The Literal Meaning of Genesis
BOOK ELEVEN 145 wrath or to humble and prove the vessels of mercy.32 We know the origin of the serpent: earth at the word of God produced all the cattle, beasts, and serpents. And all this world of creatures possessing irrational life was made subject, by the order established by God, to all the world of rational creatures having either good or bad will. What wonder, then, if the Devil is allowed to act through the serpent, since Christ Himself permitted demons to enter into pigs?95
CHAPTER 13
The Manichees refuse to recognize the Devil as a creature of God.
17. Commentators are accustomed to consider very carefully the nature of the Devil, since certain heretics, scandalized by his evil will, want to remove him entirely from the creatures made by the true sovereign God and to attribute him to another principle which in their account is opposed to God.34 They cannot understand that everything that exists, in so far as it is a substance, is good, and that it could not exist except in dependence upon the true God from whom every good comes.?° They also fail to see that an evil will is a disordered movement in which goods of a lower rank are preferred to higher goods, with the result that if the spirit of a rational creature should delight in its own 'power and excellence, it would be swollen with that pride by which it would fall from the beatitude of the spiritual paradise and waste away with envy. But in the case of such a spirit, it is a good that it lives and gives life to a body, whether a body composed of air, as in the case of the spirit of the Devil himself and of demons, or an earthly body, as in the case of the soul of man, even a man who is wicked and perverse. Consequently, while they refuse to admit that anything made by God sins of its own free will, they say that the substance of God Himself has been corrupted and perverted, first by necessity and then irremediably by free choice! But I have already written at length about this insane error.?"