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their beneficent character, therefore, they were mediators, and mediation was a very popular idea at the time. Their role, however, Augustine contends, in procuring eternal felicity for men was useless: by their very nature they were as subject to passions and miseries as were men but, unlike men, their miseries were eternal. It was absurd to believe that they could achieve eternal happiness formen when they could not win it for themselves. Christ, on the other hand, was both eternal and in felicity: he was the true mediator.
     
    The good angels, by contrast, do not seek that worship should be paid by men to themselves: they seek that it should be paid only to God.
     
    Porphyry restricted the service that demons could render to us to the elevation of our ‘spirital’ soul, that is the soul by which we apprehend the images of material things – not the intellectual soul – and even about that, Augustine suggests, he was either ambiguous or unsure:
     
Porphyry goes as far as to promise some sort of purification of the soul by means of theurgy, though to be sure he is reluctant to commit himself, and seems to blush with embarrassment in his argument. On the other hand he denies that this art offers to any one a way of return to God ( Bk X, 9 ).
     
    (Theurgy is the art of persuading divinities to do or not to do something according to one’s desire.)
     
    Porphyry in fact was seeking some universal way for the soul’s deliverance. In his
Philosophy from Oracles
he had examined the claims of Christ to be such a deliverer, such a universal way. He accepted the Hebrew-Christian god as the true god; he accepted that Christ was a good man; but he rejected the claims of the Christians. Augustine insisted that pride and his truck with demons prevented him from accepting Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion. Were it not for these, Porphyry and his followers would accept the truth of Christianity.
     
    Deliverance for the soul means not merely escape from this life: it means especially not returning to it again. Augustine agreed with Porphyry (as against Plato) in denying that in a cycle of births man’s soul would return to the body of an animal. It would return to a human body. But he disagreed with Porphyry and the Platonists on whether the soul returned at all. The soul could not be happy in the after-life if it was destined to return to life again. Christianity meant the substitution of the linear for the cyclical concept of human destiny.
     
    There is a sense in which the
City of God
can be said to centre on Porphyry and his
Philosophy from Oracles
. On the one hand this book of Porphyry’s represented a serious challenge to Christianity, as is evidenced by the anxious attention it received from so many Christian apologists: Eusebius (died 339) in his
Praeparatio Evangelica
, the Africans Amobius (
fl. c
. 300) and Lactantius (
fl. c
. 304–317), Theodoret (died
c
. 466), Claudianus Mamertus (died 474), Aeneas of Gaza (died
c
. 518), and Philoponus (died
c
. 565), as well as Augustine, in the City
of Cod
and elsewhere. Augustine compares the ‘oracles’ of the Scriptures to any others, including those of Porphyry, and avers that they are superior in every way: the ‘divine oracles’, expressed through the lips of the holy prophets and scattered by Augustine, as he says throughout the
City of God
, are more widely diffused, clear and frequent, summary, awesome, fearful but true; whereas the others are obscure and unknown, abstruse and rare. The comparison is made in a chapter ( Bk XIX, 23 ) where Porphyry’s
Philosophy from Oracles
is in question and is explicitly named.
     
    But Augustine also stresses how close Porphyry came to Christian truth – he believed in the existence of a spiritual Trinity, Providence and even something like grace. Only the demons and pride prevented him from accepting Christ, of whom the
Philosophy from Oracles
spoke highly, as God.
     
    To win Porphyry, or rather his followers in the