Exhortation to Martyrdom 46

Again, some, supposing that names exist by convention and have no natural relation to the things of which they are names, think it makes no difference whether one says, “I worship the first God,” or “Zeus,” or “Zen”; or whether one says, “I honor and acknowledge the sun,” or “Apollo,” and “the moon,” or “Artemis,” and “the spirit in the earth,” or “Demeter,” and all the other things the wise men of the Greeks say. To them we must say that there is a very deep and recondite study concerning names, and whoever understands it will see that if names existed by convention, the so-called demons or other powers invisible to us would not have obeyed those who know them and name them with names regarded as conventional. But as it is, certain sounds and syllables and names, pronounced with rough or smooth breathing, or with long or short quantity, perhaps by some nature we cannot perceive, bring those who are called. And if this is so, and names do not exist by convention, the first God must be called by no name other than those by which the servant and the prophets and our Savior and Lord himself name him, such as Sabaoth, Adonai, Shaddai, and again, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; for “this,” he says, “is an eternal name and a memorial for generations of generations.” And it is no wonder if the demons transfer their own names to the first God, so that they may be worshiped as the first God. This is not the ancestral custom of the servant of our tradition, nor of the prophets, nor of Christ, the fulfillment of the law, nor of his apostles. We have necessarily set this out so that no one may outwit us, or defile our reasoning even in some degree; we must attend to it carefully, giving the opponents no room for their attempts.