Collected Works 12 part 1/3

1. Those who strive to disturb the faith of the resurrection — a faith which, before these kinsmen of the Sadducees, had lingered without controversy — so as to deny that this hope pertains also to the flesh, do with good reason also tear apart Christ's flesh with their questions, as though it were either no flesh at all, or in some way another than human — lest, if it be established to have been human, a prejudgment be made against them that it must in every way rise again, that flesh which rose again in Christ. Therefore, from the very point where they demolish the claims of the flesh, from there our foundations must be laid. Let us examine the bodily substance of the Lord: for concerning the spiritual there is no doubt. The flesh is in question: its reality and quality are re-examined — whether it existed, and whence, and of what kind it was. Its account will give the law of our resurrection.

Marcion, in order to deny the flesh of Christ, denied also His nativity; or, in order to deny the nativity, he denied also the flesh — evidently lest nativity and flesh should give mutual testimony to each other, since neither is there nativity without flesh, nor flesh without nativity: as though he could not, with the same heretical licence, either, having admitted the flesh, deny the nativity, like Apelles, his disciple and afterwards his deserter; or, having confessed both flesh and nativity, interpret them otherwise, like Valentinus, his fellow-disciple and fellow-deserter. But he too who introduced a putative flesh of Christ could equally have feigned the nativity also as a phantasm, so that both the conception and the pregnancy and the delivery of the Virgin, and thereafter the whole course of the infant himself, might be held to exist only in appearance;

they would have deceived the same eyes and the same senses which the notion of the flesh deluded. 2. Plainly the nativity is announced by Gabriel. What has he to do with an angel of the Creator? And a conception is introduced in the Virgin's womb. What has he to do with Isaiah, a prophet of the Creator? He hates delays, who was suddenly bringing Christ down from heaven. 'Away with these,' he says, 'the ever-troublesome enrolments of Caesar, and the cramped inns, and the filthy rags, and the hard mangers. Let the angelic multitude see to it, honouring their God by night; let the shepherds rather guard their flocks; and let the magi not be wearied from afar — I make them a present of their gold. Let even Herod be better, lest Jeremiah should glory;

but let not the infant be circumcised, lest He feel pain; nor let Him be carried to the temple, lest He burden His parents with the cost of an offering; nor let Him be delivered into the hands of Simeon, lest He grieve the old man who is thereupon to die; let that aged woman too keep silence, lest she bewitch the boy.' By such counsels, I suppose, you dared, Marcion, to blot out so many original records of Christ, lest His flesh should be proved. On what grounds, I ask you? Show your authority. If you are a prophet, foretell something; if an apostle, preach publicly; if apostolic, hold the same views as the apostles; if you are only a Christian, believe what has been handed down. If you are none of these, then I may rightly say, die. For you are indeed dead, being no Christian, by not believing that which, believed, makes men Christians;

and the more dead are you, the more you are no Christian, seeing that you fell away when once you had been one, by rescinding what you had formerly believed — just as you yourself confess in a certain letter, and your own people do not deny, and ours prove. Therefore, in rescinding what you had believed, you have rescinded it as one no longer believing. Yet it was not because you ceased to believe that you rightly rescinded it; rather, by rescinding what you had believed, you prove that before you rescinded it, things were otherwise: what you believed otherwise, that had been so handed down. Further, what had been handed down was true, as handed down by those to whom it belonged to hand it down. Therefore, in rescinding what had been handed down, you have rescinded what was true. By no right have you acted. But we have already elsewhere, more fully, made use of prescriptions of this kind against all heresies;

after which we now, out of abundance, take up the matter again, desiring the reasoning by which you have supposed that Christ was not born. 3. It is necessary, insofar as you think this was allowable at your own discretion, that you have judged the nativity either impossible or unbecoming to God. But to God nothing is impossible except what He does not will. Let us consider, then, whether He willed to be born — for if He willed, He also was able, and was born. I run to a summary. For if God had not willed to be born, for whatever cause, He would not have offered Himself to be seen as a man; for who, seeing Him as a man, would deny that He was born? Thus, what He had not willed to be, He would not have willed to seem at all. Of everything displeasing, even the notion is rejected, because it makes no difference whether a thing is or is not, if, when it is not, it is presumed to be;

but this indeed matters: that it should not suffer as false what truly is not. 'But,' you say, 'His own consciousness was enough for Him: let men see to it if they thought Him born because they saw a man.' How much more worthily, then, how much more consistently, would He have sustained human estimation as truly born — He who was about to undergo the same estimation even when not born, and that with injury to His own conscience! How, in point of good faith, do you reckon it, that, not being born, He should sustain, against His own conscience, being thought born? What was worth so much — teach me — that Christ, knowing what He was, should present Himself as what He was not? You cannot say, 'Lest, if He had been born and had truly put on man, God should have ceased to be God, losing what He was while becoming what He was not': for there is no peril to His own state for God.

'But for this reason,' you say, 'I deny that God was truly changed into a man, so as both to be born and to be embodied in flesh: because He who is without end must also of necessity be unchangeable; for to be changed into something else is the end of the former state; therefore change does not befit Him to whom no end befits.' Plainly the nature of things changeable is subject to this law: that they do not remain in that into which they are changed, and thus, by not remaining, they perish while they lose by changing what they were. But nothing is equal to God: His nature stands apart from the condition of all things.

If, therefore, those things which stand apart from God — and from which God also stands apart — when they are changed, lose what they were, where will the difference of divinity from other things lie, unless it holds the contrary — that is, that God can both be changed into all things and remain such as He is? Otherwise He will be equal to those things which, when changed, lose what they were, to which God is certainly not equal in all respects: so neither in the outcome of change. You have at some time read and believed that the angels of the Creator were changed into human form, and bore so great a reality of body that Abraham even washed their feet, and Lot was rescued from the Sodomites by their hands, and an angel too, wrestling with a man, desired with the whole weight of his body to be let go — so was he held fast.

What, therefore, was permitted to the angels of the inferior god, when changed into human corporeality — namely, that they should nonetheless remain angels — this you would take away from the more powerful God, as though His Christ, having truly put on man, could not remain God? Or did those angels perhaps appear as a phantasm of flesh? But you will not dare to say this. For if with you the angels of the Creator are as Christ also is, then Christ will belong to that God whose angels are such as Christ also is. If you had not, on purpose, partly rejected and partly corrupted the Scriptures that resist your opinion, John's Gospel would have confounded you in this matter, proclaiming that the Spirit came down in the body of a dove and settled upon the Lord.

And this Spirit, since it was such, was as truly a dove as it was also Spirit, nor did it destroy its own proper substance by the assumption of an extraneous substance. But you ask where the body of the dove is, once the Spirit was taken back into heaven. And equally that of the angels: it was withdrawn by the same reasoning by which it had been brought forth. If you had seen when it was produced out of nothing, you would have known also when it was withdrawn into nothing. If there was no visible beginning, neither was there an end. Yet there was a solidity of body at whatever moment the body was seen: what has been written cannot but have existed. 4. Therefore, if you reject the embodiment neither as impossible nor as perilous to God, it remains that you should reject and accuse it as unworthy.

Beginning indeed with nativity itself as an object of hatred, declaim; go on now to the filth of the generative organs in the womb, the foul clottings of moisture and blood, the flesh to be nourished for nine months from that same mire. Describe the womb growing more distended from day to day, heavy, anxious, not even safe in sleep, uncertain amid the caprices of loathing and of appetite. Inveigh now even against the very modesty of the woman in travail — to be honoured either for its peril or held sacred for its nature. You shudder, no doubt, at the infant too, poured forth with its encumbrances, and duly smeared over. You disdain that it is bound in swaddling-clothes, that it is shaped by anointings, that it is fondled with caresses. This reverence of nature, Marcion, you spit upon — and how were you born?

You have hated man as he is born — and how do you love anyone? You certainly did not love yourself, when you withdrew from the Church and the faith of Christ. But see to it whether you displease yourself, or whether you were born otherwise. Certainly Christ loved that man, clotted amid uncleannesses in the womb, brought forth through the parts of shame, nourished amid trifling caresses. For his sake He came down, for his sake He preached, for his sake He cast Himself down in all humility even unto death, and the death of the cross. He loved, assuredly, the one whom He redeemed at a great price. If Christ belongs to the Creator, He rightly loved His own; if He is of another god, He loved him the more, since He redeemed one that was another's. He loved, therefore, together with man, also his nativity, also his flesh: nothing can be loved apart from that through which it is what it is.

Either take away nativity and show a man, or remove the flesh and present the one whom God redeemed. If these are the man whom God redeemed, do you make these things a cause of shame to Him who redeemed, and unworthy — things which, had He not loved them, He would not have redeemed? He reforms the nativity from death by a heavenly regeneration; He restores the flesh from every affliction: He cleanses the leprous, gives light again to the blind, makes whole the paralytic, cleanses the demoniac, raises the dead — and is He ashamed to be born into that flesh? If in very truth He had wished to come forth from a she-wolf, or a sow, or a cow, and, clothed with the body of a wild beast or of a brute, should have preached the kingdom of heaven, your censure, I suppose, would prescribe to Him that this was base for God and unworthy of the Son of God, and foolish therefore is he who so believes. Let it be plainly foolish;

let us judge God according to our own perception. But look around, Marcion — if indeed you have not deleted it: 'God has chosen the foolish things of the world, that He may confound the wise.' What are these foolish things? The conversion of men to the worship of the true God, the rejection of error, the discipline of righteousness, of chastity, of mercy, of patience, of all innocence? These indeed are not foolish. Ask, therefore, concerning what things He spoke; and if you presume you have found them, will anything be as foolish as to believe in a God born, and that of a virgin, and that in the flesh, who has wallowed through those affronts of nature? Let someone say that these things are not foolish, and that there are others which God chose in rivalry with worldly wisdom;

and yet with that wisdom it is more easily believed that Jupiter was made a bull or a swan, than that Christ was truly a man in Marcion's view. 5. There are plainly other things also just as foolish, which pertain to the affronts and sufferings of God: or let them call a crucified God prudence. Take this too away, Marcion — nay rather, this above all. For what is more unworthy of God, what more to be blushed at — to be born or to die, to bear flesh or to bear the cross, to be circumcised or to be nailed up, to be reared or to be buried, to be laid in a manger or to be shut up in a tomb? You will be wiser if you believe none of these things. But you will not be wise unless you have been foolish in the world, by believing the foolish things of God. Or did you for this reason not cut away the sufferings from Christ — because, as a phantasm, He was free from any sensation of them?

We have said before that He could equally have undergone the empty mockeries of an imaginary nativity and infancy. But now answer here, you slayer of the truth: was not God truly crucified? Was He not truly dead, as truly crucified? Was He not truly raised again, as truly, that is, dead? Did Paul falsely determine to know among us only Jesus crucified? Did he falsely urge upon us that He was buried? Did he falsely inculcate that He was raised again? False, then, is also our faith, and a phantasm will be the whole of what we hope for from Christ, O most wicked of men, who excuse the murderers of God! For Christ suffered nothing from them, if He truly suffered nothing. Spare the one hope of the whole world: why do you destroy the disgrace that is necessary to the faith?

Whatever is unworthy of God is of profit to me: I am saved if I am not ashamed of my Lord. 'Whoever,' He says, 'shall be ashamed of Me, of him will I also be ashamed.' Other grounds of shame I do not find, which through contempt of the blush should prove me well and truly shameless and blessedly foolish. The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed, because it is a thing to be ashamed of. And the Son of God died: it is by all means credible, because it is absurd. And, having been buried, He rose again: it is certain, because it is impossible.

But how will these things be true in Him, if He Himself was not true — if He did not truly have in Himself that which could be nailed, which could die, which could be buried and raised again — namely, this flesh, suffused with blood, framed upon bones, interwoven with sinews, threaded through with veins, which knew how to be born and to die, human without doubt, as born of a human being? And therefore this will be mortal in Christ, because Christ is man and the Son of man. Or why is Christ a man and the son of man, if He has nothing of man and nothing from man — unless either man is something other than flesh, or the flesh of man is from somewhere other than from man, or Mary is something other than a human being, or the god of Marcion is a man?

Otherwise He would not be called man without flesh, nor son of man without some human parent, just as He is not called God without the Spirit of God, nor Son of God without God the Father. Thus the reckoning of both substances set forth Him as man and God — on the one side born, on the other unborn; on the one side fleshly, on the other spiritual; on the one side weak, on the other exceedingly strong; on the one side dying, on the other living. This property of the two conditions, the divine and the human, was assigned each with the equal truth of either nature, with the same faith both of spirit and of flesh: the powers of the Spirit proved Him God, the sufferings proved the flesh of the man. If the powers were not without the Spirit, likewise also the sufferings were not without the flesh: if the flesh with its sufferings was feigned, then the Spirit too with its powers was false.

Why do you halve Christ with a lie? He was wholly truth. He preferred, I believe, to be born rather than to lie in any part — and that against Himself, so as to bear a flesh hard without bones, solid without muscles, bloody without blood, clothed without garment, hungering without hunger, eating without teeth, speaking without a tongue, so that His speech might be a phantasm to the ears, through a semblance of voice. He was, then, a phantasm even after the resurrection, when He offered His hands and feet for the disciples to inspect, saying, 'Behold, that it is I, for a spirit has not bones as you see Me to have' — without doubt hands and feet and bones which a spirit does not have, but flesh.

How do you interpret this utterance, Marcion — you who bring in Jesus only from the God who is supremely good and simple and kind? Behold, He deceives and beguiles and imposes upon the eyes of all, the senses of all, the approach and touch of all. Therefore you ought no longer to have brought Christ down from heaven, but from some troupe of mountebanks; nor to have made Him a God besides man, but a magician-man; nor a high priest of salvation, but a contriver of a spectacle; nor a raiser of the dead, but a diverter of the living — except that, even if He was a magician, He was born. 6. But certain persons, now disciples of that man of Pontus, driven to be wiser than their master, grant to Christ the reality of flesh, yet without prejudice to their refusal of the nativity:

'He had,' they say, 'flesh, though in no way born.' We have arrived, therefore, from the lime-kiln, as the saying goes, into the charcoal-pit — from Marcion to Apelles, who, after he had lapsed in the flesh with a woman from the discipline of Marcion, and had thereafter been overturned in spirit by the virgin Philumene, undertook to preach, on her authority, a solid body of Christ, but without nativity. And to that angel of Philumene the apostle will indeed reply with the same voice by which he foretold that very one even then, saying, 'Even if an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel other than that which we have preached, let him be anathema.' But to those things which they further argue, we will offer resistance. They confess that Christ truly had a body. Whence its matter, if not from that quality in which it was seen?

Whence a body, if not flesh a body? Whence flesh, if not born? For since it was to be born, that which is born was to come into being. 'From the stars,' they say, 'and from the substances of the higher world He borrowed His flesh': and indeed they urge that it is no marvel for a body to exist without birth, since among us also it was permitted to angels to appear in flesh without any working of a womb. We acknowledge, to be sure, that it is so reported; but yet what sort of thing is it that the faith of one rule should borrow from that very faith which it assails the instrument of its own argumentation? What has that man to do with Moses, who rejects the God of Moses? If He is another God, let His affairs be otherwise.

But let all heretics use the Scriptures of Him whose world also they use—this too will serve them as a testimony at the judgment, that they build their blasphemies out of His own examples—it is easy for truth to prevail even without laying down any such prescription against them. Therefore let those who propose the flesh of Christ after the example of angels, saying His flesh, though flesh, was not born, compare, I would ask, the causes both of Christ and of the angels for which they came forth in flesh. No angel ever came down for this end, that he might be crucified, that he might taste death, that he might be raised from death. If there was never such a cause for the embodiment of angels, you have the reason why they received flesh without being born: they had not come to die, therefore neither to be born.

But Christ, on the other hand, being sent to die, of necessity had also to be born, that He might be able to die. For nothing is wont to die save what is born: birth owes a mutual debt to mortality; the manner of dying is the cause of being born. If, on account of that which dies, Christ died, and that which dies is also that which is born, it followed—nay, it went before—that He should equally be born on account of that which is born, since on account of that very thing He had to die which, because it is born, dies. It was not fitting that He should not be born, for whom it was fitting to die. And yet then also, among those angels, the Lord Himself appeared to Abraham without birth—with flesh, to be sure—by reason of that same diversity of cause:

but you do not accept this, since you do not accept Him as Christ who even then was learning to address, to deliver, and to judge the human race in the garb of flesh—flesh not yet born, because not yet destined to die, unless first both His birth and His mortality were announced. Therefore let them prove that those angels conceived flesh from the stars: if they do not prove it, since it is not written, then neither will Christ's flesh be from thence, to which they apply the example of angels. It is agreed that the angels did not bear flesh of their own, being by nature of a spiritual substance—even if of some body, yet of its own kind—but that they could for a time appear transfigurable into human flesh and could meet with men.

Therefore, since it is not recorded whence they took their flesh, it is left to our understanding not to doubt that this is proper to angelic power: to take a body for itself out of no matter. 'How much more,' you say, 'out of some matter.' It is certain: but nothing is established about this, since Scripture does not set it forth. Moreover, those who are able to make themselves what by nature they are not, why should they not be able to make it out of no substance? If they become what they are not, why should they not become it out of that which is not? And that which is not, when it comes to be, is out of nothing. For this reason it is neither inquired into nor shown what afterward became of their bodies: that which was out of nothing has become nothing. They can convert nothing itself into flesh, who were able to convert themselves into flesh:

for it is more to transmute a nature than to make matter. But even if it was necessary that the angels took flesh from matter, it is surely more credible that it was from earthly matter than from any kind of heavenly substances, since that flesh was of so earthly a quality that it was fed on earthly food. Grant it: let it now also be that it was of the stars, yet fed on earthly food in the same way, though it was not earthly, just as the earthly was fed on heavenly things though it was not heavenly—for we read that manna was food for the people: 'Man,' it says, 'ate the bread of angels.' Yet the once-distinguished condition of the Lord's flesh is not overthrown by reason of another arrangement. Being one who was truly to be man even unto death, He had to put on that flesh whose death also was involved:

and further, that flesh which death belongs to, birth precedes. VII. But as often as there is contention concerning birth, all who reject it—as prejudging the truth of the flesh in Christ—wish to make the Lord Himself deny that He was born, because He said, 'Who is My mother, and who are My brethren?' Let Apelles therefore hear also what has already been answered by us to Marcion in that little book in which we appealed to his own Gospel, namely, that the occasion of this pronouncement must be considered. First of all, no one would ever have announced to Him His mother and brethren standing outside who was not certain both that He had a mother and brethren and that these were the very persons whom he was then announcing, whether known before or discovered on the spot then and there:

although for this reason the heresies have taken these things away from the Gospel, because those who marveled at His teaching declared that His father Joseph the carpenter and His mother Mary and His brothers and sisters were exceedingly well known to them. 'But for the sake of tempting Him they had announced to Him a mother and brethren whom He did not have.' This, indeed, the Scripture does not say, though elsewhere it is not silent when anything has been done toward Him for the sake of temptation: 'Behold,' it says, 'a doctor of the law rose up, tempting Him'; and elsewhere, 'And the Pharisees came to Him, tempting Him'; so that nothing prevented its being here likewise indicated as done for the sake of temptation. I do not accept what you introduce from your own store, outside the Scripture. Next, there ought to underlie a subject-matter of temptation. What did they think was to be tempted in Him?

'Surely, whether He was born or not: for if His answer denied this, this is what the tempter's announcement aimed at.' But no temptation, tending toward the recognition of that concerning which it tempts by way of doubt, proceeds so suddenly that there does not first precede a question which, introducing the doubt, compels the temptation. Further, if the birth of Christ was nowhere debated, why do you argue that they wished by way of temptation to inquire into what they never brought forward into question? To this we add: even if He were to be tempted concerning His birth, He surely would not have been tempted in this manner, by the announcement of persons who could have existed even if Christ had not been born. We are all born, and yet we do not all have either brothers or a mother:

moreover, one may rather have a father than a mother, and uncles rather than brothers. So little does a temptation about birth fit, which might stand even without the naming of a mother and of brothers. It is plainly easier that, being sure He had both a mother and brethren, they should have tempted rather His divinity than His birth—namely, whether, acting within, He would know what was outside, being challenged by a lie in the announcement of the presence of those who were not in fact present. Except that even so the device of the temptation would have come to nothing: for it could happen that those whom they announced to be standing outside, He should know to be absent by reason of some necessity—of illness, of business, or of a journey known to Him already.

No one tempts in such a way as to know that he can bring back on himself the blush of the temptation. Since, therefore, no subject-matter of temptation is applicable, the guilelessness of the messenger is cleared, in that His mother and brethren had truly come upon the scene. But let Apelles also learn what is the reason of the answer which for the present denies a mother and brethren. The brethren of the Lord had not believed in Him, as is contained also in the Gospel published before Marcion; His mother likewise is not shown to have clung to Him, whereas Martha and the other Marys are frequently found in His company. In this place, finally, their unbelief appears: when Jesus was teaching the way of life, when He was preaching the kingdom of God, when He was at work healing diseases and infirmities, with strangers fixed intently upon Him, those so near to Him were absent:

in short, they come upon the scene and take their stand outside, and do not enter, plainly not considering what was going on within, nor do they even wait, as though they were bringing something needful to that in which He was then most engaged, but they rather interrupt, and wish Him recalled from so great a work. I ask you, Apelles, or you too, Marcion, if perchance, while playing at dice or contending about actors or charioteers, you were called away by such a message, would you not have said, 'Who is my mother or who are my brethren?' Christ, preaching and proving God, fulfilling the Law and the Prophets, dispelling the darkness of so long a bygone age, did He use this saying unworthily, to strike at the unbelief of those standing outside, or to shake off the importunity of those calling Him back from so great a work?

For the rest, for denying His birth there would have been for Him another place, time, and order of discourse—not that of one who could be uttered even by someone who had both a mother and brethren. For when indignation denies parents, it does not deny but rebukes. In short, He made others preferable, and, showing the merit of preference—namely, the hearing of the word—He demonstrates on what condition He denied a mother and brethren: for by the same condition by which He adopted to Himself others who clung to Him, He disowned those who withdrew from Him. Christ is also wont to fulfill what He teaches others. What sort of thing, then, would it have been if, while teaching not to value a mother or father or brothers as highly as the word of God, He Himself, the Word of God, upon the announcement of His mother and brotherhood, should have forsaken them?

He therefore denied His kindred in the very manner in which He taught they were to be denied, for the sake of God's work. But moreover, it is also a figure in another way: of the synagogue in the mother set apart, and of the Jews in the unbelieving brethren. In them Israel was outside; but the new disciples, hearing and believing within, cleaving to Christ, sketched out the Church, whom He named the preferable mother and the worthier brotherhood, the carnal kindred being refused. Finally, in the same sense He answered that other exclamation as well, not denying His mother's womb and breasts, but designating as more blessed those who hear the word of God. VIII.