God by their intercession, mean to turn them from the path of truth._
As to the demons, these false and deceitful mediators, who, though
their uncleanness of spirit frequently reveals their misery and
malignity, yet, by virtue of the levity of their aerial bodies and
the nature of the places they inhabit, do contrive to turn us aside
and hinder our spiritual progress; they do not help us towards God,
but rather prevent us from reaching Him. Since even in the bodily
way, which is erroneous and misleading, and in which righteousness
does not walk,--for we must rise to God not by bodily ascent, but
by incorporeal or spiritual conformity to Him,--in this bodily way,
I say, which the friends of the demons arrange according to the
weight of the various elements, the aerial demons being set between
the ethereal gods and earthy men, they imagine the gods to have
this privilege, that by this local interval they are preserved from
the pollution of human contact. Thus they believe that the demons
are contaminated by men rather than men cleansed by the demons,
and that the gods themselves should be polluted unless their local
superiority preserved them. Who is so wretched a creature as to
expect purification by a way in which men are contaminating, demons
contaminated, and gods contaminable? Who would not rather choose
that way whereby we escape the contamination of the demons, and
are cleansed from pollution by the incontaminable God, so as to be
associated with the uncontaminated angels?