BOOK TENTH.

Argument

IN THIS BOOK AUGUSTINE TEACHES THAT THE GOOD ANGELS WISH GOD ALONE,
WHOM THEY THEMSELVES SERVE, TO RECEIVE THAT DIVINE HONOUR WHICH
IS RENDERED BY SACRIFICE, AND WHICH IS CALLED “LATREIA.” HE THEN
GOES ON TO DISPUTE AGAINST PORPHYRY ABOUT THE PRINCIPLE AND WAY
OF THE SOUL’S CLEANSING AND DELIVERANCE.

1. That the Platonists themselves have determined that God alone can confer
happiness either on angels or men, but that it yet remains a question
whether those spirits whom they direct us to worship, that we may obtain
happiness, wish sacrifice to be offered to themselves, or to the one God
only.

It is the decided opinion of all who use their brains, that
all men desire to be happy. But who are happy, or
how they become so, these are questions about which the
weakness of human understanding stirs endless and angry
controversies, in which philosophers have wasted their strength
and expended their leisure. To adduce and discuss their
various opinions would be tedious, and is unnecessary. The
reader may remember what we said in the eighth book, while
making a selection of the philosophers with whom we might
discuss the question regarding the future life of happiness,
whether we can reach it by paying divine honours to the one
true God, the Creator of all gods, or by worshipping many
gods, and he will not expect us to repeat here the same
argument, especially as, even if he has forgotten it, he may
refresh his memory by reperusal. For we made selection of
the Platonists, justly esteemed the noblest of the philosophers,
because they had the wit to perceive that the human soul,
immortal and rational, or intellectual, as it is, cannot be happy
except by partaking of the light of that God by whom both
itself and the world were made; and also that the happy life
which all men desire cannot be reached by any who does not
cleave with a pure and holy love to that one supreme good,[Pg 383]
the unchangeable God. But as even these philosophers,
whether accommodating to the folly and ignorance of the
people, or, as the apostle says, “becoming vain in their imaginations,”[364]
supposed or allowed others to suppose that many
gods should be worshipped, so that some of them considered
that divine honour by worship and sacrifice should be rendered
even to the demons (an error I have already exploded),
we must now, by God’s help, ascertain what is thought about
our religious worship and piety by those immortal and blessed
spirits, who dwell in the heavenly places among dominations,
principalities, powers, whom the Platonists call gods, and
some either good demons, or, like us, angels,—that is to say,
to put it more plainly, whether the angels desire us to offer
sacrifice and worship, and to consecrate our possessions and
ourselves, to them, or only to God, theirs and ours.

For this is the worship which is due to the Divinity, or,
to speak more accurately, to the Deity; and, to express this
worship in a single word, as there does not occur to me any
Latin term sufficiently exact, I shall avail myself, whenever
necessary, of a Greek word. Λατρεία, whenever it occurs in
Scripture, is rendered by the word service. But that service
which is due to men, and in reference to which the apostle
writes that servants must be subject to their own masters,[365] is
usually designated by another word in Greek,[366] whereas the
service which is paid to God alone by worship, is always, or
almost always, called λατρεία in the usage of those who wrote
from the divine oracles. This cannot so well be called simply
“cultus,” for in that case it would not seem to be due exclusively
to God; for the same word is applied to the respect
we pay either to the memory or the living presence of men.
From it, too, we derive the words agriculture, colonist, and
others.[367] And the heathen call their gods “cœlicolæ,” not because
they worship heaven, but because they dwell in it, and
as it were colonize it,—not in the sense in which we call those
colonists who are attached to their native soil to cultivate it[Pg 384]
under the rule of the owners, but in the sense in which the
great master of the Latin language says, “There was an ancient
city inhabited by Tyrian colonists.”[368] He called them colonists,
not because they cultivated the soil, but because they inhabited
the city. So, too, cities that have hived off from
larger cities are called colonies. Consequently, while it is
quite true that, using the word in a special sense, “cult” can
be rendered to none but God, yet, as the word is applied to
other things besides, the cult due to God cannot in Latin be
expressed by this word alone.

The word “religion” might seem to express more definitely
the worship due to God alone, and therefore Latin translators
have used this word to represent θρησκεία; yet, as not
only the uneducated, but also the best instructed, use the word
religion to express human ties, and relationships, and affinities,
it would inevitably introduce ambiguity to use this word in
discussing the worship of God, unable as we are to say that
religion is nothing else than the worship of God, without contradicting
the common usage which applies this word to the
observance of social relationships. “Piety,” again, or, as the
Greeks say, εὐσέβεια, is commonly understood as the proper
designation of the worship of God. Yet this word also is used
of dutifulness to parents. The common people, too, use it of
works of charity, which, I suppose, arises from the circumstance
that God enjoins the performance of such works, and
declares that He is pleased with them instead of, or in preference
to sacrifices. From this usage it has also come to pass
that God Himself is called pious,[369] in which sense the Greeks
never use εὐσεβεῖν, though εὐσέβεια is applied to works of
charity by their common people also. In some passages of
Scripture, therefore, they have sought to preserve the distinction
by using not εὐσέβεια, the more general word, but
θεοσέβεια, which literally denotes the worship of God. We,
on the other hand, cannot express either of these ideas by one
word. This worship, then, which in Greek is called λατρεία,
and in Latin “servitus” [service], but the service due to God
only; this worship, which in Greek is called θρησκεία, and in[Pg 385]
Latin “religio,” but the religion by which we are bound to God
only; this worship, which they call θεοσέβεια, but which we
cannot express in one word, but call it the worship of God,—this,
we say, belongs only to that God who is the true God, and
who makes His worshippers gods.[370] And therefore, whoever
these immortal and blessed inhabitants of heaven be, if they do
not love us, and wish us to be blessed, then we ought not to
worship them; and if they do love us and desire our happiness,
they cannot wish us to be made happy by any other
means than they themselves have enjoyed,—for how could
they wish our blessedness to flow from one source, theirs from
another?

2. The opinion of Plotinus the Platonist regarding enlightenment from above.

But with these more estimable philosophers we have no
dispute in this matter. For they perceived, and in various
forms abundantly expressed in their writings, that these spirits
have the same source of happiness as ourselves,—a certain
intelligible light, which is their God, and is different from
themselves, and illumines them that they may be penetrated
with light, and enjoy perfect happiness in the participation of
God. Plotinus, commenting on Plato, repeatedly and strongly
asserts that not even the soul which they believe to be the
soul of the world, derives its blessedness from any other
source than we do, viz. from that Light which is distinct from
it and created it, and by whose intelligible illumination it
enjoys light in things intelligible. He also compares those
spiritual things to the vast and conspicuous heavenly bodies,
as if God were the sun, and the soul the moon; for they
suppose that the moon derives its light from the sun. That
great Platonist, therefore, says that the rational soul, or rather
the intellectual soul,—in which class he comprehends the
souls of the blessed immortals who inhabit heaven,—has no
nature superior to it save God, the Creator of the world and
the soul itself, and that these heavenly spirits derive their
blessed life, and the light of truth, from the same source as
ourselves, agreeing with the gospel where we read, “There was
a man sent from God whose name was John; the same came
for a witness to bear witness of that Light, that through Him[Pg 386]
all might believe. He was not that Light, but that he might
bear witness of the Light. That was the true Light which
lighteth every man that cometh into the world;”[371]—a distinction
which sufficiently proves that the rational or intellectual
soul such as John had cannot be its own light, but
needs to receive illumination from another, the true Light.
This John himself avows when he delivers his witness: “We
have all received of His fulness.”[372]

3. That the Platonists, though knowing something of the Creator of the universe,
have misunderstood the true worship of God, by giving divine honour to
angels, good or bad.

This being so, if the Platonists, or those who think with
them, knowing God, glorified Him as God and gave thanks, if
they did not become vain in their own thoughts, if they did
not originate or yield to the popular errors, they would certainly
acknowledge that neither could the blessed immortals
retain, nor we miserable mortals reach, a happy condition
without worshipping the one God of gods, who is both theirs
and ours. To Him we owe the service which is called in
Greek λατρεία, whether we render it outwardly or inwardly;
for we are all His temple, each of us severally and all of us
together, because He condescends to inhabit each individually
and the whole harmonious body, being no greater in all than
in each, since He is neither expanded nor divided. Our heart
when it rises to Him is His altar; the priest who intercedes
for us is His Only-begotten; we sacrifice to Him bleeding
victims when we contend for His truth even unto blood; to
Him we offer the sweetest incense when we come before Him
burning with holy and pious love; to Him we devote and
surrender ourselves and His gifts in us; to Him, by solemn
feasts and on appointed days, we consecrate the memory of
His benefits, lest through the lapse of time ungrateful oblivion
should steal upon us; to Him we offer on the altar of our
heart the sacrifice of humility and praise, kindled by the fire
of burning love. It is that we may see Him, so far as He
can be seen; it is that we may cleave to Him, that we are
cleansed from all stain of sins and evil passions, and are consecrated
in His name. For He is the fountain of our happiness,[Pg 387]
He the end of all our desires. Being attached to Him, or
rather let me say, re-attached,—for we had detached ourselves
and lost hold of Him,—being, I say, re-attached to Him,[373] we
tend towards Him by love, that we may rest in Him, and find
our blessedness by attaining that end. For our good, about
which philosophers have so keenly contended, is nothing else
than to be united to God. It is, if I may say so, by spiritually
embracing Him that the intellectual soul is filled and impregnated
with true virtues. We are enjoined to love this good
with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength.
To this good we ought to be led by those who love us, and
to lead those we love. Thus are fulfilled those two commandments
on which hang all the law and the prophets: “Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all
thy mind, and with all thy soul;” and “Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself.”[374] For, that man might be intelligent in
his self-love, there was appointed for him an end to which
he might refer all his actions, that he might be blessed. For
he who loves himself wishes nothing else than this. And the
end set before him is “to draw near to God.”[375] And so, when
one who has this intelligent self-love is commanded to love
his neighbour as himself, what else is enjoined than that he
shall do all in his power to commend to him the love of God?
This is the worship of God, this is true religion, this right
piety, this the service due to God only. If any immortal
power, then, no matter with what virtue endowed, loves us as
himself, he must desire that we find our happiness by submitting
ourselves to Him, in submission to whom he himself finds
happiness. If he does not worship God, he is wretched, because
deprived of God; if he worships God, he cannot wish
to be worshipped in God’s stead. On the contrary, these
higher powers acquiesce heartily in the divine sentence in
which it is written, “He that sacrificeth unto any god, save
unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed.”[376]

4. That sacrifice is due to the true God only.

But, putting aside for the present the other religious services[Pg 388]
with which God is worshipped, certainly no man would dare
to say that sacrifice is due to any but God. Many parts,
indeed, of divine worship are unduly used in showing honour
to men, whether through an excessive humility or pernicious
flattery; yet, while this is done, those persons who are thus
worshipped and venerated, or even adored, are reckoned no
more than human; and who ever thought of sacrificing save
to one whom he knew, supposed, or feigned to be a god?
And how ancient a part of God’s worship sacrifice is, those
two brothers, Cain and Abel, sufficiently show, of whom God
rejected the elder’s sacrifice, and looked favourably on the
younger’s.

5. Of the sacrifices which God does not require, but wished to be observed for the
exhibition of those things which He does require.

And who is so foolish as to suppose that the things offered
to God are needed by Him for some uses of His own? Divine
Scripture in many places explodes this idea. Not to be wearisome,
suffice it to quote this brief saying from a psalm: “I
have said to the Lord, Thou art my God: for Thou needest
not my goodness.”[377] We must believe, then, that God has no
need, not only of cattle, or any other earthly and material
thing, but even of man’s righteousness, and that whatever
right worship is paid to God profits not Him, but man. For
no man would say he did a benefit to a fountain by drinking,
or to the light by seeing. And the fact that the ancient
church offered animal sacrifices, which the people of God
now-a-days reads of without imitating, proves nothing else
than this, that those sacrifices signified the things which we
do for the purpose of drawing near to God, and inducing our
neighbour to do the same. A sacrifice, therefore, is the visible
sacrament or sacred sign of an invisible sacrifice. Hence that
penitent in the psalm, or it may be the Psalmist himself,
entreating God to be merciful to his sins, says, “If Thou
desiredst sacrifice, I would give it: Thou delightest not in
whole burnt-offerings. The sacrifice of God is a broken heart:
a heart contrite and humble God will not despise.”[378] Observe
how, in the very words in which he is expressing God’s refusal
of sacrifice, he shows that God requires sacrifice. He does[Pg 389]
not desire the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast, but He desires
the sacrifice of a contrite heart. Thus, that sacrifice which he
says God does not wish, is the symbol of the sacrifice which
God does wish. God does not wish sacrifices in the sense
in which foolish people think He wishes them, viz. to gratify
His own pleasure. For if He had not wished that the sacrifices
He requires, as, e.g., a heart contrite and humbled by
penitent sorrow, should be symbolized by those sacrifices
which He was thought to desire because pleasant to Himself,
the old law would never have enjoined their presentation;
and they were destined to be merged when the fit opportunity
arrived, in order that men might not suppose that the sacrifices
themselves, rather than the things symbolized by them,
were pleasing to God or acceptable in us. Hence, in another
passage from another psalm, he says, “If I were hungry, I
would not tell thee; for the world is mine and the fulness
thereof. Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of
goats?”[379] as if He should say, Supposing such things were
necessary to me, I would never ask thee for what I have in
my own hand. Then he goes on to mention what these
signify: “Offer unto God the sacrifice of praise, and pay thy
vows unto the Most High. And call upon me in the day of
trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.”[380] So
in another prophet: “Wherewith shall I come before the
Lord, and bow myself before the High God? Shall I come
before Him with burnt-offerings, with calves of a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten
thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my
transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
Hath He showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth
the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with thy God?”[381] In the words of this
prophet, these two things are distinguished and set forth with
sufficient explicitness, that God does not require these sacrifices
for their own sakes, and that He does require the sacrifices
which they symbolize. In the epistle entitled “To the
Hebrews” it is said, “To do good and to communicate, forget
not: for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.”[382] And so,[Pg 390]
when it is written, “I desire mercy rather than sacrifice,”[383]
nothing else is meant than that one sacrifice is preferred to
another; for that which in common speech is called sacrifice
is only the symbol of the true sacrifice. Now mercy is the
true sacrifice, and therefore it is said, as I have just quoted,
“with such sacrifices God is well pleased.” All the divine
ordinances, therefore, which we read concerning the sacrifices
in the service of the tabernacle or the temple, we are to refer
to the love of God and our neighbour. For “on these two
commandments,” as it is written, “hang all the law and the
prophets.”[384]

6. Of the true and perfect sacrifice.

Thus a true sacrifice is every work which is done that we
may be united to God in holy fellowship, and which has a
reference to that supreme good and end in which alone we
can be truly blessed.[385] And therefore even the mercy we
show to men, if it is not shown for God’s sake, is not a
sacrifice. For, though made or offered by man, sacrifice is
a divine thing, as those who called it sacrifice[386] meant to
indicate. Thus man himself, consecrated in the name of God,
and vowed to God, is a sacrifice in so far as he dies to the
world that he may live to God. For this is a part of that
mercy which each man shows to himself; as it is written,
“Have mercy on thy soul by pleasing God.”[387] Our body, too,
is a sacrifice when we chasten it by temperance, if we do so
as we ought, for God’s sake, that we may not yield our members
instruments of unrighteousness unto sin, but instruments
of righteousness unto God.[388] Exhorting to this sacrifice, the
apostle says, “I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercy
of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy,
acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.”[389] If,
then, the body, which, being inferior, the soul uses as a servant
or instrument, is a sacrifice when it is used rightly, and with
reference to God, how much more does the soul itself become[Pg 391]
a sacrifice when it offers itself to God, in order that, being
inflamed by the fire of His love, it may receive of His beauty
and become pleasing to Him, losing the shape of earthly
desire, and being remoulded in the image of permanent loveliness?
And this, indeed, the apostle subjoins, saying, “And be
not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed in the
renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good,
and acceptable, and perfect will of God.”[390] Since, therefore,
true sacrifices are works of mercy to ourselves or others, done
with a reference to God, and since works of mercy have no
other object than the relief of distress or the conferring of
happiness, and since there is no happiness apart from that
good of which it is said, “It is good for me to be very near to
God,”[391] it follows that the whole redeemed city, that is to say,
the congregation or community of the saints, is offered to God
as our sacrifice through the great High Priest, who offered
Himself to God in His passion for us, that we might be
members of this glorious head, according to the form of a
servant. For it was this form He offered, in this He was
offered, because it is according to it He is Mediator, in this
He is our Priest, in this the Sacrifice. Accordingly, when
the apostle had exhorted us to present our bodies a living
sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, our reasonable service, and
not to be conformed to the world, but to be transformed in the
renewing of our mind, that we might prove what is that good,
and acceptable, and perfect will of God, that is to say, the true
sacrifice of ourselves, he says, “For I say, through the grace
of God which is given unto me, to every man that is among
you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to
think, but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to
every man the measure of faith. For, as we have many
members in one body, and all members have not the same
office, so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every
one members one of another, having gifts differing according
to the grace that is given to us.”[392] This is the sacrifice of
Christians: we, being many, are one body in Christ. And this
also is the sacrifice which the Church continually celebrates in
the sacrament of the altar, known to the faithful, in which[Pg 392]
she teaches that she herself is offered in the offering she
makes to God.

7. Of the love of the holy angels, which prompts them to desire that we worship
the one true God, and not themselves.

It is very right that these blessed and immortal spirits,
who inhabit celestial dwellings, and rejoice in the communications
of their Creator’s fulness, firm in His eternity, assured
in His truth, holy by His grace, since they compassionately
and tenderly regard us miserable mortals, and wish us to
become immortal and happy, do not desire us to sacrifice to
themselves, but to Him whose sacrifice they know themselves
to be in common with us. For we and they together are the
one city of God, to which it is said in the psalm, “Glorious
things are spoken of thee, O city of God;”[393] the human part
sojourning here below, the angelic aiding from above. For
from that heavenly city, in which God’s will is the intelligible
and unchangeable law, from that heavenly council-chamber,—for
they sit in counsel regarding us,—that holy Scripture, descended
to us by the ministry of angels, in which it is written,
“He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the Lord only,
he shall be utterly destroyed,”[394]—this Scripture, this law, these
precepts, have been confirmed by such miracles, that it is sufficiently
evident to whom these immortal and blessed spirits,
who desire us to be like themselves, wish us to sacrifice.

8. Of the miracles which God has condescended to adhibit, through the ministry
of angels, to His promises for the confirmation of the faith of the godly.

I should seem tedious were I to recount all the ancient
miracles, which were wrought in attestation of God’s promises
which He made to Abraham thousands of years ago,
that in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed.[395]
For who can but marvel that Abraham’s barren wife should
have given birth to a son at an age when not even a prolific
woman could bear children; or, again, that when Abraham
sacrificed, a flame from heaven should have run between the
divided parts;[396] or that the angels in human form, whom he
had hospitably entertained, and who had renewed God’s promise[Pg 393]
of offspring, should also have predicted the destruction
of Sodom by fire from heaven;[397] and that his nephew Lot
should have been rescued from Sodom by the angels as the
fire was just descending, while his wife, who looked back as
she went, and was immediately turned into salt, stood as a
sacred beacon warning us that no one who is being saved
should long for what he is leaving? How striking also were
the wonders done by Moses to rescue God’s people from the
yoke of slavery in Egypt, when the magi of the Pharaoh, that
is, the king of Egypt, who tyrannized over this people, were
suffered to do some wonderful things that they might be
vanquished all the more signally! They did these things by
the magical arts and incantations to which the evil spirits or
demons are addicted; while Moses, having as much greater
power as he had right on his side, and having the aid of
angels, easily conquered them in the name of the Lord who
made heaven and earth. And, in fact, the magicians failed
at the third plague; whereas Moses, dealing out the miracles
delegated to him, brought ten plagues upon the land, so that
the hard hearts of Pharaoh and the Egyptians yielded, and
the people were let go. But, quickly repenting, and essaying
to overtake the departing Hebrews, who had crossed the
sea on dry ground, they were covered and overwhelmed in
the returning waters. What shall I say of those frequent
and stupendous exhibitions of divine power, while the people
were conducted through the wilderness?—of the waters which
could not be drunk, but lost their bitterness, and quenched
the thirsty, when at God’s command a piece of wood was cast
into them? of the manna that descended from heaven to
appease their hunger, and which begat worms and putrefied
when any one collected more than the appointed quantity,
and yet, though double was gathered on the day before the
Sabbath (it not being lawful to gather it on that day), remained
fresh? of the birds which filled the camp, and turned
appetite into satiety when they longed for flesh, which it
seemed impossible to supply to so vast a population? of the
enemies who met them, and opposed their passage with arms,
and were defeated without the loss of a single Hebrew, when[Pg 394]
Moses prayed with his hands extended in the form of a cross?
of the seditious persons who arose among God’s people, and
separated themselves from the divinely-ordered community,
and were swallowed up alive by the earth, a visible token of
an invisible punishment? of the rock struck with the rod,
and pouring out waters more than enough for all the host? of
the deadly serpents’ bites, sent in just punishment of sin, but
healed by looking at the lifted brazen serpent, so that not only
were the tormented people healed, but a symbol of the crucifixion
of death set before them in this destruction of death by
death? It was this serpent which was preserved in memory
of this event, and was afterwards worshipped by the mistaken
people as an idol, and was destroyed by the pious and God-fearing
king Hezekiah, much to his credit.

9. Of the illicit arts connected with demonolatry, and of which the Platonist
Porphyry adopts some, and discards others.

These miracles, and many others of the same nature, which
it were tedious to mention, were wrought for the purpose of
commending the worship of the one true God, and prohibiting
the worship of a multitude of false gods. Moreover, they were
wrought by simple faith and godly confidence, not by the incantations
and charms composed under the influence of a
criminal tampering with the unseen world, of an art which
they call either magic, or by the more abominable title necromancy,[398]
or the more honourable designation theurgy; for they
wish to discriminate between those whom the people call
magicians, who practise necromancy, and are addicted to illicit
arts and condemned, and those others who seem to them to
be worthy of praise for their practice of theurgy,—the truth,
however, being that both classes are the slaves of the deceitful
rites of the demons whom they invoke under the names
of angels.

For even Porphyry promises some kind of purgation of the
soul by the help of theurgy, though he does so with some
hesitation and shame, and denies that this art can secure to
any one a return to God; so that you can detect his opinion
vacillating between the profession of philosophy and an art
which he feels to be presumptuous and sacrilegious. For at[Pg 395]
one time he warns us to avoid it as deceitful, and prohibited
by law, and dangerous to those who practise it; then again,
as if in deference to its advocates, he declares it useful for
cleansing one part of the soul, not, indeed, the intellectual part,
by which the truth of things intelligible, which have no sensible
images, is recognised, but the spiritual part, which takes cognizance
of the images of things material. This part, he says,
is prepared and fitted for intercourse with spirits and angels,
and for the vision of the gods, by the help of certain theurgic
consecrations, or, as they call them, mysteries. He acknowledges,
however, that these theurgic mysteries impart to the
intellectual soul no such purity as fits it to see its God, and
recognise the things that truly exist. And from this acknowledgment
we may infer what kind of gods these are, and what
kind of vision of them is imparted by theurgic consecrations,
if by it one cannot see the things which truly exist. He says,
further, that the rational, or, as he prefers calling it, the intellectual
soul, can pass into the heavens without the spiritual
part being cleansed by theurgic art, and that this art cannot
so purify the spiritual part as to give it entrance to immortality
and eternity. And therefore, although he distinguishes angels
from demons, asserting that the habitation of the latter is in
the air, while the former dwell in the ether and empyrean,
and although he advises us to cultivate the friendship of some
demon, who may be able after our death to assist us, and
elevate us at least a little above the earth,—for he owns that
it is by another way we must reach the heavenly society of
the angels,—he at the same time distinctly warns us to avoid
the society of demons, saying that the soul, expiating its sin
after death, execrates the worship of demons by whom it was
entangled. And of theurgy itself, though he recommends it
as reconciling angels and demons, he cannot deny that it treats
with powers which either themselves envy the soul its purity,
or serve the arts of those who do envy it. He complains of
this through the mouth of some Chaldæan or other: “A good
man in Chaldæa complains,” he says, “that his most strenuous
efforts to cleanse his soul were frustrated, because another man,
who had influence in these matters, and who envied him
purity, had prayed to the powers, and bound them by his conjuring[Pg 396]
not to listen to his request. Therefore,” adds Porphyry,
“what the one man bound, the other could not loose.” And
from this he concludes that theurgy is a craft which accomplishes
not only good but evil among gods and men; and that
the gods also have passions, and are perturbed and agitated
by the emotions which Apuleius attributed to demons and
men, but from which he preserved the gods by that sublimity of
residence, which, in common with Plato, he accorded to them.

10. Concerning theurgy, which promises a delusive purification of the soul
by the invocation of demons.

But here we have another and a much more learned Platonist
than Apuleius, Porphyry, to wit, asserting that, by I know
not what theurgy, even the gods themselves are subjected to
passions and perturbations; for by adjurations they were so
bound and terrified that they could not confer purity of soul,—were
so terrified by him who imposed on them a wicked
command, that they could not by the same theurgy be freed
from that terror, and fulfil the righteous behest of him who
prayed to them, or do the good he sought. Who does not see
that all these things are fictions of deceiving demons, unless
he be a wretched slave of theirs, and an alien from the grace of
the true Liberator? For if the Chaldæan had been dealing
with good gods, certainly a well-disposed man, who sought to
purify his own soul, would have had more influence with them
than an evil-disposed man seeking to hinder him. Or, if the
gods were just, and considered the man unworthy of the
purification he sought, at all events they should not have been
terrified by an envious person, nor hindered, as Porphyry avows,
by the fear of a stronger deity, but should have simply denied
the boon on their own free judgment. And it is surprising
that that well-disposed Chaldæan, who desired to purify his
soul by theurgical rites, found no superior deity who could
either terrify the frightened gods still more, and force them to
confer the boon, or compose their fears, and so enable them to
do good without compulsion,—even supposing that the good
theurgist had no rites by which he himself might purge away
the taint of fear from the gods whom he invoked for the purification
of his own soul. And why is it that there is a god
who has power to terrify the inferior gods, and none who has[Pg 397]
power to free them from fear? Is there found a god who listens
to the envious man, and frightens the gods from doing good?
and is there not found a god who listens to the well-disposed
man, and removes the fear of the gods that they may do him
good? O excellent theurgy! O admirable purification of the
soul!—a theurgy in which the violence of an impure envy has
more influence than the entreaty of purity and holiness.
Rather let us abominate and avoid the deceit of such wicked
spirits, and listen to sound doctrine. As to those who perform
these filthy cleansings by sacrilegious rites, and see in
their initiated state (as he further tells us, though we may
question this vision) certain wonderfully lovely appearances
of angels or gods, this is what the apostle refers to when he
speaks of “Satan transforming himself into an angel of light.”[399]
For these are the delusive appearances of that spirit who longs
to entangle wretched souls in the deceptive worship of many
and false gods, and to turn them aside from the true worship
of the true God, by whom alone they are cleansed and healed,
and who, as was said of Proteus, “turns himself into all
shapes,”[400] equally hurtful, whether he assaults us as an enemy,
or assumes the disguise of a friend.

11. Of Porphyry’s epistle to Anebo, in which he asks for information about
the differences among demons.

It was a better tone which Porphyry adopted in his letter
to Anebo the Egyptian, in which, assuming the character of
an inquirer consulting him, he unmasks and explodes these
sacrilegious arts. In that letter, indeed, he repudiates all
demons, whom he maintains to be so foolish as to be attracted
by the sacrificial vapours, and therefore residing not in the
ether, but in the air beneath the moon, and indeed in the
moon itself. Yet he has not the boldness to attribute to all
the demons all the deceptions and malicious and foolish
practices which justly move his indignation. For, though he
acknowledges that as a race demons are foolish, he so far accommodates
himself to popular ideas as to call some of them
benignant demons. He expresses surprise that sacrifices not
only incline the gods, but also compel and force them to do
what men wish; and he is at a loss to understand how the[Pg 398]
sun and moon, and other visible celestial bodies,—for bodies he
does not doubt that they are,—are considered gods, if the gods
are distinguished from the demons by their incorporeality; also,
if they are gods, how some are called beneficent and others
hurtful, and how they, being corporeal, are numbered with the
gods, who are incorporeal. He inquires further, and still as
one in doubt, whether diviners and wonderworkers are men of
unusually powerful souls, or whether the power to do these
things is communicated by spirits from without. He inclines
to the latter opinion, on the ground that it is by the use of
stones and herbs that they lay spells on people, and open
closed doors, and do similar wonders. And on this account,
he says, some suppose that there is a race of beings whose
property it is to listen to men,—a race deceitful, full of contrivances,
capable of assuming all forms, simulating gods,
demons, and dead men,—and that it is this race which brings
about all these things which have the appearance of good or
evil, but that what is really good they never help us in, and
are indeed unacquainted with, for they make wickedness easy,
but throw obstacles in the path of those who eagerly follow
virtue; and that they are filled with pride and rashness,
delight in sacrificial odours, are taken with flattery. These and
the other characteristics of this race of deceitful and malicious
spirits, who come into the souls of men and delude their senses,
both in sleep and waking, he describes not as things of which
he is himself convinced, but only with so much suspicion and
doubt as to cause him to speak of them as commonly received
opinions. We should sympathize with this great philosopher
in the difficulty he experienced in acquainting himself with
and confidently assailing the whole fraternity of devils, which
any Christian old woman would unhesitatingly describe and
most unreservedly detest. Perhaps, however, he shrank from
offending Anebo, to whom he was writing, himself the most
eminent patron of these mysteries, or the others who marvelled
at these magical feats as divine works, and closely allied to
the worship of the gods.

However, he pursues this subject, and, still in the character
of an inquirer, mentions some things which no sober judgment
could attribute to any but malicious and deceitful powers.[Pg 399]
He asks why, after the better class of spirits have been invoked,
the worse should be commanded to perform the wicked
desires of men; why they do not hear a man who has just left
a woman’s embrace, while they themselves make no scruple of
tempting men to incest and adultery; why their priests are
commanded to abstain from animal food for fear of being polluted
by the corporeal exhalations, while they themselves are
attracted by the fumes of sacrifices and other exhalations;
why the initiated are forbidden to touch a dead body, while
their mysteries are celebrated almost entirely by means of dead
bodies; why it is that a man addicted to any vice should utter
threats, not to a demon or to the soul of a dead man, but to
the sun and moon, or some of the heavenly bodies, which he
intimidates by imaginary terrors, that he may wring from them
a real boon,—for he threatens that he will demolish the sky,
and such like impossibilities,—that those gods, being alarmed,
like silly children, with imaginary and absurd threats, may
do what they are ordered. Porphyry further relates that a
man Chæremon, profoundly versed in these sacred or rather
sacrilegious mysteries, had written that the famous Egyptian
mysteries of Isis and her husband Osiris had very great influence
with the gods to compel them to do what they were
ordered, when he who used the spells threatened to divulge
or do away with these mysteries, and cried with a threatening
voice that he would scatter the members of Osiris if they
neglected his orders. Not without reason is Porphyry surprised
that a man should utter such wild and empty threats
against the gods,—not against gods of no account, but against
the heavenly gods, and those that shine with sidereal light,—and
that these threats should be effectual to constrain them
with resistless power, and alarm them so that they fulfil his
wishes. Not without reason does he, in the character of an
inquirer into the reasons of these surprising things, give it to
be understood that they are done by that race of spirits which
he previously described as if quoting other people’s opinions,—spirits
who deceive not, as he said, by nature, but by their
own corruption, and who simulate gods and dead men, but
not, as he said, demons, for demons they really are. As to
his idea that by means of herbs, and stones, and animals, and[Pg 400]
certain incantations and noises, and drawings, sometimes fanciful,
and sometimes copied from the motions of the heavenly
bodies, men create upon earth powers capable of bringing
about various results, all that is only the mystification which
these demons practise on those who are subject to them, for
the sake of furnishing themselves with merriment at the expense
of their dupes. Either, then, Porphyry was sincere in
his doubts and inquiries, and mentioned these things to demonstrate
and put beyond question that they were the work,
not of powers which aid us in obtaining life, but of deceitful
demons; or, to take a more favourable view of the philosopher,
he adopted this method with the Egyptian who was wedded to
these errors, and was proud of them, that he might not offend
him by assuming the attitude of a teacher, nor discompose his
mind by the altercation of a professed assailant, but, by assuming
the character of an inquirer, and the humble attitude
of one who was anxious to learn, might turn his attention
to these matters, and show how worthy they are to be despised
and relinquished. Towards the conclusion of his letter, he
requests Anebo to inform him what the Egyptian wisdom indicates
as the way to blessedness. But as to those who hold
intercourse with the gods, and pester them only for the sake
of finding a runaway slave, or acquiring property, or making a
bargain of a marriage, or such things, he declares that their
pretensions to wisdom are vain. He adds that these same
gods, even granting that on other points their utterances were
true, were yet so ill-advised and unsatisfactory in their disclosures
about blessedness, that they cannot be either gods or
good demons, but are either that spirit who is called the deceiver,
or mere fictions of the imagination.

12. Of the miracles wrought by the true God through the ministry of the
holy angels.

Since by means of these arts wonders are done which quite
surpass human power, what choice have we but to believe that
these predictions and operations, which seem to be miraculous
and divine, and which at the same time form no part of the worship
of the one God, in adherence to whom, as the Platonists
themselves abundantly testify, all blessedness consists, are the
pastime of wicked spirits, who thus seek to seduce and hinder[Pg 401]
the truly godly? On the other hand, we cannot but believe
that all miracles, whether wrought by angels or by other
means, so long as they are so done as to commend the worship
and religion of the one God in whom alone is blessedness, are
wrought by those who love us in a true and godly sort, or
through their means, God Himself working in them. For we
cannot listen to those who maintain that the invisible God
works no visible miracles; for even they believe that He
made the world, which surely they will not deny to be visible.
Whatever marvel happens in this world, it is certainly less
marvellous than this whole world itself,—I mean the sky and
earth, and all that is in them,—and these God certainly
made. But, as the Creator Himself is hidden and incomprehensible
to man, so also is the manner of creation.
Although, therefore, the standing miracle of this visible world
is little thought of, because always before us, yet, when we
arouse ourselves to contemplate it, it is a greater miracle than
the rarest and most unheard-of marvels. For man himself is
a greater miracle than any miracle done through his instrumentality.
Therefore God, who made the visible heaven and earth,
does not disdain to work visible miracles in heaven or earth,
that He may thereby awaken the soul which is immersed in
things visible to worship Himself, the Invisible. But the place
and time of these miracles are dependent on His unchangeable
will, in which things future are ordered as if already they were
accomplished. For He moves things temporal without Himself
moving in time. He does not in one way know things that
are to be, and, in another, things that have been; neither does
He listen to those who pray otherwise than as He sees those
that will pray. For, even when His angels hear us, it is He
Himself who hears us in them, as in His true temple not
made with hands, as in those men who are His saints; and
His answers, though accomplished in time, have been arranged
by His eternal appointment.

13. Of the invisible God, who has often made Himself visible, not as He really is,
but as the beholders could bear the sight.

Neither need we be surprised that God, invisible as He is,
should often have appeared visibly to the patriarchs. For
as the sound which communicates the thought conceived in[Pg 402]
the silence of the mind is not the thought itself, so the form
by which God, invisible in His own nature, became visible,
was not God Himself. Nevertheless it is He Himself who
was seen under that form, as that thought itself is heard in
the sound of the voice; and the patriarchs recognised that,
though the bodily form was not God, they saw the invisible
God. For, though Moses conversed with God, yet he said,
‘If I have found grace in Thy sight, show me Thyself, that
I may see and know Thee.’[401] And as it was fit that the law,
which was given, not to one man or a few enlightened men,
but to the whole of a populous nation, should be accompanied
by awe-inspiring signs, great marvels were wrought, by the
ministry of angels, before the people on the mount where the
law was being given to them through one man, while the
multitude beheld the awful appearances. For the people of
Israel believed Moses, not as the Lacedæmonians believed their
Lycurgus, because he had received from Jupiter or Apollo the
laws he gave them. For when the law which enjoined the
worship of one God was given to the people, marvellous signs
and earthquakes, such as the divine wisdom judged sufficient,
were brought about in the sight of all, that they might know
that it was the Creator who could thus use creation to promulgate
His law.

14. That the one God is to be worshipped not only for the sake of eternal
blessings, but also in connection with temporal prosperity, because all
things are regulated by His providence.

The education of the human race, represented by the people
of God, has advanced, like that of an individual, through certain
epochs, or, as it were, ages, so that it might gradually rise
from earthly to heavenly things, and from the visible to the
invisible. This object was kept so clearly in view, that, even
in the period when temporal rewards were promised, the one
God was presented as the object of worship, that men might
not acknowledge any other than the true Creator and Lord of
the spirit, even in connection with the earthly blessings of
this transitory life. For he who denies that all things, which
either angels or men can give us, are in the hand of the one
Almighty, is a madman. The Platonist Plotinus discourses[Pg 403]
concerning providence, and, from the beauty of flowers and
foliage, proves that from the supreme God, whose beauty is
unseen and ineffable, providence reaches down even to these
earthly things here below; and he argues that all these frail
and perishing things could not have so exquisite and elaborate
a beauty, were they not fashioned by Him whose unseen and
unchangeable beauty continually pervades all things.[402] This
is proved also by the Lord Jesus, where He says, ‘Consider
the lilies, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.
And yet I say unto you that Solomon in all his glory was not
arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothe the grass of
the field, which to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven,
how much more shall He clothe you, O ye of little faith!’[403]
It was best, therefore, that the soul of man, which was still
weakly desiring earthly things, should be accustomed to seek
from God alone even these petty temporal boons, and the
earthly necessaries of this transitory life, which are contemptible
in comparison with eternal blessings, in order that the
desire even of these things might not draw it aside from the
worship of Him, to whom we come by despising and forsaking
such things.

15. Of the ministry of the holy angels, by which they fulfil the providence
of God.

And so it has pleased Divine Providence, as I have said,
and as we read in the Acts of the Apostles,[404] that the law
enjoining the worship of one God should be given by the
disposition of angels. But among them the person of God
Himself visibly appeared, not, indeed, in His proper substance,
which ever remains invisible to mortal eyes, but by the infallible
signs furnished by creation in obedience to its Creator.
He made use, too, of the words of human speech, uttering
them syllable by syllable successively, though in His own
nature He speaks not in a bodily but in a spiritual way;
not to sense, but to the mind; not in words that occupy
time, but, if I may so say, eternally, neither beginning to
speak nor coming to an end. And what He says is accurately
heard, not by the bodily but by the mental ear of His ministers
and messengers, who are immortally blessed in the enjoyment[Pg 404]
of His unchangeable truth; and the directions which they in
some ineffable way receive, they execute without delay or
difficulty in the sensible and visible world. And this law
was given in conformity with the age of the world, and contained
at the first earthly promises, as I have said, which,
however, symbolized eternal ones; and these eternal blessings
few understood, though many took a part in the celebration
of their visible signs. Nevertheless, with one consent both
the words and the visible rites of that law enjoin the worship
of one God,—not one of a crowd of gods, but Him who made
heaven and earth, and every soul and every spirit which is
other than Himself. He created; all else was created; and,
both for being and well-being, all things need Him who
created them.

16. Whether those angels who demand that we pay them divine honour, or
those who teach us to render holy service, not to themselves, but to God,
are to be trusted about the way to life eternal.

What angels, then, are we to believe in this matter of blessed
and eternal life?—those who wish to be worshipped with religious
rites and observances, and require that men sacrifice to them;
or those who say that all this worship is due to one God, the
Creator, and teach us to render it with true piety to Him, by
the vision of whom they are themselves already blessed, and
in whom they promise that we shall be so? For that vision
of God is the beauty of a vision so great, and is so infinitely
desirable, that Plotinus does not hesitate to say that he who
enjoys all other blessings in abundance, and has not this, is
supremely miserable.[405] Since, therefore, miracles are wrought
by some angels to induce us to worship this God, by others,
to induce us to worship themselves; and since the former forbid
us to worship these, while the latter dare not forbid us to
worship God, which are we to listen to? Let the Platonists
reply, or any philosophers, or the theurgists, or rather, periurgists,[406]—for
this name is good enough for those who practise
such arts. In short, let all men answer,—if, at least, there
survives in them any spark of that natural perception which,
as rational beings, they possess when created,—let them, I say,
tell us whether we should sacrifice to the gods or angels who[Pg 405]
order us to sacrifice to them, or to that One to whom we are
ordered to sacrifice by those who forbid us to worship either
themselves or these others. If neither the one party nor the
other had wrought miracles, but had merely uttered commands,
the one to sacrifice to themselves, the other forbidding that,
and ordering us to sacrifice to God, a godly mind would have
been at no loss to discern which command proceeded from
proud arrogance, and which from true religion. I will say
more. If miracles had been wrought only by those who demand
sacrifice for themselves, while those who forbade this, and
enjoined sacrificing to the one God only, thought fit entirely
to forego the use of visible miracles, the authority of the latter
was to be preferred by all who would use, not their eyes only,
but their reason. But since God, for the sake of commending
to us the oracles of His truth, has, by means of these immortal
messengers, who proclaim His majesty and not their own pride,
wrought miracles of surpassing grandeur, certainty, and distinctness,
in order that the weak among the godly might not
be drawn away to false religion by those who require us to
sacrifice to them and endeavour to convince us by stupendous
appeals to our senses, who is so utterly unreasonable as not to
choose and follow the truth, when he finds that it is heralded
by even more striking evidences than falsehood?

As for those miracles which history ascribes to the gods
of the heathen,—I do not refer to those prodigies which at
intervals happen from some unknown physical causes, and
which are arranged and appointed by Divine Providence, such
as monstrous births, and unusual meteorological phenomena,
whether startling only, or also injurious, and which are said
to be brought about and removed by communication with
demons, and by their most deceitful craft,—but I refer to
these prodigies which manifestly enough are wrought by their
power and force, as, that the household gods which Æneas
carried from Troy in his flight moved from place to place;
that Tarquin cut a whetstone with a razor; that the Epidaurian
serpent attached himself as a companion to Æsculapius on his
voyage to Rome; that the ship in which the image of the
Phrygian mother stood, and which could not be moved by a
host of men and oxen, was moved by one weak woman, who[Pg 406]
attached her girdle to the vessel and drew it, as proof of her
chastity; that a vestal, whose virginity was questioned, removed
the suspicion by carrying from the Tiber a sieve full of water
without any of it dropping: these, then, and the like, are by
no means to be compared for greatness and virtue to those
which, we read, were wrought among God’s people. How
much less can we compare those marvels, which even the laws
of heathen nations prohibit and punish,—I mean the magical
and theurgic marvels, of which the great part are merely
illusions practised upon the senses, as the drawing down of
the moon, “that,” as Lucan says, “it may shed a stronger
influence on the plants?”[407] And if some of these do seem to
equal those which are wrought by the godly, the end for
which they are wrought distinguishes the two, and shows that
ours are incomparably the more excellent. For those miracles
commend the worship of a plurality of gods, who deserve
worship the less the more they demand it; but these of ours
commend the worship of the one God, who, both by the testimony
of His own Scriptures, and by the eventual abolition of
sacrifices, proves that He needs no such offerings. If, therefore,
any angels demand sacrifice for themselves, we must
prefer those who demand it, not for themselves, but for God,
the Creator of all, whom they serve. For thus they prove
how sincerely they love us, since they wish by sacrifice to
subject us, not to themselves, but to Him by the contemplation
of whom they themselves are blessed, and to bring us to Him
from whom they themselves have never strayed. If, on the
other hand, any angels wish us to sacrifice, not to one, but to
many, not, indeed, to themselves, but to the gods whose angels
they are, we must in this case also prefer those who are the
angels of the one God of gods, and who so bid us to worship
Him as to preclude our worshipping any other. But, further,
if it be the case, as their pride and deceitfulness rather indicate,
that they are neither good angels nor the angels of good
gods, but wicked demons, who wish sacrifice to be paid, not to
the one only and supreme God, but to themselves, what better
protection against them can we choose than that of the one
God whom the good angels serve, the angels who bid us[Pg 407]
sacrifice, not to themselves, but to Him whose sacrifice we
ourselves ought to be?

17. Concerning the ark of the covenant, and the miraculous signs whereby God
authenticated the law and the promise.

On this account it was that the law of God, given by the
disposition of angels, and which commanded that the one God
of gods alone receive sacred worship, to the exclusion of all
others, was deposited in the ark, called the ark of the testimony.
By this name it is sufficiently indicated, not that
God, who was worshipped by all those rites, was shut up and
enclosed in that place, though His responses emanated from
it along with signs appreciable by the senses, but that His
will was declared from that throne. The law itself, too, was
engraven on tables of stone, and, as I have said, deposited in
the ark, which the priests carried with due reverence during
the sojourn in the wilderness, along with the tabernacle, which
was in like manner called the tabernacle of the testimony;
and there was then an accompanying sign, which appeared as
a cloud by day and as a fire by night; when the cloud
moved, the camp was shifted, and where it stood the camp
was pitched. Besides these signs, and the voices which proceeded
from the place where the ark was, there were other
miraculous testimonies to the law. For when the ark was
carried across Jordan, on the entrance to the land of promise,
the upper part of the river stopped in its course, and the
lower part flowed on, so as to present both to the ark and the
people dry ground to pass over. Then, when it was carried
seven times round the first hostile and polytheistic city they
came to, its walls suddenly fell down, though assaulted by no
hand, struck by no battering-ram. Afterwards, too, when
they were now resident in the land of promise, and the ark
had, in punishment of their sin, been taken by their enemies,
its captors triumphantly placed it in the temple of their
favourite god, and left it shut up there, but, on opening the
temple next day, they found the image they used to pray to
fallen to the ground and shamefully shattered. Then, being
themselves alarmed by portents, and still more shamefully
punished, they restored the ark of the testimony to the people
from whom they had taken it. And what was the manner of[Pg 408]
its restoration? They placed it on a wagon, and yoked to
it cows from which they had taken the calves, and let
them choose their own course, expecting that in this way the
divine will would be indicated; and the cows, without any
man driving or directing them, steadily pursued the way to
the Hebrews, without regarding the lowing of their calves,
and thus restored the ark to its worshippers. To God these
and such like wonders are small, but they are mighty to terrify
and give wholesome instruction to men. For if philosophers,
and especially the Platonists, are with justice esteemed wiser
than other men, as I have just been mentioning, because they
taught that even these earthly and insignificant things are
ruled by Divine Providence, inferring this from the numberless
beauties which are observable not only in the bodies of animals,
but even in plants and grasses, how much more plainly do
these things attest the presence of divinity which happen at
the time predicted, and in which that religion is commended
which forbids the offering of sacrifice to any celestial, terrestrial,
or infernal being, and commands it to be offered to God only,
who alone blesses us by His love for us, and by our love to
Him, and who, by arranging the appointed times of those
sacrifices, and by predicting that they were to pass into a better
sacrifice by a better Priest, testified that He has no appetite
for these sacrifices, but through them indicated others of more
substantial blessing,—and all this not that He Himself may
be glorified by these honours, but that we may be stirred up
to worship and cleave to Him, being inflamed by His love,
which is our advantage rather than His?

18. Against those who deny that the books of the Church are to be believed about
the miracles whereby the people of God were educated.

Will some one say that these miracles are false, that they
never happened, and that the records of them are lies? Whoever
says so, and asserts that in such matters no records whatever
can be credited, may also say that there are no gods who
care for human affairs. For they have induced men to worship
them only by means of miraculous works, which the
heathen histories testify, and by which the gods have made a
display of their own power rather than done any real service.
This is the reason why we have not undertaken in this work,[Pg 409]
of which we are now writing the tenth book, to refute those
who either deny that there is any divine power, or contend
that it does not interfere with human affairs, but those who
prefer their own god to our God, the Founder of the holy and
most glorious city, not knowing that He is also the invisible
and unchangeable Founder of this visible and changing world,
and the truest bestower of the blessed life which resides not
in things created, but in Himself. For thus speaks His most
trustworthy prophet: “It is good for me to be united to God.”[408]
Among philosophers it is a question, what is that end and
good to the attainment of which all our duties are to have a
relation? The Psalmist did not say, It is good for me to have
great wealth, or to wear imperial insignia, purple, sceptre,
and diadem; or, as some even of the philosophers have not
blushed to say, It is good for me to enjoy sensual pleasure;
or, as the better men among them seemed to say, My good is
my spiritual strength; but, “It is good for me to be united
to God.” This he had learned from Him whom the holy
angels, with the accompanying witness of miracles, presented
as the sole object of worship. And hence he himself became
the sacrifice of God, whose spiritual love inflamed him, and
into whose ineffable and incorporeal embrace he yearned to
cast himself. Moreover, if the worshippers of many gods
(whatever kind of gods they fancy their own to be) believe
that the miracles recorded in their civil histories, or in the
books of magic, or of the more respectable theurgy, were
wrought by these gods, what reason have they for refusing
to believe the miracles recorded in those writings, to which
we owe a credence as much greater as He is greater to whom
alone these writings teach us to sacrifice?

19. On the reasonableness of offering, as the true religion teaches, a visible
sacrifice to the one true and invisible God.

As to those who think that these visible sacrifices are suitably
offered to other gods, but that invisible sacrifices, the
graces of purity of mind and holiness of will, should be offered,
as greater and better, to the invisible God, Himself greater
and better than all others, they must be oblivious that these
visible sacrifices are signs of the invisible, as the words we[Pg 410]
utter are the signs of things. And therefore, as in prayer or
praise we direct intelligible words to Him to whom in our
heart we offer the very feelings we are expressing, so we are
to understand that in sacrifice we offer visible sacrifice only
to Him to whom in our heart we ought to present ourselves
an invisible sacrifice. It is then that the angels, and all those
superior powers who are mighty by their goodness and piety,
regard us with pleasure, and rejoice with us and assist us to
the utmost of their power. But if we offer such worship to
them, they decline it; and when on any mission to men they
become visible to the senses, they positively forbid it. Examples
of this occur in holy writ. Some fancied they should,
by adoration or sacrifice, pay the same honour to angels as is
due to God, and were prevented from doing so by the angels
themselves, and ordered to render it to Him to whom alone
they know it to be due. And the holy angels have in this
been imitated by holy men of God. For Paul and Barnabas,
when they had wrought a miracle of healing in Lycaonia, were
thought to be gods, and the Lycaonians desired to sacrifice to
them, and they humbly and piously declined this honour, and
announced to them the God in whom they should believe.
And those deceitful and proud spirits, who exact worship, do
so simply because they know it to be due to the true God.
For that which they take pleasure in is not, as Porphyry says
and some fancy, the smell of the victims, but divine honours.
They have, in fact, plenty odours on all hands, and if they
wished more, they could provide them for themselves. But
the spirits who arrogate to themselves divinity are delighted
not with the smoke of carcases, but with the suppliant spirit
which they deceive and hold in subjection, and hinder from
drawing near to God, preventing him from offering himself in
sacrifice to God by inducing him to sacrifice to others.

20. Of the supreme and true sacrifice which was effected by the Mediator between
God and men.

And hence that true Mediator, in so far as, by assuming
the form of a servant, He became the Mediator between God
and men, the man Christ Jesus, though in the form of God
He received sacrifice together with the Father, with whom He
is one God, yet in the form of a servant He chose rather to[Pg 411]
be than to receive a sacrifice, that not even by this instance
any one might have occasion to suppose that sacrifice should
be rendered to any creature. Thus He is both the Priest
who offers and the Sacrifice offered. And He designed that
there should be a daily sign of this in the sacrifice of the
Church, which, being His body, learns to offer herself through
Him. Of this true Sacrifice the ancient sacrifices of the saints
were the various and numerous signs; and it was thus variously
figured, just as one thing is signified by a variety of words,
that there may be less weariness when we speak of it much.
To this supreme and true sacrifice all false sacrifices have
given place.

21. Of the power delegated to demons for the trial and glorification of the saints,
who conquer not by propitiating the spirits of the air, but by abiding in
God.

The power delegated to the demons at certain appointed
and well-adjusted seasons, that they may give expression
to their hostility to the city of God by stirring up against
it the men who are under their influence, and may not
only receive sacrifice from those who willingly offer it,
but may also extort it from the unwilling by violent persecution;—this
power is found to be not merely harmless, but
even useful to the Church, completing as it does the number
of martyrs, whom the city of God esteems as all the more
illustrious and honoured citizens, because they have striven
even to blood against the sin of impiety. If the ordinary
language of the Church allowed it, we might more elegantly
call these men our heroes. For this name is said to be
derived from Juno, who in Greek is called Hêrê, and hence,
according to the Greek myths, one of her sons was called
Heros. And these fables mystically signified that Juno was
mistress of the air, which they suppose to be inhabited by
the demons and the heroes, understanding by heroes the souls
of the well-deserving dead. But for a quite opposite reason
would we call our martyrs heroes,—supposing, as I said, that
the usage of ecclesiastical language would admit of it,—not
because they lived along with the demons in the air, but
because they conquered these demons or powers of the air,
and among them Juno herself, be she what she may, not[Pg 412]
unsuitably represented, as she commonly is by the poets, as
hostile to virtue, and jealous of men of mark aspiring to the
heavens. Virgil, however, unhappily gives way, and yields to
her; for, though he represents her as saying, “I am conquered
by Æneas,”[409] Helenus gives Æneas himself this religious
advice:

“Pay vows to Juno: overbear

Her queenly soul with gift and prayer.”[410]

In conformity with this opinion, Porphyry—expressing, however,
not so much his own views as other people’s—says that
a good god or genius cannot come to a man unless the evil
genius has been first of all propitiated, implying that the evil
deities had greater power than the good; for, until they have
been appeased and give place, the good can give no assistance;
and if the evil deities oppose, the good can give no
help; whereas the evil can do injury without the good being
able to prevent them. This is not the way of the true and
truly holy religion; not thus do our martyrs conquer Juno,
that is to say, the powers of the air, who envy the virtues of
the pious. Our heroes, if we could so call them, overcome
Hêrê, not by suppliant gifts, but by divine virtues. As
Scipio, who conquered Africa by his valour, is more suitably
styled Africanus than if he had appeased his enemies
by gifts, and so won their mercy.

22. Whence the saints derive power against demons and true purification
of heart.

It is by true piety that men of God cast out the hostile
power of the air which opposes godliness; it is by exorcising
it, not by propitiating it; and they overcome all the temptations
of the adversary by praying, not to him, but to their
own God against him. For the devil cannot conquer or
subdue any but those who are in league with sin; and
therefore he is conquered in the name of Him who assumed
humanity, and that without sin, that Himself being both
Priest and Sacrifice, He might bring about the remission of
sins, that is to say, might bring it about through the Mediator
between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, by whom we are
reconciled to God, the cleansing from sin being accomplished.[Pg 413]
For men are separated from God only by sins, from which we
are in this life cleansed not by our own virtue, but by the
divine compassion; through His indulgence, not through our
own power. For, whatever virtue we call our own is itself
bestowed upon us by His goodness. And we might attribute
too much to ourselves while in the flesh, unless we lived in
the receipt of pardon until we laid it down. This is the
reason why there has been vouchsafed to us, through the
Mediator, this grace, that we who are polluted by sinful flesh
should be cleansed by the likeness of sinful flesh. By this
grace of God, wherein He has shown His great compassion
toward us, we are both governed by faith in this life, and,
after this life, are led onwards to the fullest perfection by the
vision of immutable truth.

23. Of the principles which, according to the Platonists, regulate the
purification of the soul.

Even Porphyry asserts that it was revealed by divine
oracles that we are not purified by any sacrifices[411] to sun
or moon, meaning it to be inferred that we are not purified
by sacrificing to any gods. For what mysteries can purify,
if those of the sun and moon, which are esteemed the chief
of the celestial gods, do not purify? He says, too, in the
same place, that “principles” can purify, lest it should be
supposed, from his saying that sacrificing to the sun and
moon cannot purify, that sacrificing to some other of the host
of gods might do so. And what he as a Platonist means by
“principles,” we know.[412] For he speaks of God the Father and
God the Son, whom he calls (writing in Greek) the intellect
or mind of the Father;[413] but of the Holy Spirit he says either
nothing, or nothing plainly, for I do not understand what other
he speaks of as holding the middle place between these two.[Pg 414]
For if, like Plotinus in his discussion regarding the three
principal substances,[414] he wished us to understand by this
third the soul of nature, he would certainly not have given
it the middle place between these two, that is, between the
Father and the Son. For Plotinus places the soul of nature
after the intellect of the Father, while Porphyry, making it
the mean, does not place it after, but between the others.
No doubt he spoke according to his light, or as he thought
expedient; but we assert that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit
not of the Father only, nor of the Son only, but of both.
For philosophers speak as they have a mind to, and in the
most difficult matters do not scruple to offend religious ears;
but we are bound to speak according to a certain rule, lest
freedom of speech beget impiety of opinion about the matters
themselves of which we speak.

24. Of the one only true principle which alone purifies and renews
human nature.

Accordingly, when we speak of God, we do not affirm two
or three principles, no more than we are at liberty to affirm
two or three gods; although, speaking of each, of the Father,
or of the Son, or of the Holy Ghost, we confess that each is
God: and yet we do not say, as the Sabellian heretics say,
that the Father is the same as the Son, and the Holy Spirit
the same as the Father and the Son; but we say that the
Father is the Father of the Son, and the Son the Son of the
Father, and that the Holy Spirit of the Father and the Son
is neither the Father nor the Son. It was therefore truly
said that man is cleansed only by a Principle, although the
Platonists erred in speaking in the plural of principles. But
Porphyry, being under the dominion of these envious powers,
whose influence he was at once ashamed of and afraid to
throw off, refused to recognise that Christ is the Principle by
whose incarnation we are purified. Indeed he despised Him,
because of the flesh itself which He assumed, that He might
offer a sacrifice for our purification,—a great mystery, unintelligible
to Porphyry’s pride, which that true and benignant
Redeemer brought low by His humility, manifesting Himself
to mortals by the mortality which He assumed, and which[Pg 415]
the malignant and deceitful mediators are proud of wanting,
promising, as the boon of immortals, a deceptive assistance to
wretched men. Thus the good and true Mediator showed
that it is sin which is evil, and not the substance or nature
of flesh; for this, together with the human soul, could without
sin be both assumed and retained, and laid down in death,
and changed to something better by resurrection. He showed
also that death itself, although the punishment of sin, was
submitted to by Him for our sakes without sin, and must
not be evaded by sin on our part, but rather, if opportunity
serves, be borne for righteousness’ sake. For he was able
to expiate sins by dying, because He both died, and not for
sin of His own. But He has not been recognised by Porphyry
as the Principle, otherwise he would have recognised
Him as the Purifier. The Principle is neither the flesh nor
the human soul in Christ, but the Word by which all things
were made. The flesh, therefore, does not by its own virtue
purify, but by virtue of the Word by which it was assumed,
when “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”[415] For,
speaking mystically of eating His flesh, when those who did
not understand Him were offended and went away, saying,
“This is an hard saying, who can hear it?” He answered to
the rest who remained, “It is the Spirit that quickeneth;
the flesh profiteth nothing.”[416] The Principle, therefore, having
assumed a human soul and flesh, cleanses the soul and flesh
of believers. Therefore, when the Jews asked Him who He
was, He answered that He was the Principle.[417] And this we
carnal and feeble men, liable to sin, and involved in the darkness
of ignorance, could not possibly understand, unless we
were cleansed and healed by Him, both by means of what we
were, and of what we were not. For we were men, but we
were not righteous; whereas in His incarnation there was a
human nature, but it was righteous, and not sinful. This
is the mediation whereby a hand is stretched to the lapsed
and fallen; this is the seed “ordained by angels,” by whose
ministry the law also was given enjoining the worship of one
God, and promising that this Mediator should come.

[Pg 416]

25. That all the saints, both under the law and before it, were justified by faith
in the mystery of Christ’s incarnation.

It was by faith in this mystery, and godliness of life, that
purification was attainable even by the saints of old, whether
before the law was given to the Hebrews (for God and the
angels were even then present as instructors), or in the periods
under the law, although the promises of spiritual things, being
presented in figure, seemed to be carnal, and hence the name
of Old Testament. For it was then the prophets lived, by
whom, as by angels, the same promise was announced; and
among them was he whose grand and divine sentiment regarding
the end and supreme good of man I have just now quoted,
“It is good for me to cleave to God.”[418] In this psalm the distinction
between the Old and New Testaments is distinctly
announced. For the Psalmist says, that when he saw that
the carnal and earthly promises were abundantly enjoyed by
the ungodly, his feet were almost gone, his steps had well-nigh
slipped; and that it seemed to him as if he had served
God in vain, when he saw that those who despised God increased
in that prosperity which he looked for at God’s hand.
He says, too, that, in investigating this matter with the desire
of understanding why it was so, he had laboured in vain,
until he went into the sanctuary of God, and understood the
end of those whom he had erroneously considered happy.
Then he understood that they were cast down by that very
thing, as he says, which they had made their boast, and that
they had been consumed and perished for their iniquities;
and that that whole fabric of temporal prosperity had become
as a dream when one awaketh, and suddenly finds himself
destitute of all the joys he had imaged in sleep. And, as
in this earth or earthy city they seemed to themselves to be
great, he says, “O Lord, in Thy city Thou wilt reduce their
image to nothing.” He also shows how beneficial it had
been for him to seek even earthly blessings only from the
one true God, in whose power are all things, for he says, “As
a beast was I before Thee, and I am always with Thee.” “As
a beast,” he says, meaning that he was stupid. For I ought
to have sought from Thee such things as the ungodly could[Pg 417]
not enjoy as well as I, and not those things which I saw
them enjoying in abundance, and hence concluded I was serving
Thee in vain, because they who declined to serve Thee
had what I had not. Nevertheless, “I am always with Thee,”
because even in my desire for such things I did not pray to
other gods. And consequently he goes on, “Thou hast holden
me by my right hand, and by Thy counsel Thou hast guided
me, and with glory hast taken me up;” as if all earthly advantages
were left-hand blessings, though, when he saw them
enjoyed by the wicked, his feet had almost gone. “For what,”
he says, “have I in heaven, and what have I desired from
Thee upon earth?” He blames himself, and is justly displeased
with himself; because, though he had in heaven so
vast a possession (as he afterwards understood), he yet sought
from his God on earth a transitory and fleeting happiness,—a
happiness of mire, we may say. “My heart and my flesh,” he
says, “fail, O God of my heart.” Happy failure, from things
below to things above! And hence in another psalm he
says, “My soul longeth, yea, even faileth, for the courts of the
Lord.”[419] Yet, though he had said of both his heart and his
flesh that they were failing, he did not say, O God of my
heart and my flesh, but, O God of my heart; for by the
heart the flesh is made clean. Therefore, says the Lord,
“Cleanse that which is within, and the outside shall be clean
also.”[420] He then says that God Himself,—not anything
received from Him, but Himself,—is his portion. “The God
of my heart, and my portion for ever.” Among the various
objects of human choice, God alone satisfied him. “For, lo,”
he says, “they that are far from Thee shall perish: Thou destroyest
all them that go a-whoring from Thee,”—that is, who
prostitute themselves to many gods. And then follows the
verse for which all the rest of the psalm seems to prepare:
“It is good for me to cleave to God,”—not to go far off; not
to go a-whoring with a multitude of gods. And then shall
this union with God be perfected, when all that is to be redeemed
in us has been redeemed. But for the present we
must, as he goes on to say, “place our hope in God.” “For
that which is seen,” says the apostle, “is not hope. For what[Pg 418]
a man sees, why does he yet hope for? But if we hope for
that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.”[421]
Being, then, for the present established in this hope, let us do
what the Psalmist further indicates, and become in our measure
angels or messengers of God, declaring His will, and
praising His glory and His grace. For when he had said,
“To place my hope in God,” he goes on, “that I may declare
all Thy praises in the gates of the daughter of Zion.” This
is the most glorious city of God; this is the city which knows
and worships one God: she is celebrated by the holy angels,
who invite us to their society, and desire us to become fellow-citizens
with them in this city; for they do not wish us to
worship them as our gods, but to join them in worshipping
their God and ours; nor to sacrifice to them, but, together with
them, to become a sacrifice to God. Accordingly, whoever
will lay aside malignant obstinacy, and consider these things,
shall be assured that all these blessed and immortal spirits,
who do not envy us (for if they envied they were not blessed),
but rather love us, and desire us to be as blessed as themselves,
look on us with greater pleasure, and give us greater
assistance, when we join them in worshipping one God,
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, than if we were to offer to
themselves sacrifice and worship.

26. Of Porphyry’s weakness in wavering between the confession of the true God
and the worship of demons.

I know not how it is so, but it seems to me that Porphyry
blushed for his friends the theurgists; for he knew all that
I have adduced, but did not frankly condemn polytheistic
worship. He said, in fact, that there are some angels who
visit earth, and reveal divine truth to theurgists, and others
who publish on earth the things that belong to the Father,
His height and depth. Can we believe, then, that the angels
whose office it is to declare the will of the Father, wish us to
be subject to any but Him whose will they declare? And
hence, even this Platonist himself judiciously observes that we
should rather imitate than invoke them. We ought not, then,
to fear that we may offend these immortal and happy subjects[Pg 419]
of the one God by not sacrificing to them; for this they
know to be due only to the one true God, in allegiance to
whom they themselves find their blessedness, and therefore
they will not have it given to them, either in figure or in the
reality, which the mysteries of sacrifice symbolized. Such
arrogance belongs to proud and wretched demons, whose disposition
is diametrically opposite to the piety of those who are
subject to God, and whose blessedness consists in attachment
to Him. And, that we also may attain to this bliss, they aid
us, as is fit, with sincere kindliness, and usurp over us no
dominion, but declare to us Him under whose rule we are then
fellow-subjects. Why, then, O philosopher, do you still fear
to speak freely against the powers which are inimical both to
true virtue and to the gifts of the true God? Already you
have discriminated between the angels who proclaim God’s
will, and those who visit theurgists, drawn down by I know
not what art. Why do you still ascribe to these latter the
honour of declaring divine truth? If they do not declare the
will of the Father, what divine revelations can they make?
Are not these the evil spirits who were bound over by the
incantations of an envious man,[422] that they should not grant
purity of soul to another, and could not, as you say, be set
free from these bonds by a good man anxious for purity, and
recover power over their own actions? Do you still doubt
whether these are wicked demons; or do you, perhaps, feign
ignorance, that you may not give offence to the theurgists, who
have allured you by their secret rites, and have taught you,
as a mighty boon, these insane and pernicious devilries? Do
you dare to elevate above the air, and even to heaven, these
envious powers, or pests, let me rather call them, less worthy
of the name of sovereign than of slaves, as you yourself own;
and are you not ashamed to place them even among your
sidereal gods, and so put a slight upon the stars themselves?

27. Of the impiety of Porphyry, which is worse than even the mistake of
Apuleius.

How much more tolerable and accordant with human feeling
is the error of your Platonist co-sectary Apuleius! for he[Pg 420]
attributed the diseases and storms of human passions only
to the demons who occupy a grade beneath the moon, and
makes even this avowal as by constraint regarding gods whom
he honours; but the superior and celestial gods, who inhabit
the ethereal regions, whether visible, as the sun, moon, and
other luminaries, whose brilliancy makes them conspicuous, or
invisible, but believed in by him, he does his utmost to remove
beyond the slightest stain of these perturbations. It is
not, then, from Plato, but from your Chaldæan teachers you
have learned to elevate human vices to the ethereal and empyreal
regions of the world and to the celestial firmament,
in order that your theurgists might be able to obtain from
your gods divine revelations; and yet you make yourself
superior to these divine revelations by your intellectual life,
which dispenses with these theurgic purifications as not
needed by a philosopher. But, by way of rewarding your
teachers, you recommend these arts to other men, who, not
being philosophers, may be persuaded to use what you acknowledge
to be useless to yourself, who are capable of higher
things; so that those who cannot avail themselves of the
virtue of philosophy, which is too arduous for the multitude,
may, at your instigation, betake themselves to theurgists by
whom they may be purified, not, indeed, in the intellectual, but
in the spiritual part of the soul. Now, as the persons who are
unfit for philosophy form incomparably the majority of mankind,
more may be compelled to consult these secret and illicit
teachers of yours than frequent the Platonic schools. For
these most impure demons, pretending to be ethereal gods,
whose herald and messenger you have become, have promised
that those who are purified by theurgy in the spiritual part of
their soul shall not indeed return to the Father, but shall
dwell among the ethereal gods above the aerial regions. But
such fancies are not listened to by the multitudes of men
whom Christ came to set free from the tyranny of demons.
For in Him they have the most gracious cleansing, in which
mind, spirit, and body alike participate. For, in order that
He might heal the whole man from the plague of sin, He
took without sin the whole human nature. Would that you
had known Him, and would that you had committed yourself[Pg 421]
for healing to Him rather than to your own frail and infirm
human virtue, or to pernicious and curious arts! He would
not have deceived you; for Him your own oracles, on your
own showing, acknowledged holy and immortal. It is of Him,
too, that the most famous poet speaks, poetically indeed, since
he applies it to the person of another, yet truly, if you refer it
to Christ, saying, “Under thine auspices, if any traces of our
crimes remain, they shall be obliterated, and earth freed from
its perpetual fear.”[423] By which he indicates that, by reason of
the infirmity which attaches to this life, the greatest progress in
virtue and righteousness leaves room for the existence, if not
of crimes, yet of the traces of crimes, which are obliterated only
by that Saviour of whom this verse speaks. For that he
did not say this at the prompting of his own fancy, Virgil tells
us in almost the last verse of that 4th Eclogue, when he
says, “The last age predicted by the Cumæan sibyl has now
arrived;” whence it plainly appears that this had been dictated
by the Cumæan sibyl. But those theurgists, or rather
demons, who assume the appearance and form of gods, pollute
rather than purify the human spirit by false appearances and
the delusive mockery of unsubstantial forms. How can those
whose own spirit is unclean cleanse the spirit of man? Were
they not unclean, they would not be bound by the incantations
of an envious man, and would neither be afraid nor grudge
to bestow that hollow boon which they promise. But it is
sufficient for our purpose that you acknowledge that the intellectual
soul, that is, our mind, cannot be justified by
theurgy; and that even the spiritual or inferior part of our
soul cannot by this act be made eternal and immortal, though
you maintain that it can be purified by it. Christ, however,
promises life eternal; and therefore to Him the world flocks,
greatly to your indignation, greatly also to your astonishment
and confusion. What avails your forced avowal that theurgy
leads men astray, and deceives vast numbers by its ignorant
and foolish teaching, and that it is the most manifest mistake
to have recourse by prayer and sacrifice to angels and principalities,
when at the same time, to save yourself from the
charge of spending labour in vain on such arts, you direct[Pg 422]
men to the theurgists, that by their means men, who do not
live by the rule of the intellectual soul, may have their spiritual
soul purified?

28. How it is that Porphyry has been so blind as not to recognise the true
wisdom—Christ.

You drive men, therefore, into the most palpable error. And
yet you are not ashamed of doing so much harm, though
you call yourself a lover of virtue and wisdom. Had you
been true and faithful in this profession, you would have recognised
Christ, the virtue of God and the wisdom of God,
and would not, in the pride of vain science, have revolted from
His wholesome humility. Nevertheless you acknowledge that
the spiritual part of the soul can be purified by the virtue of
chastity without the aid of those theurgic arts and mysteries
which you wasted your time in learning. You even say,
sometimes, that these mysteries do not raise the soul after
death, so that, after the termination of this life, they seem to be
of no service even to the part you call spiritual; and yet you
recur on every opportunity to these arts, for no other purpose,
so far as I see, than to appear an accomplished theurgist, and
gratify those who are curious in illicit arts, or else to inspire
others with the same curiosity. But we give you all praise
for saying that this art is to be feared, both on account of the
legal enactments against it, and by reason of the danger involved
in the very practice of it. And would that in this,
at least, you were listened to by its wretched votaries, that
they might be withdrawn from entire absorption in it, or might
even be preserved from tampering with it at all! You say,
indeed, that ignorance, and the numberless vices resulting from
it, cannot be removed by any mysteries, but only by the πατρικὸς
νοῦς, that is, the Father’s mind or intellect conscious of
the Father’s will. But that Christ is this mind you do not
believe; for Him you despise on account of the body He took
of a woman and the shame of the cross; for your lofty wisdom
spurns such low and contemptible things, and soars to more
exalted regions. But He fulfils what the holy prophets truly
predicted regarding Him: “I will destroy the wisdom of the
wise, and bring to nought the prudence of the prudent.”[Pg 423][424]
For He does not destroy and bring to nought His own gift in
them, but what they arrogate to themselves, and do not hold
of Him. And hence the apostle, having quoted this testimony
from the prophet, adds, “Where is the wise? where is the
scribe? where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God
made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that, in
the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it
pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that
believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek
after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews
a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto
them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the
power of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness
of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is
stronger than men.”[425] This is despised as a weak and foolish
thing by those who are wise and strong in themselves; yet
this is the grace which heals the weak, who do not proudly
boast a blessedness of their own, but rather humbly acknowledge
their real misery.

29. Of the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, which the Platonists
in their impiety blush to acknowledge.

You proclaim the Father and His Son, whom you call the
Father’s intellect or mind, and between these a third, by whom
we suppose you mean the Holy Spirit, and in your own fashion
you call these three Gods. In this, though your expressions
are inaccurate, you do in some sort, and as through a veil, see
what we should strive towards; but the incarnation of the
unchangeable Son of God, whereby we are saved, and are
enabled to reach the things we believe, or in part understand,
this is what you refuse to recognise. You see in a fashion,
although at a distance, although with filmy eye, the country
in which we should abide; but the way to it you know not.
Yet you believe in grace, for you say it is granted to few to
reach God by virtue of intelligence. For you do not say, “Few
have thought fit or have wished,” but, “It has been granted
to few,”—distinctly acknowledging God’s grace, not man’s
sufficiency. You also use this word more expressly, when, in[Pg 424]
accordance with the opinion of Plato, you make no doubt that
in this life a man cannot by any means attain to perfect
wisdom, but that whatever is lacking is in the future life
made up to those who live intellectually, by God’s providence
and grace. Oh, had you but recognised the grace of God in
Jesus Christ our Lord, and that very incarnation of His,
wherein He assumed a human soul and body, you might
have seemed the brightest example of grace![426] But what am
I doing? I know it is useless to speak to a dead man,—useless,
at least, so far as regards you, but perhaps not in
vain for those who esteem you highly, and love you on
account of their love of wisdom or curiosity about those arts
which you ought not to have learned; and these persons I
address in your name. The grace of God could not have
been more graciously commended to us than thus, that the
only Son of God, remaining unchangeable in Himself, should
assume humanity, and should give us the hope of His love,
by means of the mediation of a human nature, through which
we, from the condition of men, might come to Him who was so
far off,—the immortal from the mortal; the unchangeable from
the changeable; the just from the unjust; the blessed from
the wretched. And, as He had given us a natural instinct to
desire blessedness and immortality, He Himself continuing
to be blessed, but assuming mortality, by enduring what we
fear, taught us to despise it, that what we long for He might
bestow upon us.

But in order to your acquiescence in this truth, it is lowliness
that is requisite, and to this it is extremely difficult to bend
you. For what is there incredible, especially to men like you,
accustomed to speculation, which might have predisposed you
to believe in this,—what is there incredible, I say, in the
assertion that God assumed a human soul and body? You
yourselves ascribe such excellence to the intellectual soul,
which is, after all, the human soul, that you maintain that it
can become consubstantial with that intelligence of the Father
whom you believe in as the Son of God. What incredible
thing is it, then, if some one soul be assumed by Him in an
ineffable and unique manner for the salvation of many?[Pg 425]
Moreover, our nature itself testifies that a man is incomplete
unless a body be united with the soul. This certainly would
be more incredible, were it not of all things the most common;
for we should more easily believe in a union between spirit
and spirit, or, to use your own terminology, between the
incorporeal and the incorporeal, even though the one were
human, the other divine, the one changeable and the other
unchangeable, than in a union between the corporeal and the
incorporeal. But perhaps it is the unprecedented birth of a
body from a virgin that staggers you? But, so far from this
being a difficulty, it ought rather to assist you to receive our
religion, that a miraculous person was born miraculously. Or,
do you find a difficulty in the fact that, after His body had
been given up to death, and had been changed into a higher
kind of body by resurrection, and was now no longer mortal
but incorruptible, He carried it up into heavenly places?
Perhaps you refuse to believe this, because you remember that
Porphyry, in these very books from which I have cited so
much, and which treat of the return of the soul, so frequently
teaches that a body of every kind is to be escaped from, in
order that the soul may dwell in blessedness with God. But
here, in place of following Porphyry, you ought rather to have
corrected him, especially since you agree with him in believing
such incredible things about the soul of this visible world and
huge material frame. For, as scholars of Plato, you hold that
the world is an animal, and a very happy animal, which you
wish to be also everlasting. How, then, is it never to be loosed
from a body, and yet never lose its happiness, if, in order to
the happiness of the soul, the body must be left behind? The
sun, too, and the other stars, you not only acknowledge to be
bodies, in which you have the cordial assent of all seeing men,
but also, in obedience to what you reckon a profounder insight,
you declare that they are very blessed animals, and eternal,
together with their bodies. Why is it, then, that when the
Christian faith is pressed upon you, you forget, or pretend to
ignore, what you habitually discuss or teach? Why is it that
you refuse to be Christians, on the ground that you hold
opinions which, in fact, you yourselves demolish? Is it not
because Christ came in lowliness, and ye are proud? The[Pg 426]
precise nature of the resurrection bodies of the saints may
sometimes occasion discussion among those who are best read
in the Christian Scriptures; yet there is not among us the
smallest doubt that they shall be everlasting, and of a nature
exemplified in the instance of Christ’s risen body. But whatever
be their nature, since we maintain that they shall be
absolutely incorruptible and immortal, and shall offer no
hindrance to the soul’s contemplation by which it is fixed
in God, and as you say that among the celestials the bodies
of the eternally blessed are eternal, why do you maintain that,
in order to blessedness, every body must be escaped from?
Why do you thus seek such a plausible reason for escaping
from the Christian faith, if not because, as I again say, Christ
is humble and ye proud? Are ye ashamed to be corrected?
This is the vice of the proud. It is, forsooth, a degradation
for learned men to pass from the school of Plato to the discipleship
of Christ, who by His Spirit taught a fisherman to think
and to say, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the
beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and
without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him
was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light
shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”[427]
The old saint Simplicianus, afterwards bishop of Milan, used to
tell me that a certain Platonist was in the habit of saying that
this opening passage of the holy gospel, entitled “According
to John,” should be written in letters of gold, and hung up in
all churches in the most conspicuous place. But the proud
scorn to take God for their Master, because “the Word was
made flesh and dwelt among us.”[428] So that, with these miserable
creatures, it is not enough that they are sick, but they boast
of their sickness, and are ashamed of the medicine which could
heal them. And, doing so, they secure not elevation, but a more
disastrous fall.

30. Porphyry’s emendations and modifications of Platonism.

If it is considered unseemly to emend anything which Plato
has touched, why did Porphyry himself make emendations,[Pg 427]
and these not a few? for it is very certain that Plato wrote
that the souls of men return after death to the bodies of
beasts.[429] Plotinus also, Porphyry’s teacher, held this opinion;[430]
yet Porphyry justly rejected it. He was of opinion that
human souls return indeed into human bodies, but not into
the bodies they had left, but other new bodies. He shrank
from the other opinion, lest a woman who had returned into
a mule might possibly carry her own son on her back. He
did not shrink, however, from a theory which admitted the
possibility of a mother coming back into a girl and marrying
her own son. How much more honourable a creed is that
which was taught by the holy and truthful angels, uttered by
the prophets who were moved by God’s Spirit, preached by
Him who was foretold as the coming Saviour by His forerunning
heralds, and by the apostles whom He sent forth,
and who filled the whole world with the gospel,—how much
more honourable, I say, is the belief that souls return once
for all to their own bodies, than that they return again and
again to divers bodies? Nevertheless Porphyry, as I have
said, did considerably improve upon this opinion, in so far, at
least, as he maintained that human souls could transmigrate
only into human bodies, and made no scruple about demolishing
the bestial prisons into which Plato had wished to cast
them. He says, too, that God put the soul into the world
that it might recognise the evils of matter, and return to the
Father, and be for ever emancipated from the polluting contact
of matter. And although here is some inappropriate
thinking (for the soul is rather given to the body that it may
do good; for it would not learn evil unless it did it), yet he
corrects the opinion of other Platonists, and that on a point
of no small importance, inasmuch as he avows that the soul,
which is purged from all evil and received to the Father’s
presence, shall never again suffer the ills of this life. By
this opinion he quite subverted the favourite Platonic dogma,
that as dead men are made out of living ones, so living men
are made out of dead ones; and he exploded the idea which
Virgil seems to have adopted from Plato, that the purified
souls which have been sent into the Elysian fields (the poetic[Pg 428]
name for the joys of the blessed) are summoned to the river
Lethe, that is, to the oblivion of the past,

“That earthward they may pass once more,

Remembering not the things before,

And with a blind propension yearn

To fleshly bodies to return.”[431]

This found no favour with Porphyry, and very justly; for it
is indeed foolish to believe that souls should desire to return
from that life, which cannot be very blessed unless by the
assurance of its permanence, and to come back into this life,
and to the pollution of corruptible bodies, as if the result of
perfect purification were only to make defilement desirable.
For if perfect purification effects the oblivion of all evils, and
the oblivion of evils creates a desire for a body in which the
soul may again be entangled with evils, then the supreme
felicity will be the cause of infelicity, and the perfection of
wisdom the cause of foolishness, and the purest cleansing the
cause of defilement. And, however long the blessedness of
the soul last, it cannot be founded on truth, if, in order to be
blessed, it must be deceived. For it cannot be blessed unless
it be free from fear. But, to be free from fear, it must be
under the false impression that it shall be always blessed,—the
false impression, for it is destined to be also at some time
miserable. How, then, shall the soul rejoice in truth, whose
joy is founded on falsehood? Porphyry saw this, and therefore
said that the purified soul returns to the Father, that it
may never more be entangled in the polluting contact with
evil. The opinion, therefore, of some Platonists, that there is
a necessary revolution carrying souls away and bringing them
round again to the same things, is false. But, were it true,
what were the advantage of knowing it? Would the Platonists
presume to allege their superiority to us, because we
were in this life ignorant of what they themselves were doomed
to be ignorant of when perfected in purity and wisdom in
another and better life, and which they must be ignorant of
if they are to be blessed? If it were most absurd and foolish
to say so, then certainly we must prefer Porphyry’s opinion
to the idea of a circulation of souls through constantly alternating[Pg 429]
happiness and misery. And if this is just, here is a
Platonist emending Plato, here is a man who saw what Plato
did not see, and who did not shrink from correcting so illustrious
a master, but preferred truth to Plato.

31. Against the arguments on which the Platonists ground their assertion that
the human soul is co-eternal with God.

Why, then, do we not rather believe the divinity in those
matters, which human talent cannot fathom? Why do we
not credit the assertion of divinity, that the soul is not co-eternal
with God, but is created, and once was not? For the
Platonists seemed to themselves to allege an adequate reason
for their rejection of this doctrine, when they affirmed that
nothing could be everlasting which had not always existed.
Plato, however, in writing concerning the world and the gods
in it, whom the Supreme made, most expressly states that
they had a beginning and yet would have no end, but, by the
sovereign will of the Creator, would endure eternally. But,
by way of interpreting this, the Platonists have discovered
that he meant a beginning, not of time, but of cause. “For
as if a foot,” they say, “had been always from eternity in
dust, there would always have been a print underneath it;
and yet no one would doubt that this print was made by the
pressure of the foot, nor that, though the one was made by
the other, neither was prior to the other; so,” they say, “the
world and the gods created in it have always been, their
Creator always existing, and yet they were made.” If, then,
the soul has always existed, are we to say that its wretchedness
has always existed? For if there is something in it
which was not from eternity, but began in time, why is it
impossible that the soul itself, though not previously existing,
should begin to be in time? Its blessedness, too, which, as
he owns, is to be more stable, and indeed endless, after the
soul’s experience of evils,—this undoubtedly has a beginning
in time, and yet is to be always, though previously it had no
existence. This whole argumentation, therefore, to establish
that nothing can be endless except that which has had no
beginning, falls to the ground. For here we find the blessedness
of the soul, which has a beginning, and yet has no end.
And, therefore, let the incapacity of man give place to the[Pg 430]
authority of God; and let us take our belief regarding the
true religion from the ever-blessed spirits, who do not seek for
themselves that honour which they know to be due to their
God and ours, and who do not command us to sacrifice save
only to Him, whose sacrifice, as I have often said already,
and must often say again, we and they ought together to be,
offered through that Priest who offered Himself to death a
sacrifice for us, in that human nature which He assumed, and
according to which He desired to be our Priest.

32. Of the universal way of the soul’s deliverance, which Porphyry did not find
because he did not rightly seek it, and which the grace of Christ has alone
thrown open.

This is the religion which possesses the universal way for
delivering the soul; for, except by this way, none can be
delivered. This is a kind of royal way, which alone leads to
a kingdom which does not totter like all temporal dignities,
but stands firm on eternal foundations. And when Porphyry
says, towards the end of the first book De Regressu Animæ,
that no system of doctrine which furnishes the universal way
for delivering the soul has as yet been received, either from
the truest philosophy, or from the ideas and practices of the
Indians, or from the reasoning[432] of the Chaldæans, or from any
source whatever, and that no historical reading had made
him acquainted with that way, he manifestly acknowledges
that there is such a way, but that as yet he was not acquainted
with it. Nothing of all that he had so laboriously learned
concerning the deliverance of the soul, nothing of all that he
seemed to others, if not to himself, to know and believe, satisfied
him. For he perceived that there was still wanting a
commanding authority which it might be right to follow in a
matter of such importance. And when he says that he had
not learned from any truest philosophy a system which possessed
the universal way of the soul’s deliverance, he shows
plainly enough, as it seems to me, either that the philosophy
of which he was a disciple was not the truest, or that it did
not comprehend such a way. And how can that be the truest
philosophy which does not possess this way? For what else
is the universal way of the soul’s deliverance than that by[Pg 431]
which all souls universally are delivered, and without which,
therefore, no soul is delivered? And when he says, in addition,
“or from the ideas and practices of the Indians, or from
the reasoning of the Chaldæans, or from any source whatever,”
he declares in the most unequivocal language that this universal
way of the soul’s deliverance was not embraced in what
he had learned either from the Indians or the Chaldæans; and
yet he could not forbear stating that it was from the Chaldæans
he had derived these divine oracles of which he makes such
frequent mention. What, therefore, does he mean by this
universal way of the soul’s deliverance, which had not yet
been made known by any truest philosophy, or by the doctrinal
systems of those nations which were considered to have
great insight in things divine, because they indulged more
freely in a curious and fanciful science and worship of angels?
What is this universal way of which he acknowledges his
ignorance, if not a way which does not belong to one nation
as its special property, but is common to all, and divinely
bestowed? Porphyry, a man of no mediocre abilities, does
not question that such a way exists; for he believes that
Divine Providence could not have left men destitute of this
universal way of delivering the soul. For he does not say
that this way does not exist, but that this great boon and
assistance has not yet been discovered, and has not come to
his knowledge. And no wonder; for Porphyry lived in an age
when this universal way of the soul’s deliverance,—in other
words, the Christian religion,—was exposed to the persecutions
of idolaters and demon-worshippers, and earthly rulers,[433] that
the number of martyrs or witnesses for the truth might be
completed and consecrated, and that by them proof might be
given that we must endure all bodily sufferings in the cause
of the holy faith, and for the commendation of the truth.
Porphyry, being a witness of these persecutions, concluded
that this way was destined to a speedy extinction, and that it,
therefore, was not the universal way of the soul’s deliverance,
and did not see that the very thing that thus moved him, and
deterred him from becoming a Christian, contributed to the
confirmation and more effectual commendation of our religion.

[Pg 432]

This, then, is the universal way of the soul’s deliverance,
the way that is granted by the divine compassion to the
nations universally. And no nation to which the knowledge
of it has already come, or may hereafter come, ought to
demand, Why so soon? or, Why so late?—for the design of
Him who sends it is impenetrable by human capacity. This
was felt by Porphyry when he confined himself to saying that
this gift of God was not yet received, and had not yet come
to his knowledge. For, though this was so, he did not on
that account pronounce that the way itself had no existence.
This, I say, is the universal way for the deliverance
of believers, concerning which the faithful Abraham received
the divine assurance, “In thy seed shall all nations be
blessed.”[434] He, indeed, was by birth a Chaldæan; but, that
he might receive these great promises, and that there might
be propagated from him a seed “disposed by angels in the
hand of a Mediator,”[435] in whom this universal way, thrown
open to all nations for the deliverance of the soul, might be
found, he was ordered to leave his country, and kindred, and
father’s house. Then was he himself, first of all, delivered
from the Chaldæan superstitions, and by his obedience worshipped
the one true God, whose promises he faithfully
trusted. This is the universal way, of which it is said in
holy prophecy, “God be merciful unto us, and bless us, and
cause His face to shine upon us; that Thy way may be
known upon earth, Thy saving health among all nations.”[436]
And hence, when our Saviour, so long after, had taken flesh
of the seed of Abraham, He says of Himself, “I am the way,
the truth, and the life.”[437] This is the universal way, of which
so long before it had been predicted, “And it shall come to
pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be
exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.
And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go
up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of
Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk
in His paths: for out of Sion shall go forth the law, and the[Pg 433]
word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”[438] This way, therefore, is not
the property of one, but of all nations. The law and the word
of the Lord did not remain in Zion and Jerusalem, but issued
thence to be universally diffused. And therefore the Mediator
Himself, after His resurrection, says to His alarmed disciples,
“These are the words which I spake unto you while I was yet
with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written
in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms,
concerning me. Then opened He their understandings that
they might understand the Scriptures, and said unto them,
Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and
to rise from the dead the third day: and that repentance and
remission of sins should be preached in His name among all
nations, beginning at Jerusalem.”[439] This is the universal way
of the soul’s deliverance, which the holy angels and the holy
prophets formerly disclosed where they could among the few
men who found the grace of God, and especially in the Hebrew
nation, whose commonwealth was, as it were, consecrated to
prefigure and fore-announce the city of God which was to be
gathered from all nations, by their tabernacle, and temple, and
priesthood, and sacrifices. In some explicit statements, and
in many obscure foreshadowings, this way was declared; but
latterly came the Mediator Himself in the flesh, and His
blessed apostles, revealing how the grace of the New Testament
more openly explained what had been obscurely hinted
to preceding generations, in conformity with the relation of
the ages of the human race, and as it pleased God in His
wisdom to appoint, who also bore them witness with signs
and miracles, some of which I have cited above. For not
only were there visions of angels, and words heard from those
heavenly ministrants, but also men of God, armed with the
word of simple piety, cast out unclean spirits from the bodies
and senses of men, and healed deformities and sicknesses;
the wild beasts of earth and sea, the birds of air, inanimate
things, the elements, the stars, obeyed their divine commands;
the powers of hell gave way before them, the dead were restored
to life. I say nothing of the miracles peculiar and
proper to the Saviour’s own person, especially the nativity[Pg 434]
and the resurrection; in the one of which He wrought only
the mystery of a virgin maternity, while in the other He
furnished an instance of the resurrection which all shall at
last experience. This way purifies the whole man, and prepares
the mortal in all his parts for immortality. For, to
prevent us from seeking for one purgation for the part which
Porphyry calls intellectual, and another for the part he calls
spiritual, and another for the body itself, our most mighty
and truthful Purifier and Saviour assumed the whole human
nature. Except by this way, which has been present among
men both during the period of the promises and of the proclamation
of their fulfilment, no man has been delivered, no
man is delivered, no man shall be delivered.

As to Porphyry’s statement that the universal way of the
soul’s deliverance had not yet come to his knowledge by any
acquaintance he had with history, I would ask, what more
remarkable history can be found than that which has taken
possession of the whole world by its authoritative voice? or
what more trustworthy than that which narrates past events,
and predicts the future with equal clearness, and in the unfulfilled
predictions of which we are constrained to believe by
those that are already fulfilled? For neither Porphyry nor
any Platonists can despise divination and prediction, even of
things that pertain to this life and earthly matters, though
they justly despise ordinary soothsaying and the divination
that is connected with magical arts. They deny that these
are the predictions of great men, or are to be considered
important, and they are right; for they are founded, either
on the foresight of subsidiary causes, as to a professional eye
much of the course of a disease is foreseen by certain premonitory
symptoms, or the unclean demons predict what
they have resolved to do, that they may thus work upon the
thoughts and desires of the wicked with an appearance of
authority, and incline human frailty to imitate their impure
actions. It is not such things that the saints who walk in
the universal way care to predict as important, although, for
the purpose of commending the faith, they knew and often
predicted even such things as could not be detected by human
observation, nor be readily verified by experience. But there[Pg 435]
were other truly important and divine events which they predicted,
in so far as it was given them to know the will of
God. For the incarnation of Christ, and all those important
marvels that were accomplished in Him, and done in His
name; the repentance of men and the conversion of their wills
to God; the remission of sins, the grace of righteousness, the
faith of the pious, and the multitudes in all parts of the world
who believe in the true divinity; the overthrow of idolatry
and demon worship, and the testing of the faithful by trials;
the purification of those who persevered, and their deliverance
from all evil; the day of judgment, the resurrection of the
dead, the eternal damnation of the community of the ungodly,
and the eternal kingdom of the most glorious city of God,
ever-blessed in the enjoyment of the vision of God,—these
things were predicted and promised in the Scriptures of this
way; and of these we see so many fulfilled, that we justly
and piously trust that the rest will also come to pass. As
for those who do not believe, and consequently do not understand,
that this is the way which leads straight to the vision
of God and to eternal fellowship with Him, according to the
true predictions and statements of the Holy Scriptures, they
may storm at our position, but they cannot storm it.

And therefore, in these ten books, though not meeting, I
dare say, the expectation of some, yet I have, as the true God
and Lord has vouchsafed to aid me, satisfied the desire of
certain persons, by refuting the objections of the ungodly,
who prefer their own gods to the Founder of the holy city,
about which we undertook to speak. Of these ten books, the
first five were directed against those who think we should
worship the gods for the sake of the blessings of this life, and
the second five against those who think we should worship
them for the sake of the life which is to be after death. And
now, in fulfilment of the promise I made in the first book, I
shall go on to say, as God shall aid me, what I think needs
to be said regarding the origin, history, and deserved ends of
the two cities, which, as already remarked, are in this world
commingled and implicated with one another.

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[Pg 436]