City of God 10.26–10.31

Chapter 26. On the inconsistency of Porphyry, wavering between confessing the true God and worshipping demons.

Somehow, as it seems to me, Porphyry was ashamed before his friends the theurgists. For he knew these things in some measure, but did not defend them freely against the worship of many gods. For he said that there are some angels who come down and announce divine things to theurgists, and others who declare on earth the things that are the Father's, his height and his depth. Are we then to believe that these angels, whose ministry is to declare the will of the Father, wish us to be subject to anyone but him whose will they announce to us? So this Platonist himself advises very well that they should be imitated rather than invoked. We need not fear, then, that we offend the immortal and blessed beings subject to the one God by not sacrificing to them. For what they know is owed only to the one true God, by cleaving to whom they too are blessed, they certainly do not wish to be offered to themselves, either by any signifying figure or by the very reality which is signified by the sacraments. This is the arrogance of proud and wretched demons, from whom the piety of those who are subject to God, and blessed from no other source than by cleaving to him, is far different. And in order that we too may receive this good, they must favor us with sincere kindness, and not claim for themselves that we be subjected to them, but announce him under whom we may be joined with them in peace. Why do you still tremble, O philosopher, to speak freely against the powers that envy true virtues and the gifts of the true God? You have already distinguished the angels who announce the will of the Father from those angels who come down to theurgist men, drawn by some art or other. Why do you still honor these, so as to say that they announce divine things? What divine things, pray, do they announce who do not announce the will of the Father? These are surely the ones whom the envious man bound with sacred prayers so that they would not grant purification to a soul, and who, as you say, could not be released from those bonds by the good man who wished to purify it, and restored to their own power. Do you still doubt that these are malignant demons, or do you perhaps pretend not to know, because you do not wish to offend the theurgists, from whom, deceived by curiosity, you learned these ruinous and insane things as a great benefit? Do you dare to raise this envious thing, not a power but a pestilence, and, I will not say a mistress, but, as you admit, rather the handmaid of the envious, above this air into heaven, and to place it among your gods, even the starry ones, or to defame the stars themselves with these reproaches?

Chapter 27. On the impiety of Porphyry, by which he goes beyond even the error of Apuleius.

How much more humanely and tolerably your fellow Platonist Apuleius erred! For he honored the demons, set from the moon downward, as agitated by the diseases of passions and the disturbances of mind, though he confessed it willy-nilly; but the higher gods of heaven, belonging to the ethereal spaces, whether visible, whom he saw shining conspicuously, the sun and moon and the other lights there, or invisible, as he thought, he separated with all the argument he could from every stain of these disturbances. But you learned, not from Plato but from your Chaldean masters, to lift human vices into the ethereal or empyrean heights of the world and the heavenly firmaments, so that your gods could announce divine things to theurgists; and yet you make yourself higher than these divine things by the intellectual life, so that, as a philosopher, the purifications of the theurgic art seem to you in no way necessary. Yet you urge them on others, to pay this, as it were, as a fee to your masters, that you lead astray to these things those who cannot philosophize, things which you confess to be useless to you as one capable of higher things; so that, of course, all who are far from the virtue of philosophy, which is too arduous and belongs to few, may on your authority seek out theurgist men, by whom they may be purified, not indeed in the intellectual soul, but at least in the spiritual soul; and since the multitude of those who are too lazy to philosophize is incomparably greater, more may be driven to your secret and unlawful masters than to the Platonic schools. For this is what the most unclean demons, pretending to be ethereal gods, whose preacher and angel you have become, promised you: that those purified in the spiritual soul by the theurgic art do not indeed return to the Father, but will dwell above the regions of the air among the ethereal gods. The multitude of men does not listen to these things, for whose deliverance from the dominion of demons Christ came. For in him they have the most merciful purification of their mind, their spirit, and their body. For this reason he took on the whole man without sin, that he might heal from the plague of sins the whole of which man consists. Would that you too had known him and had more safely committed yourself to him for healing, rather than either to your own virtue, which is human, fragile, and weak, or to a most ruinous curiosity! For he would not have deceived you, whom your own oracles, as you yourself write, confessed to be holy and immortal; of whom also a most famous poet said, poetically indeed, because in the shadowed person of another, yet truly, if you refer it to him:

“Under your leadership, if any traces of our crime remain, made void, they will free the lands from perpetual fear.”

For he said what may remain, because of the weakness of this life, even in those who make much progress in the virtue of righteousness: if not crimes, yet traces of crimes, which are healed only by that Savior of whom this verse speaks. For Virgil indicates, at about the fourth line of that eclogue, that he did not say this of himself, where he says: “Now has come the last age of the Cumaean song”; from which it plainly appears that this was said by the Cumaean Sibyl. But those theurgists, or rather demons feigning the appearances and shapes of gods, defile rather than purify the human spirit by the falsity of phantoms and the deceitful sport of empty forms. For how could those purify the spirit of man who have an unclean one of their own? Otherwise they would in no way be bound by the spells of an envious man, and would not either hold back out of fear, or deny out of a like envy, the empty benefit which they seemed about to bestow. It is enough that you say that neither the intellectual soul, that is, our mind, can be purified by theurgic purification, and that you confess that the spiritual soul itself, that is, the part of our soul lower than the mind, which you assert can be purified by such an art, cannot by this art be made immortal and eternal. But Christ promises eternal life; so the world runs to him, while you people fume, yet wonder and are amazed. What good is it that you could not deny that men err by the theurgic discipline and deceive very many by a blind and foolish notion, and that it is a most certain error to run with rites and supplications to principalities and angels; and then again, as if not to seem to have wasted your effort in learning these things, you send men to the theurgists so that through them the spiritual soul may be purified of those who do not live according to the intellectual soul?

Chapter 28. By what persuasions Porphyry was blinded so that he could not recognize the true Wisdom, which is Christ.

So you send men into the most certain error, and you are not ashamed of so great an evil, though you profess yourself a lover of virtue and wisdom; if you had loved it truly and faithfully, you would have recognized Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God, and would not have recoiled from his most wholesome humility, puffed up with the swelling of empty knowledge. Yet you confess that even the spiritual soul can be purified by the virtue of continence without theurgic arts and without the teletai which you labored in vain to learn. Sometimes you even say that the teletai do not raise the soul after death, so that they seem to be of no use after the end of this life even to that very part which you call spiritual; and yet you turn these things over in many ways and repeat them, for no other purpose, as far as I can judge, than to appear skilled in such things too and to please those curious about unlawful arts, or to make people curious about them yourself. But you do well to say that this art is to be feared, both for the dangers of the laws and for those of its very practice. Would that the wretched would at least hear this from you, and withdraw from there so as not to be swallowed up in it, or not approach it at all! You certainly say that ignorance, and the many vices that come from it, are not purified by any teletai, but only by the patrikos nous, that is, the paternal mind or intellect, which is conscious of the paternal will. But you do not believe that this is Christ; for you despise him because of the body taken from a woman and because of the shame of the cross, being fit, no doubt, to pluck lofty wisdom from higher things, spurning and casting away the lowest. But he fulfills what the holy prophets truly foretold of him: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the prudence of the prudent I will reject.” For he does not destroy and reject in them his own wisdom, which he himself gave, but that which they claim for themselves who do not have his. So, having cited this prophetic testimony, the apostle goes on to say: “Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe. For the Jews ask for signs and the Greeks seek wisdom; but we,” he says, “preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God; for the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” This, as though foolish and weak, those despise who are wise and strong, as it were, by their own power. But this is the grace that heals the weak, who do not proudly boast of their false happiness, but rather humbly confess their true misery.

Chapter 29. On the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, which the impiety of the Platonists is ashamed to confess.

You proclaim the Father and his Son, whom you call the paternal intellect or mind, and the one between these, whom we think you mean to be the Holy Spirit; and in your fashion you call them three gods. Here, though you use undisciplined words, you still see in some way, and as it were through certain shadows of a thin imagination, where one must strive to go; but the incarnation of the unchangeable Son of God, by which we are saved, so that we may come to the things we believe or understand in however small a part, you will not acknowledge. So you see, in some way, though from afar and with clouded vision, the country in which we must abide; but you do not hold to the way by which we must go. Yet you confess grace, since you say that it has been granted to few to reach God by the power of the understanding. For you do not say, “It has pleased few,” or “Few have willed”; but when you say “it has been granted,” you certainly confess the grace of God, not the sufficiency of man. You also use this word more openly where, following the opinion of Plato, you yourself do not doubt that in this life man in no way reaches the perfection of wisdom, but that for those who live according to the intellect, all that is lacking can be completed after this life by the providence and grace of God. O, if you had known the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord, you could have seen that his very incarnation, by which he took a human soul and body, is the supreme example of grace! But what shall I do? I know that I speak in vain to a dead man, as far as you are concerned; but as far as those are concerned who think much of you and love you, whether from some love of wisdom or from curiosity about the arts you ought not to have learned, whom I rather address in addressing you, perhaps not in vain. The grace of God could not have been commended more graciously than that the only Son of God himself, remaining unchangeably in himself, should put on man and give men the hope of his love through man as mediator, by which men might come to him, who was so far off: the immortal from mortals, the unchangeable from the changeable, the just from the impious, the blessed from the wretched. And since he has implanted in us by nature the desire to be blessed and immortal, he, remaining blessed and taking on the mortal, in order to give us what we love, taught us by suffering to despise what we fear. But for you to be able to assent to this truth, humility was needed, which can be urged on your neck only with the greatest difficulty. For what is said that is incredible, especially to you who think such things that you ought to remind yourselves of them in order to believe this; what, I say, is said that is incredible to you when it is said that God took on a human soul and body? You certainly attribute so much to the intellectual soul, which is of course a human soul, that you say it can become consubstantial with that paternal mind which you confess to be the Son of God. What then is incredible if one intellectual soul was taken up in an ineffable and singular way for the salvation of many? That a body is joined to a soul, so that a man is whole and complete, we know from the testimony of our own nature. If this were not so very common, it would certainly be more incredible; for it is easier to accept in faith that spirit is joined to spirit, even the human to the divine, the changeable to the unchangeable, or, to use the words you are used to, the incorporeal to the incorporeal, than that a body is joined to the incorporeal. Or perhaps the unusual birth of a body from a virgin offends you? Neither ought this to offend; rather it ought to lead you to embrace piety, that one who is wonderful was born wonderfully. Or perhaps you refuse to believe that he carried up to heaven that very body, laid down in death and changed for the better by resurrection, now incorruptible and no longer mortal, because you see Porphyry, in these very books from which I have cited much, which he wrote On the Return of the Soul, so often teaching that every body must be fled from, so that the soul may remain blessed with God? But he himself should rather have been corrected in holding this, especially since you, with him, hold such incredible things about the soul of this visible world and so immense a bodily mass. For on Plato's authority you say that the world is a living being, and a most blessed living being, which you also want to be everlasting. How then will it never be released from a body and never lack blessedness, if, for a soul to be blessed, every body must be fled from? The sun too and the other stars you not only admit in your books to be bodies, as all men with you do not hesitate both to see and to say; but by a higher skill, as you think, you declare that they are most blessed living beings, everlasting with these bodies. Why is it, then, that when the Christian faith is urged on you, you forget, or pretend not to know, what you are accustomed to argue or teach? What reason is there why, because of your opinions, which you yourselves attack, you will not be Christians, except that Christ came humbly and you are proud? What the bodies of the saints will be like in the resurrection can be discussed somewhat more precisely among those most learned in the Christian Scriptures; yet we do not doubt in the least that they will be everlasting, and that they will be such as Christ showed in his own resurrection as an example. But whatever they are like, since they are proclaimed to be wholly incorruptible and immortal and in no way hindering the contemplation of the soul by which it is fixed on God, and since you too say that there are in the heavens immortal bodies of those who are immortally blessed, why do you think that every body must be fled from in order for us to be blessed, so that you may seem to flee the Christian faith with reason, unless it is because of what I say again: Christ is humble, you are proud? Or perhaps you are ashamed to be corrected? This too is a vice only of the proud. It shames learned men, of course, to become disciples of Christ instead of disciples of Plato: of Christ, who taught a fisherman by his Spirit to understand and say: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men; and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” This beginning of the holy Gospel called according to John a certain Platonist used to say, as we often heard from the holy old man Simplician, who afterwards presided as bishop over the church of Milan, ought to be written in letters of gold and set up in the most prominent places in all the churches. But that God, the Master, became cheap in the eyes of the proud because “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”; so that it is not enough for the wretched to be sick unless they also exalt themselves in their very sickness and are ashamed of the medicine by which they could be healed. For they do not do this to be raised up, but to be more gravely afflicted by falling.

Chapter 30. How many of Plato's doctrines Porphyry refuted and corrected by disagreeing.

If it is thought unworthy to correct anything after Plato, why did Porphyry himself correct a number of things, and those not small? For it is quite certain that Plato wrote that the souls of men after death return even into the bodies of beasts. This opinion was also held by Plotinus, Porphyry's teacher; yet Porphyry rightly disliked it. He thought, indeed, that human souls return into the bodies of men, not their own which they had left, but other, new ones. He was ashamed, of course, to believe the former, lest a mother, perhaps returned as a mule, should carry her son; and he was not ashamed to believe this, where a mother returned as a girl might perhaps marry her son! How much more honorable it is to believe what the holy and truthful angels taught, what the prophets, moved by the Spirit of God, spoke, what he himself foretold, whom the messengers sent before foretold as the coming Savior, what the apostles sent out, who filled the world with the Gospel, taught: how much more honorable, I say, to believe that souls return once to their own bodies than that they return so often to different ones! Yet, as I said, Porphyry was corrected in large part in this opinion, so that he at least held that human souls can be cast down only into men, and did not hesitate at all to overturn the prisons of beasts. He also says that God gave the soul to the world for this purpose, that, knowing the evils of matter, it might run back to the Father and never again be held by the polluting contagion of such things. Here, though he thinks something unfitting (for it was given to the body rather that it might do good; for it would not learn evils if it did not do them), yet in this he corrected the opinion of other Platonists, and in no small matter: he confessed that the soul, cleansed from all evils and established with the Father, will never again suffer the evils of this world. By this opinion he certainly removed what is said to be most characteristically Platonic, that as the dead come from the living, so the living always come from the dead; and he showed to be false what Virgil seems to have said in Platonic fashion, that purified souls sent into the Elysian fields (by which name, as in a fable, the joys of the blessed seem to be signified) are called to the river Lethe, that is, to forgetfulness of the past:

“That, forgetful, they may see again the vault above and begin to wish to return into bodies.”

Rightly did this displease Porphyry, since it is truly foolish to believe that from that life, which could not be most blessed unless it were most certain of its own eternity, souls should long for the corruption of corruptible bodies and return from there to these things, as if the supreme purification brought it about that defilement is sought. For if being perfectly cleansed causes them to forget all evils, and forgetfulness of evils causes a desire for bodies, in which they are again entangled in evils, then supreme happiness will be the cause of unhappiness, the perfection of wisdom the cause of folly, and supreme cleansing the cause of uncleanness. Nor will the soul be blessed there in truth, however long it is there, where it must be deceived in order to be blessed. For it will not be blessed unless secure; but to be secure, it will think falsely that it will always be blessed, since at some time it will also be wretched. How, then, will the soul whose cause of joy is falsehood rejoice in truth? Porphyry saw this, and said that the purified soul returns to the Father so that it may never again be held by the polluting contagion of evils. False, then, is that circuit, believed necessary by certain Platonists, of departing from the same things and returning to the same things. And even if it were true, what good would it be to know it, unless perhaps the Platonists should dare to prefer themselves to us on the ground that we already did not know in this life what they themselves, most purified and most wise, were not going to know in another, better life, and would be blessed by believing a falsehood? If it is most absurd and most foolish to say this, then certainly the opinion of Porphyry is to be preferred to those who supposed a circuit of souls, always alternating happiness and misery. If this is so, see, a Platonist disagrees with Plato for the better; see, he saw what Plato did not see, and after such a great master he did not shrink from correction, but put truth before a man.

Chapter 31. Against the argument of the Platonists by which they assert that the human soul is coeternal with God.

Why then do we not rather believe the divine authority about those things which we cannot investigate by human wit, which says that even the soul itself is not coeternal with God but created, when it did not exist? For the Platonists thought they offered a sufficient reason for refusing to believe this: that nothing could be everlasting hereafter unless it had always existed before; although Plato, speaking both of the world and of those whom he writes were made gods in the world by God, says quite plainly that they began to be and have a beginning, but declares that they will not have an end, but will remain forever by the most powerful will of their maker. But they have found a way to understand this, namely that this is not a beginning in time but a beginning of dependence. “For just as,” they say, “if a foot had been in dust from eternity, there would always be a footprint under it, and yet no one would doubt that the footprint was made by the one treading, nor would one be prior to the other, although one was made by the other: so,” they say, “both the world and the gods created in it have always existed, since he who made them always exists, and yet they were made.” If, then, the soul always existed, must its misery also be said to have always existed? And if something in it which did not exist from eternity began to exist in time, why could it not be that the soul itself existed from a point in time, not having existed before? Then too its happiness, made firmer after the experience of evils and lasting without end, as this man confesses, certainly began in time, and yet will always be, though it was not before. So that whole argument is undone by which it is thought that nothing can be without an end in time except what has no beginning in time. For the happiness of the soul has been found, which, having had a beginning in time, will not have an end in time. Therefore let human weakness yield to divine authority; and let us believe about the true religion those blessed and immortal beings who do not seek for themselves the honor which they know is owed to their God, who is ours too, and who do not command us to offer sacrifice except to him alone, whose sacrifice we too, together with them, ought to be, as I have often said and must often say, offered through that priest who, in the manhood that he took on and according to which he willed to be a priest, deigned even to become a sacrifice for us unto death.