On Idolatry 5

Plainly I will answer more fully the excuses of craftsmen of this kind, who ought never to be admitted into the house of God, if anyone knows that discipline. That common retort, “I have nothing else to live by,” can be struck back more sharply: “Must you live, then? What have you to do with God, if you live by your own laws?” Then, since they dare to argue even from the Scriptures that the apostle said, “As each was found, so let him remain”: by that interpretation we can all remain in our sins! For none of us was found other than a sinner, since Christ came down for no other reason than to set sinners free. Likewise they say that the same apostle commanded, after his own example, that each should work with his own hands for his living. If this precept is to cover all hands, I suppose the thieves at the baths too live by their hands, and robbers work with their hands for their living, and forgers produce their false documents not with their feet but with their hands, while actors earn their living not with their hands alone but with all their limbs. Let the church, then, be open to all who support themselves by their hands and their own work, if there is no exception made of the arts which God's discipline does not accept. But someone says, against the proposition that likenesses are forbidden: “Why then did Moses make the image of a serpent out of bronze in the wilderness?” Figures that were laid down beforehand for some secret dispensation stand apart: not to repeal the law, but as a type of their own purpose. Otherwise, if we interpret these things as the adversaries of the law do, do we too, like the Marcionites, ascribe inconsistency to the Almighty, whom they destroy in this way as changeable, since in one place he forbids and in another commands? But if anyone fails to see that the figure of the bronze serpent, hung up, pointed as a type to the Lord's cross, which was to free us from serpents, that is, from the devil's angels, since through itself it hung up the devil, the serpent, slain; or whatever other exposition of that figure has been revealed to worthier men, so long as the apostle affirms that all things then happened to the people figuratively: it is enough that the same God both forbade in the law that a likeness be made and, by an extraordinary command, enjoined the likeness of a serpent. If you obey the same God, you have his law: “You shall not make a likeness.” If you look also to the later command about the likeness that was made, then you too imitate Moses: do not make any image against the law unless God has commanded you too.