Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] It will be proper, then, for those entering upon this inquiry into the God we already know — if the question is under what conditions he is known — to begin from his works, which exist before man does, so that, once his goodness is discovered along with man himself, and thereby established and set on the record beforehand, it may offer us some means of grasping how the sequence of things that followed later took its shape. [2] Now, Marcion's disciples, in recognizing the goodness of our God as worthy of a god, can recognize it through the very same headings by which we have shown theirs to be unworthy of one. This very fact — that here is the material for knowing him — he found in no one else, but made for himself out of himself. The first goodness of the Creator, then, is this: that God was unwilling to lie hidden forever — that is, that there should be nothing at all by which God might be known. [3] For what is so good as the knowledge and enjoyment of God? Now even though this good was not yet apparent, since as yet there was nothing to which it could appear, still God foreknew what good would come to appear, and therefore committed to the sum of his own goodness the power of producing that future good — a goodness by no means sudden, nor accidental, nor provoked into life, as if it were to be reckoned only from the moment it began to act. [4] For if that goodness itself set the starting-point from which it began to work, then it had no beginning at the moment it acted. But once a beginning was made by it, the reckoning of times was born from that same moment, since it was for marking and distinguishing times that the stars and the lights of heaven were arranged. 'They shall be,' it says, 'for seasons and months and years.' Therefore that which made time had no time before time, just as that which established a beginning had no beginning before the beginning. [5] And so, lacking both an order of beginning and a measure of time, it must be reckoned as belonging to an immense and unbounded eternity, nor can it be counted sudden or accidental or provoked, having nothing by which it could be so reckoned — that is, no trace of time at all — but must rather be presumed eternal, ingenerate in God, and perpetual, and therefore worthy of God — which already, from this point on, puts to shame the goodness of Marcion's god, coming, I do not say merely later than the beginnings and the ages, but later than the very malice of the Creator himself — if indeed malice could ever have been committed by goodness at all.
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