[I] It is the settled judgment of all who can in any way use reason, that all men wish to be blessed. But while mortal weakness inquires who are blessed, or whence they become so, many and great controversies have been stirred up, over which the philosophers have worn out their studies and their leisure; to bring these forward and discuss them is both long and unnecessary. For if he who reads these things recalls what we did in the eighth book in choosing philosophers with whom this question of the blessed life which is to come after death might be handled—whether we can attain to it by serving with religion and sacred rites the one true God, who is also the maker of the gods, or many gods:
he does not expect that the same things should be repeated here also, especially since, by re-reading, if perchance he has forgotten, he can assist his memory. For we chose the Platonists, deservedly the most renowned of all philosophers, for this reason: because they were able to be wise enough to perceive that the immortal and rational, or intellectual, soul of man cannot be blessed except by participation in the light of that God by whom both it and the world were made; and thus they deny that anyone can attain that which all men seek, namely the blessed life, who has not adhered, by the purity of a chaste love, to that one supreme Good, which is the unchangeable God.
But because they too, whether yielding to the vanity and error of the peoples, or, as the Apostle says, "becoming vain in their imaginations," supposed—or wished it to be supposed—that many gods were to be worshipped, so that some of them held that even to demons divine honors of sacred rites and sacrifices were to be rendered (to whom we have already in no small measure replied): now it must be seen and discussed, as much as God grants, in what manner the immortal and blessed—established in the heavenly seats, dominions, principalities, powers, whom these men call gods, and some of whom they name either good demons or, with us, angels—are to be believed to wish that religion and piety be preserved by us;
that is, to speak more openly, whether it pleases them that we perform sacred rites and sacrifice to themselves also, or only to their God, who is also ours, or that we consecrate by the rites of religion any things of ours, or our very selves. For this is the worship owed to the divinity, or, if it must be said more expressly, to the deity; for signifying which by a single word—since no sufficiently suitable Latin one occurs to me—I introduce the Greek where necessary, to intimate what I mean to say. For latreia, wherever it is placed in the holy Scriptures, our translators have rendered as "service." But that service which is owed to men, according to which the Apostle enjoins that servants ought to be subject to their masters, is usually called by another name in Greek;
but latreia, according to the custom by which those spoke who composed for us the divine oracles, is always—or so frequently as to be almost always—called that service which pertains to the worship of God. Accordingly, if only "worship" (cultus) itself be spoken of, it does not seem to be owed to God alone. For we are said to "cultivate" (colere) men also, whom we frequent with honorable remembrance or presence. Nor is it only those to whom we subject ourselves with religious humility, but even certain things which are subject to us, that are said to be "cultivated." For from this word are called both husbandmen (agricolae) and settlers (coloni) and inhabitants (incolae), and they call the very gods "heaven-dwellers" (caelicolae) for no other reason than that they cultivate—that is, inhabit—heaven, not indeed by venerating but by dwelling, as though certain settlers of heaven;
not as those are called coloni who owe a condition to their native soil for the sake of agriculture under the dominion of the owners, but as a certain great author of Latin eloquence says: "An ancient city there was; Tyrian settlers held it." For he called them coloni from inhabiting, not from agriculture. Hence also cities founded from greater cities, as it were by swarms of peoples, are called "colonies." And through this it is altogether most true that worship (cultus), by a certain proper notion of this word, is owed to none but God; but because the worship of other things also is spoken of, therefore in Latin the worship owed to God cannot be signified by a single word.
For religion itself too—although it seems more distinctly to signify not any worship whatsoever, but the worship of God (whence by this name our translators rendered that which is called in Greek threskeia)—nevertheless, because by the Latin custom of speaking, not of the unlearned but even of the most learned, religion is said to be exhibited both to human kinships and affinities and to any relationships whatsoever, ambiguity is not avoided by this word when the question turns upon the worship of the deity, so that we might confidently be able to say that religion is nothing but the worship of God, since this word seems to be unusually withdrawn from signifying the observance of human relationship. Piety too is commonly understood, properly speaking, as the worship of God, which the Greeks call eusebeia.
Yet this word is said to be used also of the dutiful conduct shown toward parents. But in the common speech of the people this name is likewise frequently applied to works of mercy; which I judge to have come about because God commands these especially to be done, and testifies that they please Him either in place of sacrifices or above sacrifices. From this habit of speech it has come to pass that God Himself is called 'pious' (pius); though the Greeks, by no usage of their own tongue, call Him eusebes, even while the common people among them employ eusebeia also for mercy. Hence in certain places of the Scriptures, that the distinction might appear more sure, they preferred to say not eusebeia, which sounds as compounded from good worship, but theosebeia, which sounds as compounded from the worship of God.
But neither of these can we express in a single word. Therefore that which in Greek is called latreia and in Latin is rendered 'service'—but that service by which we worship God; or that which in Greek is threskeia, and in Latin is called 'religion'—but that religion which is ours toward God; or that which they call theosebeia, which we cannot express in a single word but can name 'the worship of God': this we declare to be owed to Him alone who is the true God and who makes His worshippers gods. Whatever immortal and blessed beings there are dwelling in the heavenly habitations, if they do not love us nor wish us to be blessed, they are by no means to be worshipped. But if they love us and wish us blessed, surely they wish us blessed from that source whence they too are blessed; or are they blessed from one source and we from another?
[II] But with these more excellent philosophers we have no conflict on this question. For they saw, and in their writings copiously set forth in many ways, that those beings are made blessed from the same source as we, by a certain intelligible light being set before them, which is God for them and is other than they, by whom they are illumined so as to shine and by participation in whom they subsist perfect and blessed. Often and at length Plotinus, expounding the meaning of Plato, asserts that not even that soul which they believe to be the soul of the universe is blessed from any other source than ours, and that this is a light which the soul itself is not, but by which it was created, and by whose intelligible illumination it intelligibly shines.
He also gives a likeness to those incorporeal things drawn from these visible and vast heavenly bodies, as though God were the sun and the soul the moon. For they think the moon is illumined by being set opposite the sun. That great Platonist therefore says that the rational soul—or rather it should be called the intellectual soul, of which kind he understands the souls of the immortal and blessed beings also to be, whom he does not doubt to dwell in the heavenly seats—has above itself no nature save God, who fashioned the world and by whom the soul itself was made; and that a blessed life and the light of the understanding of truth are furnished to those beings on high from no other source than that from which it is furnished also to us; which agrees with the Gospel, where it is read: 'There was a man sent from God, whose name was John;'
'this man came for a witness, that he might bear witness of the Light, that all might believe through him. He was not that Light, but was to bear witness of the Light. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into this world.' By which distinction it is sufficiently shown that the rational or intellectual soul, such as was in John, cannot be a light to itself, but shines by participation in another, the true Light. This John himself also confesses, when bearing witness to Him he says: 'Of His fullness have we all received.'
[III] Since these things are so, if the Platonists, or whoever else perceived these truths, had, in knowing God, glorified Him as God and given thanks, and had not become vain in their thoughts, nor in part become authors of the errors of the peoples and in part not dared to resist them: surely they would confess that both for those immortal and blessed beings and for us mortal and wretched ones, in order that we may be able to be immortal and blessed, there is one God of gods to be worshipped, who is both ours and theirs. To Him we owe the service which in Greek is called latreia, whether in any sacraments or in ourselves. For we, all together and each singly, are His temple, since He deigns to inhabit both the concord of all and each single one;
being no greater in all than in each single one, since He is neither extended by mass nor diminished by division. When our heart is lifted up to Him, it is His altar; we appease Him by His Only-begotten as our priest; we slay to Him bloody victims, when we strive even unto blood for His truth; we burn to Him the sweetest incense, when in His sight we are aglow with pious and holy love; we vow and render to Him His gifts in us and our very selves; we dedicate and consecrate to Him the memory of His benefits by solemn feasts and appointed days, lest through the rolling of time ungrateful forgetfulness creep in; we sacrifice to Him upon the altar of the heart the victim of humility and praise, kindled by the fervid fire of charity.
To see Him, so far as He can be seen, and to cleave to Him, we are cleansed from every stain of sins and evil desires, and consecrated in His name. For He Himself is the fountain of our blessedness, He is the end of all our longing. Choosing Him, or rather re-choosing Him (for we had lost Him by neglecting Him)—re-choosing Him therefore, whence 'religion' is said to be named, we tend toward Him by love, that by reaching Him we may rest, blessed for this reason, that we are made perfect by that end. For our good, concerning whose end there is a great contention among the philosophers, is no other than to cleave to Him, by whose incorporeal embrace alone (if it may be so said) the intellectual soul is filled and made fruitful with true virtues.
We are commanded to love this Good with the whole heart, the whole soul, and the whole strength; to this Good we ought both to be led by those from whom we are loved, and to lead those whom 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 soul, and with all thy mind,' and, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' For that a man might know how to love himself, an end was set for him to which he should refer all that he did, that he might be blessed; for no one who loves himself wishes anything other than to be blessed. But this end is to cleave to God.
Now therefore, to one who already knows how to love himself, when it is commanded that he love his neighbor as himself, what else is commanded than that he commend to him, as far as he can, the love of God? This is the worship of God, this is true religion, this is right piety, this is the service owed to God alone. Whatever immortal power therefore, however endowed with virtue, if it loves us as itself, wishes us to be subject to Him, that we may be blessed, to whom it too being subject is blessed. If then it does not worship God, it is wretched, because it is deprived of God; but if it does worship God, it does not wish itself to be worshipped in God's stead. For it rather votes for that divine sentence and favors it with the strength of its love, whereby it is written: 'He that sacrificeth unto the gods shall be rooted out, save unto the Lord alone.'
[IV] For—to be silent now about other things that pertain to the homage of religion by which God is worshipped—there is certainly no man who would dare to say that sacrifice is owed to any but God. Many things indeed borrowed from divine worship have been rendered to human honors, whether through excessive humility or through pestilent flattery; yet in such a way that those to whom these were rendered were held to be men, who are said to be worshipped and venerated, and, if much is added to them, even to be adored: but who has judged that sacrifice should be offered save to Him whom one either knew or supposed or feigned to be a god? How ancient, moreover, is the worship of God in sacrificing, those two brothers Cain and Abel sufficiently indicate, of whom God rejected the sacrifice of the elder and looked upon that of the younger.
[V] But who would be so foolish as to think that the things offered in sacrifices are necessary for any uses of God? Although the divine Scripture testifies to this in many places, yet, that we may not be long, it will suffice to recall that brief word from the Psalm: 'I said unto the Lord, Thou art my Lord, for Thou hast no need of my goods.' Not only, therefore, of cattle or of any other corruptible and earthly thing, but not even of a man's own righteousness is God to be believed to have need, and all worship rightly rendered to God profits man, not God. For no one would say that he had done a service to a fountain if he drank of it, or to the light if he saw by it.
Nor, from the fact that other sacrifices in victims of cattle were offered by the ancient fathers—which the people of God now reads about but does not do—is anything else to be understood, save that by those things were signified these things that are wrought within us, to the end that we may cleave to God and consult our neighbor's welfare toward the same end. A visible sacrifice, therefore, is the sacrament, that is, the sacred sign, of an invisible sacrifice. Whence that penitent in the prophet, or the prophet himself, seeking to have God propitious to his sins, says: 'If Thou hadst desired sacrifice, I would surely have given it; in burnt offerings Thou wilt not delight. A sacrifice to God is a broken spirit; a broken and humbled heart God will not despise.'
Let us consider how, where he said that God does not will sacrifice, there he shows that God does will sacrifice. He wills not, therefore, the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast, and He does will the sacrifice of a contrite heart. By that, then, which he said God does not will, is signified this which he subjoined that God does will. Thus, therefore, he said God wills not those things in the way in which by the foolish they are believed to be willed, as though for the sake of His own pleasure. For if He did not will that those sacrifices which He does will (of which this is one: a contrite and humbled heart in the sorrow of penitence) should be signified by those sacrifices which He was supposed to desire as if delightful to Himself, He would surely not have commanded that these be offered in the old law.
And therefore they had to be changed at a fitting and now certain time, lest they should be believed to be desirable to God Himself, or at any rate acceptable in us, rather than the things which are signified by them. Hence also in another place of another Psalm He says: 'If I were hungry, I would not tell thee; for the whole world is mine and the fullness thereof. Shall I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?'—as though He said: 'Certainly, if these were necessary to me, I would not seek from thee things which I have in my own power.' Then, adding what those things signify, He says: 'Offer unto God the sacrifice of praise, and pay thy vows unto the Most High, and call upon me in the day of tribulation, and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.' Likewise in another prophet:
'Wherewith,' he says, 'shall I lay hold of the Lord, take hold of my God most high? Shall I lay hold of Him in burnt offerings, in yearling calves? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with tens of thousands of fat he-goats? Shall I give my firstborn for my impiety, the fruit of my womb for the sin of my soul? Has it been shown thee, O man, what is good? Or what does the Lord require of thee but to do judgment and to love mercy and to be ready to walk with the Lord thy God?' And in this prophet's words both are distinguished, and it is sufficiently declared that God does not for their own sake require those sacrifices by which are signified these sacrifices which God does require. In the epistle which is inscribed 'To the Hebrews':
'Forget not,' he says, 'to do good and to communicate; for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.' And hence, where it is written: 'I will have mercy rather than sacrifice,' nothing else ought to be understood than that one sacrifice is preferred to another sacrifice; since that which by all is called sacrifice is the sign of the true sacrifice. But mercy is the true sacrifice; whence it was said, which I recalled a little before: 'For with such sacrifices God is well pleased.' Whatever things, therefore, are read in the ministry of the tabernacle or the temple to have been divinely commanded in many ways concerning sacrifices, are referred, by way of signification, to the love of God and neighbor.
For on these two commandments, as it is written, hang all the law and the prophets. [VI] Accordingly, a true sacrifice is every work by which it is brought about that we cleave to God in holy fellowship, referred, that is, to that end of good by which we can be truly blessed. Whence even that mercy itself, by which help is given to a man, if it is not done for God's sake, is not a sacrifice. For although it is done or offered by a man, yet sacrifice is a divine thing, so that the old Latins named it by this very word (sacrificium, 'a making sacred'). Whence man himself, consecrated in the name of God and vowed to God, in so far as he dies to the world that he may live to God, is a sacrifice. For this too pertains to the mercy which each one shows to himself. Therefore it is written:
'Have mercy on thy soul, pleasing God.' Our body also, when we chastise it with temperance, if we do this—in the way we ought—for God's sake, that we may not present our members as weapons of iniquity unto sin, but as weapons of righteousness unto God, is a sacrifice. Exhorting to which the apostle says: 'I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercy of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, well-pleasing to God, your reasonable service.' If, then, the body, which the soul uses as an inferior thing, as a servant or as an instrument, when its good and right use is referred to God, is a sacrifice:
how much more is the soul itself a sacrifice, when it refers itself to God, so that, kindled by the fire of His love, it may lose the form of worldly desire and, subjected to Him as to the unchangeable form, be reformed, being thereby pleasing to Him because it has received from His beauty! This the same apostle consequently adds, saying: 'And be not conformed to this world; but be ye reformed in the newness of your mind, that ye may prove what is the will of God, that which is good and well-pleasing and perfect.' Since, therefore, true sacrifices are works of mercy, whether toward ourselves or toward our neighbors, which are referred to God;
and since works of mercy are done for no other reason than that we may be freed from misery and thereby that we may be blessed (which comes about only by that Good of which it is said: 'But for me it is good to cleave to God'): surely it is brought about that the whole redeemed City itself, that is, the congregation and society of the saints, is offered to God as a universal sacrifice through the great Priest, who also offered Himself in His passion for us, that we might be the body of so great a Head, according to the form of a servant. For it was this form that He offered, in this form that He was offered, because according to it He is Mediator, in it He is Priest, in it He is Sacrifice.
When therefore the apostle had exhorted us that we present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy, well-pleasing to God, our reasonable service, and be not conformed to this world, but be reformed in the newness of our mind, to prove what is the will of God, that which is good and well-pleasing and perfect—which whole sacrifice we ourselves are: 'For I say,' he says, 'through the grace of God which is given to me, to all that are among you, not to be more wise than it behooves to be wise, but to be wise unto sobriety; even as God hath dealt to every one the measure of faith. For as we have many members in one body, but all members have not the same acts: so we, being many, are one body in Christ;'
'and every one members one of another, having diverse gifts according to the grace that is given to us.' This is the sacrifice of Christians: the many, one body in Christ. Which also the Church frequents in that sacrament of the altar well known to the faithful, where it is shown to her that in the very thing which she offers, she herself is offered. [VII] Rightly do those immortal and blessed beings, established in the heavenly seats, who rejoice together in the participation of their Creator—by whose eternity they are made firm, by whose truth they are made certain, by whose gift they are made holy—since they mercifully love us mortal and wretched ones, that we may become immortal and blessed, not wish us to sacrifice to them, but to Him whose sacrifice they too, together with us, have come to know that they themselves are.
For with them we are one City of God, to which it is said in the Psalm: 'Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God'; of which one part sojourns as a pilgrim in us, another part gives aid in them. From that heavenly City, indeed, where the will of God is the intelligible and unchangeable law, from that heavenly court, as it were (for there is exercised there a care concerning us), that holy Scripture, ministered to us through angels, descended, where it is read: 'He that sacrificeth unto the gods shall be rooted out, save unto the Lord alone.' To this Scripture, to this law, to such precepts, so great miracles have borne witness, that it sufficiently appears to whom the immortal and blessed beings, who wish us to be that which they themselves are, wish us to sacrifice.
[VIII] For if I should recall things too ancient, I shall seem to be unrolling further back than is enough what miracles were wrought bearing witness to the promises of God, whereby, thousands of years before, He foretold to Abraham that in his seed all the nations were to have a blessing.
For who would not marvel that to this same Abraham a barren wife bore a son at that time of old age when even a fertile woman could no longer bear; and that in the sacrifice of the same Abraham a flame made from heaven ran between the divided victims; and that to this same Abraham the heavenly burning of Sodom was foretold by the angels—those angels whom, in the likeness of men, he had received into hospitality, and through whom he had held the promises of God concerning offspring to come; and that, with the burning now imminent, there was wrought through those same angels a wondrous deliverance of Lot, his brother's son, from Sodom, whose wife, looking back on the way and suddenly turned into salt, admonished by a great sacrament that no one on the way of his deliverance ought to long for the things left behind?
But those things—how great and how many they are—which were already wondrously wrought through Moses on behalf of the people of God, for delivering them from the yoke of slavery in Egypt, where the magicians of Pharaoh, that is, of the king of Egypt, who oppressed that people by his domination, were permitted to do certain marvels, to the end that they might be the more marvelously overcome! For they did their deeds by sorceries and magical incantations, to which the evil angels, that is, the demons, are given over; but Moses, by so much the more powerfully as he was more just, in the name of God who made heaven and earth, with the angels serving him, easily overcame them.
Finally, at the third plague, when the magicians failed, ten plagues were accomplished through Moses with a great disposition of mysteries, whereby the hard hearts of Pharaoh and of the Egyptians yielded to letting the people of God go. And soon he repented, and when, as the Hebrews were departing, they endeavored to pursue them, while those crossed on dry ground through the divided sea, the wave returning upon itself from this side and that covered and overwhelmed them. What shall I say of those miracles which, while that same people was being led through the desert, grew frequent with astounding divine power: that the waters which could not be drunk, when wood was cast into them as God had commanded, were freed from bitterness and satisfied the thirsty;
that manna came from heaven to the hungry, and, when a measure had been fixed for those gathering, whatever anyone had gathered beyond it rotted with worms breeding therein, but on the day before the sabbath a double portion was gathered—because on the sabbath it was not lawful to gather—violated by no putrefaction; that to those desiring to feed on flesh, which seemed as though none could suffice for so great a people, the camp was filled with birds, and the ardor of their craving was extinguished by a loathing of satiety; that the enemies who met them and hindered their passage and gave battle were, while Moses prayed and his hands were stretched out in the figure of the cross, laid low with not one of the Hebrews falling;
that the seditious in the people of God, who divided themselves from the divinely-ordained fellowship, were, as a visible example of an invisible punishment, swallowed up alive by the gaping earth; that the rock struck by the rod poured out abundant streams for so great a multitude; that the deadly bites of the serpents, the most just punishment of sins, were healed by a bronze serpent lifted up on wood and looked upon, so that both the afflicted people might be succored, and death might be signified as destroyed by death, as it were by the likeness of a crucified death? Which serpent, indeed, being kept in memory of the deed, when afterwards the erring people began to worship it as an idol, Hezekiah the king, serving God with religious authority, broke in pieces with great praise for his piety.
[IX] These and many other things of this sort, all of which it is too long to recount, were done to commend the worship of the one true God and to forbid that of the many and false. But they were done by simple faith and the confidence of piety, not by incantations and songs composed by the art of wicked curiosity, which they call either magic, or by the more detestable name goetia, or by the more honorable name theurgy—those who as it were attempt to distinguish these things, and would have some, given over to unlawful arts, seem damnable, whom the common people also call sorcerers (for these, they say, pertain to goetia), but others seem praiseworthy, to whom they impute theurgy; whereas both alike are bound by the deceitful rites of demons under the names of angels.
For Porphyry too promises a certain kind of purgation of the soul through theurgy, yet hesitantly and, as it were, with a somewhat shamefaced discussion; but he denies that this art furnishes to anyone a return to God; so that you may see him fluctuate, with alternating opinions, between the vice of sacrilegious curiosity and the profession of philosophy. For now he warns that this art is to be guarded against as deceitful and dangerous in the very performance and prohibited by the laws; now again, as though yielding to its praisers, he says it is useful for cleansing a part of the soul—not indeed the intellectual part, by which the truth of intelligible things is perceived, things having no likenesses of bodies; but the spiritual part, by which the images of corporeal things are grasped.
For he says that this part is made, through certain theurgic consecrations which they call teletai, fit and apt for the reception of spirits and angels and for seeing the gods. Yet he confesses that from these theurgic rites no purgation accrues to the intellectual soul, such as would make it fit for seeing its own God and beholding those things which truly are. From which it can be understood of what sort of gods, or of what sort a vision, he says is made by theurgic consecrations, in which those things are not seen which truly are. Finally, he says that the rational soul—or, as he more likes to call it, the intellectual soul—can escape into its own realm, even if that which is its spiritual part has been purged by no theurgic art;
but that its spiritual part is purged by the theurgist only so far that it does not thereby attain to immortality and eternity. And so, although he distinguishes angels from demons, discoursing that the airy places are of demons and the ethereal or empyrean of angels, and though he advises that one should make use of the friendship of some demon, by whose carrying one might be lifted even a little from the earth after death, yet he declares that there is another way to the heavenly fellowships of the angels: nevertheless he testifies, by a confession in a manner expressed, that the society of demons is to be guarded against, when he says that the soul, paying its penalties after death, shudders at the worship of the demons by whom it was encompassed;
and theurgy itself, which he commends as though a conciliator of angels and gods, he could not deny to operate among such powers as either themselves envy the purgation of the soul, or serve the arts of the envious, bringing forth on this matter the complaint of some Chaldean or other: 'A good man in Chaldea complains,' he says, 'that his efforts to purge a soul were frustrated with great toil, when a man powerful for the same things, touched by envy, had by sacred prayers bound the powers he had adjured, so that they would not grant what was asked. Therefore that one bound them,' he says, 'and this one did not loose them.' By which token, he said, it appears that theurgy is a discipline for accomplishing as much good as evil, both among gods and among men;
and that the gods too suffer, and are led into those disturbances and passions which Apuleius attributed in common to demons and to men; yet he separates the gods from these by the loftiness of an ethereal seat, and asserts Plato's opinion in that distinction. [X] Behold now another Platonist, whom they report to be more learned, Porphyry, says that through some theurgic discipline or other even the gods themselves are bound by passions and disturbances, since they could be adjured and held by sacred prayers, so as not to furnish purgation to the soul, and so terrified by him who commanded evil, that they could not, by another who asked good, through the same theurgic art, be freed from that fear and released to grant the benefit.
Who would not see that all these are the fabrications of deceitful demons, save one who is their most wretched slave and a stranger to the grace of the true Deliverer? For if these things were done among good gods, surely there the beneficent purger of a soul would prevail more than the malevolent hinderer. Or if to just gods the man on whose behalf it was being done seemed unworthy of purgation, they surely ought not, terrified by the envious one, nor, as he himself says, hindered through fear of a more powerful deity, but by free judgment, to have refused it.
But it is a marvel that that benign Chaldean, who desired to purge a soul by theurgic rites, did not find some higher god who might either terrify still more and compel the terrified gods to do good, or restrain from them the one who was terrifying them, so that they might freely do good—if indeed sacred rites were lacking to the good theurgist, whereby he might first purge from that plague of fear the very gods whom he invoked as purgers of the soul. For what is the reason why a more powerful god can be brought in by whom they are terrified, and cannot be brought in one by whom they are purged? Or is there found a god who hears the envious and strikes fear into the gods lest they do good; and is there not found a god who hears the benevolent and takes fear away from the gods that they may do good?
O splendid theurgy! O purgation of the soul to be proclaimed, where unclean envy commands more than pure beneficence obtains! Nay rather, the deceit of malignant spirits is to be guarded against and detested, and the saving doctrine is to be heard. For as to the fact that those who work these filthy purgations by sacrilegious rites see certain marvelously beautiful images, as this man relates, whether of angels or of gods, as though with a purged spirit (if indeed they see any such thing), this is what the apostle says: 'For Satan transforms himself as an angel of light.'
For those phantasms are his, who, desiring to ensnare the wretched souls of many by the deceitful rites of false gods, and to turn them away from the true worship of the true God, by which alone they are cleansed and healed, turns himself into all forms, as was said of Proteus—pursuing as an enemy, aiding deceitfully, harming in both ways. [XI] This Porphyry was the wiser when he wrote to Anebo the Egyptian, where, like one consulting and inquiring, he both betrays the sacrilegious arts and overthrows them. And there, indeed, he reproves all the demons, whom he says, through imprudence, draw in humid vapor, and are therefore not in the ether but in the air beneath the moon and in the very globe of the moon;
Yet nonetheless he does not dare to assign to all the demons all the deceptions, malices, and follies by which he is rightly moved. For he calls some of them benevolent demons, after the manner of others, although he confesses that as a class they are all imprudent. He wonders, moreover, that the gods are not only enticed by victims but are also compelled and forced to do what men wish; and, if the gods are distinguished from the demons by having body and the demons by being incorporeal, how the sun and moon and the other visible things in heaven, which he does not doubt to be bodies, are to be reckoned gods; and, if they are gods, how some are said to be beneficent and others maleficent; and how, being corporeal, they can be joined to things incorporeal.
He also inquires, as if in doubt, whether in those who divine and work certain marvels there are passions of the soul, or whether some spirits come from without through whom they are able to do these things; and he rather conjectures that they come from without, on the ground that by applying stones and herbs they bind certain persons, and open closed doors, and marvellously perform something of that kind. Whence he says that some hold there is a certain kind of being, whose property it is to give ear, deceptive by nature, of every form and manifold, feigning gods and demons and the souls of the dead, and that this is what produces all these things which appear to be good or evil;
but that concerning the things which are truly good it renders no help—nay rather, it neither knows these things, but even ill-advises, calumniates, and sometimes hinders the diligent followers of virtue, and is full of rashness and pride, delighting in the reek of sacrifice, captivated by flatteries, and the rest—all which things, concerning this kind of deceptive and malignant spirits that come into the soul from without and mock the human senses, whether drowsy or awake, he does not affirm as things of which he himself is persuaded, but so faintly does he suspect or doubt them that he ascribes these opinions to others. For it was hard for so great a philosopher either to know or confidently to convict the whole diabolical fellowship, which any little Christian old woman does not hesitate to affirm and most freely detests.
Unless perhaps he is ashamed to offend both the man to whom he writes, Anebo, as a most illustrious high-priest of such rites, and the other admirers of such works as of things divine and pertaining to the worship of the gods. Nevertheless he goes on, and, as it were by way of inquiry, mentions those things which, soberly considered, cannot be attributed to any but malignant and deceptive powers. For he asks why, when the better are invoked, command is given as to worse, that they may execute a man's unjust orders; why they do not hearken to one who prays after he has touched a woman, while they themselves make no delay in leading anyone whatsoever into incestuous couplings;
why they enjoin that their priests must abstain from animal food, lest indeed they be polluted by bodily vapours, while they themselves are enticed by other vapours and by the reek of victims; and while their observer is forbidden to touch a corpse, yet these rites are for the most part celebrated over corpses; what is the reason that a man subject to any vice at all directs threats, not against a demon or the soul of some dead person, but against the sun and moon themselves or against any of the celestial bodies, and terrifies them falsely, so as to wring the truth out of them. For he threatens even to shatter the heaven and other things impossible for man, so that those gods, like most foolish boys, terrified by false and ridiculous threats, may do what is commanded.
He says also that a certain Chaeremon, skilled in such sacred—or rather sacrilegious—rites, wrote that the things which among the Egyptians are celebrated in the stories about Isis or about Osiris her husband have the greatest power of compelling the gods to do what is commanded, when he who compels by incantations threatens to betray or overthrow those very mysteries; where he even declares terribly that he will scatter the limbs of Osiris, should they neglect to do what is bidden. That a man should utter these and suchlike vain and insane threats against the gods—and not against just any gods, but against the very celestial ones that shine with starry light—and that not without effect, but compelling them by violent power and by these terrors leading them to do whatever he wills, Porphyry rightly marvels at;
nay rather, under the guise of one who marvels and seeks the causes of such things, he gives us to understand that these things are wrought by those spirits whose class he described above under the opinion of others—spirits deceptive not, as he himself put it, by nature, but by vice, who feign gods and the souls of the dead, but do not, as he says, merely feign to be demons: they plainly are demons.
And as for what seems to him to be the case—that by herbs and stones and animals and certain fixed sounds and words and shapes and figments, and also by certain movements of the stars observed in the revolution of the heaven, powers are fashioned on earth by men suited for carrying out various effects—all this belongs to those same demons, mockers of the souls that are subject to them, and displaying to themselves voluptuous sport out of the errors of men. Therefore either Porphyry, truly doubting and inquiring into these things, nevertheless mentions those very facts by which they may be convicted and refuted, and shown to belong not to the powers that favour us in our laying hold of the blessed life, but to the deceiver demons;
or else—that we may suspect something better of the philosopher—he wished by this means not to offend the Egyptian, given over to such errors and supposing himself to know some great things, with the proud authority as it were of a teacher, nor to disturb him by the wrangling of one openly opposing, but as it were by the humility of one inquiring and desiring to learn, to turn him to reflect upon these things and to show how contemptible, and even to be shunned, they are. In fine, near the end of the letter he begs to be taught by him what, from Egyptian wisdom, is the way to blessedness.
As for the rest, he says that those whose intercourse with the gods was such that they troubled the divine mind for the sake of finding a runaway slave, or acquiring an estate, or on account of a marriage or trade or something of that kind, seem to him to have cultivated wisdom in vain; and that those very deities with whom they had intercourse, even if they foretold true things about other matters, yet, since concerning blessedness they gave no sure nor sufficiently fitting counsel, were neither gods nor benevolent demons, but either that one who is called the deceiver, or wholly a human invention. [XII] But since through these arts things so great and of such a kind are wrought that they exceed the whole measure of human capacity:
what remains but that those things which seem marvellously to be foretold or done as if by divine power, and yet are not referred to the worship of the one God—to whom simply to cleave, as even the Platonists confess and in many ways testify, is the sole beatifying good—be prudently understood to be the mockeries of malignant demons and seductive hindrances, which are to be guarded against by true piety? But on the other hand, whatever miracles are wrought, whether by angels or in whatever manner, so divinely that they commend the worship and religion of the one God, in whom alone is the blessed life—these are to be believed to be truly done by them, or through them, who love us according to truth and piety, God Himself working in them.
For we must not listen to those who deny that the invisible God works visible miracles, since He, even according to them, made the world, which surely they cannot deny to be visible. Whatever marvellous thing, therefore, is done in this world, it is assuredly less than the whole of this world—that is, the heaven and the earth and all that is in them—which God certainly made. But just as He Himself who made them, so also the manner in which He made them is hidden and incomprehensible to man. Although, therefore, the miracles of visible natures have grown cheap through the constancy of our seeing them, yet, when we contemplate them wisely, they are greater than the most unwonted and rarest of marvels. For man himself is a greater miracle than any miracle wrought through man.
Wherefore God, who made the visible heaven and earth, does not disdain to work visible miracles in heaven or on earth, whereby He may rouse to the worship of Himself the invisible God the soul that is still given over to visible things; but where and when He does it, an unchangeable counsel rests with Him, in whose ordering all the times whatsoever that are to come are already made. For, moving temporal things, He is not Himself moved in time, nor does He know things to be done otherwise than done, nor does He hearken to those who invoke Him otherwise than He sees those who are about to invoke Him. For even when His angels hearken, He hearkens in them, as in His true temple not made with hands, as in His holy men; and His eternal commands, beheld in His law, are temporally fulfilled.
[XIII] Nor ought it to disturb us that, although He is invisible, He is often recorded to have appeared visibly to the fathers. For just as the sound by which a thought established in the silence of the understanding is heard is not the same as the thought itself, so also the form in which God, established in an invisible nature, was seen was not the same as He Himself. Yet nevertheless He Himself was seen in that same bodily form, just as that very thought is heard in the sound of the voice; nor were they ignorant that they saw the invisible God in a bodily form which He Himself was not. For Moses both spoke with Him who spoke, and yet said to Him: If I have found grace before Thee, show me Thyself, that I may knowingly see Thee.
Since, therefore, it behoved that the law of God should be given awesomely in the edicts of angels, not to one man or to a few wise men, but to a whole nation and an immense people: in the sight of that same people great things were done on the mountain, where the law was given through one man, while the multitude beheld the fearful and tremendous things that were being done. For the people of Israel did not believe Moses in the manner that the Lacedaemonians believed their own Lycurgus, namely, that he had received the laws which he framed from Jove or Apollo. For when the law was being given to the people, whereby the one God was commanded to be worshipped, in the sight of that people itself, so far as divine providence judged sufficient, the creation was seen, by marvellous signs and motions of things, to serve the Creator in the giving of that same law.
[XIV] But just as the right instruction of one man, so also that of the human race, in so far as it pertains to the people of God, has advanced by certain articulations of times, as of ages, by steady progressions, so that from things temporal one might rise to grasp things eternal, and from things visible to things invisible; yet in such wise that even in that time when visible rewards were divinely promised, still the one God was commended as to be worshipped, lest the human mind should, even for the sake of those earthly benefits of a transitory life, be subjected to any but the true Creator and Lord of the soul. For whoever denies that all things which either angels or men can afford to men are in the power of the one Omnipotent, is insane.
Concerning providence, indeed, the Platonist Plotinus argues, and proves that it reaches, from the supreme God, whose is intelligible and ineffable beauty, even down to these earthly and lowest things, by the beauty of little flowers and of leaves; all which things, as though abject and most swiftly perishing, he affirms could not have the most comely numbers of their forms, unless they were formed from thence, where the intelligible and unchangeable form, having all things together, endures. This the Lord Jesus showed there, where He says: Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin. But I say unto you, that not even Solomon in all his glory was so arrayed as one of these. But if the grass of the field, which today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven, God so clothes:
how much more you, O you of little faith? Most excellently, therefore, the human soul, still weak with earthly desires, learns to expect from the one God alone those very things which it temporally longs for, the lowest and earthly goods necessary for this transitory life and to be despised in comparison with the everlasting benefits of that other life, so that it may not depart from His worship even in the desiring of these things, but by contempt of them and by turning away from them may attain unto Him.
[XV] Thus, then, it pleased the divine providence to order the course of the times, so that, as I have said and as is read in the Acts of the Apostles, the law was given in the edicts of angels concerning the worship of the one true God, in which also the Person of God Himself appeared visibly—not indeed through His own substance, which ever remains invisible to corruptible eyes, but by certain signs through the creature made subject to the Creator—and spoke, syllable by syllable through the transitory little intervals of time, in the utterances of a human tongue: He who in His own nature neither begins to speak nor ceases, not corporeally but spiritually, not sensibly but intelligibly, not temporally but, so to say, eternally;
which His ministers and messengers hear more purely with Him, not with the ear of the body but of the mind—they who enjoy His unchangeable truth, immortally blessed; and what they hear must be done in ineffable ways and brought down even to these visible and sensible things, they accomplish without delay and without difficulty. But this law was given by a distribution of times, which at first held, as has been said, earthly promises, by which nevertheless eternal things were signified—things which many celebrated in visible sacraments, but few understood.
Yet the worship of the one God is there enjoined with the most manifest attestation of both words and of all things—not one out of the crowd, but He who made heaven and earth and every soul and every spirit, which is not what He Himself is. For He made them, they were made; and that they may be, and may fare well, they have need of Him by whom they were made. [XVI] To which angels, therefore, do we judge that we ought to give credence concerning the blessed and everlasting life? To those who wish themselves to be worshipped with religious rites, demanding that sacred things and sacrifices be rendered to themselves by mortals, or to those who say that all this worship is owed to the one God, Creator of all, and enjoin that it be rendered to Him with true piety—by the contemplation of whom they too are blessed, and promise that we shall be so?
For that vision of God is a vision of such great beauty, and so worthy of such great love, that without it Plotinus does not hesitate to call one most wretched, however endowed and abounding in any other goods. Since, therefore, some angels rouse us by marvellous signs to worship this one God, but others to worship themselves with the worship due to God alone—and this in such a way that the former forbid these latter to be worshipped, while the latter dare not forbid Him to be worshipped—let the Platonists answer which are rather to be believed, let whatever philosophers answer, let the theurgists answer, or rather the periurgists (for this is a name more worthy of all those arts); and finally let men answer, if any sense of their own nature—that they were created rational—still lives in any part of them;
let them answer, I say, whether sacrifice ought to be offered to those gods or angels who bid sacrifice be offered to themselves, or to that One alone, to whom sacrifice is bidden by these who forbid it both to themselves and to those others. If neither these nor those wrought any miracles, but only gave commands—some indeed that sacrifice be offered to themselves, but others forbidding it and bidding it to the one God alone—piety itself ought sufficiently to discern which of these descended from the pride of arrogance, and which from true religion. Nay, I will say still more: if only those who demand sacrifices for themselves moved human souls by marvellous deeds, while those who forbid this and bid sacrifice be offered to the one God alone by no means deigned to work these visible miracles:
assuredly the authority of the latter would have to be preferred, not by the sense of the body, but by the reason of the mind. But since God, in order to commend the utterances of His truth, has brought it about that, through those immortal messengers who proclaim not their own pride but His majesty, greater, more certain, more manifest miracles should be wrought—lest those who demand sacrifices for themselves should the more easily persuade the weak among the pious of a false religion, on the ground that they show certain astonishing things to their senses—who at last would please to be so foolish as not to choose the true things to follow, where he also finds the greater things to marvel at?
For those miracles of the gods of the Gentiles which history commends (I do not speak of those which, at hidden intervals of time, by the secret causes of the world itself—yet causes established and ordered under divine providence—come to pass as portents; such as unwonted births of animals and unusual appearances of things in sky and earth, whether merely terrifying or even harmful, which by their most deceitful cunning are said to be procured and appeased by demonic rites; but I speak of those which manifestly enough appear to be done by their own force and power, as when the images of the household gods, the Penates, which Aeneas carried away in his flight from Troy, are reported to have migrated from place to place; that Tarquin cut a whetstone with a razor;
that the Epidaurian serpent attached himself as a companion to Aesculapius sailing to Rome; that the ship in which the image of the Phrygian mother was being conveyed, rendered immovable by such great efforts of men and oxen, a single little woman, having bound it with her girdle, moved and drew along as a testimony of her chastity; that a Vestal virgin, about whose corruption a question was pending, filling a sieve with water from the Tiber, and it not flowing through, removed the controversy)—these things, therefore, and such as these, are in no wise to be compared, in power and greatness, to those which we read to have been done among the people of God; how much less those things which were adjudged to be forbidden and to be punished even by the laws of those very peoples who worshipped such gods, namely, magical or theurgical arts!
most of which deceive the senses of mortals merely in outward appearance by imaginary mockery, such as bringing down the moon, 'until,' as Lucan says, 'brought nearer, she foams down upon the herbs set beneath'; while some, even if they seem in performance to be matched by certain deeds of the pious, yet the very end by which they are distinguished shows that these our miracles incomparably excel. For by those miracles the gods are so much the less to be worshipped with sacrifices, the more they demand them; but by ours the one God is commended, who shows, both by the testimony of His scriptures and afterwards by the removal of those very sacrifices, that He needs no such things. If, therefore, angels demand sacrifice for themselves, those are to be preferred to them who demand it not for themselves, but for God, Creator of all, whom they serve.
For hereby they show with how sincere a love they cherish us, when through sacrifice they wish us to be subjected not to themselves but to Him, by the contemplation of whom they too are blessed, and to attain unto Him from whom they themselves have not departed. But if the angels who wish sacrifices to be made not to one but to many wish it made not to themselves but to those gods whose angels they are: even so, those angels are to be preferred to them who are angels of the one God of gods, to whom they so bid sacrifice be offered that they forbid it to any other, whereas none of the former forbids it to Him alone, to whom these bid that sacrifice be offered.
But further, if—as their proud deceit rather indicates—they are neither good angels nor angels of good gods, but evil demons, who wish not the one and supreme God alone, but themselves, to be worshipped with sacrifices: what greater protection is to be chosen against them than that of the one God, whom the good angels serve, who bid us to serve with sacrifice, not themselves, but Him whose sacrifice we ourselves ought to be? [XVII] Accordingly, the law of God, which was given in the edicts of angels, in which the one God of gods was commanded to be worshipped with the religion of sacred rites, while all others whatsoever were forbidden, was placed in an ark, which ark was called the ark of the testimony.
By which name it is sufficiently signified that God, who was worshipped through all those things, is not wont to be circumscribed or contained in a place, although His responses and certain signs to human senses were given from the place of that ark—but rather that the testimonies of His will were furnished thence; which also that same law was, written on tablets of stone and placed in the ark, as I have said, which, in the time of their pilgrimage in the wilderness, the priests carried with due veneration together with the tabernacle, which was likewise called the tabernacle of the testimony; and there was a sign, that by day a cloud appeared, which by night shone like fire; and when this cloud moved, the camp moved, and where it stood, the camp was pitched.
Now to that law were rendered testimonies of great miracle besides these which I have mentioned, and besides the voices which were uttered from the place of that ark. For when the same ark crossed over as they entered the land of promise, the river Jordan, standing still on its upper part and running down on its lower part, afforded a dry place of crossing both to the ark itself and to the people. Then, the ark having been carried around seven times, the walls of the city which first met them as hostile, worshipping after the manner of the Gentiles very many gods, suddenly fell, assaulted by no hand, struck by no battering-ram.
After these things, moreover, when they were now in the land of promise and that same ark had, on account of their sins, been captured by the enemy, those who had captured it placed it honourably in the temple of their god, whom they worshipped above the rest, and departing, shut it up; but on the morrow, when they had opened it, they found the image to which they made supplication fallen down and shamefully broken to pieces. Then they themselves, driven by prodigies and more shamefully punished, restored the ark of the divine testimony to the people from whom they had taken it. And what sort of a restoration it was! They set it upon a wagon, and yoked to it heifers from which they had drawn away the calves that were sucking, and let them go whithersoever they would, desiring here too to make trial of the divine power.
But those heifers, without any man to lead or guide them, treading steadfastly the way toward the Hebrews, nor recalled by the lowings of their hungering young, carried back a great sacrament to their worshippers. These things and suchlike are small to God, but great for the wholesome terrifying and instructing of mortals. For if the philosophers, and especially the Platonists, are praised for having been wiser than the rest, as I mentioned a little before, because they taught that divine providence administers these lowest and earthly things also, by the testimony of manifold beauties which are begotten not only in the bodies of animals but even in herbs and grass:
how much more evidently do those things attest divinity which are done at the hour of His proclamation, where that religion is commended which forbids sacrifice to all things celestial, terrestrial, and infernal, bidding it be offered to the one God only—who alone, loving and beloved, makes men blessed—and who, prefixing the appointed times of those sacrifices, and foretelling that they were to be changed for the better through a better Priest, testifies that He does not covet these things, but through them signifies other and more excellent things; not that He Himself may be exalted by these honours, but that we, kindled by the fire of His love to worship Him and to cleave to Him, may be roused to that which is good for us, not for Him. [XVIII] But will anyone say that these miracles are false, and were not done, but lyingly written?
Whoever says this, if he denies that any writings whatever are to be believed concerning these matters, can also say that no gods at all care for mortal affairs. For they persuaded men that they were to be worshipped in no other way than by the effects of marvellous works, of which the history of the Gentiles too is witness—the gods of which were able to display themselves as marvellous rather than to show themselves useful.
Wherefore, in this work of ours, of which we now have the tenth book in hand, we have not undertaken to refute those who either deny that there is any divine power, or contend that it does not care for human affairs, but those who prefer their own gods to our God, the Founder of the holy and most glorious City—not knowing that He Himself is also the invisible and unchangeable Founder of this visible and changeable world, and the most true Bestower of the blessed life not out of the things which He founded, but out of Himself. For His most truthful prophet says: But for me it is good to cleave to God. For concerning the end of the good, indeed, it is inquired among the philosophers, to the attaining of which all duties are to be referred. Nor did this man say:
But for me it is good to abound in riches, or to be distinguished by the purple and to excel by sceptre or diadem; nor, as some even of the philosophers did not blush to say: For me the pleasure of the body is good; nor what seemed better men to say something better: For me the virtue of my mind is good; but: For me, he says, it is good to cleave to God. This He had taught him, to whom alone sacrifice is to be offered, as His holy angels also, by the very attestation of miracles, admonished. Whence he himself too had become a sacrifice to Him, seized and burning with whose intelligible fire he glowed, and was borne, with holy longing, into His ineffable and incorporeal embrace.
But further, if the worshippers of many gods (whatever kind they suppose their gods to be) believe that miracles were wrought by them, whether from the histories of civil affairs or from magical books, or, as they more honourably think, theurgical books: what reason is there why they should be unwilling to believe that these things were done in those writings to which so much the greater faith is due, as He is great above all, to whom alone they enjoin that sacrifice be offered? [XIX] But those who think that these visible sacrifices are fitting for other gods, while to Him, as invisible, invisible and greater sacrifices are fitting for the greater and better One, and better sacrifices for the better One—such as are the offices of a pure mind and a good will: assuredly they know not that these are signs of those things, just as sounding words are signs of things.
Wherefore, just as in praying and praising we direct significant utterances to Him to whom we offer in our heart the very things which we signify: so in sacrificing let us know that a visible sacrifice is to be offered to none other than to Him whose invisible sacrifice we ourselves ought to be in our hearts. Then do the angels favour us and rejoice with us, and, according to their powers, help us toward this very thing—the angels and the higher powers, mightier by their very goodness and piety. But if we should wish to render these things to them, they do not gladly accept them, and, when they are so sent to men that their presence is perceived, they most openly forbid it. There are examples in the holy writings.
Certain persons supposed that the honour which is due to God ought to be paid to angels, either by adoring or by sacrificing, and were forbidden by their admonition and bidden to render this to Him to whom alone they knew it lawful. The holy men of God also imitated the holy angels. For Paul and Barnabas, when a certain miracle of healing had been wrought in Lycaonia, were supposed to be gods, and the Lycaonians wished to immolate victims to them; which they, putting it away from themselves with humble piety, announced to them the God in whom they should believe. Nor for any other reason do those deceivers proudly exact this for themselves, save that they know it is due to the true God. For not, in truth, as Porphyry and not a few suppose, do they rejoice in the reek of corpses, but in divine honours.
They have, moreover, a great abundance of nests everywhere, and if they wished for more they could furnish these for themselves. Those spirits, therefore, who arrogate divinity to themselves take delight not in the smoke of any body whatever, but in the mind of the suppliant, over whom, once deceived and made subject, they may lord it, barring the way to the true God, so that a man may not be that God's sacrifice while he is offered in sacrifice to some being other than He. [XX] Hence that true Mediator — inasmuch as, by taking the form of a servant, He was made the Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus — although in the form of God He receives sacrifice together with the Father, with whom He is also one God, nevertheless in the form of a servant chose rather to be a sacrifice than to receive one, lest by this very occasion anyone should suppose that sacrifice ought to be offered to any creature.
By this He is also priest, Himself the offerer, Himself also the oblation. Of this reality He willed that the Church's sacrifice should be the daily sacrament — the Church which, being the body of that Head, learns to offer herself through Him. Of this true sacrifice the ancient sacrifices of the saints were the manifold and varied signs, since this one thing was prefigured through many, as though one matter were expressed in many words, so that it might be greatly commended without weariness. To this supreme and true sacrifice all false sacrifices have given way.
[XXI] But within limited and predetermined times power has also been permitted to the demons, so that, by stirring up the men whom they possess, they may tyrannically wage enmity against the City of God, and may take sacrifices for themselves not only from those who offer them and demand them from the willing, but may even violently extort them from the unwilling by persecution. This power is not only not pernicious, but is even found to be useful to the Church, in order that the number of the martyrs may be completed — whom the City of God holds as citizens the more illustrious and honoured, the more bravely they contend even unto blood against the sin of impiety. These we should call, far more elegantly, if the custom of ecclesiastical speech would allow it, our heroes.
For this name is said to be derived from Juno, since in Greek Juno is called Hēra, and therefore, according to the fables of the Greeks, some son of hers was named Hērōs (Hero) — the fable signifying this, as it were mystically, that the air is assigned to Juno, where they hold that the heroes dwell together with the demons; by which name they call the souls of the dead who have some merit.
But by contrast our martyrs would be called heroes — if, as I said, the usage of ecclesiastical speech admitted it — not because they had any fellowship with the demons in the air, but because they conquered those very demons, that is, the aerial powers, and in them Juno herself, whatever she is thought to signify; who is not altogether unfittingly introduced by the poets as hostile to the virtues and envious of brave men who seek heaven. But again Virgil unhappily gives way and yields to her, so that, when in his poem she says, 'I am conquered by Aeneas,' Helenus advises Aeneas himself, as though with religious counsel, and says: 'Sing your vows gladly to Juno, and overcome the powerful mistress with suppliant gifts.'
From this opinion Porphyry — though not from his own view, but from that of others — says that a good god or genius does not come into a man unless a bad one has first been appeased; as though among them the evil deities were stronger than the good, since indeed the evil ones hinder the aids of the good, unless, being appeased, they yield place; and if the evil are unwilling, the good cannot benefit; whereas the evil can do harm, the good being unable to resist them. This is not the way of the true and truly holy religion. It is not thus that our martyrs conquer Juno, that is, the aerial powers that envy the virtues of the godly. Not at all, if it could be said in the customary way, do our heroes overcome Hēra by suppliant gifts, but by divine virtues.
For Scipio was more fittingly surnamed Africanus because he conquered Africa by valour, than if he had appeased his enemies with gifts that they might spare him. [XXII] With true piety the men of God cast out the hostile aerial power, contrary to piety, by exorcizing rather than by appeasing it, and they conquer all the temptations of its adversity by praying, not to it, but to their God against it. For it conquers or subjugates no one save by the fellowship of sin. Therefore it is conquered in the name of Him who took manhood upon Himself and acted without sin, so that in Him, the priest and sacrifice alike, there might be remission of sins — that is, through the Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, by whom, our sins being purged away, we are reconciled to God.
For men are separated from God by nothing but their sins, whose purgation in this life is wrought not by our own virtue, but by the divine mercy; through His indulgence, not through our power; since even that virtue, however small, which is called ours, has been granted to us by His goodness. We should indeed attribute much to ourselves in this flesh, did we not live under pardon until its laying-down. Therefore grace has been bestowed on us through the Mediator, so that, defiled by the flesh of sin, we might be cleansed by the likeness of sinful flesh. By this grace of God, in which He has shown His great mercy toward us, we are both governed in this life by faith, and after this life shall be brought to fullest perfection through the very vision of unchangeable truth.
[XXIII] Porphyry also says that it was answered by the divine oracles that we are not purified by the rites of the moon and sun, so that hereby it might be shown that a man can be purified by the rites of no gods. For by whose rites are men purified, if not by those of the moon and sun, whom they hold to be pre-eminent among the celestial gods? Then he says that it was expressed by the same oracle that the principles can purify, lest perchance, when it had been said that the rites of sun and moon do not purify, the rites of some other god from the throng should be believed to avail for purification. But what he means by 'principles,' as a Platonist, we know. For he speaks of God the Father and God the Son, whom in Greek he calls the paternal intellect or paternal mind;
but of the Holy Spirit he says either nothing, or nothing openly; though what other he calls the mean of these, I do not understand. For if, like Plotinus, where he discusses the three principal substances, this man too wished the nature of the soul to be understood as the third, he certainly would not call it the mean of these, that is, the mean of the Father and the Son. For Plotinus places the nature of the soul below the paternal intellect; but this man, when he says 'mean,' does not place it below, but sets it between. And doubtless he said this, as he could or as he would, which we call the Holy Spirit, the Spirit not of the Father only, nor of the Son only, but of both.
For the philosophers speak with free words, and in matters most difficult to understand they do not dread giving offence to religious ears. But for us it is right to speak according to a fixed rule, lest license of words should engender an impious opinion even about the realities that are signified by them.
[XXIV] Therefore we do not, when speaking of God, say two or three principles, just as it is not lawful for us to say two or three gods; although, when speaking of each single one — whether of the Father or of the Son or of the Holy Spirit — we confess that each single one also is God, yet we do not say, as the Sabellian heretics do, that the same one is the Father who is also the Son, and the same Holy Spirit who is both the Father and the Son; but that the Father is the Father of the Son, and the Son is the Son of the Father, and the Holy Spirit of the Father and of the Son is neither the Father nor the Son. Truly, then, it was said that a man is not purified save by the Principle, although among them 'principles' were spoken of in the plural.
But Porphyry, being subject to the envious powers — of whom he was both ashamed and yet feared to censure freely — was unwilling to understand that the Lord Christ is the Principle by whose incarnation we are purified. For he despised Him in that very flesh which He assumed for the sacrifice of our purification, not understanding — in that pride of his — the great sacrament which the true and benign Mediator cast down by His humility, showing Himself in that mortality to mortals, whereas the malignant and deceitful mediators, by not having such mortality, more proudly exalted themselves and promised to wretched men a deceptive aid, as though immortals to mortals.
The good and true Mediator therefore showed that sin is the evil, not the substance or nature of the flesh, which, together with the soul of man, could both be assumed without sin and be possessed, and be laid aside in death and changed for the better in the resurrection; nor is even death itself — although it was the penalty of sin, which nevertheless He paid for us without sin — to be avoided by sinning, but rather, if the opportunity be given, to be endured for the sake of righteousness. For He was able to loose sins by dying precisely because He both died, and not for sin. This one that Platonist did not recognize to be the Principle; for he would have recognized Him to be purifying. For neither the flesh is the principle, nor the human soul, but the Word through whom all things were made.
Therefore the flesh does not cleanse by itself, but through the Word by which it was assumed, when the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. For when He spoke mystically of His flesh to be eaten, and those who did not understand withdrew in offence, saying, 'This is a hard saying; who can hear it?' He answered to the rest who remained, 'It is the Spirit that quickens; the flesh profits nothing.' The Principle, therefore, having assumed soul and flesh, cleanses both the soul and the flesh of them that believe. Hence, when the Jews asked who He was, He answered that He was the Principle. This we, carnal, weak, subject to sins, and wrapped in the darkness of ignorance, could by no means perceive, unless we were cleansed and healed by Him, through that which we were and were not.
For we were men, but we were not righteous; whereas in His incarnation there was a human nature, but it was righteous, not sinful. This is the mediation by which a hand was stretched out to the fallen and prostrate; this is the seed ordained through angels, in whose edicts the Law also was given, by which both the one God was commanded to be worshipped, and this Mediator who was to come was promised. [XXV] By faith in this sacrament even the righteous of old could be cleansed by living devoutly, not only before the Law was given to the Hebrew people (for neither a preaching God nor the angels were wanting to them), but also in the very times of the Law, although it seemed to hold carnal promises under figures of spiritual things, on account of which it is called the Old Testament.
For there were prophets then also, through whom, as through angels, the same promise was proclaimed; and of their number was he whose so great and divine sentence concerning the end of human good I mentioned a little before: 'But for me it is good to cleave to God.' In which psalm the distinction of the two testaments, which are called the Old and the New, is plainly enough declared. For on account of the carnal and earthly promises, when he saw them abounding to the impious, he says that his feet were almost moved and his steps well-nigh poured out in a fall, as though he had served God in vain, when he perceived the despisers of Him flourishing in that felicity which he had expected from Him;
and that he laboured in the inquiry of this matter, wishing to apprehend why it should be so, until he entered into the sanctuary of God and understood, concerning the last things of those who seemed happy, that he had been in error. Then he understood that they, in that they had exalted themselves — as he says — had been cast down and had failed and perished on account of their iniquities; and that all that height of temporal felicity had become to them as the dream of one awaking, who suddenly finds himself deprived of the deceitful joys he was dreaming. And since on this earth or in the earthly city they seemed great to themselves: 'O Lord,' he says, 'in Thy city Thou wilt bring their image to nothing.'
Yet how useful it was for him to seek even these earthly things from none but the one true God, in whose power are all things, he shows plainly enough where he says: 'I am become as a beast before Thee, and I am ever with Thee.' 'As a beast,' he said, meaning surely 'not understanding.' 'For I ought to have desired from Thee those things which cannot be common to me with the impious, whom, when I perceived abounding in them, I supposed that I had served Thee in vain, since even they possessed these things, who had refused to serve Thee. Yet I am ever with Thee, because even in the desire of such things I did not seek other gods.' And by this it follows: 'Thou hast held my right hand; in Thy will Thou hast led me, and with glory Thou hast taken me up';
as though all those things which he saw abounding among the impious, and by which he was almost overthrown, pertained to the left hand. 'For what have I in heaven,' he says, 'and what have I desired from Thee upon earth?' He reproves himself and is justly displeased with himself, because, when he had so great a good in heaven (which he afterwards understood), he sought from his God upon earth a thing transitory, fragile, and, in a manner, a muddy felicity. 'My heart and my flesh have failed,' he says, 'O God of my heart' — failing indeed with a good failing, from the lower to the higher; whence in another psalm it is said, 'My soul longs and faints for the courts of the Lord'; and again in another, 'My soul has failed for Thy salvation.' Yet when he had spoken of both, that is, of the heart and the flesh failing, he did not add:
'God of my heart and of my flesh,' but 'God of my heart.' For through the heart the flesh is cleansed. Whence the Lord says: 'Cleanse the things that are within, and the things that are without shall be clean.' Then he says that his portion is God Himself, not something from Him, but Himself. 'God,' he says, 'of my heart, and my portion is God forever'; which, among the many things that are chosen by men, it pleased him should be chosen. 'For behold,' he says, 'those who put themselves far from Thee shall perish; Thou hast destroyed everyone that goes a-whoring from Thee' — that is, who wishes to be the prostitute of many gods. Whence follows that saying, on account of which the other things from the same psalm seemed worth quoting: 'But for me it is good to cleave to God' — not to go far off, not to go a-whoring after many.
But to cleave to God will then be perfected, when all that is to be freed has been freed. Now, however, that comes to pass which follows: 'To put my hope in God.' For hope which is seen is not hope; for what a man sees, why does he also hope for? says the Apostle. But if we hope for that which we see not, we wait for it through patience. Being now, then, established in this hope, let us do what follows, and let us also be, according to our small measure, angels of God, that is, His messengers, announcing His will and praising His glory and grace. Whence, having said, 'To put my hope in God,' he says, 'that I may announce all Thy praises in the gates of the daughter of Sion.' This is the most glorious City of God; this knows and worships the one God;
this the holy angels announced, who invited us to their fellowship and willed that we should be their fellow-citizens in it; who are not pleased that we should worship them as our gods, but along with them worship their God and ours; nor that we should sacrifice to them, but along with them be a sacrifice to God. Therefore, no one doubting who considers these things with the malignant obstinacy laid aside, all the immortal blessed ones, who do not envy us (for if they envied, they would not be blessed), but rather love us, that we too may be blessed together with them — these favour us more, help us more, when we worship the one God together with them, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, than if we worshipped them themselves by sacrifices.
[XXVI] In some way, as it seems to me, Porphyry was ashamed before his theurgist friends. For he understood these things after a fashion, but did not freely defend himself against the worship of many gods. He said, indeed, that there are some angels who, descending below, announce divine things to theurgic men; but others who, upon earth, declare the things that are the Father's, and His height and depth. Are we then to believe that these angels, whose ministry is to declare the will of the Father, wish us to be made subject to any but Him whose will they announce to us? Whence even this Platonist himself best admonishes that they are rather to be imitated than invoked.
We ought not, therefore, to fear lest we offend the immortal and blessed ones who are subject to the one God, by not sacrificing to them. For what they know is due to none but the one true God — to whom they too, by cleaving, are blessed — that beyond doubt they do not wish to be exhibited to themselves, neither through any signifying figure, nor through the very reality which is signified by the sacraments. This arrogance belongs to the proud and wretched demons, from whom the piety of those subject to God — and blessed from cleaving to none other than Him — is far different. For the attainment of which good it behoves that they too should, with sincere kindness, favour us; not arrogating to themselves that we should be made subject to them, but announcing Him under whom we may be associated with them in peace.
Why do you still tremble, O philosopher, to have a free voice against the powers that envy both true virtues and the gifts of the true God? Already you have distinguished the angels who announce the Father's will from those angels who, drawn down by some art, descend to theurgic men. Why do you still honour them, so as to say that they pronounce divine things? What divine things, pray, do they pronounce, who do not announce the Father's will? Surely they are those whom the envious one has bound with sacred prayers, lest they should furnish purgation to the soul, and could not, by the good one who — as you say — desires to purify, be loosed from those bonds and restored to their own power.
Do you still doubt that these are malignant demons? Or do you perhaps feign not to know, while you are unwilling to offend the theurgists, by whom, deceived through curiosity, you learned these pernicious and insane things as though for a great benefit? Do you dare to lift up into heaven, above this air once transcended, this envious thing — not a power, but a pestilence, and, not to call it a mistress, but, as you yourself confess, rather a handmaid of the envious — and to place it among your gods, even the starry ones, or even to defame the very stars with these reproaches? [XXVII] How much more humanly and tolerably did your fellow-follower, the Platonist Apuleius, err, who, honouring the demons ranked below the moon and downward, yet, willing or unwilling, confessed that they are agitated by the maladies of the passions and the disturbances of the mind;
yet the higher gods of heaven, pertaining to the ethereal spaces — whether visible, whom he beheld shining conspicuously, the sun and moon and the other lights there, or invisible, whom he supposed to exist — he separated, with as great a disputation as he could, from every stain of these perturbations! But you learned this not from Plato, but from Chaldean masters, to exalt human vices into the ethereal or empyreal heights of the world and the celestial firmaments, so that your gods might pronounce divine things to the theurgists; above which divine things you nevertheless make yourself, by the intellectual life, higher, so that to you, forsooth, as to a philosopher, the purgations of the theurgic art seem in no way necessary;
but you nevertheless impose them on others, so as to render this as it were a fee to your masters, in that you seduce to these things those who cannot philosophize — things which you confess to be useless to yourself as one capable of higher things; so that, namely, whoever are removed from the virtue of philosophy, which is too arduous and belongs to few, may, on your authority, seek out theurgic men, by whom they may be purified — not indeed in the intellectual soul, but at least in the spiritual soul; and since, incomparably, the multitude of those who are loath to philosophize is greater, more are compelled to come to your secret and unlawful masters than to the Platonic schools.
For this the most unclean demons, feigning themselves to be ethereal gods, whose herald and angel you have become, promised you: that those purified in the spiritual soul by the theurgic art do not indeed return to the Father, but shall dwell above the aerial regions among the ethereal gods. That multitude of men, for whose deliverance from the dominion of the demons Christ came, does not hearken to these things. For in Him they have the most merciful purgation of their mind and spirit and body. For this reason indeed He took upon Himself the whole man without sin, that He might heal from the plague of sins the whole of which man consists.
Would that you too had known Him, and had more safely committed yourself to be healed by Him, rather than by your own virtue, which is human, frail, and infirm, or by that most pernicious curiosity! For He would not have deceived you, whom your own oracles — as you yourself write — confessed to be holy and immortal; of whom also the most noble poet said, poetically indeed, because in the shadowed person of another, yet truly, if you refer it to Him: 'Under Thy leadership, whatever traces of our wickedness remain shall, being made void, release the lands from perpetual dread.'
For he said those things which can, on account of the infirmity of this life, remain even in those who greatly advance in the virtue of righteousness — if not crimes, yet traces of crimes — which are healed by none but that Saviour of whom this verse was expressed. For that Virgil did not say this of himself he indicates in about the fourth verse of the eclogue itself, where he says: 'The last age of the Cumaean song has now come'; whence it appears beyond doubt that this was said by the Cumaean Sibyl. But those theurgists, or rather the demons feigning the appearance and figures of gods, defile rather than purify the human spirit by the falsity of phantasms and the deceptive mockery of empty forms.
For how should they purify a man's spirit, who have an unclean spirit of their own? Otherwise they would in no way be bound by the incantations of an envious man, nor would they, out of fear, either withhold, or through like envy deny, that very empty benefit which they seemed about to bestow. It suffices that you say that neither the intellectual soul — that is, our mind — can be purified by theurgic purgation, and that this spiritual part itself — that is, the part of our soul below the mind, which you assert can be purified by such an art — you nevertheless confess cannot by this art be made immortal and eternal. But Christ promises eternal life; and therefore, though you are indeed vexed, yet wondering and amazed, the world runs to Him.
What does it profit that you could not deny that men err in the theurgic discipline, and that very many are deceived by a blind and foolish opinion, and that it is a most certain error to have recourse, by acting and supplicating, to the princes and angels; and yet again, as though lest you should seem to have wasted your labour in learning these things, you send men to the theurgists, that through them the spiritual soul of those who do not live according to the intellectual soul may be purified? [XXVIII] You send men, therefore, into a most certain error, and you are not ashamed of so great an evil, while you profess yourself a lover of virtue and wisdom;
which, had you truly and faithfully loved it, you would have recognized Christ, the virtue of God and the wisdom of God, and would not have recoiled, puffed up with the swelling of vain knowledge, from His most salutary humility. You confess nevertheless that even the spiritual soul can be purified by the virtue of continence without the theurgic arts and without the rites in the vain learning of which you laboured. Sometimes you even say that the rites do not, after death, elevate the soul, so that they now seem to profit nothing, even to that very part which you call spiritual, after the end of this life; and yet you turn these matters over in many ways and repeat them, for no other reason, as I judge, than that you may appear expert even in such things and please the curious lovers of unlawful arts, or that you may yourself make them curious about these arts.
But it is well that you say this art is to be feared, both because of the perils of the laws and of the very practice itself. And would that at least the wretched might hear this from you, and thereupon depart from it, lest they be swallowed up there, or not approach it at all. Ignorance, certainly, and, on account of it, many vices, you say are purged by no rites, but by the patrikon noun alone — that is, the paternal mind or intellect, which is conscious of the paternal will. But this you do not believe to be Christ; for you despise Him on account of the body received from a woman and on account of the reproach of the cross — being, forsooth, fit to cull lofty wisdom from the higher things, with the lowest despised and cast off. But He fulfils what the holy prophets truly foretold of Him:
'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the prudence of the prudent I will reject.' For He does not destroy and reject in them His own wisdom, which He Himself gave, but that which they arrogate to themselves, who do not have His. Whence, having recalled this prophetic testimony, the Apostle goes on and says: 'Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. For the Jews ask for signs, and the Greeks seek after wisdom;
but we,' he says, 'preach Christ crucified — to the Jews indeed a stumbling-block, and to the Gentiles foolishness; but to those very ones who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God; because the foolish thing of God is wiser than men, and the weak thing of God is stronger than men.' This, as it were foolish and weak, the wise and strong despise as though by their own virtue. But this is the grace which heals the infirm, who do not proudly boast their false blessedness, but rather humbly confess their true misery. [XXIX] You proclaim the Father and His Son, whom you call the paternal intellect or mind, and the mean of these, whom we suppose you to call the Holy Spirit, and after your manner you name three gods.
Wherein, although you use undisciplined words, you nevertheless see in some fashion, and as it were through certain shadowy veils of a slight imagination, whither one must strive; but the incarnation of the unchangeable Son of God, by which we are saved, so that we may be able to come to those things which we believe or in however small a part understand — this you refuse to acknowledge. And so you see in some fashion, even if from afar, even if with a clouded gaze, the fatherland in which we must abide, but the way by which we must go you do not hold. You confess grace nevertheless, since indeed you say it is granted to few to come to God through the virtue of intelligence. For you do not say: 'It pleased few,' or 'Few willed';
but when you say it is granted, you beyond doubt confess the grace of God, not the sufficiency of man. You use this word even more openly where, following the opinion of Plato, you yourself do not doubt that in this life a man in no way attains to the perfection of wisdom, yet for those living according to the intellect all that is lacking can, by the providence and grace of God, be completed after this life. O, had you but known the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord, and His very incarnation, by which He assumed a man's soul and body, you could have seen it to be the supreme example of grace! But what shall I do? I know that I speak in vain to one dead — yet as far as concerns you;
But as for those who hold you in high esteem and love you, whether out of some love for wisdom or from curiosity about the arts which you ought not to have learned—these rather I address in the very act of accosting you, and perhaps not in vain. The grace of God could not have been more graciously commended than that the very only-begotten Son of God, remaining unchangeably in Himself, should put on manhood and give the Spirit of His love to men through the mediation of a man, so that by Him men might come to Him who was so far removed—immortal from mortals, unchangeable from the changeable, just from the impious, blessed from the wretched.
And since He has naturally implanted in us the desire to be blessed and immortal, He, remaining blessed and yet taking upon Himself our mortality in order to grant us what we love, by His own suffering taught us to despise what we fear. But that you might be able to acquiesce in this truth, humility was needful—a thing most difficult to persuade your stiff neck to accept. For what incredible thing is being told, especially to you who understand such matters, by which you ought to admonish your very selves to believe it? What, I say, incredible thing is told you when it is said that God assumed a human soul and body? You yourselves certainly attribute so much to the intellectual soul—which is assuredly the human soul—that you say it can become consubstantial with that paternal Mind whom you confess to be the Son of God.
What, then, is incredible if some one intellectual soul, in a manner ineffable and unique, was assumed for the salvation of many? That a body should be joined to a soul so as to make one whole and complete man, we know by the witness of our very own nature. And if this were not most customary, it would surely be far more incredible; for it is easier to admit to belief that spirit should cleave to spirit—though the human to the divine, the mutable to the immutable—or, to use words you commonly employ, the incorporeal to the incorporeal, than that a body should cleave to what is incorporeal. Or does perhaps the unusual birth of a body from a virgin offend you? Yet this too ought not to offend, but rather to draw you toward embracing piety, that One marvelous was marvelously born.
Or is it perhaps this that you refuse to believe—that that very body, laid aside in death and changed for the better by resurrection, now incorruptible and no longer mortal, was borne aloft to the heights—because you look to Porphyry, who in these very books from which I have quoted much, which he wrote On the Return of the Soul, so frequently enjoins that every body must be fled if the soul is to remain blessed with God? But he himself, holding such views, ought rather to have been corrected, especially since you hold beliefs no less incredible about the soul of this visible world and of so vast a corporeal mass. For, on the authority of Plato, you say the world is an animal, and a most blessed animal, which you wish to be also everlasting.
How, then, will it never be released from a body, nor ever lack blessedness, if, in order that a soul may be blessed, every body must be fled? This sun too and the other stars you confess to be bodies, not only in your books—which all men, along with you, do not hesitate both to see and to say—but you moreover assert, by what you deem a loftier expertise, that these are most blessed animals, everlasting together with these very bodies. What is it, then, that when the Christian faith is urged upon you, you forget, or feign to be ignorant of, what you are accustomed to dispute or teach? What is the cause why, on account of your own opinions, which you yourselves assail, you refuse to become Christians, unless it be that Christ came in humility and you are proud?
What sort of bodies the saints will have in the resurrection may be disputed with somewhat greater subtlety among the most learned of the Christian Scriptures; that they will be everlasting, however, we do not in the least doubt, and that they will be such as Christ by His own resurrection displayed as a pattern. But whatever they may be, since they are declared to be wholly incorruptible and immortal, and in no way to hinder that contemplation of the soul by which it is fixed on God—and since you too say there are in the heavens immortal bodies of those immortally blessed—what is it that you suppose every body must be fled in order for us to be blessed, so that you seem to flee the Christian faith as if reasonably, unless it be that which I say again: Christ is humble, you are proud?
Or is it perhaps that you are ashamed to be corrected? And this vice belongs to none but the proud. Learned men, forsooth, are ashamed to become, from disciples of Plato, disciples of Christ, who by His Spirit taught a fisherman to have understanding and to say: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was made nothing that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.
This beginning of the holy Gospel entitled According to John—as we used to hear from the holy old man Simplicianus, who afterward presided as bishop over the church of Milan—a certain Platonist said ought to be written in golden letters and set up in the most conspicuous places throughout all the churches. But that divine Teacher became of no worth to the proud for this reason: that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us; so that it is too little for the wretched that they are sick, unless they even exalt themselves in their very sickness, and blush at the medicine by which they might have been healed. For they do this not that they may be raised up, but that by falling they may be more grievously crushed.
[XXX] If it is deemed unworthy to amend anything after Plato, why did Porphyry himself amend not a few things, and those no small ones? For it is most certain that Plato wrote that the souls of men after death are rolled round even down into the bodies of beasts. This opinion Porphyry's teacher Plotinus also held; yet it rightly displeased Porphyry. He judged indeed that human souls return into men, not into the bodies they had left, but into other new ones. He was ashamed, forsooth, to believe that a mother, rolled round perhaps into a mule, might carry her own son; and yet he was not ashamed to believe that a mother, rolled round into a girl, might perhaps be married to her son.
How much more honorably is it believed—what the holy and truthful angels taught, what the prophets moved by the Spirit of God spoke, what He Himself whom the forerunning messengers foretold as the Savior to come, what the apostles sent forth who filled the whole earth with the Gospel proclaimed—how much more honorably, I say, is it believed that souls return once to their own bodies, than that they return so many times to divers bodies! Yet, as I have said, Porphyry was in large part corrected in this opinion, so that he held human souls can be cast down into men alone, and did not in the least hesitate to overthrow the beastly prisons.
He says, moreover, that God gave the soul to the world for this purpose: that, coming to know the evils of matter, it might return to the Father and never again be held bound by the pollution of contact with such things. Here, although he has some inappropriate notion (for the soul was rather given to the body that it might do good; for it would not learn evils if it did not do them), yet in this he amended the opinion of the other Platonists, and that in no small matter: for he confessed that the soul, once cleansed from all evils and established with the Father, will never again suffer the evils of this world. By this opinion he certainly did away with what is held to be most characteristically Platonic—that, as the dead are made from the living, so the living are ever made from the dead.
And he showed to be false what Virgil, in Platonic fashion, seems to have said—that the purged souls sent into the Elysian fields (by which name the joys of the blessed seem to be signified as by a fable) are summoned to the river Lethe, that is, to the forgetting of things past: Namely, that, forgetful, they may again revisit the vault above and begin to wish to return into bodies. Rightly did this displease Porphyry, since it is truly foolish to believe that from that life—which cannot be most blessed unless it be most certain of its own eternity—souls should desire the corruption and taint of corruptible bodies and thence return to these things, as though the highest purgation should bring this about, that defilement be sought after.
For if the fact that they are perfectly cleansed brings this about, that they forget all evils, and the forgetting of evils produces the desire for bodies, wherein they are again entangled in evils—then surely the highest felicity will be the cause of unhappiness, and the perfection of wisdom the cause of folly, and the highest cleansing the cause of impurity. Nor will the soul there be blessed by truth, for however long it exists there, it must be deceived in order to be blessed. For it will not be blessed unless it is secure; but that it may be secure, it will falsely suppose it will always be blessed, since at some time it will also be wretched. To whom, then, the cause of rejoicing will be falsehood, how will it rejoice in truth? Porphyry saw this, and said that the purged soul returns to the Father for this reason: that it may never again be held bound by the pollution of contact with evils.
Falsely, therefore, was that cycle believed by certain Platonists to be, as it were, necessary—of departing from the same things and returning to the same. And even if this were true, what profit would there be in knowing it, unless perhaps the Platonists would dare on that account to prefer themselves to us, because in this life we do not yet know what they, in another and better life, being most purged and most wise, would be destined not to know, and would be blessed by believing what is false? But if it is most absurd and most foolish to say this, then surely the opinion of Porphyry is to be preferred to those who supposed the cycles of souls with blessedness and misery ever alternating. And if this is so, behold, a Platonist dissents from Plato for the better;
behold, he saw what the other did not see, nor after so great a master did he shrink from correction, but preferred truth to a man. [XXXI] Why, then, do we not rather believe the divinity concerning those matters which we cannot search out by human wit—the divinity which says that the soul itself is not coeternal with God, but was created, whereas before it was not? For the reason the Platonists were unwilling to believe this, they seemed to themselves to offer as suitable was this: that nothing could henceforth be everlasting unless it had always existed before.
And yet concerning the world, and concerning those whom Plato writes to be gods made by God within the world, he most openly says that they began and have a beginning, but declares that they will nevertheless have no end, but, through the most mighty will of their Founder, will remain forever. But the manner in which they understand this they have found out—that this is, namely, not a beginning of time, but of substitution. "For just as," they say, "if a foot had from eternity always been in dust, a footprint would always have been beneath it, which footprint nevertheless no one would doubt was made by the one treading, nor would the one be prior to the other, although the one was made by the other:
so also," they say, "the world and the gods created within it have both always existed, since He who made them always exists, and yet they were made." If, then, the soul always existed, must its misery too be said always to have existed? But if something in it which did not exist from eternity began to be in time, why could it not have come to pass that the soul itself should be in time, which formerly had not been? Furthermore, its blessedness also—which, after the experience of evils, will be firmer and destined to remain without end, as this man himself confesses—undoubtedly began in time, and yet will always be, though before it was not. That whole argument, therefore, is dissolved by which it is supposed that nothing can be without end of time unless it has no beginning of time.
For the soul's blessedness has been found which, though it has a beginning of time, will have no end of time. Wherefore let human weakness yield to divine authority, and let us believe those blessed and immortal beings concerning true religion, who do not seek for themselves the honor which they know is due to their God, who is also ours, nor bid us offer sacrifice save to Him alone, whose sacrifice both we and they—as I have often said, and often must be said—ought to be, being offered through that Priest who, in the man whom He assumed, and according to whom He willed also to be a Priest, deigned even unto death to become a sacrifice for us.
[XXXII] This is the religion which holds the universal way of the soul's liberation, since by none but this can it be liberated. For this is, in a certain manner, the royal way, which alone leads to a kingdom—not one tottering on a temporal pinnacle, but secure in the firmness of eternity. But when Porphyry says, in the first book near its end concerning the return of the soul, that no single sect has yet embraced what contains the universal way of the soul's liberation—whether some most true philosophy, or the customs and discipline of the Indians, or the induction of the Chaldeans, or by any other way whatsoever, and that this way had not yet come to his knowledge by historical acquaintance—he beyond doubt confesses that there is such a way, but that it had not yet come to his notice.
Thus whatever he had most diligently learned concerning the soul's liberation, and seemed to himself, or rather to others, to know and hold, was not sufficient for him. For he perceived that there was still lacking to him some most excellent authority which one ought to follow in so great a matter. But when he says that not even from any most true philosophy had a sect yet come to his knowledge which contains the universal way of the soul's liberation, he shows quite plainly, as I judge, either that the very philosophy in which he philosophized is not the most true, or that such a way is not contained in it. And how can that now be the most true, in which this way is not contained?
For what other universal way is there of the soul's liberation, save that by which all souls universally are liberated, and consequently without which no soul is liberated? But when he adds and says: "Or from the customs and discipline of the Indians, or from the induction of the Chaldeans, or by any other way whatsoever," he testifies with most manifest voice that neither in those things which he had learned from the Indians nor in those which he had learned from the Chaldeans is this universal way of the soul's liberation contained; and he could not keep silent that he had assuredly taken divine oracles from the Chaldeans, of which he makes constant mention.
What, then, would he have us understand as the universal way of the soul's liberation, not yet embraced either from any most true philosophy or from the doctrines of those nations who were held to be great, as it were, in divine matters—because among them a devout curiosity prevailed concerning the knowing and worshiping of certain angels—and not yet brought to his notice by historical acquaintance? What is this universal way, save that which is imparted from God not as proper to any single nation, but as common to all nations universally? This, that man of no mean genius certainly does not doubt to be. For he does not believe that divine Providence could have left the human race without this universal way of the soul's liberation.
For he does not say that it does not exist, but only that this so great good and so great a help had not yet been embraced, had not yet come to his notice; and no wonder. For Porphyry was then in human affairs at a time when this universal way of the soul's liberation—which is none other than the Christian religion—was permitted to be assailed by the worshipers of idols and demons and by earthly kings, for the sake of establishing and consecrating the number of the martyrs, that is, of the witnesses of the truth, through whom it might be shown that all bodily evils must be endured for the faith of piety and for the commendation of truth.
Porphyry, therefore, saw these things, and supposed that through persecutions of this kind that way would speedily perish, and on that account he thought it was not itself the universal way of the soul's liberation—not understanding that this very thing which moved him, and which in his own choice he feared to endure, pertained rather to its confirmation and stronger commendation. This, then, is the universal way of the soul's liberation—that is, granted by divine mercy to all nations universally—whose knowledge, to whomsoever it has now come and to whomsoever it is to come, neither ought nor will be right to say to it: Why now? and: Why so late? since the counsel of Him who sends is not penetrable by human wit.
This too that man perceived, when he said that this gift of God had not yet been embraced and had not yet been brought to his notice. For he did not on that account judge it to be untrue, because it had not yet been received into his faith, nor yet come into his knowledge. This, I say, is the universal way of the believers who are to be liberated, concerning which the faithful Abraham received the divine oracle: In thy seed shall all nations be blessed. He was indeed by nation a Chaldean; but that he might receive such promises, and that from him might be propagated the seed ordained through angels in the hand of the Mediator, in whom should be this universal way of the soul's liberation—that is, given to all nations—he was bidden to depart from his land, and from his kindred, and from his father's house.
Then, first freed from the superstitions of the Chaldeans, he worshiped the one true God by following Him, and faithfully believed Him who made these promises. This is the universal way, concerning which it is said in holy prophecy: May God have mercy on us and bless us; may He make His countenance to shine upon us, that we may know Thy way upon earth, Thy salvation among all nations. Whence, so long afterward, having taken flesh from the seed of Abraham, the Savior Himself says of Himself: I am the way, the truth, and the life. This is the universal way, concerning which it was prophesied so long before: It shall come to pass in the last days that the mountain of the Lord shall be made manifest, prepared on the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall come to it, and many peoples shall enter in and shall say:
Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will declare to us His way, and we will walk in it. For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. This way, therefore, is not of one nation, but of all nations; and the law and the word of the Lord did not remain in Zion and Jerusalem, but went forth thence, that it might diffuse itself through all things. Whence the Mediator Himself, after His resurrection, says to His trembling disciples: It behooved that those things should be fulfilled which were written in the law and the prophets and the psalms concerning Me.
Then He opened their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures, and said to them that it behooved Christ to suffer and to rise again from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.
This, then, is the universal way of the soul's liberation, which the holy angels and holy prophets first, among the few men who—where they could—found the grace of God, and chiefly among the Hebrew nation (whose commonwealth was, in a certain manner, itself consecrated to the prophecy and foreannouncement of the City of God to be gathered out of all nations), signified by the tabernacle and the temple and the priesthood and the sacrifices, and foretold by certain plain utterances, but for the most part by mystical ones;
but the Mediator Himself, present in the flesh, and His blessed apostles, now revealing the grace of the New Testament, indicated more openly those things which in former times were somewhat more obscurely signified, according to the apportionment of the ages of the human race, even as it pleased God in His wisdom to ordain—with signs bearing witness of divine and wondrous works, of which I have already set down a few above.
For not only did angelic visions appear and the words of heavenly ministers alone resound, but moreover, as men acted by the word of God in simplicity of piety, unclean spirits were driven from the bodies and senses of men, the diseases and infirmities of the body were healed, the wild animals of land and water, the birds of the air, trees, elements, and stars performed the divine commands, the regions below yielded, the dead returned to life—apart from the Savior's own singular and peculiar miracles, especially of His nativity and resurrection, in the one of which He displayed only the sacrament of His mother's virginity, but in the other also the pattern of those who are to rise at the end.
This way cleanses the whole man and prepares the mortal for immortality in all the parts of which he consists. For, that no other purgation might be sought for that part which Porphyry calls intellectual, another for that which he calls spiritual, and another for the body itself, therefore the most truthful and most powerful Cleanser and Savior assumed the whole man. Apart from this way, which—partly when these future things are foreannounced, partly when accomplished things are announced—was never lacking to the human race, no one has been liberated, no one is liberated, no one will be liberated. But as for Porphyry's saying that the universal way of the soul's liberation has not yet been brought to his notice by historical acquaintance:
what can be found either more illustrious than this history, which has taken possession of the whole world with so lofty a summit of authority, or more faithful, in which past things are so narrated that things to come are also foretold, of which we see many fulfilled, and from which we without doubt hope that those which remain will be fulfilled? For neither Porphyry nor any of the Platonists can, even in this way, despise the divination and prediction as it were of earthly things and of things pertaining to this mortal life, which they rightly do in the case of other soothsayers and the divinations of whatsoever kinds or arts. For they deny that such things are to be reckoned as belonging to great men or as of great worth—and rightly so.
For they come to pass either through the foreknowledge of inferior causes—just as in the art of medicine, by certain antecedent signs, very many things are foreseen that will befall one's health—or unclean demons foreannounce their own predetermined deeds, whose right they claim for themselves, in a certain manner, both in leading the minds and desires of the wicked toward whatever deeds are agreeable to them, and in the lowest matter of human frailty. Not such things did the holy men, walking in that universal way of the souls to be liberated, take care to prophesy as great, although even these did not escape them and were often foretold by them to produce faith in those things which could not be conveyed to mortal senses nor brought to proof by swift and easy means.
For Christ's coming in the flesh, and those things which in Him were so clearly perfected and fulfilled in His name—the repentance of men and the conversion of their wills to God, the remission of sins, the grace of righteousness, the faith of the pious, and throughout the whole world the multitude of those believing in the true Godhead, the overthrow of the worship of images and demons and the testing by temptations, the purgation of those making progress and the liberation from every evil, the day of judgment, the resurrection of the dead, the eternal damnation of the fellowship of the impious, and the eternal kingdom of the most glorious City of God enjoying His presence immortally—these were foretold and promised in the Scriptures of this way;
and so many of these things we behold fulfilled, that with upright piety we are confident the rest will come to pass. As for the rectitude of this way—reaching even unto the seeing of God and cleaving to Him for eternity—whosoever do not believe it in the truth of the holy Scriptures by which it is proclaimed and asserted, and for that reason do not understand it, they can assail it, but they cannot vanquish it. Wherefore in these ten books, although less than the intent of some concerning us expected, yet in accordance with the zeal of certain persons, so far as the true God and Lord has deigned to help, we have given satisfaction by refuting the contradictions of the impious, who prefer their own gods to the Founder of the holy City concerning which we have set out to dispute.
Of which ten books the first five were written against those who think the gods are to be worshiped for the good things of this life; the latter five against those who suppose the worship of the gods is to be maintained for the sake of the life which is to be after death. Thenceforth, therefore, as I promised in the first book, I will—so far as I shall be divinely helped—set forth what I judge must be said concerning the rise, the course, and the appointed ends of the two cities, which in this age we have said are entangled and mutually intermingled.