City of God 10.6–10.15

Chapter 6. On the true and perfect sacrifice.

Therefore a true sacrifice is every work done so that we may cleave to God in holy fellowship, that is, referred to that end of good by which we can be truly happy. So even the mercy by which a man is helped is not a sacrifice if it is not done for God's sake. For though it is done or offered by a man, still a sacrifice is a divine thing, so that the ancient Latins called it by this very word [sacrificium, “a sacred act”]. So man himself, consecrated in God's name and vowed to God, is a sacrifice inasmuch as he dies to the world that he may live to God. For this too belongs to mercy, which each one shows to himself. That is why it is written: “Have mercy on your own soul, pleasing God.” Our body too, when we chasten it by temperance, if we do this, as we ought, for God's sake, so as not to present our members as weapons of iniquity to sin, but as weapons of righteousness to God, is a sacrifice. Exhorting us to this, the apostle says: “I beseech you therefore, brothers, by the mercy of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God, your reasonable service.” If, then, the body, which the soul uses as a lower servant or as an instrument, is a sacrifice when its good and right use is referred to God, how much more does the soul itself become a sacrifice when it refers itself to God, so that, kindled by the fire of his love, it loses the form of worldly desire and, subject to him as to an unchangeable form, is re-formed, pleasing him from what it has received from his beauty! This the same apostle adds next, saying: “And do not be conformed to this world, but be re-formed in the newness of your mind, so that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and well-pleasing and perfect.” Since, then, true sacrifices are works of mercy, whether toward ourselves or toward our neighbors, which are referred to God; and since works of mercy are done for no other purpose than that we may be freed from misery and so be happy (which does not happen except by that good of which it was said, “But for me it is good to cleave to God”): it certainly follows that the whole redeemed city itself, that is, the congregation and fellowship of the saints, is offered as a universal sacrifice to God through the great priest, who also offered himself in his passion for us, that we might be the body of so great a head, according to the form of a servant. For this he offered, in this he was offered, because according to this he is mediator, in this he is priest, in this he is sacrifice. So when the apostle had exhorted us to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God, our reasonable service, and not to be conformed to this world but re-formed in the newness of our mind, to prove what is the will of God, what is good and well-pleasing and perfect, which whole sacrifice we ourselves are, he says: “For I say, by the grace of God that has been given to me, to all who are among you, not to think more highly than one ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, as God has assigned to each the measure of faith. For as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have the same function, so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another, having different gifts according to the grace that has been given to us.” This is the sacrifice of Christians: “we, being many, are one body in Christ.” This the church also celebrates continually in the sacrament of the altar, known to the faithful, where it is shown to her that in the thing she offers she herself is offered.

Chapter 7. That the love of the holy angels for us is such that they wish us to worship not them but the one true God.

Rightly do those immortal and blessed beings set in the heavenly seats, who rejoice together in participation in their Creator, firm by his eternity, certain by his truth, holy by his gift, since they love us mortal and wretched ones with mercy, so that we may be immortal and blessed, not wish sacrifice to be offered to themselves, but to him whose sacrifice they know that they themselves are, together with us. For with them we are one city of God, to which it is said in the psalm: “Most glorious things are spoken of you, O city of God”; part of which is on pilgrimage in us, and part gives help in them. For from that city above, where the will of God is the intelligible and unchangeable law, from that council-house above, as it were (for there care [cura] is taken for us), that holy Scripture came down to us, ministered by angels, in which we read: “He who sacrifices to gods shall be rooted out, except to the Lord alone.” To this Scripture, to this law, to such precepts such great miracles have borne witness that it is plain enough to whom the immortal and blessed beings, who wish for us what they wish for themselves, want us to sacrifice.

Chapter 8. On the miracles which God has deigned to add to his promises, even through the ministry of angels, to strengthen the faith of the pious.

For if I were to recall events that are very old, I would seem to go back further than is enough to show what miracles were done in witness to the promises of God, by which he foretold to Abraham thousands of years ago that in his seed all nations would receive a blessing. For who would not marvel that a barren wife bore a son to that same Abraham at an age of such advanced years that even a fruitful woman could no longer bear; and that in Abraham's sacrifice a flame came from heaven and ran between the divided victims; and that the heavenly burning of the Sodomites was foretold to the same Abraham by angels, whom he had received as guests in the likeness of men, and through whom he had received God's promise about the offspring to come; and that, when the burning was already imminent, Lot, his brother's son, was wonderfully delivered from Sodom by the same angels, whose wife, looking back on the way and suddenly turned into salt, warned by a great sign [sacramentum] that no one on the way of his deliverance ought to long for what is past? And what, and how great, were the wonders done through Moses for delivering the people of God from the yoke of slavery in Egypt, where the magicians of Pharaoh, that is, of the king of Egypt, who oppressed that people with his domination, were allowed to do certain wonders only so that they might be more wonderfully defeated! For they worked by sorcery and magical incantations, to which evil angels, that is, demons, are devoted; but Moses, with power as much greater as his cause was juster, in the name of God who made heaven and earth, with angels serving, easily overcame them. Finally, when the magicians failed at the third plague, ten plagues were completed through Moses in a great arrangement of mysteries, by which the hard hearts of Pharaoh and the Egyptians gave way to let God's people go. And soon they repented, and when they tried to overtake the departing Hebrews, while these crossed on dry ground through the divided sea, the waves returning on themselves from this side and that covered and overwhelmed them. What shall I say of the miracles that abounded with astonishing divine power while that same people was led through the desert: that waters which could not be drunk lost their bitterness when wood was thrown into them, as God had commanded, and satisfied the thirsty; that manna came from heaven to the hungry, and when a measure was fixed for those gathering it, whatever anyone had gathered beyond it rotted with worms breeding in it, while before the sabbath a double portion was gathered, because it was not lawful to gather on the sabbath, and was spoiled by no rot; that when they longed to eat meat, which it seemed no amount could suffice for so great a people, the camp was filled with birds and the heat of craving was extinguished by the disgust of satiety; that enemies who met them, barred their passage, and fought them were laid low without one Hebrew falling, while Moses prayed with his hands stretched out in the figure of a cross; that rebels among the people of God, who were separating themselves from the fellowship ordained by God, were swallowed alive when the earth opened, as a visible example of an invisible punishment; that a rock struck with a rod poured out abundant streams for so great a multitude; that the deadly bites of serpents, a most just punishment for sins, were healed by looking at a bronze serpent lifted up on a pole, so that both the afflicted people might be helped and death destroyed by death might be signified by a likeness, as it were, of death crucified? That serpent, indeed, kept in memory of the event, when the people afterwards went astray and began to worship it as an idol, King Hezekiah, serving God with religious power, broke in pieces, to the great praise of his piety.

Chapter 9. On the unlawful arts connected with the worship of demons, in which the Platonist Porphyry is involved, approving some things and seeming to disapprove others.

These and many other things of this kind, which it would take too long to mention, were done to commend the worship of the one true God and to forbid that of many false ones. They were done by simple faith and pious confidence, not by incantations and spells composed by the art of wicked curiosity, which they call either magic, or by a more detestable name goētia, or by a more honorable one theurgy. They try, as it were, to distinguish these, and would have some of those devoted to unlawful arts seem worthy of condemnation, those whom the common people call sorcerers (for these, they say, belong to goētia), but others praiseworthy, to whom they assign theurgy; whereas both are bound by the deceitful rites of demons under the names of angels. For Porphyry too promises a kind of purification of the soul through theurgy, though hesitantly and in a somewhat shamefaced argument; but he denies that this art offers anyone a return to God. So you can see him wavering, with alternating opinions, between the vice of sacrilegious curiosity and the profession of philosophy. For at one time he warns that this art is to be avoided as deceitful, dangerous in its very practice, and forbidden by the laws; at another, as if yielding to its praisers, he says it is useful for cleansing a part of the soul, not indeed the intellectual part, by which the truth of intelligible things is perceived, which have no likeness to bodies, but the spiritual part, by which the images of bodily things are grasped. For he says that this part, by certain theurgic consecrations which they call teletai, is made fit and apt to receive spirits and angels and to see gods. Yet he admits that from these theurgic teletai no purification comes to the intellectual soul that would make it fit to see its God and to perceive the things that truly are. From this one can understand what kind of gods, or what kind of vision of them, he says comes about by theurgic consecrations, a vision in which the things that truly are are not seen. Finally, he says that the rational soul, or, as he prefers to say, the intellectual soul, can escape into its own realm even if its spiritual part has not been purified by any theurgic art; and that the spiritual part is purified by the theurgist only so far that it does not by this attain immortality and eternity. So although he distinguishes angels from demons, discoursing that the places of demons are in the air and those of angels in the ether or the empyrean, and advises that the friendship of some demon should be used, by whose lifting one may be raised even a little from the earth after death, while he declares that there is another way to the higher fellowship of the angels, he nevertheless testifies, by a kind of express confession, that the company of demons is to be avoided, where he says that the soul, paying its penalties after death, shudders at the worship of the demons by whom it was ensnared. And he could not deny that theurgy itself, which he commends as a reconciler of angels and gods, deals with such powers as either themselves envy the purification of the soul or serve the arts of the envious; bringing forward on this matter the complaint of some Chaldean or other. “A good man in Chaldea,” he says, “complains that his success was frustrated in a great effort to purify a soul, because a man powerful in the same arts, touched by envy, had bound the powers adjured by sacred prayers, so that they would not grant what was asked. So,” he says, “the one bound and the other did not loose.” By this sign, he said, it appears that theurgy is a discipline for accomplishing evil as well as good, both among gods and among men; and that the gods too suffer and are brought into those disturbances and passions which Apuleius attributes to demons and men in common; though he separates the gods from them by the height of their ethereal seat, and asserts the opinion of Plato in that distinction.

Chapter 10. On theurgy, which promises souls a false purification by invoking demons.

See now another Platonist, reputed more learned, Porphyry, saying that through some theurgic discipline or other even the gods themselves are bound by passions and disturbances, since they could be adjured and frightened by sacred prayers from granting purification to a soul; and so frightened by the one who commanded evil that they could not be released from that fear by another who asked for good through the same theurgic art, and be set free to confer the benefit. Who does not see that all these are the inventions of deceitful demons, unless he is their most wretched slave and a stranger to the grace of the true Liberator? For if these things were done among good gods, surely the kind purifier of the soul would have prevailed there more than the malevolent obstructer. Or if the just gods thought the man for whom it was being done unworthy of purification, they ought to have refused it by free judgment, not frightened by an envious man nor, as he himself says, hindered through fear of a stronger deity. It is surprising, too, that that kindly Chaldean who wished to purify a soul by theurgic rites did not find some higher god to frighten the frightened gods more and compel them to do good, or to restrain the one who frightened them so that they might do good freely; unless, indeed, the good theurgist lacked rites by which to purify first from that plague of fear the very gods he was invoking as purifiers of the soul. For what reason is there why a more powerful god can be brought in to frighten them, but not one to purify them? Or is a god found who hears the envious man and strikes fear into the gods so that they do not do good, and no god found who hears the benevolent man and takes fear away from the gods so that they do good? O splendid theurgy, O purification of the soul worthy to be proclaimed, where unclean envy commands more than pure beneficence obtains! Rather, the deceit of malignant spirits is to be avoided and detested, and saving doctrine is to be heard. For as to the fact that those who perform these filthy purifications with sacrilegious rites see, as he relates, certain wonderfully beautiful images either of angels or of gods, as if with a purified spirit (if indeed they see anything of the kind), this is what the apostle says: “For Satan transforms himself into an angel of light.” For his are those phantoms, who, wishing to ensnare wretched souls in the deceitful rites of many false gods and to turn them from the true worship of the true God, by which alone they are cleansed and healed, as was said of Proteus, “turns himself into all shapes,” pursuing as an enemy, helping deceitfully, harmful both ways.

Chapter 11. On Porphyry's letter to the Egyptian Anebo, in which he asks to be taught about the different kinds of demons.

This Porphyry showed better sense when he wrote to the Egyptian Anebo, where, like one consulting and asking questions, he both exposes and overthrows the sacrilegious arts. And there indeed he rejects all demons, who he says draw in moist vapor because of their lack of wisdom and so are not in the ether but in the air beneath the moon and in the very globe of the moon. Yet he does not dare to attribute to all demons all the deceits, malice, and follies by which he is rightly troubled. For he calls some demons benign, after the manner of others, though he admits that all in general lack wisdom. He wonders that gods are not only enticed by victims but even compelled and forced to do what men wish; and, if gods are distinguished from demons by body and incorporeality, how the sun and moon and the other visible things in the sky, which he does not doubt are bodies, are to be thought gods; and, if they are gods, how some can be called beneficent and others maleficent; and how, since they are bodily, they are joined to incorporeal beings. He also asks, as if in doubt, whether in those who divine and do certain wonders there are passions of the soul, or whether some spirits come from outside through whom they have this power; and he conjectures rather that they come from outside, because by using stones and herbs they bind certain people, open closed doors, or do something wonderful of that kind. Hence he says that others think there is a certain kind of being whose property it is to hear prayers, deceitful by nature, of every form, of many modes, feigning gods and demons and souls of the dead; and that this is what brings about all these things that seem good or bad; but that as for things truly good, it gives no help, and indeed does not even know them, but makes evil alliances and brings false charges against, and sometimes hinders, zealous followers of virtue; that it is full of rashness and pride, rejoices in the smoke of sacrifices, is caught by flattery; and the other things which he says about this kind of deceitful and malignant spirits, who come into the soul from outside and delude human senses asleep or awake, not affirming them as things he is persuaded of, but suspecting or doubting them so faintly that he asserts that others think so. It was hard, of course, for so great a philosopher either to know or confidently to denounce the whole diabolical fellowship, which any little old Christian woman does not hesitate to say exists, and detests most freely. Unless perhaps he is ashamed to offend Anebo himself, to whom he writes, as a most distinguished priest of such rites, and others who admire such works as divine and belonging to the worship of the gods. Yet he goes on and mentions, as if inquiring, things which, soberly considered, can be attributed only to malignant and deceitful powers. For he asks why, when they are invoked as better beings, they are commanded as if they were worse, to carry out a man's unjust orders; why they do not hear one who prays if he has had sexual intercourse, when they themselves do not hesitate to lead anyone to any incestuous unions; why they declare that their priests must abstain from animal food, lest they be polluted by bodily vapors, while they themselves are enticed both by other vapors and by the smoke of victims; and, while the one who examines the entrails is forbidden to touch a corpse, their rites are very often celebrated with corpses; what it means that a man liable to any vice directs threats, not at a demon or some soul of the dead, but at the sun and moon themselves or any of the heavenly beings, and frightens them with falsehoods to extort the truth from them. For he threatens to shatter the sky and other such things impossible to man, so that those gods, frightened like the silliest children by false and ridiculous threats, may do what they are commanded. He says also that a certain Chaeremon, skilled in such rites, or rather sacrileges, wrote that the things celebrated in Egyptian stories about Isis or her husband Osiris have the greatest power to compel the gods to do what they are commanded, when the one who compels them with spells threatens to reveal or overturn these things, and even says terribly that he will scatter the limbs of Osiris if they neglect to do what they are bidden. That a man should utter these and such empty and mad threats against gods, and not against any gods whatever but against the heavenly ones shining with starry light, and not without effect but compelling them by violent power and leading them by these terrors to do what he wishes, Porphyry rightly wonders; or rather, under the appearance of one wondering and asking the causes of such things, he gives us to understand that those spirits do these things whose kind he described above under the opinion of others: deceitful not by nature, as he put it, but by vice, who feign gods and souls of the dead, but do not feign demons, as he says, but plainly are demons. And as to his view that by herbs and stones and animals and certain sounds and words and shapes and figures, and by certain motions of the stars observed in the revolution of the sky, powers fit to carry out various effects are fashioned on earth by men, all this belongs to those same demons who make sport of the souls subject to them and provide themselves with pleasurable amusements from the errors of men. Either, then, Porphyry really doubted and inquired into these things and yet mentions things by which they are refuted and shown to belong not to the powers that help us to attain the happy life but to deceiving demons; or, to think better of the philosopher, he wished in this way not to offend the Egyptian, devoted to such errors and thinking he knew great things, with the proud authority, as it were, of a teacher, nor to disturb him by the altercation of an open opponent, but, with the humility of one asking and wishing to learn, to turn him to think about these things and to show how contemptible, or even to be shunned, they are. Finally, near the end of the letter he asks to be taught by him what the way to happiness is according to Egyptian wisdom. But those whose converse with the gods was for this, that they might trouble the divine mind to find a runaway slave, or buy an estate, or for marriage or trade or something of that kind, he says seemed to have cultivated wisdom in vain; and he says that those very deities with whom they conversed, even if they foretold the truth about other things, yet since they gave no careful or suitable counsel about happiness, were neither gods nor benign demons, but either that being which is called the deceiver, or entirely a human invention.

Chapter 12. On the miracles which the true God works through the ministry of the holy angels.

But since such great things are done by these arts that they exceed every measure of human ability, what remains but that those things which seem to be foretold or done wonderfully, as if by divine power, and yet are not referred to the worship of the one God, to cleave to whom simply is the only beatifying good, as even the Platonists admit and testify in many ways, should be wisely understood as the mockeries and seductive hindrances of malignant demons, to be avoided by true piety? On the other hand, whatever miracles are done by divine power, whether through angels or in any other way, such that they commend the worship and religion of the one God, in whom alone is the happy life, these we must believe are truly done by those, or through those, who love us according to truth and piety, God himself working in them. Nor should we listen to those who deny that the invisible God works visible miracles, since even according to them he made the world, which they certainly cannot deny is visible. Whatever wonderful thing happens in this world is surely less than this whole world, that is, heaven and earth and all that is in them, which God certainly made. But as he who made it is hidden and incomprehensible to man, so is the way in which he made it. So although the miracles of visible natures have become cheap through our constantly seeing them, yet when we look at them wisely they are greater than the most unusual and rarest. For man is a greater miracle than any miracle done through man. Therefore God, who made the visible heaven and earth, does not disdain to do visible miracles in heaven or on earth, by which to rouse the soul, still given over to visible things, to worship him, the invisible. But where and when he does them is an unchangeable counsel that rests with him, in whose arrangement all times that are to come have already been made. For he moves temporal things without being moved temporally, and he does not know things to be done otherwise than things done, nor does he hear those who call on him otherwise than as he sees those who will call. For even when his angels hear, he hears in them, as in his true temple not made with hands, as also in his holy men; and his commands are carried out in time, having been seen in his eternal law.

Chapter 13. On the invisible God, who often made himself visible, not as he is, but as those who saw him could bear.

Nor should it trouble anyone that, though he is invisible, he is recorded to have often appeared visibly to the fathers. For just as the sound by which a thought is heard, a thought formed in the silence of the understanding, is not the same as the thought itself, so also the form in which God was seen, who exists in an invisible nature, was not what he himself is. Yet he himself was seen in that bodily form, as the thought itself is heard in the sound of the voice; and they were not ignorant that they were seeing the invisible God in a bodily form, which he himself was not. For Moses spoke with him as he spoke, and yet said to him: “If I have found favor before you, show me yourself, so that I may see you knowingly.” Since, then, the law of God had to be given in terrifying fashion in decrees delivered by angels, not to one man or to a few wise men, but to a whole nation and a huge people, great things were done before that same people on the mountain where the law was being given through one man, while the multitude looked on at the fearful and terrible things that were happening. For the people of Israel did not believe Moses as the Lacedaemonians believed their Lycurgus, that he had received the laws he established from Jupiter or Apollo. For when the law was being given to the people, by which they were commanded to worship one God, it appeared, in the sight of that people, by wonderful signs and movements of things, as far as divine providence judged sufficient, that the creation served the Creator in giving that same law.

Chapter 14. That the one God is to be worshipped not only for eternal but also for temporal benefits, since all things lie in the power of his providence.

As with one man, so with the human race, as far as it belongs to the people of God, right education has advanced through certain stages of time, like the steps of a person's ages, so that it might rise from temporal things to the grasp of eternal ones, and from visible to invisible; yet in such a way that even at the time when visible rewards were promised by God, the one God was still commended as the one to be worshipped, lest the human mind should subject itself, even for the earthly benefits of this passing life, to anyone but the soul's true Creator and Lord. For anyone who denies that all that angels or men can give to men lies in the power of the one Almighty is mad. The Platonist Plotinus certainly discusses providence, and proves from the beauty of little flowers and leaves that it reaches from the supreme God, whose beauty is intelligible and ineffable, down to these earthly and lowest things; all of which, he affirms, cast away as it were and perishing very swiftly, could not have the most fitting proportions of their forms unless they were formed from there where the intelligible and unchangeable form, holding all things at once, endures. This the Lord Jesus showed where he said: “Consider the lilies of the field: they neither toil nor spin. But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his glory was clothed like one of these. And if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more you, O you of little faith?” It is best, then, that the human soul, still weak with earthly desires, should grow accustomed to expect from the one God alone even those lowest and earthly goods which it longs for in time, necessary for this passing life and to be despised in comparison with the everlasting benefits of that life, so that even in desiring these it may not withdraw from the worship of him to whom it comes by despising them and turning away from them.

Chapter 15. On the ministry of the holy angels, by which they serve the providence of God.

So it pleased divine providence to order the course of the times that, as I have said and as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, the law about the worship of the one true God should be given in decrees delivered by angels; in which the person of God himself should appear visibly, not indeed through his own substance, which always remains invisible to corruptible eyes, but by definite signs through the creation subject to the Creator; and should speak syllable by syllable, through the passing moments of time, with the sounds of human language, he who in his own nature speaks not bodily but spiritually, not to the senses but to the understanding, not in time but, so to speak, eternally, and neither begins nor ceases to speak. This his ministers and messengers hear more purely in his presence, not with the ear of the body but of the mind, who enjoy his unchangeable truth, blessed immortally; and what they hear, in ineffable ways, is to be done and brought down into these visible and sensible things, they carry out without hesitation and without difficulty. This law was given according to a distribution of times, so that at first it contained, as has been said, earthly promises, by which, however, eternal things were signified, which many celebrated in visible sacraments, but few understood. Yet the worship of one God is commanded there with the plainest testimony of all words and things; not of one out of a crowd, but of him who made heaven and earth and every soul and every spirit that is not what he is. For he made, they were made; and in order to exist and to be well, they need him by whom they were made.