Refuting Pagan Worship
2. Humanity Created to Know God
Wickedness did not exist in the beginning. Nor does it exist even now in those who are holy, or belong in any way to their nature. People later began to invent it and develop it to their own harm. This also led them to invent idols, treating what did not exist as though it did.
God, the Maker and King of all, exists beyond all substance and beyond human discovery. Because he is good and supremely noble, he made the human race in his own image through his own Word, our Savior Jesus Christ. By this likeness to himself, he made humanity capable of seeing and knowing realities. He also gave human beings a conception and knowledge even of his own eternity. His purpose was that they should preserve their nature intact, never lose their understanding of God, and never draw back from fellowship with the holy ones. With the grace of the one who gave it, and with God’s own power from the Father’s Word, they could rejoice and have fellowship with God, living an immortal life, unharmed and truly blessed.
With nothing to hinder his knowledge of God, a human being in his purity always beholds the Father’s Image, God the Word, in whose image he himself was made. He is filled with awe as he contemplates the providence that reaches the whole universe through the Word. He rises above the things perceived by the senses and every bodily appearance. Through the power of his mind, he holds fast to the divine realities in heaven that thought can perceive.
When the human mind does not occupy itself with bodies, and no bodily desire enters and mixes with it from outside, it remains entirely above them. It dwells within itself, as it was originally made. Then, transcending everything perceived by the senses and everything human, it is lifted on high. Seeing the Word, it also sees the Word’s Father in him. It delights in contemplating him and is renewed by its desire for him.
This is precisely how Holy Scripture describes the first human being created, whose Hebrew name was Adam. At first his mind was directed toward God, in a freedom untroubled by shame. He associated with the holy ones as he contemplated realities perceived by the mind, in the place where he lived. Holy Moses figuratively called that place a garden. Thus purity of soul is sufficient in itself to reflect God, as the Lord also says: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
3. Turning from God to the Body
This, then, is how the Creator fashioned the human race, as we have said, and how he intended it to remain. But people made light of better things and held back from understanding them. They began instead to seek things nearer to themselves.
Nearest to them were the body and its senses. They turned their minds away from realities perceived by thought and began to focus on themselves. As they did so, clinging to the body and other things perceived by the senses, they were deceived, so to speak, by their own surroundings. They fell into desire for themselves, preferring what was their own to the contemplation of what belonged to God. They became at home in these things and refused to leave what was so near. They entangled their souls in bodily pleasures, disturbed and confused by every kind of desire, and entirely forgot the power they had originally received from God.
We can see the truth of this in the first human being made, according to what Holy Scripture tells us about him. As long as he kept his mind directed toward God and the contemplation of God, he turned away from contemplating the body. But when he followed the serpent’s advice, abandoned the consideration of God, and began to focus on himself, the first humans not only fell into bodily desire but also knew they were naked. Knowing this, they were ashamed. Yet they knew themselves to be stripped less of clothing than of the contemplation of divine realities. They had transferred their understanding to the opposite things. After abandoning the consideration of the one true God and their desire for him, they pursued various desires, including those of each bodily sense.
Then, as commonly happens, they formed a desire for each of these things and became accustomed to those desires, until they were even afraid to leave them. The soul thus became subject to cowardice, fears, pleasures, and thoughts of mortality. Unwilling to abandon its desires, it fears death and separation from the body. Again, when it desires something but finds no satisfaction, it learns to commit murder and injustice. We are naturally led, then, to explain as well as we can how it does this.
4. The Soul’s Misuse of Freedom
The soul abandoned the contemplation of realities perceived by thought. It fully exercised the body’s various powers and took pleasure in contemplating the body. Seeing that pleasure was good for it, the soul was misled. It misused the name of good and thought that pleasure was the very essence of goodness. It was like a man out of his mind who asked for a sword to attack everyone he met, and thought this showed a sound mind.
Having fallen in love with pleasure, the soul began to pursue it in various ways. It is active by nature, and even when it turns away from what is good, it does not lose its power of movement. It therefore continues to act, but no longer in accordance with virtue or with a view to seeing God. Instead, it imagines false things and puts its power to a new use, abusing it to obtain the pleasures it has devised. After all, it was made with power over itself.
The soul can incline toward what is good, but it can also reject it. In rejecting the good, it naturally entertains thoughts of the opposite, for it cannot cease its activity altogether. As I said before, it is active by nature. Knowing its power over itself, it sees that it can use the parts of its body in either direction: toward what exists or toward what does not exist.
Good exists, while evil does not. By what exists, I mean what is good, since it has its pattern in God, who exists. By what does not exist, I mean what is evil, insofar as evil consists in a false imagining in human thought. The body has eyes to see creation and recognize the Creator through its entirely harmonious arrangement. It has ears to listen to the divine Scriptures and God’s laws, and hands both to perform necessary work and to raise to God in prayer. Yet the soul abandons the contemplation of what is good and activity within its sphere. It wanders away and moves toward the opposite.
As I said, the soul sees its power and abuses it. It has discovered that it can also move the body’s parts in the opposite direction. Instead of looking at creation, it turns the eye toward objects of desire, showing that it has this power too. It thinks that merely exercising its power preserves its own dignity, and that it commits no sin by doing as it pleases. It does not know that it was made not merely to move, but to move in the right direction. This is why an apostolic saying assures us: “All things are lawful, but not all things are expedient” (1 Cor 10:23).
5. Choosing the Wrong Direction
Human boldness paid attention to what it could do, rather than to what was beneficial and fitting, and began to do the opposite of what was right. It turned the hands in the wrong direction and made them commit murder. It led hearing into disobedience, and other parts of the body into adultery rather than lawful procreation. It turned the tongue from right speech to slander, insult, and perjury; the hands again to theft and striking others; the sense of smell to many kinds of lust-provoking scents; the feet to being swift to shed blood; and the stomach to drunkenness and insatiable gluttony (Rom 3:10 and following verses).
All these things are the soul’s vice and sin. Their only cause is the rejection of better things. Imagine a charioteer who mounts his chariot on the racetrack but pays no attention to the goal toward which he should drive. Ignoring it, he simply drives the horse however he can, or rather, however he wishes. He often drives into people he meets and often down steep slopes, rushing wherever he urges himself by the team’s speed. He thinks that by racing like this he has not missed the goal. He pays attention only to the racing, without seeing that he has gone far wide of the goal.
So too the soul turns from the path toward God and drives the body’s parts beyond what is proper. Or rather, through its own action it is itself driven along with them. It sins and makes trouble for itself, without seeing that it has strayed from the path and turned aside from the goal of truth. The blessed Paul, who bore Christ within him, was looking toward that goal when he said: “I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of Christ Jesus” (Phil 3:14). Thus the holy man made goodness his aim and never did evil.
6. Does Evil Exist Independently?
Some of the Greeks strayed from the right path and did not know Christ. They attributed a substantial, independent existence to evil. In this they make a twofold mistake. If evil has an independent existence and being of its own, they deny that the Creator made everything. But if they mean that he made everything, they must admit that he also made evil, since they include evil among the things that exist.
This must appear contradictory and impossible. Evil does not come from good, nor is it within good or produced by good. Otherwise, good would no longer be good, since its nature would be mixed or it would be a cause of evil.
Those who have separated from the Church’s teaching and shipwrecked their faith (1 Tim 1:19) also wrongly think that evil has a substantial existence. But they arbitrarily imagine another god besides the true one, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. They suppose this other god to be the uncreated producer of evil and head of wickedness, and also the maker of creation. We can easily refute these people from the divine Scriptures and even from human understanding itself, the very source of their insane imaginings.
To begin with, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ confirms Moses’ words in his own Gospels, saying, “The Lord God is one” (Mark 12:29), and, “I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth” (Matt 11:25). If God is one, and also Lord of heaven and earth, how could there be another god beside him? What room is there for the god they imagine, if the one true God fills everything within heaven and earth? How could someone else have created what the Savior says is under the lordship of God, the Father of Christ?
Perhaps they would say that the two are, so to speak, evenly balanced, and that the evil god can overcome the good God. But if they say this, see how far they descend into impiety. When powers are equal, it is impossible to discover which is superior and better. If one exists even against the other’s will, both are equally strong and equally weak. They are equal because the very existence of either defeats the other’s will. They are weak because what happens opposes their wills. The good God exists despite the evil one, and the evil god equally exists despite the good.
7. Evil Arises from the Soul’s Choice
In particular, they face this reply. If visible things are the work of the evil god, what is the work of the good God? Nothing can be seen except the maker’s work. What evidence is there that the good God exists at all, if he has no works by which he can be known? A maker is known by his works.
Again, how could two opposing first principles exist? What separates them so that they can exist apart? They cannot exist together, because they destroy each other. Nor can one be contained within the other, since their natures are unmixed and unlike. What separates them must therefore have a third nature and itself be God. But what could the nature of this third thing be: good or evil? It would be impossible to determine, since it cannot have the nature of both.
Their notion is plainly unsound, then, and the truth of the Church’s teaching about God must be clear. Evil has not been with God or in God from the beginning, nor does it have a substantial existence. Rather, when people failed to behold the good, they began to devise and imagine for themselves what did not exist, according to their own pleasure.
Imagine someone closing his eyes tightly while the sun shines and its light illuminates the whole earth. He imagines darkness where no darkness exists, then wanders as though in darkness, often falling and going down steep slopes. He thinks it is dark rather than light. Imagining that he sees, he sees nothing at all. In the same way, the human soul closes the eyes with which it can see God and imagines evil for itself. Moving within this evil, it does not know that, while it thinks it is doing something, it is doing nothing. It imagines what does not exist and does not remain in its original nature. Its present condition is plainly the product of its own disorder.
The soul was made to see God and receive light from him. Yet of its own accord it has sought perishable things and darkness instead of God. As the Spirit says somewhere in Scripture, “God made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions” (Eccl 7:29). This is how people first discovered, devised, and imagined evil for themselves. Now it is time to explain how they descended into the madness of idolatry. You will see that the invention of idols is entirely due to evil, rather than good. What originates in evil can never be called good in any respect, since it is altogether evil.
8. Forgetting God and Inventing Idols
The human soul was not satisfied with inventing evil. Little by little it began to venture into something worse. It had experienced a variety of pleasures and was surrounded by forgetfulness of divine realities. It delighted in the body’s passions and kept its attention on them, on present things alone, and on opinions about them. It ceased to think that anything existed beyond what could be seen, or that anything was good except temporal and bodily things.
The soul thus turned away and forgot that it was made in the image of the good God. It no longer used the power within itself to see God the Word, in whose likeness it was made. Instead, it departed from itself and imagined and invented what did not exist. Entangled bodily desires concealed the mirror, so to speak, within the soul, through which alone it could see the Father’s Image. It no longer saw what a soul ought to behold. Instead, it was carried about by everything and saw only what the senses could perceive.
Weighed down by every fleshly desire and distracted among the impressions of these things, the soul imagined that the God its understanding had forgotten could be found in bodily, perceptible things. It gave the name of God to visible things, honoring only what it desired and what pleased its eyes. Evil thus brings idolatry in its wake. Having learned to devise evil, which has no reality in itself, people likewise invented gods for themselves that had no real existence.
It is as though someone had plunged into deep water and could no longer see the light or what the light reveals. His eyes are turned downward, and the water lies above him. Perceiving only what is in the depths, he thinks that nothing exists beyond it, and that what he sees is the only true reality. In the same way, people in former times lost their reason and plunged into the desires and imaginings of fleshly things. They forgot the knowledge and glory of God. Their reasoning became dull, or rather, they followed unreason. They made gods for themselves out of visible things, glorifying the creature rather than the Creator (Rom 1:25). They deified the works rather than the Master, God, their cause and maker.
In the comparison just given, people who plunge into deep water reach darker and deeper places the farther they descend. So it is with humanity. People did not remain with a simple form of idolatry or keep to what they had begun. The longer they persisted in their original condition, the more new superstitions they invented. Unsatisfied with their first evils, they filled themselves with others. They advanced further into utter shamefulness and surpassed themselves in impiety. Divine Scripture bears witness to this when it says, “When the wicked cometh unto the depth of evils, he despiseth” (Prov 18:3).
9. The Growing Forms of Idolatry
Human understanding had now broken away from God. As people sank lower in their ideas and imaginings, they first gave the honor due to God to the heavens, the sun, the moon, and the stars. They thought these were not only gods but also the causes of other gods below them. Then their dark imaginings sank still lower. They gave the name of gods to the upper ether, the air, and the things in the air. Advancing further in evil, they began to celebrate as gods the elements and principles of which bodies are composed: heat, cold, dryness, and wetness.
Like people who have fallen flat and crawl through the slime like land snails, the most impious of humanity sank farther and farther from the conception of God. They then set up human beings and human forms as gods, some still living and others after death. Planning and imagining still worse things, they finally transferred the divine and supernatural name of God even to stones, pieces of wood, creatures that crawl on land and in water, and wild animals without reason. They bestowed every divine honor on these, turning away from the true and only real God, the Father of Christ.
If only the boldness of these foolish people had stopped even there, instead of going further in their impious confusion! Some people’s understanding has sunk so low and their minds have grown so dark that they have devised gods from things that do not exist at all and have no place among created things. They combine the rational with the irrational, mixing things unlike in nature, and worship the result as gods. Examples include the Egyptians’ dog-headed, snake-headed, and donkey-headed gods, and the Libyans’ ram-headed Ammon. Others divide the parts of the human body, the head, shoulder, hand, and foot, and set up each as a god, deifying them as though their religion were not satisfied with the whole body intact.
Others push impiety to the utmost. They deify the motive behind the invention of these things and their own wickedness: pleasure and lust. They worship these, as with their Eros and Aphrodite at Paphos. Still others seem to compete with them in depravity. They venture to make gods of their rulers or even their sons, either to honor their princes or out of fear of their tyranny. Such are the Cretan Zeus, so renowned among them, and the Arcadian Hermes; Dionysus among the Indians; Isis, Osiris, and Horus among the Egyptians; and, in our own time, Antinous, the favorite of Hadrian, emperor of the Romans.
People know that Antinous was merely a man, and no respectable man at that, but one full of sexual immorality. Yet they worship him out of fear of the man who commanded it. Hadrian had come to stay in Egypt. When Antinous, who served his pleasure, died, Hadrian ordered that he be worshiped. He remained in love with the youth even after his death. Yet in doing so he convincingly exposed himself and supplied evidence against all idolatry: people invented it for no other reason than the lust of those who imagined it. God’s wisdom bears witness to this beforehand when it says, “The devising of idols was the beginning of fornication” (Wis 14:12).
Do not be surprised or think what we say hard to believe. Not long ago, and perhaps even now, the Roman Senate voted a place among the gods for the emperors who had ruled them from the beginning, either for all of them or for those it chose and approved. It decreed that they should be worshiped. Those it opposed, it treated as enemies and called human beings, acknowledging their real nature. But those who were popular with it, it ordered to be worshiped for their virtue. It acted as though it had the power to make gods, although its members were themselves human and did not claim to be anything other than mortal.
If they are to make gods, they ought to be gods themselves. What makes something must be better than what it makes. A judge necessarily has authority over the one judged. Someone who gives what he possesses bestows a favor. Every king who grants what he has to give is greater and holds a higher position than those who receive it. If, then, they decree that anyone they please is a god, they ought first to be gods themselves. Yet the strange thing is that, by dying as human beings, they expose the falsehood of their own decree about those they deified.
10. Mortals Made into Gods
This custom is not new, and it did not begin with the Roman Senate. It existed long before and was practiced in earlier times to devise idols. The gods long renowned among the Greeks, Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Hephaestus, and Hermes, and among the females Hera, Demeter, Athena, and Artemis, received the title of gods by a decree of Theseus, whom Greek history describes. The people who pass such decrees die as human beings and are mourned, while those for whom the decrees are passed are worshiped as gods. What extreme inconsistency and madness! They know who passed the decree, yet give greater honor to those who received it.
If only their idolatrous madness had stopped at males, and they had not extended the title of deity to females! Even women, whom it is unsafe to admit to deliberation on public affairs, they worship and serve with the honor due to God. These include those whom Theseus ordered to be worshiped, as already mentioned; among the Egyptians, Isis, the Maid, and the Younger One; and among others, Aphrodite. I do not consider it decent even to mention the names of the others, so full are they of every kind of grotesqueness.
Many people, in ancient times and in our own, lost loved ones, brothers, relatives, and wives. Many women lost their husbands. Nature proved all these to be mortal human beings. Yet those who survived made representations of them, devised sacrifices, and consecrated them. Later generations, moved by the likeness and the artist’s brilliance, worshiped them as gods, contradicting nature (Wis 14:12 and following verses).
Their parents had mourned them because they did not regard them as gods. Had they known them to be gods, they would not have lamented them as though they had perished. Indeed, they represented them in images precisely because they not only did not think them gods but did not believe they existed any longer at all. Seeing their likeness in an image was meant to console them for their being no more. Yet foolish people pray to them as gods and bestow on them the honor of the true God.
In Egypt, for example, a funeral lament is celebrated to this day for Osiris, Horus, Typho, and the others. The cauldrons at Dodona and the Corybantes in Crete prove that Zeus is a man rather than a god, and a man born of a cannibal father. Strangely enough, even Plato, the sage whom the Greeks admire, with all his celebrated understanding of God, goes down with Socrates to Piraeus to worship Artemis, a fiction of human art.
11. Scripture and the Deeds of Zeus
Scripture taught us long ago about these and similar inventions of idolatrous madness. It said: “The devising of idols was the beginning of fornication, and the invention of them, the corruption of life. For neither were they from the beginning, neither shall they be for ever. For the vain glory of men they entered into the world, and therefore shall they come shortly to an end. For a father afflicted with untimely mourning when he hath made an image of his child soon taken away, now honoured him as a god which was then a dead man, and delivered to those that were under him ceremonies and sacrifices. Thus in process of time an ungodly custom grown strong was kept as a law. And graven images were worshipped by the commands of kings. Whom men could not honour in presence because they dwelt afar off, they took the counterfeit of his visage from afar, and made an express image of the king whom they honoured, to the end that by this their forwardness they might flatter him that was absent as if he were present. Also the singular diligence of the artificer did help to set forward the ignorant to more superstition: for he, peradventure, willing to please one in authority, forced all his skill to make the resemblance of the best fashion: and so the multitude, allured by the grace of the work, took him now for a god, which a little before was but honoured as a man: and this was an occasion to deceive the world, for men serving either calamity or tyranny, did ascribe unto stones and stocks the incommunicable Name” (Wis 14:12 and following verses).
Scripture thus bears witness to the origin and invention of idols. It is now time to show you how they can be refuted by evidence drawn less from outside than from these people’s own opinions about their idols. To begin at the lowest level, anyone who examined the actions of those they call gods would find that they were not gods at all, but among the most contemptible of human beings.
What a sight the poets give us of Zeus’s loves and sexual misconduct! What a story we hear of him carrying off Ganymede and committing secret adulteries, while at other times he panics in fear that the Trojans’ walls will be destroyed against his wishes! What a sight to see him grieving over the death of his son Sarpedon, wishing to help him but unable to do so! When the other so-called gods, Athena, Hera, and Poseidon, plot against him, he is helped by Thetis, a woman, and by the hundred-handed Aegaeon.
We see him overcome by pleasures, enslaved to women, and undertaking adventures for their sake in the disguises of wild animals, crawling creatures, and birds. Again, we see him hiding from his father’s plots, or see Cronos bound by him, or see him mutilating his father. Is it fitting to regard someone as a god when he has committed such deeds and is accused of things that even the public laws of the Romans forbid mere human beings to do?
12. Gods Accused of Human Vices
To mention a few examples out of many, without going on at length: who would not despise Zeus and pronounce him worthy of death on seeing his lawless, corrupt behavior toward Semele, Leda, Alcmene, Artemis, Leto, Maia, Europe, Danae, and Antiope? Who would not do so on seeing what he dared to undertake with his own sister, making the same woman both his wife and his sister? He not only committed adultery but also deified those born of his adulteries and raised them to heaven. He used their deification to conceal his lawlessness. Such were Dionysus, Heracles, the Dioscuri, Hermes, Perseus, and Soteira.
Who can see the so-called gods in irreconcilable conflict at Troy over the Greeks and Trojans without recognizing their weakness? Their mutual jealousies drove even mortals into conflict. Who can see Ares and Aphrodite wounded by Diomedes; Hera and Aidoneus, the one from beneath the earth whom they call a god, wounded by Heracles; Dionysus wounded by Perseus; Athena by Arcas; and Hephaestus hurled down and left lame, without recognizing their true nature? When he hears that they can decay and suffer, he will refuse to call them gods. He will be certain that they are merely human beings, and weak ones at that. He will admire those who inflicted the wounds rather than those who suffered them.
Who can see Ares committing adultery with Aphrodite, Hephaestus devising a trap for them both, and the other so-called gods summoned by Hephaestus to look at the adultery, coming and witnessing their sexual misconduct, without laughing and recognizing their worthlessness? Who would not laugh at the drunken folly and misconduct of Heracles toward Omphale?
Their deeds of pleasure, their shameless loves, and their divine images of gold, silver, bronze, iron, stone, and wood need no serious argument to expose them. The facts are abhorrent in themselves and alone provide enough evidence of the deception. Our chief feeling must be pity for those deceived about them. People hate the adulterer who interferes with their own wives, yet they are not ashamed to deify the teachers of adultery. They refrain from incest themselves, yet worship those who practice it. They acknowledge that corrupting children is evil, yet serve those accused of it. They do not blush to attribute to those they call gods things that the laws forbid even among human beings.
13. Worshiping the Work of Human Hands
Again, people who worship wood and stone do not see that they call portions of these materials gods while trampling on and burning other portions that are no different. In their folly, they carve and worship what they were using only a short time before. They neither see nor consider that they are worshiping the carver’s art rather than gods.
As long as the stone is uncut and the wood unworked, they walk on the one and frequently use the other for their own purposes, including less honorable ones. But once the artist has shaped them with his skill and impressed the form of a man or woman on the material, they thank the artist and worship them as gods, after buying them from the carver. Often the image-maker himself, as though forgetting his own work, prays to what he has made. He calls gods the things he was just trimming and chipping.
If these things must be admired, it would be better to admire the skilled craftsman’s art, rather than honor the products above their producer. The material has not adorned the art; the art has adorned and deified the material. It would therefore be much more just for them to worship the artist than his products. He existed before the gods produced by his art, and they came into being in the form he chose to give them.
As it is, they set justice aside and dishonor skill and art by worshiping their products. When the man who made them is dead, they honor his works as immortal. Yet without daily attention, those works would certainly come to a natural end in time.
How can we fail to pity them for this too? They can see, yet worship things that cannot see. They can hear, yet pray to things that cannot hear. Born with life and reason, human beings call things gods that cannot move and have no life at all. Strangest of all, they serve beings as their masters while keeping those beings under their own power. Do not imagine that this is merely my assertion, or that I am slandering them. The evidence is before our eyes, and anyone who wishes can see such things.
14. Scripture Condemns Image Worship
Holy Scripture provides better testimony about all this. It tells us beforehand: “Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. Eyes have they and will not see; a mouth have they and will not speak; ears have they and will not hear; noses have they and will not smell; hands have they and will not handle; feet have they and will not walk; they will not speak through their throat. Like unto them be they that make them” (Ps 115:5 and following verses).
