A Plea for the Christians 25

These angels, then, who fell from heaven and haunt the air and the earth, no longer able to rise to the realms above the heavens, together with the souls of the giants, are the demons who wander about the world. Both produce similar movements: the demons according to the natures they received, the angels according to the desires they conceived. The ruler of matter, as one can see from what happens, directs and administers things contrary to the goodness of God. “Often has this care come over my mind: whether chance or a divinity rules the affairs of mortals, bringing some, against hope and against justice, falling from their homes without a livelihood, and others to prosperity.” That people fare well or badly against hope and justice left Euripides at a loss to know whose is this administration of earthly things, under which one might say: “How, then, seeing these things, can we say that there is a race of gods, or live by laws?” This also made Aristotle say that the things below heaven are not under providence, although the eternal providence of God remains over us equally (“The earth, by necessity, whether it will or not, grows grass and fattens my cattle”), while his particular providence goes, in truth and not in appearance, to the worthy, and all the rest are provided for in common by the law of reason governing their constitution. But the demonic movements and operations that come from the adverse spirit produce these disorderly assaults, moving people from within and from without, one in one way and another in another, as individuals and as nations, separately and in common, according to the reason of matter and their affinity with divine things. For this reason some whose reputation is not small have thought that this universe was not constituted by any order, but is driven and carried about by irrational chance. They do not know that in the constitution of the whole world nothing is disorderly or neglected, but each thing has come into being by reason, and so they do not transgress the order appointed for them. The human being too, as far as his Maker is concerned, is well ordered: in the nature of his birth, which has one common principle; in the disposition of his formation, which does not transgress the law set for it; and in the end of his life, which remains the same and common to all. But according to his own individual reason, and the operation of the ruler who holds sway and of the demons who attend him, each is carried and moved in a different direction, though all have within them a common power of reasoning.