Exhortation to the Greeks 5.64–8.81

Let us run through, if you like, the opinions of the philosophers too, which they boast of concerning the gods, to see whether we may find philosophy itself, out of vainglory, making an idol of matter, or whether we can show in passing that, while deifying certain daemons, it dreams of the truth. Some left us the elements as first principles and sang their praises: Thales of Miletus, water; Anaximenes, also of Miletus, air, and Diogenes of Apollonia later followed him. Parmenides of Elea introduced fire and earth as gods; Hippasus of Metapontum and Heraclitus of Ephesus took only one of the two, fire, to be god; and Empedocles of Acragas, falling into multiplicity, counts strife and love besides these four elements. These too are atheists, who worshiped matter with a wisdom that is no wisdom; they did not honor stones or wood, but they deified the earth, the mother of these; they did not fashion a Poseidon, but they pray to water itself. For what else is Poseidon but a liquid substance, named from drinking (posis)? Just as, of course, warlike Ares is named from lifting up (arsis) and destroying; for which reason, it seems to me, many simply fix a sword in the ground and sacrifice to it as to Ares. This is a custom of the Scythians, as Eudoxus says in the second book of his Circuit of the Earth; and among the Scythians the Sauromatae, as Hicesius says in his book on the mysteries, worship a dagger.

The followers of Heraclitus, who revere fire as the origin of all things, have suffered the same thing; for others have named this fire Hephaestus. The magi of the Persians have honored fire, and many of those who live in Asia, and the Macedonians too, as Diogenes says in the first book of his Persian History. Why should I list for you the Sauromatae, whom Nymphodorus, in his Barbarian Customs, records as worshiping fire, or the Persians and the Medes and the magi? Dinon says that they sacrifice in the open air, considering fire and water the only images of the gods. I have not hidden their ignorance either. For even if they think they are escaping error as far as possible, they slip into another deception: they have not supposed wood and stones to be images of the gods, as the Greeks do, nor ibises and ichneumons, as the Egyptians do, but fire and water, as the philosophers do. Yet many ages later, Berossus shows in the third book of his Chaldaean History, they came to worship statues in human form; Artaxerxes, the son of Darius Ochus, introduced this: he was the first to set up the statue of Aphrodite Anaitis in Babylon, Susa, and Ecbatana, and taught the Persians and Bactrians, Damascus and Sardis, to worship it. Let the philosophers, then, acknowledge as their teachers the Persians or the Sauromatae or the magi, from whom they learned the godlessness of the first principles they revere, ignorant of the supreme Ruler, the maker of all things and the creator of the first principles themselves, God who has no beginning, and worshiping instead these “weak and beggarly elements,” as the apostle says, which were made for the service of human beings.

Of the other philosophers, those who went beyond the elements and busied themselves with something loftier and more remarkable, some sang the praises of the infinite, like Anaximander (he was of Miletus), Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, and Archelaus of Athens. These two set mind over the infinite; while Leucippus of Miletus and Metrodorus of Chios also left two first principles, it seems, the full and the void; and Democritus of Abdera took these two and added the images (eidōla). Alcmaeon of Croton thought the stars were gods, being ensouled. I will not keep silent about their shamelessness: Xenocrates (he was of Chalcedon) hints that the seven planets are gods, and that the eighth is the world made up of all the fixed stars. Nor will I pass over those of the Stoa, who say that the divine pervades all matter, even the most dishonorable, and who simply disgrace philosophy. Having come this far, I think it will not be hard to mention the Peripatetics too. The father of the school, not recognizing the Father of all things, thinks that the one called “the Highest” is the soul of the universe; that is, by taking the soul of the world to be God, he impales himself on his own argument. For he limits providence to the region of the moon, and then, thinking the world to be God, he contradicts himself, declaring that to be God which has no share in God. Theophrastus of Eresus, the pupil of Aristotle, supposes God to be sometimes heaven, sometimes spirit. Epicurus alone I will willingly forget, who thinks that God cares for nothing, impious through and through. And what of Heraclides of Ponticus? Is he not somewhere dragged down to the images of Democritus too?

A great crowd of this kind streams in on me, bringing in, like some bogey, a strange and absurd sketch of foreign daemons, telling myths with old wives' nonsense. We are far from allowing men to listen to such stories, we who do not even soothe our own children, as the saying goes, with fairy tales when they cry, afraid of rearing them in the godlessness proclaimed by these men who seem wise but know the truth no better than infants. Why, in the name of truth, do you show those who have believed you subject to flux and motion and random whirls? Why do you fill my life with idols, fashioning winds or air or fire or earth or stones or wood or iron, this world, into gods, and making gods of the planets too, talking idly and prating about the heavens to those human beings who have truly wandered (planaō), through this much-vaunted astrology, not astronomy?

I long for the Lord of the winds, the Lord of fire, the creator of the world, the one who gives light to the sun. I seek God, not the works of God. Whom shall I take from you as a helper in my search? For we have not altogether despaired of you. Plato, if you like. How then is God to be tracked down, Plato? “For to find the Father and Maker of this universe is a hard task, and having found him, it is impossible to declare him to all.” Why so, in his name? “For he cannot be expressed in words at all.” Well done, Plato, you have touched the truth. But do not grow weary; join me in the search for the Good. For in all human beings without exception, and especially in those who spend their time on words, a certain divine effluence has been instilled. For this reason, even against their will, they confess that God is one, indestructible and unbegotten, and that he is somewhere above, around the back of heaven, in his own proper place of watch, truly existing forever. “What kind of God, tell me, must we conceive? The one who sees all things and is not himself seen,” says Euripides. Menander seems to me to have gone astray where he says: “O Sun, for you must be worshiped first of the gods, through whom it is possible to see the other gods.” For the sun would never show us the true God; but the sound Word, who is the sun of the soul, can, through whom alone, when he has risen within in the depth of the mind, the soul's eye is lit up. Hence, not without reason, Democritus says that “a few of the learned, stretching out their hands toward what we Greeks now call the air, called it Zeus: for he knows all things, gives all and takes away, and he is king of all.”

Plato too, thinking along these lines, hints at God: “All things are around the King of all, and he is the cause of all things beautiful.” Who then is the King of all things? God, the measure of the truth of what exists. Just as the things measured are grasped by the measure, so too truth is measured and grasped by the understanding of God. And Moses, who is truly holy, says: “There shall not be in your bag weight and weight, large or small, nor shall there be in your house a measure large or small, but you shall have a true and just weight,” taking God to be the weight and measure and number of all things. For the unjust and unequal idols are hidden at home in the bag, and in the soul that is, so to speak, filthy; but the only just measure, the only true God, always equal, remaining the same and unchanging, measures and weighs all things, encompassing and holding up the nature of the universe without leaning, as with the balance of his justice.

“God, as the ancient saying has it, holding the beginning and end and middle of all things that exist, goes straight on his way, moving in accordance with nature; and Justice always follows him, the avenger of those who fall short of the divine law.” Where did you get this hint of the truth, Plato? Where did this abundant supply of words, prophesying true religion, come from? “The races of the barbarians,” he says, “are wiser than these.” I know your teachers, even if you want to hide them. You learn geometry from the Egyptians, astronomy from the Babylonians; you take healthful incantations from the Thracians; the Assyrians too have taught you much; but the laws, those that are true, and your belief about God, you have got from the Hebrews themselves, “who honor neither with empty deceits the works of men, golden and bronze, of silver and ivory, nor images of dead men of wood and stone, such as mortals honor with empty-minded counsel; but they lift up pure arms to heaven, rising early from their beds, always purifying their skin with water, and they honor only the Immortal who rules forever.”

And, philosophy, hasten to bring before me not only this one man, Plato, but many others too, who proclaim the one and only true God as God by his inspiration, if they have somewhere laid hold of the truth. Antisthenes did not think this as a Cynic, but as a pupil of Socrates, when he says that “God is like no one; therefore no one can learn about him from an image.” Xenophon the Athenian would himself have written something openly about the truth, bearing witness as Socrates did, if he had not feared Socrates's poison; nonetheless he hints at it. “He who shakes all things,” he says, “and gives them rest, is manifest as someone great and mighty; but what he is like in form is not manifest. Nor does even the sun, which seems all-shining, allow itself to be seen; if anyone gazes at it shamelessly, it takes away his sight.” Where then did the son of Gryllus get his wisdom, if not plainly from the prophetess of the Hebrews, who prophesies somewhat as follows? “For what flesh can see with its eyes the heavenly and true God, the immortal, who dwells in the sky? No, human beings, born mortal, cannot even stand facing the rays of the sun.”

Cleanthes of Pedasis, the Stoic philosopher, displays not a poetic theogony but a true theology. He did not hide what he thought about God: “You ask me what the good is like? Listen, then: ordered, just, holy, pious, master of itself, useful, beautiful, fitting, austere, candid, always advantageous, fearless, painless, profitable, without anguish, helpful, well-pleasing, secure, friendly, honored, consistent … glorious, without conceit, careful, gentle, vehement, enduring, blameless, ever abiding. Everyone who looks to opinion is ignoble, as though he would get something good from it.” Here, I think, he teaches clearly what God is like, and how common opinion and custom enslave those who follow them instead of seeking God. Nor must we hide the followers of Pythagoras, who say: “God is one; and he is not, as some suppose, outside the ordered world, but within it, whole in the whole circle, overseer of all coming-to-be, the blending of all the ages, and worker of his own powers and of all works, the light in heaven and Father of all, mind and ensouling of the whole circle, the movement of all things.” These words too are enough for the knowledge of God, written by them through God's inspiration and selected by us, for anyone who can examine the truth even a little.

Let poetry too come to us (for philosophy alone is not enough), poetry, which is wholly occupied with falsehood, now at last bearing witness, however reluctantly, to the truth, or rather confessing to God its departure into myth. Let any poet who wishes come forward first. Aratus understands that the power of God pervades all things: “so that all things may grow steadfast; therefore they always propitiate him first and last: hail, Father, great wonder, great blessing to humankind.” In the same way Hesiod of Ascra too hints at God: “For he is king and lord of all; no other of the immortals has contended with his might.”

And now even on the stage they lay bare the truth. One of them, Euripides, looking up to the ether and to heaven, says: “Consider this to be God.” And Sophocles, the son of Sophillus: “One, in very truth, one is God, who made heaven and the long earth, and the bright-flashing swell of the sea, and the might of the winds; but many of us mortals, straying in our hearts, have set up for ourselves, as a consolation for our sorrows, images of gods of stone, or figures of bronze or wrought gold or ivory; and assigning them sacrifices and empty festivals, we think we are pious in this way.” This man, at some risk, brought the truth before the spectators on the stage. And the Thracian hierophant and poet in one, Orpheus the son of Oeagrus, after his hierophantic teaching of the orgies and his theology of idols, brings in a recantation of truth, singing at last, late though it was, the truly holy word: “I will speak to those for whom it is lawful; close the doors, all you profane alike. But you, Musaeus, offspring of the light-bearing Moon, listen, for I will tell the truth; and let not what appeared in your breast before rob you of your dear life. Look to the divine Word and devote yourself to it, directing the intelligent vessel of your heart; walk well on the path, and look only to the immortal ruler of the world.” And then, further on, he adds plainly: “He is one, self-begotten; all things are born the offspring of the one; and he himself goes about among them; nor does any mortal see him, but he sees all.” So Orpheus, at least; in time he understood that he had gone astray. “But you, mortal of many devices, do not delay; turn back and propitiate God.”

For even if the Greeks, having received certain sparks of the divine Word, uttered a few words of truth, they bear witness that its power is not hidden, but they convict themselves of weakness, since they did not reach the goal. For by now, I think, it has become clear to everyone that those who do or say anything without the Word of truth are like those who try to walk without feet. Let the exposures of your gods also shame you into salvation, which the poets, compelled by the truth, bring on as comedy. Menander the comic poet, for example, in his play The Charioteer, says: “No god pleases me who walks about out of doors with an old woman, nor one who comes into houses on a board,” a begging priest of the Mother; for such are the begging priests of the Mother. Hence Antisthenes rightly said to them when they begged: “I do not support the Mother of the gods, whom the gods support.” Again, the same comic poet, in his play The Priestess, angry at the custom, tries to expose the godless vanity of error, saying sensibly: “For if a man draws the god wherever he wants with cymbals, the one who does this is greater than the god; but these are instruments of daring and violence, invented for human beings.”

And not Menander alone, but Homer and Euripides and many other poets expose your gods and are not afraid to revile them as much as they like. For example, they call Athena “dog-fly” and Hephaestus “lame in both feet”; and Helen says to Aphrodite, “May you never again turn your feet back to Olympus.” And of Dionysus Homer writes openly: “who once drove the nurses of raving Dionysus down over sacred Nysa; and they all at once threw their wands to the ground under the blows of man-slaying Lycurgus.” Euripides is truly worthy of the Socratic school, looking to the truth and disregarding the spectators. Now he exposes Apollo, “who dwells in the seat at the navel of the earth, dispensing to mortals the clearest speech”: “Obeying him I killed my mother; consider him unholy, and kill him; he sinned, not I,” since Apollo was more ignorant of what is good and just than he; now he brings on Heracles mad, and elsewhere drunk and insatiable. And why not? One who, while feasting on meat, ate green figs besides, “howling unmusically, so that even a barbarian would notice.” And in his play Ion he rolls the gods onto the stage bareheaded: “How then is it just that you, who have written the laws for mortals, should yourselves be guilty of injustice? If (it will not happen, but I will use the argument) you pay the penalty to human beings for your violent marriages, you and Poseidon and Zeus, who rules heaven, will empty your temples to pay for your injustice.”

Now that we have gone through the other matters in order, it is time to turn to the prophetic Scriptures. For the oracles, setting before us most clearly the starting points for true religion, lay the foundation of the truth. The divine Scriptures and the wise ways of life are short roads to salvation. Bare of cosmetics and of outward beauty of speech, of chatter and flattery, they raise up the human being who is being strangled by wickedness, looking beyond the slipperiness of life; with one and the same voice they heal many ills, turning us away from harmful deceit and urging us plainly toward a salvation set before our eyes. So let the prophetess, the Sibyl, sing us first the song of salvation: “Behold, he is clear to all, free from error; come, do not always pursue darkness and gloom. Behold, the sweetly shining light of the sun shines out preeminently. Know it, and lay up wisdom in your breasts. There is one God, who sends rains, winds, and earthquakes, lightnings, famines, plagues, and grievous sorrows, and snows and ice; why should I tell them one by one? He rules heaven, he governs the earth, he himself exists.” Very inspiredly she likens deceit to darkness, and the knowledge of God to the sun and light; and setting both side by side for comparison, she teaches us to choose. For falsehood is not scattered by the mere setting beside it of what is true; it is driven out and put to flight by the practice of the truth.

Jeremiah, the all-wise prophet, or rather the Holy Spirit in Jeremiah, shows us God. “I am a God who is near,” he says, “and not a God far off. If a man does anything in secret, shall I not see him? Do I not fill the heavens and the earth? says the Lord.” And again through Isaiah: “Who will measure heaven with a span, and all the earth with his hand?” See the greatness of God, and be amazed! Let us worship him of whom the prophet says: “Before your face the mountains will melt, as wax melts before the fire.” This, he says, is God, “whose throne is heaven, and the earth his footstool”; “if he opens heaven, trembling will seize you.” Do you wish to hear too what this prophet says about the idols? “They will be made a public example before the sun, and their carcasses will be food for the birds of heaven and the beasts of the earth, and they will rot before the sun and the moon, which they loved and which they served, and their city will be burned.”

He says that the elements too, and the world along with them, will be destroyed: “The earth,” he says, “will grow old, and heaven will pass away,” “but the word of the Lord abides forever.” And what of when God wishes to show himself again, through Moses? “See, see that I am, and there is no other god besides me. I will kill and I will make alive; I will strike and I will heal, and there is no one who will deliver out of my hands.” Do you want to hear another oracle-singer too? You have the whole chorus of the prophets, the fellow worshipers of Moses. What does the Holy Spirit say to them through Hosea? I will not hesitate to say it: “Behold, I am he who makes the thunder firm and creates the wind,” whose hands founded the host of heaven. And further, through Isaiah (this saying too I will recall to you): “I am, I am,” he says, “the Lord, who speaks righteousness and declares truth. Gather together and come; take counsel together, you who are being saved from the nations. They did not know, who carry the wood, their carved image, and pray to gods who will not save them.” Then, further on: “I am God,” he says, “and there is none righteous besides me, and there is no savior except me. Turn to me and you will be saved, you from the end of the earth. I am God, and there is no other; by myself I swear.” And he is indignant with the idolaters, saying: “To whom have you likened the Lord? Or with what likeness have you likened him? Has a carpenter made an image, or a goldsmith melted gold and overlaid it with gold?” and so on. Are you, then, still idolaters? Even now beware of the threats: for the carved images and the things made by hands will howl, or rather those who trust in them; for matter is senseless.

He says further: “The Lord will shake inhabited cities, and will seize the whole world in his hand like a nest.” Why should I declare to you the mysteries of wisdom and sayings from a Hebrew child made wise? “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways, for his works”; and “The Lord gives wisdom, and from his face come knowledge and understanding.” “How long, sluggard, will you lie there? When will you rise from sleep? But if you are diligent, your harvest will come to you like a spring”: the Father's Word, the good lamp, the Lord who brings light, faith and salvation to all. For “the Lord who made the earth by his strength,” as Jeremiah says, “set the world upright by his wisdom.” For when we had fallen away to idols, Wisdom, which is his Word, sets us upright again toward the truth. And this is the first resurrection from the fall. So the inspired Moses, turning us away from all idolatry, cried out most beautifully: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God, the Lord is one”; and “You shall worship the Lord your God and serve him alone.” Now therefore understand, you people, as that blessed psalmist David says: “Lay hold of instruction, lest the Lord be angry, and you perish from the righteous way, when his wrath is suddenly kindled.

Blessed are all who trust in him.” And now the Lord, in his great compassion for us, strikes up the song of salvation, like a marching rhythm: “Sons of men, how long will you be heavy-hearted? Why do you love vanity and seek falsehood?” What then is the vanity, and what the falsehood? The holy apostle of the Lord, accusing the Greeks, will explain it to you: “Because, knowing God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but became vain in their reasonings, and exchanged the glory of God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and served the creation rather than the Creator.” And indeed this is God, who “in the beginning made the heaven and the earth”; but you do not recognize God, and you worship heaven; how can you not be impious? Hear again the prophet saying: “The sun will fail and the heaven will be darkened, but the Almighty will shine forever; and the powers of the heavens will be shaken, and the heavens will be rolled up like a skin, stretched out and drawn together” (for these are the prophetic words), “and the earth will flee from the face of the Lord.”