Against the Pagans 6 part 1/2

Now, since we have shown in summary how impious are the infamies of opinion which you have established concerning your gods, it follows that we should speak of temples, and also of images and sacrifices, and of the other series of matters that is attached to these things and joined to them by a neighbouring connection. For in this respect you are accustomed to fasten upon us the greatest charge of impiety: that we neither build sacred edifices for the offices of worship, nor set up any image or form of a god, nor fashion altars nor hearths, nor offer the blood of slain animals, nor incense nor salted grain, nor finally bring wine flowing in the outpourings of libation-bowls.

These things indeed we refrain from building or doing—not because we bear impious and wicked minds, or have conceived some contempt for the gods in reckless despair, but because we judge and believe that they—if indeed they are true gods and endowed with the eminence of this name—either regard these kinds of honour as matter for laughter, if they laugh, or endure them with indignation, if they are exasperated by the movements of wrath.

For that you may know what we think about that name, and what our judgement is: we consider that they—if indeed they are true gods (that the same things may be said again to satiety)—ought to be possessed of all perfect virtues, wise and just (if it be no fault that we heap human praises upon them), strong in inward goods, and not to bind themselves to external aids by which the integrity of their unimpaired blessedness might be completed, being free from all affections and all disturbances...

...free—that they do not boil over with anger, nor are stirred by any desires, inflict calamity on none, take no cruel pleasure from the evils of men, do not terrify with portents nor display prodigious terrors, do not hold men liable and bound by the debts of vows, nor demand expiatory victims with menacing signs, do not bring in pestilences nor diseases by the corruption of the air, do not scorch the crops with droughts, do not take part in the slaughters of wars nor the destructions of cities, do not wish adversity to these nor favour the advantages of those; but—which belongs to great minds—weigh all in an equal balance and show undivided benevolence to all. For it belongs to a perishable kind and to human weakness to act in contrary ways:

And the decrees and pronouncements of the wise define that those whom emotion touches must suffer, grieve, and be diminished, and that it cannot be otherwise but that they are bound by the laws of mortality who are enslaved to any disturbances. Since this is so, how can we be judged to hold the gods in contempt—we who deny that they exist as gods, and cannot be reckoned among the heavenly powers, unless they are upright and praiseworthy by the admiration due to great minds? 'But you build them no temples, nor adore their images, do not slay victims, do not offer incense and wine.'

And what greater honour or dignity can we attribute to them, than that we place them in the same rank as the Head of all things and the Lord and highest King himself, to whom the gods, together with us, owe the fact that they perceive themselves to exist and to be contained in a vital substance? Do we indeed honour Him with shrines or with the building of temples? Do we slay victims to Him? Do we give Him other things which it is not the part of considered reason to pour out lavishly, but of being drawn along by the custom of habit? For it is utter madness to measure by your own needs things more powerful than yourself, and to give to the gods, as givers, what is of use to you, and to reckon that an honour and not an insult.

Temples, then, we ask: for what use of the gods, or for the necessity of what thing, do you say they have been built, or judge that they should be built anew? Do the gods feel the cold of winter, or are they scorched by the summer suns, drenched by rainy clouds; do winds or whirlwinds harass them; are they in danger of suffering the hostile onset of wild beasts or their raging appetites—so that it would rightly befit to shut them within the defences of roofs, or to protect them by the barrier of stones? For what are these temples? If you ask human weakness, they are something huge and vast; if you measure the power of the gods, they are certain small achievements, and—to speak more truly—a most cramped kind of caverns, hung up by the contrivance of a poverty-stricken heart.

If you wish to hear who was their first founder, who their builder, either Phoroneus, or the Egyptian Merops will be pointed out to you, or, as Varro relates in his 'Marvels,' Aeacus, the offspring of Jupiter. But granting that these are either constructed of marble masses, or glitter with golden panelled ceilings, and that here gems shine and pour forth starry gleams with their varied inlay: all these things are earth, and compounded from the lowest dregs of baser material. For even if you value them at dearer prices, it must not be believed that the gods delight in these, nor refuse nor scorn to fence themselves in and be confined, enclosed by their barriers.

'This temple,' he says, 'is Mars's, this is Juno's and Venus's, this is Hercules's, Apollo's, Dis's.' What else is this to say than: this house is Mars's, this is Juno's and Venus's, Apollo dwells here, in this one Hercules remains, in that one Summanus? Is it not therefore the first and greatest insult to have the gods confined to dwellings, to give them little huts, to build chambers and cells for them, and to think that things are necessary to them which are so to men, to cats, to little ants and lizards, to fleeing, timid, and tiny mice?

'But we do not,' he says, 'assign temples to the gods for this reason, that we might ward off from them damp rains, winds, showers, or suns, but that we may be able to behold them face to face and close at hand, to address them from nearby, and in a way to mingle the conversations of worship with them as present.' For if they are invoked under the bare vault of heaven and under the ethereal covering, they hear nothing; and unless prayers are brought to them from close at hand, they will stand blocked and motionless, as though nothing were said. But we, on the contrary, judge that every god whatsoever—if indeed he is strong with the power of this name—ought to hear, from whatever part of the world anyone speaks, as though he were present; nay rather, whatever each has conceived...

...under dim and silent perceptions, the god ought to anticipate by foreknowledge; and as the stars, the sun, the moon, when they pass above the earth, are at once present to all who behold them, and everywhere present, so it is likewise fitting that the hearing of the deities be closed to no tongue and be ever present, however voices flow to it from distant regions. For this is the property of the gods: to fill all things with their power, to be nowhere in part but everywhere whole, neither to be present nor absent, not to go off to dine among the Ethiopians and after twice six days return privately to their dwelling. But if it will not be so, all hope of help is taken away, and it will be in doubt whether you are heard by the gods or not, whenever you perform the sacred rites of due ceremonies.

For, that we may understand the matter, let us suppose that there is a temple of some deity among the Canary Islands, another of the same among furthest Thule, another among the Seres, among the swarthy Garamantes, and any others whom seas, mountains, forests, and the four cardinal points cut off from knowledge of one another: if all at one and the same time, having performed the divine rites, make request—each compelled by his own need—and ask of the deity, what hope of a benefit returned will there be for all, if the god does not hear from every side the voice sent to him, and there is any remoteness which the prayer of one asking for help cannot penetrate?

For either he will be present in no place, if he can anywhere at some time not be, or he will be present to some only, since he cannot indivisibly furnish his hearing in common. And thus it comes about that either the god helps none at all, if, occupied with some matter, he cannot fly to hear the voices, or only those alone who are heard go away satisfied, and the rest have accomplished nothing. What of the fact that many of these temples—which are raised on golden domes and lofty pinnacles—are proved by the writings of authors to cover ashes and bones, and to be the burial-places of dead bodies?

Is it not plain and evident that either you worship the dead in place of the immortal gods, or that an inexpiable insult is done to the deities, whose shrines and temples have been raised over the tombs of the dead? In the ninth book of his Histories Antiochus records that at Athens, in the temple of Minerva, Cecrops was committed to the earth; again, in the temple of the same goddess, which is on the citadel of Larisa, Acrisius is written and pointed out to have been buried; Erichthonius in the shrine of Athena Polias; the brothers Daïras and Immaradus in the Eleusinian enclosure that lies beneath the city. What of the daughters of Celeus? Are they not said to have received the office of burial in the temple of Eleusinian Ceres?

Are not Hyperoche and Laodice—who are reported to have been conveyed thither from the Hyperborean regions—buried in the shrine of Diana which is established within that of Delian Apollo? In the Didymaean temple at Miletus, Leandrius says that a certain one had the last rites of a funeral. Myndius declares, and Zeno records, that the monument of Leucophryne is in the shrine of Diana at Magnesia. Is it not indicated by consistent writings that beneath the little altar of Apollo which is seen at the town of Telmessus, the seer Telmessus is buried? Ptolemy, son of Agesarchus, in the first book which he published about Philopator, declares by the authority of writings that Cinyras, king of Paphos, with all his household—nay, with all his lineage—is laid in the temple of Venus.

It would be infinite and immense to describe who is buried in which shrines throughout the whole world, nor does it require exact care to say by which temples those 'common tombs' of Varro are covered, and what masses of superimposed weight they bear upon themselves—although Egypt appointed a penalty for anyone who should publish where Apis lay hidden. But why do I dwell on these trifles? Who among men is there who does not know that in the Capitol of the ruling people there is the tomb of Olus of Vulci? Who is there, I say, who does not know that from the foundation-beds the head of a man was rolled out, not very long ago—either alone, without the rest of the parts (for so some report), or having obtained the offices of burial with all its members?

But if you demand that this be made plain by the testimonies of authors, Sammonicus, Granius, Valerianus, and Fabius will show you whose son Aulus was, of what family and nation, by the hand of what little slave he was despoiled of his life and light, what he deserved of his fellow citizens, that burial in the soil of his native land was denied him. You will also learn—though they pretend to be unwilling to publish this—what was done with the uncovered head, or in what part of the citadel it was enclosed in careful obscurity, so that the perpetuity of the sealed omen might stand, as it were, immovable and fixed.

And though it were fitting that this be suppressed and hidden by the obliteration of age, the formation of the name brought it into the open, and made it proceed, with its causes, through the ages granted to it, by an inextinguishable attestation; nor was the greatest city, worshipper of all the deities, ashamed, when giving a name to the temple, to call it 'Capitolium' from the head (caput) of Olus rather than from the name of Jupiter. Enough, then, as I think, we have shown that temples have either been built in vain for the immortal gods, or fashioned—against the honour and power ascribed to them—by insulting suppositions. It follows that we should say something about the statues and images, which you compose with much art and tend with religious observance.

In this matter, if there is any credence, we can by no considerations settle with ourselves whether you do this seriously and with grave purpose, or whether, in mockery, you sport with the things themselves in childish delusion. For if it is certain among you that the gods exist, whom you revere and believe to dwell in the highest regions of heaven, what cause, what reason is there, that these images should be fashioned by you, when you have the real beings to whom you can pour out prayers and ask help in pressing matters? But if you do not believe, or—to put it mildly—are in doubt, even so, what reason is there to fashion and set up images of doubtful things, and to form by an airy imitation that which you do not believe to exist?

Or do you perchance say that a certain presence of the deities is exhibited to you beneath these images, and that, because it is not granted to see the gods, they are worshipped in a solid form and dutiful services rendered to them? He who says and asserts this does not believe that the gods exist, and is convicted of having no faith in his own religion—he who needs to see what he holds, lest perchance that be empty which, being unseen, is not visible. 'We worship the gods,' you say, 'through images.' What then? If these did not exist, would the gods not know that they were worshipped, and would they think that no honour was imparted to them by you?

So then, by certain byways and, as it were, through certain things committed in trust, do the gods take and receive your acts of worship; and before those to whom that homage is owed perceive it, you first make offering to the images and transmit them to the gods from an external authority, as if certain relics. And what can be done more injurious, more insulting, more harsh, than to acknowledge one god and to supplicate another thing? To hope for help from a deity and to entreat an image that has no sense at all? Is not this, I ask, what is said in the common proverbs: 'To strike the smith when you mean to beat the fuller,' and 'When you seek the counsel of a man, to demand opinions on things to be done from little asses and piglets'?

And how, finally, do you know whether all these images, which you form as vicarious substitutes for the immortal gods, reproduce a likeness and possess a divine resemblance? For it may be that one who is fashioned by you as smooth-faced is bearded in heaven; it may be that one to whom you assign a boyish age is far advanced in old age; it may be that one who in truth has grey-blue eyes is made tawny, and that he whom you make and figure with a hooked nose wears flattened nostrils. For it is not right to call or name a thing an image which does not draw its lines equal to the original face—a thing which can be recognized as plain and certain from manifest facts.

For whereas all we men see, by the indubitable contemplation of its light, that the sun is round, you have given it the face of a man and the features of mortal bodies. The moon is always in motion and receives thrice ten faces in her monthly renewal: under your leadership and shaping she is a woman, and she who is changed through a thousand aspects by daily instability has, with you, a single countenance. We all understand that the winds are a flowing of air that has been struck and stirred by the workings of the world: according to you they are shapes of men, blowing the curved trumpets with inward and native blasts. Among your gods we see a most savage lion's face smeared with pure vermilion and called by the name Frugifer (the Fruit-bearer).

If all these images are likenesses of the gods above, then a god of such a kind must be said to dwell also in heaven, to whose form and appearance the likeness of this image is directed; and clearly, just as this one here, so that one there is a mask without the rest of a body and a face alone—roaring with grim gapings, dreadful in bloody colour, gripping an apple between its teeth, and, like tired dogs at times, ever thrusting its tongue out of its wide-open mouth in perpetuity. But if this is by no means so—as we all judge it is not—what great audacity is it to fashion for yourself whatever form you please, and to say that it is the image of a god whom you cannot prove to exist in any part of nature?

You laugh that in ancient times the Persians worshipped rivers—as memorial writings indicate—the Arabs a shapeless stone, the Scythian nations a scimitar, the Thespians a branch in place of Cinxia, the Icarians an unhewn log in place of Diana, the people of Pessinus a flint in place of the Mother of the Gods, the Romans a spear in place of Mars (as the Muses of Varro indicate), and, as Aethlius records, before the use and craft of image-makers, the Samians a board in place of Juno: and yet you refrain from laughter, when in place of the immortal gods you supplicate little figurines of men and human forms? Nay rather, you judge that these very statuettes are gods, and believe that, apart from these, nothing possesses divine power.

What do you say? O you, do the heavenly gods then have ears and temples, necks, back of the head, spine, loins, sides, hams, buttocks, hocks, ankles, and all the other members of which we are constructed, and which were spoken of a little more fully in an earlier part and set forth in fuller writing? Would that it were permitted to look into your minds and the very recesses of your thought, in which you turn over and enter upon various most obscure cogitations: we should find that you yourselves feel the same as we, and hold no other opinions about the shaping of the deities. But what can we do against stubborn zeal, against those who brandish swords and devise new punishments?

Threatening, you—most knowing—maintain a bad cause, and what you once did without reason, you defend, lest you should ever seem to have been ignorant, and you think it better not to be overcome than to yield to and assent to acknowledged truth. From causes of this kind it has also followed, with your connivance, that upon the bodies of the gods the wantonness of craftsmen has sported, and has given them forms which could be a mockery to any solemn person.

And so Ammon is now formed and fashioned with ram's horns; Saturn with a curved sickle, a guardian of the fields, like some pruner of luxuriant branches; the son of Maia with a broad-brimmed hat, as though he were preparing to set out upon the roads and turn aside from sun and dust; Liber with soft limbs and utterly relaxed with womanish looseness; Venus naked and exposed, as though you should say she prostitutes and sells the form of a hireling body; Vulcan with a cap and hammer, his right hand free but girt for the smith's task; the Delian with plectrum and lyre, keeping the gestures of a citharist about to sing an actor's ditties; the king of the sea with a trident, as though he had to enter the fight of a gladiatorial contest:

nor is any image of any deity to be found which does not bear certain attributes bestowed by the generosity of craftsmen. Behold, if some witty and cunning king, without your knowing or being aware, should take the Sun from his doors and transfer him to Mercury's seat, and again seize Mercury and make him migrate into the shrine of the Sun—for each is fashioned by you as beardless and with a smooth face—and should give the one rays, and set upon the Sun's head a little broad-brimmed hat: by what means will you be able to distinguish whether that is the Sun or this is Mercury, since with you it is the attributes, not the peculiarity of the face, that is wont to indicate the gods?

Again, by a similar transference, if he should take the horns off the bare head of Jupiter and fix them on Mars's temples, strip Mars of his arms and gird Ammon with these in turn: what distinction of the several ones will be possible, when he who was Jupiter can be reckoned to be Mars, and he who was Mavors can slip into the appearance of Jupiter or of Ammon? To such a degree is it a game to fabricate these images, to dedicate names to them as though proper, when, if you take away their attributes, the recognition of each is destroyed, one god is believed in place of another, one seems in place of another—nay, either can be reckoned in place of both. But why do I laugh at the sickles and tridents given to the gods, why the horns,

the mallets and caps, when I know that certain images bear the forms of particular men and the features of infamous prostitutes? For who is there who does not know that those famous Athenian Hermae were fashioned to the likeness of Alcibiades's body? Who does not know—if he reads Posidippus—that Praxiteles, by a contest of his skills, forced the face of the Cnidian Venus into the form of the prostitute Cratina, whom the unhappy man loved to distraction? But is this the only Venus whose borrowed beauty was augmented from the face of a harlot?

That famous Phryne of Thespiae—as those relate who have written of Thespian affairs—when she was at the very height of beauty, charm, and bloom, is reported to have been the model of all the Venuses that are in repute, whether throughout the Greek cities, or wherever this love and desire for such statues has flowed. And so all the artists who lived in those very times—to whom the truth of reproducing likenesses gave the first rank—strove with all care and zeal to transfer the lineaments of a prostitute's head into images of Cytherea; the ordinances of the craftsmen were aflame, and each sought to outdo the other in contentious rivalry, not that Venus might be made more august, but that Phryne might stand in place of Venus.

And so the matter was brought to such a point that, in place of the immortal gods, sacred rites were performed to prostitutes, and unhappy religion was deceived by the fabrication of statues. Among the image-makers, the famous Phidias is foremost: when he had raised up the form of Olympian Jupiter with the effort of an immense work, upon the god's finger he inscribed 'PANTARCES IS BEAUTIFUL'—and this was the name of a boy loved by him and cherished with obscene desire—nor was he moved by any fear or religious scruple to name the god by the title of a catamite; nay rather, to consecrate the divinity and image of Jupiter to a boy prostitute.

To such a degree is it a game and a childish inclination to fashion those little images, to come forth and adore them, to heap divine sanctities upon them, when we see the very craftsmen playing while they shape these things and consecrating the monuments of their own lusts. For what is there, if you ask, why Phidias should hesitate to play and to be wanton, when a little while before he knew that the very Jupiter which he had made had been gold, and stones and shapeless bones, disparate and confused, and that he himself was the gatherer and binder of all these; that the forms given to them were fabricated by his own hand in the likeness of limbs; and — what is foremost of all — that it was the benefit of his own gift that the god had itself been born and was adored among human affairs?

It pleases me in this place, as if all the nations from the world's circle were present, to convene one assembly and to bring forth into the ears of all these things to be heard in common. 'What is this, O men, that in matters so ready and so clear you of your own accord deceive yourselves and hem yourselves in with a voluntary blindness? Shake off at last the darkness, and, returning to the light of the mind, look more closely and see of what sort is this that is being done — if only you still retain your own right and dwell within the bounds of the reason and judgment that were given you.'

Those images which terrify you, and which you adore, prostrate and humbled, in all the temples, are bones, stones, bronze — silver, gold, earthenware, wood taken from a tree or glue mingled with gypsum — heaped together perhaps from harlots' ornaments or from a woman's finery, from camel bones or from the tooth of an Indian beast, from little pots and jars, from candelabra and lamps, or from other more obscene little vessels; melted down, they have been drawn into these shapes and have come forth into the forms you behold: baked in potters' furnaces, born from anvils and hammers, scraped with gravers, filed with files, cut with saws, gimlets and adzes, hewn, dug out, hollowed by the whirling of drills, and smoothed by the flat blades of planes.

Is this then not an error — not, to speak properly, a madness — to believe that to be a god which you yourself have fashioned; to supplicate, trembling, the thing manufactured by you; and, though you know and are certain that it is your own work and the offspring of your fingers, to fall prone upon your face, to beg help as a suppliant, and in adverse circumstances and harsh times to hope to be succored by the favor of a propitious deity?' Behold, if someone should set in the midst raw bronze cast into no work, masses of untamed silver and unwrought gold, wood, stones and bones and the other remaining things —

from which the accustomed signs and the images of divinities are wont to be composed — nay, if someone should set in the midst the faces of shattered gods, images broken and diminished, and should bid you to slaughter victims to these same fragments and pieces and to impart sacred rites and divine offices to the shapeless masses: we demand to hear from you whether you would do this, or, on the contrary, would refuse what is commanded. Perhaps you will say: 'For what reason?' — Because there is no one in human affairs so stupidly blind as to reckon silver, bronze, gold, gypsum, ivory, or clay into the number of the gods and to say that they of themselves possess and hold divine power.

What then is the reasoning, that if all these bodies remain untouched and unwrought they lack the power of divinity and heavenly authority, but if they receive the forms of men — if they receive little ears, noses, cheeks, lips, eyes, eyelids — they straightway become gods and are enrolled in the rank and census of the celestials? Does the fashioning add some novelty to these bodies, so that by that very addition you are compelled to believe that something of divinity and majesty has been conferred upon them? Does it change them into gold or bronze, or force the cheapness of the potsherd to degenerate into silver substance? Does it make what a little before was insensible to be alive and moved by a spiritual stirring?

If, once set up in the bodies of the images, they retain all the natures which they had before on the outside, how great is the stupidity — for I forbear to say blindness — of thinking that the natures of things are changed by the quality of forms, and of supposing that a thing receives divinity from its shape which in its primal body was inert and brute and deprived of the mobility of sense.

And so, unmindful and forgetful of what the substance and origin of the images is, you men — rational by soul and endowed with the gift of wisdom and counsel — succumb to baked potsherds, adore plates of bronze, ask secondary health from elephants' tusks, [beg for] the commands of magistracies, powers, victories, acquisitions, gains, the best harvests and most fruitful vintages; and though it is manifest and clear that words are exchanged with brute things, you dream that you are heard, and of your own accord you betray yourselves by the deception of an empty credulity? O that it were permitted to enter into the inmost