Tertullian — Against Marcion 1.13

When we drive God out from this rank, for whom no condition so proper and worthy of God has pre-signed testimony as of Creator, the most shameless Marcionites, contracting the nose, turn to destruction of the Creator’s works. ‘Doubtless,’ they say, ‘a grand work and worthy of God is the world!’ Is the Creator therefore least God? Clearly God. Therefore neither is the world unworthy of God: for God would have made nothing unworthy of himself, even if he made the world for the human, not for himself, even if every work is lower than its artisan. And yet, if it is unworthy of God to have made such a thing, how much more unworthy of God is it that he have made nothing at all!—or something unworthy, by which he could even be hoped author of worthier things.

So then to say something also about this ‘unworthy’ of this world, which even among the Greeks has the name of ornament and culture, not of filth—those very professors of wisdom, from whose talents every heresy is animated, have pronounced as gods the ‘unworthy’ substances: as Thales water, as Heraclitus fire, as Anaximenes air, as Anaximander all the celestials, as Strato heaven and earth, as Zeno air and ether, as Plato the stars, which he calls a fiery genus of gods—when about the world, considering of course both the greatness and force and power and honor and beauty, the help, faith, law of the several elements which conspire for generating, nourishing, completing, and repairing all things, as most of the physicists have feared lest its substances, so great of course, be held less than gods—which the Magi of the Persians and the hierophants of the Egyptians and the gymnosophists of the Indians also worship.

Common superstition of ordinary idolatry too, when it is ashamed in images from the names and tales of old dead men, flees to an interpretation of natural things and shadows its disgrace with ingenuity, figuring Jupiter into a fiery substance and his Juno into an airy one according to the sound of Greek words; likewise Vesta into fire and the Camenae into water and the Great Mother into earth—harvested of seeds, plowed with arms, watered with washings. So also that Osiris is always buried and sought in the living and found with joy they argue as the faith of reciprocating fruits and living elements and the returning year, just as they philosophize the lions of Mithras as sacraments of dry and burning nature. And for substances higher by site or status it is enough that they have been more easily held gods than unworthy of God. Shall I sink to low things? One little flower from hedges, I do not say from meadows; one little shell of any sea, I do not say from the Red; one little wing-feather of a francolin—I am silent about the peacock—will pronounce the Creator a sordid artisan for you?