Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] "But I say to you who hear," he says (thereby showing that this was commanded long ago by the Creator: "Speak in the ears of those who hear"), "love your enemies, and bless those who hate you, and pray for those who slander you." The Creator wrapped all this up in a single pronouncement through Isaiah: "Say, You are our brothers, to those who hate you." For if those who are enemies, who hate, curse, and slander are to be called brothers, then surely he who commanded them to be reckoned as brothers also commanded that those who hate be blessed and that prayer be made for slanderers. [2] Christ, it is granted, teaches a new patience, even restraining the repayment of injury that the Creator permitted, who demanded eye in exchange for eye and tooth in exchange for tooth; Christ, by contrast, commands that the other cheek be offered as well, and that the cloak be surrendered along with the tunic. Very well -- let it be said that Christ has added these things as supplements consistent with the Creator's own discipline. But this must be settled at once: is a discipline of patience proclaimed under the Creator or not? [3] He did, through Zechariah, command that no one call to mind the malice of his brother, nor even of his neighbor. Indeed elsewhere he says, "Let none of you plot the malice of his neighbor." Far more, then, has he imposed patience toward injury, seeing that he imposed forgetfulness of it. And when he says, "Retribution belongs to me; I myself will render it," he is likewise teaching a patience that waits upon vengeance. [4] So then, to the very degree that it is unbelievable that the same God who forbids not only repayment but even the very remembering and rehearsing of an injury should demand tooth for tooth and eye for eye as repayment in kind, to that same degree it becomes clear to us how he intended eye for eye and tooth for tooth -- not to license a second injury by way of retaliation, since he had already forbidden vengeance outright, but to check the first, by setting retaliation over against it, so that each man, foreseeing the license granted to the second injury, would restrain himself from committing the first. [5] He knew that violence is more easily checked by the immediate prospect of retaliation than by the mere promise of a future vengeance. Both provisions had to be laid down to suit the nature and the faith of men: the man who trusted God would await vengeance from God, the man of weaker faith would fear the laws of retaliation. This intent of the law, laboring under misunderstanding, the Lord -- Christ, lord of the sabbath, of the law, and of all the Father's dispositions -- both revealed and brought to fulfillment, by commanding that the other cheek too be offered, so as all the more thoroughly to extinguish the repayment of injury which the law by its talion had only meant to restrain, and which prophecy had already plainly suppressed, forbidding the very memory of injury and referring vengeance to God alone. [6] So then, whatever Christ introduced, he introduced with a precept that assists, not opposes; he did not destroy the Creator's discipline. Indeed, if I weigh the very rationale of the command to patience -- and so full and perfect a patience at that -- it will not hold together unless it belongs to the very God who promises vengeance, who furnishes the judge. Otherwise, if such a weight of patience is laid on me -- not merely not striking back but offering the other cheek, not merely not cursing back but blessing, not merely not keeping the tunic but yielding the cloak as well -- by one who is not going to defend me, then he has commanded patience in vain, giving me no reward for the precept, I mean no fruit of my patience, which is vengeance -- vengeance he ought to have granted me himself if he does not execute it himself, or, if he would not let me execute it myself, then it is because it belongs to his own discipline that injury be avenged. [7] For it is by fear of vengeance that all wrongdoing is held in check. Let that fear be released unchecked and wickedness will rule everywhere, gouging out both eyes and knocking out every tooth, secure in its impunity. But this, apparently, is the way of the good god, the god who is so very good: to do violence to patience itself, to fling wide a gateway for aggression, to abandon the honest man defenseless while the villain goes unchecked. [8] "Give to everyone who asks of you" -- certainly to one in need, and all the more to one in need even if he already has abundance. But that no one should be in need in the first place, you have, in Deuteronomy, the Creator's own instruction laid upon the giver: "There shall be no one in need among you," he says, "so that the Lord your God, in blessing, may bless you" -- that is, may bless the giver, who has thereby made sure there is no one in need. [9] And here he goes even further. He does not merely command giving to one who asks; he says, "Let there be no one in need among you" -- that is, see to it, unasked, that there is none; which settles all the more firmly that one who does ask must be given to. And further on: "But if there is a needy man among your brothers, you shall not turn your heart away, nor close your hand against your needy brother: you shall open, yes, open your hand to him, and lend him whatever he needs." [10] For a loan, by its nature, is not given except to one who asks for it. But of lending, more later. Now, if someone wishes to argue that the Creator commanded giving to brothers only, while Christ commands giving to all who ask, and that this makes the two teachings new and different -- on the contrary, this will be one more instance of the Creator's law living on in Christ. For Christ commands nothing toward all men other than what the Creator commanded toward brothers. True, the goodness that works toward strangers is the greater goodness -- but it is not prior to the goodness that was owed first to one's neighbors. [11] For who could possibly love strangers who had not first learned to love his neighbor? And if goodness toward strangers is the second stage of a goodness whose first stage is toward one's neighbors, then the second stage must belong to the same author as the first -- far more readily than a second stage could belong to someone who never produced a first. So the Creator, following the order of nature itself, first taught kindness toward neighbors, meaning afterward to release it upon strangers; and, following the plan of his own arrangement, first toward the Jews, afterward toward the whole race of mankind. [12] Therefore, so long as the mystery was confined within Israel, he rightly enjoined mercy on brothers alone; but once he gave to Christ the nations as inheritance, and the ends of the earth as possession, and the word spoken through Hosea began to be fulfilled -- "her who was Not-my-people shall be called My-people, and she who had not obtained mercy shall obtain mercy," namely the nations -- from that point Christ extended the law of the Father's kindness to all men, excluding no one from mercy, just as none had been excluded from the call. And so, if he taught anything further, he received this too as part of the nations' inheritance. [13] "And as you wish men to do to you, so do also to them." In this precept, of course, its other half is understood along with it: "And as you do not wish men to do to you, so do not do to them either." Now if this precept comes from a new god, one previously unknown and not yet plainly disclosed, one who had never before shaped me by any prior training by which I might first know what I ought to want or not want for myself, and so do to others what I would want for myself and not do what I would not want for myself -- then he has simply left my judgment adrift, without binding me to any correspondence between what I will and what I do, so that I do to others what I want for myself and refrain from doing to others what I do not want for myself. [14] For he never defined beforehand what I ought to want or not want for myself and for others, so as to bring my conduct into line with a law of the will -- and so I might just as well fail to render to another what I would want rendered to me by another (love, deference, comfort, protection, and goods of that kind), and just as readily do to another what I would not want done to me by another (violence, injury, insult, fraud, and evils of that kind). And indeed it is exactly this mismatch between will and deed that marks the conduct of pagans not yet instructed by God. [15] For even though good and evil are known by nature, they are not known as the discipline of God; and it is only once that discipline is known that the correspondence between will and deed is finally carried out from faith, that is, under the fear of God. And so the god of Marcion, however newly revealed -- if indeed he is revealed at all -- could not have issued this precept we are discussing in so terse, so obscure, so still-unlit a form, a form more readily interpreted by my own private judgment than by any rule, since he had laid down for it no prior definition at all. [16] But my Creator, long ago and everywhere, commanded that the needy poor, orphans, and widows be protected, helped, and refreshed; so too through Isaiah: "Break your bread for beggars, and bring the homeless into your house, and if you see one naked, cover him." Likewise through Ezekiel, of the righteous man: "He will give his bread to the hungry, and cover the naked." So he had already, long before, taught me sufficiently to do for others what I would want done for myself. [17] And likewise, in proclaiming "You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness," he taught me not to do to others what I would not want done to me; and so this precept in the gospel belongs to none other than the one who long ago laid its foundation, spelled out its distinctions, ordered it according to the judgment of his own discipline, and only now, rightly, has drawn it together into a summary -- since it was foretold that the Lord, that is, Christ, would one day make on earth "a word cut short.
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