Exhortation to the Greeks 4.56

How then can idols and daemons still be gods, when they are truly abominable and unclean spirits, admitted by all to be earthly and filthy, weighed down below, “rolling about tombs and monuments,” where they appear dimly as “shadowy phantoms”? These are your gods: idols, shades, and besides these those “lame and wrinkled, squinting-eyed” Prayers, daughters of Thersites rather than of Zeus; so that Bion, it seems to me, put it wittily: how could people rightly ask Zeus for fine children, which he was not able to provide even for himself? Alas for such godlessness! You bury, as far as in you lies, the pure being, and you have heaped up in tombs what is undefiled and holy, robbing the truly existing being of its divinity. Why have you assigned the privileges of God to those who are not gods? Why have you left heaven and honored earth? What else is gold or silver or adamant or iron or bronze or ivory or precious stones? Are they not earth and from earth? Are not all these things you see the offspring of one mother, the earth? Why then, you foolish and empty-minded (for I will repeat myself), have you blasphemed the place above the heavens and dragged piety down to the ground, fashioning earthly gods for yourselves, and, by pursuing these created things instead of the uncreated God, fallen into deeper darkness? Parian marble is beautiful, but it is not yet Poseidon; ivory is beautiful, but it is not yet the Olympian. Matter always needs art, but God needs nothing. Art has advanced, matter has been clothed with a shape; and the richness of the substance makes it worth carrying off for gain, but it becomes worthy of reverence only by its shape. Your statue is gold, it is wood, it is stone; if you think of it from the beginning, it is earth, which has received its form from the craftsman. But I have practiced treading on earth, not worshiping it; for it is not right for me ever to entrust the hopes of the soul to soulless things.