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| Marcion, Aided by Cerdon, Teaches a Duality of Gods; How He Constructed This Heresy of an Evil and a Good God.
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Chapter II.—Marcion, Aided
by Cerdon, Teaches a Duality of Gods; How He Constructed This Heresy of
an Evil and a Good God.
The heretic of Pontus introduces two Gods, like
the twin Symplegades of his own shipwreck: One whom it was impossible
to deny, i.e. our Creator; and one whom he will never be able to
prove, i.e. his own god. The unhappy man
gained2348
the first
idea2349
of his conceit from the simple passage of
our Lord’s saying, which has reference to human beings and not
divine ones, wherein He disposes of those examples of a good tree and a
corrupt one;2350
how that “the
good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit, neither the corrupt tree
good fruit.” Which means, that an honest mind and good faith
cannot produce evil deeds, any more than an evil disposition can
produce good deeds. Now (like many other persons now-a-days, especially
those who have an heretical proclivity), while morbidly
brooding2351
over the question
of the origin of evil, his perception became blunted by the very
irregularity of his researches; and when he found the Creator
declaring, “I am He that createth evil,”2352
inasmuch as he had already concluded from
other arguments, which are satisfactory to every perverted mind, that
God is the author of evil, so he now applied to the Creator the figure
of the corrupt tree bringing forth evil fruit, that is, moral
evil,2353
and then presumed that there ought to be
another god, after the analogy of the good tree producing its good
fruit. Accordingly, finding in Christ a different disposition, as
it were—one of a simple and pure benevolence2354
| 2354 [This purely
good or goodish divinity is an idea of the Stoics. De
Præscript. chap. 7.] | —differing from the Creator, he readily
argued that in his Christ had been revealed a new and strange2355
divinity; and then with a little leaven he
leavened the whole lump of the faith, flavouring it with the acidity of
his own heresy.
He had, moreover, in one2356
| 2356 Quendam. [See
Irenæus, Vol. I. p. 352, this Series.] |
Cerdon an abettor of this blasphemy,—a circumstance which made
them the more readily think that they saw most clearly their two gods,
blind though they were; for, in truth, they had not seen the one God
with soundness of faith.2357
To men of diseased
vision even one lamp looks like many. One of his gods, therefore, whom
he was obliged to acknowledge, he destroyed by defaming his attributes
in the matter of evil;
the other, whom he laboured so hard to devise, he constructed, laying
his foundation2358
in the principle of
good. In what articles2359
he arranged these
natures, we show by our own refutations of them.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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