Devil

For it is by ambiguity that the Lord outwits the devil at the time of the temptation;

rather, it came, it says, stolen, or given by a thief.

The false prophets too had the theft, the prophetic name, being prophets, but of the liar.

For under the person of the prince of Tyre it is pronounced against the devil:

And, what is more, the same man, the same substance of soul, the same state of Adam, is by the same liberty and power of arbitration made today a conqueror over the same devil, when he is administered according to obedience to His laws.

of the evils of sin and fault, the devil;

You too, then, hold to such a reckoning always, in no way supposing those to live who are dead to every good work, but live in sins and serve the world-ruler of the things dragged down below, spending their life in pleasures and wicked desires;

which is the word of God, and being most excellently armed and fortified on every side, go out thus confident to the war against impiety, so that, having routed it and dashed to the ground its leader the devil, you may be adorned with the crowns of victory from the life-giving right hand of the Master.

Just as someone who has a most beloved kinsman taken captive and carried off into a foreign nation, and wishing to lead him out from there, lays aside his own dress and, putting on the mask of the adversaries, reaches their country, and by many devices frees his kinsman from the bitter tyranny—in the same way I too, having been informed of your case, put on this guise and came to cast the seed of …

Therefore, if neither the spirit of God nor the spirit of the devil is sown into the soul from its birth, it stands that the soul is alone before the access of either spirit;

And here too, accordingly, we conclude that all the natural things of the soul, as belonging to its substance, are in it and proceed and thrive along with it, from the very point at which it is reckoned.

But if the nature of the soul was uniform from the beginning in Adam, before so many talents, then it is not manifold through so many talents, nor in any way triform — that the Valentinian trinity may be cut down even now, which is not itself recognized in Adam.

But against the king of the Assyrians — against the devil, who thinks he reigns to this end, if he casts the saints down from the religion of God.

The same Moses again — after every likeness of any thing was forbidden — why did he set up a bronze serpent placed on a tree in the posture of one hanging, as a salutary spectacle for Israel, at the time when they were being destroyed by serpents after their idolatry, except that here he was pointing to the Lord's cross, by which the serpent the devil was designated, and that for each one wounded …

First he is clothed in filthy garments — that is, in the indignity of passible and mortal flesh, when the devil too opposed him, namely the author of Judas the betrayer, who had even tempted him after his baptism.

This will be the whole device of the devil:

In many ways the devil has set himself against the truth.

He does not deny that he is acknowledged by Peter to be God's Christ.

and so, the devil meanwhile relegated into the abyss, the prerogative of the first resurrection be ordered from thrones;

— since the threefold power of God was denoted through those three signs:

Is the devil understood the stronger for man's injury, dashing the whole of him down — while God shall be reported the weaker, not revealing the whole of him?

For these were the pomps of the devil and his angels:

For if the devil works the lie of divinity in this kind too—a liar from the beginning—without doubt he himself had also foreseen those in whom the lie of divinity should be enacted.

Do you ask whether nature ought to go before us for the enjoyment of His creation, lest we be carried away by that whereby the rival of God corrupted, together with man himself, the whole creation made over in certain particulars to man's service—whence the Apostle too says that it has been subjected to vanity unwillingly, first overturned to vain uses, then to base and unjust and impious ones?

O most blessed too was that man who wiped out every kind of patience against every force of the devil!

Let us strive, then, to endure the things inflicted by the Evil One, that the rivalry of our equanimity may baffle the enemy's zeal.

The birth of impatience, then, I detect in the devil himself, even then when he bore it impatiently that the Lord God had subjected all the works he had made to his own image, that is, to man.

the whole world Satan and his angels have filled.

Therefore, if it shall be established that the whole apparatus of the spectacles consists of idolatry, it will undoubtedly be prejudged that the testimony of our renunciation in the laver pertains to the spectacles also, which are made over to the devil and his pomp and his angels, namely, through idolatry.

Since that power of the interpolating and rivalling angel cast down from integrity, from the beginning, man himself, the work and image of God, the possessor of the whole universe, he likewise changed the whole substance of him, instituted together with him for integrity, together with him into perversity against the Institutor;

For what kind of thing would it be, that, while the devil is always working and daily adding to the contrivances of iniquity, the work of God should either have ceased or have left off advancing?

This we sometimes interpret to the devil, for the hatred of good is his;

yet let us not consent to be led away with them in their wickednesses, praying above all to gain them and to deliver them from the snare of the evil one;

But the common enemy of our life, who by his own devices fights against the goodness of God, when he saw you despising, like a strong wall, the assault from without, has devised, as I hear, that there should arise among you yourselves certain griefs and small-mindednesses toward one another;

The devil ordered Michelle Chaudron to bewitch two young girls.

The devil gave her a kiss, received her homage, and imprinted on her upper lip and on her right breast, the mark which he is wont to bestow upon his favourites.

Custom, then, and empty supposition are the mysteries, and a kind of deception of the serpent is worshipped, when men turn with bastard piety to initiations that are no initiations and rites that are no rites.

So this wicked tyrant and serpent, having bound whomever he can master from birth to stones and timber and statues and such like idols by the wretched chain of superstition, has, as the saying goes, carried the living off and buried them with the dead, until they too perish together.

This visible form deceives death and the devil;

He that loveth not his brother is a murderer, the seed of Cain, the nursling of the devil;

The prison, indeed, is the devil's house too, in which he keeps his household.

The rest, whom we know to be demons, you yourselves too think to be gods.

For the secretary of a certain man, when he was being hurled down by a demon, was set free;

But if, on the contrary, there will be an end of evil, when its president the devil shall have departed into the fire which God prepared for him and his angels — being first relegated to the pit of the abyss, when the revelation of the sons of God shall have redeemed the creation from evil (which, of course, was made subject to vanity), when, innocence and the integrity of the creation being resto …

And yet they affirm that the devil too is a work of the Demiurge, and call him "Lord of the world" (Munditenens), and defend him as more knowing of the higher things than the Demiurge—as spiritual by nature, whereas the Demiurge is animal.

lower still the devil, in this world common with us, co-elemented and embodied together, as was set forth above, out of the most useful mischances of Sophia—so that it would not have even air, the space for the reciprocation of the breath, the tender garment of all bodies, the index of all colours, the instrument of the seasons, had not Sophia's sadness strained this too, as fears strained the ani …

The nations are set free from the world, by water of course, and they leave behind the devil, their former master, overwhelmed in the water.

In acknowledging which, here too we recognize the zeal of the devil, who rivals the things of God, since he too practises a baptism among his own.

For into a virgin, while still Eve, had crept the word that builds death.

He is the devil.

You are the devil's gateway;

So they are understood to be from the devil, the falsifier of nature.

But when Satan affects the sacraments of God, it is a challenge to us — nay, a reason for the blush — if we be slothful in exhibiting to God the continence which certain ones render to the devil, now by virginity, now by perpetual widowhood.

Accordingly you too, if you obey not God, who has constituted you, by the setting forth of a precept, of free power, willingly through the freedom of your will swerve into that which God does not will, and so you think yourself overthrown by the devil — who, even if he wills you to will what God does not will, yet does not bring it about that you also will it, since not even then did he subdue tho …

you have made yourself a fugitive together with the devil.

for the will of God concerning the probation of faith—which is the reason of persecution—precedes, while the iniquity of the devil follows as the instrument of persecution—which is the reason of probation.

Since, then, these examples too come about rather in persecutions—seeing that we are then the more proved or reprobated, and are then the more humbled or corrected—it must be permitted or commanded by Him by whom, in part, these things are done catholically, namely, by Him who says, "I am He that makes peace and creates evils"—that is, war;