But perhaps, in examining the justice and wisdom displayed in this dispensation, someone is led to think that God devised on our behalf a method involving a certain deception. For God, not in unveiled divinity but concealed beneath human nature, was unrecognized by the enemy and came within the power of the one who held sway. This is in some sense a deception and a misleading, since it is characteristic of deceivers to turn the expectations of those they plot against in one direction and then bring about something other than what was expected.
But the one who looks to the truth will agree that this, above all, belongs to justice and wisdom. It belongs to justice to allot to each what is according to his due; and to wisdom neither to distort justice nor to separate the good purpose of love for humanity from judgment according to justice, but skillfully to join the two together—repaying what is due according to justice while, in goodness, not departing from the purpose of love for humanity. Let us see, then, whether these two are not visible in what happened.
For the repayment according to what is due, by which the deceiver is deceived in return, displays justice, while the purpose of what takes place bears witness to the goodness of the One who acts. It belongs to justice to allot to each the things whose beginnings and causes he himself had previously laid down, just as the earth returns fruits according to the kinds of seed sown in it. It belongs to wisdom, however, in the very act of returning like for like, not to fall away from what is better.
For both the one plotting harm and the one healing the victim may mix a drug with food in the same way: the one mixes poison, the other an antidote to the poison. Yet the manner of the treatment does not damage the purpose of the benefit. Even though in both cases a drug is mixed with food, when we look to the purpose we praise the one and are angry with the other. So too here, according to the principle of justice, the deceiver receives in return the very things whose seeds he had sown through his own moral choice. For the one who first deceived the human being with the bait of pleasure is himself deceived by the human guise; but the purpose of what takes place has its change toward what is better.
For the one employed deception for the corruption of nature, while the One who is at once just, good, and wise used the device of deception for the salvation of the one who had been ruined, thereby benefiting not only the one who had been lost but also the very one who had brought destruction upon us. For when death draws near to life, darkness to light, and corruption to incorruption, what is worse is brought to disappearance and passes into non-being, while the one cleansed from these things receives benefit.
For just as, when baser material has been mixed with gold, those who refine the gold consume by fire what is foreign and fit to be discarded and restore the more precious material to its natural brilliance, so the separation is not without pain: over time the consuming power of the fire makes the counterfeit material disappear. Nevertheless, melting away what lies embedded in the gold to the injury of its beauty is a kind of healing for the gold. In the same way, when death, corruption, darkness, and whatever else is an offspring of evil have grown around the inventor of evil, the approach of divine power, like fire, brings about the disappearance of what is contrary to nature and benefits that nature through purification, even if the separation is painful.
Therefore not even the adversary himself would dispute that what took place was both just and saving, if he came to perceive the benefit.
For now it is like those who are cut and cauterized for healing: stung by the pain of the incision, they are angry with those treating them. But if health comes to them through these measures and the pain of the cautery passes away, they will give thanks to those who carried out the treatment. In the same way, when over long periods the evil now mixed with nature and grown together with it has been removed from that nature, and when those now lying in evil have been restored to the original state, thanksgiving in one voice will arise from all creation—both from those who were chastened in the course of purification and from those who never needed purification at all.
These and things like them are handed on by the great mystery of the divine Incarnation. For through the things by which He was blended with humanity, passing through all the characteristics of the nature—birth, nurture, growth, and even the experience of death—He accomplished all that was said above: freeing the human being from evil and healing even the inventor of evil himself. For the purification of disease is the healing of sickness, even if it is painful.