For Porphyry too promises a certain kind of purgation of the soul through theurgy, yet hesitantly and, as it were, with a somewhat shamefaced discussion; but he denies that this art furnishes to anyone a return to God; so that you may see him fluctuate, with alternating opinions, between the vice of sacrilegious curiosity and the profession of philosophy. For now he warns that this art is to be guarded against as deceitful and dangerous in the very performance and prohibited by the laws; now again, as though 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, things having no likenesses of bodies; but the spiritual part, by which the images of corporeal things are grasped.
For he says that this part is made, through certain theurgic consecrations which they call teletai, fit and apt for the reception of spirits and angels and for seeing the gods. Yet he confesses that from these theurgic rites no purgation accrues to the intellectual soul, such as would make it fit for seeing its own God and beholding those things which truly are. From which it can be understood of what sort of gods, or of what sort a vision, he says is made by theurgic consecrations, in which those things are not seen which truly are. Finally, he says that the rational soul—or, as he more likes to call it, the intellectual soul—can escape into its own realm, even if that which is its spiritual part has been purged by no theurgic art;
but that its spiritual part is purged by the theurgist only so far that it does not thereby attain to immortality and eternity. And so, although he distinguishes angels from demons, discoursing that the airy places are of demons and the ethereal or empyrean of angels, and though he advises that one should make use of the friendship of some demon, by whose carrying one might be lifted even a little from the earth after death, yet he declares that there is another way to the heavenly fellowships of the angels: nevertheless he testifies, by a confession in a manner expressed, that the society of demons is to be guarded against, when he says that the soul, paying its penalties after death, shudders at the worship of the demons by whom it was encompassed;
and theurgy itself, which he commends as though a conciliator of angels and gods, he could not deny to operate among such powers as either themselves envy the purgation of the soul, or serve the arts of the envious, bringing forth on this matter the complaint of some Chaldean or other: 'A good man in Chaldea complains,' he says, 'that his efforts to purge a soul were frustrated with great toil, when a man powerful for the same things, touched by envy, had by sacred prayers bound the powers he had adjured, so that they would not grant what was asked. Therefore that one bound them,' he says, 'and this one did not loose them.' By which token, he said, it appears that theurgy is a discipline for accomplishing as much good as evil, both among gods and among men;
and that the gods too suffer, and are led into those disturbances and passions which Apuleius attributed in common to demons and to men; yet he separates the gods from these by the loftiness of an ethereal seat, and asserts Plato's opinion in that distinction. [X] Behold now another Platonist, whom they report to be more learned, Porphyry, says that through some theurgic discipline or other even the gods themselves are bound by passions and disturbances, since they could be adjured and held by sacred prayers, so as not to furnish purgation to the soul, and so terrified by him who commanded evil, that they could not, by another who asked good, through the same theurgic art, be freed from that fear and released to grant the benefit.
Who would not see that all these are the fabrications of deceitful demons, save one who is their most wretched slave and a stranger to the grace of the true Deliverer? For if these things were done among good gods, surely there the beneficent purger of a soul would prevail more than the malevolent hinderer. Or if to just gods the man on whose behalf it was being done seemed unworthy of purgation, they surely ought not, terrified by the envious one, nor, as he himself says, hindered through fear of a more powerful deity, but by free judgment, to have refused it.
But it is a marvel that that benign Chaldean, who desired to purge a soul by theurgic rites, did not find some higher god who might either terrify still more and compel the terrified gods to do good, or restrain from them the one who was terrifying them, so that they might freely do good—if indeed sacred rites were lacking to the good theurgist, whereby he might first purge from that plague of fear the very gods whom he invoked as purgers of the soul. For what is the reason why a more powerful god can be brought in by whom they are terrified, and cannot be brought in one by whom they are purged? Or is there found a god who hears the envious and strikes fear into the gods lest they do good; and is there not found a god who hears the benevolent and takes fear away from the gods that they may do good?
O splendid theurgy! O purgation of the soul to be proclaimed, where unclean envy commands more than pure beneficence obtains! Nay rather, the deceit of malignant spirits is to be guarded against and detested, and the saving doctrine is to be heard. For as to the fact that those who work these filthy purgations by sacrilegious rites see certain marvelously beautiful images, as this man relates, whether of angels or of gods, as though with a purged spirit (if indeed they see any such thing), this is what the apostle says: 'For Satan transforms himself as an angel of light.'
For those phantasms are his, who, desiring to ensnare the wretched souls of many by the deceitful rites of false gods, and to turn them away from the true worship of the true God, by which alone they are cleansed and healed, turns himself into all forms, as was said of Proteus—pursuing as an enemy, aiding deceitfully, harming in both ways. [XI] This Porphyry was the wiser when he wrote to Anebo the Egyptian, where, like one consulting and inquiring, he both betrays the sacrilegious arts and overthrows them. And there, indeed, he reproves all the demons, whom he says, through imprudence, draw in humid vapor, and are therefore not in the ether but in the air beneath the moon and in the very globe of the moon;
Yet nonetheless he does not dare to assign to all the demons all the deceptions, malices, and follies by which he is rightly moved. For he calls some of them benevolent demons, after the manner of others, although he confesses that as a class they are all imprudent. He wonders, moreover, that the gods are not only enticed by victims but are also compelled and forced to do what men wish; and, if the gods are distinguished from the demons by having body and the demons by being incorporeal, how the sun and moon and the other visible things in heaven, which he does not doubt to be bodies, are to be reckoned gods; and, if they are gods, how some are said to be beneficent and others maleficent; and how, being corporeal, they can be joined to things incorporeal.
He also inquires, as if in doubt, whether in those who divine and work certain marvels there are passions of the soul, or whether some spirits come from without through whom they are able to do these things; and he rather conjectures that they come from without, on the ground that by applying stones and herbs they bind certain persons, and open closed doors, and marvellously perform something of that kind. Whence he says that some hold there is a certain kind of being, whose property it is to give ear, deceptive by nature, of every form and manifold, feigning gods and demons and the souls of the dead, and that this is what produces all these things which appear to be good or evil;
but that concerning the things which are truly good it renders no help—nay rather, it neither knows these things, but even ill-advises, calumniates, and sometimes hinders the diligent followers of virtue, and is full of rashness and pride, delighting in the reek of sacrifice, captivated by flatteries, and the rest—all which things, concerning this kind of deceptive and malignant spirits that come into the soul from without and mock the human senses, whether drowsy or awake, he does not affirm as things of which he himself is persuaded, but so faintly does he suspect or doubt them that he ascribes these opinions to others. For it was hard for so great a philosopher either to know or confidently to convict the whole diabolical fellowship, which any little Christian old woman does not hesitate to affirm and most freely detests.
Unless perhaps he is ashamed to offend both the man to whom he writes, Anebo, as a most illustrious high-priest of such rites, and the other admirers of such works as of things divine and pertaining to the worship of the gods. Nevertheless he goes on, and, as it were by way of inquiry, mentions those things which, soberly considered, cannot be attributed to any but malignant and deceptive powers. For he asks why, when the better are invoked, command is given as to worse, that they may execute a man's unjust orders; why they do not hearken to one who prays after he has touched a woman, while they themselves make no delay in leading anyone whatsoever into incestuous couplings;
why they enjoin that their priests must abstain from animal food, lest indeed they be polluted by bodily vapours, while they themselves are enticed by other vapours and by the reek of victims; and while their observer is forbidden to touch a corpse, yet these rites are for the most part celebrated over corpses; what is the reason that a man subject to any vice at all directs threats, not against a demon or the soul of some dead person, but against the sun and moon themselves or against any of the celestial bodies, and terrifies them falsely, so as to wring the truth out of them. For he threatens even to shatter the heaven and other things impossible for man, so that those gods, like most foolish boys, terrified by false and ridiculous threats, may do what is commanded.
He says also that a certain Chaeremon, skilled in such sacred—or rather sacrilegious—rites, wrote that the things which among the Egyptians are celebrated in the stories about Isis or about Osiris her husband have the greatest power of compelling the gods to do what is commanded, when he who compels by incantations threatens to betray or overthrow those very mysteries; where he even declares terribly that he will scatter the limbs of Osiris, should they neglect to do what is bidden. That a man should utter these and suchlike vain and insane threats against the gods—and not against just any gods, but against the very celestial ones that shine with starry light—and that not without effect, but compelling them by violent power and by these terrors leading them to do whatever he wills, Porphyry rightly marvels at;
nay rather, under the guise of one who marvels and seeks the causes of such things, he gives us to understand that these things are wrought by those spirits whose class he described above under the opinion of others—spirits deceptive not, as he himself put it, by nature, but by vice, who feign gods and the souls of the dead, but do not, as he says, merely feign to be demons: they plainly are demons.
And as for what seems to him to be the case—that by herbs and stones and animals and certain fixed sounds and words and shapes and figments, and also by certain movements of the stars observed in the revolution of the heaven, powers are fashioned on earth by men suited for carrying out various effects—all this belongs to those same demons, mockers of the souls that are subject to them, and displaying to themselves voluptuous sport out of the errors of men. Therefore either Porphyry, truly doubting and inquiring into these things, nevertheless mentions those very facts by which they may be convicted and refuted, and shown to belong not to the powers that favour us in our laying hold of the blessed life, but to the deceiver demons;
or else—that we may suspect something better of the philosopher—he wished by this means not to offend the Egyptian, given over to such errors and supposing himself to know some great things, with the proud authority as it were of a teacher, nor to disturb him by the wrangling of one openly opposing, but as it were by the humility of one inquiring and desiring to learn, to turn him to reflect upon these things and to show how contemptible, and even to be shunned, they are. In fine, near the end of the letter he begs to be taught by him what, from Egyptian wisdom, is the way to blessedness.
As for the rest, he says that those whose intercourse with the gods was such that they troubled the divine mind for the sake of finding a runaway slave, or acquiring an estate, or on account of a marriage or trade or something of that kind, seem to him to have cultivated wisdom in vain; and that those very deities with whom they had intercourse, even if they foretold true things about other matters, yet, since concerning blessedness they gave no sure nor sufficiently fitting counsel, were neither gods nor benevolent demons, but either that one who is called the deceiver, or wholly a human invention. [XII] But since through these arts things so great and of such a kind are wrought that they exceed the whole measure of human capacity:
what remains but that those things which seem marvellously to be foretold or done as if by divine power, and yet are not referred to the worship of the one God—to whom simply to cleave, as even the Platonists confess and in many ways testify, is the sole beatifying good—be prudently understood to be the mockeries of malignant demons and seductive hindrances, which are to be guarded against by true piety? But on the other hand, whatever miracles are wrought, whether by angels or in whatever manner, so divinely that they commend the worship and religion of the one God, in whom alone is the blessed life—these are to be believed to be truly done by them, or through them, who love us according to truth and piety, God Himself working in them.
For we must not listen to those who deny that the invisible God works visible miracles, since He, even according to them, made the world, which surely they cannot deny to be visible. Whatever marvellous thing, therefore, is done in this world, it is assuredly less than the whole of this world—that is, the heaven and the earth and all that is in them—which God certainly made. But just as He Himself who made them, so also the manner in which He made them is hidden and incomprehensible to man. Although, therefore, the miracles of visible natures have grown cheap through the constancy of our seeing them, yet, when we contemplate them wisely, they are greater than the most unwonted and rarest of marvels. For man himself is a greater miracle than any miracle wrought through man.
Wherefore God, who made the visible heaven and earth, does not disdain to work visible miracles in heaven or on earth, whereby He may rouse to the worship of Himself the invisible God the soul that is still given over to visible things; but where and when He does it, an unchangeable counsel rests with Him, in whose ordering all the times whatsoever that are to come are already made. For, moving temporal things, He is not Himself moved in time, nor does He know things to be done otherwise than done, nor does He hearken to those who invoke Him otherwise than He sees those who are about to invoke Him. For even when His angels hearken, He hearkens in them, as in His true temple not made with hands, as in His holy men; and His eternal commands, beheld in His law, are temporally fulfilled.
[XIII] Nor ought it to disturb us that, although He is invisible, He is often recorded to have appeared visibly to the fathers. For just as the sound by which a thought established in the silence of the understanding is heard is not the same as the thought itself, so also the form in which God, established in an invisible nature, was seen was not the same as He Himself. Yet nevertheless He Himself was seen in that same bodily form, just as that very thought is heard in the sound of the voice; nor were they ignorant that they saw the invisible God in a bodily form which He Himself was not. For Moses both spoke with Him who spoke, and yet said to Him: If I have found grace before Thee, show me Thyself, that I may knowingly see Thee.
Since, therefore, it behoved that the law of God should be given awesomely in the edicts of angels, not to one man or to a few wise men, but to a whole nation and an immense people: in the sight of that same people great things were done on the mountain, where the law was given through one man, while the multitude beheld the fearful and tremendous things that were being done. For the people of Israel did not believe Moses in the manner that the Lacedaemonians believed their own Lycurgus, namely, that he had received the laws which he framed from Jove or Apollo. For when the law was being given to the people, whereby the one God was commanded to be worshipped, in the sight of that people itself, so far as divine providence judged sufficient, the creation was seen, by marvellous signs and motions of things, to serve the Creator in the giving of that same law.
[XIV] But just as the right instruction of one man, so also that of the human race, in so far as it pertains to the people of God, has advanced by certain articulations of times, as of ages, by steady progressions, so that from things temporal one might rise to grasp things eternal, and from things visible to things invisible; yet in such wise that even in that time when visible rewards were divinely promised, still the one God was commended as to be worshipped, lest the human mind should, even for the sake of those earthly benefits of a transitory life, be subjected to any but the true Creator and Lord of the soul. For whoever denies that all things which either angels or men can afford to men are in the power of the one Omnipotent, is insane.
Concerning providence, indeed, the Platonist Plotinus argues, and proves that it reaches, from the supreme God, whose is intelligible and ineffable beauty, even down to these earthly and lowest things, by the beauty of little flowers and of leaves; all which things, as though abject and most swiftly perishing, he affirms could not have the most comely numbers of their forms, unless they were formed from thence, where the intelligible and unchangeable form, having all things together, endures. This the Lord Jesus showed there, where He says: Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin. But I say unto you, that not even Solomon in all his glory was so arrayed as one of these. But if the grass of the field, which today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven, God so clothes:
how much more you, O you of little faith? Most excellently, therefore, the human soul, still weak with earthly desires, learns to expect from the one God alone those very things which it temporally longs for, the lowest and earthly goods necessary for this transitory life and to be despised in comparison with the everlasting benefits of that other life, so that it may not depart from His worship even in the desiring of these things, but by contempt of them and by turning away from them may attain unto Him.
[XV] Thus, then, it pleased the divine providence to order the course of the times, so that, as I have said and as is read in the Acts of the Apostles, the law was given in the edicts of angels concerning the worship of the one true God, in which also the Person of God Himself appeared visibly—not indeed through His own substance, which ever remains invisible to corruptible eyes, but by certain signs through the creature made subject to the Creator—and spoke, syllable by syllable through the transitory little intervals of time, in the utterances of a human tongue: He who in His own nature neither begins to speak nor ceases, not corporeally but spiritually, not sensibly but intelligibly, not temporally but, so to say, eternally;
which His ministers and messengers hear more purely with Him, not with the ear of the body but of the mind—they who enjoy His unchangeable truth, immortally blessed; and what they hear must be done in ineffable ways and brought down even to these visible and sensible things, they accomplish without delay and without difficulty. But this law was given by a distribution of times, which at first held, as has been said, earthly promises, by which nevertheless eternal things were signified—things which many celebrated in visible sacraments, but few understood.
Yet the worship of the one God is there enjoined with the most manifest attestation of both words and of all things—not one out of the crowd, but He who made heaven and earth and every soul and every spirit, which is not what He Himself is. For He made them, they were made; and that they may be, and may fare well, they have need of Him by whom they were made. [XVI] To which angels, therefore, do we judge that we ought to give credence concerning the blessed and everlasting life? To those who wish themselves to be worshipped with religious rites, demanding that sacred things and sacrifices be rendered to themselves by mortals, or to those who say that all this worship is owed to the one God, Creator of all, and enjoin that it be rendered to Him with true piety—by the contemplation of whom they too are blessed, and promise that we shall be so?
For that vision of God is a vision of such great beauty, and so worthy of such great love, that without it Plotinus does not hesitate to call one most wretched, however endowed and abounding in any other goods. Since, therefore, some angels rouse us by marvellous signs to worship this one God, but others to worship themselves with the worship due to God alone—and this in such a way that the former forbid these latter to be worshipped, while the latter dare not forbid Him to be worshipped—let the Platonists answer which are rather to be believed, let whatever philosophers answer, let the theurgists answer, or rather the periurgists (for this is a name more worthy of all those arts); and finally let men answer, if any sense of their own nature—that they were created rational—still lives in any part of them;
let them answer, I say, whether sacrifice ought to be offered to those gods or angels who bid sacrifice be offered to themselves, or to that One alone, to whom sacrifice is bidden by these who forbid it both to themselves and to those others. If neither these nor those wrought any miracles, but only gave commands—some indeed that sacrifice be offered to themselves, but others forbidding it and bidding it to the one God alone—piety itself ought sufficiently to discern which of these descended from the pride of arrogance, and which from true religion. Nay, I will say still more: if only those who demand sacrifices for themselves moved human souls by marvellous deeds, while those who forbid this and bid sacrifice be offered to the one God alone by no means deigned to work these visible miracles:
assuredly the authority of the latter would have to be preferred, not by the sense of the body, but by the reason of the mind. But since God, in order to commend the utterances of His truth, has brought it about that, through those immortal messengers who proclaim not their own pride but His majesty, greater, more certain, more manifest miracles should be wrought—lest those who demand sacrifices for themselves should the more easily persuade the weak among the pious of a false religion, on the ground that they show certain astonishing things to their senses—who at last would please to be so foolish as not to choose the true things to follow, where he also finds the greater things to marvel at?
For those miracles of the gods of the Gentiles which history commends (I do not speak of those which, at hidden intervals of time, by the secret causes of the world itself—yet causes established and ordered under divine providence—come to pass as portents; such as unwonted births of animals and unusual appearances of things in sky and earth, whether merely terrifying or even harmful, which by their most deceitful cunning are said to be procured and appeased by demonic rites; but I speak of those which manifestly enough appear to be done by their own force and power, as when the images of the household gods, the Penates, which Aeneas carried away in his flight from Troy, are reported to have migrated from place to place; that Tarquin cut a whetstone with a razor;
that the Epidaurian serpent attached himself as a companion to Aesculapius sailing to Rome; that the ship in which the image of the Phrygian mother was being conveyed, rendered immovable by such great efforts of men and oxen, a single little woman, having bound it with her girdle, moved and drew along as a testimony of her chastity; that a Vestal virgin, about whose corruption a question was pending, filling a sieve with water from the Tiber, and it not flowing through, removed the controversy)—these things, therefore, and such as these, are in no wise to be compared, in power and greatness, to those which we read to have been done among the people of God; how much less those things which were adjudged to be forbidden and to be punished even by the laws of those very peoples who worshipped such gods, namely, magical or theurgical arts!
most of which deceive the senses of mortals merely in outward appearance by imaginary mockery, such as bringing down the moon, 'until,' as Lucan says, 'brought nearer, she foams down upon the herbs set beneath'; while some, even if they seem in performance to be matched by certain deeds of the pious, yet the very end by which they are distinguished shows that these our miracles incomparably excel. For by those miracles the gods are so much the less to be worshipped with sacrifices, the more they demand them; but by ours the one God is commended, who shows, both by the testimony of His scriptures and afterwards by the removal of those very sacrifices, that He needs no such things. If, therefore, angels demand sacrifice for themselves, those are to be preferred to them who demand it not for themselves, but for God, Creator of all, whom they serve.
For hereby they show with how sincere a love they cherish us, when through sacrifice they wish us to be subjected not to themselves but to Him, by the contemplation of whom they too are blessed, and to attain unto Him from whom they themselves have not departed. But if the angels who wish sacrifices to be made not to one but to many wish it made not to themselves but to those gods whose angels they are: even so, those angels are to be preferred to them who are angels of the one God of gods, to whom they so bid sacrifice be offered that they forbid it to any other, whereas none of the former forbids it to Him alone, to whom these bid that sacrifice be offered.
But further, if—as their proud deceit rather indicates—they are neither good angels nor angels of good gods, but evil demons, who wish not the one and supreme God alone, but themselves, to be worshipped with sacrifices: what greater protection is to be chosen against them than that of the one God, whom the good angels serve, who bid us to serve with sacrifice, not themselves, but Him whose sacrifice we ourselves ought to be? [XVII] Accordingly, the law of God, which was given in the edicts of angels, in which the one God of gods was commanded to be worshipped with the religion of sacred rites, while all others whatsoever were forbidden, was placed in an ark, which ark was called the ark of the testimony.
By which name it is sufficiently signified that God, who was worshipped through all those things, is not wont to be circumscribed or contained in a place, although His responses and certain signs to human senses were given from the place of that ark—but rather that the testimonies of His will were furnished thence; which also that same law was, written on tablets of stone and placed in the ark, as I have said, which, in the time of their pilgrimage in the wilderness, the priests carried with due veneration together with the tabernacle, which was likewise called the tabernacle of the testimony; and there was a sign, that by day a cloud appeared, which by night shone like fire; and when this cloud moved, the camp moved, and where it stood, the camp was pitched.