A Plea for the Christians 5

Poets and philosophers were not thought to be atheists when they turned their minds to God. Euripides, puzzled about those who are ignorantly called gods according to common opinion, says: “If Zeus is in heaven, he ought not to make the same man unhappy.” But concerning the one who is apprehended by knowledge, he teaches as the mind understands it: “Do you see this boundless ether on high, which holds the earth around in its moist embrace? Think this is Zeus; consider this to be God.” For of the former he saw neither real substances underlying them, to which the name is applied (“Zeus, whoever Zeus is, I do not know, except by hearsay”), nor names applied to things that really exist (for where there are no real substances, what more is there than names?). But the other he apprehended from his works, taking the visible things, air, ether, and earth, as a view of what is unseen. So he understood that the one whose works these are, and by whose spirit they are guided, is God. Sophocles agrees with him: “One, in truth, one is God, who made the heaven and the broad earth.” He teaches, with regard to the nature of God, that both heaven and earth are filled with his beauty, and where God must be, and that he must be one.