The City of God: Book 8

This question demands far more careful attention than anything we addressed in the preceding books. Our conversation partners here are not ordinary people but philosophers, and the subject is what they call natural theology. This is not the same as fabulous theology, which belongs to the theater, or civil theology, which belongs to the city: the first puts the crimes of the gods on public display, while the second reveals their criminal desires, proving them to be malicious demons rather than gods. It is with philosophers, then, that we must engage on this subject, men whose very name, when translated into Latin, means those who profess the love of wisdom. Now, if wisdom is God, who made all things (as divine authority and truth confirm), then the philosopher is, by definition, a lover of God. But the thing itself does not always match the name. Not everyone who calls himself a philosopher actually loves true wisdom, so we must carefully select, from among those whose views we have been able to study, the thinkers worthy of serious engagement on this question. In this work, I have not set out to refute every misguided opinion held by philosophers, only those that bear on theology, a Greek word we take to mean an account or explanation of the divine nature. Nor have I set out to refute every flawed theological opinion held by every philosopher, but only those held by thinkers who, while agreeing that a divine nature exists and that it takes an interest in human affairs, still deny that worshiping the one unchangeable God is sufficient for obtaining a blessed life, both now and after death. These thinkers hold that, in order to reach that life, one must also worship many gods who were created and assigned their respective roles by that one God. Even so, they come closer to the truth than Varro did. Varro had no difficulty extending natural theology in its entirety to the world and the world's soul, but these philosophers recognize a God who stands above everything belonging to the order of soul, a God who is the Creator not only of this visible world (commonly called heaven and earth) but of every soul whatsoever, and who grants blessedness to the rational soul (of which the human soul is one kind) through participation in His own unchangeable and incorporeal light. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with these matters will recognize the Platonic philosophers, who take their name from their master Plato. I will say briefly what I consider necessary about Plato for the present question, but first I will mention those who came before him in the same field of inquiry.

As far as Greek literature is concerned (and Greek held a more distinguished place than any other language of the ancient world), history records two schools of philosophy. The first was called the Italic school, which originated in the part of Italy once known as Magna Graecia. The second was called the Ionic school, which arose in the regions still known today as Greece. The founder of the Italic school was Pythagoras of Samos, to whom the very word "philosophy" is said to owe its origin. In earlier times, those who seemed to surpass others by the admirable way they lived were simply called sages. But when Pythagoras was asked what he professed, he replied that he was a philosopher, meaning a student or lover of wisdom, because it struck him as the height of arrogance to call oneself a sage outright. The founder of the Ionic school, by contrast, was Thales of Miletus, one of the famous seven men known as the "seven sages." Six of those seven were distinguished by their manner of life and by the practical maxims they offered for right conduct. Thales stood apart as an investigator into the nature of things, and to ensure that his school would have successors, he committed his inquiries to writing. What made him especially famous, however, was his ability to predict eclipses of the sun and moon through astronomical calculation. He believed that water was the first principle of all things, and that every element of the world, the world itself, and everything generated within it ultimately consists of water. Yet over all this work, which strikes us as so remarkable when we contemplate the world, he placed nothing resembling a divine mind. His successor was his pupil Anaximander, who held a different view of the nature of things. Unlike Thales, who traced everything back to a single principle (water), Anaximander believed that each thing springs from its own distinct principle. He held that these principles are infinite in number and that they generate countless worlds along with everything that arises within them. He also believed these worlds undergo a perpetual cycle of dissolution and regeneration, each lasting for a shorter or longer period depending on its nature. Like Thales, he attributed nothing to a divine mind in accounting for all this activity. Anaximander left behind his disciple Anaximenes as his successor, who attributed all the causes of things to an infinite air. Anaximenes neither denied nor ignored the existence of gods, but rather than believing that air was made by them, he held the opposite: that the gods themselves sprang from the air. His pupil Anaxagoras, however, recognized that a divine mind was the productive cause of everything we see, and argued that all the various kinds of things, in their different forms and species, were produced from an infinite matter made up of homogeneous particles, but through the agency of a divine mind. Diogenes, another pupil of Anaximenes, likewise held that a certain air was the original substance from which all things were produced, but insisted that this air was possessed of a divine reason, without which nothing could come from it. Anaxagoras was succeeded by his disciple Archelaus, who also believed that all things consist of homogeneous particles from which each individual thing is made, but that those particles were permeated by a divine mind that perpetually energized all the eternal bodies (that is, the particles themselves), causing them to alternately unite and separate. Socrates, the master of Plato, is said to have been a disciple of Archelaus, and it is on Plato's account that I have offered this brief sketch of the history of these two schools.

Socrates is generally credited as the first philosopher to redirect the entire focus of philosophy toward the correction and regulation of human conduct. All who came before him had devoted their greatest energies to investigating physical, that is, natural phenomena. Yet it seems to me that we cannot say with any certainty why Socrates made this shift. Perhaps he had grown weary of obscure and uncertain questions and wanted to turn his mind toward something clear and dependable, something necessary for achieving a blessed life, which appears to have been the one great goal toward which the labor, vigilance, and industry of all philosophers were ultimately directed. Or perhaps, as those more sympathetic to him suggest, he made this shift because he was unwilling to see minds still stained by earthly desires attempt to lift themselves toward divine things. He observed that his contemporaries were searching for the causes of things, causes he believed were ultimately reducible to nothing other than the will of the one true and supreme God. For that reason, he concluded that such causes could only be grasped by a purified mind, and therefore that every effort should be given to purifying one's life through good morals. Only then could the mind, freed from the crushing weight of its desires, rise by its own natural strength toward eternal things and, with a clarified understanding, contemplate that nature which is incorporeal and unchangeable light, where the causes of all created things reside. What is clear, in any case, is that Socrates pursued and exposed the foolishness of ignorant men, those who imagined they knew this or that, with a remarkable charm of style and argument and a sharp, penetrating wit. He would sometimes confess his own ignorance and sometimes conceal his knowledge, even on those very moral questions to which he seems to have devoted the full force of his mind. This approach bred hostility toward him, which eventually led to his being falsely accused and condemned to death. Afterward, however, that same city of Athens that had publicly condemned him publicly mourned him. Popular outrage turned so fiercely against his accusers that one of them was killed by the violence of the crowd, while the other escaped a similar fate only by going into voluntary and permanent exile.

Socrates was remarkable both in how he lived and how he died, and he left behind a large number of philosophical disciples who competed eagerly with one another in their pursuit of moral questions, particularly the question of the highest good (*summum bonum*): the possession of which, they believed, could make a person truly blessed. Because Socrates, in his characteristic style of debate, raised every kind of question, proposed answers, and then dismantled them, it was never entirely clear what he himself believed the highest good to be. As a result, each of his followers drew from those discussions whatever appealed to him most, and each located the ultimate good in whatever seemed most convincing to him personally. The "final good," as it was called, is simply that which, once attained, makes a person blessed. Yet the opinions among Socrates' followers on this question were so wildly divergent that, in a fact almost too strange to believe of students who shared the same teacher, some placed the highest good in pleasure (as Aristippus did), while others placed it in virtue (as Antisthenes did). It would take too long to catalogue every opinion held by every disciple.

Among the disciples of Socrates, Plato shone with a brilliance that far surpassed all the others, and not without good reason. Born in Athens to a distinguished family, he exceeded his fellow students in natural ability to a remarkable degree. Yet he considered neither himself nor the Socratic tradition sufficient to bring philosophy to its fullest expression, so he traveled as widely as he could, seeking out every place renowned for learning in any discipline he wished to master. From the Egyptians he absorbed whatever they considered most significant; then, moving on to those parts of Italy filled with the reputation of the Pythagoreans, he mastered the whole of Italic philosophy then in fashion, with impressive ease and under the finest teachers available. Because he felt a deep personal devotion to his master Socrates, he made him the speaker in all his dialogues, placing in his mouth whatever he had learned from others or worked out through his own formidable intellect, and softening even his moral arguments with the charm and elegance of the Socratic manner. The pursuit of wisdom, as Plato understood it, divides into two broad modes: action and contemplation. The active side concerns how we live, specifically the ordering of our moral conduct, while the contemplative side concerns the investigation of nature and the search for pure truth. Socrates is said to have excelled in the active dimension, while Pythagoras devoted himself more to the contemplative, bringing the full force of his intellect to bear on it. Plato receives credit for perfecting philosophy by uniting both into a single whole. He then divided it into three parts: the moral, which is primarily concerned with action; the natural, whose object is contemplation; and the rational, which distinguishes truth from falsehood. Although this third part is necessary to both action and contemplation, it is contemplation that has the strongest claim to the work of investigating the nature of truth. This threefold division, then, does not contradict the broader framework that grounds wisdom in action and contemplation together.

As for what Plato actually believed about each of these parts, specifically what he held to be the ultimate end of all action, the cause of all nature, and the light of all understanding, that is too large a question to settle here, and one about which we should not speak rashly. Plato was deeply attached to the well-known method of his master Socrates, that habit of concealing his own knowledge and opinions, which makes it genuinely difficult to determine what he himself believed on any number of questions, just as it is difficult to determine what Socrates truly thought. We must, however, incorporate into our discussion certain views that appear in his writings, whether he states them in his own voice or presents them through others and seems to endorse them. Some of these views are favorable to the true religion, which our faith embraces and defends; others stand in tension with it, as in the questions surrounding the existence of one God or many, and what this means for the truly blessed life that awaits us after death. Those who are praised for following Plato most closely, who is rightly preferred above all other philosophers of the Gentiles, and who are said to have understood him with the greatest precision, may well hold a conception of God that recognizes in Him the cause of all existence, the ultimate ground of all understanding, and the end toward which the whole of life should be directed. These three things correspond, respectively, to the natural, the rational, and the moral parts of philosophy. If humanity has been created in such a way that we reach, through what is highest in us, the One who surpasses all things, that is, the one true and supremely good God, without whom no nature exists, no teaching instructs, and no effort bears fruit, then let Him be sought as the One in whom all things are made secure, let Him be discovered as the One in whom all truth becomes certain, and let Him be loved as the One in whom all things are set right.

If Plato defined the wise man as one who imitates, knows, and loves God, and who finds blessedness through fellowship with Him, why bother debating the other philosophers at all? None of them come closer to our position than the Platonists. So let that mythological theology step aside first: the kind that entertains human minds with stories of the gods' crimes. And let the civic theology step aside as well, in which corrupt demons, masquerading as gods, have seduced earthly peoples who were already given over to earthly pleasures. These demons wanted to be honored through human error, and by filling their worshippers' minds with impure desires, they drove them to reenact divine crimes as acts of worship, while the demons themselves took great pleasure in watching those very performances as spectators. In this theology, whatever was dignified in the temple was contaminated by its association with the obscenity of the theater, and whatever was shameful in the theater found its justification in the abominations of the temples. Varro's interpretations must also give way to these philosophers: his explanations of sacred rites as references to the heavens, the earth, seeds, and the workings of perishable things. In the first place, those rites simply don't carry the meaning he claims, and so the truth doesn't follow him in that interpretive effort. But even if they did carry that meaning, a rational soul still should not worship as its god things that rank below it in the order of nature, nor should the soul elevate to divine status things to which the true God has already given the soul precedence. The same must be said of those writings connected to sacred rites that Numa Pompilius deliberately concealed by having them buried with him, and which, when a plough later turned them up, were burned on the senate's orders. And to treat Numa fairly, we should place in the same category the letter Alexander of Macedon wrote to his mother, based on what an Egyptian high priest named Leo had revealed to him. In that letter, not only figures like Picus and Faunus, Aeneas and Romulus, or even Hercules, Aesculapius, Liber (born of Semele), and the twin sons of Tyndareus, or any other mortals who had been deified, but even the principal gods themselves are shown to have been human beings. These are the gods Cicero alludes to without naming in his Tusculan Disputations: Jupiter, Juno, Saturn, Vulcan, Vesta, and many others whom Varro attempts to identify with parts or elements of the world. As we noted, this situation parallels Numa's case: the priest, frightened by what he had disclosed, urgently begged Alexander to order his mother to burn the letter containing these revelations. So let both of these theologies, the mythological and the civic, yield to the Platonic philosophers, who recognized the true God as the author of all things, the source of the light of truth, and the generous giver of all blessedness. And it isn't only those two theologies that must yield. The philosophers who were enslaved to the body in their thinking, and who supposed that the first principles of all things were material, must also yield to these great thinkers who acknowledged so great a God. This includes Thales, who held that water was the first principle of all things; Anaximenes, who said it was air; the Stoics, who said it was fire; Epicurus, who claimed it consisted of atoms, that is, tiny particles of matter; and many others who need not be listed here, all of whom believed that bodies, whether simple or compound, living or inert, were the cause and principle of everything. Some of them, the Epicureans for instance, believed that living things could arise from non-living matter. Others held that all things, living or not, spring from a living principle, but that everything, being material, ultimately springs from a material source. The Stoics, for their part, believed that fire, one of the four material elements making up the visible world, was both living and intelligent, the maker of the world and everything in it, and that fire was, in fact, God. These thinkers and others like them could only imagine what their sense-bound minds suggested to them. And yet there was something within them that they couldn't quite see: they formed interior representations of things they had perceived externally, even when those things were absent and they were only thinking about them. But such a mental representation is no longer a body; it is only the likeness of a body. And the faculty of the mind that perceives this likeness is neither a body nor the likeness of a body. Furthermore, the faculty that judges whether a representation is beautiful or ugly is, without question, superior to the thing being judged. This principle is the human intellect, the rational soul, and it is certainly not a body, since the likeness of a body that it perceives and evaluates is itself not a body. The soul is not earth, water, air, or fire, the four elements of which we see this world is composed. And if the soul is not a body, how could God, its Creator, be a body? So let all those philosophers yield to the Platonists, as we have said, and let those also yield who, while too embarrassed to call God a body, still believed that our souls share the same nature as God. They were not troubled by the soul's profound changeability, an attribute it would be impious to assign to the divine nature, and instead argued that it is the body that changes the soul, while the soul itself remains unchangeable. They might as well argue that flesh is wounded by some external body, since in itself it is invulnerable. The point is simple: what is truly unchangeable cannot be changed by anything at all, so whatever can be changed by the body cannot rightly be called immutable.

These philosophers, whom we rightly see elevated above the rest in fame and reputation, recognized that no material body is God, and so they looked beyond all physical matter in their search for Him. They recognized that whatever is subject to change cannot be the supreme God, and so they looked beyond every soul and every changeable spirit in their search for the highest being. They also recognized that in every changeable thing, the form that makes it what it is, whatever its nature or character, can only exist through Him who truly and fully exists, because He is unchangeable. Consider the whole body of the world: its shape, its qualities, its orderly movement, and all the bodies within it. Consider every kind of life, whether the life that nourishes and sustains, as in trees; or the life that also perceives, as in animals; or the life that adds intelligence to all of these, as in human beings; or the life that needs no nourishment but simply sustains, perceives, and understands, as in angels. All of these can only exist through Him who absolutely and completely exists. For in Him, existing and living are not two separate things, as though He could exist without living. Nor are living and understanding two separate things in Him, as though He could live without understanding. Nor are understanding and being blessed two separate things, as though He could understand without being blessed. In Him, to live, to understand, and to be blessed are all simply to exist. From this unchangeableness and this simplicity, these philosophers understood that all things must have been made by Him, and that He Himself could have been made by nothing. They reasoned that everything is either body or life, that life is something greater than body, that the nature of body is perceptible to the senses, and that the nature of life is perceptible to the mind. They therefore placed the intelligible above the sensible. By sensible things, we mean things that can be perceived by physical sight and touch; by intelligible things, we mean things that can be grasped by the sight of the mind. There is no physical beauty, whether in the form of a body such as its shape, or in its movement such as in music, that is not ultimately judged by the mind. But this would never have been possible if there did not exist within the mind itself a higher form of these things, one without mass, without sound, without the constraints of space and time. And even with respect to these intelligible things, if the mind itself were not subject to change, it would be impossible for one person to judge sensible forms better than another. The clever person judges better than the slow one, the skilled better than the unskilled, the experienced better than the inexperienced; and the same person judges better after gaining experience than before. But whatever admits of more and less is mutable, and from this, thoughtful people who have reflected deeply on these matters have concluded that the first and original form is not to be found in things whose form is changeable. Since they saw that both body and mind could possess more or less beauty of form, and that without form they could not exist at all, they recognized that there must be some reality in which the original form resides, unchangeable and therefore admitting no degrees of comparison. In that reality, they rightly believed, lay the first principle of all things: uncreated, and the source through which all things were made. This is why what can be known of God was made clear to them, as His invisible qualities were perceived through the things He had made, including His eternal power and divine nature, by whom all visible and temporal things were created. We have said enough on the part of philosophy these thinkers call physics, or the study of nature.

When it comes to what philosophers call logic, or rational philosophy, we should not even think of comparing the Platonists with those who placed the power of discerning truth entirely in the bodily senses, and believed that everything we know must be measured by those unreliable and deceptive standards. The Epicureans fell into this error, along with every school that shared their outlook. So did the Stoics, who traced even their beloved art of argumentation, which they called dialectic, back to the bodily senses. They held that the mind draws its basic concepts (the Greek *ennoia*) from sensory experience, and that this forms the entire foundation and structure of their learning and teaching. I have often found myself puzzled by one particular claim of theirs: that only the wise are truly beautiful. By what bodily sense, I wonder, have they ever perceived that kind of beauty? With what physical eyes have they glimpsed the loveliness of wisdom's form? The thinkers we rightly place above all others, by contrast, carefully distinguished between what the mind grasps directly and what the senses perceive. They neither denied the senses their proper role nor credited them with more than they can actually deliver. And the light by which our understanding comes to know anything at all, they identified as none other than God Himself, the very God by whom all things were made.

The final branch of philosophy is ethics, or what the Greeks called *ēthikē*, which addresses the question of the highest good. This is the good that, once we orient all our actions toward it and pursue it for its own sake rather than as a means to something else, leaves us with nothing more to seek in order to be happy. It is called the "end" precisely because we desire everything else for the sake of it, while desiring it for nothing beyond itself. Now, different thinkers have located this highest good in different places: some in the body, some in the mind, and some in both together. Their reasoning was straightforward. Since a human being consists of both soul and body, they concluded that well-being must arise from one or both of these, taking the form of some ultimate good that could make a person truly happy and serve as the final reference point for all human action. This is why those who added a third category of goods, things they called "external," such as honor, glory, and wealth, did not treat these as part of the final good to be pursued for their own sake. Instead, they regarded them as goods to be pursued for the sake of something else, and they noted that such goods benefit the virtuous and harm the wicked. Whether philosophers located the human good in the mind, the body, or both, they were still searching for it within the human being alone. Those who looked to the body were looking to the lower part of human nature; those who looked to the mind were looking to the higher part; and those who looked to both were looking to the whole person. In every case, the search remained confined to humanity, and these three broad approaches gave rise not merely to three competing schools of thought, but to many, since philosophers disagreed among themselves about what specifically constitutes the good of the body, the good of the mind, and the good of both combined.

All of these schools, then, should yield to those philosophers who have argued that human happiness comes not from enjoying the body, the mind, or even another person, but from enjoying God. And this enjoyment is not like the mind's enjoyment of the body, or of itself, or even like the enjoyment one friend takes in another. It is more like the way the eye enjoys light, though whether that comparison truly holds is something I hope to examine more carefully elsewhere, with God's help, to the best of my ability. For now, it is enough to note that Plato identified the highest good as living according to virtue, and he maintained that only the person who knows and imitates God can attain virtue. That knowledge and imitation, he argued, are the sole source of human happiness. He therefore had no hesitation in defining philosophy as the love of God, whose nature is incorporeal. From this it follows directly that the philosopher, as a student of wisdom, will become truly happy only when he begins to enjoy God. It is true that enjoying what one loves does not automatically produce happiness, since many people are made miserable by loving what they should not love, and even more miserable when they actually obtain it. Yet no one is happy who does not enjoy what they love. Even those who love the wrong things do not consider themselves happy simply by loving; they consider themselves happy only when they possess and enjoy what they love. Who, then, except the most wretched of people, would deny that a person is happy who enjoys what they love and who loves the true and highest good? According to Plato, that true and highest good is God. He would therefore call a person a philosopher who loves God, since philosophy aims at achieving the happy life, and the one who loves God finds happiness in the enjoyment of God.

Among all the philosophers who have reflected on the supreme God, some have concluded that He is simultaneously the maker of all created things, the light by which things are known, and the good toward which all action should be directed. In other words, they found in Him the first principle of nature, the truth of doctrine, and the source of human happiness. Whether these thinkers are best called Platonists or prefer some other label for their school; whether this insight belongs only to the leading figures of the Ionic tradition, such as Plato himself and those who genuinely understood him; whether it also extends to the Italic school through Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans and all who held similar views; and whether it further includes every wise man and philosopher across all nations who can be shown to have seen and taught this truth, be they Atlanteans, Libyans, Egyptians, Indians, Persians, Chaldeans, Scythians, Gauls, Spaniards, or people of any other nation: we place all of these thinkers above every other school of philosophy, and we freely acknowledge that they come closer to us than anyone else.

Even a Christian who has been formed entirely by the Church's own literature, and who may never have heard the name "Platonist" or known that Greek philosophy divided itself into two great schools, the Ionic and the Italic, is still not so cut off from the wider world that he doesn't know philosophers claim to pursue wisdom, and even to possess it. He is rightly cautious, however, about those who philosophize according to the elements of this world rather than according to God, by whom the world itself was made. The apostle's warning has reached him, and he takes it seriously: "Beware that no one deceives you through philosophy and vain deceit, according to the elements of the world" (Col 2:8). Yet so that he doesn't conclude that all philosophers fall into this trap, he also hears the same apostle say of certain among them: "Because that which is known of God is manifest among them, for God has manifested it to them. For His invisible things from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things which are made, also His eternal power and Godhead" (Rom 1:19-20). And when Paul spoke to the Athenians and said something profound about God that few are able to grasp, "In Him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28), he went on to add, "As certain also of your own have said." The Christian also knows to stay on guard even against these philosophers when they go wrong. For in the very passage where Paul says that God made His invisible things visible through creation so that the mind could perceive them, he also makes clear that these same thinkers failed to worship God rightly, because they offered divine honors, which belong to Him alone, to things that had no claim to them: "because, knowing God, they glorified Him not as God; neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of corruptible man, and of birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things" (Rom 1:21-23). Here the apostle has in view the Romans, the Greeks, and the Egyptians, who prided themselves on the name of wisdom. We will take up that dispute with them in due course. On the point where they do agree with us, however, we place them above all other thinkers: namely, their affirmation of the one God, the author of this universe, who is not only above every body, being incorporeal, but also above every soul, being incorruptible. He is our first principle, our light, our good. And even though the Christian, unfamiliar with their writings, doesn't use the technical vocabulary he has never learned, calling nothing "natural philosophy" (the Latin term) or "physics" (the Greek equivalent) for the study of nature, nothing "rational" or "logical" for the discipline of discovering truth, and nothing "moral" or "ethical" for the study of how to pursue the good and avoid evil, he is not therefore ignorant of what matters most. He knows that it is from the one true and supremely good God that we receive the nature by which we are made in His image, the knowledge by which we understand both Him and ourselves, and the grace by which, in clinging to Him, we find our blessedness. This, then, is why we prefer these philosophers to all the rest: while other thinkers wore themselves out searching for the causes of things and trying to work out the right way to learn and to live, these men, by knowing God, found the very source from which the universe was constituted, the light by which truth can be seen, and the fountain at which true happiness is to be drunk. All philosophers, therefore, whether Platonists or others, who have arrived at this understanding of God are in agreement with us. We have chosen, however, to make our case primarily with the Platonists, because their writings are the most widely known. The Greeks, whose language holds the highest place among the tongues of the nations, have praised these writings with great enthusiasm; and the Latins, drawn in by their quality and their reputation, have studied them more eagerly than any other philosophical works, and by translating them into our own language have given them still wider reach and recognition.

Some of our fellow believers in Christ are struck with wonder when they hear or read that Plato held ideas about God that closely resemble the truths of our own faith. Some have concluded from this that, during his travels to Egypt, Plato must have heard the prophet Jeremiah in person or read the prophetic scriptures while visiting that country. I have even expressed this view myself in certain of my writings. But a careful calculation of dates from chronological history shows that Plato was born roughly a hundred years after Jeremiah's prophetic ministry, and since Plato lived to eighty-one, there were approximately seventy years between his death and the time when Ptolemy, king of Egypt, requested that the prophetic scriptures of the Hebrew people be sent to him from Judea and entrusted them to seventy Hebrews who also knew Greek, for the purpose of translation and preservation. It follows, then, that during his Egyptian voyage Plato could not have met Jeremiah, who had been dead for generations, nor could he have read those scriptures, which had not yet been rendered into Greek, the only language he commanded. Unless, of course, we allow that, driven by his intense passion for learning, he studied those writings through an interpreter, just as he studied the writings of the Egyptians. He would not have produced a translation, since even Ptolemy only secured that privilege through extraordinary acts of generosity (though the sheer weight of royal authority might have been incentive enough on its own), but he could have learned as much as possible about their contents through conversation. What lends this theory some credibility is the opening of Genesis: "In the beginning God made the heaven and earth. And the earth was invisible, and without order; and darkness was over the abyss: and the Spirit of God moved over the waters" (Gen 1:1-2). In the *Timaeus*, when writing about the formation of the world, Plato says that God first united earth and fire, which makes clear that he assigns fire a place in the heavens. This view bears a recognizable resemblance to the statement "In the beginning God made heaven and earth" (Gen 1:1). Plato then speaks of the two intermediate elements, water and air, through which the two extremes of earth and fire are mutually joined, and this has led many to think he interpreted the phrase "the Spirit of God moved over the waters" (Gen 1:2) as a reference to all four elements, since air is also called spirit, and he may simply not have paid close enough attention to how those scriptures use the term "Spirit of God." As for Plato's claim that the philosopher is a lover of God, nothing shines more brightly throughout those sacred writings than precisely that idea. But the detail that most nearly convinces me that Plato was not ignorant of those scriptures is the answer given to Moses when God's words were conveyed to him through an angel. When Moses asked the name of the God commanding him to go and deliver the Hebrew people from Egypt, the answer came: "I am who am; and thou shalt say to the children of Israel, He who *is* sent me unto you" (Exod 3:14). The implication is that, measured against the One who truly *is*, because He is unchangeable, all created and mutable things in a sense *are not*. This was precisely the conviction Plato held with such intensity and worked so diligently to establish. And I cannot find this idea anywhere in the writings of those who came before Plato, except in that very passage where it is said, "I am who am; and thou shalt say to the children of Israel, *Who is* sent me unto you" (Exod 3:14).

We need not settle the question of where he learned these things, whether from the writings of earlier thinkers or, more likely, from the words of the apostle: "Because that which is known of God has been manifested among them, for God has manifested it to them. For His invisible things from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by those things which have been made, also His eternal power and Godhead" (Rom 1:19-20). Whatever the source of his knowledge, I think I have made it clear enough that my choice of the Platonic philosophers as dialogue partners was not arbitrary. The question we have just taken up belongs to natural theology, specifically whether sacred rites should be performed to one God or to many, for the sake of the happiness that awaits us after death. I chose the Platonists in particular because their relatively sound thinking about the one God who made heaven and earth has made them the most distinguished of all the philosophers. This distinction has given them such an advantage over all others in the eyes of later generations that, although Aristotle, Plato's student, a man of remarkable ability and far from negligible as a writer (though inferior to Plato in eloquence), founded the Peripatetic school, so called because its members were in the habit of walking about during their discussions, and although his great reputation drew many students to his school even during Plato's own lifetime, and although Plato at his death was succeeded at his school, known as the Academy, by Speusippus (his sister's son) and Xenocrates (his beloved student), whose followers came to be called Academics after the school's name, the most celebrated philosophers of recent times who chose to follow Plato have been unwilling to call themselves Peripatetics or Academics, preferring instead the name Platonists. Among these were the renowned Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Porphyry, all Greeks, along with the African Apuleius, who was learned in both Greek and Latin. All of these thinkers, however, along with the rest of their school and Plato himself, believed that sacred rites should be performed in honor of many gods.

So, while the pagans differ from us in many significant ways, I want to focus on one particular point of disagreement that is especially relevant to the matter at hand. I will begin by asking them a direct question: to which gods do they believe sacred rites should be offered? To the good gods, the bad gods, or both? We have Plato's own position affirming that all the gods are good and that not one of them is bad. It follows, then, that sacred rites should be offered to the good, since only the good qualify as gods at all. If a being is not good, it is not a god. If this is true (and what else should we believe about the gods?), then it completely demolishes the idea that wicked gods must be appeased through sacred rites to keep them from harming us, while good gods are invoked to secure their help. There are no wicked gods, and it is to the good gods alone that such rites are supposedly owed. What, then, are we to make of those gods who love theatrical performances, even demanding that such spectacles be included among sacred observances and staged in their honor? The power these gods wield confirms that they exist, but their appetite for such entertainments confirms that they are wicked. Plato's own view on theatrical performances is well known: he believed that poets, precisely because they composed works so unworthy of the majesty and goodness of the gods, should be banished from the state entirely. What kind of gods, then, are these who find themselves in direct conflict with Plato over theatrical performances? Plato refuses to allow the gods to be slandered with false crimes; these gods demand that those very same crimes be celebrated in their honor.

Finally, when the gods ordered these plays to be inaugurated, they didn't just demand shameful things; they also acted with cruelty, striking Titus Latinius with a disease and taking his son from him because he had refused to obey them. They only lifted the affliction once he had complied. Plato, however, bad as the gods were, didn't think they deserved fear. Holding firmly and consistently to his convictions, he had no hesitation in removing from a well-ordered state all the impious absurdities of the poets that these gods so delighted in, precisely because the gods themselves were impure. Yet Labeo places this same Plato (as I mentioned earlier in the second book) among the demigods. Labeo's view is that evil deities must be appeased with bloody sacrifices and fasting, while good deities are honored with plays and everything associated with celebration and joy. How is it, then, that the demigod Plato so persistently dares to strip away those very pleasures, judging them base, not from the demigods but from the gods themselves, and specifically from the good gods? What's more, those gods thoroughly refute Labeo's position by their own behavior, since they showed themselves in the case of Latinius to be not only wanton and capricious, but cruel and terrifying as well. Let the Platonists, then, explain all of this to us. They follow their master's view that all gods are good, honorable, and friendly to the virtues of the wise, and they consider it wrong to think anything less of any god. They say they will explain it. Let us listen carefully.

They propose a threefold division of all rational beings: gods, humans, and demons. The gods occupy the highest realm, humans the lowest, and demons the middle. The gods dwell in heaven, humans on earth, and demons in the air. Just as these realms differ in dignity, so too do the natures of those who inhabit them; the gods are therefore superior to both humans and demons. Humans are placed below gods and demons in both the order of their dwelling places and the measure of their worth. Demons, holding the middle position, are inferior to the gods (whose realm sits above theirs) yet superior to humans (whose realm sits below). They share bodily immortality with the gods, but share the passions of the mind with humans. It is no surprise, then, that demons take pleasure in the obscenities of the theater and the fictions of the poets, since they are subject to the same human passions from which the gods are entirely removed and utterly free. From this, the argument concludes that when Plato condemned and banned the fictions of the poets, he was not depriving the gods of theatrical pleasure, since the gods are wholly good and supremely exalted; he was depriving the demons.

Many writers have addressed this subject, among them Apuleius, the Platonist from Madaura, who devoted an entire work to it titled *Concerning the God of Socrates*. In that work, he examines and explains the nature of the deity said to have attended Socrates as a kind of personal spirit, one that reportedly warned him away from any course of action that would prove harmful. Apuleius argues clearly and at considerable length that this being was not a god but a demon, and he carefully examines Plato's view of the three tiers of existence: the exalted realm of the gods, the humble condition of humanity, and the intermediate position of demons. Given all this, how did Plato dare to strip from the demons (since he had already placed the gods beyond all contact with human affairs) every pleasure of the theatre, going so far as to banish poets from his ideal state? His evident purpose was to call the human soul, even while it remains trapped in these dying bodies, to rise above the shameful demands of demons, to reject their corruption, and to choose the brilliance of virtue instead. But if Plato showed genuine integrity by condemning and forbidding these things, then it was surely disgraceful for demons to demand them in the first place. So one of three things must be true: either Apuleius is wrong and Socrates' familiar spirit did not belong to this class of beings; or Plato contradicted himself, honoring demons in one breath and banishing their favorite entertainments from his well-ordered state in the next; or Socrates deserves no congratulations for his friendship with a demon, a friendship that clearly embarrassed Apuleius enough that he titled his book *On the God of Socrates*, while the actual content of his argument, in which he so carefully and thoroughly distinguishes gods from demons, should have led him to call it *On the Demon of Socrates* instead. He apparently preferred to bury that admission in the body of the text rather than announce it on the cover. And the reason is clear: through the sound teaching that has enlightened human society, virtually everyone recoils at the very word "demon," so much so that any reader who encountered the title *On the Demon of Socrates* before reading Apuleius's careful argument about the dignity of demons would almost certainly have concluded that the author had lost his mind. But what did Apuleius actually find to praise in demons? Only their physical agility, their bodily strength, and the elevated position they occupy in the cosmic order. When he spoke about their character in general terms, he said nothing good and a great deal that was damning. In the end, no one who has read that book is surprised that demons wanted obscene theatrical performances counted among sacred rites, or that beings who wished to be mistaken for gods would take pleasure in stories about divine crimes, or that all those religious ceremonies, with their shameful absurdities that provoke laughter and their brutal cruelties that inspire horror, should align so perfectly with their appetites.

A truly religious mind, one submitted to the true God, should never assume that demons are better than humans simply because they have superior bodies. If bodily quality were the measure of worth, we would have to rank many animals above ourselves, since they surpass us in the sharpness of their senses, the ease and speed of their movement, and the strength and endurance of their bodies. What human can match the eagle or the vulture in the power of sight? Who can rival the dog in keenness of smell? Who can keep pace with the hare, the stag, or the birds in sheer speed? Who can match the lion or the elephant in raw strength? Who can match the serpent in length of life, since serpents are said to shed old age along with their skin and return to something like youth? Yet we are better than all these creatures because we possess reason and understanding, and by that same logic we should be better than the demons by living good and virtuous lives. Divine providence gave demons bodies of finer quality than ours precisely so that what we excel them in would stand out as something far more worth caring for than the body. We are meant to learn to look past the bodily advantages of demons and fix our attention on goodness of life, in which we genuinely surpass them. We should also remember that we too will one day have immortal bodies: not an immortality tormented by eternal punishment, but one that follows from the purity of the soul.

But when it comes to elevation of place, it is simply absurd to be so impressed by the fact that demons inhabit the air while we inhabit the earth that we conclude they are therefore superior to us. By that logic, we would have to rank every bird above ourselves. And yet birds, when they grow tired from flying or need to eat, return to the earth to rest and feed, which the demons, we are told, do not do. Does that mean birds are superior to us, and demons superior to birds? If that conclusion is obviously absurd, then there is no good reason to think that demons deserve our religious devotion simply because they occupy a higher element. The truth is that birds are not only not ranked above us earthbound creatures, but are actually subject to us, because of the dignity of the rational soul we possess. The same principle applies to demons: though they are aerial beings, they are not better than us simply because air sits higher than earth. On the contrary, human beings should be ranked above demons, because the despair of demons cannot be compared to the hope of the devout. Even Plato's own law, by which he arranges the four elements in a mutual order, placing the two middle elements (air and water) between the two extremes (fire, the most mobile, at the top, and the immovable earth at the bottom), so that air stands above water as fire stands above air, and water above earth, even this law, I say, gives us sufficient reason not to judge the worth of living creatures by the rank of the elements they inhabit. Apuleius himself acknowledges that human beings are terrestrial animals like many others, and yet should be ranked far above aquatic creatures, even though Plato places water above land in his elemental hierarchy. The point is clear: the order that applies to physical elements does not carry over when we are assessing the worth of living souls. A soul of a higher order may well inhabit a body of a lower kind, and a soul of a lower order may inhabit a body of a higher.

When Apuleius spoke about the character of demons, he described them as being driven by the same mental disturbances as human beings. They are provoked by injuries, won over by favors and gifts, they delight in honors, take pleasure in various sacred rites, and grow irritable when any of those rites are neglected. He also tells us that augurs, soothsayers, and prophets all depend on demons for their divinations, that dreams and their revelations come from demons as well, and that the feats of magicians draw on demonic power. When offering a concise definition, he puts it this way: "Demons are of an animal nature, passive in soul, rational in mind, aerial in body, and eternal in time." Of these five characteristics, he says the first three are shared with human beings, the fourth belongs to demons alone, and the fifth they share with the gods. But I notice that demons actually share two of those first three traits with the gods as well. Apuleius holds that the gods are also animals, and when he assigns each order of beings to its proper element, he places humanity among the other earthly creatures that live and feel on the ground. So if demons are animals by genus, that quality is shared not only with humans but with the gods and with beasts; if they are rational in mind, that is shared with both gods and humans; if they are eternal in time, that is shared with the gods alone; if they are passive in soul, that is shared with humans alone; and if they are aerial in body, that characteristic belongs to them exclusively. None of this amounts to much. Being animals by nature is nothing special, since beasts are the same. Being rational in mind places them no higher than us, since we are rational too. Being eternal in time offers no real advantage if they are not blessed, because a brief happiness is better than an endless misery. Being passive in soul puts them no higher than us either, since we share that condition, though we would not have shared it had we not fallen into wretchedness. And being aerial in body counts for little, since a soul of any kind outranks every body, and therefore religious worship, which must flow from the soul, is not owed to anything that ranks below the soul. If Apuleius had included virtue, wisdom, and happiness among the qualities of demons, and had affirmed that they share those qualities with the gods eternally, he would at least have attributed to them something genuinely worth admiring and prizing. Even then, it would not have been right to worship them as we worship God on account of those gifts; we would instead owe our worship to the One from whom they received those gifts in the first place. How much less, then, do these aerial creatures deserve divine honor: rational only in the sense that they are capable of misery, passive in soul in the sense that they are actually miserable, and eternal in time in the sense that their misery can never end.

Setting aside other matters and focusing on what Apuleius says demons share with us, let us ask a pointed question. If all four elements are filled with their own creatures, fire and air with immortal ones, water and earth with mortal ones, then why are the souls of demons churned up by storms of passion? The Greek word *pathos* means disturbance, which is precisely why Apuleius chose to describe demons as "passive in soul," since the word "passion," derived from *pathos*, refers to a movement of the mind that runs contrary to reason. Why, then, do demons possess these inner disturbances when beasts do not? If something resembling passion appears in animals, it cannot truly be called a disturbance, because disturbance by definition opposes reason, and animals have no reason to oppose. In human beings, these disturbances arise from foolishness or misery, since we have not yet attained the perfection of wisdom promised to us when we are finally freed from our present mortality. The gods, we are told, are free from such disturbances because they are not only eternal but also blessed; they too possess rational souls, but souls of the purest kind, untouched by any corruption. So if the gods are free from disturbance because they are blessed rather than miserable, and beasts are free from it because they are incapable of either blessedness or misery, then it follows that demons, like human beings, are subject to disturbance precisely because they are not blessed but miserable creatures.

What foolishness, then, or rather what madness, to submit ourselves through any act of religious devotion to demons, when true religion exists specifically to deliver us from the very depravity that makes us like them. Even Apuleius, who treats demons with considerable generosity and considers them worthy of divine honor, is still forced to admit that they are subject to anger, while true religion commands us not to be carried away by anger but to resist it. Demons are won over by gifts, while true religion commands us not to show favor on account of gifts received. Demons are flattered by honors, while true religion commands us not to be swayed by such things at all. Demons hate some people and love others, not through calm and reasoned judgment, but because of what Apuleius himself calls their "passive soul," while true religion commands us to love even our enemies. Finally, true religion commands us to put away all restlessness of heart, all agitation of mind, and all the inner storms that Apuleius says are constantly swelling and surging within the souls of demons. Why, then, except through foolishness and wretched error, would you humble yourself to worship a being whose character you have no desire to share? Why would you offer religious devotion to one you have no wish to imitate, when the highest duty of religion is precisely to imitate the One you worship?

All of this effort has been wasted. Apuleius and those who share his views honored the demons by placing them in the air between the ethereal heavens and the earth, so they could carry human prayers up to the gods and bring divine answers back down to men. The reasoning behind this was Plato's supposed teaching that no god has direct contact with humanity. Those who accept this framework considered it improper for gods and men to interact directly, but perfectly appropriate for demons to serve as go-betweens, carrying petitions upward and delivering responses downward. The result of this arrangement is deeply troubling: a morally upright man, someone entirely untouched by the crimes of magic, must rely on demons as his patrons before the gods will hear him, even though those very demons love the crimes he refuses to commit. One would think his refusal to love those crimes should have made the gods more willing to hear him directly, not less. But no. The demons love the obscenities of the stage, which a chaste person does not love. They love the sorceries of the magicians, with their thousand methods of causing harm, which an innocent person does not love. And yet both chastity and innocence, if they want anything from the gods, apparently cannot obtain it on their own merits. They must rely on their enemies to speak for them. Apuleius should not bother trying to defend the fictions of the poets or the mockeries of the stage. If human modesty can betray itself so thoroughly as not only to love shameful things but to believe the divine takes pleasure in them, we have a ready answer: their own supreme authority and teacher, Plato himself, stands against them.

What's more, consider the widespread public condemnation of those magic arts that certain deeply wretched and impious men love to boast about. Why are those arts so severely punished by law if they are the works of deities worthy of worship? Will someone argue that Christians invented the laws against magic? Even Virgil, the most celebrated of poets, made clear what he thought of such practices, and it wasn't admiration:

"By heaven, I swear, and your dear life,

Unwillingly these arms I wield,

And take, to meet the coming strife,

Enchantment's sword and shield."

And when the same poet writes elsewhere about magic arts, "I've seen him to another place transport the standing corn," he is referring to the widely held belief that these arts could transfer the harvest of one field to another. This is the kind of thing that this pestilent and accursed teaching claims to accomplish. Cicero tells us that among the Twelve Tables, the oldest laws of Rome, there was a statute prescribing punishment for anyone who did exactly this. And finally, was it before Christian judges that Apuleius himself was put on trial for practicing magic? If he had genuinely believed these arts to be divine, holy, and consistent with the workings of divine power, he should not merely have confessed to them but openly proclaimed them, denouncing the laws that prohibited and condemned such practices as misguided, and arguing instead that they deserved admiration and respect.

By taking that approach, Socrates would have achieved one of two outcomes: either he would have persuaded the judges to adopt his view, or, if they had revealed their bias toward unjust laws and condemned him to death despite his praise of virtuous things, the demons would have rewarded his soul as it deserved, since he had not feared losing his mortal life in order to proclaim and celebrate their divine works. Our own martyrs faced a similar test. When the faith that they knew had secured their eternal safety and glory was treated as a criminal offense, they refused to deny it in order to escape temporal punishment. Instead, they confessed it, proclaimed it, endured everything for it with faithfulness and courage, and died for it with a calm and pious spirit. In doing so, they exposed the injustice of the law that had banned their religion and ultimately brought about its repeal. Now, there does survive a lengthy and eloquent speech by this Platonic philosopher, in which he defends himself against charges of practicing magic. He insists he has nothing to do with such arts, and he tries to establish his innocence by denying involvement in things that cannot be done innocently. Yet all the miracles performed by sorcerers, whom he considers rightly condemned, are carried out through the instruction and power of demons. Why, then, does he think demons deserve to be honored? He argues that they are necessary because they carry our prayers up to the gods, yet their works are precisely the kind we must avoid if we want our prayers to reach the true God. I must also ask: what kind of human prayers does he imagine the demons actually deliver to the good gods? If they are magical prayers, the good gods will want nothing to do with them. If they are lawful prayers, the good gods will not accept them from such messengers. Consider a sinner who repents, especially one guilty of sorcery: does he receive pardon through the intercession of the very demons who urged him into the sin he now mourns? Or do the demons themselves, in order to win pardon for the penitent, first become penitents themselves for having led him astray? No one has ever suggested this about demons, and rightly so, because if it were true, they would never have dared to seek divine honors for themselves. After all, how could beings who sought the grace of pardon through repentance simultaneously display the kind of detestable pride that is utterly incompatible with the humility that pardon requires?

But is there some urgent, pressing reason why demons must serve as intermediaries between the gods and humanity, carrying human prayers upward and bringing divine answers back down? And if so, what exactly is that reason? What is this great necessity? Because, they say, no god has direct dealings with a human being. What admirable holiness this is in a god: one who will not deal with a man who comes in supplication, yet freely deals with an arrogant demon; who will not deal with a man who comes in repentance, yet freely deals with a demon who deceives; who will not deal with a man who flees to the divine nature for refuge, yet freely deals with a demon who merely pretends to divinity; who will not deal with a man who seeks forgiveness, yet freely deals with a demon who encourages wickedness; who will not deal with a man who, through philosophical writing, drives the poets out of a well-ordered state, yet freely deals with a demon who petitions the rulers and priests of that same state to stage theatrical performances mocking those very poets; who will not deal with a man who refuses to attribute crimes to the gods, yet freely deals with a demon who takes pleasure in dramatizing those imaginary crimes; who will not deal with a man who punishes the crimes of sorcerers through just laws, yet freely deals with a demon who teaches and practices those same magical arts; who will not deal with a man who refuses to imitate a demon, yet freely deals with a demon who lies in wait to deceive that very man.

Here, then, is the great absurdity that supposedly makes this whole system necessary: the ethereal gods, who care about human affairs, cannot know what mortals are doing down on earth unless the aerial demons carry the news to them. The reasoning goes that ether hangs far above the earth, while air sits between them, touching both. What remarkable wisdom! What exactly do these thinkers believe about gods who are, by their own account, supremely good? On one hand, these gods care about human affairs, or else they would be unworthy of worship. On the other hand, the sheer distance between the elements leaves them ignorant of everything happening on earth. This is why demons are supposedly necessary as go-betweens, keeping the gods informed about human affairs and enabling them to help people when needed. And it is precisely this function, we are told, that makes the demons worthy of worship. If that is the case, then a demon is better known to these good gods through physical proximity than a good man is known through goodness of soul. What a miserable conclusion. Or should I call it a detestable and empty error, so I don't end up attributing emptiness to the divine nature itself? If the gods can perceive our minds directly, unhindered by their bodies, then they have no need of demons as messengers. But if the ethereal gods can only perceive minds indirectly, through physical signals like a person's face, speech, and movement, and must rely on demons to interpret and report these things, then it follows that the gods can also be deceived by whatever lies the demons choose to tell. And yet, if the divine nature of the gods is truly beyond deception by demons, then it cannot be ignorant of our actions either.

But I would like to ask these thinkers a pointed question. Have the demons informed the gods that Plato found the poets' scandalous fictions about divine crimes deeply offensive, while quietly hiding their own delight in those same fictions? Or have the demons concealed both things, leaving the gods entirely in the dark about the whole matter? Or have they reported both: Plato's devout concern for the gods' honor and the demons' own appetite for things that dishonor those gods? Or, finally, have the demons suppressed Plato's view, his principled refusal to allow the gods to be smeared with invented crimes by reckless poets, while having no shame or hesitation in broadcasting their own wickedness, their love of theatrical performances in which the gods' supposed misdeeds are celebrated with relish? Let them pick whichever of these four options they prefer, and then consider how much damage any one of them does to their picture of the gods. If they choose the first, they must admit that the good gods could not be close to the good Plato, who was trying to protect them from slander, while they remained close to the evil demons who reveled in that slander. This would be because, on their account, the good gods can only learn about a good man at such a great distance through the mediation of evil demons, whom they can know simply because of physical nearness. If they choose the second and say the demons concealed both things, leaving the gods ignorant of both Plato's devout legislation and the demons' own sacrilegious pleasure, then what useful knowledge can the gods possibly gain about human affairs through these intermediaries? They would be unaware of the very things that pious people have done, out of reverence for good gods, to resist the corrupt desires of evil demons. If they choose the third and say the demons reported not only Plato's objection to the wrongs done to the gods but also their own delight in those wrongs, I have to ask: is that kind of report not itself an insult? The gods, hearing and knowing both sides, would then be permitting the approach of malicious demons who desire and pursue things contrary to divine dignity and Platonic religion, while also using those same wicked demons, who are physically near to them, to send blessings to the good Plato, who is far away. They would inhabit a position in the linked chain of elements that puts them in contact with their accusers but not with their defender, knowing the truth on both sides yet unable to overcome the weight of air and earth that separates them from goodness. The fourth option remains, and it is the worst of all. Who could bear to hear that the demons reported the poets' slanderous inventions about the immortal gods, along with the shameful mockeries of the theater and their own burning passion for such spectacles, while hiding from the gods the fact that Plato, with all the seriousness of a philosopher, argued that every one of these things should be banished from a well-ordered republic? The good gods would then be forced, through such messengers, to learn about the evil deeds of the messengers themselves, while being denied any knowledge of the good deeds of the philosophers, even though the former bring dishonor to the gods and the latter bring them glory.

None of these four alternatives deserves our acceptance, because we cannot attribute to the gods the kind of degrading qualities that any one of them would imply. This means we must reject entirely the view held by Apuleius and the other philosophers of his school: that demons serve as messengers and go-betweens, carrying our prayers up to the gods and bringing divine assistance back down to us. On the contrary, we should recognize them for what they truly are: spirits consumed by the desire to cause harm, completely estranged from righteousness, bloated with pride, hollowed out by envy, and cunning in deception. They inhabit the air as one inhabits a prison, which suits their nature perfectly, because they were cast down from the heights of the higher heaven and condemned to dwell in this lower region as a just punishment for sins beyond recovery. And while the air sits above the earth and the waters, that physical elevation gives them no moral advantage over human beings. People may not surpass demons in terms of their earthly bodies, but they far exceed them in spiritual devotion, having chosen the true God as their help and refuge. Over the many who are clearly unworthy of true religion, however, these demons rule like conquerors over captives, and they have convinced the greater part of humanity of their divinity through astonishing but fraudulent signs, whether in the form of spectacular deeds or seemingly accurate predictions. Some people, though, have observed the vices of these spirits too carefully and too closely to be persuaded that they are gods, so the demons have settled for presenting themselves as mere intermediaries between the gods and humanity. Others have gone further, refusing to grant even that lesser status, since they could see that these beings were wicked, and in their view the gods are entirely good. Yet even these critics lacked the courage to declare the demons wholly unworthy of any divine honor, fearing the backlash from ordinary people who, through generations of deep-rooted superstition, had been serving the demons through countless rituals and the building of many temples.

The Egyptian Hermes, known as Trismegistus, held a different view on demons than Apuleius did. Apuleius denies that demons are gods, but when he describes them as occupying a middle position between gods and men, serving as necessary mediators, he fails to distinguish between the worship owed to them and the religious reverence owed to the higher gods. This Egyptian, however, claims that some gods were made by the supreme God, and others were made by men. Anyone hearing this might naturally assume he means physical idols, since those are the work of human hands. But Trismegistus argues that visible, tangible images are merely the bodies of the gods, and that certain spirits have been invited to inhabit them, spirits with the power to cause harm or to fulfill the wishes of those who honor and serve them. The art of binding these invisible spirits to visible, material objects, thereby creating what amount to animated bodies dedicated to and inhabited by those spirits, is, he says, the art of making gods. He goes further, claiming that humanity has received this remarkable and extraordinary power. Here are his words, as translated into our language: "And since we have undertaken to discuss the relationship and fellowship between men and the gods, know, O Asclepius, the power and strength of man. Just as the Lord and Father, the highest of all, even God, is the maker of the celestial gods, so man is the maker of the gods who dwell in temples, content to live near to men." A little later he adds: "Thus humanity, always mindful of its nature and origin, perseveres in the imitation of divinity; and as the Lord and Father made eternal gods to be like Himself, so humanity fashioned its own gods in the likeness of its own face." When Asclepius, to whom he was primarily speaking, responded by asking, "Do you mean the statues, O Trismegistus?" he replied: "Yes, the statues, however skeptical you may be, O Asclepius. The statues, animated and full of sensation and spirit, who accomplish such great and wonderful things. The statues, who foresee future events and announce them through lots, through prophecy, through dreams, and by many other means, who bring diseases on men and cure them again, dispensing joy or sorrow according to what people deserve. Do you not know, O Asclepius, that Egypt is an image of heaven, or more truly, a reflection and earthly counterpart of everything that is ordered and carried out there, and that it is, if we may say so, the temple of the whole world? And yet, as it befits a wise man to know all things in advance, you should not be ignorant of this: a time is coming when it will appear that the Egyptians have waited on the divine in vain, with sincere hearts and the most careful devotion, and when all their sacred worship will come to nothing and be shown to be empty."

Hermes then elaborates at great length on the statements in this passage, where he appears to predict the very era we now inhabit: one in which the Christian religion is dismantling every lying fabrication with a force and freedom proportional to its superior truth and holiness, so that the grace of the true Savior might deliver humanity from the gods that human hands have fashioned and bring them into submission to the God by whom humanity itself was made. Yet when Hermes makes these predictions, he speaks as someone who is sympathetic to these demonic deceptions, and he never clearly names Christ. Instead, he mourns the coming abolition of those practices by which Egypt had maintained what seemed like a reflection of heaven, lamenting it as though it had already occurred. In doing so, he bears witness to Christianity through a kind of grief-stricken prophecy. It was precisely with people like him in mind that the apostle wrote: "knowing God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened; professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of corruptible man" (Rom 1:21-23), and so on, since the full passage is too long to quote here. Hermes does, in fact, make many statements that align with the truth about the one true God who created this world. Yet it is difficult to understand how he became so thoroughly confused by that "darkening of the heart" that he ended up expressing a wish for humanity to remain forever in subjection to gods he himself admits were made by human hands, and lamenting their eventual removal. There could hardly be anything more pitiable than a humanity tyrannized by the work of its own hands, since a person who worships what he has made will more easily cease to be human than the things he has made will ever become gods through his worship of them. It is far more likely that a human being, who was created in a position of dignity, might sink through ignorance to the level of the beasts, than that the works of human hands could ever surpass the work of God made in His own image, which is to say, the human person himself. It is entirely fitting, then, that a person is left to fall away from the One who made him when he chooses to elevate his own creations above himself.

For these vain, deceitful, destructive, and sacrilegious things, the Egyptian Hermes grieved, because he knew the time was coming when they would be swept away. But his grief was expressed just as shamelessly as his knowledge was obtained unwisely. It was not the Holy Spirit who revealed these things to him, as He had done for the holy prophets, who foresaw these events and spoke of them with joy: "If a man shall make gods, lo, they are no gods." And in another place: "And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord, that I will cut off the names of the idols out of the land, and they shall no more be remembered." The holy Isaiah prophesies directly about Egypt on this very matter, saying, "And the idols of Egypt shall be moved at His presence, and their heart shall be overcome in them," along with much else to the same effect. In this, the prophets stand alongside those who rejoiced that what they had known was coming had finally arrived: Simeon and Anna, who recognized Jesus the moment He was born; Elisabeth, who recognized Him in the Spirit at the moment of His conception; and Peter, who declared by the Father's revelation, "Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God." But what revealed the time of their own destruction to this Egyptian were those same spirits who, when the Lord was present in the flesh, cried out in terror, "Art Thou come hither to destroy us before the time?" By "destruction before the time," they meant one of two things: either the very destruction they had long expected, which they simply hadn't anticipated arriving so soon, or the particular kind of destruction that came from being exposed and brought into contempt. And in truth, this was a destruction before the time, meaning before the final judgment, when they will be condemned to eternal damnation along with all who shared in their wickedness. This is what true religion declares, and true religion neither errs nor leads others into error. It is nothing like this man, who was tossed about by every shifting wind of doctrine, mixing truth with falsehood, and who mourned a religion as though it were about to perish, only to later confess that it had been error all along.

After a long digression, Hermes returns to the subject of gods made by human hands, writing as follows: "But enough on this subject. Let us return to man and to reason, that divine gift on account of which man has been called a rational animal. For the things which have been said concerning man, wonderful though they are, are less wonderful than those which have been said concerning reason. That man should discover the divine nature, and then actually create it, surpasses every other wonder. Because our forefathers strayed so far from any true knowledge of the gods, through unbelief and neglect of genuine worship and service, they invented this art of making gods. And once invented, they paired it with a suitable power drawn from universal nature, and, being unable to create souls themselves, they summoned those of demons or angels and bound them to these sacred images and divine rites, so that through these souls the images might have power to help or harm human beings." I'm not sure that even the demons themselves, if put under oath, could have confessed more plainly than Hermes does here: "Because our forefathers strayed so far from any true knowledge of the gods, through unbelief and neglect of their worship and service, they invented the art of making gods." Notice that he doesn't describe this as a minor deviation that happened to produce the art of making gods, nor does he settle for simply saying "they erred." No, he feels compelled to add "very far," stating plainly, "*They erred very far.*" It was this profound error and unbelief on the part of forefathers who had turned away from genuine worship and service that gave birth to the art of making gods. And yet this supposedly wise man mourns the future destruction of that art as though it were a sacred religion. Is he not, in truth, driven by a divine impulse to expose the ancient error of his forefathers on the one hand, and by a diabolical impulse to lament the coming punishment of demons on the other? If their forefathers, by straying so far from any real knowledge of the gods, through unbelief and a deliberate turning away from true worship and service, invented the art of making gods, then why should anyone be surprised that everything produced by this corrupt art, which stands in direct opposition to true religion, would eventually be swept away by that religion? Truth corrects error, faith answers unbelief, and genuine conversion reverses deliberate rejection.

If Hermes had simply said that his ancestors discovered the art of making gods, without explaining why, we would have been obliged, out of basic reverence and right thinking, to examine how they could ever have acquired such an art. The answer would have been clear: they could only have reached it by straying from the truth, by failing to believe what is worthy of God, and by neglecting genuine worship and service. Now, if we alone had argued that this art arose from humanity's profound error, unbelief, and the mind's turning away from true religion, the stubbornness of those who resist the truth might have been somewhat understandable. But consider the situation we actually face: the very man who admires this power above all other human achievements, and who grieves that a time is coming when the laws will command these man-made gods to be destroyed, this same man nevertheless confesses and explains the origins of the art himself. He tells us that his ancestors, through great error and unbelief, through their neglect of the worship and service of the gods, invented the craft of making gods. Given that admission, what should we say, or rather what should we do, except offer to the Lord our God every thanks we are capable of giving, because He has removed these things through causes that are the exact opposite of those that brought them into being? What error established, truth dismantled. What unbelief established, faith dismantled. What the turning away from divine worship established, the turning toward the one true and holy God dismantled. And this was not confined to Egypt alone, the country for which the spirit of the demons lamented through Hermes; it happened across the whole earth, which sings to the Lord a new song, just as the truly holy and truly prophetic Scriptures foretold: "Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth" (Ps 96:1). The title of this psalm is "When the house was built after the captivity," and indeed a house is being built for the Lord across the whole earth, the city of God, which is the holy Church, rising up after that captivity in which demons held in bondage those who, through faith in God, became living stones in that house. For although human beings made these gods, it did not follow that the maker was free from their captivity. By worshipping them, he was drawn into fellowship with them, and not merely into the fellowship of lifeless idols, but into the fellowship of cunning demons. What, after all, are idols but what the same Scriptures describe them as: "They have eyes, but they do not see" (Ps 115:5), and though skillfully crafted, they remain without life or sensation. Yet unclean spirits, bound to these idols through that wicked art, have wretchedly taken captive the souls of those who worshipped them, dragging them down into fellowship with themselves. This is why the apostle writes: "We know that an idol is nothing, but the things which the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to demons, and not to God; and I would not have you have fellowship with demons" (1 Cor 10:19-20). After this captivity, in which malign demons held humanity in bondage, the house of God is being built across the whole earth. Hence the title of that psalm in which it is written: "Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing to the Lord, bless His name; declare His salvation from day to day. Declare His glory among the nations, among all peoples His wonderful works. For great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; He is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the nations are demons, but the Lord made the heavens" (Ps 96:1-5).

Therefore, the man who grieved over the coming abolition of idol worship, and the end of demonic dominion over those who served those idols, was himself acting under demonic influence. He wanted that captivity to last forever, the very captivity whose end the psalm celebrates as the occasion for building the house of the Lord across all the earth. Hermes foretold these things with sorrow; the prophet foretold them with joy. And because the Spirit who sang through the ancient prophets is victorious, even Hermes himself was compelled, in a remarkable way, to admit that the very things he wished to preserve, and mourned at the prospect of losing, had been established not by wise, faithful, and devout men, but by men who were mistaken, unbelieving, and hostile to the true worship and service of the gods. He calls them gods, yes, but when he acknowledges that they were made by the kind of men we certainly should not be, he reveals, whether he intends to or not, that they are not worthy of worship by those who bear no resemblance to their makers. In other words, prudent, faithful, and religious people have no business worshipping them. At the same time, he makes it plain that the very men who crafted these images entangled themselves in the worship of things that were not gods at all.

The prophet's words ring true: "If a man *makes gods, they are no gods*." The gods that Hermes called "gods made by men" were precisely this: demons, bound to images by some obscure art, held fast by the chains of their own desires, acknowledged by worshippers and fashioned by human hands. Yet Hermes did not share the view held by the Platonic philosopher Apuleius, whose position we have already shown to be both incoherent and absurd: namely, that these beings served as interpreters and intermediaries between the gods whom God created and the humans whom God likewise created, carrying human prayers upward and divine gifts downward. It is deeply foolish to believe that gods made by human hands would carry more weight with gods made by God than the humans themselves do, since God made them all. Consider further that the demon bound to an image through impious art has been made a god only for the particular man who performed that binding, not for humanity at large. What kind of god is that, one whom no one would create except a person who is mistaken, faithless, and turned away from the true God? Furthermore, if the demons worshipped in temples, drawn into images by some strange art and installed there as visible representations of themselves by men who were already wandering away from true worship, if those demons are neither mediators nor interpreters between humans and the gods (and they cannot be, both because of their own thoroughly wicked and degraded character, and because even erring, faithless, and irreverent men are still plainly better than the demons they themselves have summoned), then what remains is this: whatever power these demons possess, they use either to harm people by dispensing counterfeit benefits (harm made all the worse by the deception involved) or to harm them openly and without pretense. Even so, they can do nothing of this kind except where the deep and hidden providence of God permits it, and then only to the extent that permission is granted. When permission is granted, it is not because these beings, positioned midway between humans and the gods, enjoy the gods' friendship and therefore wield great power over people. These demons cannot possibly be friends to the good gods who dwell in the holy and heavenly realm, by whom we mean the holy angels and rational creatures, whether thrones, dominions, principalities, or powers. Between the demons and those heavenly beings lies the same distance that separates vice from virtue and wickedness from goodness.

We must never seek, through the supposed mediation of demons, to gain the goodwill or favor of the gods, or rather of the good angels. Instead, we draw near to them by resembling them in good will, through which we stand alongside them, live with them, and worship the same God together, even though we cannot see them with our physical eyes. The distance between us and them is not a matter of location but of how we live, caused by our sad failure to match their purity of will and the weakness of our character. The simple fact that we live on earth in bodies of flesh does not, by itself, prevent fellowship with them. What prevents it is when we, with impure hearts, fix our minds on earthly things. But in this present life, while we are being healed so that we may one day become like them, we are drawn close to them through faith, if, with their help, we believe that the One who is their blessedness is also ours.

It is certainly remarkable that this Egyptian, when expressing his grief over a time when these things would be taken away from Egypt, openly admits that they were invented by men who were mistaken, faithless, and hostile to genuine religious devotion. Among other things, he says, "Then shall that land, the most holy place of shrines and temples, be full of sepulchres and dead men" (as if, without these things, people would somehow stop dying; as if bodies could be buried anywhere other than in the ground; as if the number of graves would not inevitably grow in proportion to the number of the dead as time went on). Those with perverse minds who oppose us assume that what he mourns is the replacement of their temples and shrines by the memorials of our martyrs, so that they can claim the pagans worshipped gods in temples while we worship dead men in tombs. Such is the blindness of the impious: they stumble over mountains, as it were, and refuse to see what is right in front of them. They ignore the fact that across the whole of pagan literature, there are virtually no gods to be found who were not once human beings, honored with divine worship after their deaths. I will not dwell at length on Varro's claim that all dead men are considered gods of the underworld (*Manes*) by the pagans, a point he supports by pointing to the sacred rites performed in honor of nearly all the dead, including funeral games, which he regards as the clearest proof of divine status, since such games were traditionally held only in honor of divinities. Hermes himself, the very figure we are discussing, in that same book where he sorrowfully predicts, "Then shall that land, the most holy place of shrines and temples, be full of sepulchres and dead men," actually testifies that the gods of Egypt were dead human beings. He first explains that their ancestors, having gone badly astray in their knowledge of the gods, faithless and indifferent to divine worship, invented the art of making gods. Once invented, they combined this art with the appropriate power inherent in universal nature, and by blending that power with their craft, they summoned the souls of demons or angels (since they could not create souls themselves) and caused these souls to inhabit holy images and sacred mysteries, so that through these souls the images might have the power to help or harm human beings. Having said all this, he proceeds to illustrate his point: "Your grandfather, O Asclepius, the first discoverer of medicine, to whom a temple was consecrated on a mountain in Libya near the shore of the crocodiles, in which temple lies his earthly man, that is, his body (for the better part of him, or rather the whole of him, if the whole man consists in the intelligent life, returned to heaven) still provides by his divinity all the help to the sick that he once provided through the art of medicine." He is saying, therefore, that a dead man was worshipped as a god in the very place where his tomb stood. He deceives people with a falsehood when he says the man "returned to heaven." He then adds: "Does not Hermes, who was my grandfather and whose name I bear, dwelling in the country called by his name, help and preserve all mortals who come to him from every direction?" This elder Hermes, that is, Mercury, whom he identifies as his grandfather, is said to be buried in Hermopolis, the city that bears his name. So here are two figures he explicitly identifies as former human beings: Asclepius and Mercury. Greeks and Romans alike agree on this point regarding Asclepius, but many do not believe Mercury was ever mortal, even though Hermes himself testifies that Mercury was his grandfather. Could these perhaps be two different individuals who happened to share the same name? I will not spend much time debating whether they are distinct persons or not. It is enough to recognize that the Mercury of whom Hermes speaks was, like Asclepius, a god who was once a man, on the testimony of Trismegistus himself, a figure held in the highest esteem by his own people and, by his own account, the grandson of Mercury.

But Hermes continues: "Do we know how many good things Isis, the wife of Osiris, bestows when she is favorable, and what fierce opposition she can mount when enraged?" Then, to demonstrate that there were gods made by human hands through this art, he adds: "For it is easy for earthly and worldly gods to be angry, being made and composed by men out of either nature." By this he reveals his belief that demons were originally the souls of dead men, which, as he explains, were induced through a certain art invented by deeply misguided, skeptical, and irreligious people to take possession of images, because those who made such gods were incapable of making souls. When he speaks of "either nature," he means soul and body: the demon being the soul, and the image the body. What, then, are we to make of that mournful lament, that the land of Egypt, the most sacred place of shrines and temples, was destined to be filled with tombs and corpses? The truth is that the deceptive spirit who inspired Hermes to speak these things was compelled, through him, to confess that even then that land was already full of tombs and dead men whom the people were worshipping as gods. What was expressing itself through his mouth was the grief of the demons themselves, who were mourning the punishments that were about to fall on them at the tombs of the martyrs. For in many such places, demons are tormented and forced to confess, and are driven out of the bodies of men whose possession they had taken.

We don't build temples for our martyrs, however, or ordain priests, rites, and sacrifices in their honor. They are not our gods; their God is our God. We do honor their relics as memorials to holy men and women of God who struggled for the truth even to the point of death, so that the true religion might be made known and false, invented religions exposed. If there were people before them who recognized those religions as false and invented, they were too afraid to say so openly. But who has ever heard a faithful priest, standing at an altar built for the honor and worship of God over the body of a martyr, pray: "I offer this sacrifice to you, O Peter, or O Paul, or O Cyprian"? Sacrifices at their tombs are offered to God, the God who made them both human beings and martyrs, and who joined them with the holy angels in heavenly honor. We pay such honors to their memory so that we might give thanks to the true God for their victories, and so that, by calling them freshly to mind, we might stir ourselves to imitate them by seeking the same crowns and palms, calling on the same God they called on. Whatever honors the faithful pay at the shrines of the martyrs are simply honors paid to their memory, not sacred rites or sacrifices offered to dead men as though they were gods. Even those who bring food to these places (which the better Christians don't do, and which isn't done at all in most parts of the world) do so in order that the food might be made holy through the merits of the martyrs, in the name of the Lord of the martyrs. They first present the food and offer a prayer, then take it away to eat or to share with those in need. Anyone who understands the one sacrifice of Christians, which is what is truly being offered in those places, also understands that these are not sacrifices to the martyrs.

So we honor our martyrs neither with the divine honors nor with the human crimes by which the pagans worship their gods. We don't offer sacrifices to them, and we don't transform the crimes of the gods into sacred rites for them. Those who wish to understand what I mean, and are able to do so, should read the letter Alexander wrote to his mother Olympias, in which he describes what the priest Leon revealed to him. Those who have already read it should call its contents to mind, so they can see what great abominations are recorded, not by poets, but in the mystical writings of the Egyptians, concerning the goddess Isis, wife of Osiris, and the parents of both, all of whom these writings identify as royal figures. Isis, while sacrificing to her parents, is said to have discovered a crop of barley, some ears of which she brought to her husband the king and his advisor Mercurius, and this is why they identify her with Ceres. Readers of that letter can see for themselves what kind of people these were, to whom sacred rites were instituted as though they were gods after their deaths, and what deeds of theirs gave rise to those rites. No one should dare to compare those people, even granting that they are gods, in any respect to our holy martyrs, even though we don't hold our martyrs to be gods. We don't ordain priests or offer sacrifices to our martyrs as the pagans do to their dead, because that would be inappropriate, unwarranted, and unlawful, since such things belong to God alone. Nor do we honor our martyrs with their own crimes, or with the kind of shameful performances used to celebrate the crimes of the gods, crimes that were either actually committed when those gods were still living as men, or, if they were never men at all, invented for the pleasure of harmful demons.

The god of Socrates, if he had one, could not have belonged to this class of demons. Perhaps those who were skilled in the art of fabricating gods simply assigned a god of this kind to a man who had nothing to do with that art and was entirely innocent of it. But what more needs to be said? No one with even a modest degree of wisdom imagines that demons are worth worshipping as a path to the blessed life that awaits us after death. Perhaps, though, someone will argue that all the gods are good, but that among the demons some are bad and some are good, and that it is the good ones who should be worshipped, so that through them we might attain eternal blessedness. We will take up that argument in the following book.