Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
Unmoved his mind: the tears roll down in vain.
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5.
For Christians, the passions offer a training in virtue, not an inducement to sin
It is not at this point necessary to expound in copious detail what is taught about these passions in the divine Scriptures, which contain the syllabus of instruction for Christians. Scripture subjects the mind to God for his direction and assistance, and subjects the passions to the mind for their restraint and control so that they may be turned into the instruments of justice. In fact, in our discipline, the question is not
whether
the devout soul is angry,
but
why; not whether it is sad, but what causes its sadness; not whether it is afraid, but what is the object of its fear.
To be indignant with the sinner with a view to his correction, to feel sorrow for the afflicted with a view to his release from suffering, to be afraid for one in danger so as to prevent his death – those are emotions which, as far as I can see, no sane judgement could reprove. The Stoics, to be sure, are in the habit of extending their condemnation to compassion;
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but how much more honourable would it have been in the Stoic of our anecdote to have been ‘disturbed’ by compassion so as to rescue someone, rather than by the fear of being shipwrecked! Far more creditable, more humane, and more in harmony with the feelings of true religion was the sentiment expressed in Cicero’s praise of Caesar, ‘Of all your virtues, none was more admirable, none more attractive, than your compassion.’
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What is compassion but a kind of fellow-feeling in our hearts for another’s misery, which compels us to come to his help by every means in our power? Now this emotion is the servant of reason, when compassion is shown without detriment to justice, when it is a matter of giving to the needy or of pardoning the repentant. Cicero, with his unique mastery of words, did not hesitate to call compassion a virtue, while the Stoics did not scruple to class it as a vice. Yet, on the evidence of the book of that notable Stoic, Epictetus (a book based on the principles of Zeno and Chrysippus, the founders of that sect) even the Stoics admit passions of this kind into the soul of a wise man, while insisting that such a man is free from every vice. From this one must conclude that they do not regard them as vices when they occur in a wise man in such a way as to have no power against his strength of mind and his reason. The Stoic position would then be identical with that of the Peripatetics and even the Platonists; and, as Cicero says, ‘It is high
time that these linguistic disputes were left to torment those poor little Greeks who are more devoted to controversy than to truth.’
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There is another question which merits examination. Are we to suppose that our experience of such emotions, even in the practice of good works, is one of the disabilities involved in this present life? Do we then assume that the holy angels feel no anger when they punish those who are consigned to them for punishment by God’s eternal law? That they come to the help of the wretched without feeling compassion for their wretchedness, and have no fear for those whom they love when they rescue them from danger? Certainly, we follow the conventions of human language in applying to the angels the words denoting these passions, but this is perhaps because of the analogy between their actions and those of men, not because they are subject to the infirmity of our passions. In the same way, God is described in Scripture as showing anger though in fact he is not troubled by any passion. The word ‘anger’ signifies that his vengeance is effected; it does not mean he is himself affected by any storm of emotion.
6.
Demons are at the mercy of passions
Let us postpone the question of the holy angels for the time being and notice how, according to the Platonists, these demons, located midway between gods and men, are tossed about on the waves of the passions. If they experienced these emotions while their minds remained free from their influence, and exerted mastery over the passions, Apuleius would not have spoken of them as ‘tossed about on the stormy waters of their imaginations, subject, like men, to such agitation of the heart and turmoil in the mind’.
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It follows that it is their mind that is affected, the superior part of the soul, the faculty that makes them rational beings, the place where virtue and wisdom, if they have any, exercises mastery over the turbulent passions of the lower parts of the soul by directing and controlling them. It is their mind, which, on the admission of this Platonist, is ‘tossed on those stormy waters’. Thus the mind of the demons is in subjection to the passions of desire, of fear, of anger, and the rest. Then is there any part of them free and capable of wisdom, which can make them acceptable to the gods, and of service to man by offering an example of morality? How can there be, if their mind is subdued under the oppressive tyranny of vicious passions, and employs for seduction and deception all the rational
power that it has by nature, with all the more eagerness as the lust for doing harm gains increasing mastery?
7.
According to the Platonists, the poets’ slanders of the gods refer to the demons
It may be objected that it is not the whole class of demons, but only the evil kind, to which this applies; that it is from this class that the poets have taken their characters, when, without straying far from the truth, they give a fictitious picture of gods as haters and lovers of men (these being the ‘gods’ who, in the words of Apuleius, ‘are tossed about on the stormy waters of their imaginations’). What are we to make of this? For when Apuleius made this remark he was describing the intermediate situation between gods and men held, in virtue of their bodies of air, by all the demons, not just by some of them, the evil kind.
According to Apuleius the effect of the poets’ fictions was to make some of these demons into gods, to give them the names of gods, and to distribute them to men as friends or foes, quite capriciously, thanks to the unrestricted licence of poetical fiction; whereas the gods, he maintains, are worlds apart from such demon morality in virtue of their situation in the heavens and their abundant felicity. Thus it is mere poetic fiction to give the names of gods to those who are not gods, and to portray them in mutual conflict on account of men for whom they feel the affection or dislike of partisanship. For all that, Apuleius declares that this fiction is not far from the truth, seeing that though they are given names of gods, to which they are not entitled, it is demons who are being presented in their real characters. In fact Apuleius asserts that Minerva, as Homer presents her, belongs to this class ‘when she intervenes to restrain Achilles in the midst of the Greek assemblies’.
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It was, he insists, a poetical fiction to say that she was Minerva; for he considers Minerva to be a goodess and sets her among the gods, whom he believes to be all of them good and happy in their ethereal abode on high, far from any intercourse with mortals. But he agrees that there was same demon supporting the Greeks against the Trojans and another demon helping the Trojans against the Greeks, whom the poet calls Venus, or Mars, using the names of gods whom Apuleius locates in heavenly abodes, taking no part in such activities, and that those demons fought among themselves in support of those whom they loved, and in opposition to those
whom they hated. All this he admitted to be not far from the truth in the poet’s narrative. For these accounts were concerned with beings who were, on his showing, ‘subject, like men, to such agitation of the heart and turmoil in the mind, tossed about on the stormy waters of their imaginations’, so that their loves or hates could prompt them to act in favour of some and in opposition to others, without regard to justice, but at the bidding of partisan feeling, just as the members of the populace, who are the image of them, support their favourite wild beast fighters and charioteers. The chief anxiety of our Platonist was that the activities described by the poets should be attributed to these intermediary demons, and not to the gods whose names the poets misapplied.
8.
Gods, demons, and men, as defined by Apuleius
But we must not too lightly pass over the actual definition of demons, given by Apuleius – a definition intended to include them all The demons, he says, are animals in respect of species; in respect of soul, liable to passions; in mind, capable of reason; in body, composed of air; in life-span, eternal.
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Now in all these five attributes thus listed, he has mentioned nothing at all which would suggest that the demons have something in common with good men which is not found in the bad. For he gives a somewhat extended description of man, to embrace him in a definition; he treats of him in his turn as being a creature made of earth on the lowest scale of existence, when he had previously treated of the gods of heaven, and so after allocating these two divisions of the universe, the highest and the lowest, he goes on to speak in the third and last place about the demons, who occupy the intermediate situation. These are his words:
And so we come to men, rejoicing in reason, endowed with the great power of speech; with immortal souls, but with physical frames destined for death; with minds unstable and unquiet, and bodies clumsy and vulnerable; diverse in character, but alike in error, persistent in daring, pertinacious in hope, ineffectual in their striving, dogged by ill-luck; individually mortal, yet perpetual as a whole species, one generation taking the place of another in continual exchange; their life a fleeting span, their wisdom slow in coming, but their death swift; their life full of complaining. Such are the inhabitants of the earth.
While saying so many things, which apply to most men, he certainly did not omit to mention something which he knew to apply to only a
few. He mentioned this in speaking of ‘wisdom’, which is ‘slow in coming’. Had he omitted this element, he would have failed to give a complete description of the human race, for all his care and thoroughness. On the other hand, when he is concerned to emphasize the preeminence of the gods, it is felicity that he asserts as their pre-eminent quality; the felicity which they wish men to attain through wisdom.
Accordingly, if he had wished it to be understood that there are some good demons, he would have put into his description of them some characteristic which would suggest that the demons shared some portion of felicity with the gods, or some kind of wisdom with men. But in fact he mentions no good quality in them by which the good might be distinguished from the evil. Doubtless he was chary of expressing himself frankly about their wickedness, for fear, not so much of offending the demons themselves, as of offending their worshippers, who formed his audience; nevertheless he made clear, to the thoughtful readers, what they ought to think about the demons. For he made the gods, (who, he insisted, must all be understood to be good) completely aloof from the passions and, as he put it, the ‘storms’, which affect the demons. He united gods and demons only in respect of the eternity of their bodies, while expressly driving home the point that in soul the demons resemble men, and not the gods; and they resemble men not in the good quality of wisdom, of which men can have a share, but in the turbulent passions, which gain the mastery over the foolish and the wicked, but are controlled by the wise and the good – though they would prefer not to have them rather than to gain the victory over them. Now if he had wished it to be understood that the eternity which the demons share with the gods is an eternity of souls, not of bodies, he would not have excluded men from a share in it, because there can be no shadow of doubt that, as a Platonist, he believed the soul of man to be eternal. That is why, in describing this species of living beings, he ascribes to man ‘an immortal soul, but a physical frame destined for death’. It follows that if it is the mortality of their bodies that debars man from sharing the eternity of the gods, it must be the immortality of their bodies that entitles the demons to share it.
9.
Can men receive the friendship of the gods through the mediation of demons
?
What kind of beings are these mediators between gods and men through whom men are to canvass the friendly offices of the gods?
They share man’s inferiority in respect of the better part of a living being, the soul; they share the superiority of the gods in respect of the lower part of a living being, the body. Now every living being, or ‘animal’, consists of a soul and a body. Of these two constituents the soul is certainly better than the body, however faulty and weak it may be, better even than the healthiest and strongest body, because its nature is more excellent, and the blemishes of vice cannot make it inferior to the body – just as gold, even if dirty, is valued above silver or lead, however pure. And these ‘mediators’ between gods and men, through whose intervention the human is joined to the divine, have an eternal body in common with the gods, but a corrupted soul in common with men – as if religion, by which men aspire to be united with the gods by the mediation of demons, were located in the body, not in the soul. What a wicked thing to do, to hang those spurious and deceptive mediators upside down! Or perhaps it was a punishment? Anyhow, they have their body, the lower part of their being, in the company of the higher powers, while their higher part, the soul, is with the lower creatures; united with the gods of heaven in virtue of their subordinate part, they are united in misery with men on earth in respect of the part which should command. For the body is undoubtedly a servant; as Sallust says, ‘Our soul is appointed to command, our body to obey.’
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And he adds, ‘One element in us we share with the gods, the other with the beasts,’ for he is speaking about man, who, like the beasts, has a mortal body. On the other hand, these demons, whom the philosophers have provided for us as mediators between ourselves and the gods, can indeed say of their soul and body, ‘One element in us we share with the gods, the other with men.’ But, as I have said, they have been tied up and suspended as it were topsyturvy, with their body, the servant, in the company of the blessed gods, and their soul, the master, in the company of wretched men; exalted in the lower part of their being, they are abased in their upper part. Hence even if one supposes that the demons share eternity with the gods, because their souls are never sundered from the body by death, as happens with terrestrial creatures, one should not think of their body as the eternal instrument of beings advanced to honour, but as the eternal chain that binds the damned.