A Plea for the Christians 16

The world is beautiful: it excels in its size, in the arrangement of the stars in the oblique circle and around the Bear, and in its spherical shape. Yet it is not the world but its Artificer who is to be worshiped. When your subjects come to you, they do not neglect to pay court to you, their rulers and masters, from whom they obtain whatever they need, and take refuge in the magnificence of your residence instead. When they come upon the royal residence they admire its fine decoration in passing, but to you they give glory as all in all. You kings furnish your residences for yourselves; but the world did not come into being because God needed it. For God is himself everything to himself: light unapproachable, a perfect world, spirit, power, Word. If, then, the world is a well-tuned instrument moving in rhythm, I worship the one who tuned it, who strikes its notes and sings the harmonious melody, not the instrument; for at the contests the judges do not pass over the lyre-players and crown their lyres. Whether, as Plato says, the world is God's work of art, I admire its beauty and approach the Artificer; or whether it is substance and body, as the Peripatetics say, we do not neglect to worship God, the cause of the body's motion, and fall down before the poor and weak elements, worshiping passive matter instead of what they call the impassive ether; or whether one takes the parts of the world to be powers of God, we do not approach and serve the powers, but their Maker and Lord. I do not ask of matter what it does not have, nor do I pass over God to serve the elements, which can do nothing beyond what they were commanded; for even if they are beautiful to look at through the art of their Creator, in themselves they have the nature of matter. Plato too bears witness to this argument: “What we call heaven and the world,” he says, “has received many blessings from the Father; yet it shares in a body, and so it cannot be free of change.” If, then, while admiring the heavens and the elements for their workmanship, I do not worship them as gods, knowing that the principle of dissolution is in them, how can I call gods the things whose makers I know to be human beings? Consider this with me briefly.