Against Marcion 2.8

For he had brought man forward only as far as living, not as far as living rightly — with regard, that is, to God and his law. So he himself had granted him to live, making him a living soul; but living rightly he had laid upon him as a charge, admonishing him to obey the law. Thus he who even now desires man restored to life, preferring the sinner's repentance to his death, proves that man was not established for death. As, then, God brought upon man a state of life, so man drew upon himself a state of death — and this not through weakness, any more than through ignorance, so that nothing might be imputed to the author. For although it was an angel who seduced him, yet the one seduced was free and in his own power; although it was an angel, yet the image and likeness of God was stronger than an angel; although it was an angel, yet the breath of God was nobler than the material spirit of which the angels consist — “who makes,” it says, “his angels spirits and his attendants a flame of fire” — since he would not have subjected the universe to man if man were too weak to rule it and not superior to the angels, to whom he subjected nothing of the kind. So neither would he have laid the weight of the law — if the law is heavy — on one too weak to bear it, nor have confronted with the sentence of death one whom he knew to be excusable on the ground of weakness. Finally, he would have made him weak not by the freedom and power of choice but rather by the lack of them. And indeed the same man, the same substance of soul, the same state as Adam's, the same freedom and power of choice makes a man victor today over the same devil, when it is exercised in obedience to the laws of God.