Exhortation to the Greeks 10.98

“Come out into the road, all you craftsmen folk, who pray to Zeus's fierce-eyed daughter, the Worker, with winnowing baskets set up,” you foolish makers and worshipers of stones. Let your Phidias and Polyclitus come, and Praxiteles too and Apelles, and all who practice the mechanical arts, earthly workers of earth. For then, says a certain prophecy, things here will fare badly, when people put their trust in statues. Let them come again, then (for I will not stop calling them), these petty craftsmen. Not one of them has made a breathing image, nor molded soft flesh out of earth. Who melted the marrow, or who made the bones solid? Who stretched out the sinews, or who inflated the veins? Who poured blood into them, or who stretched skin around them? How could any of them make eyes that see? Who breathed a soul into it? Who bestowed righteousness? Who has promised immortality? Only the Creator of the universe, “the Father, the supreme artist,” fashioned such a living statue as us, the human being. But your Olympian Zeus, an image of an image, far out of tune with the truth, is a dumb work of Attic hands. For “the image of God” is his Word (and the divine Word is the true Son of Mind, the Light that is the archetype of light); and the image of the Word is the true human being, the mind in the human being, who is said for this reason to have been made “in the image” of God and “after his likeness,” being likened to the divine Word by the understanding of the heart, and in this way rational. But the man-shaped statues are an earthly image of the visible, earthborn man, and appear to be a transient impression, far from the truth.