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| What Apuleius Attributes to the Demons, to Whom, Though He Does Not Deny Them Reason, He Does Not Ascribe Virtue.
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Chapter 3.—What Apuleius
Attributes to the Demons, to Whom, Though He Does Not Deny Them
Reason, He Does Not Ascribe Virtue.
What, then, is the difference
between good and evil demons? For the Platonist Apuleius, in a
treatise on this whole subject,335
while he says a great deal about
their aerial bodies, has not a word to say of the spiritual virtues
with which, if they were good, they must have been endowed. Not a
word has he said, then, of that which could give them happiness;
but proof of their misery he has given, acknowledging that their
mind, by which they rank as reasonable beings, is not only not
imbued and fortified with virtue so as to resist all unreasonable
passions, but that it is somehow agitated with tempestuous
emotions, and is thus on a level with the mind of foolish men.
His own words are: “It is this class of demons the poets refer
to, when, without serious error, they feign that the gods hate and
love individuals among men, prospering and ennobling some, and
opposing and distressing others. Therefore pity, indignation,
grief, joy, every human emotion is experienced by the demons, with
the same mental disturbance, and the same tide of feeling and
thought. These turmoils and tempests banish them far from the
tranquility of the celestial gods.” Can there be any doubt that
in these words it is not some inferior part of their spiritual
nature, but the very mind by which the demons hold their rank as
rational beings, which he says is tossed with passion like a stormy
sea? They cannot, then, be compared even to wise men, who with
undisturbed mind resist these perturbations to which they are
exposed in this life, and from which human infirmity is never
exempt, and who do not yield themselves to approve of or perpetrate
anything which might deflect them from the path of wisdom and law
of rectitude. They resemble in character, though not in bodily
appearance, wicked and foolish men. I might indeed say they are
worse, inasmuch as they have grown old in iniquity, and
incorrigible by punishment. Their mind, as Apuleius says, is a
sea tossed with tempest, having no rallying point of truth or
virtue in their soul from which they can resist their turbulent and
depraved emotions.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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