the Platonist Porphyry adopts some, and discards others._
These miracles, and many others of the same nature, which it were
tedious to mention, were wrought for the purpose of commending
the worship of the one true God, and prohibiting the worship of a
multitude of false gods. Moreover, they were wrought by simple faith
and godly confidence, not by the incantations and charms composed
under the influence of a criminal tampering with the unseen world, of
an art which they call either magic, or by the more abominable title
necromancy,[398] or the more honourable designation theurgy; for they
wish to discriminate between those whom the people call magicians,
who practise necromancy, and are addicted to illicit arts and
condemned, and those others who seem to them to be worthy of praise
for their practice of theurgy,--the truth, however, being that both
classes are the slaves of the deceitful rites of the demons whom they
invoke under the names of angels.
For even Porphyry promises some kind of purgation of the soul by the
help of theurgy, though he does so with some hesitation and shame,
and denies that this art can secure to any one a return to God; so
that you can detect his opinion vacillating between the profession
of philosophy and an art which he feels to be presumptuous and
sacrilegious. For at one time he warns us to avoid it as deceitful,
and prohibited by law, and dangerous to those who practise it; then
again, as if in deference to its advocates, he declares it useful for
cleansing one part of the soul, not, indeed, the intellectual part,
by which the truth of things intelligible, which have no sensible
images, is recognised, but the spiritual part, which takes cognizance
of the images of things material. This part, he says, is prepared and
fitted for intercourse with spirits and angels, and for the vision of
the gods, by the help of certain theurgic consecrations, or, as they
call them, mysteries. He acknowledges, however, that these theurgic
mysteries impart to the intellectual soul no such purity as fits it
to see its God, and recognise the things that truly exist. And from
this acknowledgment we may infer what kind of gods these are, and
what kind of vision of them is imparted by theurgic consecrations,
if by it one cannot see the things which truly exist. He says,
further, that the rational, or, as he prefers calling it, the
intellectual soul, can pass into the heavens without the spiritual
part being cleansed by theurgic art, and that this art cannot so
purify the spiritual part as to give it entrance to immortality
and eternity. And therefore, although he distinguishes angels from
demons, asserting that the habitation of the latter is in the air,
while the former dwell in the ether and empyrean, and although he
advises us to cultivate the friendship of some demon, who may be able
after our death to assist us, and elevate us at least a little above
the earth,--for he owns that it is by another way we must reach the
heavenly society of the angels,--he at the same time distinctly warns
us to avoid the society of demons, saying that the soul, expiating
its sin after death, execrates the worship of demons by whom it
was entangled. And of theurgy itself, though he recommends it as
reconciling angels and demons, he cannot deny that it treats with
powers which either themselves envy the soul its purity, or serve
the arts of those who do envy it. He complains of this through the
mouth of some Chaldæan or other: "A good man in Chaldæa complains,"
he says, "that his most strenuous efforts to cleanse his soul were
frustrated, because another man, who had influence in these matters,
and who envied him purity, had prayed to the powers, and bound them
by his conjuring not to listen to his request. Therefore," adds
Porphyry, "what the one man bound, the other could not loose." And
from this he concludes that theurgy is a craft which accomplishes
not only good but evil among gods and men; and that the gods also
have passions, and are perturbed and agitated by the emotions which
Apuleius attributed to demons and men, but from which he preserved
the gods by that sublimity of residence, which, in common with Plato,
he accorded to them.