Exhortation 1 part 4/7

But the keepers and tenders of apes have marvelled that nothing of these waxen or clay likenesses and dolls deceives them.

And shall you, then, prove yourselves even worse than apes, fixing your attention on little images of stone and wood and gold and ivory, and on paintings?

Of so many ruinous playthings have your craftsmen—the stone-cutters and the statue-makers, the painters again, and the carpenters and the poets—brought in for you a great and motley crowd of them: in the fields Satyrs and Pans, throughout the woods the mountain Nymphs and the Hamadryads, and indeed, around the waters and the rivers and the springs, the Naiads, and around the sea the Nereids.

They boast, having registered these as their own household servants, having by their incantations made them their constrained slaves.

And so weddings and child-bearings and the lyings-in of gods are recounted, adulteries are sung, feastings are made the subject of comedy, and the laughter raised over the cups—all this incites me to cry aloud, even though I would fain keep silence.

You have made heaven a stage, and the divine has become for you a drama, and the holy you have turned into comedy under the masks of daemons, satirizing true godliness with superstition.

“But he, striking the lyre, struck up a beautiful song.” Sing to us, Homer, that fair song, “of the love of Ares and fair-crowned Aphrodite, how first they lay together in the house of Hephaestus in secret.”

“Much did he give, and he dishonoured the marriage-bed and the couch of lord Hephaestus.”

Cease, Homer, from your song.

It is not beautiful; it teaches adultery.

But we have refused even to let our ears commit fornication.

For we, we ourselves, are they who bear about the image of God in this living and moving statue, namely man—an indwelling image, a counsellor, a fellow-converser, a companion at hearth, a sharer of feeling, a sharer in suffering above measure.

We have become a votive offering to God for Christ’s sake.

We are the chosen race, the royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession—who once were not a people, but now are the people of God.

They who follow John are not of those below, but have learned the whole from him who came from above; they have understood the dispensation of God, and have practiced to walk in newness of life.

But the multitude do not think thus.

Having cast away shame and fear, they inscribe in their homes the lustful passions of the demons.

Fixing their gaze on certain painted tablets that hang high above, they have adorned their bedchambers with lewdness, counting licentiousness for piety.

Reclining on their couches, even in the very midst of their embraces, they look up at that naked Aphrodite, bound fast in her amorous union, and at the bird hovering over Leda—the lover of femininity. Approving the painting, they stamp it on their signet-rings, using as a seal a device that matches the lewdness of Zeus.

These are the archetypes of your wantonness; these the theologies of your insolence; these the teachings of the gods who join you in your fornication.

For what each man wishes, that he also believes, as the Athenian orator says.

And what again are these other images of yours—little Pans, naked maidens, drunken satyrs, and erect members, laid bare in the paintings, convicted of incontinence?

And now, openly gazing in public upon the depicted postures of every kind of licentiousness, you are not ashamed; rather, you keep them displayed all the more, as though forsooth they were the images of your gods, having consecrated in your homes these monuments of shamelessness—inscribing on equal terms the postures of Philaenis as you would the labors of Heracles.

Of these things we proclaim oblivion—not only of their use, but also of the very sight and hearing of them.

Your ears have played the harlot, your eyes have committed fornication, and—stranger still—your very glances have committed adultery before the embrace itself.

O you who have done violence to man, and who, having struck off the divine impress from the creature that bears it, disbelieve everything that you may give yourselves over to passion!

You believe the idols, emulating their incontinence, but you disbelieve God, unable to bear self-control.

You have hated the better and honored the worse, becoming spectators of virtue but contenders for vice.

Blessed, then, alone, so to speak, are all those, of one accord, according to the Sibyl, who shall renounce all temples and altars when they behold them—senseless shrines of dumb stones, and stone images and statues made by hands, defiled with living blood and with the sacrifices of beasts, and with the slaughter of four-footed creatures, two-footed creatures, birds, and wild beasts.

For indeed it is openly forbidden us to practice a deceitful art.

"You shall not make," says the prophet, "the likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath." Are we then to suppose that Praxiteles' Demeter and Kore and the mystic Iacchus are gods, or the works of Lysippus, or the hands of Apelles, which have clothed matter with the semblance of divine glory? But while you take pains that the statue may be wrought as beautiful as possible, you take no thought lest you yourselves, through insensibility, be made like the statues.

Quite plainly and concisely, indeed, the prophetic word reproves the custom, that "all the gods of the nations are demons' idols;"

"but God made the heavens and the things that are in heaven."

Certain ones, then, going astray hence—I know not how—worship not God but a divine craftsmanship: the sun and moon and the rest of the choir of stars, supposing these unreasonably to be gods, though they are but the instruments of time.

"For by his word were they established, and by the spirit of his mouth all their host." Now human art fashions houses and ships and cities and paintings; but how could I tell how many things God makes? Behold the whole world—it is his work.

Heaven and sun and angels and men are the works of his fingers. How great, then, is the power of God!

His will alone is the making of the world;

for God alone made it, since he alone is truly God.

By the mere act of willing he creates, and upon his merely choosing to will, there follows the coming-into-being.

Here the chorus of philosophers turns aside, who confess on the one hand that man was made all-beautiful for the contemplation of heaven, but on the other worship the things that appear in heaven and are apprehended by sight.

For even if the works in heaven are not human, yet at any rate they were created for men.

Let none of you worship the sun, but let him long for the Maker of the sun; let no one deify the world, but let him seek after the Creator of the world.

It seems, then, that the only refuge left for him who is to come to the gates of salvation is divine wisdom;

for hence, as from some inviolable sanctuary, man, hastening to salvation, becomes no longer a captive subject to any of the demons.

But let us, if you please, run through also the opinions of the philosophers, all the boasts they make concerning the gods, that we may discover whether philosophy herself, for vainglory's sake, makes an idol of matter; or whether, while deifying certain demons in passing, we may be able to show her dreaming of the truth.

Now they left the elements as first principles, extolling them—Thales of Miletus, water; and Anaximenes, also a Milesian, the air, whom afterward Diogenes of Apollonia followed.

Parmenides the Eleatic introduced fire and earth as gods; but of the two, only one—fire—was supposed to be god by Hippasus of Metapontum and Heraclitus of Ephesus.

Empedocles of Acragas, falling into multiplicity, reckons up, besides these four elements, Strife and Love.

Atheists, then, are these too, who in a kind of unwise wisdom worshipped matter; and though they did not honor stones or wood, yet they deified earth, the mother of these; and while they did not fashion a Poseidon, they paid homage to water itself.

For what else is Poseidon than a kind of liquid substance, named from drinking (posis)? Just as, no doubt, the warlike Ares is so called from rising up (arsis) and destruction (anairesis).

Wherefore also many seem to me, fixing only a sword, to sacrifice to it as to Ares;

and this is a Scythian practice, as Eudoxus says in the second book of his Circuit of the Earth.

Of the Scythians, the Sauromatians, as Hicesius says in his book On Mysteries, worship a scimitar.

For this fire others named Hephaestus.

The Magi of the Persians have honored fire, and so do many of the inhabitants of Asia, and besides them the Macedonians, as Diogenes says in the first book of his Persica.

Why should I enumerate to you the Sauromatians, whom Nymphodorus in his Barbarian Customs records as worshipping fire, or the Persians and the Medes and the Magi? These, Dinon says, sacrifice in the open air, accounting fire and water alone the images of the gods.

Nor have I concealed even their ignorance.

For even if they think they are by all means fleeing from error, yet they slip into another deception;

they have not supposed the images of the gods to be wood and stones, as the Greeks do, nor ibises and ichneumons, as the Egyptians do, but fire and water, as the philosophers do.

After many cycles of years, however, Berossus in the third book of his Chaldaica shows that they later came to worship images in human form—this having been introduced by Artaxerxes, son of Darius son of Ochus, who first set up the statue of Aphrodite Anaitis and showed the Persians at Babylon and Susa and Ecbatana, and the Bactrians and the people of Damascus and Sardis, that they should worship it.

Let the philosophers, then, confess that their teachers were Persians or Sauromatians or Magi, from whom they learned the godlessness of those first principles they hold sacred, while ignorant of the Ruler of all, the Maker, and the Creator of those very principles—the God who has no beginning—and paying homage instead to those "poor and weak," as the Apostle says, the elements made for the service of men.

But of the other philosophers, all who, passing beyond the elements, busied themselves with something loftier and more recondite: some of them hymned the Infinite, like Anaximander (he was a Milesian) and Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and Archelaus the Athenian.

These two, indeed, both set Mind over the Infinite; but Leucippus the Milesian and Metrodorus of Chios left, as it seems, two principles also—the full and the void;

and Democritus of Abdera, taking up these two, added to them the images (eidola).

Alcmaeon of Croton, indeed, thought the stars to be gods, being animate.

I will not be silent about the shamelessness of these men:

Xenocrates (he was a Chalcedonian) hints that the seven planets are gods, and the world, composed of all the fixed stars, is the eighth.

Nor indeed will I pass over those of the Stoa, who say that the divine pervades all matter, even the basest, and who utterly disgrace philosophy.

Having come to this point, I think it no hard thing to make mention also of those from the Peripatos;

and the father of that school, not having understood the Father of all things, supposes that what is called the Most High is the Soul of the universe;

that is, supposing the soul of the world to be God, he impales himself on his own contradiction.

For he who confines Providence to the moon itself, and then accounts the world to be God, overturns himself, dogmatizing about a god that has no share in God.

And that Eresian, Theophrastus, the disciple of Aristotle, in one place suspects God to be heaven, in another, spirit.

Of Epicurus alone I will even willingly be forgetful, who thinks that nothing is of concern to God—being impious through and through.

And what of Heraclides of Pontus? Is there any point at which he too is not dragged down to the images of Democritus?

And a great throng of such men streams in upon me, bringing in, as it were, a strange and absurd shadow-painting of foreign demons, telling tales with the prattle of old wives;

far indeed is it from being right to permit men to hear such words, with which we do not even accustom our own children—as the saying goes—to be soothed when they cry by telling them tales, fearing to nurse up in them, along with such, the godlessness proclaimed by these men reputedly wise, who know the truth no better than infants.

Why, O custom, do you show those who have trusted in you to be subjected to flux and motion and disorderly whirlings? Why do you fill my life with idols, fashioning into gods winds, or air, or fire, or earth, or stones, or wood, or iron, this world—and making gods even of the planets, for those men who are truly led astray, through this much-babbled astrology, not astronomy, prating loftily and chattering idly? I long for the Lord of the spirits, the Lord of fire, the Maker of the world, the Light-bringer of the sun.

I seek after God, not the works of God.

Whom shall I take from you as a fellow-worker in the search? For we have not despaired of you altogether.

Where, then, must one track down God, O Plato? "To find the Father and Maker of this universe is a task, and having found him, to declare him to all is impossible." Why so, in his own name? "Because he is in no way utterable." Well done, O Plato—you have touched upon the truth;

join with me in the search concerning the Good;

for into all men without exception, but most of all into those who spend their time in discourse, a certain divine effluence has been instilled.

Wherefore even against their will they confess that there is one God, imperishable and unbegotten, who is somewhere above, around the back of heaven, in his own proper watch-tower, truly and ever existing.

But what kind of God must one conceive, tell me? "Him who sees all things and is himself unseen," as Euripides says.

Menander, then, seems to me to have gone astray, where he says: "O Sun, for you one must worship first of the gods, through whom it is possible to behold the other gods;"

for the sun would never reveal the true God; but the sound Reason (Logos), which is the sun of the soul, through which alone, when it has risen within in the depth of the mind, the eye of the soul is illumined.

Whence not unfittingly Democritus says that a few of men of reason, lifting up their hands to this which we Greeks now call air, declared that "all is Zeus, and that he knows all and gives and takes away, and that he is king of all things."

In this way too Plato, in his thought, hints at God: "About the King of all are all things, and that is the cause of all good things." Who, then, is the King of all? God, the measure of the truth of the things that are.

As, then, the things measured are apprehended by the measure, so likewise by the act of conceiving God is the truth measured and apprehended.

And the truly holy Moses says: "There shall not be in your bag two weights, a great and a small; nor shall there be in your house two measures, a great and a small; but a true and just weight shall be yours"—reckoning God to be the weight and measure and number of all things;

for the unjust and unequal idols are hidden at home in the bag and, so to speak, in the filthy soul;

but the only just measure, the only truly existing God, ever equal and the same and after the same manner, both measures all things and weighs them, holding fast and sustaining the nature of all things by justice as by an even balance, without inclining to either side.

God indeed, as the ancient saying goes, holding the beginning and the end and the middle of all things that are, accomplishes a straight course, going round according to nature;

and ever upon him follows Justice, the avenger of those who fall short of the divine law.

Whence, O Plato, do you hint at the truth? Whence does the abundant supply of your words prophesy the worship of God? "Wiser than these," he says, "are the races of the barbarians."

I know your teachers, even though you would conceal them;

for they lift up holy arms to heaven, rising at dawn from their beds, ever purifying their flesh with water, and honor only the immortal one who reigns forever.

And to me, O Philosophy, take pains to present not only this one Plato, but many others also, proclaiming the one truly only God to be God, according to his inspiration, if anywhere they have laid hold of the truth.

For Antisthenes conceived this—not as a Cynic doctrine, but as a disciple of Socrates—that God is like nothing;

wherefore no one can learn him thoroughly from an image.

Xenophon the Athenian, too, would expressly have written something himself, bearing witness about the truth as Socrates did, had he not feared the poison of Socrates;

yet nonetheless he hints at it.

"He, at any rate," he says, "who shakes all things and brings them to rest—how great and mighty he is, is manifest;

but what he is like in form, is unseen."

Nor indeed does the sun, which seems all-radiant, even allow itself to look upon itself; but if anyone gazes at it shamelessly, it takes away his sight. Whence, then, does the son of Gryllus draw his wisdom, if not plainly from the prophetess of the Hebrews, who prophesies somewhat thus: "For what flesh is able with eyes to behold the heavenly and true immortal God, who dwells in the vault of heaven? Nay, men, being mortal born, are not able even to stand against the rays of the sun."

Cleanthes of Pedasus, the philosopher of the Stoa, sets forth not a poetic theogony but a true theology.

He did not conceal what he thought concerning God:

"You ask me what the Good is like? Hear, then:

ordered, just, holy, pious, master of itself, useful, beautiful, fitting, austere, self-dependent, ever profitable, fearless, griefless, advantageous, painless, helpful, well-pleasing, secure, friendly, honored, of good repute, consistent, free from conceit, careful, gentle, vehement, enduring, blameless, ever-abiding."

"Slavish is everyone who looks to glory, as if from her he would obtain some good."

Here, I think, he plainly teaches what God is like, and how common opinion and custom enslave those who follow them, but not those who seek after God.

Nor should we conceal those about Pythagoras, who say: "God is one; and he is not, as some suppose, outside the world-order, but within it, wholly in the whole circle, overseer of all generation, a blending of all things, ever existing, and the worker of his own powers and works, the luminary of all things in heaven and the Father of all, the mind and animating soul of the whole circle, the motion of all things." These things, written by them under the inspiration of God, and selected by us, suffice for the knowledge of God for anyone able to discern the truth even a little.

But let poetry also come to us (for philosophy alone does not suffice)—even that poetry which is wholly occupied with falsehood—now at length, however late, to bear witness to the truth, or rather to confess to God its mythical deviation;

let whatever poet who wishes come forward first.

Aratus, then, conceives that the power of God pervades all things: "that all things may grow firmly fixed; wherefore men ever propitiate him first and last;"

"Hail, Father, great wonder, great boon to men."

In this way, too, the Ascraean Hesiod hints at God:

"For he himself is king and lord of all;

among the immortals no other has contended with him for power."

And now even on the stage they lay bare the truth;

"He who, looking up to the aether and to heaven yonder, hold this to be God," says Euripides;

and Sophocles, son of Sophillus: "In very truth there is one, one God, who made heaven and the wide earth and the gray swell of the sea and the might of the winds;

but many of us mortals, gone astray in heart, have set up, as a solace from ills, images of the gods—of stones, or of bronze, or wrought of gold, or of ivory—

and rendering to these sacrifices and empty festal assemblies, we thus suppose ourselves to be pious."

This poet, indeed, has now even, at no small risk, brought the truth before the spectators on the stage.

But the Thracian hierophant and poet at once, Orpheus the son of Oeagrus, after his celebration of the mysteries and his theology of the idols, introduces a recantation of the truth—singing at length, though late at last, the truly sacred word:

"I will speak to those to whom it is lawful;

but you, the profane, all alike, set the doors upon yourselves;

but you, hear, O child of the light-bearing Moon, Musaeus; for I will declare truths—let not the things that before appeared in your breast deprive you of the beloved age.

Looking to the divine Word, cleave to it, guiding the intelligent vessel of your heart;

and tread well the path, and look only to the immortal King of the world."

Then, going on a little further, he expressly adds:

"He is one, self-begotten; from this one all things have been wrought;

and in them he himself moves about; nor does any one of mortals behold him, but he himself beholds all."

Thus, then, Orpheus, having gone astray, at length in time understood.

"But you, do not delay nor tarry, O mortal of intricate counsels; but turning back from your wandering, propitiate God."

For even if the Greeks, having received certain sparks of the divine Word, uttered some few things of the truth, they bear witness to its power as not hidden, but convict themselves as weak, not having attained to the end.

For I think it has now become plain to everyone that those who do or even utter anything apart from the Word of truth are like men who try to walk without a foothold.

And the very refutations of your gods—which the poets, compelled by the truth, make a comedy of—shame you toward salvation.

Menander the comic poet, then, in the drama The Charioteer [The Changeling], says: "No god pleases me who walks about outside with an old woman, nor one who slips into houses upon the little board—a begging priest of Cybele;"

for such are the begging priests of the Mother of the gods.

Whence Antisthenes fittingly said to them as they begged:

"I do not feed the Mother of the gods, whom the gods themselves feed."

And again the same comic poet, in the drama The Priestess, being angry at the custom, tries to refute the godless conceit of error, exclaiming sensibly: "For if a man drags the god where he wishes by the cymbals, then he who does this is greater than the god;

but these are instruments of audacity and violence, devised by men."

And not Menander alone, but also Homer and Euripides and many other poets refute your gods and do not fear to revile them, even to whatever extent.

For instance, they call Athena a dog-fly and Hephaestus lame in both feet, and to Aphrodite Helen says: "May you no more return with your own feet to Olympus."

And concerning Dionysus, Homer writes openly: "who once chased the nurses of raging Dionysus down the sacred mount of Nysa;

and they all together cast their thyrsus-wands upon the ground, smitten by murderous Lycurgus."

Worthy indeed in truth of the Socratic school of discourse is Euripides, who, having looked to the truth and disregarded the spectators, at one time refutes Apollo, who "dwells in the central seat, dealing out to mortals the clearest oracle:" "obeying him, I slew her who bore me; account him impious, and slay him;

he sinned, not I, being more ignorant than the noble and the just;" and at another time, bringing in Heracles mad, and elsewhere drunken and insatiable;

for how not? Who, while feasting on flesh, ate green figs besides, bellowing unmusically, so that even a barbarian might learn of it.

And now in the drama Ion, with bare head he wheels the gods out before the theatre.

It is time, therefore, now that the other matters have been accomplished by us in due order, to come to the prophetic scriptures;

for the oracles also, most clearly proffering to us the starting-points toward the worship of God, lay the foundation of the truth;

and the divine scriptures and sober institutions are concise roads of salvation;

being bare of cosmetic and of outward fine speech and chatter and flattery, they raise up the man who is being choked by vice, supporting him against the slippery fall of life, with one and the same voice healing many things—turning us away from hurtful deception, and openly exhorting us to manifest salvation.

Forthwith, then, let the prophetess Sibyl first sing for us the song of salvation:

"Behold, this one is in all things plain; he is unerring;

come, and pursue not darkness and gloom forever."

"Behold, the sweetly-beaming light of the sun shines surpassingly."

"Know it, laying up wisdom in your breasts."

"One God there is, who sends rains, winds, and earthquakes, lightnings, famines, plagues, grievous sorrows, snows, and ice;"

"why should I recount them one by one? He guides heaven, he rules earth, he himself exists."

Very divinely she likens error to darkness, but the knowledge of God to the sun and to light; and setting both side by side in comparison, she teaches the choice;

for falsehood is not dispelled by the mere setting of truth beside it, but, forced out by the use of the truth, is put to flight.

And Jeremiah the all-wise prophet—or rather, the Holy Spirit in Jeremiah—displays God:

"I am a God at hand," he says, "and not a God afar off."

"Shall a man do anything in secret, and I shall not see him? Do I not fill the heavens and the earth? says the Lord." And again through Isaiah: "Who has measured the heaven with a span, and all the earth with his hand?" he says. Behold the greatness of God, and be astonished.

Let us worship this One, of whom the prophet says: "From before your face the mountains shall melt, as wax melts before the face of fire." "This," he says, "is God, whose throne is heaven and whose footstool is the earth; who, if he should open heaven, trembling shall seize you." Do you wish to hear also what this prophet says concerning the idols? "They shall be made a public example before the sun, and their carcasses shall be food for the birds of heaven and for the beasts of the earth, and they shall rot under the sun and the moon—those things which they themselves loved and which they themselves served; and their city shall be burned."

And he says that the elements also and the world shall perish together with them:

"the earth," he says, "shall grow old, and the heaven shall pass away, but the word of the Lord abides forever." And what when God again wills to show himself through Moses? "See, see that I am he, and there is no other God besides me."

"I kill, and I make alive;

I wound, and I also heal, and there is none who can deliver out of my hands." But do you wish to hearken to yet another oracle-singer? You have the whole prophetic choir, the fellow-celebrants of Moses.

What says the Holy Spirit to them through Hosea? I will not shrink from quoting it: "Behold, I am he who establishes thunder and creates wind, whose hands have founded the host of heaven."

And still further, through Isaiah (and this saying too I will recall for you):

"I am he, I am he," he says, "the Lord who speaks righteousness and declares truth;

take counsel together, you who are being saved from among the nations."

"They have not known, those who lift up the wood, their graven image, and who pray to gods that will not save them." Then going on he says: "I am God, and there is none righteous besides me, and there is no savior except me;"

"turn to me and be saved, you who are from the end of the earth."

"I am God, and there is none other;

I swear by myself." And he is indignant at the idolaters, saying: "To whom have you likened the Lord? Or with what likeness have you compared him? Has a craftsman made an image, or a goldsmith, having melted gold, overlaid it with gold?" And what follows upon these.

Are you, then, still idolaters? But even now, at least, guard against the threats;

for the graven and hand-made things shall howl—or rather, those who have trusted in them shall, for matter is without sense.