Against the Nations 6.13–7.4

But why do I laugh at the sickles and tridents given to the gods, why at horns, hammers, and caps, when I know that some images bear the forms of certain men and the features of infamous harlots? For who does not know that those Athenian Hermae were made in the likeness of the body of Alcibiades? Who does not know, if he rereads Posidippus ..., that Praxiteles ... forced the face of the Cnidian Venus into the shape of the harlot Cratina, whom he loved desperately, poor man? But is this the only Venus to whose face borrowed beauty was added from a prostitute's face? That Phryne of Thespiae, as those who wrote of Thespian affairs report, when she was at the very height of beauty, charm, and bloom, is said to have been the model for all the Venuses that are in repute, whether throughout the Greek cities or wherever the love and desire of such statues has spread. So all the artists who lived at the same time, and to whom truth in expressing likenesses gave first place, strove with all care and zeal to carry over the outline of a prostitute's head into images of Cythera's goddess; the ... of artists burned, and each sought to surpass the other in contentious rivalry, not that Venus might become more august, but that Phryne might stand in place of Venus. And so the matter was brought to this, that sacred rites were performed to harlots instead of immortal gods, and unhappy religion was deceived by the making of statues. Among the sculptors, that famous and first Phidias, when he had raised the form of Olympian Jupiter by the labor of an immense work, inscribed on the god's finger 'Pantarces is handsome' (now this was the name of a boy he loved and cherished with obscene desire), and he was not moved by any fear or religious scruple to call the god by the name of a prostitute, indeed to consecrate the divinity and image of Jupiter to a catamite. So much is it a game and a childish passion to form these figurines, to adore them as gods, to heap divine sanctities on them, when we see the artists themselves playing in making them and consecrating memorials of their own lusts. For why, if you ask, should Phidias hesitate to play and be wanton, when he knew that a little while before the Jupiter he had made had been gold, stones, and shapeless bones, separate and mixed up; that he himself was the one who gathered and bound all these, who gave them forms made in the likeness of limbs; and, what is first of all, that it was the kindness of his own gift that the god was born and adored among human affairs?

I would like at this point, as if all the nations of the world were present, to make a single assembly and set these things before the ears of all to be heard in common. What is this, men, that you yourselves willingly deceive and ensnare yourselves by voluntary blindness in matters so obvious and clear? Shake off the mist at last, and, returning to the light of the mind, look more closely and see what sort of thing this is that is done, if only you keep your right and remain within the bounds of the reason and counsel given you. These images which frighten you, and which you adore lying prostrate and humble in all the temples, are bones, stones, bronze, silver, gold, earthenware, wood taken from a tree or glue mixed with gypsum, perhaps put together from harlots' ornaments or women's toilet articles, from camels' bones or the tooth of the Indian animal, from little cooking pots and jars, from lampstands and lamps or from other more obscene little vessels; melted, drawn into these shapes, and come out in the forms you see; baked in potters' furnaces, born from anvils and hammers, scraped with ... , filed down, cut, hewn, and dug out with saws, augers, and adzes, hollowed by the turning of drills, smoothed by the planes of routers. Is it not an error, not to say properly madness, to believe a god to be what you yourself have formed, to pray trembling to a thing made by you, and, when you know and are sure that it is your own work and the offspring of your fingers, to fall prone on your face, to ask help suppliantly, and to have it come to your aid in adversity and hard times by the favor of a gracious deity?

Suppose someone sets before you rough bronze not worked into any object, masses of untamed silver and unworked gold, wood, stones, and bones, and all the other things of which statues and images of the deities are usually made; indeed, suppose someone sets before you the smashed faces of gods and broken and damaged images, and bids you slaughter victims to the pieces and fragments and give sacred rites and divine services to the shapeless masses: we ask to hear from you whether you will do it or refuse, contrary to what is ordered. Perhaps you will say: 'For what reason?' Because there is no one in human affairs so stupidly blind as to count silver, bronze, gold, gypsum, ivory, and clay among the gods and say that they have and hold divine power by themselves. What reason is there, then, that if all these bodies remain untouched and unworked they lack the power of deity and heavenly authority, but if they receive human forms, ears, noses, cheeks, lips, eyes, and eyebrows, they at once become gods and are brought into the order and roll of heavenly beings? Does the fashioning add something new to these bodies, so that by this very addition you are compelled to believe that something of divinity and majesty has been conferred on them? Does it change bronze into gold, or force the cheapness of a potsherd to degenerate into the material of silver? Does it make things which were senseless a little before become alive and moved by the motion of breath? If they keep, placed in the bodies of images, all the natures they had outside, what great stupidity is it (for I shrink from saying blindness) to think that the natures of things are changed by the quality of forms, and that what was inert, brutish, and deprived of the movement of sense in its original body receives divinity from a shape?

And so, unmindful and forgetful of what the substance and origins of images are, you human beings, a rational creature endowed with the gift of wisdom and counsel, bow down before baked potsherds, adore plates of bronze, ask good health from elephants' teeth, magistracies, commands, powers, victories, acquisitions, profits, the best harvests and most fruitful vintages; and though it is plain and clear that you are speaking to brute things, you think you are heard, and of your own accord lead yourselves astray by the deception of empty credulity. O would that it were possible to enter the inner hollows of some image; indeed, would that it were possible to take apart those Olympian and Capitoline Jupiters, loosened into their members, and see separate and individual all those parts by which the sum of their bodies is enclosed! You would long ago see that these gods, whom an outer smoothness makes august by the allure of brilliance, are frameworks of hammered plates, joinings of shapeless little parts, held together against the fall of ruins and the fear of dissolution by dovetails and clamps, hooks and little handles, and that lead is poured into all the hollows and joints of the seams, lending saving delays to the durability of the statues. You would see, I say, faces alone without backs of the head, hands without arms, half-filled, bellies with half sides, unfinished traces of feet, and, what would bring the most laughter, gods of wood on one side and stone on the other, drawn together in an unequal construction of bodies. But if these things could not be seen because the art hides them, at least the things placed in plain view ought to have taught and warned you that you are doing nothing and spending the vanities of your services on empty things. For do you not see that these breathing statues, whose feet and knees you touch and handle as you pray, now slip down from the falling of drips, now are loosened by the rot of decay; how, fumigated with the fumes and smoke of sacrifices, they grow black and discolored; how through the neglect of a longer age they lose their appearance by mold and are wounded and eaten by rust? Do you not see, I say, that under the hollows of these images newts, shrews, mice, and light-shunning cockroaches make their nests and dwell, bring all sorts of filth there and other things suited to their uses, hard crusts of half-gnawed bread, bones dragged in ..., rags, down, and scraps of paper, carefully for the softness of their nests, as comforts for their wretched young? That spiders sometimes weave nets and treacherous snares in the image's mouth, with which to entangle the flights of buzzing and shameless flies? Finally, that swallows, flying about within the very domes of the temples, shoot out their droppings ... and bespatter now the faces themselves, now the mouths of the deities, beard, eyes, noses, and all other parts on which the outflow of their unburdened hindquarters falls? Blush, then, even late, and take ways and reasons from dumb animals, and let them teach you that there is no divinity in images, on which they neither fear nor avoid dropping filth, following their own laws and prompted by the truth of nature.

'But you are wrong,' he says, 'and you slip: for we do not judge that bronze or the materials of gold and silver, or the others of which statues are made, are gods in themselves and religious deities; but in them we worship and revere those whom sacred dedication brings in and causes to dwell in the craftsmen's images.' Not a wicked or contemptible reasoning, by which any dull person, and also the most prudent, might believe that the gods, leaving their own seats, that is, heaven, do not refuse or flee to enter earthly dwellings, but, driven by the right of dedication, grow into union with the images! So your gods stay in gypsum and potsherds; indeed, are the gods the minds, breath, and souls of potsherds and gypsum? And so that the vilest things may become more august, do they allow themselves to be shut in and to hide in the confinement of a dark seat? So first we want and ask to hear from you on this point: do they do this unwillingly, that is, do they enter the dwellings of images drawn by the right of dedication, or readily and willingly, with no necessities imposed? Do they do it unwillingly? And how can it be that they are forced into any necessity, with their majesty diminished? With the assent of voluntary compliance? And what do the gods seek in potsherds, that they prefer them to their starry seats? What then?

Do the gods always stay in such materials and never go anywhere, even if the greatest matter demands it, or do they have free goings, to go wherever they please and depart from their seats and images? If they suffer the necessity of remaining, what could be more wretched or unhappy than they, if hooks and lead fastenings hold them thus on their bases? But let us grant ... that they prefer them to heaven and the starry seats, and have lost the power of their divinity; but if they fly away when they wish and have the absolute right to leave the images empty, then at some time the statues will cease to be gods, and it will be doubtful when sacred rites ought to be paid and when it is fitting and proper to abstain from them. We often see these statues made by artists now tiny and contracted to the smallness of a palm, now raised to immense size and lifted to a wonderful greatness. By this reasoning, then, it follows that we must understand that in little figurines the gods contract themselves and are compressed into the likeness of another's body, but in vast ones they stretch themselves further and extend to hugeness. If this is so, it must be said that in seated statues the god sits, in standing ones stands, in running ones runs, in those throwing weapons throws, and that he shapes and fits himself to their faces and adapts himself to the likeness of the other features of the fashioned body.

The gods dwell in images. Is each one whole in each, or partly and divided into members? For neither can one god be in several images at one time, nor again be divided into parts by cutting. For let us suppose that there are ten thousand images of Vulcan in the whole world: can one be, as I said, in all ten thousand at one time? I do not think so. For what reason? Because things that are single and individual by nature cannot become many while keeping the integrity of their simplicity; and still more they cannot if the gods have human forms, as your opinion declares. For neither a hand separated from the head nor a foot divided from the body can present the sum of the whole; or it must be said that portions can do what the whole can, though the whole cannot exist unless it is formed by the gathering of parts. But if the same god is said to be in all, the whole reason and integrity of truth perishes, if it is assumed that one can remain in all at one time; or it must be said that each of the gods divides himself from himself so that he is both himself and another, not separated by any difference but the same himself and another. Since nature refuses, rejects, and spurns this, either it must be said and confessed that there are countless Vulcans, if we do not want him to live and be present in all the images, or he will be in none, since nature forbids him to be divided among many.

And yet, if it is plain and clear to you that the gods live in the inward parts of statues and the heavenly ones dwell there, why do you guard, keep, and hold them shut in under the strongest keys and huge bars, bolts, latches, and other things of this kind, and protect them with a thousand temple-keepers and a thousand watchmen, lest perhaps some thief or nighttime robber creep in? Why do you feed dogs on the Capitol? Why do you provide geese with food and nourishment? Rather, if you trust that the gods are there and never depart from the statues and images, leave them the care of themselves: let the shrines always be unlocked and open, and if anything is stolen by anyone with reckless fraud, let them show the power of their divinity and transfix the sacrilegious with fitting punishments in the very act of theft. For it is an unworthy thing, destroying their power and authority, to entrust the guarding of the highest deities to the vigilance of dogs, and, when you seek some means of fear to keep thieves away, not to ask it of them but to place and put it in the cackling of geese.

They say that Antiochus of Cyzicus took a golden Jupiter ten cubits high from a shrine and substituted one of bronze gilded with thin leaves. If the gods are present and dwell in their images, with what business, what cares was Jupiter bound, that he did not pursue his private wrongs and avenge himself on being replaced by himself in a baser material? When the younger Dionysius stripped Jupiter of his golden mantle and put a woolen one in its place, even playing with jesting witticisms, saying that the one was cold in frosts and the other warm, the one heavy in summer and the other airy in the heat: where was the king of heaven, that he did not prove his presence by some terror and call the witty jester back to seriousness by torments? For why should I mention that he mocked the gravity of Aesculapius? When he stripped him of his very full beard, of good weight and philosophic thickness, he said it was an unworthy thing that a son born of Apollo, a smooth and beardless father most like a boy, should be fashioned so bearded that it was left doubtful which of them was the father and which the son, indeed whether they were of one race and kinship. When all this was done and the plunderer joked with sacrilegious mockery, if a divinity was present in the statue consecrated to his name and majesty, why did he not pursue with just and deserved vengeance the insult of his mouth being shaved and his face dishonored, and show by this deed both that he was present and that he protected his temples and images with unremitting guard?

Unless perhaps you will say that the gods neglect these losses and do not think it a sufficient cause for bestirring themselves and inflicting punishment on the guilty for violated religion. If this is so, then they do not even want to have images, which they allow to be torn down and plundered with impunity; on the contrary, they teach that they despise those images in which they do not care to show by any vengeance that they have been scorned. Philostephanus, in his Cypriaca, is the authority that Pygmalion, king of Cyprus, fell in love with an image of Venus, which was held among the Cyprians in ancient holiness and reverence, as though with a woman, his mind, soul, light of reason, and judgment blinded; and that, mad, as though it were a wifely matter, he used to lift the deity onto his bed, join with it in embraces and kisses, and do other things frustrated by the imagination of empty lust. In a similar way Posidippus, in the book he declares he wrote about Cnidus and its affairs, records that a young man not of low birth (but he conceals his name), seized with love for the Venus for whom Cnidus is famous, himself mingled amorous wantonness with the statue of the same deity, enjoying the marriage bed and the consequences of pleasure. So that I may ask again in like manner: if the powers of the gods above hide in bronze and the other materials of which statues are formed, where in the world were one Venus and the other, to drive the young men's shameless wantonness far away from themselves and punish the impious contacts with torturing restraint? Or, since the goddesses are gentle and of more tranquil disposition, how much would it have taken to extinguish the frenzied joys of the wretches and restore their minds to sanity with their senses renewed?

Unless perhaps, as you say, the goddesses of lust and pleasures found these insults most pleasing and did not think worthy of vengeance a deed which soothed their own minds too, and which they knew was subject to human desires because of them. But if the goddesses Venus, endowed with gentler dispositions, judged that they should indulge the misfortunes of the blind, when devouring fire so often consumed the Capitol and seized Capitoline Jupiter himself with his wife and daughter, where was the Thunderer at that time, to ward off that wicked fire and rescue his possessions, himself, and his whole family from the deadly disaster? Where was Queen Juno, when the same force of flame destroyed her famous shrine and her priestess Chrysis in the city of Argos? Where was Egyptian Serapis, when by a similar disaster he lay dissolved into ashes with all his mysteries and Isis? Where was Liber Eleutherius, when at Athens? Where was Diana, when at Ephesus? Where was Jupiter of Dodona, when at Dodona? Where finally was the prophet Apollo, when he was so despoiled and burned by pirates and sea-robbers that, of so many weights of gold which infinite ages had heaped up, he did not have even a single scruple to show hospitality to the swallows, as Varro, but the Menippean, says? It is an infinite task to describe in the whole world which shrines were overthrown by earthquakes and storms, which burned by enemies, which by kings and tyrants, which the high priests and priests themselves stripped, with suspicion turned away from them, which finally thieves and those who open what is locked ... : which would surely remain safe and exposed to no accidents, if the guardian gods were present or had any care of their temples, as is said. But now, because they are empty and roofs without inhabitants, fortune has its right in them, and they are exposed to all accidents just as all other things deprived of inner motion.

In this same part the defenders of images usually also say that the ancients were not unaware that statues have no divinity and that there is no sense at all in them, but that because of the untamed and ignorant common people, which is the largest part in peoples and cities, they formed them for their good and by design, so that, with a kind of appearance of the deities set before them, they might throw off their roughness through fear, and, thinking they acted under the gods as present, might renounce impious deeds and pass over to human duties by a change of character; and that for no other reason were venerable forms sought for them in gold and silver than that some power might be believed present in the very gleams, which would not only dazzle the sense of the eyes but also terrify the minds themselves with the rays of most august light. This would perhaps seem to be said with some reason, if after the founding of the temples of the gods and the institution of images there were no wicked person in the world, no wickedness at all; if justice, peace, and good faith possessed the hearts of mortals, and no one on earth were called guilty or innocent, all being ignorant of wicked works. But now, since on the contrary everything is full of evils, the name of innocence has almost perished, and new swarms of crimes are born every moment and instant by the wickedness of the guilty, how is it fitting to say that images of the gods were instituted to strike fear into the crowd, when besides countless forms of crimes and misdeeds we see even the temples themselves attacked with sacrilegious violations by tyrants, by kings, by robbers and nighttime thieves, and those very gods, whom old antiquity fashioned and consecrated to cause fear, going into robbers' caves with their golden and fearsome gleams?

For, if you look at it truly and without any flattery, what great thing do these statues they speak of have in them, that antiquity rightly hoped and thought that by the sight of them the vices and misdeeds of men could be broken and their characters tempered? The reaping sickle, of course, which is assigned to Saturn, was to strike fear into mortals so that they would want to lead a peaceful life and cast away malicious wishes; or Janus with his two-faced brow, or that toothed key with which he is marked; Jupiter in a cloak and bearded, holding in his right hand a stick hewn in the shape of a thunderbolt; that girdle of Juno, or the little girl hiding under a soldier's helmet; the Mother of the Gods with her tambourine; the Muses with flutes and psalteries; winged Mercury, slayer of Argus; Aesculapius with his staff; Ceres with great breasts; or the drinking cup hanging in Liber's right hand; Mulciber in smith's dress; or Fortune with her horn full of apples, figs, or autumn fruits; Diana with thighs half covered, or naked Venus stirring to lust; Anubis with a dog's face, or Priapus, inferior to his own private parts.

O dreadful forms of fear and fearful terrors, on account of which the human race was to be fixed in perpetual numbness, attempt nothing in its astonishment, and rein itself in from every criminal and shameful act: little sickles, keys, headdresses, sticks, winged sandals, staffs, little tambourines, flutes, psalteries, breasts prominent and huge, little cups, tongs, fruit-bearing horns, the naked bodies of women, and the publicly displayed size of male members! Would it not have been better to dance and sing than, under the title of gravity and the pretext of severity, to tell such cold and silly stories, that images were formed by the ancients to restrain sins and to frighten the guilty and impious? Were the mortals of that age and time so empty of heart, of no reason or sense, that they were restrained from wicked actions, like little boys, by the most monstrous grimness of masks, by grimaces and bogeys? And how has the matter turned out the opposite, so that, although there are so many temples in the cities full of images of all the gods, the multitude of the guilty cannot be met by so many laws and kinds of punishments, nor boldness be cut off by any remedies, and misdeeds multiply the more, doubled, the more it is striven by laws and courts to diminish cruel deeds and quiet them by the restraint of punishments? If images inflicted any fears on mortals, the passing of laws would cease, and such different tortures would not be established for the boldness of criminals. But now, because it is established and proved by the fact itself that the opinion of fear said to flow from statues is empty, recourse has been had to the sanctions of laws, from which there might be the most certain fear and a condemnation already fixed and established; to which even the images themselves owe it that they still stand unharmed and are protected by the grant of some honor.

Since it has been shown sufficiently, as the matter allowed, how vainly images are made, the order next demands that we speak as briefly as possible and without any circumlocutions about sacrifices, about the slaughter and immolation of victims, about wine, about incense, and about all the other things done in this part. For in this part you are accustomed to stir up the most tumultuous odium against us, to call us atheists, and, because we do not sacrifice to the gods, even to inflict capital punishment on us through the cruelty of beasts. We confess that we do this, not out of contempt and scorn of the divine, but because we think that the powers of this name demand nothing of the kind and are not held by desires for such things.

'What then,' someone may say, 'do you think that no sacrifices at all should be made?' To answer you with the opinion not of ourselves but of your Varro: none. Why so? 'Because,' he says, 'the true gods neither desire nor demand them, and those made of bronze, earthenware, gypsum, or marble care much less for them, for they lack sense; and no guilt is incurred if you do not make them, nor any favor gained if you do.' No sounder or truer opinion can be found, nor one which anyone, however perverse and difficult he may be, could seize upon. For who is so dull-hearted as either to slaughter victims and offerings to things that have no sense, or to think they should be given to those who are far removed from them in nature and blessedness?

'Who are the true gods?' you say. To answer you with a common and simple word: we do not know. For how can we know who those are whom we have never seen? We have been accustomed to hear from you that there are very many gods and that they are counted in a series of deities. If they exist anywhere, as you say, and are true, as Terentius believes, it follows that they are like their name, that is, such as we all conceive they ought to be and should be called by the title of this name; indeed, to define it briefly, such as the Lord of things and the Almighty himself is, whom we all know and understand is truly called God when we come to mention that name. For a god differs from another in nothing in which he is a god, nor can what is one in kind be less or more in its parts, the uniformity of its proper quality being kept. Since there is no doubt of this, it follows that they must be never born and everlasting, seeking nothing from outside and plucking no pleasures from the wealth of earthly matter.

If this is so, then first we want to learn from you what is the cause, what the reason that you make these sacrifices, and then what gain from this comes to the gods themselves and settles into their advantage. For whatever is done must have its cause, and not be so separated from reason that it is done in empty works and plays in the vain errors of emptiness. Are the heavenly gods perhaps nourished by these rites, and is there need of a supply of some matter to hold their frame together? And who among men is so wholly ignorant of what a god is as to think that they are kept alive by some kind of nourishment, and that it is the gift of food that makes them live and last into immense everlastingness? For whatever is supported by external causes and things must be mortal and have a road inclined toward danger when something by which it lives begins to fail. Then ... that nothing of those things which are brought to the altars is seen to be added to and reach the substance of the deities. For either incense is given and, melted on the coals, perishes; or it is an animal victim, and the blood is licked up by dogs; or if some inward part has been given to the altars, it burns in the same way and falls, dissolved, into ashes. Unless perhaps the god devours the souls of the victims or pursues the smell and smoke from the burning altars, and feeds on the fat-savor which the burning inward parts belch out, still wet with blood and moist with their former juices. But if God, as is said, has no body and is untouchable by any contact, how can the incorporeal be nourished by bodily things, the mortal sustain the immortal and give health and supply vital motion to a thing it cannot touch? This reason for the rites falls away, then, as appears, and no one can say that sacrifices are celebrated for this reason, that the deities are fed by them and sustained by their pasture.

If perhaps this is not so, are victims slaughtered to the gods and put on the kindled altars for the sake of some pleasure and delight of mind, as is said? And is there any human being who persuades himself that the gods grow soft with the diffusion of pleasures, exult ... in the joy of lust, and, like a vile animal, are affected by pleasant sensations and soothed by the fleeting titillation of passing sweetness? For what is dissolved by pleasure must be contracted by the contrary sadness, and what quivers with joy and is lifted by the frivolities of delight cannot be free from the anxiety of grief. But the gods must be free from both feelings, if we want them to be everlasting and exempt from the frailty of mortals. What of this, that all pleasure is a kind of flattery of the body and is received by those well-known five senses? If the gods above feel it, they must also share in bodies, through which there is a way for senses and a door for receiving pleasures. Finally, what joy is it to rejoice in the slaughter of harmless animals, often to hear pitiful lowings, to see rivers of blood, lives fleeing with the gore, and, the hidden parts laid open, the intestines rolling out with dung, and hearts still leaping from the remaining breath, and veins throbbing in the trembling inward parts? We human beings, half-wild, or rather, to say more plainly what is truer and more fitting to say, wild, whom unhappy necessity and bad custom have taught to take food from them, are sometimes moved with pity for them, reproach ourselves, and, when we have seen and examined the matter thoroughly, condemn ourselves for having laid aside the law of humanity and broken the fellowship of a natural bond. Will anyone believe that the gods, pious, beneficent, and gentle, are delighted by the slaughter of cattle and spread with joy whenever they fall before them and pitifully lay down their breath? So there is no reason of pleasure in sacrifices, as we see, and that is not the reason they are made, since there is no pleasure in them; and if perhaps there is some, it has been shown that it can by no means fall upon the gods.