City of God 8.26–9.7

Chapter 26. That all the religion of the pagans was bound up with dead men.

We must certainly notice how this Egyptian, when he grieved that a time was to come in which those things would be taken away from Egypt which he admits were instituted by men who greatly erred, were unbelieving, and were turned away from the worship of divine religion, says among other things: “Then this land, the most holy seat of shrines and temples, will be completely full of tombs and dead men” — as though, if those things were not taken away, men would not die, or the dead would have to be laid elsewhere than in the earth; and certainly, the more time and days rolled on, the greater would be the number of tombs because of the greater number of the dead. But he seems to grieve at this, that the memorials of our martyrs would succeed to their temples and shrines, so that, evidently, those who read these things with minds turned away from us and perverse may think that by the pagans gods were worshipped in temples, but by us the dead are worshipped in tombs. For with such blindness do impious men stumble, as it were, against mountains and refuse to see things that strike their eyes, that they do not notice that in all the literature of the pagans gods are not found, or hardly found, who were not men, and to whom, when dead, divine honors were paid. I pass over Varro's saying that all the dead are thought by them to be gods of the underworld (Manes), and his proving it by the rites that are performed for almost all the dead, where he also mentions funeral games, as though this were the greatest proof of divinity, that games are usually celebrated only for deities. Hermes himself, with whom we are now dealing, in that same book where, as if foretelling the future with lamentation, he says, “Then this land, the most holy seat of shrines and temples, will be completely full of tombs and dead men,” testifies that the gods of Egypt are dead men. For when he had said that his forefathers, erring greatly concerning the account of the gods, unbelieving and not turning their minds to worship and divine religion, discovered the art by which to make gods, he says: “To this discovery they joined a suitable power from the nature of the world; and mixing it, since they could not make souls, they called up the souls of demons or angels and put them into sacred images and divine mysteries, through which the idols might have the power of doing both good and evil.” Then he goes on, as if to prove this by examples, and says: “For your grandfather, O Asclepius, the first discoverer of medicine, to whom a temple has been consecrated on a mountain of Libya near the shore of the crocodiles, in which lies his worldly man, that is, his body — for the rest, or rather the whole, if the whole man is in the sense of life, has gone back, better, to heaven — even now provides by his divine power to sick men all the helps which are usually given by the art of medicine.” See, he said that a dead man is worshipped as a god in the place where he had his tomb, deceived and deceiving in saying that he went back to heaven. Then, adding another, he says: “Hermes, whose ancestral name I bear, does he not, dwelling in the city named after him, help and preserve all mortals who come from every side?” For this elder Hermes, that is, Mercury, whom he says was his grandfather, is said to be in Hermopolis, that is, in the city of his name. See, he says that two gods were men, Aesculapius and Mercury. About Aesculapius both Greeks and Latins think the same; but many do not think Mercury was mortal, whom this man nevertheless testifies was his grandfather. “But that one is one person and this another, though they are called by the same name.” I do not argue much; let that one be one and this another. Still this one too, like Aesculapius, became a god from a man, according to the testimony of so great a man among his people, this Trismegistus, his grandson. He adds further: “As for Isis, the wife of Osiris, how many good things we know she bestows when favorable, how many she harms when angry!” Then, to show that the gods whom men make by that art are of this kind (from which he gives us to understand that he thinks demons arose from the souls of dead men, whom he says were put into images by the art which men discovered who greatly erred, who were unbelieving and irreligious, since those who made such gods certainly could not make souls), when he had said of Isis what I have mentioned, “how many she harms when angry,” he went on to add: “For it is easy for earthly and worldly gods to be angry, since they have been made and composed by men from both natures.” By “from both natures” he means from soul and body, so that the demon stands for the soul and the image for the body. “Hence it has come about,” he says, “that these are called holy animals by the Egyptians, and that the souls of those who were consecrated while living are worshipped in each of their cities, so that the cities are governed by their laws and called by their names.” Where now is that mournful complaint, as it were, that the land of Egypt, the most holy seat of shrines and temples, would be completely full of tombs and dead men? Surely the deceitful spirit, at whose prompting Hermes said these things, was compelled through him to confess that even then that land was completely full of tombs and dead men, whom they worshipped as gods. But the grief of the demons spoke through him, who mourned that their future punishments were imminent at the memorials of the holy martyrs. For in many such places they are tortured and confess and are cast out of the bodies of men they have possessed.

Chapter 27. On the manner of honor which Christians pay to the martyrs.

Yet we do not establish temples, priesthoods, rites, and sacrifices for these same martyrs, because not they, but their God, is our God. We do indeed honor their memorials as those of holy men of God, who contended for the truth even to the death of their bodies, so that the true religion might become known and false and fictitious ones be refuted — which even those who felt it before suppressed out of fear. But who of the faithful ever heard a priest standing at the altar, even one built over the holy body of a martyr for the honor and worship of God, say in his prayers, “I offer sacrifice to you, Peter, or Paul, or Cyprian”? For at their memorials sacrifice is offered to God, who made them both men and martyrs and joined them in heavenly honor to his holy angels; so that by that celebration we may both give thanks to the true God for their victories, and, by renewing their memory, exhort ourselves to imitate such crowns and palms, calling on the same God for help. Whatever acts of devotion, then, are paid by religious people at the places of the martyrs are adornments of their memorials, not rites or sacrifices of the dead as of gods. And whoever bring their meals there (which indeed is not done by the better Christians, and in most lands there is no such custom) — yet whoever do this, when they have set the food down, pray and take it away, to eat it or to give some of it to the needy; they wish it to be sanctified for them through the merits of the martyrs in the name of the Lord of the martyrs. But that these are not sacrifices to the martyrs is known by whoever knows the one sacrifice of the Christians, which is offered there too. We, then, do not worship our martyrs either with divine honors or with human crimes, as they worship their gods; we neither offer sacrifices to them nor turn their disgraces into their rites. For about Isis, the wife of Osiris, the Egyptian goddess, and about their parents, who are all written to have been kings — Isis, when she was sacrificing to her parents, found a crop of barley and showed the ears from it to the king her husband and his counsellor Mercury, whence they want her to be Ceres too — what and how great evils have been committed to memory not by poets but by their mystical writings, as Alexander writes to his mother Olympias on the disclosure of the priest Leo, let those read who will or can, and let those who have read recall them, and see to what dead men, or on account of what deeds of theirs, rites were instituted as to gods. Far be it that they, though they hold them to be gods, should dare to compare them in any part with our holy martyrs, whom nevertheless we do not hold to be gods. For we do not appoint priests or offer sacrifices to our martyrs, because that is unfitting, undue, unlawful, and due to the one God alone; and so we do not delight them either with their crimes or with most shameful plays, in which these men celebrate either the outrages of their gods, if they committed such things when they were men, or the invented delights of harmful demons, if they were not men. Socrates would not have had a god of this class of demons, if he had a god; but perhaps those who wished to excel in that art of making gods imposed such a god on a man who was a stranger to that art and innocent of it. What more, then? That these spirits are not to be worshipped for the sake of the happy life that is to come after death no one even moderately prudent doubts. But perhaps they will say that the gods indeed are all good, while of the demons some are bad and some good, and they will judge that those are to be worshipped through whom we may come to the life that is happy for eternity, namely those they think good. What this amounts to must be seen in the following volume.

Chapter 1. To what point the preceding discussion has come, and what remains to be discussed of the question.

Some have held that there are both good and bad gods; but some, thinking better of the gods, have given them so much honor and praise that they did not dare to believe any god bad. But those who said that some gods are good and some bad also called the demons by the name of gods, and also, though more rarely, the gods by the name of demons, so that they admit that Jupiter himself, whom they want to be king and chief of the rest, was called a demon by Homer. But those who assert that all gods are good, and far more excellent than the men who are said to be good, are rightly troubled by the deeds of demons, which they cannot deny; and, thinking that these can in no way be committed by the gods, whom they want to be all good, they are compelled to make a distinction between gods and demons, so that whatever rightly displeases them in the depraved works or affections by which hidden spirits show their power, they believe to belong to demons, not gods. But they think these same demons are placed between men and gods as if no god mingles with man, so as to carry men's desires from here and bring back what has been obtained from there; and this is the view of the Platonists, the chief and noblest of the philosophers, with whom, as the more excellent, I have chosen to examine this question: whether the worship of many gods is of use for attaining the happy life that is to come after death. So in the preceding book we inquired how the demons, who delight in such things as good and prudent men shun and condemn — namely the sacrilegious, scandalous, and criminal fictions of the poets, not about any man at all but about the gods themselves, and the wicked and punishable violence of the magic arts — could, as though nearer and friendlier to the good gods, reconcile good men to them; and it was found that this can in no way be.

Chapter 2. Whether among the demons, to whom the gods are superior, there is any class of good ones, by whose protection the human soul could come to true happiness.

Accordingly this book, as we promised at the end of the last, will have to contain a discussion of the difference (if they want there to be one) not of the gods among themselves, all of whom they call good, nor of the difference between gods and demons, of whom they separate the former far and high from men and place the latter between gods and men, but of the difference among the demons themselves, as far as it pertains to the present question. For it is commonly said by most people that some demons are good and others bad; and whether this is the opinion of the Platonists or of anyone else, its discussion is by no means to be neglected, lest anyone think that he ought to follow supposedly good demons, through whom, as mediators, he tries and strives to be reconciled to the gods, whom he believes all to be good, so that he may be with them, as it were, after death — and so, ensnared and deceived by the deceit of malignant spirits, wanders far from the true God, with whom alone, in whom alone, and from whom alone the human soul, that is, the rational and intellectual soul, is happy.

Chapter 3. What Apuleius ascribes to the demons, to whom, though he does not deny reason, he assigns no virtue.

What, then, is the difference between good and bad demons? For the Platonist Apuleius, discussing them in general and saying so much about their aerial bodies, kept silent about the virtues of mind with which they would be endowed if they were good. So he kept silent about the cause of happiness, but could not keep silent about the sign of wretchedness. He confessed that their mind, by which he said they are rational, is not even imbued and fortified with virtue so as never to yield to irrational passions of the soul, but that it too, as is the way with foolish minds, is tossed in a way by stormy perturbations. For these are his words on the matter: “From this class of demons, for the most part,” he says, “the poets, not at all far from the truth, are accustomed to invent gods who hate and love certain men — prospering and exalting these, opposing and afflicting those; and so they feel pity and indignation, anguish and joy, and suffer every aspect of the human mind, tossing with a like movement of heart and surge of mind through all the tides of thought. All these turmoils and storms are exiled far from the tranquillity of the heavenly gods.” Is there any doubt in these words that he said not some lower parts of their souls, but the very minds of the demons, by which they are rational animals, are disturbed like a stormy sea by a tempest of passions? So they are not to be compared even with wise men, who resist perturbations of the soul of this kind — from which human weakness is not immune — with an undisturbed mind, even when they suffer them through the condition of this life, not yielding to them so as to approve or do anything that strays from the path of wisdom and the law of justice. Rather, like foolish and unjust mortals, not in body but in morals (not to say worse, inasmuch as they are older and incurable by due punishment), they are tossed on the surge, as he called it, of their very mind, and in no part of their soul do they stand firm in the truth and virtue by which turbulent and depraved affections are resisted.

Chapter 4. What is the opinion of the Peripatetics and the Stoics about the perturbations that befall the soul.

There are two opinions of the philosophers about these movements of the soul which the Greeks call pathē, and some of our writers, like Cicero, call perturbations, some affections or feelings, and some, like this man, more exactly from the Greek, passions. Some philosophers say that these perturbations, or affections, or passions befall even the wise man, but moderated and subject to reason, so that the mastery of the mind imposes laws on them, as it were, by which they are brought to a necessary measure. Those who hold this are the Platonists or Aristotelians, since Aristotle, who founded the Peripatetic school, was a disciple of Plato. Others, like the Stoics, do not accept that any passions of this kind at all befall the wise man. But Cicero, in his books On the Ends of Good and Evil, proves that these, the Stoics, contend with the Platonists or Peripatetics in words rather than in reality. For the Stoics refuse to call bodily and external advantages goods, but call them “advantages,” because they hold that there is no good for man except virtue, as the art of living well, which exists only in the mind. The others call these things goods simply and according to the common usage of speech, but small and slight in comparison with the virtue by which one lives rightly. Hence, whatever they are called by either side, goods or advantages, they are weighed with equal valuation, and in this question the Stoics delight in nothing but the novelty of words. It seems to me, then, that in this point too, where it is asked whether passions of the soul befall the wise man or whether he is wholly free of them, they are arguing about words rather than things. For I think that they themselves hold nothing different from the Platonists and Peripatetics here, as far as concerns the force of the things, not the sound of the words. To pass over other things by which I might show this, so as not to be long, I shall mention one very clear instance. In the books entitled Attic Nights, Aulus Gellius, a man of most elegant style and wide learning on every subject, writes that he once sailed with a certain noted Stoic philosopher. This philosopher — as Aulus Gellius tells more fully and richly what I shall touch on briefly — when the ship was being most dangerously tossed by a terrible sky and sea, turned pale from the force of fear. This was noticed by those who were present, who, though in the neighborhood of death, were most curiously attentive to whether the philosopher was disturbed in mind. Then, when the storm had passed and safety soon gave room for conversation or even chatter, one of those whom the ship was carrying, a rich and luxurious Asiatic, accosted the philosopher mockingly, because he had been afraid and turned pale while he himself had remained undaunted in the destruction that threatened. But the philosopher repeated the answer of Aristippus the Socratic, who, when he had heard the same words from a similar man in a similar situation, replied that the other had rightly not been anxious for the soul of a most worthless scoundrel, but that he himself had had to fear for the soul of Aristippus. When the rich man had been repulsed by this answer, Aulus Gellius afterwards asked the philosopher, not in order to provoke him but in order to learn, what was the reason for his fear. To teach a man so eagerly fired with the desire of knowing, he at once brought out of his little bag a book of the Stoic Epictetus, in which were written things agreeing with the doctrines of Zeno and Chrysippus, who we know were the leaders of the Stoics. In that book Aulus Gellius says he read that the Stoics held this: that the appearances to the mind which they call phantasiai — it is not in our power whether and when they fall upon the mind — when they come from terrible and frightening things, must necessarily move even the mind of the wise man, so that for a little while he either trembles with fear or is contracted by sadness, as though these passions forestalled the office of mind and reason; yet not on that account is an opinion of evil formed in the mind, nor are these things approved or consented to. For this, they hold, is in our power, and they judge that this is the difference between the mind of the wise man and that of the fool: the fool's mind yields to these same passions and adapts the assent of the mind to them; but the wise, though they suffer them by necessity, retain with unshaken mind a true and stable judgment about what they ought rationally to seek or avoid. I have set this out as well as I could — not more elegantly than Aulus Gellius, but certainly more briefly and, I think, more plainly — what he records he read in the book of Epictetus, as said and held by him according to the doctrines of the Stoics. If these things are so, there is no difference, or almost none, between the opinion of the Stoics and that of the other philosophers about the passions and perturbations of souls; for both defend the mind and reason of the wise man from their domination. And perhaps the Stoics say that they do not befall the wise man because they by no means cloud with any error or overturn with any stain his wisdom, by which he is wise. But they befall the mind of the wise man, the serenity of wisdom remaining intact, on account of those things which they call advantages or disadvantages, though they will not call them goods or evils. For surely, if that philosopher had valued as nothing those things which he felt he was about to lose in the shipwreck, such as this life and the safety of the body, he would not have so dreaded that danger as to betray it even by the testimony of his pallor. Yet he could both suffer that disturbance and hold fixed in his mind the judgment that life and bodily safety, the loss of which the savagery of the storm threatened, were not goods that make good those in whom they are, as justice does. But as to their saying that these things should not even be called goods but advantages, this must be put down to a contest over words, not an examination of things. For what difference does it make whether they are more aptly called goods or advantages, provided that the Stoic no less than the Peripatetic trembles and turns pale lest he be deprived of them — naming them unequally, but valuing them equally? Both, certainly, if they were pressed by dangers to these goods or advantages to commit an outrage or crime, so that they could not otherwise keep them, say that they would rather lose these things, by which the nature of the body is kept safe and sound, than commit those things by which justice is violated. So the mind in which this judgment is fixed allows no perturbations, even if they befall the lower parts of the soul, to prevail in it against reason; rather, it rules them itself, and by not consenting to them, and even resisting them, exercises the reign of virtue. Such is Aeneas as Virgil describes him, where he says: “His mind remains unmoved; the tears roll down in vain.”

Chapter 5. That the passions that affect Christian souls do not draw them into vice but exercise virtue.

There is no need now to show fully and carefully what the divine Scripture, in which Christian learning is contained, teaches about these passions. For it subjects the mind itself to God, to be ruled and helped by him, and the passions to the mind, to be so moderated and bridled that they are turned to the service of justice. In short, in our discipline the question is not so much whether a devout soul is angry, but why it is angry; not whether it is sad, but from what cause it is sad; not whether it fears, but what it fears. For to be angry with a sinner so that he may be corrected, to be saddened for the afflicted so that he may be freed, to fear for one in danger lest he perish — I do not know whether anyone on sound consideration would blame these. For it is the Stoics' habit to find fault even with compassion; but how much more honorably would that Stoic have been disturbed by compassion for a man to be rescued than by fear of shipwreck! Far better, more humanely, and more suitably to the feelings of the devout did Cicero speak in praise of Caesar, where he says: “Of your virtues none is more admirable or more pleasing than your mercy.” And what is mercy but a kind of fellow-suffering in our heart with the misery of another, by which we are certainly compelled to help, if we can? This movement serves reason when mercy is shown in such a way that justice is preserved, whether when it is given to the needy or when pardon is granted to the penitent. Cicero, that excellent speaker, did not hesitate to call this a virtue, which the Stoics are not ashamed to count among the vices — the Stoics who nevertheless, as the book of Epictetus, a most noted Stoic, taught from the doctrines of Zeno and Chrysippus, the leaders of this school, admit passions of this kind into the mind of the wise man, whom they want to be free from all vices. It follows, then, that they do not think these things vices when they befall the wise man in such a way that they can do nothing against the virtue of the mind and reason; and that the opinion of the Peripatetics, or even the Platonists, and of the Stoics themselves is one and the same, but, as Tully says, a controversy about a word has long tormented these little Greeks, more eager for contention than for truth. But it may still rightly be asked whether it belongs to the weakness of the present life to suffer affections of this kind even in all good duties, while the holy angels both punish without anger those whom they receive to be punished by the eternal law of God, and help the wretched without fellow-suffering in their misery, and assist without fear those whom they love when they are in danger; and yet the names of these passions are applied to them too by the custom of human speech, because of a certain likeness of works, not because of weakness of affections. So God himself, according to the Scriptures, is angry, and yet is not disturbed by any passion. For this word has been taken from the effect of his punishment, not from any turbulent affection of his.

Chapter 6. By what passions, on Apuleius's own admission, the demons are agitated — the demons by whose help he asserts men are aided with the gods.

Putting off for the moment this question about the holy angels, let us see how the Platonists say that the demons, placed midway between gods and men, are tossed on these tides of passions. For if they suffered movements of this kind with their mind free from them and ruling them, Apuleius would not say that they toss “with a like movement of heart and surge of mind through all the tides of thought.” Their very mind, then — that is, the higher part of the soul, by which they are rational, in which virtue and wisdom, if they had any, would rule, governing and moderating the turbulent passions of the lower parts of the soul — their very mind, I say, as this Platonist confesses, is tossed on a surge of perturbations. The mind of the demons, therefore, is subject to the passions of lusts, fears, angers, and the rest of this kind. What part of them, then, is free and in possession of wisdom, by which they might please the gods and counsel men toward the likeness of good morals, when their mind, subjugated and oppressed by the vices of the passions, bends whatever reason it naturally has to cheating and deceiving the more keenly, the more the desire of harming possesses it?

Chapter 7. That the Platonists assert that the gods are defamed by the fictions of the poets concerning the conflict of opposing partisanships, when these roles belong to demons, not gods.

But if anyone says that it is not from the number of all demons, but of the bad ones, that the poets, not far from the truth, invent gods who hate and love certain men (for it was these, Apuleius said, that toss with a surge of mind through all the tides of thought) — how can we understand this, when, in saying it, he was describing the middle position of all demons, not just of some, that is, the bad ones, between gods and men, on account of their aerial bodies? For this, he says, is the poets' invention: that out of the number of these demons they make gods, give them the names of gods, and distribute them as friends and enemies to whatever men they please, with the unpunished licence of fictitious verse — while he declares that the gods are far removed from these ways of the demons, both by their heavenly place and by the wealth of their happiness. This, then, is the fiction of the poets: to call gods those who are not gods, and to make them contend among themselves under the names of gods on account of men, whom they love or hate out of partisanship. And he says that this fiction is not far from the truth, because, though called by the names of gods, which they are not, the demons are nevertheless described as they are. Finally, he says that from this comes Homer's Minerva, “who intervened in the midst of the Greek assembly to restrain Achilles.” That it was Minerva, he wants to be a poetic fiction, because he thinks Minerva a goddess and places her among the gods, all of whom he believes good and happy, in the high ethereal seat, far from the company of mortals. But that some demon favored the Greeks and opposed the Trojans, as another helped the Trojans against the Greeks, whom the same poet mentions under the name of Venus or Mars — gods whom Apuleius places in the heavenly dwellings, not doing such things — and that these demons contended among themselves for those they loved against those they hated: this he confessed the poets said not far from the truth. For they said these things of those whom he testifies toss, like men, with a like movement of heart and surge of mind through all the tides of thought, so that they can exercise loves and hatreds not according to justice, but, like the people who resemble them in their partisanship for hunters and charioteers, for some against others according to the zeal of their factions. For the Platonic philosopher seems to have taken care that, when these things were sung by the poets, they should not be believed to be done by the gods themselves, whose names the poets set on them in their fictions, rather than by the middle demons.