Against the Pagans 3 part 1/3

Long since indeed a full, careful, and complete answer has been made to all these charges — or rather revilings, to speak the truth — by men eminent in this field and who have earned the knowledge of this truth; nor has any point of any question been passed over that has not been refuted in a thousand ways and by the most forcible reasonings. It is therefore not necessary to linger longer over this part of the case. For it is not that the matter cannot stand without champions, nor will the Christian religion be proved true on the ground that it has very many who assent to it and has taken its authority from men.

It is content with its own strength and rests upon the foundations of its own truth, nor is it stripped of its power even if it has no defender — nay, even if all tongues were to work against it and strive against it, and conspire with the animosity of a united consent to abrogate belief in it. Now let us return to the order from which we necessarily digressed a little before, lest, our defence being longer interrupted, it be said that we have conceded to our slanderers the palm of a proven charge. For they urge this: "If divine matters are at heart with you, why do you neither worship nor adore other gods together with us, nor share common rites with your peoples, and join in the observances of our religions?" We can meanwhile reply:

For the discharge of the worship due to the Deity, the first God suffices us — the first God, I say, the Father of things and Lord, the Founder and Governor of all — in Him we worship all that must be worshipped, we adore what it is fitting to adore, we do reverence to what claims the homage of veneration. For since we hold fast the very Head of the Godhead, from which the very divinity of all divine beings, whatever they are, is derived, we deem it superfluous to go through each one individually, since we neither know who they are nor what names they have, nor, moreover, can we have any clear, grasped, or ascertained knowledge of their number. And as in earthly kingdoms we are compelled by no necessity

to worship by name, alongside the princes, those set within the royal households; rather, in the worship of the kings themselves, whatever is attached to them is comprehended by a silent deference, as it feels itself to be — on no other principle, whoever these gods are that you set before us as existing, if they are royal offspring and spring from a princely head, even though they receive no worship from us by name, they nevertheless understand that they are honoured in common with their king and are included in the veneration paid to him. And this indeed would be so put forward by us, provided it is clear and established that, besides the king and prince himself, there are other heads of divine powers, which, arranged and set apart by number, form as it were a certain populace of a plebeian multitude.

Nor would you have us regard, in sacred buildings, as gods those effigies and images which you yourselves also understand — and refuse and decline to confess — to be most worthless shapes of clay and childish fabrications of craftsmen. And when we speak with you concerning the divine matter, we demand that you show this: that there are other gods by nature, by power, and by name, not set before us in images, which we see, but in that substance in which it is fitting to reckon that the power of so great a name ought to be estimated. But it is not our intention to linger longer over this part of the case, lest we seem to wish to stir up the greatest quarrels and to join in tumultuous contests.

Let there be, as you proclaim, this populace of divinities; let there be countless tribes of gods; we assent, we acquiesce, we close our eyes, and we do not fasten upon this as anything doubtful or ambiguous in dispute. Yet this we demand and ask to hear from you: whence has it been ascertained by you, or by what reasonings grasped, that the gods you suppose to exist and worship are those that are in heaven, and not some others of an unknown character and name? For it may well be that both those exist whom you do not recall, and those you are confident exist are found in no part of nature.

For you have not at some time flown up to heaven, to the stars, and beheld the faces and countenances of each, and, having remembered that yonder gods are these, established the worship of the same here as of beings known and seen. But again we desire to hear this too: whether these names by which you call them have been imposed by you, or whether they themselves assumed these for themselves on their naming-days. If these are divine and heavenly names, who reported them to you? But if, on the other hand, they have these appellations affixed by you, how were you able to give designations to those whom you never at any time saw, nor had any knowledge of what sort or who they were?

But, as you wish and believe, and as you are persuaded, these are gods; let them be called even by these names by which popular vulgarity leads them to be reckoned by the crowd. Yet whence is it known to you how many names make up their census, or whether there are any unknown to you and never at any time brought into use and notice? For it is not easy to know whether the multitude of their number is defined and fixed, or is without any total of population and is bounded by no reckonings of any computation. For let us suppose that you worship a thousand gods, or rather five thousand: yet in the nature of things it may perchance come to pass that there are a hundred thousand gods, or, it may be, even more than this — nay, as we said a little before, it may be that the sum of the gods is none at all,

and bounded by no numerable limitation. Either, then, you too are impious, who do not perform the duties owed to the rest apart from a few gods; or, if you claim pardon for yourselves in your ignorance of the others, you will procure for us that same pardon, if for a like reason we abstain from the religious rites of those whom we do not know to exist at all. And yet, let no one perversely judge that we are unwilling to undertake the sacred observances of the rest, whatever divinities they are. For we stretch out devoted minds and suppliant hands, and do not scorn to approach wherever you invite us, provided only we learn who these divine beings are that you thrust upon us, and whom it is fitting to join to the veneration of the highest King and Prince.

"Saturn," he says, "and Janus, Minerva, Juno, Apollo, Venus, Triptolemus, Hercules, and the others besides, to whom religious antiquity has consecrated magnificent temples in almost all cities." You might perhaps have been able to invite us to the worship of these divinities, had you not yourselves first, in the foulness of base opinions, feigned such things about them as not only defiled their dignity but proved them, by the qualities attached to them, to be no gods at all. For, in the first place, we cannot be brought to believe this: that that immortal and most excellent nature is divided by sexes, and that one part are males, another part females.

Indeed, men of living heart have long since fully expounded this topic, both in Roman letters and in Greek, and before all Tullius, the most eloquent of the Roman race, fearing no odium of impiety, frankly, steadfastly, and freely showed with the greater piety what he felt about such an opinion; from whom, if you were to take up matters composed with the truth of judgement, and not seek after the brilliancies of words, this case would have been fully argued, nor, as they say, would it demand of us from mere infants a second pleading.

But why should I say that grace of words and splendour of speech is to be sought from this man, when I know that there are not a few who turn away from and flee his books on this subject, and are unwilling to admit to their ear a reading that overcomes the presumptions of their own opinions? And when I hear others muttering indignantly and saying that it ought to be decreed by the senate that these writings, by which the Christian religion is proved and the authority of antiquity overwhelmed, should be abolished? Nay rather, if you are confident that you say anything ascertained about your gods, convict Cicero of error, refute, rebut, and prove that he prates rashly and impiously. For to intercept writings and to wish to suppress a published reading is not to defend the gods, but to fear the testimony of truth.

And yet, lest some inconsiderate person raise a calumny against us also — as though we believed the God whom we worship to be male, for this reason forsooth, that when we speak of Him we pronounce it in the masculine gender — let him understand that it is not sex, but that His appellation and designation is brought forth by the usage and familiarity of speech. For God is not male, but His name is of the masculine gender, which you cannot say of your own in your religion. For you are accustomed to say in your prayers, "whether thou art a god or a goddess"; and this qualification of doubt shows that you assign sex to the gods by the very distinction. We cannot therefore be brought to believe that God has a body. For bodies must needs exist, if there are

males and females, distinguished by a differentiation of gender. For who, even of the slightest sense, does not know that the sexes of earthly living creatures were instituted and formed by their Maker for no other reason than that, through the coitus and unions of bodies, this fleeting and slipping thing might endure by the perpetual renewal of continuous succession? What then? Shall we say that gods beget, that gods are born, and that on this account the parts of the generative members have been added to them, that they might be able to supply offspring, and that, as each new brood springs up, a renewing substitution might replace whatever a former age had taken away?

Therefore, if these things are so — that is, if the gods above beget, and if they experience their sexes according to earthly laws, and are immortal and are not made effete by the chills of old age — it follows that all things ought to be full of gods, and that the countless heavens cannot contain their multitude, since they too beget perpetually, and through the offspring of offspring their numberlessness, ever multiplied, is enlarged: or, if the obscenity of coupling is, as is fitting, absent from the gods, what cause or reason will be shown why they are marked with those parts by which sex is wont to recognise itself by the promptings of its own lusts?

For it is not likely that these are had in vain, or that their improvident nature wished to sport with them, so as to heap upon them parts they were not to use. For as the hands, feet, eyes, and the rest of the structure of the members are each appointed to their own certain uses and offices, so it is fitting to believe that these parts have been provided for the discharge of their own function: or it must be confessed that in the bodies of the gods there is something vacant, which has been fabricated in vain and to no purpose. What say you, O holy and unpolluted high priests of the religions? Do the gods, then, have sexes, and do they carry about the foulnesses of generative members, which it is infamous to bring forth from modest mouths by their own names?

What then now remains, but that we should believe them to riot in the frenzies of lust after the manner of unclean quadrupeds, to go with rabid desires into mutual embraces, and at last, their bodies broken and dissolved, to grow faint with the enervation of pleasure? And since certain things are proper to the female sex, it follows that we must believe the goddesses too to discharge their laws with their recurring months, to conceive with squeamish loathing and to carry conceptions, to miscarry, to come to term, and sometimes with too-hasty birth to bring forth seven-month broods. O pure, O holy divinity, set apart and severed from every stain of baseness!

The mind craves and burns to behold, in those great halls and in the palaces of heaven, gods and goddesses with bodies unveiled and naked — Venus with Iacchus, full-breasted, as the Lucretian Muse proclaims; Hellespontine Priapus carrying about, among virgin goddesses and matrons, those parts of his ever ready and prepared for the campaign of his battles. It craves, I say, to see goddesses pregnant, goddesses with young, lingering with the peevishness of the inward burden as their bellies swell day by day, others in labour with long-drawn travail and seeking the hands of midwives, others pierced with heavy darts and the sharp pangs of pains, wailing, tortured, and amid all these imploring the aid of Juno Lucina.

Is it not far more upright to speak evil, to rail, and to heap other reproaches upon the gods, than under a pious pretext to presume such monstrous things about them, with the unworthiness of your opinions? And do you dare to ascribe to us the cause of the gods' offence, when — if judgement be made — it will be found most certainly that this rests with you, and that the affront lies elsewhere than you suppose? For if the gods, as you say, are affected by anger and grow hot with the indignations of their minds, why should we not think that they bear with difficulty, nay most grievously, that sexes are given to them by you, by which dogs and swine are formed, and that, since you believe them so, they are fashioned in no other way and set forth with ignominious display?

Therefore, since these things are so, O you are the cause of all miseries; you drive on the gods, you rouse them to assail the lands with every evil and to contrive daily some new mischief, whereby they may avenge themselves, exasperated by so many injuries and revilings from you — revilings, I say, and injuries, which partly by shameful fables, partly by unbecoming opinions, which your theologians, which your poets, which you yourselves also celebrate in ignominious rites, you will find that they have brought human affairs to ruin and that the gods have thrown down the helm, if indeed the care of ruling mortals and administering their fortunes belongs to them.

For they have no cause to be angry with us, whom they see and perceive neither to worship nor to deride them, as is said, and to esteem far more honourably of the dignity of their name than you do — than to believe it. So much for sex. Now let us come to the appearance and forms in which you believe the gods above to be delineated, nay, in which, once fashioned, you place them in the most spacious seats of temples. And let no one in this place bring against us Jewish and Sadducee fables, as though we too assigned forms to God; for this is thought to be said in their writings, and, as it were, affirmed as a sure thing and upon authority:

which either do not pertain to us at all, nor have anything in common with us in any portion, or, if they are, as is believed, allied to us, you must seek out teachers of a higher understanding, through whom you may learn in what ways it is fitting to unfold the clouds and wrappings of those writings. Our opinion concerning this is such: that all the divine nature, which neither at some time began to be, nor will ever come to a term of life, lacks bodily lineaments and possesses no effigies of forms, by which the outer boundary of members is wont to bring their joinings to an end. For whatever is such, we judge to be mortal and perishable;

nor do we believe that what is confined within extreme bounds, which a necessary extremity encloses, can obtain perpetual duration. But indeed you gods — it is too little that you embrace them with the measurement of forms, with a line, and delimit them by the human standard, and, what is far more unworthy, that you bound them by the outline of earthly bodies. What then shall we say? That the gods carry a head gathered into a smooth roundness, bound to the back by the ties of sinews and to the breast, and, for the necessary bendings of the neck, propped up by the joinings of the little vertebrae and by a bony framework?

But if we shall accept this as true, it follows further that they have ears too, bored through with curving windings; the movable little orbs of the eyes, shaded by the margins of the brows; the overhanging pent of the nostrils, passable for the mucous discharges and for the current of breath; teeth of three kinds for the working over of food, and composed for three offices; hands as ministers of works, tractable by the joints, the fingers, and the mobility of the elbows; feet for sustaining the body, for unfolding the steps and for supplying the forward reaches of their goings.

But if those things which are exposed to view exist, it is consistent that those too be carried which lie beneath the ribs, and which the skins cover beneath their lattice-work, and the little membranes of the caul — the gullets, stomachs, spleens, lungs, little bladders, livers, the winding tracts of the rolling intestines, and the veins of purple blood coursing through all the vitals, coupled with the arteries of breath. Or do the bodies of the heavenly ones lack these foulnesses, and, since they abstain from mortal food, must it be believed that they are toothless after the manner of an infant, and, widowed of all their inward parts, hang like blown-up wineskins in the emptiness of their swollen bodies?

And what of this — that, if these things are so, it will be necessary for you to consider whether all the gods are alike, or are held in a diverse delineation of forms? For if there is to all one and the same species of likeness, it is not absurd to believe that they err and are deceived in the mutual recognition of one another. But if, on the other hand, they bear a distinction in their countenances, it follows that it ought to be understood that dissimilarities were given to them for no other cause than that each might be able to recognise himself by the properties of distinguishing marks.

Therefore it must be said that some among them are big-headed, some little-headed, broad-browed, thick-lipped, others long-chinned, moley, and snub-nosed; these with flat-spread nostrils, those with turned-up; some hollow-cheeked or, from the fullness of their jowls, deep-voiced; dwarfish, tall, middling, lean, fat, gross; these curly with the twistings of their hair, others shaven with baldness and smoothness. Nor do your workshops betray and reveal that we suppose these things falsely, since, when you make and shape the gods, you fashion some as long-haired, others as smooth, old, young, boys, dark, grey-eyed, tawny, half-naked, uncovered, or — lest cold should incommode them — clothed with an overlay of flowing garments.

Is there any of men, touched with any savour of reason, who would believe that hairs and down grow on the bodies of gods, that the distinctions of years are present in them, and that, clothed in various forms of coverings and cloaks, they go about and guard themselves from heats and colds? He who holds this as true must needs accept this also as true: that there are gods who are fullers, gods who are barbers, who either wash out the sacred garments or trim the hair of those wrapped in the fleeces of their forest-like locks.

Is this not base, is it not full of impiety and outrage — to give to the gods the lineaments of a dying and perishable creature, to distinguish them with those parts which no honest man dares to enumerate or to pursue, nor to conceive in the imagination of his mind without a shudder at their utmost foulness? Is this that fastidiousness of yours, this arrogant wisdom, whereby you spit upon us as uncouth and recall that all knowledge of divine things lies open to you? You laugh at the enigmas of the Egyptians, because they have inserted the forms of dumb animals into divine matters, and receive these same forms with much incense and the rest of the apparatus of ceremonies:

you venerate effigies of men as the powers of gods, and are not ashamed to set upon them the face of an earthly animal; you condemn others of error and folly, and are caught in the likeness and vice of the same error. Unless perhaps you will say that the gods have indeed other forms, and that for the sake of honour and endowment you have accommodated to them the appearances of mortals: which is a matter of far greater outrage than to have done something through ignorance of error. For if you confessed that which your suspicion had believed — that you had assigned these to divine shapes — the presumption would have been of less injury, to have sinned in an opinion:

but now, since you believe one thing and feign another, you are both insulting to those to whom you attribute that which you confess is not theirs, and you are shown to be irreligious, since you adore that which you feign, not that which you judge to be in the thing itself and in very truth. If little asses, dogs, and swine had any human understanding and possessed the arts of fashioning, and wished likewise to attend us with some worship and to honour us with the consecration of statues, what flames of wrath, what whirlwinds of indignation would they stir up in us, if they should wish our images to bear and to possess the forms of their own bodies?

What flames of wrath, I say, would they pour forth and kindle, if the founder of the city, Romulus, were to stand in an ass's face, if holy Pompilius in a dog's, if under a swine's shape the name of Cato or of Marcus Cicero were inscribed? Do you then recall that your stupidity is not laughed at by your divinities, if they laugh; or, since you judge them to be affected by anger, that they neither rage nor go mad, nor wish to go and avenge themselves for such injuries and outrages, and to hurl against you those things which grief is wont to hurl and the bitterness of offence to devise? How much more upright would it have been to bestow upon them the forms of elephants, of panthers or tigers, of bulls and horses? For what is there in man

what is beautiful, what, I ask, is admirable or comely, save what some author would have to be common even with the ape-like herd? "But if," they say, "our opinion displeases you, do you show, do you tell, with what form God is endowed." — If you wish to hear a true judgement: either God has no form, or, if He is formed with some, we assuredly do not know what it is. For we likewise deem it no disgrace not to know what we have never seen, nor are we barred by the matter from refuting the opinions of others, because upon this we ourselves put forth no opinion of our own.

For as, if the world were said to be of glass, or of silver, or of iron, or heaped up and fabricated out of brittle earthenware, we should not hesitate to contend that it is false, although we know not what its material is; so, when the appearance of God is in question, we prove that it is not what you allege, even though we are less able to explain what it is. "What then," someone will say, "does God not hear, not speak, not see the things set before Him, not behold them?" — In His own manner, perhaps, not in ours. For neither can we know anything true in so great a matter, nor track it down by conjectures, which, it is plain, are with us unstable, slippery, and like the semblances of empty dreams.

For if we shall say that He sees by the same means by which we too see, it follows that it must be understood that He has little membranes spread over His pupils, that He blinks, winks, and discerns by rays or images, or — what is common to all eyes — that without the intermixture of another light He beholds nothing at all. And this same thing must likewise be said concerning hearing, and concerning the form of utterance and the bringing forth of words: if He hears through ears, that these too are bored through with winding passages, by which the voice may creep in to announce the meaning of speech; or, if words are poured forth from His mouth, that He has lips with teeth, by the striking and mobility of which the many-yoked tongue may articulate sounds and shape the voice into words.

But if you do not refuse to hear the judgment of our mind, so far are we from ascribing bodily features to God that we shrink from attributing to so great a Being even the graces of souls and those very virtues in which it has scarcely been granted to a few men to excel. For who would call God brave, steadfast, frugal, wise? Who would call Him upright, who temperate, who indeed would say that He knows anything, that He understands, that He takes forethought, that He directs the decisions of His own actions toward fixed ends of duty? These are human goods, and it is from their opposition to vices that they have earned a praiseworthy esteem. But who is of so dull a heart, so brutish, as to say that God is great by reason of human goods, or that on this account He surpasses in the majesty of His name, because He lacks the foulness of vices?

Whatever you say of God, whatever you conceive in the silent thought of your mind, passes over into a human sense and is corrupted, nor does that which is spoken in our words, framed for human affairs, bear the mark of its proper meaning. There is one most certain understanding a man may have concerning the nature of God: if you know and feel that nothing can be uttered about Him in mortal speech. And this indeed is the first affront to your deities, which you, forsooth the good and religious champions, have established as authors of forms and sexes. But what sort of thing is that which follows, that you bring in for us gods who are, some of them, smiths, some physicians, some wool-workers, sailors, harpists, flute-players, hunters, shepherds, and, to crown all, rustics?

「This one,」 he says, 「is a musical god, and that other is divine.」 — For the rest of the gods, then, are not divine, and they know not how to foretell things to come, being ignorant and lacking knowledge of the future. 「That one is trained in the arts of midwifery, another has been instructed in the disciplines of physicians.」 — Do individuals then prevail each only in his own field, and, when called to aid, cannot they come to the help of others in their departments? 「This one is eloquent in speech and ready in the linking of words」: — for others are dullards, and can utter nothing skilful if a speech must be made. And I ask: 「What reason, what harsh necessity, what cause is there, that the gods above should know these crafts as if they were mean fellows, and hold themselves as bench-workers?」 — For in heaven there is singing and playing:

so that the graceful sisters may join together and modulate the intervals and the nine notes of the voice. There are woodlands amid the starry motions, there are lairs, there are groves: so that Diana, mighty in the chase, may be reckoned foremost in her expeditions. The gods know not what threatens, and they live by lots and are driven by fatal decrees: so that the Latonian prophet may unfold and disclose what tomorrow or what the hour may bring to each. He himself is filled with another god, and is pressed and agitated by the power of a greater deity: so that he may deservedly be called and held divine. The gods are seized with diseases and can be wounded, can be afflicted by some cause: so that, when reason demands it, the Epidaurian may come as helper and give aid. They are in travail, they give birth: so that Juno-Lucina may soothe and take away the hard pangs of childbirth.