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We ought to understand that while God knows all things beforehand,
yet He does not predetermine all things. For He knows beforehand
those things that are in our power, but He does not predetermine
them. For it is not His will that there should be wickedness nor does
He choose to compel virtue. So that predetermination is the work of
the divine command based on fore-knowledge. But on the other hand
God predetermines those things which are not within our power in
accordance with His prescience. For already God in His prescience
has prejudged all things in accordance with His goodness and justice.
Bear in mind, too, that virtue is a gift from God implanted in our
nature, and that He Himself is the source and cause of all good, and
without His co-operation and help we cannot will or do any good
thing, But we have it in our power either to abide in virtue and
follow God, Who calls us into ways of virtue, or to stray from paths
of virtue, which is to dwell in wickedness, and to follow the devil
who summons but cannot compel us. For wickedness is nothing else than
the withdrawal of goodness, just as darkness is nothing else than the
withdrawal of light While then we abide in the natural state we abide
in virtue, but when we deviate from the natural state, that is from
virtue, we come into an unnatural state and dwell in wickedness.
Repentance is the returning from the unnatural into the natural state,
from the devil to God, through discipline and effort.
Man then the Creator made male, giving him to share in His own
divine grace, and bringing him thus into communion with Himself: and
thus it was that he gave in the manner of a prophet the names to living
flyings, with authority as though they were given to be his slaves.
For having been endowed with reason and mind, and free-will after the
image of God, he was filly entrusted with dominion over earthly things
by the common Creator and Master of all.
But since God in His prescience knew that man would transgress and
become liable to destruction, He made from him a female to be a help
to him like himself; a help, indeed, for the conservation of the race
after the transgression from age to age by generation. For the
earliest formation is called 'making' and not 'generation.' For
'making ' is the original formation at God's hands, while
'generation' is the succession from each Other made necessary by the
sentence of death imposed on us 'on account of the transgression.
This man He placed in Paradise, a home that was alike spiritual and
sensible. For he lived in the body on the earth in the realm of
sense, while he dwelt in the spirit among the angels, cultivating
divine thoughts, and being supported by them: living in naked
simplicity a life free from artificiality, and being led up through
His creations to the one and only Creator, in Whose contemplation he
found joy and gladness.
When therefore He had furnished his nature with free-will, He
imposed a law on him, not to taste of the tree of knowledge.
Concerning this tree, we have said as much as is necessary in the
chapter about Paradise, at least as much as it was in our power to
say. And with this command He gave the promise that, if he should
preserve the dignity of the soul by giving the victory to reason, and
acknowledging his Creator and observing His command, he should share
eternal blessedness and live to all eternity, proving mightier than
death: but if forsooth he should subject the soul to the body, and
prefer the delights of the body, comparing himself in ignorance of his
true dignity to the senseless beasts, and shaking off Iris Creator's
yoke, and neglecting His divine injunction, he will be liable to
death and corruption, and will be compelled to labour throughout a
miserable life. For it was no profit to man to obtain incorruption
while still untried and unproved, lest he should fall into pride and
under the judgment of the devil. For through his incorruption the
devil, when he had fallen as the result of his own free choice, was
firmly established in wickedness, so that there was no room for
repentance and no hope of change: just as, moreover, the angels
also, when they had made free choice of virtue became through grace
immoveably rooted in goodness.
It was necessary, therefore, that man should first be put to the test
(for man untried and unproved would be worth nothing), and being made
perfect by the trial through the observance of the command should thus
receive incorruption as the prize of his virtue. For being
intermediate between God and matter he was destined, if he kept the
command, to be delivered from his natural relation to existing things
and to be made one with God's estate, and to be immoveably
established in goodness, but, if he transgressed and inclined the
rather to what was material, and tore his mind from the Author of his
being, I mean God, his fate was to be corruption, and he was to
become subject to passion instead of passionless, and mortal instead of
immortal, and dependent on connection and unsettled generation. And
in his desire for life he would cling to pleasures as though they were
necessary to maintain it, and would fearlessly abhor those who sought
to deprive him of these, and transfer his desire from God to matter,
and his anger from the real enemy of his salvation to his own brethren.
The envy of the devil then was the reason of man's fall. For that
same demon, so full of envy and with such a hatred of good, would not
suffer us to enjoy the pleasures of heaven, when he himself was kept
below on account of his arrogance, and hence the false one tempts
miserable man with the hope of Godhead, and leading him up to as great
a height of arrogance as himself, he hurls him down into a pit of
destruction just as deep.
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