“If God is good, and prescient of the future, and able to avert evil, why did He allow man, that is to say His own image and likeness, nay more, His own substance, to be tricked by the devil and fall from obedience to the law into death? For if He had been good, and thereby unwilling that such an event should happen, and prescient, and thereby not ignorant that it would happen, and powerful, and thereby able to prevent its happening, it would certainly not have happened, being impossible under these three conditions of divine greatness. But since it did happen, the inference is certain that God must be believed to be neither good nor prescient nor powerful.”[429]
The hypothesis of the existence of two Gods, by which Marcion solved this and other problems of theology, was consistently opposed by the great mass of the Christian communities. The solution which they found was almost uniformly that of the Stoics: evil is necessary for the production of moral virtue: there is no virtue where there is no choice: and man was created free to choose. It was found, in short, in the doctrine of free-will.
This solution is found in Justin Martyr:
“The nature of every created being is to be capable of vice and virtue: for no one of them would be an object of praise if it had not also the power of turning in the one direction or the other.”[430]
It is found in Tatian:
“Each of the two classes of created things (men and angels) is born with a power of self-determination, not absolutely good by nature, for that is an attribute of God alone, but brought to perfection through freedom of voluntary choice, in order that the bad man may be justly punished, being himself the cause of his being wicked, and that the righteous man may be worthily praised for his good actions, not having in his exercise of moral freedom transgressed the will of God.”[431]
It is found in Irenæus:
“In man as in angels, for angels also are rational beings, God has placed the power of choosing, so that those who have obeyed might justly be in possession of what is good; and that those who have not obeyed may justly not be in possession of what is good, and may receive the punishment which they deserve.... But if it had been by nature that some were bad and others good, neither would the latter be deserving of praise for being good, inasmuch as they were so constituted; nor the others of blame for being bad, inasmuch as they were born so. But since in fact all men are of the same nature, able on the one hand to hold fast and to do what is good, and again on the other hand to reject it and not do it, it is right for them to be in the one case praised for their choice of the good and their adherence to it, and in the other case blamed and punished for their rejection of it, both among well-governed men and much more in the sight of God.”[432]
It is found in Theophilus[433] and Athenagoras,[434] and, as a more elaborate theory, in Tertullian and the philosophers of Alexandria. Just as Epictetus and the later Stoics had made freedom of will to be the specially divine part of human nature, so Tertullian[435] answers Marcion’s objection, that if God foreknew that Adam would fall He should not have made him free, by the argument that the goodness of God in making man necessarily gave him the highest form of existence, that such highest form was “the image and likeness of God,” and that such image and likeness was freedom of will. And just as Epictetus and the later Stoics had conceived of life as a moral discipline, and of its apparent evils as necessary means of testing character, so the Christian philosophers of Alexandria conceive of God as the Teacher and Trainer and Physician of men, of the pains of life as being disciplinary, and of the punishments of sin as being not vindictive but remedial.[436]