Writings of Augustine. The City of God.
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The City of God.
translated by Rev. Marcus Dods, D.D.
Published in 1886 by Philip Schaff,
New York: Christian Literature Publishing Co.
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Book VIII.
Argument--Augustin comes now to the third kind of theology, that is,
the natural, and takes up the question, whether the worship of the
gods of the natural theology is of any avail towards securing
blessedness in the life to come. This question he prefers to discuss
with the Platonists, because the Platonic system is "facile princeps"
among philosophies, and makes the nearest approximation to Christian
truth. In pursuing this argument, he first refutes Apuleius, and all
who maintain that the demons should be worshipped as messengers and
mediators between gods and men; demonstrating that by no possibility
can men be reconciled to good gods by demons, who are the slaves of
vice, and who delight in and patronize what good and wise men abhor
and condemn,--The blasphemous fictions of poets, theatrical
exhibitions, and magical arts.
Chapter 1.--That the Question of Natural Theology is to Be Discussed
with Those Philosophers Who Sought a More Excellent Wisdom.
We shall require to apply our mind with far greater intensity to the
present question than was requisite in the solution and unfolding of
the questions handled in the preceding books; for it is not with
ordinary men, but with philosophers that we must confer concerning the
theology which they call natural. For it is not like the fabulous,
that is, the theatrical; nor the civil, that is, the urban theology:
the one of which displays the crimes of the gods, whilst the other
manifests their criminal desires, which demonstrate them to be rather
malign demons than gods. It is, we say, with philosophers we have to
confer with respect to this theology,--men whose very name, if
rendered into Latin, signifies those who profess the love of wisdom.
Now, if wisdom is God, who made all things, as is attested by the
divine authority and truth, [296] then the philosopher is a lover of
God. But since the thing itself, which is called by this name, exists
not in all who glory in the name,--for it does not follow, of course,
that all who are called philosophers are lovers of true wisdom,--we
must needs select from the number of those with whose opinions we have
been able to acquaint ourselves by reading, some with whom we may not
unworthily engage in the treatment of this question. For I have not
in this work undertaken to refute all the vain opinions of the
philosophers, but only such as pertain to theology, which Greek word
we understand to mean an account or explanation of the divine nature.
Nor, again, have I undertaken to refute all the vain theological
opinions of all the philosophers, but only of such of them as,
agreeing in the belief that there is a divine nature, and that this
divine nature is concerned about human affairs, do nevertheless deny
that the worship of the one unchangeable God is sufficient for the
obtaining of a blessed life after death, as well as at the present
time; and hold that, in order to obtain that life, many gods, created,
indeed, and appointed to their several spheres by that one God, are to
be worshipped. These approach nearer to the truth than even Varro;
for, whilst he saw no difficulty in extending natural theology in its
entirety even to the world and the soul of the world, these
acknowledge God as existing above all that is of the nature of soul,
and as the Creator not only of this visible world, which is often
called heaven and earth, but also of every soul whatsoever, and as Him
who gives blessedness to the rational soul,--of which kind is the
human soul,--by participation in His own unchangeable and incorporeal
light. There is no one, who has even a slender knowledge of these
things, who does not know of the Platonic philosophers, who derive
their name from their master Plato. Concerning this Plato, then, I
will briefly state such things as I deem necessary to the present
question, mentioning beforehand those who preceded him in time in the
same department of literature.
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Footnotes
[296] Wisdom vii. 24-27.
Chapter 2.--Concerning the Two Schools of Philosophers, that Is, the
Italic and Ionic, and Their Founders.
As far as concerns the literature of the Greeks, whose language holds
a more illustrious place than any of the languages of the other
nations, history mentions two schools of philosophers, the one called
the Italic school, originating in that part of Italy which was
formerly called Magna Græcia; the other called the Ionic school,
having its origin in those regions which are still called by the name
of Greece. The Italic school had for its founder Pythagoras of Samos,
to whom also the term "philosophy" is said to owe its origin. For
whereas formerly those who seemed to excel others by the laudable
manner in which they regulated their lives were called sages,
Pythagoras, on being asked what he professed, replied that he was a
philosopher, that is, a student or lover of wisdom; for it seemed to
him to be the height of arrogance to profess oneself a sage. [297]
The founder of the Ionic school, again, was Thales of Miletus, one of
those seven who were styled the "seven sages," of whom six were
distinguished by the kind of life they lived, and by certain maxims
which they gave forth for the proper conduct of life. Thales was
distinguished as an investigator into the nature of things; and, in
order that he might have successors in his school, he committed his
dissertations to writing. That, however, which especially rendered
him eminent was his ability, by means of astronomical calculations,
even to predict eclipses of the sun and moon. He thought, however,
that water was the first principle of things, and that of it all the
elements of the world, the world itself, and all things which are
generated in it, ultimately consist. Over all this work, however,
which, when we consider the world, appears so admirable, he set
nothing of the nature of divine mind. To him succeeded Anaximander,
his pupil, who held a different opinion concerning the nature of
things; for he did not hold that all things spring from one principle,
as Thales did, who held that principle to be water, but thought that
each thing springs from its own proper principle. These principles of
things he believed to be infinite in number, and thought that they
generated innumerable worlds, and all the things which arise in them.
He thought, also, that these worlds are subject to a perpetual process
of alternate dissolution and regeneration, each one continuing for a
longer or shorter period of time, according to the nature of the case;
nor did he, any more than Thales, attribute anything to a divine mind
in the production of all this activity of things. Anaximander left as
his successor his disciple Anaximenes, who attributed all the causes
of things to an infinite air. He neither denied nor ignored the
existence of gods, but, so far from believing that the air was made by
them, he held, on the contrary, that they sprang from the air.
Anaxagoras, however, who was his pupil, perceived that a divine mind
was the productive cause of all things which we see, and said that all
the various kinds of things, according to their several modes and
species, were produced out of an infinite matter consisting of
homogeneous particles, but by the efficiency of a divine mind.
Diogenes, also, another pupil of Anaximenes, said that a certain air
was the original substance of things out of which all things were
produced, but that it was possessed of a divine reason, without which
nothing could be produced from it. Anaxagoras was succeeded by his
disciple Archelaus, who also thought that all things consisted of
homogeneous particles, of which each particular thing was made, but
that those particles were pervaded by a divine mind, which perpetually
energized all the eternal bodies, namely, those particles, so that
they are alternately united and separated. Socrates, the master of
Plato, is said to have been the disciple of Archelaus; and on Plato's
account it is that I have given this brief historical sketch of the
whole history of these schools.
Footnotes
[297] Sapiens,that is, a wise man, one who had attained to wisdom.
Chapter 3.--Of the Socratic Philosophy.
Socrates is said to have been the first who directed the entire effort
of philosophy to the correction and regulation of manners, all who
went before him having expended their greatest efforts in the
investigation of physical, that is, natural phenomena. However, it
seems to me that it cannot be certainly discovered whether Socrates
did this because he was wearied of obscure and uncertain things, and
so wished to direct his mind to the discovery of something manifest
and certain, which was necessary in order to the obtaining of a
blessed life,--that one great object toward which the labor,
vigilance, and industry of all philosophers seem to have been
directed,--or whether (as some yet more favorable to him suppose) he
did it because he was unwilling that minds defiled with earthly
desires should essay to raise themselves upward to divine things. For
he saw that the causes of things were sought for by them,--which
causes he believed to be ultimately reducible to nothing else than the
will of the one true and supreme God,--and on this account he thought
they could only be comprehended by a purified mind; and therefore that
all diligence ought to be given to the purification of the life by
good morals, in order that the mind, delivered from the depressing
weight of lusts, might raise itself upward by its native vigor to
eternal things, and might, with purified understanding, contemplate
that nature which is incorporeal and unchangeable light, where live
the causes of all created natures. It is evident, however, that he
hunted out and pursued, with a wonderful pleasantness of style and
argument, and with a most pointed and insinuating urbanity, the
foolishness of ignorant men, who thought that they knew this or
that,--sometimes confessing his own ignorance, and sometimes
dissimulating his knowledge, even in those very moral questions to
which he seems to have directed the whole force of his mind. And
hence there arose hostility against him, which ended in his being
calumniously impeached, and condemned to death. Afterwards, however,
that very city of the Athenians, which had publicly condemned him, did
publicly bewail him,--the popular indignation having turned with such
vehemence on his accusers, that one of them perished by the violence
of the multitude, whilst the other only escaped a like punishment by
voluntary and perpetual exile.
Illustrious, therefore, both in his life and in his death, Socrates
left very many disciples of his philosophy, who vied with one another
in desire for proficiency in handling those moral questions which
concern the chief good (summum bonum), the possession of which can
make a man blessed; and because, in the disputations of Socrates,
where he raises all manner of questions, makes assertions, and then
demolishes them, it did not evidently appear what he held to be the
chief good, every one took from these disputations what pleased him
best, and every one placed the final good [298] in whatever it
appeared to himself to consist. Now, that which is called the final
good is that at which, when one has arrived, he is blessed. But so
diverse were the opinions held by those followers of Socrates
concerning this final good, that (a thing scarcely to be credited with
respect to the followers of one master) some placed the chief good in
pleasure, as Aristippus, others in virtue, as Antisthenes. Indeed, it
were tedious to recount the various opinions of various disciples.
Footnotes
[298] Finem boni.
Chapter 4.--Concerning Plato, the Chief Among the Disciples of
Socrates, and His Threefold Division of Philosophy.
But, among the disciples of Socrates, Plato was the one who shone with
a glory which far excelled that of the others, and who not unjustly
eclipsed them all. By birth, an Athenian of honorable parentage, he
far surpassed his fellow-disciples in natural endowments, of which he
was possessed in a wonderful degree. Yet, deeming himself and the
Socratic discipline far from sufficient for bringing philosophy to
perfection, he travelled as extensively as he was able, going to every
place famed for the cultivation of any science of which he could make
himself master. Thus he learned from the Egyptians whatever they held
and taught as important; and from Egypt, passing into those parts of
Italy which were filled with the fame of the Pythagoreans, he
mastered, with the greatest facility, and under the most eminent
teachers, all the Italic philosophy which was then in vogue. And, as
he had a peculiar love for his master Socrates, he made him the
speaker in all his dialogues, putting into his mouth whatever he had
learned, either from others, or from the efforts of his own powerful
intellect, tempering even his moral disputations with the grace and
politeness of the Socratic style. And, as the study of wisdom
consists in action and contemplation, so that one part of it may be
called active, and the other contemplative,--the active part having
reference to the conduct of life, that is, to the regulation of
morals, and the contemplative part to the investigation into the
causes of nature and into pure truth,--Socrates is said to have
excelled in the active part of that study, while Pythagoras gave more
attention to its contemplative part, on which he brought to bear all
the force of his great intellect. To Plato is given the praise of
having perfected philosophy by combining both parts into one. He then
divides it into three parts,--the first moral, which is chiefly
occupied with action; the second natural, of which the object is
contemplation; and the third rational, which discriminates between the
true and the false. And though this last is necessary both to action
and contemplation, it is contemplation, nevertheless, which lays
peculiar claim to the office of investigating the nature of truth.
Thus this tripartite division is not contrary to that which made the
study of wisdom to consist in action and contemplation. Now, as to
what Plato thought with respect to each of these parts,--that is, what
he believed to be the end of all actions, the cause of all natures,
and the light of all intelligences,--it would be a question too long
to discuss, and about which we ought not to make any rash
affirmation. For, as Plato liked and constantly affected the
well-known method of his master Socrates, namely, that of
dissimulating his knowledge or his opinions, it is not easy to
discover clearly what he himself thought on various matters, any more
than it is to discover what were the real opinions of Socrates. We
must, nevertheless, insert into our work certain of those opinions
which he expresses in his writings, whether he himself uttered them,
or narrates them as expressed by others, and seems himself to approve
of,--opinions sometimes favorable to the true religion, which our
faith takes up and defends, and sometimes contrary to it, as, for
example, in the questions concerning the existence of one God or of
many, as it relates to the truly blessed life which is to be after
death. For those who are praised as having most closely followed
Plato, who is justly preferred to all the other philosophers of the
Gentiles, and who are said to have manifested the greatest acuteness
in understanding him, do perhaps entertain such an idea of God as to
admit that in Him are to be found the cause of existence, the ultimate
reason for the understanding, and the end in reference to which the
whole life is to be regulated. Of which three things, the first is
understood to pertain to the natural, the second to the rational, and
the third to the moral part of philosophy. For if man has been so
created as to attain, through that which is most excellent in him, to
that which excels all things,--that is, to the one true and absolutely
good God, without whom no nature exists, no doctrine instructs, no
exercise profits,--let Him be sought in whom all things are secure to
us, let Him be discovered in whom all truth becomes certain to us, let
Him be loved in whom all becomes right to us.
Chapter 5.--That It is Especially with the Platonists that We Must
Carry on Our Disputations on Matters of Theology, Their Opinions Being
Preferable to Those of All Other Philosophers.
If, then, Plato defined the wise man as one who imitates, knows, loves
this God, and who is rendered blessed through fellowship with Him in
His own blessedness, why discuss with the other philosophers? It is
evident that none come nearer to us than the Platonists. To them,
therefore, let that fabulous theology give place which delights the
minds of men with the crimes of the gods; and that civil theology
also, in which impure demons, under the name of gods, have seduced the
peoples of the earth given up to earthly pleasures, desiring to be
honored by the errors of men, and by filling the minds of their
worshippers with impure desires, exciting them to make the
representation of their crimes one of the rites of their worship,
whilst they themselves found in the spectators of these exhibitions a
most pleasing spectacle,--a theology in which, whatever was honorable
in the temple, was defiled by its mixture with the obscenity of the
theatre, and whatever was base in the theatre was vindicated by the
abominations of the temples. To these philosophers also the
interpretations of Varro must give place, in which he explains the
sacred rites as having reference to heaven and earth, and to the seeds
and operations of perishable things; for, in the first place, those
rites have not the signification which he would have men believe is
attached to them, and therefore truth does not follow him in his
attempt so to interpret them; and even if they had this signification,
still those things ought not to be worshipped by the rational soul as
its god which are placed below it in the scale of nature, nor ought
the soul to prefer to itself as gods things to which the true God has
given it the preference. The same must be said of those writings
pertaining to the sacred rites, which Numa Pompilius took care to
conceal by causing them to be buried along with himself, and which,
when they were afterwards turned up by the plough, were burned by
order of the senate. And, to treat Numa with all honor, let us
mention as belonging to the same rank as these writings that which
Alexander of Macedon wrote to his mother as communicated to him by
Leo, an Egyptian high priest. In this letter not only Picus and
Faunus, and Æneas and Romulus or even Hercules, and Æsculapius and
Liber, born of Semele, and the twin sons of Tyndareus, or any other
mortals who have been deified, but even the principal gods themselves,
[299] to whom Cicero, in his Tusculan questions, [300] alludes without
mentioning their names, Jupiter, Juno, Saturn, Vulcan, Vesta, and many
others whom Varro attempts to identify with the parts or the elements
of the world, are shown to have been men. There is, as we have said,
a similarity between this case and that of Numa; for the priest being
afraid because he had revealed a mystery, earnestly begged of
Alexander to command his mother to burn the letter which conveyed
these communications to her. Let these two theologies, then, the
fabulous and the civil, give place to the Platonic philosophers, who
have recognized the true God as the author of all things, the source
of the light of truth, and the bountiful bestower of all blessedness.
And not these only, but to these great acknowledgers of so great a
God, those philosophers must yield who, having their mind enslaved to
their body, supposed the principles of all things to be material; as
Thales, who held that the first principle of all things was water;
Anaximenes, that it was air; the Stoics, that it was fire; Epicurus,
who affirmed that it consisted of atoms, that is to say, of minute
corpuscules; and many others whom it is needless to enumerate, but who
believed that bodies, simple or compound, animate or inanimate, but
nevertheless bodies, were the cause and principle of all things. For
some of them--as, for instance, the Epicureans--believed that living
things could originate from things without life; others held that all
things living or without life spring from a living principle, but
that, nevertheless, all things, being material, spring from a material
principle. For the Stoics thought that fire, that is, one of the four
material elements of which this visible world is composed, was both
living and intelligent, the maker of the world and of all things
contained in it,--that it was in fact God. These and others like them
have only been able to suppose that which their hearts enslaved to
sense have vainly suggested to them. And yet they have within
themselves something which they could not see: they represented to
themselves inwardly things which they had seen without, even when they
were not seeing them, but only thinking of them. But this
representation in thought is no longer a body, but only the similitude
of a body; and that faculty of the mind by which this similitude of a
body is seen is neither a body nor the similitude of a body; and the
faculty which judges whether the representation is beautiful or ugly
is without doubt superior to the object judged of. This principle is
the understanding of man, the rational soul; and it is certainly not a
body, since that similitude of a body which it beholds and judges of
is itself not a body. The soul is neither earth, nor water, nor air,
nor fire, of which four bodies, called the four elements, we see that
this world is composed. And if the soul is not a body, how should
God, its Creator, be a body? Let all those philosophers, then, give
place, as we have said, to the Platonists, and those also who have
been ashamed to say that God is a body, but yet have thought that our
souls are of the same nature as God. They have not been staggered by
the great changeableness of the soul,--an attribute which it would be
impious to ascribe to the divine nature,--but they say it is the body
which changes the soul, for in itself it is unchangeable. As well
might they say, "Flesh is wounded by some body, for in itself it is
invulnerable." In a word, that which is unchangeable can be changed
by nothing, so that that which can be changed by the body cannot
properly be said to be immutable.
Footnotes
[299] Dii majorum gentium.
[300] Book i. 13.
Chapter 6.--Concerning the Meaning of the Platonists in that Part of
Philosophy Called Physical.
These philosophers, then, whom we see not undeservedly exalted above
the rest in fame and glory, have seen that no material body is God,
and therefore they have transcended all bodies in seeking for God.
They have seen that whatever is changeable is not the most high God,
and therefore they have transcended every soul and all changeable
spirits in seeking the supreme. They have seen also that, in every
changeable thing, the form which makes it that which it is, whatever
be its mode or nature, can only be through Him who truly is, because
He is unchangeable. And therefore, whether we consider the whole body
of the world, its figure, qualities, and orderly movement, and also
all the bodies which are in it; or whether we consider all life,
either that which nourishes and maintains, as the life of trees, or
that which, besides this, has also sensation, as the life of beasts;
or that which adds to all these intelligence, as the life of man; or
that which does not need the support of nutriment, but only maintains,
feels, understands, as the life of angels,--all can only be through
Him who absolutely is. For to Him it is not one thing to be, and
another to live, as though He could be, not living; nor is it to Him
one thing to live, and another thing to understand, as though He could
live, not understanding; nor is it to Him one thing to understand,
another thing to be blessed, as though He could understand and not be
blessed. But to Him to live, to understand, to be blessed, are to
be. They have understood, from this unchangeableness and this
simplicity, that all things must have been made by Him, and that He
could Himself have been made by none. For they have considered that
whatever is is either body or life, and that life is something better
than body, and that the nature of body is sensible, and that of life
intelligible. Therefore they have preferred the intelligible nature
to the sensible. We mean by sensible things such things as can be
perceived by the sight and touch of the body; by intelligible things,
such as can be understood by the sight of the mind. For there is no
corporeal beauty, whether in the condition of a body, as figure, or in
its movement, as in music, of which it is not the mind that judges.
But this could never have been, had there not existed in the mind
itself a superior form of these things, without bulk, without noise of
voice, without space and time. But even in respect of these things,
had the mind not been mutable, it would not have been possible for one
to judge better than another with regard to sensible forms. He who is
clever, judges better than he who is slow, he who is skilled than he
who is unskillful, he who is practised than he who is unpractised; and
the same person judges better after he has gained experience than he
did before. But that which is capable of more and less is mutable;
whence able men, who have thought deeply on these things, have
gathered that the first form is not to be found in those things whose
form is changeable. Since, therefore, they saw that body and mind
might be more or less beautiful in form, and that, if they wanted
form, they could have no existence, they saw that there is some
existence in which is the first form, unchangeable, and therefore not
admitting of degrees of comparison, and in that they most rightly
believed was the first principle of things which was not made, and by
which all things were made. Therefore that which is known of God He
manifested to them when His invisible things were seen by them, being
understood by those things which have been made; also His eternal
power and Godhead by whom all visible and temporal things have been
created. [301]We have said enough upon that part of theology which
they call physical, that is, natural.
Footnotes
[301] Rom. i. 19, 20.
Chapter 7.--How Much the Platonists are to Be Held as Excelling Other
Philosophers in Logic, i.e. Rational Philosophy.
Then, again, as far as regards the doctrine which treats of that which
they call logic, that is, rational philosophy, far be it from us to
compare them with those who attributed to the bodily senses the
faculty of discriminating truth, and thought, that all we learn is to
be measured by their untrustworthy and fallacious rules. Such were
the Epicureans, and all of the same school. Such also were the
Stoics, who ascribed to the bodily senses that expertness in
disputation which they so ardently love, called by them dialectic,
asserting that from the senses the mind conceives the notions
(ennoiai) of those things which they explicate by definition. And
hence is developed the whole plan and connection of their learning and
teaching. I often wonder, with respect to this, how they can say that
none are beautiful but the wise; for by what bodily sense have they
perceived that beauty, by what eyes of the flesh have they seen
wisdom's comeliness of form? Those, however, whom we justly rank
before all others, have distinguished those things which are conceived
by the mind from those which are perceived by the senses, neither
taking away from the senses anything to which they are competent, nor
attributing to them anything beyond their competency. And the light
of our understandings, by which all things are learned by us, they
have affirmed to be that selfsame God by whom all things were made.
Chapter 8.--That the Platonists Hold the First Rank in Moral
Philosophy Also.
The remaining part of philosophy is morals, or what is called by the
Greeks ethike, in which is discussed the question concerning the chief
good,--that which will leave us nothing further to seek in order to be
blessed, if only we make all our actions refer to it, and seek it not
for the sake of something else, but for its own sake. Therefore it is
called the end, because we wish other things on account of it, but
itself only for its own sake. This beatific good, therefore,
according to some, comes to a man from the body, according to others,
from the mind, and, according to others, from both together. For they
saw that man himself consists of soul and body; and therefore they
believed that from either of these two, or from both together, their
well-being must proceed, consisting in a certain final good, which
could render them blessed, and to which they might refer all their
actions, not requiring anything ulterior to which to refer that good
itself. This is why those who have added a third kind of good things,
which they call extrinsic,--as honor, glory, wealth, and the
like,--have not regarded them as part of the final good, that is, to
be sought after for their own sake, but as things which are to be
sought for the sake of something else, affirming that this kind of
good is good to the good, and evil to the evil. Wherefore, whether
they have sought the good of man from the mind or from the body, or
from both together, it is still only from man they have supposed that
it must be sought. But they who have sought it from the body have
sought it from the inferior part of man; they who have sought it from
the mind, from the superior part; and they who have sought it from
both, from the whole man. Whether therefore, they have sought it from
any part, or from the whole man, still they have only sought it from
man; nor have these differences, being three, given rise only to three
dissentient sects of philosophers, but to many. For diverse
philosophers have held diverse opinions, both concerning the good of
the body, and the good of the mind, and the good of both together.
Let, therefore, all these give place to those philosophers who have
not affirmed that a man is blessed by the enjoyment of the body, or by
the enjoyment of the mind, but by the enjoyment of God,--enjoying Him,
however, not as the mind does the body or itself, or as one friend
enjoys another, but as the eye enjoys light, if, indeed, we may draw
any comparison between these things. But what the nature of this
comparison is, will, if God help me, be shown in another place, to the
best of my ability. At present, it is sufficient to mention that
Plato determined the final good to be to live according to virtue, and
affirmed that he only can attain to virtue who knows and imitates
God,--which knowledge and imitation are the only cause of
blessedness. Therefore he did not doubt that to philosophize is to
love God, whose nature is incorporeal. Whence it certainly follows
that the student of wisdom, that is, the philosopher, will then become
blessed when he shall have begun to enjoy God. For though he is not
necessarily blessed who enjoys that which he loves (for many are
miserable by loving that which ought not to be loved, and still more
miserable when they enjoy it), nevertheless no one is blessed who does
not enjoy that which he loves. For even they who love things which
ought not to be loved do not count themselves blessed by loving
merely, but by enjoying them. Who, then, but the most miserable will
deny that he is blessed, who enjoys that which he loves, and loves the
true and highest good? But the true and highest good, according to
Plato, is God, and therefore he would call him a philosopher who loves
God; for philosophy is directed to the obtaining of the blessed life,
and he who loves God is blessed in the enjoyment of God.
Chapter 9.--Concerning that Philosophy Which Has Come Nearest to the
Christian Faith.
Whatever philosophers, therefore, thought concerning the supreme God,
that He is both the maker of all created things, the light by which
things are known, and the good in reference to which things are to be
done; that we have in Him the first principle of nature, the truth of
doctrine, and the happiness of life,--whether these philosophers may
be more suitably called Platonists, or whether they may give some
other name to their sect; whether, we say, that only the chief men of
the Ionic school, such as Plato himself, and they who have well
understood him, have thought thus; or whether we also include the
Italic school, on account of Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, and all
who may have held like opinions; and, lastly, whether also we include
all who have been held wise men and philosophers among all nations who
are discovered to have seen and taught this, be they Atlantics,
Libyans, Egyptians, Indians, Persians, Chaldeans, Scythians, Gauls,
Spaniards, or of other nations,--we prefer these to all other
philosophers, and confess that they approach nearest to us.
Chapter 10.--That the Excellency of the Christian Religion is Above
All the Science of Philosophers.
For although a Christian man instructed only in ecclesiastical
literature may perhaps be ignorant of the very name of Platonists, and
may not even know that there have existed two schools of philosophers
speaking the Greek tongue, to wit, the Ionic and Italic, he is
nevertheless not so deaf with respect to human affairs, as not to know
that philosophers profess the study, and even the possession, of
wisdom. He is on his guard, however, with respect to those who
philosophize according to the elements of this world, not according to
God, by whom the world itself was made; for he is warned by the
precept of the apostle, and faithfully hears what has been said,
"Beware that no one deceive you through philosophy and vain deceit,
according to the elements of the world." [302]Then, that he may not
suppose that all philosophers are such as do this, he hears the same
apostle say concerning certain of them, "Because that which is known
of God is manifest among them, for God has manifested it to them. For
His invisible things from the creation of the world are clearly seen,
being understood by the things which are made, also His eternal power
and Godhead." [303]And, when speaking to the Athenians, after
having spoken a mighty thing concerning God, which few are able to
understand, "In Him we live, and move, and have our being," [304] he
goes on to say, "As certain also of your own have said." He knows
well, too, to be on his guard against even these philosophers in their
errors. For where it has been said by him, "that God has manifested
to them by those things which are made His invisible things, that they
might be seen by the understanding," there it has also been said that
they did not rightly worship God Himself, because they paid divine
honors, which are due to Him alone, to other things also to which they
ought not to have paid them,--"because, knowing God, they glorified
Him not as God: neither were thankful, but became vain in their
imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing
themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the
incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of corruptible man,
and of birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things;" [305]
--where the apostle would have us understand him as meaning the
Romans, and Greeks, and Egyptians, who gloried in the name of wisdom;
but concerning this we will dispute with them afterwards. With
respect, however, to that wherein they agree with us we prefer them to
all others namely, concerning the one God, the author of this
universe, who is not only above every body, being incorporeal, but
also above all souls, being incorruptible--our principle, our light,
our good. And though the Christian man, being ignorant of their
writings, does not use in disputation words which he has not
learned,--not calling that part of philosophy natural (which is the
Latin term), or physical (which is the Greek one), which treats of the
investigation of nature; or that part rational, or logical, which
deals with the question how truth may be discovered; or that part
moral, or ethical, which concerns morals, and shows how good is to be
sought, and evil to be shunned,--he is not, therefore, ignorant that
it is from the one true and supremely good God that we have that
nature in which we are made in the image of God, and that doctrine by
which we know Him and ourselves, and that grace through which, by
cleaving to Him, we are blessed. This, therefore, is the cause why we
prefer these to all the others, because, whilst other philosophers
have worn out their minds and powers in seeking the causes of things,
and endeavoring to discover the right mode of learning and of living,
these, by knowing God, have found where resides the cause by which the
universe has been constituted, and the light by which truth is to be
discovered, and the fountain at which felicity is to be drunk. All
philosophers, then, who have had these thoughts concerning God,
whether Platonists or others, agree with us. But we have thought it
better to plead our cause with the Platonists, because their writings
are better known. For the Greeks, whose tongue holds the highest
place among the languages of the Gentiles, are loud in their praises
of these writings; and the Latins, taken with their excellence, or
their renown, have studied them more heartily than other writings,
and, by translating them into our tongue, have given them greater
celebrity and notoriety.
Footnotes
[302] Col. ii. 8.
[303] Rom. i. 19, 20.
[304] Acts xvii. 28.
[305] Rom. i. 21-23.
Chapter 11.--How Plato Has Been Able to Approach So Nearly to
Christian Knowledge.
Certain partakers with us in the grace of Christ, wonder when they
hear and read that Plato had conceptions concerning God, in which they
recognize considerable agreement with the truth of our religion. Some
have concluded from this, that when he went to Egypt he had heard the
prophet Jeremiah, or, whilst travelling in the same country, had read
the prophetic scriptures, which opinion I myself have expressed in
certain of my writings. [306]But a careful calculation of dates,
contained in chronological history, shows that Plato was born about a
hundred years after the time in which Jeremiah prophesied, and, as he
lived eighty-one years, there are found to have been about seventy
years from his death to that time when Ptolemy, king of Egypt,
requested the prophetic scriptures of the Hebrew people to be sent to
him from Judea, and committed them to seventy Hebrews, who also knew
the Greek tongue, to be translated and kept. Therefore, on that
voyage of his, Plato could neither have seen Jeremiah, who was dead so
long before, nor have read those same scriptures which had not yet
been translated into the Greek language, of which he was a master,
unless, indeed, we say that, as he was most earnest in the pursuit of
knowledge, he also studied those writings through an interpreter, as
he did those of the Egyptians,--not, indeed, writing a translation of
them (the facilities for doing which were only gained even by Ptolemy
in return for munificent acts of kindness, [307] though fear of his
kingly authority might have seemed a sufficient motive), but learning
as much as he possibly could concerning their contents by means of
conversation. What warrants this supposition are the opening verses
of Genesis: "In the beginning God made the heaven and earth. And the
earth was invisible, and without order; and darkness was over the
abyss: and the Spirit of God moved over the waters." [308]For in
the Timæus, when writing on the formation of the world, he says that
God first united earth and fire; from which it is evident that he
assigns to fire a place in heaven. This opinion bears a certain
resemblance to the statement, "In the beginning God made heaven and
earth." Plato next speaks of those two intermediary elements, water
and air, by which the other two extremes, namely, earth and fire, were
mutually united; from which circumstance he is thought to have so
understood the words, "The Spirit of God moved over the waters." For,
not paying sufficient attention to the designations given by those
scriptures to the Spirit of God, he may have thought that the four
elements are spoken of in that place, because the air also is called
spirit. [309]Then, as to Plato's saying that the philosopher is a
lover of God, nothing shines forth more conspicuously in those sacred
writings. But the most striking thing in this connection, and that
which most of all inclines me almost to assent to the opinion that
Plato was not ignorant of those writings, is the answer which was
given to the question elicited from the holy Moses when the words of
God were conveyed to him by the angel; for, when he asked what was the
name of that God who was commanding him to go and deliver the Hebrew
people out of Egypt, this answer was given: "I am who am; and thou
shalt say to the children of Israel, He who is sent me unto you;"
[310] as though compared with Him that truly is, because He is
unchangeable, those things which have been created mutable are not,--a
truth which Plato zealously held, and most diligently commended. And
I know not whether this sentiment is anywhere to be found in the books
of those who were before Plato, unless in that book where it is said,
"I am who am; and thou shalt say to the children of Israel, who is
sent me unto you."
Footnotes
[306] De Doctrina Christiana, ii. 43. Comp. Retract. ii. 4, 2.
[307] Liberating Jewish slaves, and sending gifts to the temple. See
Josephus, Ant. xii. 2.
[308] Gen. i. 1, 2.
[309] Spiritus.
[310] Ex. iii. 14.
Chapter 12.--That Even the Platonists, Though They Say These Things
Concerning the One True God, Nevertheless Thought that Sacred Rites
Were to Be Performed in Honor of Many Gods.
But we need not determine from what source he learned these
things,--whether it was from the books of the ancients who preceded
him, or, as is more likely, from the words of the apostle: "Because
that which is known of God, has been manifested among them, for God
hath manifested it to them. For His invisible things from the
creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by those
things which have been made, also His eternal power and Godhead."
[311]From whatever source he may have derived this knowledge, then,
I think I have made it sufficiently plain that I have not chosen the
Platonic philosophers undeservedly as the parties with whom to
discuss; because the question we have just taken up concerns the
natural theology,--the question, namely, whether sacred rites are to
be performed to one God, or to many, for the sake of the happiness
which is to be after death. I have specially chosen them because
their juster thoughts concerning the one God who made heaven and
earth, have made them illustrious among philosophers. This has given
them such superiority to all others in the judgment of posterity,
that, though Aristotle, the disciple of Plato, a man of eminent
abilities, inferior in eloquence to Plato, yet far superior to many in
that respect, had founded the Peripatetic sect,--so called because
they were in the habit of walking about during their
disputations,--and though he had, through the greatness of his fame,
gathered very many disciples into his school, even during the life of
his master; and though Plato at his death was succeeded in his school,
which was called the Academy, by Speusippus, his sister's son, and
Xenocrates, his beloved disciple, who, together with their successors,
were called from this name of the school, Academics; nevertheless the
most illustrious recent philosophers, who have chosen to follow Plato,
have been unwilling to be called Peripatetics, or Academics, but have
preferred the name of Platonists. Among these were the renowned
Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Porphyry, who were Greeks, and the African
Apuleius, who was learned both in the Greek and Latin tongues. All
these, however, and the rest who were of the same school, and also
Plato himself, thought that sacred rites ought to be performed in
honor of many gods.
Footnotes
[311] Rom. i. 20.
Chapter 13.--Concerning the Opinion of Plato, According to Which He
Defined the Gods as Beings Entirely Good and the Friends of Virtue.
Therefore, although in many other important respects they differ from
us, nevertheless with respect to this particular point of difference,
which I have just stated, as it is one of great moment, and the
question on hand concerns it, I will first ask them to what gods they
think that sacred rites are to be performed,--to the good or to the
bad, or to both the good and the bad? But we have the opinion of
Plato affirming that all the gods are good, and that there is not one
of the gods bad. It follows, therefore, that these are to be
performed to the good, for then they are performed to gods; for if
they are not good, neither are they gods. Now, if this be the case
(for what else ought we to believe concerning the gods?), certainly it
explodes the opinion that the bad gods are to be propitiated by sacred
rites in order that they may not harm us, but the good gods are to be
invoked in order that they may assist us. For there are no bad gods,
and it is to the good that, as they say, the due honor of such rites
is to be paid. Of what character, then, are those gods who love
scenic displays, even demanding that a place be given them among
divine things, and that they be exhibited in their honor? The power
of these gods proves that they exist, but their liking such things
proves that they are bad. For it is well-known what Plato's opinion
was concerning scenic plays. He thinks that the poets themselves,
because they have composed songs so unworthy of the majesty and
goodness of the gods, ought to be banished from the state. Of what
character, therefore, are those gods who contend with Plato himself
about those scenic plays? He does not suffer the gods to be defamed
by false crimes; the gods command those same crimes to be celebrated
in their own honor.
In fine, when they ordered these plays to be inaugurated, they not
only demanded base things, but also did cruel things, taking from
Titus Latinius his son, and sending a disease upon him because he had
refused to obey them, which they removed when he had fulfilled their
commands. Plato, however, bad though they were, did not think they
were to be feared; but, holding to his opinion with the utmost
firmness and constancy, does not hesitate to remove from a
well-ordered state all the sacrilegious follies of the poets, with
which these gods are delighted because they themselves are impure.
But Labeo places this same Plato (as I have mentioned already in the
second book [312] ) among the demi-gods. Now Labeo thinks that the
bad deities are to be propitiated with bloody victims, and by fasts
accompanied with the same, but the good deities with plays, and all
other things which are associated with joyfulness. How comes it,
then, that the demi-god Plato so persistently dares to take away those
pleasures, because he deems them base, not from the demi-gods but from
the gods, and these the good gods? And, moreover, those very gods
themselves do certainly refute the opinion of Labeo, for they showed
themselves in the case of Latinius to be not only wanton and sportive,
but also cruel and terrible. Let the Platonists, therefore, explain
these things to us, since, following the opinion of their master, they
think that all the gods are good and honorable, and friendly to the
virtues of the wise, holding it unlawful to think otherwise concerning
any of the gods. We will explain it, say they. Let us then
attentively listen to them.
Footnotes
[312] Ch. 14.
Chapter 14.--Of the Opinion of Those Who Have Said that Rational Souls
are of Three Kinds, to Wit, Those of the Celestial Gods, Those of the
Aerial Demons, and Those of Terrestrial Men.
There is, say they, a threefold division of all animals endowed with a
rational soul, namely, into gods, men, and demons. The gods occupy
the loftiest region, men the lowest, the demons the middle region.
For the abode of the gods is heaven, that of men the earth, that of
the demons the air. As the dignity of their regions is diverse, so
also is that of their natures; therefore the gods are better than men
and demons. Men have been placed below the gods and demons, both in
respect of the order of the regions they inhabit, and the difference
of their merits. The demons, therefore, who hold the middle place, as
they are inferior to the gods, than whom they inhabit a lower region,
so they are superior to men, than whom they inhabit a loftier one.
For they have immortality of body in common with the gods, but
passions of the mind in common with men. On which account, say they,
it is not wonderful that they are delighted with the obscenities of
the theatre, and the fictions of the poets, since they are also
subject to human passions, from which the gods are far removed, and to
which they are altogether strangers. Whence we conclude that it was
not the gods, who are all good and highly exalted, that Plato deprived
of the pleasure of theatric plays, by reprobating and prohibiting the
fictions of the poets, but the demons.
Of these things many have written: among others Apuleius, the
Platonist of Madaura, who composed a whole work on the subject,
entitled, Concerning the God of Socrates. He there discusses and
explains of what kind that deity was who attended on Socrates, a sort
of familiar, by whom it is said he was admon ished to desist from any
action which would not turn out to his advantage. He asserts most
distinctly, and proves at great length, that it was not a god but a
demon; and he discusses with great diligence the opinion of Plato
concerning the lofty estate of the gods, the lowly estate of men, and
the middle estate of demons. These things being so, how did Plato
dare to take away, if not from the gods, whom he removed from all
human contagion, certainly from the demons, all the pleasures of the
theatre, by expelling the poets from the state? Evidently in this way
he wished to admonish the human soul, although still confined in these
moribund members, to despise the shameful commands of the demons, and
to detest their impurity, and to choose rather the splendor of
virtue. But if Plato showed himself virtuous in answering and
prohibiting these things, then certainly it was shameful of the demons
to command them. Therefore either Apuleius is wrong, and Socrates'
familiar did not belong to this class of deities, or Plato held
contradictory opinions, now honoring the demons, now removing from the
well-regulated state the things in which they delighted, or Socrates
is not to be congratulated on the friendship of the demon, of which
Apuleius was so ashamed that he entitled his book On the God of
Socrates, whilst according to the tenor of his discussion, wherein he
so diligently and at such length distinguishes gods from demons, he
ought not to have entitled it, Concerning the God, but Concerning the
Demon of Socrates. But he preferred to put this into the discussion
itself rather than into the title of his book. For, through the sound
doctrine which has illuminated human society, all, or almost all men
have such a horror at the name of demons, that every one who before
reading the dissertation of Apuleius, which sets forth the dignity of
demons, should have read the title of the book, On the Demon of
Socrates, would certainly have thought that the author was not a sane
man. But what did even Apuleius find to praise in the demons, except
subtlety and strength of body and a higher place of habitation? For
when he spoke generally concerning their manners, he said nothing that
was good, but very much that was bad. Finally, no one, when he has
read that book, wonders that they desired to have even the obscenity
of the stage among divine things, or that, wishing to be thought gods,
they should be delighted with the crimes of the gods, or that all
those sacred solemnities, whose obscenity occasions laughter, and
whose shameful cruelty causes horror, should be in agreement with
their passions.
Chapter 15.--That the Demons are Not Better Than Men Because of Their
Aerial Bodies, or on Account of Their Superior Place of Abode.
Wherefore let not the mind truly religious, and submitted to the true
God, suppose that demons are better than men, because they have better
bodies. Otherwise it must put many beasts before itself which are
superior to us both in acuteness of the senses, in ease and quickness
of movement, in strength and in long-continued vigor of body. What
man can equal the eagle or the vulture in strength of vision? Who can
equal the dog in acuteness of smell? Who can equal the hare, the
stag, and all the birds in swiftness? Who can equal in strength the
lion or the elephant? Who can equal in length of life the serpents,
which are affirmed to put off old age along with their skin, and to
return to youth again? But as we are better than all these by the
possession of reason and understanding, so we ought also to be better
than the demons by living good and virtuous lives. For divine
providence gave to them bodies of a better quality than ours, that
that in which we excel them might in this way be commended to us as
deserving to be far more cared for than the body, and that we should
learn to despise the bodily excellence of the demons compared with
goodness of life, in respect of which we are better than they, knowing
that we too shall have immortality of body,--not an immortality
tortured by eternal punishment, but that which is consequent on purity
of soul.
But now, as regards loftiness of place, it is altogether ridiculous to
be so influenced by the fact that the demons inhabit the air, and we
the earth, as to think that on that account they are to be put before
us; for in this way we put all the birds before ourselves. But the
birds, when they are weary with flying, or require to repair their
bodies with food, come back to the earth to rest or to feed, which the
demons, they say, do not. Are they, therefore, inclined to say that
the birds are superior to us, and the demons superior to the birds?
But if it be madness to think so, there is no reason why we should
think that, on account of their inhabiting a loftier element, the
demons have a claim to our religious submission. But as it is really
the case that the birds of the air are not only not put before us who
dwell on the earth; but are even subjected to us on account of the
dignity of the rational soul which is in us, so also it is the case
that the demons, though they are aerial, are not better than we who
are terrestrial because the air is higher than the earth, but, on the
contrary, men are to be put before demons because their despair is not
to be compared to the hope of pious men. Even that law of Plato's,
according to which he mutually orders and arranges the four elements,
inserting between the two extreme elements--namely, fire, which is in
the highest degree mobile, and the immoveable earth--the two middle
ones, air and water, that by how much the air is higher up than the
water, and the fire than the air, by so much also are the waters
higher than the earth,--this law, I say, sufficiently admonishes us
not to estimate the merits of animated creatures according to the
grades of the elements. And Apuleius himself says that man is a
terrestrial animal in common with the rest, who is nevertheless to be
put far before aquatic animals, though Plato puts the waters
themselves before the land. By this he would have us understand that
the same order is not to be observed when the question concerns the
merits of animals, though it seems to be the true one in the gradation
of bodies; for it appears to be possible that a soul of a higher order
may inhabit a body of a lower, and a soul of a lower order a body of a
higher.
Chapter 16.--What Apuleius the Platonist Thought Concerning the
Manners and Actions of Demons.
The same Apuleius, when speaking concerning the manners of demons,
said that they are agitated with the same perturbations of mind as
men; that they are provoked by injuries, propitiated by services and
by gifts, rejoice in honors, are delighted with a variety of sacred
rites, and are annoyed if any of them be neglected. Among other
things, he also says that on them depend the divinations of augurs,
soothsayers, and prophets, and the revelations of dreams, and that
from them also are the miracles of the magicians. But, when giving a
brief definition of them, he says, "Demons are of an animal nature,
passive in soul, rational in mind, aerial in body, eternal in time."
"Of which five things, the three first are common to them and us, the
fourth peculiar to themselves, and the fifth common to therewith the
gods." [313]But I see that they have in common with the gods two of
the first things, which they have in common with us. For he says that
the gods also are animals; and when he is assigning to every order of
beings its own element, he places us among the other terrestrial
animals which live and feel upon the earth. Wherefore, if the demons
are animals as to genus, this is common to them, not only with men,
but also with the gods and with beasts; if they are rational as to
their mind, this is common to them with the gods and with men; if they
are eternal in time, this is common to them with the gods only; if
they are passive as to their soul, this is common to them with men
only; if they are aerial in body, in this they are alone. Therefore
it is no great thing for them to be of an animal nature, for so also
are the beasts; in being rational as to mind, they are not above
ourselves, for so are we also; and as to their being eternal as to
time, what is the advantage of that if they are not blessed? for
better is temporal happiness than eternal misery. Again, as to their
being passive in soul, how are they in this respect above us, since we
also are so, but would not have been so had we not been miserable?
Also, as to their being aerial in body, how much value is to be set on
that, since a soul of any kind whatsoever is to be set above every
body? and therefore religious worship, which ought to be rendered from
the soul, is by no means due to that thing which is inferior to the
soul. Moreover, if he had, among those things which he says belong to
demons, enumerated virtue, wisdom, happiness, and affirmed that they
have those things in common with the gods, and, like them, eternally,
he would assuredly have attributed to them something greatly to be
desired, and much to be prized. And even in that case it would not
have been our duty to worship them like God on account of these
things, but rather to worship Him from whom we know they had received
them. But how much less are they really worthy of divine
honor,--those aerial animals who are only rational that they may be
capable of misery, passive that they may be actually miserable, and
eternal that it may be impossible for them to end their misery!
Footnotes
[313] De Deo Socratis.
Chapter 17.--Whether It is Proper that Men Should Worship Those
Spirits from Whose Vices It is Necessary that They Be Freed.
Wherefore, to omit other things, and confine our attention to that
which he says is common to the demons with us, let us ask this
question: If all the four elements are full of their own animals, the
fire and the air of immortal, and the water and the earth of mortal
ones, why are the souls of demons agitated by the whirlwinds and
tempests of passions?--for the Greek word pathos means perturbation,
whence he chose to call the demons "passive in soul," because the word
passion, which is derived from pathos, signified a commotion of the
mind contrary to reason. Why, then, are these things in the minds of
demons which are not in beasts? For if anything of this kind appears
in beasts, it is not perturbation, because it is not contrary to
reason, of which they are devoid. Now it is foolishness or misery
which is the cause of these perturbations in the case of men, for we
are not yet blessed in the possession of that perfection of wisdom
which is promised to us at last, when we shall be set free from our
present mortality. But the gods, they say, are free from these
perturbations, because they are not only eternal, but also blessed;
for they also have the same kind of rational souls, but most pure from
all spot and plague. Wherefore, if the gods are free from
perturbation because they are blessed, not miserable animals, and the
beasts are free from them because they are animals which are capable
neither of blessedness nor misery, it remains that the demons, like
men, are subject to perturbations because they are not blessed but
miserable animals. What folly, therefore, or rather what madness, to
submit ourselves through any sentiment of religion to demons, when it
belongs to the true religion to deliver us from that depravity which
makes us like to them! For Apuleius himself, although he is very
sparing toward them, and thinks they are worthy of divine honors, is
nevertheless compelled to confess that they are subject to anger; and
the true religion commands us not to be moved with anger, but rather
to resist it. The demons are won over by gifts; and the true religion
commands us to favor no one on account of gifts received. The demons
are flattered by honors; but the true religion commands us by no means
to be moved by such things. The demons are haters of some men and
lovers of others, not in consequence of a prudent and calm judgment,
but because of what he calls their "passive soul;" whereas the true
religion commands us to love even our enemies. Lastly, the true
religion commands us to put away all disquietude of heart and
agitation of mind, and also all commotions and tempests of the soul,
which Apuleius asserts to be continually swelling and surging in the
souls of demons. Why, therefore, except through foolishness and
miserable error shouldst thou humble thyself to worship a being to
whom thou desirest to be unlike in thy life? And why shouldst thou
pay religious homage to him whom thou art unwilling to imitate, when
it is the highest duty of religion to imitate Him whom thou
worshippest?
Chapter 18.--What Kind of Religion that is Which Teaches that Men
Ought to Employ the Advocacy of Demons in Order to Be Recommended to
the Favor of the Good Gods.
In vain, therefore, have Apuleius, and they who think with him,
conferred on the demons the honor of placing them in the air, between
the ethereal heavens and the earth, that they may carry to the gods
the prayers of men, to men the answers of the gods: for Plato held,
they say, that no god has intercourse with man. They who believe
these things have thought it unbecoming that men should have
intercourse with the gods, and the gods with men, but a befitting
thing that the demons should have intercourse with both gods and men,
presenting to the gods the petitions of men, and conveying to men what
the gods have granted; so that a chaste man, and one who is a stranger
to the crimes of the magic arts, must use as patrons, through whom the
gods may be induced to hear him, demons who love these crimes,
although the very fact of his not loving them ought to have
recommended him to them as one who deserved to be listened to with
greater readiness and willingness on their part. They love the
abominations of the stage, which chastity does not love. They love,
in the sorceries of the magicians, "a thousand arts of inflicting
harm," [314] which innocence does not love. Yet both chastity and
innocence, if they wish to obtain anything from the gods, will not be
able to do so by their own merits, except their enemies act as
mediators on their behalf. Apuleius need not attempt to justify the
fictions of the poets, and the mockeries of the stage. If human
modesty can act so faithlessly towards itself as not only to love
shameful things, but even to think that they are pleasing to the
divinity, we can cite on the other side their own highest authority
and teacher, Plato.
Footnotes
[314] Virgil, Æn. 7, 338.
Chapter 19.--Of the Impiety of the Magic Art, Which is Dependent on
the Assistance of Malign Spirits.
Moreover, against those magic arts, concerning which some men,
exceedingly wretched and exceedingly impious, delight to boast, may
not public opinion itself be brought forward as a witness? For why
are those arts so severely punished by the laws, if they are the works
of deities who ought to be worshipped? Shall it be said that the
Christians have or dained those laws by which magic arts are
punished? With what other meaning, except that these sorceries are
without doubt pernicious to the human race, did the most illustrious
poet say,
"By heaven, I swear, and your dear life,
Unwillingly these arms I wield,
And take, to meet the coming strife,
Enchantment's sword and shield." [315]
And that also which he says in another place concerning magic arts,
"I've seen him to another place transport the standing corn," [316]
has reference to the fact that the fruits of one field are said to be
transferred to another by these arts which this pestiferous and
accursed doctrine teaches. Does not Cicero inform us that, among the
laws of the Twelve Tables, that is, the most ancient laws of the
Romans, there was a law written which appointed a punishment to be
inflicted on him who should do this? [317]Lastly, was it before
Christian judges that Apuleius himself was accused of magic arts?
[318]Had he known these arts to be divine and pious, and congruous
with the works of divine power, he ought not only to have confessed,
but also to have professed them, rather blaming the laws by which
these things were prohibited and pronounced worthy of condemnation,
while they ought to have been held worthy of admiration and respect.
For by so doing, either he would have persuaded the judges to adopt
his own opinion, or, if they had shown their partiality for unjust
laws, and condemned him to death notwithstanding his praising and
commending such things, the demons would have bestowed on his soul
such rewards as he deserved, who, in order to proclaim and set forth
their divine works, had not feared the loss of his human life. As our
martyrs, when that religion was charged on them as a crime, by which
they knew they were made safe and most glorious throughout eternity,
did not choose, by denying it, to escape temporal punishments, but
rather by confessing, professing, and proclaiming it, by enduring all
things for it with fidelity and fortitude, and by dying for it with
pious calmness, put to shame the law by which that religion was
prohibited, and caused its revocation. But there is extant a most
copious and eloquent oration of this Platonic philosopher, in which he
defends himself against the charge of practising these arts, affirming
that he is wholly a stranger to them, and only wishing to show his
innocence by denying such things as cannot be innocently committed.
But all the miracles of the magicians, who he thinks are justly
deserving of condemnation, are performed according to the teaching and
by the power of demons. Why, then, does he think that they ought to
be honored? For he asserts that they are necessary, in order to
present our prayers to the gods, and yet their works are such as we
must shun if we wish our prayers to reach the true God. Again, I ask,
what kind of prayers of men does he suppose are presented to the good
gods by the demons? If magical prayers, they will have none such; if
lawful prayers, they will not receive them through such beings. But
if a sinner who is penitent pour out prayers, especially if he has
committed any crime of sorcery, does he receive pardon through the
intercession of those demons by whose instigation and help he has
fallen into the sin he mourns? or do the demons themselves, in order
that they may merit pardon for the penitent, first become penitents
because they have deceived them? This no one ever said concerning the
demons; for had this been the case, they would never have dared to
seek for themselves divine honors. For how should they do so who
desired by penitence to obtain the grace of pardon; seeing that such
detestable pride could not exist along with a humility worthy of
pardon?
Footnotes
[315] Virgil, Æn. 4. 492, 493.
[316] Virgil, Ec. 8. 99.
[317] Pliny (Hist. Nat. xxviii. 2) and others quote the law as
running: Qui fruges incantasit, qui malum carmen incantasit...neu
alienam segetem pelexeris.
[318] Before Claudius, the prefect of Africa, a heathen.
Chapter 20.--Whether We are to Believe that the Good Gods are More
Willing to Have Intercourse with Demons Than with Men.
But does any urgent and most pressing cause compel the demons to
mediate between the gods and men, that they may offer the prayers of
men, and bring back the answers from the gods? and if so, what, pray,
is that cause, what is that so great necessity? Because, say they, no
god has intercourse with man. Most admirable holiness of God, which
has no intercourse with a supplicating man, and yet has intercourse
with an arrogant demon! which has no intercourse with a penitent man,
and yet has intercourse with a deceiving demon! which has no
intercourse with a man fleeing for refuge to the divine nature, and
yet has intercourse with a demon feigning divinity! which has no
intercourse with a man seeking pardon, and yet has intercourse with a
demon persuading to wickedness! which has no intercourse with a man
expelling the poets by means of philosophical writings from a
well-regulated state, and yet has intercourse with a demon requesting
from the princes and priests of a state the theatri cal performance of
the mockeries of the poets! which has no intercourse with the man who
prohibits the ascribing of crime to the gods, and yet has intercourse
with a demon who takes delight in the fictitious representation of
their crimes! which has no intercourse with a man punishing the crimes
of the magicians by just laws, and yet has intercourse with a demon
teaching and practising magical arts! which has no intercourse with a
man shunning the imitation of a demon, and yet has intercourse with a
demon lying in wait for the deception of a man!
Chapter 21.--Whether the Gods Use the Demons as Messengers and
Interpreters, and Whether They are Deceived by Them Willingly, or
Without Their Own Knowledge.
But herein, no doubt, lies the great necessity for this absurdity, so
unworthy of the gods, that the ethereal gods, who are concerned about
human affairs, would not know what terrestrial men were doing unless
the aerial demons should bring them intelligence, because the ether is
suspended far away from the earth and far above it, but the air is
contiguous both to the ether and to the earth. O admirable wisdom!
what else do these men think concerning the gods who, they say, are
all in the highest degree good, but that they are concerned about
human affairs, lest they should seem unworthy of worship, whilst, on
the other hand, from the distance between the elements, they are
ignorant of terrestrial things? It is on this account that they have
supposed the demons to be necessary as agents, through whom the gods
may inform themselves with respect to human affairs, and through whom,
when necessary, they may succor men; and it is on account of this
office that the demons themselves have been held as deserving of
worship. If this be the case, then a demon is better known by these
good gods through nearness of body, than a man is by goodness of
mind. O mournful necessity, or shall I not rather say detestable and
vain error, that I may not impute vanity to the divine nature! For if
the gods can, with their minds free from the hindrance of bodies, see
our mind, they do not need the demons as messengers from our mind to
them; but if the ethereal gods, by means of their bodies, perceive the
corporeal indices of minds, as the countenance, speech, motion, and
thence understand what the demons tell them, then it is also possible
that they may be deceived by the falsehoods of demons. Moreover, if
the divinity of the gods cannot be deceived by the demons, neither can
it be ignorant of our actions. But I would they would tell me whether
the demons have informed the gods that the fictions of the poets
concerning the crimes of the gods displease Plato, concealing the
pleasure which they themselves take in them; or whether they have
concealed both, and have preferred that the gods should be ignorant
with respect to this whole matter, or have told both, as well the
pious prudence of Plato with respect to the gods as their own lust,
which is injurious to the gods; or whether they have concealed Plato's
opinion, according to which he was unwilling that the gods should be
defamed with falsely alleged crimes through the impious license of the
poets, whilst they have not been ashamed nor afraid to make known
their own wickedness, which make them love theatrical plays, in which
the infamous deeds of the gods are celebrated. Let them choose which
they will of these four alternatives, and let them consider how much
evil any one of them would require them to think of the gods. For if
they choose the first, they must then confess that it was not possible
for the good gods to dwell with the good Plato, though he sought to
prohibit things injurious to them, whilst they dwelt with evil demons,
who exulted in their injuries; and this because they suppose that the
good gods can only know a good man, placed at so great a distance from
them, through the mediation of evil demons, whom they could know on
account of their nearness to themselves. [319]If they shall choose
the second, and shall say that both these things are concealed by the
demons, so that the gods are wholly ignorant both of Plato's most
religious law and the sacrilegious pleasure of the demons, what, in
that case, can the gods know to any profit with respect to human
affairs through these mediating demons, when they do not know those
things which are decreed, through the piety of good men, for the honor
of the good gods against the lust of evil demons? But if they shall
choose the third, and reply that these intermediary demons have
communicated, not only the opinion of Plato, which prohibited wrongs
to be done to the gods, but also their own delight in these wrongs, I
would ask if such a communication is not rather an insult? Now the
gods, hearing both and knowing both, not only permit the approach of
those malign demons, who desire and do things contrary to the dignity
of the gods and the religion of Plato, but also, through these wicked
demons, who are near to them, send good things to the good Plato, who
is far away from them; for they inhabit such a place in the
concatenated series of the elements, that they can come into contact
with those by whom they are accused, but not with him by whom they are
defended,--knowing the truth on both sides, but not being able to
change the weight of the air and the earth. There remains the fourth
supposition; but it is worse than the rest. For who will suffer it to
be said that the demons have made known the calumnious fictions of the
poets concerning the immortal gods, and also the disgraceful mockeries
of the theatres, and their own most ardent lust after, and most sweet
pleasure in these things, whilst they have concealed from them that
Plato, with the gravity of a philosopher, gave it as his opinion that
all these things ought to be removed from a well-regulated republic;
so that the good gods are now compelled, through such messengers, to
know the evil doings of the most wicked beings, that is to say, of the
messengers themselves, and are not allowed to know the good deeds of
the philosophers, though the former are for the injury, but these
latter for the honor of the gods themselves?
Footnotes
[319] Another reading, whom they could not know, though near to
themselves.
Chapter 22.--That We Must, Notwithstanding the Opinion of Apuleius,
Reject the Worship of Demons.
None of these four alternatives, then, is to be chosen; for we dare
not suppose such unbecoming things concerning the gods as the adoption
of any one of them would lead us to think. It remains, therefore,
that no credence whatever is to be given to the opinion of Apuleius
and the other philosophers of the same school, namely, that the demons
act as messengers and interpreters between the gods and men to carry
our petitions from us to the gods, and to bring back to us the help of
the gods. On the contrary, we must believe them to be spirits most
eager to inflict harm, utterly alien from righteousness, swollen with
pride, pale with envy, subtle in deceit; who dwell indeed in this air
as in a prison, in keeping with their own character, because, cast
down from the height of the higher heaven, they have been condemned to
dwell in this element as the just reward of irretrievable
transgression. But, though the air is situated above the earth and
the waters, they are not on that account superior in merit to men,
who, though they do not surpass them as far as their earthly bodies
are concerned, do nevertheless far excel them through piety of
mind,--they having made choice of the true God as their helper. Over
many, however, who are manifestly unworthy of participation in the
true religion, they tyrannize as over captives whom they have
subdued,--the greatest part of whom they have persuaded of their
divinity by wonderful and lying signs, consisting either of deeds or
of predictions. Some, nevertheless, who have more attentively and
diligently considered their vices, they have not been able to persuade
that they are gods, and so have feigned themselves to be messengers
between the gods and men. Some, indeed, have thought that not even
this latter honor ought to be acknowledged as belonging to them, not
believing that they were gods, because they saw that they were wicked,
whereas the gods, according to their view, are all good. Nevertheless
they dared not say that they were wholly unworthy of all divine honor,
for fear of offending the multitude, by whom, through inveterate
superstition, the demons were served by the performance of many rites,
and the erection of many temples.
Chapter 23.--What Hermes Trismegistus Thought Concerning Idolatry, and
from What Source He Knew that the Superstitions of Egypt Were to Be
Abolished.
The Egyptian Hermes, whom they call Trismegistus, had a different
opinion concerning those demons. Apuleius, indeed, denies that they
are gods; but when he says that they hold a middle place between the
gods and men, so that they seem to be necessary for men as mediators
between them and the gods, he does not distinguish between the worship
due to them and the religious homage due to the supernal gods. This
Egyptian, however, says that there are some gods made by the supreme
God, and some made by men. Any one who hears this, as I have stated
it, no doubt supposes that it has reference to images, because they
are the works of the hands of men; but he asserts that visible and
tangible images are, as it were, only the bodies of the gods, and that
there dwell in them certain spirits, which have been invited to come
into them, and which have power to inflict harm, or to fulfil the
desires of those by whom divine honors and services are rendered to
them. To unite, therefore, by a certain art, those invisible spirits
to visible and material things, so as to make, as it were, animated
bodies, dedicated and given up to those spirits who inhabit
them,--this, he says, is to make gods, adding that men have received
this great and wonderful power. I will give the words of this
Egyptian as they have been translated into our tongue: "And, since we
have undertaken to discourse concerning the relationship and
fellowship between men and the gods, know, O Æsculapius, the power and
strength of man. As the Lord and Father, or that which is highest,
even God, is the maker of the celestial gods, so man is the maker of
the gods who are in the temples, content to dwell near to men." [320]
And a little after he says, "Thus humanity, always mindful of its
nature and origin, perseveres in the imitation of divinity; and as the
Lord and Father made eternal gods, that they should be like Himself,
so humanity fashioned its own gods according to the likeness of its
own countenance." When this Æsculapius, to whom especially he was
speaking, had answered him, and had said, "Dost thou mean the statues,
O Trismegistus?"--"Yes, the statues," replied he, "however unbelieving
thou art, O Æsculapius,--the statues, animated and full of sensation
and spirit, and who do such great and wonderful things,--the statues
prescient of future things, and foretelling them by lot, by prophet,
by dreams, and many other things, who bring diseases on men and cure
them again, giving them joy or sorrow according to their merits. Dost
thou not know, O Æsculapius, that Egypt is an image of heaven, or,
more truly, a translation and descent of all things which are ordered
and transacted there, that it is, in truth, if we may say so, to be
the temple of the whole world? And yet, as it becomes the prudent man
to know all things beforehand, ye ought not to be ignorant of this,
that there is a time coming when it shall appear that the Egyptians
have all in vain, with pious mind, and with most scrupulous diligence,
waited on the divinity, and when all their holy worship shall come to
nought, and be found to be in vain."
Hermes then follows out at great length the statements of this
passage, in which he seems to predict the present time, in which the
Christian religion is overthrowing all lying figments with a vehemence
and liberty proportioned to its superior truth and holiness, in order
that the grace of the true Saviour may deliver men from those gods
which man has made, and subject them to that God by whom man was
made. But when Hermes predicts these things, he speaks as one who is
a friend to these same mockeries of demons, and does not clearly
express the name of Christ. On the contrary, he deplores, as if it
had already taken place, the future abolition of those things by the
observance of which there was maintained in Egypt a resemblance of
heaven,--he bears witness to Christianity by a kind of mournful
prophecy. Now it was with reference to such that the apostle said,
that "knowing God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were
thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish
heart was darkened; professing themselves to be wise, they became
fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the
likeness of the image of corruptible man," [321] and so on, for the
whole passage is too long to quote. For Hermes makes many such
statements agreeable to the truth concerning the one true God who
fashioned this world. And I know not how he has become so bewildered
by that "darkening of the heart" as to stumble into the expression of
a desire that men should always continue in subjection to those gods
which he confesses to be made by men, and to bewail their future
removal; as if there could be anything more wretched than mankind
tyrannized over by the work of his own hands, since man, by
worshipping the works of his own hands, may more easily cease to be
man, than the works of his hands can, through his worship of them,
become gods. For it can sooner happen that man, who has received an
honorable position, may, through lack of understanding, become
comparable to the beasts, than that the works of man may become
preferable to the work of God, made in His own image, that is, to man
himself. Wherefore deservedly is man left to fall away from Him who
made Him, when he prefers to himself that which he himself has made.
For these vain, deceitful, pernicious, sacrilegious things did the
Egyptian Hermes sorrow, because he knew that the time was coming when
they should be removed. But his sorrow was as impudently expressed as
his knowledge was imprudently obtained; for it was not the Holy Spirit
who revealed these things to him, as He had done to the holy prophets,
who, foreseeing these things, said with exultation, "If a man shall
make gods, lo, they are no gods;" [322] and in another place, "And it
shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord, that I will cut off
the names of the idols out of the land, and they shall no more be
remembered." [323]But the holy Isaiah prophesies expressly
concerning Egypt in reference to this matter, saying, "And the idols
of Egypt shall be moved at His presence, and their heart shall be
overcome in them," [324] and other things to the same effect. And
with the prophet are to be classed those who rejoiced that that which
they knew was to come had actually come,--as Simeon, or Anna, who
immediately recognized Jesus when He was born, or Elisabeth, who in
the Spirit recognized Him when He was conceived, or Peter, who said by
the revelation of the Father, "Thou art Christ, the Son of the living
God." [325]But to this Egyptian those spirits indicated the time of
their own destruction, who also, when the Lord was present in the
flesh, said with trembling, "Art Thou come hither to destroy us before
the time?" [326] meaning by destruction before the time, either that
very destruction which they expected to come, but which they did not
think would come so suddenly as it appeared to have done, or only that
destruction which consisted in their being brought into contempt by
being made known. And, indeed, this was a destruction before the
time, that is, before the time of judgment, when they are to be
punished with eternal damnation, together with all men who are
implicated in their wickedness, as the true religion declares, which
neither errs nor leads into error; for it is not like him who, blown
hither and thither by every wind of doctrine, and mixing true things
with things which are false, bewails as about to perish a religion,
which he afterwards confesses to be error.
Footnotes
[320] These quotations are from a dialogue between Hermes and
Æsculapius, which is said to have been translated into Latin by
Apuleius.
[321] Rom. i. 21.
[322] Jer. xvi. 10.
[323] Zech. xiii. 2.
[324] Isa. xix. 1.
[325] Matt. xvi. 16.
[326] Matt. viii. 29.
Chapter 24.--How Hermes Openly Confessed the Error of His Forefathers,
the Coming Destruction of Which He Nevertheless Bewailed.
After a long interval, Hermes again comes back to the subject of the
gods which men have made, saying as follows: "But enough on this
subject. Let us return to man and to reason, that divine gift on
account of which man has been called a rational animal. For the
things which have been said concerning man, wonderful though they are,
are less wonderful than those which have been said concerning reason.
For man to discover the divine nature, and to make it, surpasses the
wonder of all other wonderful things. Because, therefore, our
forefathers erred very far with respect to the knowledge of the gods,
through incredulity and through want of attention to their worship and
service, they invented this art of making gods; and this art once
invented, they associated with it a suitable virtue borrowed from
universal nature, and being incapable of making souls, they evoked
those of demons or of angels, and united them with these holy images
and divine mysteries, in order that through these souls the images
might have power to do good or harm to men." I know not whether the
demons themselves could have been made, even by adjuration, to confess
as he has confessed in these words: "Because our forefathers erred
very far with respect to the knowledge of the gods, through
incredulity and through want of attention to their worship and
service, they invented the art of making gods." Does he say that it
was a moderate degree of error which resulted in their discovery of
the art of making gods, or was he content to say "they erred?" No; he
must needs add "very far," and say, "They erred very far." It was
this great error and incredulity, then, of their forefathers who did
not attend to the worship and service of the gods, which was the
origin of the art of making gods. And yet this wise man grieves over
the ruin of this art at some future time, as if it were a divine
religion. Is he not verily compelled by divine influence, on the one
hand, to reveal the past error of his forefathers, and by a diabolical
influence, on the other hand, to bewail the future punishment of
demons? For if their forefathers, by erring very far with respect to
the knowledge of the gods, through incredulity and aversion of mind
from their worship and service, invented the art of making gods, what
wonder is it that all that is done by this detestable art, which is
opposed to the divine religion, should be taken away by that religion,
when truth corrects error, faith refutes incredulity, and conversion
rectifies aversion?
For if he had only said, without mentioning the cause, that his
forefathers had discovered the art of making gods, it would have been
our duty, if we paid any regard to what is right and pious, to
consider and to see that they could never have attained to this art if
they had not erred from the truth, if they had believed those things
which are worthy of God, if they had attended to divine worship and
service. However, if we alone should say that the causes of this art
were to be found in the great error and incredulity of men, and
aversion of the mind erring from and unfaithful to divine religion,
the impudence of those who resist the truth were in some way to be
borne with; but when he who admires in man, above all other things,
this power which it has been granted him to practise, and sorrows
because a time is coming when all those figments of gods invented by
men shall even be commanded by the laws to be taken away,--when even
this man confesses nevertheless, and explains the causes which led to
the discovery of this art, saying that their ancestors, through great
error and incredulity, and through not attending to the worship and
service of the gods, invented this art of making gods,--what ought we
to say, or rather to do, but to give to the Lord our God all the
thanks we are able, because He has taken away those things by causes
the contrary of those which led to their institution? For that which
the prevalence of error instituted, the way of truth took away; that
which incredulity instituted, faith took away; that which aversion
from divine worship and service instituted, conversion to the one true
and holy God took away. Nor was this the case only in Egypt, for
which country alone the spirit of the demons lamented in Hermes, but
in all the earth, which sings to the Lord a new song, [327] as the
truly holy and truly prophetic Scriptures have predicted, in which it
is written, "Sing unto the Lord a new song; sing unto the Lord, all
the earth." For the title of this psalm is, "When the house was built
after the captivity." For a house is being built to the Lord in all
the earth, even the city of God, which is the holy Church, after that
captivity in which demons held captive those men who, through faith in
God, became living stones in the house. For although man made gods, it
did not follow that he who made them was not held captive by them,
when, by worshipping them, he was drawn into fellowship with
them,--into the fellowship not of stolid idols, but of cunning demons;
for what are idols but what they are represented to be in the same
scriptures, "They have eyes, but they do not see," [328] and, though
artistically fashioned, are still without life and sensation? But
unclean spirits, associated through that wicked art with these same
idols, have miserably taken captive the souls of their worshippers, by
bringing them down into fellowship with themselves. Whence the
apostle says, "We know that an idol is nothing, but those things which
the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to demons, and not to God; and I
would not ye should have fellowship with demons." [329]After this
captivity, therefore, in which men were held by malign demons, the
house of God is being built in all the earth; whence the title of that
psalm in which it is said, "Sing unto the Lord a new song; sing unto
the Lord, all the earth. Sing unto the Lord, bless His name; declare
well His salvation from day to day. Declare His glory among the
nations, among all people His wonderful things. For great is the
Lord, and much to be praised: He is terrible above all gods. For all
the gods of the nations are demons: but the Lord made the heavens."
[330]
Wherefore he who sorrowed because a time was coming when the worship
of idols should be abolished, and the domination of the demons over
those who worshipped them, wished, under the influence of a demon,
that that captivity should always continue, at the cessation of which
that psalm celebrates the building of the house of the Lord in all the
earth. Hermes foretold these things with grief, the prophet with
joyfulness; and because the Spirit is victorious who sang these things
through the ancient prophets, even Hermes himself was compelled in a
wonderful manner to confess, that those very things which he wished
not to be removed, and at the prospect of whose removal he was
sorrowful, had been instituted, not by prudent, faithful, and
religious, but by erring and unbelieving men, averse to the worship
and service of the gods. And although he calls them gods,
nevertheless, when he says that they were made by such men as we
certainly ought not to be, he shows, whether he will or not, that they
are not to be worshipped by those who do not resemble these
image-makers, that is, by prudent, faithful, and religious men, at the
same time also making it manifest that the very men who made them
involved themselves in the worship of those as gods who were not
gods. For true is the saying of the prophet, "If a man make gods, lo,
they are no gods." [331]Such gods, therefore, acknowledged by such
worshippers and made by such men, did Hermes call "gods made by men,"
that is to say, demons, through some art of I know not what
description, bound by the chains of their own lusts to images. But,
nevertheless, he did not agree with that opinion of the Platonic
Apuleius, of which we have already shown the incongruity and
absurdity, namely, that they were interpreters and intercessors
between the gods whom God made, and men whom the same God made,
bringing to God the prayers of men, and from God the gifts given in
answer to these prayers. For it is exceedingly stupid to believe that
gods whom men have made have more influence with gods whom God has
made than men themselves have, whom the very same God has made. And
consider, too, that it is a demon which, bound by a man to an image by
means of an impious art, has been made a god, but a god to such a man
only, not to every man. What kind of god, therefore, is that which no
man would make but one erring, incredulous, and averse to the true
God? Moreover, if the demons which are worshipped in the temples,
being introduced by some kind of strange art into images, that is,
into visible representations of themselves, by those men who by this
art made gods when they were straying away from, and were averse to
the worship and service of the gods,--if, I say, those demons are
neither mediators nor interpreters between men and the gods, both on
account of their own most wicked and base manners, and because men,
though erring, incredulous, and averse from the worship and service of
the gods, are nevertheless beyond doubt better than the demons whom
they themselves have evoked, then it remains to be affirmed that what
power they possess they possess as demons, doing harm by bestowing
pretended benefits,--harm all the greater for the deception,--or else
openly and undisguisedly doing evil to men. They cannot, however, do
anything of this kind unless where they are permitted by the deep and
secret providence of God, and then only so far as they are permitted.
When, however, they are permitted, it is not because they, being
midway between men and the gods, have through the friendship of the
gods great power over men; for these demons cannot possibly be friends
to the good gods who dwell in the holy and heavenly habitation, by
whom we mean holy angels and rational creatures, whether thrones, or
dominations, or principalities, or powers, from whom they are as far
separated in disposition and character as vice is distant from virtue,
wickedness from goodness.
Footnotes
[327] Ps. xcvi. 1.
[328] Ps. cxv. 5, etc.
[329] 1 Cor. x. 19, 20.
[330] Ps. xcvi. 1-5.
[331] Jer. xvi. 20.
Chapter 25.--Concerning Those Things Which May Be Common to the Holy
Angels and to Men.
Wherefore we must by no means seek, through the supposed mediation of
demons, to avail ourselves of the benevolence or beneficence of the
gods, or rather of the good angels, but through resembling them in the
possession of a good will, through which we are with them, and live
with them, and worship with them the same God, although we cannot see
them with the eyes of our flesh. But it is not in locality we are
distant from them, but in merit of life, caused by our miserable
unlikeness to them in will, and by the weakness of our character; for
the mere fact of our dwelling on earth under the conditions of life in
the flesh does not prevent our fellowship with them. It is only
prevented when we, in the impurity of our hearts, mind earthly
things. But in this present time, while we are being healed that we
may eventually be as they are, we are brought near to them by faith,
if by their assistance we believe that He who is their blessedness is
also ours.
Chapter 26.--That All the Religion of the Pagans Has Reference to Dead
Men.
It is certainly a remarkable thing how this Egyptian, when expressing
his grief that a time was coming when those things would be taken away
from Egypt, which he confesses to have been invented by men erring,
incredulous, and averse to the service of divine religion, says, among
other things, "Then shall that land, the most holy place of shrines
and temples, be full of sepulchres and dead men," as if, in sooth, if
these things were not taken away, men would not die! as if dead bodies
could be buried elsewhere than in the ground! as if, as time advanced,
the number of sepulchres must not necessarily increase in proportion
to the increase of the number of the dead! But they who are of a
perverse mind, and opposed to us, suppose that what he grieves for is
that the memorials of our martyrs were to succeed to their temples and
shrines, in order, forsooth, that they may have grounds for thinking
that gods were worshipped by the pagans in temples, but that dead men
are worshipped by us in sepulchres. For with such blindness do
impious men, as it were, stumble over mountains, and will not see the
things which strike their own eyes, that they do not attend to the
fact that in all the literature of the pagans there are not found any,
or scarcely any gods, who have not been men, to whom, when dead,
divine honors have been paid. I will not enlarge on the fact that
Varro says that all dead men are thought by them to be gods--Manes and
proves it by those sacred rites which are performed in honor of almost
all the dead, among which he mentions funeral games, considering this
the very highest proof of divinity, because games are only wont to be
celebrated in honor of divinities. Hermes himself, of whom we are now
treating, in that same book in which, as if foretelling future things,
he says with sorrow "Then shall that land, the most holy place of
shrines and temples, be full of sepulchres and dead men," testifies
that the gods of Egypt were dead men. For, having said that their
forefathers, erring very far with respect to the knowledge of the
gods, incredulous and inattentive to the divine worship and service,
invented the art of making gods, with which art, when invented, they
associated the appropriate virtue which is inherent in universal
nature, and by mixing up that virtue with this art, they called forth
the souls of demons or of angels (for they could not make souls), and
caused them to take possession of, or associate themselves with holy
images and divine mysteries, in order that through these souls the
images might have power to do good or harm to men;--having said this,
he goes on, as it were, to prove it by illustrations, saying, "Thy
grandsire, O Æsculapius, the first discoverer of medicine, to whom a
temple was consecrated in a mountain of Libya, near to the shore of
the crocodiles, in which temple lies his earthly man, that is, his
body,--for the better part of him, or rather the whole of him, if the
whole man is in the intelligent life, went back to heaven,--affords
even now by his divinity all those helps to infirm men which formerly
he was wont to afford to them by the art of medicine." He says,
therefore that a dead man was worshipped as a god in that place where
he had his sepulchre. He deceives men by a falsehood, for the man
"went back to heaven." Then he adds "Does not Hermes, who was my
grandsire, and whose name I bear, abiding in the country which is
called by his name, help and preserve all mortals who come to him from
every quarter?" For this elder Hermes, that is, Mercury, who, he
says, was his grandsire, is said to be buried in Hermopolis, that is,
in the city called by his name; so here are two gods whom he affirms
to have been men, Æsculapius and Mercury. Now concerning Æsculapius,
both the Greeks and the Latins think the same thing; but as to
Mercury, there are many who do not think that he was formerly a
mortal, though Hermes testifies that he was his grandsire. But are
these two different individuals who were called by the same name? I
will not dispute much whether they are different individuals or not.
It is sufficient to know that this Mercury of whom Hermes speaks is,
as well as Æsculapius, a god who once was a man, according, to the
testimony of this same Trismegistus, esteemed so great by his
countrymen, and also the grandson of Mercury himself.
Hermes goes on to say, "But do we know how many good things Isis, the
wife of Osiris, bestows when she is propitious, and what great
opposition she can offer when enraged?" Then, in order to show that
there were gods made by men through this art, he goes on to say, "For
it is easy for earthly and mundane gods to be angry, being made and
composed by men out of either nature;" thus giving us to understand
that he believed that demons were formerly the souls of dead men,
which, as he says, by means of a certain art invented by men very far
in error, incredulous, and irreligious, were caused to take possession
of images, because they who made such gods were not able to make
souls. When, therefore, he says "either nature," he means soul and
body,--the demon being the soul, and the image the body. What, then,
becomes of that mournful complaint, that the land of Egypt, the most
holy place of shrines and temples, was to be full of sepulchres and
dead men? Verily, the fallacious spirit, by whose inspiration Hermes
spoke these things, was compelled to confess through him that even
already that land was full of sepulchres and of dead men, whom they
were worshipping as gods. But it was the grief of the demons which
was expressing itself through his mouth, who were sorrowing on account
of the punishments which were about to fall upon them at the tombs of
the martyrs. For in many such places they are tortured and compelled
to confess, and are cast out of the bodies of men, of which they had
taken possession.
Chapter 27.--Concerning the Nature of the Honor Which the Christians
Pay to Their Martyrs.
But, nevertheless, we do not build temples, and ordain priests, rites,
and sacrifices for these same martyrs; for they are not our gods, but
their God is our God. Certainly we honor their reliquaries, as the
memorials of holy men of God who strove for the truth even to the
death of their bodies, that the true religion might be made known, and
false and fictitious religions exposed. For if there were some before
them who thought that these religions were really false and
fictitious, they were afraid to give expression to their convictions.
But who ever heard a priest of the faithful, standing at an altar
built for the honor and worship of God over the holy body of some
martyr, say in the prayers, I offer to thee a sacrifice, O Peter, or O
Paul, or O Cyprian? for it is to God that sacrifices are offered at
their tombs,--the God who made them both men and martyrs, and
associated them with holy angels in celestial honor; and the reason
why we pay such honors to their memory is, that by so doing we may
both give thanks to the true God for their victories, and, by
recalling them afresh to remembrance, may stir ourselves up to imitate
them by seeking to obtain like crowns and palms, calling to our help
that same God on whom they called. Therefore, whatever honors the
religious may pay in the places of the martyrs, they are but honors
rendered to their memory, [332] not sacred rites or sacrifices offered
to dead men as to gods. And even such as bring thither food,--which,
indeed, is not done by the better Christians, and in most places of
the world is not done at all,--do so in order that it may be
sanctified to them through the merits of the martyrs, in the name of
the Lord of the martyrs, first presenting the food and offering
prayer, and thereafter taking it away to be eaten, or to be in part
bestowed upon the needy. [333]But he who knows the one sacrifice of
Christians, which is the sacrifice offered in those places, also knows
that these are not sacrifices offered to the martyrs. It is, then,
neither with divine honors nor with human crimes, by which they
worship their gods, that we honor our martyrs; neither do we offer
sacrifices to them, or convert the crimes of the gods into their
sacred rites. For let those who will and can read the letter of
Alexander to his mother Olympias, in which he tells the things which
were revealed to him by the priest Leon, and let those who have read
it recall to memory what it contains, that they may see what great
abominations have been handed down to memory, not by poets, but by the
mystic writings of the Egyptians, concerning the goddess Isis, the
wife of Osiris, and the parents of both, all of whom, according to
these writings, were royal personages. Isis, when sacrificing to her
parents, is said to have discovered a crop of barley, of which she
brought some ears to the king her husband, and his councillor
Mercurius, and hence they identify her with Ceres. Those who read the
letter may there see what was the character of those people to whom
when dead sacred rites were instituted as to gods, and what those
deeds of theirs were which furnished the occasion for these rites.
Let them not once dare to compare in any respect those people, though
they hold them to be gods, to our holy martyrs, though we do not hold
them to be gods. For we do not ordain priests and offer sacrifices to
our martyrs, as they do to their dead men, for that would be
incongruous, undue, and unlawful, such being due only to God; and thus
we do not delight them with their own crimes, or with such shameful
plays as those in which the crimes of the gods are celebrated, which
are either real crimes committed by them at a time when they were men,
or else, if they never were men, fictitious crimes invented for the
pleasure of noxious demons. The god of Socrates, if he had a god,
cannot have belonged to this class of demons. But perhaps they who
wished to excel in this art of making gods, imposed a god of this sort
on a man who was a stranger to, and innocent of any connection with
that art. What need we say more? No one who is even moderately wise
imagines that demons are to be worshipped on account of the blessed
life which is to be after death. But perhaps they will say that all
the gods are good, but that of the demons some are bad and some good,
and that it is the good who are to be worshipped, in order that
through them we may attain to the eternally blessed life. To the
examination of this opinion we will devote the following book.
Footnotes
[332] Ornamenta memoriarum.
[333] Comp. The Confessions, vi. 2.
.
Book IX.
Argument--Having in the preceding book shown that the worship of
demons must be abjured, since they in a thousand ways proclaim
themselves to be wicked spirits, Augustin in this book meets those who
allege a distinction among demons, some being evil, while others are
good; and, having exploded this distinction, he proves that to no
demon, but to Christ alone, belongs the office of providing men with
eternal blessedness.
Chapter 1.--The Point at Which the Discussion Has Arrived, and What
Remains to Be Handled.
Some have advanced the opinion that there are both good and bad gods;
but some, thinking more respectfully of the gods, have attributed to
them so much honor and praise as to preclude the supposition of any
god being wicked. But those who have maintained that there are wicked
gods as well as good ones have included the demons under the name
"gods," and sometimes though more rarely, have called the gods demons;
so that they admit that Jupiter, whom they make the king and head of
all the rest, is called a demon by Homer. [334]Those, on the other
hand, who maintain that the gods are all good, and far more excellent
than the men who are justly called good, are moved by the actions of
the demons, which they can neither deny nor impute to the gods whose
goodness they affirm, to distinguish between gods and demons; so that,
whenever they find anything offensive in the deeds or sentiments by
which unseen spirits manifest their power, they believe this to
proceed not from the gods, but from the demons. At the same time they
believe that, as no god can hold direct intercourse with men, these
demons hold the position of mediators, ascending with prayers, and
returning with gifts. This is the opinion of the Platonists, the
ablest and most esteemed of their philosophers, with whom we therefore
chose to debate this question,--whether the worship of a number of
gods is of any service toward obtaining blessedness in the future
life. And this is the reason why, in the preceding book, we have
inquired how the demons, who take pleasure in such things as good and
wise men loathe and execrate, in the sacrilegious and immoral fictions
which the poets have written not of men, but of the gods themselves,
and in the wicked and criminal violence of magical arts, can be
regarded as more nearly related and more friendly to the gods than men
are, and can mediate between good men and the good gods; and it has
been demonstrated that this is absolutely impossible.
Footnotes
[334] See Plutarch, on the Cessation of Oracles.
Chapter 2.--Whether Among the Demons, Inferior to the Gods, There are
Any Good Spirits Under Whose Guardianship the Human Soul Might Reach
True Blessedness.
This book, then, ought, according to the promise made in the end of
the preceding one, to contain a discussion, not of the difference
which exists among the gods, who, according to the Platonists, are all
good, nor of the difference between gods and demons, the former of
whom they separate by a wide interval from men, while the latter are
placed intermediately between the gods and men, but of the difference,
since they make one, among the demons themselves. This we shall
discuss so far as it bears on our theme. It has been the common and
usual belief that some of the demons are bad, others good; and this
opinon, whether it be that of the Platonists or any other sect, must
by no means be passed over in silence, lest some one suppose he ought
to cultivate the good demons in order that by their mediation he may
be accepted by the gods, all of whom he believes to be good, and that
he may live with them after death; whereas he would thus be ensnared
in the toils of wicked spirits, and would wander far from the true
God, with whom alone, and in whom alone, the human soul, that is to
say, the soul that is rational and intellectual, is blessed.
Chapter 3.--What Apuleius Attributes to the Demons, to Whom, Though He
Does Not Deny Them Reason, He Does Not Ascribe Virtue.
What, then, is the difference between good and evil demons? For the
Platonist Apuleius, in a treatise on this whole subject, [335] while
he says a great deal about their aerial bodies, has not a word to say
of the spiritual virtues with which, if they were good, they must have
been endowed. Not a word has he said, then, of that which could give
them happiness; but proof of their misery he has given, acknowledging
that their mind, by which they rank as reasonable beings, is not only
not imbued and fortified with virtue so as to resist all unreasonable
passions, but that it is somehow agitated with tempestuous emotions,
and is thus on a level with the mind of foolish men. His own words
are: "It is this class of demons the poets refer to, when, without
serious error, they feign that the gods hate and love individuals
among men, prospering and ennobling some, and opposing and distressing
others. Therefore pity, indignation, grief, joy, every human emotion
is experienced by the demons, with the same mental disturbance, and
the same tide of feeling and thought. These turmoils and tempests
banish them far from the tranquility of the celestial gods." Can
there be any doubt that in these words it is not some inferior part of
their spiritual nature, but the very mind by which the demons hold
their rank as rational beings, which he says is tossed with passion
like a stormy sea? They cannot, then, be compared even to wise men,
who with undisturbed mind resist these perturbations to which they are
exposed in this life, and from which human infirmity is never exempt,
and who do not yield themselves to approve of or perpetrate anything
which might deflect them from the path of wisdom and law of
rectitude. They resemble in character, though not in bodily
appearance, wicked and foolish men. I might indeed say they are
worse, inasmuch as they have grown old in iniquity, and incorrigible
by punishment. Their mind, as Apuleius says, is a sea tossed with
tempest, having no rallying point of truth or virtue in their soul
from which they can resist their turbulent and depraved emotions.
Footnotes
[335] The De Deo Socratis.
Chapter 4.--The Opinion of the Peripatetics and Stoics About Mental
Emotions.
Among the philosophers there are two opinions about these mental
emotions, which the Greeks call pathe, while some of our own writers,
as Cicero, call them perturbations, [336] some affections, and some,
to render the Greek word more accurately, passions. Some say that
even the wise man is subject to these perturbations, though moderated
and controlled by reason, which imposes laws upon them, and so
restrains them within necessary bounds. This is the opinion of the
Platonists and Aristotelians; for Aristotle was Plato's disciple, and
the founder of the Peripatetic school. But others, as the Stoics, are
of opinion that the wise man is not subject to these perturbations.
But Cicero, in his book De Finibus, shows that the Stoics are here at
variance with the Platonists and Peripatetics rather in words than in
reality; for the Stoics decline to apply the term "goods" to external
and bodily advantages, [337] because they reckon that the only good is
virtue, the art of living well, and this exists only in the mind. The
other philosophers, again, use the simple and customary phraseology,
and do not scruple to call these things goods, though in comparison of
virtue, which guides our life, they are little and of small esteem.
And thus it is obvious that, whether these outward things are called
goods or advantages, they are held in the same estimation by both
parties, and that in this matter the Stoics are pleasing themselves
merely with a novel phraseology. It seems, then, to me that in this
question, whether the wise man is subject to mental passions, or
wholly free from them, the controversy is one of words rather than of
things; for I think that, if the reality and not the mere sound of the
words is considered, the Stoics hold precisely the same opinion as the
Platonists and Peripatetics. For, omitting for brevity's sake other
proofs which I might adduce in support of this opinion, I will state
but one which I consider conclusive. Aulus Gellius, a man of
extensive erudition, and gifted with an eloquent and graceful style,
relates, in his work entitled Noctes Atticæ [338] that he once made a
voyage with an eminent Stoic philosopher; and he goes on to relate
fully and with gusto what I shall barely state, that when the ship was
tossed and in danger from a violent storm, the philosopher grew pale
with terror. This was noticed by those on board, who, though
themselves threatened with death, were curious to see whether a
philosopher would be agitated like other men. When the tempest had
passed over, and as soon as their security gave them freedom to resume
their talk, one of the passengers, a rich and luxurious Asiatic,
begins to banter the philosopher, and rally him because he had even
become pale with fear, while he himself had been unmoved by the
impending destruction. But the philosopher availed himself of the
reply of Aristippus the Socratic, who, on finding himself similarly
bantered by a man of the same character, answered, "You had no cause
for anxiety for the soul of a profligate debauchee, but I had reason
to be alarmed for the soul of Aristippus." The rich man being thus
disposed of, Aulus Gellius asked the philosopher, in the interests of
science and not to annoy him, what was the reason of his fear? And he
willing to instruct a man so zealous in the pursuit of knowledge, at
once took from his wallet a book of Epictetus the Stoic, [339] in
which doctrines were advanced which precisely harmonized with those of
Zeno and Chrysippus, the founders of the Stoical school. Aulus
Gellius says that he read in this book that the Stoics maintain that
there are certain impressions made on the soul by external objects
which they call phantasiæ, and that it is not in the power of the soul
to determine whether or when it shall be invaded by these. When these
impressions are made by alarming and formidable objects, it must needs
be that they move the soul even of the wise man, so that for a little
he trembles with fear, or is depressed by sadness, these impressions
anticipating the work of reason and self-control; but this does not
imply that the mind accepts these evil impressions, or approves or
consents to them. For this consent is, they think, in a man's power;
there being this difference between the mind of the wise man and that
of the fool, that the fool's mind yields to these passions and
consents to them, while that of the wise man, though it cannot help
being invaded by them, yet retains with unshaken firmness a true and
steady persuasion of those things which it ought rationally to desire
or avoid. This account of what Aulus Gellius relates that he read in
the book of Epictetus about the sentiments and doctrines of the Stoics
I have given as well as I could, not, perhaps, with his choice
language, but with greater brevity, and, I think, with greater
clearness. And if this be true, then there is no difference, or next
to none, between the opinion of the Stoics and that of the other
philosophers regarding mental passions and perturbations, for both
parties agree in maintaining that the mind and reason of the wise man
are not subject to these. And perhaps what the Stoics mean by
asserting this, is that the wisdom which characterizes the wise man is
clouded by no error and sullied by no taint, but, with this
reservation that his wisdom remains undisturbed, he is exposed to the
impressions which the goods and ills of this life (or, as they prefer
to call them, the advantages or disadvantages) make upon them. For we
need not say that if that philosopher had thought nothing of those
things which he thought he was forthwith to lose, life and bodily
safety, he would not have been so terrified by his danger as to betray
his fear by the pallor of his cheek. Nevertheless, he might suffer
this mental disturbance, and yet maintain the fixed persuasion that
life and bodily safety, which the violence of the tempest threatened
to destroy, are not those good things which make their possessors
good, as the possession of righteousness does. But in so far as they
persist that we must call them not goods but advantages, they quarrel
about words and neglect things. For what difference does it make
whether goods or advantages be the better name, while the Stoic no
less than the Peripatetic is alarmed at the prospect of losing them,
and while, though they name them differently, they hold them in like
esteem? Both parties assure us that, if urged to the commission of
some immorality or crime by the threatened loss of these goods or
advantages, they would prefer to lose such things as preserve bodily
comfort and security rather than commit such things as violate
righteousness. And thus the mind in which this resolution is well
grounded suffers no perturbations to prevail with it in opposition to
reason, even though they assail the weaker parts of the soul; and not
only so, but it rules over them, and, while it refuses its consent and
resists them, administers a reign of virtue. Such a character is
ascribed to Æneas by Virgil when he says,
"He stands immovable by tears,
Nor tenderest words with pity hears." [340]
Footnotes
[336] De Fin. iii. 20; Tusc. Disp. iii. 4.
[337] The distinction between bona and commoda is thus given by Seneca
(Ep. 87, ad fin.): Commodum est quod plus usus est quam molestiæ;
bonum sincerum debet esse et ab omni parte innoxium.
[338] Book xix. ch. 1.
[339] See Diog. Laert. ii. 71.
[340] Virgil, Æn. iv. 449.
Chapter 5.--That the Passions Which Assail the Souls of Christians Do
Not Seduce Them to Vice, But Exercise Their Virtue.
We need not at present give a careful and copious exposition of the
doctrine of Scripture, the sum of Christian knowledge, regarding these
passions. It subjects the mind itself to God, that He may rule and
aid it, and the passions, again, to the mind, to moderate and bridle
them, and turn them to righteous uses. In our ethics, we do not so
much inquire whether a pious soul is angry, as why he is angry; not
whether he is sad, but what is the cause of his sadness; not whether
he fears, but what he fears. For I am not aware that any right
thinking person would find fault with anger at a wrongdoer which seeks
his amendment, or with sadness which intends relief to the suffering,
or with fear lest one in danger be destroyed. The Stoics, indeed, are
accustomed to condemn compassion. [341]But how much more honorable
had it been in that Stoic we have been telling of, had he been
disturbed by compassion prompting him to relieve a fellow-creature,
than to be disturbed by the fear of shipwreck! Far better and more
humane, and more consonant with pious sentiments, are the words of
Cicero in praise of Cæsar, when he says, "Among your virtues none is
more admirable and agreeable than your compassion." [342]And what
is compassion but a fellow-feeling for another's misery, which prompts
us to help him if we can? And this emotion is obedient to reason,
when compassion is shown without violating right, as when the poor are
relieved, or the penitent forgiven. Cicero, who knew how to use
language, did not hesitate to call this a virtue, which the Stoics are
not ashamed to reckon among the vices, although, as the book of the
eminent Stoic, Epictetus, quoting the opinions of Zeno and Chrysippus,
the founders of the school, has taught us, they admit that passions of
this kind invade the soul of the wise man, whom they would have to be
free from all vice. Whence it follows that these very passions are
not judged by them to be vices, since they assail the wise man without
forcing him to act against reason and virtue; and that, therefore, the
opinion of the Peripatetics or Platonists and of the Stoics is one and
the same. But, as Cicero says, [343] mere logomachy is the bane of
these pitiful Greeks, who thirst for contention rather than for
truth. However, it may justly be asked, whether our subjection to
these affections, even while we follow virtue, is a part of the
infirmity of this life? For the holy angels feel no anger while they
punish those whom the eternal law of God consigns to punishment, no
fellow-feeling with misery while they relieve the miserable, no fear
while they aid those who are in danger; and yet ordinary language
ascribes to them also these mental emotions, because, though they have
none of our weakness, their acts resemble the actions to which these
emotions move us; and thus even God Himself is said in Scripture to be
angry, and yet without any perturbation. For this word is used of the
effect of His vengeance, not of the disturbing mental affection.
Footnotes
[341] Seneca, De Clem. ii. 4 and 5.
[342] Pro. Lig. c. 12.
[343] De Oratore,i. 11, 47.
Chapter 6.--Of the Passions Which, According to Apuleius, Agitate the
Demons Who Are Supposed by Him to Mediate Between Gods and Men.
Deferring for the present the question about the holy angels, let us
examine the opinion of the Platonists, that the demons who mediate
between gods and men are agitated by passions. For if their mind,
though exposed to their incursion, still remained free and superior to
them, Apuleius could not have said that their hearts are tossed with
passions as the sea by stormy winds. [344]Their mind, then,--that
superior part of their soul whereby they are rational beings, and
which, if it actually exists in them, should rule and bridle the
turbulent passions of the inferior parts of the soul,--this mind of
theirs, I say, is, according to the Platonist referred to, tossed with
a hurricane of passions. The mind of the demons, therefore, is
subject to the emotions of fear, anger, lust, and all similar
affections. What part of them, then, is free, and endued with wisdom,
so that they are pleasing to the gods, and the fit guides of men into
purity of life, since their very highest part, being the slave of
passion and subject to vice, only makes them more intent on deceiving
and seducing, in proportion to the mental force and energy of desire
they possess?
Footnotes
[344] De Deo Soc.
Chapter 7.--That the Platonists Maintain that the Poets Wrong the Gods
by Representing Them as Distracted by Party Feeling, to Which the
Demons and Not the Gods, are Subject.
But if any one says that it is not of all the demons, but only of the
wicked, that the poets, not without truth, say that they violently
love or hate certain men,--for it was of them Apuleius said that they
were driven about by strong currents of emotion,--how can we accept
this interpretation, when Apuleius, in the very same connection,
represents all the demons, and not only the wicked, as intermediate
between gods and men by their aerial bodies? The fiction of the
poets, according to him, consists in their making gods of demons, and
giving them the names of gods, and assigning them as allies or enemies
to individual men, using this poetical license, though they profess
that the gods are very different in character from the demons, and far
exalted above them by their celestial abode and wealth of beatitude.
This, I say, is the poets' fiction, to say that these are gods who are
not gods, and that, under the names of gods, they fight among
themselves about the men whom they love or hate with keen partisan
feeling. Apuleius says that this is not far from the truth, since,
though they are wrongfully called by the names of the gods, they are
described in their own proper character as demons. To this category,
he says, belongs the Minerva of Homer, "who interposed in the ranks of
the Greeks to restrain Achilles." [345]For that this was Minerva he
supposes to be poetical fiction; for he thinks that Minerva is a
goddess, and he places her among the gods whom he believes to be all
good and blessed in the sublime ethereal region, remote from
intercourse with men. But that there was a demon favorable to the
Greeks and adverse to the Trojans, as another, whom the same poet
mentions under the name of Venus or Mars (gods exalted above earthly
affairs in their heavenly habitations), was the Trojans' ally and the
foe of the Greeks, and that these demons fought for those they loved
against those they hated,--in all this he owned that the poets stated
something very like the truth. For they made these statements about
beings to whom he ascribes the same violent and tempestuous passions
as disturb men, and who are therefore capable of loves and hatreds not
justly formed, but formed in a party spirit, as the spectators in
races or hunts take fancies and prejudices. It seems to have been the
great fear of this Platonist that the poetical fictions should be
believed of the gods, and not of the demons who bore their names.
Footnotes
[345] De Deo. Soc.
Chapter 8.--How Apuleius Defines the Gods Who Dwell in Heaven, the
Demons Who Occupy the Air, and Men Who Inhabit Earth.
The definition which Apuleius gives of demons, and in which he of
course includes all demons, is that they are in nature animals, in
soul subject to passion, in mind reasonable, in body aerial, in
duration eternal. Now in these five qualities he has named absolutely
nothing which is proper to good men and not also to bad. For when
Apuleius had spoken of the celestials first, and had then extended his
description so as to include an account of those who dwell far below
on the earth, that, after describing the two extremes of rational
being, he might proceed to speak of the intermediate demons, he says,
"Men, therefore, who are endowed with the faculty of reason and
speech, whose soul is immortal and their members mortal, who have weak
and anxious spirits, dull and corruptible bodies, dissimilar
characters, similar ignorance, who are obstinate in their audacity,
and persistent in their hope, whose labor is vain, and whose fortune
is ever on the wane, their race immortal, themselves perishing, each
generation replenished with creatures whose life is swift and their
wisdom slow, their death sudden and their life a wail,--these are the
men who dwell on the earth." [346]In recounting so many qualities
which belong to the large proportion of men, did he forget that which
is the property of the few when he speaks of their wisdom being slow?
If this had been omitted, this his description of the human race, so
carefully elaborated, would have been defective. And when he commended
the excellence of the gods, he affirmed that they excelled in that
very blessedness to which he thinks men must attain by wisdom. And
therefore, if he had wished us to believe that some of the demons are
good, he should have inserted in his description something by which we
might see that they have, in common with the gods, some share of
blessedness, or, in common with men, some wisdom. But, as it is, he
has mentioned no good quality by which the good may be distinguished
from the bad. For although he refrained from giving a full account of
their wickedness, through fear of offending, not themselves but their
worshippers, for whom he was writing, yet he sufficiently indicated to
discerning readers what opinion he had of them; for only in the one
article of the eternity of their bodies does he assimilate them to the
gods, all of whom, he asserts, are good and blessed, and absolutely
free from what he himself calls the stormy passions of the demons; and
as to the soul, he quite plainly affirms that they resemble men and
not the gods, and that this resemblance lies not in the possession of
wisdom, which even men can attain to, but in the perturbation of
passions which sway the foolish and wicked, but is so ruled by the
good and wise that they prefer not to admit rather than to conquer
it. For if he had wished it to be understood that the demons
resembled the gods in the eternity not of their bodies but of their
souls, he would certainly have admitted men to share in this
privilege, because, as a Platonist, he of course must hold that the
human soul is eternal. Accordingly, when describing this race of
living beings, he said that their souls were immortal, their members
mortal. And, consequently, if men have not eternity in common with
the gods because they have mortal bodies, demons have eternity in
common with the gods because their bodies are immortal.
Footnotes
[346] De Deo Soc.
Chapter 9.--Whether the Intercession of the Demons Can Secure for Men
the Friendship of the Celestial Gods.
How, then, can men hope for a favorable introduction to the friendship
of the gods by such mediators as these, who are, like men, defective
in that which is the better part of every living creature, viz., the
soul, and who resemble the gods only in the body, which is the
inferior part? For a living creature or animal consists of soul and
body, and of these two parts the soul is undoubtedly the better; even
though vicious and weak, it is obviously better than even the soundest
and strongest body, for the greater excellence of its nature is not
reduced to the level of the body even by the pollution of vice, as
gold, even when tarnished, is more precious than the purest silver or
lead. And yet these mediators, by whose interposition things human
and divine are to be harmonized, have an eternal body in common with
the gods, and a vicious soul in common with men,--as if the religion
by which these demons are to unite gods and men were a bodily, and not
a spiritual matter. What wickedness, then, or punishment has
suspended these false and deceitful mediators, as it were head
downwards, so that their inferior part, their body, is linked to the
gods above, and their superior part, the soul, bound to men beneath;
united to the celestial gods by the part that serves, and miserable,
together with the inhabitants of earth, by the part that rules? For
the body is the servant, as Sallust says: "We use the soul to rule,
the body to obey;" [347] adding, "the one we have in common with the
gods, the other with the brutes." For he was here speaking of men;
and they have, like the brutes, a mortal body. These demons, whom our
philosophic friends have provided for us as mediators with the gods,
may indeed say of the soul and body, the one we have in common with
the gods, the other with men; but, as I said, they are as it were
suspended and bound head downwards, having the slave, the body, in
common with the gods, the master, the soul, in common with miserable
men,--their inferior part exalted, their superior part depressed. And
therefore, if any one supposes that, because they are not subject,
like terrestrial animals, to the separation of soul and body by death,
they therefore resemble the gods in their eternity, their body must
not be considered a chariot of an eternal triumph, but rather the
chain of an eternal punishment.
Footnotes
[347] Cat. Conj.i.
Chapter 10.--That, According to Plotinus, Men, Whose Body is Mortal,
are Less Wretched Than Demons, Whose Body is Eternal.
Plotinus, whose memory is quite recent, [348] enjoys the reputation of
having understood Plato better than any other of his disciples. In
speaking of human souls, he says, "The Father in compassion made their
bonds mortal;" [349] that is to say, he considered it due to the
Father's mercy that men, having a mortal body, should not be forever
confined in the misery of this life. But of this mercy the demons
have been judged unworthy, and they have received, in conjunction with
a soul subject to passions, a body not mortal like man's, but
eternal. For they should have been happier than men if they had, like
men, had a mortal body, and, like the gods, a blessed soul. And they
should have been equal to men, if in conjunction with a miserable soul
they had at least received, like men, a mortal body, so that death
might have freed them from trouble, if, at least, they should have
attained some degree of piety. But, as it is, they are not only no
happier than men, having, like them, a miserable soul, they are also
more wretched, being eternally bound to the body; for he does not
leave us to infer that by some progress in wisdom and piety they can
become gods, but expressly says that they are demons forever.
Footnotes
[348] Plotinus died in 270 A.D. For his relation to Plato, see
Augustin's Contra Acad. iii. 41.
[349] Ennead. iv. 3. 12.
Chapter 11.--Of the Opinion of the Platonists, that the Souls of Men
Become Demons When Disembodied.
He [350] says, indeed, that the souls of men are demons, and that men
become Lares if they are good, Lemures or Larvæ if they are bad, and
Manes if it is uncertain whether they de serve well or ill. Who does
not see at a glance that this is a mere whirlpool sucking men to moral
destruction? For, however wicked men have been, if they suppose they
shall become Larvæ or divine Manes, they will become the worse the
more love they have for inflicting injury; for, as the Larvæ are
hurtful demons made out of wicked men, these men must suppose that
after death they will be invoked with sacrifices and divine honors
that they may inflict injuries. But this question we must not
pursue. He also states that the blessed are called in Greek
eudaimones, because they are good souls, that is to say, good demons,
confirming his opinion that the souls of men are demons.
Footnotes
[350] Apuleius, not Plotinus.
Chapter 12.--Of the Three Opposite Qualities by Which the Platonists
Distinguish Between the Nature of Men and that of Demons.
But at present we are speaking of those beings whom he described as
being properly intermediate between gods and men, in nature animals,
in mind rational, in soul subject to passion, in body aerial, in
duration eternal. When he had distinguished the gods, whom he placed
in the highest heaven, from men, whom he placed on earth, not only by
position but also by the unequal dignity of their natures, he
concluded in these words: "You have here two kinds of animals: the
gods, widely distinguished from men by sublimity of abode, perpetuity
of life, perfection of nature; for their habitations are separated by
so wide an interval that there can be no intimate communication
between them, and while the vitality of the one is eternal and
indefeasible, that of the others is fading and precarious, and while
the spirits of the gods are exalted in bliss, those of men are sunk in
miseries." [351]Here I find three opposite qualities ascribed to
the extremes of being, the highest and lowest. For, after mentioning
the three qualities for which we are to admire the gods, he repeated,
though in other words, the same three as a foil to the defects of
man. The three qualities are, "sublimity of abode, perpetuity of
life, perfection of nature." These he again mentioned so as to bring
out their contrasts in man's condition. As he had mentioned
"sublimity of abode," he says, "Their habitations are separated by so
wide an interval;" as he had mentioned "perpetuity of life," he says,
that "while divine life is eternal and indefeasible, human life is
fading and precarious;" and as he had mentioned "perfection of
nature," he says, that "while the spirits of the gods are exalted in
bliss, those of men are sunk in miseries." These three things, then,
he predicates of the gods, exaltation, eternity, blessedness; and of
man he predicates the opposite, lowliness of habitation, mortality,
misery.
Footnotes
[351] De Deo Socratis.
Chapter 13.--How the Demons Can Mediate Between Gods and Men If They
Have Nothing in Common with Both, Being Neither Blessed Like the Gods,
Nor Miserable Like Men.
If, now, we endeavor to find between these opposites the mean occupied
by the demons, there can be no question as to their local position;
for, between the highest and lowest place, there is a place which is
rightly considered and called the middle place. The other two
qualities remain, and to them we must give greater care, that we may
see whether they are altogether foreign to the demons, or how they are
so bestowed upon them without infringing upon their mediate position.
We may dismiss the idea that they are foreign to them. For we cannot
say that the demons, being rational animals, are neither blessed nor
wretched, as we say of the beasts and plants, which are void of
feeling and reason, or as we say of the middle place, that it is
neither the highest nor the lowest. The demons, being rational, must
be either miserable or blessed. And, in like manner, we cannot say
that they are neither mortal nor immortal; for all living things
either live eternally or end life in death. Our author, besides,
stated that the demons are eternal. What remains for us to suppose,
then, but that these mediate beings are assimilated to the gods in one
of the two remaining qualities, and to men in the other? For if they
received both from above, or both from beneath, they should no longer
be mediate, but either rise to the gods above, or sink to men
beneath. Therefore, as it has been demonstrated that they must
possess these two qualities, they will hold their middle place if they
receive one from each party. Consequently, as they cannot receive
their eternity from beneath, because it is not there to receive, they
must get it from above; and accordingly they have no choice but to
complete their mediate position by accepting misery from men.
According to the Platonists, then, the gods, who occupy the highest
place, enjoy eternal blessedness, or blessed eternity; men, who occupy
the lowest, a mortal misery, or a miserable mortality; and the demons,
who occupy the mean, a miserable eternity, or an eternal misery. As
to those five things which Apu leius included in his definition of
demons, he did not show, as he promised, that the demons are mediate.
For three of them, that their nature is animal, their mind rational,
their soul subject to passions, he said that they have in common with
men; one thing, their eternity, in common with the gods; and one
proper to themselves, their aerial body. How, then, are they
intermediate, when they have three things in common with the lowest,
and only one in common with the highest? Who does not see that the
intermediate position is abandoned in proportion as they tend to, and
are depressed towards, the lowest extreme? But perhaps we are to
accept them as intermediate because of their one property of an aerial
body, as the two extremes have each their proper body, the gods an
ethereal, men a terrestrial body, and because two of the qualities
they possess in common with man they possess also in common with the
gods, namely, their animal nature and rational mind. For Apuleius
himself, in speaking of gods and men, said, "You have two animal
natures." And Platonists are wont to ascribe a rational mind to the
gods. Two qualities remain, their liability to passion, and their
eternity,--the first of which they have in common with men, the second
with the gods; so that they are neither wafted to the highest nor
depressed to the lowest extreme, but perfectly poised in their
intermediate position. But then, this is the very circumstance which
constitutes the eternal misery, or miserable eternity, of the demons.
For he who says that their soul is subject to passions would also have
said that they are miserable, had he not blushed for their
worshippers. Moreover, as the world is governed, not by fortuitous
haphazard, but, as the Platonists themselves avow, by the providence
of the supreme God, the misery of the demons would not be eternal
unless their wickedness were great.
If, then, the blessed are rightly styled eudemons, the demons
intermediate between gods and men are not eudemons. What, then, is
the local position of those good demons, who, above men but beneath
the gods, afford assistance to the former, minister to the latter?
For if they are good and eternal, they are doubtless blessed. But
eternal blessedness destroys their intermediate character, giving them
a close resemblance to the gods, and widely separating them from men.
And therefore the Platonists will in vain strive to show how the good
demons, if they are both immortal and blessed, can justly be said to
hold a middle place between the gods, who are immortal and blessed,
and men, who are mortal and miserable. For if they have both
immortality and blessedness in common with the gods, and neither of
these in common with men, who are both miserable and mortal, are they
not rather remote from men and united with the gods, than intermediate
between them. They would be intermediate if they held one of their
qualities in common with the one party, and the other with the other,
as man is a kind of mean between angels and beasts,--the beast being
an irrational and mortal animal, the angel a rational and immortal
one, while man, inferior to the angel and superior to the beast, and
having in common with the one mortality, and with the other reason, is
a rational and mortal animal. So, when we seek for an intermediate
between the blessed immortals and miserable mortals, we should find a
being which is either mortal and blessed, or immortal and miserable.
Chapter 14.--Whether Men, Though Mortal, Can Enjoy True Blessedness.
It is a great question among men, whether man can be mortal and
blessed. Some, taking the humbler view of his condition, have denied
that he is capable of blessedness so long as he continues in this
mortal life; others, again, have spurned this idea, and have been bold
enough to maintain that, even though mortal, men may be blessed by
attaining wisdom. But if this be the case, why are not these wise men
constituted mediators between miserable mortals and the blessed
immortals, since they have blessedness in common with the latter, and
mortality in common with the former? Certainly, if they are blessed,
they envy no one (for what more miserable than envy?), but seek with
all their might to help miserable mortals on to blessedness, so that
after death they may become immortal, and be associated with the
blessed and immortal angels.
Chapter 15.--Of the Man Christ Jesus, the Mediator Between God and
Men.
But if, as is much more probable and credible, it must needs be that
all men, so long as they are mortal, are also miserable, we must seek
an intermediate who is not only man, but also God, that, by the
interposition of His blessed mortality, He may bring men out of their
mortal misery to a blessed immortality. In this intermediate two
things are requisite, that He become mortal, and that He do not
continue mortal. He did become mortal, not rendering the divinity of
the Word infirm, but assuming the infirmity of flesh. Neither did He
continue mortal in the flesh, but raised it from the dead; for it is
the very fruit of His mediation that those, for the sake of whose
redemption He became the Mediator, should not abide eternally in
bodily death. Wherefore it became the Mediator between us and God to
have both a transient mortality and a permanent blessedness, that by
that which is transient He might be assimilated to mortals, and might
translate them from mortality to that which is permanent. Good
angels, therefore, cannot mediate between miserable mortals and
blessed immortals, for they themselves also are both blessed and
immortal; but evil angels can mediate, because they are immortal like
the one party, miserable like the other. To these is opposed the good
Mediator, who, in opposition to their immortality and misery, has
chosen to be mortal for a time, and has been able to continue blessed
in eternity. It is thus He has destroyed, by the humility of His
death and the benignity of His blessedness, those proud immortals and
hurtful wretches, and has prevented them from seducing to misery by
their boast of immortality those men whose hearts He has cleansed by
faith, and whom He has thus freed from their impure dominion.
Man, then, mortal and miserable, and far removed from the immortal and
the blessed, what medium shall he choose by which he may be united to
immortality and blessedness? The immortality of the demons, which
might have some charm for man, is miserable; the mortality of Christ,
which might offend man, exists no longer. In the one there is the
fear of an eternal misery; in the other, death, which could not be
eternal, can no longer be feared, and blessedness, which is eternal,
must be loved. For the immortal and miserable mediator interposes
himself to prevent us from passing to a blessed immortality, because
that which hinders such a passage, namely, misery, continues in him;
but the mortal and blessed Mediator interposed Himself, in order that,
having passed through mortality, He might of mortals make immortals
(showing His power to do this in His own resurrection), and from being
miserable to raise them to the blessed company from the number of whom
He had Himself never departed. There is, then, a wicked mediator, who
separates friends, and a good Mediator, who reconciles enemies. And
those who separate are numerous, because the multitude of the blessed
are blessed only by their participation in the one God; of which
participation the evil angels being deprived, they are wretched, and
interpose to hinder rather than to help to this blessedness, and by
their very number prevent us from reaching that one beatific good, to
obtain which we need not many but one Mediator, the uncreated Word of
God, by whom all things were made, and in partaking of whom we are
blessed. I do not say that He is Mediator because He is the Word, for
as the Word He is supremely blessed and supremely immortal, and
therefore far from miserable mortals; but He is Mediator as He is man,
for by His humanity He shows us that, in order to obtain that blessed
and beatific good, we need not seek other mediators to lead us through
the successive steps of this attainment, but that the blessed and
beatific God, having Himself become a partaker of our humanity, has
afforded us ready access to the participation of His divinity. For in
delivering us from our mortality and misery, He does not lead us to
the immortal and blessed angels, so that we should become immortal and
blessed by participating in their nature, but He leads us straight to
that Trinity, by participating in which the angels themselves are
blessed. Therefore, when He chose to be in the form of a servant, and
lower than the angels, that He might be our Mediator, He remained
higher than the angels, in the form of God,--Himself at once the way
of life on earth and life itself in heaven.
Chapter 16.--Whether It is Reasonable in the Platonists to Determine
that the Celestial Gods Decline Contact with Earthly Things and
Intercourse with Men, Who Therefore Require the Intercession of the
Demons.
That opinion, which the same Platonist avers that Plato uttered, is
not true, "that no god holds intercourse with men." [352]And this,
he says, is the chief evidence of their exaltation, that they are
never contaminated by contact with men. He admits, therefore, that
the demons are contaminated; and it follows that they cannot cleanse
those by whom they are themselves contaminated, and thus all alike
become impure, the demons by associating with men, and men by
worshipping the demons. Or, if they say that the demons are not
contaminated by associating and dealing with men, then they are better
than the gods, for the gods, were they to do so, would be
contaminated. For this, we are told, is the glory of the gods, that
they are so highly exalted that no human intercourse can sully them.
He affirms, indeed, that the supreme God, the Creator of all things,
whom we call the true God, is spoken of by Plato as the only God whom
the poverty of human speech fails even passably to describe; and that
even the wise, when their mental energy is as far as possible
delivered from the trammels of connection with the body, have only
such gleams of insight into His nature as may be compared to a flash
of lightning illumining the darkness. If, then, this supreme God, who
is truly exalted above all things, does nevertheless visit the minds
of the wise, when emancipated from the body, with an intelligible and
ineffable presence, though this be only occasional, and as it were a
swift flash of light athwart the darkness, why are the other gods so
sublimely removed from all contact with men, as if they would be
polluted by it? as if it were not a sufficient refutation of this to
lift up our eyes to those heavenly bodies which give the earth its
needful light. If the stars, though they, by his account, are visible
gods, are not contaminated when we look at them, neither are the
demons contaminated when men see them quite closely. But perhaps it
is the human voice, and not the eye, which pollutes the gods; and
therefore the demons are appointed to mediate and carry men's
utterances to the gods, who keep themselves remote through fear of
pollution? What am I to say of the other senses? For by smell
neither the demons, who are present, nor the gods, though they were
present and inhaling the exhalations of living men, would be polluted
if they are not contaminated with the effluvia of the carcasses
offered in sacrifice. As for taste, they are pressed by no necessity
of repairing bodily decay, so as to be reduced to ask food from men.
And touch is in their own power. For while it may seem that contact
is so called, because the sense of touch is specially concerned in it,
yet the gods, if so minded, might mingle with men, so as to see and be
seen, hear and be heard; and where is the need of touching? For men
would not dare to desire this, if they were favored with the sight or
conversation of gods or good demons; and if through excessive
curiosity they should desire it, how could they accomplish their wish
without the consent of the god or demon, when they cannot touch so
much as a sparrow unless it be caged?
There is, then, nothing to hinder the gods from mingling in a bodily
form with men, from seeing and being seen, from speaking and hearing.
And if the demons do thus mix with men, as I said, and are not
polluted, while the gods, were they to do so, should be polluted, then
the demons are less liable to pollution than the gods. And if even
the demons are contaminated, how can they help men to attain
blessedness after death, if, so far from being able to cleanse them,
and present them clean to the unpolluted gods, these mediators are
themselves polluted? And if they cannot confer this benefit on men,
what good can their friendly mediation do? Or shall its result be,
not that men find entrance to the gods, but that men and demons abide
together in a state of pollution, and consequently of exclusion from
blessedness? Unless, perhaps, some one may say that, like sponges or
things of that sort, the demons themselves, in the process of
cleansing their friends, become themselves the filthier in proportion
as the others become clean. But if this is the solution, then the
gods, who shun contact or intercourse with men for fear of pollution,
mix with demons who are far more polluted. Or perhaps the gods, who
cannot cleanse men without polluting themselves, can without pollution
cleanse the demons who have been contaminated by human contact? Who
can believe such follies, unless the demons have practised their
deceit upon him? If seeing and being seen is contamination, and if
the gods, whom Apuleius himself calls visible, "the brilliant lights
of the world," [353] and the other stars, are seen by men, are we to
believe that the demons, who cannot be seen unless they please, are
safer from contamination? Or if it is only the seeing and not the
being seen which contaminates, then they must deny that these gods of
theirs, these brilliant lights of the world, see men when their rays
beam upon the earth. Their rays are not contaminated by lighting on
all manner of pollution, and are we to suppose that the gods would be
contaminated if they mixed with men, and even if contact were needed
in order to assist them? For there is contact between the earth and
the sun's or moon's rays, and yet this does not pollute the light.
Footnotes
[352] Apuleius, ibid.
[353] Virgil, Georg. i. 5.
Chapter 17.--That to Obtain the Blessed Life, Which Consists in
Partaking of the Supreme Good, Man Needs Such Mediation as is
Furnished Not by a Demon, But by Christ Alone.
I am considerably surprised that such learned men, men who pronounce
all material and sensible things to be altogether inferior to those
that are spiritual and intelligible, should mention bodily contact in
connection with the blessed life. Is that sentiment of Plotinus
forgotten?--"We must fly to our beloved fatherland. There is the
Father, there our all. What fleet or flight shall convey us thither?
Our way is, to become like God." [354]If, then, one is nearer to
God the liker he is to Him, there is no other distance from God than
unlikeness to Him. And the soul of man is unlike that incorporeal and
unchangeable and eternal essence, in proportion as it craves things
temporal and mutable. And as the things beneath, which are mortal and
impure, cannot hold intercourse with the immortal purity which is
above, a mediator is indeed needed to remove this difficulty; but not
a mediator who resembles the highest order of being by possessing an
immortal body, and the lowest by having a diseased soul, which makes
him rather grudge that we be healed than help our cure. We need a
Mediator who, being united to us here below by the mortality of His
body, should at the same time be able to afford us truly divine help
in cleansing and liberating us by means of the immortal righteousness
of His spirit, whereby He remained heavenly even while here upon
earth. Far be it from the incontaminable God to fear pollution from
the man [355] He assumed, or from the men among whom He lived in the
form of a man. For, though His incarnation showed us nothing else,
these two wholesome facts were enough, that true divinity cannot be
polluted by flesh, and that demons are not to be considered better
than ourselves because they have not flesh. [356]This, then, as
Scripture says, is the "Mediator between God and man, the man Christ
Jesus," [357] of whose divinity, whereby He is equal to the Father,
and humanity, whereby He has become like us, this is not the place to
speak as fully as I could.
Footnotes
[354] Augustin apparently quotes from memory from two passages of the
Enneades, l. vi. 8, and ii. 3.
[355] Or, humanity.
[356] Comp. De Trin. 13. 22.
[357] 1 Tim. ii. 5.
Chapter 18.--That the Deceitful Demons, While Promising to Conduct Men
to God by Their Intercession, Mean to Turn Them from the Path of
Truth.
As to the demons, these false and deceitful mediators, who, though
their uncleanness of spirit frequently reveals their misery and
malignity, yet, by virtue of the levity of their aerial bodies and the
nature of the places they inhabit, do contrive to turn us aside and
hinder our spiritual progress; they do not help us towards God, but
rather prevent us from reaching Him. Since even in the bodily way,
which is erroneous and misleading, and in which righteousness does not
walk,--for we must rise to God not by bodily ascent, but by
incorporeal or spiritual conformity to Him,--in this bodily way, I
say, which the friends of the demons arrange according to the weight
of the various elements, the aerial demons being set between the
ethereal gods and earthy men, they imagine the gods to have this
privilege, that by this local interval they are preserved from the
pollution of human contact. Thus they believe that the demons are
contaminated by men rather than men cleansed by the demons, and that
the gods themselves should be polluted unless their local superiority
preserved them. Who is so wretched a creature as to expect
purification by a way in which men are contaminating, demons
contaminated, and gods contaminable? Who would not rather choose that
way whereby we escape the contamination of the demons, and are
cleansed from pollution by the incontaminable God, so as to be
associated with the uncontaminated angels?
Chapter 19.--That Even Among Their Own Worshippers the Name "Demon"
Has Never a Good Signification.
But as some of these demonolators, as I may call them, and among them
Labeo, allege that those whom they call demons are by others called
angels, I must, if I would not seem to dispute merely about words, say
something about the good angels. The Platonists do not deny their
existence, but prefer to call them good demons. But we, following
Scripture, according to which we are Christians, have learned that
some of the angels are good, some bad, but never have we read in
Scripture of good demons; but wherever this or any cognate term
occurs, it is applied only to wicked spirits. And this usage has
become so universal, that, even among those who are called pagans, and
who maintain that demons as well as gods should be worshipped, there
is scarcely a man, no matter how well read and learned, who would dare
to say by way of praise to his slave, You have a demon, or who could
doubt that the man to whom he said this would consider it a curse?
Why, then, are we to subject ourselves to the necessity of explaining
away what we have said when we have given offence by using the word
demon, with which every one, or almost every one, connects a bad
meaning, while we can so easily evade this necessity by using the word
angel?
Chapter 20.--Of the Kind of Knowledge Which Puffs Up the Demons.
However, the very origin of the name suggests something worthy of
consideration, if we compare it with the divine books. They are
called demons from a Greek word meaning knowledge. [358]Now the
apostle, speaking with the Holy Spirit, says, "Knowledge puffeth up,
but charity buildeth up." [359]And this can only be understood as
meaning that without charity knowledge does no good, but inflates a
man or magnifies him with an empty windiness. The demons, then, have
knowledge without charity, and are thereby so inflated or proud, that
they crave those divine honors and religious services which they know
to be due to the true God, and still, as far as they can, exact these
from all over whom they have influence. Against this pride of the
demons, under which the human race was held subject as its merited
punishment, there was exerted the mighty influence of the humility of
God, who appeared in the form of a servant; but men, resembling the
demons in pride, but not in knowledge, and being puffed up with
uncleanness, failed to recognize Him.
Footnotes
[358] daimon=daemon, knowing; so Plato, Cratylus, 398. B.
[359] 1 Cor. viii. 1.
Chapter 21.--To What Extent the Lord Was Pleased to Make Himself Known
to the Demons.
The devils themselves knew this manifestation of God so well, that
they said to the Lord though clothed with the infirmity of flesh,
"What have we to do with Thee, Jesus of Nazareth? Art Thou come to
destroy us before the time?" [360]From these words, it is clear
that they had great knowledge, and no charity. They feared His power
to punish, and did not love His righteousness. He made known to them
so much as He pleased, and He was pleased to make known so much as was
needful. But He made Himself known not as to the holy angels, who
know Him as the Word of God, and rejoice in His eternity, which they
partake, but as was requisite to strike with terror the beings from
whose tyranny He was going to free those who were predestined to His
kingdom and the glory of it, eternally true and truly eternal. He
made Himself known, therefore, to the demons, not by that which is
life eternal, and the unchangeable light which illumines the pious,
whose souls are cleansed by the faith that is in Him, but by some
temporal effects of His power, and evidences of His mysterious
presence, which were more easily discerned by the angelic senses even
of wicked spirits than by human infirmity. But when He judged it
advisable gradually to suppress these signs, and to retire into deeper
obscurity, the prince of the demons doubted whether He were the
Christ, and endeavored to ascertain this by tempting Him, in so far as
He permitted Himself to be tempted, that He might adapt the manhood He
wore to be an example for our imitation. But after that temptation,
when, as Scripture says, He was ministered to [361] by the angels who
are good and holy, and therefore objects of terror to the impure
spirits, He revealed more and more distinctly to the demons how great
He was, so that, even though the infirmity of His flesh might seem
contemptible, none dared to resist His authority.
Footnotes
[360] Mark i. 24.
[361] Matt. iv. 3-11.
Chapter 22.--The Difference Between the Knowledge of the Holy Angels
and that of the Demons.
The good angels, therefore, hold cheap all that knowledge of material
and transitory things which the demons are so proud of
possessing,--not that they are ignorant of these things, but because
the love of God, whereby they are sanctified, is very dear to them,
and because, in comparison of that not merely immaterial but also
unchangeable and ineffable beauty, with the holy love of which they
are inflamed, they despise all things which are beneath it, and all
that is not it, that they may with every good thing that is in them
enjoy that good which is the source of their goodness. And therefore
they have a more certain knowledge even of those temporal and mutable
things, because they contemplate their principles and causes in the
word of God, by which the world was made,--those causes by which one
thing is, approved, another rejected, and all arranged. But the
demons do not behold in the wisdom of God these eternal, and, as it
were, cardinal causes of things temporal, but only foresee a larger
part of the future than men do, by reason of their greater
acquaintance with the signs which are hidden from us. Sometimes, too,
it is their own intentions they predict. And, finally, the demons are
frequently, the angels never, deceived. For it is one thing, by the
aid of things temporal and changeable, to conjecture the changes that
may occur in time, and to modify such things by one's own will and
faculty,--and this is to a certain extent permitted to the demons,--it
is another thing to foresee the changes of times in the eternal and
immutable laws of God, which live in His wisdom, and to know the will
of God, the most infallible and powerful of all causes, by
participating in His spirit; and this is granted to the holy angels by
a just discretion. And thus they are not only eternal, but blessed.
And the good wherein they are blessed is God, by whom they were
created. For without end they enjoy the contemplation and
participation of Him.
Chapter 23.--That the Name of Gods is Falsely Given to the Gods of the
Gentiles, Though Scripture Applies It Both to the Holy Angels and Just
Men.
If the Platonists prefer to call these angels gods rather than demons,
and to reckon them with those whom Plato, their founder and master,
maintains were created by the supreme God, [362] they are welcome to
do so, for I will not spend strength in fighting about words. For if
they say that these beings are immortal, and yet created by the
supreme God, blessed but by cleaving to their Creator and not by their
own power, they say what we say, whatever name they call these beings
by. And that this is the opinion either of all or the best of the
Platonists can be ascertained by their writings. And regarding the
name itself, if they see fit to call such blessed and immortal
creatures gods, this need not give rise to any serious discussion
between us, since in our own Scriptures we read, "The God of gods, the
Lord hath spoken;" [363] and again, "Confess to the God of gods;"
[364] and again, "He is a great King above all gods." [365]And
where it is said, "He is to be feared above all gods," the reason is
forthwith added, for it follows, "for all the gods of the nations are
idols, but the Lord made the heavens." [366]He said, "above all
gods," but added, "of the nations;" that is to say, above all those
whom the nations count gods, in other words, demons. By them He is to
be feared with that terror in which they cried to the Lord, "Hast Thou
come to destroy us?" But where it is said, "the God of gods," it
cannot be understood as the god of the demons; and far be it from us
to say that "great King above all gods" means "great King above all
demons." But the same Scripture also calls men who belong to God's
people "gods:" "I have said, Ye are gods, and all of you children of
the Most High." [367]Accordingly, when God is styled God of gods,
this may be understood of these gods; and so, too, when He is styled a
great King above all gods.
Nevertheless, some one may say, if men are called gods because they
belong to God's people, whom He addresses by means of men and angels,
are not the immortals, who already enjoy that felicity which men seek
to attain by worshipping God, much more worthy of the title? And what
shall we reply to this, if not that it is not without reason that in
holy Scripture men are more expressly styled gods than those immortal
and blessed spirits to whom we hope to be equal in the resurrection,
because there was a fear that the weakness of unbelief, being overcome
with the excellence of these beings, might presume to constitute some
of them a god? In the case of men this was a result that need not be
guarded against. Besides, it was right that the men belonging to
God's people should be more expressly called gods, to assure and
certify them that He who is called God of gods is their God; because,
although those immortal and blessed spirits who dwell in the heavens
are called gods, yet they are not called gods of gods, that is to say,
gods of the men who constitute God's people, and to whom it is said,
"I have said, Ye are gods, and all of you the children of the Most
High." Hence the saying of the apostle, "Though there be that are
called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, as there be gods many and
lords many, but to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are
all things, and we in Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all
things, and we by Him." [368]
We need not, therefore, laboriously contend about the name, since the
reality is so obvious as to admit of no shadow of doubt. That which
we say, that the angels who are sent to announce the will of God to
men belong to the order of blessed immortals, does not satisfy the
Platonists, because they believe that this ministry is discharged, not
by those whom they call gods, in other words, not by blessed
immortals, but by demons, whom they dare not affirm to be blessed, but
only immortal, or if they do rank them among the blessed immortals,
yet only as good demons, and not as gods who dwell in the heaven of
heavens remote from all human contact. But, though it may seem mere
wrangling about a name, yet the name of demon is so detestable that we
cannot bear in any sense to apply it to the holy angels. Now,
therefore, let us close this book in the assurance that, whatever we
call these immortal and blessed spirits, who yet are only creatures,
they do not act as mediators to introduce to everlasting felicity
miserable mortals, from whom they are severed by a twofold
distinction. And those others who are mediators, in so far as they
have immortality in common with their superiors, and misery in common
with their inferiors (for they are justly miserable in punishment of
their wickedness), cannot bestow upon us, but rather grudge that we
should possess, the blessedness from which they themselves are
excluded. And so the friends of the demons have nothing considerable
to allege why we should rather worship them as our helpers than avoid
them as traitors to our interests. As for those spirits who are good,
and who are therefore not only immortal but also blessed, and to whom
they suppose we should give the title of gods, and offer worship and
sacrifices for the sake of inheriting a future life, we shall, by
God's help, endeavor in the following book to show that these spirits,
call them by what name, and ascribe to them what nature you will,
desire that religious worship be paid to God alone, by whom they were
created, and by whose communications of Himself to them they are
blessed.
Footnotes
[362] Timæus.
[363] Ps. l. 1.
[364] Ps. cxxxvi. 2.
[365] Ps. xcv. 3.
[366] Ps. xcvi. 5, 6.
[367] Ps. lxxxii. 6.
[368] 1 Cor. viii. 5, 6.
.
Book X.
Argument--In this book Augustin teaches that the good angels wish God
alone, whom they themselves serve, to receive that divine honor which
is rendered by sacrifice, and which is called "latreia." He then goes
on to dispute against Porphyry about the principle and way of the
soul's cleansing and deliverance.
Chapter 1.--That the Platonists Themselves Have Determined that God
Alone Can Confer Happiness Either on Angels or Men, But that It Yet
Remains a Question Whether Those Spirits Whom They Direct Us to
Worship, that We May Obtain Happiness, Wish Sacrifice to Be Offered to
Themselves, or to the One God Only.
It is the decided opinion of all who use their brains, that all men
desire to be happy. But who are happy, or how they become so, these
are questions about which the weakness of human understanding stirs
endless and angry controversies, in which philosophers have wasted
their strength and expended their leisure. To adduce and discuss
their various opinions would be tedious, and is unnecessary. The
reader may remember what we said in the eighth book, while making a
selection of the philosophers with whom we might discuss the question
regarding the future life of happiness, whether we can reach it by
paying divine honors to the one true God, the Creator of all gods, or
by worshipping many gods, and he will not expect us to repeat here the
same argument, especially as, even if he has forgotten it, he may
refresh his memory by reperusal. For we made selection of the
Platonists, justly esteemed the noblest of the philosophers, because
they had the wit to perceive that the human soul, immortal and
rational, or intellectual, as it is, cannot be happy except by
partaking of the light of that God by whom both itself and the world
were made; and also that the happy life which all men desire cannot be
reached by any who does not cleave with a pure and holy love to that
one supreme good, the unchangeable God. But as even these
philosophers, whether accommodating to the folly and ignorance of the
people, or, as the apostle says, "becoming vain in their
imaginations," [369] supposed or allowed others to suppose that many
gods should be worshipped, so that some of them considered that divine
honor by worship and sacrifice should be rendered even to the demons
(an error I have already exploded), we must now, by God's help,
ascertain what is thought about our religious worship and piety by
those immortal and blessed spirits, who dwell in the heavenly places
among dominations, principalities, powers, whom the Platonists call
gods, and some either good demons, or, like us, angels,--that is to
say, to put it more plainly, whether the angels desire us to offer
sacrifice and worship, and to consecrate our possessions and
ourselves, to them or only to God, theirs and ours.
For this is the worship which is due to the Divinity, or, to speak
more accurately, to the Deity; and, to express this worship in a
single word as there does not occur to me any Latin term sufficiently
exact, I shall avail myself, whenever necessary, of a Greek word.
Latreia, whenever it occurs in Scripture, is rendered by the word
service. But that service which is due to men, and in reference to
which the apostle writes that servants must be subject to their own
masters, [370] is usually designated by another word in Greek, [371]
whereas the service which is paid to God alone by worship, is always,
or almost always, called latreia in the usage of those who wrote from
the divine oracles. This cannot so well be called simply "cultus,"
for in that case it would not seem to be due exclusively to God; for
the same word is applied to the respect we pay either to the memory or
the living presence of men. From it, too, we derive the words
agriculture, colonist, and others. [372]And the heathen call their
gods "coelicolæ," not because they worship heaven, but because they
dwell in it, and as it were colonize it,--not in the sense in which we
call those colonists who are attached to their native soil to
cultivate it under the rule of the owners, but in the sense in which
the great master of the Latin language says, "There was an ancient
city inhabited by Tyrian colonists." [373]He called them colonists,
not because they cultivated the soil, but because they inhabited the
city. So, too, cities that have hived off from larger cities are
called colonies. Consequently, while it is quite true that, using the
word in a special sense, "cult" can be rendered to none but God, yet,
as the word is applied to other things besides, the cult due to God
cannot in Latin be expressed by this word alone.
The word "religion" might seem to express more definitely the worship
due to God alone, and therefore Latin translators have used this word
to represent threskeia; yet, as not only the uneducated, but also the
best instructed, use the word religion to express human ties, and
relationships, and affinities, it would inevitably introduce ambiguity
to use this word in discussing the worship of God, unable as we are to
say that religion is nothing else than the worship of God, without
contradicting the common usage which applies this word to the
observance of social relationships. "Piety," again, or, as the Greeks
say, eusebeia, is commonly understood as the proper designation of the
worship of God. Yet this word also is used of dutifulness to
parents. The common people, too, use it of works of charity, which, I
suppose, arises from the circumstance that God enjoins the performance
of such works, and declares that He is pleased with them instead of,
or in preference to sacrifices. From this usage it has also come to
pass that God Himself is called pious, [374] in which sense the Greeks
never use eusebein, though eusebeia is applied to works of charity by
their common people also. In some passages of Scripture, therefore,
they have sought to preserve the distinction by using not eusebeia,
the more general word, but theosebeia, which literally denotes the
worship of God. We, on the other hand, cannot express either of these
ideas by one word. This worship, then, which in Greek is called
latreia, and in Latin "servitus" [service], but the service due to God
only; this worship, which in Greek is called threskeia, and in Latin
"religio," but the religion by which we are bound to God only; this
worship, which they call theosebeia, but which we cannot express in
one word, but call it the worship of God,--this, we say, belongs only
to that God who is the true God, and who makes His worshippers gods.
[375]And therefore, whoever these immortal and blessed inhabitants
of heaven be, if they do not love us, and wish us to be blessed, then
we ought not to worship them; and if they do love us and desire our
happiness, they cannot wish us to be made happy by any other means
than they themselves have enjoyed,--for how could they wish our
blessedness to flow from one source, theirs from another?
Footnotes
[369] Rom. i. 21.
[370] Eph. vi. 5.
[371] Namely, douleia: comp. Quæst in Exod. 94; Quæst. in Gen. 21;
Contra Faustum, 15. 9, etc.
[372] Agricolæ, coloni, incolæ.
[373] Virgil, Æn., i. 12.
[374] 2 Chron. xxx. 9; Eccl. xi. 13; Judith vii. 20.
[375] Ps. lxxxii. 6.
Chapter 2.--The Opinion of Plotinus the Platonist Regarding
Enlightenment from Above.
But with these more estimable philosophers we have no dispute in this
matter. For they perceived, and in various forms abundantly expressed
in their writings, that these spirits have the same source of
happiness as ourselves,--a certain intelligible light, which is their
God, and is different from themselves, and illumines them that they
may be penetrated with light, and enjoy perfect happiness in the
participation of God. Plotinus, commenting on Plato, repeatedly and
strongly asserts that not even the soul which they believe to be the
soul of the world, derives its blessedness from any other source than
we do, viz., from that Light which is distinct from it and created it,
and by whose intelligible illumination it enjoys light in things
intelligible. He also compares those spiritual things to the vast and
conspicuous heavenly bodies, as if God were the sun, and the soul the
moon; for they suppose that the moon derives its light from the sun.
That great Platonist, therefore, says that the rational soul, or
rather the intellectual soul,--in which class he comprehends the souls
of the blessed immortals who inhabit heaven,--has no nature superior
to it save God, the Creator of the world and the soul itself, and that
these heavenly spirits derive their blessed life, and the light of
truth from their blessed life, and the light of truth, the source as
ourselves, agreeing with the gospel where we read, "There was a man
sent from God whose name was John; the same came for a witness to bear
witness of that Light, that through Him all might believe. He was not
that Light, but that he might bear witness of the Light. That was the
true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world;" [376]
a distinction which sufficiently proves that the rational or
intellectual soul such as John had cannot be its own light, but needs
to receive illumination from another, the true Light. This John
himself avows when he delivers his witness: "We have all received of
His fullness." [377]
Footnotes
[376] John i. 6-9.
[377] Ibid. 16.
Chapter 3.--That the Platonists, Though Knowing Something of the
Creator of the Universe, Have Misunderstood the True Worship of God,
by Giving Divine Honor to Angels, Good or Bad.
This being so, if the Platonists, or those who think with them,
knowing God, glorified Him as God and gave thanks, if they did not
become vain in their own thoughts, if they did not originate or yield
to the popular errors, they would certainly acknowledge that neither
could the blessed immortals retain, nor we miserable mortals reach, a
happy condition without worshipping the one God of gods, who is both
theirs and ours. To Him we owe the service which is called in Greek
latreia, whether we render it outwardly or inwardly; for we are all
His temple, each of us severally and all of us together, because He
condescends to inhabit each individually and the whole harmonious
body, being no greater in all than in each, since He is neither
expanded nor divided. Our heart when it rises to Him is His altar;
the priest who intercedes for us is His Only-begotten; we sacrifice to
Him bleeding victims when we contend for His truth even unto blood; to
Him we offer the sweetest incense when we come before Him burning with
holy and pious love; to Him we devote and surrender ourselves and His
gifts in us; to Him, by solemn feasts and on appointed days, we
consecrate the memory of His benefits, lest through the lapse of time
ungrateful oblivion should steal upon us; to Him we offer on the altar
of our heart the sacrifice of humility and praise, kindled by the fire
of burning love. It is that we may see Him, so far as He can be seen;
it is that we may cleave to Him, that we are cleansed from all stain
of sins and evil passions, and are consecrated in His name. For He is
the fountain of our happiness, He the end of all our desires. Being
attached to Him, or rather let me say, re-attached,--for we had
detached ourselves and lost hold of Him,--being, I say, re-attached to
Him, [378] we tend towards Him by love, that we may rest in Him, and
find our blessedness by attaining that end. For our good, about which
philosophers have so keenly contended, is nothing else than to be
united to God. It is, if I may say so, by spiritually embracing Him
that the intellectual soul is filled and impregnated with true
virtues. We are enjoined to love this good with all our heart, with
all our soul, with all our strength. To this good we ought to be led
by those who love us, and to lead those we love. Thus are fulfilled
those two commandments on which hang all the law and the prophets:
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
mind, and with all thy soul;" and "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as
thyself." [379]For, that man might be intelligent in his self-love,
there was appointed for him an end to which he might refer all his
actions, that he might be blessed. For he who loves himself wishes
nothing else than this. And the end set before him is "to draw near
to God." [380]And so, when one who has this intelligent self-love
is commanded to love his neighbor as himself, what else is enjoined
than that he shall do all in his power to commend to him the love of
God? This is the worship of God, this is true religion, this right
piety, this the service due to God only. If any immortal power, then,
no matter with what virtue endowed, loves us as himself, he must
desire that we find our happiness by submitting ourselves to Him, in
submission to whom he himself finds happiness. If he does not worship
God, he is wretched, because deprived of God; if he worships God, he
cannot wish to be worshipped in God's stead. On the contrary, these
higher powers acquiesce heartily in the divine sentence in which it is
written, "He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the Lord only,
he shall be utterly destroyed." [381]
Footnotes
[378] Augustin here remarks, in a clause that cannot be given in
English, that the word religio is derived from religere.--So Cicero,
De Nat. Deor. ii. 28.
[379] Matt. xxii. 37-40.
[380] Ps. lxxiii. 28.
[381] Ex. xxii. 20.
Chapter 4.--That Sacrifice is Due to the True God Only.
But, putting aside for the present the other religious services with
which God is worshipped, certainly no man would dare to say that
sacrifice is due to any but God. Many parts, indeed, of divine
worship are unduly used in showing honor to men, whether through an
excessive humility or pernicious flattery; yet, while this is done,
those persons who are thus worshipped and venerated, or even adored,
are reckoned no more than human; and who ever thought of sacrificing
save to one whom he knew, supposed, or feigned to be a god? And how
ancient a part of God's worship sacrifice is, those two brothers, Cain
and Abel, sufficiently show, of whom God rejected the elder's
sacrifice, and looked favorably on the younger's.
Chapter 5.--Of the Sacrifices Which God Does Not Require, But Wished
to Be Observed for the Exhibition of Those Things Which He Does
Require.
And who is so foolish as to suppose that the things offered to God are
needed by Him for some uses of His own? Divine Scripture in many
places explodes this idea. Not to be wearisome, suffice it to quote
this brief saying from a psalm: "I have said to the Lord, Thou art my
God: for Thou needest not my goodness." [382]We must believe,
then, that God has no need, not only of cattle, or any other earthly
and material thing, but even of man's righteousness, and that whatever
right worship is paid to God profits not Him, but man. For no man
would say he did a benefit to a fountain by drinking, or to the light
by seeing. And the fact that the ancient church offered animal
sacrifices, which the people of God now-a-days read of without
imitating, proves nothing else than this, that those sacrifices
signified the things which we do for the purpose of drawing near to
God, and inducing our neighbor to do the same. A sacrifice,
therefore, is the visible sacrament or sacred sign of an invisible
sacrifice. Hence that penitent in the psalm, or it may be the
Psalmist himself, entreating God to be merciful to his sins, says, "If
Thou desiredst sacrifice, I would give it: Thou delightest not in
whole burnt-offerings. The sacrifice of God is a broken heart: a
heart contrite and humble God will not despise." [383]Observe how,
in the very words in which he is expressing God's refusal of
sacrifice, he shows that God requires sacrifice. He does not desire
the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast, but He desires the sacrifice of
a contrite heart. Thus, that sacrifice which he says God does not
wish, is the symbol of the sacrifice which God does wish. God does
not wish sacrifices in the sense in which foolish people think He
wishes them, viz., to gratify His own pleasure. For if He had not
wished that the sacrifices He requires, as, e.g., a heart contrite and
humbled by penitent sorrow, should be symbolized by those sacrifices
which He was thought to desire because pleasant to Himself, the old
law would never have enjoined their presentation; and they were
destined to be merged when the fit opportunity arrived, in order that
men might not suppose that the sacrifices themselves, rather than the
things symbolized by them, were pleasing to God or acceptable in us.
Hence, in another passage from another psalm, he says, "If I were
hungry, I would not tell thee; for the world is mine and the fullness
thereof. Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?"
[384] as if He should say, Supposing such things were necessary to me,
I would never ask thee for what I have in my own hand. Then he goes
on to mention what these signify: "Offer unto God the sacrifice of
praise, and pay thy vows unto the Most High. And call upon me in the
day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shall glorify me."
[385]So in another prophet: "Wherewith shall I come before the
Lord, and bow myself before the High God? Shall I come before Him
with burnt-offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be
pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of
oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my
body for the sin of my soul? Hath He showed thee, O man, what is
good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to
love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" [386]In the words of
this prophet, these two things are distinguished and set forth with
sufficient explicitness, that God does not require these sacrifices
for their own sakes, and that He does require the sacrifices which
they symbolize. In the epistle entitled "To the Hebrews" it is said,
"To do good and to communicate, forget not: for with such sacrifices
God is well pleased." [387]And so, when it is written, "I desire
mercy rather than sacrifice," [388] nothing else is meant than that
one sacrifice is preferred to another; for that which in common speech
is called sacrifice is only the symbol of the true sacrifice. Now
mercy is the true sacrifice, and therefore it is said, as I have just
quoted, "with such sacrifices God is well pleased." All the divine
ordinances, therefore, which we read concerning the sacrifices in the
service of the tabernacle or the temple, we are to refer to the love
of God and our neighbor. For "on these two commandments," as it is
written, "hang all the law and the prophets." [389]
Footnotes
[382] Ps. xvi. 2.
[383] Ps. li. 16, 17.
[384] Ps. l. 12, 13.
[385] Ps. l. 14, 15.
[386] Micah vi. 6-8.
[387] Heb. xiii. 16.
[388] Hos. vi. 6.
[389] Matt. xxii. 40.
Chapter 6.--Of the True and Perfect Sacrifice.
Thus a true sacrifice is every work which is done that we may be
united to God in holy fellowship, and which has a reference to that
supreme good and end in which alone we can be truly blessed. [390]
And therefore even the mercy we show to men, if it is not shown for
God's sake, is not a sacrifice. For, though made or offered by man,
sacrifice is a divine thing, as those who called it sacrifice [391]
meant to indicate. Thus man himself, consecrated in the name of God,
and vowed to God, is a sacrifice in so far as he dies to the world
that he may live to God. For this is a part of that mercy which each
man shows to himself; as it is written, "Have mercy on thy soul by
pleasing God." [392]Our body, too, as a sacrifice when we chasten
it by temperance, if we do so as we ought, for God's sake, that we may
not yield our members instruments of unrighteousness unto sin, but
instruments of righteousness unto God. [393]Exhorting to this
sacrifice, the apostle says, "I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by
the mercy of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice,
holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service." [394]
If, then, the body, which, being inferior, the soul uses as a servant
or instrument, is a sacrifice when it is used rightly, and with
reference to God, how much more does the soul itself become a
sacrifice when it offers itself to God, in order that, being inflamed
by the fire of His love, it may receive of His beauty and become
pleasing to Him, losing the shape of earthly desire, and being
remoulded in the image of permanent loveliness? And this, indeed, the
apostle subjoins, saying, "And be not conformed to this world; but be
ye transformed in the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is
that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God." [395]Since,
therefore, true sacrifices are works of mercy to ourselves or others,
done with a reference to God, and since works of mercy have no other
object than the relief of distress or the conferring of happiness, and
since there is no happiness apart from that good of which it is said,
"It is good for me to be very near to God," [396] it follows that the
whole redeemed city, that is to say, the congregation or community of
the saints, is offered to God as our sacrifice through the great High
Priest, who offered Himself to God in His passion for us, that we
might be members of this glorious head, according to the form of a
servant. For it was this form He offered, in this He was offered,
because it is according to it He is Mediator, in this He is our
Priest, in this the Sacrifice. Accordingly, when the apostle had
exhorted us to present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable
to God, our reasonable service, and not to be conformed to the world,
but to be transformed in the renewing of our mind, that we might prove
what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God, that is to
say, the true sacrifice of ourselves, he says, "For I say, through the
grace of God which is given unto me, to every man that is among you,
not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to
think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of
faith. For, as we have many members in one body, and all members have
not the same office, so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and
every one members one of another, having gifts differing according to
the grace that is given to us." [397]This is the sacrifice of
Christians: we, being many, are one body in Christ. And this also is
the sacrifice which the Church continually celebrates in the sacrament
of the altar, known to the faithful, in which she teaches that she
herself is offered in the offering she makes to God.
Footnotes
[390] On the service rendered to the Church by this definition, see
Waterland's Works, v. 124.
[391] Literally, a sacred action.
[392] Ecclus. xxx. 24.
[393] Rom. vi. 13.
[394] Rom. xii. 1.
[395] Rom. xii. 2.
[396] Ps. lxxiii. 28.
[397] Rom. xii. 3-6.
Chapter 7.--Of the Love of the Holy Angels, Which Prompts Them to
Desire that We Worship the One True God, and Not Themselves.
It is very right that these blessed and immortal spirits, who inhabit
celestial dwellings, and rejoice in the communications of their
Creator's fullness, firm in His eternity, assured in His truth, holy
by His grace, since they compassionately and tenderly regard us
miserable mortals, and wish us to become immortal and happy, do not
desire us to sacrifice to themselves, but to Him whose sacrifice they
know themselves to be in common with us. For we and they together are
the one city of God, to which it is said in the psalm, "Glorious
things are spoken of thee, O city of God;" [398] the human part
sojourning here below, the angelic aiding from above. For from that
heavenly city, in which God's will is the intelligible and
unchangeable law, from that heavenly council-chamber,--for they sit in
counsel regarding us,--that holy Scripture, descended to us by the
ministry of angels, in which it is written, "He that sacrificeth unto
any god, save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed,"
[399] --this Scripture, this law, these precepts, have been confirmed
by such miracles, that it is sufficiently evident to whom these
immortal and blessed spirits, who desire us to be like themselves,
wish us to sacrifice.
Footnotes
[398] Ps. lxxxvii. 3.
[399] Ex. xxii. 20.
Chapter 8.--Of the Miracles Which God Has Condescended to Adhibit
Through the Ministry of Angels, to His Promises for the Confirmation
of the Faith of the Godly.
I should seem tedious were I to recount all the ancient miracles,
which were wrought in attestation of God's promises which He made to
Abraham thousands of years ago, that in his seed all the nations of
the earth should be blessed. [400]For who can but marvel that
Abraham's barren wife should have given birth to a son at an age when
not even a prolific woman could bear children; or, again, that when
Abraham sacrificed, a flame from heaven should have run between the
divided parts; [401] or that the angels in human form, whom he had
hospitably entertained, and who had renewed God's promise of
offspring, should also have predicted the destruction of Sodom by fire
from heaven; [402] and that his nephew Lot should have been rescued
from Sodom by the angels as the fire was just descending, while his
wife, who looked back as she went, and was immediately turned into
salt, stood as a sacred beacon warning us that no one who is being
saved should long for what he is leaving? How striking also were the
wonders done by Moses to rescue God's people from the yoke of slavery
in Egypt, when the magi of the Pharaoh, that is, the king of Egypt,
who tyrannized over this people, were suffered to do some wonderful
things that they might be vanquished all the more signally! They did
these things by the magical arts and incantations to which the evil
spirits or demons are addicted; while Moses, having as much greater
power as he had right on his side, and having the aid of angels,
easily conquered them in the name of the Lord who made heaven and
earth. And, in fact, the magicians failed at the third plague;
whereas Moses, dealing out the miracles delegated to him, brought ten
plagues upon the land, so that the hard hearts of Pharaoh and the
Egyptians yielded, and the people were let go. But, quickly
repenting, and essaying to overtake the departing Hebrews, who had
crossed the sea on dry ground, they were covered and overwhelmed in
the returning waters. What shall I say of those frequent and
stupendous exhibitions of divine power, while the people were
conducted through the wilderness?--of the waters which could not be
drunk, but lost their bitterness, and quenched the thirsty, when at
God's command a piece of wood was cast into them? of the manna that
descended from heaven to appease their hunger, and which begat worms
and putrefied when any one collected more than the appointed quantity,
and yet, though double was gathered on the day before the Sabbath (it
not being lawful to gather it on that day), remained fresh? of the
birds which filled the camp, and turned appetite into satiety when
they longed for flesh, which it seemed impossible to supply to so vast
a population? of the enemies who met them, and opposed their passage
with arms, and were defeated without the loss of a single Hebrew, when
Moses prayed with his hands extended in the form of a cross? of the
seditious persons who arose among God's people, and separated
themselves from the divinely-ordered community, and were swallowed up
alive by the earth, a visible token of an invisible punishment? of the
rock struck with the rod, and pouring out waters more than enough for
all the host? of the deadly serpents' bites, sent in just punishment
of sin, but healed by looking at the lifted brazen serpent, so that
not only were the tormented people healed, but a symbol of the
crucifixion of death set before them in this destruction of death by
death? It was this serpent which was preserved in memory of this
event, and was afterwards worshipped by the mistaken people as an
idol, and was destroyed by the pious and God-fearing king Hezekiah,
much to his credit.
Footnotes
[400] Gen. xviii. 18.
[401] Gen. xv. 17. In his Retractations, ii. 43, Augustin says that
he should not have spoken of this as miraculous, because it was an
appearance seen in sleep.
[402] Gen. xviii.
Chapter 9.--Of the Illicit Arts Connected with Demonolatry, and of
Which the Platonist Porphyry Adopts Some, and Discards Others.
These miracles, and many others of the same nature, which it were
tedious to mention, were wrought for the purpose of commending the
worship of the one true God, and prohibiting the worship of a
multitude of false gods. Moreover, they were wrought by simple faith
and godly confidence, not by the incantations and charms composed
under the influence of a criminal tampering with the unseen world, of
an art which they call either magic, or by the more abominable title
necromancy, [403] or the more honorable designation theurgy; for they
wish to discriminate between those whom the people call magicians, who
practise necromancy, and are addicted to illicit arts and condemned,
and those others who seem to them to be worthy of praise for their
practice of theurgy,--the truth, however, being that both classes are
the slaves of the deceitful rites of the demons whom they invoke under
the names of angels.
For even Porphyry promises some kind of purgation of the soul by the
help of theurgy, though he does so with some hesitation and shame, and
denies that this art can secure to any one a return to God; so that
you can detect his opinion vacillating between the profession of
philosophy and an art which he feels to be presumptuous and
sacrilegious. For at one time he warns us to avoid it as deceitful,
and prohibited by law, and dangerous to those who practise it; then
again, as if in deference to its advocates, he declares it useful for
cleansing one part of the soul, not, indeed, the intellectual part, by
which the truth of things intelligible, which have no sensible images,
is recognized, but the spiritual part, which takes cognizance of the
images of things material. This part, he says, is prepared and fitted
for intercourse with spirits and angels, and for the vision of the
gods, by the help of certain theurgic consecrations, or, as they call
them, mysteries. He acknowledges, however, that these theurgic
mysteries impart to the intellectual soul no such purity as fits it to
see its God, and recognize the things that truly exist. And from this
acknowledgment we may infer what kind of gods these are, and what kind
of vision of them is imparted by theurgic consecrations, if by it one
cannot see the things which truly exist. He says, further, that the
rational, or, as he prefers calling it, the intellectual soul, can
pass into the heavens without the spiritual part being cleansed by
theurgic art, and that this art cannot so purify the spiritual part as
to give it entrance to immortality and eternity. And therefore,
although he distinguishes angels from demons, asserting that the
habitation of the latter is in the air, while the former dwell in the
ether and empyrean, and although he advises us to cultivate the
friendship of some demon, who may be able after our death to assist
us, and elevate us at least a little above the earth,--for he owns
that it is by another way we must reach the heavenly society of the
angels,--he at the same time distinctly warns us to avoid the society
of demons, saying that the soul, expiating its sin after death,
execrates the worship of demons by whom it was entangled. And of
theurgy itself, though he recommends it as reconciling angels and
demons, he cannot deny that it treats with powers which either
themselves envy the soul its purity, or serve the arts of those who do
envy it. He complains of this through the mouth of some Chaldæan or
other: "A good man in Chaldæa complains," he says, "that his most
strenuous efforts to cleanse his soul were frustrated, because another
man, who had influence in these matters, and who envied him purity,
had prayed to the powers, and bound them by his conjuring not to
listen to his request. Therefore," adds Porphyry, "what the one man
bound, the other could not loose." And from this he concludes that
theurgy is a craft which accomplishes not only good but evil among
gods and men; and that the gods also have passions, and are perturbed
and agitated by the emotions which Apuleius attributed to demons and
men, but from which he preserved the gods by that sublimity of
residence, which, in common with Plato, he accorded to them.
Footnotes
[403] Goetia.
Chapter 10.--Concerning Theurgy, Which Promises a Delusive
Purification of the Soul by the Invocation of Demons.
But here we have another and a much more learned Platonist than
Apuleius, Porphyry, to wit, asserting that, by I know not what
theurgy, even the gods themselves are subjected to passions and
perturbations; for by adjurations they were so bound and terrified
that they could not confer purity of soul,--were so terrified by him
who imposed on them a wicked command, that they could not by the same
theurgy be freed from that terror, and fulfill the righteous behest of
him who prayed to them, or do the good he sought. Who does not see
that all these things are fictions of deceiving demons, unless he be a
wretched slave of theirs, and an alien from the grace of the true
Liberator? For if the Chaldæan had been dealing with good gods,
certainly a well-disposed man, who sought to purify his own soul,
would have had more influence with them than an evil-disposed man
seeking to hinder him. Or, if the gods were just, and considered the
man unworthy of the purification he sought, at all events they should
not have been terrified by an envious person, nor hindered, as
Porphyry avows, by the fear of a stronger deity, but should have
simply denied the boon on their own free judgment. And it is
surprising that that well-disposed Chaldæan, who desired to purify his
soul by theurgical rites, found no superior deity who could either
terrify the frightened gods still more, and force them to confer the
boon, or compose their fears, and so enable them to do good without
compulsion,--even supposing that the good theurgist had no rites by
which he himself might purge away the taint of fear from the gods whom
he invoked for the purification of his own soul. And why is it that
there is a god who has power to terrify the inferior gods, and none
who has power to free them from fear? Is there found a god who
listens to the envious man, and frightens the gods from doing good?
and is there not found a god who listens to the well-disposed man, and
removes the fear of the gods that they may do him good? O excellent
theurgy! O admirable purification of the soul!--a theurgy in which
the violence of an impure envy has more influence than the entreaty of
purity and holiness. Rather let us abominate and avoid the deceit of
such wicked spirits, and listen to sound doctrine. As to those who
perform these filthy cleansings by sacrilegious rites, and see in
their initiated state (as he further tells us, though we may question
this vision) certain wonderfully lovely appearances of angels or gods,
this is what the apostle refers to when he speaks of "Satan
transforming himself into an angel of light." [404]For these are
the delusive appearances of that spirit who longs to entangle wretched
souls in the deceptive worship of many and false gods, and to turn
them aside from the true worship of the true God, by whom alone they
are cleansed and healed, and who, as was said of Proteus, "turns
himself into all shapes," [405] equally hurtful, whether he assaults
us as an enemy, or assumes the disguise of a friend.
Footnotes
[404] 2 Cor. xi. 14.
[405] Virgil, Georg. iv. 411.
Chapter 11.--Of Porphyry's Epistle to Anebo, in Which He Asks for
Information About the Differences Among Demons.
It was a better tone which Porphyry adopted in his letter to Anebo the
Egyptian, in which, assuming the character of an inquirer consulting
him, he unmasks and explodes these sacrilegious arts. In that letter,
indeed, he repudiates all demons, whom he maintains to be so foolish
as to be attracted by the sacrificial vapors, and therefore residing
not in the ether, but in the air beneath the moon, and indeed in the
moon itself. Yet he has not the boldness to attribute to all the
demons all the deceptions and malicious and foolish practices which
justly move his indignation. For, though he acknowledges that as a
race demons are foolish, he so far accommodates himself to popular
ideas as to call some of them benignant demons. He expresses surprise
that sacrifices not only incline the gods, but also compel and force
them to do what men wish; and he is at a loss to understand how the
sun and moon, and other visible celestial bodies,--for bodies he does
not doubt that they are,--are considered gods, if the gods are
distinguished from the demons by their incorporeality; also, if they
are gods, how some are called beneficent and others hurtful, and how
they, being corporeal, are numbered with the gods, who are
incorporeal. He inquires further, and still as one in doubt, whether
diviners and wonderworkers are men of unusually powerful souls, or
whether the power to do these things is communicated by spirits from
without. He inclines to the latter opinion, on the ground that it is
by the use of stones and herbs that they lay spells on people, and
open closed doors, and do similar wonders. And on this account, he
says, some suppose that there is a race of beings whose property it is
to listen to men,--a race deceitful, full of contrivances, capable of
assuming all forms, simulating gods, demons, and dead men,--and that
it is this race which bring about all these things which have the
appearance of good or evil, but that what is really good they never
help us in, and are indeed unacquainted with, for they make wickedness
easy, but throw obstacles in the path of those who eagerly follow
virtue; and that they are filled with pride and rashness, delight in
sacrificial odors, are taken with flattery. These and the other
characteristics of this race of deceitful and malicious spirits, who
come into the souls of men and delude their senses, both in sleep and
waking, he describes not as things of which he is himself convinced,
but only with so much suspicion and doubt as to cause him to speak of
them as commonly received opinions. We should sympathize with this
great philosopher in the difficulty he experienced in acquainting
himself with and confidently assailing the whole fraternity of devils,
which any Christian old woman would unhesitatingly describe and most
unreservedly detest. Perhaps, however, he shrank from offending
Anebo, to whom he was writing, himself the most eminent patron of
these mysteries, or the others who marvelled at these magical feats as
divine works, and closely allied to the worship of the gods.
However, he pursues this subject, and, still in the character of an
inquirer, mentions some things which no sober judgment could attribute
to any but malicious and deceitful powers. He asks why, after the
better class of spirits have been invoked, the worse should be
commanded to perform the wicked desires of men; why they do not hear a
man who has just left a woman's embrace, while they themselves make no
scruple of tempting men to incest and adultery; why their priests are
commanded to abstain from animal food for fear of being polluted by
the corporeal exhalations, while they themselves are attracted by the
fumes of sacrifices and other exhalations; why the initiated are
forbidden to touch a dead body, while their mysteries are celebrated
almost entirely by means of dead bodies; why it is that a man addicted
to any vice should utter threats, not to a demon or to the soul of a
dead man, but to the sun and moon, or some of the heavenly bodies,
which he intimidates by imaginary terrors, that he may wring from them
a real boon,--for he threatens that he will demolish the sky, and such
like impossibilities,--that those gods, being alarmed, like silly
children, with imaginary and absurd threats, may do what they are
ordered. Porphyry further relates that a man, Chæremon, profoundly
versed in these sacred or rather sacrilegious mysteries, had written
that the famous Egyptian mysteries of Isis and her husband Osiris had
very great influence with the gods to compel them to do what they were
ordered, when he who used the spells threatened to divulge or do away
with these mysteries, and cried with a threatening voice that he would
scatter the members of Osiris if they neglected his orders. Not
without reason is Porphyry surprised that a man should utter such wild
and empty threats against the gods,--not against gods of no account,
but against the heavenly gods, and those that shine with sidereal
light,--and that these threats should be effectual to constrain them
with resistless power, and alarm them so that they fulfill his
wishes. Not without reason does he, in the character of an inquirer
into the reasons of these surprising things, give it to be understood
that they are done by that race of spirits which he previously
described as if quoting other people's opinions,--spirits who deceive
not, as he said, by nature, but by their own corruption, and who
simulate gods and dead men, but not, as he said, demons, for demons
they really are. As to his idea that by means of herbs, and stones,
and animals, and certain incantations and noises, and drawings,
sometimes fanciful, and sometimes copied from the motions of the
heavenly bodies, men create upon earth powers capable of bringing
about various results, all that is only the mystification which these
demons practise on those who are subject to them, for the sake of
furnishing themselves with merriment at the expense of their dupes.
Either, then, Porphyry was sincere in his doubts and inquiries, and
mentioned these things to demonstrate and put beyond question that
they were the work, not of powers which aid us in obtaining life, but
of deceitful demons; or, to take a more favorable view of the
philosopher, he adopted this method with the Egyptian who was wedded
to these errors, and was proud of them, that he might not offend him
by assuming the attitude of a teacher, nor discompose his mind by the
altercation of a professed assailant, but, by assuming the character
of an inquirer, and the humble attitude of one who was anxious to
learn, might turn his attention to these matters, and show how worthy
they are to be despised and relinquished. Towards the conclusion of
his letter, he requests Anebo to inform him what the Egyptian wisdom
indicates as the way to blessedness. But as to those who hold
intercourse with the gods, and pester them only for the sake of
finding a runaway slave, or acquiring property, or making a bargain of
a marriage, or such things, he declares that their pretensions to
wisdom are vain. He adds that these same gods, even granting that on
other points their utterances were true, were yet so ill-advised and
unsatisfactory in their disclosures about blessedness, that they
cannot be either gods or good demons, but are either that spirit who
is called the deceiver, or mere fictions of the imagination.
Chapter 12.--Of the Miracles Wrought by the True God Through the
Ministry of the Holy Angels.
Since by means of these arts wonders are done which quite surpass
human power, what choice have we but to believe that these predictions
and operations, which seem to be miraculous and divine, and which at
the same time form no part of the worship of the one God, in adherence
to whom, as the Platonists themselves abundantly testify, all
blessedness consists, are the pastime of wicked spirits, who thus seek
to seduce and hinder the truly godly? On the other hand, we cannot
but believe that all miracles, whether wrought by angels or by other
means, so long as they are so done as to commend the worship and
religion of the one God in whom alone is blessedness, are wrought by
those who love us in a true and godly sort, or through their means,
God Himself working in them. For we cannot listen to those who
maintain that the invisible God works no visible miracles; for even
they believe that He made the world, which surely they will not deny
to be visible. Whatever marvel happens in this world, it is certainly
less marvellous than this whole world itself,--I mean the sky and
earth, and all that is in them,--and these God certainly made. But,
as the Creator Himself is hidden and incomprehensible to man, so also
is the manner of creation. Although, therefore, the standing miracle
of this visible world is little thought of, because always before us,
yet, when we arouse ourselves to contemplate it, it is a greater
miracle than the rarest and most unheard-of marvels. For man himself
is a greater miracle than any miracle done through his
instrumentality. Therefore God, who made the visible heaven and
earth, does not disdain to work visible miracles in heaven or earth,
that He may thereby awaken the soul which is immersed in things
visible to worship Himself, the Invisible. But the place and time of
these miracles are dependent on His unchangeable will, in which things
future are ordered as if already they were accomplished. For He moves
things temporal without Himself moving in time, He does not in one way
know things that are to be, and, in another, things that have been;
neither does He listen to those who pray otherwise than as He sees
those that will pray. For, even when His angels hear us, it is He
Himself who hears us in them, as in His true temple not made with
hands, as in those men who are His saints; and His answers, though
accomplished in time, have been arranged by His eternal appointment.
Chapter 13.--Of the Invisible God, Who Has Often Made Himself Visible,
Not as He Really Is, But as the Beholders Could Bear the Sight.
Neither need we be surprised that God, invisible as He is, should
often have appeared visibly to the patriarchs. For as the sound which
communicates the thought conceived in the silence of the mind is not
the thought itself, so the form by which God, invisible in His own
nature, became visible, was not God Himself. Nevertheless it is He
Himself who was seen under that form, as that thought itself is heard
in the sound of the voice; and the patriarchs recognized that, though
the bodily form was not God, they saw the invisible God. For, though
Moses conversed with God, yet he said, "If I have found grace in Thy
sight, show me Thyself, that I may see and know Thee." [406]And as
it was fit that the law, which was given, not to one man or a few
enlightened men, but to the whole of a populous nation, should be
accompanied by awe-inspiring signs, great marvels were wrought, by the
ministry of angels, before the people on the mount where the law was
being given to them through one man, while the multitude beheld the
awful appearances. For the people of Israel believed Moses, not as
the Lacedæmonians believed their Lycurgus, because he had received
from Jupiter or Apollo the laws he gave them. For when the law which
enjoined the worship of one God was given to the people, marvellous
signs and earthquakes, such as the divine wisdom judged sufficient,
were brought about in the sight of all, that they might know that it
was the Creator who could thus use creation to promulgate His law.
Footnotes
[406] Ex. xxxiii. 13.
Chapter 14.--That the One God is to Be Worshipped Not Only for the
Sake of Eternal Blessings, But Also in Connection with Temporal
Prosperity, Because All Things are Regulated by His Providence.
The education of the human race, represented by the people of God, has
advanced, like that of an individual, through certain epochs, or, as
it were, ages, so that it might gradually rise from earthly to
heavenly things, and from the visible to the invisible. This object
was kept so clearly in view, that, even in the period when temporal
rewards were promised, the one God was presented as the object of
worship, that men might not acknowledge any other than the true
Creator and Lord of the spirit, even in connection with the earthly
blessings of this transitory life. For he who denies that all things,
which either angels or men can give us, are in the hand of the one
Almighty, is a madman. The Platonist Plotinus discourses concerning
providence, and, from the beauty of flowers and foliage, proves that
from the supreme God, whose beauty is unseen and ineffable, providence
reaches down even to these earthly things here below; and he argues
that all these frail and perishing things could not have so exquisite
and elaborate a beauty, were they not fashioned by Him whose unseen
and unchangeable beauty continually pervades all things. [407]This
is proved also by the Lord Jesus, where He says, "Consider the lilies,
how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say
unto you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of
these. But if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is
and to-morrow is cast into the oven, how much more shall He clothe
you, O ye of little faith.!" [408]It was best, therefore, that the
soul of man, which was still weakly desiring earthly things, should be
accustomed to seek from God alone even these petty temporal boons, and
the earthly necessaries of this transitory life, which are
contemptible in comparison with eternal blessings, in order that the
desire even of these things might not draw it aside from the worship
of Him, to whom we come by despising and forsaking such things.
Footnotes
[407] Plotin. Ennead. III. ii. 13.
[408] Matt. vi. 28-30.
Chapter 15.--Of the Ministry of the Holy Angels, by Which They Fulfill
the Providence of God.
And so it has pleased Divine Providence, as I have said, and as we
read in the Acts of the Apostles, [409] that the law enjoining the
worship of one God should be given by the disposition of angels. But
among them the person of God Himself visibly appeared, not, indeed, in
His proper substance, which ever remains invisible to mortal eyes, but
by the infallible signs furnished by creation in obedience to its
Creator. He made use, too, of the words of human speech, uttering
them syllable by syllable successively, though in His own nature He
speaks not in a bodily but in a spiritual way; not to sense, but to
the mind; not in words that occupy time, but, if I may so say,
eternally, neither beginning to speak nor coming to an end. And what
He says is accurately heard, not by the bodily but by the mental ear
of His ministers and messengers, who are immortally blessed in the
enjoyment of His unchangeable truth; and the directions which they in
some ineffable way receive, they execute without delay or difficulty
in the sensible and visible world. And this law was given in
conformity with the age of the world, and contained at the first
earthly promises, as I have said, which, however, symbolized eternal
ones; and these eternal blessings few understood, though many took a
part in the celebration of their visible signs. Nevertheless, with
one consent both the words and the visible rites of that law enjoin
the worship of one God,--not one of a crowd of gods, but Him who made
heaven and earth, and every soul and every spirit which is other than
Himself. He created; all else was created; and, both for being and
well-being, all things need Him who created them.
Footnotes
[409] Acts vii. 53.
Chapter 16.--Whether Those Angels Who Demand that We Pay Them Divine
Honor, or Those Who Teach Us to Render Holy Service, Not to
Themselves, But to God, are to Be Trusted About the Way to Life
Eternal.
What angels, then, are we to believe in this matter of blessed and
eternal life?--those who wish to be worshipped with religious rites
and observances, and require that men sacrifice to them; or those who
say that all this worship is due to one God, the Creator, and teach us
to render it with true piety to Him, by the vision of whom they are
themselves already blessed, and in whom they promise that we shall be
so? For that vision of God is the beauty of a vision so great, and is
so infinitely desirable, that Plotinus does not hesitate to say that
he who enjoys all other blessings in abundance, and has not this, is
supremely miserable. [410]Since, therefore, miracles are wrought by
some angels to induce us to worship this God, by others, to induce us
to worship themselves; and since the former forbid us to worship
these, while the latter dare not forbid us to worship God, which are
we to listen to? Let the Platonists reply, or any philosophers, or
the theurgists, or rather, periurgists, [411] --for this name is good
enough for those who practise such arts. In short, let all men
answer,--if, at least, there survives in them any spark of that
natural perception which, as rational beings, they possess when
created,--let them, I say, tell us whether we should sacrifice to the
gods or angels who order us to sacrifice to them, or to that One to
whom we are ordered to sacrifice by those who forbid us to worship
either themselves or these others. If neither the one party nor the
other had wrought miracles, but had merely uttered commands, the one
to sacrifice to themselves, the other forbidding that, and ordering us
to sacrifice to God, a godly mind would have been at no loss to
discern which command proceeded from proud arrogance, and which from
true religion. I will say more. If miracles had been wrought only by
those who demand sacrifice for themselves, while those who forbade
this, and enjoined sacrificing to the one God only, thought fit
entirely to forego the use of visible miracles, the authority of the
latter was to be preferred by all who would use, not their eyes only,
but their reason. But since God, for the sake of commending to us the
oracles of His truth, has, by means of these immortal messengers, who
proclaim His majesty and not their own pride, wrought miracles of
surpassing grandeur, certainty, and distinctness, in order that the
weak among the godly might not be drawn away to false religion by
those who require us to sacrifice to them and endeavor to convince us
by stupendous appeals to our senses, who is so utterly unreasonable as
not to choose and follow the truth, when he finds that it is heralded
by even more striking evidences than falsehood?
As for those miracles which history ascribes to the gods of the
heathen,--I do not refer to those prodigies which at intervals happen
from some unknown physical causes, and which are arranged and
appointed by Divine Providence, such as monstrous births, and unusual
meteorological phenomena, whether startling only, or also injurious,
and which are said to be brought about and removed by communication
with demons, and by their most deceitful craft,--but I refer to these
prodigies which manifestly enough are wrought by their power and
force, as, that the household gods which Æneas carried from Troy in
his flight moved from place to place; that Tarquin cut a whetstone
with a razor; that the Epidaurian serpent attached himself as a
companion to Æsculapius on his voyage to Rome; that the ship in which
the image of the Phrygian mother stood, and which could not be moved
by a host of men and oxen, was moved by one weak woman, who attached
her girdle to the vessel and drew it, as proof of her chastity; that a
vestal, whose virginity was questioned, removed the suspicion by
carrying from the Tiber a sieve full of water without any of it
dropping: these, then, and the like, are by no means to be compared
for greatness and virtue to those which, we read, were wrought among
God's people. How much less can we compare those marvels, which even
the laws of heathen nations prohibit and punish,--I mean the magical
and theurgic marvels, of which the great part are merely illusions
practised upon the senses, as the drawing down of the moon, "that," as
Lucan says, "it may shed a stronger influence on the plants?" [412]
And if some of these do seem to equal those which are wrought by the
godly, the end for which they are wrought distinguishes the two, and
shows that ours are incomparably the more excellent. For those
miracles commend the worship of a plurality of gods, who deserve
worship the less the more they demand it; but these of ours commend
the worship of the one God, who, both by the testimony of His own
Scriptures, and by the eventual abolition of sacrifices, proves that
He needs no such offerings. If, therefore, any angels demand
sacrifice for themselves, we must prefer those who demand it, not for
themselves, but for God, the Creator of all, whom they serve. For
thus they prove how sincerely they love us, since they wish by
sacrifice to subject us, not to themselves, but to Him by the
contemplation of whom they themselves are blessed, and to bring us to
Him from whom they themselves have never strayed. If, on the other
hand, any angels wish us to sacrifice, not to one, but to many, not,
indeed, to themselves, but to the gods whose angels they are, we must
in this case also prefer those who are the angels of the one God of
gods, and who so bid us to worship Him as to preclude our worshipping
any other. But, further, if it be the case, as their pride and
deceitfulness rather indicate, that they are neither good angels nor
the angels of good gods, but wicked demons, who wish sacrifice to be
paid, not to the one only and supreme God, but to themselves, what
better protection against them can we choose than that of the one God
whom the good angels serve, the angels who bid us sacrifice, not to
themselves, but to Him whose sacrifice we ourselves ought to be?
Footnotes
[410] Ennead. 1. vi. 7.
[411] Meaning, officious meddlers.
[412] Pharsal. vi. 503.
Chapter 17.--Concerning the Ark of the Covenant, and the Miraculous
Signs Whereby God Authenticated the Law and the Promise.
On this account it was that the law of God, given by the disposition
of angels, and which commanded that the one God of gods alone receive
sacred worship, to the exclusion of all others, was deposited in the
ark, called the ark of the testimony. By this name it is sufficiently
indicated, not that God, who was worshipped by all those rites, was
shut up and enclosed in that place, though His responses emanated from
it along with signs appreciable by the senses, but that His will was
declared from that throne. The law itself, too, was engraven on
tables of stone, and, as I have said, deposited in the ark, which the
priests carried with due reverence during the sojourn in the
wilderness, along with the tabernacle, which was in like manner called
the tabernacle of the testimony; and there was then an accompanying
sign, which appeared as a cloud by day and as a fire by night; when
the cloud moved, the camp was shifted, and where it stood the camp was
pitched. Besides these signs, and the voices which proceeded from the
place where the ark was, there were other miraculous testimonies to
the law. For when the ark was carried across Jordan, on the entrance
to the land of promise, the upper part of the river stopped in its
course, and the lower part flowed on, so as to present both to the ark
and the people dry ground to pass over. Then, when it was carried
seven times round the first hostile and polytheistic city they came
to, its walls suddenly fell down, though assaulted by no hand, struck
by no battering-ram. Afterwards, too, when they were now resident in
the land of promise, and the ark had, in punishment of their sin, been
taken by their enemies, its captors triumphantly placed it in the
temple of their favorite god, and left it shut up there, but, on
opening the temple next day, they found the image they used to pray to
fallen to the ground and shamefully shattered. Then, being them
selves alarmed by portents, and still more shamefully punished, they
restored the ark of the testimony to the people from whom they had
taken it. And what was the manner of its restoration? They placed it
on a wagon, and yoked to it cows from which they had taken the calves,
and let them choose their own course, expecting that in this way the
divine will would be indicated; and the cows without any man driving
or directing them, steadily pursued the way to the Hebrews, without
regarding the lowing of their calves, and thus restored the ark to its
worshippers. To God these and such like wonders are small, but they
are mighty to terrify and give wholesome instruction to men. For if
philosophers, and especially the Platonists, are with justice esteemed
wiser than other men, as I have just been mentioning, because they
taught that even these earthly and insignificant things are ruled by
Divine Providence, inferring this from the numberless beauties which
are observable not only in the bodies of animals, but even in plants
and grasses, how much more plainly do these things attest the presence
of divinity which happen at the time predicted, and in which that
religion is commended which forbids the offering of sacrifice to any
celestial, terrestrial, or infernal being, and commands it to be
offered to God only, who alone blesses us by His love for us, and by
our love to Him, and who, by arranging the appointed times of those
sacrifices, and by predicting that they were to pass into a better
sacrifice by a better Priest, testified that He has no appetite for
these sacrifices, but through them indicated others of more
substantial blessing,--and all this not that He Himself may be
glorified by these honors, but that we may be stirred up to worship
and cleave to Him, being inflamed by His love, which is our advantage
rather than His?
Chapter 18.--Against Those Who Deny that the Books of the Church are
to Be Believed About the Miracles Whereby the People of God Were
Educated.
Will some one say that these miracles are false, that they never
happened, and that the records of them are lies? Whoever says so, and
asserts that in such matters no records whatever can be credited, may
also say that there are no gods who care for human affairs. For they
have induced men to worship them only by means of miraculous works,
which the heathen histories testify, and by which the gods have made a
display of their own power rather than done any real service. This is
the reason why we have not undertaken in this work, of which we are
now writing the tenth book, to refute those who either deny that there
is any divine power, or contend that it does not interfere with human
affairs, but those who prefer their own god to our God, the Founder of
the holy and most glorious city, not knowing that He is also the
invisible and unchangeable Founder of this visible and changing world,
and the truest bestower of the blessed life which resides not in
things created, but in Himself. For thus speaks His most trustworthy
prophet: "It is good for me to be united to God." [413]Among
philosophers it is a question, what is that end and good to the
attainment of which all our duties are to have a relation? The
Psalmist did not say, It is good for me to have great wealth, or to
wear imperial insignia, purple, sceptre, and diadem; or, as some even
of the philosophers have not blushed to say, It is good for me to
enjoy sensual pleasure; or, as the better men among them seemed to
say, My good is my spiritual strength; but, "It is good for me to be
united to God." This he had learned from Him whom the holy angels,
with the accompanying witness of miracles, presented as the sole
object of worship. And hence he himself became the sacrifice of God,
whose spiritual love inflamed him, and into whose ineffable and
incorporeal embrace he yearned to cast himself. Moreover, if the
worshippers of many gods (whatever kind of gods they fancy their own
to be) believe that the miracles recorded in their civil histories, or
in the books of magic, or of the more respectable theurgy, were
wrought by these gods, what reason have they for refusing to believe
the miracles recorded in those writings, to which we owe a credence as
much greater as He is greater to whom alone these writings teach us to
sacrifice?
Footnotes
[413] Ps. lxxiii. 28.
Chapter 19.--On the Reasonableness of Offering, as the True Religion
Teaches, a Visible Sacrifice to the One True and Invisible God.
As to those who think that these visible sacrifices are suitably
offered to other gods, but that invisible sacrifices, the graces of
purity of mind and holiness of will, should be offered, as greater and
better, to the invisible God, Himself greater and better than all
others, they must be oblivious that these visible sacrifices are signs
of the invisible, as the words we utter are the signs of things. And
therefore, as in prayer or praise we direct intelligible words to Him
to whom in our heart we offer the very feelings we are expressing, so
we are to understand that in sacrifice we offer visible sacrifice only
to Him to whom in our heart we ought to present ourselves an invisible
sacrifice. It is then that the angels, and all those superior powers
who are mighty by their goodness and piety, regard us with pleasure,
and rejoice with us and assist us to the utmost of their power. But
if we offer such worship to them, they decline it; and when on any
mission to men they become visible to the senses, they positively
forbid it. Examples of this occur in holy writ. Some fancied they
should, by adoration or sacrifice, pay the same honor to angels as is
due to God, and were prevented from doing so by the angels themselves,
and ordered to render it to Him to whom alone they know it to be due.
And the holy angels have in this been imitated by holy men of God.
For Paul and Barnabas, when they had wrought a miracle of healing in
Lycaonia, were thought to be gods, and the Lycaonians desired to
sacrifice to them, and they humbly and piously declined this honor,
and announced to them the God in whom they should believe. And those
deceitful and proud spirits, who exact worship, do so simply because
they know it to be due to the true God. For that which they take
pleasure in is not, as Porphyry says and some fancy, the smell of the
victims, but divine honors. They have, in fact, plenty odors on all
hands, and if they wished more, they could provide them for
themselves. But the spirits who arrogate to themselves divinity are
delighted not with the smoke of carcasses but with the suppliant
spirit which they deceive and hold in subjection, and hinder from
drawing near to God, preventing him from offering himself in sacrifice
to God by inducing him to sacrifice to others.
Chapter 20.--Of the Supreme and True Sacrifice Which Was Effected by
the Mediator Between God and Men.
And hence that true Mediator, in so far as, by assuming the form of a
servant, He became the Mediator between God and men, the man Christ
Jesus, though in the form of God He received sacrifice together with
the Father, with whom He is one God, yet in the form of a servant He
chose rather to be than to receive a sacrifice, that not even by this
instance any one might have occasion to suppose that sacrifice should
be rendered to any creature. Thus He is both the Priest who offers
and the Sacrifice offered. And He designed that there should be a
daily sign of this in the sacrifice of the Church, which, being His
body, learns to offer herself through Him. Of this true Sacrifice the
ancient sacrifices of the saints were the various and numerous signs;
and it was thus variously figured, just as one thing is signified by a
variety of words, that there may be less weariness when we speak of it
much. To this supreme and true sacrifice all false sacrifices have
given place.
Chapter 21 .--Of the Power Delegated to Demons for the Trial and
Glorification of the Saints, Who Conquer Not by Propitiating the
Spirits of the Air, But by Abiding in God.
The power delegated to the demons at certain appointed and
well-adjusted seasons, that they may give expression to their
hostility to the city of God by stirring up against it the men who are
under their influence, and may not only receive sacrifice from those
who willingly offer it, but may also extort it from the unwilling by
violent persecution;--this power is found to be not merely harmless,
but even useful to the Church, completing as it does the number of
martyrs, whom the city of God esteems as all the more illustrious and
honored citizens, because they have striven even to blood against the
sin of impiety. If the ordinary language of the Church allowed it, we
might more elegantly call these men our heroes. For this name is said
to be derived from Juno, who in Greek is called Hêrê, and hence,
according to the Greek myths, one of her sons was called Heros. And
these fables mystically signified that Juno was mistress of the air,
which they suppose to be inhabited by the demons and the heroes,
understanding by heroes the souls of the well-deserving dead. But for
a quite opposite reason would we call our martyrs heroes,--supposing,
as I said, that the usage of ecclesiastical language would admit of
it,--not because they lived along with the demons in the air, but
because they conquered these demons or powers of the air, and among
them Juno herself, be she what she may, not unsuitably represented, as
she commonly is by the poets, as hostile to virtue, and jealous of men
of mark aspiring to the heavens. Virgil, however, unhappily gives
way, and yields to her; for, though he represents her as saying, "I am
conquered by Æneas," [414] Helenus gives Æneas himself this religious
advice:
"Pay vows to Juno: overbear
Her queenly soul with gift and prayer." [415]
In conformity with this opinion, Porphyry-- expressing, however, not
so much his own views as other people's--says that a good god or
genius cannot come to a man unless the evil genius has been first of
all propitiated, implying that the evil deities had greater power than
the good; for, until they have been appeased and give place, the good
can give no assistance; and if the evil deities oppose, the good can
give no help; whereas the evil can do injury without the good being
able to prevent them. This is not the way of the true and truly holy
religion; not thus do our martyrs conquer Juno, that is to say, the
powers of the air, who envy the virtues of the pious. Our heroes, if
we could so call them, overcome Hêrê, not by suppliant gifts, but by
divine virtues. As Scipio, who conquered Africa by his valor, is more
suitably styled Africanus than if he had appeased his enemies by
gifts, and so won their mercy.
Footnotes
[414] Æn., vii. 310.
[415] Æn., iii. 438, 439.
Chapter 22.--Whence the Saints Derive Power Against Demons and True
Purification of Heart.
It is by true piety that men of God cast out the hostile power of the
air which opposes godliness; it is by exorcising it, not by
propitiating it; and they overcome all the temptations of the
adversary by praying, not to him, but to their own God against him.
For the devil cannot conquer or subdue any but those who are in league
with sin; and therefore he is conquered in the name of Him who assumed
humanity, and that without sin, that Himself being both Priest and
Sacrifice, He might bring about the remission of sins, that is to say,
might bring it about through the Mediator between God and men, the man
Christ Jesus, by whom we are reconciled to God, the cleansing from sin
being accomplished. For men are separated from God only by sins, from
which we are in this life cleansed not by our own virtue, but by the
divine compassion; through His indulgence, not through our own power.
For, whatever virtue we call our own is itself bestowed upon us by His
goodness. And we might attribute too much to ourselves while in the
flesh, unless we lived in the receipt of pardon until we laid it
down. This is the reason why there has been vouchsafed to us, through
the Mediator, this grace, that we who are polluted by sinful flesh
should be cleansed by the likeness of sinful flesh. By this grace of
God, wherein He has shown His great compassion toward us, we are both
governed by faith in this life, and, after this life, are led onwards
to the fullest perfection by the vision of immutable truth.
Chapter 23.--Of the Principles Which, According to the Platonists,
Regulate the Purification of the Soul.
Even Porphyry asserts that it was revealed by divine oracles that we
are not purified by any sacrifices [416] to sun or moon, meaning it to
be inferred that we are not purified by sacrificing to any gods. For
what mysteries can purify, if those of the sun and moon, which are
esteemed the chief of the celestial gods, do not purify? He says,
too, in the same place, that "principles" can purify, lest it should
be supposed, from his saying that sacrificing to the sun and moon
cannot purify, that sacrificing to some other of the host of gods
might do so. And what he as a Platonist means by "principles," we
know. [417]For he speaks of God the Father and God the Son, whom he
calls (writing in Greek) the intellect or mind of the Father; [418]
but of the Holy Spirit he says either nothing, or nothing plainly, for
I do not understand what other he speaks of as holding the middle
place between these two. For if, like Plotinus in his discussion
regarding the three principal substances, [419] he wished us to
understand by this third the soul of nature, he would certainly not
have given it the middle place between these two, that is, between the
Father and the Son. For Plotinus places the soul of nature after the
intellect of the Father, while Porphyry, making it the mean, does not
place it after, but between the others. No doubt he spoke according
to his light, or as he thought expedient; but we assert that the Holy
Spirit is the Spirit not of the Father only, nor of the Son only, but
of both. For philosophers speak as they have a mind to, and in the
most difficult matters do not scruple to offend religious ears; but we
are bound to speak according to a certain rule, lest freedom of speech
beget impiety of opinion about the matters themselves of which we
speak.
Footnotes
[416] Teletis.
[417] The Platonists of the Alexandrian and Athenian schools, from
Plotinus to Proclus, are at one in recognizing in God three principles
or hypostases: 1st, the One or the Good, which is the Father; 2nd,
the Intelligence or Word, which is the Son; 3rd, the Soul, which is
the universal principle of life. But as to the nature and order of
these hypostases, the Alexandrians are no longer at one with the
school of Athens. On the very subtle differences between the Trinity
of Plotinus and that of Porphyry, consult M. Jules Simon, ii. 110, and
M. Vacherot, ii. 37.--Saisset.
[418] See below, c. 28.
[419] Ennead. v. 1.
Chapter 24.--Of the One Only True Principle Which Alone Purifies and
Renews Human Nature.
Accordingly, when we speak of God, we do not affirm two or three
principles, no more than we are at liberty to affirm two or three
gods; although, speaking of each, of the Father, or of the Son, or of
the Holy Ghost, we confess that each is God: and yet we do not say,
as the Sabellian heretics say, that the Father is the same as the Son,
and the Holy Spirit the same as the Father and the Son; but we say
that the Father is the Father of the Son, and the Son the Son of the
Father, and that the Holy Spirit of the Father and the Son is neither
the Father nor the Son. It was therefore truly said that man is
cleansed only by a Principle, although the Platonists erred in
speaking in the plural of principles. But Porphyry, being under the
dominion of these envious powers, whose influence he was at once
ashamed of and afraid to throw off, refused to recognize that Christ
is the Principle by whose incarnation we are purified. Indeed he
despised Him, because of the flesh itself which He assumed, that He
might offer a sacrifice for our purification,--a great mystery,
unintelligible to Porphyry's pride, which that true and benignant
Redeemer brought low by His humility, manifesting Himself to mortals
by the mortality which He assumed, and which the malignant and
deceitful mediators are proud of wanting, promising, as the boon of
immortals, a deceptive assistance to wretched men. Thus the good and
true Mediator showed that it is sin which is evil, and not the
substance or nature of flesh; for this, together with the human soul,
could without sin be both assumed and retained, and laid down in
death, and changed to something better by resurrection. He showed
also that death itself, although the punishment of sin, was submitted
to by Him for our sakes without sin, and must not be evaded by sin on
our part, but rather, if opportunity serves, be borne for
righteousness' sake. For he was able to expiate sins by dying,
because He both died, and not for sin of His own. But He has not been
recognized by Porphyry as the Principle, otherwise he would have
recognized Him as the Purifier. The Principle is neither the flesh
nor the human soul in Christ but the Word by which all things were
made. The flesh, therefore, does not by its own virtue purify, but by
virtue of the Word by which it was assumed, when "the Word became
flesh and dwelt among us." [420]For speaking mystically of eating
His flesh, when those who did not understand Him were offended and
went away, saying, "This is an hard saying, who can hear it?" He
answered to the rest who remained, "It is the Spirit that quickeneth;
the flesh profiteth nothing." [421]The Principle, therefore, having
assumed a human soul and flesh, cleanses the soul and flesh of
believers. Therefore, when the Jews asked Him who He was, He answered
that He was the Principle. [422]And this we carnal and feeble men,
liable to sin, and involved in the darkness of ignorance, could not
possibly understand, unless we were cleansed and healed by Him, both
by means of what we were, and of what we were not. For we were men,
but we were not righteous; whereas in His incarnation there was a
human nature, but it was righteous, and not sinful. This is the
mediation whereby a hand is stretched to the lapsed and fallen; this
is the seed "ordained by angels," by whose ministry the law also was
given enjoining the worship of one God, and promising that this
Mediator should come.
Footnotes
[420] John i. 14.
[421] John vi. 60-64.
[422] John viii. 25; or "the beginning," following a different reading
from ours.
Chapter 25.--That All the Saints, Both Under the Law and Before It,
Were Justified by Faith in the Mystery of Christ's Incarnation.
It was by faith in this mystery, and godliness of life, that
purification was attainable even by the saints of old, whether before
the law was given to the Hebrews (for God and the angels were even
then present as instructors), or in the periods under the law,
although the promises of spiritual things, being presented in figure,
seemed to be carnal, and hence the name of Old Testament. For it was
then the prophets lived, by whom, as by angels, the same promise was
announced; and among them was he whose grand and divine sentiment
regarding the end and supreme good of man I have just now quoted, "It
is good for me to cleave to God." [423]In this psalm the
distinction between the Old and New Testaments is distinctly
announced. For the Psalmist says, that when he saw that the carnal
and earthly promises were abundantly enjoyed by the ungodly, his feet
were almost gone, his steps had well-nigh slipped; and that it seemed
to him as if he had served God in vain, when he saw that those who
despised God increased in that prosperity which he looked for at God's
hand. He says, too, that, in investigating this matter with the
desire of understanding why it was so, he had labored in vain, until
he went into the sanctuary of God, and understood the end of those
whom he had erroneously considered happy. Then he understood that
they were cast down by that very thing, as he says, which they had
made their boast, and that they had been consumed and perished for
their inequities; and that that whole fabric of temporal prosperity
had become as a dream when one awaketh, and suddenly finds himself
destitute of all the joys he had imaged in sleep. And, as in this
earth or earthy city they seemed to themselves to be great, he says,
"O Lord, in Thy city Thou wilt reduce their image to nothing." He
also shows how beneficial it had been for him to seek even earthly
blessings only from the one true God, in whose power are all things,
for he says, "As a beast was I before Thee, and I am always with
Thee." "As a beast," he says, meaning that he was stupid. For I
ought to have sought from Thee such things as the ungodly could not
enjoy as well as I, and not those things which I saw them enjoying in
abundance, and hence concluded I was serving Thee in vain, because
they who declined to serve Thee had what I had not. Nevertheless, "I
am always with Thee," because even in my desire for such things I did
not pray to other gods. And consequently he goes on, "Thou hast
holden me by my right hand, and by Thy counsel Thou hast guided me,
and with glory hast taken me up;" as if all earthly advantages were
left-hand blessings, though, when he saw them enjoyed by the wicked,
his feet had almost gone. "For what," he says, "have I in heaven, and
what have I desired from Thee upon earth?" He blames himself, and is
justly displeased with himself; because, though he had in heaven so
vast a possession (as he afterwards understood), he yet sought from
his God on earth a transitory and fleeting happiness;--a happiness of
mire, we may say. "My heart and my flesh," he says, "fail, O God of
my heart." Happy failure, from things below to things above! And
hence in another psalm He says, "My soul longeth, yea, even faileth,
for the courts of the Lord." [424]Yet, though he had said of both
his heart and his flesh that they were failing, he did not say, O God
of my heart and my flesh, but, O God of my heart; for by the heart the
flesh is made clean. Therefore, says the Lord, "Cleanse that which is
within, and the outside shall be clean also." [425]He then says
that God Himself,--not anything received from Him, but Himself,--is
his portion. "The God of my heart, and my portion for ever." Among
the various objects of human choice, God alone satisfied him. "For,
lo," he says, "they that are far from Thee shall perish: Thou
destroyest all them that go a-whoring from Thee,"--that is, who
prostitute themselves to many gods. And then follows the verse for
which all the rest of the psalm seems to prepare: "It is good for me
to cleave to God,"--not to go far off; not to go a-whoring with a
multitude of gods. And then shall this union with God be perfected,
when all that is to be redeemed in us has been redeemed. But for the
present we must, as he goes on to say, "place our hope in God." "For
that which is seen," says the apostle, "is not hope. For what a man
sees, why does he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not,
then do we with patience wait for it." [426]Being, then, for the
present established in this hope, let us do what the Psalmist further
indicates, and become in our measure angels or messengers of God,
declaring His will, and praising His glory and His grace. For when he
had said, "To place my hope in God," he goes on, "that I may declare
all Thy praises in the gates of the daughter of Zion." This is the
most glorious city of God; this is the city which knows and worships
one God: she is celebrated by the holy angels, who invite us to their
society, and desire us to become fellow-citizens with them in this
city; for they do not wish us to worship them as our gods, but to join
them in worshipping their God and ours; nor to sacrifice to them, but,
together with them, to become a sacrifice to God. Accordingly,
whoever will lay aside malignant obstinacy, and consider these things,
shall be assured that all these blessed and immortal spirits, who do
not envy us (for if they envied they were not blessed), but rather
love us, and desire us to be as blessed as themselves, look on us with
greater pleasure, and give us greater assistance, when we join them in
worshipping one God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, than if we were to
offer to themselves sacrifice and worship.
Footnotes
[423] Ps. lxxiii. 28.
[424] Ps. lxxxiv. 2.
[425] Matt. xxiii. 26.
[426] Rom. viii. 24, 25.
Chapter 26.--Of Porphyry's Weakness in Wavering Between the Confession
of the True God and the Worship of Demons.
I know not how it is so, but it seems to me that Porphyry blushed for
his friends the theurgists; for he knew all that I have adduced, but
did not frankly condemn polytheistic worship. He said, in fact, that
there are some angels who visit earth, and reveal divine truth to
theurgists, and others who publish on earth the things that belong to
the Father, His height and depth. Can we believe, then, that the
angels whose office it is to declare the will of the Father, wish us
to be subject to any but Him whose will they declare? And hence, even
this Platonist himself judiciously observes that we should rather
imitate than invoke them. We ought not, then, to fear that we may
offend these immortal and happy subjects of the one God by not
sacrificing to them; for this they know to be due only to the one true
God, in allegiance to whom they themselves find their blessedness, and
therefore they will not have it given to them, either in figure or in
the reality, which the mysteries of sacrifice symbolized. Such
arrogance belongs to proud and wretched demons, whose disposition is
diametrically opposite to the piety of those who are subject to God,
and whose blessedness consists in attachment to Him. And, that we
also may attain to this bliss, they aid us, as is fit, with sincere
kindliness, and usurp over us no dominion, but declare to us Him under
whose rule we are then fellow-subjects. Why, then, O philosopher, do
you still fear to speak freely against the powers which are inimical
both to true virtue and to the gifts of the true God? Already you
have discriminated between the angels who proclaim God's will, and
those who visit theurgists, drawn down by I know not what art. Why do
you still ascribe to these latter the honor of declaring divine
truth? If they do not declare the will of the Father, what divine
revelations can they make? Are not these the evil spirits who were
bound over by the incantations of an envious man, [427] that they
should not grant purity of soul to another, and could not, as you say,
be set free from these bonds by a good man anxious for purity, and
recover power over their own actions? Do you still doubt whether
these are wicked demons; or do you, perhaps, feign ignorance, that you
may not give offence to the theurgists, who have allured you by their
secret rites, and have taught you, as a mighty boon, these insane and
pernicious devilries? Do you dare to elevate above the air, and even
to heaven, these envious powers, or pests, let me rather call them,
less worthy of the name of sovereign than of slave, as you yourself
own; and are you not ashamed to place them even among your sidereal
gods, and so put a slight upon the stars themselves?
Footnotes
[427] See above, c. 9.
Chapter 27.--Of the Impiety of Porphyry, Which is Worse Than Even the
Mistake of Apuleius.
How much more tolerable and accordant with human feeling is the error
of your Platonist co-sectary Apuleius! for he attributed the diseases
and storms of human passions only to the demons who occupy a grade
beneath the moon, and makes even this avowal as by constraint
regarding gods whom he honors; but the superior and celestial gods,
who inhabit the ethereal regions, whether visible, as the sun, moon,
and other luminaries, whose brilliancy makes them conspicuous, or
invisible, but believed in by him, he does his utmost to remove beyond
the slightest stain of these perturbations. It is not, then, from
Plato, but from your Chaldæan teachers you have learned to elevate
human vices to the ethereal and empyreal regions of the world and to
the celestial firmament, in order that your theurgists might be able
to obtain from your gods divine revelations; and yet you make yourself
superior to these divine revelations by your intellectual life, which
dispenses with these theurgic purifications as not needed by a
philosopher. But, by way of rewarding your teachers, you recommend
these arts to other men, who, not being philosophers, may be persuaded
to use what you acknowledge to be useless to yourself, who are capable
of higher things; so that those who cannot avail themselves of the
virtue of philosophy, which is too arduous for the multitude, may, at
your instigation, betake themselves to theurgists by whom they may be
purified, not, indeed, in the intellectual, but in the spiritual part
of the soul. Now, as the persons who are unfit for philosophy form
incomparably the majority of mankind, more may be compelled to consult
these secret and illicit teachers of yours than frequent the Platonic
schools. For these most impure demons, pretending to be ethereal
gods, whose herald and messenger you have become, have promised that
those who are purified by theurgy in the spiritual part of their soul
shall not indeed return to the Father, but shall dwell among the
ethereal gods above the aerial regions. But such fancies are not
listened to by the multitudes of men whom Christ came to set free from
the tyranny of demons. For in Him they have the most gracious
cleansing, in which mind, spirit, and body alike participate. For, in
order that He might heal the whole man from the plague of sin, He took
without sin the whole human nature. Would that you had known Him, and
would that you had committed yourself for healing to Him rather than
to your own frail and infirm human virtue, or to pernicious and
curious arts! He would not have deceived you; for Him your own
oracles, on your own showing, acknowledged holy and immortal. It is
of Him, too, that the most famous poet speaks, poetically indeed,
since he applies it to the person of another, yet truly, if you refer
it to Christ , saying, "Under thine auspices, if any traces of our
crimes remain, they shall be obliterated, and earth freed from its
perpetual fear." [428]By which he indicates that, by reason of the
infirmity which attaches to this life, the greatest progress in virtue
and righteousness leaves room for the existence, if not of crimes, yet
of the traces of crimes, which are obliterated only by that Saviour of
whom this verse speaks. For that he did not say this at the prompting
of his own fancy, Virgil tells us in almost the last verse of that 4th
Eclogue, when he says, "The last age predicted by the Cumæan sibyl has
now arrived;" whence it plainly appears that this had been dictated by
the Cumæan sibyl. But those theurgists, or rather demons, who assume
the appearance and form of gods, pollute rather than purify the human
spirit by false appearances and the delusive mockery of unsubstantial
forms. How can those whose own spirit is unclean cleanse the spirit
of man? Were they not unclean, they would not be bound by the
incantations of an envious man, and would neither be afraid nor grudge
to bestow that hollow boon which they promise. But it is sufficient
for our purpose that you acknowledge that the intellectual soul, that
is, our mind, cannot be justified by theurgy; and that even the
spiritual or inferior part of our soul cannot by this act be made
eternal and immortal, though you maintain that it can be purified by
it. Christ, however, promises life eternal; and therefore to Him the
world flocks, greatly to your indignation, greatly also to your
astonishment and confusion. What avails your forced avowal that
theurgy leads men astray, and deceives vast numbers by its ignorant
and foolish teaching, and that it is the most manifest mistake to have
recourse by prayer and sacrifice to angels and principalities, when at
the same time, to save yourself from the charge of spending labor in
vain on such arts, you direct men to the theurgists, that by their
means men, who do not live by the rule of the intellectual soul, may
have their spiritual soul purified?
Footnotes
[428] Virgil, Eclog. iv. 13, 14.
Chapter 28.--How It is that Porphyry Has Been So Blind as Not to
Recognize the True Wisdom--Christ.
You drive men, therefore, into the most palpable error. And yet you
are not ashamed of doing so much harm, though you call yourself a
lover of virtue and wisdom. Had you been true and faithful in this
profession, you would have recognized Christ, the virtue of God and
the wisdom of God, and would not, in the pride of vain science, have
revolted from His wholesome humility. Nevertheless you acknowledge
that the spiritual part of the soul can be purified by the virtue of
chastity without the aid of those theurgic arts and mysteries which
you wasted your time in learning. You even say, sometimes, that these
mysteries do not raise the soul after death, so that, after the
termination of this life, they seem to be of no service even to the
part you call spiritual; and yet you recur on every opportunity to
these arts, for no other purpose, so far as I see, than to appear an
accomplished theurgist, and gratify those who are curious in illicit
arts, or else to inspire others with the same curiosity. But we give
you all praise for saying that this art is to be feared, both on
account of the legal enactments against it, and by reason of the
danger involved in the very practice of it. And would that in this,
at least, you were listened to by its wretched votaries, that they
might be withdrawn from entire absorption in it, or might even be
preserved from tampering with it at all! You say, indeed, that
ignorance, and the numberless vices resulting from it, cannot be
removed by any mysteries, but only by the patrikos nous, that is, the
Father's mind or intellect conscious of the Father's will. But that
Christ is this mind you do not believe; for Him you despise on account
of the body He took of a woman and the shame of the cross; for your
lofty wisdom spurns such low and contemptible things, and soars to
more exalted regions. But He fulfills what the holy prophets truly
predicted regarding Him: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and
bring to nought the prudence of the prudent." [429]For He does not
destroy and bring to nought His own gift in them, but what they
arrogate to themselves, and do not hold of Him. And hence the
apostle, having quoted this testimony from the prophet, adds, "Where
is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this
world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after
that, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it
pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that
believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after
wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a
stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which
are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the
wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and
the weakness of God is stronger than men." [430]This is despised as
a weak and foolish thing by those who are wise and strong in
themselves; yet this is the grace which heals the weak, who do not
proudly boast a blessedness of their own, but rather humbly
acknowledge their real misery.
Footnotes
[429] Isa. xxix. 14.
[430] 1 Cor. i. 19-25.
Chapter 29.--Of the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Which the
Platonists in Their Impiety Blush to Acknowledge.
You proclaim the Father and His Son, whom you call the Father's
intellect or mind, and between these a third, by whom we suppose you
mean the Holy Spirit, and in your own fashion you call these three
Gods. In this, though your expressions are inaccurate, you do in some
sort, and as through a veil, see what we should strive towards; but
the incarnation of the unchangeable Son of God, whereby we are saved,
and are enabled to reach the things we believe, or in part understand,
this is what you refuse to recognize. You see in a fashion, although
at a distance, although with filmy eye, the country in which we should
abide; but the way to it you know not. Yet you believe in grace, for
you say it is granted to few to reach God by virtue of intelligence.
For you do not say, "Few have thought fit or have wished," but, "It
has been granted to few,"--distinctly acknowledging God's grace, not
man's sufficiency. You also use this word more expressly, when, in
accordance with the opinion of Plato, you make no doubt that in this
life a man cannot by any means attain to perfect wisdom, but that
whatever is lacking is in the future life made up to those who live
intellectually, by God's providence and grace. Oh, had you but
recognized the grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord, and that very
incarnation of His, wherein He assumed a human soul and body, you
might have seemed the brightest example of grace! [431]But what am
I doing? I know it is useless to speak to a dead man,--useless, at
least, so far as regards you, but perhaps not in vain for those who
esteem you highly, and love you on account of their love of wisdom or
curiosity about those arts which you ought not to have learned; and
these persons I address in your name. The grace of God could not have
been more graciously commended to us than thus, that the only Son of
God, remaining unchangeable in Himself, should assume humanity, and
should give us the hope of His love, by means of the mediation of a
human nature, through which we, from the condition of men, might come
to Him who was so far off,--the immortal from the mortal; the
unchangeable from the changeable; the just from the unjust; the
blessed from the wretched. And, as He had given us a natural instinct
to desire blessedness and immortality, He Himself continuing to be
blessed; but assuming mortality, by enduring what we fear, taught us
to despise it, that what we long for He might bestow upon us.
But in order to your acquiescence in this truth, it is lowliness that
is requisite, and to this it is extremely difficult to bend you. For
what is there incredible, especially to men like you, accustomed to
speculation, which might have predisposed you to believe in
this,--what is there incredible, I say, in the assertion that God
assumed a human soul and body? You yourselves ascribe such excellence
to the intellectual soul, which is, after all, the human soul, that
you maintain that it can become consubstantial with that intelligence
of the Father whom you believe in as the Son of God. What incredible
thing is it, then, if some one soul be assumed by Him in an ineffable
and unique manner for the salvation of many? Moreover, our nature
itself testifies that a man is incomplete unless a body be united with
the soul. This certainly would be more incredible, were it not of all
things the most common; for we should more easily believe in a union
between spirit and spirit, or, to use your own terminology, between
the incorporeal and the incorporeal, even though the one were human,
the other divine, the one changeable and the other unchangeable, than
in a union between the corporeal and the incorporeal. But perhaps it
is the unprecedented birth of a body from a virgin that staggers you?
But, so far from this being a difficulty, it ought rather to assist
you to receive our religion, that a miraculous person was born
miraculously. Or, do you find a difficulty in the fact that, after
His body had been given up to death, and had been changed into a
higher kind of body by resurrection, and was now no longer mortal but
incorruptible, He carried it up into heavenly places? Perhaps you
refuse to believe this, because you remember that Porphyry, in these
very books from which I have cited so much, and which treat of the
return of the soul, so frequently teaches that a body of every kind is
to be escaped from, in order that the soul may dwell in blessedness
with God. But here, in place of following Porphyry, you ought rather
to have corrected him, especially since you agree with him in
believing such incredible things about the soul of this visible world
and huge material frame. For, as scholars of Plato, you hold that the
world is an animal, and a very happy animal, which you wish to be also
everlasting. How, then, is it never to be loosed from a body, and yet
never lose its happiness, if, in order to the happiness of the soul,
the body must be left behind? The sun, too, and the other stars, you
not only acknowledge to be bodies, in which you have the cordial
assent of all seeing men, but also, in obedience to what you reckon a
profounder insight, you declare that they are very blessed animals,
and eternal, together with their bodies. Why is it, then, that when
the Christian faith is pressed upon you, you forget, or pretend to
ignore, what you habitually discuss or teach? Why is it that you
refuse to be Christians, on the ground that you hold opinions which,
in fact, you yourselves demolish? Is it not because Christ came in
lowliness, and ye are proud? The precise nature of the resurrection
bodies of the saints may sometimes occasion discussion among those who
are best read in the Christian Scriptures; yet there is not among us
the smallest doubt that they shall be everlasting, and of a nature
exemplified in the instance of Christ's risen body. But whatever be
their nature, since we maintain that they shall be absolutely
incorruptible and immortal, and shall offer no hindrance to the soul's
contemplation, by which it is fixed in God, and as you say that among
the celestials the bodies of the eternally blessed are eternal, why do
you maintain that, in order to blessedness, every body must be escaped
from? Why do you thus seek such a plausible reason for escaping from
the Christian faith, if not because, as I again say, Christ is humble
and ye proud? Are ye ashamed to be corrected? This is the vice of
the proud. It is, forsooth, a degradation for learned men to pass
from the school of Plato to the discipleship of Christ, who by His
Spirit taught a fisherman to think and to say, "In the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same
was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and
without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life; and
the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and
the darkness comprehended it not." [432]The old saint Simplicianus,
afterwards bishop of Milan, used to tell me that a certain Platonist
was in the habit of saying that this opening passage of the holy
gospel, entitled, According to John, should be written in letters of
gold, and hung up in all churches in the most conspicuous place. But
the proud scorn to take God for their Master, because "the Word was
made flesh and dwelt among us." [433]So that, with these miserable
creatures, it is not enough that they are sick, but they boast of
their sickness, and are ashamed of the medicine which could heal
them. And, doing so, they secure not elevation, but a more disastrous
fall.
Footnotes
[431] According to another reading, "You might have seen it to be,"
etc.
[432] John i. 1-5.
[433] John i. 14.
Chapter 30.--Porphyry's Emendations and Modifications of Platonism.
If it is considered unseemly to emend anything which Plato has
touched, why did Porphyry himself make emendations, and these not a
few? for it is very certain that Plato wrote that the souls of men
return after death to the bodies of beasts. [434]Plotinus also,
Porphyry's teacher, held this opinion; [435] yet Porphyry justly
rejected it. He was of opinion that human souls return indeed into
human bodies, but not into the bodies they had left, but other new
bodies. He shrank from the other opinion, lest a woman who had
returned into a mule might possibly carry her own son on her back. He
did not shrink, however, from a theory which admitted the possibility
of a mother coming back into a girl and marrying her own son. How
much more honorable a creed is that which was taught by the holy and
truthful angels, uttered by the prophets who were moved by God's
Spirit, preached by Him who was foretold as the coming Saviour by His
forerunning heralds, and by the apostles whom He sent forth, and who
filled the whole world with the gospel,--how much more honorable, I
say, is the belief that souls return once for all to their own bodies,
than that they return again and again to divers bodies? Nevertheless
Porphyry, as I have said, did considerably improve upon this opinion,
in so far, at least, as he maintained that human souls could
transmigrate only into human bodies, and made no scruple about
demolishing the bestial prisons into which Plato had wished to cast
them. He says, too, that God put the soul into the world that it
might recognize the evils of matter, and return to the Father, and be
for ever emancipated from the polluting contact of matter. And
although here is some inappropriate thinking (for the soul is rather
given to the body that it may do good; for it would not learn evil
unless it did it), yet he corrects the opinion of other Platonists,
and that on a point of no small importance, inasmuch as he avows that
the soul, which is purged from all evil and received to the Father's
presence, shall never again suffer the ills of this life. By this
opinion he quite subverted the favorite Platonic dogma, that as dead
men are made out of living ones, so living men are made out of dead
ones; and he exploded the idea which Virgil seems to have adopted from
Plato, that the purified souls which have been sent into the Elysian
fields (the poetic name for the joys of the blessed) are summoned to
the river Lethe, that is, to the oblivion of the past,
"That earthward they may pass once more,
Remembering not the things before,
And with a blind propension yearn
To fleshly bodies to return." [436]
This found no favor with Porphyry, and very justly; for it is indeed
foolish to believe that souls should desire to return from that life,
which cannot be very blessed unless by the assurance of its
permanence, and to come back into this life, and to the pollution of
corruptible bodies, as if the result of perfect purification were only
to make defilement desirable. For if perfect purification effects the
oblivion of all evils, and the oblivion of evils creates a desire for
a body in which the soul may again be entangled with evils, then the
supreme felicity will be the cause of infelicity, and the perfection
of wisdom the cause of foolishness, and the purest cleansing the cause
of defilement. And, however long the blessedness of the soul last, it
cannot be founded on truth, if, in order to be blessed, it must be
deceived. For it cannot be blessed unless it be free from fear. But,
to be free from fear, it must be under the false impression that it
shall be always blessed,--the false impression, for it is destined to
be also at some time miserable. How, then, shall the soul rejoice in
truth, whose joy is founded on falsehood? Porphyry saw this, and
therefore said that the purified soul returns to the Father, that it
may never more be entangled in the polluting contact with evil. The
opinion, therefore, of some Platonists, that there is a necessary
revolution carrying souls away and bringing them round again to the
same things, is false. But, were it true, what were the advantage of
knowing it? Would the Platonists presume to allege their superiority
to us, because we were in this life ignorant of what they themselves
were doomed to be ignorant of when perfected in purity and wisdom in
another and better life, and which they must be ignorant of if they
are to be blessed? If it were most absurd and foolish to say so, then
certainly we must prefer Porphyry's opinion to the idea of a
circulation of souls through constantly alternating happiness and
misery. And if this is just, here is a Platonist emending Plato, here
is a man who saw what Plato did not see, and who did not shrink from
correcting so illustrious a master, but preferred truth to Plato.
Footnotes
[434] Comp. Euseb. Præp. Evan. xiii. 16.
[435] Ennead, iii. 4, 2.
[436] Æneid, vi. 750, 751.
Chapter 31.--Against the Arguments on Which the Platonists Ground
Their Assertion that the Human Soul is Co-Eternal with God.
Why, then, do we not rather believe the divinity in those matters,
which human talent cannot fathom? Why do we not credit the assertion
of divinity, that the soul is not co-eternal with God, but is created,
and once was not? For the Platonists seemed to themselves to allege
an adequate reason for their rejection of this doctrine, when they
affirmed that nothing could be everlasting which had not always
existed. Plato, however, in writing concerning the world and the gods
in it, whom the Supreme made, most expressly states that they had a
beginning and yet would have no end, but, by the sovereign will of the
Creator, would endure eternally. But, by way of interpreting this,
the Platonists have discovered that he meant a beginning, not of time,
but of cause. "For as if a foot," they say, "had been always from
eternity in dust, there would always have been a print underneath it;
and yet no one would doubt that this print was made by the pressure of
the foot, nor that, though the one was made by the other, neither was
prior to the other; so," they say, "the world and the gods created in
it have always been, their Creator always existing, and yet they were
made." If, then, the soul has always existed, are we to say that its
wretchedness has always existed? For if there is something in it
which was not from eternity, but began in time, why is it impossible
that the soul itself, though not previously existing, should begin to
be in time? Its blessedness, too, which, as he owns, is to be more
stable, and indeed endless, after the soul's experience of
evils,--this undoubtedly has a beginning in time, and yet is to be
always, though previously it had no existence. This whole
argumentation, therefore, to establish that nothing can be endless
except that which has had no beginning, falls to the ground. For here
we find the blessedness of the soul, which has a beginning, and yet
has no end. And, therefore, let the incapacity of man give place to
the authority of God; and let us take our belief regarding the true
religion from the ever-blessed spirits, who do not seek for themselves
that honor which they know to be due to their God and ours, and who do
not command us to sacrifice save only to Him, whose sacrifice, as I
have often said already, and must often say again, we and they ought
together to be, offered through that Priest who offered Himself to
death a sacrifice for us, in that human nature which He assumed, and
according to which He desired to be our Priest.
Chapter 32.--Of the Universal Way of the Soul's Deliverance, Which
Porphyry Did Not Find Because He Did Not Rightly Seek It, and Which
the Grace of Christ Has Alone Thrown Open.
This is the religion which possesses the universal way for delivering
the soul; for except by this way, none can be delivered. This is a
kind of royal way, which alone leads to a kingdom which does not
totter like all temporal dignities, but stands firm on eternal
foundations. And when Porphyry says, towards the end of the first
book De Regressu Animoe, that no system of doctrine which furnishes
the universal way for delivering the soul has as yet been received,
either from the truest philosophy, or from the ideas and practices of
the Indians, or from the reasoning [437] of the Chaldæans, or from any
source whatever, and that no historical reading had made him
acquainted with that way, he manifestly acknowledges that there is
such a way, but that as yet he was not acquainted with it. Nothing of
all that he had so laboriously learned concerning the deliverance of
the soul, nothing of all that he seemed to others, if not to himself,
to know and believe, satisfied him. For he perceived that there was
still wanting a commanding authority which it might be right to follow
in a matter of such importance. And when he says that he had not
learned from any truest philosophy a system which possessed the
universal way of the soul's deliverance, he shows plainly enough, as
it seems to me, either that the philosophy of which he was a disciple
was not the truest, or that it did not comprehend such a way. And how
can that be the truest philosophy which does not possess this way?
For what else is the universal way of the soul's deliverance than that
by which all souls universally are delivered, and without which,
therefore, no soul is delivered? And when he says, in addition, "or
from the ideas and practices of the Indians, or from the reasoning of
the Chaldæans, or from any source whatever," he declares in the most
unequivocal language that this universal way of the soul's deliverance
was not embraced in what he had learned either from the Indians or the
Chaldæans; and yet he could not forbear stating that it was from the
Chaldæans he had derived these divine oracles of which he makes such
frequent mention. What, therefore, does he mean by this universal way
of the soul's deliverance, which had not yet been made known by any
truest philosophy, or by the doctrinal systems of those nations which
were considered to have great insight in things divine, because they
indulged more freely in a curious and fanciful science and worship of
angels? What is this universal way of which he acknowledges his
ignorance, if not a way which does not belong to one nation as its
special property, but is common to all, and divinely bestowed?
Porphyry, a man of no mediocre abilities, does not question that such
a way exists; for he believes that Divine Providence could not have
left men destitute of this universal way of delivering the soul. For
he does not say that this way does not exist, but that this great boon
and assistance has not yet been discovered, and has not come to his
knowledge. And no wonder; for Porphyry lived in an age when this
universal way of the soul's deliverance,--in other words, the
Christian religion,--was exposed to the persecutions of idolaters and
demon-worshippers, and earthly rulers, [438] that the number of
martyrs or witnesses for the truth might be completed and consecrated,
and that by them proof might be given that we must endure all bodily
sufferings in the cause of the holy faith, and for the commendation of
the truth. Porphyry, being a witness of these persecutions, concluded
that this way was destined to a speedy extinction, and that it,
therefore, was not the universal way of the soul's deliverance, and
did not see that the very thing that thus moved him, and deterred him
from becoming a Christian, contributed to the confirmation and more
effectual commendation of our religion.
This, then, is the universal way of the soul's deliverance, the way
that is granted by the divine compassion to the nations universally.
And no nation to which the knowledge of it has already come, or may
hereafter come, ought to demand, Why so soon? or, Why so late?--for
the design of Him who sends it is impenetrable by human capacity.
This was felt by Porphyry when he confined himself to saying that this
gift of God was not yet received, and had not yet come to his
knowledge. For though this was so, he did not on that account
pronounce that the way it self had no existence. This, I say, is the
universal way for the deliverance of believers, concerning which the
faithful Abraham received the divine assurance, "In thy seed shall all
nations be blessed." [439]He, indeed, was by birth a Chaldæan; but,
that he might receive these great promises, and that there might be
propagated from him a seed "disposed by angels in the hand of a
Mediator," [440] in whom this universal way, thrown open to all
nations for the deliverance of the soul, might be found, he was
ordered to leave his country, and kindred, and father's house. Then
was he himself, first of all, delivered from the Chaldæan
superstitions, and by his obedience worshipped the one true God, whose
promises he faithfully trusted. This is the universal way, of which
it is said in holy prophecy, "God be merciful unto us, and bless us,
and cause His face to shine upon us; that Thy way may be known upon
earth, Thy saving health among all nations." [441]And hence, when
our Saviour, so long after, had taken flesh of the seed of Abraham, He
says of Himself, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." [442]This
is the universal way, of which so long before it had been predicted,
"And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the
Lord's house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and
shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.
And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the
mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will
teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths: for out of Sion
shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem."
[443]This way, therefore, is not the property of one, but of all
nations. The law and the word of the Lord did not remain in Zion and
Jerusalem, but issued thence to be universally diffused. And
therefore the Mediator Himself, after His resurrection, says to His
alarmed disciples, "These are the words which I spake unto you while I
was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written
in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms,
concerning me. Then opened He their understandings that they might
understand the Scriptures, and said unto them, Thus it is written, and
thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third
day: and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in
His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem." [444]This is
the universal way of the soul's deliverance, which the holy angels and
the holy prophets formerly disclosed where they could among the few
men who found the grace of God, and especially in the Hebrew nation,
whose commonwealth was, as it were, consecrated to prefigure and
fore-announce the city of God which was to be gathered from all
nations, by their tabernacle, and temple, and priesthood, and
sacrifices. In some explicit statements, and in many obscure
foreshadowings, this way was declared; but latterly came the Mediator
Himself in the flesh, and His blessed apostles, revealing how the
grace of the New Testament more openly explained what had been
obscurely hinted to preceding generations, in conformity with the
relation of the ages of the human race, and as it pleased God in His
wisdom to appoint, who also bore them witness with signs and miracles
some of which I have cited above. For not only were there visions of
angels, and words heard from those heavenly ministrants, but also men
of God, armed with the word of simple piety, cast out unclean spirits
from the bodies and senses of men, and healed deformities and
sicknesses; the wild beasts of earth and sea, the birds of air,
inanimate things, the elements, the stars, obeyed their divine
commands; the powers of hell gave way before them, the dead were
restored to life. I say nothing of the miracles peculiar and proper
to the Saviour's own person, especially the nativity and the
resurrection; in the one of which He wrought only the mystery of a
virgin maternity, while in the other He furnished an instance of the
resurrection which all shall at last experience. This way purifies
the whole man, and prepares the mortal in all his parts for
immortality. For, to prevent us from seeking for one purgation for
the part which Porphyry calls intellectual, and another for the part
he calls spiritual, and another for the body itself, our most mighty
and truthful Purifier and Saviour assumed the whole human nature.
Except by this way, which has been present among men both during the
period of the promises and of the proclamation of their fulfillment,
no man has been delivered, no man is delivered, no man shall be
delivered.
As to Porphyry's statement that the universal way of the soul's
deliverance had not yet come to his knowledge by any acquaintance he
had with history, I would ask, what more remarkable history can be
found than that which has taken possession of the whole world by its
authoritative voice? or what more trustworthy than that which narrates
past events, and predicts the future with equal clearness, and in the
unfulfilled predictions of which we are constrained to believe by
those that are already fulfilled? For neither Porphyry nor any
Platonists can despise divination and prediction, even of things that
pertain to this life and earthly matters, though they justly despise
ordinary soothsaying and the divination that is connected with magical
arts. They deny that these are the predictions of great men, or are
to be considered important, and they are right; for they are founded,
either on the foresight of subsidiary causes, as to a professional eye
much of the course of a disease is foreseen by certain pre-monitory
symptoms, or the unclean demons predict what they have resolved to do,
that they may thus work upon the thoughts and desires of the wicked
with an appearance of authority, and incline human frailty to imitate
their impure actions. It is not such things that the saints who walk
in the universal way care to predict as important, although, for the
purpose of commending the faith, they knew and often predicted even
such things as could not be detected by human observation, nor be
readily verified by experience. But there were other truly important
and divine events which they predicted, in so far as it was given them
to know the will of God. For the incarnation of Christ, and all those
important marvels that were accomplished in Him, and done in His name;
the repentance of men and the conversion of their wills to God; the
remission of sins, the grace of righteousness, the faith of the pious,
and the multitudes in all parts of the world who believe in the true
divinity; the overthrow of idolatry and demon worship, and the testing
of the faithful by trials; the purification of those who persevered,
and their deliverance from all evil; the day of judgment, the
resurrection of the dead, the eternal damnation of the community of
the ungodly, and the eternal kingdom of the most glorious city of God,
ever-blessed in the enjoyment of the vision of God,--these things were
predicted and promised in the Scriptures of this way; and of these we
see so many fulfilled, that we justly and piously trust that the rest
will also come to pass. As for those who do not believe, and
consequently do not understand, that this is the way which leads
straight to the vision of God and to eternal fellowship with Him,
according to the true predictions and statements of the Holy
Scriptures, they may storm at our position, but they cannot storm it.
And therefore, in these ten books, though not meeting, I dare say, the
expectation of some, yet I have, as the true God and Lord has
vouchsafed to aid me, satisfied the desire of certain persons, by
refuting the objections of the ungodly, who prefer their own gods to
the Founder of the holy city, about which we undertook to speak. Of
these ten books, the first five were directed against those who think
we should worship the gods for the sake of the blessings of this life,
and the second five against those who think we should worship them for
the sake of the life which is to be after death. And now, in
fulfillment of the promise I made in the first book, I shall go on to
say, as God shall aid me, what I think needs to be said regarding the
origin, history, and deserved ends of the two cities, which, as
already remarked, are in this world commingled and implicated with one
another.
Footnotes
[437] Inductio.
[438] Namely, under Diocletian and Maximian.
[439] Gen. xxii. 18.
[440] Gal. iii. 19.
[441] Ps. lxvii. 1, 2.
[442] John xiv. 6.
[443] Isa. ii. 2, 3.
[444] Luke xxiv. 44-47.
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