Against Marcion 4.20

But who is this who commands the winds and the sea? (No doubt a new ruler and owner of the elements, now that the Creator has been subdued and shut out. Not so. Rather, these substances recognized their own maker, they who had been used to obeying even his servants. Look into Exodus, Marcion: see the rod of Moses commanding the Red Sea, vaster than all the lakes of Judea, so that, split to its depths and held fixed on either side in equal astonishment at the division, it let the people pass over dry-shod by a path through its very bowels, and again, at the nod of the same rod, as nature returned, overwhelmed the Egyptian army as the waves came together; and the south winds too served that work. Read also that at its crossing the Jordan was a sword for dividing … family by lot, whose rush and downward course Joshua too had plainly taught to stand still while the prophets passed over. (What have you to say to this? If he is your Christ, he will not be more powerful than the Creator's servants. But I would have used only these examples if a prediction of this voyage on the sea had not also gone before Christ. For when he crosses the lake, a psalm is fulfilled: “The Lord,” it says, “upon many waters”; when he scatters the waves of the lake, Habakkuk is fulfilled: “Scattering waters on his way”; when the sea is dashed down at his threats, Nahum too is discharged: “Threatening the sea,” he says, “and drying it up,” surely along with the winds by which it was being stirred up. From which do you want my Christ to be vindicated? From the examples or from the prophets of the Creator?

Come now, you who think that a military and armed warrior is foretold, not figuratively or allegorically, one who would win a spiritual war against spiritual enemies with spiritual soldiery and spiritual weapons, spiritually: when you find in one man a multitude of demons calling itself a legion, surely a spiritual one, learn that Christ too is to be understood as the conqueror of spiritual enemies, spiritually armed and spiritually warlike, and that he is the very one who was to fight even with a legion of demons, so that the psalm may be seen to have spoken of this war too: “The Lord strong, the Lord mighty in battle.” For when he was to do battle with the last enemy, death, he triumphed through the trophy of the cross. But of which God did the legion testify that Jesus was the Son? Without doubt of the one whose torments and abyss they knew and feared. For they can hardly have been ignorant until then of what the power of a new and unknown god was working on earth, because it is not likely that the Creator was ignorant of it. For even if he had once been ignorant of another god above himself, yet he had surely found him out by now, acting beneath his own heaven. And what the master had found out would by now have become known to his whole household too, … in the same world and within the same circuit of heaven in which the foreign divinity was moving about. To the extent, then, that the Creator and his substance would have known of it, had it existed, to that extent it did not exist, because the demons knew no other Christ than the Christ of their own God. For they would not have begged from another what they remembered they must beg from the Creator, namely to be spared the Creator's abyss. And in the end they obtained it. For what merit? Because they had lied, because they had made him the son of a cruel god? And what kind of god will he be who helped liars and put up with slanderers? But no: because they had not lied, because they had recognized him as the God of the abyss and as their own, he himself thereby confirmed that he was the one whom the demons recognized, Jesus, Son of the God who judges and avenges.

Here is something too of those petty traits and weaknesses of the Creator in Christ — for I too wish to ascribe ignorance to him; allow me this against the heretic —: he is touched by a woman who was flowing with blood, and he did not know by whom. “Who touched me?” he says. Even when the disciples make excuses, he persists in the language of ignorance: “Someone touched me,” and he affirms it from evidence: “For I perceived that power had gone out from me.” What does the heretic say? Did he know the person? Then why did he speak as though he did not know? Surely to call forth her confession, to test her fear. So too (the Creator) once asked, as though he did not know: “Adam, where are you?” You have both the Creator excused along with Christ and Christ made equal to the Creator. (But this too, they say, he did as an opponent of the law: because the law keeps a bleeding woman from touching, he was eager not only to allow her touch but even to grant her healing. O god, beneficent not by nature but by rivalry! But if we find that the woman's faith merited this, since he said, “Your faith has saved you,” who are you to read rivalry with the law into this deed, which the Lord himself shows was done as a reward for faith? But you want to make this the woman's faith, that she had despised the law. And who could believe that a woman who was not yet aware of any (new) god, not yet initiated into any new law, would break through the law by which she was still bound? In short, by what faith did she break through it? Believing in what god? Despising the Creator for whom? Surely she touched him by faith in him. If by faith in the Creator, which knew no other god, how did she break through his law? For she broke through it, if she did, precisely as far as from faith in the Creator. But how will both fit together, that she both broke through it and broke through it by faith in the one on whose account she ought not to have broken through it? I will tell you. Her faith was first this: she trusted that her God prefers mercy to sacrifice itself, and she was sure that this God was at work in Christ. If with this faith she touched him, it was not as a holy man nor as a prophet, whom she would know could be defiled because of his human substance, but as God himself, who she had assumed could be polluted by no uncleanness. So she did not rashly interpret the law for herself as meaning that those things are defiled which are capable of defilement, not God, whom she trusted was in Christ. She also reflected that what the law regulates is the regular and customary flow of menstrual blood or of childbirth, which comes from the working of nature, not from a defect of health; but hers was overflowing from a defect of health, for which she knew that what was needed was not a limit of time but the help of divine mercy; and so she can be seen not to have broken through the law but to have drawn a distinction within it. This will be the faith that had also brought understanding: “Unless you believe,” he says, “you will not understand.” Approving this faith of the woman, who believed only in the Creator, Christ answered that he was the God of the faith which he approved. Nor will I pass over this: when his garment was touched, a garment surely put on a body and not on a phantom, a body too was being demonstrated; not as though we were going over this ground again, but because it bears on the present question. For if there was no reality of a body, a phantom, being an empty thing, surely could not be defiled. How then could one who cannot be defiled, because of the emptiness of his substance, have wanted it, as a rival of the law? He was lying, since he was not truly being polluted.