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How much more tolerable and accordant with human feeling is the error
of your Platonist co-sectary Apuleius! for he attributed the
diseases and storms of human passions only to the demons who occupy a
grade beneath the moon, and makes even this avowal as by constraint
regarding gods whom he honors; hut the superior and celestial gods,
who inhabit the ethereal regions, whether visible, as the sun, moon,
and other luminaries, whose brilliancy makes them conspicuous, or
invisible, but believed in by him, he does his utmost to remove beyond
the slightest stain of these perturbations. It is not, then, from
Plato, but from your Chaldaean teachers you have learned to elevate
human vices to the ethereal and empyreal regions of the world and to the
celestial firmament, in order that your theurgists might be able to
obtain from your gods divine revelations; and yet you make yourself
superior to these divine revelations by your intellectual life, which
dispenses with these theurgic purifications as not needed by a
philosopher. But, by way of rewarding your teachers, you recommend
these arts to other men, who, not being philosophers, may be
persuaded to use what you acknowledge to be useless to yourself, who
are capable of higher things; so that those who cannot avail themselves
of the virtue of philosophy, which is too arduous for the multitude,
may, at your instigation, betake themselves to theurgists by whom they
may be purified, not, indeed, in the intellectual, but in the
spiritual part of the soul. Now, as the persons who are unfit for
philosophy form incomparably the majority of mankind, more may be
compelled to consult these secret and illicit teachers of yours than
frequent the Platonic schools. For these most impure demons,
pretending to be ethereal gods, whose herald and messenger you have
become, have promised that those who are purified by theurgy in the
spiritual part of their soul shall not indeed return to the Father,
but shall dwell among the ethereal gods above the aerial regions. But
such fancies are not listened to by the multitudes of men whom Christ
came to set free from the tyranny of demons. For in Him they have the
most gracious cleansing, in which mind, spirit, and body alike
participate. For, in order that He might heal the whole man from the
plague of sin, He took without sin the whole human nature. Would
that you had known Him, and would that you had committed yourself for
healing to Him rather than to your own frail and infirm human virtue,
or to pernicious and curious arts! He would not have deceived you;
for Him your own oracles, on your own showing, acknowledged holy and
immortal. It is of Him, too, that the most famous poet speaks,
poetically indeed, since he applies it to the person of another, yet
truly, if you refer it to Christ, saying, "Under thine auspices,
if any traces of our crimes remain, they shall be obliterated, and
earth freed from its perpetual fear." By which he indicates that, by
reason of the infirmity which attaches to this life, the greatest
progress in virtue and righteousness leaves room for the existence, if
not of crimes, yet of the traces of crimes, which are obliterated only
by that Saviour of whom this verse speaks. For that he did not say
this at the prompting of his own fancy, Virgil tells us in almost the
last verse of that 4th Eclogue, when he says, "The last age
predicted by the Cumaean sibyl has now arrived;" whence it plainly
appears that this had been dictated by the Cumaean sibyl. But those
theurgists, or rather demons, who assume the appearance and form of
gods, pollute rather than purify the human spirit by false appearances
and the delusive mockery of unsubstantial forms. How can those whose
own spirit is unclean cleanse the spirit of man? Were they not
unclean, they would not be bound by the incantations of an envious
man, and would neither be afraid nor grudge to bestow that hollow boon
which they promise. But it is sufficient for our purpose that you
acknowledge that the intellectual soul, that is, our mind, cannot be
justified by theurgy; and that even the spiritual or inferior part of
our soul cannot by this act be made eternal and immortal, though you
maintain that it can be purified by it. Christ, however, promises
life eternal; and therefore to Him the world flocks, greatly to your
indignation, greatly also to your astonishment and confusion. What
avails your forced avowal that theurgy leads men astray, and deceives
vast numbers by its ignorant and foolish teaching, and that it is the
most manifest mistake to have recourse by prayer and sacrifice to angels
and principalities, when at the same time, to save yourself from the
charge of spending labor in vain on such arts, you direct men to the
theurgists, that by their means men, who do not live by the rule of
the intellectual soul, may have their spiritual soul purified?
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