Protrepticus

1. Amphion of Thebes and Arion of Methymna were both singers, and both are the stuff of legend; and to this day the song is sung in the chorus of the Greeks, telling how by the art of music the one lured a fish and the other walled in Thebes. Another, a Thracian sophist (this too is a Greek legend), tamed the wild beasts by his bare song, and even transplanted trees, the oaks, by his music. I could tell you of yet another legend and singer akin to these, Eunomus the Locrian and the Pythian grasshopper. A Greek festival was being held over a dead serpent at Pytho, and Eunomus sang the serpent's dirge. Whether the song was a hymn or a lament for the snake I cannot say; but it was a contest, and Eunomus was playing the lyre in the heat of noon, when the grasshoppers were singing among the leaves up and down the mountains, warmed by the sun. They were singing, of course, not to the dead serpent, the Pythian, but to the all-wise God, a song of their own making, finer than the measures of Eunomus. A string broke in the Locrian's hand; the grasshopper flew down upon the bridge of the instrument; it chirped as though upon a branch; and the singer, adjusting his playing to the song of the grasshopper, supplied the missing string. So it is not by the song of Eunomus that the grasshopper is moved, as the legend will have it — the legend that set up at Pytho a bronze statue of Eunomus with his very lyre, and his fellow-contestant the Locrian. No: of its own will the grasshopper flew down, and of its own will it sang, though the Greeks supposed it had become an actor in the performance of music.

How then have you come to believe in empty fables, imagining that living creatures are charmed by music? Yet the bright face of truth alone seems to you, it appears, to be a counterfeit, and falls under the eyes of your unbelief. So Cithaeron and Helicon and the mountains of the Odrysians and Thracians, those halls of initiation into error, have been deified and hymned because of the mysteries. For my part, even if these are only legends, I cannot endure to see so many calamities set out as tragedy; whereas with you the very records of your evils have become dramas, and the actors of those dramas a spectacle for your delight. But as for the dramas and the poets who play the Lenaean reveller, by now wholly drunk — let us crown them with ivy, raving extravagantly in the Bacchic rite, with their satyrs and their frenzied troop, together with the rest of the chorus of demons; let us shut them up in Helicon and Cithaeron, now grown old, and let us bring down from above, from the heavens, truth together with her radiant wisdom, to the holy mountain of God and to the holy choir of the prophets. And let her, shedding as far as may be a light that shines from afar, illumine on every side those who are wallowing in darkness, and free men from their error, stretching out to them her highest right hand, understanding, unto salvation. And let those who lift up their heads and look up leave Helicon and Cithaeron behind, 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 genuine champion crowned in the theatre of the whole world. This Eunomus of mine sings no measure of Terpander or of Capion, nor any Phrygian or Lydian or Dorian air, but the eternal measure of the new harmony that bears the name of God, the new song, the Levitical, "that lulls grief and anger, and brings forgetfulness of every ill." A sweet and true medicine of persuasion is blended into that song.

To my mind, then, that Thracian Orpheus, and the Theban and the Methymnean — men who were no men — were deceivers; under the pretext of music they laid waste human life; possessed by an artful sorcery that worked corruption, celebrating outrages, deifying griefs, they were the first to lead men by the hand to idols; indeed, they built up the rudeness of the custom out of stones and timber — that is, out of statues and painted images; and that noble freedom of those who live as citizens under heaven they yoked, by songs and incantations, to the uttermost slavery.

But not such is my singer; he has come to put an end, and that without delay, to the bitter slavery of the tyrant demons, and, transferring us to the gentle and kindly yoke of piety, he calls back to heaven those who had been cast down to earth. He alone of all who have ever lived tamed the most intractable of beasts — human beings — the flighty among them as birds, the deceivers as reptiles, the hot-tempered as lions, the pleasure-loving as swine, the rapacious as wolves. The senseless are stones and timber; and a man steeped in ignorance is more insensible even than a stone. Let the prophetic voice come forward as our witness, accordant with truth, pitying those who are worn down by ignorance and folly: "for God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham." He, taking pity on the great unlearning and the hardness of heart of those who had been turned to stone against the truth, raised up from those stones — from the nations that had put their trust in stones — a seed of piety, alive to virtue. Again, certain venomous and treacherous hypocrites who go about waylaying righteousness he has somewhere called a brood of vipers; yet even of these serpents, if one repent of his own will and follow the Word, he becomes a man of God. Others again he allegorizes as wolves clothed in sheepskins, hinting at the rapacious who go about in the shapes of men. And all these most savage beasts, and such stones, the heavenly song itself has transformed into gentle men. For we too were once foolish, disobedient, going astray, slaves to pleasures and manifold lusts, passing our days in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another, as the apostolic Scripture says; "but when the kindness and love toward man of God our Saviour appeared, not by works done in righteousness which we did, but according to his own mercy he saved us."

See how strong the new song is: it has made men out of stones and men out of beasts. And those who were otherwise dead, who had no part in the life that truly is, became alive again by merely hearing the song. It is this same song that set the whole in order harmoniously and tuned the discord of the elements into the concord of music, so that the whole world might become for it a harmony. It let loose the sea, yet forbade it to encroach upon the land; the land in turn, which was in motion, it made firm, and fixed it as a boundary of the sea; the rush of fire too it softened with air, blending, as it were, the Dorian harmony with the Lydian, and the harsh coldness of air it tamed by the interweaving of fire, tuning these extreme notes of the universe melodiously together. And indeed this pure song, the stay of all things and the harmony of all, stretched from the centre to the limits and from the extremes to the centre, has tuned this universe — not according to the Thracian music, like that of Jubal, but according to the ancestral will of God, which David emulated. He who is of David, and was before him, the Word of God, scorning the lyre and the harp, those lifeless instruments, and tuning by the Holy Spirit this universe, and especially that little universe, man — his soul and body alike — makes music to God through the many-voiced instrument, and accompanies his song upon the instrument that is man. "For you are my harp and pipe and temple": a harp because of the harmony, a pipe because of the breath, a temple because of the Word; so that the one may sound, the other breathe, and the third contain the Lord. Yes, and David the king, the harper of whom we spoke a little before, exhorted men toward the truth and turned them away from idols; far from hymning the demons, he drove them out by true music, with which, when Saul was possessed, he healed him by merely singing. A fair instrument, breathing and alive, did the Lord fashion man to be, after his own image; and the Lord himself is indeed an all-harmonious instrument of God, melodious and holy, the wisdom that is above the world, the heavenly Word.

What, then, does this 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, and to lead by the hand the lame in foot, or the wandering, into righteousness; to reveal God to senseless men, to put an end to corruption, to conquer death, to reconcile disobedient sons to their Father. The instrument of God loves mankind. The Lord has pity, instructs, exhorts, admonishes, saves, guards; and as the reward of our learning he promises us, out of his abundance, the kingdom of heaven, taking from us this one thing only — that we be saved. For wickedness feeds upon the corruption of men, but truth, like the bee, harming none of the things that are, rejoices only in the salvation of men. You have, then, the promise; you have his love toward mankind: partake of the grace.

And do not suppose that my song of salvation is new in the sense in which 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. Whether, then, the mythical goats teach that the Phrygians are most ancient, or the poets who record the Arcadians as older than the moon, or those who dream that the Egyptians first brought forth from this earth both gods and men — yet not one of these existed before this universe; but before the foundation of the world were we, who, because we were destined to be in it, had been begotten beforehand by God: we, the rational creatures of the Word of God, on whose account we lay claim to antiquity, "because in the beginning was the Word." But because the Word was from on high, he was and is the divine beginning of all things; and because he has now taken the name that was long ago consecrated and is worthy of power, the name of Christ, I have called him a new song.

The Word, then, Christ, is the cause both of our being long ago (for he was in God) and of our well-being; and now this very Word has appeared to men — he who alone is both, God and man — the author for us of all good things; instructed by whom in living well, we are escorted on to eternal life. For according to that inspired apostle of the Lord, "the saving grace of God has appeared to all men, instructing us, that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly and righteously and godly in this present age, awaiting the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ." This is the new song: the manifestation, now shining forth among us, of the Word who was in the beginning and was before the beginning. The pre-existent Saviour has appeared but lately; he who exists in the One that is has appeared, because the Word "was with God"; he has appeared as Teacher, the Word by whom all things have been made; who, as Creator, granted us life together with our fashioning, and, appearing as Teacher, taught us to live well, that as God he might afterward bestow life everlasting.

He did not now for the first time take pity on us in our error, but from of old, from the beginning; now, however, he has appeared and rescued us when we were already perishing. For the wicked and creeping beast, working its sorceries, even now enslaves and torments men, punishing them, it seems to me, after a barbarous fashion — those barbarians who are said to bind their captives to dead bodies, until the living rot away together with them. So this wicked tyrant and serpent, having bound whomever he can master from birth to stones and timber and statues and such like idols by the wretched chain of superstition, has, as the saying goes, carried the living off and buried them with the dead, until they too perish together. For this cause — since there is one deceiver who from of old led astray Eve, and now leads the rest of men down to death — there is also one helper and succourer for us, the Lord, who from the beginning foretold by the prophets, and now plainly calls us to salvation.

Let us flee, then, obeying the apostolic command, "the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that now works in the sons of disobedience," and let us run to the Lord our Saviour, who both now and always exhorted men to salvation — through wonders and signs in Egypt, and in the wilderness through the bush and through the cloud that, by an attendant grace of love toward man, served the Hebrews like a handmaid. By the fear of these things he exhorted the hard of heart; but already, through Moses the all-wise, and through Isaiah the lover of truth, and through all the choir of the prophets, he turns to the Word, in more reasonable fashion, those who have ears. Sometimes he reproaches, sometimes he threatens; some men he laments; to others he sings — like a good physician of ailing bodies, who plasters some parts, soothes others, bathes others, cuts some with the knife and cauterizes others, and sometimes even amputates, if by any means the man can be made whole even in part or limb. Many-voiced indeed and of many turns is the Saviour for the salvation of men: by threatening he admonishes, by reproaching he turns men about, by lamenting he shows pity, by making music he exhorts; he speaks through the bush — they had need of signs and wonders — and frightens men by fire, kindling a flame from a pillar, a token at once of grace and of fear: if you obey, the light; if you disobey, the fire. And since flesh is more precious than pillar and bush, after these 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 fable, the Lord himself shall speak to you — he who, being in the form of God, "thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but he emptied himself," the compassionate God, longing to save man. And now the Word himself speaks to you plainly, shaming your unbelief — yes, I say, the Word of God, who became man, that you too might learn from a man how it is that a man may become God.

Is it not then absurd, my friends, that God should ever be exhorting us to virtue, while we draw back from the benefit and put off our salvation? For does not John too call men to salvation, becoming wholly a voice of exhortation? Let us, then, ask of him: "Who are you, and whence among men?" Elijah he will not say he is; that he is the Christ he will deny; but he will confess that he is a voice crying in the wilderness. Who, then, is John? Let it be permitted to say, taking him as a type: he is the exhorting voice of the Word, crying in the wilderness. What do you cry, O voice? Tell us also. "Make straight the ways of the Lord." John is the forerunner, and the voice is the forerunner of the Word — a voice of consolation, preparing the way for salvation, a voice exhorting men to the inheritance of the heavens; through which she that was barren and desolate is no longer childless.

This conception was foretold to me by an angel's voice; that voice too was a forerunner of the Lord, bringing good tidings to a barren woman, as John brought them to the wilderness. Through this voice of the Word, then, the barren bears fair children and the wilderness brings forth fruit. The two voices that are forerunners of the Lord, of the angel and of John, hint to me at the salvation laid up in store: that, when this Word has appeared, we should carry off the fruit of fair offspring, life everlasting. The Scripture, bringing both voices to the same point, makes the whole plain: "Hear, you that bear not; break forth into a cry, you that travail not: for more are the children of the desolate than of her that has a husband." To us the angel brought glad tidings; us John exhorted to recognize the husbandman and to seek the husband. For one and the same is he, the husband of the barren, the husbandman of the wilderness, who filled both the barren and the wilderness with the divine power. Since the children of the noble woman were many, while she who of old had borne many children, the Hebrew woman, was childless through disobedience, the barren receives the husband, and the wilderness the husbandman; then the one becomes a mother of fruits, the other of believers, but both mothers through the Word; and for the unbelieving even now there is left both barrenness and desolation. John, then, the herald of the Word, in this way exhorted men to make themselves ready for the coming of God, of Christ; and this was what the silence of Zacharias signified, awaiting the forerunning fruit of Christ, that the light of truth, the Word, might loose the mystic silence of the prophetic riddles, becoming good tidings. But if you long to see God in truth, partake of purifications worthy of God — not laurel leaves and fillets adorned with wool and purple, but, binding righteousness upon your brow and setting about your head the leaves of self-control, seek diligently after Christ. "For I am the door," he says somewhere; which we must learn thoroughly if we wish to apprehend God, that he may throw open wide for us the gates of the heavens. For the gates of the Word are gates of reason, opened by the key of faith. No one has known God except the Son, and he to whom the Son reveals him. And I well know that he who opens the door that hitherto was shut afterward reveals what is within and shows what it was not possible to know before, except for those who have gone through Christ, by whom alone God is beheld.

2. Do not, then, busy yourselves about godless shrines, nor about the mouths of chasms full of marvel-mongering, nor about the Thesprotian cauldron, the Cirrhaean tripod, or the bronze of Dodona. As for the aged tree-stump honoured amid the desert sands, and the oracle there withered together with its very oak, leave them to legends that have grown old. The fountain of Castalia, at any rate, is silenced, and the other fountain of Colophon; and likewise the other prophetic streams are dead, stripped of their pretension late indeed, yet at last confuted, having flowed away together with their own legends. Recount to us also the useless oracles of the rest of your divination — or rather mania: the Clarian, the Pythian, the Didymaean, the oracle of Amphiaraus, of Apollo, of Amphilochus; and, if you will, dedicate to perdition along with them the prodigy-mongers and the bird-augurs and the interpreters of dreams. Set up beside the Pythian, too, the diviners by meal and the diviners by barley and the ventriloquists still honoured among the many; yes, and let the shrines of the Egyptians and the necromancies of the Etruscans be handed over to darkness. These, in truth, are the lecture-halls of faithless men and the gaming-houses of unmixed error; partners in this sorcery are the goats trained for divination, and the ravens taught by men to give oracles to men.

But what if I were to recount to you the mysteries? I will not parody them, as they say Alcibiades did, but I will lay quite bare, in accordance with the argument of truth, the sorcery hidden in them, and your so-called gods themselves, whose mystic rites they are; I will wheel them out, as it were upon the stage of life, before the spectators of truth. The Bacchants celebrate the orgies of the maddened Dionysus, conducting their sacred frenzy by eating raw flesh, and consummate the distribution of the meat of their slaughter, crowned with serpents, shrieking out "Eua!" — that Eve through whom error followed; and a consecrated serpent is the badge of the Bacchic orgies. At any rate, according to the exact speech of the Hebrews, the name "Hevia," with the rough breathing, is interpreted as "the female serpent." Deo and Kore have already become a mystic drama, and Eleusis celebrates with torches their wandering, the rape, and the mourning.

It seems to me that we ought to derive the etymology of the words "orgies" and "mysteries": the one from the wrath (orge) of Deo against Zeus, the other from the pollution (mysos) that befell Dionysus. And if you derive it from a certain Myous, an Athenian whom Apollodorus says was killed while hunting, I do not grudge it: your mysteries have been glorified with a sepulchral honour. You may also take "mysteries" as "myth-hunts" (mytheria), the letters answering to each other; for, if certain others hunt, so too do such legends as these hunt the most barbarous of the Thracians, the most senseless of the Phrygians, and the superstitious among the Greeks. May he perish, then, who began this deception among men — whether it was 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, having learned them from the Odrysian, then passed on the artful deception to his subjects. For the islander Cinyras of Cyprus would never persuade me — he who dared to bring out from night into day the lewd orgies of Aphrodite, ambitious to deify a fellow-citizen who was a harlot. Others say that Melampus son of Amythaon brought over from Egypt to Greece the festivals of Deo, a hymned mourning. These men I should call the authors of mischief, the fathers of godless myths and of ruinous superstition, who sowed in human life the seed of wickedness and corruption — the mysteries.

But now — for it is high time — I will expose your very orgies, full of deception and marvel-mongering. And if you have been initiated, you will laugh all the more at these your honoured myths. I will proclaim openly the things kept secret, not ashamed to tell what you are not ashamed to worship. There is the foam-born and Cyprus-born goddess, dear to Cinyras — I mean Aphrodite, the lover of the members (philomedea), because she was revealed from the members, those severed members of Uranus, the lustful, which after the cutting did violence to the wave. As fit fruit of lewd parts, in the rites of this pleasure of the sea a lump of salt and a phallus are given to the initiates as a token of her birth, and they bring her money, as lovers to a courtesan, the initiates.

The mysteries of Deo are the amorous embraces of Zeus with his mother Demeter, and the wrath — of the mother, or the wife, I no longer know which to call Deo — on account of which she is said to have been styled Brimo; and the suppliant entreaties of Zeus, and the draught of gall, and the tearing out of hearts, and the unspeakable deeds. The same rites the Phrygians celebrate for Attis and Cybele and the Corybantes. They have babbled that Zeus, tearing off the testicles of a ram, threw them into the bosom of Deo, paying a false penalty for his violent embrace, as though he had castrated himself. The symbols of this initiation, set out in full, I know will move you to laughter, even though you are in no mood for laughing because of the exposures: "I ate from the drum; I drank from the cymbal; I carried the sacred dish; I crept beneath the canopy." Are not these symbols an outrage? Are not the mysteries a mockery? And what if I should add the rest? Demeter conceives, Kore is brought up, and again this same Zeus, the begetter, has intercourse with Pherephatta, his own daughter, after the mother Deo, forgetful of his former pollution — Zeus the father and corrupter of the maiden — and he has intercourse in the form of a serpent, which he was, being convicted. The token of the Sabazian mysteries for the initiates is "the god through the bosom"; and this is a serpent, drawn through the bosom of the initiates, a proof of the incontinence of Zeus.

Pherephatta also conceives a son in the form of a bull; for, as a certain idolatrous poet says, "a bull, father of a serpent, and a serpent, father of a bull, the secret goad upon the mountain, herdsman's goad" — calling, I suppose, the fennel-stalk the herdsman's goad, which the Bacchants wreathe with garlands. Do you wish me to recount to you also the flower-gatherings of Pherephatta, and the basket, and the rape by Aïdoneus, and the cleft of the earth, and the swine of Eubuleus that were swallowed up along with the goddesses — the reason why, at the Thesmophoria, they cast pigs into the chasms? This story the women celebrate variously throughout the cities — Thesmophoria, Skirophoria, Arrhetophoria — dramatizing in many fashions the rape of Pherephatta.

The mysteries of Dionysus are utterly inhuman. While he was still a child, with the Curetes dancing about him in arms, and the Titans creeping in by stealth, these Titans, having beguiled him with childish toys, tore him to pieces while he was still an infant, as Orpheus the Thracian, the poet of the rite, says: "Cone and bull-roarer and limb-bending toys, and golden apples fair from the clear-voiced Hesperides." And it is not useless to set out, for their condemnation, the useless symbols of this rite: knuckle-bone, ball, top, apples, bull-roarer, mirror, fleece. Athena, then, having made off with the heart of Dionysus, was called Pallas from its throbbing (pallein). And the Titans, who had torn him to pieces, set a cauldron upon a tripod, threw in the limbs of Dionysus, and first boiled them; then, piercing them through with spits, they held them over the fire. But Zeus, appearing later — if he was a god, perhaps having got a share of the savour of the roasting flesh, the privilege which your gods admit they are allotted — blasted the Titans with the thunderbolt and entrusted the limbs of Dionysus to his son Apollo for burial. And Apollo, since he did not disobey Zeus, carried the mangled corpse to Parnassus and laid it down.

If you wish also to behold the orgies of the Corybantes, these slew their third brother, covered the head of the dead man with a purple cloak, and, crowning it with garlands, buried it, carrying it upon a bronze shield to the foothills of Olympus. And these are the mysteries — to put it briefly, murders and burials. The priests of these rites, whom those whose business it is call "Lords of the Initiation," add a further marvel to the calamity, forbidding men to set whole celery, root and all, upon the table; for they believe that celery sprang up from the blood that flowed from the Corybant. So too the women who keep the Thesmophoria take care to eat no pomegranate seeds that have fallen to the ground, believing that pomegranates have sprung from the drops of the blood of Dionysus. Calling the Corybantes "Cabiri," they also proclaim a Cabiric rite. For these two fratricides, taking up the chest in which the privy member of Dionysus had been laid, brought it down into Etruria, merchants of a glorious cargo; and there they settled, being exiles, setting before the Etruscans, to be reverenced, that highly prized teaching of piety — a privy member and a chest. For which reason not without ground do some wish Dionysus to be called Attis, since he was deprived of his members.

And what wonder is it if the barbarous Etruscans are initiated in such shameful sufferings, when among the Athenians, and in the rest of Greece — I am ashamed even to say it — the legend about Deo is full of shame? For Deo, wandering in search of her daughter Kore about Eleusis (this is a place in Attica), grew weary and sat down at a well in her grief. This even now is forbidden to the initiates, lest the consecrated should seem to imitate her in her lamentation. At that time there dwelt about Eleusis the earth-born men; their names were Baubo and Dysaules and Triptolemus, and besides them Eumolpus and Eubuleus. Triptolemus was a herdsman, Eumolpus a shepherd, Eubuleus a swineherd; from whom the families of the Eumolpidae and the Heralds, that priestly clan at Athens, came into flower. And now — for I will not refrain from telling it — Baubo, having received Deo as a guest, offered her a draught of barley-water; and when she refused to take it and would not drink, being plunged in grief, Baubo, grievously stung at being thus, as she thought, slighted, drew up her garments and displayed her private parts to the goddess; and Deo was pleased at the sight, and at last, hardly, took the draught, delighted by the spectacle. These are the secret mysteries of the Athenians. These too Orpheus records. I will set before you the very verses of Orpheus, that you may have the conductor of the mysteries himself as witness of their shamelessness: "So saying, she drew up her robes and showed all, the unseemly form of her body; and there was the boy Iacchus, and laughing he kept tossing his hand beneath the bosom of Baubo; and the goddess then smiled, smiled in her heart, and took the gleaming vessel in which the draught lay." And the watchword of the Eleusinian mysteries is this: "I fasted; I drank the barley-draught; I took from the chest; having done the work, I placed in the basket, and from the basket into the chest." Fair spectacles indeed, and fit for a goddess! Worthy, in truth, of night and fire, and of the great-hearted — rather, the vain-minded — people of the Erechtheidae, and of the rest of the Greeks besides, "whom there awaits after death such things as they do not even expect." To whom, then, does Heraclitus of Ephesus prophesy? "To night-roamers, magi, Bacchants, Maenads, initiates" — to these he threatens the things after death, to these he prophesies the fire; "for the rites accounted mysteries among men are celebrated in unholy fashion."

Custom, then, and empty supposition are the mysteries, and a kind of deception of the serpent is worshipped, when men turn with bastard piety to initiations that are no initiations and rites that are no rites. And of what sort are the mystic chests? For we must lay bare their holy things and tell out their secrets. Are not these sesame-cakes and cones and lumps and round cakes with many bosses, and lumps of salt, and a serpent, the orgy of Dionysus Bassareus? And besides these, pomegranates and fig-branches and fennel-stalks and ivy, and round cakes and poppies? These are their holy things. And besides, the secret tokens of Themis the Earth-goddess: marjoram, a lamp, a sword, a woman's comb — which is, to speak euphemistically and mystically, a woman's part. O the manifest shamelessness! Of old, for sober men, night that kept silence was the veil of pleasure; but now, for the initiates, night that is talked about is a trial of incontinence, and the torch-lit fire convicts the passions. Quench the fire, O hierophant; have shame, O torch-bearer, before the torches; the light convicts your Iacchus. Permit night to hide the mysteries; let the orgies be honoured by darkness. The fire does not play a part: it is commanded to convict and to chastise.

These are the mysteries of the godless. And I rightly call godless those who have not known the God who truly is, but who shamelessly reverence, out of shame, a child torn to pieces by the Titans, and a poor woman mourning, and members that are in truth unspeakable; men held fast in a twofold godlessness: the first, in that they are ignorant of God, not knowing the God who truly is; the second and other, in this their error, that they reckon as existing the things that are not, and call gods these things that do not truly exist — nay, do not exist at all, but have got only the name. For this reason, indeed, the apostle convicts us, saying: "And you were strangers from the covenants of the promise, having no hope, and godless in the world."

Many blessings be upon the king of the Scythians, whoever he was. He shot down with arrows his own subject, who, imitating among the Scythians the rite of the Mother of the gods practised among the Cyzicenes, beat a drum and clashed a cymbal and had hanging from his neck the trappings of a begging priest of the Mother — judging him to have become unmanly among the Greeks, and a teacher to the rest of the Scythians of the womanish disease. For which reason — for I must by no means hide it — it occurs to me to wonder in what manner men have called "godless" Euhemerus of Acragas, Nicanor of Cyprus, Diagoras and Hippo, both of Melos, and besides these that Cyrenean (Theodorus was his name) and several others, men who lived soberly and saw more keenly than the rest the error about these gods — even though they did not perceive the truth itself, yet they suspected the error, which is no small living spark, a seed springing up toward the truth of understanding. One of them charges the Egyptians: "If you believe them gods, do not lament them nor beat your breasts; but if you mourn them, no longer reckon these to be gods." Another, taking up a Heracles made of wood — he happened to be cooking something at home, as was likely — said: "Come now, Heracles; now is your time, as once for Eurystheus, so now for us also, to render this thirteenth labour and prepare the dish for Diagoras"; and then he put him into the fire as firewood.

Godlessness and superstition, then, are the extremes of unlearning, outside which we must strive to remain. Do you not see how Moses, the hierophant of truth, commands that the eunuch and the man with severed parts shall not enter the assembly, and besides these him that is born of a harlot? By the first he hints at the godless temper, deprived of the divine and generative power; by the last, the third, at him who inscribes for himself many falsely-named gods in place of the one true God — just as he that is born of a harlot inscribes for himself many fathers, in ignorance of his true father. There was, however, a certain ancient kinship implanted in men toward heaven, darkened by ignorance, yet now and then leaping out of the darkness and shining up; such as that which someone has said: "Do you behold this boundless ether on high, holding the earth round about in its moist embraces?" and "O thou that art the earth's support and hast thy seat upon the earth, whoever thou art, hard to descry"; and all the other things of the kind that the children of the poets sing.

But mistaken notions, turned aside from the straight path, ruinous in truth, have turned the heavenly plant, man, away from the heavenly mode of life and stretched him out upon the earth, persuading him to cling to earthly fashionings. For some, deceived straightway about the spectacle of heaven and trusting sight alone, gazing upon the motions of the stars, wondered and deified them, naming the stars "gods" from their "running" (thein), and worshipped the sun, as the Indians, and the moon, as the Phrygians. Others, gathering the cultivated fruits of the things that grow from the earth, called the grain Deo, as the Athenians, and the vine Dionysus, as the Thebans. Others, considering the requitals of wickedness, deify the recompenses and worship the calamities; hence the poets of the stage have fashioned the Erinyes and the Eumenides, and the Palamnaei and Prostropaei and Alastores. Some philosophers too, after the poets, make idols of the types of the passions within you — Fear and Love and Joy and Hope — just as Epimenides of old set up at Athens altars to Insolence and Shamelessness; while others, starting from the very affairs of men, deify them and fashion them in bodily form: a certain Justice, and Clotho and Lachesis and Atropos and Destiny, and Auxo and Thallo, the Attic goddesses. There is a sixth, an introductory, manner of deception that produces gods, according to which they reckon the twelve gods — of whom Hesiod sings his own theogony, and all that Homer treats of as theology. The last that remains (for these manners are seven in all) is that which starts from the divine benefit conferred upon men. For not understanding the God who benefits them, they fashioned certain saviours, the Dioscuri, and Heracles the averter of ills, and Asclepius the physician.

These are the slippery and harmful deviations from the truth, dragging man down from heaven and overturning him into the pit. But I wish to show you the gods themselves at close quarters, what manner of beings they are, and whether they are anything 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, even as the rest; but God, being rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, when we were already dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ." For the Word is living, and he that is buried together with Christ is exalted together with God. But the unbelieving are still called children of wrath, nourished by wrath; we, however, are no longer nurslings of wrath, we who have been torn away from error and are hastening toward the truth. Thus we, who were once sons of lawlessness, have now, through the love of the Word toward mankind, become sons of God; whereas your own poet, Empedocles of Acragas, hints at your case: "Therefore, distraught with grievous wickednesses, never shall you ease your soul of its wretched griefs." Most things, then, have been turned into myth and invented about your gods; and as for whatever is supposed actually to have happened, these things have been recorded concerning shameful men who lived in wantonness: "In conceit and madness you walk; and forsaking the right straight path, you have gone off through thorns and stakes. Why do you wander, mortals? Cease, vain men; leave the gloom of night, and lay hold of the light." This the prophetic and poetic Sibyl enjoins upon us; and truth enjoins it too, stripping from this rabble of gods their astonishing and stupefying masks, refuting the false opinions about them by certain identities of name.

For example, there are some who record three Zeuses: one the son of Ether in Arcadia, the other two the sons of Cronus; of these two, the one in Crete, the other again in Arcadia. And there are some who posit five Athenas: one the daughter of Hephaestus, the Athenian; another the daughter of the Nile, the Egyptian; a third the daughter of Cronus, the inventor of war; a fourth the daughter of Zeus, whom the Messenians have surnamed Coryphasia after her mother; and over all the daughter of Pallas and of the Titaness daughter of Ocean, who, having impiously sacrificed her father, was adorned with her father's skin like a fleece.

Yes, and as for Apollo, Aristotle reckons the first the son of Hephaestus and Athena — here, then, Athena is no longer a virgin; the second the son of Corybas in Crete; the third the son of Zeus; and the fourth the Arcadian, son of Silenus — this one is called Nomius among the Arcadians; and after these he lists the Libyan, son of Ammon; and Didymus the grammarian adds to these a sixth, the son of Magnes. And how many Apollos are there even now — countless mortal and perishable men, called by the same name as those mentioned before? And what if I were to tell you of the many Asclepiuses, or the Hermeses that are counted up, or the Hephaestuses recorded in legend? Should I not seem superfluous, flooding your ears with these many names? But indeed their fatherlands and their crafts and their lives, and besides these their tombs, convict them of having been men.

Take Ares, who even among the poets is honoured as much as may be — "Ares, Ares, bane of mortals, blood-stained, stormer of walls" — this fickle and hostile one was, as Epicharmus says, a Spartan; Sophocles knows him for a Thracian; and others for an Arcadian. And Homer says that he was bound for thirteen months: "Ares endured it, when Otus and mighty Ephialtes, sons of Aloeus, bound him in a strong bond; in a bronze jar he lay bound for thirteen months." Many blessings be upon the Carians, who sacrifice dogs to him. And let not the Scythians cease from sacrificing asses, as Apollodorus and Callimachus say: "Phoebus rises among the Hyperboreans at sacrifices of asses." The same poet elsewhere: "Fat sacrifices of asses delight Phoebus." Hephaestus, whom Zeus hurled from Olympus "from the divine threshold," fell in Lemnos and worked as a smith, lamed in both feet, "and his slender legs moved nimbly beneath him." You have also a physician, not a smith only, among the gods; and the physician was a lover of money — Asclepius was his name. And I will set before you your own poet, the Boeotian Pindar: "Gold, appearing in his hands at a princely wage, turned even him aside; and the son of Cronus, casting the thunderbolt through the breasts of both, took away their breath swiftly, and the blazing bolt brought down doom." And Euripides: "For Zeus, slaying my son Asclepius, is the cause, hurling the flame into his breast." This one, then, lies blasted by the thunderbolt within the bounds of Cynosuris. And Philochorus says that in Tenos Poseidon is honoured as a physician, and that Sicily lies upon Cronus, and that he is buried there. Patrocles of Thurii and Sophocles the younger relate in certain tragedies about the Dioscuri: these two Dioscuri were mortal men, if Homer is enough to confirm what is said: "These the life-giving earth already held there in Lacedaemon, in their dear native land." Let the author of the Cypria too come forward: "Castor was mortal, and the doom of death was fated for him; but immortal was Polydeuces, scion of Ares." This is a poetic falsehood; but Homer, more worthy of trust than he, said this concerning both the Dioscuri, and besides convicted Heracles too of being a phantom: "the mighty man Heracles, well versed in great deeds." Heracles, then, Homer himself knows for a mortal man; and Hieronymus the philosopher describes even the build of his body — short, bristly-haired, robust; while Dicaearchus calls him slender, sinewy, dark, hook-nosed, with somewhat gleaming eyes and straight hair. This Heracles, then, having lived two and fifty years, ended his life, buried on the pyre at Oeta.

As for the Muses, whom Alcman traces to Zeus and Mnemosyne, and whom the rest of the poets and prose-writers deify and reverence — so that whole cities consecrate temples to them as Muses — these were Mysian handmaids, bought by Megaclo, the daughter of Macar. Macar reigned over the Lesbians, and was always quarrelling with his wife; and Megaclo was indignant for her mother's sake — and why should she not be? So she buys these Mysian handmaids, of such a number, and calls them Moisai, in the dialect of the Aeolians. These she taught to sing and to play the lyre, recounting the deeds of old harmoniously. And they, playing continually and singing soothingly, charmed Macar and made him cease from his wrath. For which reason Megaclo dedicated them in bronze as a thank-offering on her mother's behalf, and ordered them to be honoured throughout all the temples. Such, then, are the Muses; and the story is in Myrsilus the Lesbian.

Hear now, then, the loves of your gods, and the strange myths of their incontinence, and their wounds and bonds and laughter and battles, their servitudes too and banquets, and again their embraces and tears and passions and lewd pleasures. Summon me Poseidon and the chorus of women corrupted by him — Amphitrite, Amymone, Alope, Melanippe, Alcyone, Hippothoe, Chione, and the rest, the countless others; among whom, many as they were, the passions of your Poseidon were still cramped for room. Summon me Apollo too: this is Phoebus, a pure prophet and a good counsellor; but Sterope does not say so, nor Aethusa, nor Arsinoe, nor Zeuxippe, nor Prothoe, nor Marpessa, nor Hypsipyle; for Daphne alone escaped both the prophet and the ravishing. And let Zeus himself come last of all, the father, as you say, "of men and gods." So much was he poured out upon love-making that he desired all women and satisfied his desire upon all. At any rate, he was filled with women no less than the goat of Thmuis is with she-goats. And at your verses, Homer, I am amazed: "Yea, and with his dark brows the son of Cronus nodded; the ambrosial locks of the lord streamed forward from his immortal head; and he made great Olympus quake." You make Zeus august, Homer, and attach to him a nod that is held in honour. But only show him the girdle, fellow, and Zeus too is convicted, and his hair is put to shame. To what a pitch of wantonness has that Zeus driven — he who took such pleasure in his nights with Alcmene? For not even the nine nights were long to the licentious one — nay, on the contrary, the whole of his life was short for his incontinence — that he might sow for us the god who averts ills. Heracles, son of Zeus — truly son of Zeus — begotten of that long night, who toiled at his twelve labours over a long time, but corrupted the fifty daughters of Thestius in a single night, becoming both adulterer and bridegroom of so many maidens. Not without reason, then, do the poets call him reckless and a worker of wickedness. It would be long to recount his adulteries of every sort and the corruptions of boys. For not even from boys did your gods abstain: one loving Hylas, another Hyacinthus, another Pelops, another Chrysippus, another Ganymede. Let your women worship such gods, and let them pray that their husbands may be like them, so chaste, that they may be like the gods, emulating the same things; let your sons accustom themselves to revere these, that they too may become men who take the gods as a vivid image of fornication.

But perhaps the male gods alone among them rush after love-making, while "the female goddesses each abode at home for shame," says Homer — the goddesses being ashamed, out of their solemnity, to look upon Aphrodite taken in adultery. But these behave more wantonly, bound fast in adultery: Eos with Tithonus, Selene with Endymion, a Nereid with Aeacus, Thetis with Peleus, Demeter with Iasion, Pherephatta with Adonis. Aphrodite, put to shame over Ares, passed on to Cinyras, and married Anchises, and lay in wait for Phaethon, and loved Adonis; she contended with the ox-eyed goddess, and the goddesses, stripping themselves naked for the sake of an apple, presented themselves to the shepherd, that he might judge which of them seemed fair.

Come now, let us briefly survey the games also, and abolish these funeral festivals — the Isthmian and the Nemean and the Pythian and, after these, the Olympic. At Pytho the Pythian serpent is worshipped, and the festival of the snake is proclaimed as the Pythia. At the Isthmus the sea spat up a pitiful piece of refuse, and the Isthmian games mourn Melicertes. At Nemea another little boy, Archemorus, is buried, and the funeral games of the child are called the Nemea. Pisa is for you, O Panhellenes, the tomb of a Phrygian charioteer; and the Olympic games, the libations of Pelops, the Zeus of Pheidias appropriates. The games, it seems, were mysteries celebrated over the dead, just as the oracles were, and both have become public property. But the mysteries at Agra and those at Halimous in Attica are confined to Athens; while the games — and the phalli celebrated for Dionysus — have become a worldwide disgrace, perverting human life for the worse.

For Dionysus, longing to go down to Hades, did not know the way; and a certain man, Prosymnus by name, promises to tell him — but not without a price; and the price was no fair one, though fair to Dionysus: it was a favour of love that Dionysus asked. The request was agreeable to the god, and so he promises to grant it, if he should return, confirming the promise with an oath. Having learned the way, he set off; he came back again; he does not find Prosymnus, for he had died. To discharge his obligation to his lover, Dionysus hastens to the tomb and does an unseemly thing. Cutting, then, a branch of a fig-tree as it chanced, he shaped it after the manner of a man's member, and sat upon the branch, fulfilling his promise to the dead. As a mystic memorial of this experience, phalli are set up to Dionysus throughout the cities; "for if it were not to Dionysus that they made a procession and sang a song to the privy parts, the most shameless deeds would be done," says Heraclitus; "but Hades and Dionysus are the same, in whose honour they rave and keep the Lenaean rite" — not so much because of the drunkenness of the body, as I think, as because of the disgraceful initiation into wantonness.

Fitly, then, are such gods of yours slaves, having become slaves of the passions. Nay, even before the so-called Helots among the Lacedaemonians, Apollo passed under the yoke of slavery to Admetus in Pherae, Heracles to Omphale in Sardis; Poseidon and Apollo served Laomedon as a worthless hireling, Apollo not even being able, it seems, to obtain his freedom from his former master; and then they two built up the walls of Ilium for the Phrygian. And Homer is not ashamed to portray Athena holding a golden lamp in her hands for Odysseus; and we have read of Aphrodite, like some wanton little handmaid, carrying and setting the chair of the adulterer right before the face of Helen, to draw her into intercourse. For Panyassis, besides these, records that many other gods served men, writing somewhat thus: "Demeter endured it, and the famed Lame-god endured it, and Poseidon endured it, and Apollo of the silver bow endured to serve a mortal man for a year; and stout-hearted Ares too endured it under the constraint of his father" — and what follows thereon.

Upon these things it fittingly follows that they introduce, by every means, these amorous and passion-ridden gods of yours as subject to human feelings. For indeed "their flesh too was mortal." Homer testifies to it, most exactly bringing in Aphrodite crying out sharp and loud over her wound, and relating how the most warlike Ares himself was wounded in the flank by Diomedes. Polemon says that Athena too was wounded by Ornytus; yes, and Homer says that Aïdoneus was shot by Heracles, and Panyassis records that Helios was. And the same Panyassis records that Hera, the goddess of marriage, was wounded by the same Heracles "in sandy Pylos." And Sosibius says that Heracles was wounded on the hand by the sons of Hippocoon. And if there are wounds, there is blood too; for the ichor of the poets is more loathsome even than blood, since ichor is understood to be the putrefaction of blood. It is necessary, then, to bring in for them attendance and nourishment, of which they stand in need. Hence tables and drinkings and laughter and unions — which they would not have, were they not using human pleasures, nor begetting children, nor sleeping, if they were immortal and without need and unaging. Zeus himself partook of a human table among the Ethiopians, and of an inhuman and lawless one, feasted by Lycaon the Arcadian; at any rate he was filled with human flesh against his will. For the god did not know that Lycaon the Arcadian, his host, having slaughtered his own son (Nyctimus was his name), had set him before Zeus as a dish. A fine fellow indeed is Zeus the prophetic, the god of strangers, of suppliants, the gentle, the giver of omens, the averter — or rather the unjust, the lawless, the impious, the unholy, the inhuman, the violent, the corrupter, the adulterer, the lover. But once he was such, when he was such, when he was a man; now, it seems to me, your very myths have grown old. Zeus is a serpent no longer, no swan, no eagle, no amorous man; he does not fly as a god, does not love boys, does not love women, does not do violence — and yet there are even now many fair women, comelier than Leda and fresher than Semele, and youths more graceful and more refined than the Phrygian herdsman. Where now is that eagle? Where the swan? Where Zeus himself? He has grown old, feathers and all; for he surely does not repent of his amours nor is he being schooled to be chaste. The myth is laid bare to you: Leda is dead, the swan is dead, the eagle is dead. Seek your Zeus; do not busy yourself about heaven, but search the earth. The Cretan will tell you, in whose land he is also buried — Callimachus in his hymns: "For they fashioned a tomb for thee, O lord — the Cretans." For Zeus is dead — do not take it ill — like Leda, like the swan, like the eagle, like an amorous man, like a serpent.

By now even the superstitious themselves are seen, unwillingly indeed, yet still perceiving the error about the gods. For "they are not of an oak of ancient story, nor of a rock, but they are of the race of men"; and a little later they will be found to be oaks and rocks after all. Staphylus records that a certain Agamemnon is honoured as Zeus in Sparta; and Phanocles, in his Loves or Fair Ones, says that Agamemnon king of the Greeks set up a temple of Aphrodite Argynnis in honour of Argynnus, his beloved. The Arcadians worship an Artemis called "the Strangled," as Callimachus says in his Causes. And in Methymna another Artemis, "the Condylitis," is honoured. There is also a sanctuary of another Artemis, "the Foot-snarer" (Podagra), in Laconia, as Sosibius says. Polemon knows of a statue of "the Gaping Apollo" (Cechenotos), and again of another "the Glutton Apollo" (Opsophagos) honoured in Elis. There the Eleans sacrifice to Zeus "the Fly-averter" (Apomyios); and the Romans sacrifice to Heracles the Fly-averter, and to Fever and to Fear, whom they too enroll among the company of Heracles. I pass over the Argives: the Argives and Laconians worship Aphrodite "the Grave-robber," and the Spartans revere Artemis "Chelytis," since they call coughing "chelyttein."

Do you suppose that what we adduce is brought to you from some forged sources? You do not seem even to recognize your own writers, whom I call as witnesses against your unbelief — men who have filled your whole unlivable life, you wretches, with godless mockery. Is not a "Bald Zeus" honoured in Argos, and another "Avenger" in Cyprus? Do not the Argives sacrifice to Aphrodite "the Open-thighed," the Athenians to "the Courtesan," and the Syracusans to "the Fair-buttocked," whom Nicander the poet has somewhere called "the Beautiful-rumped"? Of Dionysus "the Swine-fingerer" (Choiropsalas) I say nothing now: the Sicyonians worship him, having set Dionysus over the female parts, reverencing as the founder of outrage the overseer of shame. Such, then, are their gods, and such are they themselves, sporting with the gods — or rather mocking and outraging themselves. And how much better are the Egyptians, who, village by village and city by city, honour the irrational animals, than the Greeks who worship such gods? For the animals, though beasts, are not adulterers, are not lewd, and none of them hunts after a pleasure contrary to nature; but the gods — of what sort they are, why need I say more, since they have been refuted sufficiently?

The Egyptians, however, whom I just now mentioned, are divided in their worships: the men of Syene reverence the phagrus fish, the men of Elephantine the maeotes (another fish); the Oxyrhynchites the fish that bears the name of their own region; the Heracleopolites the ichneumon; the men of Sais and the Thebans a sheep; the Lycopolites a wolf; the Cynopolites a dog; the Memphites the Apis; the Mendesians the goat. But you, who are altogether better than the Egyptians — I shrink from saying worse — who never cease laughing at the Egyptians day by day, what sort of people are you concerning the irrational animals? Some of you Thessalians have honoured the storks because of custom, and the Thebans the weasels because of the birth of Heracles. And the Thessalians again? They are recorded to reverence ants, since they learned that Zeus, likened to an ant, had intercourse with Eurymedusa, daughter of Cletor, and begot Myrmidon. And Polemon records that the inhabitants about the Troad reverence the native mice, which they call sminthoi, because they gnawed through the bowstrings of the enemy's bows; and they surnamed Apollo "Sminthian" from those mice. And Heraclides, in his Foundations of Temples concerning Acarnania, where is the promontory of Actium and the temple of Apollo of Actium, says that an ox is offered in sacrifice to the flies. Nor will I forget the Samians: a sheep, as Euphorion says, the Samians reverence; nor the Syrians who inhabit Phoenicia, of whom some reverence doves, others fishes, with as extravagant a worship as the Eleans pay to Zeus.

Well then: since they are not gods whom you worship, it seems good to me to consider next whether they are really demons, classed in this second rank, as you say. For if they are demons, they are gluttonous and foul. It is possible to find, openly, in city after city, local demons reaping honour: among the Cythnians Menedemus, among the Tenians Callistagoras, among the Delians Anius, among the Laconians Astrabacus. A certain hero too is honoured at Phalerum at the stern of a ship; and the Pythia ordained that the Plataeans should sacrifice to Androcrates and Democrates and Cyclaeus and Leucon, when the contests of the Median wars were at their height. One may discern very many other demons too, for anyone able to consider even a little: "for thrice ten thousand are upon the bountiful earth the immortal demons, guardians of mortal men." Who are the guardians, O Boeotian? Do not grudge to tell. Or is it plain that these, and those more honoured than they, the great demons — Apollo, Artemis, Leto, Demeter, Kore, Pluto, Heracles, Zeus himself? But they do not guard us from running away, Ascraean, but rather, perhaps, from sinning — they who have surely had no experience of sins. Here it is fitting to add the proverbial saying: "the father admonishes a child past admonition." But if indeed these are guardians, it is not out of goodwill toward us that they are full of feeling, but, intent upon your destruction, after the manner of flatterers, they hang about human life, enticed by the smoke of sacrifice. The demons themselves somewhere confess their own gluttony: "for this is the privilege we have obtained," they say, "libation and savour." What other utterance, if the gods of the Egyptians took a voice — cats and weasels — would they send forth than the Homeric and poetic one, dear to savour and to cookery? Such, then, among you, are the demons and the gods, and any "demigods," if there be such — as "mules" are so called by mingling; for you have no poverty even of names for your compoundings of impiety.

3. Come, then, let us add this also, that your gods are inhuman and man-hating demons, who not only rejoice over the madness of men, but also take their pleasure in the slaying of men; now procuring for themselves occasions of delight in the armed contests of the stadiums, now in the countless rivalries of wars, that they may have the fullest licence to glut themselves with human slaughter. And ere now, falling upon cities and nations like a pestilence, they have demanded savage libations. Aristomenes the Messenian, at any rate, slaughtered three hundred men to Ithometan Zeus, supposing that he was offering sacrifices of fair omen, so many and such hecatombs at once; among whom was Theopompus, the king of the Lacedaemonians, a noble victim. And the Tauri, the people who dwell about the Taurian peninsula, whatever strangers they capture among them — those of them who have been shipwrecked at sea — these they straightway sacrifice to the Taurian Artemis; these sacrifices of yours Euripides puts upon the stage as tragedy. And Monimus records, in his collection of marvels, that at Pella in Thessaly an Achaean man was sacrificed to Peleus and Cheiron. Anticleides, in his Returns, declares that the Lyctians (these are a Cretan people) slaughter men to Zeus; and Dosidas says that the Lesbians offer the like sacrifice to Dionysus. The Phocaeans too — for I will not pass them by either — these Pythocles, in his third book On Concord, records as offering up a man as a whole burnt offering to Artemis Tauropolus. Erechtheus the Athenian and Marius the Roman sacrificed their own daughters; the former to Pherephatta, as Demaratus says in the first book of his Tragic Subjects, the latter, Marius, to the Averting Powers, as Dorotheus records in the fourth book of his Italian Affairs.

Loving toward men, indeed, do the demons show themselves to be from these things; and how should the superstitious not be holy in like proportion? The one are called Saviours, the other ask salvation from those who plot against salvation. Imagining that they are offering acceptable sacrifices to them, they have not noticed that they are slaughtering men. For the murder does not become a sacrifice because of the place, not even if a man should slaughter a man to Artemis and Zeus in what is supposed to be a sacred spot, rather than in wrath and love of money, to other like demons, at altars or in the roads, calling it a sacrifice: such a sacrifice is murder and manslaughter. Why then, O men, wisest of all the other animals, do we flee from the savage beasts, and if anywhere we meet with a bear or a lion, turn aside — "as when a man, seeing a serpent, starts back in the glens of a mountain, and trembling seizes his limbs, and he draws back again" — yet, when we perceive beforehand and understand that the demons are ruinous and accursed, plotters and man-haters and destroyers, you do not turn aside nor turn away from them? What truth could the wicked tell, or whom could they benefit? At any rate I can show you a man better than these gods of yours, the demons: against the prophetic Apollo, Cyrus and Solon. Your Phoebus is fond of giving, but not fond of man. He betrayed his friend Croesus, and, forgetting his fee — so fond of glory was he — he led Croesus across the Halys to the pyre. So loving are the demons that they guide men into the fire. But you, O man more loving of mankind and more truthful than Apollo, take pity on him bound upon the pyre; and you, Solon, prophesy the truth; and you, Cyrus, command that the pyre be quenched. Be wise at last, Croesus, taught by your suffering: ungrateful is he whom you worship; he takes his fee and, after the gold, lies again. So in the end it is not the demon, but the man, who speaks to you. Solon does not prophesy in crooked riddles; him you will find true, O barbarian — this oracle alone; this you shall test upon the pyre.

Hence it occurs to me to wonder by what fancies the first deceived men were led astray, when they proclaimed superstition to men, ordaining by law the worship of accursed demons — whether it was that Phoroneus, or Merops, or some other, who set up temples and altars for them, and besides are fabled to have been the first to establish sacrifices. For indeed in later times too men kept fashioning gods to worship. This very Eros, who is said to be among the most ancient of the gods, no one honoured before Charmus seized a certain youth and set up an altar in the Academy as a thank-offering for a lust brought to fulfilment; and they have called the wantonness of the disease Eros, deifying unbridled lust. The Athenians, again, did not even know who Pan was, until Philippides told them.

Reasonably, then, did superstition, having got its beginning from somewhere, become a fountain of senseless wickedness; and then, not being checked, but coming to increase and flowing in full flood, it sets itself up as the maker of many demons, sacrificing hecatombs and holding festivals and setting up statues and building temples — which (for I will not pass these by in silence either, but will convict them too) are euphemistically called temples, but are in fact tombs. But do you, even now at last, forget superstition, ashamed to honour tombs. In the temple of Athena in Larissa, on the acropolis, is the tomb of Acrisius; and at Athens, on the acropolis, the tomb of Cecrops, as Antiochus says in the ninth book of his Histories. And what of Erichthonius? Is he not buried in the temple of Athena Polias? And Immaradus, son of Eumolpus and Daeira, is he not buried in the enclosure of the Eleusinion below the acropolis? And the daughters of Celeus, are they not buried at Eleusis? Why should I recount to you the women from the Hyperboreans? Hyperoche and Laodice they are called, and they are buried in the Artemisium in Delos, and the spot is in the sanctuary of the Delian Apollo. And Leandrius says that Cleochus is buried in Miletus, in the Didymaeum. Here it is not fitting to pass over the monument of Leucophryne, following Zenon of Myndus, who is buried in the sanctuary of Artemis in Magnesia; nor indeed the altar of Apollo at Telmessus: this too they record to be a memorial of Telmessus the seer. And Ptolemy son of Agesarchus, in the first book of his work about Philopator, says that at Paphos, in the sanctuary of Aphrodite, Cinyras and his descendants are buried. But indeed, if I were to go over all the tombs worshipped among you, all time would not suffice me; and as for you, unless some shame for your audacities steals over you, then, being yourselves utterly dead, you go about trusting in the dead: "Ah, wretched men, what evil is this you suffer? In night your heads are shrouded."

4. But if, in addition to these things, I were to bring before you the statues themselves to inspect, you would, on going over them, find custom to be in truth a folly, when you worship insensible works of men's hands. Of old, then, the Scythians worshipped the dagger, the Arabs the stone, the Persians the river; and the still more ancient among the rest of men set up conspicuous logs and erected columns of stones — which were called xoana from the "scraping" (apexesthai) of the material. At any rate, in Icarus the statue of Artemis was an unwrought log, and that of Cithaeronian Hera in Thespiae a cut tree-trunk; and that of Samian Hera, as Aethlius says, was at first a plank, but later, in the archonship of Procles, became of human form. And when the xoana began to be made in the likeness of men, they got the name brete from "mortals" (brotoi). At Rome, in old times, the xoanon of Ares was a spear, as Varro the prose-writer says, the craftsmen not yet having rushed to this fair-faced bad artistry. But when the art came into flower, the error increased.

That they made the stones and the timber, and, to put it briefly, the material, into statues in the likeness of men, on which you counterfeit piety, slandering the truth, is from this point already plain; nevertheless, since the subject requires some proof, it must not be declined. That Pheidias made the Zeus at Olympia and the Athena Polias at Athens of gold and ivory is doubtless clear to all; and Olympichus records, in his Samian Affairs, that the xoanon of Hera in Samos was made by Smilis the son of Eucleides. Do not doubt, then, that of the goddesses called the Venerable at Athens, Scopas made two out of the so-called lychnean stone, and Calos the middle one of them; I can show you Polemon recording this in the fourth of his works against Timaeus. Nor doubt that the statues of Zeus and Apollo at Patara in Lycia were made again by that same Pheidias, just like the lions dedicated together with them; or, if, as some say, the work is of Bryaxis, I do not contend: you have him too as a maker of statues; put down whichever of them you wish. And indeed the nine-cubit statues of Poseidon and Amphitrite, worshipped in Tenos, are the work of Telesius the Athenian, as Philochorus says. And Demetrius, in the second book of his Argolic Affairs, records that the material of the xoanon of Hera in Tiryns was a wild pear-tree, and its maker Argus. Many, perhaps, would marvel if they learned that the Palladium called "heaven-fallen," which Diomedes and Odysseus are recorded to have stolen from Ilium and deposited with Demophon, was made from the bones of Pelops, just as the Olympian Zeus was made from other bones, those of an Indian beast. And I cite Dionysius, who records this in the fifth part of his Cycle. Apellas, in his Delphica, says that there were two Palladia, both fashioned by men. But that no one may suppose that I have passed these over too out of ignorance, I will add that the statue of Dionysus Morychus at Athens was made of the stone called phellata, and is the work of Sicon son of Eupalamus, as Polemon says in a certain letter. And there were also two other sculptors, Cretans, I think (they were named Scyllis and Dipoenus); these made the statues of the Dioscuri in Argos, and the statue of Heracles in Tiryns, and the xoanon of Munychian Artemis in Sicyon.

And why do I waste time upon these, when I can show you who the great demon himself was — he whom we hear to be deemed worthy, above all, of universal worship, whom they have dared to call "not made with hands," the Egyptian Sarapis? For some record that he was sent as a thank-offering by the men of Sinope to Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of the Egyptians, who recovered them, when they were wasted by famine, by sending for grain from Egypt; and that this xoanon was a statue of Pluto; and that Ptolemy, receiving the statue, set it up on the headland now called Rhacotis, where also the sanctuary of Sarapis is honoured, and the precinct is neighbour to those places. And Blistiche his concubine, who died at Canopus, Ptolemy removed and buried beneath the aforesaid shrine. Others say that Sarapis is a Pontic image, and was conveyed to Alexandria with festal honour. Isidore alone says that the statue was brought from the Seleucians near Antioch, when they too were in want of grain and were sustained by Ptolemy. But Athenodorus son of Sandon, wishing to make out Sarapis to be ancient, somehow fell into the very thing that proved him a made statue. For he says that Sesostris, the Egyptian king, having subdued most of the nations among the Greeks, on his return to Egypt brought back skilful craftsmen; he himself, then, ordered his own ancestor Osiris to be wrought sumptuously, and Bryaxis the craftsman made him — not the Athenian, but another of the same name as that Bryaxis — who used a mixed and varied material for the work. For he had filings of gold and silver, of bronze and iron and lead, and besides, of tin; and of Egyptian stones not one was lacking, but fragments of sapphire and haematite and emerald, and of topaz too. Having ground them all up and mingled them, he coloured them with blue, on which account the colour of the statue is rather dark; and mixing the whole with the pigment left over from the burial of Osiris and Apis, he moulded Sarapis — whose very name hints at the partnership of the burial and the fashioning from the entombment, being compounded from Osiris and Apis, Osirapis.

And another new god the king of the Romans deified with reverence in Egypt, and nearly among the Greeks too — his beloved, who had become exceedingly fair: Antinous he consecrated, just as Zeus did Ganymede; for lust, when it has no fear, is not easily restrained. And men now worship the holy nights of Antinous — nights which the lover who shared their sleeplessness knew to be shameful. Why do you reckon among the gods one honoured by fornication? Why did you command him to be mourned as a son? Why too do you describe his beauty? Beauty is a shameful thing when it has been blasted by outrage. Do not tyrannize, O man, over beauty, nor outrage the youth in his bloom; keep it pure, that it may be fair. Be a king of beauty, not a tyrant; let it remain free; then I shall recognize your beauty, when you have kept the image pure; then I shall worship beauty, when it is the true archetype of fair things. But now it is the tomb of the beloved; there is a temple of Antinous, and a city; just as, I think, the temples, so too the tombs are admired — pyramids and mausoleums and labyrinths, other temples of the dead, as those are tombs of the gods. As your teacher I will set before you the prophetess Sibyl, "oracle-singer not of a lying Phoebus, whom vain men called a god, and falsely styled a seer, but of the great God, whom the hands of men did not fashion, like to dumb idols of polished stone." This same prophetess calls the temples ruins, foretelling thus that the temple of Ephesian Artemis shall be swallowed up by chasms and earthquakes: "Ephesus shall wail prostrate, weeping by her banks, and seeking a temple that dwells there no more"; and she says that the temple of Isis and Sarapis in Egypt shall be cast down and burned: "Isis, thrice-wretched goddess, you shall remain alone upon the streams of the Nile, a speechless Maenad upon the sands of Acheron"; and then, going on: "And you, Sarapis, heaped about with many useless stones, you shall lie a mighty ruin in thrice-wretched Egypt." But if you will not hearken to the prophetess, hearken at least to your own philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus, reproaching the statues with their insensibility: "And they pray to these statues, as if one were to chatter with houses." Are they not, in truth, prodigious, who turn to stones, and then, moreover, set them up before their gates as though they were active, worshipping Hermes as a god and setting up Agyieus as a doorkeeper? For if they outrage them as insensible, why do they worship them as gods? And if they think them to share in sensation, why do they set them up as doorkeepers? And the Romans, ascribing their greatest successes to Fortune, and reckoning her the greatest goddess, carried her into the privy and dedicated her there, assigning the latrine to the goddess as a fitting temple.

But surely insensible stone and timber and rich gold care not at all — not for savour, not for blood, not for smoke, by which, being honoured and fumigated, they are blackened; nor yet for honour, nor for outrage. Statues are things meaner than any animal. And how the insensible things have come to be deified, it occurs to me to be at a loss, and to pity the erring for their folly as wretched. For even if some of the animals do not have all the senses, like grubs and caterpillars and all that appear maimed straightway from their first birth, as moles and the shrew-mouse, which Nicander calls "blind and dreadful" — yet these are better than these xoana and statues, which are wholly dumb; for they have at least some one sense, say hearing or touch, or that which answers to smell or taste; whereas the statues partake of not even one sense. And there are many of the animals which have neither sight nor hearing nor voice, such as the race of oysters, but they live and grow, and moreover are affected together with the moon; whereas the statues are idle, inactive, insensible, and are bound and nailed and fixed, are cast, filed, sawn, planed, carved. The dumb earth, then, the statue-makers outrage, displacing it from its proper nature, persuading men by their art to worship it; and the god-makers worship not gods and demons, according to my sense of it, but earth and art, which the statues are. For the statue is in truth dead matter shaped by a craftsman's hand. But for us the image is not of perceptible matter and perceptible, but intelligible. God is intelligible, not perceptible — the only true God.

And again, in those very straits, the superstitious, the worshippers of stones, having learned in fact not to reverence insensible matter, perish through superstition, overcome by the very want it cannot relieve; yet, while they despise the statues, not wishing to seem to despise them altogether, they are convicted by the very gods to whom the statues are ascribed. For Dionysius the younger tyrant, having stripped off the golden cloak of Zeus in Sicily, ordered a woollen one to be put about him, wittily saying that this was better than the golden one, both lighter in summer and warmer in cold. And Antiochus of Cyzicus, when he was short of money, ordered the golden statue of Zeus, fifteen cubits in height, to be melted down, and another like it, of meaner material, gilded over with leaf, to be set up again. And the swallows and most of the birds fly in and defile the very statues, caring nothing for Olympian Zeus or Epidaurian Asclepius or Athena Polias or Egyptian Sarapis; from whom not even do you learn the insensibility of the statues. But there are certain malefactors or enemies who, attacking, have for shameful gain ravaged the sanctuaries and plundered the offerings, or have even melted down the statues themselves. And if a Cambyses or a Darius or any other madman attempted such things, and if one slew the Egyptian Apis, I laugh that he slew their god, but am vexed that he did wrong for gain. So I will willingly forget this wrongdoing, reckoning it a work of greed, and not a proof of the impotence of the idols. But fire and earthquakes are not greedy; and they neither fear nor stand in awe of the demons or the statues, any more than the waves do of the pebbles heaped along the shores. I know a fire that convicts and is a remedy for superstition. If you wish to cease from your folly, the fire will be your torch-bearer. This fire burned down the temple in Argos, together with its priestess Chrysis; and the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, the second after the Amazons; and the Capitol in Rome it has consumed many times. Nor did it spare the sanctuary of Sarapis in the city of the Alexandrians. At Athens it cast down the temple of Dionysus Eleuthereus; and the temple of Apollo in Delphi first a storm-blast seized, and then a chastening fire made away with. This is shown you as the prelude of what the fire promises.

Do not the makers of statues shame those of you who have sense, into despising the matter? The Athenian Pheidias inscribed on the finger of the Olympian Zeus, "Pantarkes is fair"; for it was not Zeus that was fair to him, but his beloved. And Praxiteles, as Posidippus makes clear in his work on Cnidus, when fashioning the statue of Cnidian Aphrodite, made her like in form to Cratine his mistress, that the wretches might have Praxiteles' mistress to worship. And when Phryne the Thespian courtesan was in her bloom, all the painters reproduced the images of Aphrodite to the beauty of Phryne, just as again the stone-cutters at Athens likened the Hermae to Alcibiades. It is left to bring your judgement to bear upon the deed, whether you will worship courtesans too. Hence, I think, the kings of old, moved and despising these myths, freely proclaimed themselves gods, since from men there was no danger, teaching that those others too were made immortal through fame. Ceyx 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; and Mithridates of Pontus was himself called Dionysus too; and Alexander wished to seem the son of Ammon and to be fashioned by the statue-makers with horns, eager to outrage the fair face of man with a horn. And not kings only, but private men too dignified themselves with divine titles, like Menecrates the physician, surnamed Zeus. Why need I list Alexarchus — he was by profession a grammarian, as Aristus of Salamis records — who fashioned himself into Helios? Why mention Nicagoras — he was a Zeleite by birth, of the times of Alexander — Hermes was Nicagoras called, and he used the dress of Hermes, as he himself testifies? Where whole nations, indeed, and cities, men and all, putting on flattery, degrade the myths about the gods, fashioning men into equals of the gods, puffed up by glory, voting themselves enormous honours; now ordaining the worship of the Macedonian from Pella, Philip son of Amyntas, in the Cynosarges — him with the broken collar-bone and the maimed leg, who had his eye knocked out; again proclaiming Demetrius too a god; and where he dismounted from his horse on entering Athens, there is a sanctuary of Demetrius "the Alighter," and altars everywhere. And a marriage with Athena was prepared for him by the Athenians; but he scorned the goddess, being unable to marry the statue, and, taking Lamia the courtesan, went up to the acropolis and consorted with her in the bridal chamber of Athena, displaying to the old virgin the postures of the young courtesan. Nor is there any cause for indignation against Hippo, who made his own death immortal; this Hippo ordered to be inscribed upon his monument this elegy: "This is the tomb of Hippo, whom Fate made equal to the immortal gods in his death." Well done, Hippo, you show us human error! For if they did not believe you while you spoke, let them become disciples of the dead man. This is an oracle of Hippo: let us mark it. Those whom you worship were once men, and then died; and myth and time have honoured them. For somehow the things present are wont, through familiarity, to be despised, while the things past, removed by the obscurity of time from immediate refutation, are honoured by fiction, and the one are disbelieved, the other admired. At any rate, the ancient dead, dignified by the long lapse of error, are reckoned gods by those that come after. Your pledge of these things is your very mysteries, your festivals, the bonds and wounds and weeping gods: "Ah, woe is me, that Sarpedon, dearest of men, is doomed to be slain by Patroclus son of Menoetius." The will of Zeus has been overcome, and Zeus laments for you over Sarpedon, defeated. Reasonably, then, have you yourselves called them idols and demons, since Homer too, honouring even Athena herself and the rest of the gods with wickedness, styled them demons: "And she went to Olympus, to the house of aegis-bearing Zeus, among the other demons." How, then, are the idols and the demons still gods, being in truth abominable and unclean spirits, admitted by all to be earthly and foul, weighed downward, lurking about the tombs and the monuments, where dim shadowy phantoms appear faintly? These are your gods, the idols, the shadows, and besides these those lame and wrinkled ones, "with eyes asquint," the Prayers, daughters rather of Thersites than of Zeus; so that it seems to me Bion said wittily, how could men justly ask of Zeus fair offspring, which he could not even provide for himself? Alas for the godlessness! The incorruptible essence — as far as in you lies — you bury, and that pure and holy being you have heaped into the tombs, robbing the truly existing essence of its divinity. Why, then, have you assigned to the things that are not gods the prerogatives of God? Why, forsaking heaven, have you honoured 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 that you see the offspring of one mother, earth? Why, then, O vain and empty-minded — for I will say it again — having blasphemed the region above the heavens, have you dragged piety down to the ground, fashioning for yourselves chthonic gods, and, pursuing these created things in preference to the uncreated God, fallen into deeper gloom?

The Parian stone is fair, but it is not yet Poseidon; the ivory is fair, but it is not yet the Olympian. Matter is always in need of art, but God is without need. Art has come forward, matter has been clothed with the shape; and the richness of the substance, fit for gain, becomes worthy of worship only through the shape. Your statue is gold, it is wood, it is stone, it is earth, if you consider it from above — earth that has received its form from the craftsman. But I have learned to tread the earth, not to worship it; for it is not lawful for me ever to entrust the hopes of the soul to lifeless things. We must, then, go as close as possible to the statues, that their error may be convicted out of their very appearance as native to them; for the forms of the statues have stamped upon them very plainly the character of the demons. If, then, one were to go round and gaze upon the paintings and the statues, he would at once recognize your gods from their disgraceful figures: Dionysus from his dress, Hephaestus from his craft, Deo from her calamity, Ino from her veil, Poseidon from his trident, Zeus from his swan; the pyre points to Heracles; and if one sees a naked woman painted, he understands the golden Aphrodite. Thus that Cyprian, Pygmalion, fell in love with an ivory statue; the statue was of Aphrodite, and it was naked; the Cyprian is overcome by the figure and unites with the statue — and this Philostephanus records. And another Aphrodite in Cnidus was stone, and was fair; another man fell in love with this one and united with the stone — Posidippus records it, the former in his work on Cyprus, the latter in his work on Cnidus. So strong was art to deceive, becoming a pander to amorous men, leading them into the pit. Productive indeed is the craftsman's art, but it cannot deceive a rational man, nor those who have lived according to reason. Doves, indeed, flew to painted doves because of the likeness, and horses neighed at well-painted mares; they say a maiden fell in love with an image, and a fair youth with the Cnidian statue — but the eyes of the spectators were deceived by the art. For no man in his right mind would have embraced a goddess, or been buried with a corpse, or fallen in love with a demon and a stone. But you art deceives by another sorcery: even if it does not lead you to love, yet it does lead you to honour and worship the statues and the paintings. The painting is like, indeed: let the art be praised, but let it not deceive man as though it were truth. The horse stands quietly, the dove is still, the wing inactive; but the cow of Daedalus, made of wood, drew a wild bull to her, and the art, deceiving him, forced the beast to mount a woman in love. So great a frenzy did the arts, working their evil arts, breed in the senseless. But the keepers and tenders of apes have marvelled that no waxen or clay likeness or doll deceives these creatures; yet you, then, will become worse even than apes, clinging to little statues of stone and wood and gold and ivory, and to paintings. The makers of such ruinous playthings for you are the stone-cutters and the statue-makers, the painters too and the carpenters and the poets, who bring in a great rabble of such things: in the fields Satyrs and Pans, in the woods the Nymphs of the mountains and the Hamadryads, yes, and about the waters and the rivers and the springs the Naiads, and about the sea the Nereids. And by now the magi boast of demons as ministers of their own impiety, having enrolled them as their own servants, having made them by their incantations into slaves under compulsion. The marriages, then, of gods, and the begettings of children, and the childbirths recorded, and the adulteries sung, and the feastings made matter of comedy, and the laughter brought in over the wine — all these urge me to cry out, even though I would be silent: Alas for the godlessness! You have made heaven a stage, and the divine has become for you a drama, and the holy you have made a comedy with the masks of demons, satirizing true piety with superstition. "Then the harper struck up to sing a fair song" — sing to us, Homer, the fair strain — "of the love of Ares and fair-crowned Aphrodite, how first they lay together secretly in the house of Hephaestus; and much he gave, and shamed the bed and couch of the lord Hephaestus." Stop the song, Homer; it is not fair, it teaches adultery; and we have refused even our ears to fornication; for we — we are they who carry about the image of God in this living and moving statue, man — an indwelling image, a counsellor, a companion, a sharer of the hearth, sympathetic, more than sympathetic; we have become an offering to God for Christ's sake. We are "the elect race, the royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people, who once were no people, but now are the people of God"; we who, according to John, "are not of those below," but have learned the whole from him who came from above; who have understood the dispensation of God; who have practised to walk in newness of life. But the many do not think these things; casting away shame and fear, they inscribe at home the lewd doings of the demons. Indeed, fixing their gaze on certain painted tablets hung up rather high, they have adorned their bedchambers with wantonness, reckoning licentiousness piety; and reclining upon their couches, in the very midst of their embraces, they look up at that naked Aphrodite, bound fast in her embrace, and at the amorous bird flitting about Leda; and, approving the picture of the female, they impress it on their seal-rings, using a seal suited to the licentiousness of Zeus. These are the archetypes of your luxury, these the theologies of outrage, these the teachings of the gods who join with you in fornication; for "what each man wishes, that also he thinks," according to the Athenian orator. And of what sort, again, are your other images — little Pans and naked girls and drunken Satyrs and swollen members, laid bare in the paintings, convicted of their incontinence? And now, openly gazing upon the figures of all wantonness, set out for the whole public, you are not ashamed, but keep them up still more, dedicating them, just as, forsooth, you do the images of your gods, consecrating at home pillars of shamelessness, inscribing on equal terms the postures of Philaenis as the labours of Heracles. Of these we proclaim forgetfulness not only of the use, but also of the very sight and hearing. Your ears have played the harlot, your eyes have committed fornication, and — what is stranger — before the embrace your eyes have committed adultery. O you who have done violence to man and struck out the divine impress of his fashioning, you disbelieve everything, that you may give yourselves up to passion; and you believe in the idols, emulating their incontinence, but disbelieve God, not enduring chastity; you have hated the better and honoured the worse, becoming spectators of virtue but contenders for vice. Blessed alone, then, so to speak, are all those, of one mind, of whom the Sibyl says, "who shall deny all temples when they see them, and altars, vain shrines of dumb stones, and stone xoana and statues made with hands, defiled with living blood and with sacrifices of four-footed creatures, of two-footed, of winged things, and with the slaughter of beasts." For indeed it has been forbidden us to ply openly a deceiving art: "you shall not make," says the prophet, "the likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath." Could we, then, still suppose Praxiteles' Demeter and Kore and the mystic Iacchus to be gods, or the arts of Lysippus, or the hands of Apelles, which have clothed matter with the appearance of divine glory? But you, that the statue may be wrought as comely as possible, persevere; yet that you may not yourselves, through insensibility, be made like to the statues, you take no thought. Very plainly and briefly does the prophetic word convict custom, saying that "all the gods of the nations are idols of demons; but God made the heavens" and the things in heaven. Some, then, wandering from this point, somehow worship divine art, but not God — the sun and moon and the rest of the choir of the stars — supposing these, against all reason, to be gods, the very instruments of time. "For by his word were they established, and by the breath of his mouth is all their host." But human art makes houses and ships and cities and pictures; and how could I tell all that God makes? Behold the whole world: it is his work; and heaven and the sun and the angels and men are the works of his fingers. How great is the power of God! His mere will is the making of a world; for God alone made it, since he alone is truly God. By his mere willing he creates, and on his mere willing follows the coming-to-be. Here the chorus of philosophers turns aside, agreeing that man has been made altogether fair for the spectacle of heaven, yet worshipping the things that appear in heaven and are grasped by sight. For even if the works in heaven are not human, yet they have been made for men. And let none of you worship the sun, but let him long for the maker of the sun; let none deify the world, but let him seek after the maker of the world. The only refuge, it seems, left to him who is to come to the doors of salvation is divine wisdom; from this, as from some inviolable sanctuary, man can no longer be carried off by any of the demons, as he hastens to salvation.

5. Let us now run over, if you will, the opinions of the philosophers too, all that they boast about the gods, that we may find whether philosophy itself, for vainglory's sake, makes matter into an idol, or whether, in passing, we can show it deifying certain spirits, dreaming the truth. The elements, then, some set down as first principles, hymning them: Thales of Miletus, water; and Anaximenes, himself also a Milesian, air, whom Diogenes of Apollonia afterward followed. Parmenides the Eleatic introduced as gods fire and earth; but one of these only, fire, Hippasus of Metapontum and Heraclitus of Ephesus supposed to be a god. As for Empedocles of Acragas, he fell into a plurality, and in addition to these four elements reckons up Strife and Love. These too, then, are godless, who, by a certain unwise wisdom, worship matter; and though they do not honour stones or timber, they deify earth, the mother of these; and though they do not fashion a Poseidon, they bow down to water itself. For what is Poseidon but a certain liquid substance, named from "drinking" (posis)? Just as, of course, the warlike Ares is named from "lifting up" (arsis) and "destruction" (anairesis), by which it seems to me that many, especially those who simply fix a sword and sacrifice to it as to Ares — and this is a Scythian custom, as Eudoxus says in the second book of his Circuit of the Earth; and of the Scythians, the Sauromatae, as Hicesius says in his work On Mysteries, reverence the scimitar. This too is the case with the followers of Heraclitus, who reverence fire as the primal element; for this fire others have named Hephaestus. And the magi of the Persians have honoured fire, and many of the inhabitants of Asia, and besides them the Macedonians, as Diogenes says in the first book of his Persian Affairs. Why need I list the Sauromatae, whom Nymphodorus in his Barbarian Customs records as reverencing fire, or the Persians and the Medes and the magi? Dinon says that these sacrifice in the open air, reckoning fire and water alone as the statues of the gods. Nor did I conceal their ignorance either. For even if they think they are most of all escaping error, yet they slide into another deception: statues of gods they have not supposed to be wood and stones, like the Greeks, nor ibises and ichneumons, like the Egyptians, but fire and water, like philosophers. After many cycles of years, however, they too came to reverence statues of human form, as Berossus shows in the third book of his Chaldaic Affairs, this having been introduced by Artaxerxes son of Darius son of Ochus, who first set up the statue of Aphrodite Anaïtis in Babylon and Susa and Ecbatana, and showed the Persians and Bactrians and Damascus and Sardis to reverence it. Let the philosophers, then, confess that their teachers are the Persians or the Sauromatae or the magi, from whom they have learned the godlessness of the principles they reverence, ignorant of the ruler who is the maker of all things and the fashioner of those principles themselves — the God without beginning — while they turn to those poor and weak elements, as the apostle says, made for the service of men. And of the other philosophers, all who, passing beyond the elements, busied themselves with something loftier and more extraordinary, some of them hymned the Infinite, as Anaximander (he was a Milesian) and Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and the Athenian Archelaus. These two, indeed, both set Mind over the Infinite; but Leucippus the Milesian and Metrodorus of Chios, it seems, left two principles also, the full and the void; and Democritus of Abdera, taking these two, added the images. For Alcmaeon of Croton thought the stars were gods, being ensouled. I will not pass over their shamelessness: Xenocrates (this man was a Chalcedonian) hints at seven gods, the planets, and an eighth, the world composed of all the fixed stars. Nor indeed will I pass by the Stoics, who say that the divine pervades all matter, even the meanest, who simply disgrace philosophy. Nor do I think it hard, now that I have come to this point, to make mention also of those of the Peripatos; and the father of the school, not understanding the Father of all things, thinks that the one called "Supreme" is the soul of the universe; that is, supposing the soul of the world to be God, he is pierced by his own argument. For he who limits providence as far as the moon herself, and then reckons the world a god, overturns himself, dogmatizing a god that has no share in God. And that Eresian, Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle, sometimes suspects heaven, sometimes spirit, to be God. Of Epicurus alone I will willingly be forgetful, who thinks that God cares for nothing, being impious through and through. And what of Heraclides of Pontus? Is there any point where he too is not dragged down to the images of Democritus?

6. And a great rabble of such men flows in upon me, bringing in, like some hobgoblin, a strange shadow-painting of foreign demons, mythologizing with old wives' twaddle. Far be it from us to permit men to listen to such tales, men whom we do not accustom even to soothe our own children with myths when they cry, as the saying goes, dreading to nurse up in them the godlessness proclaimed by these would-be wise men, who know the truth no better than babes. For why, in the name of truth, do you show those who have believed you to be subject to flux and motion and disorderly eddies? Why do you fill my life with idols, fashioning into gods winds or air or fire or earth or stones or timber or iron — this world of ours — and making gods too of the planets, prating astrology, not astronomy, to men truly led astray, with this much-bruited star-talk? I long for the Lord of the winds, the Lord of fire, the maker of the world, the kindler of the sun's light; I seek after God, not the works of God. Whom, then, shall I take from you as a fellow-worker in the search? For we have not utterly despaired of you. If you will, take Plato. Where, then, must we track God, O Plato? "For it is a task to find the father and maker of this universe, and, having found him, it is impossible to declare him to all." Why so, in the name of God himself? "Because it can in no wise be spoken." Well said, Plato; you have touched upon the truth. But do not weary; lay hold with me of the search concerning the Good; for into all men without exception, but especially those who spend their lives in discourse, there has been instilled a certain divine effluence. Wherefore, even unwillingly, they confess that there is one God, imperishable and unbegotten, somewhere up above, about the back of heaven, in his own proper watch-tower, truly existing forever. "But what kind of God should one conceive? Him who sees all things, while himself unseen," says Euripides. Menander, then, seems to me to have gone astray, where he says: "O Sun, you must worship first of the gods, through whom it is possible to behold the other gods." For not even the sun could ever show the true God; but the sound Reason, which is the sun of the soul, alone — through which alone, when it has risen within, in the depth of the mind — its eye is illumined. Hence not unreasonably did Democritus say that "few of the men of reason, stretching out their hands to this place which we Greeks now call air, said that all this was Zeus; and he knows all things and gives all and takes away, and he is king of all." In this way, too, Plato, thinking of God, hints at him: "About the king of all are all things, and that is the cause of all fair things." Who, then, is the king of all? God, the measure of the truth of the things that are. As, then, the things measured are grasped by the measure, so too, by the understanding of God, the truth is measured and grasped. And the truly holy Moses says: "There shall not be in your bag a weight and a weight, great or small; nor shall there be in your house a measure great 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 away at home, in the bag and in the soul that is, so to speak, filthy; but the only just measure, the only truly existing God, ever equal in the same way and after the same manner, measures all things and weighs them, encompassing and upholding without bias, as in the balance of justice, the nature of the universe. "God, then, as the ancient saying goes, holding the beginning and end and middle of all things that are, completes a straight course, journeying round according to nature; and ever upon him follows Justice, the avenger of those who fall short of the divine law." Whence, O Plato, do you hint at the truth? Whence does the unstinted supply of your words prophesy piety? "Wiser than these," he says, "are the races of the barbarians." I know your teachers, even if you wish to conceal them: geometry you learn from the Egyptians, astronomy from the Babylonians, the wholesome incantations you take from the Thracians; the Assyrians too have taught you much; but the laws, all that are true, and the right opinion concerning God, you have profited from the Hebrews themselves, "who not with empty deceits, nor with works of men — gold and bronze and silver and ivory, and idols of wood and of stone, of dead mortals — do they pay honour, all that mortals do in their empty-minded counsel; but they raise to heaven pure arms, rising at dawn from their beds, ever purifying their flesh with water, and they honour the One alone who ever rules, the immortal." And do not, O Philosophy, set before me this one Plato only, but be eager to bring forward many others too, who declare the one and only true God to be God, by his inspiration, if anywhere they have laid hold on the truth. For Antisthenes thought this — not as a Cynic, but as a pupil of Socrates — that God is like to no one; wherefore no one can learn him from an image. And Xenophon the Athenian would himself also have written something expressly, bearing witness about the truth as Socrates did, had he not feared the poison of Socrates; yet none the less he hints: "He who shakes all things and brings them to rest is manifest as some great and powerful one; but of what form he is, is unseen; nor indeed does the sun, that seems all-shining, seem to permit itself to be looked at, but if anyone shamelessly gazes at it, it takes away his sight." Whence, then, does the son of Gryllus draw his wisdom? Plainly from the prophetess of the Hebrews, who prophesies somewhat thus: "What flesh can with its eyes behold the heavenly and true immortal God, who dwells in the pole? Nay, men, born mortal, cannot even stand against the rays of the sun." Cleanthes of Pedasus, the philosopher of the Stoa, shows not a poetic theogony, but a true theology. He did not conceal what he had in mind concerning God: "Do you ask me what the Good is like? Listen, then: ordered, just, holy, pious, master of itself, useful, fair, fitting, austere, self-contained, ever profitable, fearless, griefless, advantageous, painless, helpful, pleasing, secure, friendly, honoured, agreeing, glorious, free from conceit, careful, gentle, vehement, lasting, blameless, ever abiding. Every man is base who looks to glory, as though he would get from her some fair thing." Here, I think, he clearly teaches what God is, and how common opinion and custom enslave those who follow them, but not those who seek after God. Nor must we conceal the followers of Pythagoras, who say: "God is one; and this God is not, as some suppose, outside the world-order, but within it, whole in the whole circle, overseer of all coming-to-be, the blending of all the ages and the worker of his own powers and of all works, the light-giver in heaven and father of all, mind and the ensouling of the whole circle, the mover of all things." Enough is even this for the knowledge of God, written down by them through the inspiration of God, and selected by us, for one able to discern the truth even a little.

7. Now let there come to us — for philosophy alone is not sufficient — poetry too, which has busied itself wholly about falsehood, at last, late as it is, to bear witness to the truth, or rather to confess to God its mythical wandering. Let whatever poet wishes come forward first. Aratus, then, understands the power of God to pervade all things: "that all things may grow firm; therefore him men ever propitiate first and last. Hail, Father, great wonder, great boon to men." In this way too the Ascraean Hesiod hints at God: "For he himself is king and lord of all, and of the immortals none else has matched his might." Even upon the stage they lay bare the truth: the one — "looking up to the ether and to heaven, hold this to be God," says Euripides. And Sophocles son of Sophillus: "In truth there is one God, one, who made heaven and the wide earth and the gleaming swell of the sea and the force of the winds; but mortals, much wandering in heart, set up for ourselves, as a comfort in griefs, statues of the gods from stones, or figures wrought of bronze or gold or ivory; and rendering to these sacrifices and empty festivals, we suppose that thus we are pious." This poet, then, has now, and even at some risk, brought the truth onto the stage before the spectators.

And the Thracian hierophant and poet at once, Orpheus son of Oeagrus, after his initiation into the orgies and his theology of the idols, brings in a recantation of truth, singing the truly sacred discourse, late at last, yet for all that singing it: "I will speak to those for whom it is lawful; but set up the doors, all you profane alike. But you, hearken, son of light-bringing Mene, Musaeus; for I will declare what is true. And let not the things that before appeared in your breast rob you of your dear life. Looking to the divine Word, attend to it, guiding straight the understanding vessel of the heart; and tread well the path, and look on him alone, the immortal King of the world." Then, going on, he expressly adds: "He is one, self-begotten; from one are all things begotten; and in them he himself moves about; and no mortal beholds him, but he himself beholds all." So, then, Orpheus; in time, at last, having wandered, he came to understand. But do not you, mortal of crafty mind, delay and tarry; but, turning back from your wandering, propitiate God. For even if the Greeks, having got certain sparks of the divine Word, uttered some few things of the truth, they bear witness indeed to its power, that it is not hidden, but they convict themselves as weak, not having reached the end. For by now, I think, it has become plain to everyone that those who do or say anything apart from the Word of truth are like men forced to walk without a footing.

And the very refutations of your gods, which the poets, constrained by truth, put into comedy, may shame you into salvation. Menander the comic poet, for instance, in the play The Charioteer: "No god pleases me," he says, "who goes about outside with an old woman, nor who slips into houses upon a little board" — for such are the begging priests of the Mother. Hence Antisthenes reasonably said to them as they begged: "I do not feed the Mother of the gods, whom the gods feed." Again the same comic poet, in the play The Priestess, vexed at the custom, tries to convict the godless conceit of error, adding sensibly: "For if a man by his cymbals drags the god where he wishes, then he who does this is greater than the god; but these are instruments of recklessness and of livelihood, devised by men." And not Menander only, but Homer too and Euripides and many other poets convict your gods, and do not fear to revile them, even to no small degree. At once they call Athena "dog-fly" and Hephaestus "lame in both legs"; and to Aphrodite Helen says, "Mayest thou never return on thy feet to Olympus." And of Dionysus Homer writes openly: "who once chased the nurses of frenzied Dionysus down through holy Nysa; and they all together cast their wands to the ground, beneath the murderous Lycurgus." Worthy in truth of a Socratic schooling is Euripides, looking to the truth and despising the spectators; now convicting Apollo, "who dwells at the central seat, dealing out to mortals utterance most clear" — "obeying him, I slew my mother; hold him impious and slay him; he erred, not I, being more ignorant than the fair and the just" — now bringing in Heracles mad, and elsewhere drunken and insatiable. For how should he not be? — who, feasting on the flesh, "ate green figs upon it, howling without music, so as to be understood even by a barbarian." And in the play Ion he wheels out the gods bare-headed to the theatre: "How, then, is it just that you who wrote the laws for mortals should yourselves incur a charge of injustice? But if — for it shall not be, yet I will use the argument — you shall pay penalty to men for forced unions, you and Poseidon and Zeus who rules heaven, you shall empty your temples in paying for your injustices."

8. It is time now, then — the rest being already gone through in order — to come to the prophetic Scriptures. For the oracles too, holding out to us most plainly the starting-points toward piety, lay the foundation of the truth. And the divine Scriptures and sober ways of life are short roads of salvation; bare of cosmetic art and of outward fine speech and chatter and flattery, they raise up the man choked by wickedness, despising the slipperiness of worldly life, with one and the same voice healing many things, turning us away from harmful deception, and openly exhorting us to manifest salvation. At once, then, let the prophetess Sibyl first sing for us the song of salvation: "Behold, this one is clear to all, free from error: come, pursue not darkness and gloom forever. Behold, the sweet-eyed light of the sun shines surpassingly. Know, laying up wisdom in your breasts: there is one God, who sends rains and winds and earthquakes, lightnings, famines, plagues and grievous sorrows, and snows and the rest. Why should I recount them one by one? He rules heaven, he holds sway over earth, himself from the beginning." Very inspiredly, likening deception to darkness and the knowledge of God to the sun and light, and setting both side by side in comparison, she teaches the choice. For falsehood is not dispelled by the bare setting beside it of the truth, but, being driven out by the use of the truth, it is put to flight. Jeremiah the all-wise prophet, or rather the Holy Spirit in Jeremiah, shows God: "I am a God at hand," he says, "and not a God afar 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 has measured," he says, "the heaven with a span and all the earth with the hollow of his hand?" Behold the greatness of God, and be amazed. Him let us worship, of whom the prophet says: "At your presence the mountains shall melt, as wax melts at the presence of fire." This, he says, is the God whose throne is heaven and footstool the earth; who, if he should open the heaven, trembling shall seize you. Do you wish to hear too what this prophet says about the idols? "They shall be made a public example before the sun, and their carcasses shall be food for the birds of heaven and the beasts of the earth, and they shall rot under the sun and the moon, which they themselves loved and to which they were enslaved, and their city shall be burned." And he says that the elements too and the world shall be destroyed together with them: "The earth," he says, "shall grow old, and the heaven shall pass away, but the word of the Lord abides forever." And what when again God wishes to show himself through Moses? "See, see that I am, and there is no other God beside me. I will slay and I will make alive; I will smite and I will heal, and there is none who can deliver out of my hands." But do you wish to hear too another oracle-singer? You have the whole prophetic choir, the fellow-revellers of Moses. What does the Holy Spirit say to them through Hosea? I will not shrink to tell it: "Behold, I am he that establishes thunder and creates wind, whose hands have founded the host of heaven." And again, through Isaiah — and this saying too I will recall to you — "I am, I am," he says, "the Lord, who speaks righteousness and announces truth. Gather yourselves and come; take counsel together, you that are saved from the nations. They have no knowledge, those who lift up the carved wood of theirs, and pray to gods who cannot save them." Then, going on: "I," he says, "am God, and there is none righteous beside me, and there is no saviour beside me. Turn to me and be saved, you from the ends of the earth. I am God, and there is none other; by myself I swear." And against the idolaters he is indignant, saying: "To whom have you likened the Lord? Or to what likeness have you likened him? Has a carpenter made an image, or has a goldsmith, having melted gold, gilded it over?" — and what follows. Are you, then, still idolaters? But even now beware the threats; for the carved images and the works of hands shall howl — or rather those who trust in them, for the matter is insensible. Again he says: "The Lord shall shake the inhabited cities, and shall lay hold of 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 presence come knowledge and understanding. "How long, O sluggard, will you lie down? When will you be raised from sleep? But if you are unsluggish, your harvest shall come to you like a fountain" — the fatherly Word, the good lamp, the Lord who brings the light, faith and salvation to all. "For the Lord who made the earth in his strength," as Jeremiah says, "set up the world in his wisdom." For us, when we had fallen away to the idols, wisdom, which is his Word, sets us upright again toward the truth. And this is the first resurrection from our falling. Whence, turning men away from all idolatry, the inspired Moses cried out most nobly: "Hear, O Israel; the Lord your God, the Lord is one, and you shall worship the Lord your God and serve him alone." Now then, understand, O men, according to that blessed psalmist David: "Lay hold of instruction, lest at any time the Lord be angry, and you perish from the righteous way, when his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all they that trust in him." And already, taking exceeding pity on us, the Lord gives the saving strain, like a marching rhythm: "Sons of men, how long will you be heavy of heart? Why do you love vanity and seek after a lie?" What, then, is the vanity and what the lie? The holy apostle of the Lord, charging the Greeks, will explain to you: "Because, knowing God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their reasonings, and changed the glory of God into the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and served the creature rather than the Creator." And surely this God it is "who in the beginning made the heaven and the earth"; but you do not understand God, and you worship heaven; and how are you not impious? Hear again the prophet saying: "The sun shall fail and the heaven shall be darkened; but the Almighty shall shine forever, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken, and the heavens shall be rolled together like a scroll, stretched out and contracted" — for these are the prophetic voices — "and the earth shall flee from the face of the Lord."

9. And I could bring to you ten thousand Scriptures, of which "not one tittle shall 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, despise the instruction of the Lord, nor faint when you are rebuked by him." O the exceeding love toward man! Not as a teacher to disciples, nor as a master to servants, nor as God to men, but "as a gentle father he admonishes his sons." Then Moses confesses that he is afraid and trembling, hearing about the Word; but you, hearing the divine Word, do you not fear? Are you not in anguish? Are you not at once cautious and eager to learn thoroughly — that is, eager for salvation — fearing wrath, loving grace, emulating hope, that you may escape the judgement? Come, come, O my young company; for unless you become again as little children and are born anew, as the Scripture says, you shall not receive the Father who truly is, nor shall you ever enter into the kingdom of the heavens. 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 shall be among the things of the Father, then he shall be deemed worthy to inherit, then he shall share in the Father's kingdom with the genuine, the beloved Son. For this is the Church of the firstborn, composed of many good children; these are the firstborn enrolled in heaven, who keep festival with so many myriads of angels. And we are the firstborn children, the nurslings of God, the genuine friends of the Firstborn, the first of all other men to have understood God, the first to have been torn away from sins, the first to have been separated from the devil. But now some are godless in proportion as God is loving to man; for he wishes us, who were slaves, to become sons, but they have disdained even to become sons. O the great folly! You are ashamed of the Lord. He promises freedom, but you run away into slavery. He gives salvation as a gift, but you are carried down to death. He bestows eternal life, but you await punishment, and prefer the fire which the Lord has prepared for the devil and his angels. For this cause the blessed apostle says: "I testify in the Lord that you no longer walk as the nations walk, in the vanity of their mind, being darkened in their understanding and alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance that is in them, through the hardness of their heart; who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to wantonness, to work all uncleanness and greed." When such a witness convicts the folly of men and calls upon God, what else remains for the unbelieving but judgement and condemnation? And the Lord does not weary of exhorting, of striking fear, of urging, of rousing, of admonishing; indeed he wakes men from sleep, and raises up out of their darkness those who have gone astray: "Awake," he says, "you that sleep, and arise from the dead, and Christ the Lord shall give you light" — the sun of the resurrection, "begotten before the morning star," who has bestowed life by his own rays. Let no one, then, despise the Word, lest he unawares despise himself. For the Scripture somewhere says: "Today, if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness, where your fathers tempted me in a testing." And if you wish to learn what the testing is, the Holy Spirit will explain it to you: "And I saw my works," he says, "forty years; wherefore I was grieved with that generation and said, They do always err in heart; but they have not known my ways; so I swore in my wrath, If they shall enter into my rest." See the threat; see the exhortation; see the honour. Why, then, do we still change grace into wrath, and not, with open ears, receive the Word, and lodge God in pure souls? For great is the grace of his promise, "if today we hear his voice"; and that "today" is increased day by day, as long as it is called "today." And until the consummation both the "today" and the learning abide; and then the true "today," the unfailing day of God, is stretched out coextensive with the ages. Let us, then, ever hearken to the voice of the divine Word; for the "today" is an image of the eternal age, and the day is a symbol of light, and the Word is light to men, through whom we are illumined toward God. Reasonably, then, to those who believe and obey, grace shall abound exceedingly; but to those who disobey and wander in heart, and have not known the ways of the Lord, which John commanded to make straight and prepare, with these God is grieved and threatens. And indeed the end of the threat, as the elders among the Hebrews who wandered say enigmatically, the threat — for they are said not to enter into the rest because of unbelief, until, following the successor of Moses, they learned at last by experience that they could not otherwise be saved than by believing as Jesus did. And the Lord, being loving to man, calls all men to the knowledge of the truth, he who sends the Comforter. What, then, is the knowledge? Piety; and "piety is profitable unto all things," according to Paul, "having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come." At what price would you have confessed, O men, that you would buy eternal salvation, if it were for sale? Not even if one were to measure out the whole Pactolus, the fabled stream of gold, would he count out a worthy price for salvation. Do not, then, grow weary; it is possible for you, if you will, to buy out the precious salvation with your own treasure, with love and faith, which is a price worthy of life. This price God gladly receives. "For we have hoped in the living God, who is the saviour of all men, especially of the faithful." But the rest, grown fast to the world like seaweed on sea-girt rocks, make light of immortality, like the old man of Ithaca, longing not for the truth and the heavenly fatherland, and besides for the light that truly is, but for the smoke.

Piety, then, making man like to God so far as is possible, inscribes God as a fitting teacher, who alone is able worthily to make man like to God. This teaching the apostle, knowing it to be truly divine, "you, O Timothy," he says, "from a babe have known the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise unto salvation through faith in Christ." For truly sacred are the writings that make holy and make divine; out of which writings and sacred syllables the same apostle accordingly calls the composed Scriptures, the books, "inspired of God," being profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, furnished completely unto every good work. No one would be so astonished at the exhortations of the other saints as at the Lord himself, the lover of man; for he has no other work but this alone, to save man. He cries, at any rate, pressing on to salvation: "The kingdom of the heavens is at hand"; he turns men about as they draw near by fear. In this way too the apostle of the Lord, exhorting the Macedonians, becomes an interpreter of the divine voice: "The Lord is at hand," he says; "take heed lest we be found empty." But you are so fearless — or rather faithless — obeying neither the Lord himself nor Paul, and that though he was bound for Christ's sake. "Taste and see that the Lord is good." Faith will lead you in, experience will teach you, the Scripture will train you, saying: "Come, O children, hearken to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord." Then, as to those who already believe, it briefly adds: "Who is the man that desires life, that loves to see good days?" It is we, we shall say, the worshippers of the Good, the emulators of good things. Hear, then, you that are far off; hear, you that are near: the Word is hidden from none; it is a common light, it shines upon all men; there is no Cimmerian in the Word. Let us hasten to salvation, to the new birth; let us hasten to be gathered, the many, into one love, according to the union of the single substance. Working good in like manner, let us pursue unity, seeking out the good Monad. And the union out of many, having received divine harmony out of the many-voiced and scattered, becomes one symphony, following one leader of the chorus and teacher, the Word, resting upon the very truth, saying "Abba, Father." This true voice God welcomes, receiving it first from his own children as firstfruits.

10. "But," you say, "it is not reasonable to overthrow a custom handed down to us from our fathers." Then why do we not use our first food, milk, to which the nurses no doubt accustomed us from birth? Why do we increase or diminish the paternal estate, and not keep it equal, as we received it? Why do we no longer dribble into our fathers' bosoms, or do the other things which, when we were infants and were reared by our mothers, made us a laughing-stock? Why did we correct ourselves, even if we did not happen upon good tutors? Then, on voyages, deviations, though harmful and dangerous, yet somehow fall out pleasantly; but in life shall we not forsake the custom that is wicked and passion-ridden and godless, even though our fathers be angry, and turn aside toward the truth and seek after the Father who truly is, thrusting away custom like a deadly drug? For this very thing is the fairest of the tasks before us, to show you that it was from madness and from this thrice-wretched custom that piety came to be hated. For so great a good — than which nothing greater has yet been given by God to the begetting of men — would never have been hated or forbidden, unless you, swept along by custom, then, stopping your ears against us, like stiff-necked horses balking, biting on the bit, fled from our words, longing to shake us off, your charioteers of life, and, carried by your folly toward the cliffs of destruction, supposed the holy Word of God to be accursed. There follows for you, then, according to Sophocles, the wage of your choice: "mind gone, ears useless, empty thoughts." And you do not know that this, above all, is true: that the good and pious shall obtain a good requital, having honoured the Good, while the wicked, on the contrary, shall obtain the fitting punishment; and upon the ruler of wickedness chastisement is hung. The prophet Zechariah threatens him: "The Lord who chose Jerusalem rebuke you. Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?" What craving, then, still lies in men for a voluntary death? Why have they fled to this death-bringing brand, with which they shall be burned up, when it is possible to live well according to God, not according to custom? For God bestows life, but a wicked custom, after the departure from this world, brings empty repentance together with punishment. "And the foolish learns by suffering" that superstition destroys and piety saves. Let one of you look at those who serve the idols, with filthy hair, outraged in dingy and torn raiment, wholly untried in baths, savage with the points of their nails; many, too, deprived of their privy parts, showing in fact that the precincts of the idols are tombs or prison-houses. These seem to me to be mourning, not worshipping, the gods, having suffered things worthy of pity rather than of piety. And, seeing these things, are you still blind, and will you not look up to the Lord of all and Master of the universe? Will you not flee, escaping from these prison-houses here, to the mercy from heaven? For God, out of his great love toward man, holds fast to man, as the mother-bird flies down after the nestling that falls out of the nest; and if some creeping beast should gape at the nestling, "the mother flutters round, bewailing her dear young." God the Father both seeks his creature and heals the fall and drives away the beast and takes up the nestling again, urging it to fly back to the nest. Then, dogs that have lost their way, hunting by scent, have tracked out their master; and horses, having thrown their rider, have obeyed their master at a single whistle. "The ox knows," it says, "his owner, and the ass his master's crib; but Israel has not known me." What, then, the Lord? He does not bear malice; he still pities, he still demands repentance. And I wish to ask you, whether it does not seem to you absurd that you men, having been made the creature of God and having received your soul from him and being wholly his, should serve another master, and besides should worship instead of the king the tyrant, and instead of the good the wicked. For who, in the name of truth, being of sound mind, forsakes the good and consorts with wickedness? Who is there that, fleeing from God, lives with demons? Who, being able to be a son of God, takes pleasure in being a slave? Or who, being able to be a citizen of heaven, pursues the gloom, when he might till paradise and walk about heaven and partake of the living and pure fountain, treading the air in the track of that shining cloud, like Elijah, beholding the saving rain? But these, wallowing like worms about pools and mire, the streams of pleasure, feed upon profitless and senseless luxuries, swinish men. "For swine," it says, "delight in mire rather than in pure water," and "rave over filth," according to Democritus. Let us not, then, let us not be enslaved nor become swinish, but, as true children of the light, let us look up and gaze toward the light, lest the Lord prove us bastards, as the sun does the eagles. Let us repent, then, and pass over from unlearning to knowledge, from folly to understanding, from incontinence to self-control, from injustice to righteousness, from godlessness to God. Fair is the risk of deserting to God. And there are many other goods, too, for the lovers of righteousness to enjoy, who pursue eternal salvation — yes, and those which God himself hints at, speaking through Isaiah: "There is an inheritance for those who serve the Lord." Fair indeed and lovely is the inheritance — not gold, not silver, not raiment, the things of the earth, where the moth and the robber lurk, with eyes set upon the low-lying wealth — but that treasure of salvation, to which we must hasten, becoming lovers of the Word. From here our good works set out with us, and fly together with us on the wing of truth. This inheritance the eternal covenant of God puts into our hands, supplying the eternal gift; and this our loving Father, the true Father, does not cease to exhort, to admonish, to instruct, to love; for neither does he cease to save, but counsels the best: "Become just," says the Lord; "you that thirst, go to the water; and as many of you as have no money, come and buy and drink without money." To the bath, to salvation, to the illumination he calls, all but crying out and saying: "Earth I give you and sea, O child, and heaven, and all the living creatures in them I bestow upon you. Only, O child, thirst for the Father; God shall be shown to you without price; the truth is not bought and sold. He gives you the winged things and the swimming things and the things upon the earth; these the Father has fashioned for your thankful enjoyment." With money the bastard, who is the child of destruction, shall buy — he who has chosen to serve mammon; but to you he entrusts what is yours, to you the genuine, I say, who love the Father, for whose sake he still works, and to whom alone he promises, saying: "And the land shall not be sold for confirmation"; for it is not confirmed to corruption; "for all the land is mine," and it is yours too, if you receive God. Whence the Scripture reasonably proclaims good tidings to those who have believed: "But the saints of the Lord shall inherit the glory of God and his power." What glory, O blessed one, tell me? "That which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man; and they shall rejoice over the kingdom of their Lord forever, Amen." You have, O men, the divine promise of grace; you have heard, too, the other, the threat of punishment, through which the Lord saves, training man by fear and by grace. Why do we delay? Why do we not turn aside from punishment? Why do we not receive the gift? Why do we not choose the better — God instead of the wicked one — and prefer wisdom to idolatry, and take life in exchange for death? "Behold, I have set before your face," he says, "death and life." The Lord tests you, to choose life; he counsels you as a father to obey God. "For if you hear me," he says, "and are willing, you shall eat the good things of the land" — the grace of obedience; "but if you do not hear me nor are willing, the sword and fire shall devour you" — the judgement of disobedience. For "the mouth of the Lord has spoken these things"; the law of truth is the Word of the Lord. Do you wish me to become a good counsellor to you? Then do you hear, and I will show, if I can. You ought, O men, considering the Good itself, to bring to bear an innate faith, a credible witness from within, from your own home, manifestly choosing the best, and not to labour as if it were something to be tracked down. For if one ought to get drunk, say, then one ought to deliberate; but you get drunk before considering; and if one ought to commit outrage, you make no inquiry, but commit outrage with all speed. Only about whether one ought to be pious do you inquire, and whether one ought to follow this wise God and Christ — this you deem worthy of counsel and consideration, not having even understood what befits God, whatever it may be. Believe us, at least, as you believe drunkenness, that you may be sober; believe, at least, as you do outrage, that you may live. But if you wish also to be persuaded, having beheld the manifest faith of the virtues, come, I will set before you, out of my abundance, the persuasion concerning the Word. But you — since now the ancestral customs no longer keep you from the truth, you who have been pre-instructed — you may now hear how the matter stands hereafter. And let no shame at this name forestall you, which "greatly harms men," turning them aside from salvation. Stripping ourselves, then, openly, let us contend genuinely in the stadium of truth, the holy Word being umpire and the Master of all presiding as president of the games. For no small prize lies before us — immortality. Therefore care no more, not even a little, what certain market-rabble say of you, godless dancers in superstition, pushed by folly and madness into the very pit, makers of idols and worshippers of stones. For these have dared to deify men, recording Alexander the Macedonian as a thirteenth god, whom Babylon convicted as a corpse. I admire, then, the Chian sophist, Theocritus by name; after the death of Alexander, mocking the empty opinions of men which they held about gods, Theocritus said to his fellow-citizens: "Men, take courage, so long as you see the gods dying before men."

But he who worships the visible gods and the promiscuous rabble of these created things, and makes them his companions, is far more wretched than those very demons. For God is in no way unjust, as the demons are, but, as far as may be, most just; and there is nothing more like to him than whoever of us becomes most just. "Go forth, then, to the road, all you handicraft folk, who propitiate the grim-eyed Worker-goddess, the daughter of Zeus, with standing winnowing-fans" — you witless makers and worshippers of stones. Let your Pheidias come, and your Polycleitus, and Praxiteles again, and Apelles, and all who pursue the menial crafts, earthy workers of earth. For then, says a certain prophecy, the affairs here shall fare ill, when men trust in statues. Let the petty craftsmen come again, then — for I will not cease from fair speaking. None of these has fashioned a breathing image, nor moulded soft flesh out of earth. Who melted the marrow, or who fixed the bones? Who stretched the sinews? Who blew up the veins? Who poured the blood into them, or who stretched the skin around? Where could any of them make eyes that see? Who breathed in a soul? Who gave righteousness as a gift? Who promised immortality? The Maker of all things alone, the best-craftsman Father, fashioned such a living statue as man. But your Olympian — 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 genuine Son of the Mind is the divine Word, the archetypal light of light — and the image of the Word is the true man, the mind in man, who is therefore said to have been made "after the image and likeness of God," likened in his heart's understanding to the divine Word, and in this respect rational. But of the visible, earth-born man the earthy image is the man-shaped statue, and it appears far from the truth, a transient impress. Nothing, then, but a life full of madness has seemed to me to have been, when men gave themselves with so much zeal to matter. And custom, fostered by empty opinion, has given you a taste of slavery and of unreasonable curiosity; and the cause is ignorance of lawless and deceitful pretences, which, introducing into the human race the contrivances of ruinous deaths and of hateful idols, having devised many forms of demons, has stamped upon those who follow it a stain of long death. Take, then, the rational water; wash, you that are defiled; sprinkle yourselves clean from custom with the true drops; you must go up pure into the heavens. You are a man — that which is most common; seek out him who made you. You are a son — that which is most peculiarly your own; recognize the Father. But do you still abide in your sins, fast bound by pleasures? To whom will the Lord say, "Yours is the kingdom of the heavens"? Yours it is, if you will, you who have set your choice toward God; yours, if you will only to believe and to follow the brief proclamation, obeying which the Ninevites, by genuine repentance, exchanged the expected capture for the fair salvation. "How, then, shall I go up to the heavens?" you say. The Lord is the way, narrow indeed, but from heaven; narrow indeed, but sending up to the heavens; narrow, despised upon earth; broad, worshipped in the heavens. Then he who has not heard the Word has ignorance as the excuse of his wandering; but he who is struck on the ears, and yet bears to his soul, from his own judgement, disobedience — the wiser he seems to be, the more his understanding turns to his hurt, since he has used his prudence as accuser, not choosing the best; for man is by nature so framed as to be intimate with God. As, then, we do not force the horse to plough nor the bull to hunt, but lead each animal round to that for which it is by nature framed, so, of course, we call man too, born for the contemplation of heaven, a heavenly plant in truth, to the knowledge of God, having grasped what is proper to him and choice and peculiar to him beyond the other animals, a self-sufficient provision for the ages — piety — counselling him to prepare it. Till the soil, we say, if you are a husbandman, but know God while you till; sail, you who love seafaring, but call upon the heavenly Pilot. Has knowledge laid hold of you while you served as a soldier? Hear the general who signals just things.

As, then, men weighed down by sleep and drunkenness, come to your senses, and, looking up a little, consider what the worshipped stones mean for you, and the things you waste with empty zeal upon matter; into ignorance you consume both your goods and your life, as you spend your living upon death, having found this only as the end of your vain hope, not able even to pity yourselves, but not even fit to obey those who pity you for your wandering, enslaved by evil custom, dependent on which of your own accord you are carried to destruction to your last breath; "because the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than the light," when it was possible to wipe away the things that stand in the way of salvation — both conceit and wealth and fear — saying that poetic line: "Whither am I carrying all this wealth? And whither do I myself wander?" Will you not, then, casting away these empty fancies, renounce custom itself, saying to vainglory, "False dreams, farewell; you were nothing after all"?

For what do you think, O men, the Tychon-Hermes is, and that of Andocides, and the Maimed one? Surely it is plain to everyone that they are stones, just as Hermes himself is. And as the halo is not a god, and as the rainbow is not a god, but affections of air and clouds, and as in like manner the day is not a god, nor the year, nor the time made up of these, so neither is the sun nor the moon, by which each of the things named is bounded. Who, then, being of sound mind, would suppose Correction and Punishment and Justice and Nemesis to be gods? For neither are the Erinyes nor the Fates nor Destiny gods, since neither is the state nor glory nor wealth — which painters even show to be blind. But if you deify Modesty and Love and Aphrodite, then let Shame and Impulse and Beauty and Intercourse follow upon them. So Sleep and Death, two twin gods, could no longer reasonably be reckoned by you, these being affections that befall living things naturally; nor will you justly call Doom nor Destiny nor the Fates goddesses. And if Strife and Battle are not gods, neither is Ares nor Enyo. And further, if the lightnings and the thunderbolts and the rains are not gods, how can fire and water be gods? And how the shooting stars and the comets, which come to be through an affection of the air? And he who calls Fortune a god, let him call Action too a god. If, then, none of these is reckoned a god, nor those handmade and insensible fashionings, while a certain providence of a divine power over us is plainly seen, nothing else remains but to confess this — that he alone truly is and subsists, the only truly existing God. But, like men who have drunk mandrake or some other drug, you senseless ones are; and may God grant you one day to come to your senses out of this sleep, and to understand God, and not to imagine gold or stone or tree or action or affection or disease or fear as God. "For thrice ten thousand," in truth, "are upon the bountiful earth" demons — not immortal, nor yet mortal (for they have not even shared in sensation, that they might share in death), but stony and wooden masters of men, outraging and breaking faith with life through custom. "The earth is the Lord's," it says, "and the fullness thereof." Then how dare you, while you revel in what is the Lord's, be ignorant of the Master? "Leave my earth," the Lord will say to you; "touch not the water which I give forth; partake not of the fruits which I till. Render, O man, the price of your nurture to God; recognize your Master; you are God's own creature. But how could his own justly become alien?" For that which is estranged, deprived of intimacy, is deprived of the truth. Are you not, in a manner like Niobe — or rather, to speak more mystically to you, like that Hebrew woman (the men of old called her Lot's wife) — turning to insensibility? We have received that this woman was turned to stone for her love of Sodom; and the Sodomites are the godless and those who turn to impiety, hard-hearted and senseless. Believe that these voices are recited to you from God: do not suppose that stones and timber and birds and serpents are holy, but men not; on the contrary, suppose that men are in truth holy, and that the beasts and stones are what they are. For the wretched and miserable among men believe that God cries out through a raven and a jackdaw, but keeps silence through a man, and they have honoured the raven as a messenger of God, but they hunt down the man of God, who does not croak nor caw, but speaks articulately; alas, who instructs rationally and lovingly — him they undertake to slaughter inhumanly, calling them to righteousness, neither awaiting the grace from above nor turning aside from punishment. For they do not believe God, nor learn his power. But where his love toward man is unspeakable, there his hatred of wickedness is not to be contained. Wrath nourishes the punishment upon sin, but love does good upon repentance. And most pitiable it is to be deprived of the help that comes from God. The blinding of the eyes and the deafening of the hearing is more grievous than the rest of the wicked one's encroachments; for the one is robbed of the heavenly sight, the other deprived of the divine learning. But you, maimed toward the truth, blind in mind and deaf in understanding, are not grieved, are not indignant; you have not desired to see heaven and the maker of heaven, nor sought to hear and learn of the Maker and Father of all things, joining your choice to salvation. For nothing stands in the way of him who hastens toward the knowledge of God — not unlearning, not poverty, not obscurity, not want of possessions. Nor does anyone, having marred the truly true wisdom with bronze, pray to exchange it, nor with iron; for this above all has been well said: "the good man is everywhere saving." For the emulator of the just, as the lover of him who is without need, has little need, having treasured up his blessedness in no other than God himself, where is no moth, no robber, no pirate, but the eternal giver of good things. Rightly, then, have you been likened to those serpents whose ears are stopped against the charmers. "For their wrath," says the Scripture, "is after the likeness of the serpent, like the deaf asp that stops her ears, which will not hear the voice of the charmers." But do you be charmed out of your savagery, and receive the gentle and our Word, and spit out the deadly venom, that it may be granted you, as fully as may be, to put off corruption, as those serpents put off age. Hear me, and do not stop your ears nor block your hearing, but lay to mind the things said. Fair is the medicine of immortality; at last stay your creeping coils. "For the enemies of the Lord shall lick the dust," it says. Lift up your faces from the earth into the upper air; look up to heaven; marvel; cease lying in wait for the heel of the just and hindering the way of truth; become prudent and harmless; perhaps the Lord will grant you the wing of simplicity — for he has chosen to give wings to the earth-born — that, leaving the clefts, you may dwell in the heavens. Only let us repent with the whole heart, that with the whole heart we may be able to contain God. "Hope in him," it says, "all the congregation of the people; pour out before him all your hearts." He speaks to those emptied of wickedness: he pities and fills them with righteousness. Believe, O man, in the man and God; believe, O man, in him who suffered and is worshipped. Believe, you slaves, in the living God who was dead; all men, believe in the only God of all men; believe, and receive as your wage salvation. Seek out God, "and your soul shall live." He who seeks out God is busy about his own salvation; you have found God, you have life. Let us seek, then, that we may also live. The wage of finding is life with God. "Let all that seek you be glad and rejoice in you, and let them say continually, God be magnified." A fair hymn of God is an immortal man, built up in righteousness, in whom the oracles of the truth are engraved. For where else than in a sober soul should righteousness be inscribed? Where love? Where modesty? Where gentleness? Those who have sealed up these divine Scriptures upon the soul ought, I think, to count wisdom a fair starting-place for those who turn to whatever part of life, and to reckon this same wisdom a waveless harbour of salvation; through which the fathers of children are good, those who have run to the Father; and good are the sons to their parents, who have understood the Son; and good are the husbands of wives, who remember the Bridegroom; and good are the masters of servants, who have been redeemed from the uttermost slavery. O happier than the wandering among men are the beasts! They feed upon their ignorance, as you do, but they do not counterfeit the truth; there is among them no race of flatterers; fishes are not superstitious; birds do not commit idolatry; they are astonished at the one heaven alone, since they cannot understand God, having been deemed unworthy of the Word. Then are you not ashamed, having made yourselves more irrational than the irrational, who through so many ages have worn yourselves out in godlessness? You have become children, then youths, then striplings, then men, but never good. At least respect old age, and, being at the setting of life, be sober; and even at the end of life recognize God, that the end of life may take up for you a beginning of salvation. Grow old toward superstition; come young toward piety. God will reckon you guileless children. Let the Athenian, then, follow the laws of Solon, and 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 kill; 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 the complements of these, rational laws and holy words inscribed in the very hearts: "You shall love your neighbour as yourself; and to him that smites you on the cheek offer also the other; and you shall not covet, for by lust alone you have committed adultery." How much better, then, for men than to obtain their lusts, not even at the beginning to wish to lust after what they ought not. But you cannot endure the austerity of salvation; rather, just as we are pleased with the sweet among foods, preferring them for the smoothness of the pleasure, while the bitter, which roughen the sense, heal and make us whole — for the austerity of medicines strengthens those weak in the stomach — so custom delights and tickles, but the one, custom, thrusts into the pit; the other, truth, leads up to heaven, rough indeed at first, but a good nurse of youth. And august is this women's quarter, and sober the council of elders; nor is she hard of access, nor impossible to attain, but she is the nearest indweller of us, as Moses the all-wise hints, dwelling in the three parts that are ours — hands and mouth and heart — a genuine symbol that the truth is fulfilled by all three, by counsel and deed and word. And do not fear this either, lest the many and delightful things imagined take you away from wisdom; of your own free will you will pass over the trifling of custom, just as children too, when they have become men, cast away their playthings. With unsurpassable speed and easily-approached goodwill the divine power, shining upon the earth, has filled the whole with the seed of salvation. For not in so short a time would the Lord have accomplished so great a work without divine care — despised in appearance, worshipped in deed, the purifier and saviour and gentle one, the divine Word, the most manifest, truly God, made equal to the Master of all, because he was his Son, and the Word was in God; neither, when he was first proclaimed beforehand, disbelieved, nor, when he had taken upon him the mask of man and moulded himself in flesh and played out the saving drama of humanity, unknown; for he was a genuine champion and fellow-contestant of the creature, and, swiftly distributed among all men, having risen faster than the sun from the Father's very will, with the greatest ease shone upon us God, presenting both whence he was and who he was by the things he taught and showed — the Word, the bearer of the truce and the reconciler and our Saviour, the life-giving fountain, peaceful, poured out over the whole face of the earth, through whom, so to speak, all things have now become a sea of good things.

11. Consider a little, if you will, from above, the divine benefit. The first man played, free, in paradise, for he was a child of God; but when, yielding to pleasure (the serpent is the allegory of pleasure, creeping upon its belly, an earthly wickedness, fed upon matter), he was led aside by lusts, the child, made manly by disobedience and disobeying his Father, was ashamed before God. See what pleasure availed: the man who through simplicity was free was found bound by sins. The Lord wished to loose him again from his bonds, and, bound in flesh (this is a divine mystery), he subdued the serpent and enslaved the tyrant, death; and — most marvellous of all — that man who had been led astray by pleasure, bound by corruption, he showed loosed by hands stretched out. O mystic wonder! The Lord was laid low, but man rose up; and he that fell from paradise receives a greater prize for his obedience — the heavens. Wherefore it seems to me that, since the Word himself has come to us from heaven, we ought no longer to go to human teaching, busying ourselves about Athens and the rest of Greece, and Ionia besides. For if our teacher is he who has filled all things with holy powers — by creation, salvation, beneficence, lawgiving, prophecy, teaching — the teacher now instructs us in all things, and the whole has already become Athens and Greece through the Word. For surely you did not believe a poetic myth that records Minos the Cretan as the familiar of Zeus, and yet will disbelieve us, who have become disciples of God, having taken up the truly true wisdom, which the topmost of the philosophers only hinted at, but the disciples of Christ both grasped and proclaimed. And indeed all Christ, so to speak, is not divided: he is neither barbarian nor Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, but a new man, remade by the Holy Spirit of God.

Then the other counsels and precepts are paltry and concern particulars: whether one ought to marry, whether to take part in public life, whether to beget children; but the only universal exhortation, and that for the whole of life, in every season, in every circumstance, straining toward the chief end, life, is piety; in accordance with which alone it is necessary to live, that we may live forever. Philosophy, as the elders say, is a long-lasting counsel, wooing the eternal love of wisdom; but "the commandment of the Lord is far-shining, enlightening the eyes." Receive Christ, receive sight, receive your light, "that you may know well both God and man." "Lovely is the Word that enlightened us," beyond gold and precious stone; "it is sweet beyond honey and the honeycomb." For how is he not lovely who made the mind, buried in darkness, clear, and sharpened the light-bringing eyes of the soul? For just as, the sun not being, for all the other stars it would be night over all, so, had we not known the Word and been illumined by him, we should have differed in nothing from fattened birds, fed in darkness and nourished for death. Let us receive the light, that we may receive God; let us receive the light, and become disciples of the Lord. For this very thing has been promised to the Father: "I will declare your name to my brethren; in the midst of the assembly I will hymn you." Hymn and declare to me your Father, God; your tales shall save, your song shall instruct me. Until now I wandered, seeking God; but since you light my way, Lord, I both find God through you and receive the Father from you; I become your fellow-heir, since you were not ashamed of me as a brother. Let us put away, then, let us put away forgetfulness of the truth; the ignorance and the darkness that stands in our way, like a mist upon the sight, having put it down, let us behold the God who truly is, first hymning to him this voice: "Hail, light." Light from heaven shone upon us, who were buried in darkness and shut up in the shadow of death, purer than the sun, sweeter than the life here. That light is eternal life, and whatever has partaken of it lives; but night fears the light, and, setting through fear, gives way to the day of the Lord; all things have become unsleeping light, and the setting has turned to a rising. This is what the new creation desired; for he who rides upon all things, the sun of righteousness, goes round upon mankind impartially, imitating the Father, who makes his sun rise upon all men and sheds down the dew of truth. He has turned the setting into a rising, and crucified death into life, and, snatching man out of destruction, has hung him up in the ether, transplanting corruption into incorruption and changing earth into heavens — the husbandman of God, "signalling good things, and rousing the peoples to a good work," reminding them of the true livelihood, and granting us the great and truly divine and inalienable inheritance of the Father, making man divine by heavenly teaching, "putting laws into their understanding and writing them upon the heart." What laws does he prescribe? "That all shall know God, from small to great"; and "I will be merciful to them," says God, "and their sins I will remember no more." Let us receive the laws of life; let us be persuaded by God exhorting; let us learn of him, that he may be merciful; let us render, even to him who has no need, a thankful wage of well-being, 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 so great an earth to till, water to drink and other to sail, air to breathe, fire to serve you, a world to dwell in; from here he has granted you to send out a colony to the heavens. These great and so many works and graces he has let out to you for a little faith. Then those who have believed the cheats accept their amulets and incantations as supposedly saving; but you will not bind upon yourselves the heavenly amulet itself, the saving Word, and, trusting the incantation of God, be released from the passions, which are diseases of the soul, and torn away from sin? For sin is eternal death. Are you utterly toothless and blind, like moles, doing nothing but eating and living in darkness, dribbling away in corruption? But there is — there is — the truth that cried out, "Out of darkness light shall shine." Let the light, then, shine in the hidden part of the man, in the heart, and let the rays of knowledge rise, revealing and making to shine the man hidden within, the disciple of the light, the friend and fellow-heir of Christ — especially when the most precious and most reverend name of a good Father comes to the knowledge of a pious and good child of a good Father, who commands gentle things and enjoins on the child the things that save. He who obeys him has the advantage in every way: he follows God, he obeys the Father, he came to know him through wandering, he loved God, he loved his neighbour, he fulfilled the commandment, he seeks the prize, he demands the promise. And it is ever set before God to save the flock of men. For this cause too the good God sent the good shepherd. And the Word, having unfolded the truth, showed men the height of salvation, that, repenting, they might be saved, or, disobeying, be judged. This is the proclamation of righteousness, good tidings to those who obey, judgement to those who disobey. But while the loud-clamouring trumpet, sounding, gathers soldiers and proclaims war, shall not Christ, having breathed a peaceful strain to the ends of the earth, gather his own peaceful soldiers? He has gathered, O man, the bloodless army by blood and by the Word, and has put into their hands the kingdom of the heavens. The trumpet of Christ is his gospel: he sounded it, and we heard. Let us arm ourselves peacefully, putting on the breastplate of righteousness and taking up the shield of faith and setting about our head the helmet of salvation, and let us sharpen the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. So the apostle peacefully draws us up in array; these are our invulnerable weapons; with these armed, let us set ourselves against the wicked one; the fiery darts of the wicked one let us quench with the watery points dipped by the Word, requiting kindnesses with thankful blessings and honouring God with the divine Word. "For while you are yet speaking," it says, "he will say, Behold, I am here." O this holy and blessed power, through which God lives as a fellow-citizen with men! Better, then, and best, to become at once the imitator and the servant of the best of beings; for no one can imitate God except by serving him in holiness, nor again serve and reverence him except by imitating him. The heavenly and truly divine love thus comes to men, whenever in the very soul the truly fair, kindled by the divine Word, can shine forth; and, what is greatest, salvation runs side by side with the genuine willing to be saved, choice and life being yoked together, so to speak. Therefore this exhortation of truth alone, like the most faithful of friends, abides with us to the last breath, and becomes a good escort, with the whole and perfect breath of the soul, to those who depart toward heaven. Why, then, do I exhort you? I am eager that you be saved. This Christ wills; in one word he gives you life. And who is he? Learn briefly. The Word of truth, the Word of incorruption, who regenerates man, bringing him back to the truth, the goad of salvation, who drives out corruption, who chases away death, who has built up in men a temple, that in men he may set up God. Purify the temple, and the pleasures and the slacknesses, like a flower of a day, leave to the wind and the fire; the fruits of self-control cultivate prudently, and set yourself up as firstfruits to God, that you may be not only his work but also his grace; and both befit the friend of Christ, both to appear worthy of the kingdom and to be deemed worthy of the kingdom.

12. Let us flee, then, custom; let us flee it like a dangerous headland, or the menace of Charybdis, or the fabled Sirens. It chokes man, turns him away from the truth, leads him from life; it is a snare, a pit, a hole, a greedy evil — custom. "Keep your ship away from that smoke and wave." Let us flee, fellow-voyagers, let us flee this wave; it belches fire; it is a wicked island, heaped with bones and corpses, and there sings within it a fair little harlot, pleasure, delighting in vulgar music: "Come hither, much-praised Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans; bring your ship to land, that you may hear a more divine voice." She praises you, O sailor, and calls you much-hymned, and the harlot makes the glory of the Greeks her own. Let her feed upon the dead; a heavenly breath helps you. Pass pleasure by; she beguiles. "Let no woman, with her decked-out rear, deceive your mind, prattling coaxing words, prying into your barn." Sail past the song; it works death. Only if you will, you have conquered destruction, and, bound fast to the wood, you shall be loosed from all corruption; the Word of God shall steer you, and the Holy Spirit shall bring you to anchor in the harbours of the heavens. Then you shall behold my God, and be initiated into those holy mysteries, and enjoy the things hidden in the heavens, reserved for me, "which neither ear has heard nor has entered into the heart of any."

"And truly I seem to see two suns and a double Thebes," said one as he revelled to the idols, drunk with unmingled ignorance; but I would pity him in his drunken folly, and would call him who is thus beside himself to a sober salvation, since the Lord too welcomes the repentance, and not the death, of the sinner. Come, O madman, not leaning on the thyrsus, not wreathed with ivy; cast off the headband, cast off the fawn-skin, be sober; I will show you the Word and the mysteries of the Word, recounting them according to your own image. This is a mountain beloved of God, not laid out for tragedies like Cithaeron, but dedicated to the dramas of truth, a sober mountain, shaded with pure groves. And in it revel not the sisters of thunder-struck Semele, the Maenads, who are initiated into a foul distribution of flesh, but the daughters of God, the fair lambs, declaring the august rites of the Word, gathering a sober chorus. The chorus are the just; the song is a hymn of the King of all; the maidens make music, the angels glorify, the prophets speak, a sound of music is sent forth; at a run they pursue the holy band; those who are called hasten, longing to receive the Father. Come to me too, old man — yes, you — leaving Thebes, and casting away your divination and your Bacchic frenzy, be led by the hand to the truth. Behold, I give you the wood to lean upon; hasten, Teiresias, believe; you shall see. Christ shines more brightly than the sun, through whom the eyes of the blind see again; night shall flee from you, fire shall be afraid, death shall depart; you shall see the heavens, O old man, you who do not see Thebes. O the truly holy mysteries! O the pure light! I am led with torches to behold the heavens and God; I become holy as I am initiated; the Lord is hierophant, and seals the initiate as he leads him to the light, and presents to the Father him who has believed, to be kept through the ages. These are the revels of my mysteries. If you will, be initiated too, and you shall dance with angels about the unbegotten and imperishable and only truly existing God, the Word of God hymning together with us. This Jesus is eternal, one great High Priest of the one God who is at once the same and the Father; he prays for men and exhorts men: "Hearken, you countless tribes" — or rather, all you of men that are rational, both barbarians and Greeks; the whole race of men I call, of whom I am the Maker by the will of the Father. Come to me, to be marshalled under one God and the one Word of God; and do not only excel the irrational animals by reason, but, alone of all mortal things, take from me the harvest of immortality. For I will, I will impart to you this grace too, supplying the whole benefit, incorruption; and I give you the Word as a gift, the knowledge of God; I give you myself, perfect. For this is what I am; this is what God wills; this is 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 all things, the will of the Father. O you who were of old images, but not all of them like — I wish to set you right toward the archetype, that you may become like to me also. I will anoint you with the unguent of faith, through which you cast off corruption, and I will show bare the figure of righteousness, through which you ascend to God. "Come unto me, all you that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest; take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am gentle and lowly of heart, and you shall find rest unto your souls; for my yoke is good and my burden is light." Let us hasten, let us run, O statues of the Word, dear to God and like to God; let us hasten, let us run, let us take up his yoke, let us put on incorruption, let us love Christ, the fair charioteer of men; he led the colt under the yoke together with the old beast, and, having harnessed the pair of mankind, he steers the chariot straight toward immortality, hastening to God, to fulfil clearly what he hinted at — first into Jerusalem, but now driving into the heavens, a fairest spectacle to the Father, the eternal, victorious Son. Let us, then, become emulous of fair things and lovers of God, and let us gain the greatest of goods, God and life. Our helper is the Word; let us take courage in him, and let no such longing for silver and gold, nor for glory, ever come upon us, as the longing for the very Word of truth. For neither is it pleasing to God himself, if we count the things of greatest worth as least, and choose rather the manifest outrages of ignorance and unlearning and idleness and idolatry, and the uttermost impiety. For not without reason do the children of the philosophers reckon all that the senseless do to be acts of unholiness and impiety; and, describing ignorance itself as a form of madness, they confess that the many are nothing else than mad. There is no room, then, to doubt, or to be mad; but, holding fast to the truth with all our strength, we must follow God with all our power, being sober, and reckoning all things to be his, as indeed they are; and besides, having learned that we are his fairest possession, we must entrust ourselves to God, loving the Lord God, and reckoning this our work throughout the whole of life. And if the things of friends are common, and man is dear to God — for indeed he is a friend of God, the Word mediating — then all things become man's, because all things are God's, and all things are common to the two friends, God and man. It is time, then, for us to say that the pious man alone is rich and sober and well-born, and in this respect an image of God with the likeness, and to declare and believe that, having become just and holy with prudence through Christ Jesus, he is to this extent already like even to God. For the prophet does not conceal the grace, saying: "I said, You are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High." For us, us he has adopted, and of us alone he wishes to be called Father, not of the disobedient. For thus indeed stand our affairs, who are the followers of Christ: as the counsels, such also the words; as the words, such the deeds; and as the works, such the life. Good throughout is the whole life of men who have come to know Christ. Enough, I think, of words, though out of love toward man I have gone on rather far, pouring out what I had from God, as one exhorting toward the greatest of goods, salvation. For concerning the life that has no pause at all, not even the words are willing ever to cease their hierophany. And for you there is left this final end, the profitable, to choose — either judgement or grace; for I, for my part, deem it not even worthy of doubt which of the two is better, nor is it lawful to compare life with destruction.