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If, then, Plato defined the wise man as one who imitates, knows,
loves this God, and who is rendered blessed through fellowship with
Him in His own blessedness, why discuss with the other philosophers?
It is evident that none come nearer to us than the Platonists. To
them, therefore, let that fabulous theology give place which delights
the minds of men with the crimes of the gods; and that civil theology
also, in which impure demons, under the name of gods, have seduced
the peoples of the earth given up to earthly pleasures, desiring to be
honored by the errors of men, and by filling the minds of their
worshippers with impure desires, exciting them to make the
representation of their crimes one of the rites of their worship,
whilst they themselves found in the spectators of these exhibitions a
most pleasing spectacle, a theology in which, whatever was honorable
in the temple, was defiled by its mixture with the obscenity of the
theatre, and whatever was base in the theatre was vindicated by the
abominations of the temples. To these philosophers also the
interpretations of Varro must give place, in which he explains the
sacred rites as having reference to heaven and earth, and to the seeds
and operations of perishable things; for, in the first place, those
rites have not the signification which he would have men believe is
attached to them, and therefore truth does not follow him in his
attempt so to interpret them; and even if they had this signification,
still those things ought not to be worshipped by the rational soul as
its god which are placed below it in the scale of nature, nor ought the
soul to prefer to itself as gods things to which the true God has given
it the preference. The same must be said of those writings pertaining
to the sacred rites, which Numa Pompilius took care to conceal by
causing them to be buried along with himself, and which, when they
were afterwards turned up by the plough, were burned by order of the
senate. And, to treat Numa with all honor, let us mention as
belonging to the same rank as these writings that which Alexander of
Macedon wrote to his mother as communicated to him by Leo, an
Egyptian high priest. In this letter not only Picus and Faunus,
and Æneas and Romulus or even Hercules, and Æsculapius and Liber,
born of Semele, and the twin sons of Tyndareus, or any other mortals
who have been deified, but even the principal gods themselves, to whom
Cicero, in his Tusculan questions, alludes without mentioning their
names, Jupiter, Juno, Saturn, Vulcan, Vesta, and many others
whom Varro attempts to identify with the parts or the elements of the
world, are shown to have been men. There is, as we have said, a
similarity between this case and that of Numa; for the priest being
afraid because he had revealed a mystery, earnestly begged of
Alexander to command his mother to burn the letter which conveyed these
communications to her. Let these two theologies, then, the fabulous
and the civil, give place to the Platonic philosophers, who have
recognized the true God as the author of all things, the source of the
light of truth, and the bountiful bestower of all blessedness. And
not these only, but to these great acknowledgers of so great a God,
those philosophers must yield who, having their mind enslaved to their
body, supposed the principles of all things to be material; as
Thales, who held that the first principle of all things was water;
Anaximenes, that it was air; the Stoics, that it was fire;
Epicurus, who affirmed that it consisted of atoms, that is to say,
of minute corpuscules; and many others whom it is needless to
enumerate, but who believed that bodies, simple or compound, animate
or inanimate, but nevertheless bodies, were the cause and principle of
all things. For some of them, as, for instance, the Epicureans,
believed that living things could originate from things without life;
others held that all things living or without life spring from a living
principle, but that, nevertheless, all things, being material,
spring from a material principle. For the Stoics thought that fire,
that is, one of the four material elements of which this visible world
is composed, was both living and intelligent, the maker of the world
and of all things contained in it, that it was in fact God. These
and others like them have only been able to suppose that which their
hearts enslaved to sense have vainly suggested to them. And yet they
have within themselves Something which they could not see: they
represented to themselves inwardly things which they had seen without,
even when they were not seeing them, but only thinking of them. But
this representation in thought is no longer a body, but only the
similitude of a body; and that faculty of the mind by which this
similitude of a body is seen is neither a body nor the similitude of a
body; and the faculty which judges whether the representation is
beautiful or ugly is without doubt superior to the object judged of.
This principle is the understanding of man, the rational soul; and it
is certainly not a body, since that similitude of a body which it
beholds and judges of is itself not a body. The soul is neither
earth, nor water, nor air, nor fire, of which four bodies, called
the four elements, we see that this world is composed. And if the
soul is not a body, how should God, its Creator, be a body? Let
all those philosophers, then, give place, as we have said, to the
Platonists, and those also who have been ashamed to say that God is a
body, but yet have thought that our souls are of the same nature as
God. They have not been staggered by the great changeableness of the
soul, an attribute which it would be impious to ascribe to the divine
nature, but they say it is the body which changes the soul, for in
itself it is unchangeable. As well might they say, "Flesh is
wounded by some body, for in itself it is invulnerable." In a word,
that which is unchangeable can be changed by nothing, so that that
which can be changed by the body cannot properly be said to be
immutable.
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