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