A Plea for the Christians 6

Philolaus too, when he says that all things are enclosed by God as in a guard-house, shows both that God is one and that he is above matter. Of Lysis and Opsimus, the one defines God as an ineffable number, the other as the excess of the greatest number over the one nearest to it. If, according to the Pythagoreans, ten is the greatest number, being the tetractys and containing all the arithmetical and harmonic ratios, and nine lies next to it, then God is a unit, that is, one; for the greatest number exceeds the smaller one nearest to it by one. As for Plato and Aristotle, I do not go through what they said about God as if I were giving a precise account of the philosophers' teachings. For I know that, just as you surpass all people in intelligence and in the power of your rule, so you excel all in the precise mastery of all learning, succeeding in every branch of it better than those who have made a single part of it their own. But since it is impossible to show, without citing names, that we are not the only ones who confine God to a unity, I have turned to their opinions. Plato, then, says: “To find the Maker and Father of this universe is a task, and having found him it is impossible to declare him to all,” thinking of the one uncreated and eternal God. And if he knows of others too, such as the sun, the moon, and the stars, he knows them as created: “Gods of gods, of whom I am the maker and father of works, indissoluble as long as I will it; everything that has been bound can be undone.” If, then, Plato is no atheist when he thinks of the Maker of all things as one uncreated God, neither are we atheists, who know and hold fast as God the one by whose Word all things were made and by whose Spirit, which comes from him, they are held together. Aristotle and his followers, acknowledging one God as a kind of composite living being, say that God consists of soul and body: they take his body to be the ethereal region, the planets and the sphere of the fixed stars, moving in circles, and his soul to be the reason that governs the motion of the body, itself unmoved but the cause of its motion. The Stoics, even if in their names for the divine they multiply it according to the variations of matter, through which they say the spirit of God passes, in reality think that God is one. For if God is a creative fire proceeding methodically toward the generation of the world, containing within itself all the seminal principles by which each thing comes into being according to fate, and his spirit pervades the whole world, then according to them God is one, called Zeus from the seething (ζέον) of matter and Hera from the air (ἀήρ), and given the other names after each part of matter through which he has passed.