Tertullian — Against Marcion 1.1

Whatever was formerly done by us against Marcion—from here let it see to itself. We approach a new matter from an old. The first little work, as if hurried, I had afterward cut back by a fuller composition. This too, not yet furnished to copies, I lost by the fraud then of a brother, afterward an apostate, who by chance had copied some things most faultily and displayed them to a crowd. Necessity of correction became necessity of renewal. Its occasion persuaded to add something. So this pen, now third from the second and from the third already from here first, necessarily prefaces this outcome of its little work, lest the variety of it found scattered confuse anyone.

Pontus, then, which is denied to be Euxine by nature, is mocked by the name. For the rest, do not even judge Pontus hospitable from its site; so far has it withdrawn from our more human seas as if by a certain shame of its own barbarism. Most fierce nations dwell there—if yet one dwells in a wagon. Uncertain seats, crude life, promiscuous lust and for the most part naked; even when they hide, they are marked by quivers hung from the yoke as signs, lest anyone intervene. So they do not blush even at their own arms. Parents’ corpses, slaughtered with cattle, they devour at a feast. Whoever have not so departed as to have gone edible—that is a cursed death. Nor are women softened by sex according to modesty; they shut out the breasts, make their spinning with axes, prefer to soldier than to marry. Hardness from the sky too. Day never open, sun never laughing, one air mist, the whole year winter, everything that has blown is the north wind. Liquids return to snows, rivers are denied by ice, mountains are heaped with frost. All things stiffen, all things freeze; nothing there is hot except fierceness—that of course which gave the stages tales of the Taurians’ sacrifices and the Colchians’ loves and the Caucasus’ crosses.

But nothing so barbarous and grim at Pontus as that Marcion was born there—more frightful than a Scythian, more unstable than a wagon-dweller, more inhuman than a Massagete, bolder than an Amazon, darker than cloud, colder than winter, more brittle than frost, more treacherous than the Danube, more abrupt than Caucasus. Why not? With whom the true Prometheus, the almighty God, is mangled by blasphemies. Already Marcion is also more troublesome than that barbarism’s beasts. For who is so much a beaver, castrator of flesh, as he who took away marriages? Who so much a Pontic mouse, devourer, as he who has gnawed the gospels? Truly, Euxine, you have brought forth a beast more acceptable to philosophers than to Christians. For that dog Diogenes was wanting to find a human, carrying a lantern at noon; Marcion, with the light of his faith extinguished, lost the God he had found. His disciples will not deny that his first faith was with us, by his own letters as witnesses, so that from here already he can be marked a heretic who, having deserted what he had been before, afterward chose for himself what formerly was not. For so far will that be counted heresy which is afterward introduced, inasmuch as that will be held truth which was handed down formerly and from the beginning. But another booklet will sustain this step against heretics, to be refuted even without rehandling of doctrines, because they are this by prescription of novelty. Now, inasmuch as a contest is sometimes to be admitted, lest the shortcut of prescription everywhere invoked be counted as diffidence, I will first string out the adversary’s rule, lest it be hidden from anyone, in which the principal question is going to fight.