City of God (Penguin Classics), page 57
For all that, the psalmist makes it plain that he has profited from seeking even worldly benefits only from the one true God who has all things in his power. He says, ‘I have become like a beast in your presence’; and by ‘like a beast’ he obviously means ‘without understanding’.
I ought to have desired to receive from you the things which I cannot share with the wicked. But when I saw the wicked abundantly supplied with these goods, I thought that I had served you to no purpose, seeing that those goods were enjoyed even by those who refused to serve you. And yet ‘I am always with you’; for even in my search for those benefits I have not applied to any other gods.
Thus he goes on to say, ‘You have taken hold of my right hand: you have guided me according to your will, and have taken me to yourself in glory.’ He implies that all those advantages which he saw the wicked enjoying in abundance – a sight which brought him almost to collapse – all those belong to the left hand. ‘What do I possess in heaven?’ he asks; ‘and what have I wished to receive from you on earth?’ He is reproaching himself and is ashamed of himself with good reason because, having (as he afterwards realized) such a treasure in heaven, he sought from his God such transient benefits on earth such a fragile and shabby felicity. ‘My heart and my flesh’, he says, ‘have failed, God of my heart’; but this is a happy failure, a desertion of the lower level, to gain the heights. Hence, in another psalm, ‘My soul longs, and faints with desire for the courts of the Lord.’98 And again, in another psalm, ‘My soul has fainted with desire for your salvation.’99 And yet, though he has spoken of the failure of both heart and flesh, he does not add, ‘God of my heart and flesh’, but ‘God of my heart’. For it is clearly by means of the heart that the flesh is purified. Thus the Lord says, ‘Clean what is inside, and then the outside will be clean.’100
The psalmist goes on to say that his ‘possession’ is God himself, and not something which comes from God. ‘God of my heart’, he says, ‘and God my possession for all the ages’, because out of all the possible choices offered to men, he has decided to choose God himself. ‘For look,’ he says, ‘those who remove themselves far away from you will perish: you have destroyed everyone who deserts you to play the harlot’, that is, everyone who chooses to prostitute himself to a multitude of gods. Then follows the statement which led me to quote the other verse of the psalm, ‘As for me, my true good is to cling to God, not to depart from him; not to indulge in the promiscuity of a harlot. Now this ‘cleaving to God’ will only be perfect when all that has to be set free has gained its freedom.
Meanwhile, now is the time, as he goes on to say, ‘to place my hope in God’. For, as the Apostle says, ‘To experience what one hopes for is no longer to hope; for why should anyone hope for what he already experiences? But if we hope for something we do not experience, it is with patient endurance that we a wait it.’101 Now since we are established in this hope, let us put into practice the next verse of the psalm, and be ourselves, to the best of our poor ability, the angels – that is the heralds – of God, proclaiming his will, praising his glory and his grace. ‘To place my hope in God’, says the psalmist, and he proceeds, ‘so that I may proclaim all your praises in the gates of the Daughter of Sion.’102 ‘The Daughter of Sion’ is the most glorious City of God, which knows and worships one God. It is proclaimed by holy angels, who have invited us into the society of that City, and have desired us to become their fellow-citizens in it. They have no wish that we should honour them as our gods. Their desire is that we should join with them in the worship of him who is their God and ours, not that we should sacrifice to them, but that we should be, with them, a sacrifice to God.
No one who considers these facts without malice or prejudice can have any hesitation in concluding hat the blessed immortals feel no jealousy towards us – and indeed jealousy would prevent their blessedness – but rather that they all extend their love to us, that their purpose is that we should join them in their blessedness, and that they offer us more support and more assistance when we, with them, worship one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, than they would give us if we worshipped those immortal spirits themselves by our sacrifices.
26. The inconsistency of Porphyry, in his hesitation between the true God and demon-worship
It seems to me that Porphyry feels some embarrassment in his attitude to his friends the theurgists. For his own belief corresponded more or less to what we hold, but he did not defend his opinions without reserve against the worship of many gods. He alleged, in fact, that there are two classes of angels: the one sort come down from above and reveal divine prophecies to men who practice theurgy, while the others are those who make known on earth the truth about the Father, his height and his depth.
Are we to believe that those angels, whose task is to declare the will of the Father, wish us to be in subjection to any other being than him whose will they convey to us? Thus our Platonist himself very rightly advises us to imitate them rather than to invoke them. And so we have no need to fear that we shall offend those blessed and immortal beings by failing to offer sacrifice to them. For they know that such worship is due only to the one true God, and their blessedness is derived from their adherence to him. Can it then be doubted that they would not wish such worship to be offered to them either figuratively, or in the reality which is represented by the symbols? To claim such honour is the arrogance of the proud and wretched demons; far different is the piety of those beings who are subject to God, and who derive their happiness from adherence to him, and from no other source. They are bound to support us with sincere goodwill towards the attainment of the same blessing. They could not arrogate to themselves a worship which would bring us into subjection to them; they must needs proclaim him under whom we may enjoy peace in fellowship with them.
Why do you still tremble, my dear philosopher, to raise your voice without restraint against the powers who are envious of genuine virtue and of the gifts of the true God? You have already distinguished between the angels who announce the will of the Father, and those who come down to the theurgists, attracted by magical art of some kind. Why do you still do these latter the honour of seeing that they reveal divine prophecies? What divine prophecies can they reveal, seeing that they do not reveal the will of the Father? No doubt these are the spirits which were bound by that envious magician by means of sacred spells, to prevent them from effecting the purification of a soul.103 You tell us that the good magician who was anxious to effect the purification was unable to release those spirits from their bondage and restore their freedom of action. Do you still doubt that they are malignant demons? Or is it perhaps that you pretend ignorance for fear of offending the theurgists, who have taken advantage of your superstition to seduce you into accepting the pernicious nonsense of their teaching as if it were some great benefit? Here is a malicious power – or rather a plague – holding sway over malicious men – or rather, according to your own account, acting as their humble servant. Have you the audacity to exalt this power above the air and establish it in heaven among your gods, even among your gods of the stars, or even to dishonour the stars themselves with these disgraceful slanders?
27. Porphyry’s impiety is worse than the errors of Apuleius
Your fellow-Platonist, Apuleius, went wrong in a more civilized and acceptable fashion. It was only to the demons that he attributed unhealthy passions and perturbations of the mind;104 and they were stationed beneath the moon. He venerated them; but, for all that, he had to admit that such was their condition, whether he liked it or not. But when it came to the higher gods, who belong to the ethereal spaces, the visible gods, whom he saw shining for all to see, like the sun, the moon, and the other lights in the same sphere, as well as the invisible deities, whose existence he imagined, he used every possible argument to isolate them from the taint of such disturbances.
You did not get this doctrine from Plato. It was your Chaldean teachers who persuaded you to bring human weakness up into the exalted heights of the universe, into the ether and the empyrean, up to the heavenly firmaments, so that your gods might be able to give supernatural revelations to the theurgists. Yet you consider yourself superior to such supernatural knowledge, in virtue of your intellectual life. You, of course, feel that, as a philosopher, you have not the slightest need of the purifications of theurgic art. Yet as a kind of repayment of your debt to those masters of yours, you prescribe such purgations for others. You inveigle those who are incapable of becoming philosophers to indulge in practices which, on your own showing, are of no use to you, because you are capable of higher things. Thus all those who cannot approach to philosophic virtue (a lofty ideal to which only a few attain) have your authority to seek out theurgists, in order to receive at their hands the purgation of the ‘spiritual’ soul at least, though not of the ‘intellectual’. The result is, naturally, that since the vast majority have no taste for philosophy, you collect far more clients for those secret and illegal masters of yours than candidates for the Platonic schools. You have made yourself the preacher and the angel of those unclean spirits who pretend to be gods of the ether; and they have promised you that those who have been purified in their ‘spiritual’ soul, by theurgic art, although they cannot, indeed, return to the Father, will have their dwelling among the gods of the ether, above the levels of the air.
Such teaching gets no hearing from that vast multitude whom Christ came to set free from the domination of the demons. For it is in him that they find a purification full of compassion, the purification of mind, spirit, and body. For he took upon himself entire humanity, though without sin, for this precise purpose, that he might cure all the constituents of human nature of the plague of sins. Would that you had recognized him and had entrusted yourself to him for your healing, instead of relying either on your own virtue, fragile and insecure as human virtue is, or on disastrous superstition! That would have been safer, for he would not have deceived you. Even your own oracles, as you yourself say, acknowledged him as holy and immortal; and the most renowned of poets also spoke of him, in a poetical manner certainly, for Christ is represented by an imaginary portrait of another person, but with complete truth, if the picture is referred to Christ.105 This is what Virgil says:
With you for guide, whatever trace remains
Of our past crimes, shall all be done away;
The world shall then be freed from endless fear.106
He means that even in those who are far advanced in righteousness and virtue there may remain, because of the weakness of our mortal life, if not the crimes at least the traces of crimes; and they can only be healed by that Saviour, whom this verse expressly describes. It is quite clear that Virgil did not say this on his own. This is shown by the fourth verse of the same eclogue,
Now comes the last age in the prophecy
Of Cumae’s oracle.
It is immediately apparent that this passage was derived from the Sibyl of Cumae.107
But those theurgists, or rather the demons who disguise themselves by appearing in the form of gods, cannot purify the human spirit; rather they defile it by their fantastic illusions, by the deceptive apparitions through which they make game of their victims. For how could they purify a man’s spirit, when their own spirit is unclean? If it were not, they could not possibly have been bound by the spells of a malicious man, and terrified into withholding that worthless boon which, it was supposed, they intended to convey; nor would they have refused it because of a like malice in themselves.108 It is enough for our purpose that you admit that theurgic purification cannot purify the ‘intellectual’ soul – that is, our mind; and that while you assert that it can purify the ‘spiritual’ soul – that is, the part of the soul inferior to the reason – you confess that theurgic art cannot make it immortal and eternal. Whereas Christ promises eternal life; and therefore the world flocks to him. You and your like are indignant at this, but dumbfounded in amazement as well.
You have not been able to deny that men are led astray by the practices of theurgy, that large numbers are deceived by its confused and nonsensical doctrines, that the most certain of all false steps is to betake oneself to those ‘principalities’ and ‘angels’ with sacrifices and supplications. But to what avail is this acknowledgement, if you go back on it (as if to assure yourself that all this learning has not been a waste of time) by sending men to theurgists, so that those practitioners may purify the ‘spiritual’ soul of those who do not live the life of the ‘intellectual’ soul?
28. The blindness of Porphyry to the true wisdom, which is Christ
And so you send men on the most certainly mistaken path; and you are not ashamed of doing so great a wrong, although you profess to be a lover of virtue and wisdom. If you were a genuine and faithful lover, you would have recognized ‘Christ, the Power of God and the Wisdom of God’,109 instead of shying away110 from his saving humility, inflated with the swollen pride of useless learning.
You admit, however, that even the ‘spiritual’ soul can be purified by the virtue of self-control, without the aid of theurgic arts or of initiations, which you have been at such unprofitable pains to learn about. Sometimes you go as far as to say that initiations do not lift up the soul, after death, so that it now seems that they are of no value after the end of this life even for what you call the ‘spiritual’ soul. And yet you keep on discussing them in various aspects; you return to them again and again, your only object being, as far as I can see, to give the appearance of being an expert in those matters also, and to ingratiate yourself with those who hanker after such illicit practices, or else to arouse a curious interest in them on your own account. But I give you a good mark for admitting that this is a dangerous art, both by reason of the perils of the law111 and of the risk involved in the actual performance. I trust that the unfortunates will attend at least to these warnings and will retreat from these arts, or never approach them at all, to avoid being sucked into the gulf.
You do say, to be sure, that ignorance, and the many faults that arise from ignorance, cannot be purified by any initiatory rites. That can only be done through the patrikos nous, that is, the Mind or Intellect of the Father, which is acquainted with the Father’s will. But you do not believe that this is what Christ is. In fact, you despise him on account of the body which he received from a woman, and because of the shame of the cross; you are of course, the kind of thinker to reject such lowness with disdain, and to cull your exalted wisdom on the heights. While Christ fulfils the true prophecy of the holy prophets when they said of him, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise men, and I will reprove the prudence of the prudent.’112 It is not his own wisdom, the wisdom which he has given them, which he destroys and reproves in them; it is the wisdom which they arrogate to themselves, when they have not the wisdom which comes from him. This is why the Apostle, after quoting the witness of the prophet, goes on to say,
Where is the wise man now? Where is the learned scholar? Where is your worldly-wiseman? Has not God turned worldly wisdom into foolishness? For according to God’s wise design the world did not find God by its worldly wisdom: and therefore God decided to save those who believe by means of the folly of the preaching of the gospel. The Jews demanded miracles, the Greeks look for wisdom. But what we preach is a crucified Christ, which is shocking to the Jews, and ludicrous to the Greeks; but for those who have been called, Jews and Greeks alike, he is the Power of God and the Wisdom of God. For God’s piece of folly is wiser than men, and God’s show of weakness is stronger than men.113
This is rejected, as folly and weakness, by those who think themselves wise and strong by their own virtue. But this in fact is grace, which heals the weakness of those who do not proudly boast of their delusive happiness, but instead make a humble admission of their genuine misery.
29. The Platonists in their impiety are ashamed to acknowledge Christ’s incarnation
You assert the Father and his Son, whom you call the Intellect or Mind of the Father; you also speak of a being who is between the two, and we imagine that you are referring to the Holy Spirit. And it is your habit to call them three gods.114 In spite of your irregular terminology you Platonists have here some kind of an intuition of the goal to which we must strive, however dimly seen through the obscurities of a subtle imagination. And yet you refuse to recognize the incarnation of the unchanging Son of God, which brings us salvation, so that we can arrive at those realities in which we believe, and which we can in some small measure comprehend. Thus you see, to some extent, though from afar off and with clouded vision, the country in which we must find our home; but you do not keep to the road along which we must travel.
For all this, Porphyry, you acknowledge the existence of grace, when you say that it is granted only to few to reach God by virtue of their intelligence. For you do not say, ‘Only few have decided’, or, ‘Few have had the wish’; you speak of its being ‘granted’. And this is an undoubted confession of the grace of God and the insufficiency of man. You even use the word ‘grace’ itself quite openly in the passage where, following Plato,115 you assert without hesitation that man cannot by any means reach the perfection of wisdom in this life, but that, after this life, all those who live the life of the intellect receive all that is needed for their fulfilment from the providence and grace of God.
If only you had recognized the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord! If only you had been able to see his incarnation, in which he took a human soul and body, as the supreme instance of grace! But what can I do? I know that it is to no avail that I speak to a dead man, to no avail, that is, as far as you are concerned. But there are people who hold you in high regard, who are attached to you by reason of some kind of a love of wisdom, or a superstitious interest in those magic arts which you should never have studied, and they are the authence to whom my colloquy with you is really directed, and it may be that for them it is not in vain. The grace of God could not be commended in a way more likely to evoke a grateful response, than the way by which the only Son of God, while remaining unchangeably in his own proper being, clothed himself in humanity and gave to men the spirit of his love by the mediation of a man, so that by this love men might come to him who formerly was so far away from them, far from mortals in his immortality, from the changeable in his changelessness, from the wicked in his righteousness, from the wretched in his blessedness. And because he has implanted in our nature the desire for blessedness and immortality he has now taken on himself mortality, while continuing in his blessedness, so that he might confer on us what our hearts desire; and by his sufferings he has taught us to make light of what we dread.
