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| Magic and Sorcery Only Apparent in Their Effects. God Alone Can Raise the Dead.
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Chapter LVII.—Magic and
Sorcery Only Apparent in Their Effects. God Alone Can Raise the
Dead.
It is either a very fine thing to be detained in
these infernal regions with the Aori, or souls which were
prematurely hurried away; or else a very bad thing indeed to be there
associated with the Biaeothanati, who suffered violent deaths. I
may be permitted to use the actual words and terms with which magic
rings again, that inventor of all these odd opinions—with its
Ostanes, and Typhon, and Dardanus, and Damigeron, and Nectabis, and
Berenice. There is a well-known popular bit of writing,1817
which undertakes to summon up from the abode
of Hades the souls which have actually slept out their full age, and
had passed away by an honourable death, and had even been buried with
full rites and proper ceremony. What after this shall we say about
magic? Say, to be sure, what almost everybody says of it—that it
is an imposture. But it is not we Christians only whose notice
this system of imposture does not escape. We, it is true, have
discovered these spirits of evil, not, to be sure, by a complicity with
them, but by a certain knowledge which is hostile to them; nor is it by
any procedure which is attractive to them, but by a power which
subjugates them that we handle (their wretched system)—that
manifold pest of the mind of man, that artificer of all error, that
destroyer of our salvation and our soul at one swoop.1818
| 1818 Oehler takes
these descriptive clauses as meant of Satan, instead of being
synonymes of magic, as the context seems to require. | In this way, even by magic, which is indeed
only a second idolatry, wherein they pretend that after death they
become demons, just as they were supposed in the first and literal
idolatry to become gods (and why not? since the gods are but dead
things), the before-mentioned Aori Biaeothanati are actually
invoked,—and not unfairly,1819
if one grounds
his faith on this principle, that it is clearly credible for those
souls to be beyond all others addicted to violence and wrong, which
with violence and wrong have been hurried away by a cruel and premature
death and which would have a keen appetite for reprisals. Under
cover, however, of these souls, demons operate, especially such as used
to dwell in them when they were in life, and who had driven them, in
fact, to the fate which had at last carried them off. For, as we
have already suggested,1820
| 1820 Above, in ch. xxxix.
p. 219. | there is hardly a
human being who is unattended by a demon; and it is well known to many,
that premature and violent deaths, which men ascribe to accidents, are
in fact brought about by demons. This imposture of the evil
spirit lying concealed in the persons of the dead, we are able, if I
mistake not, to prove by actual facts, when in cases of exorcism (the
evil spirit) affirms himself sometimes to be one of the
relatives1821
| 1821 Aliquem ex
parentibus. | of the person
possessed by him, sometimes a gladiator or a
bestiarius,1822
and sometimes even
a god; always making it one of his chief cares to extinguish the very
truth which we are proclaiming, that men may not readily believe that
all souls remove to Hades, and that they may overthrow faith in the
resurrection and the judgment. And yet for all that, the demon, after
trying to circumvent the bystanders, is vanquished by the pressure of
divine grace, and sorely against his will confesses all the truth. So
also in that other kind of magic, which is supposed to bring up from
Hades the souls now resting there, and to exhibit them to public view,
there is no other expedient of imposture ever resorted to which
operates more powerfully. Of course, why a phantom becomes visible, is
because a body is also attached to it; and it is no difficult matter to
delude the external vision of a man whose mental eye it is so easy to
blind. The serpents which emerged from the magicians’ rods,
certainly appeared to Pharaoh and to the Egyptians as bodily
substances. It is true that the verity of Moses swallowed up
their lying deceit.1823
Many attempts were
also wrought against the apostles by the sorcerers Simon and
Elymas,1824
but the blindness
which struck (them) was no enchanter’s trick. What novelty is
there in the effort of an unclean spirit to counterfeit the
truth? At this very time, even, the heretical dupes of this same
Simon (Magus) are so much elated by the extravagant pretensions of
their art, that they undertake to bring up from Hades the souls of the
prophets themselves. And I suppose that they can do so under cover of a
lying wonder. For, indeed, it was no less than this that was anciently
permitted to the Pythonic (or ventriloquistic) spirit1825
| 1825 See above in ch.
xxviii. p. 209, supra. | —even to represent the soul of Samuel,
when Saul consulted the dead, after (losing the living) God.1826
God forbid, however, that we should suppose
that the soul of any saint, much less of a prophet, can be dragged out
of (its resting-place in Hades) by a demon. We know that “Satan
himself is transformed into an angel of light”1827
—much more into a man of
light—and that at last he will “show himself to be even
God,”1828
and will exhibit
“great signs and wonders, insomuch that, if it were possible, he
shall deceive the very elect.”1829
He
hardly1830
hesitated on the
before-mentioned occasion to affirm himself to be a prophet of God, and
especially to Saul, in whom he was then actually dwelling. You must not
imagine that he who produced the phantom was one, and he who consulted
it was another; but that it was one and the same spirit, both in the
sorceress and in the apostate (king), which easily pretended an
apparition of that which it had already prepared them to believe as
real—(even the spirit) through whose evil influence Saul’s
heart was fixed where his treasure was, and where certainly God was
not. Therefore it came about, that he saw him through whose aid he
believed that he was going to see, because he believed him through
whose help he saw. But we are met with the objection, that in visions
of the night dead persons are not unfrequently seen, and that for a set
purpose.1831
For instance, the
Nasamones consult private oracles by frequent and lengthened visits to
the sepulchres of their relatives, as one may find in Heraclides, or
Nymphodorus, or Herodotus;1832
and the Celts, for
the same purpose, stay away all night at the tombs of their brave
chieftains, as Nicander affirms. Well, we admit apparitions of
dead persons in dreams to be not more really true than those of living
persons; but we apply the same estimate to all alike—to the dead
and to the living, and indeed to all the phenomena which are seen. Now
things are not true because they appear to be so, but because they are
fully proved to be so. The truth of dreams is declared from the
realization, not the aspect. Moreover, the fact that Hades is not in
any case opened for (the escape of) any soul, has been firmly
established by the Lord in the person of Abraham, in His representation
of the poor man at rest and the rich man in torment.1833
No one, (he said,) could possibly be
despatched from those abodes to report to us how matters went in the
nether regions,—a purpose which, (if any could be,) might have
been allowable on such an occasion, to persuade a belief in Moses and
the prophets. The power of God has, no doubt, sometimes recalled
men’s souls to their bodies, as a proof of His own transcendent
rights; but there must never be, because of this fact, any agreement
supposed to be possible between the divine faith and the arrogant
pretensions of sorcerers, and the imposture of dreams, and the licence
of poets. But yet in all cases of a true resurrection, when the power
of God recalls souls to their bodies, either by the agency of prophets,
or of Christ, or of apostles, a complete presumption is afforded us, by
the solid, palpable, and ascertained reality (of the revived body),
that its true form must be such as to compel one’s belief of the
fraudulence of every incorporeal apparition of dead
persons.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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