Against the Pagans 6 part 2/2

recesses of some image — nay, would that it were permitted to draw those Olympian and Capitoline Jupiters apart, resolved into their limbs, and to behold, separate and single, all those parts by which the whole of a body is enclosed: long ago you would see that those gods, whom the outer smoothness dignifies with the allurement of brilliance, are lattices of pitiable plates, joinings of deformed little particles, held together against the chances of collapse and the fear of dissolution by wedges and chains, hooks and little clasps; and that throughout all the folds and joints of the seams runs poured lead, lending salutary supports to the long duration of the statues.

You would see, I say, long ago faces alone without backs of heads, hands without arms and half-filled, bellies halved with the sides, imperfect traces of soles, and — what most provokes laughter — [statues] drawn together in an unequal construction of bodies, wooden on one part but stony on the other. And if these things could by no means be perceived because of the art of concealment, at least the things set before your very eyes ought to teach and warn you that you accomplish nothing and expend the vanities of your services upon empty things.

For do you thus not see these 'breathing' statues — whose soles and knees you touch and handle in prayer — now slipping away by the falls of drippings, now loosening by the rot of decay, so that, smoked and discolored by fumes and smoke, they grow black; how by the neglect of a longer age they lose their appearance through mildew and are wounded, eaten away by rust? Thus, I say, do you not see beneath any of these images lizards, shrews, mice and light-shunning cockroaches placing their nests and dwelling, and bringing hither all filth and other things fitted to their uses — the hardnesses of half-gnawed bread, bones dragged in hope [of food], rags, wool, little scraps of paper, gathered anxiously for the softness of their nests, the warm bedding of their wretched chicks?

Do not spiders sometimes begin their nets and treacherous snares in the mouth of an image, that they may entangle the flights of the whirring and shameless flies? Do not swallows, finally, flying around within the very domes of the buildings, cast down [droppings] full of dung and now paint the very faces, now the mouths of the divinities — the beard, eyes, nose and all the other parts — into whatever place the discharge of the emptied hindpart carries itself? Blush, therefore, even if late, and from dumb animals receive ways and reasons; and let these same creatures teach you that there is no divinity present in the images, into which they neither fear nor avoid to cast their filth, following their own laws and prompted by the truth of nature. 'But you err,' he says, 'and are deceived:

for we do not decree that the bronze, nor the materials of gold and silver, nor the others from which the statues are made, are of themselves gods and religious divinities; but in these we worship, and we venerate, those whom the sacred dedication brings in and causes to inhabit the fashioned images.' — Not an improbable nor a contemptible reasoning, by which anyone dull, and even the most prudent, might believe that the gods, having left their proper seats — that is, heaven — do not refuse nor flee to enter earthly dwellings, but rather, impelled by the right of dedication, coalesce with the binding of the images. In gypsum, then, and in potsherds do your gods abide — nay, are the minds, spirits, and souls of potsherds and gypsum themselves gods?

And in order that the cheapest things may be able to become more august, do they suffer themselves to be shut up and to lurk in the confinement of an obscure seat? Therefore, on this point first, we desire and demand to hear from you: 'Do they do this unwilling — that is, dragged by the right of dedication do they enter the dwellings of the images — or willing and compliant and with no necessities imposed?' 'Do they do this unwilling?' — And how can it come about that they should be forced into any necessity, their majesty being diminished? 'By the assent of voluntary obedience?' — And what do the gods seek in potsherds, that they should prefer them to their starry seats? that they should be as it were bound in fetters, ennobling potsherds and the other materials from which statues are made? What then?

In such materials do the gods always abide and go nowhere, even if the greatest matter should require it, or do they have free goings, when it pleases them to depart anywhere and to withdraw from their own seats and images? If they suffer the necessity of remaining, what could be more wretched than these, or what more unhappy, than that fetters and leaden bindings so hold them on their bases? But let us grant that they prefer these to heaven and the starry seats: they will have lost the power of their divinity. But if, when they wish, they fly out and have the absolute right to leave the empty images, then at some time the statues will cease to be gods, and it will stand in doubt when sacred rites ought to be rendered, and when it is fitting and proper to abstain from them.

Very often we see these statues made by craftsmen now tiny and contracted to a palm's littleness, now raised to immensity and lifted to an admirable magnitude. By this reasoning, then, it follows that we ought to understand that the gods contract themselves in tiny little images and are constrained to the likeness of an alien body, but truly in vast ones extend themselves further and are drawn out into the greatest size. Therefore, if this is so, it must be said that in sitting statues the god sits, and in standing ones stands, in running ones runs, hurls weapons in throwing ones, forms and fits himself to their faces, and lends himself to the likeness of the remaining postures of the figured body. 'In the images the gods dwell.'

— Is each one whole in each single image, or partitioned and divided into limbs? For neither can one god be present at one time in several images, nor again, once divided into parts by the intervention of a cutting. For let us suppose that there are ten thousand images of Vulcan in the whole world: can one, as I have said, be in all ten thousand at one time? Not, I think. For what cause? Because things that are private and singular by nature cannot become many while the integrity of their simplicity is preserved; and this the less can they do if the gods have the forms of men, as your opinion declares.

For neither can a hand separated from the head, nor a foot divided from the body, furnish the sum of the whole; nor must it be said that the portions can do the same as the whole, since the whole cannot subsist unless it be composed by the gathering together of its parts. But if it be said that the same one is entire in all of them, then all reason and the integrity of truth perishes, if this be granted — that one can remain in all at one time. Or else each of the gods must be said thus to divide his very self from himself, so that he is both himself and another, separated by no distinction, but himself the same and yet another.

And since nature refuses and rejects and spurns this, either it must be said and confessed that there are innumerable Vulcans, if we wish him to dwell and be present in all the images, or he will be in none, because nature forbids him to be divided among many. 'And yet, O you men, if it is open and clear to you that in the innards of the statues the heavenly gods live and dwell, why do you guard, preserve, and keep them shut up under the strongest keys and huge bars, under bolts, latches, and other such things, and, lest perchance some thief or nocturnal robber creep in, do you protect them with a thousand temple-keepers and a thousand watchmen?' Why do you feed dogs in the Capitols?

Why do you furnish food and sustenance to geese? Nay rather, if you trust that the gods are there and depart nowhere from the signs and images, entrust to them the care of themselves; let the shrines always stand unbarred and open, and if anything be filched by anyone with rash fraud, let them display the power of their divinity and, under the very name of the theft and the deed, transfix the sacrilegious with fitting punishments. For it is an unworthy thing, and one that destroys their power and authority, to entrust the guardianship of the highest divinities to the anxieties of dogs; and, when you seek some terror for warding off thieves, not to ask it of the gods themselves but to place and set it in the cacklings of geese.

They say that Antiochus Cyzicenus carried off from a shrine a golden Jupiter of ten cubits and put in its place a counterfeit one gilded with little leaves of bronze. If the gods are present in their images and dwell in them, with what businesses, with what cares had Jupiter been entangled, that he did not pursue his private injuries and avenge himself, replaced as he was in a baser material? That Dionysius — the younger one — when he despoiled Jupiter of his golden robe and substituted a woolen one in its place, jesting even with facetious witticisms, saying that the former was chilly in the frosts and this one warm, that the former was burdensome in the summers and this one, again, airy under the heats:

where then was the king of the sky, that he might prove himself present by some terror and recall the witty buffoon to seriousness by tortures? For why should I recount that the gravity of Aesculapius was mocked by him? — who, when he despoiled him of his most ample beard of goodly weight and philosophical thickness, said it was an unworthy deed that a son begotten of Apollo — a father smooth and hairless and most like a beardless youth — should be fashioned so bearded that it be left in doubt which of them is father and which son, nay, whether they are even of one race and kindred.

When all these things were done and the plunderer spoke with sacrilegious mockeries, if there was a divinity in the statue consecrated to his name and majesty, why did he not pursue with just and merited vengeance the outrage done to his smoothed mouth and dishonored face, and prove by this deed both that he was present and that he guards his own temples and images with persistent watchfulness? 'Unless perhaps you will say that the gods neglect these damages and do not think there is a sufficient cause for which they should exert themselves and inflict on the guilty the punishment for violated religion.' — Therefore, if these things are so, the gods themselves do not even desire to have images,

which they suffer to be torn down and plundered with impunity — nay, on the contrary, they plainly teach that they despise those things, in which, when they are scorned, they do not care to signify themselves by any vengeance. Philostephanus, in his work On Cyprus, is the authority that Pygmalion, king of Cyprus, fell in love, as with a woman, with a statue of Venus which was held among the Cypriots to be of ancient sanctity and religion — his mind, soul, light of reason, and judgment being blinded — and that, deranged, he was accustomed, as though it were a marital matter, to lift the divinity onto his little couch and couple with it in embraces and with his mouth, and to do the other empty acts of lust, mocked by imagination.

In a similar manner Posidippus, in that book which he indicates was written about Cnidos and its affairs, records a youth of no ignoble birth — but he conceals his name — seized with love of the Venus on whose account Cnidos is famous, and that he too mingled amatory wantonness with the statue of that same divinity, using the nuptial couches and the ends of the pleasures that follow. So that I may similarly ask again: 'If in the bronze and in the other materials from which the statues are formed the powers of the upper gods lie hidden, where in the world had the one Venus and the other been, that they should have driven far from themselves the shameless wantonness of the young men and punished the impious contacts with tormenting restraint?

Or, since the goddesses are mild and of more tranquil dispositions, how fitting it would have been that they should extinguish for the wretched their frenzied joys and lead their minds back, restored, into sound senses?' Unless perhaps, as you allege, the goddesses of lust and of pleasures held these insults most welcome and did not judge the deed worthy of vengeance, because it also soothed their own minds, and because they knew that they too were made subject to human desires.

But if the goddesses, the Venuses endowed with more placid dispositions, judged that indulgence must be shown to the misfortunes of the blind, then when the devouring fire so often consumed the Capitol and seized the Capitoline Jupiter himself together with his wife and daughter, where at that time was the thunderer, that he might ward off that wicked conflagration and rescue his own property and himself and his whole household from the pestilent disaster? Where was Juno the queen, when the same force of flame destroyed her renowned fane and the priestess Chrysis in the Argive city? Where was Egyptian Serapis, when by a like disaster he lay dissolved into ashes with all his mysteries and with Isis? Where was Liber Eleutherius, when at Athens? Where Diana, when at Ephesus? Where Dodonaean Jupiter, when at Dodona?

Where, finally, was divine Apollo, when he was so despoiled and burned by pirates and sea-robbers that, out of so many weights of gold which countless ages had heaped up, he had not even a single scruple left to show to the swallows of his host — as Varro, the Menippean one, says? It is a work of infinite labor to describe throughout the whole world what fanes have been overthrown by earthquakes and storms, which burned by enemies, which by kings and tyrants, which the overseers and priests and even they themselves — their suspicion averted — have stripped bare, and which at last thieves and, opening what was locked by the obscurity of [magical] remedies, the burglars [have plundered]:

which would surely have remained safe and subject to no chance mishaps, if the gods were present as protectors, or had, as is said, any care of their temples. But now, because they are empty and roofed with no inhabitants, fortune holds its own right over them, and they are exposed to all chances just as are all other things deprived of interior motion.

'On this same point the defenders of images are also wont to say this: that the ancients were not ignorant that the statues have nothing of divinity nor any sense at all in them, but that, on account of the untamed and unskilled crowd — which is the greatest part among peoples and in cities — they fashioned them wholesomely and with design, so that, as if by a certain semblance of divinities set before them, the crowd might cast off their harshness through fear, and, thinking that they were acting in the presence of the gods, might reckon impious deeds [as such] and pass over to human duties by a change of manners:

and for no other cause were venerable forms sought for them in gold and silver, except that some power might be believed to be present in the very brilliancies — a power which should not only strike the sense of the eyes, but also terrify the very minds with the radiances of most august light.' Which might perhaps seem to be said with some reason, if, after the temples of the gods were founded and the images established, there had been no one wicked in the world, no wickedness at all; if justice, peace, and faith possessed the breasts of mortals, and no one on earth were called guilty or innocent, wicked works being unknown to all.

But now, since on the contrary all things are full of evils, the name of innocence has all but perished, and by moments, by instants, swarms of misdeeds are begotten with the harmful men's ever-new wickedness — how is it fitting to say that the images were established for the crowd, to strike terrors into them, when, besides innumerable forms of crimes and misdeeds, we see the very temples assailed with sacrilegious violations by tyrants, by kings, by robbers and by nocturnal thieves, and those very gods whom old antiquity fashioned and consecrated for making men afraid going into the dens of the plunderers together with their own golden and dreadful brilliances?

For what, if you should look at the truth without any flattery, do those signs of which they speak have in themselves so great, that antiquity should have deservedly hoped and thought that at the sight of them the vices of men could be broken and their manners and misdeeds tempered?

The reaping-sickle, forsooth, which is assigned to Saturn, would have injected fear into mortals, that they might wish to lead a peaceful life and cast off malicious wills; Janus with his two-faced front, or that toothed key with which he is marked; cloaked and bearded Jupiter, holding in his right hand a stake carefully hewn in the likeness of a thunderbolt; that Junonian cestus, or a little girl hiding under a soldier's helmet; the Mother of the gods with her drum; the Muses with flutes and psalteries; winged Mercury; Aesculapius leaning on his serpent-bearing staff; Ceres with her great breasts, or the drinking-cup hanging in Liber's right hand; Mulciber in a smith's garb, or Fortune with a horn full of apples, figs, or autumn fruits; Diana with half-covered thighs, or naked Venus rousing to lust; Anubis with a dog's face, or Priapus, conspicuous below for his own genitals.

O dire shapes of terrors and dreadful frights, on account of which the race of men should be fixed in perpetual torpor, attempt nothing in its stupefaction, and restrain itself from every wicked and shameful act: little sickles, keys, headdresses, firebrands, winged sandals, staffs, little drums, flutes, psalteries, breasts prominent and huge, little cups, tongs and fruit-bearing horns, the naked bodies of women, and the magnitudes of privy parts made public! Would it not have been more satisfactory to leap and to sing, than, under the title of gravity and the pretext of severity, to relate that images so cold and so inept were fashioned by the ancients to restrain sins and as terrors of the harmful and impious?

Were the mortals of that age and time so empty in heart, of no reason and sense, that, like little children, they were restrained from wicked actions by the most monstrous grimness of masks, and even by grimaces and bogeys? And whence has the matter turned to its contrary, that, although there are in the cities so many temples full of all the images of the gods, yet the multitude of the harmful cannot be met by so many laws and kinds of such great punishments, nor can audacity be cut off by any remedies, and misdeeds, redoubled, multiply themselves all the more, the more it is striven by laws and judgments to diminish cruel deeds and to allay them by the coercion of penalties?

But if the images inflicted any fears upon mortals, the enacting of laws would cease, nor would such varied crosses be set up for the audacity of the criminal. But now, since it has been established and proved by the fact itself that the opinion of terror said to flow from the statues is empty, recourse has been had to the sanctions of the laws, from which there might be a most certain dread and a condemnation now fixed and settled — to which the very images owe even this, that they still stand unharmed and are protected by the grant of some honor.

Since it has been sufficiently shown, as the matter allowed, how vainly the images are made, the order [of discourse] next demands to speak — in as few words as possible and without any circumlocutions — about sacrifices, about the slayings and immolations of victims, about wine, about incense, and about all the other things that are performed in that department. For in this matter you are wont to stir up most tumultuous odium against us, to call us atheists, and, because we assign least [worship] to the gods, to inflict even capital punishments by the cruelties of wild beasts. Which indeed we confess we do not from contempt and disdain of the divine, but because we consider that the powers of this name demand nothing of the kind, nor are held by desires of things of this sort.