As to the demons , these false and deceitful mediators, who, though their uncleanness of spirit frequently reveals their misery and malignity, yet, by virtue of the levity of their aerial bodies and the nature of the places they inhabit, do contrive to turn us aside and hinder our spiritual progress; they do not help us towards God , but rather prevent us from reaching Him. Since even in the bodily way, which is erroneous and misleading, and in which righteousness does not walk — for we must rise to God not by bodily ascent, but by incorporeal or spiritual conformity to Him — in this bodily way, I say, which the friends of the demons arrange according to the weight of the various elements, the aerial demons being set between the ethereal gods and earthy men, they imagine the gods to have this privilege, that by this local interval they are preserved from the pollution of human contact. Thus they believe that the demons are contaminated by men rather than men cleansed by the demons , and that the gods themselves should be polluted unless their local superiority preserved them. Who is so wretched a creature as to expect purification by a way in which men are contaminating, demons contaminated, and gods contaminable? Who would not rather choose that way whereby we escape the contamination of the demons , and are cleansed from pollution by the incontaminable God , so as to be associated with the uncontaminated angels ? Chapter 19.— That Even Among Their Own Worshippers the Name Demon Has Never a Good Signification. But as some of these demonolators, as I may call them, and among them Labeo, allege that those whom they call demons are by others called angels , I must, if I would not seem to dispute merely about words, say something about the good angels . The Platonists do not deny their existence , but prefer to call them good demons . But we, following Scripture, according to which we are Christians , have learned that some of the angels are good, some bad, but never have we read in Scripture of good demons ; but wherever this or any cognate term occurs, it is applied only to wicked spirits. And this usage has become so universal, that, even among those who are called pagans , and who maintain that demons as well as gods should be worshipped, there is scarcely a man , no matter how well read and learned, who would dare to say by way of praise to his slave, You have a demon , or who could doubt that the man to whom he said this would consider it a curse? Why, then, are we to subject ourselves to the necessity of explaining away what we have said when we have given offense by using the word demon , with which every one, or almost every one, connects a bad meaning, while we can so easily evade this necessity by using the word angel ?
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