Tertullian, Against Marcion 9

However you put it, you ask, the Creator's substance is found capable of sin, since God's breath—that is, the soul—sinned in man, and the corruption of a part cannot help but be traced back to the original total. That is why the soul's quality must be explained. First, we must hold that Greek Scripture uses 'breath,' not 'spirit.' Some translators from Greek, ignoring the distinction and careless with word choice, substitute 'spirit' for 'breath' and hand heretics the chance to smear God's Spirit with sin—that is, to smear God Himself. The question has already been hijacked. So understand: breath is less than spirit. A scrap of gold is not the whole, even if it comes from the spirit, it is still not the spirit. A breeze is rarer than wind; even if the breeze comes from the wind, it is not the wind. 'Breath' can also be called an image of the spirit. For man is the image of God—that is, the Spirit; God is Spirit (John 4:24). Therefore the image of the Spirit is breath. Moreover, an image never fully matches the truth. Being 'according to the truth' is one thing; being the truth itself is another. So the breath, as the Spirit's image, cannot claim the image of God in such a way that, because the truth—that is, the Spirit, that is, God—is sinless, the image—that is, the breath, that is, man—should not have admitted sin. Here the image falls short of the truth, and the breath is inferior to the Spirit, even though it bears God's lines: immortality, freedom and self-determination, frequent prescience, rationality, capacity for intellect and knowledge. Yet even in these it remains an image, not the very power of divinity; so also it does not reach the integrity of sinlessness, because that belongs to God alone, that is, to the truth. And that integrity is the one thing denied to an image. Just as an image reproduces every line of the truth yet lacks the power itself—it has no motion—so the soul, the Spirit's image, could not express the Spirit's power alone, namely the happiness of not sinning. Otherwise it would not be a soul but the Spirit, and the being who received a soul would not be man but God. Besides, not everything that belongs to God is God, so you cannot demand that God and the breath—that is, the one free from sin—are identical just because the breath is God's. If you blow into a flute, you do not make the flute a man, even though you blow with your soul. God likewise blows with His Spirit. Finally, since Scripture plainly says God breathed into man's face and man became a living soul, not a life-giving spirit (Genesis 2:7), it separated the soul from the Creator's condition. The work must necessarily differ from the artisan—be inferior to the artisan. The jar the potter makes is not the potter; so the breath made by the Spirit is not the Spirit. The very fact that the soul is called 'breath' warns that it may have slipped into an even lesser quality than the condition of breath implies. So you ask: have I granted the soul a weakness I denied above? Absolutely. When you demand it be God's equal—that is, immune from sin—I call it weak; but when it is matched against an angel, I must defend it as stronger, the Lord of the universe, to whom angels already minister, who will also judge angels if they stand in God's law, which they refused at the start. Therefore God's breath was able to admit sin; it was able, but it ought not to have. It had the ability through the thinness of its substance—being breath, not Spirit—but it ought not to have through the power of its will—being free, not a slave—with the added demonstration of not sinning under the threat of death, by which the substance's thinness would be reinforced and the freedom of the decree governed. Consequently, it cannot be seen that the soul sinned because of what is akin to God—that is, through the breath—but through what was added to the substance: free will, rationally given by God, but exercised by man as he chose. If this stands, God's entire ordering is cleared of the reproach of evil. The freedom of the will does not shift its guilt onto the one who gave it, but onto the one who did not administer it as he should. What evil, finally, do you pin on the Creator? If it is man's sin, it is not God's, which is man's; nor is the same one the author of sin who is found to be its prohibitor, indeed its condemner. If death is evil, death brings shame not on its threatener but on its contemptor—just as on the author; for by contempt he made it happen, not as something inevitable if it had not been despised.