did not lay a hand on him until, when he had asked for this too, the Lord had said, "See, I hand him over to you — only guard his life." So too against the apostles he asked for the power of testing, not having it, of course, except by permission — since the Lord in the Gospel says to Peter, "Behold, Satan has asked to sift you like wheat; but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail" — that is, that the devil might not be allowed so much that faith should be put in jeopardy. By this it is shown that both things lie with God, both the shaking of faith and its protection, since both are asked of him — the shaking, by the devil; the protection, by the Son.
And in any case, since the Son of God holds the protection of faith in his own power — a power he asks of the Father, from whom he receives all authority in heaven and on earth — how could it be that the devil holds the shaking of faith in his own hand? No, in the appointed prayer, when we say to the Father, "Lead us not into temptation" — and what greater temptation is there than persecution? — we thereby confess that it is from him that such a thing befalls us, since it is from him that we beg pardon for it; for this is what follows: "But deliver us from the evil one," that is, do not lead us into temptation by handing us over to the evil one; for we are snatched from the devil's hands precisely when we are not delivered over to him for trial.
Nor did the devil's legion have any power over the herd of pigs except what it had obtained from God — so far is it from having power over God's sheep. I might even say that the very bristles of those pigs had already been numbered before God, let alone the hairs of his saints. The devil may seem to have power of his own, if at all, over those who do not belong to God — once, "like a drop from a bucket and dust on the scales and spittle," as regards the nations assigned to him by God and thereby left exposed to him, as it were, as an empty, ownerless holding. But over God's own household he has no right at all by his own authority; when he is allowed some, and on what grounds, the examples fixed in Scripture show us. For either the right of testing is granted him by way of proving, when the one being tried has provoked it or been provoked, as in the cases above, or the sinner is handed over to him by way of disproving, as to an executioner, for punishment — as with Saul, of whom it is said, "And the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him and stifled him" — or by way of restraint, as the apostle reports that a thorn was given him, an angel of Satan, to buffet him, lest — and let us not be ignorant of this — this kind of thing is permitted to the devil for the humbling of the saints through the harassment of the flesh, and at the same time so that virtue — endurance, that is — may be perfected in weakness. For the apostle himself handed over Phygelus and Hermogenes to Satan, that they might be corrected and blaspheme no more. You see, then, that the devil more easily receives power even from God's own servants — so far is he from possessing it as his own property.
III.

======== De Fuga in Persecutione — Chapter 3 ========

Since, then, these examples occur all the more in persecutions — seeing that it is then above all that we are proved or disproved, and then above all that we are humbled or corrected — it must follow, on Catholic principle, that these things happen, whether permitted or commanded, by the very one from whom, in part, they come — namely, by him who says, "I am the one who makes peace and creates evils," that is, war; for war is the opposite of peace. And what is war to our peace, if not persecution? If the very outcomes of persecution bring either life or death, either the wound or the healing, you have the author of both alike: "I will strike and I will heal, I will make alive and I will put to death." "I will burn them," he says, "as gold is burned, and I will prove them," he says, "as silver is proved." For when we are scorched by the fire of persecution, it is then that we are proved as to the mettle of our faith. These will be the devil's "fiery darts," through which the burning and refining of faith is carried out — yet by God's will all the same. Who could doubt this — I do not know, unless it is a faith that is simply frivolous and lukewarm — the kind that catches out those who timidly gather in church. For you say — so it is claimed — "Because we gather in disorder, and gather all together, and crowd into the church in great numbers, we draw the attention of the pagans, and we are afraid the pagans may be provoked to riot." Do you not know that God is Lord of all, and that if God wills it, you will then suffer persecution, but if he does not will it, the pagans will keep quiet? You would surely believe this, if indeed you believe in that God without whose will not even a single sparrow falls worth a penny to the ground — and we, I take it, are worth rather more than a great many sparrows.
IV.

======== De Fuga in Persecutione — Chapter 4 ========

So then, if it is established from whom persecution comes, we can now bring your question forward and, on the strength of this very preliminary discussion, determine that flight in persecution is not to be resorted to. For if persecution comes from God, there will be no way one ought to flee what comes from God, as a twofold argument establishes: because what comes from God ought neither to be avoided nor can it be escaped. It ought not to be avoided, because it is good; for everything that seems good to God must necessarily be good. And was it not for this very reason recorded in Genesis, "And God looked upon it, and it was good" — not because he could not have known its goodness without looking upon it, but so that this phrase might signal that a thing counts as good precisely in that it has appeared so to God? There are, to be sure, many things that come from God and yet come about to someone's harm — no, rather, it is good for that very reason, because it comes from God as something divine, something rational; for what is divine that is not rational, not good? What is good that is not divine? But if it seems otherwise to anyone's private feeling, it is not feeling that dictates to the nature of things, but the nature of things that dictates to feeling; for the nature of each thing is a fixed reality and gives feeling the law of perceiving that nature as it is. But if by its nature a thing is good because it comes from God — for nothing from God is not good, because it is divine, because it is rational — while to feeling it seems evil, the nature of the thing will stand secure, and the fault will lie with the feeling. By nature, chastity and truth and justice are the best of things, and yet they displease the feelings of many; is the nature of the thing therefore made subject to feeling? So too persecution, by its nature, is good, because it is a divine and rational arrangement, even though it displeases the feelings of those to whose harm it comes. But whoever sees that even that evil is reckoned rational before God, when someone is overturned from salvation in persecution, just as that good happens by reason too, when someone makes progress toward salvation through persecution — unless someone perishes before the Lord, or is saved, without any reason at all — such a person will not be able to call persecution an evil, since even on the evil side of it, it is good, so long as it is administered by reason. So if persecution is in some way good, since its nature is established, we rightly conclude that what is good ought not to be avoided, since it would be a fault to refuse what is good — all the more so, what has seemed good to God — and indeed that it cannot even be avoided, since it comes from God, whose will cannot be avoided. And so those who think one should flee either charge God with evil, if they flee persecution as an evil thing — for no one avoids what is good — or else they consider themselves stronger than God, thinking they can escape, if God should will some such thing to happen.
V.

======== De Fuga in Persecutione — Chapter 5 ========

[1] "But what is mine to do," he says, "I do: I flee, so that I may not perish by denying; it is his part, if he wills it, to bring even the man who flees back into the open." Answer me this first: are you certain you would deny, if you did not flee, or uncertain? If certain, then you have already denied — for by presuming you would deny, you have already pledged the very thing you presumed, and you now flee in vain to avoid denying, since if you are going to deny, you have already denied. [2] But if you are uncertain, why, given that the fear of the unknown weighs the same on both outcomes, do you not just as readily presume you could confess and be saved all the more by not fleeing, as you presume you will deny so as to flee? Now then, either both possibilities lie in us or the whole matter lies in God. If in us, whether to confess or to deny, why do we not presume the better of the two — that we shall confess? — unless, that is, you simply do not want to confess, so you avoid the suffering; and not wanting to confess is denial. [3] But if the whole thing lies in God, why do we not leave the whole of it to his judgment, acknowledging the power and the might by which he can bring us into the open whether we flee or not — indeed can overshadow and protect us even while we go about in the middle of the crowd? [4] What sense does it make to pay God the honor of assuming he can drag you into the open even while you flee, and yet, when it comes to standing firm, to dishonor him by despairing of the power of his protection? How much more, on this side — the side of constancy and trust in God — does it become you to say: "I do what is mine to do: I do not leave; God, if he wills, will himself protect me"! This is far more truly ours: to stand under God's judgment rather than to flee under our own. [5] Rutilius, that most holy martyr, after fleeing the persecution from place to place so many times, and even buying off the danger, as he thought, with money, was seized quite by surprise after all the security he had secured for himself, was handed over to the governor, was torn apart by torture — as punishment, I believe, for his flight — and then, given to the flames, rendered up to God's mercy the very suffering he had tried to escape. What else did the Lord mean to show us by this example, but that we should not flee, since flight profits nothing if God does not will it?
VI.

======== De Fuga in Persecutione — Chapter 6 ========

[1] "On the contrary," he says, "because in fleeing from city to city he was fulfilling a commandment." So some one has chosen to argue — himself a fugitive too — and those who likewise refuse to understand the sense of that pronouncement of the Lord's, so as to use it as a cover for their own timidity, though it had its own persons, its own times, its own reasons. "When they persecute you," he says, "in one city, flee to another." [2] We maintain that this belongs properly to the person of the apostles, and to their time and their circumstances, as the sense that follows will prove — a sense that fits none but the apostles: "Do not go into the way of the Gentiles, and do not enter a city of the Samaritans, but go instead to the sheep of the house of Israel who have wandered off." [3] But for us the way of the Gentiles lies open — on it, indeed, we were found, and along it we walk to the end — and no city is excepted, since we preach through the whole world; nor is any special charge for Israel laid on us outside the general rule, except insofar as we must preach to all nations alike. [4] Even if we are seized, we shall not be brought before their councils nor scourged in their synagogues, but handed over, of course, to Roman powers and tribunals. [5] So then, the condition of the apostles required even the command to flee, since the preaching had first to be carried to Israel's own wandering sheep. In order, then, that the preaching might be received by those among whom it had first to be accomplished — so that the children might eat the bread before the dogs — for that reason he commanded them to flee for a time, not so as to dodge the danger under the name of persecution itself (indeed he was foretelling that they would suffer persecutions and teaching them to endure them), but for the sake of the progress of the announcement, lest, once they were crushed at the very outset, the spreading of the gospel too should perish with them. For it was not as though they were to slip quietly away into some other city, but rather as men who were to proclaim everywhere, and therefore to undergo persecutions everywhere, until they had filled up their teaching. [6] In short: "You will not have gone through all the cities of Israel," he says — so entirely was the command to flee confined within the borders of Judea. But no such Judean limitation touches our preaching, now that the Holy Spirit has been poured out upon all flesh. [7] And so Paul and the apostles themselves, mindful of the Lord's command, bore witness to it before Israel, whom by then they had filled with their teaching: "It was necessary that the word of God be spoken to you first; but since you have thrust it away and judged yourselves unworthy of eternal life, see, we turn to the nations." And from then on, having turned, just as their forerunners had ordained, they went both into the way of the nations and into the cities of the Samaritans, so that their voice would carry out across the whole earth, their utterances reaching earth's farthest edges. [8] If, then, the exception of the way of the nations and the entering of the cities of the Samaritans has ceased, why should not the command to flee, issued at the same time, have ceased as well? In fact, from the moment Israel had had its fill and the apostles crossed over to the nations, they neither fled from city to city nor hesitated to suffer. [9] Yet Paul, who had once let himself be let down over a wall to be delivered from a persecution belonging to that earlier time under command, this same Paul, now at the close of his office and the fulfillment of the command, when his disciples begged him earnestly not to commit himself to Jerusalem to suffer what Agabus had prophesied, did not yield to their anxiety, but on the contrary said: "What are you doing, weeping and breaking my heart? For I am ready not only to suffer chains, but even to die at Jerusalem on behalf of the name that belongs to my Lord Jesus Christ." [10] And so they all said: "The Lord's will be done." And what was the Lord's will? Certainly not, by then, to flee the persecution. Yet they could just as well have set before him the Lord's earlier will, by which he had commanded flight — to those who would rather have chosen to avoid persecuting him. [11] Therefore, since even under the apostles themselves the command to flee was temporary, like the rest of his prescriptions, it cannot go on standing in force for us once it had ceased for our teachers — even if it had not been issued to them specifically; or else, if the Lord meant it to go on standing forever, then the apostles were at fault for not taking care to flee to the very end.
VII.

======== De Fuga in Persecutione — Chapter 7 ========

[1] Let us see now whether the Lord's other pronouncements agree with a perpetual command to flee. First of all, if persecution comes from God, what sense does it make for the very one who inflicts it also to order that it be fled? If he wanted it evaded, better that he never send it in the first place, lest he seem to work against his own will with another will of his own; for either he wanted us to suffer persecution or to flee it: if to flee, how can we suffer? If to suffer, how can we flee? And besides, how great is the inconsistency between the sentence commanding flight and the invitation to suffering, which is the very opposite of flight! [2] "Whoever confesses me, I too will confess him before my Father": how will the one who flees confess? How will the one who confesses flee? "Whoever is ashamed of me, of him I too will be ashamed before my Father": I avoid the suffering, I am ashamed of the confession. "Blessed are they who have suffered persecution for my name's sake": unhappy, then, are they who, fleeing on command, will not have suffered. "He who endures to the end will be saved": how then can you, commanding me to flee, want me to endure to the end? If such a diversity of sentences does not sit well with the gravity that befits God, it becomes clear from these very words too that the command to flee had, at the time, its own particular reason — the one we have shown.
[3] "But," he says, "foreseeing the weakness of some, the Lord in his kindness nonetheless also pointed out the harbor of flight." As if he were not capable, even without flight, and without so shameful, unworthy, and servile a refuge, of keeping safe in persecution those he knew to be weak! On the contrary, he never coddles the weak, but always refuses to indulge them — teaching first of all that the persecutors are not to be fled, but rather not to be feared: "Do not fear those who kill the body but can do nothing to the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell."
[4] And then what does he prescribe for the fearful? "Whoever holds his own life dearer than he holds me does not deserve me," and "whoever does not take up his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple." And finally, in the Apocalypse, he offers the fearful not flight, but, along with the rest of the reprobate, a share in the lake of fire and sulfur, which is the second death.
VIII.

======== De Fuga in Persecutione — Chapter 8 ========

[1] He himself, too, at times shrank from violence — but for the same reason for which he had commanded the apostles to flee: namely, until he had fulfilled his teaching. Once that was accomplished, I will not even say he stood his ground — he did not so much as ask for help from the Father of the armies of angels, and rebuked even Peter's sword. [2] He himself, too, professed a soul sorrowful unto death and a weak flesh, so as to show you, first, that in himself there were truly both human substances, by their own proper marks — the anxiety of the soul and the frailty of the flesh — lest you interpret, as some now do, that Christ's flesh or soul was of some other kind; and second, that once these conditions of theirs were laid bare, you might know that they are worth nothing by themselves, apart from the spirit. [3] And so he puts first: "The spirit is willing," so that, taking account of the condition of each substance, you may understand that in you too there is both the courage of the spirit and the weakness of the flesh, and from this may know at once what to draw from which, and which to subordinate to which — the weak, obviously, to the strong — instead of doing what you do now: pleading the weakness of the flesh while quietly passing over the strength of the spirit. [4] He too asked the Father, if it could be, that the cup of his suffering might pass from him: ask too, but standing, as he did — only asking, and then adding the rest: "Yet not what I will, but what you will." But how will you ask this while fleeing, when you yourself grant yourself the very passing-over of the cup, doing not what the Father wills but what you will?
IX.

======== De Fuga in Persecutione — Chapter 9 ========

[1] The apostles taught everything according to God, wished to preach everything as gospel. Where do you show me that they reinstated a command to flee from city to city? For they could not have laid down anything so contrary to their own example — ordering flight, when it was precisely from chains or from islands, where they were held not for fleeing but for confessing the Name, that they wrote to the churches. [2] Paul bids the weak be borne with — obviously men who are not fleeing; for how could the absent be borne with? Rather, he says they are to be borne with in patience, if they stumble through weakness of faith; and likewise the fainthearted are to be consoled — not, however, sent off into flight.
So too, when he warns us not to give the devil a foothold, he is not counseling flight but teaching restraint of anger; and when he says the time is to be redeemed, because the days are evil, he wants us to gain the opportunity not by flight but by wisdom of conduct. Moreover, the one who bids us shine like children of light does not bid us hide in flight like children of darkness. He prescribes standing firm, unmoved — hardly a posture for those made mobile by flight — and girded: girded for flight, or for meeting the gospel head-on? He points out weapons, too, which men bent on fleeing would have no need of; among them the shield, "with which you may quench the darts of the devil" — resisting them, without doubt, and catching the full force of his assault.
[3] Likewise John teaches that we must lay down our lives even for our brothers, let alone for the Lord; this cannot be fulfilled by men who are fleeing. And finally, mindful of his own Apocalypse, in which he had heard the fate of the fearful, he too warns from his own understanding that fear must be cast out: "Fear," he says, "is not in love; but perfect love casts fear outside, because fear has punishment" — the fire of the lake, that is — "and he who fears is not perfected in love" — in the love of God, that is. And who, then, will flee persecution, but the one who fears? And who will fear, but the one who does not love? [4] And if you consult the Spirit — what does that word of the Spirit prove more clearly? For almost all of it exhorts to martyrdom, not to flight, so that we too may recall these words of it: "You are being made a public spectacle? Good for you; for he who is not made a spectacle before men is made a spectacle before the Lord. Do not be ashamed: righteousness leads you out into the open; why be ashamed when you carry praise with you? It becomes power, when you are seen by men." And likewise elsewhere: "Do not wish to depart in your beds, nor in miscarriages and soft fevers, but in martyrdoms, so that he who suffered for you may be glorified."
X.

======== De Fuga in Persecutione — Chapter 10 ========

But some, setting aside the divine exhortations, prefer to apply to themselves that little Greek verse of worldly wisdom: "He who fled will fight again." So that perhaps he may flee again too? And when will he ever win, who, once he has fled, is already beaten? What a fine soldier he offers to Christ his commander—a man so fully armed by the apostle that, the moment he hears the trumpet of persecution, he deserts on the very day of battle! I too will answer with something from the world: "Is death, then, really so wretched a thing?" Let him die, one way or another, beaten or victorious; for even if he falls by denying, he has at least fought it out under torture. I would rather have a man to be pitied than one to be ashamed of; a soldier lost in battle is a finer sight than one saved by flight. Do you fear man, Christian—you, whom angels ought to fear, since you are to judge angels? Whom demons ought to fear, since you have received power even over demons? Whom the whole world ought to fear, since the world itself is judged in you? You have put on Christ—since you have been dipped into Christ—and you flee the devil? You have cheapened the Christ who is in you; you have made yourself, along with the devil, a runaway. But in fleeing your Lord you reproach all his other runaways for their folly: a certain hot-blooded prophet once fled the Lord too, crossing from Joppa to Tarshish, as though he could cross out of God's reach as well; but the Lord found him—not, I need hardly say, on sea or land, but inside the belly of a beast itself, where he could neither die for three days nor even so escape God. How much better off is the servant of God who, whether he fears the lord of iniquity and yet does not flee him but rather despises him, trusting, of course, in the protection of his own Lord, or whether he stands in awe of God—all the more does he plant himself under God's eyes and say: "He is the Lord; he is powerful; all things are his; wherever I am, I am in his hand; let him do as he wills. I will not leave. And if he wants me to perish, let him be the one to destroy me, so long as I keep myself in his service. I would rather do him the injury of perishing by his own will than the injury of escaping by mine."'
XI.

======== De Fuga in Persecutione — Chapter 11 ========

Every servant of God, however lowly his place, must think and act this way, so that he may rise higher still, should he climb any rung on the ladder of endurance under persecution. But when the very leaders—the deacons, the presbyters, and the bishops themselves—flee, how is a layman to understand on what principle it was said, "Flee from city to city"? And so, when the generals flee, who among the rank and file will hold his ground and be persuaded to keep his post in the battle line? Surely the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, as Moses—though the Lord Christ had not yet been revealed, and was already prefigured in him—said: "If you destroy this people, destroy me together with them." But since Christ confirms these figures of himself, the bad shepherd is the one who, seeing the wolf, flees and leaves the flock to be torn apart; such a shepherd will be thrown off the estate, his wages for his service will be withheld as compensation, and indeed the loss to his master will be exacted even out of his former earnings—for "to him who has, more will be given, but from him who has not, even what he seems to have will be taken away." So Zechariah thunders: "Rise up, sword, against the shepherds, and pluck out the sheep, and I will turn my hand against the shepherds." Against these same men Ezekiel and Jeremiah level the identical threats, because such shepherds not only feed shamelessly on the flock, pasturing themselves rather than it, but also scatter the flock and leave it as prey to every beast of the field, for lack of a shepherd. And this never happens more than when, in persecution, the church is abandoned by its clergy. And if anyone will listen to the Spirit, he will hear it singling out the runaways for rebuke. Furthermore, if it is not fitting—indeed not even lawful—for those set over the flock to flee when wolves attack (for the one who called such a shepherd wicked has thereby condemned him; and whatever is condemned is beyond doubt made unlawful), then it follows that the leaders of the church must not flee in persecution. And besides, if the flock itself ought to flee, then the flock's leaders ought not to stand their ground, since they would then be standing guard, pointlessly, over a flock that—by the very license granted for flight—does not even want their protection.
XII.

======== De Fuga in Persecutione — Chapter 12 ========

As far as your question goes, brother, you now have my answer and my exhortation on the point. But if anyone goes on to ask whether persecution ought to be fled, he must also look ahead, of necessity, to the next question: whether, if it ought not to be fled, it may at least be bought off. So let me offer you a further point on this, laying it down that persecution, which we have established is not to be fled, is likewise not to be bought off. There is a difference of price involved; but just as flight is a free-of-charge redemption, so a cash redemption is a form of flight. And it is certainly born of the same cowardice. What you fear, you buy off—therefore you flee; you stood your ground on your feet, but you ran with your coin; the very fact that you "stood firm" by way of a payoff means you fled. But for you to redeem with money a man whom Christ redeemed with his own blood—how unworthy this is of God and of his design, God who did not spare his own Son for your sake, that he might become a curse for us (for "cursed is he who hangs on a tree"), who was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer opened not his mouth, but offered his back to the whips and his cheeks to the blows, and did not turn his face from spitting, and was numbered among the wicked, and was delivered up to death, even death on a cross—all of this, so that he might win us back from our sins. The sun withdrew on the day of our purchase; our release from bondage is transacted in the underworld, and our contract is ratified in the heavens; the everlasting gates were lifted up, that the King of Glory might enter, the Lord of hosts, having bought man from the earth—indeed from the underworld itself—into the heavens. Who, then, is the man who now wrestles against him, who indeed cheapens a ransom purchased at so great a cost—namely, the most precious blood of an unblemished lamb? So it is now better to flee than to make oneself cheaper still, if a man will not cost himself as much as he cost his Lord. And the Lord, for his part, redeemed that man from the angelic powers holding the world in their grip, from the spiritual forces of wickedness, from the darkness of this age, from eternal judgment, from everlasting death; but you, instead, strike a bargain for him with an informer, or a soldier, or some petty grafter tucked under the governor's cloak and in his purse, as they say—treating as stolen goods the very man whom Christ bought openly before the whole world, and indeed set free. Will you then value as a free man, and possess by payment, one you can only truly possess at the same price it cost the Lord—namely, at the price of his own blood? Why, then, do you use Christ, who dwells in that man, to buy back that man from other men? Simon tried nothing different when he offered the apostles money for the Spirit of Christ. So this man too, in redeeming himself, will hear the same sentence pronounced on him who tried to buy the Spirit of Christ: "May your money perish with you, because you thought the grace of God could be had for a price." Who would not despise such a man as no better than an outright denier? For what does the extortioner say? "Give me money." Certainly—so as not to hand you over, since he is selling nothing other than what he was going to do anyway, in exchange for your reward. When you pay, you clearly wished not to be handed over; but were you not already liable to being exposed, even without being handed over? So then, in refusing, by your unwillingness, to be handed over, you refuse, by that same unwillingness, to be exposed—and by that refusal you have denied that you are the very thing you did not want exposed. "No," you say, "in refusing to have exposed what I am, I have confessed that I am the very thing I do not want exposed—namely, a Christian." Well then, you might claim the title of martyr for yourself, if you steadily show forth Christ; but a man who buys himself off shows forth nothing. If perhaps you confessed before one man, then by your unwillingness to confess before more, you have denied him. Salvation itself will judge that the man has fallen, precisely by his escaping; he has fallen, then, who chose to escape. Denial is itself nothing other than the refusal of martyrdom. Is a Christian "saved" by money, and does he keep coin on hand for this very purpose—so as not to suffer—while all along he grows rich against God? But Christ was rich in blood on his behalf. Blessed, then, are the poor, for theirs, it is said, is the kingdom of heaven—those who hold only their soul, nothing else, in the general confiscation. If we cannot serve both God and mammon, can we really be redeemed both by God and by mammon? For who will serve mammon more than the man mammon has bought? Finally, what precedent do you use to justify buying off arrest? When the apostles were harassed by persecutions on every side, when did they ever free themselves with money—money which, of course, they were not short of, given the proceeds of properties laid at their feet? Indeed, with so many wealthy believers, men and women, who even supplied them with material comforts, when did an Onesiphorus, an Aquila, or a Stephanas ever come to their rescue in this fashion during persecution? As for Paul—when the governor Felix hoped to receive money for his release from the disciples (a matter Paul himself discussed privately with Felix), neither Paul himself nor his disciples paid anything on his behalf. And these were the very disciples who wept because he would not be turned from his resolve to go up to Jerusalem, and would not take precautions against the persecutions foretold to await him there; in the end they said only: "The Lord's will be done." And what was that will? Surely that he should suffer for the name of the Lord, not that he should be ransomed. For just as Christ laid down his life for us, so it is fitting that the same be done for him by us as well—and not only for him, but even for the brothers, for his sake. This too John teaches: that we are bound not merely to count the cost for the brothers, but rather to die for them. It makes no difference whether the Christian you should not ransom is someone else, or yourself. And this, in fact, is exactly what the will of God amounts to: look at the very structure of kingdoms and empires, ordained, of course, by God, in whose hand is the heart of the king; every day such elaborate schemes are devised for swelling the treasury—taxes, tolls, levies, tributes—and yet never once, to this day, has any such scheme been devised specifically against Christians, some tax on the head or the sect, though a harvest so enormous could be reaped from a multitude so vast, known to everyone. We were bought with blood, we were numbered by blood; we owe no coin for our heads, because Christ is our head; it does not befit Christ to be priced in money. How could martyrdoms even happen, to the glory of the Lord, if we bought off the freedom to practice our religion with a bribe? And so whoever bargains for that freedom with a payoff sets himself against the divine order. Since, then, Caesar has laid on us no tax of this kind, as a religion liable to tribute—nor indeed could any such tax ever be levied—now, with Antichrist already pressing close and gaping not for the money of Christians but for their blood, how can anyone quote Scripture to me: "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's"? A soldier, an informer, or an enemy shakes me down, demanding nothing for Caesar—indeed, acting quite against what is right, since he lets a man legally guilty under human law go free for a bribe. That is a different coin than the one I owe to Caesar—the tax coin, belonging to him to whom the matter at hand pertained, owed by tributaries as tributaries, not owed by free men. Or how am I to render to God the things that are God's—namely, his own image and likeness, stamped with his own name, that is, the Christian man himself? What, indeed, do I owe to God—as I owe the tax-coin to Caesar—except the blood which his own Son poured out for me? But if I owe God my very self and my blood, and I now find myself in the very moment when what I owe to God is being demanded of me, then in trying to escape that demand I am defrauding God of what is owed him. I would keep the command well, rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's—but rendering to God what is God's by denying him!
XIII.

======== De Fuga in Persecutione — Chapter 13 ========

[1] "But I will give to everyone who asks me": that covers almsgiving, not extortion. He says "to him who asks"; but the man who strong-arms you is not asking. The man who threatens, if he gets nothing, is not requesting but wringing it out of you; he is not waiting for charity, he who comes not to be pitied but to be feared. I will give in the name of mercy, not of my own cowardice — where the one who receives honors God and returns a blessing to me, not where he believes he has done me the greater favor, and eyeing his loot says, "for services rendered." [2] A toll-collector, and an enemy!" But even granting that enmities go by other names too, Scripture never called him a betrayer, a persecutor, or an extortioner; for how much the more shall I heap coals on his head if I do not buy myself off! "Likewise," he says, "if a man takes your tunic, let him have your cloak as well." That applies to a man who is after my property, not my faith; I will give up my cloak too to a man making no threats — but if he threatens betrayal, I will demand my tunic back as well. [3] All the Lord's sayings now have their own particular cases and their own rules; their limits do not run on forever or apply to everything; and indeed he commands giving to "everyone who asks," yet he himself gives no sign to those who ask him. Otherwise, if you think you must give indiscriminately to every asker, it seems to me you would give — I won't even say wine to a man in fever, but poison or a sword to a man begging for death. [4] As for how "make yourselves friends by means of unrighteous mammon" is to be understood, let the parable prefacing it teach you: it was spoken to the Jewish people, who, having mismanaged the estate entrusted to them by their Lord, ought to have looked to make friends rather than enemies out of the men of mammon — which is what we were — relieving us of the debts of sin by which we were held bound to God, if by their lord's own reckoning they conferred that on us, so that when grace began to desert them, fleeing to our faith they might be received into the eternal dwellings. Though grant, if you like, some other interpretation of that parable and saying for now — still you must know it is not plausible that our extortioners, won over into friendship by way of our mammon, will then receive us into the eternal dwellings. [5] But what will cowardice not talk itself into? As if it were written that flight is permitted, and ransom commanded! It is little enough if this man or that gets himself dug out that way — whole churches, en masse, have levied a tribute on themselves! I don't know whether to grieve or blush that in the tax-rolls of the informers and the pryers, among the tavern-keepers and pimps and bath-house thieves and gamblers and panders, Christians too are listed as ratepayers. [6] Did the apostles set up this form of episcopate with such foresight, so that bishops might enjoy their own little kingdom safely, under the pretext of procuring salvation? As if, to be sure, that was the kind of peace Christ, on his way back to the Father, commanded to be bought from soldiers with Saturnalia money!
14.

======== De Fuga in Persecutione — Chapter 14 ========

[1] "But how then shall we take up the collection?" you ask, "how shall we keep the Lord's rites?" Why, exactly as the apostles did — kept safe by faith, not by money; and if that faith can move a mountain, how much more easily a soldier! Be cautious by wisdom, not bribery! For you will not automatically be safe from the mob either, just because you have bought off the military detail. You need faith and wisdom together for your protection; without them your bribe may cost you your safety anyway, and with them you will have no need to buy your safety at all. [2] Finally, if you cannot gather by day, you have the night, lit by the light of Christ against the darkness. Can you not move about among individual believers? Then let the church for you, for a time, be three people. Better that you sometimes not see your own crowds than that you sell them off. Keep the virgin bride for Christ; let no one turn her into merchandise.
[3] These things, brother, perhaps seem hard and unbearable to you — but remember that God has said: Let the one who can accept this, accept it — meaning, let the one who cannot, walk away. The man who is afraid to suffer cannot belong to the one who suffered; but the man unafraid to suffer, he will be made perfect in love — in God's love, that is; for perfect love casts out fear. And so many are called, few are chosen — the search is not for one ready to walk the wide road, but the narrow one; and that is why the Paraclete is necessary, guide into all truths, exhorter to all endurance. Those who have received him know neither how to flee persecution nor how to buy themselves out of it, having him who will stand for us — just as he is to speak on our behalf at the interrogation, so he is to help us in the suffering.