Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
City of God (Penguin Classics) (63 page)
1.
The upshot of the previous discussion
S
OME
people believe in the existence both of good and of bad gods. Others take a better view of the gods, and ascribe to them so much praise and honour that they cannot bring themselves to believe that there can be such a thing as a bad god. Now those who have asserted the existence of good gods and bad gods,
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have applied the name of gods to demons also, while sometimes, though more rarely, speaking of gods as ‘demons’. In fact they admit that Jupiter himself, the king and leader of the gods, in their view, was called ‘demon’ by Homer.
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As for those who assert that there can only be good gods, whose goodness far excels anything that is called goodness in man, they are rightly disturbed by the actions of the demons, which they cannot deny, and consider it impossible that such things could be done by gods, whom they hold to be good. So they are forced to postulate a difference between gods and demons. All that they disapprove of, with good reason, whether in the evil activities or in the degraded passions where the hidden spirits display their power – all this they attribute to the demons, not to the gods. On the other hand, they hold that ‘gods never have direct contact with men’
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and therefore suppose that these demons are established midway between men and gods, to carry men’s requests to the gods and to bring back the benefits the gods have granted. This is the view of the Platonists, the most eminent and celebrated of the philosophers. And it is with them, because of their superiority to all the other thinkers, that we decided to discuss the question whether the worship of a plurality of gods is of any value for the attainment of blessedness in the life after death. Thus in the preceding book we observed that demons rejoice in such things as are detested and condemned by men of virtue and wisdom, in the blasphemous, outrageous, criminal fictions of the poets, invented not
about any mere human being but about the gods themselves, and in the abominable and legally punishable violence of magic arts. And we asked how it could be that such demons should be able, as being reputedly closer to the gods and more friendly with them, to bring good men into the favour of the ‘good gods’. And our finding was that this was utterly impossible.
2.
Are there any good demons who might assist the human soul to attain felicity
?
This present volume will have to fulfil the promise given at the end of the last book, and contain a discussion of the distinction (if any is admitted to exist) between different kinds of demons. We shall not treat of any distinction between gods, since the Platonists insist that all gods are good, nor of the distinction between gods and demons. There is, according to them, a vast interval separating men from gods, while the demons are situated in between the two. We shall be concerned with the distinction among the demons, as far as is relevant to the question before us. Now it is with many people a commonplace that there are good demons and bad demons. And whether this opinion is also held by the Platonists, or whether by any other philosophical school, we must certainly not omit to discuss it. We should not let anyone imagine that so-called ‘good demons’ are to be courted, on the assumption that their mediation can assure him that reconciliation with the gods (all of whom he believes to be good) on which he has set his heart. Such a man might suppose that he would be able to enter into fellowship with the gods after death; but in fact he would find himself in the toils of malignant spirits, the victim of their deception, far astray from the true God, with whom alone, in whom alone, and through whom alone, the soul of man, the rational and intelligent soul, can attain to felicity.
3.
Apuleius attributes reason, but not goodness, to the demons
What then is the distinction between good demons and bad? Apuleius the Platonist describes the demons in general, and writes at length about their bodies of air. But he has nothing to say about the virtues of their character, with which they would have been endowed, if they had been good. Thus he was silent about the essential condition of felicity; but he could not suppress the proof of their wretchedness,
since he admits that their mind, which in his account made them rational beings, far from being steeped in virtue and thus protected against any surrender to irrational passions of the soul, was itself in some measure liable to disturbances, agitations, and storms of passion, the normal condition of foolish minds. These are his words on the subject:
It is from this collection of demons that the poets generally select their characters when, without departing much from the truth, they give a fictitious picture of the gods as haters or lovers of particular men: when they represent them as raising some people to prosperity and bringing to others frustration and affliction. Hence the gods are shown feeling pity and indignation, anguish, joy and every facet of human emotion; being subject, like men, to such agitation of the heart and turmoil in the mind they are tossed about on the stormy waters of their imaginations. All these squalls and tempests banish them far away from the tranquillity of the gods of heaven.
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There is no uncertainty in those words. It is not any of the lower parts of the souls of the demons that Apuleius describes as agitated as if by raging seas and storms of passion; it is their mind, the faculty that makes them rational beings. And therefore they are not worthy of comparison with wise men who, even under the conditions of their present life, offer the resistance of an undisturbed mind to those disturbances of the soul from which human weakness cannot be exempt, and do not allow themselves either to command or to commit any act which strays from the path of wisdom or transgresses the law of justice. It is the foolish and the lawless among mortals that these demons resemble, not in their bodies but in their characters. I might say that they are worse than such men, inasmuch as they are older in wickedness, and incapable of being reformed by the punishment they deserve. And so they are tossed about on what Apuleius calls the raging sea of their minds. Only truth and virtue can offer a centre of resistance against turbulent and degraded passions. And there is no truth or virtue in the constitution of their souls.
4.
The opinions of Peripatetics and Stoics about the passions
Two opinions are found among the philosophers concerning these agitations of the soul, which the Greeks call
pathê
, while some of our Latin authors, Cicero for example,
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describe them as disturbances, others as affections or affects, or again as passions, the word used by
Apuleius, which is closer to the meaning of the Greek term. Now these disturbances (or affections or passions), according to some philosophers, befall even a wise man, though with him they are restrained and subjected to reason, and the predominant intellect as it were imposes laws on the passions, which keep them within strict bounds. This opinion is held by the Platonists and the Aristotelians – Aristotle being a disciple of Plato who founded the Peripatetic school. Others, the Stoics among them, refuse to admit that passions of this kind can conceivably befall a wise man. Now Cicero, in his work On the
Ends of Good and
Evil, proves that the opposition between Stoics and Platonists (or Peripatetics) is really a quarrel about words rather than things. For example, the Stoics refuse to give the name ‘goods’ to what they call material and external ‘advantages’. According to them there is no ‘good’ for man except virtue, meaning the art of the good life, which exists only in the soul. The other side called them quite simply ‘goods’, in conformity with the normal usage, but they regarded them as goods of small or infinitesimal value in comparison with virtue, the practice of the good life. The result is that both sides attach the same value to ‘goods’ or ‘advantages’, in spite of the different terminology; the Stoics are only indulging in the pleasure of linguistic innovation on this point. And it seems to me that in the question whether passions of the soul can befall the wise man, the dispute is a matter of words rather than of things. In my opinion, the Stoic view of the matter is identical with that of Platonists and Peripatetics, in respect of the objective reference of their statements, as opposed to the sound of their words.
To dispense with the tedium of a detailed demonstration, I shall confine myself to one most cogent piece of evidence. In his work entitled
Attic Nights
, Aulus Gellius,
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a writer of polished eloquence and multifarious erudition, tells the following anecdote.
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He once found himself on a sea voyage in the company of a well-known Stoic. When the ship began to pitch dangerously on a stormy sea beneath a lowering sky (I am condensing the detailed and copious narrative of Gellius) the philosopher turned pale with fright. This was noticed by those present, who were curious to observe, even when death was imminent, whether a philosopher would be disturbed in soul or not.
Once the storm had passed, and restored confidence afforded the opportunity for conversation, and even raillery, one of the other passengers, a rich and self-indulgent Asiatic, hailed the philosopher with a jibe at his terror and pallor, in contrast with the speaker’s own unshaken intrepidity in the face of impending destruction. The Stoic replied with the retort given in a similar situation by Aristippus
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the Socratic to a man of the same type who had made the same remark: ‘You were quite right not to be worried about the life of a contemptible scoundrel: but I was bound to be afraid for the life of Aristippus.’ This reply put the rich man in his place. But later on Gellius asked the philosopher, with no intention of criticizing him, but simply for information, what really was the reason for his panic. The Stoic was ready to instruct a man who betrayed such an ardent thirst for knowledge, and he immediately produced from his baggage a work of Epictetus
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the Stoic, an exposition of doctrines in harmony with the principles laid down by Zeno and Chrysippus, whom we know as the originators of Stoicism.
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Gellius tells us that he read in that book that the Stoics had concluded that there are certain mental phenomena, to which they give the name of ‘fantasies’, which we cannot control. We cannot decide whether they will happen, or when they will happen. When these are brought on by circumstances of overwhelming terror they are bound to disturb even the mind of a philosopher, so that, for a moment, he experiences the panic of terror or the anguish of grief. It is as if these passions are too quick for the functioning of his intellect and reason. This does not mean that his intellect forms any judgement on the evil, or that his reason approves those reactions or consents to them. It is this consent, they insist, that is under our control, and this, according to the Stoics, is the difference between the attitude of a wise man and a fool. The soul of the fool gives way to these passions and accords them the consent of his mind, while the wise man’s soul, although it cannot help experiencing these emotions, still keeps its mind unshaken and holds firmly to its right decision about what aims it ought, in reason, to pursue, and what it should reject.
Such is the teaching which Gellius read, according to his own account,
in the book of Epictetus, where the author expresses ideas based on the principles of Stoicism. I have expounded the teaching to the best of my power, less attractively, no doubt, than Gellius, but more succinctly, and, I fancy, with greater clarity.
On this showing there is little or no difference between the opinions of Stoics and of other philosophers on the subject of the disturbances – or passions – of the soul. Both sides champion the mind and the reason against the tyranny of the passions. And the meaning of the Stoic assertion that passions do not touch a wise man is probably that passions in no way cloud with error that wisdom in virtue of which he is wise, nor can they undermine and overthrow it. However, they do happen to his soul, but that is because of circumstances which the Stoics call ‘advantageous’ or ‘disadvantageous’, being unwilling to describe them as ‘good’ or ‘evil’. For, to be sure, if the philosopher in the anecdote had attached no importance to all that he felt he was going to lose in the shipwreck, including his life, and his material existence, he would not have dreaded the danger to the point of betraying his fear by turning pale. Yet it was possible for him to experience that emotion, while retaining in his mind the fixed conviction that life and material existence, which were threatened by the violence of the storm, are not ‘goods’ of the same order as justice; they cannot determine the goodness of their possessor.
The Stoic insistence that such things are not to be called ‘good’, but ‘advantageous’, should be regarded as a quibble about words, not a question of the realities they signify. What does it matter whether they are more properly called ‘goods’, or ‘advantages’, seeing that Stoic and Peripatetic alike turn pale with dread at the prospect of their loss? There is a difference of terminology, but an identical judgement of value. Both schools certainly maintain that if they were urged to any disgraceful or criminal act by a threatened danger to these ‘goods’ or ‘advantages’ as the only way to ensure their retention, they would prefer to lose all that guarantees the life and health of the physical body rather than commit any violation of justice. Thus the mind in which this principle is fixed does not allow any of those disturbances to prevail in it against reason, even though they may occur in the lower parts of the soul. On the contrary, the mind exercises dominion over them. Far from consenting to them, it resists, and by that resistance establishes the reign of virtue. Virgil describes Aeneas as such a man when he says