Against Marcion 2.10

But suppose you transfer the indictment of evil from man to the devil, as the instigator of sin, so as to direct the blame in this way too at the Creator as the devil's author — “who makes his angels spirits.” Then what was made by God, that is, an angel, will belong to him who made it; but what was not made by God, that is, the devil — that is, the accuser — it remains that he made himself, by bringing an accusation against God, and a false one: first, that God had forbidden them to eat of every tree; then, as though they would not die if they ate; third, as though God had grudged them divinity. Where, then, did the malice of lying and deceiving men and of slandering God come from? Certainly not from God, who established this angel too as good, after the pattern of his good works. Indeed he is proclaimed the wisest of all before he became the devil — unless wisdom is an evil. And if you unroll the prophecy of Ezekiel, you will easily see that that angel was both good by his establishment and corrupted of his own accord. For in the person of the prince of Tyre it is said of the devil: “And the word of the Lord came to me, saying: Son of man, take up a lament over the prince of Tyre, and say: Thus says the Lord: You are the seal of the likeness” — he, that is, who broke the seal on the integrity of the image and likeness — “a crown of beauty” — this as to the most eminent of angels, an archangel, the wisest of all — “in the delights of the paradise of your God you were born” — for it was there that God had made the angels, in the second formation of the shapes of living creatures — “you were clothed with the finest stone: sardius, topaz, emerald, carbuncle, sapphire, jasper, ligure, agate, amethyst, chrysolite, beryl, onyx; and you filled your storehouses and your treasuries with gold. From the day you were created, when I set you with the cherub on the holy mountain of God, you were in the midst of the stones of fire. You were blameless in your days, from the day you were created, until your wounds were found; from the abundance of your trading you filled your storerooms, and you sinned,” and so on.

These words plainly belong to the rebuke of the angel, not properly to that prince; for no human being was born in the paradise of God, not even Adam himself, who was rather moved there; nor was any man set with the cherub on the holy mountain of God, that is, in the heavenly heights, from which the Lord too testifies that Satan fell; nor did he dwell among the stones of fire, among the jewelled rays of the burning stars, from which Satan was cast down like lightning. It was the very author of sin who was being pointed out in the person of a sinful man: once blameless from the day of his creation, created by God for good, as by the good creator of blameless creatures, adorned with all angelic glory and placed with God, the good with the good; but afterwards turned by himself to evil. “From the time,” it says, “your wounds appeared” — imputing to him, of course, those wounds with which he wounded man and led him away from obedience to God. And he sinned from the time he sowed sin, and so thereafter carried on the abundance of his trading, that is, of his malice — the tally of sins, namely — he too having been established, as a spirit, with free choice no less. For God would have ordered nothing close to himself without freedom of this kind. Yet by condemning him beforehand God testified that he had gone off course from the form of his establishment through the lust of a malice conceived of his own accord; and by measuring out a period of leave for his operations he carried out the reason of his goodness, postponing the devil's destruction by the same counsel as man's restoration. For he gave room for a contest, so that man, by the same freedom of choice by which he had fallen to the enemy, might crush him, proving that the fault was his own and not God's, and so might worthily recover salvation through victory; and that the devil might be punished more bitterly, defeated by the one he had crushed before; and that God might be found so much the more good, waiting for man to return more glorious to paradise, now from life, with leave to pluck the tree of life.