The City of God: Book 10

It is the settled conviction of all thinking people that every human being wants to be happy. But who actually achieves happiness, and how they achieve it, are questions that have fueled endless, bitter controversy, draining the energy and leisure of philosophers across the ages. To catalogue and debate their various opinions would be tedious and unnecessary. The reader will recall what we said in the eighth book, where we were selecting the philosophers best suited for a discussion about the future life of happiness: specifically, whether we can reach that life by offering divine honor to the one true God, the Creator of all gods, or by worshipping many gods. There is no need to repeat that argument here, and if the reader has forgotten it, a quick re-reading will bring it back. We settled on the Platonists, rightly regarded as the finest of the philosophers, because they were perceptive enough to recognize that the human soul, being immortal and rational, cannot be happy unless it shares in the light of the God who made both the soul and the world. They also understood that the happy life every person desires cannot be reached by anyone who does not cling, with a pure and devoted love, to that one supreme and unchanging good, which is God Himself. Yet even these philosophers, whether they were bending to the ignorance of the common people or, as the apostle says, "becoming vain in their imaginations" (Rom 1:21), either supposed themselves or allowed others to suppose that many gods should be worshipped. Some of them even held that divine honor, through worship and sacrifice, should be given to demons, an error I have already addressed and refuted. We must now, with God's help, determine what those immortal and blessed spirits who dwell in the heavenly places think about our religious worship and devotion. These are the spirits who exist among the dominations, principalities, and powers, whom the Platonists call gods and others call either good demons or, as we do, angels. To put it plainly: do the angels want us to offer sacrifice and worship, and to consecrate our possessions and ourselves, to them, or only to God, who is Lord over them and over us alike?

This is the worship that belongs to the Divine, or, to be more precise, to the Deity. Since no Latin term captures it exactly, I will use a Greek word whenever necessary. *Latreia* (λατρεία), wherever it appears in Scripture, is translated as "service." The service owed to other human beings, which the apostle refers to when he writes that servants must be subject to their masters, is expressed by a different Greek word entirely. But the service rendered to God alone through worship is almost always called *latreia* in the writings of those who drew from the divine oracles. We can't simply call it *cultus*, because that word doesn't suggest something owed exclusively to God. The same term applies to the respect we show toward people, whether living or remembered. It also gives us words like "agriculture," "colonist," and others. The pagans even call their gods *coelicolae* (dwellers of heaven), not because they worship the sky, but because they inhabit it and, in a sense, settle it as colonists. This isn't the same as the colonists who are bound to their native land to work it under the authority of its owners. It's closer to what the great master of the Latin language meant when he wrote, "There was an ancient city inhabited by Tyrian colonists." He called them colonists not because they farmed the land, but simply because they lived there. In the same way, cities that branch off from larger ones are called colonies. So while it's perfectly true that, in a specific and restricted sense, *cultus* can be rendered to God alone, the word carries too many other meanings for it to serve, by itself, as the Latin expression for the worship that belongs to God.

The word "religion" might seem to capture most precisely the worship owed to God alone, and Latin translators have indeed used it to render the Greek *θρησκεία*. Yet both ordinary people and the most educated alike use "religion" to describe human bonds, relationships, and family ties. This makes the word dangerously ambiguous when we try to discuss the worship of God specifically, since we can't simply declare that religion means nothing other than the worship of God without contradicting the common usage that applies the term to social obligations as well. "Piety," or as the Greeks say *εὐσέβεια*, is generally understood as the proper word for the worship of God. Yet this word, too, gets applied to dutifulness toward parents. Ordinary people also use it for acts of charity, which probably stems from the fact that God commands such works and declares that He takes more pleasure in them than in sacrifices. From this same usage, God Himself has come to be called "pious," though the Greeks never use *εὐσεβεῖν* in that sense, even while their common people also apply *εὐσέβεια* to charitable works. In certain passages of Scripture, writers have tried to preserve a clearer distinction by using not the more general *εὐσέβεια* but *θεοσέβεια*, which literally means the worship of God. We, for our part, can't capture either of these ideas in a single word. This worship, then, which in Greek is *λατρεία* and in Latin *servitus* (service), meaning specifically the service owed to God alone; this worship, which in Greek is *θρησκεία* and in Latin *religio* (religion), meaning the bond that ties us to God alone; this worship, which the Greeks call *θεοσέβεια* and which we can only render as "the worship of God" since no single word suffices: all of this, we say, belongs exclusively to the one true God, who makes those who worship Him into gods themselves. Therefore, whoever these immortal and blessed inhabitants of heaven may be, if they don't love us and don't desire our happiness, we have no reason to worship them. And if they do love us and wish us well, they cannot possibly want us to find happiness through any means other than what they themselves have enjoyed. How could they want our blessedness to flow from one source while theirs flows from another?

With these more admirable philosophers, however, we have no real quarrel on this point. They recognized, and expressed in various ways throughout their writings, that these spirits share the same source of happiness as we do: a certain intelligible light, which is their God, distinct from themselves, illumining them so that they are filled with light and enjoy perfect happiness through participation in God. Plotinus, commenting on Plato, repeatedly and forcefully argues that not even the soul they believe to be the soul of the world derives its blessedness from any other source than we do. That source is the Light that is distinct from it, that created it, and by whose intelligible illumination it enjoys light in intelligible things. He also compares these spiritual realities to the great and visible heavenly bodies, as if God were the sun and the soul the moon, since they hold that the moon receives its light from the sun. This great Platonist therefore argues that the rational soul, or rather the intellectual soul (a category in which he includes the souls of the blessed immortals who inhabit heaven), has no nature superior to it except God, the Creator of the world and of the soul itself. He further holds that these heavenly spirits draw their blessed life and the light of truth from the same source as we do, which aligns with the Gospel where we read: "There was a man sent from God whose name was John; he came as a witness to bear witness to that Light, so that through Him all might believe. He was not that Light, but came to bear witness to the Light. That was the true Light which enlightens every man who comes into the world" (John 1:6-9). This distinction makes it clear enough that the rational or intellectual soul, such as John possessed, cannot be its own light but must receive illumination from another, the true Light. John himself acknowledges this in his testimony: "We have all received from His fullness" (John 1:16).

Given all of this, if the Platonists, or those who share their views, had truly known God, glorified Him, and given Him thanks; if they had not become lost in their own speculations; if they had neither invented nor surrendered to popular errors: they would certainly have acknowledged that neither could the blessed immortals hold on to happiness, nor could we wretched mortals ever reach it, without worshipping the one God of gods, who belongs to them and to us alike. To Him we owe the service the Greeks call *latreia* (worship due to God alone), whether we offer it outwardly in ritual or inwardly in the soul. We are all His temple, each of us individually and all of us together, because He graciously dwells in each person and in the whole harmonious body of believers, being no greater in all of them than in each one, since He is neither stretched out nor divided. When our heart rises toward Him, it becomes His altar. The priest who intercedes for us is His Only-begotten Son. We sacrifice bleeding victims to Him when we contend for His truth even to the point of death. We offer Him the sweetest incense when we come before Him burning with holy and devoted love. We dedicate ourselves to Him, along with every gift He has placed in us. Through solemn feasts and appointed days, we consecrate the memory of His benefits, so that ungrateful forgetfulness does not quietly overtake us with the passing of time. On the altar of our heart, we offer Him the sacrifice of humility and praise, kindled by the fire of ardent love. All of this is so that we may see Him, as far as He can be seen, and cleave to Him. For this reason we are cleansed from every stain of sin and disordered passion, and consecrated in His name. He is the fountain of our happiness; He is the goal of all our desires. When we are attached to Him, or rather re-attached to Him (for we had pulled away and lost our hold on Him), we are drawn toward Him by love, so that we may rest in Him and find our blessedness by reaching that end. The good that philosophers have debated so fiercely is nothing other than union with God. It is, if I may put it this way, by spiritually embracing Him that the intellectual soul is filled and made fruitful with true virtues. We are commanded to love this good with all our heart, all our soul, and all our strength. Those who love us should lead us toward this good, and we in turn should lead those we love toward it. In this way, the two great commandments are fulfilled, on which all the law and the prophets depend: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your mind, and with all your soul," and "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." For in order that a person might love himself wisely, an end was set before him toward which he could direct all his actions and so find blessedness, since anyone who truly loves himself wants nothing less than this. And the end set before him is to draw near to God. So when someone who loves himself rightly is commanded to love his neighbor as himself, what is being asked of him but that he do everything in his power to bring his neighbor to the love of God? This is the worship of God; this is true religion; this is genuine piety; this is the service owed to God alone. If any immortal power, no matter how great its virtue, loves us as itself, it must desire that we find our happiness by submitting to God, in submission to whom that power itself finds happiness. If it does not worship God, it is miserable, because it is cut off from God. If it does worship God, it cannot wish to be worshipped in God's place. On the contrary, these higher powers wholeheartedly embrace the divine verdict recorded in Scripture: "He that sacrifices to any god, except to the Lord only, shall be utterly destroyed" (Exod 22:20).

Setting aside for now the other forms of religious worship offered to God, surely no one would dare to claim that sacrifice is owed to anyone but God. Many elements of divine worship are, admittedly, misapplied in honoring human beings, whether out of excessive humility or dangerous flattery. Yet even when this happens, the people being honored, venerated, or even adored are still regarded as merely human. Who has ever thought to offer sacrifice except to someone he knew, believed, or at least pretended to be a god? As for how ancient a part of God's worship sacrifice truly is, the two brothers Cain and Abel make this abundantly clear: God rejected the older brother's sacrifice and looked with favor on the younger's.

Who could be foolish enough to think that the things offered to God are things He actually needs for His own use? Scripture dismisses this idea in many places. Rather than belabor the point, one brief line from a psalm is enough: "I have said to the Lord, You are my God, for You have no need of my goodness" (Ps 16:2). We must understand, then, that God needs nothing, not cattle, not any earthly or material thing, and not even human righteousness. Whatever genuine worship is offered to God benefits not Him, but the worshiper. No one would claim to have done a favor to a spring by drinking from it, or to the light by seeing with it. The fact that the ancient church offered animal sacrifices, which God's people today read about without repeating, points to one thing only: those sacrifices signified the things we do in order to draw near to God and to encourage our neighbors to do the same. A sacrifice, then, is the visible sign of an invisible one, a sacred symbol pointing beyond itself.

This is why the penitent in the psalm, or perhaps the psalmist himself, while pleading with God for mercy on his sins, says: "If You desired sacrifice, I would give it; You take no delight in burnt offerings. The sacrifice of God is a broken spirit; a heart contrite and humble God will not despise" (Ps 51:16-17). Notice how, in the very words where he acknowledges that God refuses sacrifice, he also reveals what God truly requires. God does not want the sacrifice of a slaughtered animal; He wants the sacrifice of a contrite heart. The sacrifice He says God does not want is therefore a symbol of the sacrifice God does want. God does not desire sacrifices in the way foolish people imagine, as though they gratify Him or give Him pleasure. If He had not wanted the sacrifices He truly requires, such as a heart broken and humbled by genuine repentance, to be represented by those outward offerings that people assumed He enjoyed, the old law would never have required them in the first place. They were always meant to be set aside when the right moment came, so that people would not mistake the symbols for the realities, or suppose that the outward offerings themselves, rather than what they pointed to, were what pleased God or made us acceptable to Him.

This is why another psalm says: "If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world is mine and everything in it. Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?" (Ps 50:12-13). The meaning is clear: even if such things were necessary to God, He would never need to ask us for what He already holds in His own hand. Then the psalm goes on to name what these offerings actually signify: "Offer to God the sacrifice of praise, and pay your vows to the Most High. Call on me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will glorify me" (Ps 50:14-15). The same point appears in one of the prophets: "With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the High God? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Mic 6:6-8). In these lines, the prophet draws a clear and explicit distinction: God does not require outward sacrifices for their own sake, but He does require the realities those sacrifices represent.

The letter to the Hebrews makes the same point directly: "Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased" (Heb 13:16). And when Scripture says, "I desire mercy rather than sacrifice" (Hos 6:6), it does not mean that sacrifice is rejected altogether; it means that one kind of sacrifice is preferred over another. What ordinary speech calls "sacrifice" is only the symbol of the true sacrifice, and mercy is that true sacrifice. This is why it is written, as I just quoted, that "with such sacrifices God is well pleased." All the divine instructions we read concerning the sacrifices in the tabernacle or the temple must therefore be understood in light of love for God and love for our neighbor, because, as Scripture says, "on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets" (Matt 22:40).

A true sacrifice, then, is any act performed with the aim of uniting us to God in holy fellowship, oriented toward that supreme good and final end in which alone we can find genuine blessedness. This means that even the mercy we show to other people is not a sacrifice if it isn't shown for God's sake. For although a sacrifice is made or offered by a human being, it is fundamentally a divine thing, as those who first used the word *sacrifice* intended to convey. In the same way, a person who is consecrated in God's name and devoted to God becomes a sacrifice insofar as he dies to the world in order to live to God. This is part of the mercy each person owes to himself, as it is written: "Have mercy on your soul by pleasing God." Our body, too, becomes a sacrifice when we discipline it through temperance, provided we do so as we should, for God's sake, so that we don't offer our members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but as instruments of righteousness to God. Urging us toward this sacrifice, the apostle writes: "I urge you, therefore, brothers, by the mercy of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service" (Rom 12:1). If the body, which is the lesser part and serves the soul as a servant or instrument, becomes a sacrifice when it is used rightly and with reference to God, how much more does the soul itself become a sacrifice when it offers itself to God? In doing so, it is set ablaze by the fire of His love, receives something of His beauty, becomes pleasing to Him, sheds the shape of earthly desire, and is remolded into the image of enduring loveliness. The apostle goes on to say exactly this: "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God" (Rom 12:2). Since true sacrifices are acts of mercy toward ourselves or others, performed with reference to God; and since acts of mercy aim at nothing other than relieving suffering or conferring happiness; and since there is no happiness apart from that good of which it is said, "It is good for me to draw near to God" (Ps 73:28), it follows that the whole redeemed city, that is, the congregation and community of the saints, is offered to God as our sacrifice through the great High Priest, who offered Himself to God in His passion for us, so that we might be members of this glorious head, in accordance with the form of a servant. For it was in that form that He offered, and in that form that He was offered, because it is in that form that He is Mediator, in that form our Priest, in that form the Sacrifice. So when the apostle had urged us to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, our reasonable service, and not to be conformed to the world but transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we might discern the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God, that is, the true sacrifice of ourselves, he continues: "For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another, having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us" (Rom 12:3-6). This is the sacrifice of Christians: we, though many, are one body in Christ. And this is also the sacrifice that the Church continually celebrates in the sacrament of the altar, known to the faithful, in which she teaches that she herself is offered in the very offering she makes to God.

It is entirely fitting that these blessed and immortal spirits, who dwell in celestial realms and rejoice in the fullness of their Creator's presence, firm in His eternity, assured in His truth, made holy by His grace, should look upon us miserable mortals with compassion and tenderness. They want us to become immortal and happy, and precisely because of that, they do not ask us to sacrifice to themselves, but to Him whose sacrifice they know themselves to share with us. For we and they together form the one city of God, of which the psalm declares, "Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God" (Ps 87:3): the human portion making its pilgrimage here below, the angelic portion offering its aid from above. From that heavenly city, where God's will is the eternal and unchangeable law, from that heavenly council (for they deliberate on our behalf), the holy Scriptures came down to us through the ministry of angels. In those Scriptures it is written, "He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed" (Exod 22:20). This Scripture, this law, these commands have been confirmed by such extraordinary miracles that it is abundantly clear to whom these immortal and blessed spirits, who long for us to become like themselves, wish us to offer our worship.

It would take far too long to recount all the ancient miracles performed in confirmation of God's promise to Abraham, made thousands of years ago, that through his descendants all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Who could fail to marvel that Abraham's barren wife gave birth to a son at an age when even a fertile woman could no longer bear children? Or that when Abraham made his sacrifice, a flame from heaven passed between the divided portions? Or that the angels who appeared in human form, whom he had welcomed as guests and who had renewed God's promise of offspring, also foretold the destruction of Sodom by fire from heaven? His nephew Lot was rescued from Sodom by the angels just as the fire was falling, while his wife, who looked back as she fled, was immediately turned into a pillar of salt. She stands as a solemn warning that no one in the process of being saved should look back with longing at what they are leaving behind. Consider also the wonders Moses performed to free God's people from the bondage of slavery in Egypt. The magicians of Pharaoh, the king who tyrannized over this people, were permitted to perform certain marvels of their own, but only so that their eventual defeat would be all the more decisive. They worked through the magical arts and incantations that evil spirits and demons practice, while Moses, armed with far greater power, with justice on his side, and with the help of angels, defeated them with ease in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. In fact, the magicians failed at the third plague, while Moses, carrying out the miracles entrusted to him, brought ten plagues upon the land in total, until even the hardened hearts of Pharaoh and the Egyptians gave way and the people were released. But Pharaoh quickly changed his mind and set out to pursue the departing Hebrews, who had already crossed the sea on dry ground. His forces were swallowed up and destroyed when the waters closed back over them.

What can be said about all those frequent and astonishing displays of divine power during the people's journey through the wilderness? There were the waters that could not be drunk until God commanded a piece of wood to be thrown into them, at which point their bitterness vanished and they quenched the people's thirst. There was the manna that fell from heaven to satisfy their hunger, which bred worms and rotted whenever anyone collected more than the allotted amount, yet remained fresh when a double portion was gathered the day before the Sabbath, since gathering it on that day was not permitted. There were the birds that flooded the camp and satisfied the people's craving for meat when they longed for flesh that seemed impossible to provide for so vast a multitude. There were the enemies who blocked their path with armed force and were defeated without the loss of a single Hebrew, while Moses prayed with his hands stretched out in the form of a cross. There were the rebels who rose up among God's people, broke away from the divinely ordered community, and were swallowed alive by the earth, a visible sign of an invisible punishment. There was the rock struck with the staff, which poured out water in abundance for the entire host. There were the deadly serpent bites, sent as just punishment for sin, but healed by looking up at the bronze serpent lifted on a pole, so that the suffering people were not only cured but also shown a symbol of the crucifixion: death destroyed by death. This same serpent was preserved as a memorial of that event, but was later worshipped by the people in their error as an idol, and was rightly destroyed by the devout and God-fearing King Hezekiah, much to his lasting credit.

These miracles, and many others like them that would take too long to recount, were performed to commend the worship of the one true God and to forbid the worship of countless false gods. They were accomplished through simple faith and sincere confidence in God, not through incantations and charms produced by criminal meddling with the unseen world. This kind of meddling is what people call magic, or by the more repellent name of necromancy, or the more respectable-sounding label of theurgy. Those who use that last term want to draw a distinction between two groups: common magicians, who practice necromancy and are condemned for their involvement in forbidden arts, and theurgists, whom they consider worthy of admiration. The truth, however, is that both groups are equally enslaved to the deceptive rituals of the demons they invoke, whatever angelic names they may use to dress those demons up.

Even Porphyry promises some kind of purification of the soul through theurgy, though he does so with noticeable hesitation and embarrassment, and he denies that this art can secure anyone's return to God. You can see his thinking pulled in two directions, caught between his commitment to philosophy and an art he privately regards as presumptuous and sacrilegious. At one moment he warns us to avoid theurgy as deceptive, legally prohibited, and dangerous to those who practice it; then, as if conceding ground to its defenders, he declares it useful for cleansing one part of the soul. Not the intellectual part, mind you, by which we recognize the truth of things that can only be grasped by the mind and have no physical form, but the spiritual part, which processes the images of material things. This part, he says, is prepared and fitted for communion with spirits and angels, and for the vision of the gods, through certain theurgic consecrations, or what practitioners call mysteries. He acknowledges, however, that these theurgic mysteries impart no such purity to the intellectual soul as would fit it to see God or perceive the things that truly exist. From this admission we can draw our own conclusions about what kind of gods these actually are, and what kind of vision theurgic consecrations actually provide, if that vision cannot reach the things which truly exist. He goes on to say that the rational soul, or the intellectual soul as he prefers to call it, can ascend to the heavens without the spiritual part being cleansed by theurgic art, and that this art cannot purify the spiritual part sufficiently to grant it entrance into immortality and eternity. And so, while he distinguishes angels from demons by placing demons in the air and angels in the ether and the empyrean, and while he advises cultivating the friendship of some demon who might assist us after death and lift us at least a little above the earth (since he admits that reaching the heavenly company of angels requires an entirely different path), he simultaneously warns us to avoid the company of demons. He tells us that the soul, as it atones for its sins after death, comes to despise the worship of the very demons that had ensnared it. And even regarding theurgy itself, which he recommends as a means of winning the favor of angels and demons, he cannot deny that it deals with powers who either begrudge the soul its purity themselves, or serve those who do. He voices this complaint through the words of some Chaldean: "A good man in Chaldea," he says, "found that all his strenuous efforts to cleanse his soul came to nothing, because another man with influence in these matters, who envied him his purity, had prayed to the powers and bound them by conjuring not to hear his request. Therefore," Porphyry adds, "what the one man bound, the other could not loose." From this he concludes that theurgy is a craft capable of producing not only good but evil among gods and men alike, and that the gods themselves have passions and are disturbed and agitated by the very emotions that Apuleius attributed to demons and men, but from which he shielded the gods by virtue of that lofty dwelling place which, following Plato, he assigned to them.

But here we encounter another Platonist, one far more learned than Apuleius: Porphyry, who claims that through some form of theurgy, even the gods themselves are subject to passions and disturbances. Through ritual invocations, they were supposedly bound and terrified to the point where they could not grant purity of soul. They were so frightened by whoever imposed a wicked command on them that they could not, through that same theurgy, be freed from their terror and fulfill the righteous request of the one who prayed to them, or accomplish the good he sought. Anyone who fails to see that all of this is the fabrication of deceiving demons must be their miserable slave, cut off from the grace of the true Liberator. If the Chaldean had been dealing with genuinely good gods, then surely a well-intentioned man seeking to purify his own soul would have carried more weight with them than a malicious man trying to obstruct him. Or, if the gods were just and judged the man unworthy of the purification he sought, they should at least not have been frightened by some envious person, nor hindered, as Porphyry openly admits, by fear of a stronger deity. They should simply have refused the request on their own judgment. It is also remarkable that this well-intentioned Chaldean, who wanted to purify his soul through theurgical rites, could find no superior deity willing either to frighten the already-frightened gods into granting the benefit, or to calm their fears so they could act freely for good, even assuming the well-meaning theurgist had no rites of his own by which he might purge the taint of fear from the very gods he was invoking for his soul's purification. And why is it that there exists a god with the power to terrify lesser gods, yet none with the power to free them from that terror? Is there a god who hears the envious man and frightens the others away from doing good, while no god can be found who hears the well-disposed man and removes that fear so they might help him? What an excellent theurgy this is. What an admirable purification of the soul: a system in which the force of impure envy carries more weight than the petition of purity and holiness. We should rather turn away in disgust from the deceptions of such wicked spirits and listen to sound teaching. As for those who perform these foul cleansings through sacrilegious rites and then behold, in their initiated state (as Porphyry further claims, though we may well question such visions), certain wonderfully beautiful appearances of angels or gods: this is precisely what the apostle means when he speaks of "Satan transforming himself into an angel of light." These are the deceptive apparitions of a spirit whose sole aim is to ensnare wretched souls in the false worship of many counterfeit gods, and to draw them away from the true worship of the true God, by whom alone they are cleansed and healed. This spirit, like Proteus in the old stories, "turns himself into all shapes," and is equally dangerous whether he attacks us as an open enemy or approaches us wearing the mask of a friend.

Porphyry struck a far better note in his letter to Anebo the Egyptian. Writing in the guise of a sincere inquirer seeking guidance, he actually dismantles and discredits these sacrilegious arts from within. In that letter, he dismisses all demons as beings too foolish to resist the vapors of sacrifice, creatures who dwell not in the ether but in the lower air beneath the moon, and in the moon itself. Yet he lacks the courage to lay every deception, every malicious and absurd practice that rightly disgusts him, at the feet of all demons equally. He acknowledges that demons as a class are foolish, but he still bends to popular opinion far enough to call some of them benevolent. He expresses puzzlement that sacrifices don't merely incline the gods toward human wishes but actually compel and coerce them. He's also at a loss to explain how the sun, the moon, and the other visible celestial bodies (and he has no doubt they are bodies) can be counted as gods, if what distinguishes gods from demons is their incorporeality. And if these celestial beings are gods, how can some be called beneficent and others harmful? How can beings with physical bodies be grouped together with gods who have none? He goes on to ask, still posing as someone genuinely uncertain, whether diviners and miracle workers draw on some exceptional power within their own souls, or whether that power is channeled into them from outside by spirits. He leans toward the latter view, reasoning that it is through the use of stones and herbs that these practitioners cast spells on people, open locked doors, and perform similar wonders. This leads him to note that some thinkers believe there exists a race of beings whose very nature is to respond to human invocation: deceitful, endlessly resourceful, capable of taking any form, mimicking gods, demons, and the dead alike. According to this view, it is this race that produces everything that appears to be either good or evil, though they never actually assist with anything genuinely good and are, in fact, entirely ignorant of it. They make wickedness effortless while throwing up obstacles before those who earnestly pursue virtue. They are swollen with pride and recklessness, drawn to the smell of sacrificial offerings, and easily won over by flattery. Porphyry describes all these characteristics of this deceitful and malicious order of spirits, who invade the souls of men and distort their perception both in sleep and in waking life, not as settled convictions of his own but with just enough suspicion and hesitation to present them as widely held opinions rather than established truths. We should have some sympathy for this great philosopher as he struggled to understand and forthrightly condemn the entire company of devils, a company that any ordinary Christian woman could describe without hesitation and denounce without reservation. Perhaps, though, he was simply reluctant to give offense to Anebo, the very person he was writing to, who was himself a leading patron of these mysteries, or to the others who looked on magical feats with reverence, treating them as divine works intimately bound up with the worship of the gods.

Porphyry continues on this subject, and still writing in the voice of someone genuinely asking questions, he raises points that no reasonable person could attribute to anything other than malicious and deceptive powers.

He asks why, after the higher class of spirits has been invoked, the lower ones are then commanded to carry out the wicked desires of men; why these spirits refuse to hear a man who has just come from a woman's bed, while they themselves have no hesitation about tempting men to incest and adultery; why their priests are told to avoid eating meat for fear of being polluted by bodily vapors, while the spirits themselves are drawn in by the smoke of sacrifices and other such fumes; why the initiated are forbidden to touch a dead body, while their own rituals depend almost entirely on dead bodies; and why a man given over to some vice should direct his threats not at a demon or the soul of a dead man, but at the sun, the moon, or some other heavenly body, which he tries to frighten with imaginary terrors in order to extract a real benefit. He threatens, for instance, to tear down the sky and other such impossibilities, so that these gods, frightened like foolish children by absurd and empty threats, will do what they are told. Porphyry also mentions that a man named Chaeremon, deeply versed in these sacred or rather sacrilegious mysteries, had written that the famous Egyptian mysteries of Isis and her husband Osiris held great power over the gods to compel their obedience, when the person using the spells threatened to expose or destroy those mysteries, and cried out in a threatening voice that he would scatter the limbs of Osiris if his orders were ignored. Porphyry is understandably astonished that a man would hurl such wild and hollow threats at the gods, not at minor gods of little account, but at the heavenly gods themselves, those that shine with the light of the stars, and that these threats should prove so effective as to constrain them with irresistible force and frighten them into compliance. He is right to suggest, still playing the role of someone puzzling over these strange phenomena, that they are the work of that class of spirits he described earlier, though he framed it as if reporting other people's views: spirits who deceive not by their nature, as he put it, but through their own corruption, and who impersonate gods and dead men, though not demons, as he claimed, since demons is precisely what they are. As for his notion that through herbs, stones, animals, certain incantations and sounds, and drawings, some invented and some modeled on the movements of the heavenly bodies, men can create forces on earth capable of producing various effects, all of that is simply the trickery these demons practice on those under their influence, for the sake of their own amusement at their victims' expense. Either, then, Porphyry was genuinely uncertain and was raising these points to demonstrate beyond doubt that they were the work not of powers that help us toward true life, but of deceptive demons; or, to put the most charitable interpretation on the philosopher's approach, he adopted this method with the Egyptian who was deeply attached to these errors and proud of them, so as not to offend him by taking the posture of a teacher, nor to agitate his mind by coming at him as an open opponent, but instead, by posing as a curious student genuinely eager to learn, to draw his attention to these matters and reveal how thoroughly they deserve to be despised and abandoned. Near the end of his letter, Porphyry asks Anebo to explain what Egyptian wisdom identifies as the path to true happiness. But as for those who seek communion with the gods only to track down a runaway slave, acquire property, arrange a profitable marriage, or handle similar trivial concerns, he declares that their claims to wisdom are worthless. He adds that these same gods, even granting that their pronouncements on other matters were true, were so unhelpful and inadequate in what they revealed about happiness that they cannot be either gods or good demons; they must be either the spirit known as the deceiver, or nothing more than products of the imagination.

Given that these arts produce wonders that far exceed human power, what conclusion can we reach except this: that predictions and operations which appear miraculous and divine, yet form no part of the worship of the one God (in whose service, as the Platonists themselves freely acknowledge, all true blessedness consists), are nothing more than the amusements of wicked spirits seeking to seduce and obstruct the genuinely devout? By the same logic, we must also conclude that all miracles, whether performed by angels or by other means, so long as they serve to commend the worship of the one God in whom alone blessedness is found, are carried out either by those who love us with a true and godly love, or through such beings as instruments, with God Himself working within them. We cannot accept the position of those who claim that the invisible God performs no visible miracles, since even they believe He created the world, which they surely cannot deny is visible. Whatever wonder occurs in this world is certainly less astonishing than the world itself: the sky, the earth, and everything within them, all of which God made. And just as the Creator Himself is hidden and beyond human comprehension, so too is the manner of His creation. The standing miracle of this visible world goes largely unnoticed precisely because it is always before us, yet when we pause to truly contemplate it, it surpasses in wonder even the rarest and most extraordinary marvels. Man himself, after all, is a greater miracle than anything accomplished through him. God, therefore, who made the visible heavens and earth, does not hesitate to perform visible miracles within them, precisely so that the soul, buried as it is in visible things, might be awakened to worship Him, the Invisible. The place and time of these miracles, however, rest entirely within His unchangeable will, in which future events are ordered as though they have already taken place. He moves temporal things without Himself moving in time. He does not know things yet to come in one way and things already past in another; nor does He hear those who pray any differently than He sees those who will pray. For even when His angels hear us, it is He Himself who hears us in them, as in His true temple not made with human hands, as in those people who are His saints. And His answers, though they unfold in time, were arranged by His eternal appointment long before time began.

We shouldn't be surprised that God, invisible by nature, so often appeared visibly to the patriarchs. Consider the analogy: the sound that carries a thought conceived in the silence of the mind is not the thought itself. In the same way, the form through which God, invisible in His own nature, became visible was not God Himself. And yet it truly was He who was seen in that form, just as a thought itself is genuinely heard in the sound of a voice. The patriarchs understood this: even though the bodily form was not God, they were seeing the invisible God. Moses himself conversed with God, and yet he said, "If I have found grace in Your sight, show me Yourself, that I may see and know You." And because the law was given not to one man or a handful of enlightened individuals, but to an entire nation of people, it was fitting that it should be accompanied by awe-inspiring signs. Great marvels were performed by the ministry of angels before the people at the mountain where the law was being delivered through a single man, while the multitude looked on at the terrifying spectacle. The people of Israel trusted Moses in a way that was fundamentally different from how the Spartans trusted Lycurgus, who claimed to have received his laws from Jupiter or Apollo. When the law commanding the worship of one God was given to Israel, wonders and earthquakes, as many as divine wisdom judged sufficient, were produced before the eyes of all, so that they would know it was the Creator Himself who could bend creation to the task of proclaiming His law.

The education of the human race, represented by the people of God, has unfolded much like the development of an individual person, moving through distinct epochs and stages so that humanity might gradually rise from earthly concerns to heavenly ones, from the visible world to the invisible. This goal was kept consistently in view, so that even during the period when God's people were promised material rewards, the one God was still held up as the sole object of worship. The purpose was to ensure that people would acknowledge no one other than the true Creator and Lord of the spirit, even when their attention was drawn to the earthly blessings of this passing life. Anyone who denies that everything angels or human beings can give us rests ultimately in the hand of the one Almighty is simply not thinking clearly. The Platonist philosopher Plotinus, in his writings on providence, argues from the beauty of flowers and foliage that the supreme God, whose own beauty is invisible and beyond description, extends His providential care all the way down to these lowly earthly things. His point is that all these fragile and perishable things could not possess such exquisite and intricate beauty unless they were shaped by the One whose unseen and unchanging beauty continuously flows through all of creation. The Lord Jesus makes the same point when He says, "Consider the lilies, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say to you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will He clothe you, O you of little faith!" (Matt 6:28-30). It was best, then, that the human soul, still weak in its attachment to earthly things, should be trained to seek from God alone even these small, temporal gifts and the basic necessities of this passing life. Compared to eternal blessings, such things are of little account; but by learning to seek even them from God, the soul would be less likely to let its desire for them pull it away from worshiping the One to whom we draw near precisely by letting go of such things.

And so it pleased Divine Providence, as I have mentioned and as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, that the law commanding the worship of one God should be delivered through the ministry of angels. Yet among them, the person of God Himself visibly appeared, not in His own proper substance, which remains forever invisible to mortal eyes, but through unmistakable signs produced by creation in obedience to its Creator. He also made use of human speech, uttering words syllable by syllable in sequence, even though in His own nature He does not speak in a bodily way but a spiritual one: not to the senses but to the mind, not in words that unfold through time but, if I may put it this way, eternally, with neither beginning nor end. What He says is received not by the physical ear but by the mental ear of His ministers and messengers, who are immortally blessed in the enjoyment of His unchangeable truth. The directions they receive in some ineffable way, they carry out without delay or difficulty in the sensible, visible world. This law was given in keeping with the age of the world, and it contained at first earthly promises, as I have noted, though those promises served as symbols of eternal ones. Few people understood the eternal realities behind them, even as many participated in the outward ceremonies that signified them. Nevertheless, both the words and the visible rites of that law speak with one voice: worship one God. Not one deity among many, but the One who made heaven and earth, and every soul and every spirit distinct from Himself. He created; everything else was created. And for both existence and flourishing, all things depend on the One who made them.

Which angels, then, should we trust on the question of blessed and eternal life? Those who demand religious worship and require that people sacrifice to them? Or those who say all such worship belongs to the one God who created everything, and who teach us to offer it to Him in genuine devotion, the God by whose vision they themselves are already blessed, and in whom they promise we too will find our blessedness? That vision of God is a beauty so immense and so infinitely desirable that Plotinus himself doesn't hesitate to say that anyone who possesses every other good in abundance, yet lacks this one, is utterly miserable. So then: some angels work miracles to draw us toward worshipping God, while others work miracles to draw us toward worshipping themselves. The first group forbids us to worship the second group, while the second group doesn't dare forbid us to worship God. Whom should we listen to? Let the Platonists answer. Let any philosopher answer, or the theurgists, or rather the *periurgists* (a fitting name for those who practice such arts). Let everyone answer, provided there remains in them even a spark of that natural perception which rational beings possess by virtue of their creation. Tell us: should we sacrifice to the gods or angels who command us to sacrifice to them, or to the One whom we are commanded to worship by those who refuse worship for themselves and for all others alike? Even if neither side had worked a single miracle and had simply issued commands, one side demanding sacrifice to themselves and the other forbidding it and directing us to God instead, any godly mind could easily have recognized which command came from proud arrogance and which from true religion. I will go further. Even if miracles had been performed only by those who demand sacrifice for themselves, while those who forbade this and directed us to sacrifice to the one God alone had chosen to forgo all visible miracles entirely, the authority of the latter should still have been preferred by anyone willing to use not just their eyes but their reason. But in fact, God, in order to establish the credibility of His truth, has worked miracles of surpassing greatness, clarity, and certainty through these immortal messengers who proclaim His majesty rather than their own pride. He has done this so that the spiritually vulnerable would not be seduced into false religion by those who demand sacrifice and try to overwhelm us with spectacular appeals to our senses. Given all of this, who could be so completely unreasonable as to refuse the truth, especially when he finds that it is announced by evidence even more compelling than what falsehood can offer?

As for the miracles that history attributes to the gods of the pagans, I need to draw a distinction. I'm not referring to the strange phenomena that occur periodically from unknown natural causes and are arranged by Divine Providence, such as monstrous births or unusual weather events, whether merely alarming or actually destructive, which are said to be produced and dispelled through dealings with demons and their deeply deceptive arts. Rather, I'm referring to those wonders that are clearly produced by the direct power and force of these beings: the household gods that Aeneas carried out of Troy reportedly moving on their own; Tarquin cutting a whetstone with a razor; the serpent of Epidaurus attaching itself as a companion to Aesculapius on his voyage to Rome; the ship carrying the image of the Phrygian mother, which no number of men and oxen could budge, being drawn forward by one frail woman who tied her belt to the vessel as proof of her chastity; and a vestal virgin, whose purity had been called into question, silencing her accusers by carrying water from the Tiber in a sieve without losing a single drop. Even these wonders cannot begin to compare, in greatness or moral significance, with what we read was accomplished among God's own people. Still less can we compare those marvels that even pagan law itself prohibits and punishes, namely the tricks of magic and theurgy, most of which are nothing more than illusions played on the senses, such as drawing down the moon so that, as Lucan puts it, it may shed a stronger influence on the plants. And if some of these feats do seem to rival what is accomplished through godly power, the purpose behind them reveals the difference and shows that ours are incomparably superior. The pagan miracles promote the worship of many gods who deserve reverence less the more they demand it, while our miracles promote the worship of the one God, who, both through the witness of His own Scriptures and through the eventual abolition of sacrifices, demonstrates that He has no need of such offerings. If, then, any angels demand sacrifice for themselves, we should prefer those who demand it not for themselves but for God, the Creator of all, whom they serve. In doing so, they prove the sincerity of their love for us, since they seek through sacrifice to bring us not under their own authority but under His, the One in whose contemplation they themselves find blessedness, drawing us toward the One from whom they themselves have never wandered. If, on the other hand, any angels call us to sacrifice not to one God but to many, and not to themselves but to the gods whose angels they are, then here too we should prefer the angels of the one God of gods, who command us to worship Him in a way that leaves no room for worshipping any other. And if it turns out, as their pride and deceitfulness strongly suggest, that these beings are neither good angels nor servants of good gods but wicked demons who want sacrifice offered not to the one supreme God but to themselves, then what better protection could we choose than the one God whom the good angels serve, those angels who call us to sacrifice not to themselves but to Him, the One to whom we ourselves ought to be a living sacrifice?

This is why the law of God, delivered through the ministry of angels and commanding that the one God of gods alone receive sacred worship, to the exclusion of all others, was placed in the ark known as the ark of the testimony. That name makes clear that God, who was worshipped through all those rites, was not literally confined or enclosed in that place, even though His responses came from it along with signs perceptible to the senses; rather, His will was declared from that throne. The law itself was engraved on tablets of stone and, as noted, placed in the ark, which the priests carried with due reverence throughout the wilderness wanderings, along with the tabernacle, which was likewise called the tabernacle of the testimony. A visible sign accompanied them throughout: a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. When the cloud moved, the camp broke and followed; where it stopped, the camp was pitched. Beyond these signs, and the voices that came from where the ark rested, there were other miraculous confirmations of the law. When the ark was carried across the Jordan on the entrance into the promised land, the upper part of the river stopped in its course while the lower part flowed on, leaving dry ground for both the ark and the people to cross. Then, when the ark was carried seven times around the first hostile, polytheistic city they encountered, its walls suddenly collapsed, though no hand had assaulted them and no battering ram had struck them. Later, when they were already settled in the promised land and the ark had been captured by their enemies as punishment for their sin, those captors triumphantly placed it in the temple of their favored god and shut it inside. When they opened the temple the next morning, they found the idol they had been praying to lying face down on the ground, broken beyond dignity. Alarmed by these portents and afflicted by further humiliating punishments, they returned the ark of the testimony to the people from whom they had taken it. And how did they return it? They placed it on a wagon, yoked to it cows whose calves had been taken away, and let the animals choose their own path, expecting that the divine will would be revealed through their movement. The cows, with no man driving or guiding them, walked steadily toward the Hebrews without once turning back toward the lowing of their calves, and so restored the ark to those who worshipped the God it represented. To God, wonders such as these are small things; to human beings, they are powerful enough to instruct and inspire reverence. If philosophers, and especially the Platonists, are rightly regarded as wiser than other thinkers, as I have just been noting, because they recognized that even the lowly and ordinary things of this earth are governed by divine providence, drawing that conclusion from the countless beauties observable not only in the bodies of animals but even in plants and grasses, then how much more plainly do these events attest the presence of divinity: events that occurred precisely when predicted, and that commend a religion which forbids offering sacrifice to any celestial, terrestrial, or infernal being, commanding instead that sacrifice be offered to God alone. He alone blesses us through His love for us and our love for Him, and by appointing the times of those sacrifices and foretelling that they would give way to a better sacrifice through a better Priest, He made clear that He has no appetite for those sacrifices in themselves, but used them to point toward others of far greater and more lasting blessing. All of this was not so that He Himself might be glorified by these honors, but so that we might be moved to worship and cling to Him, drawn by His love, which benefits us far more than it benefits Him.

Will someone claim that these miracles are false, that they never happened, and that the records of them are lies? Whoever makes that argument, and insists that no historical record of such things can be trusted, might just as well say that there are no gods who care about human affairs at all. After all, the gods won their worshippers only through miraculous works, which even pagan histories confirm, and by which the gods put their power on display rather than rendering any genuine service. This is why, in this tenth book of our work, we have not set out to refute those who deny divine power altogether, or who argue that it plays no role in human affairs. Our concern is with those who prefer their own gods to our God, the Founder of the holy and most glorious city, not realizing that He is also the invisible and unchangeable Founder of this visible and changing world, and the truest source of the blessed life, which resides not in created things but in Himself. His most trustworthy prophet speaks to this point: "It is good for me to be united to God" (Ps 73:28). Among philosophers, the great debate has always been about what the final good is, the goal toward which all our duties and actions should be directed. The Psalmist did not say, "It is good for me to have great wealth," or "to wear the insignia of empire, the purple robe, the scepter, and the crown." He did not say, as some philosophers have shamelessly claimed, "It is good for me to enjoy sensual pleasure," nor even, as the better sort among them seemed to suggest, "My good is my own spiritual strength." He said simply, "It is good for me to be united to God." He had learned this from the One whom the holy angels, through the witness of miracles, presented as the sole object of worship. And so he himself became a sacrifice to God, set ablaze by a spiritual love for Him, longing to cast himself into an embrace that is beyond all words and beyond all bodily form. Furthermore, if the worshippers of many gods, whatever kind of gods they imagine their own to be, are willing to believe the miracles recorded in their civil histories, in books of magic, or in the more respectable writings on theurgy, then what reason do they have for refusing to believe the miracles recorded in our scriptures? The credence we owe those scriptures is proportionally greater, because He to whom alone they teach us to offer sacrifice is incomparably greater than any rival.

Some people argue that visible sacrifices are appropriate for lesser gods, while invisible sacrifices, such as purity of mind and holiness of will, should be reserved for the invisible God as something greater and better. These people have apparently forgotten that visible sacrifices are signs of invisible realities, just as spoken words are signs of the things they represent. Therefore, just as we direct intelligible words to God in prayer and praise while offering Him the very feelings those words express, we should understand that visible sacrifice is likewise to be offered only to the One to whom we should also present ourselves as an invisible sacrifice in our hearts. When we worship this way, the angels and all those superior powers who are mighty through their goodness and piety look on us with pleasure, rejoice with us, and help us as much as they can. But if we try to offer such worship to them directly, they refuse it; and when they appear visibly to people on some mission, they explicitly forbid it. Scripture gives us clear examples of this. When certain people tried to honor angels with adoration or sacrifice as they would honor God, the angels themselves stopped them and directed them to offer that worship to the One they knew was its rightful recipient. Holy men of God have followed the same example. When Paul and Barnabas performed a miraculous healing in Lycaonia, the people there took them for gods and wanted to offer sacrifice to them, but the two apostles humbly and devoutly refused the honor and pointed the people toward the God in whom they should believe. As for those deceitful and proud spirits who do demand worship, they do so precisely because they know such worship is rightly owed to the true God. What they take pleasure in is not, as Porphyry claims and some people imagine, the smell of sacrificial victims; it is divine honor itself. They already have plenty of pleasant odors all around them, and if they wanted more, they could easily provide them for themselves. No, the spirits who claim divinity for themselves are not delighted by the smoke of carcasses but by the submissive soul they deceive and hold in bondage, keeping it from drawing near to God and preventing it from offering itself to God in sacrifice by luring it into sacrificing to others instead.

And so it is that the true Mediator, having taken on the form of a servant and thereby becoming the Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, though in the form of God He received sacrifice together with the Father as one God, yet in the form of a servant He chose rather to be the sacrifice than to receive one. This was so that no one could use even this as grounds for thinking that sacrifice should be offered to any creature. He is, therefore, both the Priest who offers and the Sacrifice that is offered. And He intended that this reality would be signified daily in the sacrifice of the Church, which, as His body, learns through Him to offer itself. The ancient sacrifices of the saints were the many and varied signs pointing toward this one true Sacrifice, figured in different ways just as a single truth can be expressed through many different words, so that speaking of it at length does not become tedious. Before this supreme and true sacrifice, all false sacrifices have given way.

The power granted to demons at certain appointed and carefully measured seasons allows them to express their hostility toward the city of God by stirring up against it those people who fall under their influence. In this role, they not only receive sacrifice from those who offer it willingly, but also extort it from the unwilling through violent persecution. Yet this power turns out to be not merely harmless to the Church, but actually beneficial, since it completes the number of martyrs. The city of God regards these martyrs as its most illustrious and honored citizens, precisely because they struggled against the sin of impiety to the point of shedding their blood. If the ordinary language of the Church permitted it, we might more fittingly call these men our heroes. That name is said to derive from Juno, who in Greek is called Hêrê, and according to Greek mythology one of her sons was therefore named Heros. These myths were meant to signify, in symbolic terms, that Juno was mistress of the air, which they believed to be inhabited by demons and heroes alike, understanding by "heroes" the souls of those who had lived well and died honorably. But we would call our martyrs heroes for precisely the opposite reason, assuming, as I said, that the Church's customary language would allow it: not because they dwelt alongside demons in the air, but because they conquered those demons, those powers of the air, and among them Juno herself, whoever or whatever she may be. She is commonly portrayed by the poets as hostile to virtue and envious of great men who aspire to the heavens, and that portrayal is not entirely without meaning. Virgil, however, unfortunately gives way before her. Though he has her declare, "I am conquered by Aeneas," he also has Helenus offer Aeneas this piece of religious counsel:

"Pay vows to Juno: overbear

Her queenly soul with gift and prayer."

Following this line of thought, Porphyry (though he was largely reporting others' views rather than his own) says that a good god or spirit cannot come to a person unless the evil spirit has first been appeased. This implies that evil deities hold greater power than good ones, since the good cannot offer any assistance until the evil have been pacified and step aside. If the evil deities resist, the good are helpless; yet the evil can cause harm without the good being able to stop them. This is not the way of true and genuinely holy religion. Our martyrs do not conquer Juno, that is, the powers of the air who resent the virtues of the faithful, in this manner. Our heroes, if we may call them that, overcome Hera not through desperate offerings and pleas, but through divine virtue. Think of Scipio, who conquered Africa by his courage: the title "Africanus" suits him far better than it would if he had simply bribed his enemies into showing mercy.

It is through genuine piety that the servants of God drive out the hostile powers of the air that stand against godliness. They do this by commanding those powers, not by appeasing them, and they overcome every temptation of the adversary by praying not to him, but to their own God against him. The devil can only conquer and subdue those who are already in league with sin. He is therefore defeated in the name of the One who took on human nature, and did so without sin, so that, as both Priest and Sacrifice, He might accomplish the forgiveness of sins. This was brought about through the Mediator between God and humanity, the man Christ Jesus, through whom we are reconciled to God and cleansed from sin.

We are separated from God only by sin, and in this life we are not cleansed from sin by our own virtue but by divine compassion, through God's mercy rather than our own strength. Whatever virtue we can genuinely call our own has itself been given to us by His goodness. We might claim too much credit for ourselves while still in the flesh, unless we lived continually in the receipt of His pardon until we set the flesh aside. This is why, through the Mediator, we have been granted this grace: that we who are stained by sinful flesh should be cleansed through One who took on the very likeness of sinful flesh. By this grace of God, in which He has shown such profound compassion toward us, we are guided by faith throughout this life, and after this life we are brought forward to the fullest perfection through the vision of unchanging truth.

Even Porphyry acknowledges that divine oracles revealed we cannot be purified by any sacrifices offered to the sun or moon, which implies we cannot be purified by sacrificing to any gods at all. After all, if the mysteries of the sun and moon, regarded as the greatest of the celestial gods, cannot purify us, what mysteries possibly could? He also states, in the same passage, that "principles" can purify, apparently to prevent anyone from concluding that while sacrificing to the sun and moon is ineffective, sacrificing to some other deity in the divine host might still work. As a Platonist, we know what he means by "principles." He is referring to God the Father and God the Son, whom he calls (writing in Greek) the intellect or mind of the Father. As for the Holy Spirit, he says either nothing at all, or nothing clear enough to be understood, for I cannot identify with confidence which figure he has in mind when he speaks of one who holds the middle place between the other two.

For if, like Plotinus in his discussion of the three principal substances, he wanted us to understand this third as the soul of nature, he certainly would not have placed it in the middle position between the other two, that is, between the Father and the Son. Plotinus places the soul of nature after the intellect of the Father, while Porphyry, making it the mean, places it not after but between the others. No doubt he spoke according to his own understanding, or as he thought best; but we affirm that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit not of the Father alone, nor of the Son alone, but of both. Philosophers speak as they please, and in the most difficult matters they don't hesitate to offend devout ears; but we are bound to speak according to a fixed rule, so that freedom of expression does not give rise to impiety in our thinking about the very matters we are discussing.

When we speak of God, we don't affirm two or three principles, any more than we are free to affirm two or three gods. Even so, when speaking of each person individually, whether the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit, we confess that each is God. Yet we don't say, as the Sabellian heretics do, that the Father is the same as the Son, or that the Holy Spirit is the same as the Father and the Son. Rather, we say that the Father is the Father of the Son, and the Son is the Son of the Father, and that the Holy Spirit of the Father and the Son is neither the Father nor the Son. It was therefore rightly said that humanity is cleansed only through a single Principle, even though the Platonists erred by speaking of *principles* in the plural. But Porphyry, living under the dominion of these envious powers whose influence he was simultaneously ashamed of and too afraid to reject, refused to recognize that Christ is the Principle through whose incarnation we are purified. He despised Christ precisely because of the flesh He assumed in order to offer a sacrifice for our purification: a profound mystery, beyond the reach of Porphyry's pride, which the true and gracious Redeemer humbled by His own humility, revealing Himself to mortal human beings through the mortality He took on. The malicious and deceitful mediators, by contrast, boast of lacking that mortality, and offer nothing but false help to suffering humanity under the pretense of immortal gifts. The good and true Mediator thus demonstrated that it is sin which is evil, not the substance or nature of flesh itself. For flesh, together with the human soul, could be assumed and retained without sin, laid down in death, and transformed into something better through resurrection. He also showed that death itself, though it is the punishment for sin, was accepted by Him on our behalf without any sin of His own, and that we must not evade death through sin, but rather bear it willingly for the sake of righteousness when the occasion calls for it. He was able to atone for sins by dying precisely because He died without any sin of His own. Yet Porphyry failed to recognize Him as the Principle; had he done so, he would have recognized Him as the Purifier. The Principle is neither the flesh nor the human soul in Christ, but the Word through whom all things were made. The flesh, therefore, does not purify by its own power, but by the power of the Word through whom it was assumed, when "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). When He spoke in mysterious terms about eating His flesh, and those who didn't understand Him took offense and walked away saying, "This is a hard saying; who can accept it?" He answered those who remained: "It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh profits nothing" (John 6:60, 63). The Principle, therefore, having taken on a human soul and flesh, cleanses the soul and flesh of all who believe in Him. This is why, when the Jews asked who He was, He answered that He was the *Principle* (John 8:25). We who are weak and bound to the flesh, prone to sin and wrapped in the darkness of ignorance, could never have understood this on our own, unless He had cleansed and healed us through both what we were and what we were not. We were human beings, but we were not righteous; in His incarnation, there was a human nature, but it was righteous and without sin. This is the mediation by which a hand is extended to those who have stumbled and fallen. This is the seed "ordained by angels" (Gal 3:19), through whose ministry the law was also given, commanding the worship of one God and promising that this Mediator would come.

It was through faith in this mystery, and through a godly life, that even the ancient saints could be purified, whether they lived before the law was given to the Hebrews (when God and the angels served as their teachers) or during the period when the law was in force, even though the promises of spiritual things were presented in symbolic form and appeared to be earthly, which is why that era is called the Old Testament. The prophets lived in that time, and through them, as through angels, the same promise was proclaimed. Among those prophets was the one whose profound and inspired statement about humanity's highest good I quoted just above: "It is good for me to cleave to God." In that psalm, the distinction between the Old and New Testaments is made unmistakably clear. The Psalmist describes how, when he saw the ungodly enjoying in abundance the earthly and material blessings that had been promised, his footing nearly gave way; he came close to concluding that he had served God for nothing, since those who despised God were thriving in exactly the kind of prosperity he had hoped to receive from God's hand. He also describes how, when he tried to work this out through his own reasoning, he labored without success until he entered the sanctuary of God and finally understood the end that awaited those he had mistakenly considered fortunate. He then saw that they were brought down by the very thing they had boasted in, consumed and destroyed by their own sins, and that the entire structure of their temporal prosperity had dissolved like a dream from which one wakes to find every imagined joy gone. Because they had seemed so great to themselves in this earthly city, he says: "O Lord, in Your city You will reduce their image to nothing." He also shows how much it had benefited him to seek even earthly blessings from the one true God alone, in whose power all things rest, saying: "As a beast was I before You, and I am always with You." By "as a beast," he means that he had been foolish, reasoning: I should have sought from You the kinds of things the ungodly could not equally enjoy, not the things I saw them possessing in abundance, which led me to conclude I was serving You in vain because those who refused to serve You had what I lacked. Yet even so, "I am always with You," because even in my desire for such things I never turned to other gods. He continues: "You have held me by my right hand, and by Your counsel You have guided me, and with glory have taken me up," as though all earthly advantages were left-hand blessings, even though the sight of the wicked enjoying them had nearly caused him to stumble. "For what," he asks, "have I in heaven, and what have I desired from You on earth?" He blames himself, and rightly so, because even though he possessed so vast an inheritance in heaven (as he later came to understand), he had been asking his God for a fleeting, transitory happiness on earth, a happiness of mud, one might say. "My heart and my flesh fail, O God of my heart." What a blessed failing, turning away from what is below toward what is above. In another psalm he echoes this: "My soul longs, yes, even fails, for the courts of the Lord." Yet though he spoke of both heart and flesh as failing, he did not say "O God of my heart and my flesh," but only "O God of my heart," because it is through the heart that the flesh is made clean. This is why the Lord says: "Cleanse what is within, and the outside will be clean as well." He then declares that God Himself, not anything received from Him, but God Himself, is his portion: "The God of my heart, and my portion forever." Among all the things a person might choose, God alone was enough for him. "For look," he says, "those who are far from You will perish; You destroy all who go whoring from You," meaning those who give themselves over to many gods. Then comes the verse toward which the entire psalm seems to build: "It is good for me to cleave to God," not to wander far off, not to go whoring after a multitude of gods. This union with God will be made perfect when everything in us that needs to be redeemed has been redeemed. For now, however, we must, as he goes on to say, "place our hope in God." "For that which is seen," says the apostle, "is not hope. For what a man sees, why does he yet hope for it? But if we hope for what we do not see, then we wait for it with patience" (Rom 8:24-25). Grounded in this hope for the present, let us do what the Psalmist further points toward and become, in our own measure, angels and messengers of God, declaring His will and proclaiming His glory and grace. After saying "to place my hope in God," he continues: "that I may declare all Your praises in the gates of the daughter of Zion." This is the most glorious city of God, the city that knows and worships one God. She is celebrated by the holy angels, who invite us into their fellowship and long for us to become fellow citizens with them in this city, for they do not want us to worship them as gods but to join them in worshipping their God and ours; not to offer sacrifice to them, but to become, together with them, a sacrifice to God. Therefore, anyone who sets aside stubborn resistance and considers these things carefully will be convinced that all these blessed and immortal spirits, who bear us no envy (for if they envied us they would not be blessed), but rather love us and desire us to share in their blessedness, look on us with greater joy and give us greater help when we join them in worshipping one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, than they ever would if we were to offer sacrifice and worship to themselves.

I'm not entirely sure why, but it seems to me that Porphyry was embarrassed by his friends the theurgists. He knew everything I've laid out above, yet he couldn't bring himself to openly condemn the worship of many gods. He claimed that certain angels visit the earth and reveal divine truth to theurgists, while others proclaim to humanity the things that belong to the Father, His greatness and His depth. If that's true, can we really believe that angels whose very purpose is to declare the Father's will would want us to submit to anyone other than Him? Even Porphyry himself, to his credit, wisely observes that we should imitate these angels rather than invoke them. We have no reason, then, to fear that we might offend these immortal and blessed servants of the one God by refusing to offer them sacrifices. They know that sacrifice belongs to the one true God alone; their own blessedness comes from their devotion to Him, and so they have no desire to receive what is owed to Him, whether in symbol or in reality, whether in the outward form of sacrifice or in its deeper meaning. That kind of arrogance belongs to proud and miserable demons, whose character stands in complete opposition to the reverent submission of those who are devoted to God and find their joy in Him. And because these holy angels genuinely want us to share in that same blessedness, they help us with sincere goodwill, without claiming any dominion over us, pointing us instead toward the One under whose authority we all stand together as fellow subjects.

So why, philosopher, do you still hesitate to speak plainly against powers that are hostile to both true virtue and the gifts of the true God? You have already drawn a distinction between the angels who proclaim the Father's will and those who visit theurgists, drawn down by some art I won't pretend to understand. Why, then, do you still credit these latter beings with the ability to reveal divine truth? If they don't declare the Father's will, what kind of divine revelation could they possibly offer? Aren't these the very evil spirits who, as you yourself describe, were bound by the incantations of a jealous man so that they could not grant purity of soul to another person, and who couldn't be freed from those bonds even by a good man earnestly seeking purity? Do you still doubt that these are wicked demons? Or are you perhaps pretending not to know, so as not to offend the theurgists who have drawn you in with their secret rites and presented these mad and destructive practices to you as some great gift? How can you bring yourself to elevate these envious powers, these plagues (a more fitting word than rulers, as you yourself admit), lifting them above the air and even into the heavens, placing them among your celestial gods, and in doing so casting a shadow over the very stars themselves?

How much more bearable, and how much more in keeping with ordinary human feeling, is the error of your fellow Platonist Apuleius! He attributed the diseases and storms of human passion only to the demons who occupy a rank below the moon, and even this he admitted reluctantly, as though forced to say something unflattering about gods he revered. As for the higher, celestial gods who inhabit the ethereal regions, whether visible ones like the sun, moon, and other luminaries whose brilliance makes them unmistakable, or invisible ones he simply believed in, he took great care to place them entirely beyond the reach of such disturbances. So it is not from Plato, but from your Chaldean teachers, that you learned to drag human vices up into the ethereal and empyrean regions of the cosmos and into the celestial firmament, all so that your theurgists could claim to receive divine revelations from your gods. And yet you position yourself above those very revelations through your intellectual life, which you say has no need of theurgic purifications since you are a philosopher. But then, as a kind of reward to your teachers, you recommend these same arts to other men who, not being philosophers, can be persuaded to use what you yourself admit is useless to you. Those who cannot reach the heights of philosophy, which is far too demanding for most people, are directed by you to theurgists who will purify them, not in the intellectual part of the soul, but in what you call the spiritual part. Since the people who are unfit for philosophy make up the overwhelming majority of humanity, far more will end up consulting these secret and illicit teachers of yours than will ever attend the Platonic schools. These most impure demons, pretending to be ethereal gods, whose herald and messenger you have made yourself, have promised that those purified by theurgy in the spiritual part of their soul will not return to the Father, but will dwell among the ethereal gods in the regions above the air. Yet these fantasies hold no appeal for the multitudes of men whom Christ came to free from the tyranny of demons. In Him they find the most gracious cleansing, one in which mind, spirit, and body all share equally. For in order to heal the whole person from the plague of sin, He took on the whole of human nature, yet without sin. If only you had known Him. If only you had entrusted yourself to Him for healing, rather than to your own fragile and unreliable human virtue, or to those dangerous and meddlesome arts. He would not have deceived you, for your own oracles, by your own account, acknowledged Him to be holy and immortal. It is of Him, too, that the most celebrated poet speaks, poetically of course, since he applies the words to another person, yet truly, if you refer them to Christ: "Under your auspices, if any traces of our crimes remain, they shall be obliterated, and earth freed from its perpetual fear." This suggests that, given the weakness inherent in this life, even the greatest progress in virtue and righteousness still leaves room, if not for crimes themselves, then for the traces of crimes, and these are wiped away only by that Savior of whom the verse speaks. That Virgil did not write this out of his own imagination he tells us himself in nearly the final line of the Fourth Eclogue, where he says, "The last age predicted by the Cumaean Sibyl has now arrived," from which it is clear that the words were dictated by the Cumaean Sibyl. But those theurgists, or rather those demons who take on the appearance and form of gods, pollute the human spirit rather than purify it, through false appearances and the mocking illusion of empty forms. How can those whose own spirit is unclean cleanse the spirit of anyone else? If they were not unclean, they would not be bound by the incantations of an envious man, and they would neither fear nor begrudge giving the hollow gift they promise. But it is enough for our purposes that you yourself acknowledge the intellectual soul, that is, our mind, cannot be made righteous through theurgy, and that even the spiritual or lower part of our soul cannot be made eternal and immortal by it, though you maintain it can be purified. Christ, however, promises eternal life, and so the world flocks to Him, much to your indignation, and much to your astonishment and confusion. What good is your reluctant admission that theurgy leads people astray and deceives vast numbers through its ignorant and foolish teaching, and that it is a clear mistake to approach angels and principalities through prayer and sacrifice, when at the very same time, to avoid being accused of wasting your own effort on such arts, you direct others to the theurgists so that those who do not live by the rule of the intellectual soul may at least have their spiritual soul purified?

You are driving people into the most obvious error, and yet you feel no shame about the harm you cause, even while calling yourself a lover of virtue and wisdom. If you had been genuine in that claim, you would have recognized Christ as the power of God and the wisdom of God, and you would not have let your pride in empty learning turn you away from His healing humility. And yet you yourself acknowledge that the spiritual part of the soul can be purified through chastity alone, without any help from the theurgic arts and mysteries on which you wasted so much time. You even admit at times that these mysteries cannot lift the soul after death, which means that once this life ends, they appear to be useless even for the part of the soul you call spiritual. And yet you keep returning to these arts at every opportunity, apparently for no other reason than to look like an accomplished theurgist and to satisfy those who are drawn to forbidden practices, or perhaps to stir that same curiosity in others. We do give you credit, though, for saying that this art should be feared, both because of the laws against it and because of the genuine dangers involved in practicing it. If only its misguided devotees would listen to you on that point, so that they might at least pull back from total immersion in it, or better yet, avoid it altogether. You also say that ignorance, and the countless vices that flow from it, cannot be cured by any mysteries, but only by the *patrikos nous*, that is, the Father's mind or intellect that knows the Father's will. But you refuse to believe that Christ is that mind. You look down on Him because of the body He took from a woman and the disgrace of the cross, since your lofty wisdom has no patience for things so lowly and contemptible, preferring instead to soar toward more exalted heights. But He fulfills exactly what the holy prophets truly foretold about Him: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the intelligent" (1 Cor 1:19).

God does not destroy or nullify His own gifts in people; He only nullifies what they claim for themselves, what they refuse to receive from Him. This is why the apostle, after quoting the prophet's testimony, goes on to ask: "Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men" (1 Cor 1:20-25). Those who are wise and strong in their own estimation despise this message as weak and foolish. Yet it is precisely this grace that heals the truly weak: not those who proudly claim a happiness of their own making, but those who humbly acknowledge their real misery for what it is.

You speak of the Father and His Son, whom you describe as the Father's intellect or mind, and between these two a third figure, whom we take to be the Holy Spirit. In your own way, you call these three Gods. Your language is imprecise, but through it you glimpse, as if through a veil, something of what we should be striving toward. What you refuse to accept, however, is the incarnation of the unchangeable Son of God, through which we are saved and enabled to reach the things we believe, or at least partially understand. You can see, in a manner of speaking, the country where we should make our home, though you see it from a great distance and with clouded eyes. The road that leads there, though, is unknown to you. And yet you do believe in grace, because you say it is granted to only a few to reach God through the power of intelligence. Notice that you don't say "few have chosen to" or "few have wished to," but rather "it has been granted to few," which is a clear acknowledgment of God's grace rather than human sufficiency. You use this language even more explicitly when, following Plato's view, you assert without hesitation that no one in this life can attain perfect wisdom, but that whatever remains incomplete will be supplied in the life to come, through God's providence and grace, to those who have lived thoughtfully. If only you had recognized the grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord, and in that very incarnation through which He took on a human soul and body, you might have stood as the brightest possible example of grace! But what am I doing? I know it is pointless to speak to a dead man, pointless at least as far as you yourself are concerned, though perhaps not entirely futile for those who hold you in high regard and love you because of their love of wisdom or their fascination with those arts you should never have pursued. It is to those people that I now speak, using your name as my point of entry. God's grace could not have been commended to us more beautifully than in this: that the only Son of God, remaining unchangeable in Himself, took on our humanity and gave us the hope of His love through the mediation of a human nature. Through that mediation, we who are merely human might come to Him who was so far beyond us: the immortal reaching the mortal, the unchangeable reaching the changeable, the just reaching the unjust, the blessed reaching the wretched. He had already given us a natural longing for blessedness and immortality. He Himself remained blessed, but He took on mortality, and by enduring the very things we dread, He taught us not to fear them, so that He might finally give us what we have always longed for.

But for you to accept this truth, what's required is humility, and that is precisely what you find so difficult to embrace. Consider what is actually unbelievable here, especially for men like you who are accustomed to philosophical inquiry and should, if anything, be predisposed to believe it. What is so unbelievable, I ask, about the claim that God took on a human soul and body? You yourselves assign such extraordinary dignity to the intellectual soul (which is, after all, simply the human soul) that you argue it can become one in substance with that Intelligence of the Father whom you recognize as the Son of God. Why, then, is it so difficult to accept that one particular soul might be taken up by Him in a manner that is unique and beyond description, for the salvation of many?

Our very nature testifies that a human being is incomplete without a body united to the soul. This would be far more difficult to believe if it weren't the most common thing in the world. We would more readily accept a union between spirit and spirit, or, to use your own terms, between the incorporeal and the incorporeal, even if one were human and the other divine, one changeable and the other unchangeable, than a union between the corporeal and the incorporeal. But perhaps what trips you up is the unprecedented birth of a body from a virgin? Far from being a stumbling block, this should actually help you accept our faith: a miraculous person was born in a miraculous way. Or perhaps you struggle with the fact that, after His body was given over to death and transformed through resurrection into a higher kind of existence, no longer mortal but incorruptible, He carried it up into the heavenly realms? You may refuse to believe this because you recall that Porphyry, in the very books I have been quoting, which deal with the soul's return, repeatedly insists that the soul must escape every kind of body in order to dwell in blessedness with God. But here, rather than following Porphyry, you should have corrected him, especially since you agree with him in accepting things far more incredible about the soul of this visible world and its vast material frame. As students of Plato, you hold that the world is a living creature, and a supremely happy one, which you also want to be eternal. How, then, is it never to be freed from a body, and yet never lose its happiness, if the soul must leave the body behind in order to be blessed? The sun and the other stars you not only acknowledge to be bodies (something every sighted person would readily grant), but you also declare, on the basis of what you consider a deeper insight, that they are perfectly blessed and eternal creatures, bodies included. Why is it, then, that when the Christian faith is pressed on you, you forget, or pretend to forget, what you habitually discuss and teach? Why do you refuse to become Christians on the grounds of convictions you yourselves undermine? Is it not because Christ came in humility, and you are proud? The precise nature of the resurrection bodies of the saints may sometimes spark debate even among the most learned readers of the Christian Scriptures, but among us there is not the slightest doubt that those bodies will be eternal, and of the same kind as Christ's risen body. Whatever their exact nature, since we maintain that they will be absolutely incorruptible and immortal, and will pose no obstacle to the soul's contemplation of God, and since you yourselves say that the bodies of the eternally blessed among the heavenly beings are eternal, why do you insist that blessedness requires escaping the body entirely? Why do you reach for such a convenient reason to avoid the Christian faith, if not because, as I keep saying, Christ is humble and you are proud? Are you ashamed to be corrected? That is the vice of the proud. It is, apparently, beneath the dignity of learned men to move from the school of Plato to the discipleship of Christ, who by His Spirit taught a fisherman to think 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 not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it" (John 1:1-5). The venerable Simplicianus, who later became bishop of Milan, used to tell me that a certain Platonist was fond of saying that this opening passage of the Gospel of John should be written in letters of gold and displayed in the most prominent place in every church. But the proud refuse to take God as their teacher, because "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). For these wretched souls, it is not enough that they are sick; they boast about their sickness and recoil from the medicine that could heal them. In doing so, they do not achieve the elevation they seek, but only a more catastrophic fall.

If it is somehow improper to correct anything Plato has written, why did Porphyry himself make corrections, and quite a few of them at that? It is well established that Plato taught that human souls return after death into the bodies of animals. Plotinus, Porphyry's own teacher, held the same view; yet Porphyry rightly rejected it. His position was that human souls do indeed return, but into new human bodies rather than the ones they had left behind. He recoiled from the alternative, since it would allow a woman reborn as a mule to carry her own son on her back. He did not recoil, however, from a theory that permitted a mother to return as a young girl and then marry her own son. How much more honorable, then, is the faith taught by holy and truthful angels, proclaimed by prophets moved by God's Spirit, preached by the one foretold as the coming Savior by those who prepared His way, and spread to the ends of the earth by the apostles He sent out. How much more honorable, I say, is the belief that souls return once and only once to their own bodies, rather than cycling again and again through various bodies. Still, as I have noted, Porphyry did improve considerably on this point, at least insofar as he held that human souls could only pass into other human bodies, and he had no hesitation in tearing down the animal prisons into which Plato had wanted to cast them. He also argues that God placed the soul in the world so that it might come to recognize the evils of matter, return to the Father, and be freed forever from the corrupting contact with material existence. There is some flawed thinking here, since the soul is given to the body primarily so that it may do good; it would not learn evil unless it actually committed it. Even so, Porphyry corrects the other Platonists on a point of real significance: he insists that the soul, once purified of all evil and received into the Father's presence, will never again suffer the miseries of this life. This position effectively dismantles the cherished Platonic idea that just as the living are made from the dead, so the dead are made from the living. It also demolishes the notion that Virgil appears to have borrowed from Plato, namely that purified souls sent to the Elysian fields (the poetic name for the blessedness of the redeemed) are called to the river Lethe, that is, to the forgetting of all that came before.

"That earthward they may pass once more,

Remembering not the things before,

And with a blind propension yearn

To fleshly bodies to return."

Porphyry found no favor with this idea, and rightly so. It is genuinely foolish to believe that souls would desire to leave a life that can only be truly blessed if it is permanent, and return instead to this life and to the corruption of physical bodies, as though the whole point of perfect purification were simply to make defilement appealing again. Consider the logic: if perfect purification produces the forgetting of all evils, and the forgetting of evils produces a desire for a body in which the soul becomes entangled with evils once more, then supreme happiness becomes the cause of misery, the perfection of wisdom becomes the cause of foolishness, and the purest cleansing becomes the cause of defilement. Moreover, however long the soul's blessedness may last, it cannot rest on truth if the soul must be deceived in order to enjoy it. A soul cannot be truly blessed unless it is free from fear. But to be free from fear, it must labor under the false belief that its blessedness will last forever, which is a false belief precisely because it is destined to become miserable again at some point. How, then, can a soul genuinely rejoice in truth when its joy is built on a lie? Porphyry recognized this, and so he argued that the purified soul returns to the Father never to be entangled again in the polluting contact with evil. The view held by some Platonists, that souls are caught in a necessary cycle carrying them away and bringing them back to the same conditions over and over, is simply false. But even if it were true, what would be the benefit of knowing it? Would the Platonists dare claim superiority over us on the grounds that we are ignorant in this life of something they themselves are destined to be ignorant of when they reach perfect purity and wisdom in a higher life, and which they must remain ignorant of if they are to be blessed at all? To say so would be absurd and foolish in the extreme. We must therefore prefer Porphyry's view over the idea of souls cycling endlessly through alternating happiness and misery. And if that preference is justified, then here we have a Platonist correcting Plato: a man who saw what Plato did not see, who did not hesitate to revise so celebrated a teacher, and who chose truth over loyalty to Plato.

Why, then, don't we simply trust divine revelation on matters that human reason cannot reach? Why don't we accept what God has declared: that the soul is not co-eternal with Him, but was created, and at one point did not exist? The Platonists believed they had a solid argument against this doctrine when they insisted that nothing could be everlasting unless it had always existed. Yet Plato himself, when writing about the world and the gods within it whom the Supreme Being made, states quite explicitly that they had a beginning and yet would have no end, but would endure forever by the sovereign will of their Creator. To get around this, the Platonists argued that he meant a beginning of cause, not of time. Their illustration goes like this: if a foot had rested in dust from all eternity, there would always have been a footprint beneath it, and yet no one would doubt that the print was made by the pressure of the foot, even though neither came before the other. In the same way, they say, the world and the gods created within it have always existed alongside their always-existing Creator, and yet they were still made by Him. But if the soul has always existed, must we then say that its misery has always existed too? If there is something within the soul that did not exist from eternity but began at a point in time, why is it impossible that the soul itself, though previously nonexistent, should also begin to exist in time? Consider also the soul's blessedness, which Plato himself acknowledges will be more stable and indeed endless after the soul has passed through its experience of evil. That blessedness undoubtedly has a beginning in time, and yet it will last forever, even though it had no prior existence. The entire argument, therefore, that nothing can be endless unless it had no beginning, collapses under its own weight. We have right before us the soul's blessedness: it has a beginning, and yet it has no end. Let human limitation, then, yield to divine authority. Let us draw our understanding of true religion from those ever-blessed spirits who do not seek for themselves the honor they know belongs to their God and ours, and who do not call us to offer sacrifice to anyone but Him. That sacrifice, as I have said many times already and must say many times again, is one that we and they ought to offer together, through that Priest who offered Himself to death as a sacrifice for us, in the human nature He took on, and according to which He willed to be our Priest.

This is the religion that holds the universal way of the soul's deliverance; apart from this way, no one can be saved. It is a kind of royal road, the only one that leads to a kingdom that doesn't wobble like every temporal power, but stands firm on eternal foundations. Near the end of the first book of *De Regressu Animae* ("On the Soul's Return"), Porphyry admits that no system of thought offering a universal way of the soul's deliverance has yet come to him, whether from the truest philosophy, from the teachings and practices of the Indians, from the reasoning of the Chaldeans, or from any other source, and that no amount of reading had brought him to that way. In saying this, he clearly acknowledges that such a way exists, but that he had not yet found it. Nothing he had labored so hard to learn about the soul's deliverance, nothing he appeared to others (if not to himself) to know and believe, gave him any real satisfaction. He sensed that what was still missing was a commanding authority worthy of trust in a matter of such enormous importance. And when he says he had not found this universal way in any truest philosophy, he reveals, as I read it, one of two things: either the philosophy he followed was not truly the truest, or it simply didn't contain such a way. How can any philosophy claim to be the truest if it lacks this? What else is the universal way of the soul's deliverance, after all, if not the way by which all souls without exception are delivered, and without which no soul is delivered at all? When he adds "or from the teachings and practices of the Indians, or from the reasoning of the Chaldeans, or from any source whatever," he states as plainly as possible that this universal way was not found in anything he had learned from the Indians or the Chaldeans, and yet he couldn't help noting that it was from the Chaldeans that he had drawn those divine oracles he cites so frequently. So what does he mean by this universal way of the soul's deliverance, a way not yet revealed by any truest philosophy, nor by the doctrinal systems of nations considered to have deep insight into divine things, precisely because they indulged so freely in a curious and fanciful science and worship of angels? What is this universal way he confesses he doesn't know, if not a way that belongs to no single nation as its private possession, but is common to all people and given by God? Porphyry, a man of no small intellectual ability, doesn't doubt that such a way exists; he believes that Divine Providence could not have left humanity without a universal means of the soul's deliverance. He doesn't say the way doesn't exist; he says only that this great gift and help had not yet been discovered, and had not come to his knowledge. And no wonder. Porphyry lived in an age when this universal way of the soul's deliverance (that is, the Christian religion) was being subjected to persecution by idol-worshippers, demon-worshippers, and earthly rulers, so that the full number of martyrs and witnesses to the truth might be completed and consecrated, and through them proof given that we must endure all bodily suffering for the sake of holy faith and the vindication of truth. Watching these persecutions, Porphyry concluded that this way was headed for swift extinction, and therefore could not be the universal way of the soul's deliverance. What he failed to see was that the very thing that troubled him and kept him from becoming a Christian was actually contributing to the confirmation and more powerful commendation of our religion.

This, then, is the universal path of the soul's deliverance, the way that divine compassion has opened to all nations everywhere. No nation that has received this knowledge, or will receive it in the future, should ask, "Why so soon?" or "Why so late?" The purpose of the One who sends it lies beyond human understanding. Porphyry himself felt this when he limited his objection to saying that this gift of God had not yet been received and had not yet come to his knowledge. Even so, he did not on that account deny that the way itself existed. This, I say, is the universal path of deliverance for all who believe, and it is the very thing about which faithful Abraham received the divine promise: "In your seed shall all nations be blessed" (Gen 22:18). Abraham was by birth a Chaldean, but in order to receive these great promises, and so that from him might come a seed "arranged by angels in the hand of a Mediator," in whom this universal way would be opened to all nations for the deliverance of the soul, he was commanded to leave his country, his family, and his father's house. He himself was the first to be freed from Chaldean superstition, and through his obedience he worshipped the one true God, whose promises he trusted completely. This is the universal way, of which the holy prophecy says: "God be merciful to us and bless us, and make His face shine on us, that Your way may be known on earth, Your saving health among all nations" (Ps 67:1-2). And so, when our Savior had taken on flesh from the seed of Abraham long afterward, He said of Himself: "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). This is the universal way, foretold so long before in the words: "It shall come to pass in the last days that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established at the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills, and all nations shall flow to it. And many people shall go and say, Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, and He will teach us His ways, and we will walk in His paths, for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem" (Isa 2:2-3). This way, therefore, belongs not to one nation but to all. The law and the word of the Lord did not stay confined to Zion and Jerusalem; they went out from there to spread across the whole world. And so the Mediator Himself, after His resurrection, said to His frightened disciples: "These are the words I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms, concerning me." Then He opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures, and said to them: "Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem" (Luke 24:44-47). This is the universal way of the soul's deliverance, which the holy angels and holy prophets once disclosed, where they could, to the few people who found the grace of God, and especially among the Hebrew nation, whose entire commonwealth was consecrated, as it were, to prefigure and announce the city of God that would be gathered from all nations, through their tabernacle, their temple, their priesthood, and their sacrifices. This way was declared in some explicit statements and in many obscure foreshadowings; but at last the Mediator Himself came in the flesh, along with His blessed apostles, revealing how the grace of the New Testament more openly explained what had been only dimly hinted to earlier generations. This unfolded in keeping with the progression of human history and according to the wisdom of God's own design, confirmed by signs and miracles, some of which I have cited above. For not only were there visions of angels and words spoken by those heavenly messengers, but men of God, armed with nothing more than simple, sincere faith, drove unclean spirits out of human bodies and minds, and healed deformities and diseases. The wild beasts of earth and sea, the birds of the air, inanimate objects, the elements themselves, and the stars obeyed their divine commands; the powers of hell gave way before them, and the dead were restored to life. I will say nothing here of the miracles unique to the Savior's own person, especially the nativity and the resurrection: in the first He accomplished the mystery of a virgin birth, and in the second He provided the pattern of the resurrection that all will ultimately experience. This way purifies the whole person and prepares every part of mortal humanity for immortality. To prevent us from seeking one kind of purification for what Porphyry calls the intellectual part of the person, another for what he calls the spiritual part, and yet another for the body itself, our all-powerful and truthful Purifier and Savior took on the whole of human nature. Apart from this way, which has been present among humanity both in the age of promise and in the age of fulfillment, no one has ever been delivered, no one is being delivered, and no one ever will be delivered.

When Porphyry claimed that no history known to him had revealed a universal way of deliverance for the soul, one must ask: what history could be more remarkable than the one that has claimed the entire world through its authoritative voice? What history could be more trustworthy than one that narrates past events and predicts future ones with equal clarity, and whose unfulfilled predictions we are compelled to believe precisely because so many others have already come true? Neither Porphyry nor any of the Platonists can dismiss divination and prophecy outright, even when it concerns this life and earthly affairs, though they rightly reject common fortune-telling and anything connected with magical arts. They deny that such practices reflect genuine insight or deserve serious consideration, and they are correct to do so. Such predictions rest either on the observation of underlying causes (much as a trained physician can foresee the course of a disease from early warning signs) or on the scheming of unclean demons who announce what they have already decided to do, thereby working on the thoughts and desires of the wicked with a false air of authority, nudging human weakness toward imitating their corrupt behavior. The saints who walk the universal way have no interest in treating such things as worthy of prediction, though they did know and often foretell even events that lay beyond ordinary human observation or easy verification, for the purpose of strengthening faith. But there were other predictions of a truly important and divine character, made insofar as God's will was revealed to them. These included the incarnation of Christ and all the great wonders accomplished in Him and done in His name; the repentance of humanity and the turning of human wills toward God; the forgiveness of sins, the grace of righteousness, the faith of the devout, and the vast multitudes across the world who would come to believe in the true divinity; the overthrow of idol worship and the veneration of demons; the testing of the faithful through trials; the purification of those who persevered and their deliverance from all evil; the day of judgment, the resurrection of the dead, the eternal condemnation of the community of the ungodly, and the eternal kingdom of the most glorious city of God, forever blessed in the vision of God. All of these things were predicted and promised in the Scriptures of this way, and we have seen so many of them fulfilled that we are entirely justified in trusting, with reverent confidence, that the rest will come to pass as well. As for those who refuse to believe, and therefore cannot understand, that this is the way that leads directly to the vision of God and to eternal fellowship with Him, in accordance with the true predictions and declarations of the Holy Scriptures: they may rage against our position, but they cannot bring it down.

In these ten books, though I may not have met everyone's expectations, I have, with the help of the true God and Lord, satisfied the desire of those who asked me to refute the objections of the ungodly: those who prefer their own gods to the Founder of the holy city, about which we set out to speak. The first five of these ten books were directed against those who believe we should worship the gods for the sake of earthly blessings, and the second five against those who believe we should worship them for the sake of the life to come. Now, in keeping with the promise I made in the first book, I will go on to say, as God gives me the ability, what I believe needs to be said about the origin, history, and deserved ends of the two cities, which, as I have already noted, are in this world intermingled and entangled with one another.