On First Principles 3.3.1–3.3.6

The holy apostle, wishing to teach us something great and hidden about knowledge and wisdom, says in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: "We speak wisdom among the perfect; yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the rulers of this world, who are coming to nothing; but we speak the wisdom of God hidden in a mystery, which God foreordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this world knew; for if they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of majesty." Wishing to show in this the differences between wisdoms, he describes a certain wisdom of this world, and a certain wisdom of the rulers of this world, and another, the wisdom of God. And when he says "the wisdom of the rulers of this world," I do not think he means some wisdom common to all the rulers of this world; rather he seems to me to indicate a wisdom proper to each ruler. And again, when he says, "But we speak the wisdom of God hidden in a mystery, which God foreordained before the ages for our glory," we must ask whether he means that this wisdom of God, which was hidden in other times and generations and was not made known to the sons of men as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets, is the same as the wisdom of God that existed before the Saviour's coming, by which Solomon was made wise; and the Saviour's own word declares that what the Saviour teaches is more than Solomon, when he says, "And behold, something greater than Solomon is here." In this it is shown that those who were taught by the Saviour were taught something more than Solomon knew. For if someone says that the Saviour indeed knew more, but did not hand on more to others than Solomon did, how will it fit, and how will it be thought consistently said, what he says afterwards: "The queen of the South will rise in the judgment and condemn the people of this generation, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here"? There is, then, a wisdom of this world, and there is a wisdom belonging perhaps to each of the rulers of this world. But of the wisdom of the one God itself we perceive this to be indicated: that it worked less in the ancient and older times, but has been revealed more fully and more clearly through Christ. But we shall inquire about the wisdom of God in its proper place.

But now, since the treatise in hand concerns the opposing powers and how they also stir up those contests by which false knowledge is implanted in human minds, and souls are led astray while they think they have found wisdom, I think it necessary to state and distinguish what the wisdom of this world is and what the wisdom of the rulers of this world is, so that through this we may also notice who are the fathers of this wisdom, or rather of these wisdoms. I think, then, as we said above, that the wisdom of this world is something other than those wisdoms which belong to the rulers of this world; by this wisdom, it seems, the things that belong to this world are understood and grasped. Yet it has nothing in itself by which it can perceive anything about the Godhead, or about the reason of the world, or about any higher matters, or about the ordering of a good and blessed life; but it is such, for example, as is all the art of poetry, or grammar, or rhetoric, or geometry, or music, with which perhaps medicine too should be counted. In all these we must consider the wisdom of this world to be present. By the wisdom of the rulers of this world we understand such things as the secret and hidden philosophy, as they call it, of the Egyptians, and the astrology of the Chaldeans, and the claims of the Indians to knowledge of the highest, and also the manifold and varied opinions of the Greeks about the Godhead. We find in the holy Scriptures, then, that there are rulers over each nation, as we read in Daniel that there is a certain prince of the kingdom of the Persians and another prince of the kingdom of the Greeks, who, it is clearly shown from the course of the reading itself, are not human beings but certain powers. In the prophet Ezekiel, too, the prince of Tyre is most plainly indicated to be a certain spiritual power. These, then, and others like them, each having its own wisdoms and building up its own doctrines and varied opinions, when they saw our Lord and Saviour promising and proclaiming that he had come into this world in order to destroy all the doctrines of knowledge falsely so called, at once, not knowing who was hidden within him, laid snares for him: "For the kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ." Knowing these snares of theirs, and understanding what they plotted against the Son of God when they crucified the Lord of glory, the apostle says: "We speak wisdom among the perfect, yet not the wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing, which none of the rulers of this world knew; for if they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory."

We must certainly examine whether these wisdoms of the rulers of this world, with which they try to imbue human beings, are put into people by the opposing powers with the aim of ensnaring and harming them, or are applied only through error, that is, not with a view to harming humans, but because these rulers of this world themselves think these things true and therefore wish to teach others too what they themselves suppose to be true; which I rather think. For as, for example, the Greek authors, or the leaders of each heresy, having first themselves accepted the error of false doctrine as truth and judged within themselves that this is the truth, then try to persuade others too of the things they have judged within themselves to be true; so we must think the rulers of this world also do, in which world certain spiritual powers have been allotted rule over certain nations and for that reason are called rulers of this world. Besides these rulers there are also certain special energies of this world, that is, certain spiritual powers working certain things which they chose to do by the freedom of their choice; among these are those rulers who produce the wisdom of this world: for example, there is a particular energy and power that inspires poetry, another geometry, and so each one prompts each of the arts and disciplines of this kind. Indeed very many of the Greeks have held that the art of poetry cannot exist without madness; hence it is also related in their histories that those whom they call bards were sometimes suddenly filled with the spirit of a kind of madness. And what is to be said of those whom they call diviners, from whom, through the working of the demons that preside over them, answers are given in skilfully measured verse? Those too whom they call magicians or sorcerers have sometimes, by calling up demons over boys still of tender age, made them recite poems in verse that amazed and astonished everyone. We must think these things happen in this way: as holy and spotless souls, when they have devoted themselves to God with all affection and all purity, and have kept themselves aloof from all contact with demons, and have purified themselves by much abstinence, and have been steeped in pious and religious disciplines, thereby take on a share in divinity and deserve the grace of prophecy and of the other divine gifts; so we must think that those who show themselves fit for the opposing powers, that is, by a way of life or by pursuits friendly and acceptable to them, receive their inspiration and become partakers of their wisdom and doctrine. Hence it comes about that they are filled with the workings of those to whose service they have first subjected themselves.

Concerning those who teach otherwise about Christ than the rule of the Scriptures allows, it is not idle to consider whether the opposing powers, striving with treacherous purpose against the faith of Christ, invented certain fabulous and at the same time impious doctrines; or whether they too, having heard the word of Christ, and being able neither to vomit it out of the secret places of their conscience nor to keep it purely and holily, brought in various errors against the rule of Christian truth through vessels suited to them and, so to speak, through their own prophets. And we must rather think that the apostate and runaway powers, which have withdrawn from God, out of the very wickedness of their mind and purpose, or out of envy of those for whom, once they have known the truth, an ascent is being prepared to that rank from which they themselves fell, put together these errors and deceptions of false doctrine in order to hinder such progress. It is therefore plainly shown by many indications that the human soul, while it is in this body, can receive different energies, that is, workings of different spirits, evil and good. Of the evil there are two kinds: either when they have wholly and entirely possessed the mind, so that they allow those they have besieged to understand or feel nothing at all, as with those commonly called energumens, whom we see out of their minds and mad, such as those who are reported in the Gospel to have been healed by the Saviour; or when, by hostile suggestion, they corrupt with various thoughts and sinister persuasions a soul that still feels and understands, as an example of which is Judas, provoked to the crime of betrayal by the devil's prompting, as Scripture declares, saying, "When the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot to betray him." But a person receives the energy, that is, the working, of a good spirit when he is moved and provoked to good things and inspired toward heavenly or divine things; as the holy angels and God himself worked in the prophets, provoking and exhorting them to better things by holy suggestions, yet in such a way that it remained in the person's own choice and judgment whether he would or would not follow the one calling him to heavenly and divine things. Hence by this clear mark it is recognized when the soul is moved by the presence of a better spirit: that is, if it suffers no disturbance or derangement of mind at all from the inspiration that comes upon it, and does not lose the free judgment of its choice; as an example are all the prophets and apostles, who ministered the divine oracles without any disturbance of mind. That human memory is provoked by the suggestions of a good spirit to the recollection of better things we have already shown by examples above, when we mentioned Mordecai and Artaxerxes.

I think we must next inquire for what causes the human soul is moved now by good powers and now by evil ones. Of this I suspect there are certain causes older even than this bodily birth, as John indicates, leaping and exulting in his mother's womb when the voice of Mary's greeting reached the ears of Elizabeth his mother; and as the prophet Jeremiah declares, who “before he was formed in his mother's womb” was known to God, and “before he came out of the womb” was sanctified by him, and while still a boy received the grace of prophecy. And again, on the contrary, it is plainly shown that some have been possessed by hostile spirits from their earliest age, that is, that some were born with a demon itself, and others, as the credibility of histories declares, practised divination from boyhood, having suffered from their earliest age the demon they call Python, that is, a ventriloquist. Concerning all these, those who assert that all things in this world are governed by God's providence, as our faith also holds, cannot, it seems to me, answer otherwise, so as to show divine providence free from all blame of injustice, than by saying that there were certain earlier causes for them, by which, before they were born in the body, the souls contracted some guilt in their thoughts or motions, for which they were judged by divine providence to deserve to suffer this. For the soul is always of free choice, both when it is in this body and when it is outside the body; and freedom of choice is always moved either toward good or toward evil; nor can a rational sense, that is, a mind or soul, ever be without some motion, either good or evil. It is probable that these motions furnish the causes of merits even before they do anything in this world; so that for these causes or merits they are, by divine providence, appointed to suffer something good or evil immediately from their first birth, indeed even before their birth, so to speak.

Let this be said about the things that seem to happen to people either immediately at their first birth or even before they come forth into this light. But concerning the things suggested by different spirits to souls, that is, to human thoughts, which provoke either to good or to the contrary, we must think that sometimes in this too there are certain causes prior to bodily birth. But sometimes the mind, watchful and casting away from itself what is evil, calls to itself the help of the good; or, on the contrary, negligent and slothful, when it is less on its guard, it gives place to those spirits which, lying in wait like robbers in hiding, try to rush into human minds when they have seen a place given them through sloth; as the apostle Peter says, “Your adversary the devil goes about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” Therefore our heart must be kept day and night with all watchfulness, and “no place must be given to the devil,” but everything must be done by which the ministers of God (that is, those “spirits who have been sent to minister” to those who are called to “the inheritance of salvation”) may find a place in us and delight to enter the guest-chamber of our soul, and, dwelling with us, that is, in our heart, may guide us by better counsels; if, that is, they find the dwelling of our heart adorned with the cultivation of virtue and holiness. But let these things suffice that we have discussed, as best we could, about the powers that oppose the human race.