Tertullian — Against Marcion 2.29
But I would also have felled Marcion’s Antitheses at close quarters if defense of the Creator—as good as also judge according to examples of each part agreeing with God, as we have shown—needed a more laborious destruction of them. But if both parts, of goodness and of justice, effect a worthy fullness of divinity for one all-powerful, for the meantime I can briefly have beaten back the Antitheses that itch to discern Christ from the Creator by qualities of tempers or laws or powers—and so alienate him—as the best from the judge and the mild from the fierce and the saving from the destructive.
For they rather join those whom they set in those diversities that suit God. Remove Marcion’s title and the intention and purpose of his own work, and they furnish nothing other than demonstration of the same God, best and judge, because these two meet in God alone.
For even the very zeal in those examples of opposing Christ to the Creator looks more to unity. So much was the substance of divinity itself one—good and severe—that by the same examples and in like arguments he wanted to show his goodness in those in which he had first put severity; nor will temporal diversity be strange if afterward God is milder for things subdued who earlier was harsher for the untamed.
So through Antitheses the Creator’s order can more easily be shown reformed by Christ than struck back, and restored rather than shut out—especially when you fence your god off from every bitterer motion, and of course also from rivalry with the Creator. For if that is so, how do the Antitheses show him rivaling each species of the Creator?
I will therefore recognize even in this through them my God as jealous, who by a good—because rational—rivalry prepared his cruder things in the beginnings for maturity in his own right, whose Antitheses even his own world will acknowledge, modulated from contrarieties of elements yet with highest reason. For which reason, most thoughtless Marcion, you ought to have shown another god of light and another of darkness, so that more easily you might have persuaded of another of goodness and another of severity. Otherwise the Antithesis will belong to him whose also it is in the world.
Latin
Ceterum ipsas quoque antithesis Marcionis comminus cecidissem, si operosiore destructione earum egeret defensio creatoris, tam boni quam et iudicis secundum utriusque partis exempla congruentia deo, ut ostendimus. quodsi utraque pars. bonitatis atque iustitiae, dignam plenitudinem diuinitatis efficiunt omnia potentis, compendio interim possum antithesis retudisse, gestientes ex qualitatibus ingeniorum siue legum siue uirtutum discernere atque ita alienare Christum a creatore, ut optimum a iudice et mitem a fero et salutarem ab exitioso. magis enim eos coniungunt, quos in eis diuersitatibus ponunt, quae deo congruunt. aufer titulum Marcionis et intentionem atque propositum operis ipsius, et nihil aliud praestare * quam demonstrationem eiusdem dei, optimi et iudicis, quia haec duo in solum deum competunt. nam et ipsum studium in eis exemplis opponendi Christum creatori ad unitatem magis spectat. adeo enim ipsa et una erat substantia diuinitatis, bona et seuera, ut eisdem exemplis et in similibus argumentis et bonitatem suam uoluerit ostendere, in quibus praemiserat seueritatem, quia nec mirum erit diuersitas temporalis, si postea deus mitior pro rebus edomitis, qui retro austerior pro indomitis. ita per antithesis facilius ostendi potest ordo creatoris a Christo reformatus quam repercussus, et redditus potius quam exclusus, praesertim (cum) deum tuum ab omni motu amariore secernas, utique et ab aemulatione creatoris scilicet. nam si ita est, quomodo eum antithesis singulas species creatoris aemulatum demonstrant? agnoscam igitur et in hoc per illas deum meum zeloten, qui res suas arbustiores in primordiis bona, ut rationali, aemulatione maturitati praecurauerit suo iure, cuius antithesis etiam ipse mundus eius agnoscet, ex contrarietatibus elementorum, summa tamen ratione, modulatus. quam ob rem, inconsiderantissime Marcion, alium deum lucis ostendisse debueras alium uero tenebrarum, quo facilius alium bonitatis alium seueritatis persuasisses. ceterum eius erit antithesis. cuius est et in mundo.