The City of God, Volume I

Finally, Augustine clarifies the nature of Christian honor paid to martyrs. He insists that Christians do not build temples or ordain priests and sacrifices to martyrs, for the martyrs are not gods. The God of the martyrs is the God of the Christians. Honors paid at their tombs are memorials to holy men, not sacrifices to the dead. Sacrifices are offered to God alone at their tombs, giving thanks for the martyrs’ victories and stirring up imitators. Even if some Christians bring food to these places, it is to be sanctified through the merits of the martyrs and shared with the needy, not offered as a sacrifice to the martyr. Augustine contrasts this with the pagan rites, which often involve the abominable crimes of their gods, either real crimes committed when they were men or fictitious crimes invented for the pleasure of demons. He concludes that no wise man imagines demons are to be worshipped on account of a blessed life after death, and he prepares to examine the opinion that some demons are good and worthy of worship in the following book.

In the preceding book, Augustine established that the worship of demons must be utterly rejected, as they have manifested themselves in a thousand ways as wicked spirits. However, he now turns his attention to a more sophisticated objection raised by the Platonists and other philosophers. These thinkers, while maintaining that the gods themselves are entirely good and incapable of evil, posit a distinction among the invisible spirits known as demons. They argue that while some demons are undoubtedly evil, others are good and serve a necessary function as mediators between the exalted gods and mortal men. Because the gods are considered too high and pure for direct intercourse with humanity, these good demons are said to carry prayers upward and bring blessings downward. Augustine promises to demonstrate that this distinction is false and that no demon, whether deemed good or bad by the philosophers, can provide true blessedness to men. This office, he asserts, belongs solely to Jesus Christ, the true Mediator who unites divinity and mortality.

Augustine begins his examination by analyzing the testimony of Apuleius, a Platonist philosopher who wrote a treatise on the nature of Socrates and the gods. Apuleius, while ascribing aerial bodies to demons and acknowledging their rationality, fails to attribute to them any spiritual virtue that could constitute happiness. On the contrary, Apuleius admits that the minds of demons are agitated by violent and tempestuous emotions. He explicitly states that demons experience pity, indignation, grief, and joy with the same mental disturbance as human beings, banishing them far from the tranquility enjoyed by the celestial gods. Augustine argues that this description disqualifies demons from being good mediators. Even wise human beings, though subject to initial impressions, strive to resist these perturbations through reason and virtue. Demons, however, are described as having minds like a storm-tossed sea, entirely enslaved by passion. They resemble wicked and foolish men in character, and indeed are worse, having grown old in iniquity and become incorrigible by punishment.

To further clarify the nature of these passions, Augustine reviews the philosophical debate between the Stoics and the Peripatetics (followers of Aristotle) regarding mental emotions. The Stoics argue that the wise man is not subject to these passions, while the Peripatetics believe he experiences them in a moderated form. Augustine, citing the account of Aulus Gellius, suggests that this disagreement is largely verbal rather than real. He recounts the story of a Stoic philosopher who turned pale with fear during a shipwreck. When questioned later, the philosopher explained that while the wise man cannot prevent the initial physical impression of fear, he does not consent to it mentally. Thus, the mind of the wise man remains steadfast in reason, even if the body reacts to danger. Augustine concludes that both schools essentially agree that the rational mind of the wise person is not dominated by vice. In contrast, Apuleius attributes to demons a mind that is tossed about by a hurricane of passions, implying that their highest faculty is enslaved to vice. This makes them intent on deception and seduction rather than capable of guiding men to purity.

Augustine contrasts this demoniacal condition with Christian virtue. He argues that in Christian ethics, the question is not whether a soul experiences passion, but why and toward what end. Anger at wrongdoers to correct them, sadness to relieve the suffering, or fear to preserve life are not condemned when they are obedient to reason and directed toward righteous ends. Even the holy angels, who have no weakness, are described in Scripture with metaphors of anger or pity because their actions resemble those prompted by such emotions in us, though they themselves are entirely undisturbed. The demons, however, are driven by turbulent emotions that make them unstable and untrustworthy. Augustine notes that the Platonists themselves are forced to admit that the poets’ stories of gods fighting with partisan passions are actually true descriptions of demons, not gods. The poets slander the true gods by attributing human distempers to them, but they accurately describe the demons who falsely bear the names of gods.

Augustine proceeds to a rigorous logical analysis of Apuleius’s definition of demons. Apuleius defines them as animals, rational, subject to passion, aerial in body, and eternal in duration. Augustine dissects this definition to show the miserable condition of these beings. He notes that Apuleius describes men as mortal and miserable, and gods as immortal and blessed. Demons, according to the definition, share the passions of men and the immortality of body (though not soul) of the gods. Augustine argues that this combination results in a state of “eternal misery” or “miserable eternity.” He points out that the soul is the superior part of a living creature, and the body the inferior. Yet these mediators are linked to the gods by their inferior part (the body) and to men by their superior part (the soul). They are, as it were, suspended head downwards, united to the celestial gods by the servant and bound to miserable men by the ruler. This is not a harmonious mediation but a grotesque inversion. Augustine cites Plotinus, who said that the Father showed mercy to men by making their bonds—that is, their bodies—mortal, so that death might free them from trouble. Demons, however, have been judged unworthy of this mercy; they are eternally bound to their bodies, making them more wretched than men, who at least have the hope of release through death.