Against Marcion 4.1

Every opinion and every contrivance of the impious and sacrilegious Marcion we now challenge before his gospel itself, which he made his own by tampering with it. And to establish credit for it, he devised a sort of dowry for it: a work called Antitheses from its oppositions of contrary statements, forced into separating the law and the gospel, by which, dividing two gods, as different as one belonging to one instrument (or, as it is more usual to say, testament) and the other to the other, he might then champion the gospel too as one to be believed according to the Antitheses. But I would have cut these down in a separate engagement at close quarters, that is, objection by objection of the man from Pontus, were it not much more convenient to beat them back within and together with the gospel whose case they plead. And yet it is so easy to meet them by prescription that I actually accept them, count them valid, and say they are on our side, so that they may blush all the more at their author's blindness: they are now our Antitheses against Marcion. And so I confess that one order ran its course in the old arrangement under the Creator, and another in the new under Christ. I do not deny a difference in the records of speech, the precepts of virtue, and the disciplines of the law, provided that the whole difference applies to one and the same God, namely him by whom it is established that it was arranged, as it was also foretold. Long ago Isaiah proclaims that the law would go forth from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem: certainly another law and another word. “In short,” he says, “he will judge among the nations and will convict a very great people,” not of the one nation of the Jews, namely, but of the nations, who by the new law of the gospel and the new word of the apostles are judged and convicted in their own hearts of their former error as soon as they believe; and from then on they beat their swords into ploughs and their hunting spears (for zibinae are a kind of hunting spear) into sickles, that is, they turn minds once fierce and savage into upright dispositions that work to produce good fruit. And again: “Hear me, hear me, my people, and you kings, give ear to me; for a law will go forth from me, and my judgment for a light of the nations,” by which he had judged and decreed that the nations too were to be enlightened by the law and word of the gospel. This too will be the law in David, blameless because perfect, “converting the soul,” from idols to God, of course. This too will be the word of which the same Isaiah says: “For the Lord will make a cut-short word on the earth.” For the new testament is abridged, and freed from the ragged burdens of the law. But why say more, when renewal is foretold by the Creator through the same prophet more plainly and more clearly than light itself? “Do not remember the former things, and do not consider the things of old” (the old have passed away, new things are arising); “behold, I make new things, which will now arise.” Likewise through Jeremiah: “Break up for yourselves new fallow ground, and do not sow among thorns; and be circumcised in the foreskin of your heart”; and elsewhere: “Behold, the day will come, says the Lord, and I will accomplish for the house of Jacob and the house of Judah a new covenant, not according to the covenant which I arranged for their fathers in the day when I took hold of their arrangement to lead them out of the land of Egypt.” Thus he shows that the former covenant was temporary, in showing it changeable and in promising an eternal one for the future. For through Isaiah he says: “Hear me, and you will live, and I will arrange for you an eternal covenant,” adding, “the holy and sure things of David,” to show that this covenant would run its course in Christ, of the line of David by Mary's descent, whom he also foretold figuratively in the rod that would come forth from the root of Jesse. If, then, he said that other laws, other words, and new arrangements of covenants would come from the Creator, so that he appointed other, better offices even of the sacrifices themselves, and those among the nations, as Malachi says: “My will is not in you, says the Lord, and I will not accept your sacrifices from your hands, for from the rising of the sun to its setting my name has been glorified among the nations, and in every place a sacrifice is offered to my name, and a pure sacrifice,” namely simple prayer from a pure conscience; then every change that comes from renewal must enter into difference from the things of which it is made, and from difference into contrariety. For as nothing is changed that is not different, so nothing is different that is not contrary. Therefore the contrariety arising from difference will be assigned to the same one to whom the change arising from renewal belonged. He who arranged the change also instituted the difference; he who foretold the renewal also announced the contrariety beforehand. Why do you interpret a difference in things as a distinction of powers? Why do you twist against the Creator the antitheses of examples, which you can recognize in his own feelings and dispositions too? “I will strike,” he says, “and I will heal; I will kill,” he says, “and I will make alive,” creating evils and making peace; on which ground you are even accustomed to reproach him with the name of fickleness and inconstancy, forbidding what he commands and commanding what he forbids. Why then have you not reckoned up antitheses in the natural works of the Creator, who is always contrary to himself? Could you not at least consider the world, which, unless I am mistaken, even among the people of Pontus is built out of the differences of substances rivaling one another? You ought first, then, to have defined one god of light and another of darkness, so that you could thus have asserted one god of the law and another of the gospel. But the matter has been prejudged from what is plain: he whose works and designs consist of antitheses has his mysteries consist in the same form.