Free and His Own Master

So far our argument will be understood to claim man’s unshackled power over his own will only for this end: that whatever happens to him should be charged to him and not to God. But you may object even now that he ought never to have been made that way, since freedom and power of will could turn out to do harm. So I will maintain first of all that he was rightly made that way, so that I may then commend with more confidence both the way he was actually made and the further fact that it was worthy of God — once the reason that led to his being created like this has been shown to be the better one. A man made this way is defended by God’s goodness and by God’s reason together, and in our God the two are never found apart. His reason is no reason without goodness, and his goodness is no goodness without reason — except, of course, in the case of Marcion’s god, who is good without any reason for it, as we have shown. Now then: it was fitting that God should be known. That was certainly a good thing and a reasonable one. It was fitting too that there should be something worthy of knowing God. And what could be found as worthy as the image and likeness of God? That also was without doubt good and reasonable. [a]

So it was fitting that the one who is the image and likeness of God should be formed with a free will and mastery of himself, so that this very thing — freedom of will and self-command — might be reckoned the image and likeness of God in him. For that purpose a substance was fitted to man that suited such a standing: the breath of God himself, who is free and his own master. Or take it another way: what sort of arrangement would it have been for man to hold the whole world in his possession and not, above everything else, be in possession of himself — master over others and a slave to himself? So you can read God’s goodness in the honor he did man by that gift, and his reason in his ordering of everything. For the moment let God’s goodness alone occupy us, the goodness that made man so large a gift, the freedom of his will. God’s reason must claim its own occasion, and it offers instruction to the same effect.

Now God alone is good by nature. What he has, he has without beginning, and therefore not by being made but by nature. Man, though, exists entirely by being made. He has a beginning, and along with that beginning he received the form in which he exists. So he is inclined to good not by nature but by having been made so, and being good is not a property of his own, because, as we said, it is not by nature but by his making that he is inclined to good, according to the appointment of his good Creator, the Author of all good. Therefore, in order that man might have a good that was now his own, made over to him by God, and that there might from then on be in man a property, and in a sense a natural attribute, of goodness, there was set into the make-up of his nature — as the witness who holds the scales for the goodness God had conveyed to him — freedom and power of will. It was to make good be done by man of his own accord, as something belonging to him, since nothing less than this would be required in the case of a goodness he was to exercise willingly, that is, by the freedom of his will, without either doing his nature a favor or being a slave to it. Man would stand as good just up to this point: if he displayed his goodness in line with the nature he was made with, but still as the act of his will, as a property of his own nature. And by the same exercise of will he was to show himself the stronger in his defense against evil too — for God of course foresaw evil as well — being free and his own master. For if he had lacked this privilege of self-mastery, so as to do even good by necessity and not by will, then in the helplessness of his slavery he would have lain open to evil’s seizing him, as much a slave to evil as to good.

So complete freedom of will was granted him in both directions. As his own master he would meet good steadily by keeping it of his own accord, and meet evil by avoiding it of his own accord. For even if man had been placed otherwise, it was still owed, in God’s judgment, that justice be done according to what his will deserved — his will being taken, of course, as free. But no repayment for good or for evil could be handed to a man who turned out to be good or evil by necessity and not by choice. This is exactly what the law was set up for: not to shut out man’s freedom but to prove it, whether by obedience freely given or by wrongdoing freely committed — so plain was the freedom of man’s will toward either outcome.

Since, then, both God’s goodness and God’s reason are found in this gift of a free will to man, it is not right to pass over the original account of that goodness and reason, which had to be settled before any discussion of the subject at all, and then, on the strength of what happened afterwards, to declare that God ought not to have formed man this way, because the outcome was other than what was assumed to befit God. We ought instead to weigh properly that it did befit God to create man so, leave that finding standing, and then survey the rest of the case. It is easy enough, no doubt, for people who take offense at the fall of man before they have looked into the facts of his making, to lay the blame for what happened on the Creator, without any examination of his reason. To sum up: God’s goodness, fully considered from the beginning of his works, will be enough to satisfy us that nothing evil could have come out of God; and man’s freedom, thought over a second time, will show that it alone is answerable for the fault it committed itself.

On that conclusion everything is kept safe and whole for God: his natural goodness, and the reasons behind his governing and his foreknowledge, and the abundance of his power. You would have to strip from God both his weight of seriousness and the perfect truthfulness he shows through the whole of his creation, before you could stop asking whether anything might have happened against the will of God. For as long as you hold on to this seriousness and truthfulness of the good God — and both can be proved from a creation made rational — you will not be surprised that God did not step in to prevent what he did not want to happen, so that he might keep unharmed what he did want. Once he had granted man freedom of will and mastery of himself, and granted it worthily, as we have shown, he surely by his very authority in creation let those gifts be enjoyed: enjoyed, on his own side, in keeping with his character as God, that is, for good — for who would permit anything hostile to himself? — and, on man’s side, according to the impulses of his freedom; for who does not, when giving a thing to someone to enjoy, hand over with it the permission to enjoy it with all his heart and will? [g]

The necessary result was that God had to keep his foreknowledge and his power apart from the freedom he had once for all bestowed on man — that is, keep them to himself — though by them he could have prevented man from falling into danger when he tried to enjoy his freedom wrongly. Had he interfered, he would have rescinded the freedom of man’s will, which he had allowed by reason and in goodness. But suppose God had interfered. Suppose he had annulled man’s freedom by warning him away from the tree and keeping the cunning serpent off before it could talk with the woman. Would Marcion not exclaim at once: “What a shallow, unsteady, faithless Lord, canceling the gifts he had given! Why did he allow any freedom of will at all, if he meant to withdraw it afterwards? Why withdraw it after allowing it? Let him choose where he wants to be branded for error — in his original making of man, or in his canceling of it afterwards!” Had he checked man’s freedom, would he not have seemed rather to have been caught out, for want of foresight into the future? And in giving it full scope, who would not say that he did so in ignorance of how things would turn out?

But God did foreknow that man would make bad use of the make-up he was given. And what can be so worthy of God as his seriousness of purpose and the truth of the works he has made, whatever they turn out to be? Man has to see that if he did not settle his account well with the good gift he had received, the guilt was his own, in respect of a law he chose not to keep — and not that the Lawgiver was defrauding his own law by refusing to let its orders be carried out. So whenever you are working up to deliver your closing speech against the Creator, which suits you better than anything, whisper to yourself on his behalf his seriousness, his endurance, and his truth, in having discharged his duty to his creatures by making them both rational and good.

For God did not bring man into being merely so that he might live the life of nature, but so that he might live well — that is, in relation to God and to God’s law. Accordingly God gave him to live when he was formed into a living soul, but charged him to live well when he was required to obey a law. And God shows that man was not made for death, since he now wishes him restored to life, preferring a sinner’s repentance to his death. So, just as God appointed man a condition of life, man brought on himself a state of death — and not through weakness or through ignorance either, so that no blame can be charged to the Creator. [k]

True, the one who led him astray was an angel. But the one led astray was free and his own master; being the image and likeness of God, he was stronger than any angel; and being God’s own breath, he was nobler than that material spirit angels are made of. “Who makes his angels spirits,” it says, “and his ministers a flame of fire.” God would not have put everything under man if man had been too weak to rule, and lower than the angels, to whom he assigned no such subjects. He would not have laid the weight of a law on him if he had been unable to carry so great a load. And he would not have threatened with the penalty of death a creature he knew to be guiltless on the score of helplessness. In short, if he had made him weak, it would not have been by freedom and independence of will, but rather by withholding those endowments from him. And so it comes about that even now the same human being, with the same substance of soul and the same standing as Adam’s, is made conqueror over the same devil by that very same freedom and power of will, when it moves in obedience to the laws of God.

But you say: “Whichever way you take it, the Creator’s own substance turns out to be capable of fault. When the breath of God — that is, the soul — goes wrong in a man, the fault of the part must be charged back to the whole it came from.” To meet that objection we must set out what kind of thing the soul is. At the outset we must hold fast to what the Greek Scripture says: it has breath, not spirit. Some translators of the Greek, not stopping to think about the difference between the words and careless of their exact force, put spirit where it says breath. That is how they hand the heretics their chance to smear the Spirit of God — that is, God himself — with a flaw. [n]

And now to the question. Breath, you will notice, is less than spirit, though it comes from spirit: it is the spirit’s light breeze, but it is not the spirit. A breeze is thinner than a wind, and though it comes off a wind, a breeze is not the wind. You might call a breeze the image of the spirit. In the same way man is the image of God, that is, of spirit; for God is spirit. So breath is the image of the spirit. And an image is never in any case equal to the thing itself. It is one thing to be like the reality and another to be the reality. So although breath is the image of the spirit, you cannot press the comparison of God’s image so far as to say that, because the reality — the spirit, that is, the divine Being — is faultless, therefore the breath also, that is, the image, could not possibly have done wrong. This is just where the image will be less than the reality and the breath lower than the spirit. It carries beyond doubt the true lineaments of divinity: an immortal soul, freedom and mastery over itself, foreknowledge in most things, reasonableness, a capacity for understanding and knowledge. Yet even in these it is an image still, and it never amounts to the actual power of deity, or to the complete exemption from fault which is granted to God alone, that is, to the reality, and which simply cannot go with being an image. An image may express every lineament of the reality and still be wanting in the power inside it; it has no motion of its own. In the same way the soul, the image of the spirit, cannot express that one simple power of it — the happy inability to do wrong. If it could, it would not be soul but spirit, not man, who received a soul, but God.

Besides, take another view of the matter. Not everything that belongs to God is to be reckoned as God, so you could not maintain that his breath is God, that is, exempt from fault, merely because it is the breath of God. Take something you do yourself: when you blow into a flute, you do not thereby make the flute human, although the breath you breathed into it was your own human breath, precisely as God breathed of his own Spirit. In fact Scripture, by saying in so many words that God breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life and that man became by it a living soul, not a life-giving spirit, has marked that soul off from the Creator’s own condition. The work must necessarily be distinct from the workman, and it ranks below him. The jug will not be the potter, though the potter made it; and in the same way the breath, because it was made by the spirit, will not on that account be the spirit. The soul has often been called by the same name as the breath. But you should also take care that no step down is made from the breath to something lower still.

“So you have granted the weakness of the soul, which you denied before!” Undoubtedly. When you demand for it an equality with God, that is, a freedom from fault, I contend that it is weak. But when the comparison is challenged with an angel, I am obliged to maintain that the stronger of the two is the head over all things, the one whom the angels serve, the one destined to be the judge of angels, if he stands fast in the law of God — the obedience he refused at first. Now this refusal was something the breath of God was able to commit: able to, but it was not proper. The ability lay in the thinness of its nature, being breath and not spirit; the impropriety arose from its power of will, being free and not a slave. It had further help in the warning against committing sin under threat of incurring death, which was meant as a support for its thin nature and a direction for its freedom of choice.

So the soul can no longer be made out to have sinned because it has an affinity with God, that is, through the breath, but rather through what was an addition to its nature, that is, through its free will — which God did indeed give it, in keeping with his ordering of things and his reason, but which man drove recklessly wherever he chose. That being so, God’s whole ordering of things is purged of any charge of evil. For the freedom of the will will not throw its own wrong back on the one by whom it was bestowed, but on the one by whom it was wrongly used. What is the evil, then, that you want to charge to the Creator? If it is man’s sin, it will not be God’s fault, because it is man’s doing; and the one who turns out to be sin’s forbidder, indeed its condemner, is not to be regarded as its author. If death is the evil, death will not fasten the reproach of authorship on the one who threatened it, but on the one who thought nothing of it. By his contempt he brought it in, and it would certainly never have appeared if man had not despised it.