Against the Heathen

Contents

Reading pages: 1–10 · 11–21 · 22–31 · 32–41 · 42–47

1. 1Athanasius explains that he writes for a Christian friend to show that faith in the crucified Christ is not irrational, first by refuting the errors of unbelievers.
2. 2Evil did not exist at first: God made humanity in his image through the Word, to contemplate him in purity, as Adam did in paradise.
3. 3Humanity turned from contemplating God to the body and its senses, as Adam did at the serpent’s counsel, and from this came desire, fear, and violence.
4. 4The soul, free and always in motion, mistook pleasure for the good and turned the body’s members from their proper uses to evil.
5. 5Evil is the misuse of the body’s members, like a charioteer who drives at full speed while ignoring the goal of the race.
6. 6Against Greeks and heretics who give evil its own existence, Athanasius argues from Scripture and reason that there is one God, Lord of heaven and earth.
7. 7Two opposed first principles are impossible; evil is not a being but the soul’s self-made darkness when it shuts its eye to God.
8. 8Forgetting that it is God’s image, the soul sank, like a diver into the depths, from inventing evil to inventing gods out of visible things.
9. 9Idolatry descended step by step from the heavenly bodies to the elements, to men, beasts, and monsters, to deified lust, to rulers such as Hadrian’s Antinous, and to emperors voted gods by the Roman senate.
10. 10Deifying the dead is an old custom: Theseus’ decrees, the cult of goddesses, and portraits of the mourned dead all became gods, and even Plato went to worship an image of Artemis.
11. 11Scripture (Wisdom 14) explains how idols arose from grief and flattery, and the poets’ own tales of Zeus show him to be no god but the most shameful of men.
12. 12The myths of the gods’ adulteries, incest, quarrels, and wounds show them to be weak and wicked men, yet their worshipers deify the very vices their own laws punish.
13. 13Idolaters worship the craftsman’s art rather than the craftsman, and living, rational beings serve lifeless objects they themselves must guard.
14. 14The Psalms and Isaiah 44 mock idols that cannot see, hear, or act, and the carpenter who burns half a log and worships the rest.
15. 15The idols’ idle sense-organs betray their lifelessness, and the poets who tell of the gods’ vices prove that they are not even good men.
16. 16The plea of poetic license fails: if the poets lied about the gods’ deeds, they lied about their names too; deeds reveal natures, and these deeds are human and shameful.
17. 17The poets’ praises of the gods are flattery meant to hide their shameful deeds, and truth forced the poets to record those deeds as evidence against them.
18. 18The gods cannot be honored as inventors of the arts, for the arts come from human nature, and by that logic every human inventor would be a god.
19. 19Idolaters carve gods in the shapes of men and beasts, as Romans 1 says, and their philosophers defend images as channels for the divine or for angels.
20. 20Neither the material, nor the form, nor the art of an image can be the means of God’s appearing; on any of these grounds idolatry refutes itself.
21. 21If images are only like letters through which angels are invoked, the idolaters wrongly give them God’s name and honor, and should rather honor their makers.
22. 22The mixed and contradictory forms given to the gods, and the bodily shapes that need human repair, show that idols cannot represent the incorporeal and immortal God.
23. 23Every nation, city, and village worships different and contradictory gods, as in Egypt, because people who have turned from the one God and his Word wander in many directions.
24. 24Since one people’s gods are another people’s sacrifices, libations, or washing water, all these gods destroy one another.
25. 25Human sacrifice among Scythians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Cretans, and early Romans shows the cruelty of demon-gods, whose worshipers imitate their murders and licentiousness.
26. 26Temple prostitution, ritual emasculation, and the vices described in Romans 1 are learned from gods whose own myths are full of the same deeds.
27. 27Against those who worship the cosmos, Athanasius argues that each part of creation, from the sun to the winds and the elements, depends on the others and so points to its Maker.
28. 28Neither the parts of creation nor the cosmos as a composite whole can be God, since God is not composed of unlike parts but is the maker of all composition.
29. 29Since the parts of creation hinder and overcome one another, they cannot be gods; having refuted error, Athanasius turns to the Word of the Father, through whom the Father is known.
30. 30The road to the true God lies within each person, in the rational soul, which Athanasius now sets out to prove exists.
31. 31The human soul is rational, as shown by deliberate choice, by the mind’s judging the senses as a musician governs a lyre, and by thought ranging beyond the body.
32. 32Thoughts of immortality and the mind’s control over the senses show that a rational soul governs the body, as a rider drives a horse.
33. 33The soul is immortal, for it moves itself, its movement is its life, and even in the body it reaches beyond the body to eternal things.
34. 34The soul made in God’s image can return to God by cleansing itself of desire and beholding the Word, the Father’s image, as in a mirror; creation also proclaims its Maker.
35. 35God, invisible by nature, ordered creation through his Word so that he might be known from his works, as Paul teaches in Romans 1 and Acts 14.
36. 36The harmony of opposite elements, seasons, waters, earth, and sexes shows one power above them that joins and governs them.
37. 37Opposite elements could not combine into an ordered world unless a superior Lord bound them together; left to strife they would produce only chaos.
38. 38As an orderly city implies a ruler and a harmonious lyre one musician, the ordered cosmos shows one ruler, the Word, not many gods.
39. 39There is one world, and so one maker; many makers would imply weakness, vanity, and disorder, like a ship with many helmsmen.
40. 40The one Maker is the Father of Christ, who orders all things through his own Word and Wisdom, not a seminal principle or a spoken word but the living God the Word.
41. 41The Word, the unchanging image of the Father and not composite like a human word, holds creation in being, which by its own nature would dissolve into nothing.
42. 42The Word pervades and holds all things together, blending opposite elements into one harmony, like a musician playing the universe as a lyre (John 1:1–3).
43. 43Three images, a choir under its leader, the soul moving the senses, and a city under its king, illustrate how the Word moves all creation at once.
44. 44By the Word’s single nod the heavens, the elements, the seasons, all living things, and the invisible powers are moved and held together, to make the Father known.
45. 45As a word reveals the mind, the Word reveals the Father; Scripture forbids idols and the worship of the heavenly bodies, which were given so that the nations might know their Maker.
46. 46Scripture teaches the one God and his providence through the Word, to whom the Father spoke at creation (“Let us make man”); the Son is the Father’s own Wisdom, Word, and Power, not by participation.
47. 47The Word, through whom the Father orders all things, is revealed daily in creation; those who honor creation instead of its Maker are senseless, while faith in Christ bears the fruit of immortality.