Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] "Yet somehow or other," you say, "the Creator's own substance turns out capable of sin, since the breath of God — that is, the soul — sinned in man, and the corruption of the part cannot but reflect back on the original whole." To answer this, we must examine the quality of the soul. First we must hold fast to what the Greek scripture indicated, calling it a "breathing," not a "spirit." [2] For some, translating from the Greek without weighing the difference or attending to the precise meaning of the words, put "spirit" for "breath," and so give heretics the occasion to smear the Spirit of God — that is, God himself — with sin. And this question has already been raised. Understand, then, that the breath is lesser than the spirit, even though it derives from the spirit — as its little breeze, so to speak, but not the spirit itself. For a breeze is thinner than wind, and though the breeze comes from the wind, the breeze is not the wind. It can also aptly be said that "breath" is the image of "spirit." [3] This is exactly why man bears God's image, which is to say, the image of spirit — since God is himself spirit. Breath, accordingly, is the image spirit casts. But an image will never in every respect be equal to the truth; it is one thing to exist according to the truth, another to be the truth itself. So too the breath, though it is the image of spirit, cannot match the image of God so completely that, because the truth — that is, the spirit, that is, God — is without sin, the breath too, that is, the image, must therefore be incapable of admitting sin. [4] In this the image will fall short of the truth, and the breath be inferior to the spirit, though it possesses those outlines, so to speak, of God: that it is an immortal soul, that it is free and its own master, that it is largely prescient, that it is rational, capable of understanding and knowledge — yet in these too it remains an image, not reaching to the very force of divinity, and so not reaching either to complete immunity from sin, because that belongs to God alone, that is, to the truth, and this alone is not permitted to the image. [5] For just as an image, though it reproduces all the lines of the truth, still lacks that very force, having no motion of its own, so too the soul, the image of spirit, was unable to reproduce the one thing that is its force — namely, the happy incapacity to sin. Were it otherwise, it would count as spirit rather than soul — not a man endowed with a soul, but God outright. [6] And besides, not everything that belongs to God will be reckoned God, so that you should demand of the breath — because it is God's breath — that it be void of sin, as if it were God. For you yourself, if you blow into a flute, do not make the flute a man, even though you blew from your own soul, just as God blew from his own spirit. Finally, since Scripture plainly says that God breathed into man's face, and that man turned into a soul that lives, rather than a spirit that gives life, it thereby set the soul apart from the condition proper to its Maker. [7] For a work must of necessity be something other than its maker — that is, inferior to the maker. A jug made by a potter will not itself be a potter; no more will a breath made by spirit therefore be spirit. Consider, too, whether the very fact that it is called a "breath" — "soul" — does not show that it passed from the condition of breath into some still lesser quality. "So then," you say, "you have granted the soul a weakness you earlier denied it." Certainly — when you demand it be equal to God, that is, immune from sin, I call it weak. But when it is set against an angel, I must defend it as the stronger, being the Lord of the whole created order, whom even the angels now serve, and who will one day judge the angels too, if it stands firm in God's law — which in the beginning it refused to do. [8] This, then, is precisely what the breath of God was able to admit; it was able, but it was not bound to. For it had the ability through the thinness of its substance, being breath and not spirit; but it was not bound to, through the power of choice, by which it was free, not a slave — attended, moreover, by the further demonstration of a command not to sin, backed by the threat of death, by which the thinness of its substance might be shored up and the freedom of its judgment kept in check. So then, it can no longer be thought that the soul sinned through that which it shares in common with God — that is, through the breath — but through that which was added to its substance, that is, through free will: granted by God, indeed, rationally, but set in motion by man just as he chose. [9] If this is how things stand, then the whole of God's arrangement stands cleared of the reproach of evil. For the freedom of choice will not throw its own fault back upon the one who gave it, but upon the one who did not administer it as he ought. And after all, what wrong will you lay at the Creator's door? Where the fault is man's own, it cannot also be God's, precisely because it is man's; and whoever turns out to be its forbidder, indeed its condemner, cannot at the same time be counted its author. If death is the evil, death will bring reproach not on the one who threatened it, but on the one who despised the warning — on him as its author. For man made death by despising it; it would certainly not have come to be, had he not despised the warning.
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