Exhortation to the Greeks

Amphion of Thebes and Arion of Methymna were both singers (both are myths, and the song is still sung by a chorus of Greeks): by their musical art the one lured a fish, and the other built the walls of Thebes. Another sophist, a Thracian (another Greek myth, this), tamed wild beasts by his song alone, and even moved trees, the oaks, by music. I could tell you another myth too, and another singer, brother to these: Eunomus the Locrian and the Pythian cicada. A Greek festival was being held at Pytho over a dead serpent, and Eunomus was singing the reptile's funeral ode. Whether his song was a hymn or a dirge for the serpent, I cannot say; but there was a contest, and Eunomus was playing the lyre in the heat of the day, when the cicadas were singing under the leaves on the hills, warmed by the sun. They were singing, of course, not to the dead serpent of Pytho, but to the all-wise God, a song of their own making, better than the tunes of Eunomus. A string breaks for the Locrian; the cicada flies onto the crossbar of the lyre and chirps on the instrument as if on a branch; and the singer, fitting himself to the cicada's song, made up for the missing string. So the cicada was not drawn by the song of Eunomus, as the myth would have it, which set up at Pytho a bronze statue of Eunomus with his lyre and the Locrian's fellow competitor. It flew there of its own accord and sang of its own accord; yet to the Greeks it seems to have been a performer of music.

How is it, then, that you have believed empty myths, supposing that animals are charmed by music, while the bright face of truth alone, it seems, looks to you like a mask and falls under the eyes of unbelief? Cithaeron and Helicon, and the mountains of the Odrysians and the Thracians, the initiation halls of error, have been made divine and celebrated in hymns because of the mysteries. For my part, even if they are myths, I cannot bear so many calamities turned into tragedy; but for you even the records of evils have become dramas, and the actors of the dramas a delightful spectacle. But let us shut up the dramas and the poets of the Lenaean festival, who are by now quite drunk, crowned with ivy, raving wildly in Bacchic rites, satyrs and frenzied throng and the rest of the chorus of demons, on Helicon and Cithaeron, which have grown old; and let us bring truth down from heaven above, together with most radiant wisdom, to the holy mountain of God and to the holy chorus of the prophets. Let truth, shining out her far-flashing light, illumine on every side those who wallow in darkness, and set people free from error, stretching out her right hand, understanding, which is supreme, for their salvation. And let them look up and lift their heads, and leave Helicon and Cithaeron and dwell in Zion: “for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem,” the heavenly Word, the true contestant, crowned on the stage of the whole world. My Eunomus sings neither the tune of Terpander nor that of Capion, nor the Phrygian or Lydian or Dorian mode, but the eternal tune of the new harmony, which bears the name of God, the new song, the song of the Levites. “Soothing grief and anger, bringing forgetfulness of all ills,” a sweet and true remedy for sorrow is blended with this song.

It seems to me, then, that the Thracian [Orpheus], the Theban, and the Methymnaean, men and yet not men, were deceivers. Under the pretext of music they ruined human life; possessed by demons, with a kind of artful sorcery, they led people to corruption, celebrating outrages as sacred rites and making gods of sorrows. They were the first to lead human beings by the hand to idols, and indeed to build up, with stones and wood, that is, with statues and paintings, the stupidity of custom; with songs and incantations they yoked that truly noble freedom of those who live as citizens under heaven to the most abject slavery. But my singer is not of that kind: he has come to put an end, and that without delay, to the bitter slavery of the tyrant demons; and bringing us over to the gentle and kindly yoke of godliness, he calls back to heaven those who had been cast down to the earth.

He alone of all who ever lived has tamed the most intractable of wild beasts, human beings: birds, the flighty among them; reptiles, the deceivers; lions, the passionate; swine, the lovers of pleasure; wolves, the rapacious. Stones and wood are the senseless; indeed a human being steeped in ignorance is more insensible than stones. Let the prophetic voice come forward as our witness, singing in harmony with the truth and pitying those who are worn down by ignorance and folly: “For God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” He, taking pity on the great ignorance and hardness of heart of those who had been turned to stone against the truth, raised up from those stones, the nations who had trusted in stones, a seed of godliness, responsive to virtue. Again, he somewhere called certain venomous and treacherous hypocrites, who lie in wait for righteousness, a “brood of vipers”; yet if even one of these serpents repents of his own accord and follows the Word, he becomes “a man of God.” Others he calls, figuratively, “wolves” clothed in sheepskins, hinting at those who are rapacious in human form. And all these most savage beasts, and such stones as these, the heavenly song itself has transformed into gentle human beings. “For we too were once foolish, disobedient, deceived, slaves to various passions and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another,” as the apostolic writing says; “but when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, not by works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy he saved us.” See how powerful the new song is! It has made human beings out of stones and human beings out of beasts.

Those who were otherwise dead, having no share in the life that truly is, came back to life just by becoming hearers of the song. It is this song that set the universe in harmonious order and tuned the discord of the elements into an ordered concord, so that the whole world might become a harmony to him. He let the sea go free, yet kept it from encroaching on the land; and the land, which was being swept away, he made firm and fixed as a boundary for the sea. He softened the rush of fire with air, as if blending the Dorian mode with the Lydian; and he tamed the harsh cold of air by interweaving it with fire, blending harmoniously these extreme notes of the universe. And this pure song, the support of the universe and the harmony of all things, stretching from the center to the ends and from the ends to the center, tuned this whole universe, not according to Thracian music, which is like that of Jubal, but according to the ancestral will of God, which David sought after with zeal. He who is from David and yet before him, the Word of God, disdaining lyre and harp, which are lifeless instruments, has tuned by the Holy Spirit this world, and especially the small world, the human being, soul and body; and on this many-voiced instrument he makes music to God, and sings to the instrument, the human being. “For you are my harp and flute and temple”: a harp because of its harmony, a flute because of its breath, a temple because of the Word; so that the one may resound, the second breathe, and the third contain the Lord. And King David, the harpist whom we mentioned a little earlier, urged people toward the truth and away from idols. So far was he from hymning the demons that they were driven away by his true music; when Saul was possessed by them, David cured him simply by singing. The Lord fashioned the human being as a beautiful instrument that breathes, after his own image; and he himself is surely God's all-harmonious instrument, melodious and holy, the Wisdom above the world, the heavenly Word.

What, then, does the instrument, the Word of God, the Lord, and the new song desire? To open the eyes of the blind and unstop the ears of the deaf, to lead by the hand into righteousness those who limp or go astray, to show God to foolish people, to put an end to corruption, to conquer death, to reconcile disobedient sons to their Father. God's instrument loves humankind. The Lord pities, disciplines, exhorts, admonishes, saves, and guards, and he promises us, abundantly, the kingdom of heaven as the reward for our learning, taking from us only this benefit: that we are saved. For wickedness feeds on the corruption of human beings; but truth, like the bee, harming nothing that exists, delights only in the salvation of human beings. You have the promise, then; you have his love for humankind; take your share of the grace. And do not suppose that my song of salvation is new in the way that a vessel or a house is new. For it was “before the morning star,” and “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Error is old, but truth appears new. Let the mythical goats teach that the Phrygians are ancient, or the poets who record the Arcadians as older than the moon, or those who dream that the Egyptians were the first people, gods and men alike, that this earth brought to light. Yet not one of these existed before this world. But we existed before the foundation of the world: we who, since we were destined to be in him, were begotten beforehand by God. We are the rational creatures of God's Word, and because of him we are older than all, for “in the beginning was the Word.”

But because the Word existed from above, he was and is the divine beginning of all things; and because he has now taken the name hallowed of old and worthy of his power, the Christ, I have called him a new song. The Word, the Christ, is the cause both of our being long ago (for he was in God) and of our well-being. Now this same Word has appeared to human beings, he who alone is both, God and man, the cause of all good things for us; learning from him how to live well, we are sent on our way to eternal life. For, as that inspired apostle of the Lord says, “the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” This is the new song: the appearing, which has now shone out among us, of the Word who was in the beginning and existed before all things. The Savior who existed before has recently appeared; he who is in the One who is has appeared, because “the Word was with God” as teacher; the Word by whom all things were made has appeared. He who, as Creator, gave us life in the beginning when he formed us, taught us to live well when he appeared as teacher, so that afterward, as God, he might supply eternal life. It was not now for the first time that he pitied us for our error; he pitied us from the very beginning; but now, by appearing, he has saved us when we were already perishing. For that wicked, creeping beast enslaves human beings by sorcery and torments them even now, taking vengeance, it seems to me, in the manner of the barbarians, who are said to bind their captives to corpses until they rot together. This wicked tyrant and dragon, then, takes those he can claim from birth, binds them by the wretched bond of superstition to stones and wood and statues and such idols, and carries them off, as the saying goes, and buries them alive, until they perish together. For this reason, since the deceiver is one, who from the beginning brought Eve, and now also the rest of humankind, down to death, our helper and defender, the Lord, is also one; he foretold it prophetically from the beginning, and now also …

… plainly calls us to salvation. Let us flee, then, obeying the apostle's command, from “the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now at work in the sons of disobedience,” and let us run to our Savior, the Lord, who both now and always has urged us toward salvation: through wonders and signs in Egypt, and in the desert through the bush and through the cloud that, by the grace of his love for humankind, followed the Hebrews like a handmaid. By the fear these inspired he urged the hard-hearted; and now, through Moses the all-wise, Isaiah the lover of truth, and the whole chorus of prophets, he turns to the Word, in a more reasonable way, those who have ears. Sometimes he rebukes, sometimes he threatens; some people he mourns over; to others he sings, like a good physician who, for diseased bodies, puts poultices on some parts, soothes others, bathes others, cuts others with the knife, cauterizes others, and in some cases amputates, if in any way he can make the patient healthy, even at the cost of a part or a limb. The Savior has many voices and many ways for the salvation of human beings. He threatens in order to admonish; he rebukes in order to convert; he mourns in order to show pity; he sings in order to encourage. He speaks through the bush (those people needed signs and wonders), and he frightens human beings with fire, kindling the flame from the pillar, a token of grace and of fear together: if you obey, the light; if you disobey, the fire. But since the flesh is more honorable than the pillar and the bush, after those things the prophets speak: the Lord himself speaking in Isaiah, himself in Elijah, himself in the mouth of the prophets. But if you do not believe the prophets, and take both the men and the fire for a myth, the Lord himself will speak to you, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself,” the compassionate God, longing to save the human being. And the Word himself now speaks to you plainly, putting your unbelief to shame; yes, I say, the Word of God became a human being, so that you too may learn from a human being how a human being may become …

… God. Is it not absurd, then, my friends, that God should always be urging us toward virtue, while we shrink from the benefit and put off our salvation? Does not John too call us to salvation, and become wholly a voice of exhortation? Let us ask him, then: “Who are you, and where are you from?” He will not say that he is Elijah, and he will deny that he is the Christ; but he will confess that he is “a voice crying in the wilderness.” Who, then, is John? To put it figuratively, let us say: the exhorting voice of the Word, crying in the wilderness. What do you cry, O voice? “Tell us too.” “Make straight the ways of the Lord.” John is the forerunner, and the voice is the forerunner of the Word: an encouraging voice, preparing for salvation, a voice urging us toward the inheritance of heaven; through it the barren and desert land is no longer childless. This pregnancy was foretold to me by the voice of an angel, which was also a forerunner of the Lord, bringing good news to a barren woman, as John did to the desert. Because of this voice of the Word, then, the barren woman is blessed with children and the desert bears fruit. The two voices that went before the Lord, the angel's and John's, hint to me at the salvation laid up for us: that when this Word has appeared, we reap the fruit of fruitfulness, eternal life. Scripture brings both voices together and makes everything clear: “Let her hear who does not bear; let her break into a cry who is not in labor; for the children of the desolate one are more than those of her who has a husband.” To us the angel brought good news; us John urged to recognize the farmer and to seek the husband. For he is one and the same, the husband of the barren woman and the farmer of the desert, who filled both the barren woman and the desert with divine power. The noble woman had many children, but the Hebrew woman, once the mother of many, had become childless through disobedience; so the barren woman receives the husband and the desert the farmer. Then the one becomes a mother of fruits, the other of believers, both through the Word; but for unbelievers the barren woman and the desert remain barren even now.

John, the herald of the Word, exhorted people in this way to be ready for the coming of God, the Christ; and this was what the silence of Zechariah hinted at, as it waited for the fruit that would go before Christ, so that the light of truth, the Word, might break the mystic silence of the prophetic riddles by becoming the Gospel. But you, if you long to see God truly, take part in purifications worthy of God: not with laurel leaves and fillets embroidered with wool and purple, but crowning yourself with righteousness and wreathing your head with the leaves of self-control; and seek out Christ. “For I am the door,” he says somewhere. Those who wish to know God must learn to know this door, so that he may throw open for us all at once the gates of heaven; for the gates of the Word are gates of reason, opened by the key of faith. “No one knows God except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son reveals him.” And I know well that he who opens the door that has been shut until now afterward reveals what is inside, and shows what could not be known before, except by those who have made their way through Christ, through whom alone God is beheld.

Do not, then, pry into godless sanctuaries, or into the mouths of chasms full of marvels, or the Thesprotian cauldron, or the Cirrhaean tripod, or the bronze gong of Dodona. Leave the old oak honored in the desert sands, and the oracle there, withered along with the oak itself, to the myths that have grown old. The Castalian spring has fallen silent, and so has the other spring, at Colophon; the other prophetic streams too have died, and, empty of their pretension, have at last, though late, been shown up as having dried up together with their own myths. Tell us of the useless oracles of the rest of that divination, or rather madness: the Clarian, the Pythian, the Didymaean, the oracles of Amphiaraus, of † Apollo, of Amphilochus; and, if you like, put in the same unholy company the readers of portents and the watchers of birds and the interpreters of dreams. Set beside the Pythian those who divine by flour and by barley, and the ventriloquists who are still honored by the many. Yes, let the sanctuaries of the Egyptians and the necromancies of the Etruscans be consigned to darkness. These are truly the mad schools of unbelieving men and the gambling dens of undiluted error. Partners in this sorcery are goats trained for divination, and ravens taught by men to give oracles to men.

What if I were to go through the mysteries for you? I will not mock them by dancing them out in public, as they say Alcibiades did; but I will strip bare, according to the word of truth, the sorcery hidden in them, and I will wheel out your so-called gods themselves, whose mystic rites these are, as on the stage of life, before the spectators of truth. The Bacchants hold orgies in honor of the frenzied Dionysus, celebrating their sacred madness by eating raw flesh; wreathed with snakes, they complete the sharing out of the flesh of their slaughtered victims, shrieking out “Eua!”, the Eve through whom error came in; and the emblem of the Bacchic orgies is a consecrated serpent. Indeed, according to the precise Hebrew pronunciation, the name “Hevia,” with a rough breathing, means “the female serpent.” Demeter and Kore have become a mystic drama, and Eleusis celebrates with torches their wandering, the abduction, and their grief.

And it seems to me that the orgies and the mysteries should be explained by their derivation: the “orgies” (ὄργια) from the wrath (ὀργή) of Demeter against Zeus, and the “mysteries” (μυστήρια) from the pollution (μύσος) that took place in connection with Dionysus. And if they come from a certain Myous of Attica, who, Apollodorus says, was killed while hunting, I do not grudge you that: your mysteries have been glorified with the honors of a funeral. You may also understand them in another way, as “myth-hunts” (μυθήρια), since the letters correspond; for such myths, if anything does, hunt down the most barbarous of the Thracians, the most senseless of the Phrygians, and the superstitious among the Greeks. Perish, then, whoever began this deceit among human beings: whether Dardanus, who introduced the mysteries of the Mother of the gods, or Eetion, who founded the orgies and rites of the Samothracians, or that Phrygian Midas, who learned the artful deceit from the Odrysian and then passed it on to his subjects. Nor would Cinyras, the Cypriot islander, ever persuade me, who dared to bring the lewd orgies of Aphrodite out of the night into the daylight, in his ambition to make a goddess of a harlot of his own city. Others say that Melampus son of Amythaon brought the festivals of Demeter, a grief celebrated in song, from Egypt to Greece. These I would call the authors of evil, the fathers of godless myths and of deadly superstition, who planted the mysteries in human life as a seed of wickedness and corruption.

Now, for it is time, I will prove that your orgies themselves are full of deceit and marvels. And if you have been initiated, you will laugh all the more at these myths of yours that are held in honor. I will proclaim openly what is hidden, not ashamed to say what you are not ashamed to worship. The “foam-born,” the “Cyprus-born,” the darling of Cinyras (I mean Aphrodite, “lover of genitals, because she sprang from the genitals,” those genitals cut off from Uranus, the lustful ones that, after the cutting, violated the wave): see how fitting a fruit of lewd members [Aphrodite] is born to you! In the rites of this pleasure born of the sea, as a token of her birth, a lump of salt and a phallus are given to those initiated into the art of adultery; and the initiates bring her a coin …

… as lovers do to a courtesan. The mysteries of Demeter are Zeus's amorous embraces with his mother Demeter, and the wrath of Demeter (I do not know what else to call her, his mother or his wife), because of which she is said to have been called Brimo; and the supplications of Zeus, and the drink of bile, and the tearing out of hearts, and unspeakable deeds. The Phrygians perform the same rites for Attis and Cybele and the Corybantes. They have spread the tale that Zeus tore off the testicles of a ram and brought them and threw them into Demeter's lap, paying a sham penalty for his violent embrace, as though he had castrated himself. The tokens of this initiation, set out here for good measure, will, I know, move you to laughter even if you are not inclined to laugh, since they expose you: “I ate from the drum; I drank from the cymbal; I carried the sacred dish; I slipped into the bridal chamber.” Are not these tokens an outrage?

Are not the mysteries a mockery? What if I were to add the rest? Demeter conceives, Kore is reared, and this same Zeus who fathered her has intercourse again, with Persephone, his own daughter, after her mother Demeter, forgetting his earlier pollution [Zeus, the father and seducer of the girl]; and he has intercourse with her in the form of a serpent, exposed as what he really was. So in the Sabazian mysteries the token given to the initiates is “the god through the bosom”: this is a serpent, drawn through the bosom of the initiates, a proof of the incontinence of Zeus. Persephone too bears a child in the shape of a bull. Indeed, as a certain idolatrous poet says: “The bull is father of the serpent, and the serpent father of the bull; on the mountain the hidden thing, the herdsman's goad”; by the herdsman's goad, I think, he means the fennel stalk that the Bacchants wreathe.

Shall I tell you of Persephone's flower-gathering, and the basket, and the abduction by Aidoneus, and the chasm in the earth, and the swine of Eubuleus that were swallowed up with the two goddesses, the reason why at the Thesmophoria the women throw pigs into the sacred pits? The women celebrate this myth in various ways in the different cities, in the Thesmophoria, the Scirophoria, and the Arrhetophoria, turning the abduction of Persephone into tragedy in many forms. And the mysteries of Dionysus are utterly inhuman. When he was still a child, the Curetes were dancing around him in armed motion, but the Titans crept in by guile, deceived him with childish toys, and tore him apart while he was still an infant, as the poet of the Initiation, Orpheus the Thracian, says: “Top, and bull-roarer, and dolls with jointed limbs, and fair golden apples from the clear-voiced Hesperides.”

And it is not useless to set before you, for your condemnation, the useless tokens of this rite: a knucklebone, a ball, a spinning top, apples, a bull-roarer, a mirror, a fleece. Athena stole away the heart of Dionysus and was called Pallas from the throbbing (πάλλειν) of the heart. The Titans, who had torn him apart, set a cauldron on a tripod, threw in the limbs of Dionysus, and first boiled them; then they pierced them with spits and “held them over Hephaestus.” Later Zeus appeared (if he was a god, no doubt he had his share of the smell of the roasting flesh, which your gods admit is “the privilege allotted” to them), struck the Titans with the thunderbolt, and entrusted the limbs of Dionysus to his son Apollo to bury. Apollo, not disobeying Zeus, carried the dismembered corpse to Parnassus and laid it there.

If you wish to look also on the orgies of the Corybantes: two of them killed their third brother, covered the head of the corpse with a purple cloth, crowned it, and buried it, carrying it on a bronze shield to the foot of Mount Olympus. And these, in short, are the mysteries: murders and tombs. Their priests, whom those who care to call them so call “Anactotelestae,” add a further marvel to the calamity by forbidding parsley with its root to be put on the table; for they believe that parsley grew from the blood that flowed from the Corybant, just as the women celebrating the Thesmophoria take care not to eat pomegranate seeds that have fallen to the ground, believing that pomegranates sprang from the drops of the blood of Dionysus. They also call the Corybantes Cabiri and proclaim a Cabiric rite. For these two fratricides took up the chest in which the genitals of Dionysus were kept and brought it to Etruria, merchants of a glorious cargo; and there they lived as exiles, handing on to the Etruscans the precious teaching of piety, genitals and a chest, to be worshiped. For this reason some, not unreasonably, would have Dionysus called Attis, since he was deprived of his genitals.

And what wonder is it if the barbarian Etruscans are initiated into such shameful sufferings, when among the Athenians and the rest of Greece (I am ashamed even to say it) the myth of Demeter is full of shame? Demeter, wandering around Eleusis (this place is in Attica) in search of her daughter Kore, grows weary and sits down by a well in her grief. This is forbidden to the initiates even now, so that those who have been initiated may not seem to imitate the mourning goddess. At that time the earthborn lived at Eleusis; their names were Baubo and Dysaules and Triptolemus, and also Eumolpus and Eubuleus. Triptolemus was a cowherd, Eumolpus a shepherd, and Eubuleus a swineherd; from them sprang the hierophantic clans of the Eumolpidae and the Ceryces at Athens. And (for I will not refrain from saying it) Baubo, having received Demeter as her guest, offers her a potion; when she refuses to take it and will not drink (for she was in mourning), Baubo, deeply hurt, as though she had been slighted, uncovers her private parts and shows them to the goddess; and Demeter is delighted at the sight and …

… at last accepts the drink, pleased by the spectacle. These are the secret mysteries of the Athenians. Orpheus too records them, and I will set before you the very verses of Orpheus, so that you may have the leader of the mysteries himself as witness to their shamelessness: “So saying, she drew up her robes and showed all her body, a shape unseemly; the child Iacchus was there, and laughing he kept tossing his hand beneath Baubo's bosom. And when the goddess smiled, she smiled in her heart, and accepted the gleaming cup in which the potion lay.” And the password of the Eleusinian mysteries is this: “I fasted, I drank the potion, I took from the chest, and having done the work I put it into the basket, and from the basket into the chest.” Fine sights indeed, and fit for a goddess!

These rites, then, are worthy of night and fire, and of the “great-hearted,” or rather empty-headed, people of the Erechtheids, and of the other Greeks too, “for whom there wait, when they die, things they do not expect.” Against whom does Heraclitus of Ephesus prophesy? “Night-roamers, magi, Bacchants, Lenaean women, initiates”: these he threatens with what comes after death, to these he prophesies the fire; “for the mysteries that are customary among men are celebrated in an unholy way.” The mysteries, then, are mere custom and empty opinion, and a deceit of the serpent that is worshiped, when people turn with a counterfeit piety to initiations that are really no initiations and rites that are no rites. And what are the mystic chests like? For I must strip bare their holy things and speak out what is not to be spoken. Are they not sesame cakes, pyramids, balls of wool, cakes with many knobs, lumps of salt, and a serpent, the sacred emblem of Dionysus Bassareus? And besides these, pomegranates, fig branches, fennel stalks, ivy, and also round cakes and poppies? These are their holy things. And further, the secret emblems of Themis, the Earth: marjoram, a lamp, a sword, and a woman's comb, which is, to put it euphemistically and in the language of the mysteries, a woman's private part. What open shamelessness! Once night was a silent veil for the pleasures of the self-controlled; now for the initiates night is a much-talked-of trial of incontinence, and the fire, carried in torches, exposes their passions. Put out the fire, hierophant; torchbearer, have some respect for the torches; the light exposes your Iacchus. Let night hide the mysteries; let the orgies be honored in darkness. The fire does not play a part; it is ordered to convict and to punish.

These are the mysteries of the godless. And I rightly call godless those who do not know the God who truly is, but shamelessly worship a child torn apart by Titans, a grieving woman, and parts that are truly unspeakable for shame. They are caught in a double godlessness: first, that they do not know God, failing to recognize the God who truly is; and second, this further error, that they consider as existing beings that do not exist, and call gods those who do not truly exist, or rather do not exist at all, but have received only the name. That is why the apostle convicts us too, saying: “You were strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.”

May many blessings come to the king of the Scythians, whoever he was [Anacharsis]! When one of his fellow citizens was imitating among the Scythians the rite of the Mother of the gods practiced at Cyzicus, beating a drum, clanging a cymbal, and hung about the neck with images like a begging priest of the goddess, the king shot him dead with arrows, as one who had become unmanly among the Greeks and was teaching the other Scythians the effeminate disease. For this reason (it must not be concealed) I am led to wonder how Euhemerus of Acragas, Nicanor of Cyprus, Diagoras and Hippo of Melos, and besides these that Cyrenian (Theodorus was his name), and many others, came to be called atheists. They lived temperate lives and saw more sharply than the rest of humankind the error about these gods; and even if they did not perceive the truth itself, they at least suspected the error, which is no small seed, springing up as a living spark of wisdom toward the truth. One of them charges the Egyptians: “If you believe they are gods, do not lament them or beat your breasts for them; but if you mourn them, stop thinking them gods.” Another took a Heracles made of wood (he happened to be cooking something at home, as one does) and said: “Come now, Heracles: now is your chance to perform for us, as you did for Eurystheus, this thirteenth labor, and cook Diagoras's dinner”; and then he put him into the fire like a piece of wood.

Atheism and superstition, then, are the two extremes of ignorance, and we must make every effort to keep clear of both. Do you not see Moses, the hierophant of the truth, commanding that one who is crushed or castrated shall not enter the assembly, nor the son of a harlot? By the first two he hints at the godless way of life, deprived of divine and fruitful power; and by the third, the one who claims many falsely named gods instead of the only God who is, just as the son of a harlot claims many fathers because he does not know his true father. Yet there was in human beings an innate and ancient fellowship with heaven, darkened by ignorance, but at times suddenly leaping out of the darkness and shining forth, as in the saying of one poet: “Do you see this boundless ether on high, which holds the earth around in its moist embrace?” and “O you who carry the earth and have your seat upon the earth, whoever you are, hard to guess and to behold,” and all the other sayings of this kind that the sons of the poets sing.

But ideas that went astray and turned aside from the straight path, truly deadly ideas, turned the heavenly plant, the human being, away from his heavenly way of life and stretched him out on the ground, persuading him to cling to earthly figments. Some, deceived at once by the sight of the heavens and trusting in sight alone, watched the movements of the stars, admired them and made gods of them, calling the stars gods (θεοί) from their running (θεῖν); and they worshiped the sun, as the Indians do, and the moon, as the Phrygians do. Others, gathering the cultivated fruits of what grows from the earth, called the grain Demeter, as the Athenians do, and the vine Dionysus, as the Thebans do. Others, observing the requitals of wickedness, make gods of retributions and worship calamities. Hence the poets of the stage have invented the Erinyes and the Eumenides, the Avengers of blood and the Avengers of suppliants, and also the Alastores. Some of the philosophers too, following the poets, make idols of the forms of your passions, Fear and Love and Joy and Hope; just as old Epimenides set up altars at Athens to Insolence and Shamelessness. Others, starting from actual things, are made gods for human beings and fashioned in bodily form: a certain Justice, and Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, and Fate, and Auxo and Thallo of Attica. A sixth way of introducing deceit and producing gods is the one by which they count the twelve gods; Hesiod sings their theogony in his own way, and Homer tells what he tells about the gods. The last remains (for there are seven ways in all): the one that starts from the divine benefits bestowed on human beings. For not understanding the God who is their benefactor, they invented certain saviors, the Dioscuri, Heracles the averter of evils, and Asclepius the physician.

These are the slippery and harmful deviations from the truth, which drag the human being down from heaven and tip him into the pit. I want to show you the gods themselves at close quarters, what they are like and whether they exist at all, so that at last you may cease from your error and run back again to heaven. “For we too were once children of wrath, like the rest; but God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, when we were already dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.” For the Word is living, and whoever has been buried with Christ is raised up with God. Those who are still unbelieving are called “children of wrath,” reared for wrath; but we are no longer the nurslings of wrath, since we have been torn away from error and are rushing toward the truth. So we, who were once sons of lawlessness, have now, through the Word's love for humankind, become sons of God. But to you your own poet, Empedocles of Acragas, says: “Therefore, distraught with grievous evils, you will never relieve your heart of wretched sorrows.” Most of what you say about the gods is myth and fiction; and what is supposed to have really happened is recorded about shameful men who lived licentiously. “You walk in conceit and madness; you have left the right and straight path and gone off by the way of thorns and stakes. Why do you wander, mortals? Stop, you fools; leave the darkness of night, and lay hold of the light.” So the prophetic and poetic Sibyl urges us; and so the truth urges us too, stripping the crowd of gods of these terrifying and bewildering masks, and exposing the reputations made for them by showing how many share the same names.

For example, there are those who record three Zeuses: one the son of Aether in Arcadia, and two sons of Kronos, one of them in Crete and the other, again, in Arcadia. Some suppose there are five Athenas: one the daughter of Hephaestus, the Athenian; one the daughter of the Nile, the Egyptian; a third, the daughter of Kronos, the inventor of war; a fourth, the daughter of Zeus, whom the Messenians call Coryphasia after her mother; and last of all the daughter of Pallas and Titanis, the daughter of Ocean, who impiously sacrificed her father and adorned herself with her father's skin as with a fleece. Aristotle counts first an Apollo who was the son of Hephaestus and Athena (so here Athena is no longer a virgin); second, the son of Cyrbas in Crete; third, the son of Zeus; and fourth, the Arcadian, the son of Silenus, who is called Nomius among the Arcadians; besides these he lists the Libyan, the son of Ammon; and Didymus the grammarian adds a sixth, the son of Magnes.

And how many Apollos are there even now, countless mortal and perishable human beings, named like the ones just mentioned? What if I were to tell you of the many Asclepiuses, or of the Hermeses that are counted, or of the Hephaestuses of mythology? Would I not seem excessive, flooding your ears with so many names? But their native countries, their crafts, their lives, and above all their tombs prove that they were human beings. Ares, for example, whom the poets honor as much as they can, “Ares, Ares, bane of mortals, bloodstained, stormer of walls,” this fickle and hostile god, was, as Epicharmus says, a Spartan; Sophocles knows him as a Thracian; others make him an Arcadian. Homer says he was bound for thirteen months: “Ares endured it, when Otus and mighty Ephialtes, the sons of Aloeus, bound him in a strong bond; he lay bound in a bronze jar for thirteen months.” Many blessings on the Carians, who sacrifice dogs to him! And let the Scythians not stop sacrificing asses, as Apollodorus says, and Callimachus: “Phoebus is honored among the Hyperboreans with sacrifices of asses.” The same poet says elsewhere: “Rich slaughterings of asses delight Phoebus.”

Hephaestus, whom Zeus threw out of Olympus “from the divine threshold,” fell on Lemnos and worked as a smith, lame in both feet, “and his slender shins moved nimbly beneath him.” You have a physician among the gods too, not only a smith; but the physician was a lover of money, and his name was Asclepius. I will set before you your own poet, the Boeotian Pindar: “Gold, shown in his hands, turned even him with a lordly fee; and so the son of Kronos, hurling with his hands through both of them, swiftly took the breath from their breasts, and the blazing thunderbolt struck them dead.” And Euripides: “For Zeus is to blame, who killed my son Asclepius, casting fire into his breast.” He lies, then, thunderstruck, in the territory of Cynosuris. Philochorus says that at Tenos Poseidon is honored as a physician, and that Sicily lies on top of Kronos, who was buried there. Patrocles of Thurii and Sophocles the Younger, in some of their tragedies, tell the story of the Dioscuri: these two Dioscuri were mortal men, if Homer is enough to confirm what is said: “But them the life-giving earth already held, in Lacedaemon, there in their own dear native land.” Let the author of the Cypria come forward too: “Castor was mortal, and the lot of death was fated for him; but Polydeuces was immortal, offshoot of Ares.” This was a poet's lie; Homer is more trustworthy than he, when he speaks of both the Dioscuri, and moreover shows Heracles to be a mere phantom, for he calls him “a mortal, Heracles, well versed in great deeds.” So Homer himself knows Heracles as a mortal man; and Hieronymus the philosopher even describes the build of his body: small, bristly-haired, and strong; while Dicaearchus says he was lean, sinewy, dark, hook-nosed, with bright eyes and straight hair. This Heracles lived fifty-two years and ended his life cremated on the pyre on Oeta.

The Muses, whom Alcman makes daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, and whom the other poets and historians make divine and worship (indeed whole cities now dedicate shrines of the Muses to them), were Mysian slave women, bought by Megaclo, the daughter of Macar. Macar was king of the Lesbians, but he was always quarreling with his wife, and Megaclo was indignant on her mother's behalf; and why should she not be? So she bought these Mysian slave women, the same number as the Muses, and called them Moisai, in the Aeolic dialect. She had them taught to sing and to play the lyre, recounting the deeds of old in melody. By constantly playing and singing beautifully they charmed Macar and stopped his anger. For this reason Megaclo set them up in bronze as a thank offering for her mother's sake and ordered them to be honored in all the temples. Such, then, are the Muses; the story is told by Myrsilus of Lesbos.

Listen, then, to the love affairs of your gods, and the extraordinary tales of their incontinence, their wounds and bonds, their laughter and battles, their slavery too, and their banquets, embraces, tears, passions, and lewd pleasures. Call me Poseidon and the chorus of those he seduced: Amphitrite, Amymone, Alope, Melanippe, Alcyone, Hippothoe, Chione, and the countless others, among whom, many as they were, the passions of your Poseidon still felt cramped. Call me Apollo too: this is Phoebus, a pure prophet and a good counselor. But Sterope does not say so, nor Aethusa, nor Arsinoe, nor Zeuxippe, nor Prothoe, nor Marpessa, nor Hypsipyle; Daphne alone escaped both the prophet and her ruin. And let Zeus himself come, above all the rest, the “father of men and gods,” as you call him. He was so given to love affairs that he desired all women and satisfied his desire on them all.

He had his fill of women no less than the he-goat of Thmuis had of she-goats. And I have admired your poems, Homer: “He spoke, and the son of Kronos nodded with his dark brows, and the ambrosial locks flowed down from the lord's immortal head, and he made great Olympus quake.” You portray Zeus as majestic, Homer, and give him a revered nod. But only show him the girdle, my friend, and Zeus is exposed and his locks disgraced. To what licentiousness did that Zeus come, who spent so many nights of pleasure with Alcmene! For not even nine nights were long enough for the incontinent god (on the contrary, a whole lifetime was too short for his lust), so that he might father for us the god who wards off evils. Heracles, the son of Zeus, truly Zeus's son, begotten in a long night, toiled a long time over the twelve labors, but corrupted the fifty daughters of Thestius in one night, becoming at once the adulterer and the bridegroom of so many virgins. Not without reason do the poets call him “wretch” and “doer of wicked deeds.” It would take long to tell of his adulteries of every kind and his corruption of boys. For your gods did not keep away even from boys: one loved Hylas, another Hyacinthus, another Pelops, another Chrysippus, another Ganymede. Let your wives worship these gods, and pray that their husbands may be like them, so “self-controlled,” so that they may be like the gods by imitating the same things; let your children get used to revering them, so that they too may grow into men who take the gods as a vivid model of sexual immorality. But perhaps it is only the male gods among them who rush after love affairs; “the goddesses, being female, stayed each at home for shame,” says Homer, being ashamed, [the goddesses,] out of modesty, to see Aphrodite caught in adultery. Yet the goddesses are still more passionately licentious, bound in adultery: Eos with Tithonus, Selene with Endymion, the Nereid with Aeacus and Thetis with Peleus, Demeter with Iasion and Persephone with Adonis. Aphrodite, disgraced with Ares, went on to Cinyras, married Anchises, lay in wait for Phaethon, and loved Adonis; she competed with the ox-eyed goddess, and the goddesses stripped for an apple and presented themselves naked to the shepherd, to see which of them he would judge beautiful.

Come now, let us also survey the games briefly, and put an end to these funeral festivals, the Isthmian, the Nemean, the Pythian, and besides these the Olympian. At Pytho the Pythian serpent is worshiped, and the festival of the snake is proclaimed as the Pythian games. At the Isthmus the sea spat out a pitiful piece of refuse, and the Isthmian games lament Melicertes. At Nemea another child, Archemorus, was buried, and the child's funeral rite is called the Nemean games. And Pisa, you Panhellenes, is the tomb of a Phrygian charioteer, and the Zeus of Phidias claims for himself the libations for Pelops, the Olympian games. The games, then, it seems, were mysteries celebrated over the dead, like the oracles, and both have been made public. The mysteries at Agra and at Halimus in Attica are confined to Athens; but the games, and the phalluses carried in procession for Dionysus, have become a disgrace to the whole world, wickedly spread through human life. For Dionysus, eager to go down to Hades, did not know the way; a man named Prosymnus promised to tell him, but not without payment. The payment was not a decent one, though decent enough to Dionysus: the favor was a sexual one, and the payment he asked for was Dionysus himself. The god was willing, and promised to grant it if he came back, confirming the promise with an oath. Having learned the way, he went off, and then came back again; he did not find Prosymnus, for he had died. To discharge his debt to his lover, Dionysus rushed to the tomb in his lust; and cutting a fig branch that was at hand, he shaped it like the male member and sat on it, fulfilling his promise to the dead man. As a mystic memorial of this passion, phalluses are set up in the cities to Dionysus. “For if it were not for Dionysus that they held the procession and sang the hymn to the shameful parts, it would be a most shameless deed,” says Heraclitus; “but Hades and Dionysus are the same, for whom they rave and keep the Lenaea”; not so much, I think, because of the body's drunkenness as because of the disgraceful priestly display of licentiousness.

Naturally, then, such gods of yours became slaves, slaves to their passions. Even before the so-called Helots of the Spartans, Apollo came under the yoke of slavery to Admetus at Pherae, and Heracles to Omphale at Sardis; Poseidon and Apollo worked for hire for Laomedon, like a worthless servant who could not even obtain his freedom from his former master; it was then that the two of them built the walls of Troy for the Phrygian king. Homer is not ashamed to show Athena “holding a golden lamp” in her hands for Odysseus; and we have read how Aphrodite, like some wanton maidservant, brought and set before Helen, face to face, the chair of her adulterous lover, to draw her into intercourse with him. Panyassis, moreover, records that very many other gods served human beings, writing somewhat as follows: “Demeter endured it, the famous lame god endured it, Poseidon endured it, Apollo of the silver bow endured it, to serve a mortal man for a year; and mighty-hearted Ares endured it too, under his father's compulsion,” and so on.

It follows naturally from this that these amorous and passionate gods of yours are portrayed in every way as having human feelings. “For surely their skin too is mortal.” Homer bears witness to this when he portrays, very precisely, Aphrodite crying out loud and shrill at her wound, and tells of Ares himself, the most warlike of all, wounded in the flank by Diomedes. Polemon says that Athena too was wounded, by Ornytus; yes, and Homer says that Aidoneus was shot with an arrow by Heracles, and Panyassis records the same of Helios [Augeas]. This same Panyassis records that Hera, the goddess of marriage, was also wounded by the same Heracles, “in sandy Pylos.” And Sosibius says that Heracles himself was wounded in the hand by the sons of Hippocoon. If there are wounds, there is blood; for the poets' “ichor” is even more repulsive than blood, since ichor is understood to be decayed blood. So they have to be provided with treatments and food, which they need. Hence tables and drinking bouts and laughter and intercourse; yet they would not indulge in human sexual pleasures, nor beget children, nor even sleep, if they were immortal and without needs and ageless. Zeus himself shared a human table among the Ethiopians, and an inhuman and lawless one when he was feasted by Lycaon the Arcadian: he gorged himself on human flesh, though unwillingly.

For the god did not know that Lycaon the Arcadian, his host, had slaughtered his own son (Nyctimus was his name) and set him before Zeus as a dish. A fine god indeed is Zeus: the prophet, the protector of guests, the protector of suppliants, the gracious, the author of all oracles, the avenger; or rather the unjust, the lawless, the unrighteous, the unholy, the inhuman, the violent, the seducer, the adulterer, the lover. But that was when he was such, when he was a man; now, it seems to me, even your myths have grown old. Zeus is no longer a serpent, nor a swan, nor an eagle, nor an amorous man; the god does not fly, does not love boys, does not kiss, does not rape; and yet there are still many beautiful women even now, more comely than Leda and more blooming than Semele, and boys more lovely and more refined than the Phrygian herdsman. Where now is that eagle? Where is the swan? Where is Zeus himself? He has grown old, feathers and all; for surely he does not repent of his love affairs, nor is he being taught self-control. Your myth is laid bare: Leda is dead, the swan is dead, the eagle is dead. Look for your Zeus; do not search heaven, but the earth. The Cretan, in whose land he is also buried, will tell you; Callimachus in his hymns: “For the Cretans, O lord, even built your tomb.” For Zeus is dead (do not take it hard), like Leda, like the swan, like the eagle, like the amorous man, like the serpent.

And now even the superstitious themselves appear to understand, unwillingly but nonetheless, the error about the gods; for they are not “from an oak of ancient story, nor from a rock,” but “are of the race of men,” and a little later they will be found to be oaks and rocks as well. Staphylus records, for example, that a certain Zeus Agamemnon is honored in Sparta; and Phanocles, in his Loves or Beautiful Boys, says that Agamemnon, the king of the Greeks, founded a temple of Aphrodite Argynnis for Argynnus, his beloved. The Arcadians pray to an Artemis called “the Strangled,” as Callimachus says in the Causes; and at Methymna another Artemis is honored, Condylitis (“of the Knuckle”). There is also in Laconia a temple of yet another Artemis, “Gout,” as Sosibius says. Polemon knows of a statue of “Gaping” Apollo, and another of Apollo “the Glutton,” honored in Elis. There the Eleans sacrifice to Zeus “Averter of Flies”; and the Romans sacrifice to Heracles “Averter of Flies,” and to Fever and to Fear, whom they also enroll among Heracles's companions.

I pass over the Argives and Spartans: the Argives worship Aphrodite “the Grave-robber,” and the Spartiates revere Artemis Chelytis (“of the Cough”), since they call coughing chelyttein. Do you think that these things we set before you are brought from some spurious source? You seem not even to know your own historians, whom I call as witnesses against your unbelief; poor wretches, they have filled your whole life, a life truly not worth living, with godless mockery. Is not a Zeus “the Bald” honored in Argos, and another Zeus, “the Avenger,” in Cyprus? Do not the Argives sacrifice to Aphrodite “the Straddler,” the Athenians to Aphrodite “the Courtesan,” and the Syracusans to Aphrodite “of the beautiful buttocks,” whom the poet Nicander somewhere called “fair-bottomed”? I say nothing of Dionysus “the Pig-plucker”: the Sicyonians worship this Dionysus, placing him in charge of women's private parts, revering the author of outrage as overseer of shame. Such are their gods, and such are they themselves, playing with the gods, or rather mocking and insulting themselves. And how much better are the Egyptians, who by villages and cities have honored the irrational animals, than the Greeks who worship such gods! For those, even if they are beasts, are not adulterous nor lewd, and not one of them hunts after pleasure contrary to nature. What the others are like, why need I say any more, when they have been sufficiently refuted? The Egyptians, however, whom I have just mentioned, are divided in their cults: the people of Syene worship the fish called phagrus; those who live on Elephantine, the maeotes (another fish); the people of Oxyrhynchus, likewise, the fish that gives its name to their country; the people of Heracleopolis, the ichneumon; those of Sais and of Thebes, the sheep; those of Lycopolis, the wolf; those of Cynopolis, the dog; the people of Memphis, Apis; those of Mendes, the goat. But you, who are in every way better than the Egyptians (I shrink from saying worse), who never stop laughing at the Egyptians every day, what are you like in regard to irrational animals? The Thessalians among you have honored storks, because they are familiar birds, and the Thebans weasels, because of the birth of Heracles. And what of the Thessalians again? They are said to worship ants, because they have learned that Zeus took the form of an ant and lay with Eurymedusa, the daughter of Cleitor, and fathered Myrmidon. Polemon records that the people living in the Troad worship the local mice, which they call sminthoi, because they gnawed through the bowstrings of their enemies; and from those mice they named Apollo Smintheus. Heraclides, in his Foundations of Temples, says that in Acarnania, where the promontory of Actium is and the temple of Actian Apollo, an ox is sacrificed beforehand to the flies. Nor will I forget the Samians (the Samians worship a sheep, as Euphorion says), nor the Syrians who live in Phoenicia, some of whom revere doves and others fish, as extravagantly as the Eleans revere Zeus.

Well then, since those whom you worship are not gods, it seems to me that we should consider next whether they are really daemons, enrolled, as you say, in this second rank. For if they are daemons, they are greedy and foul. One can even find local daemons openly receiving honor in the various cities: among the Cythnians Menedemus, among the Tenians Callistagoras, among the Delians Anius, among the Spartans Astrabacus.

At Phalerum, too, a certain hero “at the stern” is honored; and the Pythia ordered the Plataeans to sacrifice to Androcrates, Democrates, Cyclaeus, and Leucon, when the Persian wars were at their height. Anyone who can look even a little more closely can see a great many other daemons too: “For thrice ten thousand are there on the much-nourishing earth, immortal daemons, guardians of mortal men.” Who are these guardians, Boeotian? Do not grudge to tell us. Or is it clear that they are these, and those more honored than these, the great daemons: Apollo, Artemis, Leto, Demeter, Kore, Pluto, Heracles, and Zeus himself? But, poet of Ascra, they do not guard us to keep us from running away, nor perhaps from sinning, since they certainly have no lack of experience of sins themselves. Here it is fitting to repeat the proverb: “A father who is himself unadmonished admonishes his son.” And if these really are guardians, they are not moved by goodwill toward us; bent on your destruction, they fasten themselves on human life like flatterers, lured by smoke. The daemons themselves somewhere confess their own gluttony, saying: “Of libation and the savor of burnt flesh; for this is the honor that is our portion.” What other voice would the gods of the Egyptians, cats and weasels, utter, if they were given a voice, than the Homeric and poetic one, the voice of lovers of savor and of cookery? Such are your daemons and your gods, and any demigods, called so as if they were half-asses (hemionoi); for you have no lack even of names for the combinations of your impiety.

Come, then, let us add this too: that your gods are inhuman daemons who hate humankind, not only rejoicing in human madness but also enjoying human slaughter. Now in the armed contests in the stadiums, now in the countless ambitions of war, they procure occasions of pleasure for themselves, so that they may have the fullest opportunity to glut themselves unrestrained on human bloodshed. And by now, falling on cities and nations like plagues, they have demanded savage offerings. Aristomenes the Messenian, for example, slaughtered three hundred men to Zeus of Ithome, thinking to offer so many hecatombs of such a kind with good omens; among them was Theopompus, the king of the Spartans, a noble victim. The Taurians, the nation living around the Tauric Chersonese, at once sacrifice to the Tauric Artemis any strangers they catch among them, that is, those shipwrecked at sea; these are your sacrifices that Euripides puts on the tragic stage. Monimus records, in his Collection of Marvels, that at Pella in Thessaly an Achaean man is sacrificed to Peleus and Chiron. Anticlides, in his Returns, declares that the Lyctians (these are a Cretan people) slaughter human beings to Zeus; and Dosiadas says that the Lesbians offer a similar sacrifice to Dionysus. As for the Phocaeans (for I will not pass them over either), Pythocles, in the third book of On Concord, records that they burn a human being as a whole burnt offering to Artemis Tauropolus. Erechtheus of Attica and Marius the Roman sacrificed their own daughters: the one to Persephone, as Demaratus says in the first book of his Tragic Subjects; the other, Marius, to the Averting Deities, as Dorotheus records in the fourth book of his Italian History. From these examples the daemons plainly appear to be lovers of humankind! And how could the superstitious not be correspondingly holy? The one are praised as saviors, the others ask salvation from those who plot against salvation. Supposing that they offer auspicious sacrifices to them, they have failed to notice that they are slaughtering human beings. For murder does not become a sacrifice because of the place, not even if someone slaughters a human being to Artemis or Zeus in a …

… supposedly sacred place, rather than to anger and love of money, other daemons like them, on altars or in the streets, calling it a sacred victim; such a sacrifice is murder and manslaughter. Why then, you humans, wisest of the animals, do we flee from savage beasts, and turn aside if we happen to meet a bear or a lion, “as when a man sees a serpent in the mountain glens and starts back, and trembling seizes his limbs, and he retreats,” and yet, though you perceive and understand that daemons are destructive and accursed, plotters, haters of humankind, and ravagers, you do not turn aside or turn away from them? What truth could the wicked speak, or whom could they help? Here and now I can show you that a human being is better than these gods of yours, the daemons: that Cyrus and Solon are better than Apollo the prophet. Your Phoebus loves gifts, but does not love human beings. He betrayed his friend Croesus and, forgetting the payment (so fond of glory was he), led Croesus across the Halys to the pyre. So do the daemons lead to the fire those they love! But you, O man, more humane and more truthful than Apollo, pity the one bound on the pyre; and you, Solon, prophesy the truth; and you, Cyrus, order the pyre to be put out. Be wise at last, at least, Croesus, having learned by suffering: the one you worship is ungrateful; he takes the payment, and after the gold he lies again. It is not the daemon but the man who says to you, “Consider the end.” Solon does not prophesy crooked oracles; this is the only oracle, barbarian, that you will find true; you will prove it on the pyre.

So I am led to wonder by what fantasies those who first went astray were carried off when they proclaimed superstition to human beings, laying down the law that accursed daemons should be worshiped: whether it was the famous Phoroneus, or Merops, or someone else, who set up temples and altars to them and, as the myth goes, were the first to offer sacrifices to them. And indeed, as time went on, they kept inventing gods to worship. Certainly no one used to honor this Eros, who is said to be among the oldest of the gods, until Charmus seduced a certain youth and set up an altar in the Academy as a thank offering for the fulfillment of his desire; and they have called the licentiousness of this disease Eros, making a god of unbridled desire. The Athenians did not even know who Pan was until Philippides told them. Naturally, then, superstition, having taken its beginning from somewhere, has become a fountain of senseless wickedness; and then, not checked but growing and flowing in abundance, it has become the maker of many daemons, sacrificing hecatombs, celebrating festivals, setting up statues, and building temples. These (for I will not keep silent about them either, but will expose them too) are called temples as a euphemism, but in fact are tombs [that is, tombs called temples].

But you, even now at least, forget your superstition, ashamed to honor tombs. In the temple of Athena on the acropolis at Larisa there is the tomb of Acrisius, and at Athens on the acropolis that of Cecrops, as Antiochus says in the ninth book of his Histories. What of Erichthonius? Was he not buried in the temple of Athena Polias? And Immaradus, the son of Eumolpus and Daeira, was he not buried in the precinct of the Eleusinium below the acropolis? Are not the daughters of Celeus buried at Eleusis? Why should I list for you the women from the Hyperboreans? They were called Hyperoche and Laodice; they are buried in the temple of Artemis on Delos, which is in the sanctuary of Delian Apollo. Leandrius says that Cleochus is buried at Miletus in the Didymaeum. Here, following Zeno of Myndus, it is not right to pass over the monument of Leucophryne, who is buried in the temple of Artemis at Magnesia; nor the altar of Apollo at Telmessus, which too, they record, is the tomb of Telmessus the seer. Ptolemy, the son of Agesarchus, in the first book of his work on Philopator, says that Cinyras and the descendants of Cinyras are buried in the temple of Aphrodite at Paphos. But if I were to go through the tombs you worship, all time would not suffice me. As for you, if no shame at these audacities steals over you, then you go about altogether dead, having put your faith in the dead: “Ah, wretches, what evil is this you suffer? Your heads are wrapped in night.”

If, besides this, I were to bring the statues themselves and set them before you to examine, you would go through them and find that your custom is truly nonsense, since you pray to senseless “works of human hands.” In ancient times the Scythians worshiped the dagger, the Arabs the stone, the Persians the river; and among other peoples those still more ancient set up conspicuous pieces of wood and erected pillars of stone. These were called xoana, because they had been scraped (apexesthai) from the raw material. The image of Artemis on Icarus, for example, was an unworked piece of wood, and that of Cithaeronian Hera at Thespiae a felled tree trunk; and the image of Samian Hera, as Aethlius says, was at first a plank, and later, when Procles was archon, it became human-shaped. When the xoana began to be made in human likeness, they took the name brete, from brotoi (“mortals”). At Rome in ancient times, says the historian Varro, the image of Mars was a spear, since the craftsmen had not yet launched into this handsome but evil art.

But when art flourished, error grew. That they made statues in human form out of stones and wood and, in a word, out of matter, statues on which you put a show of piety while slandering the truth, is already clear in itself; but since the subject needs some proof, I must not decline to give it. That Phidias made the Zeus at Olympia and the Athena Polias at Athens of gold and ivory is surely plain to everyone; and Olympichus records in his Samian History that the xoanon of Hera in Samos was made by Smilis the son of Eucleides. So do not doubt that of the goddesses at Athens called the Venerable Ones, Scopas made two of the so-called lychnite stone, and Calos the one between them; I can show you Polemon recording it in the fourth book of his Reply to Timaeus. Nor doubt that the statues of Zeus and Apollo at Patara in Lycia were again the work of that same Phidias, like the lions set up with them; but if, as some say, they are the work of Bryaxis, I do not dispute it: you have him too as a statue-maker; ascribe them to whichever of the two you like. Further, the nine-cubit statues of Poseidon and Amphitrite worshiped on Tenos are the work of Telesius of Athens, as Philochorus says. Demetrius, in the second book of his Argolica, records both the material of the xoanon of Hera at Tiryns, pear wood, and its maker, Argus. Many would perhaps be amazed to learn that the Palladium, the one called “fallen from heaven,” which Diomedes and Odysseus are said to have stolen from Troy and entrusted to Demophon, was made from the bones of Pelops, just as the Olympian Zeus was made from the bones of another animal, an Indian one. I bring forward Dionysius as my authority, in the fifth part of his Cycle. Apellas, in his Delphica, says that there were two Palladia, and that both were made by human beings. And so that no one may suppose that I have passed over these things out of ignorance, I will add that the statue of Dionysus Morychus at Athens was made of the stone called phellatas and is the work of Sicon the son of Eupalamus, as Polemon says in one of his letters. There were also two other sculptors, Cretans, I think (Scyllis and Dipoenus were their names); they made the statues of the Dioscuri at Argos, the statue of Heracles at Tiryns, and the xoanon of Artemis Munychia at Sicyon.

But why do I dwell on these, when I can show you the great daemon himself, who he was, the one whom we hear was pre-eminently deemed worthy of reverence by all, the one whom they have dared to call “not made by hands,” the Egyptian Sarapis? Some record that he was sent as a thank offering by the people of Sinope to Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of the Egyptians, who had won their favor when, worn down by famine, they sent for grain from Egypt; and that this xoanon was a statue of Pluto. Ptolemy received the statue and set it up on the promontory now called Rhacotis, where the temple of Sarapis is honored, and the place is near those parts. Ptolemy brought his concubine Blistiche, who had died at Canopus, and buried her beneath the shrine just mentioned. Others say that Sarapis was an image from Pontus, and was brought to Alexandria with festal honors. Isidorus alone says the statue was brought from the people of Seleucia near Antioch, when they too were in a famine and were fed by Ptolemy. But Athenodorus the son of Sandon, wishing to make Sarapis ancient, fell somehow into refuting himself, proving that it was a manufactured statue. He says that Sesostris, the Egyptian king, having subdued most of the nations among the Greeks, returned to Egypt and brought with him skilled craftsmen. He ordered them to fashion his forefather Osiris lavishly; and the craftsman Bryaxis made it, not the Athenian, but another of the same name as that Bryaxis. He used for the work a mixed and varied material: he had filings of gold and silver, of bronze and iron and lead, and of tin as well; not one of the Egyptian stones was lacking: fragments of sapphire and hematite, of emerald, and of topaz too. He ground them all fine, mixed them, and colored them with dark blue, which is why the color of the statue is rather dark; and kneading it all with the drug left over from the funeral of Osiris and Apis, he molded Sarapis. His name too hints at the shared funeral and at his fashioning from the burial, being compounded from Osiris and Apis: Osirapis.

The emperor of the Romans has reverently deified another new god in Egypt, and nearly among the Greeks as well: his beloved, a youth of great beauty. He consecrated Antinous as Zeus did Ganymede; for desire that has no fear is not easily restrained. And now people worship the sacred nights of Antinous, which the lover who kept vigil with him knew to be shameful. Why do you count as a god for me one who is honored for sexual immorality? Why did you order him to be mourned as a son? Why do you tell of his beauty? Beauty withered by outrage is shameful. Do not play the tyrant over beauty, man, nor outrage the young man in his bloom; keep it pure, that it may be beautiful. Be a king of beauty, not a tyrant; let it remain free. Then I will recognize your beauty, when you have kept the image pure; then I will worship beauty, when it is the true archetype of beautiful things.

Now there is a tomb of the beloved, a temple of Antinous, and a city. Just as temples, I think, so tombs too are admired: pyramids, mausoleums, and labyrinths, other temples of the dead, as those are tombs of the gods. I will set before you as teacher the prophetess Sibyl: “not an oracle-speaker of lying Phoebus, whom vain men called a god and falsely named a seer, but of the great God, whom the hands of men did not fashion, like speechless idols of polished stone.” She calls the temples ruins, foretelling that the temple of Ephesian Artemis will be swallowed up “by chasms and earthquakes,” thus: “Ephesus, laid low, will wail, weeping by her banks, and seeking a temple that no longer has a dweller.” And she says that the temple of Isis and Sarapis in Egypt will be thrown down and burned: “Isis, thrice-wretched goddess, you remain by the streams of the Nile, alone, a speechless maenad on the sands of Acheron”; and then, further on: “And you, Sarapis, lying on many idle stones, you lie, a mighty ruin, in thrice-wretched Egypt.” But if you will not listen to the prophetess, hear at least your own philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus, reproaching the statues for their lack of sense: “And they pray to these statues, as if one were to chat with houses.” Are they not monstrous who pray to stones, and then set them up before their gates as if they were active, worshiping Hermes as a god and setting up Agyieus as doorkeeper? If they insult them as senseless, why do they worship them as gods?

And if they think the statues have sense, why do they set them up as doorkeepers? The Romans, who ascribe their greatest successes to Fortune and think her the greatest goddess, carried her into a latrine and set her up there, assigning the privy to the goddess as a worthy temple. But senseless stone and wood and precious gold care nothing at all for the savor of burnt flesh, nor for blood, nor for smoke, by which they are honored and smoked and blackened; nor for honor, nor for insult. The statues are more worthless than any animal. How senseless things have come to be deified leaves me at a loss, and I pity those who wander in this folly as wretched. For even if some animals do not have all the senses, such as worms and caterpillars, and those that appear maimed from their very birth, like moles and the shrew-mouse, which Nicander calls “blind and dreadful,” yet they are better than these xoana and statues, which are completely dumb; for they have at least one sense, hearing, say, or touch, or one corresponding to smell or taste; but the statues share in not a single sense. There are many animals that have neither sight nor hearing nor even a voice, such as the race of oysters; yet they live and grow, and are even affected by the moon. But the statues are idle, inactive, and senseless; they are bound, nailed, and fastened on; they are cast, filed, sawed, polished, and carved. The sculptors dishonor the dumb earth, changing it from its proper nature and by their art persuading people to worship it; and the god-makers worship, to my mind at least, not gods and daemons, but earth and art, which is what statues are. For a statue is truly dead matter shaped by a craftsman's hand; but for us the image is not something perceptible made of perceptible matter, but something perceived by the mind. God, the only true God, is perceived by the mind, not by the senses.

And yet, in actual emergencies, the superstitious, the worshipers of stones, learning by experience not to revere senseless matter, give way to sheer necessity and are undone by their superstition. And though they despise the statues, not wishing to appear to disregard them altogether, they are convicted by the very gods to whom the statues are dedicated. Dionysius the younger, the tyrant, took off the golden cloak of Zeus in Sicily and ordered a woolen one to be put on him, saying wittily that this was better than the golden one, being lighter in summer and warmer in winter. Antiochus of Cyzicus, being short of money, ordered the golden statue of Zeus, fifteen cubits high, to be melted down and a similar statue of some other, cheaper material, covered with gold leaf, to be set up again in its place. Swallows and most birds fly into the statues and foul them, caring nothing for Olympian Zeus, or Epidaurian Asclepius, or Athena Polias, or Egyptian Sarapis; yet not even from them do you learn the senselessness of the statues. There are also evildoers or enemy invaders who, out of greed, have ravaged the temples and plundered the offerings, or even melted down the statues themselves.

And if some Cambyses or Darius or other madman attempted something of the kind, and if someone killed the Egyptian Apis, I laugh because he killed their god, but I am indignant if he did wrong for the sake of gain. So I will willingly pass over this kind of crime, considering it the work of greed and not a proof of the powerlessness of idols. But fire and earthquakes, at least, are not greedy for gain, and they are no more afraid of or abashed by the daemons and the statues than the waves are by the pebbles heaped on the beaches. I know a fire that convicts and heals superstition; if you are willing to cease from your folly, the fire will light your way. This fire burned down the temple at Argos together with its priestess Chrysis, and the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the second time after the Amazons; it has often consumed the Capitol at Rome; nor did it spare the temple of Sarapis in the city of the Alexandrians. At Athens it threw down the temple of Dionysus Eleuthereus; and the temple of Apollo at Delphi was first carried off by a storm and then destroyed by a discerning fire. This is shown to you as a prelude to what the fire promises. And do not the makers of statues shame the sensible among you into despising matter? Phidias the Athenian wrote on the finger of Olympian Zeus, “Pantarkes is beautiful”; for to him it was not Zeus who was beautiful, but his beloved. Praxiteles, as Posidippus makes clear in his book on Cnidus, when he was making the statue of the Cnidian Aphrodite, made her resemble the form of Cratina, his mistress, so that the wretched people might worship Praxiteles's mistress. When Phryne, the courtesan of Thespiae, was in her bloom, all the painters copied their images of Aphrodite from the beauty of Phryne, just as the stonecutters at Athens modeled their Hermes statues on Alcibiades. It remains for your judgment to decide whether you want to worship courtesans too.

Moved by this, I think, the ancient kings, despising these myths, since there was no danger from human beings, openly proclaimed themselves gods, teaching by this that the earlier gods too had been made immortal because of their fame. Ceyx the son of Aeolus was called Zeus by his wife Alcyone, and Alcyone in turn was called Hera by her husband. Ptolemy the Fourth was called Dionysus; Mithridates of Pontus was also called Dionysus; and Alexander wished to be thought the son of Ammon and to be represented by the sculptors with horns, eager to outrage the beautiful face of a man with a horn. And not only kings, but private persons too exalted themselves with divine titles, like Menecrates the physician, who was called Zeus. Why need I list Alexarchus (he was a grammarian by profession, and, as Aristus of Salamis records, he dressed himself up as the Sun)? Why need I mention Nicagoras (he was from Zeleia by birth and lived in the time of Alexander; Nicagoras was called Hermes and used the dress of Hermes, as he himself testifies)? For whole nations and cities with all their people, putting on flattery, make the myths about the gods cheap, as men dress themselves up as equal to the gods, puffed up with vainglory, and vote themselves extravagant honors. At one time they decreed that Philip of Macedon, from Pella, the son of Amyntas, should be worshiped in the Cynosarges, the one “with the broken collarbone and the maimed leg,” who had lost an eye; at another they proclaimed Demetrius too a god. Where he dismounted from his horse on entering Athens, there is a temple of Demetrius the Descender, and there are altars to him everywhere; and a marriage with Athena was prepared for him by the Athenians. But he disdained the goddess, being unable to marry the statue; he went up to the acropolis with Lamia the courtesan and defiled the bridal chamber of Athena, showing the old virgin …

… the postures of the young courtesan. There is nothing to resent, then, even in Hippo, who immortalized his own death. This Hippo ordered the following elegiac couplet to be inscribed on his tomb: “This is the tomb of Hippo, whom Fate made equal to the immortal gods when he had perished.” Well done, Hippo! You show us the error of humankind. For if they did not believe you when you were speaking, let them become the disciples of a dead man. This is Hippo's oracle; let us understand it. Those whom you worship were once men, and then they died; but myth and time have honored them. For somehow what is present tends to be despised through familiarity, while what is past, being removed from immediate testing by the obscurity of time, is honored through fiction; the one is disbelieved, the other even admired. So, for example, the dead of long ago, magnified by the long duration of error, are thought gods by later generations. The proof of this for you is your very mysteries, your festivals, the bonds and wounds and weeping gods: “Ah me, that it is fated for Sarpedon, dearest of men to me, to be overcome by Patroclus son of Menoetius.” The will of Zeus has been overpowered, and your Zeus, defeated, wails for Sarpedon. So you yourselves have rightly called them idols and daemons, since Homer, honoring Athena herself and the other gods with a bad name, called them daemons: “And she went to Olympus, to the house of aegis-bearing Zeus, among the other daemons.”

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.

We must go, then, as close as possible to the statues, so that the error may be exposed as familiar from their very appearance; for the forms of the statues are very clearly stamped with the character of the daemons. If anyone goes around and looks at the paintings and statues, he will at once recognize your gods from their disgraceful figures: Dionysus by his dress, Hephaestus by his craft, Deo by her misfortune, Ino by her veil, Poseidon by his trident, Zeus by the swan; the pyre points out Heracles; and if one sees a naked woman painted, he understands “golden” Aphrodite. So that famous Pygmalion of Cyprus fell in love with an ivory statue; the statue was of Aphrodite, and it was naked. The Cypriot is conquered by its form and has intercourse with the statue; Philostephanus records this. Another Aphrodite, at Cnidus, was of stone and was beautiful; another man fell in love with her and had intercourse with the stone. Posidippus records it: the first in his book on Cyprus, the second in his book on Cnidus. So powerful was art to deceive, becoming a procurer that led amorous men into the pit. The craftsman's art is effective, but it cannot deceive a rational being, nor those who have lived according to reason. Doves, indeed, have flown to painted doves because of the likeness, and horses have neighed at well-painted mares. They say a girl fell in love with an image, and a handsome youth with the Cnidian statue; but the eyes of the spectators had been deceived by the art. For no one in his right mind would have embraced a goddess, or been buried with a dead woman, or fallen in love with a daemon and a stone. But art deceives you with another kind of sorcery: if not by leading you to love the statues and paintings, then to honor and worship them. The painting is a likeness: let the art be praised, but let it not deceive the human being as if it were the truth.

The horse stands quiet, the dove is motionless, its wing idle; but the cow of Daedalus, made of wood, caught a wild bull, and art, deceiving the beast, compelled it to mount a woman in love. Such frenzy have the arts, practicing their evil craft, produced in the foolish. The keepers and trainers of monkeys have admired them because none of the wax or clay figures and girls' dolls deceives them; but you will turn out to be worse even than monkeys, devoting yourselves to little statues of stone, wood, gold, and ivory, and to paintings. The makers of such deadly playthings for you are the stonecutters and sculptors, and the painters, carpenters, and poets, who bring in a great crowd of this kind: in the fields Satyrs and Pans, in the woods the mountain Nymphs and the Hamadryads, and indeed around the waters and rivers and springs the Naiads, and around the sea the Nereids. The magi, moreover, boast of daemons as servants of their own impiety, enrolling them as their household slaves, having made them slaves by the compulsion of their incantations. So the marriages, begettings, and childbirths of the gods that are recorded, the adulteries that are sung, the feasts presented in comedy, and the laughter brought in at drinking parties urge me to cry out, even if I wish to keep silent. Alas for such godlessness! You have made heaven a stage, the divine has become a drama for you, and you have made a comedy of what is holy with the masks of daemons, turning true religion into a satyr play through superstition.

“But he, playing the lyre, struck up a beautiful song.” Sing us, Homer, that beautiful voice: “of the love of Ares and fair-crowned Aphrodite, how they first lay together in the house of Hephaestus in secret; and he gave many gifts, and shamed the bed and couch of lord Hephaestus.” Stop the song, Homer! It is not beautiful; it teaches adultery. We have declined to commit sexual immorality even with our ears. For we, we are the ones who carry about the image of God in this living and moving statue, the human being: an image that dwells with us, counsels us, converses with us, shares our hearth, suffers with us, suffers for us. We have been made an offering to God for Christ's sake: “We are the chosen race, the royal priesthood, a holy nation, a special people, who once were not a people but are now the people of God”; we who, as John says, are not “from below,” but have learned everything from him who came from above; we who have understood the plan of God; we who have practiced “walking in newness of life.”

But most people do not think so. Casting off shame and fear, they paint the perversions of the daemons in their homes. Devoted to certain painted panels hung up high, they have decorated their bedrooms with licentiousness, thinking lewdness piety; and lying on the couch, even in the midst of their embraces, they gaze at that naked Aphrodite, bound in the act of intercourse, and at the amorous bird fluttering around Leda. Delighting in the depiction of effeminacy, they engrave it on their signet rings, using a seal that matches …

… the licentiousness of Zeus. These are the models of your self-indulgence, these are the theologies of your outrage, these are the teachings of gods who join you in sexual immorality: “for what each wishes, that he also believes,” as the Athenian orator says. And what are your other images like: little Pans, naked girls, drunken satyrs, and erect members, laid bare in paintings and convicted by their own incontinence! Now you look openly, as a public spectacle, at the depicted postures of every licentiousness and are not ashamed; still more, you keep them set up, like the images of your gods, dedicating pillars of shamelessness at home, painting the postures of Philaenis just as you do the labors of Heracles. We proclaim that not only the use of these things, but the very sight and hearing of them, must be forgotten. Your ears have become harlots, your eyes have committed sexual immorality, and, strangest of all, your gaze has committed adultery before the embrace. You who have done violence to the human being and have shamefully broken off what is divine in God's handiwork, you disbelieve everything so that you may give yourselves up to passion: you believe the idols, emulating their incontinence, but you disbelieve God, because you cannot bear self-control. You have hated what is better and honored what is worse, becoming spectators of virtue but competitors in vice.

“Blessed,” then, in a word, are all those alone, with one accord, as the Sibyl says, “who, when they see them, will reject all temples and altars, vain foundations of dumb stones, and stone xoana and statues made by hands, defiled with the blood of living creatures and with sacrifices of four-footed and two-footed beasts, of birds, and slaughterings of wild animals.” Indeed, we are openly forbidden to practice a deceptive art. “For you shall not make,” says the prophet, “the likeness of anything that is in heaven above or on the earth below.” Could we still suppose the Demeter and Kore and the mystic Iacchus of Praxiteles to be gods, or the works of Lysippus, or the hands of Apelles, which have clothed matter with the form of divine glory? But while you take pains that the statue may be made as beautiful as possible, you give no thought that you yourselves may not, through your senselessness, be made like the statues. Very clearly and concisely the prophetic word convicts this custom: “All the gods of the nations are images of daemons; but God made the heavens …”

“… made” the heavens and the things in heaven. From this some go astray, I do not know how, and worship a divine work of art, but not God: the sun and the moon and the rest of the chorus of the stars, unreasonably supposing these to be gods, though they are instruments of time. “For by his word they were established, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.” Human art makes houses and ships and cities and paintings; but how could I tell all that God makes? Look at the whole world: it is his work; heaven and sun and angels and human beings are “the works of his fingers.” How great is the power of God! His mere will is the making of the world; for God alone made it, since he alone is truly God. He creates by his bare willing, and their coming into being follows upon his merely wishing it. Here the chorus of philosophers goes astray: they agree that the human being was made, very beautifully, for the contemplation of heaven, yet they worship the things that appear in heaven and are grasped by sight. For even if the works in heaven are not made by human beings, they have at least been made for human beings. Let none of you worship the sun, but long for the maker of the sun; let him not deify the world, but seek the creator of the world. The only refuge left, it seems, for one who is going to reach the doors of salvation is divine wisdom; from there, as from a sacred sanctuary, the human being who hastens to salvation can no longer be carried off by any of the daemons.

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.”

And I could bring you countless Scriptures, of which not even “one stroke will pass away” without being fulfilled; for the mouth of the Lord, the Holy Spirit, has spoken these things. “No longer, then,” he says, “my son, make light of the Lord's discipline, nor lose heart when you are reproved by him.” O surpassing love for humankind! Not as a teacher to his pupils, nor as a master to his servants, nor as God to human beings, but “as a gentle father” he admonishes his sons. Moses confesses that he is “terrified and trembling” when he hears about the Word; and do you, when you listen to the divine Word, not fear? Are you not anxious? Are you not at once cautious and eager to learn, that is, eager for salvation, fearing the wrath, loving the grace, zealous for the hope, so that you may escape the judgment? Come, come, my young people! “For unless you become again as little children and are born again,” as the Scripture says, you will not receive him who is truly Father, “nor will you ever enter the kingdom of heaven.” For how is the stranger permitted to enter? But when, I think, he is enrolled and made a citizen and receives the Father, then he will be “in the Father's house,” then he will be counted worthy to inherit, then he will share the Father's kingdom with the true Son, “the Beloved.” For this is the firstborn church, made up of many good children; these are “the firstborn enrolled in heaven,” who hold festival with so many “myriads of angels.” And we are firstborn children, the nurslings of God, the true friends of “the Firstborn,” the first of all humankind to know God, the first to be torn away from our sins,

the first to be separated from the devil. But now some are the more godless, the more God loves humankind. For he wants us to become sons instead of slaves, but they have disdained even to become sons. O the great folly of it! You are ashamed of the Lord. He promises freedom, and you run away into slavery. He grants salvation, and you are swept down into death. He gives eternal life, and you wait for punishment; and you look ahead to “the fire which the Lord has prepared for the devil and his angels.” That is why the blessed apostle says: “I testify in the Lord that you no longer walk as the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, darkened in their understanding and alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; who, having become callous, have given themselves up to licentiousness, for the practice of every uncleanness …

… and greed.” With such a witness convicting the folly of human beings and calling on God, what else remains for the unbelieving but judgment and condemnation? But the Lord does not grow weary of exhorting, frightening, urging, rousing, admonishing; he wakes them from sleep and raises up those who have gone astray from their darkness. “Awake,” he says, “you who sleep, and arise from the dead, and Christ the Lord will shine on you,” the sun of the resurrection, begotten “before the morning star,” who has given life by his own rays. Let no one, then, despise the Word, lest he unwittingly despise himself. For the Scripture says somewhere: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts, as in the provocation, on the day of testing in the wilderness, where your fathers tested me by trial.” If you wish to learn what the trial is, the Holy Spirit will explain it to you: “And they saw my works,” he says, “for forty years. Therefore I was angry with this generation and said: They always go astray in their heart; they did not know my ways; as I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest.” See the threat! See the exhortation! See the honor! Why then do we still turn grace into wrath, instead of receiving the Word with open ears and welcoming God as a guest in pure souls? For great is the grace of his promise, if today we hear his voice; and this “today” is extended day by day, as long as it is called “today.” Until the consummation, both the “today” and the learning remain; and then the true “today,” the unending day of God, stretches out through the ages.

Let us always, then, obey the voice of the divine Word. For “today” is an image of eternity, and the day is a symbol of light, and the Word is light for human beings, by which we are illuminated to see God. Naturally, then, for those who have believed and obey, grace will abound; but with those who have disobeyed and go astray in heart, and have not known the ways of the Lord, which John commanded to be made straight and prepared, with these God is angry and threatens them. And indeed the ancient wanderers among the Hebrews received the fulfillment of the threat in a figure: for they are said not to have entered into the rest because of their unbelief, until they followed the successor of Moses and learned at last, by experience, that they could not be saved otherwise than by believing as Jesus did. But the Lord, who loves humankind, calls all people “to the knowledge of the truth,” he who sends the Paraclete. What then is this knowledge? Godliness; and “godliness is profitable for all things,” according to Paul, “having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come.” How much, you people, would you have agreed to pay, if eternal salvation were for sale?

Not even if one measured out the whole Pactolus, the legendary river of gold, would he count out a price equal to salvation. Do not lose heart, then: if you are willing, you can buy that precious salvation with a treasure of your own, love and the faith of life, which is a worthy price. God gladly accepts this payment. “For we have hoped in the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.” But the rest, clinging to the world like seaweed to rocks in the sea, make light of immortality; like the old man of Ithaca, they long not for the truth and the fatherland in heaven, nor for the light that truly is, but for the smoke. Godliness, which makes the human being like God as far as possible, enrolls God as its fitting teacher, since he alone is able worthily to make a human being like God.

The apostle, knowing this truly divine teaching, says: “But you, Timothy, from infancy have known the sacred letters, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ.” For truly sacred are the letters that make holy and make divine; and the same apostle consistently calls the Scriptures composed of these sacred letters and syllables, the collected writings, “inspired by God, being profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” No one would be so struck by the exhortations of the other saints as by those of the Lord himself, who loves humankind; for this is his one and only work, that the human being be saved. He himself cries out, urging us to salvation: “The kingdom of heaven is at hand”; he converts people as they draw near to him through fear. So too the apostle of the Lord, exhorting the Macedonians, becomes the interpreter of the divine voice, saying: “The Lord is at hand; take care that we are not found empty.” But you are so fearless, or rather so unbelieving, that you obey neither the Lord himself nor Paul, and that though he was in chains for Christ.

“Taste and see that God is good.” Faith will lead you in, experience will teach you, Scripture will train you, saying: “Come, children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord.” Then, as to those who have already believed, it adds briefly: “Who is the man who desires life, who loves to see good days?” We are, we will say, we who worship the Good, who are zealous for good things. Listen, then, “you who are far off”; listen, “you who are near.” The Word has been hidden from no one; he is a common light, he shines on all human beings; there is no Cimmerian in the Word. Let us hasten to salvation, to the new birth. Let us, being many, hasten to be gathered into one love, according to the union of the one essence. Being made good, let us in like manner pursue unity, seeking the good Monad. The union of many, taking divine harmony out of many voices and dispersion, becomes one symphony, following one leader of the chorus and teacher, the Word, resting on the truth itself, saying “Abba, Father.” This true voice God welcomes from his children, gathering it as their first fruits.

“But,” you say, “it is not reasonable to overturn a custom handed down to us from our fathers.” Then why do we not still use our first food, milk, to which our nurses accustomed us from birth? Why do we increase or diminish our father's property, instead of keeping it the same as we received it? Why do we no longer dribble on our fathers' laps, or still do the other things that made us laughed at when we were infants being brought up by our mothers? Have we not corrected ourselves, even if we did not happen to have good tutors? Then, in voyages, deviations from the course, though harmful and dangerous, somehow come as a pleasure; and in life shall we not abandon custom, which is wicked, passionate, and godless, even if our fathers are angry, and turn aside to the truth and seek him who is truly Father, thrusting custom away like a poisonous drug? This indeed is the finest part of my undertaking: to show you that it was from madness and from this thrice-wretched custom that godliness came to be hated. For so great a good, than which nothing greater has ever been given by God to the human race, would never have been hated or rejected, if you had not been carried away by custom, and then, stopping your ears against us, like stiff-necked horses throwing off the reins, biting on the bit, fled from our words, longing to throw us off, the charioteers of your life, and, carried by your folly toward the cliffs of destruction, you supposed the holy Word of God to be accursed.

(The holy Word of God, which you supposed accursed.) So there follow for you, as Sophocles says, the rewards of your choice: “mind departed, ears useless, thoughts empty”; and you do not know that this, more than anything, is true: that the good and godly, who have honored the good, will obtain a good reward, while the wicked, on the contrary, will receive fitting punishment, and punishment hangs over the ruler of wickedness. The prophet Zechariah threatens him: “May he who chose Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?” What desire for voluntary death, then, still lies in human beings? Why have they fled to this deadly brand, with which they will be burned up, when they could live well according to God, not according to custom? For God grants life, but wicked custom, after our departure from here, inflicts an empty repentance along with punishment; “and the fool learns by suffering” how superstition destroys and godliness saves.

Let any of you look at those who serve before the idols: their hair filthy, disgraced in dirty and torn clothing, utterly unacquainted with baths, made like wild beasts by the length of their nails, and many of them deprived of their private parts, showing in deed that the precincts of the idols are tombs or prisons. These seem to me to mourn the gods, not to worship them, having suffered things more deserving of pity than of reverence. And seeing these things, are you still blind, and will you not look up to the Master of all and Lord of the universe? Will you not escape from the prisons here and take refuge in the mercy from heaven? For God, out of his great love for humankind, holds fast to the human being, as a mother bird flies to her nestling when it falls out of the nest; and if a creeping beast gapes at the nestling, “the mother flutters around, lamenting her dear children.” But God, as Father, both seeks his creature and heals its fall, pursues the beast, and takes the nestling back again, urging it to fly up …

… to the nest. Then again, dogs that have gone astray have tracked down their master by following the scent, and horses that have thrown their rider have obeyed their master at a single whistle. “The ox,” it says, “knows its owner, and the donkey its master's manger; but Israel has not known me.” What then does the Lord do? He bears no grudge; he still has mercy; he still asks for repentance. I want to ask you whether it does not seem absurd to you that you human beings, who are God's creatures, who received your soul from him, and who belong wholly to God, should serve another master, and moreover serve the tyrant instead of the king, and the evil one instead of the good. For who, in the name of truth, who is in his right mind, leaves the good and keeps company with wickedness? Who flees from God to live with daemons? Who, when he could be a son of God, delights in being a slave? Or who, when he could be a citizen of heaven, pursues darkness, when he could cultivate paradise, walk about heaven, and share in the living and pure spring, treading the air in the track of that bright cloud, like Elijah, and gazing on the rain of salvation? But others, like worms, rolling about in marshes and mud, the streams of pleasure, feed on useless and senseless luxuries, swinish men. For pigs, it says, “delight in mud” more than in clean water, and “go mad over filth,” as Democritus says. Let us not, then, let us not be enslaved or become swinish, but as true “children of light,” let us look up and gaze at the light, lest the Lord prove us bastards, as the sun does eagles.

Let us repent, then, and pass over from ignorance to knowledge, from folly to wisdom, from incontinence to self-control, from injustice to righteousness, from godlessness to God. It is a noble risk to desert to God. Those who love righteousness, who pursue eternal salvation, can enjoy many other good things too, and especially those that God himself hints at when he speaks through Isaiah: “There is an inheritance for those who serve the Lord.” Beautiful and lovely indeed is this inheritance: not gold, not silver, not clothing, where the moth and the thief somewhere creep in, eyeing the earthbound wealth; but that treasure of salvation, toward which we must hasten, becoming lovers of the Word; and our good deeds go away with us from here …

… and fly with us on the wing of truth. This inheritance the eternal covenant of God puts into our hands, supplying the eternal gift. This loving Father of ours, the true Father, does not cease exhorting, admonishing, training, loving; nor does he cease saving, but he counsels what is best: “Become righteous, says the Lord. You who thirst, come to the water; and you who have no money, go and buy and drink without money.” He calls us to the washing, to salvation, to illumination, all but crying out and saying: “I give you the earth and the sea, my child, and I grant you heaven and all the living things in them. Only, my child, thirst for the Father; God will be shown to you without price. The truth is not peddled; he gives you the birds and the fish and the creatures on the earth; the Father has made these for your thankful enjoyment.” The bastard, who is a child of destruction, who has chosen “to serve mammon,” will buy with money; but to you he entrusts what is yours, to you, I mean, the true son, who loves the Father, for whose sake he is still at work, to whom alone he also makes the promise: “And the land shall not be sold in perpetuity”; for it is not given over to corruption. “For all the earth is mine”; and it is yours too, if you receive God. Hence the Scripture fittingly brings good news to those who have believed: “The saints of the Lord will inherit the glory of God and his power.”

What glory, blessed one, tell me? That “which eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man; and they will rejoice in the kingdom of their Lord forever, amen.” You have, you people, the divine promise of grace; you have heard also the other, the threat of punishment; by these the Lord saves, training the human being with fear and grace. Why do we delay? Why do we not avoid the punishment? Why do we not accept the gift? Why do we not choose what is better, God instead of the evil one, and prefer wisdom to idolatry, and take life in exchange for death? “Behold,” he says, “I have set before your face death and life.” The Lord tests you, to see whether you will choose life; he counsels you as a father to obey God. “For if you listen to me,” he says, “and are willing, you will eat the good things of the land”: the grace of obedience. “But if you do not obey me and are not willing, the sword and fire will devour you”: the judgment of disobedience. “For the mouth of the Lord has spoken these things.” The Word of the Lord is the law of truth. Do you want me to be a good counselor to you? Then listen, and I will show you, if I can. You ought, you people, when you think about the Good itself, to bring forward an innate faith, a trustworthy witness at hand from within, which plainly chooses what is best, and not to ask whether it should be pursued, but to work hard at the good. For if the question were whether one should get drunk, say, doubt would be in order; yet you get drunk before you consider it. And whether one should behave outrageously, you do not inquire, but behave outrageously as fast as you can. Only whether one should be godly do you question, and whether one should follow this wise God and Christ: this you think worthy of deliberation and inquiry, without having understood what befits God, whatever it may be.

Believe us, at least as you would drunkenness, so that you may become sober; believe, at least as you would outrage, so that you may live. And if you wish to be persuaded by looking at the clear evidence of the virtues, come, I will set before you, out of abundance, the persuasion concerning the Word. And you (for your ancestral customs, in which you were instructed beforehand, no longer keep you from the truth) may now hear how the next point stands. And let no shame of this name take hold of you, “shame, which greatly harms men,” turning them aside from salvation. Stripping off, then, openly, let us contend truly in the stadium of truth, with the holy Word as umpire and the Master of the universe presiding over the games. For no small prize is set before us: immortality. So pay no more attention, not even a little, to what certain rabble of the marketplace say to you, godless dancers in the chorus of superstition, pushed by folly and madness into the very pit, makers of idols and worshipers of stones. For these have dared to make men gods, enrolling Alexander of Macedon as the thirteenth god, “whom Babylon …

… proved to be dead.” So I admire the sophist of Chios, Theocritus by name. After Alexander's death, mocking the empty opinions people had about gods, Theocritus said to his fellow citizens: “Men, take heart, as long as you see the gods dying before the men.” But whoever worships and makes a companion of visible gods and of the motley crowd of these created things is far more wretched than the daemons themselves. For God is in no way unjust, as the daemons are, but most just in every possible way; and there is nothing more like him than whoever of us becomes as just as possible.

“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.

So human life seemed to me to have become nothing but full of madness, busying itself with such zeal about matter. Custom, which gave you a taste of slavery and of senseless meddling, has been corrupted by empty opinion. And ignorance is the cause of lawless rites and deceitful pretenses; it † having furnished the human race with deadly fates and hateful idols, and having devised many forms of daemons, has stamped on those who follow it the stain of lasting death. Take, then, the water of the Word; wash, you who are defiled; sprinkle yourselves clean of custom with the true drops. We must go up to heaven pure. You are a human being, which is what is most common: seek the one who made you. You are a son, which is most your own: recognize your Father. But do you still remain in your sins, melted into pleasures? To whom will the Lord say, “Yours is the kingdom of heaven”? It is yours, if you are willing, you who have set your choice toward God; yours, if you are willing only to believe and follow the brevity of the proclamation, by obeying which the Ninevites, through genuine repentance, exchanged the capture they expected for a glorious salvation.

How then, one asks, shall I go up to heaven? The Lord is “the way”: “narrow,” but “from heaven”; narrow, but leading up to heaven; narrow as it is despised on earth, broad as it is worshiped in heaven. Then again, one who has never heard of the Word has ignorance as an excuse for his error; but one into whose ears it has been poured, and into his soul, bears his disobedience by his own choice; and the more intelligent he seems to be, the more his understanding is to his harm, because he has his own wisdom as accuser for not choosing what is best. For as a human being he is by nature akin to God. Just as we do not force the horse to plow, or the bull to hunt, but lead each animal to what it is suited for by nature, so we call the human being, who was made to contemplate heaven, truly a heavenly plant, to the knowledge of God, having grasped what is proper to him, excellent and distinctive above the other animals, and we counsel him to provide himself with godliness, a sufficient provision for the ages.

Till the soil, we say, if you are a farmer, but know God as you till it; and sail, you who love seafaring, but call on the heavenly Pilot. Has knowledge found you serving as a soldier? Listen to the commander who gives just orders. As if weighed down with stupor and drunkenness, then, sober up, look about a little, and consider what the stones you worship want with you, and what you spend so vainly on matter. You are squandering your money and your life on ignorance, as your living on death, finding only this as the end of your vain hope. You are not able to pity yourselves, and you are not fit to be persuaded by those who pity you for your error, enslaved as you are to wicked custom; clinging to it by your own choice to your last breath, you are swept down to destruction, “because the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light.” Yet you could wipe away what stands in the way of salvation, vanity and wealth and fear, repeating the poet's words: “Where am I taking all these goods? And where am I wandering myself?” Will you not, then, throw away these empty fancies and renounce custom itself, saying to vainglory: “False dreams, farewell; you were nothing after all”?

What, you people, do you think the Hermes Tychon is, and the Hermes of Andocides, and the Hermes Amyetus? Surely it is clear to everyone that they are stones, just like Hermes himself. And just as the halo around the moon is not a god, and the rainbow is not a god, but conditions of air and clouds; and as the day is not a god, nor the year, nor the time made up of these; so neither are the sun and moon, by which each of these is marked out. Who in his right mind, then, would suppose that correction, punishment, justice, and retribution are gods? Nor are the Furies, nor the Fates, nor Destiny, since neither the state nor glory nor wealth are gods, wealth, which painters even show as blind. If you deify shame and love and sexual desire, let disgrace, impulse, beauty, and intercourse follow them. Then sleep and death could no longer reasonably be considered among you “twin gods,” since these are conditions that happen naturally to living things; nor will you rightly call doom or destiny or the Fates goddesses. If strife and battle are not gods, neither are Ares and Enyo. Further, if lightning and thunderbolts and rainstorms are not gods, how are fire and water gods? And how are shooting stars and comets, which come into being through a condition of the air?

Whoever calls chance a god, let him call action a god too. If, then, not one of these is thought to be a god, nor any of those handmade and senseless images, and yet a providence of divine power is evident around us, there remains nothing but to confess that the only truly existing God alone truly is and subsists. But you fools are like people who have drunk mandrake or some other drug. May God grant you at last to wake from this sleep and understand God, and not to imagine gold or stone or tree or action or passion or disease or fear to be a god. For there truly are “thrice ten thousand daemons on the much-nourishing earth,” not “immortal,” nor even mortal (for they do not share in sensation, so as to share in death either), but masters of human beings made of stone and wood, insulting life and breaking faith with it through custom. “The earth is the Lord's,” it says, “and its fullness.” How then do you dare, while you enjoy the Lord's things, to ignore the Master? “Leave my earth,” the Lord will say to you; “do not touch the water that I send up; do not take the fruits that I cultivate. Repay God, man, for your upbringing. Recognize your Master. You are God's own creature; how could what is his own rightly become another's?” For what is estranged, deprived of its kinship, is deprived of the truth. Are you not, like Niobe in a way, or rather, to speak to you more mystically, like the Hebrew woman (the ancients called her Lot's wife), turning into senselessness?

We have received the tradition that this woman was turned to stone because she loved Sodom; and the Sodomites are the godless, and those who turn to impiety, hard-hearted and foolish. Consider these words to be spoken to you from God: Do not think that stones and wood and birds and snakes are sacred, and human beings not; quite the contrary: consider human beings to be truly sacred, and beasts and stones to be what they are. For the wretched and miserable among humankind think that God cries out through a raven or a jackdaw, but is silent through a human being; they have honored the raven as a messenger of God, but they persecute the man of God, who does not croak or caw but speaks. Alas! They try inhumanly to slaughter him who teaches them rationally and humanely, who calls them to righteousness, neither welcoming the grace from above nor avoiding the punishment. For they do not believe God, nor learn his power. But he whose love for humankind is inexpressible has a hatred of wickedness beyond measure. His wrath feeds punishment for sin, and his love for humankind does good in response to repentance. Most pitiable of all is to be deprived of God's help.

Blindness of the eyes and deafness of the ears are more painful than the evil one's other assaults; for the one takes away the sight of heaven, the other deprives us of divine learning. But you, crippled toward the truth, blind in mind and deaf in understanding, do not grieve, are not indignant; you have not desired to see heaven and the maker of heaven, nor have you sought to hear and learn the Creator and Father of all things, joining your choice to salvation. For nothing stands in the way of one who hastens to the knowledge of God, not lack of education, not poverty, not obscurity, not want of possessions; nor does anyone pray to obtain the truly real wisdom by “slaying with bronze” or with iron. For this, more than anything, is well said: “The good man is everywhere a savior.” For the one who is zealous for righteousness, as a lover of him who needs nothing, needs little himself, having stored up his blessedness in nothing else but in God himself, where there is no moth, no robber, no pirate, but the eternal Giver of good things. Rightly, then, you have been likened to those snakes whose ears are shut against the charmers. “Their wrath,” says the Scripture, “is like that of a serpent, like a deaf asp that stops its ears, which will not listen to the voice of the charmers.”

But you, at least, let your savagery be charmed away; receive the gentle Word, who is ours, and spit out the deadly poison, so that you may be granted, as far as possible, to strip off corruption, as those snakes strip off their old age. Listen to me, and do not stop your ears or block your hearing, but take to heart what is said. Beautiful is the medicine of immortality. Stop at last your creeping trails. “For the enemies of the Lord will lick the dust,” it says [the Scripture says]. Lift your heads from the earth to the ether, look up to heaven, wonder; stop lying in wait for the heel of the righteous and obstructing “the way of truth.” Be wise and harmless; perhaps the Lord will give you the wing of simplicity (he has chosen to give wings to those born of earth), so that you may leave your holes and dwell in the heavens. Only let us repent with our whole heart, so that we may be able to receive God with our whole heart. “Hope in him,” it says, “all the assembly of the people; pour out all your hearts before him”: he says this to those who are empty of wickedness; he has mercy and fills them with righteousness. Believe, man, in him who is man and God; believe, man, in him who suffered and is worshiped, the living God. Believe, you slaves, in him who died; all people, believe in him who alone is God of all people. Believe, and receive salvation as your reward. “Seek God, and your soul shall live.”

Whoever seeks God is concerned for his own salvation. Have you found God? You have life. Let us seek, then, that we may also live. The reward of finding is life with God. “Let all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you, and let them say continually, May God be magnified.” A beautiful hymn to God is an immortal human being, built up in righteousness, on whom the oracles of truth are engraved. For where else should righteousness be written but in a self-controlled soul? Where love? Where modesty? Where gentleness? Those who have sealed these divine writings in their soul should consider wisdom a good starting point, whatever part of life they have turned to, and should consider the same wisdom a calm harbor of salvation. Through her, those who have run to the Father are good fathers to their children; those who have understood the Son are good sons to their parents; those who remember the Bridegroom are good husbands to their wives; and those who have been ransomed from the utmost slavery are good masters to their servants.

O, the beasts are more blessed than humankind in its error! They live in ignorance, as you do, but they do not pretend to the truth. There are no tribes of flatterers among them; fish are not superstitious; birds do not worship idols; they marvel at heaven alone, since, being deprived of reason, they cannot understand God. Are you not ashamed, then, to have made yourselves more irrational than the irrational animals, you who have worn yourselves out in godlessness through so many ages of life? You have been children, then boys, then youths, then men, but never good. At least respect your old age; now that you have come to the sunset of life, be wise; at least at the end of life, recognize God, so that the end of your life may become the beginning of salvation. If you have grown old in superstition, come young to godliness; God will enroll you as innocent children. Let the Athenian follow the laws of Solon, the Argive those of Phoroneus, and the Spartan those of Lycurgus; but if you enroll yourself as God's, heaven is your fatherland and God your lawgiver. And what are the laws? “You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not corrupt boys, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall love the Lord your God.” And there are their complements, rational laws and holy words written on the hearts themselves: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” and “To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also,” and “You shall not covet; for by desire alone …

… you have committed adultery.” How much better it is for people not even to wish at all to desire what they should not, than to obtain their desires! But you cannot bear the austerity of salvation. Just as we enjoy sweet foods and prefer them for the smoothness of the pleasure, while bitter things, though they roughen the palate, heal us and make us healthy, and the harshness of medicines strengthens those with weak stomachs; so custom pleases and tickles, but custom pushes us into the pit, while truth leads up to heaven, “rough” at first, “but a good nurse of the young.” This women's chamber is holy, and this council of elders is wise. Nor is she hard to approach or impossible to grasp; she is our nearest neighbor, dwelling within us, as the all-wise Moses says in a riddle, in our three parts: “in the hands, in the mouth, and in the heart.” This is a true symbol of the truth, fulfilled in all three: counsel, action, and speech. And do not fear this, that the many pleasant things that appear may rob you of wisdom; you yourself will willingly pass over the nonsense of custom, just as children throw away their toys when they become men.

… when they become men. With unsurpassable speed and approachable goodwill the divine power has shone on the earth and filled the universe with the seed of salvation. For the Lord could not have accomplished so great a work in so short a time without divine care: he who was despised in appearance but is worshiped in deed, the purifier, the savior, the gentle, the divine Word, truly the most manifest God, made equal with the Master of the universe, because he was his Son and “the Word was with God.” When he was first proclaimed he was not disbelieved; and when he took on the mask of a human being and was fashioned in flesh, and acted out the saving drama of humanity, he was not unrecognized. For he was a true contender, and a fellow contender with his creature. Spread most swiftly to all people, rising more quickly than the sun from the Father's very will, he most readily lit up God for us, showing, by what he taught and demonstrated, where he came from and who he was: the Word, the bearer of the covenant, the reconciler, our Savior, a life-giving and peaceful spring poured out over all the face of the earth, through whom, so to speak, everything has now become a sea of good things.

Look a little, if you will, from the beginning at the divine benefaction.

The first man played in paradise, free, since he was a child of God. But when he fell prey to pleasure (the serpent, creeping on its belly, is an allegory of pleasure, an earthly vice, turning toward matter) and was led astray by desires, the child, becoming a man through disobedience and disregarding his Father, was ashamed before God. See what pleasure could do! The man who was free through his simplicity was found bound by sins. The Lord wished to set him free from his bonds again; and, binding himself in flesh (this is a divine mystery), he subdued the serpent and enslaved the tyrant, death; and, most wonderful of all, that man who had been led astray by pleasure, who was bound by corruption, he showed to be set free, with outstretched hands.

O mystic wonder! The Lord has been laid low, and man has risen; and he who fell from paradise receives a greater prize for obedience: the heavens. So it seems to me that, since the Word himself has come to us from heaven, we need no longer go to human teaching, busying ourselves about Athens and the rest of Greece, and Ionia too. For if our teacher is he who has filled all things with holy powers, with creation, salvation, benefaction, lawgiving, prophecy, and teaching, this teacher now instructs us in all things, and the whole world has already become Athens and Greece through the Word. For you surely will not believe a poetic myth that records Minos of Crete as the familiar friend of Zeus, and then disbelieve us, who have become disciples of God and have taken up the truly real wisdom, which the leaders of philosophy only hinted at, but which the disciples of Christ have both grasped and proclaimed. And indeed, so to speak, the whole Christ … is not divided: there is neither barbarian nor Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, but a new man, refashioned by the Holy Spirit of God.

The other counsels and precepts are meager and concern particular matters: whether to marry, whether to take part in public life, whether to have children. But the only universal exhortation, one clearly for the whole of life, at every moment and in every circumstance, directed toward the supreme end, life, is godliness. According to it alone it is necessary to live, so that we may live forever. Philosophy, as the elders say, is a long-drawn-out counsel, wooing an everlasting love of wisdom; but “the commandment of the Lord is far-shining, enlightening the eyes.” Receive Christ, receive sight, receive your light, “so that you may know well both God and man.” “Sweet” is the Word who has enlightened us, “more than gold and precious stone; more desirable than honey and the honeycomb.” For how could he not be desirable, who has made clear the mind buried in darkness and sharpened the “light-bearing eyes” of the soul? For just as, “if there were no sun, it would be night everywhere in spite of the other stars,” so, if we had not known the Word and been lit up by him, we would be no better than fattened birds, fed in darkness and nourished for death. Let us receive the light, so that we may receive God; let us receive the light and become disciples of the Lord. This indeed he promised the Father: “I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the assembly I will sing your praise.” Sing praise and tell me of your Father, God; your stories will save, your song will teach me. Until now I went astray, seeking God; but since you light my way, Lord, I find God through you and receive the Father from you; I become your fellow heir, since you were not ashamed of your brother.

Let us remove, then, let us remove the forgetfulness of truth. Taking away the ignorance and darkness that stand in the way like a mist over the eyes, let us behold the God who truly is, first singing to him this cry: “Hail, Light!” A light has shone on us from heaven, on us who were buried in darkness and shut up in the shadow of death, a light purer than the sun, sweeter than life here. That light is eternal life, and whatever shares in it lives. Night fears the light and, sinking in fear, yields to the day of the Lord. All things have become sleepless light, and the setting has turned into a rising. This is what the new creation meant. For “the Sun of righteousness,” who drives his chariot over all things, visits all humanity alike, imitating the Father, who “makes his sun rise on all people,” and he sprinkles on them the dew of the truth. He has changed the setting into a rising and crucified death into life; snatching the human being from destruction, he has lifted him up to the sky, transplanting corruption into incorruption and changing earth into heaven. He is God's farmer, “giving favorable signs, and rousing the peoples to” good “work, reminding them of” true “livelihood,” and granting us the truly great, divine, and inalienable inheritance of the Father, deifying the human being by heavenly teaching, “putting laws into their minds and writing them on their hearts.” What laws does he write?

“That all shall know God, from the least to the greatest; and I will be merciful to them,” says God, “and I will not remember their sins.” Let us receive the laws of life; let us obey God who exhorts us; let us learn of him, so that he may be merciful; let us pay him, though he needs nothing, a grateful reward, obedience, as a kind of rent to God for our dwelling here. “Gold for bronze, a hundred oxen's worth for nine”: for a little faith he gives you this great earth to cultivate, water to drink and other water to sail, air to breathe, fire to serve you, the world to live in; and he has permitted you to send a colony from here to heaven. All these great and many works and gifts he has hired out to you for a little faith. Then those who believe in sorcerers accept amulets and incantations as if they could save; and will you not bind on the heavenly one himself, the saving Word, and, trusting in God's incantation, be freed from the passions, which are diseases of the soul, and be torn away from sin? For sin is eternal death. Or else, completely toothless and blind like moles, you live in darkness doing nothing but eat, wasting away in corruption. But there is, there is a truth that cries out, “Light shall shine out of darkness.” Let the light shine, then, in the hidden part of the human being, in the heart, and let the rays of knowledge rise, bringing to light and making shine the hidden inner man, the disciple of the light, the friend and fellow heir of Christ; especially when the most honored and revered name of a good father comes to be known by a pious and good child, a father who gives gentle commands and enjoins what is saving on his child. Whoever obeys him gains in every way: he follows God, he obeys the Father, he knew him when he was astray, he loved God, he loved his neighbor, he fulfilled the commandment, he seeks the prize, he claims the promise.

God's purpose is always to save the flock of humankind. For this reason the good God sent the Good Shepherd. The Word, unfolding the truth, has shown human beings the height of salvation, so that they may either repent and be saved, or refuse to obey and be judged. This is the proclamation of righteousness: good news to those who obey, judgment to those who disregard it. The trumpet “of mighty din,” when it sounds, gathers soldiers and proclaims war; and shall not Christ, having breathed a song of peace to the ends of the earth, gather his own soldiers of peace? He has gathered, man, by his blood and by the Word, a bloodless army, and entrusted to them the kingdom of heaven. The trumpet of Christ is his gospel; he has sounded it, and we have heard. Let us arm ourselves for peace, “putting on the breastplate of righteousness,” taking up the shield of faith, putting on the helmet of salvation, and let us sharpen “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” So the apostle draws us up in peaceful battle order. These are our invulnerable weapons; armed with them, let us take our stand against the evil one; let us quench the fiery darts of the evil one with the watery blades dipped by the Word, repaying his benefits with thankful blessings and honoring God with the divine Word. “For while you are still speaking,” he says, “he will say, Here I am.”

O this holy and blessed power, by which God shares citizenship with human beings! It is better, then, and nobler to become at once an imitator and a servant of the highest of all beings; for no one will be able to imitate God except by serving him in holiness, nor to serve and revere him except by imitating him. The heavenly and truly divine love comes to human beings in this way, when somewhere in the soul itself the truly beautiful, rekindled by the divine Word, is able to shine out; and, greatest of all, salvation runs together with the genuine wish for it, will and life being, so to speak, yoked together. Therefore this exhortation of truth alone is likened to the most faithful of friends, remaining with us to our last breath, and becoming a good escort for the whole and perfect spirit of the soul as it departs for heaven. Why then do I exhort you? I am eager that you be saved. This is what Christ wills; in a single word he grants you life. And who is he? Learn in brief: the Word of truth, the Word of incorruption, who regenerates the human being, bringing him back to the truth; the goad of salvation, who drives out corruption, who chases away death, who has built a temple in human beings, so that he may set up God in human beings. Purify the temple; leave your pleasures and idleness to wind and fire like a short-lived flower, and wisely cultivate the fruits of self-control; and dedicate yourself to God as first fruits, so that you may be not only a work but also a grace of God. Both befit the friend of Christ: to be seen worthy of the kingdom, and to be deemed worthy of it.

Let us flee, then, from custom; let us flee it like a dangerous headland, or the threat of Charybdis, or the Sirens of myth. It strangles the human being, turns him from the truth, leads him away from life; it is a snare, a pit, a trench; custom is a greedy evil. “Keep the ship clear of that smoke and wave.” Let us flee, shipmates, let us flee this wave; it belches fire; it is a wicked island heaped with bones and corpses, and on it sings a lovely harlot, Pleasure, delighting in vulgar music: “Come here, much-praised Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans; bring your ship to land, so that you may hear a diviner voice.” She praises you, sailor, and calls you much-sung, and the harlot claims for herself the glory of the Greeks. Let her feed on the dead; a heavenly spirit comes to your help. Pass by Pleasure; she beguiles. “Let no woman with trailing robes deceive your mind, coaxing with wheedling words, seeking your nest.” Sail past the song; it works death. Only be willing, and you have conquered destruction; bound to the wood, you will be freed from all corruption. The Word of God will be your pilot, and the Holy Spirit will bring you to anchor in the harbors of heaven. Then you will behold my God, and be initiated into those holy mysteries, and enjoy the things hidden in heaven, kept for me, “which neither ear has heard, nor have they entered into the heart” of anyone. “And indeed I seem to see two suns, and a double Thebes,” said someone raving in Bacchic frenzy for idols, drunk with undiluted ignorance. I would pity him in his drunken madness and invite one so out of his mind to a sober salvation, since the Lord too welcomes the repentance of a sinner …

… and not his death. Come, madman, not leaning on the thyrsus, not crowned with ivy; throw away the headband, throw away the fawnskin; come to your senses. I will show you the Word and the mysteries of the Word, describing them in terms of your own imagery. This is the mountain beloved by God, not a subject for tragedies like Cithaeron, but dedicated to the dramas of truth; a sober mountain, shaded by pure woods. On it revel not the sisters of Semele “the thunderstruck,” the maenads, who are initiated into the unholy distribution of flesh, but the daughters of God, the fair lambs, who proclaim the holy rites of the Word, gathering a sober chorus. The chorus is the righteous; the song is a hymn to the King of all. The maidens play the harp, angels give glory, prophets speak; the sound of music is sent forth; they run swiftly after the sacred band; those who have been called hasten, longing to receive the Father. Come to me, old man, you too; leave Thebes, throw away your prophecy and your Bacchic revelry, and be led by the hand to the truth. See, I give you the wood to lean on. Hurry, Tiresias, believe; you will see. Christ shines more brightly than the sun, and through him the eyes of the blind see again. Night will flee from you, fire will be afraid, death will be gone. You will see the heavens, old man, you who do not see Thebes.

O truly holy mysteries! O pure light! I am led by torchlight to behold the heavens and God; I become holy by being initiated. The Lord is the hierophant, and he seals the initiate, giving him light, and commends to the Father the one who has believed, to be kept forever. These are the Bacchic rites of my mysteries. If you wish, be initiated too, and you will dance with the angels around the unbegotten and imperishable and only true God, while the Word of God joins us in the hymn. This eternal Jesus, the one great High Priest of the one God, who is also Father, prays for human beings and exhorts them: “Hear, you countless tribes,” or rather, all of humankind who are rational, both barbarians and Greeks. “I call the whole human race, whose creator I am by the will of the Father. Come to me, to be ranked under one God and the one Word of God; and not only do you surpass the irrational animals by reason, but I grant you alone of all mortals to enjoy the fruit of immortality. For I will, I will to give you a share in this grace too, supplying the benefit in full: incorruption. And I grant you the Word, the knowledge of God; I grant you myself, complete. This is what I am, this is what God wills, this is the symphony, this is the harmony of the Father, this is the Son, this is Christ, this is the Word of God, the arm of the Lord, the power of the universe, the will of the Father. O you who of old were images, but not all resembling the original, I want to restore you to the archetype, so that you may become like me. I will anoint you with the ointment of faith, by which you cast off corruption, and I will show you the naked form of righteousness, by which you ascend to God. Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls; for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Let us hasten, let us run, you God-beloved and godlike images of the Word; let us hasten, let us run, let us take up his yoke, let us mount toward incorruption; let us love Christ, the good charioteer of human beings. He led the colt under the yoke together with the old one; and having yoked the pair of human beings, he guides the chariot to immortality, hastening to God to fulfill plainly what he signified in a figure, formerly driving into Jerusalem, but now into the heavens: a most beautiful sight for the Father, the eternal, victorious Son. Let us then be ambitious for what is good, and become men beloved by God, and acquire the greatest of good things, God and life. The Word is our helper; let us take courage in him, and may no desire for silver and gold, nor for glory, ever come upon us so strongly as the desire for the Word of truth himself.

For it is not pleasing to God himself if we make least of what is worth most, and prefer the open outrages of ignorance, stupidity, idleness, and idolatry, and the utmost impiety. For not without reason do the sons of the philosophers think that everything the foolish do is sacrilege and impiety; and describing ignorance itself as a form of madness, they confess that the many are simply mad. So the Word does not allow us to doubt which of the two is better, to be sane or to be mad. Rather, holding fast to the truth, we must follow God with all our strength, being of sound mind, and consider all things to be his, as they are; and, having learned that we too are the most beautiful of his possessions, entrust ourselves to God, loving the Lord our God, and considering this our work through our whole life. And if “friends have all things in common,” and the human being is dear to God (for he is indeed God's friend, the Word being mediator), then all things belong to the human being, because all things belong to God, and all things are common to both friends, God and the human being. It is time, then, for us to say that only the godly [Christian] is rich and self-controlled and noble, and in this way an image of God with likeness; and to say and believe that he has become “just and holy with wisdom” through Christ Jesus, and to that extent …

… already like God. The prophet does not hide this grace when he says: “I said, You are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High.” For it is us, us whom he has adopted, and of us alone that he wishes to be called Father, not of the disobedient. And indeed this is how it is with us, the followers of Christ: as are our intentions, so are our words; as are our words, so are our actions; and as are our deeds, such is our life. The whole life of those who have known Christ is good. Enough words, I think, even if I have gone on at some length, out of love for humankind, pouring out whatever I had from God, as I called you to the greatest of good things, salvation. For about the life that has no end whatever, words too are unwilling ever to stop revealing the sacred mysteries. But for you this final point still remains: to choose what is profitable, judgment or grace. For my part, I do not think it right even to doubt which of the two is better; nor is it lawful to compare life with destruction.