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For this the most unclean demons, feigning themselves to be ethereal gods, whose herald 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 shall dwell above the aerial regions among the ethereal gods. That multitude of men, for whose deliverance from the dominion of the demons Christ came, does not hearken to these things. For in Him they have the most merciful purgation of their mind and spirit and body. For this reason indeed He took upon Himself 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 be healed by Him, rather than by your own virtue, which is human, frail, and infirm, or by that most pernicious 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 the most noble poet said, poetically indeed, because in the shadowed person of another, yet truly, if you refer it to Him: 'Under Thy leadership, whatever traces of our wickedness remain shall, being made void, release the lands from perpetual dread.'
For he said those things which can, on account of the infirmity of this life, remain even in those who greatly advance in the virtue of righteousness — if not crimes, yet traces of crimes — which are healed by none but that Saviour of whom this verse was expressed. For that Virgil did not say this of himself he indicates in about the fourth verse of the eclogue itself, where he says: 'The last age of the Cumaean song has now come'; whence it appears beyond doubt that this was said by the Cumaean Sibyl. But those theurgists, or rather the demons feigning the appearance and figures of gods, defile rather than purify the human spirit by the falsity of phantasms and the deceptive mockery of empty forms.
For how should they purify a man's spirit, who have an unclean spirit of their own? Otherwise they would in no way be bound by the incantations of an envious man, nor would they, out of fear, either withhold, or through like envy deny, that very empty benefit which they seemed about to bestow. It suffices that you say that neither the intellectual soul — that is, our mind — can be purified by theurgic purgation, and that this spiritual part itself — that is, the part of our soul below the mind, which you assert can be purified by such an art — you nevertheless confess cannot by this art be made immortal and eternal. But Christ promises eternal life; and therefore, though you are indeed vexed, yet wondering and amazed, the world runs to Him.
What does it profit that you could not deny that men err in the theurgic discipline, and that very many are deceived by a blind and foolish opinion, and that it is a most certain error to have recourse, by acting and supplicating, to the princes and angels; and yet again, as though lest you should seem to have wasted your labour in learning these things, you send men to the theurgists, that through them the spiritual soul of those who do not live according to the intellectual soul may be purified? [XXVIII] You send men, therefore, into a most certain error, and you are not ashamed of so great an evil, while you profess yourself a lover of virtue and wisdom;
which, had you truly and faithfully loved it, you would have recognized Christ, the virtue of God and the wisdom of God, and would not have recoiled, puffed up with the swelling of vain knowledge, from His most salutary humility. You confess nevertheless that even the spiritual soul can be purified by the virtue of continence without the theurgic arts and without the rites in the vain learning of which you laboured. Sometimes you even say that the rites do not, after death, elevate the soul, so that they now seem to profit nothing, even to that very part which you call spiritual, after the end of this life; and yet you turn these matters over in many ways and repeat them, for no other reason, as I judge, than that you may appear expert even in such things and please the curious lovers of unlawful arts, or that you may yourself make them curious about these arts.
But it is well that you say this art is to be feared, both because of the perils of the laws and of the very practice itself. And would that at least the wretched might hear this from you, and thereupon depart from it, lest they be swallowed up there, or not approach it at all. Ignorance, certainly, and, on account of it, many vices, you say are purged by no rites, but by the patrikon noun alone — that is, the paternal mind or intellect, which is conscious of the paternal will. But this you do not believe to be Christ; for you despise Him on account of the body received from a woman and on account of the reproach of the cross — being, forsooth, fit to cull lofty wisdom from the higher things, with the lowest despised and cast off. But He fulfils 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 arrogate to themselves, who do not have His. Whence, having recalled this prophetic testimony, the Apostle goes on and says: 'Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. For the Jews ask for signs, and the Greeks seek after wisdom;
but we,' he says, 'preach Christ crucified — to the Jews indeed a stumbling-block, and to the Gentiles foolishness; but to those very ones who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God; because the foolish thing of God is wiser than men, and the weak thing of God is stronger than men.' This, as it were foolish and weak, the wise and strong despise as though by their own virtue. But this is the grace which heals the infirm, who do not proudly boast their false blessedness, but rather humbly confess their true misery. [XXIX] You proclaim the Father and His Son, whom you call the paternal intellect or mind, and the mean of these, whom we suppose you to call the Holy Spirit, and after your manner you name three gods.
Wherein, although you use undisciplined words, you nevertheless see in some fashion, and as it were through certain shadowy veils of a slight imagination, whither one must strive; but the incarnation of the unchangeable Son of God, by which we are saved, so that we may be able to come to those things which we believe or in however small a part understand — this you refuse to acknowledge. And so you see in some fashion, even if from afar, even if with a clouded gaze, the fatherland in which we must abide, but the way by which we must go you do not hold. You confess grace nevertheless, since indeed you say it is granted to few to come to God through the virtue of intelligence. For you do not say: 'It pleased few,' or 'Few willed';
but when you say it is granted, you beyond doubt confess the grace of God, not the sufficiency of man. You use this word even more openly where, following the opinion of Plato, you yourself do not doubt that in this life a man in no way attains to the perfection of wisdom, yet for those living according to the intellect all that is lacking can, by the providence and grace of God, be completed after this life. O, had you but known the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord, and His very incarnation, by which He assumed a man's soul and body, you could have seen it to be the supreme example of grace! But what shall I do? I know that I speak in vain to one dead — yet as far as concerns you;
But as for those who hold you in high esteem and love you, whether out of some love for wisdom or from curiosity about the arts which you ought not to have learned—these rather I address in the very act of accosting you, and perhaps not in vain. The grace of God could not have been more graciously commended than that the very only-begotten Son of God, remaining unchangeably in Himself, should put on manhood and give the Spirit of His love to men through the mediation of a man, so that by Him men might come to Him who was so far removed—immortal from mortals, unchangeable from the changeable, just from the impious, blessed from the wretched.
And since He has naturally implanted in us the desire to be blessed and immortal, He, remaining blessed and yet taking upon Himself our mortality in order to grant us what we love, by His own suffering taught us to despise what we fear. But that you might be able to acquiesce in this truth, humility was needful—a thing most difficult to persuade your stiff neck to accept. For what incredible thing is being told, especially to you who understand such matters, by which you ought to admonish your very selves to believe it? What, I say, incredible thing is told you when it is said that God assumed a human soul and body? You yourselves certainly attribute so much to the intellectual soul—which is assuredly the human soul—that you say it can become consubstantial with that paternal Mind whom you confess to be the Son of God.
What, then, is incredible if some one intellectual soul, in a manner ineffable and unique, was assumed for the salvation of many? That a body should be joined to a soul so as to make one whole and complete man, we know by the witness of our very own nature. And if this were not most customary, it would surely be far more incredible; for it is easier to admit to belief that spirit should cleave to spirit—though the human to the divine, the mutable to the immutable—or, to use words you commonly employ, the incorporeal to the incorporeal, than that a body should cleave to what is incorporeal. Or does perhaps the unusual birth of a body from a virgin offend you? Yet this too ought not to offend, but rather to draw you toward embracing piety, that One marvelous was marvelously born.
Or is it perhaps this that you refuse to believe—that that very body, laid aside in death and changed for the better by resurrection, now incorruptible and no longer mortal, was borne aloft to the heights—because you look to Porphyry, who in these very books from which I have quoted much, which he wrote On the Return of the Soul, so frequently enjoins that every body must be fled if the soul is to remain blessed with God? But he himself, holding such views, ought rather to have been corrected, especially since you hold beliefs no less incredible about the soul of this visible world and of so vast a corporeal mass. For, on the authority of Plato, you say the world is an animal, and a most blessed animal, which you wish to be also everlasting.
How, then, will it never be released from a body, nor ever lack blessedness, if, in order that a soul may be blessed, every body must be fled? This sun too and the other stars you confess to be bodies, not only in your books—which all men, along with you, do not hesitate both to see and to say—but you moreover assert, by what you deem a loftier expertise, that these are most blessed animals, everlasting together with these very bodies. What is it, then, that when the Christian faith is urged upon you, you forget, or feign to be ignorant of, what you are accustomed to dispute or teach? What is the cause why, on account of your own opinions, which you yourselves assail, you refuse to become Christians, unless it be that Christ came in humility and you are proud?
What sort of bodies the saints will have in the resurrection may be disputed with somewhat greater subtlety among the most learned of the Christian Scriptures; that they will be everlasting, however, we do not in the least doubt, and that they will be such as Christ by His own resurrection displayed as a pattern. But whatever they may be, since they are declared to be wholly incorruptible and immortal, and in no way to hinder that contemplation of the soul by which it is fixed on God—and since you too say there are in the heavens immortal bodies of those immortally blessed—what is it that you suppose every body must be fled in order for us to be blessed, so that you seem to flee the Christian faith as if reasonably, unless it be that which I say again: Christ is humble, you are proud?
Or is it perhaps that you are ashamed to be corrected? And this vice belongs to none but the proud. Learned men, forsooth, are ashamed to become, from disciples of Plato, disciples of Christ, who by His Spirit taught a fisherman to have understanding and to say: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was made nothing that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.
This beginning of the holy Gospel entitled According to John—as we used to hear from the holy old man Simplicianus, who afterward presided as bishop over the church of Milan—a certain Platonist said ought to be written in golden letters and set up in the most conspicuous places throughout all the churches. But that divine Teacher became of no worth to the proud for this reason: that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us; so that it is too little for the wretched that they are sick, unless they even exalt themselves in their very sickness, and blush at the medicine by which they might have been healed. For they do this not that they may be raised up, but that by falling they may be more grievously crushed.
[XXX] If it is deemed unworthy to amend anything after Plato, why did Porphyry himself amend not a few things, and those no small ones? For it is most certain that Plato wrote that the souls of men after death are rolled round even down into the bodies of beasts. This opinion Porphyry's teacher Plotinus also held; yet it rightly displeased Porphyry. He judged indeed that human souls return into men, not into the bodies they had left, but into other new ones. He was ashamed, forsooth, to believe that a mother, rolled round perhaps into a mule, might carry her own son; and yet he was not ashamed to believe that a mother, rolled round into a girl, might perhaps be married to her son.
How much more honorably is it believed—what the holy and truthful angels taught, what the prophets moved by the Spirit of God spoke, what He Himself whom the forerunning messengers foretold as the Savior to come, what the apostles sent forth who filled the whole earth with the Gospel proclaimed—how much more honorably, I say, is it believed that souls return once to their own bodies, than that they return so many times to divers bodies! Yet, as I have said, Porphyry was in large part corrected in this opinion, so that he held human souls can be cast down into men alone, and did not in the least hesitate to overthrow the beastly prisons.
He says, moreover, that God gave the soul to the world for this purpose: that, coming to know the evils of matter, it might return to the Father and never again be held bound by the pollution of contact with such things. Here, although he has some inappropriate notion (for the soul was rather given to the body that it might do good; for it would not learn evils if it did not do them), yet in this he amended the opinion of the other Platonists, and that in no small matter: for he confessed that the soul, once cleansed from all evils and established with the Father, will never again suffer the evils of this world. By this opinion he certainly did away with what is held to be most characteristically Platonic—that, as the dead are made from the living, so the living are ever made from the dead.
And he showed to be false what Virgil, in Platonic fashion, seems to have said—that the purged souls sent into the Elysian fields (by which name the joys of the blessed seem to be signified as by a fable) are summoned to the river Lethe, that is, to the forgetting of things past: Namely, that, forgetful, they may again revisit 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 cannot be most blessed unless it be most certain of its own eternity—souls should desire the corruption and taint of corruptible bodies and thence return to these things, as though the highest purgation should bring this about, that defilement be sought after.
For if the fact that they are perfectly cleansed brings this about, that they forget all evils, and the forgetting of evils produces the desire for bodies, wherein they are again entangled in evils—then surely the highest felicity will be the cause of unhappiness, and the perfection of wisdom the cause of folly, and the highest cleansing the cause of impurity. Nor will the soul there be blessed by truth, for however long it exists there, it must be deceived in order to be blessed. For it will not be blessed unless it is secure; but that it may be secure, it will falsely suppose it will always be blessed, since at some time it will also be wretched. To whom, then, the cause of rejoicing will be falsehood, how will it rejoice in truth? Porphyry saw this, and said that the purged soul returns to the Father for this reason: that it may never again be held bound by the pollution of contact with evils.
Falsely, therefore, was that cycle believed by certain Platonists to be, as it were, necessary—of departing from the same things and returning to the same. And even if this were true, what profit would there be in knowing it, unless perhaps the Platonists would dare on that account to prefer themselves to us, because in this life we do not yet know what they, in another and better life, being most purged and most wise, would be destined not to know, and would be blessed by believing what is false? But if it is most absurd and most foolish to say this, then surely the opinion of Porphyry is to be preferred to those who supposed the cycles of souls with blessedness and misery ever alternating. And if this is so, behold, a Platonist dissents from Plato for the better;
behold, he saw what the other did not see, nor after so great a master did he shrink from correction, but preferred truth to a man. [XXXI] Why, then, do we not rather believe the divinity concerning those matters which we cannot search out by human wit—the divinity which says that the soul itself is not coeternal with God, but was created, whereas before it was not? For the reason the Platonists were unwilling to believe this, they seemed to themselves to offer as suitable was this: that nothing could henceforth be everlasting unless it had always existed before.
And yet concerning the world, and concerning those whom Plato writes to be gods made by God within the world, he most openly says that they began and have a beginning, but declares that they will nevertheless have no end, but, through the most mighty will of their Founder, will remain forever. But the manner in which they understand this they have found out—that this is, namely, not a beginning of time, but of substitution. "For just as," they say, "if a foot had from eternity always been in dust, a footprint would always have been beneath it, which footprint nevertheless no one would doubt was made by the one treading, nor would the one be prior to the other, although the one was made by the other:
so also," they say, "the world and the gods created within it have both always existed, since He who made them always exists, and yet they were made." If, then, the soul always existed, must its misery too be said always to have existed? But if something in it which did not exist from eternity began to be in time, why could it not have come to pass that the soul itself should be in time, which formerly had not been? Furthermore, its blessedness also—which, after the experience of evils, will be firmer and destined to remain without end, as this man himself confesses—undoubtedly began in time, and yet will always be, though before it was not. That whole argument, therefore, is dissolved by which it is supposed that nothing can be without end of time unless it has no beginning of time.
For the soul's blessedness has been found which, though it has a beginning of time, will have no end of time. Wherefore let human weakness yield to divine authority, and let us believe those blessed and immortal beings concerning true religion, who do not seek for themselves the honor which they know is due to their God, who is also ours, nor bid us offer sacrifice save to Him alone, whose sacrifice both we and they—as I have often said, and often must be said—ought to be, being offered through that Priest who, in the man whom He assumed, and according to whom He willed also to be a Priest, deigned even unto death to become a sacrifice for us.
[XXXII] This is the religion which holds the universal way of the soul's liberation, since by none but this can it be liberated. For this is, in a certain manner, the royal way, which alone leads to a kingdom—not one tottering on a temporal pinnacle, but secure in the firmness of eternity. But when Porphyry says, in the first book near its end concerning the return of the soul, that no single sect has yet embraced what contains the universal way of the soul's liberation—whether some most true philosophy, or the customs and discipline of the Indians, or the induction of the Chaldeans, or by any other way whatsoever, and that this way had not yet come to his knowledge by historical acquaintance—he beyond doubt confesses that there is such a way, but that it had not yet come to his notice.
Thus whatever he had most diligently learned concerning the soul's liberation, and seemed to himself, or rather to others, to know and hold, was not sufficient for him. For he perceived that there was still lacking to him some most excellent authority which one ought to follow in so great a matter. But when he says that not even from any most true philosophy had a sect yet come to his knowledge which contains the universal way of the soul's liberation, he shows quite plainly, as I judge, either that the very philosophy in which he philosophized is not the most true, or that such a way is not contained in it. And how can that now be the most true, in which this way is not contained?
For what other universal way is there of the soul's liberation, save that by which all souls universally are liberated, and consequently without which no soul is liberated? But when he adds and says: "Or from the customs and discipline of the Indians, or from the induction of the Chaldeans, or by any other way whatsoever," he testifies with most manifest voice that neither in those things which he had learned from the Indians nor in those which he had learned from the Chaldeans is this universal way of the soul's liberation contained; and he could not keep silent that he had assuredly taken divine oracles from the Chaldeans, of which he makes constant mention.
What, then, would he have us understand as the universal way of the soul's liberation, not yet embraced either from any most true philosophy or from the doctrines of those nations who were held to be great, as it were, in divine matters—because among them a devout curiosity prevailed concerning the knowing and worshiping of certain angels—and not yet brought to his notice by historical acquaintance? What is this universal way, save that which is imparted from God not as proper to any single nation, but as common to all nations universally? This, that man of no mean genius certainly does not doubt to be. For he does not believe that divine Providence could have left the human race without this universal way of the soul's liberation.
For he does not say that it does not exist, but only that this so great good and so great a help had not yet been embraced, had not yet come to his notice; and no wonder. For Porphyry was then in human affairs at a time when this universal way of the soul's liberation—which is none other than the Christian religion—was permitted to be assailed by the worshipers of idols and demons and by earthly kings, for the sake of establishing and consecrating the number of the martyrs, that is, of the witnesses of the truth, through whom it might be shown that all bodily evils must be endured for the faith of piety and for the commendation of truth.
Porphyry, therefore, saw these things, and supposed that through persecutions of this kind that way would speedily perish, and on that account he thought it was not itself the universal way of the soul's liberation—not understanding that this very thing which moved him, and which in his own choice he feared to endure, pertained rather to its confirmation and stronger commendation. This, then, is the universal way of the soul's liberation—that is, granted by divine mercy to all nations universally—whose knowledge, to whomsoever it has now come and to whomsoever it is to come, neither ought nor will be right to say to it: Why now? and: Why so late? since the counsel of Him who sends is not penetrable by human wit.
This too that man perceived, when he said that this gift of God had not yet been embraced and had not yet been brought to his notice. For he did not on that account judge it to be untrue, because it had not yet been received into his faith, nor yet come into his knowledge. This, I say, is the universal way of the believers who are to be liberated, concerning which the faithful Abraham received the divine oracle: In thy seed shall all nations be blessed. He was indeed by nation a Chaldean; but that he might receive such promises, and that from him might be propagated the seed ordained through angels in the hand of the Mediator, in whom should be this universal way of the soul's liberation—that is, given to all nations—he was bidden to depart from his land, and from his kindred, and from his father's house.
Then, first freed from the superstitions of the Chaldeans, he worshiped the one true God by following Him, and faithfully believed Him who made these promises. This is the universal way, concerning which it is said in holy prophecy: May God have mercy on us and bless us; may He make His countenance to shine upon us, that we may know Thy way upon earth, Thy salvation among all nations. Whence, so long afterward, having taken flesh from the seed of Abraham, the Savior Himself says of Himself: I am the way, the truth, and the life. This is the universal way, concerning which it was prophesied so long before: It shall come to pass in the last days that the mountain of the Lord shall be made manifest, prepared on the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall come to it, and many peoples shall enter in and shall say:
Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will declare to us His way, and we will walk in it. For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. This way, therefore, is not of one nation, but of all nations; and the law and the word of the Lord did not remain in Zion and Jerusalem, but went forth thence, that it might diffuse itself through all things. Whence the Mediator Himself, after His resurrection, says to His trembling disciples: It behooved that those things should be fulfilled which were written in the law and the prophets and the psalms concerning Me.
Then He opened their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures, and said to them that it behooved Christ to suffer and to rise again from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.
This, then, is the universal way of the soul's liberation, which the holy angels and holy prophets first, among the few men who—where they could—found the grace of God, and chiefly among the Hebrew nation (whose commonwealth was, in a certain manner, itself consecrated to the prophecy and foreannouncement of the City of God to be gathered out of all nations), signified by the tabernacle and the temple and the priesthood and the sacrifices, and foretold by certain plain utterances, but for the most part by mystical ones;