[I] Some have held that there are both good and evil gods; but others, thinking better things of the gods, attributed to them so much honour and praise that they dared not believe any of the gods to be evil. But those who said that some gods are good and some evil called the demons also by the name of gods, and (though more rarely) the gods too by the name of demons — so that they confess that Jupiter himself, whom they will have to be king and chief of the rest, was called a demon by Homer.
But those who assert that all the gods are none but good, and far more excellent than those men who are reputed good, are rightly moved by the deeds of the demons, which they cannot deny, and, thinking that such things can in no way be committed by gods, all of whom they will have to be good, they are compelled to introduce a distinction between gods and demons: so that whatever rightly displeases them in the depraved works or affections by which the hidden spirits manifest their power, this they believe to belong to demons, not to gods.
But since they think these same demons are set as intermediaries between men and gods, such that no god mingles with man, so that from the one side they may carry up men's desires, and from the other bring back what has been obtained — and this is the opinion of the Platonists, the foremost and most noble of philosophers, with whom, as with the more excellent, we thought it good to examine this question, whether the worship of many gods avails toward attaining the blessed life which is to be after death:
in the preceding book we inquired by what means demons, who take delight in such things as good and prudent men abhor and condemn — that is, in the sacrilegious, shameful, and criminal fictions of poets, made not about any ordinary man but about the very gods, and in the wicked and punishable violence of the magic arts — could, as it were, being nearer and more friendly to the good gods, reconcile good men to them; and it was found that this can by no reasoning be done.
[II] Accordingly this book, as we promised at the end of the former, will have to contain a discussion concerning the difference (if they will have there to be any) — not of the gods among themselves, all of whom they call good, nor of the difference between gods and demons, whom they set far and high apart from men, and place these latter between gods and men — but concerning the difference of the demons themselves, insofar as it pertains to the present question. For among most people it is customary to say that some demons are good, others evil;
and whether this be the opinion of the Platonists too, or of any others whatsoever, its examination is by no means to be neglected, lest anyone should suppose that good demons, as it were, are to be followed by him, through whom, as through intermediaries, while he affects and strives to be reconciled to the gods, all of whom he believes to be good — that he may as it were be able to be with them after death — he might, being ensnared by the malignant spirits and deceived by their deceit, stray far from the true God, with whom alone, and in whom alone, and concerning whom alone, the human soul, that is, the rational and intellectual soul, is blessed. [III] What, then, is the difference between good and evil demons?
Since indeed the Platonist Apuleius, discoursing about these things universally and saying so much about their aerial bodies, was silent about the virtues of their souls, with which they would be endowed if they were good. He was silent, therefore, about the cause of blessedness; but the mark of misery he could not keep silent, confessing that their mind — by which he declared them to be rational — is not even imbued and fortified with virtue so as by no means to yield to the irrational passions of the soul, but that it too, as is the manner of foolish minds, is agitated, as it were, by stormy perturbations. For his words on this matter are these: "From this number of demons, in general," he says, "the poets are wont, not at all far from the truth, to fashion gods as haters and lovers of certain men;
prospering and exalting these, opposing and afflicting those; and so they pity and are indignant, are distressed and rejoice, and undergo every aspect of the human soul, tossed with a like motion of the heart and surging of the mind through all the tides of thoughts. All which turmoils and tempests are banished far from the tranquillity of the heavenly gods." Is there in these words any doubt that he said, not some lower parts of the souls, but the very minds of the demons — by which they are rational animals — are troubled, like a stormy sea, by the tempest of the passions?
so that they are not to be compared even to wise men, who, when they suffer perturbations of this kind of the soul — from which human weakness is not immune — even when they undergo them by the condition of this life, resist them with an unperturbed mind, not yielding to them so as to approve or perpetrate anything that would swerve from the path of wisdom and the law of justice; but the demons, like to foolish and unjust mortals not in bodies but in morals (not to say worse, in that they are older and, by their due punishment, incurable), fluctuate also in the very "sea" of the mind, as he called it, nor do they in any part of the soul stand firm in the truth and virtue by which turbulent and depraved affections are resisted.
[IV] There are two opinions of the philosophers concerning these motions of the soul, which the Greeks call *pathē*, but some of ours, as Cicero, call perturbations, some affections or affects, and some, as this man, call passions, expressing the Greek more precisely. These perturbations, then, or affections, or passions, some philosophers say fall even upon the wise man, but moderated and made subject to reason, so that the dominion of the mind imposes upon them laws, as it were, by which they are reduced to the necessary measure. Those who hold this are Platonists or Aristotelians, since Aristotle, the disciple of Plato, founded the Peripatetic school. But to others, as to the Stoics, it does not seem that any passions of this kind at all fall upon the wise man.
But Cicero, in his books On the Ends of Goods and Evils, convicts these — that is, the Stoics — of contending against the Platonists or Peripatetics in words rather than in substance; since indeed the Stoics are unwilling to call the goods and advantages of the body and external things "goods," on the ground that they will have no good of a man except virtue, as it were the art of living well, which is nothing but in the soul. But these things the others call "goods" simply and according to the common usage of speaking; yet in comparison with virtue, by which one lives rightly, small and slight. Whence it comes about that, by whatever name they are called by either party, whether goods or advantages, they are yet weighed with equal estimation, nor do the Stoics delight in this question in anything but the novelty of words.
It seems to me, therefore, that in this matter also, where it is asked whether the passions of the soul befall the wise man, or whether he is wholly a stranger to them, they make a controversy about words rather than about things. For I think that they too feel nothing else in this than what the Platonists and Peripatetics feel, so far as the force of things is concerned, not the sound of words. For, to pass over other proofs by which I might show this, lest I make it long, let me mention one single thing that is most evident. In the books entitled Attic Nights, Aulus Gellius, a man of most elegant eloquence and of much and varied learning, writes that he once sailed with a certain noble Stoic philosopher. This philosopher, as Aulus Gellius narrates more at large and fully, which I shall touch on briefly,
when that ship was being tossed most perilously by a dreadful sky and sea, grew pale with the force of fear. This was noticed by those who were present — though most curiously attentive, in the nearness of death, to whether or not the philosopher was troubled in mind. Then, the storm having passed, as soon as security afforded room for conversing or even for chattering, one of those whom that ship carried, a rich, luxurious Asiatic, assailed the philosopher with mockery, because he had been terrified and had grown pale, whereas he himself had remained undaunted in that destruction which threatened.
But the philosopher brought forward the reply of Aristippus the Socratic, who, when in a similar situation he had heard the same words from a similar man, answered that the other had rightly not been anxious for the soul of a most worthless scoundrel, but that he himself had had reason to fear for the soul of Aristippus. That rich man having been repelled by this reply, Aulus Gellius afterward asked the philosopher — not in a spirit of provoking, but of learning — what the reason of his fear might be. And the philosopher, to instruct a man diligently kindled with the zeal of knowing, straightway brought forth from his little bag a book of the Stoic Epictetus, in which were written those things that agreed with the decrees of Zeno and Chrysippus, whom we know to have been the chiefs of the Stoics. In that book Aulus Gellius says he read
that this was approved by the Stoics: that the impressions of the mind, which they call phantasiai, and over which it is not in one's power whether and when they befall the mind, when they come from terrible and formidable things, must needs move even the wise man's mind, so that for a little while he either trembles with fear, or is contracted with sadness, these passions, as it were, forestalling the office of the mind and reason; nor yet is there therefore formed in the mind any opinion of evil, nor are these things approved, nor is consent given to them. For this, they will have it, is in one's power; and they judge this to be the difference between the mind of the wise man and of the fool, that the fool's mind yields to these same passions and accommodates to them the assent of the mind;
But the wise man, though he suffer these things by necessity, nevertheless keeps, with an unshaken mind, a true and stable judgment concerning those things which he ought reasonably to seek after or to shun. These things which Aulus Gellius records that he read in the book of Epictetus—that Epictetus said and held them from the decrees of the Stoics—I have set forth as best I could, not indeed more elegantly than Aulus Gellius, but certainly more briefly and, as I think, more plainly. And if these things are so, then there is no difference, or almost none, between the opinion of the Stoics and that of the other philosophers concerning the passions and disturbances of the soul; for both parties defend the mind and reason of the wise man from the dominion of these passions.
And therefore the Stoics perhaps say that these passions do not befall the wise man, because they in no way becloud with any error, nor overthrow with any blemish, that wisdom by which he is indeed wise. Yet they do come upon the soul of the wise man, while the serenity of his wisdom remains unimpaired, on account of those things which they call advantages or disadvantages, although they are unwilling to call them goods or evils. For assuredly, if that philosopher had counted as nothing the things which he felt he was about to lose in the shipwreck—such as this present life and the health of the body—he would not have so shuddered with dread at that peril as to be betrayed even by the testimony of his pallor.
Yet nonetheless he could both suffer that agitation, and hold fixed in his mind the judgment that that life and bodily health, whose loss the fury of the tempest threatened, are not goods such as would make those who possess them good, as justice does. But as for their saying that these things are not to be called goods but advantages, this is to be reckoned a contest of words, not an examination of things. For what does it matter whether they be more fittingly called goods or advantages, so long as the Stoic, no less than the Peripatetic, dreads and turns pale lest he be deprived of them—naming them unequally, yet valuing them equally?
Both indeed, if by the perils to these goods (or advantages) they were driven toward some shameful or wicked deed, so that they could not otherwise retain them, declare that they would rather lose these things—by which the nature of the body is kept safe and unharmed—than commit those deeds by which justice is violated. Thus the mind, where this judgment is fixed, permits no disturbances, even though they befall the lower parts of the soul, to prevail within it against reason; nay rather, it itself masters them, and by not consenting to them but rather resisting, it exercises the reign of virtue. Such a one Virgil also describes Aeneas to be, where he says: 'The mind remains unmoved; the tears roll down in vain.'
[V] It is not now necessary to show at length and in detail what the divine Scripture, in which Christian teaching is contained, instructs concerning these passions. For it subjects the very mind to God, to be ruled and helped by Him, and subjects the passions to the mind, to be so moderated and bridled that they may be turned to the use of justice. In short, in our discipline it is not so much asked whether a devout soul is angry, but why it is angry; nor whether it is sad, but whence it is sad; nor whether it fears, but what it fears. For to be angry with one who sins, that he may be corrected; to be grieved for one afflicted, that he may be set free; to fear for one in danger, that he may not perish—I know not whether anyone would rightly blame these by any sound consideration. For it is indeed the wont of the Stoics to find fault even with mercy;
but how much more honorably was that Stoic disturbed by the mercy of freeing a man than by the fear of shipwreck! Far better, and more humane, and more suited to the feelings of the devout, did Cicero speak in praise of Caesar, where he says: 'Of your virtues none is either more admirable or more welcome than your mercy.' But what is mercy save a certain fellow-feeling in our heart for another's misery, by which indeed, if we are able, we are compelled to come to his aid? Now this emotion serves reason when mercy is so extended that justice is preserved, whether when something is bestowed on one in need, or when the penitent is pardoned.
This mercy Cicero, that outstanding orator, did not hesitate to call a virtue, which the Stoics are not ashamed to number among the vices—those Stoics who nevertheless, as the book of Epictetus, a most noble Stoic, has taught, from the decrees of Zeno and Chrysippus, who held the first place in this sect, admit passions of this kind into the soul of the wise man, whom they wish to be free from all vices. Whence it follows that they do not think these very things to be vices, when they so befall the wise man that they can avail nothing against the virtue and reason of the mind; and that one and the same is the opinion of the Peripatetics, or even of the Platonists, and of the Stoics themselves—but, as Tully says, a mere verbal controversy has long tormented those little Greeks, more eager for contention than for truth.
But it may still with reason be asked whether it belongs to the infirmity of the present life to endure affections of this kind even in whatsoever good offices; whereas the holy angels punish without anger those whom they receive to be punished by the eternal law of God, and come to the aid of the wretched without any fellow-feeling of misery, and succor without fear those whom they love when they are in danger; and yet, by the custom of human speech, the names of these passions are applied even to them, on account of a certain likeness of works, not on account of any infirmity of affections—just as God Himself, according to the Scriptures, is angry, and yet is disturbed by no passion. For it is the effect of vengeance, not the turbulent affection of Him who takes vengeance, that this word has borrowed.
[VI] Deferring meanwhile this question about the holy angels, let us see in what manner the Platonists say that the middle demons, set between gods and men, are tossed by these surging passions. For if, with the mind free from these and ruling over them, they suffered motions of this kind, Apuleius would not say that they are tossed with a like agitation of heart and swell of mind through all the surges of thought. Their very mind, then—that is, the higher part of the soul, whereby they are rational, in which virtue and wisdom, if they had any, would rule and moderate the turbulent passions of the lower parts of the soul—their very mind, I say, as this Platonist confesses, is tossed by the swell of the disturbances.
The mind of the demons, therefore, is subject to the passions of lusts, fears, angers, and the rest of this kind. What part, then, in them is free and possessed of that wisdom by which they might please the gods and, after the likeness of good morals, take counsel for men—when their mind, subjugated and oppressed by the vices of the passions, directs whatever reason it naturally has toward deceiving and beguiling all the more keenly, the more the desire of doing harm possesses it? [VII] But if anyone says that these are not of the number of all the demons, but of the evil ones—whom the poets, not far from the truth, feign to be gods who hate and love certain men (for these Apuleius said are tossed by the swell of mind through all the surges of thought)—
how shall we be able to understand this, when, in saying it, he was describing the middleness—on account of their airy bodies—not of certain ones, that is of the evil, but of all the demons between gods and men? For he says that the poets feign this: that out of the number of these demons they make gods, and impose upon them the names of gods, and, with the unpunished license of fictitious song, assign from among them friends and enemies to whatever men they please—whereas he maintains that the gods are far removed from these demonic ways, from the celestial abode, and from the abundance of blessedness. This, then, is the fiction of the poets: to call gods those who are not gods, and to make them, under the names of gods, contend among themselves on account of men, whom they love or hate out of partisan zeal.
But he says that this fiction is not far from the truth, since, though called by the names of gods those who are not gods, such demons are nevertheless described as they actually are. Finally, hence he says comes that Homeric Minerva, 'who in the midst of the assemblies of the Greeks intervened to restrain Achilles.' That this was that Minerva, he wishes to be a poetic invention, on the ground that he thinks Minerva a goddess, and places her among the gods—whom he all believes to be good and blessed—in the high ethereal seat, far from intercourse with mortals;
but that some demon, favoring the Greeks and hostile to the Trojans, existed—just as another, an aider of the Trojans against the Greeks, whom the same poet commemorates under the name of Venus or of Mars, gods whom, since they do not do such things, he places in the celestial dwellings—and that these demons contended among themselves on behalf of those whom they loved, against those whom they hated: this he has confessed the poets to have said not far from the truth. For it was of such beings that they said these things—beings whom he testifies to be tossed, with a like agitation of heart and swell of mind, through all the surges of thought—so that they can exercise loves and hatreds, not on behalf of justice, but as a mob resembling them does among huntsmen and charioteers, in accordance with the zeal of their factions, for some men against others.
For this the Platonist philosopher seems to have taken care of: that, when these things were sung by the poets, they should not be believed to be done by the middle demons, but by the very gods, whose names the poets in their feigning employ. [VIII] What? Is that very definition of demons too little to be considered (wherein assuredly, by determining, he embraced them all), when he says that demons are, in kind, living beings; in soul, subject to passion; in mind, rational; in body, airy; in duration, eternal? In these five things mentioned he said nothing at all whereby demons would seem to have anything in common with good men at least, which was not also in the bad.
For when he embraced men themselves in a somewhat broader description, speaking of them in their place as of the lowest and earthly beings—having first spoken of the celestial gods, so that, the two parts having been set forth from the highest and the lowest as the extremes, he might in the third place speak of the middle demons:
'Men, therefore,' he says, 'rejoicing in reason, mighty in speech, with immortal souls, with mortal members, with fickle and anxious minds, with dull and frail bodies, with unlike morals, with like errors, of headstrong audacity, of stubborn hope, of fruitless toil, of tottering fortune—each singly mortal, yet all as a whole race perpetual, changeable through offspring successively to be supplied, of fleeting time, of tardy wisdom, of swift death, of querulous life—inhabit the lands.' When he here said so many things which pertain to most men, did he by any means keep silent about that too which he knew to be of few, when he says 'tardy wisdom'?
But if he had passed this over, he would by no means rightly have concluded the human race with so intent a diligence of this description. And when he was commending the excellence of the gods, he affirmed that very blessedness, to which men wish to attain through wisdom, to be excellent in them. Accordingly, if he wished any demons to be understood as good, he would have put something also in their description whereby they might be thought to have in common either with the gods some part of blessedness, or with men some sort of wisdom. But now he commemorated no good of theirs, whereby the good are distinguished from the bad. Although he also spared to express their malice more freely, not so much lest he should offend them, as lest he should offend their worshippers, before whom he was speaking:
yet to the prudent he signified what they ought to feel about them, since indeed he separated the gods—whom he wished all to be believed good and blessed—in every way from their passions and, as he himself says, from their turbulences, joining those gods to them only by eternity of bodies, but most plainly inculcating that the demons are, in soul, like not to the gods but to men; and this not by the good of wisdom, of which even men can be partakers, but by the disturbance of the passions, which lords it over the foolish and the wicked, but is so ruled by the wise and the good that they would rather not have it than conquer it.
For if he wished it to be understood that the demons have in common with the gods not eternity of bodies but of souls, he would surely not separate men from the fellowship of this thing, since even men have eternal souls, as the Platonist beyond doubt holds. Therefore, when he described this kind of living being, he said that men are 'with immortal souls, with mortal members.' And by this, if for this reason men do not have eternity in common with the gods, because they are mortal in body, then for this reason the demons have it, because they are immortal in body. [IX] What sort of mediators, then, are these between men and the gods, through whom men are to seek the friendships of the gods—who have this worse in common with men, namely what is better in a living being, that is, the soul;
but have this better in common with the gods, namely what is worse in a living being, that is, the body? For since a living being—that is, an animal—consists of soul and body, of which two the soul is assuredly better than the body, even if it be vicious and weak, yet certainly better than even the most healthy and most sturdy body (since its nature is more excellent and is not, by the taint of vices, ranked below the body—just as gold, even when soiled, is esteemed dearer than silver or lead, however pure): these mediators of gods and men, through whom, interposed, things human are joined to things divine, have with the gods an eternal body, but with men a vicious soul—as though the religion by which they wish men to be joined to the gods through the demons were placed in the body, not established in the soul.
What wickedness or penalty, then, has hung up these false and deceitful mediators as it were head downward, so that they have the lower part of the living being, that is the body, in common with the higher beings, but the higher, that is the soul, in common with the lower—joined with the celestial gods in the serving part, but with earthly men in the ruling part, wretched? For the body is a slave, as Sallust also says: 'We use rather the command of the soul, the servitude of the body.' And he added: 'The one we have in common with the gods, the other with the beasts,' since he was speaking of men, who have, like the beasts, a mortal body.
But these beings, whom the philosophers have provided for us as mediators between us and the gods, can indeed say concerning soul and body: 'The one we have in common with the gods, the other with men'; but, as I have said, being as it were bound and hung up upside down, they have the servile body in common with the blessed gods, the lordly soul in common with the wretched men—exalted in the lower part, cast down in the higher. Whence, even if anyone should think that for this reason they have eternity in common with the gods, because their souls are not by any death, as those of earthly animals, released from the body: not even so is their body to be esteemed as an eternal vehicle of the honored, but as an eternal chain of the condemned.
[X] Plotinus certainly, in times near to our own memory, is praised for having understood Plato more excellently than the rest. He, when treating of human souls, says: 'The merciful Father made for them mortal bonds.' Thus he judged that this very thing, that men are mortal in body, pertains to the mercy of God the Father, lest they should be held forever by the misery of this life. Of this mercy the iniquity of the demons was judged unworthy, which, in the misery of a passible soul, received not a mortal body as men do, but an eternal one. For they would indeed be happier than men, if they had, along with them, a mortal body and, along with the gods, a blessed soul. And they would be equal to men, if, together with a wretched soul, they had deserved to have at least a mortal body along with them;
if at least they should acquire something of piety, so that they might rest from their afflictions even in death. But now they are not only not happier than men, having a wretched soul, but are even more wretched, by the perpetual chain of the body. For he did not wish it to be understood that, by any discipline of piety and wisdom, they advance so as to become gods out of demons, since he most plainly said that the demons are eternal. [XI] He says indeed that the souls of men also are demons, and that out of men become lares, if they are of good desert; lemures, if bad, or larvae; and that they are called manes-gods, if it is uncertain whether they be of good or of evil desert. In which opinion, what a great abyss they open for the pursuit of depraved morals, who does not see, if he but a little attend?
Since indeed, however wicked men have been, either while they imagine themselves to become larvae, or while they imagine themselves to become manes-gods, they become so much the worse as they are the more desirous of doing harm—so that they even imagine themselves to be invited, by certain sacrifices as by divine honors after death, that they may do harm. For he says that larvae are noxious demons made out of men. But hence is another question. And thence he alleges that the blessed are called in Greek eudaimones, because they are of good soul, that is, good daemones—thus confirming that the souls of men also are demons. [XII] But we now deal with those whom he described, in their proper nature, between gods and men, as—in kind, living beings; in mind, rational; in soul, subject to passion; in body, airy; in duration, eternal.