There Cannot Be Two Gods

Above all, they are open to this reply. If the visible things are the work of the evil god, what is the work of the good God? For nothing can be seen except the work of the Maker. Or what evidence is there that the good God exists at all, if there are no works of his by which he may be known? For a maker is known by his works. Or how could two first principles exist, opposed to each other? Or what is it that divides them, so that they can exist apart? They cannot exist together, because they destroy each other. Nor can the one be contained in the other, since their natures are unmixed and unlike. So whatever divides them will clearly be of a third nature, and will itself be God. But of what nature could this third thing be? Good or evil? It will be impossible to say, for it cannot be of the nature of both. [a]

Since this notion of theirs is plainly rotten, then, the truth of the church’s teaching about God must be clear: that evil has not been with God or in God from the beginning, and has no real existence of its own. Rather, people, for lack of the vision of the good, began to devise and imagine for themselves what was not, as it pleased them. It is as if a man, while the sun is shining and the whole earth is lit up by its light, were to shut his eyes tight and imagine darkness where there is no darkness, and then walk about wandering as though in the dark, often falling and going down steep places, thinking it was dark and not light. For imagining that he sees, he does not see at all. In the same way the human soul, shutting tight her eyes, by which she is able to see God, has imagined evil for herself. Moving in it, she does not know that while she thinks she is doing something, she is doing nothing. For she is imagining what is not, and she is not staying in her original nature; what she is now is plainly the product of her own disorder.

For she was made to see God and to be enlightened by him. But of her own accord, in place of God, she has sought corruptible things and darkness, as the Spirit says somewhere in writing: “God made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions.” That, then, is how people from the first discovered, contrived and imagined evil for themselves. But it is now time to say how they came down to the madness of idolatry, so that you may know that the invention of idols comes wholly from evil and not from good. And what has its origin in evil can never be called good in any respect, since it is evil through and through.