Against Marcion 2.9

“Yet in any case,” you say, “the Creator's substance is found capable of sin, since the breath of God, that is, the soul, sinned in man, and the corruption of the portion cannot but be referred back to the original whole.” To answer this we must explain the nature of the soul. First of all we must hold to what the Greek Scripture marked in calling it “breath,” not “spirit.” For some who translate from the Greek, not reflecting on the difference or caring about the proper meaning of words, put “spirit” for “breath,” and so give the heretics occasion to stain the Spirit of God with sin, that is, God himself. And the question has already been seized upon. Understand, then, that breath is less than spirit, a little breeze from it, as it were; and though it comes from the spirit, it is not spirit. For a breeze too is thinner than wind, and though the breeze comes from the wind, it is not wind. One may even call the breath the image of the spirit. For this is why man is the image of God, that is, of spirit — for God is spirit. The breath, then, is the image of the spirit. Further, an image will not be equal to the reality in every respect. For it is one thing to be according to the reality, another to be the reality itself. So the breath too, being the image of the spirit, cannot so match the image of God that, because the reality — that is, the spirit, that is, God — is without sin, therefore the image — that is, the breath, that is, man — could not have committed sin. In this the image will be less than the reality and the breath inferior to the spirit: it has indeed those lineaments of God, in that it is immortal, free and master of its own choice, often foreknowing, rational, capable of understanding and knowledge; yet even in these it is an image and does not reach to the very power of divinity; and so neither does it reach to perfect freedom from sin, for this belongs to God alone, that is, to the reality, and this alone is not allowed to the image. For just as an image, though it expresses all the lineaments of the reality, yet lacks its very power, having no motion, so the soul, the image of the spirit, could not express its power alone, that is, the happiness of not sinning. Otherwise it would not be soul but spirit, and he who received a soul would not be man but God.

And besides, not everything that is God's will be held to be God, so that you should demand that his breath too be God, that is, free from sin, because it is God's breath. Nor would you, if you blew into a flute, make the flute a man, though you blew from your own soul — as God too blew from his own spirit. In short, since Scripture plainly says that God breathed into man's face and man became a living soul, not a life-giving spirit, it separated the soul from the condition of its maker. For the work must necessarily be other than the craftsman, that is, inferior to the craftsman. A pitcher made by a potter will not itself be a potter; so neither will the breath made by the spirit therefore be spirit. The very fact that the breath has been called soul — see whether it has not passed even from the condition of breath into some lesser quality. “So,” you say, “you have given the soul the weakness you denied above.” Clearly, when you require it to be equal to God, that is, immune from sin, I say it is weak; but when it is compared with an angel, I must defend it as stronger — the lord of the universe, whom angels now serve, who will even judge angels, if it stands firm in God's law, which at the beginning it refused to do. This very thing, then, the breath of God could commit: it could, but it ought not. It was able to, through the thinness of its substance, as being breath, not spirit; it was bound not to, through the power of choice, as being free, not a slave; and there was the further warning against sinning under threat of death, by which the thinness of its substance might be propped up and the freedom of its decision guided. So the soul cannot now be seen to have sinned through what it has akin to God, that is, through the breath, but through what was added to its substance, that is, free choice — granted indeed by God with reason, but driven by man wherever he wished. If this is so, God's whole arrangement is cleared of the reproach of evil. For freedom of choice will cast its fault back not on the one by whom it was given but on the one by whom it was not managed as it should have been. What evil, in short, will you charge to the Creator? If man's sin — what is man's will not be God's, nor is he to be held the author of sin who is found to be its forbidder, indeed its condemner. If death is an evil, death too will bring odium not on the one who threatened it but on the one who despised it, as its author. For by despising it he made it — and it would surely not have come about had he not despised.