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| The Truly Incarnate State More Worthy of God Than Marcion's Fantastic Flesh. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Chapter X.—The Truly
Incarnate State More Worthy of God Than Marcion’s Fantastic
Flesh.
Therefore, since you are not permitted to resort
to any instances of the Creator, as alien from the subject, and
possessing special causes of their own, I should like you to state
yourself the design of your god, in exhibiting his Christ not in the
reality of flesh. If he despised it as earthly, and (as you express it)
full of dung,3229
3229 Stercoribus
infersam. | why did he not on
that account include the likeness of it also in his contempt? For no
honour is to be attributed to the image of anything which is itself
unworthy of honour. As the natural state is, so will the likeness be.
But how could he hold converse with men except in the image of human
substance?3230
3230 A Marcionite
argument. | Why, then, not
rather in the reality thereof, that his intercourse might be real,
since he was under the necessity of holding it? And to how much better
account would this necessity have been turned by ministering to faith
rather than to a fraud!3231
3231 Stropham, a
player’s trick; so in Spectac. 29. | The god whom you
make is miserable enough, for this very reason that he was unable to
display his Christ except in the effigy of an unworthy, and indeed an
alien, thing. In some instances, it will be convenient to use even
unworthy things, if they be only our own, as it will also be quite
improper to use things, be they ever so worthy, if they be not our
own.3232 Why, then, did he not come in some other
worthier substance, and especially his own, that he might not seem as
if he could not have done without an unworthy and an alien one? Now,
since my Creator held intercourse with man by means of even a bush and
fire, and again afterwards by means of a cloud and column,3233 and in representations of Himself used
bodies composed of the elements, these examples of divine power afford
sufficient proof that God did not require the instrumentality of false
or even of real flesh. But yet, if we look steadily into the
subject, there is really no substance which is worthy of becoming a
vestment for God. Whatsoever He is pleased to clothe Himself withal, He
makes worthy of Himself—only without untruth.3234 Therefore how comes it to pass that he
should have thought the verity of the flesh, rather than its unreality,
a disgrace? Well, but he honoured it by his fiction of it. How great,
then, is that flesh, the very phantasy of which was a necessity to the
superior God!E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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