Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But even if you shift the charge of wrongdoing off man and onto the devil, as instigator of the sin, so as to aim the accusation at the Creator by this route too, as the devil's maker — "he who makes his angels spirits" — then whatever was made by God, that is, an angel, belongs to the one who made it; but whatever was not made by God, that is, the devil, that is, the slanderer, remains to be explained as having made himself, by slandering God — and falsely too: first, that God had barred them from eating of any tree whatsoever; next, that they would supposedly not have died, had they eaten; third, as though God had grudged them divinity. [2] Where, then, did the malice of lying and deceit toward men, and of slander toward God, come from? Certainly not from God, who instituted the angel, too, as good, out of the form of his good works. In fact he is brought forth as the wisest of all before he became the devil — unless wisdom is an evil! And if you unroll the prophecy of Ezekiel, you will readily observe that this angel was good by institution and corrupted only by his own will. [3] For under the person of the prince of Tyre the word is pronounced against the devil: "And the word of the Lord came to me, saying: Son of man, raise up a dirge over the prince of Tyre, and say: Thus says the Lord: You are the seal of likeness" — meaning, you who have broken the seal of the integrity of your image and likeness — "a crown of beauty" (this, as the most eminent of angels, as archangel, as wisest of all) "you came to be amid the delights of your God's paradise" — for it was there that God, in the second forming of the shape of living creatures, had made the angels. "You were clothed with every precious stone: sardius, topaz, emerald, carbuncle, sapphire, jasper, ligure, agate, amethyst, chrysolite, beryl, onyx, and you filled your barns and your treasuries with gold. From the day you were created, when I set you as a cherub on the holy mountain of God, you were in the midst of fiery stones, you were blameless in your days, from the day you were created, until your wounds were found; out of the abundance of your trading you filled your storehouses, and you sinned" — and so on, all of which plainly belongs properly to the reproach of an angel, not of that human prince, since no human being ever came into existence within God's paradise — not even Adam, who instead was carried there afterward — nor was any man set as a cherub on the holy mountain of God, that is, in the heavenly heights, from which the Lord himself testifies that Satan too fell, nor did any man dwell among fiery stones, among the gem-like, blazing rays of the stars — whence Satan too was cast down like lightning. [4] No, it is the very author of the sin who was being marked out under the person of the sinful man — blameless, indeed, from the day of his creation, made good by God for good, as befits blameless conditions from a good Maker, adorned with every angelic glory, and established with God, good beside the Good — but afterward, by his own act, turned aside into evil. "From the day," it says, "your wounds appeared" — reckoning to him those wounds by which he wounded the man cast out of obedience to God — [5] and from that day he sinned, from the day he sowed sin, and from then on carried on the abundance of his "trading," that is, of his malice — the tally, so to speak, of his sins — he too having been made no less free in will, as a spirit. For God would not have ordained anything so close to himself without such freedom. Yet by condemning him in advance God bore witness that he had strayed of his own accord from the form of his institution into the wickedness he had conceived by his own lust, and by measuring out the space allowed for his operations he acted according to the reasoning of his own goodness — deferring the destruction of the devil by the same design as the restoration of man. [6] For he gave time for the contest, so that man too, by that same freedom of choice by which he had been cut down, might strike down his enemy, proving his own fault, not God's, and so recover salvation deservedly, through victory; and so that the devil, once victor, might be punished the more bitterly by the one he had earlier cast down; and so that God might be found all the more good, sustaining man to be all the more glorious, on his way back to the paradise where he would once again have license to pluck the tree of life.
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