Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Or what reasoning put together two supreme greatnesses? First I will demand: why not several, if two, since one would expect the substance of divinity to be reckoned richer if number suited it at all? More honest and more generous was Valentinus, who dared at once to conceive two—Bythos and Sige—and then poured out, all the way to thirty aeons of offspring, a whole swarm of divinity, like some Aenean sow farrowing. Whatever reasoning refuses to admit several supreme greatnesses equally refuses two, since two are already 'several' following the one—for number begins after one. Whatever could admit two could equally admit more; for after two comes multitude, unity already exceeded. In short, among us the force of this very reasoning, by its own terminus, does not allow several gods to be believed, since that same rule which will not allow even two, establishing one God, is this: God must be that to which nothing is equal, as the supreme greatness; and unique is that to which nothing is equal. Now then, two supreme greatnesses, two equals—to whose credit, to whose profit would they be assigned? What would number matter, when two equals differ by not so much as one? For it is one and the same thing that is present identically in both. Even if there were several equals, all of them together would still amount to just the one thing, since none of them differ from another—precisely because they are equal. Further, if neither of the two differs at all from the other, then, both being supreme greatnesses, both being gods, neither excels the other, and they display no reason at all for their own number, having no preeminence. Yet the number of divinity, if it existed, ought to rest on some supreme rationale—if only because the worship owed to it would be thrown into uncertainty. Picture it: gazing on two gods as evenly matched as two supreme greatnesses—what would I do? If I worshiped both, I would fear that the excess of my devotion would be reckoned superstition rather than religion, since, being two so equal, I could honor both in either one, and this very act would itself testify to their equality and unity, in that while venerating the one in the other, I would have two in one. If I worshiped only one, I would equally worry that I seemed to be conniving at the emptiness of a pointless number that makes no difference—so that I would judge it safer to worship neither than to worship one with scruples, or both in vain.
6.