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As to the demons, these false and deceitful mediators, who, though
their uncleanness of spirit frequently reveals their misery and
malignity, yet, by virtue of the levity of their aerial bodies and the
nature of the places they inhabit, do contrive to turn us aside and
hinder our spiritual progress; they do not help us towards God, but
rather prevent us from reaching Him. Since even in the bodily way,
which is erroneous and misleading, and in which righteousness does not
walk, for we must rise to God not by bodily ascent, but by
incorporeal or spiritual conformity to Him, in this bodily way, I
say, which the friends of the demons arrange according to the weight of
the various elements, the aerial demons being set between the ethereal
gods and earthy men, they imagine the gods to have this privilege,
that by this local interval they are preserved from the pollution of
human contact. Thus they believe that the demons are contaminated by
men rather than men cleansed by the demons, and that the gods
themselves should be polluted unless their local superiority preserved
them. Who is so wretched a creature as to expect purification by a way
in which men are contaminating, demons contaminated, and gods
contaminable? Who would not rather choose that way whereby we escape
the contamination of the demons, and are cleansed from pollution by the
incontaminable God, so as to be associated with the uncontaminated
angels?
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