That those whom the common people worship are not gods is known from this. They were once kings, who on account of their royal memory afterward began to be worshiped among their own people even in death. Thence temples were established for them, thence images were fashioned to retain the faces of the dead through a likeness; and they offered sacrificial victims and celebrated festal days, rendering honor. Thence rites were made for posterity which had at first been taken up as consolations. And let us see whether there is also truth in this among individual cases. Melicertes and Leucothea are cast headlong into the seas and afterward become deities of the sea; the Castors die by turns that they may live; Aesculapius, that he may rise into a god, is struck by lightning; Hercules, that he may put off the man, is burned up in the fires of Oeta.
Apollo pastured the flock of Admetus; Neptune built the walls for Laomedon, and the unhappy builder received no wages for his work. The cave of Jupiter is seen in Crete and his tomb is shown, and it is plain that Saturn was put to flight by him; thence Latium received its name from his hiding place (latebra). He first established the impressing of letters, he first the stamping of coins in Italy; thence the treasury is called Saturn's. And he was a cultivator of country life; thence he is painted bearing a sickle. Janus received this fugitive in hospitality, from whose name the Janiculum is called and the month of January was instituted. He himself is portrayed two-faced, because, being set in the middle, he seems alike to follow the year that begins and the year that departs.
The Moors, indeed, openly worship kings and do not veil this name under any covering. Hence among the various nations and provinces the religion of the gods varies and changes, since not one God is worshiped by all, but each keeps the worship of his own ancestors. That this is so, Alexander the Great wrote in a notable volume to his mother, that the secret concerning gods being men was betrayed to him by a priest out of fear of his power: namely, that the memory of ancestors and kings had been preserved. Hence the rite of worshiping and sacrificing grew up. But if the gods were at some time born, why are they not born today as well? Unless perchance Jupiter has grown old, or childbearing has ceased in Juno? But why do you think the gods can avail for the Romans, when you see that they availed nothing for their own people against the Romans' arms?
For we know the home-bred gods of the Romans. There is Romulus, made a god by Proculus' perjury, and Picus, and Tiberinus, and Pilumnus, and Consus, whom Romulus willed to be worshiped as a god of fraud, that is, of counsels, after the treachery in the rape of the Sabine women succeeded. Tatius too discovered and worshiped the goddess Cloacina; Hostilius, Fear (Pavor) and Pallor. Presently Fever was dedicated by I know not whom, and Acca and Flora, harlots. These are the Roman gods. As for the rest: Thracian Mars, and Cretan Jupiter, and Juno whether Argive or Samian or Punic, and Taurian Diana, and the Idaean mother of the gods, and the Egyptian monstrosities, no deities at all; which surely, if they had any power, would have preserved their own realms and their own peoples. Plainly there are even among the Romans conquered household gods (Penates), which the fugitive Aeneas brought in:
there is also a bald Venus, far more shameful here when bald than wounded in Homer. But kingdoms do not befall by merit; they are varied by lot. Moreover, before this the Syrians and Persians held empire, and we know that the Greeks and Egyptians reigned. So by the alternations of power, the time of ruling fell to the Romans too, as to the rest. But if you go back to their origin, you would blush. A people is gathered together out of the wicked and the guilty, and by the establishing of a place of asylum the impunity of crimes makes up their number. Then, that the king himself might have the first place in crime, Romulus becomes a parricide; and that he might make a marriage, he inaugurates the matter of concord through discords. They ravish, they rage, they deceive, to increase the supply of the city:
their marriages are broken covenants of hospitality and cruel wars with their fathers-in-law. There is also a degree, the highest among Roman honors, the consulship. Thus we see the consulship begin as the kingship did: Brutus slays his sons, that the commendation of dignity may grow out of the suffrage of crime. Not, therefore, from holy religions, nor from auspices or auguries, did the Roman realms grow; but they keep the appointed time with a fixed end. Moreover, both Regulus observed the auspices and was captured; and Mancinus held to religion and was sent under the yoke; Paulus had voracious chickens and yet was cut down at Cannae; Gaius Caesar, when the auguries and auspices held him back from sending ships across to Africa before the winter solstice, despised them: all the more easily he both sailed and conquered.
But the explanation of all this is that power which deceives and beguiles, and with blinding sleights leads the foolish and prodigal common people away from the truth. They are insincere and wandering spirits, who, after they have been plunged into earthly vices and have departed from heavenly vigor through earthly contagion, do not cease, being themselves ruined, to ruin others, and being themselves depraved, to pour in the error of depravity. These the poets too know as demons; and Socrates declared that he was instructed and ruled at the bidding of a demon; and hence their power tends rather toward the destructive or the trifling. Of these, however, the chief, Ostanes, both denies that the form of the true God can be beheld, and says that true angels stand by His throne. In this, Plato too agrees by the same reasoning, and, keeping one God, calls the rest angels or demons.
Hermes Trismegistus also speaks of one God, and confesses Him to be incomprehensible and inestimable. These spirits, then, lurk beneath consecrated statues and images; these inspire the breasts of soothsayers by their afflatus, animate the fibers of entrails, govern the flights of birds, rule the lots, work the oracles, ever wrapping falsehoods in truths, for they are both deceived and deceive; they disturb life, disquiet sleep; creeping also as spirits into bodies, they secretly terrify minds, distort limbs, break health, provoke diseases, that they may force men to their worship, so that, fattened on the smoke of altars and the burnings of cattle, they may seem to have cured what they had bound, the cures being remitted. This is the remedy from them: the wrong of the worshipers ceases.
Nor is there any other aim than to call men away from God and to turn them from the understanding of true religion to superstition toward themselves; since they themselves are doomed to punishment, they seek out for themselves companions for that punishment, those whom by error they have made partners in their crime. Yet these same, adjured by the true God, yield to us at once, and confess, and are compelled to depart from the bodies they possess. You may see them, by our voice and the prayer of the hidden Majesty, scourged with whips, scorched with fire, stretched out by the increase of advancing torment, howling, groaning, beseeching; confessing whence they come and when they depart, even in the hearing of those who worship them, so that they either leap out at once or vanish gradually, according as the faith of the sufferer aids or the grace of the healer breathes upon them.
Hence they drive the common people into hatred of our name, that men may begin to hate us before they know us, lest, once they knew us, they might either imitate us or be unable to condemn us. There is, therefore, one Lord God of all; for that sublimity can have no partner, since it alone holds all power. For the divine governance let us borrow an example even from earthly things. When did a partnership in rule ever either begin with good faith or end without bloodshed? So the brotherhood of the Thebans was broken, their discord enduring even in death upon the divided pyres. And the Roman twins, whom one shelter of the womb contained, one kingdom did not contain. Pompey and Caesar were kinsmen, yet they did not keep the bond of relationship in rival power.
Nor should you wonder at this in man, since in this all nature agrees. There is one king for the bees, and one leader in the herds, and in the flocks one ruler. Much more is there one Ruler of the world, who commands by His word all things whatsoever that are, dispenses them by His reason, and consummates them by His power. He can neither be seen, being brighter than sight; nor grasped, being purer than touch; nor estimated, being greater than sense. And therefore we worthily esteem Him as God when we call Him inestimable. But what temple can God have, whose temple is the whole world? And while man dwells more widely, shall I shut up the power of so great a Majesty within one little shrine? He is to be dedicated in our mind, He is to be consecrated in our breast. Nor should you seek a name for God: God is His name.
There is need of words where a multitude must be distinguished by the proper marks of appellations. For God, who alone is, the name 'God' is the whole. Therefore He is one, and He Himself is everywhere diffused. For even the common people naturally confess God in many ways, when the mind and soul is reminded of its author and origin. We frequently hear it said, 'O God,' and 'God sees,' and 'I commend to God,' and 'God will repay me,' and 'what God wills,' and 'if God grant it.' Now what greater height of sin is this, to be unwilling to acknowledge Him whom you cannot fail to know! As for what Christ is, and how through Him salvation came to us, this is the order, this the reasoning. For the Jews there was first grace with God. So of old they were righteous, so their forefathers obeyed the religious observances.
Thence both the loftiness of their kingdom flourished for them and the greatness of their race came forth. But they, afterward becoming undisciplined and puffed up by confidence in their fathers, while they despised the divine precepts, lost the grace given to them. How profane their life was, and what offense was contracted by violated religion, they themselves also testify, who, though silent in voice, confess it by their outcome: scattered and roving they wander, exiles from their own soil and their own sky, tossed about through foreign lodgings.
Nay more, God had foretold before that it would come to pass, that with the age declining and the end of the world now near at hand, out of every nation and people and place God would choose for Himself worshipers far more faithful, who would draw indulgence from the divine gifts, which the Jews, having despised the religious observances, had lost after receiving it. Of this grace and discipline, then, the Word and Son of God is sent as arbiter and master, who through all the prophets of old was proclaimed as the enlightener and guide of the human race. He is the power of God, He the reason, He His wisdom and glory; He glides down into a virgin, as the Holy Spirit He is clothed with flesh, God is mingled with man. This is our God, this is Christ, who, as mediator of the two, put on man whom He might lead through to the Father.
What man is, Christ willed to be, that man also might be able to be what Christ is. The Jews also knew that Christ was to come, for this was always announced to them by the warnings of the prophets. But since His coming was signified as twofold—one in which He should fulfill the part and example of a man, the other in which He should be confessed as God—by not understanding the first coming, which preceded hidden in His passion, they believe only the one that shall be manifest in power. But that this people of the Jews could not understand it was the due reward of their sins: they were so smitten with blindness of wisdom and understanding, that, being themselves unworthy of life, they had life before their eyes and did not see it.
And so, when Christ Jesus, according to the things foretold before by the prophets, by His word and by the command of His voice cast out demons from men, restored the paralytics, cleansed the lepers, enlightened the blind, gave a step to the lame, brought the dead again to life, compelled the elements to serve Him, the winds to obey, the seas to give heed, and the powers below to give way—the Jews, who had believed Him to be only a man because of the lowliness of His flesh and body, supposed Him a magician acting by license of power.
Hence their teachers and leaders—that is, those whom both His doctrine and His wisdom refuted—kindled with wrath and provoked by indignation, at last, having seized Him, handed Him over to Pontius Pilate, who then governed Syria on the Roman side, demanding His cross and death by violent and obstinate clamors. That they would do this, He Himself had also foretold, and the testimony of all the prophets had thus gone before: that He must suffer, not that He might feel death but that He might conquer it; and when He had suffered, that He should return again to those above, that He might show the power of His divine Majesty. And so the course of events fulfilled the faith. For both, crucified, He of His own will dismissed His spirit, anticipating the office of the executioner, and on the third day of His own will He rose again from the dead.
He appeared to His disciples such as He had been; He offered Himself to be recognized by those who saw Him, joined together with them; and conspicuous in the firmness of His bodily substance, He tarried for forty days, that they might be instructed by Him in the precepts of life and learn what they should teach. Then He was taken up into heaven, a cloud surrounding Him, that He might set the man whom He loved, whom He put on, whom He protected from death, with the Father as victor, now about to come from heaven to the punishment of the devil and to the judgment of the human race with the vigor of an avenger and the power of a judge; while through the world His disciples, scattered at the prompting of their Master and God, gave the precepts unto salvation, led men from the error of darkness to the way of light, and gave eyes to the blind and ignorant unto the knowledge of the truth.
And lest the proof be less solid and the confession concerning Christ be too delicate, men are tried through torments, through crosses, through many kinds of punishments. Pain, which is the witness of truth, is summoned, that Christ the Son of God, who is believed to have been given to men for life, might be proclaimed not only by the heralding of the voice but also by the testimony of suffering. Him, therefore, we accompany, Him we follow, Him we have as the leader of our journey, the prince of light, the author of salvation, promising heaven alike and the Father to those who seek and believe. What Christ is, we shall be—Christians—if we have followed Christ.