History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [205]
not any bodily thing, but that all things have their being from God, and from something immutable. He was right, also, in saying that perception is not the source of truth. Platonists are the best in logic and ethics, and nearest to Christianity. 'It is said that Plotinus, that lived but lately, understood Plato the best of any.' As for Aristotle, he was Plato's inferior, but far above the rest. Both, however, said that all gods are good, and to be worshipped.
As against the Stoics, who condemned all passion, St Augustine holds that the passions of Christians may be causes of virtue; anger, or pity, is not to be condemned per se, but we must inquire into its cause.
Platonists are right about God, wrong about gods. They are also wrong in not acknowledging the Incarnation.
There is a long discussion of angels and demons, which is connected with the Neoplatonists. Angels may be good or bad, but demons are always bad. To angels, knowledge of temporal things (though they have it) is vile. St Augustine holds with Plato that the sensible world is inferior to the eternal.
Book XI begins the account of the nature of the City of God. The City of God is the society of the elect. Knowledge of God is obtained only through Christ. There are things that can be discovered by reason (as in the philosophers), but for all further religious knowledge we must rely on the Scriptures. We ought not to seek to understand time and space before the world was made: there was no time before the Creation, and there is no place where the world is not.
Everything blessed is eternal, but not everything eternal is blessed—e.g. hell and Satan. God foreknew the sins of devils, but also their use in improving the universe as a whole, which is analogous to antithesis in rhetoric.
Origen errs in thinking that souls were given bodies as a punishment. If this were so, bad souls would have bad bodies; but devils, even the worst of them, have airy bodies, which are better than ours.
The reason the world was created in six days is that six is a perfect number (i.e. equal to the sum of its factors).
There are good and bad angels, but even the bad angels do not have an essence which is contrary to God. God's enemies are not so by nature, but by will. The vicious will has no efficient cause, but only a deficient one; it is not an effect, but a defect.
The world is less than six thousand years old. History is not cyclic, as some philosophers suppose: 'Christ died once for our sins.'9
If our first parents had not sinned, they would not have died, but, because they sinned, all their posterity die. Eating the apple brought not only natural death, but eternal death, i.e. damnation.
Porphyry is wrong in refusing bodies to saints in heaven. They will have better bodies than Adam's before the fall; their bodies will be spiritual, but not spirits, and will not have weight. Men will have male bodies, and women female bodies, and those who have died in infancy will rise again with adult bodies.
Adam's sin would have brought all mankind to eternal death (i.e. damnation), but that God's grace has freed many from it. Sin came from the soul, not from the flesh. Platonists and Manichæans both err in ascribing sin to the nature of the flesh, though Platonists are not so bad as Manichæans. The punishment of all mankind for Adam's sin was just; for, as a result of this sin, man, that might have been spiritual in body, became carnal in mind.10
This leads to a long and minute discussion of sexual lust, to which we are subject as part of our punishment for Adam's sin. This discussion is very important as revealing the psychology of asceticism; we must therefore go into it, although the Saint confesses that the theme is immodest. The theory advanced is as follows.
It must be admitted that sexual intercourse in marriage is not sinful, provided the intention is to beget offspring. Yet even in marriage a virtuous man will wish that he could manage without lust. Even in marriage, as the desire for privacy shows, people are ashamed of sexual intercourse, because 'this