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