themselves indeed created by God, but that afterwards they
created man's body._
It is obvious, that in attributing the creation of the other animals
to those inferior gods who were made by the Supreme, he meant it to be
understood that the immortal part was taken from God Himself, and that
these minor creators added the mortal part; that is to say, he meant
them to be considered the creators of our bodies, but not of our souls.
But since Porphyry maintains that if the soul is to be purified, all
entanglement with a body must be escaped from; and at the same time
agrees with Plato and the Platonists in thinking that those who have
not spent a temperate and honourable life return to mortal bodies as
their punishment (to bodies of brutes in Plato's opinion, to human
bodies in Porphyry's); it follows that those whom they would have us
worship as our parents and authors, that they may plausibly call them
gods, are, after all, but the forgers of our fetters and chains,--not
our creators, but our jailers and turnkeys, who lock us up in the
most bitter and melancholy house of correction. Let the Platonists,
then, either cease menacing us with our bodies as the punishment of
our souls, or preaching that we are to worship as gods those whose
work upon us they exhort us by all means in our power to avoid and
escape from. But, indeed, both opinions are quite false. It is false
that souls return again to this life to be punished; and it is false
that there is any other creator of anything in heaven or earth, than
He who made the heaven and the earth. For if we live in a body only
to expiate our sins, how says Plato in another place, that the world
could not have been the most beautiful and good, had it not been filled
with all kinds of creatures, mortal and immortal?[570] But if our
creation even as mortals be a divine benefit, how is it a punishment
to be restored to a body, that is, to a divine benefit? And if God, as
Plato continually maintains, embraced in His eternal intelligence the
ideas both of the universe and of all the animals, how, then, should
He not with His own hand make them all? Could He be unwilling to be
the constructor of works, the idea and plan of which called for His
ineffable and ineffably to be praised intelligence?