CHAP.10.--THAT THE MARTYRS WHO OBTAIN MANY MIRACLES IN ORDER THAT THETRUE GOD
MAY BE WORSHIPPED, ARE WORTHY OF MUCH GREATER HONOR THAN THE DEMONS, WHO DOSOME MARVELS THAT THEY THEMSELVES MAY BE SUPPOSED TO BE GOD.
Here perhaps our adversaries will say that their gods also have done some wonderful things, if now they begin to compare their gods to our dead men.Or will they also say that they have gods taken from among dead men, such as Hercules, Romulus, and many others whom they fancy to have been received into the number of the gods? But our martyrs are not our gods; for we know that the martyrs and we have both but one God, and that the same.
Nor yet are the miracles which they maintain to have been done by means of their temples at all comparable to those which are done by the tombs of our martyrs.If they seem similar, their gods have been defeated by our martyrs as Pharaoh's magi were by Moses.In reality, the demons wrought these marvels with the same impure pride with which they aspired to be the gods of the nations; but the martyrs do these wonders, or rather God does them while they pray and assist, in order that an impulse may be given to the faith by which we believe that they are not our gods, but have, together with ourselves, one God.
In fine, they built temples to these gods of theirs, and set up altars, and ordained priests, and appointed sacrifices; but to our martyrs we build, not temples as if they were gods, but monuments as to dead men whose spirits live with God.Neither do we erect altars at these monuments that we may sacrifice to the martyrs, but to the one God of the martyrs and of ourselves;and in this sacrifice they are named in their own place and rank as men of God who conquered the world by confessing Him, but they are not invoked by the sacrificing priest.For it is to God, not to them, he sacrifices, though he sacrifices at their monument;for he is God's priest, not theirs.The sacrifice itself, too, is the body of Christ, which is not offered to them, because they themselves are this body.Which then can more readily be believed to work miracles? They who wish themselves to be reckoned gods by those on whom they work miracles, or those whose sole object in working any miracle is to induce faith in God, and in Christ also as God? They who wished to turn even their crimes into sacred rites, or those who are unwilling that even their own praises be consecrated, and seek that everything for which they are justly praised be ascribed to the glory of Him in whom they are praised? For in the Lord their souls are praised.Let us therefore believe those who both speak the truth and work wonders.For by speaking the truth they suffered, and so won the power of working wonders.And the leading truth they professed is that Christ rose from the dead, and first showed in His own flesh the immortality of the resurrection which He promised should be ours, either in the beginning of the world to come, or in the end of this world.
CHAP.11.--AGAINST THE PLATONISTS, WHO ARGUE FROM THE PHYSICAL WEIGHTOF THE
ELEMENTS THAT AN EARTHLY BODY CANNOT INHABIT HEAVEN.
But against this great gift of God, these reasoners, "whose thoughts the Lord knows that they are vain"(1) bring arguments from the weights of the elements; for they have been taught by their master Plato that the two greatest elements of the world, and the furthest removed from one another, are coupled and united by the two intermediate, air and water.And consequently they say, since the earth is the first of the elements, beginning from the base of the series, the second the water above the earth, the third the air above the water, the fourth the heaven above the air, it follows that a body of earth cannot live in the heaven; for each element is poised by its own weight so as to preserve its own place and rank.Behold with what arguments human infirmity, possessed with vanity, contradicts the omnipotence of God! What, then, do so many earthly bodies do in the air, since the air is the third element from the earth? Unless perhaps He who has granted to the earthly bodies of birds that they be carried through the air by the lightness of feathers and wings, has not been able to confer upon the bodies of men made immortal the power to abide in the highest heaven.The earthly animals, too, which cannot fly, among which are men, ought on these terms to live under the earth, as fishes, which are the animals of the water, live under the water.Why, then, can an animal of earth not live in the second element, that is, in water, while it can in the third? Why, though it belongs to the earth, is it forthwith suffocated if it is forced to live in the second element next above earth, while it lives in the third, and cannot live out of it? Is there a mistake here in the order of the elements, or is not the mistake rather in their reasonings, and not in the nature of things? I will not repeat what I said in the thirteenth book,(2) that many earthly bodies, though heavy like lead, receive from the workman's hand a form which enables them to swim in water; and yet it is denied that the omnipotent Worker can confer on the human body a property which shall enable it to pass into heaven and dwell there.
But against what I have formerly said they can find nothing to say, even though they introduce and make the most of this order of the elements in which they confide.For if the order be that the earth is first, the water second, the air third, the heaven fourth, then the soul is above all.For Aristotle said that the soul was a fifth body, while Plato denied that it was a body at all.If it were a fifth body, then certainly it would be above the rest; and if it is not a body at all, so much the more does it rise above all.
What, then, does it do in an earthly body? What does this soul, which is finer than all else, do in such a mass of matter as this?