The Soul and the Demons

There are old stories about people changing shape. Among you it is the gods who change shape. Rhea becomes a tree; Zeus becomes a snake, over Persephone; the sisters of Phaethon turn into poplars, and Leto into a cheap little bird — and it is on her account that what is now Delos was once called Ortygia. A god, tell me, turns into a swan? And takes on the shape of an eagle? And, because Ganymede pours his wine, takes pride in his use of a boy? [a]

Why should I revere gods who take presents and get angry if they do not receive them? Let them keep their Fate. I have no intention of bowing down to wandering stars. What is this “hair of Berenice”? Where were her stars before the woman died? And how did the dead Antinous come to be set up in the moon as a beautiful young man? Who carried him up there? Unless of course someone did to him what is done for kings: a man perjures himself for a fee, laughing at the gods all the while, says a king has gone up into heaven, and is believed — and someone in the same way made a god of this one too, and was thought to deserve honor and a gift for it.

Why have you robbed God? Why do you dishonor what he made? You sacrifice a sheep and you worship the same animal. There is a Bull in the sky, and you cut the throat of its likeness. The Kneeler crushes an evil creature — and the eagle that ate Prometheus, the maker of men, is the one that gets the honor. The swan is a fine thing, of course, because he was an adulterer; and fine too are the Dioscuri, alive on alternate days, the men who carried off the daughters of Leucippus. Better still is Helen, who walked out on flaxen-haired Menelaus and went off after Paris in his turban and his gold. And a just man, no doubt, is Sophron, who moved the woman who prostituted herself over to the Elysian fields. But the daughter of Tyndareus was not made immortal after all, and Euripides wisely brought her on stage to be killed by Orestes.

So how am I to accept a birth ruled by Fate, when I see the sort of managers Fate keeps? I do not want to be a king. I have no wish to be rich. I have turned down a command in the army. I hate sexual immorality. I do not take to the sea out of greed for more. I do not compete for wreaths. I am done with the madness for fame. I look down on death. I rise above every kind of illness. Grief does not eat my soul away. If I am a slave, I put up with slavery; if I am free, I do not preen myself on my good birth. [f]

I see that the sun is the same sun for everyone, and that there is one death for all, whether they live in pleasure or in want. The rich man sows, and the poor man gets a share of the same sowing. The richest men die, and beggars have the same boundary drawn around their lives. The rich need more things, and it is their credit, along with their reputation, that carries them; but the poor man, and the man of very modest wants who reaches only for what suits his own condition, gets what he is after more easily.

Why are you fated to lie awake for love of money? Why are you fated to grasp again and again, and to die again and again? Die to the world; refuse the madness that is in it. Live to God; by laying hold of him, refuse the old birth you were given. We were not made in order to die; we die by our own doing. Our own free will destroyed us. We who were free have become slaves. We were sold because of sin. Nothing evil has been made by God. It is we who put wickedness on show — and we who put it on show are able to refuse it again.

We know two different kinds of spirit. One of them is called the soul; the other is greater than the soul, and it is an image and likeness of God. Both were present in the first human beings, so that in one respect they were material and in another respect above matter. [i]

This is how it stands. You can see that the whole structure of the world, and the whole of creation, has come to be out of matter — and that matter itself was put forth by God, so that in one respect it is to be thought of as shapeless and unformed before it was divided up, and in another as ordered and well arranged after the division was made in it. So the sky is in it, made of matter, and the stars in the sky; and the earth too, and everything we reckon as coming from the earth, has the same makeup, so that all things have a common origin. That being so, there are still differences among the things made of matter: one is more beautiful, and another is beautiful in itself but comes off worse against something better.

Take the body. Its structure is under a single management, and the reason for its coming to be is bound up with the body itself; and even so there are differences of rank within it. One part is an eye, another an ear, another the arrangement of the hair, the ordering of the intestines, the fitting together of marrow and bones and sinews. Each part is different from the next, and yet in the way they are arranged there is the harmony of a piece of music. In the same way the world, holding by the power of the one who made it some things that are brighter and others unlike them, received by the will of its Maker a share of material spirit. Anyone can take all this in, detail by detail, if he does not conceitedly wave away those most divine explanations which in the course of time have been set down in writing, and which make those who attend to them great lovers of God.

So then, the demons — as you call them — got their frame from matter and acquired the spirit that goes with it, and they became debauched and greedy. A few of them turned toward what was purer; the rest picked out the lower part of matter and lived a life to match it. These are the ones you worship, men of Greece: things made out of matter, and found a long way from good order. Through their own stupidity they turned to empty glory, threw off the reins, and set their hearts on becoming robbers of divinity. And the Master of all has let them run riot, until the world comes to its end and is dissolved, and the judge arrives, and all those people who, under the demons’ assault, keep reaching for the knowledge of the perfect God receive through their struggles a fuller testimony on the day of judgment.

So there is spirit in the heavenly lights, spirit in angels, spirit in plants and in waters, spirit in human beings, spirit in animals. It is one and the same, and yet it holds differences within itself.

And since we say these things not out of mere talk, nor out of likely notions and clever constructions, but using the words of a more divine kind of speech — hurry and learn, you who are willing. You who do not send the Scythian Anacharsis packing, do not think it beneath you now to be taught by people who follow a barbarian code of law. Take our teachings at least as you take the fortune-telling of the Babylonians. Listen to us when we speak, even if only as you listen to an oak giving oracles. And in fact the things I have just named are the counter-tricks of demons out of their minds, while what we teach is beyond the world’s grasp.

The soul is not immortal in itself, men of Greece; it is mortal. And yet that same soul is also able not to die. If it does not know the truth, it dies and is dissolved along with the body — but it rises again later, at the end of the world, together with the body, and receives death by punishment in immortality. If, on the other hand, it has come to know God, it does not die, even though for a time it is dissolved. [m]

By itself the soul is darkness, and there is nothing luminous in it. And this in fact is what the saying means: “The darkness does not overtake the light.” For the soul did not save the spirit; it was saved by the spirit, and the light overtook the darkness. The Word is the light of God, and the soul that lacks knowledge is darkness.

This is why the soul, if it lives on its own, leans downward toward matter and dies together with the flesh; but if it has gained the divine Spirit as its yokefellow, it is not left without help, and it goes up to the regions where the Spirit leads it. The spirit’s home is above; the soul’s origin is from below. In the beginning the spirit lived alongside the soul, but the spirit left it, because the soul was not willing to follow. The soul kept, as it were, a spark of the spirit’s power; yet because of the separation it could not see clearly what is perfect, and while looking for God it wandered and shaped many gods for itself, following demons and their counter-tricks.

But the Spirit of God is not with everyone. It comes down to some — those who live justly — and binds itself closely to the soul, and through its foretellings it announced hidden things to other souls. The souls that obeyed wisdom drew to themselves the spirit that is their kin; but the souls that would not obey, and pushed away the servant of the God who suffered, showed themselves to be fighters against God rather than worshipers of him.

That is the sort of people you are too, men of Greece: glib with words, but with a mind turned strange. You have practiced the rule of many rather than the rule of one, in the habit of following demons as though they were strong. For as the bandit, who has no humanity in him, is used to getting the better of men like himself by sheer nerve, so the demons, having run themselves aground in a great deal of wickedness, have thoroughly deceived the souls among you that are left on their own, working on them through ignorance and illusions. [p]

These beings do not die easily, since they have no share in flesh. But while they live they practice the business of death, and they die themselves as often as they train their followers in sins. And so the one thing that sets them apart now — that they do not die as human beings do — is the thing still left to them when the time comes for them to be punished: they will have no share in everlasting life, so as to receive that in place of death in immortality.

And as for us, for whom dying comes easily enough now, afterward we receive either what is immortal, with enjoyment, or what is painful, along with immortality. In the same way the demons, who use this present life for going wrong, dying continually all the while they live, will hereafter have that same deathlessness — like the one they had during the time they lived, but in its makeup like that of the human beings who deliberately carried out whatever the demons laid down for them while they lived. And is it not the case that fewer kinds of sin come into flower among human beings, because they do not live long, while for the demons I have named the wrongdoing has turned out greater, because their living has no limit?

From here on, what we have to do is look for what we once had and lost: to yoke the soul to the Holy Spirit, and to work at the union that is according to God. Now the human soul has many parts, not one. It is put together, so that it can show itself through a body; it could never appear on its own without a body, and the flesh does not rise again without the soul. [r]

For a human being is not what the crow-voiced men lay down — a rational animal, able to take in intelligence and knowledge. By their account irrational creatures will turn out able to take in intelligence and knowledge as well. A human being alone is the image and likeness of God. And by “human being” I do not mean the one who does what animals do, but the one who has gone far beyond mere humanity, on toward God himself. I have set this out more exactly in the work On Animals.

What has to be said now is what sort of thing the image and likeness of God is. What cannot be compared is nothing other than Being itself; what is compared is nothing other than the thing that is like. The perfect God is without flesh; a human being is flesh. The soul is the bond of the flesh, and the flesh is what holds the soul. Such is the shape of a human being’s makeup. If it is like a temple, God is willing to live in it through the Spirit who is his envoy; but if the dwelling is not like that, then a person is better than the wild animals only in having articulate speech, and in everything else his way of life is theirs, since he is no likeness of God.

None of the demons has flesh. Their frame is spiritual, like fire or air. And only to those whom the Spirit of God guards are the demons’ bodies easily visible; to the rest they are nowhere to be seen — I mean to those who have only soul, for the lower has not the strength to take in the higher. This is why the demons’ existence has no room for repentance: they are reflections of matter and of wickedness. Matter wanted authority over the soul, and by their own free will these handed down laws of death to human beings. But human beings, after losing immortality, have conquered death by a death that comes through faith, and a call has been given them through repentance, according to the word that says, “Since they were made a little lower than the angels.” And anyone who has been conquered can conquer again, if he refuses the makeup that belongs to death. What that is will be easy to see for people who want what is immortal.

The demons who give men their orders are not the souls of human beings. How could such souls be capable of acting after death — unless a person who was mindless and powerless while alive is to be believed to take on more effective power once he is dead? But that is not how it is, as I have shown elsewhere. And it is hard to think that the immortal soul, hindered as it is by the parts of the body, becomes more sensible once it has moved out of the body. [v]

For the demons, driving men wild out of their own bad nature, twist their minds — already leaning downward — by all sorts of lying stage plays, so that they will not be able to lift themselves for the journey into heaven. But what is in the world is not hidden from us, and what is divine is easy for us to take in, once the power that makes souls immortal has come to us.

The demons are seen even by those who have only soul, at those times when the demons show themselves to men — either so that they will be thought to be somebody, or so that they may do some harm, the way friends with a bad turn of mind harm people as though they were enemies, or so as to give men like themselves an occasion for honoring them. If it were possible for them, they would certainly drag down heaven itself along with the rest of creation. As it is, they can do nothing of the kind, for they have not the power; but with the matter below they make war on the matter that is like themselves.

If anyone wants to beat them, let him refuse matter. Armed with the breastplate of the heavenly Spirit, he will be able to save everything the breastplate covers. There are, of course, diseases and upheavals of the matter that is in us; and when such things happen the demons put the causes down to themselves and come at a man whenever exhaustion takes hold of him. Sometimes they themselves shake the body’s condition with a storm of their own stupidity — but struck by the word of God’s power they go off in fear, and the sick man is healed.

As for Democritus and his sympathies and antipathies, what can we say except what the common saying says: that the man from Abdera talks like an Abderite? And as the man the city was named for — a friend of Heracles, so they say — was eaten by the mares of Diomedes, so too the man who boasted of Ostanes the magus will be handed over, on the day when everything is finished, as food for the eternal fire. And you, if you do not stop your laughing, will get the same punishments the sorcerers get. [w]

So listen to me, men of Greece — I am shouting at you as if from high ground — and do not sneer and shift your own want of reason onto the herald of the truth. An affliction is not destroyed by a counter-affliction, and a madman is not cured by hanging little strips of leather on him. These are visits from demons. The sick man, the man who says he is in love, the man who hates, the man who wants revenge — all of them take demons for their helpers.

Here is how their device works. The shapes of the letters, and the lines made out of them, cannot by themselves show what is being put together; men made signs for their own thoughts, and know from a particular arrangement of the letters what that order was laid down to say. In just the same way the various kinds of roots, and the uses made of sinews and bones, are not in themselves capable of doing anything: they are the alphabet of the demons’ villainy, and the demons have fixed what each of them is good for. And when they see that men have taken up the service they provide through such things, they take hold of them and turn them into their slaves.

How can it be good to be of service to adulteries? How can it be worth anything to help men along toward hating one another? Or how is it right to hang the relief of the insane on matter, and not on God? By this craft they turn men away from reverence for God, getting them to put their trust in grasses and roots. If God had prepared these things to do exactly what men want, he would be a maker of evil things. In fact he made everything that is in good condition, and it is the demons’ debauchery that has used what is in the world for doing harm; the look of evil these things wear belongs to the demons, and not to the perfect God.

For how is it that while I was alive I was not in the least a wicked thing, but now that I am dead and doing nothing, what is left of me — which neither moves nor even feels — is supposed to produce something the senses can register? And how will a man who has died the most pitiable death be able to help in taking revenge for anyone? If that were possible, he could far sooner take revenge on his own enemy by himself; and if he can help others, he can much more readily set himself up as his own avenger.