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