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It is obvious, that in attributing the creation of the other animals
to those inferior gods who were made by the Supreme, he meant it to be
understood that the immortal part was taken from God Himself, and
that these minor creators added the mortal part; that is to say, he
meant them to be considered the creators of our bodies, but not of our
souls. But since Porphyry maintains that if the soul is to be
purified all entanglement with a body must be escaped from; and at the
same time agrees with Plato and the Platonists in thinking that those
who have not spent a temperate and honorable life return to mortal
bodies as their punishment (to bodies of brutes in Plato's opinion,
to human bodies in Porphyry's); it follows that those whom they
would have us worship as our parents and authors, that they may
plausibly call them gods, are, after all, but the forgers of our
fetters and chains, not our creators, but our jailers and turnkeys,
who lock us up in the most bitter and melancholy house of correction.
Let the Platonists, then, either cease menacing us with our bodies
as the punishment of our souls, or preaching that we are to worship as
gods those whose work upon us they exhort us by all means in our power
to avoid and escape from. But, indeed, both opinions are quite
false. It is false that souls return again to this life to be
punished; and it is false that there is any other creator of anything
in heaven or earth, than He who made the heaven and the earth. For
if we live in a body only to expiate our sins, how says Plato in
another place, that the world could not have been the most beautiful
and good, had it not been filled with all kinds of creatures, mortal
and immortal? But if our creation even as mortals be a divine
benefit, I how is it a punishment to be restored to a body, that is,
to a divine benefit? And if God, as Plato continually maintains,
embraced in His eternal intelligence the ideas both of the universe and
of all the animals, how, then, should He not with His own hand make
them all? Could He be unwilling to be the constructor of works, the
idea and plan of which called for His ineffable and ineffably to be
praised intelligence?
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