Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] I am not surprised that a heretic who cuts off with his hands should also make off with syllables, when he generally makes off with whole pages as well. "Grace was given to me," says the apostle, "the least of all, to enlighten all men as to what is the dispensation of the mystery hidden from the ages in God who created all things." The heretic has snatched away the preposition "in," and made it read instead: "hidden from the ages, of the God who created all things" — as though the hiding were done to God, not in God. But the falsehood gives itself away. [2] For the apostle goes on: "that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places." Whose principalities and powers is he speaking of? If the Creator's, how could God have willed to display his wisdom to the Creator's principalities and powers, yet not to the Creator himself — when powers could know nothing at all apart from their own prince? Or if he did not name God here because God himself is reckoned among them as their prince, then he would have pronounced the mystery hidden in the very principalities and powers of the God who made all things, thereby counting God among them. [3] But if he says it was hidden "to" them, he ought rather to have said it was manifest to them. So it was not hidden from God, but hidden in God the maker of all things — hidden, that is, from his principalities and powers: "For who has grasped the Lord's own thinking, or who has served as his counsellor?" Here the heretic, caught out, will perhaps shift ground and say his own deity chose to reveal to his own powers and principalities the dispensation of this mystery, one the creator-God had never grasped. And what point would there be in pretending ignorance on the part of a Creator who is foreign and set apart by so vast a gulf, when even the household servants of the superior god did not know it either? [4] All the same, it was to become known to the Creator too. Was it not, after all, bound to be revealed to him, since it concerned what lies under heaven and on his own earth? So this confirms exactly what I established above. For if the Creator was one day to come to know that hidden mystery of the superior God, then the text ought to have run: "hidden from the God who made all things," and gone on: "so that its manifold wisdom would be revealed to him," and then "to the powers and principalities of whatever god" with whom the Creator was to come to know it. So it is quite clear the preposition was suppressed, and even so the truth holds its own. [5] Now let me pick a quarrel of my own with you over the apostle's allegories. What forms could this new god have had among the prophets? "He led captivity captive," it says. With what weapons? In what battles? By laying waste to which nation? By toppling which city? What wives, what boys, what petty kings did the victor chain and drag along? For when Christ is sung of in David as "girded with a sword upon his thigh," or in Isaiah as carrying off "the plunder of Samaria and the strength of Damascus," you are here forced to construct a warrior who can actually be seen. [6] Recognize, then, both his armor and his spiritual campaign — now that you have learned there is such a thing as a spiritual captivity — and recognize this one too as belonging to the same Christ, if only because the apostle took his very mention of this captivity from the prophets, from whom he also took his commands: "Putting away lying, speak the truth each to his neighbor," and "Be angry, yet do not sin" (in the very words with which the psalm explains its own meaning), "do not let the sun set while your anger lasts." "Take no part in the deeds done in darkness." "With the just you shall be just, and with the crooked you shall be made crooked," and "Put away evil from among you," and [7] "Go out from the midst of them," and "Touch no unclean thing; be separate, you who carry the vessels of the Lord." So too, "Be not drunk with wine, for that is disgraceful" comes from the same source as the rebuke of those who make the saints drunk: "and you gave my holy ones wine to drink" — the very thing the priest Aaron and his sons were forbidden to drink when approaching the sanctuary. And to teach singing to God "in psalms and hymns" belongs to the very one who knew that people who drink wine to the sound of timbrels and harps rather than psalteries stand accused by God. So then, whoever's precepts, or the seeds and increase of whose precepts, I find here — his apostle I recognize. [8] But as for wives being subject to their husbands — on what does he ground that? "Because," he says, "the husband stands as head over the wife." Tell me, Marcion: does your deity ground his own law's authority upon a work belonging to the Creator? And this next point is plainer still, for he draws the very standing of Christ himself and his church from the same source: "as Christ also is the head of the church." Likewise when he says, "He who loves his wife loves his own flesh, as Christ also loved the church" — you see your Christ and your church compared to the Creator's own handiwork. What honor is paid to flesh, under the name of the church! [9] "No one," he says, "ever hated his own flesh" (except, clearly, Marcion alone), "but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ also does the church." But you alone have hated it, robbing it of the resurrection. You ought to hate the church too, then, since it is loved in exactly the same way by Christ. But no — Christ loved the flesh just as he loved the church. No one fails to love even the mere image of his bride; indeed he keeps it, honors it, crowns it. A likeness shares in the honor due to the reality. I shall now undertake to prove that the same God belongs to male and to Christ, to woman and to church, to flesh and to spirit, with the apostle himself invoking — indeed expounding — a sentence of the Creator's: "For this cause a man shall leave father and mother, and the two shall become one flesh": is this a great mystery? [10] It is enough, amid all this, that the Creator's mysteries are great in the apostle's eyes, however small they may be in the heretics'. "But I speak," he says, "in reference to Christ and the church." There you have an interpretation of the mystery, not a separation of it. He is showing that the figure of the mystery was supplied in advance by the very one whose mystery it in fact was. What does Marcion make of that? The Creator could not have prefigured the shapes of an unknown god — and even less those of an adversary, if known. The higher god had no business borrowing anything at all from the lower one, least of all for the purpose of tearing him down. [11] "Let children also obey their parents." For even though Marcion has cut it out, the law itself declares: "This is the first commandment with a promise," "Honor your father and mother," and "Parents, bring up your children in the discipline and correction of the Lord." For you have heard that it was said also to the ancients: "You shall tell these things in the ears of your children, and your children likewise in the ears of their children." What need have I now of two gods, if the discipline is one? And even if there are two, I will follow the one who taught first. But if we must wrestle against "the world-rulers" — how many creator-gods we suddenly have! [12] For why should I not press this point too — that there ought to have been only one "world-ruler" named, if it meant the Creator, to whom the powers he had just listed belonged? Moreover, since above he bids us put on the armor in which we are to stand against the machinations of the devil, he has already shown that what he links to the devil belongs to the devil — the powers and world-rulers of this darkness — which we too attribute to the devil. But if the devil is the Creator, then who could possibly play the devil's role within the Creator's own household? Or are there, just as there are two gods, also two devils, and, in the plural, both powers and world-rulers? [13] But how can the Creator, the devil, and God be the same, when the devil is not identically both God and devil? For either both are gods, if both are now devils too, or else whichever one here is God and not devil, the devil likewise is not God. I ask by what accusation the very name "devil" could ever fit the Creator. Perhaps he laid some charge against an intention of the superior god — the very thing he himself is said to have suffered at the archangel's hands, and falsely at that: for God had not forbidden the taste of that little tree so that men should not become gods, but so that they should not die by transgression. Nor, again, do "the spiritual forces of wickedness" point to the Creator merely because he added "in the heavenlies": [14] for the apostle too knew that spiritual wickedness had done its work in the heavens, in the angels who were scandalized by the daughters of men. And how likely is it that a man in chains — for the very freedom of his preaching, for constancy in making the mystery plain "in the opening of his mouth," which is exactly what he there begs of God on the church's behalf — should go after the Creator through riddles and I-know-not-what ambiguities?
19. ON THE EPISTLE TO THE COLOSSIANS.