Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[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.
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