Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But as things now stand, Almighty God, Lord and Founder of the universe, must stand trial — for this reason only, I suppose: that he has been known from the beginning, that he has never lain hidden, that he has always shone forth, even before Romulus himself, let alone before Tiberius — except that to heretics alone he is unknown, and it is they who put him on trial, presuming another god must exist for the very reason that the one they admit exists they can find fault with more easily than they can deny — weighing God by the whim of their own private judgment, rather like a blind man, or one with wandering eyes, who wants to presume some other, milder and more wholesome sun exists, simply because the one he can see, he cannot see. [2] There is one sun only, my good man, that governs this world, and when you do not think so, it is still the best and most useful — and even when it seems to you too fierce and hostile, even too dirty and corrupted, it remains, all the same, true to its own reckoning. If you cannot work out that reckoning, neither would you have had the power to endure the beams of some different sun, supposing one existed — much less a mightier one. [3] For if you go blind staring at the lower god, what will you do with a loftier one? Better, surely, to spare your own weakness and not stretch yourself into danger, holding to a God who is certain and beyond doubt and, by that very fact, sufficiently seen — once you have grasped this first: that he is a being you cannot know except in the part he himself has chosen to reveal. As one who knows him, you do not deny God; as one who does not know him, you cross-examine him — indeed you accuse him as though you knew him, when, if you truly knew him, you would not accuse him, indeed would not even cross-examine him. Granting him the name, you deny the substance the name stands for — namely, that vastness men term Divinity — refusing to own it as vast as it truly is, since, could a man grasp it down to every particular, vastness it would cease to be. [4] Isaiah, well before the fact an apostle in his own right, foreseeing the hearts heretics would one day have, declared: 'Who has grasped the Lord's purpose, or stood as counsel at his side? With whom did he confer, and who instructed him in the path of insight and discernment?' To this the apostle affixes his own assent: 'O the depth of God's riches and wisdom! How past tracing are his rulings' — his rulings, meaning, as the one who judges — 'and his paths beyond discovery' — the paths, that is, of the insight and discernment nobody ever taught him — unless it was these self-appointed auditors of the Godhead, forever muttering 'God should not have done it in that fashion,' and 'this other way would have suited him better' — as though any creature could fathom what lies within God, save the Spirit of God himself! [5] Yet those possessed of the world's spirit, unable to spot God amid the wisdom that is God's own wisdom, fancy themselves shrewder advisers than God — for exactly as the world's wisdom counts as folly before God, so God's wisdom counts as folly before the world. Yet this we know: what looks like folly in God outstrips the cleverness of men, and what looks like frailty in God outmatches human strength. [6] Thus God stands tallest precisely where man judges him small, is finest precisely where man judges him lacking goodness, is most singularly one precisely where man perceives two or several. But if, from the outset, the man of mere nature, refusing what belongs to the Spirit, judged God's law folly — a law he then failed to keep, so that, faith being absent, even the little he had was stripped from him: the favor of paradise and God's close company, by which, had he obeyed, he would have come to full knowledge of God — what marvel is it that, cast back upon his own raw matter and driven into the toil-yard of ground to be worked, in that very toil, stooped and drawn earthward, he drew up out of it a worldly spirit and bequeathed it to his whole line — that line, at any rate, which is merely natural and given to heresy, unreceptive to what belongs to God? [7] Or who could doubt that Adam's own transgression itself deserves the name of heresy, given he committed it by setting his private judgment above God's? Only Adam never told his Maker, 'You fashioned me without skill.' He confessed the seduction. He did not conceal the seductress. He was, admittedly, a raw beginner as a heretic. He disobeyed, yet he did not blaspheme the Creator, nor find fault with his Maker, whom from the very beginning of his existence he had found good, indeed best — and whom he himself, if anything, had made his judge from the start.
3.