Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] So there you have my God's will. This blow has been met. Now let us weigh another stroke, on the quality of that will. It would take too long to show my God is good — the Marcionites have already learned that lesson from us. For now it's enough to call him God, since it's then necessary to believe him good. [2] Whoever presumes to call God evil cannot hold both positions at once: he must either deny that the being he judged evil is God, or admit that the being he called God is good. So his will too must be good, since only a good being can be God at all. [3] The very goodness of the thing which God has willed — martyrdom, I mean — will prove this, because only a good being wills what is good. I maintain martyrdom is a good in the eyes of the very God by whom idolatry is both forbidden and punished. Martyrdom resists and opposes idolatry. But nothing can resist and oppose an evil except a good. [4] Not that I deny there's rivalry among evils themselves as much as among goods, but this contest is a different case. Martyrdom does not compete with idolatry in some shared campaign — it fights on its own grounds, its own gift: it frees from idolatry. And what frees from evil, who will not call good? What else is the opposition of idolatry and martyrdom but the opposition of death and life? [5] Life will be credited to martyrdom in exactly the measure that death is charged to idolatry. Whoever calls life an evil owns a death he must call good. And it's a saving perversity in men to reject the wholesome, embrace the ruinous, seek out the dangerous, dodge the medicine, and finally prefer to die quickly rather than be cured. [6] Many indeed flee the aid of medicine — many are fools, many are cowards, many are sick with false shame. And there's plainly something like savagery in medicine's scalpel, its cautery, its burning mustard-plaster; yet cutting, cauterizing, stretching, and biting are not therefore evil, because they inflict useful pain — nor will they be refused merely because they cause distress, but applied precisely because that distress is necessary. [7] The dread of the operation is excused by its fruit. That man howling, groaning, moaning under the doctor's hands will later heap those same hands with fees, proclaim them the finest of craftsmen, and deny they were ever cruel. So too do martyrdoms rage — but toward salvation. God too may be allowed to cure unto eternal life through fires and swords and every bitterness. [8] But you will marvel at the doctor precisely in this: that he applies remedies of nearly matching quality against the qualities of the complaints, as though helping perversely, coming to the rescue through the very means that cause the suffering. He checks heat by loading on more heat, quenches burning by making one thirstier still, gathers an excess of bile with bitter little potions, and recalls a flow of blood by draining a vein besides. [9] You will judge God — indeed a jealous God — blameworthy, if he willed to contend with the cause itself and to help by rivaling the injury, dissolving death with death, scattering slaughter with slaughter, shattering torments with torments, boiling away punishments with punishments, conferring life by taking it, aiding flesh by wounding it, saving the soul by snatching it away. [10] What you think perversity is reason; what you judge savagery is grace. So does God, by curing eternal things through momentary ones, magnify your God for your own good; you have fallen into his hands, but happily fallen. And he too has fallen upon your sicknesses. Man always makes the first business for the doctor — in the end, he drew the danger of death upon himself. [11] He had received from his Lord, as from a physician, a discipline sufficiently useful for the rule of living: that he might eat everything, but abstain from one small tree alone — which the physician himself already knew, meanwhile, to be troublesome. [12] He listened instead to the one he preferred, and broke his abstinence. He ate the forbidden thing, and glutted with transgression, sickened unto death — most deserving to perish outright in good faith, because he chose to. But the Lord, holding the fever of the offense in check until, in time, a remedy could be tempered, gradually compounded his cures: all the disciplines of faith, themselves rivals to the vice, cutting away the word of death with the word of life, filing down the hearing of transgression with the hearing of devotion. So even when that physician commands one to die, he shuts out the lethargy of death. [13] Why now does man balk at suffering from a remedy, when he did not balk then at suffering from a fault? Does it displease him to be killed unto salvation, when it did not displease him to be killed unto ruin? Will he gag at the antidote, who gaped wide for the poison?