Tertullian: Against Marcion, Books I–V

Chapter XIII.—The Marcionites Depreciate the Creation, Which, However, is a Worthy Witness of God. This Worthiness Illustrated by References to the Heathen Philosophers, Who Were Apt to Invest the Several Parts of Creation with Divine Attributes.

While we are expelling from this rank (of Deity) a god who has no evidence to show for himself which is so proper and God-worthy as the testimony of the Creator, Marcion’s most shameless followers with haughty impertinence fall upon the Creator’s works to destroy them. To be sure, say they, the world is a grand work, worthy of a God. ^{Edition note 1} Then is the Creator not at all a God? By all means He is God. ^{Edition note 2} Therefore ^{Edition note 3} the world is not unworthy of God, for God has made nothing unworthy of Himself; although it was for man, and not for Himself, that He made the world, (and) although every work is less than its maker.

And yet, if to have been the author of our creation, such as it is, be unworthy of God, how much more unworthy of Him is it to have created absolutely nothing at all!—not even a production which, although unworthy, might yet have encouraged the hope of some better attempt. To say somewhat, then, concerning the alleged ^{Edition note 4} unworthiness of this world’s fabric, to which among the Greeks also is assigned a name of ornament and grace, ^{Edition note 5} not of sordidness, those very professors of wisdom, ^{Edition note 6} from whose genius every heresy derives its spirit, ^{Edition note 7} called the said unworthy elements divine; as Thales did water, Heraclitus fire, Anaximenes air, Anaximander all the heavenly bodies, Strato the sky and earth, Zeno the air and ether, and Plato the stars, which he calls a fiery kind of gods; whilst concerning the world, when they considered indeed its magnitude, and strength, and power, and honour, and glory,—the abundance, too, the regularity, and law of those individual elements which contribute to the production, the nourishment, the ripening, and the reproduction of all things,—the majority of the philosophers hesitated ^{Edition note 8} to assign a beginning and an end to the said world, lest its constituent elements, ^{Edition note 9} great as they undoubtedly are, should fail to be regarded as divine, ^{Edition note 10} which are objects of worship with the Persian magi, the Egyptian hierophants, and the Indian gymnosophists.

The very superstition of the crowd, inspired by the common idolatry, when ashamed of the names and fables of their ancient dead borne by their idols, has recourse to the interpretation of natural objects, and so with much ingenuity cloaks its own disgrace, figuratively reducing Jupiter to a heated substance, and Juno to an aërial one (according to the literal sense of the Greek words); ^{Edition note 11} Vesta, in like manner, to fire, and the Muses to waters, and the Great Mother ^{Edition note 12} to the earth, mowed as to its crops, ploughed up with lusty arms, and watered with baths. ^{Edition note 13} Thus Osiris also, whenever he is buried, and looked for to come to life again, and with joy recovered, is an emblem of the regularity wherewith the fruits of the ground return, and the elements recover life, and the year comes round; as also the lions of Mithras ^{Edition note 14} are philosophical sacraments of arid and scorched nature.

It is, indeed, enough for me that natural elements, foremost in site and state, should have been more readily regarded as divine than as unworthy of God. I will, however, come down to ^{Edition note 15} humbler objects. A single floweret from the hedgerow, I say not from the meadows; a single little shellfish from any sea, I say not from the Red Sea; a single stray wing of a moorfowl, I say nothing of the peacock,—will, I presume, prove to you that the Creator was but a sorry ^{Edition note 16} artificer!