Tertullian — Against Marcion 2.10

But even if you transfer the charge of evil from human to devil as instigator of the delict, so that you still direct the blame at the Creator as author of the devil—‘who makes,’ he says, ‘his angels spirits’—then what was made by God, that is the angel, will belong to him who made it; but what was not made by God, that is the devil, that is the accuser, remains for him to have made himself by accusing God—and falsely at that: first, that God had forbidden them to eat from every tree; next, as if they would not die if they ate; third, as if God had begrudged them divinity. Whence, then, the malice of lying and deceit toward humans and of infamy toward God? Certainly not from God, who also instituted this angel good after the form of good works. Finally he is published wisest of all before he is devil—unless wisdom is evil.

And if you unroll Ezekiel’s prophecy, you will easily notice that angel as good by institution and as corrupted by his own will. For in the person of the prince of Tyre it is pronounced to the devil: And the word of the Lord came to me saying: Son of man, take up a lament over the prince of Tyre and you will say: Thus says the Lord: You are the seal of likeness—who of course unsealed the integrity of image and likeness—a crown of beauty (this as most eminent of angels, as archangel, as wisest of all): you were born in the delights of your God’s paradise—for there, where God in a second formation of living figures had made angels. You were clothed with every precious stone… From the day you were created, when I set you with a cherub on God’s holy mountain, you were in the midst of fiery stones. You were blameless in your days from the day you were created until your wounds were found… It is plain these things belong to the branding of an angel, not properly to that prince, because no human was born in God’s paradise—not even Adam, who was rather transferred there—nor set with a cherub on God’s holy mountain, that is in heavenly height, from which the Lord also testifies Satan fell, nor lingering among fiery stones among the gem-like rays of burning stars, whence Satan too was cast down as lightning.

But the very author of the delict was marked in the person of a sinful man: formerly indeed blameless from the day of his condition, made by God into good as by a good maker of blameless conditions, and adorned with every angelic glory and established with God—as good with the Good—but afterward transferred by himself into evil. For from when, he says, your wounds appeared, counting those to him by which of course he wounded the human chosen away from God’s obedience. And he sinned from then, from when he sowed the delict, and so thereafter practiced a multitude of negotiation—that is of his malice—namely a census of delicts—himself no less instituted with free choice, as a spirit. For God would have ordered nothing next to himself without liberty of that kind.

Yet by also pre-condemning him he testified that he had of his own lust conceived malice beyond the form of his institution, and by measuring out leave for his operations he worked the reason of his own goodness—with the same counsel delaying the devil’s extinction by which he delayed human restoration. For he gave space for a contest, so that a human might also crush the enemy by the same liberty of choice by which he had fallen to him, proving his own—not God’s—fault, and so worthily recover salvation through victory; and that the devil might be punished more bitterly by the one he had earlier crushed, once defeated; and that God might be found so much the more good, sustaining a more glorious human about to return already from life into paradise to the leave of plucking the tree of life.