emotions, which the Greeks call πάθη, while some of our own writers,
as Cicero, call them perturbations,[331] 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,[332] 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_,[333] 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,[334] 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."[335]
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.[336] But how
much more honourable 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."[337] 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 that 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,[338] 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.
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.[339] 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?
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 licence, 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."[340]
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
favourable 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.
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 labour 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."[341]
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.
9. _Whether the intercession of the demons can secure for men the
friendship of the celestial gods._
How, then, can men hope for a favourable 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;"[342] 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.
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,[343] 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;"[344] that is to say, he considered it due to the
Father's mercy that men, having a mortal body, should not be for ever
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 for ever.
11. _Of the opinion of the Platonists, that the souls of men become
demons when disembodied._
He[345] 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 deserve 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 honours that they may inflict injuries. But this question we
must not pursue. He also states that the blessed are called in Greek
εὐδαίμονες, because they are good souls, that is to say, good demons,
confirming his opinion that the souls of men are demons.
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."[346]
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.
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 endeavour 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 Apuleius 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.
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.
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.
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."[347] 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 carcases 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 favoured 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,"[348] 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.
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."[349] 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[350] 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.[351] This, then, as
Scripture says, is the "Mediator between God and man, the man Christ
Jesus,"[352] 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.
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?
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?
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.[353] Now the
apostle, speaking with the Holy Spirit, says, "Knowledge puffeth up,
but charity buildeth up."[354] 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 honours 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 recognise Him.
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?"[355] 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 endeavoured 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[356] 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.
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.
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,[357] 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;"[358] and again, "Confess to the God
of gods;"[359] and again, "He is a great King above all gods."[360]
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."[361] 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."[362] 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."[363]
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, endeavour 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:
[329] See Plutarch, on the Cessation of Oracles.
[330] The _De Deo Socratis._
[331] _De Fin._ iii. 20; _Tusc. Disp._ iii. 4.
[332] 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."
[333] Book xix. ch. 1.
[334] See _Diog. Laert._ ii. 71.
[335] Virgil, _Æneid_, iv. 449.
[336] Seneca, _De Clem._ ii. 4 and 5.
[337] _Pro. Lig._ c. 12.
[338] _De Oratore_, i. 11, 47.
[339] _De Deo Soc._
[340] _De Deo Soc._
[341] _De Deo Soc._
[342] _Cat. Conj._ i.
[343] Plotinus died in 270 A.D. For his relation to Plato, see
Augustine's _Contra Acad._ iii. 41.
[344] _Ennead._ iv. 3. 12.
[345] Apuleius, not Plotinus.
[346] _De Deo Socratis._
[347] Apuleius, _ibid._
[348] Virgil, _Georg._ i. 5.
[349] Augustine apparently quotes from memory from two passages of
the _Enneades_, I. vi. 8, and ii. 3.
[350] Or, humanity.
[351] Comp. _De Trin._ 13. 22.
[352] 1 Tim. ii. 5.
[353] δαίμων = δαήμων, knowing; so Plato, _Cratylus_, 398. B.
[354] 1 Cor. viii. 1.
[355] Mark i. 24.
[356] Matt. iv. 3-11.
[357] _Timæus._
[358] Ps. l. 1.
[359] Ps. cxxxvi. 2.
[360] Ps. xcv. 3.
[361] Ps. xcvi. 5, 6.
[362] Ps. lxxxii. 6.
[363] 1 Cor. viii. 5, 6.
BOOK TENTH.
ARGUMENT.
IN THIS BOOK AUGUSTINE TEACHES THAT THE GOOD ANGELS WISH GOD
ALONE, WHOM THEY THEMSELVES SERVE, TO RECEIVE THAT DIVINE
HONOUR 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.
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 honours 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,"[364] supposed or allowed others to suppose that many
gods should be worshipped, so that some of them considered that
divine honour 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. Λατρεία, 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,[365] is usually designated by another word
in Greek,[366] whereas the service which is paid to God alone by
worship, is always, or almost always, called λατρεία 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.[367] And the
heathen call their gods "cœlicolæ," 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."[368] 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 θρησκεία; 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, εὐσέβεια, 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,[369] in which sense the Greeks never use εὐσεβεῖν, though
εὐσέβεια 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 εὐσέβεια, the more general
word, but θεοσέβεια, 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 λατρεία, and in
Latin "servitus" [service], but the service due to God only; this
worship, which in Greek is called θρησκεία, and in Latin "religio,"
but the religion by which we are bound to God only; this worship,
which they call θεοσέβεια, 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.[370] 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?
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 the same 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;"[371]--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 fulness."[372]
3. _That the Platonists, though knowing something of the Creator
of the universe, have misunderstood the true worship of God, by
giving divine honour 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 λατρεία, 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,[373] 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
neighbour as thyself."[374] 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."[375] And so, when one who has this intelligent
self-love is commanded to love his neighbour 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."[376]
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 honour 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 favourably on the younger's.
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."[377] 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 reads 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 neighbour 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."[378] 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 fulness thereof.
Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?"[379]
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 shalt glorify
me."[380] 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?"[381] 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."[382] And so, when it is written, "I desire
mercy rather than sacrifice,"[383] 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 neighbour. For "on these two commandments,"
as it is written, "hang all the law and the prophets."[384]
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.[385]
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_[386]
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."[387] Our body, too, is 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.[388] 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."[389] 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."[390] 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,"[391] 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."[392] 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.
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 fulness, 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;"[393] 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,"[394]--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.
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.[395] 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;[396] 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;[397] 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.
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,[398] or the more honourable 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 recognised, 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 recognise 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.
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 fulfil 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."[399] 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,"[400]
equally hurtful, whether he assaults us as an enemy, or assumes the
disguise of a friend.
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 vapours, 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 brings 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
odours, 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 fulfil 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 favourable 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.
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.
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 recognised 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.'[401]
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.
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.[402] 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!'[403] 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.
15. _Of the ministry of the holy angels, by which they fulfil
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,[404] 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.
16. _Whether those angels who demand that we pay them divine
honour, 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.[405] 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_,[406]--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 endeavour 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?"[407]
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?
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 favourite 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 themselves 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 honours, 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?
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."[408] 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?
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 honour 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 honour, 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 honours. They have,
in fact, plenty odours 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 carcases, 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.
20. _Of the supreme and true sacrifice which was effected by the
Mediator between God and men._