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