Against Celsus 6.44

For it was not possible for what is good by accident and as an addition to be good in the same way as what is good in its very being. Goodness would never fall away from one who, so to speak, takes the living bread to preserve himself; and if it does fall away from anyone, it falls away through his own fault, because he has been negligent about partaking of the living bread and the true drink, by which the wing, nourished and watered, is restored, as the most wise Solomon says of the one who is truly rich: “For he has made himself wings like an eagle and returns to the house of the one who is set over him.” For it was necessary that God, who knows how to use for a needful end even those who have come into being through wickedness, should place those who are so evil somewhere in the universe and make a training ground for virtue available to those who wish to strive “lawfully” to attain it; so that, being tested like gold in the fire by the wickedness of these, and doing everything so as to admit nothing counterfeit into their rational nature, they may be shown worthy and be drawn up by the Word to the ascent to divine things, to the highest blessedness of all and, so to speak, the summit of good things. The one called Satan in the language of the Hebrews, and by some in a more Greek form Satanas, is, translated into Greek, the adversary. Everyone who has chosen wickedness and the life that goes with it, doing what is contrary to virtue, is a Satan, that is, an adversary of the Son of God, who is righteousness and truth and wisdom. But in the proper sense the adversary is the first of all beings living in peace and blessedness who shed his wings and fell from blessedness; who, according to Ezekiel, walked “blameless” in all his ways until iniquity was found in him, and being “a seal of likeness and a crown of beauty” in the paradise of God, as though sated with good things, came to destruction, according to the word that mystically says to him: “You have become destruction, and you shall not exist for ever.” These few things we have set out, perhaps boldly and at some risk, in entrusting them to this writing, though perhaps they are nothing. But if anyone who has leisure for testing the sacred writings were to gather from every part of them a full account of wickedness, how it first came to be and in what manner it is destroyed, he would see that neither Celsus nor any of those who are dragged down and drawn away in soul by this evil demon from God, from the right conception of him, and from his word, has even dreamed of the meaning of Moses and the prophets concerning Satan.