A Plea for the Christians 22

But perhaps these are errors of the poets, and there is a scientific account of them, such as this: “Shining Zeus” (as Empedocles says) “and life-bringing Hera and Aidoneus, and Nestis, who with her tears moistens the springs of mortals.” If, then, Zeus is fire, Hera earth, Aidoneus air, and Nestis water, and these are elements, fire, water, and air, none of them is a god, neither Zeus nor Hera nor Aidoneus; for their constitution and origin come from matter separated out by God: “Fire and water and earth and the gentle height of air, and love together with them.” Since these cannot remain without love, but are thrown into confusion by strife, how could anyone say that they are gods? According to Empedocles love is the ruling principle and the compounds are ruled, and the ruling principle is master; so that if we suppose that the ruled and the ruler have one and the same power, we shall unwittingly make perishable, fluid, and changeable matter equal in honor to God, who is uncreated, eternal, and always consistent with himself. According to the Stoics, Zeus is the seething (ζέουσα) substance, Hera is the air (ἀήρ), as the name shows if it is joined to itself and pronounced continuously, and Poseidon is drink (πόσις). Others explain nature in other ways: some say that Zeus is air of a double nature, male and female; others that he is the season that turns the weather to mildness, which is why he alone escaped Kronos. But to the Stoics one may say: if you consider the supreme God to be one, uncreated and eternal, and the compounds to be changes of matter, and you say that the spirit of God, pervading matter, takes different names according to its variations, then the forms of matter will be the body of God; and when the elements perish in the conflagration, the names must perish together with the forms, and only the spirit of God will remain. Who, then, would believe that bodies whose material variation is perishable are gods? There are those who say that Kronos is time (χρόνος) and Rhea the earth: she conceives by Kronos and gives birth, and so she is considered the mother of all; he begets and consumes. The castration, they say, is the intercourse of male with female, which cuts off and casts seed into the womb and begets a human being who has desire, that is, Aphrodite, within himself; the madness of Kronos is the turning of the seasons, which destroys things animate and inanimate; and the bonds and Tartarus are time, changed by the seasons and vanishing from sight. To these we say: if Kronos is time, he changes; if a season, he turns; if darkness or frost or moist substance, none of these remains. But the divine is immortal, unmoved, and unchangeable; so neither Kronos nor his image is a god. As for Zeus, if he is air born from Kronos, whose male part is Zeus and female part Hera (which is why she is both his sister and his wife), he is subject to change; if a season, he turns; but the divine neither changes nor falls away. Why should I trouble you by saying more? You know better what each of the natural philosophers has said, what the writers on nature have thought, what they say about Athena, whom they call wisdom pervading all things, about Isis, whom they call the nature of the ages, from whom all things have sprung and through whom all things exist, or about Osiris, who was slain by his brother Typhon, and whose limbs Isis sought with her son Horus, and when she had found them prepared them for burial, a burial still called Osirian to this day. Turning up and down among the forms of matter, they fall away from God, who is contemplated by reason; they deify the elements and their parts, giving them now one name and now another: the sowing of grain they call Osiris (hence, they say, in the mysteries it was said to Isis at the finding of the limbs, or of the crops, “We have found, we rejoice together!”), the fruit of the vine Dionysus, the vine itself Semele, and the heat of the sun the thunderbolt. And yet those who turn the myths into gods do anything but theology, not realizing that by their very defense of the gods they confirm the charges against them. What have Europa and the Bull, the Swan and Leda, to do with earth and air, that Zeus's foul union with them should be the union of earth and air? But falling short of the greatness of God and unable to rise above it by reason (for they have no affinity with the heavenly place), they have melted away into the forms of matter, and in their fall deify the changes of the elements; as if someone were to take the ship in which he sailed for the pilot. But just as a ship, however well equipped, is of no use without its pilot, so the elements, however well ordered, are of no use without the providence of God. For the ship will not sail by itself, and the elements will not move without their Maker.