Oration to the Greeks 15–30

And so we must now seek again what we once had and lost, and join the soul to the Holy Spirit, and pursue the union that is according to God. The human soul has many parts, not one; for it is composite, so that it becomes manifest through the body; the soul itself could never appear without the body, nor does the flesh rise without the soul. A human being is not, as the raven-voiced teach, a rational animal capable of intellect and knowledge; for by their reasoning even irrational animals will be shown capable of intellect and knowledge. But the human being alone is the image and likeness of God; and by “human being” I mean not one who behaves like the animals, but one who has advanced far beyond mere humanity to God himself. We have written about this more precisely in our work On Animals. What we must now say is what the image and likeness of God is. What cannot be compared is nothing other than being itself; and what can be compared is nothing other than what is similar. The perfect God is without flesh, but the human being is flesh. The bond of the flesh is the soul, and the flesh is what holds the soul. If this structure is like a temple, God is willing to dwell in it through the spirit, his envoy; but if the dwelling is not such, the human being surpasses the beasts only in articulate speech, and in everything else his way of life is the same as theirs, since he is not a likeness of God. The demons have no flesh at all; their structure is spiritual, like fire or air. The bodies of the demons are plainly visible only to those guarded by the Spirit of God, and not at all to the rest, I mean the merely natural. For the lesser cannot comprehend the greater. That is why the being of the demons has no room for repentance: they are reflections of matter and of wickedness. Matter wanted to rule over the soul; and by their free will the demons handed on laws of death to human beings. But human beings, after losing immortality, have conquered death by the death that comes through faith, and through repentance a calling has been given them, according to the word that says, “since they were made a little lower than the angels.” And everyone who has been defeated can conquer again, if he rejects the makeup of death. What that is will be plain to those who desire immortality.

The demons who give orders to human beings are not the souls of human beings. For how could souls become active after death? Only if a human being were senseless and powerless while alive, and after becoming a corpse could be believed to acquire more active power. But this is not so, as we have shown elsewhere. And it is hard to suppose that the immortal soul, hindered by the parts of the body, becomes wiser when it has moved out of it. For the demons, raging against human beings in their malice, divert their minds, which are bent downward, by various lying stage-shows, so that they are unable to rise up for the journey to the heavens. But the things of the world have not escaped us, and the divine is easily grasped by us, since the power that makes souls immortal has come to us. The demons are seen even by the merely natural, when they sometimes show themselves to people, either so that they may be thought to be something, or to do some harm, like friends who are ill-disposed toward enemies, or to give those who are like them occasions to honor them. If they could, they would certainly have dragged down heaven too, together with the rest of creation. But as it is they do not do this at all, for they cannot; instead, with the lower matter they make war on matter that is like themselves. Whoever wishes to conquer them, let him reject matter. For armed with the breastplate of the heavenly spirit, he will be able to save everything it encloses. There are diseases and disturbances of the matter within us; but when these occur, the demons ascribe their causes to themselves, coming upon a person whenever sickness seizes him. And sometimes they themselves shake the condition of the body with a storm of their folly; but struck by the word of God's power they depart in fear, and the sick person is healed.

What can we even say about the sympathies and antipathies of Democritus, except that, as the common saying goes, the man from Abdera talks Abderite nonsense? And just as the man who gave the city its name, a friend of Heracles as they say, was devoured by the horses of Diomedes, so too the one who boasts of the magus Ostanes will be handed over on the day of the consummation as food for eternal fire. And you too, unless you stop laughing, will enjoy the same punishments as the sorcerers. So, Greeks, listen to me as I cry out to you as if from on high, and do not by mocking shift your own irrationality onto the herald of the truth. A disease is not destroyed by an antipathy, nor is a madman cured by hanging leather amulets on him. These are visitations of demons; and the sick, the one who says he is in love, the one who hates, and the one who wants revenge take the demons as their helpers. This is how their contrivance works. The shapes of letters and the lines made from them cannot by themselves signify what is composed; human beings have made them signs of their thoughts, knowing from the particular way they are combined how the order of the letters has been fixed. In the same way the varieties of roots and the use of sinews and bones are not effective in themselves, but are the alphabet of the demons' wickedness, who have determined what each of them is good for. When they see that people have taken up the service rendered through these things, they take hold of them and make them their slaves. How can it be good to assist adultery? How can it be right to help someone hate the people he passes by? Or how is it right to credit matter, and not God, with helping the mad? By their art they turn people away from piety, getting them to trust in herbs and roots. If God had made these things to do what people want, he would be the maker of evil things. But he made everything that is in any way good, and it is the profligacy of the demons that has used the things in the world to do evil; the form of the evil is theirs and not the perfect God's. For if while alive I am not at all wicked, how will my remains, when I am dead and doing nothing, a thing that neither moves nor perceives, produce anything perceptible? And how can a man who died a most miserable death serve to avenge someone? If this were so, he would much rather avenge himself on his own enemy; for if he could help others, he would much rather become his own avenger.

Pharmacy too, and every form of it, belongs to the same contrivance. For if someone is healed by matter because he trusts in it, he will be healed all the more if he himself relies on the power of God. Just as poisons are material compounds, in the same way remedies are of the same substance. If we reject the baser matter, some people still often try to heal by combining one evil thing with another, and so would use evil things for good. And just as someone who dines with a robber, even if he is not a robber himself, still shares in his punishment because he ate with him, in the same way the one who is not bad, but has mixed with the bad and made use of it for what is thought good, will be punished by God the judge for his partnership in it. Why does one who trusts in the workings of matter not wish to trust in God? And why do you not approach the more powerful Lord, but instead heal yourself as the dog does with grass, the stag with a viper, the pig with river crabs, and the lion with apes? Why do you make gods of the things in the world? And why, when you heal your neighbor, are you called a benefactor? Follow the power of the Word. Demons do not heal; by their art they take human beings captive. The most admirable Justin rightly declared that they are like robbers. For just as robbers are accustomed to take people alive and then restore them to their families for a ransom, so too those who are thought to be gods enter into people's limbs; then by dreams they procure glory for themselves, order such people to come forward in public in the sight of all, and when they have enjoyed the things of the world, they fly away from the sick, bring to an end the disease they had contrived, and restore the people to their former state.

But you, who have no understanding of these things, are learning from us who know them, when you say that you despise death and practice self-sufficiency. For your philosophers are so far from practicing it that some of them receive six hundred gold pieces a year from the Roman emperor for nothing useful, so that they may not even wear their long beards for free. Crescens, who made his nest in the great city, surpassed everyone in pederasty and was wholly given to the love of money. He who counseled contempt of death was himself so afraid of death that he schemed to bring Justin, as he did me also, to death as to an evil, because Justin, in preaching the truth, exposed the philosophers as gluttons and cheats. Whom among the philosophers was he in the habit of persecuting, if not you alone? If you say that one should not fear death, then share our teachings: do not die out of a human craving for fame, like Anaxarchus, but become despisers of death for the sake of the knowledge of God. The structure of the world is good, but the way life is lived in it is bad; and one can see those who do not know God rioting as at a festival. What is divination? Why are you led astray by it? It is a servant of your worldly greed. You want to make war, and you take Apollo as your counselor in murder. You want to carry off a girl, and you choose the demon to help you. You are ill through your own fault, and, like Agamemnon with his ten counselors, you want to have gods on your side. A woman drinks water and goes mad, and is driven out of her senses by incense, and you say that she prophesies. Apollo was a foreknower and a teacher of prophets; in the case of Daphne he deceived himself. Tell me, does an oak prophesy, and do birds foretell the future, and are you inferior to animals and plants? Then it would be good for you to become a prophetic tree and to take on the nature of the birds of the air. The one who makes you greedy for money also prophesies to you about getting rich; the one who stirs up factions and battles also foretells victory in war. If you are above the passions, you will despise all things in the world. Do not loathe us for being such people; rather, reject the demons and follow God alone. All things were made by him, and without him not one thing was made. And if there is poison among the things that grow, this came about because of our sinfulness. I can show you the image of these things; only listen, and the one who believes will understand.

Even if you are healed by drugs (I allow it you as a concession), you must give the credit to God. For the world still drags us down, and in my weakness I seek the help of matter. The perfect spirit is the soul's plumage; having cast it off through sin, the soul fluttered like a fledgling and fell to the ground; and having left its heavenly companionship, it longed to share in lesser things. The demons were made to change their dwelling; the first-formed were banished. The demons were cast down from heaven; the first-formed from an earth, but not from this one: from a better ordering than the one here. And so we must now long for our original state and reject everything that stands in the way. For heaven is not infinite, O man, but bounded and within limits; and beyond it are the better ages, which have no change of seasons, the cause of various diseases, but enjoy a perfectly tempered climate, and have a day that does not end, and a light that people from here cannot approach. Those who labored over geographies described the regions as far as a human being could; but being unable to speak of what lies beyond, because it could not be observed, they spoke of tides, of one sea full of seaweed and another full of mud, and of some regions as fiery and others as cold and frozen. But we have learned what was unknown to us through the prophets, who, being convinced that the soul will gain the heavenly spirit as a garment over its mortality, foretold things that the other souls did not know. Everyone who is naked can obtain this adornment and run back to the ancient kinship.

We are not fools, men of Greece, nor are we talking nonsense, when we proclaim that God was born in human form. You who revile us, compare your myths with our accounts. Athena, as they say, took the form of Deiphobus for Hector's sake; for Admetus's sake Phoebus of the unshorn hair herded the shambling cattle; and the wife of Zeus came to Semele as an old woman. When you study such things, how can you laugh at us? Your Asclepius died; and he who deflowered the fifty maidens at Thespiae in one night gave himself as food to the fire and is gone. Prometheus, fastened to the Caucasus, was punished for his kindness to human beings. According to you Zeus is envious, and hides the dream from people because he wants them to perish. So look at your own records, and accept us at least as telling similar stories. We are not out of our minds; it is your stories that are nonsense. If you speak of the birth of gods, you will show that they are mortal too. Why is Hera not pregnant now? Has she grown old, or has she no one to tell you? Believe me now, men of Greece: do not allegorize your myths and your gods. For if you try to do this, the divinity you believe in is abolished, and by you yourselves: either your demons are such as they are said to be, and then they are base in character; or, turned into something belonging to nature, they are not what they are said to be. I could not be persuaded to worship the substance of the elements, nor could I persuade my neighbor to. Metrodorus of Lampsacus, too, in his work On Homer, argued very foolishly, turning everything into allegory. He says that neither Hera nor Athena nor Zeus is what those who built enclosures and precincts for them think, but manifestations of nature and arrangements of the elements. And you will say, of course, that Hector and Achilles and Agamemnon, and all the Greeks and barbarians together with Helen and Paris, being of the same nature, were introduced for the sake of the plot, and that none of these persons existed. But we have put these things forward only for the sake of argument; for it is not right even to compare our understanding of God with those who wallow in matter and mud.

And what sort of things are your teachings? Who would not mock your public festivals, which are held in honor of wicked demons and bring people into disgrace? I have often seen a man (and seeing him I wondered, and after wondering I despised him) who is one thing inside and outside feigns to be what he is not: utterly effeminate, twisting himself in every direction, now flashing his eyes, now writhing his hands, raving behind a mask of clay, becoming now Aphrodite, now Apollo; a single accuser of all the gods, an epitome of superstition, a slanderer of heroic deeds, an actor of murders, a chronicler of adultery, a storehouse of madness, a teacher of catamites, an instigator of condemnations; and such a man is praised by all. But I have rejected him, liar in everything as he is: his godlessness, his practices, and the man himself. You, though, are carried off captive by these people, and you revile those who do not share in your pursuits. I have no wish to gape at a chorus of singers, and I will not be swept along in sympathy with a man who nods and gesticulates against nature. What wonderful or exceptional thing is done among you? They pipe obscenities through their noses, they make movements they should not, and your daughters and sons watch them teaching on the stage how to commit adultery. Fine indeed are your auditoriums, which proclaim everything wickedly done at night and delight their hearers with shameful words! Fine too are your lying poets, who deceive their hearers with their figures!

I have seen men weighed down by bodily training and carrying about the burden of their flesh, for whom prizes and crowns are set out, the presidents of the games calling them on not to noble deeds but to a contest in violence and strife; and the one who hits harder is crowned. And these are the lesser evils; who would not shrink from telling the greater? Some, having taken up idleness because of their profligacy, sell themselves to be killed; the one in want sells himself, and the rich man buys those who will do the killing. The witnesses take their seats for them, and the fighters fight to the death for nothing, and no one comes down to help. Are such things well done by you? The one who is foremost among you gathers an army of bloody murderers, proclaiming that he keeps robbers; the robbers come forward from his house, and you all flock to the spectacle and become judges, both of the president of this wickedness and of the gladiators themselves. And the one who misses the slaughter is grieved that he was not condemned to be a spectator of wicked, godless, and abominable deeds. You sacrifice animals in order to eat meat, and you buy human beings to supply your soul with cannibalism, feeding it with the most godless bloodshed. The robber kills for the sake of gain, but the rich man buys gladiators for the sake of their being killed.

What good does it do me when someone raves on stage in the manner of Euripides and recites Alcmaeon's murder of his mother, a man who does not even keep his own bearing, who gapes wide, carries a sword about, bursts with shouting, and wears an inhuman costume? Away too with the myths of Acusilaus, and with Menander, the versifier of that kind of speech! Why should I admire the mythical flute-player? Why should I busy myself about Aristoxenus or Antigenides of Thebes? We leave to you what is useless; and you should either be persuaded by our teachings, or likewise give up yours to us.

What great and wonderful thing do your philosophers achieve? They leave one of their shoulders bare, wear their hair long, grow beards, carry the claws of wild beasts about with them, and, while saying they need nothing, they need, like Proteus, a tanner for their wallet, a weaver for their cloak, a woodcutter for their staff, and, because of their gluttony, the rich and a cook. You who emulate the dog, you do not know God, and you have taken to imitating an irrational animal. Shouting in public with an air of authority, you make yourself your own avenger; if you do not get something, you hurl abuse, and philosophy becomes your way of making money. You follow Plato's teachings, and a sophist of Epicurus's school opposes you at the top of his voice. Next you want to be an Aristotelian, and a follower of Democritus abuses you. Pythagoras says he was once Euphorbus, and he is heir to the teaching of Pherecydes; but Aristotle impugns the immortality of the soul. You who have inherited your teachings in factious successions disagree with one another, and you fight against those who are in agreement among themselves. One man says that God is a body; I say he is incorporeal. That the world is indestructible; I say that it will be dissolved. That the conflagration comes at intervals; I say that it comes once for all. That the judges are Minos and Rhadamanthys; I say it is God himself. That the soul alone is made immortal; I say that the flesh with it is too. What harm do we do you, men of Greece? Why do you hate those who follow the word of God as if they were utterly abominable? There is no cannibalism among us; you, the educated, have become false witnesses. It is among you that Pelops becomes a dinner for the gods, though he was Poseidon's beloved, and Cronus devours his sons, and Zeus swallows Metis.

Stop parading words that are not your own and decking yourselves, like the jackdaw, in feathers that are not yours. If each city takes back from you its own dialect, your clever arguments will lose their force. You seek who God is, but you do not know what is within you; gaping at the heavens, you fall into pits. Your collections of books are like labyrinths, and those who read them like the jar of the Danaids. Why do you divide time, saying that one part of it is past, another present, and another future? How can the future pass by if the present exists? Just as people sailing on a moving ship think in their ignorance that the mountains are running past, so you do not realize that it is you who are running past, while the age stands still until its Maker wills it to exist no longer. Why am I accused for speaking my own mind, while you hurry to overthrow everything of mine? Were you not born in the same way as we, sharing in the same governance of the world? Why do you claim that wisdom is found among you alone, when you have no other sun, no different risings of the stars, no more distinguished birth, and no death exceptional compared with other people? The grammarians have been the beginning of your babble. You who divide wisdom up have cut yourselves off from true wisdom, and you have given the names of the parts to men; you do not know God, and in fighting among yourselves you destroy one another. And for this reason you are all nothing: you appropriate other people's words, and you talk like a blind man to a deaf one. Why do you hold carpenters' tools when you do not know how to build? Why do you take up words while staying far away from deeds, puffed up in good repute and humbled in misfortune? You misuse your philosophers' dress against all reason: you parade in public, but hide your words in corners. Having come to know you for what you are, we have left you, and we no longer touch what is yours, but follow the word of God. Why, man, do you stir up a war over letters? Why do you clash their sounds together, as in a boxing match, with Athenian lisps, when you ought to speak more naturally? If you speak Attic though you are not an Athenian, tell me why you do not speak Doric. How is it that one seems to you more barbarous, and the other more pleasant for conversation?

If you hold to their education, why do you fight with me for choosing the teachings I want? How is it not absurd that a robber is not punished because of the name he is charged with until the truth has been carefully established, but that we are hated because of an unexamined prejudice born of slander? Diagoras was an Athenian, but you punished him for divulging the Athenian mysteries; and yet you read his Phrygian discourses and hate us. You possess the memoirs of Leo and are annoyed at our refutations; you keep Apion's opinions about the Egyptian gods among yourselves, and yet you denounce us as utterly godless. A tomb of Olympian Zeus is shown among you, even though someone says the Cretans are liars. The assembly of your many gods is nothing. Even if Epicurus, who despises them, serves as their torchbearer, I will not any the more hide from the rulers the understanding of God that I hold concerning the universe. Why do you advise me to be false to my way of life? And why, while saying that you despise death, do you urge people to escape it by art? I do not have the heart of a deer; but the practices of your speeches are like those of Thersites, who talked without measure. How shall I be persuaded by someone who says that the sun is a red-hot lump and the moon an earth? Such things are a contest of words, not an ordering of the truth. Or how is it not foolish to believe the books of Herodorus on the story of Heracles, which proclaim an earth above, and say that the lion killed by Heracles came down from it? What use would Attic diction be, and heaps of philosophers, and plausible syllogisms, and measurements of the earth, and positions of the stars, and courses of the sun? To be occupied with such inquiries is the work of one who makes up his teachings for himself.

For this reason I also condemned your legislation. There ought to be one common polity for all; but as it is, there are as many codes of law as there are kinds of cities, so that what is shameful among some is honorable among others. The Greeks, for instance, think intercourse with one's mother is to be shunned, but among the Persian magi that practice is thought most honorable. Pederasty is prosecuted by the barbarians, but the Romans have granted it privileges, and they try to gather herds of boys like grazing horses.

Having seen these things, and having also taken part in mysteries and examined the religious rites of all peoples, performed by effeminates and hermaphrodites; having found that among the Romans their Latiarian Zeus delights in human gore and the blood of slaughtered men, and that Artemis, not far from the great city, has taken up the same kind of practices, and that one demon here and another there contrives outbreaks of evil; I withdrew into myself and sought how I might be able to discover the truth. While I was pondering what was worthwhile, I happened to come upon certain barbarian writings, too old to be compared with the teachings of the Greeks, too divine to be compared with their error. And I came to be persuaded by them because of the unpretentiousness of their language, the artlessness of their writers, the easy intelligibility of their account of how all things were made, their foreknowledge of the future, the excellence of their precepts, and their teaching that one rules over all things. My soul being taught by God, I understood that the pagan writings lead to condemnation, but that these put an end to the slavery that is in the world, and rescue us from many rulers and ten thousand tyrants; and they give us, not what we had never received, but what we had received and were prevented by error from keeping.

Having been initiated into these things and having come to understand them, I wish to strip them off, like infants putting off their childish things. For we know that wickedness is constituted like the tiniest of seeds: it grew strong from a small beginning, but it will be dissolved again if we obey the words of God and do not scatter ourselves. For it gained mastery over what is ours by means of a hidden treasure: digging for it, we were filled with dust, and so we give wickedness the occasion to establish itself. For whoever takes up that whole possession has taken hold of the more precious wealth. Let this be said to our own people. To you Greeks, what else should I say than that you should not revile those who are better than you, nor, if they are called barbarians, take this as an occasion for mockery? For if you wish, you will be able to find out the reason why all people cannot understand one another's language; and to those who wish to examine our teachings I will make the account easy and ungrudging.