'for what a man sees, why does he hope for it?' says the apostle. 'But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it through patience.' But being now established in this hope, let us do what follows, and let us ourselves also, according to our small measure, be angels of God, that is, His messengers, announcing His will and praising His glory and grace. Whence, when he had said: 'To set my hope in God,' he adds: 'that I may declare all Thy praises in the gates of the daughter of Zion.' This is the most glorious City of God: this knows and worships the one God; this the holy angels have announced, who have invited us to its fellowship and have willed that we be their fellow citizens in it; whom it does not please that we worship them as our gods, but together with them their God and ours;
and that we should not sacrifice to them, but together with them be a sacrifice to God. Therefore, with no one doubting who considers these things laid down with malicious obstinacy, all the immortal blessed ones, who do not envy us (for neither, if they envied, would they be blessed), but rather love us, that we too with them may be blessed, favor us more, help us more, when we worship together with them the one God—the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit—than if we worshipped these very ones by sacrifices. CHAPTER 26. Of the inconstancy of Porphyry, wavering between the confession of the true God and the worship of demons. In some way (as far as it seems to me), Porphyry was ashamed before his theurgist friends.
For he was in some manner discerning these things, but did not freely defend himself against the worship of many gods. And he said that some angels are of one sort, who, descending downward, announce divine things to theurgic men; but others of another sort, who upon earth declare those things which 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 subject to none but Him whose will they announce to us? Whence this very Platonist also most excellently 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 owed to none but the one true God—to whom they too, by cleaving, are blessed—without doubt they do not wish to be displayed to themselves, neither through any signifying figure, nor through the very reality which is signified by the sacraments. This is the arrogance of demons proud and wretched, from whom is far different the piety of those subject to God and blessed by cleaving to none other than Him. For the attainment of which good it is fitting that they too favor us with sincere kindness, and not arrogate to themselves that we should be made subject to them, but announce Him under whom we may be joined in peace with them. Why do you still tremble, O philosopher, to have a free voice against the powers that envy both the true virtues and the gifts of the true God?
You have already distinguished the angels who announce the Father's will from those angels who, by I-know-not-what art, are led down to theurgic men. Why do you still honor them, so as to say that they declare divine things? What divine things, pray, do they declare, who do not announce the will of the Father? Surely these are they whom the envious one bound by sacred prayers, lest they should furnish purgation to the soul; nor could they, by the good one who (as you say) desired 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 a great benefit?
Do you dare, having crossed this air, to raise that envious thing—not a power, but a pestilence; and I will not say a mistress, but, as you yourself confess, rather a handmaid of the envious—up into heaven, and to place it among your gods, even the starry ones, or even to defame the very stars with these reproaches? CHAPTER 27. Of the impiety of Porphyry, by which he surpasses even the error of Apuleius. How much more humanely and tolerably did your fellow Platonist Apuleius err, who held that only the demons, ordained from the moon and below, are agitated by the diseases of the passions and the disturbances of the mind—honoring them indeed, but willingly or unwillingly confessing it:
yet the gods of heaven, the higher ones, pertaining to the ethereal spaces—whether visible, which he discerned shining conspicuously, the sun and moon and the other lights in the same region, or invisible, which he supposed to exist—he separated, by as great a disputation as he could, from all stain of those perturbations! But you learned this not from Plato, but from your Chaldean masters, that you might exalt human vices to the ethereal or empyrean heights of the world and to the celestial firmaments, so that your gods might declare divine things to the theurgists; above which divine things, however, you make yourself higher by the intellectual life, so that, forsooth, to you as a philosopher the purgations of the theurgic art may seem in no way necessary;
yet you nevertheless impose them upon others, so as to render this as it were a wage 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 matters; so that, namely, whoever are removed from the virtue of philosophy, which is too steep 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 the multitude of those who are loath to philosophize is incomparably greater, more may be driven to come to your secret and unlawful masters than to the Platonic schools.
For this is what those most unclean demons, feigning themselves to be ethereal gods—whose preacher and angel you have become—have 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. This multitude of men does not hear such things—the men for whose deliverance from the dominion of the demons Christ came. For in Him they have the most merciful purgation of their mind and spirit and body. For this very reason He assumed the whole man without sin, that He might heal from the plague of sins the whole of which man consists.
Would that you also had known Him, and had committed yourself to be healed by Him more safely than to your own virtue, which is human, fragile, and infirm, or to that most pernicious curiosity. For He would not have deceived you, whom your own oracles, as you yourself write, have confessed to be holy and immortal; concerning whom also a most noble poet said—poetically indeed, because under the shadow of another's person, yet truly, if you refer it to Him: 'Under Thy leadership, if any traces of our crime remain, they, made void, shall release the lands from perpetual dread.'
For he said those things which can remain even in those who profit much in the virtue of righteousness, on account of the infirmity of this life—if not crimes, yet traces of crimes—which are healed by none but that Savior of whom this verse was framed. 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 without hesitation that this was spoken by the Cumaean Sibyl. But those theurgists, or rather the demons feigning the species and figures of gods, defile rather than purify the human spirit by the falsehood of phantasms and the deceptive mockery of vain forms.
For how should they cleanse the spirit of a man, who have their own unclean? Otherwise they would in no way be bound by the songs of an envious man, and that very empty benefit which they seemed about to furnish, they would either withhold under fear or deny out of like envy. It suffices that you say the intellectual soul, that is, our mind, cannot be purified by theurgic purgation; and even that spiritual one, that is, the part of our soul lower than the mind, which you assert can be purified by such an art, you confess nevertheless cannot be made immortal and eternal by this art. But Christ promises eternal life; whence the world runs together to Him—you indeed being indignant, yet wondering and astonished.
What does it profit that you could not deny that men err by the theurgic discipline and deceive very many through 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 labor in learning these things, you send men to the theurgists, that through them the spiritual soul of those may be purified who do not live according to the intellectual soul? CHAPTER 28. By what persuasions Porphyry, being blinded, could not recognize the true Wisdom, which is Christ. You send men therefore into a most certain error, nor are you ashamed of so great an evil, while you profess yourself a lover of virtue and wisdom;
Had you loved her truly and faithfully, you would have come to know Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God, nor would you, puffed up with the swelling of vain knowledge, have recoiled from His most wholesome humility. Yet you confess that even the spiritual soul can be purged by the virtue of continence, without theurgic arts and without those rites of initiation which you labored to learn in vain. At times you even say that these initiations do not exalt the soul after death, so that they would now appear to be of no benefit even to that soul you call spiritual after the end of this life; and nevertheless you turn these matters over in many ways and repeat them, for no other purpose, as I judge, than to appear as it were expert in such things and to please those who are curious about unlawful arts, or to make them curious about them yourself.
But it is well that you call this art to be feared, whether on account of the perils of the laws or of the very practice of it. And would that the wretched might at least hear this from you, and so withdraw lest they be swallowed up there, or else not approach it at all. You say certainly that ignorance, and the many vices arising from it, are purged by no initiations, but only by the πατρικὸν νοῦν, that is, the paternal mind or understanding, which is conscious of the Father's will. Yet you do not believe that this is Christ; for you despise Him on account of the body received from a woman and on account of the reproach of the cross, fancying yourself, with lofty wisdom, fit to pluck what is highest while spurning and casting aside what is lowest. But He fulfills what the holy prophets truly foretold concerning 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 bestowed, but that which they arrogate to themselves who do not possess His. Hence, 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 world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For seeing that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. For the Jews require signs, and the Greeks seek after wisdom;'
'but we,' he says, 'preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God; because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.' This which is as it were foolish and weak the wise and strong despise, as though by their own strength. But this is the grace which heals the weak, who do not proudly boast of their false blessedness, but rather humbly confess their true misery. CHAPTER XXIX. On the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, which the impiety of the Platonists is ashamed to confess.
You proclaim the Father and His Son, whom you call the paternal intellect or mind, and a mean between these two, whom we suppose you to mean as the Holy Spirit, and after your manner you call them three gods. Here, even though you use undisciplined terms, you nevertheless see in some fashion, and as it were through certain shadowy images of a slender imagination, toward what one must strive; but the incarnation of the immutable Son of God, by which we are saved so that we may come to those things which we believe or in however small a part understand, you are unwilling to acknowledge. And so you see, after a fashion, even if from afar, even if with dimmed sight, the homeland in which one must abide; but you do not hold to the way by which one must travel.
You confess grace nonetheless, since you say that to reach God through the virtue of understanding has been granted to few. For you do not say: 'It pleased few,' or: 'Few willed it'; but when you say it has been granted, you beyond doubt confess God's grace, not man's sufficiency.
You use this word even more openly where, following Plato's opinion, you yourself also do not doubt that in this life a man can in no way attain to the perfection of wisdom, yet that for those living according to the understanding, whatever is lacking can be completed after this life by the providence and grace of God. Oh, if you had known the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord, and that very incarnation of His, by which He took up a human soul and body, you might have been able to see that it is the supreme example of grace. But what shall I do? I know I speak in vain to a dead man; yet as far as concerns you:
as for those who hold you in high esteem and who love you, whether through some love of wisdom or through curiosity about the arts which you ought not to have learned, whom rather I address in this address to you, perhaps I do not speak in vain. The grace of God could not have been more graciously commended than that the only-begotten Son of God Himself, remaining immutably in Himself, should be clothed with humanity and give to men the hope of His love through a man as mediator, by whom there might be a coming to Him from men—to Him who was so far removed, immortal from mortals, immutable from the mutable, just from the impious, blessed from the wretched.
And because He naturally implanted in us a desire to be blessed and immortal, remaining blessed and taking up our mortality, that He might grant us what we love, by suffering He taught us to despise what we fear. But that you might be able to acquiesce in this truth, humility was needed, which can with the greatest difficulty be urged upon your neck. For what is said that is incredible, especially to you who know such things, things by which you ought to admonish yourselves to believe this—what, I say, is said to you that is incredible, when it is said that God assumed a human soul and body? You 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 was assumed in a manner ineffable and singular for the salvation of many? That a body coheres with a soul, so that the man may be whole and complete, we know by the testimony of our very nature. And unless this were most usual, it would assuredly be more incredible; for it is more easily admitted into belief that, even though it be the human with the divine, even though the mutable with the immutable, yet spirit coheres with spirit—or, to use the words you employ, the incorporeal with the incorporeal—than that a body coheres with the incorporeal. Or perhaps the unusual birth of a body from a virgin offends you? Yet neither ought this to offend, but rather it ought to lead you to embrace piety, that One marvelous was marvelously born.
Or is it perhaps that He raised that same body, laid down in death and changed for the better in the resurrection, now incorruptible and no longer mortal, into the heights—this perhaps you refuse to believe, looking to Porphyry in those very books from which I have cited much, which he wrote on the return of the soul, where so frequently he enjoins that every body must be fled, so that the soul may be able to remain blessed with God? But he himself, holding these opinions, ought rather to have been corrected, especially since concerning the soul of this visible world and of so vast a corporeal mass you hold with him things so incredible. For with Plato as your authority you say that the world is an animal, and a most blessed animal, which you also wish to be everlasting.
How then will it never be freed from the body, nor ever lack blessedness, if, in order for the soul to be blessed, every body must be fled? This sun also and the other stars you not only confess in your books to be bodies—which all men along with you do not hesitate both to behold and to declare—but you even, with what you suppose to be deeper learning, assert these to be most blessed animals, and everlasting together with these bodies. What then is the reason that, when the Christian faith is urged upon you, you then forget, or pretend to be ignorant of, what you are accustomed to dispute or to teach? What is the cause why, on account of your own opinions, which you yourselves attack, you are unwilling to be Christians, except that Christ came in humility and you are proud?
Of what sort the bodies of the saints will be in the resurrection may be disputed with somewhat more scrupulous care among those most learned in the Christian scriptures; that they will be everlasting, however, we do not doubt at all, and that they will be such as Christ by His own resurrection demonstrated as an example. But of whatever sort they may be, since they are proclaimed to be utterly incorruptible and immortal and in no way impeding the soul's contemplation by which it is fixed in God—and since you yourselves also say there are in the heavens immortal bodies of the immortally blessed—what is it that you suppose that, in order for us to be blessed, every body must be fled, so that you may seem to flee the Christian faith as it were rationally, except that it is that which I say again: Christ is humble, you are proud?
Or is it perhaps that they are ashamed to be corrected? And this vice belongs to none but the proud. Learned men are ashamed, you see, to become from disciples of Plato disciples of Christ, who taught a fisherman by His Spirit to be wise 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 nothing made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.'
This beginning of the holy Gospel, which is named According to John, a certain Platonist—as we used to hear from the holy old man Simplicianus, who afterwards presided as bishop over the church of Milan—used to say ought to be written in letters of gold and set up in the most prominent places throughout all the churches. But for this reason that divine Teacher became worthless to the proud, because 'the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us'; so that it is too little for the wretched that they are sick, unless they also 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 cast down. CHAPTER XXX. How much of the Platonic teaching Porphyry refuted and corrected by dissenting from it.
If it is thought unworthy to amend anything after Plato, why did Porphyry himself amend not a few things, and not small ones? For it is most certain that Plato wrote that the souls of men, after death, are turned back even into the bodies of beasts. Porphyry's teacher Plotinus also held this opinion; yet to Porphyry it rightly displeased. He judged indeed that human souls return into the bodies of men—not their own which they had left, but other new bodies. He was ashamed, forsooth, to believe the former, lest perchance a mother, turned back into a mule, might carry her son; and he was not ashamed to believe the latter, where a mother turned back into a girl might perhaps marry her son.
How much more honorably is it believed—what the holy and truthful angels taught, what the prophets moved by God's Spirit spoke, what He Himself whom the messengers sent before foretold would come as Savior, what the apostles who were sent and filled the round of the 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 diverse ones! Nevertheless, as I said, Porphyry was in great part corrected in this opinion, so that he held at least that human souls can be cast headlong only into men, while he did not in the least hesitate to overthrow the beastly prisons.
He says also that God gave the soul to the world for this purpose, that, coming to know the evils of matter, it might run back to the Father and never again be held bound by the pollution of such contact. Here, even though he is somewhat unsound in his thinking (for it was rather given to the body in order to do good things; for it would not have learned evils if it had not done them), nevertheless in this point he corrected the opinion of the other Platonists, and on no small matter, in that he confessed that the soul, once cleansed from all evils and established with the Father, would never again suffer the evils of this world. By this opinion he assuredly took away what is held to be most especially Platonic: that, as the dead come from the living, so the living come perpetually from the dead.
And he showed to be false what Virgil seems to have said in Platonic fashion, that purged souls are sent into the Elysian fields (by which name the joys of the blessed seem to be signified as it were through a fable) and are summoned to the river Lethe, that is, to the forgetting of things past: 'Forsooth, that, forgetful, they may revisit the vault above, and may again begin to wish to return into bodies.' Rightly did this displease Porphyry, since in very truth it is 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 defilement of corruptible bodies and return thence to these things, as though the supreme purgation should bring it about that defilement be sought again.
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 of bodies, where they may again be entangled in evils: then assuredly the supreme felicity will be the cause of unhappiness, and the perfection of wisdom the cause of folly, and the supreme cleansing the cause of uncleanness. Nor will the soul there be blessed by truth, for however long it shall be there, where it must needs be deceived in order to be blessed. For it will not be blessed unless secure; but in order to be secure, it will falsely suppose that it will always be blessed, since at some time it will also be wretched. To whom, then, falsehood will be the cause of rejoicing, how will it rejoice in the truth? Porphyry saw this, and said that the cleansed soul returns to the Father for this reason, that it may never again be held bound by the pollution of evils.
Falsely, therefore, was that supposedly necessary cycle of departing from the same things and returning to the same things believed by certain Platonists. And even if it were true, what would it profit to know this, unless perhaps from it the Platonists would dare to prefer themselves to us, because we in this life did not yet know what they themselves, in another and better life, most thoroughly cleansed and most wise, were going to be ignorant of, and were going to be blessed by believing what is false? But if it is most absurd and most foolish to say this, then assuredly Porphyry's opinion is to be preferred to those of the men who supposed that blessedness and misery alternate forever in a cycle of souls. 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. CHAPTER XXXI. Against the argument of the Platonists, by which they assert the human soul to be coeternal with God. Why then do we not rather believe the divinity concerning those things which we cannot investigate by human ingenuity—the divinity which says that the soul itself also is not coeternal with God, but created, which did not exist before? For that the Platonists might be unwilling to believe this, they seemed to themselves to bring forward this cause as a sufficient one: that what had not always existed before could not thereafter be everlasting;
although concerning both the world and those whom Plato writes to be gods made in the world by God, he says most openly that they began to exist and have a beginning, yet would not have an end, but by the most powerful will of the Creator would remain forever. But they discovered in what manner they understand this: that this is not a beginning of time, forsooth, but of substitution. 'For just as,' they say, 'if a foot had from eternity always been in the dust, there would always be a footprint beneath it, which footprint nevertheless no one would doubt to have been made by the one treading, nor would the one be prior to the other, although the one was made by the other:'
'so,' they say, 'both the world and the gods created in it have always existed, since He who made them always exists, and yet they were made.' Must then, if the soul has always existed, its misery also be said to have always existed? Furthermore, if something in it which was not from eternity began to be from time, why could it not have come about that the soul itself was from time, which previously had not existed? Moreover, its blessedness too, more firm after the experience of evils and destined to remain without end—as this man confesses—beyond doubt began from time, and yet will exist forever, though previously it did not exist. That whole argumentation, therefore, is dissolved, by which it is supposed that nothing can be without an end of time except what has no beginning of time.
For the soul's blessedness has been found, which, though it had a beginning of time, will not have an end of time. Wherefore let human infirmity yield to the divine authority, and let us believe, concerning true religion, those blessed and immortal beings who do not seek honor for themselves, which they know is owed to their God, who is also ours, and do not bid us offer sacrifice except to Him alone, to whom we too, along with them, as I have often said and must often say, ought to be a sacrifice—a sacrifice to be offered through that Priest who, in the man whom He assumed, according to which He also willed to be a Priest, deigned to become even unto death a sacrifice for us. CHAPTER XXXII.
On the universal way of the soul's liberation, which Porphyry, by ill seeking, did not find, and which the Christian grace alone has opened. This is the religion which contains the universal way of the soul's liberation, since by no other than this can it be liberated. For this is, in a certain manner, the royal way, which alone leads to the kingdom—not one tottering with a temporal summit, but secure in the firmness of eternity.