Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But if the soul's nature was uniform from the start, in Adam, prior to all these many talents, then it is not multiform, precisely because it is uniform, throughout all these talents — and not even threefold, so that the Valentinian trinity, still not to be found even in Adam, may at last be cut down. [2] For what was spiritual in him? If it is that he prophesied that great mystery touching Christ and his church — 'Here at last is a bone out of my own bones, flesh cut from my own flesh; woman shall be her name; and for this cause a man will forsake father and mother to be joined to his own wife, and the pair will become a single body' — this came upon him only afterward, when God cast a trance upon him, a spiritual force, by which prophecy is achieved. [3] And if evil too appeared in him, in the sin of the transgression committed, this likewise must not be reckoned natural, seeing that he worked it at the serpent's instigation — no more natural than material, since we have already ruled out any claim on behalf of matter. But if neither the spiritual nor what is called the material was properly his (even granting that the seed of evil came from matter), it remains that the only single thing in him reckoned natural was the animal, which we maintain is simple and uniform in its condition. [4] On this point, plainly, the question remains whether what is called natural ought to be believed changeable. For our opponents deny that nature is convertible at all, precisely so as to fix their 'trinity' in separate, unalterable properties — on the ground that a good tree does not bear bad fruit nor a bad tree good, and no one gathers figs from thorns or grapes from briars. Well then, if that is so, God will not be able to raise up children of Abraham from stones either, nor make vipers' brood bring forth fruits of repentance — and the apostle was mistaken when he wrote: 'you too were once darkness'; and, 'we too were once by nature children of wrath'; and, 'such were some of you also, but you have been washed.' [5] But the holy sayings will never disagree with one another. A tree will not give bad fruit unless it goes ungrafted, and a good tree will give bad fruit unless it is tended; stones will become children of Abraham if they are shaped into Abraham's faith; and vipers' brood will bear the fruit of repentance if they spit out the venom of their malice. [6] This will be the power of divine grace, more potent, certainly, than nature, holding under it, within us, the free power of choice — what is called to\ au)tecou&sion — which, being itself also natural and mutable, turns with nature wherever it turns. That the au)tecou&sion is present in us naturally, we have already shown against both Marcion and Hermogenes.
[7] What, then, if the condition of nature must also be defined in this twofold way — one for what is begotten and what is not, one for what is fashioned and what is never fashioned? For in that case whatever proves to be born and made, its nature will be capable of change: it will be able both to be reborn and to be remade. But what is unborn and unmade will stand immovable. Since this belongs to God alone, as the only one unborn and unmade, and therefore alone immortal and unconvertible, it follows for all the rest that, being born and made, their nature is convertible and changeable — so that, even if a 'trinity' were to be attributed to the soul, it would have to be reckoned a matter of the change of an accident, not of the founding constitution of its nature.