CHAPTER XXII.

We with your philosophers assert the existence of demons, spiritual beings of malefic power, who falsely claim to be divine.

AND we thus affirm the existence of certain spiritual substances; nor is the name a new one. The philosophers are acquainted with daemons; for [75] Socrates himself waited upon the will of a daemon. And why not? when a daemon is said to have attended him from boyhood as a dissuader,—doubtless from good. The poets are acquainted with daemons; even the untaught vulgar often make use of them in cursing; for they name also Satan ⁶⁸, the chief of this evil race, in their word of execration, just as if from an innate consciousness of the soul. Angels ⁶⁹, too, Plato also does not deny; and to the names of both the magicians, for example, are witnesses at hand. Moreover how from certain angels, corrupted of their own free will, a still more corrupt race of daemons has issued, condemned by God, along with the authors of the race and him whom we have spoken of as their chief, may be learnt in the sacred writings ⁷⁰. It will be sufficient now to explain the method of their operation. Their business is the ruin of man; thus spiritual wickedness began to act from the very first for the destruction of man. Consequently they inflict on the body diseases and many grievous mishaps, and violently visit the mind with sudden and extraordinary aberrations. Their wonderful subtilty and tenuity gives them access to both parts of man. Spiritual agencies possess great powers; so that, being invisible and unperceived by the senses, they [76] can be detected in the effect they produce rather than in their mode of producing it. If some hidden blight in the breeze unseasonably hastens forward any fruit or grain in blossom, nips it in the bud, or blasts it in maturity, and if the air, infected in some unseen way, pours forth its poisonous currents; then by the same obscure contagion the influence of daemons and angels brings about the corruption also of the mind with fury and foul madness, or with fierce lusts bringing various errors in their train; of which that is the most prevailing by which they commend these gods of yours to the enthralled and deluded minds of men, that so they may procure for themselves their own proper food of fumes and blood offered to effigies and images, and (what is a more acceptable banquet to them) turn mankind aside from reflecting upon the True Divinity by the deceptions of false divination.

And how they effect these very operations I will shew. Every spirit is winged. This both angels and daemons are. In a moment, therefore, they are everywhere. To them the whole world is one place : what is being done everywhere they know as easily as they declare it. Their velocity is believed to be divinity, because their real nature is unknown. So also they desire sometimes to be thought the originators of those events of which they merely bring the tidings; and indeed they are sometimes the causes of evil events, but of good ones never. Even the counsels of God, too, they formerly picked up from the addresses of the prophets; and now they gather them while their writings are being read aloud. And so [77] gleaning by this means the knowledge of certain chance events, they enviously ape a divinity by stealing the divination. Moreover, how ingeniously they framed their equivocations in the oracles to suit either event, such men as Croesus and Pyrrhus are well aware. But it was in the way which I have just mentioned that the Pythian Apollo brought back word that a tortoise was being cooked with the flesh of a lamb; in a moment he had been in Lydia. They are able, from inhabiting the air and from their proximity to the stars and from their intimate knowledge of the clouds, to know what the heavens are about to prepare, so that they can promise the rain of which they are already sensible. They are sorcerers also, truly, in respect of the cures of diseases. For they first cause the injury, and then, in order to make it seem like a miracle, prescribe remedies which are either new or absolutely opposed to the ordinary methods of treatment; after which they stop causing the injury, and are believed to have effected a cure.

There is little need for me to analyze their other ingenious devices, or even their powers of spiritual deception,—such as the apparitions of Castor, the water carried in a sieve, the ship drawn forward with a girdle, and the beard turned red at a touch,—so that stones should be believed to be divinities, and the True God not be sought after. [78]