On the Error of Profane Religions 1 part 4/5

The saving Deity exults, and the throng of the just and holy accompanies His triumphal chariots. Then with uplifted joy uplifted mortality cries out: 'Where, O death, is your sting?' Then the saving Deity, going before, commands the heavenly gates to be opened for Him: 'Open, open, and tear down the immortal barriers: Christ God, having trampled death, calls back to heaven the man whom He had assumed.' This is foresung by the venerable prophet with holy voice, and from the prophetic mouth the voice of the One commanding is heard; for the Holy Spirit says, to show us the authority of the commanding Christ: 'Lift up your gates, O princes, and be lifted up, O eternal gates, and the King of glory shall come in.' This is commanded while the angels know not.

For they could not know when the Word of God descended to earth; therefore they too answer with anxious questioning: 'Who is this King of glory?' To them as they inquire Christ responds with the clear majesty of His own deity: 'The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle.' Immediately the Son of God is recognized by the guardians of heaven, and they acknowledge whatever had before deceived them: they see the spoils of the prostrate enemy, and recalling the order of the first arrangement, they too together with those ascending cry out again with repeated voice: 'Lift up the gates, you who preside over them, and be lifted up, O eternal gates, and the King of glory shall come in.'

When the Son returns, the Father restores the promised scepters of the kingdom and grants Him the throne of the kingdom with equal power, that He may command, that He may hold the kingdom, that He may rule with the perpetual majesty of His own deity. Hear what the Holy Spirit ordered to be said of Him through Daniel: 'I beheld in a vision by night, and lo, in the clouds of heaven there came as it were a Son of man, coming even to the Ancient of days, and He stood in His sight; and those who attended presented Him, and there was given to Him royal power and a kingdom and all glory, and all the kings of the earth shall serve Him, and His power is everlasting, which shall not be taken away, and His kingdom shall not be destroyed.' These same things are shown to us by holy revelation, for we find it thus written in the Apocalypse:

'And I turned and looked back to see the voice that spoke with me, and I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a Son of man clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about at the breasts with a golden girdle; His head and His hairs were white as white wool, as snow, and His eyes as a flame of fire, and His feet like fine brass as if from a fiery furnace, and His voice as the sound of many waters; and He had in His right hand seven stars, and out of His mouth a sword sharp on both edges, and His face shone as the sun in its strength. And when I had seen Him, I fell at His feet as one dead, and He laid His right hand upon me, saying: Fear not;

I am the first and the last, and the living One who was dead, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and of hell.' After His resurrection, when He also gave sure commands to His disciples, He concluded the order of His immortal commandments by this decree: 'All power is given to me in heaven and in earth: go therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.' And that God the Father, making Him a sharer of the kingdom, granted Him the seats of the royal throne, is taught by this oracle: 'The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet.

The Lord shall send forth the rod of your strength out of Zion, and you shall rule in the midst of your enemies. With you is the principality in the day of your strength, in the splendor of the saints: from the womb before the morning star I begot you. The Lord has sworn and will not repent.' These are the enemies of God, most sacred emperors, who confound the order of truth by a contrary law, who through the instinct of perverse desire conceive sacrilegious vows, who in the frenzy of a profane mind ever venerate either wood or stone.

Placed at this point, we ought to lay open the order of the holy dispensation, so that whatever the prophetic teaching of God's holy word has handed down to us in our inquiry may be expounded specifically for refuting the stains of profane error; lest, if (as we have said) those who handed down sacrilegious rites to the erring have devised them, so the order of truth should be too curiously demanded of us. Therefore, leaving the rest suspended for a little, let our discourse be turned to expounding the things that are true. You, lord emperors, lend me the patience of your sacred ears, that we may unfold the whole of what we promise to your clemency. Why God, that is, the Son of God, suffered Himself to become man, shall be shown to your piety by a brief and true argument.

When God made the first man, that is, Adam, after His own image, He gave him a fixed law of commandments. He, deceived through a woman, that is Eve, by the persuasions of the devil, lost the dignity of the glory promised to him: there was a tree in paradise which lost the grace of the rewards promised by God. Out of the slime of virgin earth man was made; for, as Scripture says, it had not yet rained upon the earth. He, having despised the commandments of God, afflicted the human race with the snares of mortality. All this had to be both reformed and corrected, and the reformation of the origin had to reform the first beginnings. Adam, made from the slime of virgin earth, by his own transgression lost the promised life;

through the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit Christ was born and received both immortality and a kingdom. The tree of wood furnished pestilential food to the deceived: the wood of the cross restored life by an immortal bond. Adam despised, Christ obeyed God: thus by the divine dispensation whatever Adam lost, Christ recovered. For after many ages, in the latest spans of time, that is in almost the last week of the ages, the Word of God mingled Himself with a human body, that He might free man, that He might conquer death, that He might join the frailty of the human body with divine immortality. For what would so great a throng of saints do? What hope of salvation was theirs?

What reward of merits, if under one and the same condition of lot they too were held bound by the inescapable snares of mortality? Abel would promise himself nothing, Enos nothing, Noah nothing, Shem nothing, Abraham nothing, Isaac nothing, Jacob nothing, of God's mercy and majesty: they too would go, after so great a merit of faith, condemned alike with all the rest, and one destruction of death would seize all God's saints, nor would piety have any reward with God, if one and the same condition of death engulfed all. But God had promised Abraham a kingdom more clearly than the stars of heaven.

Therefore the Virgin Mary, descending from the line of Abraham, conceived God, so that the offspring of the aforesaid men might be joined by the bond of immortal fellowship; so that thus the human race, joined by an equalized comparison of fellowship through one who was at once man and God, might attain to the dominion of immortality by the merit of obedience. Therefore, most sacred emperors, since we have satisfied your inquiring ears, let us pursue the rest, that thus our discourse, purifying the filth of polluted ears, may be able to cleanse them. There follows still another symbol, which is handed down for something great to the credulous ears of wretched men: 'A bull the father of a serpent, and of a bull a serpent the father.' Sometimes, O devil, you have betrayed to us the signs of your stained name; sometimes you have confessed the infamous name with your own voice:

I know who you have been, what you have dared: I know what the malicious persuasion of your crimes has done. This is what you greatly promised to Eve when you were destroying her, when you said to her: 'You shall be as gods.' Then already you were preparing temples for yourself and your followers, and making shrines, and consecrating the foulness of your venomous mouth with wicked rites. You creep into temples and feed on the wretched blood of slaughtered victims; nor was gore wanting to your poisons, nor the half-burnt parts of cremated bodies; you have often even stained yourself with the blood of human victims, and your madness and the poisons of your parched throat were nourished by the gore of the Latian temple or by the altar of Carthage.

Doing these things, you boast that you are of use to wretched men, that by your cruelty you may destroy them, deceive them by persuasion, lay them low by promise: thus you look after your own, you murderer of kin. Flee, O wretched men, flee, and abandon that contagion with all the speed you can: it is a serpent that is worshiped, it cannot hide, it has itself confessed the property of its own name; punishment follows the confessed guilty one. Hear what the holy prophet, by divine prompting, proclaims. This oracle of Isaiah has faith handed down to us, for he says: 'In that day God shall bring on a sword, holy and great and strong, against the dragon, the great and crooked serpent, and He shall slay the dragon.' The will of God is the substance of a completed work;

concerning the slaying of the dragon the sentence has been pronounced; whatever God has said is done. This is the dragon's consolation when about to die, that a frequent throng of the lost should accompany his destruction. If you ask the day of his death, then was he struck, when he saw God become man, when the divine power of Christ appeared to us. After that day, whoever follows the practice of this serpent must of necessity die with the serpent. Those gods whom you worship, he himself has fashioned, he himself has composed: if your obstinate minds remain in this error, you too will burn together with your gods, so that whatever your authors have earned by divine punishment may also be transferred to your destruction through the partnership of association.

Believe me, the devil has left nothing undone that might either weaken or destroy wretched man: therefore he transforms himself into every shape with manifold variety, therefore he has composed himself with the cunning of diverse kinds, that he may slay men ensnared by various and manifold deceits. That ruined executioner, O abomination, has arranged that his rites be ever renewed through wood, so that, because he knew it would be so that the life of man, fastened to the wood of the cross, would be bound fast by the bond of perpetual immortality, he might deceive men destined to perish by an imitation of the wood. In the Phrygian rites, which they call those of the Mother of the gods, every year a pine tree is cut down, and in the middle of the tree an image of a youth is bound.

In the Isiac rites a trunk is cut from a pine tree; the middle part of this trunk is carefully hollowed out: there is buried an idol of Osiris made from the cuttings. In the rites of Proserpina a felled tree is shaped into the image and form of a maiden, and when it has been carried within the city, it is bewailed for forty nights, and on the fortieth night it is burned. But that other wood too, which I mentioned, a like flame consumes: for even after a year the flame devours the pyre of these woods. You have erred, wretch, and erred grievously: that fire will be able to profit you nothing; in vain do you flatter yourself with that flame, ever renewing this fire by your contrivances.

The fire which exacts punishments from your crimes rages with a perpetual continuation of torments. Learn the order of the divine and liberating wood, that you may know there is no way by which you can be helped. From the deluge a wooden ark freed the human race; Abraham lays the wood upon the shoulders of his only son; a wooden rod protected God's people as they withdrew from Egypt; wood restored a sweet taste to the bitter springs of Marah; from a wooden rod, out of the spiritual rock the saving water is brought forth; and that Amalek might be conquered, Moses is stretched out about the rod with hands outspread:

the patriarch dreams of an angel leaning upon a wooden ladder, and through that same ladder he sees some ascending and others descending; and the law of God is entrusted to a wooden ark, so that by all these, as if by certain steps, the salvation of men might arrive at the wood of the cross. Wherefore the wood of the cross sustains the framework of heaven, strengthens the foundations of the earth, and leads to life the men fastened to it. The wood of the devil ever burns and dies, and leads to the depths of Tartarus, with its embers, the men who believe in it. Let this also be discussed by reason, of what sort it is. The devil, consecrating his tree, in the dead of night has a ram sacrificed at the roots of the felled tree. Who has persuaded you of this, you criminal? Whence did you learn this with pestilential desire?

Do you forever set yourself against the most high God with wicked desire? Therefore the stern judgment of the Godhead from heaven hurls you down with fleeting humiliation, therefore the sentence of God decrees for you perpetual punishment, because to your crimes there is daily added some new crime, because you attempt to deceive the man of God by fraudulent persuasion. See what the mocking enemy has devised for himself. When Abraham was about to sacrifice his son at God's command, a ram is substituted and is bound at the roots of a nearby tree. The most high God, about to free His people from the tyranny of the Egyptians, ordered a ram to be slain by night, and commanded its blood to be smeared on the doorposts; He bids it be consumed by a fixed number of men in a nocturnal feast, and imposes upon that very sacrifice the name of Passover.

But the providence of the divine majesty devised this as an image of things to come, that through signs it might show us the true Passover. Therefore, when the prophet foresang of the passion of our Lord at the bidding of the divine Spirit, he said: 'Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer, so he opened not his mouth. In his humiliation his judgment was taken away: who shall declare his generation? For his life shall be taken from the earth.' Another prophet too responded to these same things with a like oracle: 'O Lord, show me, and I shall know: then I saw their devices. I was like an innocent lamb led to the slaughter: against me they devised a device, saying, Come, let us put wood into his bread and cut off his life from the earth.'

That our Lord is called a Lamb is shown to us by holy revelation. For in the Apocalypse we thus find it written: 'And I saw in the midst of the throne and of the four living creatures, and in the midst of the elders, a Lamb standing as though slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent forth into all the earth; and He came and took the book out of the right hand of Him who sat upon the throne, and when He had taken the book, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each having golden harps full of the incense of supplications, which are the prayers of the saints; and they sang a new song, saying:

You are worthy to take the book and to open its seals, for you were slain and have redeemed us to God by your blood out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation, and have made us a kingdom and priests to our God, and we shall reign upon the earth.' John too calls the Son of God by the name of Lamb, so that he himself may correspond to the prophetic promise; for he says in the Gospel: 'On the next day John sees Jesus coming to him, and says: Behold the Lamb of God, behold Him who takes away the sins of the world.' For the salvation of men the venerable blood of that Lamb is poured out, that the Son of God may redeem His saints by the shedding of His precious blood, so that those who are freed by the blood of Christ may first be consecrated by the majesty of His immortal blood.

Among idols the shed blood protects no one; and lest the gore of cattle either deceive or destroy wretched men, that blood pollutes, it does not redeem, and through various mishaps it presses men into death: wretched are those who are stained with the shedding of sacrilegious blood. Why does the taurobolium or the criobolium drench you with the wicked defilement of blood? Let these filths which you gather be washed away: seek the pure fountains, seek clear waters, that there, after many stains, the blood of Christ with the Holy Spirit may make you white. But that full persuasion may recall wretched men to a sound mind, there is need of greater authority, so that, when minds are cured and healed, no trace of the preceding pestilence may be left.

What therefore idols are, or what substance they have, is shown by the mouth of the prophets and by the divine voice of God; all of which must be specifically stated, so that this may be recognized as set forth not by our rashness, but as handed down to us by daily instruction and sealed by a heavenly voice. What their substance is, is shown by the venerable voice of Wisdom; for it says in the books of Solomon: 'All the idols of the nations they esteemed gods, which have neither the use of eyes to see, nor nostrils to draw breath, nor ears to hear, nor fingers of the hands to handle; and their feet too are slow to walk: for man made them, and he who borrowed his own spirit fashioned them.

But no man will be able to fashion a lord for himself, since, being mortal, he fashions a dead thing with wicked hands: yet he is better than these whom he worships, since indeed he himself has lived, but they never.' What more do we seek? Wisdom assails us with its divine voice and has taught whatever it had seen in the secret things of God, and has shown what was wholesome, lest frail and fleeting mortality should hasten to its own destruction and death. The Holy Spirit forewarns of this same thing in the Psalms: for we find it thus written in the hundred and thirty-fourth psalm: 'The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of men's hands: they have a mouth and speak not, they have eyes and see not, they have ears and hear not, neither is there any breath in their mouth:

let those who make them become like unto them.' If the craftsman who, for the display of his skill, either sculpted or cast an image, is struck with the divine punishment of a curse, it must be considered what he ought to hope for who calls a god that which another has sold. Jeremiah too, when at God's command he gave precepts to the people, addressed the people with this discourse: 'But say in your heart: You, O Lord, it is right to adore. But my angel is with you, and I will seek out your souls. Their tongue is polished by the smith; they too are gilded and silvered, yet are false and cannot speak; and like a maiden loving adornment, they have fashioned crowns out of received gold upon the heads of their gods.

But there is a time when the priests withdraw from their gods the gold and silver and spend it upon themselves; they will even give of it to prostitute harlots, and they adorn them like men with garments, these silver and gold and wooden gods.' He adds also in what follows, to shake off all doubt of trembling: 'Over their body and head fly owls and swallows and birds likewise: whence you shall know that they are not gods; therefore do not fear them. For the gold which they have about them for show, unless someone wipe off the rust, will not shine; nor did they perceive anything when they were being cast. At a price were they bought, in whom there is no breath; without feet they are carried on shoulders.' He adds also, that the mind being confirmed may be more strongly strengthened:

'Knowing therefore from these things that they are not gods, fear them not'; and to show the wretched disgrace of their priests, he adds: 'In their houses the priests sit, having tunics rent and their heads and beards shaven, whose heads are bare: they roar, crying out against their gods, like the dead in Gehenna.' And that kings and nations too will pronounce these things concerning them, this same prophet signifies with prophetic voice; for he says: 'Afterward it shall be known to all nations and kings that they are false, since it is manifest that they are not gods, and there is no work of God in them: they will not raise up a king for a region, nor give rain to men; they will not discern judgment, nor deliver a region from injury, for they can do nothing:

and when fire shall fall upon the house of the wooden and gilded and silvered gods, their priests will be freed, but they themselves will be burned up like beams in the midst; they will not resist a king or war. How is it to be thought or accepted that they are gods? The wooden and gilded and silvered gods will deliver themselves neither from thieves nor from robbers, from whom those who are strong carry off the gold and silver with which they are covered.' Take away, take away with the axe, most sacred emperors, the ornaments of the temples: let either the fire of the mint or the flame of the metalworks consume these gods; transfer all the offerings to your own use and dominion. After the destruction of the temples you have been advanced the more by the power of God:

you have conquered enemies, extended the empire, and, that greater glory might accrue to your valor, with the order of the seasons changed and despised in winter—a thing which neither has ever been done nor ever will be—you have trodden upon the swelling and raging waves of the Ocean: beneath your oars the wave of a sea till now almost unknown to us has trembled, and the Briton has stood aghast at the unhoped-for face of an emperor. What more do you desire? The conquered elements have yielded to your valor. And that God commands idols not to be made, the decrees of the sacrosanct law declare: for in Exodus we thus find it written: 'You shall not make for yourselves silver gods nor golden gods'; and again in the same book I find the voice of God commanding:

'You shall not make for yourself an idol nor any likeness of anything.' The Holy Spirit enjoins shame upon the wretched, because He desires to recall the erring, not to destroy them, and He says through Isaiah: 'You shall be confounded with confusion, you who trust in graven things, who say to molten images: You are our gods.' He also gives a law which the consecrated people should keep with devout perpetuity, and thus commands: 'You shall adore the Lord your God, and Him alone shall you serve'; and in Deuteronomy like commands of God are known, for He says: 'There shall be no other gods to you besides me'; He adds also, that He may instill the weight of His majesty into their minds: 'See, see that I am, and there is no god besides me:

I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal, and there is none that can deliver out of my hands.' In the Apocalypse too this same thing is shown by holy revelation; for it is thus written: 'And I saw another angel flying through the midst of heaven, having the eternal gospel, to proclaim it upon the earth to all nations and tribes and tongues and peoples, saying with a loud voice: Fear rather the Lord and give Him glory, for the hour of His judgment has come, and adore Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and all things that are in them.' Our Lord Jesus Christ too, keeping the institutions of the paternal law, proclaims this same thing with venerable enactment, for He says: 'Hear, O Israel:

the Lord your God is one God, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength: this is the first, and the second is like unto it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself: on these two commandments hang the whole law and the prophets.' There follows this divine and venerable precept and the holy conclusion of the immortal Lord; for He adds, that He may show more manifestly the way of salvation, and thus speaks: 'And this is eternal life, that they may know you the only true Lord, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.' You know the order of the sacred commandments; what to follow, what to flee, you have learned by a venerable and immortal voice.

Hear again what destruction awaits those who despise them, by what calamities the necessity of the venerable law has bound them: for it gathers the conclusion of the venerable commandments into these words: 'He who sacrifices to gods shall be rooted out, save to the Lord alone.' If a fearful punishment struck only the sacrilegious man, if the severity of the law threatened only the one who sins, well might he fortify himself for sacrilege with the rashness of obstinate frenzy: but now it threatens the stock and the offspring, and it does this, lest any part of the most wicked seed be left, lest any trace of the profane race remain: 'He who sacrifices,' it says, 'to gods shall be rooted out.' Consider what you do, O wretched and mournful persuasion:

your crime condemns very many, destroys very many, and the fertile punishment is divided through all the substance of your stock. But why the authority of the ordained law thus rages against those who sacrifice is shown with manifest signification in Deuteronomy: for we thus find it written: 'They sacrificed to demons and not to God.' Do not betake yourself to contaminated and polluted spirits, do not hope for help from inferior beings, do not be a suppliant to these, over whom you ought by now, by the grace of God, to command. Behold, that demon whom you worship, when it has heard the name of God and of His Christ, trembles, and that it may answer us when we question it, it scarcely gathers its trembling words:

clinging to a man, it is torn, burned, beaten, and immediately confesses the crimes it has committed. That you should not worship this one, that you should not supplicate this one, that you should not, prostrate, bend your knees to this one, is enjoined by the prohibition of the venerable law. Hence the severity of punishment, hence the fearful sentence of chastisement, because, with liberty granted by the indulgence of God, you rather choose the yoke of servitude. The most high God does not cease to strike at this crime with His saving voice, but His mercy hastens to correct erring men with frequent admonition. Hear what the divine voice says through the prophet Isaiah:

'They worshiped the gods which their own fingers made, and man was bowed down and the man was humbled, and I will not relent toward them.' To you too, O profane men, the angered Deity speaks, and still addresses your errors with sacred voice: for He says in what follows through the same prophet: 'To them you poured out libations and to them you offered sacrifices: shall I not be indignant over these things? says the Lord.' Still the saving God defers His indignation, suspends His severity, lest perchance it should repent you to sin, lest by any means you should leave behind the destruction of a sacrilegious will. Behold, in the very onset of His indignation He persuades again with a moderate voice and restrains the goads of His anger; for He says through the prophet Jeremiah: