Yet there is added, most sacred emperors, to the increase of this profane error, the fact that they defend these two-named beings — that is, Liber and Proserpina — with a seemingly greater authority: for the fictions of the Greeks would have Liber referred to the sun, while calling Proserpina 'Libera' they fashion her to be the moon. How absurd and how pitiable this is, we can gather from the very reckoning of the truth. Who has seen the sun as a boy? Who deceived it? Who killed it? Who tore it? Who divided it? Who feasted upon its limbs? Who carried off the moon? Who hid it? Who made it Pluto's wife? But this error too they wish to shield, in turn, by a physical reasoning.
The undivided mind and the divided — that is, the unparted and the parted mind — by this reasoning they think they can venerate them. Tell me, O wretched mortals, why do you add deaths to natural things? Why do you defile God's ordering with the atrocity of cruel deaths? What need was there of so harsh and cruel a torment? What does this persuasion of yours intend, that the train of a deadly calamity should be joined to divine things? That the nature of the stars, which the supreme God made by fixed laws, should be coupled with the griefs of a mortal calamity? To what purpose serves what you do? You mingle earthly things with heavenly, perishable with celestial, dark with shining, consecrating the sorrows and griefs of men with divine honors.
If the Sun, when the whole human race had been called together, were to speak in an assembly, perhaps he would strike at your desperation with such an oration as this: 'Who has driven you on to so great a crime — you perishable men, daily rebelling against the supreme God in various ways — to such a point that, by the profane error of a wicked desire, you say I both die and live at your pleasure? And would that the fancies of your insane thought proceeded in the customary manner, or at least in but one kind; would that the wickedness of your criminal thought ran its course without insult to me! As it is, hurling yourselves over precipices, you do not spare even me, nor has your speech any reverence, but with my disgrace you hasten to your own destruction and death.'
'Some drown me in Egypt in the waves of the Nile and its rushing eddies, with obstinate frenzy of mind; others bewail me with my manhood cut off; others, having me slain by a cruel death, either boil me in a pot or fix my torn limbs upon seven spits. He who has flattered me a little with gentle speech feigns that I am the charioteer of a four-horse car. Cast off at last the ruin of so great a madness, and being summoned by a saving persuasion, seek the true way of salvation. He is an enemy of God who has either thought or feigned these things; nor does a simple or customary penalty attend his crime — he who defiles holy things with profane persuasions, who fashions such things concerning the glorious work of God.'
'Mourn your dead — you yourselves likewise destined to die a like death — send to your kings the funeral offerings you wish, and soothe their bereavements by another sort of remedy. Mourn Liber, mourn Proserpina, mourn Attis, mourn Osiris, but without insult to my dignity. I do not wish you to lead me through their tombs and ashes; I do not wish my name to supply fuel to your error. At the beginning of the day I was made by God; this alone suffices me. Why do you rob me of the dignity of an honorable office? God made me one thing, bade me be one thing, and you divide me according to your lust, tear me according to the desire of your own caprice. Whatever I am, I simply obey; nor do I wish you to understand anything else about me than what you see.'
This is pleasing to God, this God gladly embraces, this leads men to the way of salvation: if, casting off your errors, you drink in the grace of God simply and faithfully. Let it suffice, most sacred emperors, that I have said these things in a speech of impersonation. But now I, formed by the instruction of the sacred readings, address lost men with a religious discourse. If those whom you worship are gods, why do you mourn them? Why do you bewail them with yearly griefs? If they are worthy of tears and grief, why do you heap divine honor upon them? Do, then, one of two things: either do not mourn them, if they are gods, or, if you deem them worthy of grief and tears, do not call them gods, lest by your griefs and tears the majesty of the divine name be defiled.
But since a lost mind, entangled in the snares of wicked desire, can by no reasoning be called back, I shall pursue the rest, so that, when all things are exposed and uncovered which profane wickedness has consecrated, the mercy of God, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, may raise up the fallen, call back to himself those who flee, confirm the doubting, correct the erring, and — what is most important — grant life to the dying. In very many cities of the East, although this evil has made its passage even to us, Adonis is bewailed as it were the husband of Venus, and his slayer and his wound are shown to the bystanders. For Mars, changed into the likeness and form of a wild boar, that he might claim for himself the foremost part in the love of Venus, struck the youth who rushed incautiously against him.
If Adonis was a god, why did he not know the rival's ambush? If a man, why did he contend with a superior? But I hear that another also had a marital partnership with Venus: Vulcan, unless I am mistaken, is by these worshippers of the gods declared to be Venus's husband. O laughable persuasion of vain men! An adulterer set between two husbands is caught by the one and conquers the other. But consider: in order that the adulterer-god might conquer the husband, what body he chose for himself! He preferred to be a boar — he who, if he had the power of changing his body, ought rather to have taken on the likeness and form of a lion. But those who know the natures of animals say that the lion, amid all the ferocity of his wild spirit, preserves the virtue of chastity.
Deservedly, then, by the adulterer the form of the lion is spurned and that of a lustful animal is chosen. Here now let us treat the secrets of the gospel tradition. When the demon was cast out, the Lord granted it a herd of swine — and not without reason: that, tossed together with lustful animals over hard precipices and through the waves, by the various deaths of the swine the unclean spirit might be torn asunder by a fitting destruction. I hear that Cinyras the Cyprian gave a temple to his beloved harlot — her name was Venus — and that he also initiated very many into the Cyprian Venus and assigned them to vain consecrations, and that he even established that whoever wished to be initiated, once the secret of Venus had been handed over to him, should give one as in the name of a fee to the goddess.
What sort of secret this is, we ought all to understand in silence, since on account of its baseness we cannot explain this very thing more openly. Well did the lover Cinyras serve the laws of harlotry: he ordered alms to be given to consecrated Venus by her priests as to a whore. Those who worship Sabazius lead a serpent through the bosom when they initiate Jupiter: even now the vices of the first error run their course, and whatever has destroyed men is worshipped, and the cunning and malicious cruelty of a deadly serpent is adored. In the rites of the Corybantes a fratricide is worshipped: for one brother was slain by two, and lest any token should reveal the slaying of the fraternal death, he was consecrated by his parricidal brothers beneath the roots of Mount Olympus. This same one the foolish persuasion of the Macedonians worships.
This is Cabirus, to whom the Thessalonians once made supplication with bloody mouth and bloody hands. It is therefore to be considered what sort of deity that is, which a parricidal madness, in order to conceal a parricide, devised. Wherefore whoever venerates these sacred rites with devoted mind, whomever the dreaded contagion of this superstition pleases, either seeks solace for his own evils, or in silent thought praises their crimes — wishing this, seeking this, and assuredly above all greatly desiring this: that to himself too may be lawful what was lawful for his gods, and that a likeness of morals may lead him too to the fellowship of such a life. Someone delights in adultery: he looks to Jupiter, and from there he gathers fuel for his own desire.
He approves, imitates, and praises that his god deceives in the form of a swan, ravishes in the form of a bull, sports in the form of a satyr, and — that he may grow accustomed to be lavish in his outrages — that he corrupted a royal maiden shut away, with gold flowing copiously. Someone delights in the embraces of boys: let him seek Ganymede in the bosom of Jupiter, let him behold Hercules seeking Hylas with impatient love, let him learn of Apollo captivated by desire for Hyacinthus; let one behold Chrysippus, another Pelops, that through his gods he may say it is lawful for him to do whatever today is most severely punished by Roman laws. It is hard to enumerate all their adulteries — who corrupted Amymone, who Alope, who Menalippe, who Chione and Hippothoe: surely your god is remembered to have done these things.
That one, whom they would have correct the sins of erring men by stern oracles, loves Sterope, ravishes Aethusa, defiles Zeuxippe, pursues Prothoe, and woos Arsinoe with adulterous desire. But out of that herd of corrupted women one girl both escaped and conquered the amorous god: Daphne — though the god divines and foretells the future, he could neither find nor ravish her. Someone submits to womanish acts and seeks solace for his effeminate body: let him behold Liber requiting his lover, even after death, with the rewards of promised lust, in imitation of a shameful coupling. If anyone, with monstrous heat of desire, is armed for the destruction of his father's life, let him take his beginning from Jupiter.
He who desires a brother's blood, let him follow the institution of the Corybantes; and let examples be taken from Jupiter by those who desire incest: he lay with his mother, took his sister to wife, and, to complete the whole crime of incest, he assailed even his daughter with the mind of a corrupter. Some inferior man pursues a rival with envious hissing and longs to torment his adversary with cruel savagery: let him learn from Apollo, from the misfortunes of Marsyas, the agonies of cruel torments. Someone covets another's property and attempts to accomplish this with the death of the owner: let him behold how Hercules, having slain Geryon, drove off the Iberian cattle. If anyone rejoices in the indiscriminate slaughter of men, let him diligently inspect the perverse lusts of Mars.
The sinning crowd gathers the seeds of nearly all crimes from their own gods, and, that a lost mind may be able to commit a crime with impunity, it defends itself with greater authority from the preceding examples of crimes. If a corrupter seeks the rewards of debauchery, if he chooses to learn the way of seduction, let him behold the gold of Jupiter in the bosom of a corrupted woman. If a public traitor desires, by wicked greed, to betray the guardianship of a kingdom committed to him, let him look to those who betrayed Saturn to his son. To what extent the right of hospitality may be injured, or to what extent the laws of friendship may be disturbed, or to what extent the holy fellowship of the table may be violated — if anyone, prone to wrongdoing, inquires, behold, let him learn the order of crimes from the misfortunes of Tantalus.
O sad solace of criminal desire! O lamentable persuasion of men! O bloody meditation of unhappy imitation! You have made a stage out of heaven, and you have led erring souls through sheer precipices into cruel calamity, when to men desirous of sinning the way of crimes is pointed out by the examples of the gods. But amid this law of crimes, amid this confession of wickedness, let us give thanks to those who have, even without our knowing, betrayed to us the destructions and deaths of these their gods, so that we might learn all things through so many obstacles. For there was even among the ancients — although the venerable condescension of our Lord Christ had not yet illumined the earth — a religious constancy in despising superstitions.
Diomedes, chaste and sober, wounds Venus, conquers and strikes Mars. By the edict of Otus and Ephialtes, Mars, mighty in war, was condemned to a temporary exile and bore the iron bonds of chains. Jupiter bewails his son Sarpedon dead at Troy, and Neptune does not receive from a proud king the wage for the walls he built. Apollo pastures the herds of another king, and to the all-seeing Sun another announces the deaths of his slaughtered oxen. Sparta buries the Castores; Hercules burns upon Oeta, and Aesculapius is elsewhere blasted by a thunderbolt. Vulcan, cast down by his father, breaks his foot; Liber, fleeing Lycurgus, dies. Venus, caught in adultery, is exposed, and after marriage with a god she pursues the bed of the man Anchises.
Saturn, fearing for his kingdom, devours his sons, and fleeing his son hides as a fugitive in Italy. For love of Catamitus, Juno is scorned; the Moon descends to Endymion; and Jupiter, bringing aid to the Trojans against the will of his wife and daughter, is deceived and sleeps. O shameful confession! O worship to be lamented! O pitiable condition of harsh servitude! To the worship of these gods a sacrilegious tyrants' rule has dragged holy men and those who believe with a mind devoted to God; and, that one crime might be added to another, death was decreed for the unwilling. Transfer rather the temples to the theater, that on the stages the secrets of these religions may be handed down, and — that wickedness may omit nothing — make actors into priests.
A more fitting place for these religions could not be found: there let the vile throng sing of the loves of the gods; there let their falls and deaths be danced; there, in the temples of the gods, let both adultery and crime be the better taught by impious and criminal masters to a lost mind. Learn also, most holy emperors, whence the deity venerated at Alexandria took its beginning, so that, our common frailty being uncovered, the discourse may recall the beginning of our mortality to the origin of the truth. When in Egypt, the crops withering, a malicious famine... the youth Joseph, born of the seed of a religious patriarch, by interpreting the king's dream revealed all that was threatening.
Joseph was the son of Jacob, who, on account of his chastity sent into prison, was after the interpretation of the dream delivered and made a sharer in the kingdom. He related that with the fruits of seven years gathered and stored, the providence of his divine mind would mitigate the want of the next seven years. To him, after his death, the Egyptians, by the ancestral institution of their nation, built temples; and that posterity might learn the grace of his just dispensation, that very modius by which he had distributed grain to the hungry was set upon his head. He received also a name, that he might be worshipped more reverently, from the first author of his line: for because he had been the great-grandson of Sarah — from whom at ninety years old, by the indulgence of God, Abraham had received a daughter — he was called Serapis in the Greek tongue, that is, 'the child of Sarah' (Sárras paîs).
But this was against Joseph's will — nay, when he was dead: for a religious soul, dedicated to the supreme God, could not have been brought to such a crime as himself to furnish, out of his own name, the allurements of error to superstitious men — especially since he knew that it was in God's most holy laws that no man should either venerate or worship any such thing. He is worshipped in Egypt, here he is adored, his image a throng of temple-keepers guards; and in memory of antiquity an erring people, with contentious zeal, still today keeps the order of rites established in honor of a most upright and most prudent man. But in that very image, as in the rest, from constant sacrifices the unclean spirits of demons are gathered.
For the victims and the gore poured out from the constant slaughter of cattle effect nothing, except that the substance of the demons — who are begotten by the procreation of the devil — may be nourished from that blood. For that this is so, Porphyry, defender of images, enemy of God, foe of truth, master of wicked arts, has betrayed to us by manifest proofs. For in the books which he entitles 'On the Philosophy Derived from Oracles,' while proclaiming his deity's majesty, he confessed to its weakness. For in the first parts of his books — that is, in the very auspices, as it were — placed, he said: 'Serapis, being summoned and brought within the body of a man, answered such things.' Let lost men now tell me:
Who is the more powerful — he who calls and commands and shuts in, or he who is called and obeys and, when he has come into the body of the man who receives him, is shut in by the power of the one commanding? We give thanks, Porphyry, to your books: you have betrayed to us the substance of your gods; we have learned through you to what extent your gods are slaves to commanding men. Your Serapis is called by a man and comes, and when he has come he is at once shut in at command, and the necessity of speaking is, perhaps, imposed on him against his will. Thus among us, when your gods have begun to harm men, the lashes of religious speech chastise them.
Thus, set within the bodies of men, your gods are tortured by the word of God with the fire of spiritual flames; and those who among us are worshipped as gods, among us, subject to human command, endure the healing remedies of religious faith and the torments of the grace of Christ, resisting yet suffering, and, conquered, are subjugated by avenging penalties. I shall strive also to explain who the Penates are, lest anything seem to have been passed over by me. Those who think life is nothing but the license of eating and drinking have bent these to be their gods, out of the lowliness of their own desire, consecrating under this name, for the welfare of men, the nourishments of the body which are procured from daily feasts.
Because by the feasting of the body the body's weakness is restored, they sanctioned that nourishments alone are god, not knowing the truth of the divine oracle. For when the Lord Jesus Christ, solicitous for our salvation, was contending with the devil in a struggle of his divine majesty, that he might free from his jaws the man whom he bore, he shook him with this reply. For when the devil said to him, 'If you are the Son of God, make these stones become bread,' the Lord answered him and said, 'Man lives not by bread alone, but by every word of God.' Not knowing, therefore, the substance of the human race, they consecrated their daily feasts under this name; for everything that men feed upon is called penus.
Hence too the larder (cella penaria), hence too the gods Penates, were composed by abject and prostrate men out of a wretched thought. But learn what Vesta is, lest you suppose it something ancient or discovered with the utmost awe of religion. It is the domestic fire which serves the daily uses on the hearths; wherefore let it have cooks, not wretched maiden priestesses, who, despising the very ashes of that fire, are either compelled to sin with a prostituted body, or, persevering in virginity, lose the honorable dignity of a glorious name. Hear also what the deity Palladium is: it is an image made from the bones of Pelops; this Abaris the Scythian is reported to have made. Now consider what sort of thing it is, that a barbarian Scythian consecrated.
Is there anything among the Scythians composed by human reason — could that savage race of men, ever raging with cruel and inhuman atrocity, find anything right in establishing religions? This image Abaris sold to the Trojans, promising vain things to foolish men. A god was being sold, that he might profit the buyer, and the buyer suppliantly adored whatever he had a little before seen put up at auction. The substance of the image itself is from the bones of Pelops. If, Abaris, you compel wretched men to venerate human bones, gather at least the relics of a purer and chaster man; let the merit you draw from a man's virtues accrue to the idol you make. Pelops was in the favor of a lover and long endured the losses of prostituted modesty.
But not even when grown was he without crime: he slew by the treachery of a betrayer the man whose daughter he was seeking; he assailed the very betrayer himself with perjuries, and, that he might not pay the promised rewards, he hurled this same man down sheer precipices. Behold him whose bones were chosen that he might become a god to preserve cities and kingdoms! But he never preserved anything, nor profited, and he saw what awaited him from the misfortunes of the cities in which he was: Troy was burned by the Greeks, Rome by the Gauls, and from both conflagrations the Palladium was preserved — but preserved not by its own virtues, but by human protection; for from both places men rescued it, and it was carried off lest it should blaze in a human fire.
For so great a deity human protections were necessary, and it sought human aid lest it should burn. The Palladium was deferred from the fire, not delivered from it: the sentence stands, the penalty remains, the fire impends, the fire presses on, which it will not be able to escape. Already the heavenly flame is in travail, already the coming of divine retribution is shown forth, already the destruction of the coming ruin is announced: in this conflagration the Palladium will not be able to find hiding-places. That fire searches out hidden things, seeks the concealed, and whatever has destroyed erring men by vain persuasions, it embraces with the swift devastation of its flames. 'For there comes,' he says, 'the day of the Lord like a burning oven.' You have heard what comes: there is nothing that, gathered from you, can be stored in the Lord's granaries.
You will burn like stubble, whose empty worthlessness is kept for ashes and cinders, by which the rapacious fire, the violence of its blast compelling, is fed. This is your end and finish, this is the penalty which God has decreed for those who deceive men: that he should burn with perpetual flames who, against the will of God, has either deceived or destroyed wretched man. I wish, indeed, to inquire diligently of which Minerva they would have this be the emblem: for it is agreed that there were several Minervas, nor does anyone dissent on this point. Let us therefore state the peculiar character, institution, art, and purpose of each, so that from all these it may be found of which Minerva's name the Palladium was consecrated. Antiquity, as we read, hands down that there were five Minervas.
One is the daughter of Vulcan, who founded Athens, whom a rustic throng accompanied from rural places to the order of urban life. There was another in Egypt, daughter of Nilus the king, mistress of the weaving art. A third was begotten of Saturn her father, but they record that she was a virago: for she never kept herself within the modesty of the female sex, but always pursued arms and the din of battles and the bloody zeal of wars. The fourth was the daughter of Jupiter the Cretan king, who brought Liber, slain, to her father. The fifth sprang from Pallas her father and a Titaness mother, who, called by her father's name, was named Pallas by men.
She, by the impulse of a parricidal madness of frenzy and of insane rashness, slaughtered her father Pallas with a cruel death; and not content with her father's mere death — that she might the longer enjoy her own evils and triumph the more cruelly over her father's death — she was adorned with the spoils of his body, that she might publish the crime of parricide by a cruel display. Hers is the Palladium — O abomination! — consecrated in her name; this is the Pallas who is worshipped, this is she who is preserved by pontifical law; and she, whose crime ought to have been more severely condemned, has her image suppliantly adored. Apply fire, increase the flames, that by your daily sacrifices she may learn to burn.
For what else does a parricide deserve than that, by a perpetual imitation of flames, she should daily, before God's sentence, be consumed with avenging flames? These, most sacred emperors, are to be called tombs, not temples; they are rather to be called the pyres of wretched men: for in honor of lost men the pitiable servitude of men makes shrines in place of sepulchres.
Here the ashes of cremated bodies are kept; here the cinders of the dead are buried under an impious rite, so that the misfortunes of bitter deaths are renewed each day by the blood of victims, so that the mournful outcome of lamentation, renewed, is reborn in yearly griefs, so that a fresher wailing stirs up tears that had been lulled to rest, so that the wretched mind of men learns both to revere and to commit parricides, incests, and slaughters according to the rite of these sacred ceremonies.
These things must be cut off, most sacred emperors, utterly destroyed and corrected by the most severe laws of your edicts, lest the deadly error of this presumption defile the Roman world any longer, lest the wickedness of this pestilent custom grow strong, lest whatever strives to destroy man from God hold dominion any longer upon the earth. Some are unwilling and resist and with eager desire long for their own ruin; but come to the aid of the wretched, set free those who are perishing: for this the most high God has entrusted to you the empire, that through you the wound of this plague may be healed. We know the peril of their crime, the penalties of their error are well known; but it is better that you free them against their will than that you grant ruin to those who desire it.
Things contrary please the sick, and when an adverse condition has taken possession of a man's body, things perverse, against their own welfare, are demanded by those who suffer. The mind, seized by the disease of its weakness, ever desires the increase of its ailments, and spurning the remedies of the physicians, holds them in contempt; it rejects the remedy of medicine and with headlong passion hastens to its own destruction. Then, if the evil of the disease has grown more violent, greater remedies are sought, and for the man's welfare medicine, anxious, more forcefully arrays itself: harsh foods and bitter drinks are forced upon the unwilling, and, if the evil has grown strong, both fire and iron are applied.
Thus a man, when his health has been recovered and his welfare restored to him, confesses, by the judgment of a steadfast mind, that whatever he unwillingly endured through the disease of his ailing body was all done for his own benefit. Receive now, most sacred princes, also the names of these gods, by what reasoning they were composed.
This light, which by God's command, when the darkness has been put to flight, gives day to men, which through the span of twelve hours directs the order of its course, they chose to call Sol (the Sun) — not because it is alone (solus), as some hold, for there too are the heaven and the moon and very many other stars which we see, of which some shine in one continuous series, joined together in perpetual coherence, while others, scattered over the whole sky, measure their wandering courses by their own deviations — but it is called Sol because, when it has risen, while the other stars are darkened, it alone shines. The Moon (Luna) also — this same one is Lucina — took its name from its nocturnal light: this too some chose to call Diana, because, shining for men through the night, it makes almost a second day.
They chose to call the sea Neptune, from swimmers (nantes), from swimming (natando); and from this which they freely did, shaping the substance of the name, they call every earthly power and nature Dis Pater (Father Dis), because such is the nature of the earth, that all things both fall back into it and again, sprung from it, go forth — a thing which displayed the opulence and riches of the earth. They wish to call the substance of crops Proserpina, because crops, when they have begun to be sown, profit (prosunt) men. The earth itself they name Ceres, borrowing this name from the bearing (gerendis) of fruits. From the chances of wars Mars (Mavors) took his name, as though he overturns (vertat) great things (magna). Minerva likewise is a name of war, as though she either lessens (minuat) or threatens (minetur). The comeliness (venustas) of men is called Venus.