That Idols Are Not Gods

That those whom the common people worship are not gods is known from this: they were once kings, who, because of the memory of their kingship, afterwards began to be worshiped by their own people even in death. From this, temples were founded for them; from this, statues were fashioned to keep the faces of the dead by their image; and people sacrificed victims and celebrated feast days by paying them honor. From this, what had been adopted at first as consolations became sacred rites for later generations. And let us see whether this truth also holds for them one by one.

Melicertes and Leucothea throw themselves into the sea and afterwards become deities of the sea; the Castors die by turns so that they may live; Aesculapius is struck by lightning so that he may rise to be a god; Hercules is burned up in the fires of Oeta so that he may put off the man. Apollo fed the flocks of Admetus; Neptune built walls for Laomedon, and the unlucky builder received no wage for his work. The cave of Jupiter is visited in Crete and his tomb is shown, and it is plain that Saturn was put to flight by him; from this Latium got its name, from his hiding place. He first taught in Italy how to print letters and to stamp coins; from this the treasury is called Saturn's. He was also a cultivator of the countryside; from this he is painted carrying a sickle. When he was a fugitive, Janus had received him as a guest; from his name the Janiculum was called and the month of January established. He himself is depicted with two faces, because, set in the middle, he seems to follow both the year that is beginning and the year that is departing. The Moors, for their part, openly worship their kings and do not cover this name with any veil.

From this the religion of the gods varies among the nations and the individual provinces, since not one God is worshiped by all, but each keeps the cult proper to its own ancestors. That this is so Alexander the Great wrote to his mother in a notable volume: that, out of fear of his power, a priest had betrayed to him the secret about the gods being men, namely that it was the memory of ancestors and kings that was preserved. From this the rite of worshiping and sacrificing grew up. But if gods were once born, why are they not born even today? Unless perhaps Jupiter has grown old, or childbearing has failed in Juno?

And why do you think the gods can do anything for the Romans, when you see that they were of no avail for their own people against Roman arms? For we know the Romans' home-born gods. Romulus became a god by the perjury of Proculus; and Picus and Tiberinus and Pilumnus and Consus, whom Romulus wished to be worshiped as a god of fraud, as if a god of counsels, after his treachery issued in the rape of the Sabine women. Tatius also invented and worshiped the goddess Cloacina; Hostilius, Fear and Pallor. Soon Fever was dedicated by someone or other, and Acca and Flora, prostitutes. These are the Roman gods. As for the rest, Thracian Mars and Cretan Jupiter and Juno, whether of Argos or Samos or Carthage, and Taurian Diana, and the Idaean mother of the gods, and the monsters of Egypt, are not deities: surely, if they had had any power, they would have preserved their own kingdoms and those of their people. Clearly there are among the Romans also the conquered household gods which the fugitive Aeneas brought over; there is also the bald Venus, much more shamefully bald here than wounded in Homer.

Kingdoms, moreover, do not come by merit but vary by lot. Before, the Syrians and Persians held empire; and we know that the Greeks and Egyptians reigned. So, by the succession of powers, the time to rule has come to the Romans as to the others. Besides, if you go back to their origin, you would blush. The people is gathered from criminals and the guilty, and, once an asylum is set up, impunity for crimes makes up their number. Then, so that the king himself may have the first place in crime, Romulus becomes a fratricide; and to make marriages, he begins a thing of concord with discords. They seize, they rage, they deceive, to increase the size of the city: their weddings are broken treaties of hospitality and cruel wars with their fathers-in-law. There is also the step of office: the highest of Roman honors is the consulship. So we see the consulship begin as the kingship did: Brutus kills his sons, so that the esteem of his office may grow by the vote of crime. Thus the Roman kingdoms did not grow from holy religions or from auspices or auguries, but they keep a time received within a fixed limit. Besides, Regulus observed the auspices and was captured; Mancinus kept religion and was sent under the yoke; Paulus had hungry chickens, and yet was cut down at Cannae; Gaius Caesar, when the auguries and auspices held him back from sending ships across to Africa before the winter solstice, disregarded them: all the more easily did he both sail and conquer.

Now the explanation of all these things is this, which deceives and misleads and, by blinding tricks, leads the foolish and prodigal crowd away from the truth. They are impure and wandering spirits, who, after they were sunk in earthly vices and withdrew from heavenly strength by earthly contagion, do not cease, being lost, to destroy, and, being depraved, to pour in the error of depravity. The poets too know these as demons; and Socrates declared that he was instructed and ruled at the will of a daimonion; and from them the magi have their power for harmful or playful things. Yet the chief of these, Ostanes, both denies that the form of the true God can be seen and says that true angels stand beside his throne. In this Plato also agrees by the same reasoning, and, keeping one God, calls the others angels or demons. Hermes Trismegistus too speaks of one God and confesses him incomprehensible and beyond estimation.

These spirits, then, lurk under consecrated statues and images; these inspire the breasts of seers with their breath, animate the fibers of entrails, govern the flights of birds, rule the lots, produce oracles, always wrap the false in the true, for they both are deceived and deceive; they disturb life, disquiet sleep; creeping secretly into bodies as spirits, they also terrify minds, twist limbs, break health, provoke diseases, in order to force people to worship them, so that, when they have been glutted with the savor of altars and the pyres of cattle, they may loosen what they had bound and seem to have cured it. This is their healing: their injury ceases for their worshipers. Nor have they any other aim than to call men away from God and to turn them from the understanding of true religion to superstition toward themselves; and since they themselves are under punishment, to seek companions in punishment, whom by error they have made partners in their crime. Yet these, when adjured by the true God, immediately yield to us and confess, and are forced to leave the bodies they possess. You may see them, at our voice and by the prayer of the hidden majesty, beaten with whips, scorched with fire, stretched by the growth of an increasing punishment, howling, groaning, pleading, confessing where they come from and when they depart, in the hearing even of those who worship them, so that they either leap out at once or vanish gradually, as the faith of the sufferer helps or the grace of the healer breathes upon it. From this they drive the crowd to hatred of our name, so that men begin to hate us before they know us, lest, once they knew us, they might either imitate us or be unable to condemn us.

There is therefore one God, Lord of all; for that sublimity cannot have a partner, since it alone holds all power. Let us borrow an example for the divine rule even from the earth. When did a shared kingship ever begin in good faith or end without blood? So the brotherhood of the Thebans was broken, their discord lasting even in death, as their pyres stood apart. And one kingdom does not hold the Roman twins, whom one lodging of the womb held. Pompey and Caesar were kinsmen by marriage, and yet they did not keep the bond of kinship in rival power. Nor should you wonder at this in man, since all nature agrees on it: the bees have one king, the flocks one leader, the herds one ruler. Much more has the world one ruler, who commands all things whatever by his word, orders them by his reason, and completes them by his power.

He cannot be seen: he is brighter than sight; nor comprehended: he is purer than touch; nor estimated: he is greater than sense. And so we estimate God worthily when we say he is beyond estimation. What temple could God have, whose temple is the whole world? And while I, a man, dwell more widely, shall I shut up the power of such great majesty within one small shrine? He is to be dedicated in our mind, consecrated in our breast. Do not seek a name for God: God is his name. There is need of words where a multitude must be distinguished by the proper marks of names; for God, who alone is, the word God is the whole. Therefore he is one, and he himself is spread everywhere. For even the common people in many things naturally confess God, when the mind and soul are reminded of their author and ruler. We often hear it said, “O God,” and “God sees,” and “I commend it to God,” and “God will repay me,” and “if God grants.” But what a sum of guilt this is, to refuse to acknowledge one whom you cannot fail to know!

As to who Christ is, and how salvation came to us through him, this is the order, this the reasoning. The Jews had favor with God. So of old they were righteous; so their ancestors obeyed their religious rites. But afterwards they became undisciplined, and, puffed up by confidence in their fathers, while they despised the divine precepts they lost the grace given them. How profane their life was, what offense of violated religion was incurred, they themselves also testify, who, though silent in voice, confess it by their outcome: scattered and straying, they wander; fugitives from their own soil and sky, they are tossed about among foreign lodgings.

And God had also foretold that, as the age declined and the end of the world drew near, God would choose for himself worshipers much more faithful, who would draw indulgence from the divine gifts. Of this grace and discipline, then, the Word and Son of God is sent as arbiter and teacher, who through all the prophets is proclaimed as the enlightener and guide of the human race. He is the power of God, he is his reason, his wisdom and glory; he descends into a virgin, he, the Holy Spirit, puts on flesh; God is mingled with man. He is our God, he is Christ, who, as mediator of the two, put on man, whom he might lead to the Father. Christ willed to be what man is, so that man also might be what Christ is.

The Jews also knew that Christ was to come, for he was always announced to them by the prophets' warnings. But since a twofold coming of his was signified, one which would carry out the practice and example of a man, the other which would declare him God, they did not understand the first coming, which went before hidden in suffering, and believe in one only, which will be manifest in power. That the Jewish people could not understand this was the desert of their sins: they were so punished with blindness of wisdom and understanding that those who were unworthy of life had life before their eyes and did not see it.

And so, when Christ Jesus, according to what had been foretold by the prophets, drove demons out of men by his word and the command of his voice, strengthened the paralyzed, cleansed lepers, gave light to the blind, gave the lame their step, brought the dead to life again, compelled the elements to serve him, the winds to be his servants, the seas to obey, the underworld to yield, the Jews, who had believed him only a man from the lowliness of his flesh and body, judged him a magician from the freedom of his power. Hence their teachers and leaders, that is, those whom he refuted by his teaching and wisdom, inflamed with anger and provoked by indignation, at last seized him and handed him over to Pontius Pilate, who was then governing Syria on behalf of Rome, and demanded his cross and death by their persistent votes.

He himself had foretold that they would do this, and the testimony of all the prophets had gone before in the same way: that he must suffer, not in order to feel death but to conquer it, and, when he had suffered, return again to the realms above, to show the power of the divine majesty. So the course of events fulfilled the promise. For, when crucified, he forestalled the executioner's office and gave up his spirit of his own accord, and on the third day he rose again from the dead of his own accord. He appeared to his disciples as he had been; he offered himself to be recognized by those who saw him gathered together; and, conspicuous in the solidity of a bodily substance, he remained forty days, so that they might be instructed by him in the life-giving precepts and learn what they were to teach. Then, surrounded by a cloud, he was taken up into heaven, so that as victor he might set before the Father the man whom he loved, whom he put on, whom he protected from death; he is soon to come from heaven for the punishment of the devil and the judgment of the human race, with the vigor of an avenger and the power of a judge. But the disciples, spread through the world at the admonition of their Teacher and God, were to give precepts for salvation, to lead men from the error of darkness to the way of light, to give sight to the blind and ignorant for the knowledge of the truth.

And so that the proof might not be less solid and the confession of Christ soft, they are tested through tortures, through crosses, through many kinds of punishment. Pain, which is the witness of truth, is summoned, so that Christ the Son of God, who is believed to have been given to men for life, might be proclaimed not only by the heralding of the voice but also by the testimony of suffering. Him therefore we accompany, him we follow, him we have as the leader of our way, the prince of light, the author of salvation, who promises heaven and the Father alike to those who seek and believe. What Christ is, we shall be, if we have followed Christ.