A Plea for the Christians 24

Why need I mention the poets, or examine other opinions, before you who have explored every branch of learning? It is enough to say this much. If the poets and philosophers did not acknowledge that God is one, and did not think of these other beings, some as demons, some as matter, and some as having been human beings, then we might with reason be driven out, since we use a reasoning that distinguishes God from matter and from their substances. For just as we say that there is God, and the Son, his Word, and the Holy Spirit, united in power, the Father, the Son, the Spirit, because the Son is the mind, word, and wisdom of the Father, and the Spirit an effluence, as light from fire; so we have come to understand that there are also other powers, which are concerned with matter and act through it. One of these is hostile to God: not because there is anything that stands opposed to God as strife opposes love in Empedocles, or as night opposes day in the visible world (for if anything had set itself against God, it would have ceased to exist, its constitution dissolved by the power and might of God), but because the spirit that is concerned with matter is opposed to the goodness of God. That goodness is an attribute of God and coexists with him, as color with a body, without which the body does not exist (not as though it were a part of him, but as a property that necessarily accompanies him, united and blended with him, as yellow belongs to fire and blue to the sky). This spirit was made by God, just as the other angels were made by him, and was entrusted with the governance of matter and of the forms of matter. For this is why the angels were constituted: they were made by God to exercise providence over the things he had ordered, so that God might have the universal and general providence over all things, and the angels appointed over particular things the providence over them. With human beings, virtue and vice are a matter of free choice (for you would neither honor the good nor punish the wicked unless vice and virtue were in their own power; and some are found diligent in the tasks you entrust to them, others unfaithful); and it is the same with the angels. Some, being free, as God had made them, remained in the tasks for which God made and appointed them; but others outraged both the constitution of their nature and their office. Among these were this ruler of matter and of the forms in it, and others of those placed around this first firmament (you know that we say nothing without witnesses, but declare what the prophets have spoken). These others fell into desire for virgins and were found weaker than the flesh; and he became negligent and wicked in the governance of what had been entrusted to him. From those who went after the virgins were born the so-called giants. And if the poets too tell a partial story about the giants, do not be surprised. Worldly wisdom and divine wisdom differ as truth differs from plausibility, the one being heavenly and the other earthly; and, as the ruler of matter puts it, “We know how to tell many lies that resemble the truth.”