Exhortation to the Greeks 1.1–2.21

Amphion of Thebes and Arion of Methymna were both singers (both are myths, and the song is still sung by a chorus of Greeks): by their musical art the one lured a fish, and the other built the walls of Thebes. Another sophist, a Thracian (another Greek myth, this), tamed wild beasts by his song alone, and even moved trees, the oaks, by music. I could tell you another myth too, and another singer, brother to these: Eunomus the Locrian and the Pythian cicada. A Greek festival was being held at Pytho over a dead serpent, and Eunomus was singing the reptile's funeral ode. Whether his song was a hymn or a dirge for the serpent, I cannot say; but there was a contest, and Eunomus was playing the lyre in the heat of the day, when the cicadas were singing under the leaves on the hills, warmed by the sun. They were singing, of course, not to the dead serpent of Pytho, but to the all-wise God, a song of their own making, better than the tunes of Eunomus. A string breaks for the Locrian; the cicada flies onto the crossbar of the lyre and chirps on the instrument as if on a branch; and the singer, fitting himself to the cicada's song, made up for the missing string. So the cicada was not drawn by the song of Eunomus, as the myth would have it, which set up at Pytho a bronze statue of Eunomus with his lyre and the Locrian's fellow competitor. It flew there of its own accord and sang of its own accord; yet to the Greeks it seems to have been a performer of music.

How is it, then, that you have believed empty myths, supposing that animals are charmed by music, while the bright face of truth alone, it seems, looks to you like a mask and falls under the eyes of unbelief? Cithaeron and Helicon, and the mountains of the Odrysians and the Thracians, the initiation halls of error, have been made divine and celebrated in hymns because of the mysteries. For my part, even if they are myths, I cannot bear so many calamities turned into tragedy; but for you even the records of evils have become dramas, and the actors of the dramas a delightful spectacle. But let us shut up the dramas and the poets of the Lenaean festival, who are by now quite drunk, crowned with ivy, raving wildly in Bacchic rites, satyrs and frenzied throng and the rest of the chorus of demons, on Helicon and Cithaeron, which have grown old; and let us bring truth down from heaven above, together with most radiant wisdom, to the holy mountain of God and to the holy chorus of the prophets. Let truth, shining out her far-flashing light, illumine on every side those who wallow in darkness, and set people free from error, stretching out her right hand, understanding, which is supreme, for their salvation. And let them look up and lift their heads, and leave Helicon and Cithaeron and dwell in Zion: “for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem,” the heavenly Word, the true contestant, crowned on the stage of the whole world. My Eunomus sings neither the tune of Terpander nor that of Capion, nor the Phrygian or Lydian or Dorian mode, but the eternal tune of the new harmony, which bears the name of God, the new song, the song of the Levites. “Soothing grief and anger, bringing forgetfulness of all ills,” a sweet and true remedy for sorrow is blended with this song.

It seems to me, then, that the Thracian [Orpheus], the Theban, and the Methymnaean, men and yet not men, were deceivers. Under the pretext of music they ruined human life; possessed by demons, with a kind of artful sorcery, they led people to corruption, celebrating outrages as sacred rites and making gods of sorrows. They were the first to lead human beings by the hand to idols, and indeed to build up, with stones and wood, that is, with statues and paintings, the stupidity of custom; with songs and incantations they yoked that truly noble freedom of those who live as citizens under heaven to the most abject slavery. But my singer is not of that kind: he has come to put an end, and that without delay, to the bitter slavery of the tyrant demons; and bringing us over to the gentle and kindly yoke of godliness, he calls back to heaven those who had been cast down to the earth.

He alone of all who ever lived has tamed the most intractable of wild beasts, human beings: birds, the flighty among them; reptiles, the deceivers; lions, the passionate; swine, the lovers of pleasure; wolves, the rapacious. Stones and wood are the senseless; indeed a human being steeped in ignorance is more insensible than stones. Let the prophetic voice come forward as our witness, singing in harmony with the truth and pitying those who are worn down by ignorance and folly: “For God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” He, taking pity on the great ignorance and hardness of heart of those who had been turned to stone against the truth, raised up from those stones, the nations who had trusted in stones, a seed of godliness, responsive to virtue. Again, he somewhere called certain venomous and treacherous hypocrites, who lie in wait for righteousness, a “brood of vipers”; yet if even one of these serpents repents of his own accord and follows the Word, he becomes “a man of God.” Others he calls, figuratively, “wolves” clothed in sheepskins, hinting at those who are rapacious in human form. And all these most savage beasts, and such stones as these, the heavenly song itself has transformed into gentle human beings. “For we too were once foolish, disobedient, deceived, slaves to various passions and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another,” as the apostolic writing says; “but when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, not by works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy he saved us.” See how powerful the new song is! It has made human beings out of stones and human beings out of beasts.

Those who were otherwise dead, having no share in the life that truly is, came back to life just by becoming hearers of the song. It is this song that set the universe in harmonious order and tuned the discord of the elements into an ordered concord, so that the whole world might become a harmony to him. He let the sea go free, yet kept it from encroaching on the land; and the land, which was being swept away, he made firm and fixed as a boundary for the sea. He softened the rush of fire with air, as if blending the Dorian mode with the Lydian; and he tamed the harsh cold of air by interweaving it with fire, blending harmoniously these extreme notes of the universe. And this pure song, the support of the universe and the harmony of all things, stretching from the center to the ends and from the ends to the center, tuned this whole universe, not according to Thracian music, which is like that of Jubal, but according to the ancestral will of God, which David sought after with zeal. He who is from David and yet before him, the Word of God, disdaining lyre and harp, which are lifeless instruments, has tuned by the Holy Spirit this world, and especially the small world, the human being, soul and body; and on this many-voiced instrument he makes music to God, and sings to the instrument, the human being. “For you are my harp and flute and temple”: a harp because of its harmony, a flute because of its breath, a temple because of the Word; so that the one may resound, the second breathe, and the third contain the Lord. And King David, the harpist whom we mentioned a little earlier, urged people toward the truth and away from idols. So far was he from hymning the demons that they were driven away by his true music; when Saul was possessed by them, David cured him simply by singing. The Lord fashioned the human being as a beautiful instrument that breathes, after his own image; and he himself is surely God's all-harmonious instrument, melodious and holy, the Wisdom above the world, the heavenly Word.

What, then, does the instrument, the Word of God, the Lord, and the new song desire? To open the eyes of the blind and unstop the ears of the deaf, to lead by the hand into righteousness those who limp or go astray, to show God to foolish people, to put an end to corruption, to conquer death, to reconcile disobedient sons to their Father. God's instrument loves humankind. The Lord pities, disciplines, exhorts, admonishes, saves, and guards, and he promises us, abundantly, the kingdom of heaven as the reward for our learning, taking from us only this benefit: that we are saved. For wickedness feeds on the corruption of human beings; but truth, like the bee, harming nothing that exists, delights only in the salvation of human beings. You have the promise, then; you have his love for humankind; take your share of the grace. And do not suppose that my song of salvation is new in the way that a vessel or a house is new. For it was “before the morning star,” and “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Error is old, but truth appears new. Let the mythical goats teach that the Phrygians are ancient, or the poets who record the Arcadians as older than the moon, or those who dream that the Egyptians were the first people, gods and men alike, that this earth brought to light. Yet not one of these existed before this world. But we existed before the foundation of the world: we who, since we were destined to be in him, were begotten beforehand by God. We are the rational creatures of God's Word, and because of him we are older than all, for “in the beginning was the Word.”

But because the Word existed from above, he was and is the divine beginning of all things; and because he has now taken the name hallowed of old and worthy of his power, the Christ, I have called him a new song. The Word, the Christ, is the cause both of our being long ago (for he was in God) and of our well-being. Now this same Word has appeared to human beings, he who alone is both, God and man, the cause of all good things for us; learning from him how to live well, we are sent on our way to eternal life. For, as that inspired apostle of the Lord says, “the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” This is the new song: the appearing, which has now shone out among us, of the Word who was in the beginning and existed before all things. The Savior who existed before has recently appeared; he who is in the One who is has appeared, because “the Word was with God” as teacher; the Word by whom all things were made has appeared. He who, as Creator, gave us life in the beginning when he formed us, taught us to live well when he appeared as teacher, so that afterward, as God, he might supply eternal life. It was not now for the first time that he pitied us for our error; he pitied us from the very beginning; but now, by appearing, he has saved us when we were already perishing. For that wicked, creeping beast enslaves human beings by sorcery and torments them even now, taking vengeance, it seems to me, in the manner of the barbarians, who are said to bind their captives to corpses until they rot together. This wicked tyrant and dragon, then, takes those he can claim from birth, binds them by the wretched bond of superstition to stones and wood and statues and such idols, and carries them off, as the saying goes, and buries them alive, until they perish together. For this reason, since the deceiver is one, who from the beginning brought Eve, and now also the rest of humankind, down to death, our helper and defender, the Lord, is also one; he foretold it prophetically from the beginning, and now also …

… plainly calls us to salvation. Let us flee, then, obeying the apostle's command, from “the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now at work in the sons of disobedience,” and let us run to our Savior, the Lord, who both now and always has urged us toward salvation: through wonders and signs in Egypt, and in the desert through the bush and through the cloud that, by the grace of his love for humankind, followed the Hebrews like a handmaid. By the fear these inspired he urged the hard-hearted; and now, through Moses the all-wise, Isaiah the lover of truth, and the whole chorus of prophets, he turns to the Word, in a more reasonable way, those who have ears. Sometimes he rebukes, sometimes he threatens; some people he mourns over; to others he sings, like a good physician who, for diseased bodies, puts poultices on some parts, soothes others, bathes others, cuts others with the knife, cauterizes others, and in some cases amputates, if in any way he can make the patient healthy, even at the cost of a part or a limb. The Savior has many voices and many ways for the salvation of human beings. He threatens in order to admonish; he rebukes in order to convert; he mourns in order to show pity; he sings in order to encourage. He speaks through the bush (those people needed signs and wonders), and he frightens human beings with fire, kindling the flame from the pillar, a token of grace and of fear together: if you obey, the light; if you disobey, the fire. But since the flesh is more honorable than the pillar and the bush, after those things the prophets speak: the Lord himself speaking in Isaiah, himself in Elijah, himself in the mouth of the prophets. But if you do not believe the prophets, and take both the men and the fire for a myth, the Lord himself will speak to you, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself,” the compassionate God, longing to save the human being. And the Word himself now speaks to you plainly, putting your unbelief to shame; yes, I say, the Word of God became a human being, so that you too may learn from a human being how a human being may become …

… God. Is it not absurd, then, my friends, that God should always be urging us toward virtue, while we shrink from the benefit and put off our salvation? Does not John too call us to salvation, and become wholly a voice of exhortation? Let us ask him, then: “Who are you, and where are you from?” He will not say that he is Elijah, and he will deny that he is the Christ; but he will confess that he is “a voice crying in the wilderness.” Who, then, is John? To put it figuratively, let us say: the exhorting voice of the Word, crying in the wilderness. What do you cry, O voice? “Tell us too.” “Make straight the ways of the Lord.” John is the forerunner, and the voice is the forerunner of the Word: an encouraging voice, preparing for salvation, a voice urging us toward the inheritance of heaven; through it the barren and desert land is no longer childless. This pregnancy was foretold to me by the voice of an angel, which was also a forerunner of the Lord, bringing good news to a barren woman, as John did to the desert. Because of this voice of the Word, then, the barren woman is blessed with children and the desert bears fruit. The two voices that went before the Lord, the angel's and John's, hint to me at the salvation laid up for us: that when this Word has appeared, we reap the fruit of fruitfulness, eternal life. Scripture brings both voices together and makes everything clear: “Let her hear who does not bear; let her break into a cry who is not in labor; for the children of the desolate one are more than those of her who has a husband.” To us the angel brought good news; us John urged to recognize the farmer and to seek the husband. For he is one and the same, the husband of the barren woman and the farmer of the desert, who filled both the barren woman and the desert with divine power. The noble woman had many children, but the Hebrew woman, once the mother of many, had become childless through disobedience; so the barren woman receives the husband and the desert the farmer. Then the one becomes a mother of fruits, the other of believers, both through the Word; but for unbelievers the barren woman and the desert remain barren even now.

John, the herald of the Word, exhorted people in this way to be ready for the coming of God, the Christ; and this was what the silence of Zechariah hinted at, as it waited for the fruit that would go before Christ, so that the light of truth, the Word, might break the mystic silence of the prophetic riddles by becoming the Gospel. But you, if you long to see God truly, take part in purifications worthy of God: not with laurel leaves and fillets embroidered with wool and purple, but crowning yourself with righteousness and wreathing your head with the leaves of self-control; and seek out Christ. “For I am the door,” he says somewhere. Those who wish to know God must learn to know this door, so that he may throw open for us all at once the gates of heaven; for the gates of the Word are gates of reason, opened by the key of faith. “No one knows God except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son reveals him.” And I know well that he who opens the door that has been shut until now afterward reveals what is inside, and shows what could not be known before, except by those who have made their way through Christ, through whom alone God is beheld.

Do not, then, pry into godless sanctuaries, or into the mouths of chasms full of marvels, or the Thesprotian cauldron, or the Cirrhaean tripod, or the bronze gong of Dodona. Leave the old oak honored in the desert sands, and the oracle there, withered along with the oak itself, to the myths that have grown old. The Castalian spring has fallen silent, and so has the other spring, at Colophon; the other prophetic streams too have died, and, empty of their pretension, have at last, though late, been shown up as having dried up together with their own myths. Tell us of the useless oracles of the rest of that divination, or rather madness: the Clarian, the Pythian, the Didymaean, the oracles of Amphiaraus, of † Apollo, of Amphilochus; and, if you like, put in the same unholy company the readers of portents and the watchers of birds and the interpreters of dreams. Set beside the Pythian those who divine by flour and by barley, and the ventriloquists who are still honored by the many. Yes, let the sanctuaries of the Egyptians and the necromancies of the Etruscans be consigned to darkness. These are truly the mad schools of unbelieving men and the gambling dens of undiluted error. Partners in this sorcery are goats trained for divination, and ravens taught by men to give oracles to men.

What if I were to go through the mysteries for you? I will not mock them by dancing them out in public, as they say Alcibiades did; but I will strip bare, according to the word of truth, the sorcery hidden in them, and I will wheel out your so-called gods themselves, whose mystic rites these are, as on the stage of life, before the spectators of truth. The Bacchants hold orgies in honor of the frenzied Dionysus, celebrating their sacred madness by eating raw flesh; wreathed with snakes, they complete the sharing out of the flesh of their slaughtered victims, shrieking out “Eua!”, the Eve through whom error came in; and the emblem of the Bacchic orgies is a consecrated serpent. Indeed, according to the precise Hebrew pronunciation, the name “Hevia,” with a rough breathing, means “the female serpent.” Demeter and Kore have become a mystic drama, and Eleusis celebrates with torches their wandering, the abduction, and their grief.

And it seems to me that the orgies and the mysteries should be explained by their derivation: the “orgies” (ὄργια) from the wrath (ὀργή) of Demeter against Zeus, and the “mysteries” (μυστήρια) from the pollution (μύσος) that took place in connection with Dionysus. And if they come from a certain Myous of Attica, who, Apollodorus says, was killed while hunting, I do not grudge you that: your mysteries have been glorified with the honors of a funeral. You may also understand them in another way, as “myth-hunts” (μυθήρια), since the letters correspond; for such myths, if anything does, hunt down the most barbarous of the Thracians, the most senseless of the Phrygians, and the superstitious among the Greeks. Perish, then, whoever began this deceit among human beings: whether Dardanus, who introduced the mysteries of the Mother of the gods, or Eetion, who founded the orgies and rites of the Samothracians, or that Phrygian Midas, who learned the artful deceit from the Odrysian and then passed it on to his subjects. Nor would Cinyras, the Cypriot islander, ever persuade me, who dared to bring the lewd orgies of Aphrodite out of the night into the daylight, in his ambition to make a goddess of a harlot of his own city. Others say that Melampus son of Amythaon brought the festivals of Demeter, a grief celebrated in song, from Egypt to Greece. These I would call the authors of evil, the fathers of godless myths and of deadly superstition, who planted the mysteries in human life as a seed of wickedness and corruption.

Now, for it is time, I will prove that your orgies themselves are full of deceit and marvels. And if you have been initiated, you will laugh all the more at these myths of yours that are held in honor. I will proclaim openly what is hidden, not ashamed to say what you are not ashamed to worship. The “foam-born,” the “Cyprus-born,” the darling of Cinyras (I mean Aphrodite, “lover of genitals, because she sprang from the genitals,” those genitals cut off from Uranus, the lustful ones that, after the cutting, violated the wave): see how fitting a fruit of lewd members [Aphrodite] is born to you! In the rites of this pleasure born of the sea, as a token of her birth, a lump of salt and a phallus are given to those initiated into the art of adultery; and the initiates bring her a coin …

… as lovers do to a courtesan. The mysteries of Demeter are Zeus's amorous embraces with his mother Demeter, and the wrath of Demeter (I do not know what else to call her, his mother or his wife), because of which she is said to have been called Brimo; and the supplications of Zeus, and the drink of bile, and the tearing out of hearts, and unspeakable deeds. The Phrygians perform the same rites for Attis and Cybele and the Corybantes. They have spread the tale that Zeus tore off the testicles of a ram and brought them and threw them into Demeter's lap, paying a sham penalty for his violent embrace, as though he had castrated himself. The tokens of this initiation, set out here for good measure, will, I know, move you to laughter even if you are not inclined to laugh, since they expose you: “I ate from the drum; I drank from the cymbal; I carried the sacred dish; I slipped into the bridal chamber.” Are not these tokens an outrage?

Are not the mysteries a mockery? What if I were to add the rest? Demeter conceives, Kore is reared, and this same Zeus who fathered her has intercourse again, with Persephone, his own daughter, after her mother Demeter, forgetting his earlier pollution [Zeus, the father and seducer of the girl]; and he has intercourse with her in the form of a serpent, exposed as what he really was. So in the Sabazian mysteries the token given to the initiates is “the god through the bosom”: this is a serpent, drawn through the bosom of the initiates, a proof of the incontinence of Zeus. Persephone too bears a child in the shape of a bull. Indeed, as a certain idolatrous poet says: “The bull is father of the serpent, and the serpent father of the bull; on the mountain the hidden thing, the herdsman's goad”; by the herdsman's goad, I think, he means the fennel stalk that the Bacchants wreathe.

Shall I tell you of Persephone's flower-gathering, and the basket, and the abduction by Aidoneus, and the chasm in the earth, and the swine of Eubuleus that were swallowed up with the two goddesses, the reason why at the Thesmophoria the women throw pigs into the sacred pits? The women celebrate this myth in various ways in the different cities, in the Thesmophoria, the Scirophoria, and the Arrhetophoria, turning the abduction of Persephone into tragedy in many forms. And the mysteries of Dionysus are utterly inhuman. When he was still a child, the Curetes were dancing around him in armed motion, but the Titans crept in by guile, deceived him with childish toys, and tore him apart while he was still an infant, as the poet of the Initiation, Orpheus the Thracian, says: “Top, and bull-roarer, and dolls with jointed limbs, and fair golden apples from the clear-voiced Hesperides.”

And it is not useless to set before you, for your condemnation, the useless tokens of this rite: a knucklebone, a ball, a spinning top, apples, a bull-roarer, a mirror, a fleece. Athena stole away the heart of Dionysus and was called Pallas from the throbbing (πάλλειν) of the heart. The Titans, who had torn him apart, set a cauldron on a tripod, threw in the limbs of Dionysus, and first boiled them; then they pierced them with spits and “held them over Hephaestus.” Later Zeus appeared (if he was a god, no doubt he had his share of the smell of the roasting flesh, which your gods admit is “the privilege allotted” to them), struck the Titans with the thunderbolt, and entrusted the limbs of Dionysus to his son Apollo to bury. Apollo, not disobeying Zeus, carried the dismembered corpse to Parnassus and laid it there.

If you wish to look also on the orgies of the Corybantes: two of them killed their third brother, covered the head of the corpse with a purple cloth, crowned it, and buried it, carrying it on a bronze shield to the foot of Mount Olympus. And these, in short, are the mysteries: murders and tombs. Their priests, whom those who care to call them so call “Anactotelestae,” add a further marvel to the calamity by forbidding parsley with its root to be put on the table; for they believe that parsley grew from the blood that flowed from the Corybant, just as the women celebrating the Thesmophoria take care not to eat pomegranate seeds that have fallen to the ground, believing that pomegranates sprang from the drops of the blood of Dionysus. They also call the Corybantes Cabiri and proclaim a Cabiric rite. For these two fratricides took up the chest in which the genitals of Dionysus were kept and brought it to Etruria, merchants of a glorious cargo; and there they lived as exiles, handing on to the Etruscans the precious teaching of piety, genitals and a chest, to be worshiped. For this reason some, not unreasonably, would have Dionysus called Attis, since he was deprived of his genitals.

And what wonder is it if the barbarian Etruscans are initiated into such shameful sufferings, when among the Athenians and the rest of Greece (I am ashamed even to say it) the myth of Demeter is full of shame? Demeter, wandering around Eleusis (this place is in Attica) in search of her daughter Kore, grows weary and sits down by a well in her grief. This is forbidden to the initiates even now, so that those who have been initiated may not seem to imitate the mourning goddess. At that time the earthborn lived at Eleusis; their names were Baubo and Dysaules and Triptolemus, and also Eumolpus and Eubuleus. Triptolemus was a cowherd, Eumolpus a shepherd, and Eubuleus a swineherd; from them sprang the hierophantic clans of the Eumolpidae and the Ceryces at Athens. And (for I will not refrain from saying it) Baubo, having received Demeter as her guest, offers her a potion; when she refuses to take it and will not drink (for she was in mourning), Baubo, deeply hurt, as though she had been slighted, uncovers her private parts and shows them to the goddess; and Demeter is delighted at the sight and …

… at last accepts the drink, pleased by the spectacle. These are the secret mysteries of the Athenians. Orpheus too records them, and I will set before you the very verses of Orpheus, so that you may have the leader of the mysteries himself as witness to their shamelessness: “So saying, she drew up her robes and showed all her body, a shape unseemly; the child Iacchus was there, and laughing he kept tossing his hand beneath Baubo's bosom. And when the goddess smiled, she smiled in her heart, and accepted the gleaming cup in which the potion lay.” And the password of the Eleusinian mysteries is this: “I fasted, I drank the potion, I took from the chest, and having done the work I put it into the basket, and from the basket into the chest.” Fine sights indeed, and fit for a goddess!