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| How Apuleius Defines the Gods Who Dwell in Heaven, the Demons Who Occupy the Air, and Men Who Inhabit Earth.
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Chapter 8.—How Apuleius Defines
the Gods Who Dwell in Heaven, the Demons Who Occupy the Air, and
Men Who Inhabit Earth.
The definition which Apuleius gives
of demons, and in which he of course includes all demons, is that
they are in nature animals, in soul subject to passion, in mind
reasonable, in body aerial, in duration eternal. Now in these
five qualities he has named absolutely nothing which is proper to
good men and not also to bad. For when Apuleius had spoken of the
celestials first, and had then extended his description so as to
include an account of those who dwell far below on the earth, that,
after describing the two extremes of rational being, he might
proceed to speak of the intermediate demons, he says, “Men,
therefore, who are endowed with the faculty of reason and speech,
whose soul is immortal and their members mortal, who have weak and
anxious spirits, dull and corruptible bodies, dissimilar
characters, similar ignorance, who are obstinate in their audacity,
and persistent in their hope, whose labor is vain, and whose
fortune is ever on the wane, their race immortal, themselves
perishing, each generation replenished with creatures whose life is
swift and their wisdom slow, their death sudden and their life a
wail,—these are the men who dwell on the earth.”346
In
recounting so many qualities which belong to the large proportion
of men, did he forget that which is the property of the few when he
speaks of their wisdom being slow? If this had been omitted, this
his description of the human race, so carefully elaborated, would
have been defective. And when he commended the excellence of the
gods, he affirmed that they excelled in that very blessedness to
which he thinks men must attain by wisdom. And therefore, if he
had wished us to believe that some of the demons are good, he
should have inserted in his description something by which we might
see that they have, in common with the gods, some share of
blessedness, or, in common with men, some wisdom. But, as it is,
he has mentioned no good quality by which the good may be
distinguished from the bad. For although he refrained from giving
a full account of their wickedness, through fear of offending, not
themselves but their worshippers, for whom he was writing, yet he
sufficiently indicated to discerning readers what opinion he had of
them; for only in the one article of the eternity of their bodies
does he assimilate them to the gods, all of whom, he asserts, are
good and blessed, and absolutely free from what he himself calls
the stormy passions of the demons; and as to the soul, he quite
plainly affirms that they resemble men and not the gods, and that
this resemblance lies not in the possession of wisdom, which even
men can attain to, but in the perturbation of passions which sway
the foolish and wicked, but
is so ruled by the good and
wise that they prefer not to admit rather than to conquer it. For
if he had wished it to be understood that the demons resembled the
gods in the eternity not of their bodies but of their souls, he
would certainly have admitted men to share in this privilege,
because, as a Platonist, he of course must hold that the human soul
is eternal. Accordingly, when describing this race of living
beings, he said that their souls were immortal, their members
mortal. And, consequently, if men have not eternity in common
with the gods because they have mortal bodies, demons have eternity
in common with the gods because their bodies are
immortal.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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