A Plea for the Christians 16–24

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.

In making a defense I must give more precise arguments both about the names of the gods, to show that they are recent, and about their images, to show that they came into being yesterday or the day before, so to speak. You yourselves know these things better, since you are in every respect conversant with the ancient writers, more than anyone else. I say, then, that Orpheus, Homer, and Hesiod are the ones who gave genealogies and names to those they call gods. Herodotus too bears witness: “I think that Hesiod and Homer lived four hundred years before my time, and not more; and it was they who made a theogony for the Greeks, gave the gods their titles, distributed their honors and skills, and described their forms.” As for images, they were not even thought of as long as there was no modeling, painting, or sculpture, until Saurias of Samos, Craton of Sicyon, Cleanthes of Corinth, and the Corinthian girl came along. Shadow-drawing was invented by Saurias, who traced the outline of a horse in the sunlight; painting by Craton, who painted the shadows of a man and a woman on a whitened tablet; and modeling in relief was invented by the girl. She was in love with someone, and traced the outline of his shadow on the wall while he slept; then her father, delighted with the exact likeness (he was a potter), cut out the outline and filled it in with clay; the figure is preserved at Corinth to this day. After these came Daedalus and Theodorus of Miletus, who further invented sculpture and modeling. So short is the time since images and the making of idols began that we can name the craftsman of each god. The Artemis at Ephesus, the Athena (or rather Athela, as those who speak more mystically call her, for such was the ancient statue made from the olive), and the seated Athena were made by Endoeus, a pupil of Daedalus; the Pythian Apollo is the work of Theodorus and Telecles; the Delian Apollo and Artemis are the art of Tectaeus and Angelion; the Hera at Samos and the one at Argos are by the hands of Smilis; the other idols are by Phidias; the Aphrodite at Cnidus is another work of Praxiteles's art; the Asclepius at Epidaurus is the work of Phidias. In short, not one of them escapes having been made by a human being. If, then, they are gods, why did they not exist from the beginning? Why are they younger than those who made them? Why did they need human beings and art in order to come into being? They are earth and stones and matter and elaborate art.

Some say that these are only images, and that the gods are those whom the images represent; that the processions and sacrifices offered to the images are referred to those gods and are made for them; and that there is no other way of approaching the gods (“hard are the gods to see in their true form”); and as proof that this is so they offer the workings of certain idols. Let us, then, examine the power attached to their names. But I must beg you, greatest of emperors, before I speak, to forgive me for offering true arguments. For it is not my purpose to refute the idols, but, clearing away the slanders, to give an account of the way of life we have chosen. You may examine the heavenly kingdom by your own example. For just as all things are subject to you, father and son, who have received your kingdom from above (“for the king's soul is in the hand of God,” says the prophetic Spirit), so all things are subordinated to the one God and to the Word that comes from him, understood as his Son, inseparable from him. Consider this above all. The gods, as they say, did not exist from the beginning; each of them came into being just as we do. And on this they all agree. Homer says: “Ocean, origin of the gods, and mother Tethys.” And Orpheus (who first discovered their names, recounted their births, and told what each of them did, who is believed among them to speak more truly about the gods, and whom Homer follows in most things, especially concerning the gods) also makes their first origin from water: “Ocean, who is the origin of all.” According to him water was the beginning of all things; from water, mud was formed; and from both was born a living creature, a serpent with the head of a lion growing on it, and between them the face of a god, named Heracles and Kronos. This Heracles produced an enormous egg, which, filled by the force of its begetter, broke in two from the friction. The upper part became heaven, and the part that fell down became earth. There came forth also the goddess Earth, with a body; and Heaven, uniting with Earth, begets the females Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, and the males, the hundred-handed Cottus, Gyges, and Briareus, and the Cyclopes Brontes, Steropes, and Argus. These he bound and cast into Tartarus, having learned that he would be deposed from his rule by his children. For this reason Earth in her anger bore the Titans: “Lady Earth bore the sons of Heaven, whom they call Titans, because they took vengeance on great starry Heaven.”

This is how, according to them, the generation of their gods and of the universe began. What follows, then? Each of the beings they have made into gods is thought of as having a beginning. And if they came into being, not having existed before, as those who tell of the gods say, then they are not gods. For a thing is either uncreated and eternal, or created and perishable. And this is not just my view, while the philosophers think otherwise: “What is it that always is and has no becoming, and what is it that comes to be but never is?” Plato, discussing the intelligible and the perceptible, teaches that what always is, the intelligible, is uncreated, while what is not, the perceptible, is created, beginning to be and ceasing to be. In line with this reasoning the Stoics too say that all things will be consumed by fire and will exist again, the world taking another beginning. But according to them there is a twofold cause: one active and initiating, namely providence, the other passive and changeable, namely matter; and it is impossible for the world, even under providence, to remain as it is, since it came into being. If so, how can the constitution of these gods remain, when they do not exist by nature but came into being? And how are the gods better than matter, when they derive their constitution from water? Yet not even according to them is water the beginning of all things. For what could be constituted from simple elements of a single kind? Matter needs a craftsman, and the craftsman needs matter. Or how could figures be shaped without matter or without a craftsman? Nor is it reasonable that matter should be older than God; for the efficient cause must come before the things that come into being.

If the implausibility of their theology went no further than saying that the gods came into being and were formed from water, I would have shown that nothing created is not also dissoluble, and gone on to the remaining charges. But they have described the gods' bodies. They say that Heracles is a god in the form of a coiled serpent; they speak of the hundred-handed ones; and of the daughter whom Zeus fathered by his mother Rhea, or Demeter, they say that she had two eyes in the natural place and two on her forehead, and a second face at the back of her neck, and horns as well, so that Rhea, frightened at the monstrous child, fled and did not give her the breast (θηλή); hence she is called Athela in the mysteries, but commonly Persephone and Kore, and is not the same as Athena, who is named from the pupil of the eye (κόρη). And they have recounted their deeds in detail, as they think: how Kronos cut off his father's genitals and threw him down from his chariot, and how he murdered his children by swallowing the males; how Zeus bound his father and cast him into Tartarus, as Heaven had done to his sons, and fought the Titans for the rule; how he pursued his mother Rhea when she forbade him to marry, and when she became a she-serpent he too changed into a serpent, bound her with the so-called Heraclean knot, and had intercourse with her (the staff of Hermes is the symbol of the form of that union); and then how he violated his daughter Persephone, again in the form of a serpent, and had by her a son, Dionysus. I must say at least this much: what is venerable or good in such a story, that we should believe Kronos, Zeus, Kore, and the rest to be gods? The shapes of their bodies? What man of judgment, trained in contemplation, would believe that a viper was begotten by a god (Orpheus says: “But Phanes brought forth another offspring, terrible, from his holy womb, a viper fearful to behold, whose hair from its head and fair face were lovely to see, but the other parts were those of a dreadful serpent, from the top of the neck down”)? Or who would accept that Phanes himself, a first-born god (for he is the one who was poured out from the egg), had the body or shape of a serpent, or was swallowed by Zeus so that Zeus might become boundless? If they differ in nothing from the lowest beasts (for clearly the divine must differ from earthly things and from what is formed out of matter), they are not gods. Why then should we approach beings whose birth is like that of cattle, and who are themselves beast-shaped and ugly?

And yet, if they had only said that the gods were fleshly and had blood and seed and passions of anger and desire, even then one ought to consider such stories nonsense and laughable; for in God there is neither anger, nor desire and appetite, nor seed for begetting children. Let them be fleshly, then, but above wrath and anger, so that Athena may not be seen “angry with father Zeus, and savage wrath seized her,” nor Hera be looked on thus: “Hera's breast could not contain her anger, but she spoke.” Let them be above grief: “Alas, a man dear to me I see with my eyes pursued around the wall; my heart laments.” I call even human beings ignorant and boorish who give way to anger and grief. But when “the father of men and gods” laments his son: “Woe is me, that it is fated for Sarpedon, dearest of men to me, to be slain by Patroclus son of Menoetius!” and for all his lamenting cannot snatch him from danger: “Sarpedon, son of Zeus; but he does not help even his own son”; who would not blame the ignorance of those who, on the strength of such myths, are lovers of the gods, or rather godless? Let them be fleshly, but let not Aphrodite be wounded in body by Diomedes: “The son of Tydeus, high-spirited Diomedes, wounded me,” nor in soul by Ares: “How Zeus's daughter Aphrodite always dishonors me, because I am lame, and loves destructive Ares”; “and he tore her fair skin.” The one who is terrible in war, Zeus's ally against the Titans, shows himself weaker than Diomedes. “He raged like Ares wielding the spear.” Be silent, Homer; a god does not rage. But you describe the god to me as bloodstained and a bane to mortals, “Ares, Ares, bane of mortals, bloodstained,” and you tell of his adultery and his bonds: “The two went to bed and slept, and about them were poured the cunning bonds of wise Hephaestus, and they could not move a limb.” Will they not give up this great and impious nonsense about the gods? Heaven is castrated; Kronos is bound and cast into Tartarus; the Titans revolt; Styx dies in the battle: so they even show that the gods are mortal. They love one another; they love human beings: “Aeneas, whom divine Aphrodite bore to Anchises, the goddess lying with a mortal in the glens of Ida.” Do they not love? Do they not suffer? Surely, if they were gods, desire would not touch them! Even if God takes flesh by a divine dispensation, is he therefore a slave of desire? “For never yet did love of goddess or woman so flood and overpower the heart in my breast: not when I loved the wife of Ixion, nor when I loved Danae of the fair ankles, daughter of Acrisius, nor the daughter of far-famed Phoenix, nor Semele, nor Alcmene in Thebes, nor Demeter, the fair-haired queen, nor glorious Leto, nor you yourself.” He is created, he is perishable, having nothing of God in him. They even serve human beings for hire: “O house of Admetus, in which I endured to accept a menial's table, god though I am”; and they herd cattle: “Coming to this land I tended cattle for my host, and kept this house safe.” So Admetus is superior to the god! O prophet and sage, who foreknows the future for others, you did not foresee the killing of your beloved, but even killed your friend with your own hand. “And I hoped that the divine mouth of Phoebus was free of falsehood, teeming with prophetic art” (so Aeschylus reproaches Apollo as a false prophet); “yet he who sang, he who was present at the feast, he who said these things, he it is who killed my son.”

But perhaps these are errors of the poets, and there is a scientific account of them, such as this: “Shining Zeus” (as Empedocles says) “and life-bringing Hera and Aidoneus, and Nestis, who with her tears moistens the springs of mortals.” If, then, Zeus is fire, Hera earth, Aidoneus air, and Nestis water, and these are elements, fire, water, and air, none of them is a god, neither Zeus nor Hera nor Aidoneus; for their constitution and origin come from matter separated out by God: “Fire and water and earth and the gentle height of air, and love together with them.” Since these cannot remain without love, but are thrown into confusion by strife, how could anyone say that they are gods? According to Empedocles love is the ruling principle and the compounds are ruled, and the ruling principle is master; so that if we suppose that the ruled and the ruler have one and the same power, we shall unwittingly make perishable, fluid, and changeable matter equal in honor to God, who is uncreated, eternal, and always consistent with himself. According to the Stoics, Zeus is the seething (ζέουσα) substance, Hera is the air (ἀήρ), as the name shows if it is joined to itself and pronounced continuously, and Poseidon is drink (πόσις). Others explain nature in other ways: some say that Zeus is air of a double nature, male and female; others that he is the season that turns the weather to mildness, which is why he alone escaped Kronos. But to the Stoics one may say: if you consider the supreme God to be one, uncreated and eternal, and the compounds to be changes of matter, and you say that the spirit of God, pervading matter, takes different names according to its variations, then the forms of matter will be the body of God; and when the elements perish in the conflagration, the names must perish together with the forms, and only the spirit of God will remain. Who, then, would believe that bodies whose material variation is perishable are gods? There are those who say that Kronos is time (χρόνος) and Rhea the earth: she conceives by Kronos and gives birth, and so she is considered the mother of all; he begets and consumes. The castration, they say, is the intercourse of male with female, which cuts off and casts seed into the womb and begets a human being who has desire, that is, Aphrodite, within himself; the madness of Kronos is the turning of the seasons, which destroys things animate and inanimate; and the bonds and Tartarus are time, changed by the seasons and vanishing from sight. To these we say: if Kronos is time, he changes; if a season, he turns; if darkness or frost or moist substance, none of these remains. But the divine is immortal, unmoved, and unchangeable; so neither Kronos nor his image is a god. As for Zeus, if he is air born from Kronos, whose male part is Zeus and female part Hera (which is why she is both his sister and his wife), he is subject to change; if a season, he turns; but the divine neither changes nor falls away. Why should I trouble you by saying more? You know better what each of the natural philosophers has said, what the writers on nature have thought, what they say about Athena, whom they call wisdom pervading all things, about Isis, whom they call the nature of the ages, from whom all things have sprung and through whom all things exist, or about Osiris, who was slain by his brother Typhon, and whose limbs Isis sought with her son Horus, and when she had found them prepared them for burial, a burial still called Osirian to this day. Turning up and down among the forms of matter, they fall away from God, who is contemplated by reason; they deify the elements and their parts, giving them now one name and now another: the sowing of grain they call Osiris (hence, they say, in the mysteries it was said to Isis at the finding of the limbs, or of the crops, “We have found, we rejoice together!”), the fruit of the vine Dionysus, the vine itself Semele, and the heat of the sun the thunderbolt. And yet those who turn the myths into gods do anything but theology, not realizing that by their very defense of the gods they confirm the charges against them. What have Europa and the Bull, the Swan and Leda, to do with earth and air, that Zeus's foul union with them should be the union of earth and air? But falling short of the greatness of God and unable to rise above it by reason (for they have no affinity with the heavenly place), they have melted away into the forms of matter, and in their fall deify the changes of the elements; as if someone were to take the ship in which he sailed for the pilot. But just as a ship, however well equipped, is of no use without its pilot, so the elements, however well ordered, are of no use without the providence of God. For the ship will not sail by itself, and the elements will not move without their Maker.

You who surpass everyone in understanding might say: “Why, then, do some of the idols work, if those for whom we set up the statues are not gods? It is not likely that lifeless and motionless images have power by themselves, without something to move them.” That in certain places, cities, and nations some effects are produced in the name of idols, we too do not deny. But if some people have been helped and others harmed, we will not for that reason consider gods those who produced the effects in either case. We have examined precisely both why you think the idols have power, and who they are that produce the effects, trading on the idols' names. As I am about to show who works through the idols, and that they are not gods, I must call on some witnesses from philosophy as well. Thales first divides beings, as those who have studied him closely record, into God, demons, and heroes. By God he means the mind of the world; by demons he understands beings of the nature of soul; and by heroes the separated souls of human beings, the good heroes being good souls and the bad ones evil souls. Plato, suspending judgment on other matters, also divides them into the uncreated God, those made by the uncreated God to adorn the heaven, namely the planets and the fixed stars, and demons. About these demons he himself declines to speak, but thinks it right to heed those who have spoken of them: “To speak about the other demons and to know their origin is beyond us; but we must believe those who have spoken before, who were, as they said, offspring of the gods, and who surely knew their own ancestors. It is impossible, then, to disbelieve the children of gods, even if they speak without plausible or necessary proofs; since they claim to be reporting family matters, we must follow custom and believe them. So, then, according to them, let the origin of these gods be held and told as follows: of Earth and Heaven were born Ocean and Tethys; of these Phorcys, Kronos, and Rhea, and those with them; of Kronos and Rhea, Zeus and Hera and all those whom we know to be called their brothers and sisters, and further others, their descendants.” Now Plato conceived of the eternal Mind and of God grasped by reason, and declared his attributes: true being, the single nature, the good flowing from him, which is truth; he spoke of the first power, and said that “all things are about the King of all, and all things are for his sake, and he is the cause of all,” and of the second and the third: “the second about the second things, and the third about the third.” Did such a man think it beyond him to learn the truth about beings said to have come from perceptible things, earth and heaven? It cannot be said. But because he thought it impossible for gods to beget and be born, since an end follows whatever comes into being, and, what is even more impossible, to change the minds of the many, who accept the myths without examining them, for these reasons he said that it was beyond him to know and to speak of the origin of the other demons, since he could neither learn nor declare that gods are begotten. And his saying, “The great leader in heaven, Zeus, driving a winged chariot, goes first, ordering all things and caring for them, and there follows him a host of gods and demons,” does not refer to the Zeus said to be born of Kronos. Here the name belongs to the Maker of all things. Plato himself makes this clear: having no other name to signify him, he used the popular name, not as proper to God but for the sake of clarity, since it is not possible to present God to everyone as he really is; and he added the word “great” to distinguish the heavenly from the earthly, the uncreated from the created, who is younger than heaven and earth, and younger than the Cretans, who stole him away so that he would not be killed by his father.

Why need I mention the poets, or examine other opinions, before you who have explored every branch of learning? It is enough to say this much. If the poets and philosophers did not acknowledge that God is one, and did not think of these other beings, some as demons, some as matter, and some as having been human beings, then we might with reason be driven out, since we use a reasoning that distinguishes God from matter and from their substances. For just as we say that there is God, and the Son, his Word, and the Holy Spirit, united in power, the Father, the Son, the Spirit, because the Son is the mind, word, and wisdom of the Father, and the Spirit an effluence, as light from fire; so we have come to understand that there are also other powers, which are concerned with matter and act through it. One of these is hostile to God: not because there is anything that stands opposed to God as strife opposes love in Empedocles, or as night opposes day in the visible world (for if anything had set itself against God, it would have ceased to exist, its constitution dissolved by the power and might of God), but because the spirit that is concerned with matter is opposed to the goodness of God. That goodness is an attribute of God and coexists with him, as color with a body, without which the body does not exist (not as though it were a part of him, but as a property that necessarily accompanies him, united and blended with him, as yellow belongs to fire and blue to the sky). This spirit was made by God, just as the other angels were made by him, and was entrusted with the governance of matter and of the forms of matter. For this is why the angels were constituted: they were made by God to exercise providence over the things he had ordered, so that God might have the universal and general providence over all things, and the angels appointed over particular things the providence over them. With human beings, virtue and vice are a matter of free choice (for you would neither honor the good nor punish the wicked unless vice and virtue were in their own power; and some are found diligent in the tasks you entrust to them, others unfaithful); and it is the same with the angels. Some, being free, as God had made them, remained in the tasks for which God made and appointed them; but others outraged both the constitution of their nature and their office. Among these were this ruler of matter and of the forms in it, and others of those placed around this first firmament (you know that we say nothing without witnesses, but declare what the prophets have spoken). These others fell into desire for virgins and were found weaker than the flesh; and he became negligent and wicked in the governance of what had been entrusted to him. From those who went after the virgins were born the so-called giants. And if the poets too tell a partial story about the giants, do not be surprised. Worldly wisdom and divine wisdom differ as truth differs from plausibility, the one being heavenly and the other earthly; and, as the ruler of matter puts it, “We know how to tell many lies that resemble the truth.”