What, then, is justice? We certainly remember what was set out in due sequence near the beginning of our argument: that the human being was fashioned as an imitation of the divine nature, preserving likeness to the divine both in the other good things and in the self-determination of moral choice, yet necessarily being of a mutable nature. For it was impossible that one who received the beginning of existence through change should be altogether unchangeable. The passage from non-being into being is itself a kind of change, as non-existence is transformed into substance by divine power. And mutability must also be seen in the human being for another reason: because the human being was an imitation of the divine nature. For if what imitates did not possess some difference, it would necessarily be identical with that which it resembles.
This, then, is the difference between what was made according to the image and the archetype: the one is unchangeable by nature, while the other is not so, but came into being through change, as has been explained, and because it changes does not always remain in the same state. Change is a kind of movement continually proceeding from the state in which something is toward another. There are two forms of such movement. One is continually toward the good, and in this progress there is no stopping, because no limit of what is traversed can be reached. The other is toward the contrary, whose mode of subsistence consists in not truly subsisting. For, as was said earlier, the contrary of the good has this sort of meaning by opposition, just as we say that being is opposed to non-being and existence to non-existence. Since, then, because of this mutable impulse and movement our nature cannot remain motionless in itself, moral choice necessarily reaches toward something, as desire for the beautiful naturally draws it into motion.
But one thing is truly beautiful by nature, while another is not so, though adorned with a certain appearance of beauty. The criterion between them is the mind established within us, in which lies the risk either of attaining what is truly beautiful or, being turned aside from it by a deception based on appearance, of drifting toward the contrary. Something like this, an outside fable says, happened to the dog that looked into the water at the shadow of what it carried in its mouth: it let go the real food and, opening wide for the image of the food, was left hungry. Thus the mind, disappointed in its desire for what is truly good, was carried toward what has no true being, having been persuaded through the deception of the counselor and inventor of evil that what is contrary to the beautiful is beautiful. For the deception would not have worked unless the appearance of beauty had been wrapped around the hook of evil like bait.
Since, then, the human being had voluntarily come into this misfortune, having subjected himself through pleasure to the enemy of life, look together for all the things fitting to our conceptions of the divine: goodness, wisdom, justice, power, incorruptibility, and whatever else signifies what is higher.
Therefore, as good, He has pity on the one who has fallen; as wise, He is not ignorant of the manner of restoration. And the judgment of what is just also belongs to wisdom, for no one would attribute true justice to folly.