Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Since, then, the uninstructed generally reason from common sensation, and the doubtful and the simple are unsettled again and again through those same senses, and this is everywhere the first battering-ram trained on us, by which the standing of the flesh is meant to be shaken down, we too must first of all fortify the standing of the flesh, clearing away both the abuse and the false praise of it: for the heretics provoke us to play the rhetorician just as the philosophers provoke the philosophers to play theirs. This trifling, worthless little body — which they do not even shrink from calling evil outright — even if it were the handiwork of angels, as Menander and Marcus would have it, or the construction of some fiery angel, as Apelles teaches, would still have grounds enough for the dignity of a second-rank divine patronage: we know angels come after God. But now, whoever this supreme god of any given heretic may be, I would not be wrong to derive the dignity of the flesh from that very god, since it was his will that brought the flesh into being: for he would surely have forbidden its making, once he knew it would be made, had he not wanted it made. So even on their own terms the flesh is just as much God's property: nothing is not the work of him who allowed it to come to be. And it is well that the majority, even of the harsher schools, concede to our God the entire shaping of man. You know well enough how great he is, you who believe in one God alone. Let the flesh begin, then, to please you — flesh whose maker is so great. 'But this world too,' you say, 'is God's work, and yet the fashion of this world passes away, on the Apostle's own authority, and no one on that account prejudges the restoration of the world simply because it is God's work: so if the universe, once it has departed, is beyond reshaping, what of a mere part of it?' Granted — if a part is on the same footing as the whole. For we appeal precisely to the differences between them. In the first place: the whole of it came to be through the speaking of God, and apart from that speech not one thing came to be; but flesh had, besides the speaking, an act of shaping behind it too, and for good reason — so that speech should stand behind everything without exception — 'Let us make man' was announced ahead of time — and, further, it came by hand, on account of its preeminence, so it should not be lumped in with the rest of the universe — 'And God fashioned man,' the text says. This surely reflects an important distinction, corresponding to the standing of the things concerned: for the lesser things were made for the sake of the one for whom they were made, since it was for man that they were made, and were straightaway made subject to him by God. Rightly, then, the rest of creation came forth like a servant, by mere command and order and the sheer power of a spoken word; man, by contrast, as their lord, was built by God himself precisely so that he could be lord, even while being made by his Lord. Remember, too, that 'man' is properly said of the flesh, which was the first to claim the name 'man.' 'And God fashioned man, dust taken from the ground' — already called 'man' while still merely dust. 'And into his nostrils he blew the breath of life, and the man came to be' — that is, the dust — 'a living being,' 'and in paradise God set the man whom he had fashioned.' Thus man is, first, a shape given form, and only afterward the whole person. I would stress this so that you may know that whatever God has in view and has promised for man at all is owed not to the soul alone but to the flesh too — if not by shared nature, then at least by right of the name.