Tertullian, Against Marcion 9

I know exactly what sense they mean when they boast of a "new God"—knowledge, of course. But I wanted to strike back at the very novelty of that knowledge as it strikes untrained souls, and at the natural charm novelty itself exerts, and from there drag the whole discussion onto the terrain of the unknown God. After all, the one they set up as new by knowledge they thereby prove was unknown before that knowledge. So then, back to the starting line and the first step! Prove that an unknown God could have existed. I find, plainly enough, altars prostituted to unknown gods—but that is Attic idolatry. Likewise, to uncertain gods—but that is Roman superstition. Moreover, uncertain gods are less known precisely because they are less certain, and therefore unknown to the degree they are less certain. What title shall we carve out for Marcion's two gods? Both, I think: now uncertain, and previously unknown. For just as the known God, the Creator, made Him unknown, so the certain God made Him uncertain. But I will not wander off to say: if God was unknown and hidden, the region of hiding places overshadowed Him—new, indeed, and itself unknown, and similarly uncertain even now—certainly something immense and greater, without doubt, than the one He hid. Instead I will briefly propose and most fully carry out my case, laying down the rule that God could not have been unknown by reason of magnitude nor ought to have been by reason of benignity, especially since in both respects our Creator is superior. But since I see that in certain quarters it is deemed necessary to demand proof of every new and previously unknown God according to the form of the Creator, I must first commend this very procedure by reason, so that I may more steadily rely on the patronage of reasoned argument. First of all, what sense does it make that someone who acknowledges the Creator God and confesses Him prior in knowledge should not know another God by the same methods by which he already learned to know God in the other case? Every prior thing supplies a norm for the posterior. Two gods are now on the table: the unknown and the known. The question about the known God is settled. His existence is certain, because He would not have been known if He did not exist. The dispute presses hard on the unknown God. For He can both exist and not exist, because if He existed, He would have been known. Therefore, what is sought, as long as it is ignored, remains in doubt as long as it is sought, and can fail to exist as long as it remains in doubt. You have a certain God insofar as He is known, and an uncertain God insofar as He is unknown. If that is so, does it strike you as defensible by just reason that uncertain things should be proved according to the norm, form, and rule of certain things? Besides, if for this cause—which is itself still uncertain—arguments drawn from uncertain things are also adduced, a chain of questions will be implicated, endangered by the re-examination of their own equally uncertain arguments, perilous to faith through the uncertain, and we will be driven into those already indeterminable questions the apostle does not love; but if the argument proceeds from certain, indubitable, and absolute parts of the rule, the uncertain, doubtful, and unexplored things will be prejudged. Plainly, when a diversity of status is found, perhaps uncertain things will not be summoned to the form of certain things, so that, freed from the rest of the comparative summons, they might stand on the diversity of the principal status. But when two gods are proposed, their principal status is common. For what it means to be God, both are: innate, unaltered, eternal. This will be the principal status; let Marcion look to the rest, if he has arranged them in diversity. For posterior things are not in the re-examination—nor will they be admitted—if the principal status is established. Moreover, it is established, because both are gods: and thus their status is common. When they are summoned to proof under that status, if they are uncertain, they will be summoned according to the form of certain things, with whom they are judged to share communion of principal status, so that they may also share in proof. Hence, therefore, I shall most constantly maintain that a God who is today uncertain, because previously unknown, does not exist—since it is established that the one who exists is established by this very fact never to have been unknown, and therefore not uncertain.