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 honorable 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?(3) But if our creation even as mortals be a divine benefit, I 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?
CHAP.27.--THAT THE WHOLE PLENITUDE OF THE HUMAN RACE WAS EMBRACED INTHE FIRST
MAN, AND THAT GOD THERE SAW THE PORTION OF IT WHICH WAS TO BE HONOREDAND
REWARDED, AND THAT WHICH WAS TO BE CONDEMNED AND PUNISHED.
With good cause, therefore, does the true religion recognize and proclaim that the same God who created the universal cosmos, created also all the animals, souls as well as bodies.Among the terrestrial animals man was made by Him in His own image, and, for the reason I have given, was made one individual, though he was not left solitary.For there is nothing so social by nature, so unsocial by its corruption, as this race.And human nature has nothing more appropriate, either for the prevention of discord, or for the healing of it, where it exists, than the remembrance of that first parent of us all, whom God was pleased to create alone, that all men might be derived from one, and that they might thus be admonished to preserve unity among their whole multitude.But from the fact that the woman was made for him from his side, it was plainly meant that we should learn how dear the bond between man and wife should be.These works of God do certainly seem extraordinary, because they are the first works.They who do not believe them, ought not to believe any prodigies; for these would not be called prodigies did they not happen out of the ordinary course of nature.But, is it possible that anything should happen in vain, however hidden be its cause, in so grand a government of divine providence? One of the sacred Psalmists says, "Come, behold the works of the Lord, what prodigies He hath wrought in the earth."(1) Why God made woman out of man's side, and what this first prodigy prefigured, I shall, with God's help, tell in another place.But at present, since this book must be concluded, let us merely say that in this first man, who was created in the beginning, there was laid the foundation, not in.deed evidently, but in God's foreknowledge, of these two cities or societies, so far as regards the human race.For from that man all men were to be derived--some of them to be associated with the good angels in their reward, others with the wicked in punishment; all being ordered by the secret yet just judgment of God.For since it is written, "All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth,"(2)neither can His grace be unjust, nor His justice cruel.