khazarzar-clement-of-alexandria-protrepticus

Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Greeks. Amphion of Thebes and Arion of Methymna were both singers, and both are myth (and this song is still sung by the chorus of the Greeks), one by the art of music having lured a fish, the other having walled Thebes. Another Thracian sophist (this is another Greek myth) tamed wild beasts with his naked song and even transplanted the trees, the oaks, by his music. I could also relate to you another myth akin to these and a singer, Eunomus of Locri and the Pythian cicada. A Greek festival was being held at Pytho over a dead serpent, Eunomus singing a dirge for the reptile. The song was a hymn or a lament for the serpent, I cannot say. There was a contest, and Eunomus was playing the cithara in the heat of summer, when the cicadas under the leaves were singing on the mountains, warmed by the sun. They were singing, then, not to the dead serpent, the Pythian one, but to the all-wise god, a song of their own, better than the laws of Eunomus. A string breaks for the Locrian; the cicada alights on the yoke; it chirped on the instrument as on a branch; and the singer, harmonizing with the song of the cicada, supplied the missing string. So the cicada is not led by the song of Eunomus, as the myth would have it, having set up a bronze statue of Eunomus at Pytho with his cithara and the fellow contestant of the Locrian; but it alights willingly and sings willingly. To the Greeks, however, he seemed to have become an interpreter of music.

Why then have you believed in empty myths, supposing that animals are charmed by music? The bright face of truth alone, it seems, seems to you to be counterfeit and has fallen under the eyes of disbelief. Cithaeron and Helicon and the mountains of the Odrysians and the Thracian rites, the mysteries of error, have been deified and sung. For my part, even if they are myths, I am indignant at such tragedies of calamities; but for you, even the records of evils have become dramas, and the actors of the dramas have become spectacles of delight. But let us finally bind up the dramas and the poets who rave like Lenaeans, already completely drunk, with ivy somewhere, raving strangely in Bacchic rite, together with the satyrs and the mad throng, and the rest of the chorus of demons, and shut them up on aged Helicon and Cithaeron; and let us bring down from above, from the heavens, truth together with the most brilliant wisdom to the holy mountain of God and the holy prophetic chorus. And let it, shining as brightly as possible, illuminate with light all those rolling in darkness and deliver men from error, extending the supreme right hand, understanding, for salvation; and let them, lifting their heads and looking up, leave Helicon and Cithaeron and dwell on Zion: "For from Zion will come forth law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem," a heavenly word, the genuine contestant crowned on the theater of the whole world.

Eunomus, my Eunomus, sings not the nome of Terpander nor that of Cepion, nor yet the Phrygian or Lydian or Dorian, but the eternal nome of the new harmony, the nome that bears the name of God, the new song, the Levitical song, "that which brings forgetfulness of sorrow and of wrath, that which brings forgetfulness of all evils." A sweet and true drug of persuasion is mingled with the song. It seems to me, then, that that Thracian Orpheus, and the Theban, and the Methymnaean, men who were not men, were deceivers, who under the pretense of music corrupted life, practicing a kind of artful sorcery, raving in their demonic rites for destruction, celebrating orgies of insolence, deifying griefs, and were the first to lead men by the hand to idols, yes, to stones and wood, that is, to statues and paintings, building up the perversity of custom, and yoking with songs and incantations that truly beautiful freedom of those who live under heaven to the most abject slavery. But not such is my singer, nor has he come to put an end, in the long run, to the bitter slavery of the tyrannizing demons; rather, leading us back to the gentle and philanthropic yoke of piety, he calls again to the heavens those who have been cast down to earth. He alone, of all who have ever been, tamed the most difficult beasts, men: the light-minded among them as birds, the deceivers as serpents, the passionate as lions, the pleasure-loving as swine, the rapacious as wolves. Stones and wood are the foolish; and more insensible than stones is a man steeped in ignorance. Let the prophetic voice, in harmony with truth, stand as our witness, pitying those worn down by ignorance and folly.

For God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones. He, taking pity on the great ignorance and hard-heartedness of those petrified toward the truth, raised up a seed of piety, conscious of virtue, from those stones—the nations that had trusted in stones. Again, then, he has somewhere called certain venomous and backsliding hypocrites who walk about in righteousness "offspring of vipers." But if any of these serpents should willingly repent, following the Word, he becomes a "man of God." He allegorizes others as "wolves" clothed in sheep's fleeces, hinting at those who are rapacious in human forms. And so all these wildest beasts and such stones that celestial song itself transformed into gentle humans. "For we were, we too were once senseless, disobedient, wandering, enslaved to pleasures and various desires, living in wickedness and envy, hateful, hating one another," as the apostolic writing says; "but when the kindness and philanthropy of our savior God appeared, not because of the works of righteousness that we performed, but according to his mercy he saved us." See how powerful the new song is: it has made humans from stones and humans from beasts. And those who were otherwise dead, who had no share in the life that truly is, merely becoming hearers of the song, came back to life. This, indeed, also adorned the whole cosmos melodiously and tuned the discord of the elements into the order of concord, so that the entire world might become harmony for him.

And he let the sea, which had been dissolved, go free, but prevented it from stepping onto the land; and conversely, he solidified the land as it was being borne along and fixed it as a boundary for the sea. Moreover, he softened the rush of fire with air, blending, as it were, a Dorian harmony with a Lydian; and he tamed the harsh coldness of air by the interweaving of fire, mixing these youngest notes of the whole in a measured way. And indeed, the pure song, the support of the whole and the harmony of all things, stretched from the middle to the extremes and from the extremes to the middle, tuned this universe, not according to Thracian music, which resembles Jubal, but according to the ancestral will of God, which David emulated. And he who is from David and before him, the Word of God, disdaining the lyre and the cithara, the soulless instruments, but tuning this cosmos and indeed the small cosmos, man, both his soul and body, with the holy Spirit, plays for God through the many-voiced instrument and sings along with the instrument, man. "For you are a cithara and a flute and a temple to me:" a cithara because of harmony, a flute because of breath, a temple because of the Word, so that the one may sound, the other

breathes, and the other receives the Lord. Indeed, King David, the cithara player, whom we mentioned a little earlier, exhorted toward the truth and turned away from idols; far be it from the demons to hymn him, since they were truly driven away by his music, with which he healed only Saul when he was possessed, singing alone. The Lord fashioned a beautiful living instrument, man, in his own image; and indeed, he himself is a perfectly harmonious instrument of God, melodious and holy, a supercosmic wisdom, a heavenly Word. What then does the instrument, the Word of God, the Lord, and the new song intend? To open the eyes of the blind and unstop the ears of the deaf, to lead the lame or the wandering by the hand to righteousness, to show God to senseless men, to put an end to corruption, to conquer death, to reconcile disobedient sons to their father. The instrument of God is philanthropic: the Lord pities, educates, exhorts, admonishes, saves, protects, and promises us the kingdom of heaven as a reward for learning, enjoying from us only this, that we are saved. For evil feeds on the corruption of men, but truth, like the bee that harms none of the things that exist, rejoices only in the salvation of men. So you have the promise, you have the philanthropy: partake of the grace. And do not suppose my saving song is new in the sense of a vessel or a house; for it was "before the morning star," and "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Error is old, but truth appears new.

Whether the mythical goats teach the Phrygians to be ancient, or the poets who record the Arcadians as pre-lunar, or the Egyptians who dream that this land was the first to appear, both gods and men—yet not one of these existed before this cosmos. Before the foundation of the cosmos, we existed, we who were born earlier to God, to be in it of necessity, the rational creations of the divine Word, through whom we claim antiquity, because "in the beginning was the Word." But that the Word existed from above, a divine beginning of all things, was and is; and that now the name, long consecrated and worthy of power, Christ, has been taken, a new song has been called for me. For the Word, Christ, is the cause both of our earlier existence (for we were in God) and of our well-being (for now he has appeared to men)—this same Word, alone both, God and man, is the cause of all good things for us; from him, learning to live well, we are sent on to eternal life. For according to that inspired apostle of the Lord, "the saving grace of God has appeared to all men, teaching us, so that, renouncing impiety and worldly desires, we may live temperately, justly, and piously in the present age, awaiting the blessed hope and epiphany of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ." This is the new song, the epiphany now shining among us of the Word that was in the beginning and pre-existed; the pre-existing savior has recently appeared, the one who is in being has appeared, because "the Word was with God," the teacher, the Word by whom all things have been created has appeared.

Having provided life in the beginning along with creation as a craftsman, he taught how to live well by appearing as a teacher, so that he might later supply eternal life as a god. And he did not take pity on us for our error only now for the first time, but from above, from the beginning, and now, when we were already perishing, he has appeared and saved us completely. For the evil and creeping beast, bewitching, enslaves and tortures men even now, it seems to me, punishing them in a barbaric manner, like those who are said to bind captives to dead bodies until they rot together with them. So this wicked tyrant and serpent, those whom he is able to appropriate from birth, binding them to stones and wood and statues and suchlike idols with the miserable bond of superstition—this, as the saying goes, he has buried alive, bringing them together, until they also decay. For this reason (for the deceiver is one, from above leading Eve, and now also leading other men to death), one and the same is our helper and assistant, the Lord, from the beginning foretelling prophetically, and now also clearly calling to salvation.

Let us then flee, obeying the apostolic command, "the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now active in the sons of disobedience," and let us run to the savior the Lord, who both now and always has exhorted us to salvation, through wonders and signs in Egypt, in the desert through both the bush and the cloud that followed, like a handmaid, with the philanthropy of grace for the Hebrews. By this fear, indeed, he exhorted the hard-hearted; but already also through Moses the all-wise and the truth-loving Isaiah and the whole prophetic chorus he more rationally turns to the Word those who have ears; and in some places he is reviled, in others he threatens; and he laments some men; and he sings to others, just as a good doctor, for sick bodies, applies poultices to some, smoothes others, drenches others, cuts others with iron, cauterizes others, and in some cases saws off, if only it is possible to heal the man even in part or in limb. The savior is indeed many-voiced and many-turned for the salvation of men: threatening he admonishes, reviled he converts, lamenting he pities, singing he encourages, he speaks through a bush (those men needed signs and wonders) and he frightens men with fire, kindling the flame from a pillar, a demonstration of both grace and fear: if you obey, the light; if you disobey, the fire. And since flesh is more honorable than a pillar and a bush, prophets speak after those things, the Lord himself speaking in Isaiah, himself in Elijah, himself in the mouth of the prophets.

But if you do not believe the prophets, and consider both the men and the fire a myth, the Lord himself will speak to you, "who, being in the form of God, did not consider it a usurpation to be equal to God; he emptied himself," the compassionate God, eager to save humanity; and the Word himself now speaks clearly to you, shaming your disbelief, yes, I say, the Word of God become man, so that you too may learn from a man how a man becomes God. Is it not then absurd, O friends, that God always exhorts us to virtue, while we shrink from the benefit and postpone our salvation? For does not John also call to salvation, and does not the whole become an exhorting voice? Let us then ask him: "Who and whence are you, O man?" He will not say he is Elijah, and he will deny being Christ; but he will confess he is a voice crying in the wilderness. Who then is John? To take him as a type, let it be said, he is the exhorting voice of the Word crying in the wilderness. What do you cry, O voice? "Tell us also." "Make straight the ways of the Lord." John is the forerunner, and the voice is the forerunner of the Word, a paraclete voice, preparing for salvation, a voice exhorting to the inheritance of the heavens; through which the barren and desolate wilderness is no longer unfruitful. This pregnancy was foretold to me by an angel's voice; that too was a forerunner of the Lord, announcing good news to a barren woman, as John does to the wilderness. Through this voice of the Word, then, the barren woman bears well, and the wilderness bears fruit.

The forerunning voices of the Lord, those of the angel and of John, hint to me at the salvation stored up, that with the appearance of this Word we may reap the fruit of good offspring, eternal life. Indeed, bringing both voices together to the same point, the Scripture makes the whole clear: "Let the one who does not give birth hear; let the one who is not in labor cry out, because the children of the desert are more numerous than those of the woman who has a husband." An angel proclaimed the good news to us, John urged us to understand the farmer, to seek the husband. For this one is the same, the husband of the barren woman, the farmer of the desert, who filled both the barren woman and the desert with divine power. Since the children of the noble woman were many, but she was childless through disobedience, the once prolific Hebrew woman, the barren woman receives the husband and the desert receives the farmer; then one becomes mother of fruits, the other of the faithful, both mothers through the Word; but for the unbelievers even now both remain barren and desert. John, the herald of the Word, in this way urged them to be ready for the coming of God the Christ, and this was what the silence of Zachariah hinted at, awaiting the forerunning fruit of Christ, so that the light of truth, the Word, might release the mystical silence of the prophetic riddles, becoming gospel. But if you truly desire to see God, partake of purifications befitting God, not of laurel leaves and fillets adorned with wool and purple, but binding on righteousness and putting on the leaves of temperance, busy yourself with Christ; "for I am the door," he says somewhere.

which must be learned by those who wish to understand God, so that he may open wide for us the gates of the heavens; for the gates of the Word are rational, opened by the key of faith: "No one has known God except the Son and the one to whom the Son reveals him." And I know well that the door which was formerly closed, when opened, later reveals what is within and shows what could not even be known before, except by those who have traveled through Christ, through whom alone God is beheld. Therefore, do not busy yourselves with godless shrines or the mouths of chasms full of marvels, nor with the Thesprotian cauldron, the Cirrhaean tripod, or the Dodonian bronze; leave the old oak tree honored in desolate sands and the oracle there, withered with its oak and aged by myths, to the past. For the spring of Castalia has fallen silent, and another spring at Colophon, and the other prophetic streams have likewise died, and indeed, empty of delusion, though late, they have been refuted, flowing away with their own myths. Tell us also of the other divination, or rather madness, the useless oracles: the Clarian, the Pythian, the Didymaean, that of Amphiaraus, of Apollo, of Amphilochus, and if you wish, the interpreters of portents, the augurs, and the interpreters of dreams, and set beside the Pythian the flour-diviners and barley-diviners and those still honored among the many, the ventriloquists; and let the shrines of the Egyptians and the necromancies of the Etruscans be consigned to darkness. These are truly maddening things, sophistries of faithless men and gambling dens of pure deception.

Companions in this sorcery are goats trained for divination and ravens taught by men to give oracles to men. But what if I were to recount the mysteries for you? I will not dance them out, as they say Alcibiades did, but I will thoroughly expose, by the word of truth, the sorcery concealed in them and those very gods of yours, whose rites are secret, as if on the stage of life I were to roll them out for spectators of the truth. The Bacchants celebrate the frenzied Dionysus with raw flesh-eating, conducting their sacred madness and performing the distribution of flesh, crowned with snakes, shrieking "Euai, Euai"—that Eve through whom error followed; and the sign of the Bacchic rites is a serpent that has been initiated. Indeed, according to the precise speech of the Hebrews, the name Heua, when aspirated, is interpreted as "the female serpent." Deo and Kore have already become a mystic drama, and Eleusis celebrates their wandering, their abduction, and their mourning with torches. And it seems to me that the orgies and the mysteries must be etymologized: the former from the anger of Deo against Zeus, the latter from the defilement that befell Dionysus; but if also from some Attic Mystes, whom Apollodorus says perished in a hunt, I have no objection—your mysteries are glorified with funereal honor. And otherwise, you may understand the mysteries as "mytheria," by a transposition of letters; for they hunt, even if some others do, but especially such myths hunt the most barbarous of Thracians, the most senseless of Phrygians, and the most superstitious of Greeks.

May the one who began this deception for humanity perish—whether Dardanos, who revealed the mysteries of the Mother of the gods, or Aëtion, who instituted the orgies and initiations of the Samothracians, or that Phrygian Midas, who learned from the Odrysian and then handed down a crafty deception to his subjects. For the Cyprian islander Kinyras would never persuade me, he who dared to hand over the lewd orgies concerning Aphrodite from night to day, ambitious to deify a citizen prostitute. As for Melampous son of Amythaon, others say he brought the festivals of Deo, a lament sung in hymns, from Egypt to Greece. These I would call the originators of evil, fathers of godless myths and destructive superstition, who planted the seed of vice and corruption in life by means of the mysteries. But now, for it is indeed time, I will expose your very orgies as full of deception and marvel-mongering. And if you have been initiated, you will rather laugh at these myths of yours that are honored. I proclaim openly what has been hidden, not ashamed to say what you are not ashamed to worship. So then, the "foam-born" and "Cyprus-born," the one dear to Kinyras (I mean Aphrodite, the "genital-loving, because she appeared from the genitals"—those severed genitals of Ouranos, those lustful ones, which after the cutting forced the wave), as a fruit worthy of your licentious members, in the initiations of this sea-goddess of pleasure, a grain of salt and a phallus are given to the initiates as a token of procreation, and the initiates bring a coin to her as lovers do to a courtesan.

The mysteries of Deo and the amorous embraces of Zeus with his mother Demeter, and the wrath (I know not what further to call her—mother or wife) of Deo, on account of which she is said to have been called Brimo, the supplications of Zeus, the drinking of gall, the heart-drawings, and the unspeakable rites: the Phrygians celebrate the same in the rites of Attis, Cybele, and the Corybantes. They have also babbled that Zeus, having torn off the testicles of the ram, brought them and cast them into the bosom of Deo, paying a false penalty for the violent embrace, as if he had castrated himself. The symbols of this initiation, which I have set forth at length, I know will move you to laughter, even if you are not given to laughter because of the refutations: "I have eaten from the drum; I have drunk from the cymbal; I have carried the winnowing-fan; I have crept under the bridal chamber." Are not these symbols an outrage? Are not the mysteries a mockery? And what if I were to add the rest? Demeter becomes pregnant, the Maiden is brought up, and then this same Zeus, the begetter, again has intercourse with Persephone, his own daughter, after the mother Deo, forgetful of his former pollution—Zeus, father and seducer of the maiden, and he has intercourse with her, having become a dragon, which he was proved to be. At any rate, the symbol of the Sabazian mysteries for the initiates is the god through the bosom; this is a dragon, drawn through the bosom of the initiated, a proof of the incontinence of Zeus. Persephone also becomes pregnant with a bull-shaped child; indeed, some idol-poet says, "The bull is the father of the dragon, and the dragon is the father of the bull, in the mountain the secret.

herd, the goad, the pastoral goad, I think, calling the narthex a goad, which the bacchants raise aloft. Do you wish me to relate to you also the flower-gathering of Persephone, and the basket, and the abduction by Hades, and the cleft in the earth, and the pigs of Eubouleus that were swallowed down together with the two goddesses, on account of which at the Thesmophoria they cast piglets into the megaron? This mythology the women celebrate in various ways according to the city—Thesmophoria, Skirophoria, Arretophoria—dramatizing in many forms the abduction of Persephone. For the mysteries of Dionysus are utterly inhuman. While he was still a child, with the armed movement of the dancing Curetes around him, and the Titans having crept in by deceit, having tricked him with childish playthings, these Titans tore him apart while he was still an infant, as the Thracian Orpheus, the poet of the Initiation, says: "a cone and a rhombus and jointed toys, and beautiful golden apples from the clear-voiced Hesperides." And of this initiation of yours it is not useless to set forth the useless symbols for condemnation: knucklebones, a ball, a top, apples, a rhombus, a mirror, a fleece. Now Athena, having stolen the heart of Dionysus, was called Pallas from brandishing the heart; and the Titans, who also tore him apart, placing a certain cauldron on a tripod and throwing in the limbs of Dionysus, first boiled them.

Then, piercing them on spits, they "held them over the fire of Hephaestus." And Zeus, appearing later (if he was a god, perhaps having partaken of the savor of the roasting meats, which your gods acknowledge as "their allotted portion"), punishes the Titans with a thunderbolt and entrusts the limbs of Dionysus to his son Apollo for burial. But he, not disobeying Zeus, carries the dismembered corpse to Parnassus and lays it there. If you wish to be initiated into the orgies of the Corybantes as well, these men, after killing their third brother, covered the head of the corpse with a crimson cloth and, having crowned it, buried it, carrying it on a bronze shield to the foothills of Olympus (and these are the mysteries, to speak concisely, murders and burials). The priests of these rites, whom those concerned call Anactotelestae, further embellish the calamity, forbidding the placing of whole-rooted celery on the table; for they think that the celery has sprung from the blood that flowed from the Corybantic victim—just as, of course, the women celebrating the Thesmophoria refrain from eating the seeds of the pomegranate, believing that the pomegranates have sprouted from the drops of blood that fell from Dionysus. And calling the Corybantes Cabeiri, they proclaim a Cabeiric initiation; for these two fratricides, taking up the chest in which the phallus of Dionysus was deposited, brought it to Tyrrhenia, merchants of a glorious cargo; and there they remained, being exiles, having bequeathed to the Tyrrhenians the highly honored teaching of piety, to worship phalli and the chest.

For what reason do some wish to call Dionysus Attis, since he was deprived of his genitals? And what wonder is it if the barbarian Tyrrhenians are initiated into such shameful sufferings, when among the Athenians and the rest of Greece—I am ashamed even to speak of it—the mythology concerning Deo is full of shame? For Deo, wandering in search of her daughter Kore around Eleusis (this is a region of Attica), grows weary and sits down upon a well, grieving. This is still forbidden to the initiates, lest the initiated seem to imitate the mourner. At that time the earth-born inhabited Eleusis; their names were Baubo and Dysaules and Triptolemus, and also Eumolpus and Eubouleus. Triptolemus was a cowherd, Eumolpus a shepherd, and Eubouleus a swineherd; from them the hierophantic race of the Eumolpidae and the Kerykes at Athens flourished. And indeed (for I will not refrain from speaking) Baubo, having entertained Deo, offers her a potion; but when she refuses to take it and is unwilling to drink (for she was in mourning), Baubo, being greatly distressed, as if slighted, draws up her genitals and shows them to the goddess. And Deo is delighted at the sight and at last barely accepts the drink, pleased by the spectacle. These are the secret mysteries of the Athenians. Orpheus records these things. And I will set before you the very verses of Orpheus, so that you may have the mystagogue as a witness of the shamelessness: "Thus speaking, she drew up her robes, and showed all the body, even the part not fitting; and the child Iacchus was there, and with his hand he kept tossing it, laughing, beneath the folds of Baubo.

And when the goddess smiled, she smiled in her heart, and received the variegated vessel in which the potion was contained. This is the formula of the Eleusinian mysteries: "I fasted, I drank the potion, I took from the chest, and having done the work, I placed it into the basket and from the basket into the chest." Fine spectacles indeed, and fitting for a goddess. Worthy, then, of night and fire and of the "great-hearted"—or rather, vain-minded—people of the Erechtheidae, and also of the other Greeks, whom "after death awaits what they do not expect." For whom does Heraclitus of Ephesus prophesy? "Night-wanderers, magi, Bacchants, Lenaeans, initiates"—to these he threatens what comes after death, to these he prophesies fire: "For the things that are considered mysteries among men are celebrated in an unholy manner." Law and empty opinion, then, and the mysteries of the serpent are some sort of worshiped deception, as those who are truly uninitiated turn to spurious piety with their uninitiated initiations and their unorgiastic rites. And what are the mystic chests like? For it is necessary to strip bare their holy things and speak the unspeakable. Are these not sesame cakes and pyramids and balls and round cakes with many navel-like projections, and lumps of salt and a serpent, the orgiastic emblem of Dionysus Bassarus? And are there not pomegranates besides these, and fig branches and fennel stalks and ivy, and also flat cakes and poppies? These are their holy things. And further, the secret symbols of Themis: marjoram, a lamp, a sword, a woman's comb—which is euphemistically and mystically called the female organ. O the manifest shamelessness! Formerly, for temperate people, night was a silent veil for pleasure.

Now, for the initiates, the experience of intemperance is spoken of as night, and fire, borne as a torch, exposes the passions. Extinguish the fire, O Hierophant; be ashamed, O Torchbearer, of your torches; the light exposes your Iacchos; permit the mysteries to be hidden by night; let the rites be honored by darkness; fire does not dissemble, it is commanded to expose and punish. These are the mysteries of the godless; and I call them godless with good reason, those who have not known the God who truly is, but worship a child torn apart by Titans and a mourning woman and unspeakable parts truly shameful, shamelessly, caught in a twofold godlessness: first, in that they are ignorant of God, not recognizing the God who truly is; and second, in this further error, they consider those who are not as if they are, and call these gods who are not truly beings, or rather are not at all, having only attained the name. Therefore the apostle also rebukes us, saying, "And you were strangers to the covenants of the promise, having no hope and being godless in the world." Many blessings to the king of the Scythians, whoever he was [Anacharsis]. He shot down with arrows his own citizen, who was imitating among the Scythians the initiation of the Mother of the gods as practiced among the Cyzicenes, beating a drum, sounding a cymbal, and having some begging-gear hung from his neck, as having become unmanly himself among the Greeks and of

oses the passions. Extinguish the fire, O Hierophant; be ashamed, O Torchbearer, of your torches; the light exp For the sake of these (for it must by no means be concealed), I am moved to wonder in what manner Euhemerus of Acragas, and Nicanor of Cyprus, and Diagoras, and Hippo of Melos, and that Cyrenaean besides (Theodorus by name), and many others, who lived temperately and perceived more keenly than the rest of men the error concerning these gods, have been called atheists, even if they did not comprehend the truth itself, yet they at least suspected the error, which is no small spark of wisdom that kindles toward truth. One of them enjoins the Egyptians, "If you consider them gods, do not mourn them nor beat your breasts; but if you mourn them, no longer consider them to be gods." Another, taking Heracles made of wood (he happened to be cooking something at home, as is likely), said, "Come now, O Heracles; now is the time for you, as for Eurystheus, to perform this thirteenth labor for us and prepare the dinner for Diagoras," and then he put him into the fire as wood. Atheism and superstition are thus extremes of ignorance, from which one must strive to remain apart. Do you not see the hierophant of truth, Moses, commanding that a eunuch or one mutilated not attend the assembly, and further, that one born of a harlot? He hints through the former at the atheistic character, deprived of divine and generative power, and through the latter, the third, at one who inscribes many falsely named gods instead of the one true God, just as one born of a harlot inscribes many fathers in ignorance of the true father.

There was a certain innate and ancient fellowship of men with heaven, darkened by ignorance, but suddenly leaping forth from the darkness and shining forth, as indeed that saying of someone: "Do you see this infinite aether high above, holding the earth around in its moist arms?" And: "O you who are the vehicle of the earth and have your seat upon the earth, whoever you are, hard to be seen," and all such things as the children of poets sing. But erroneous and perverted notions, deviating from the straight path, truly ruinous, have turned "the heavenly plant," man, from a heavenly way of life and stretched him out upon the earth, persuading him to attend to earthly creations. For some, immediately deceived concerning the spectacle of the heaven and trusting only in sight, observing the movements of the stars, marveled at them and deified them, naming the stars gods from the word "to run" (thein), and worshipped the sun, as the Indians do, and the moon, as the Phrygians do. Others, reaping the cultivated fruits that grow from the earth, called Deo the grain, as the Athenians do, and Dionysus the vine, as the Thebans do. Still others, observing the requitals of wickedness, deify the retributions, worshipping the punishments and the misfortunes. Hence the poets of the stage have fabricated the Erinyes and the Eumenides, the Palamnaioi and the Prostropaioi, and also the Alastores. And already some of the philosophers, after the poets, fashion images of the passions among you, such as Fear and Love and Joy and Hope, just as, of course, the ancient Epimenides set up altars to Insolence and Shamelessness at Athens.

Others, starting from the things themselves, are deified among men and are physically fashioned: some Dike, Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos, and Heimarmene, also Auxo and Thallo, the Attic goddesses. The sixth is a mode of deception that introduces gods, according to which they count the twelve gods; Hesiod sings his own theogony of them, and all that Homer theologizes. The last remains (for these are all seven modes) the one starting from the divine beneficence that is bestowed upon men. For not understanding the beneficent god, they fashioned certain saviors: the Dioscuri, Heracles the averter of evil, and Asclepius the healer. These are the slippery and harmful deviations from the truth, dragging man down from heaven and turning him into an abyss. I wish to show you the gods themselves close at hand, what sort they are and if they are any, so that you may at last cease from error and instead run back to heaven. "For we too were once children of wrath, as also the rest; but God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love, which he loved us, who were already dead in transgressions, made us alive together with Christ." "For the Word is living" and, buried together with Christ, is raised together with God. But those still unbelieving are called "children of wrath," nurtured by wrath; we, however, are no longer nurslings of wrath, we who have been torn away from error and are darting toward the truth. Thus we, once sons of lawlessness, have now become sons of God through the love of the Word for humanity. And your own poet, the Acragantine Empedocles, insinuates himself:

Therefore, distraught with grievous evils, you will never give rest to your spirit from wretched sorrows. For the most part, myths and fictions have been fabricated among you concerning the gods; and those things that are supposed to have happened have been recorded concerning shameful men who lived licentiously. You proceed with arrogance and madness, and having abandoned the straight and right path, you have gone off through thorns and stakes. Why do you wander, mortals? Cease, vain ones; leave the darkness of night, and take hold of the light. These things the prophetic and poetic Sibyl enjoins upon us; and truth also enjoins, stripping the multitude of gods of their terrifying and astounding masks, refuting the fabrications of opinions by certain synonymies. For instance, there are those who record three Zeuses: one of Aether in Arcadia, and the other two sons of Cronus, of whom one is in Crete and the other again in Arcadia. And there are those who posit five Athenas: one of Hephaestus, the Athenian; another of the Nile, the Egyptian; a third of Cronus, the inventor of war; a fourth of Zeus, whom the Messenians call Coryphasia from her mother; and finally, the daughter of Pallas and Titanis, daughter of Oceanus, who impiously slew her father and is adorned with her father's skin as with a fleece. Moreover, concerning Apollo, Aristotle lists a first of Hephaestus and Athena (here Athena is no longer a virgin), a second in Crete, the son of Corybas, a third of Zeus, and a fourth, the Arcadian son of Silenus—this one is called Nomius among the Arcadians; in addition to these, he enumerates a Libyan, the son of Ammon. And Didymus the grammarian adds a sixth, the son of Magnes.

How many Apollos are there even now, countless mortal and perishable men, who are called by the same name as those previously mentioned? What if I were to tell you of the many Asclepiuses or the numbered Hermeses or the Hephaestuses of myth? Would I not seem superfluous, flooding your ears with these many names? But their homelands, their arts, their lives, and indeed their tombs prove them to have been men. For instance, Ares, even honored among the poets as far as possible—"Ares, Ares, destroyer of men, defiled with blood, batterer of walls," this "turncoat" and "hostile" one—was, according to Epicharmus, a Spartan; Sophocles knows him as a Thracian; others say an Arcadian. Homer says he was bound for thirteen months: "Ares endured, when Otus and mighty Ephialtes, sons of Aloeus, bound him in a strong bond; he was bound in a bronze jar for thirteen months." May the Carians have many good things, who sacrifice dogs to him. And may the Scythians not cease sacrificing donkeys, as

Apollodorus and Callimachus say, "Phoebus rises among the Hyperboreans for the sacred asses." And the same poet elsewhere says, "The rich sacrifices of asses delight Phoebus." And Hephaestus, whom Zeus threw from Olympus "from the divine threshold," fell on Lemnos and worked as a smith, his feet crippled, "and his thin shanks were withered." You have also a physician, not only a smith among the gods; but the physician was a lover of money, Asclepius by name. And I will set before you your own poet, the Boeotian Pindar: "Him too gold turned, appearing in his hands with a lordly fee; but then the son of Cronus, hurling through both his hands, quickly took away the breath from his breast, and the blazing thunderbolt struck his doom." And Euripides: "For Zeus, having killed my son Asclepius, is to blame, casting flame into his breast." So then he lies thunderstruck within the borders of Cynosuris. And Philochorus says that in Tenos Poseidon is honored as a physician, and that Sicily lies upon Cronus and he is buried there. And Patrocles of Thurii and the younger Sophocles in three tragedies relate concerning the Dioscuri: these two Dioscuri were mortal men subject to fate, if Homer is sufficient to confirm what has been said: "But the life-giving earth already held them fast there in Lacedaemon, in their dear fatherland." And let the author of the Cypria come forward: "Castor was mortal, and the fate of death was allotted to him; but Polydeuces was immortal, a branch of Ares.

This then the poet falsely invented; but Homer is more trustworthy than him, speaking concerning both the Dioscuri, and also convicting Heracles as a "phantom"; for he says "the hero Heracles, knower of great deeds." Therefore Homer himself knows Heracles as a mortal man, and Hieronymus the philosopher also describes the condition of his body: small, with bristly hair, strong. Dicaearchus says he was sinewy, muscular, dark, hook-nosed, with greyish eyes, and straight hair. This Heracles, then, having lived fifty-two years, ended his life, buried on the pyre on Oeta. As for the Muses, whom Alcman genealogizes as daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, and whom the rest of the poets and writers deify and worship, and for whom whole cities even consecrate Museia, these were Mysian slave-girls bought by Megaclo, the daughter of Macar. Now Macar was king of the Lesbians, but was always at odds with his wife, and Megaclo was indignant on behalf of her mother—and why should she not be? So she buys these Mysian slave-girls, this many in number, and calls them Moisai in the Aeolic dialect. She taught them to sing and play the cithara, melodiously, the ancient deeds. And they, continually playing the cithara and singing beautifully, charmed Macar and put a stop to his anger. For this reason Megaclo dedicated them as thank-offerings on behalf of her mother, in bronze, and ordered that they be honored throughout all the sanctuaries. Such, then, are the Muses; the story is from Myrsilus the Lesbian.

Hear then of the loves of your gods and the paradoxical tales of their intemperance, their wounds, bonds, laughter, battles, servitudes, banquets, embraces, tears, sufferings, and lecherous pleasures. Summon for me Poseidon and the chorus of women corrupted by him: Amphitrite, Amymone, Alope, Melanippe, Alcyone, Hippothoe, Chione, and the countless others; and yet with all these, the passions of your Poseidon were still straitened. Summon for me also Apollo—this is Phoebus, the pure seer and good counselor; but Sterope says nothing of this, nor Aethusa, nor Arsinoe, nor Zeuxippe, nor Prothoe, nor Marpessa, nor Hypsipyle; for Daphne alone escaped both the seer and his corruption. And let Zeus himself come last of all, the "father of men and gods" as you say—so great was his outpouring in matters of love that he desired all women and fulfilled his desire with all. He glutted himself on women no less than the goat of the Thmuites on goats. And I have admired your poems, Homer: "The son of Cronos nodded with his dark brows; the ambrosial locks flowed from the king's immortal head; and great Olympus was shaken." You fashion Zeus as august, Homer, and attach to him an honored nod. But if you only show the girdle, man, both Zeus is exposed and his hair is shamed. To what lengths of licentiousness did that Zeus go who passed so many nights of pleasure with Alcmene?

Nor were the nine nights long enough for the licentious one (indeed, the whole life was short for his intemperance), so that he might sow for us the god who averts evil. Heracles, son of Zeus—truly son of Zeus, born from a long night—after laboring long over the twelve labors, corrupted the fifty daughters of Thestius in a single night, becoming at once adulterer and bridegroom of so many virgins. Not without reason, then, do the poets call him "wretched" and "worker of shameful deeds." It would be long to recount his manifold adulteries and corruptions of children. For not even children were spared by your gods, some loving Hylas, others Hyacinthus, others Pelops, others Chrysippus, others Ganymede. Let your women, who worship such gods, pray that their own husbands be like this—so temperate, that they may be similar to the gods, having emulated the same things. Let your children be accustomed to revere these gods, so that when they become men, they will receive the gods as a clear image of fornication. But perhaps only the male gods among them are eager for sexual pleasures; the female goddesses remain each at home, as Homer says, ashamed, the goddesses feeling shame out of modesty to look upon Aphrodite in her adultery. Yet they indulge in licentiousness more passionately, bound in adultery: Eos with Tithonus, Selene with Endymion, a Nereid with Aeacus, Thetis with Peleus, Demeter with Iasion, and Persephone with Adonis.

Aphrodite, shamed by her affair with Ares, went on to marry Cinyras and Anchises, conceived Phaethon, and loved Adonis; she also quarreled with ox-eyed Hera, and the goddesses, stripping for the apple, naked, presented themselves to the shepherd to see which of them would seem beautiful. Come then, let us also survey the contests briefly and put an end to these funeral festivals: the Isthmian, Nemean, Pythian, and, after these, the Olympian. At Pytho, then, the Pythian serpent is worshipped, and the festival of the snake is proclaimed the Pythian Games. At the Isthmus, the sea spat out a pitiful piece of refuse, and Melicertes is mourned in the Isthmian Games. At Nemea, another child, Archemorus, is buried, and the child's funeral rite is called the Nemean Games. Pisa, O Panhellenes, is a tomb for you—that of a Phrygian charioteer—and the libations for Pelops, the Olympian Games, are usurped by the Zeus of Pheidias. The contests, then, were mysteries, as it seems, held in competition over the dead, just as the oracles were, and both have been made public. But the mysteries at Agra and those at Halimous in Attica near Athens are limited. Yet the contests and the phalli performed for Dionysus are already a universal shame, having been wickedly spread throughout life. For Dionysus, eager to descend into Hades, did not know the way; a man named Prosymnus promised to show him, but not without a price. The price was not a noble one, but it was noble to Dionysus; and the favor was an amorous one, the price that Dionysus demanded. Since the god wished it, the request was granted, and indeed he promised to provide it to him, if he should return, confirming the promise with an oath. Having learned the way, he departed; he came back again, but did not find Prosymnus (for he had died).

Dionysus, fulfilling his promise to his lover, rushes to the tomb and indulges in passion. Cutting a branch of a fig tree, as it happened, he fashions it into the form of a male member and sits upon the branch, carrying out his pledge to the dead man. A memorial of this passion, phalli are set up in cities for Dionysus: "For if they did not conduct a procession for Dionysus and sing a hymn to the genitals, they would be acting most shamelessly," says Heraclitus, "and Hades and Dionysus are the same, to whom they rave and celebrate the Lenaia," not so much because of bodily drunkenness, as I think, as because of the shameful hierophancy of licentiousness. Naturally, then, your gods have become slaves of passions; but even before the so-called Helots among the Lacedaemonians, Apollo submitted to the yoke of slavery to Admetus in Pherae, Heracles to Omphale in Sardis, and Poseidon and Apollo served Laomedon, like a useless servant, evidently unable to obtain freedom from their former master; at that time they also built the walls of Ilium for the Phrygian. Homer is not ashamed to reveal Athena, saying she held "a golden lamp" in her hands for Odysseus; and we have read of Aphrodite, like some wanton maidservant, bringing a stool for the adulterer and placing it before Helen, so as to lead him into intercourse. Panyassis, in addition to these, records that the gods served many other men, writing somewhat as follows: Demeter endured, the famous Amphigyeis endured, Poseidon endured, and silver-bowed Apollo endured serving a mortal man for a year; and strong-spirited Ares endured under the compulsion of his father, and so forth.

Thus, it naturally follows that you must in every way introduce these passionate and emotional gods of yours as subject to human passions. "For indeed their skin is mortal." Homer testifies quite precisely, presenting Aphrodite crying out sharply and loudly at her wound, and relating that the most warlike Ares himself was wounded in the belly by Diomedes. Polemon says that Athena was wounded by Ornytus; and indeed Homer says that Hades was shot by Heracles, and Panyassis recounts that Helios [Augeas] was likewise. And the same Panyassis records that Hera Zygia was wounded by the same Heracles "in sandy Pylos." Sosibius says that Heracles was wounded in the hand by the Hippocoontids. If there are wounds, then there is blood; for the poetic ichor is more repulsive than blood, since ichor is understood as putrefaction of blood. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce for them treatments and foods, of which they are in need. Hence tables, drunkenness, laughter, and sexual intercourse—they would not engage in human sexual acts, nor produce children, nor sleep, if they were immortal, without needs, and ageless.

He also partook of a human table among the Ethiopians, and Zeus himself, being entertained by Lycaon the Arcadian, partook of an inhuman and lawless feast; at any rate, he gorged himself on human flesh, though not willingly. For the god did not know that Lycaon the Arcadian, his host, had slaughtered his own son (Nyctimus by name) and served him as a dish to Zeus. A fine Zeus indeed—the prophetic, the god of hospitality, of suppliants, the gracious, the god of all oracles, the averter of evil; or rather, the unjust, the lawless, the wicked, the unholy, the inhuman, the violent, the corrupter, the adulterer, the amorous. But that was then, when he was such, when he was a man; now, it seems to me, even your myths have grown old. Zeus is no longer a serpent, no longer a swan, no longer an eagle, no longer an amorous man; the god does not fly, does not practice pederasty, does not kiss, does not use force, although there are still many beautiful women, more comely than Leda and more blooming than Semele, and youths more handsome and more refined than the Phrygian herdsman. Where now is that eagle? Where is the swan? Where is Zeus himself? He has grown old along with his wing; for surely he does not repent of his amours, nor does he

He is being taught to be temperate. The myth is stripped bare before you: Leda died, the swan died, the eagle died. You seek your Zeus? Do not pry into the sky, but into the earth. The Cretan will tell you, in whose land he is also buried; Callimachus in his Hymns: "For even a tomb, O lord, the Cretans fashioned for you." For Zeus is dead (do not be distressed), like Leda, like the swan, like the eagle, like the amorous man, like the serpent. And now even the superstitious themselves, though unwilling, yet nevertheless perceive the error concerning the gods; for they are not from an ancient oak nor from a rock, but "they are of the race of men," and a little later they will be found to be oaks and rocks. At any rate, Staphylus records that a certain Agamemnon is honored as Zeus in Sparta; and Phanocles in his *Erotes* or *Kaloi* says that Agamemnon, the king of the Hellenes, established a temple of Aphrodite at Argynnos for his beloved Argynnos. And the Arcadians invoke Artemis called the Hanged One, as Callimachus says in his *Aitia*. And in Methymna another Artemis, Kondylitis, is honored. There is also a temple of another Artemis, Podagra, in Laconia, as Sosibius says. And Polemon knows of a statue of Apollo with his mouth open, and another of Apollo the Glutton honored in Elis. Here the Eleans sacrifice to Zeus Averter of Flies; and the Romans sacrifice to Hercules Averter of Flies, and to Fever and to Fear, whom they also enroll among the companions of Hercules. I pass over the Argives and Laconians: the Argives worship Aphrodite the Tomb-Digger, and the Spartans revere Artemis Chelitis, since they call coughing "chelytteuein.

Do you think that these things we are setting before you are brought to you from somewhere else, as if falsely inserted? You do not even seem to recognize your own authors, whom I call as witnesses against your disbelief, O wretches, you who have filled your entire truly unlivable life with godless mockery. Are not a bald Zeus honored in Argos, and another avenger in Cyprus? Do not the Argives worship Aphrodite as the one who straddles, the Athenians as the courtesan, and the Syracusans as the fair-buttocked, whom the poet Nicander somewhere called "fair-gluted"? I say nothing of Dionysus the pig-squeezer; the Sicyonians worship him, having set him over the female parts, revering the author of outrage as overseer of shame. Such are their gods, and such are they themselves, playing among gods, or rather mocking and insulting themselves. And how much better are the Egyptians, who have honored irrational animals village by village and city by city, than the Greeks who worship such gods? For those, even if they are beasts, are not adulterous, not lewd, and not one of them pursues pleasure contrary to nature. But as for these, what need is there to say more, since they have been sufficiently refuted? Yet the Egyptians, whom I just mentioned, are divided according to their own cults: the Syenites worship the phagrus fish, the inhabitants of Elephantine worship the maiotes (another fish), the Oxyrhynchites worship the fish of the same name as their region, the Heracleopolites worship the ichneumon, the Saïtes and Thebans worship the sheep, the Lycopolitans worship the wolf, the Cynopolitans worship the dog, the Memphites worship Apis, and the Mendesians worship the goat.

You, who consider yourselves far superior to the Egyptians (I hesitate to say worse), and who never cease mocking the Egyptians day by day, what sort are you even concerning irrational animals? The Thessalians among you have honored storks because of their habit, and the Thebans have honored weasels because of the birth of Heracles. And what again of the Thessalians? They are reported to worship ants, because they have learned that Zeus, having changed himself into an ant, mingled with Eurymedousa, the daughter of Kletor, and begat Myrmidon. And Polemon records that those dwelling around the Troad worship the local mice, which they call sminthoi, because they gnawed through the bowstrings of their enemies; and they named Apollo Smintheus after those mice. Herakleides, in his Foundations of Temples, says that in Akarnania, where the promontory of Actium is and the temple of Apollo Aktios, a cow is sacrificed as a preliminary offering to the flies. Nor shall I pass over the Samians (they worship a sheep, as Euphorion says), nor yet those Syrians who inhabit Phoenicia, of whom some worship doves and others fish as excessively as the Eleans worship Zeus. Come then: since those you worship are not gods, it seems to me I should next examine whether they are actually daimones, enrolled in this second rank, as you say. For if they are daimones, they are gluttonous and polluted. It is possible to find, even openly, local daimones in cities who reap honor: among the Kythnians, Menedemos; among the Tenians, Kallistagoras; among the Delians, Anios; among the Lakedaimonians, Astrabakos. And a certain hero is honored at Phaleron by the stern.

And the Pythia commanded the Plataeans to sacrifice to Androcrates, Democrates, Cyclaeus, and Leucon during the height of the Median wars. There are also countless other daimons that one can perceive, even if one is able to examine only a little: for thrice ten thousand are on the much-nourishing earth, immortal daimons, guardians of mortal men. Who are these guardians, O Boeotian? Do not begrudge telling. Or is it clear that these and those more honored than them, the great daimons, are Apollo, Artemis, Leto, Demeter, Kore, Pluto, Heracles, and Zeus himself? But they do not guard us to prevent us from fleeing, O Ascraean, but perhaps to prevent us from sinning, they who are surely not experienced in sins. Here it is fitting to utter the proverbial saying: a father who is not admonished admonishes his son. But if indeed these are guardians, they are not moved by goodwill toward you, but clinging to your destruction, they fawn upon life like flatterers, lured by smoke. The daimons themselves somewhere confess their own gluttony, saying, "For we have received as our portion libation and savor." And what other voice would the Egyptian gods, such as cats and weasels, utter if they took voice, except the Homeric and poetic one, dear to savor and cookery? Such, then, among you are both the daimons and the gods, and any demigods, as mules are called; for you are not even at a loss for names for the compositions of impiety. Come then, let us add this as well, that your gods are inhuman and misanthropic daimons, not only rejoicing in the madness of men, but also delighting in manslaughter.

Now they provide themselves with occasions for pleasure, at one time in armed rivalries in the stadia, at another in countless ambitious deeds in wars, so that they might glut themselves as much as possible with human blood without restraint. And already, in cities and among nations, as if plagues had descended, they have demanded savage truces. Aristomenes the Messenian, for example, slaughtered three hundred to Zeus Ithometes, thinking he was thus making a noble hecatomb of so many at once and of such quality; among them was Theopompus, king of the Lacedaemonians, a well-born victim. The Tauri, the people who inhabit the Tauric Chersonese, sacrifice to the Tauric Artemis any strangers they capture among those who have been shipwrecked at sea; Euripides dramatizes these sacrifices of yours on the stage. Monimus records in his Collection of Marvels that in Pella of Thessaly an Achaean man was sacrificed to Peleus and Cheiron; and Anticleides in his Returns declares that the Lyctians (these are a Cretan people) slaughter men to Zeus, and Dositheas says that the Lesbians offer a similar sacrifice to Dionysus; and the Phocaeans—for I will not pass them by either—Pythocles in the third book of his On Concord says that they sacrifice a man to the Tauropolos Artemis.

he records as being burned alive. Erechtheus the Athenian and Marius the Roman sacrificed their own daughters; the former to Pherephatta, as Demaratus records in the first book of his Tragic Histories, the latter to the Apotropaei, as Dorotheus records in the fourth book of his Italian Histories. From these acts the demons appear philanthropic; how, then, are the superstitious not correspondingly holy? The former are praised as saviors, the latter ask for salvation from those who plot against salvation. For, supposing they are performing a favorable sacrifice, they are unaware that they are slaughtering themselves by slaughtering men. For the murder does not become a sacrifice because of the place, not even if someone, in the name of Artemis or Zeus, in a supposedly sacred place rather than in anger or avarice, or to other similar demons, on altars or on roads, slaughters a man, having named him a sacrificial victim; such a sacrifice is murder and manslaughter. Why, then, O wisest of all other living creatures, men, do we flee from wild beasts, and if we happen upon a bear or a lion, we turn aside, as when someone, seeing a serpent, recoils from a mountain glen, and trembling seizes his limbs, and he immediately withdraws; but when you perceive and understand that demons are destructive, baneful, plotting, misanthropic, and harmful, do you not turn aside or shrink away? And what truth could the wicked utter, or what benefit could they confer? For I can show you a better man than these gods of yours, these demons, than Apollo the prophetic, Cyrus and Solon. Your Phoebus is fond of gifts, but not fond of men.

He betrayed his friend Croesus, forgetting the reward (so fond of the oblique was he), and led Croesus across the Halys to the pyre. Thus the demons, in their love, guide men into the fire. But, O man more humane and truthful than Apollo, pity the one bound on the pyre; and you, Solon, prophesy the truth; and you, Cyrus, order the pyre to be extinguished. At least learn wisdom at last, Croesus, taught by your suffering: the one you worship is ungrateful, he takes the reward and after the gold lies again. "Behold the end" is spoken to you not by the demon, but by a man. Solon does not prophesy obscurely; you will find this oracle alone true, O barbarian; you will test it on the pyre. Hence it occurs to me to wonder by what fantasies the first misguided men were carried away to announce superstition to mankind, legislating the worship of baleful demons, whether it was that Phoroneus or Merops or some other, who set up temples and altars to them, and are also fabled to have first instituted sacrifices. For indeed in later times they also fabricated gods to worship. For instance, this Eros, said to be among the most ancient of the gods, was honored by no one before Charmus, a youth, captured his beloved and set up an altar in the Academy as a thank-offering for the fulfillment of his desire; and they have called the licentiousness of the disease Eros, deifying unbridled desire. The Athenians did not even know who Pan was until Philippides told them. Naturally, then, superstition, having taken its start from somewhere, has become a source of mindless evil.

Then, not being checked but coming to increase and flowing abundantly, it becomes the creator of many demons, sacrificing hecatombs, celebrating festivals, setting up statues, and building temples—for I will not keep silent about these either, but will also expose them—temples euphemistically so called, but in reality tombs [that is, tombs called temples]. But you, at least now, forget superstition, ashamed to honor tombs. In the temple of Athena at Larissa on the acropolis there is a tomb of Acrisius. At Athens on the acropolis, Cecrops is buried, as Antiochus says in the ninth book of his Histories. And what of Erichthonius? Is he not buried in the temple of Athena Polias? And Immaradus, son of Eumolpus and Daeira, is he not in the precinct of the Eleusinium below the acropolis? And the daughters of Celeus, are they not buried at Eleusis? Why should I recount the Hyperborean women? They are called Hyperoche and Laodice, and are buried in the Artemision at Delos, which is in the sanctuary of Delian Apollo. Leandrius says that Cleochus was buried at Miletus in the Didymaeum. Nor is it right to pass over the monument of Leucophryne there, following Zeno of Myndus, who says she is buried in the temple of Artemis at Magnesia, nor yet the altar of Apollo at Telmissus, which they record is also a tomb of the seer Telmissus. Ptolemy, son of Agesarchus, in the first book of his work On Philopator, says that at Paphos, in the temple of Aphrodite, Cinyras and the descendants of Cinyras are buried. But for me, as I go over the tombs you worship, not even all time would suffice.

If no shame for these audacities enters you, then you are utterly dead, having truly placed your trust in the dead, and you go about—O wretches, what evil is this you suffer? Your heads are wrapped in night. And if, in addition to this, I should bring the statues themselves before you for inspection, you would find, upon approaching, that the custom is truly nonsense, as you turn in worship to "works of human hands," senseless things. Long ago, the Scythians worshipped the scimitar, the Arabs the stone, the Persians the river, and among other peoples, even more ancient ones, they set up conspicuous wooden posts and pillars hewn from stone—these were called *xoana* because they were carved from the material. Indeed, in Icarus, the statue of Artemis was an unworked piece of wood, and that of Cithaeronian Hera in Thespiae was a felled stump; and the statue of Samian Hera, as Aethlius says, was at first a plank, but later, under the archonship of Procles, it became anthropomorphic. When the *xoana* began to be shaped in the likeness of humans, they acquired the name *bretē*, derived from "mortals." In Rome, the ancient *xoanon* of Ares, the historian Varro says, was a spear, since the craftsmen had not yet turned to this fair-faced malpractice. But when art flourished, error increased. That you have made stones, wood, and, in a word, matter into statues—man-shaped images—to which you falsely ascribe piety while slandering the truth, is already evident in itself; nevertheless, since the topic requires some demonstration, it must not be omitted. That Pheidias fashioned the Zeus at Olympia and the Athena Polias at Athens from gold and ivory is clear to everyone.

The xoanon of Hera in Samos was made by Smilis, son of Eucleides, as Olympichus records in his Samian Histories. Do not then be in doubt if, of the goddesses called the Semnai at Athens, Scopas made two from the stone called lychnites, and Calos the middle one; I have Polemon to show you, recording this in the fourth book of his Against Timaeus. Nor be in doubt about the statues of Zeus and Apollo at Patara in Lycia, if Phidias again worked those statues, just as the lions dedicated with them; but if, as some say, the work was by Bryaxis, I do not dispute it—you have him also as a sculptor; ascribe it to whichever of the two you wish. Moreover, statues of Poseidon and Amphitrite, nine cubits high, worshipped in Tenos, are the work of Telesius the Athenian, as Philochorus says. For Demetrius, in the second book of his Argolica, records that the xoanon of Hera in Tiryns is of pear wood and that the maker was Argus. Many would perhaps be amazed if they learned that the Palladion called the heaven-sent, which Diomedes and Odysseus are said to have stolen from Ilium and entrusted to Demophon, was constructed from the bones of Pelops, just as the Olympian was from the bones of another Indian beast. And I present Dionysius, in the fifth part of his Cycle, as the one who records this. Apellas, in his Delphica, says that there were two Palladia, both crafted by human hands.

But so that no one may suppose that I have omitted these things out of ignorance, I will add that the statue of Dionysus Morychus at Athens was made from the stone called phellatas, and is the work of Sicon, son of Eupalamus, as Polemon says in some letter. And there were also two other Cretan sculptors, I think, named Scyllis and Dipoenus; these two made the statues of the Dioscuri at Argos, the statue of Heracles at Tiryns, and the xoanon of Artemis Munychia at Sicyon. And why do I linger over these things, when I can show you the great daimon himself, who he was, the one whom we hear has been deemed worthy of reverence by all preeminently, and whom they have dared to call not made by hand, the Egyptian Sarapis? For some record that he was sent as a thank-offering by the Sinopeans to Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of the Egyptians, who, when they were oppressed by famine, had sent them grain from Egypt and restored them, and that this xoanon is a statue of Pluto; and that Ptolemy, receiving the statue, set it up on the acropolis which is now called Rhacotis, where the temple of Sarapis is honored, and the place is adjacent to those sites. And Ptolemy, having transferred his concubine Blistichis, who had died at Canopus, buried her beneath the aforementioned shrine. Others say that Sarapis is a Pontic wooden image, and that it was brought to Alexandria with festive honor. Isidorus alone says that the statue was brought from the Seleucids near Antioch, when they too were in a time of famine and were sustained by Ptolemy.

But Athenodorus, son of Sandon, wishing to make Sarapis appear ancient, fell into error, I know not how, by proving him to be a manufactured statue. He says that Sesostris, the Egyptian king, after subduing most of the Greek nations, on returning to Egypt brought with him skilled craftsmen. He then ordered that his own ancestor Osiris be elaborately fashioned, and Bryaxis the craftsman—not the Athenian, but another of the same name as that Bryaxis—constructed it. He used a mixed and varied material for the work: filings of gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, and also tin; and of Egyptian stones, not one was lacking—fragments of sapphire, hematite, emerald, and also topaz. Having ground everything together and mixed it, he colored it with cyanus, which is why the statue's color is very dark; and with the drug left over from the funeral of Osiris and Apis, he kneaded everything together and molded Sarapis. His name hints at the commonality of the funeral and the creation from the burial, being a compound from Osiris and Apis, Osirapis. And another new god in Egypt—and almost among the Greeks—was deified with reverence by the Roman emperor: his beloved, who was exceedingly beautiful, Antinous, whom he consecrated just as Zeus did Ganymede; for desire that knows no fear is not easily restrained. And men now worship the holy nights of Antinous, which the lover who kept vigil with him knew to be shameful. Why do you enumerate for me a god honored by prostitution? And why did you order him to be mourned as a son?

And why describe its beauty? The beauty that has withered from wantonness is ugly. Do not tyrannize, O man, over beauty, nor outrage the youth in its bloom; keep it pure, that it may be beautiful. Be a king of beauty, not a tyrant; let it remain free. Then I shall recognize your beauty, when you have kept the image pure; then I shall worship the beauty, when it is the true archetype of beautiful things. But now it is a tomb of the beloved, a temple of Antinous and a city. And just as, I think, temples are admired, so also are tombs—pyramids, mausoleums, and labyrinths—other temples of the dead, just as those are tombs of the gods. I will set before you as a teacher the prophetess Sibyl, not the soothsayer of false Phoebus, whom vain men called a god and falsely claimed as a prophet, but of the great God, whom the hands of men did not fashion like speechless idols of hewn stone. She, indeed, calls the temples ruins, foretelling that the temple of Artemis at Ephesus will be swallowed up by "chasms and earthquakes" thus: "Ephesus will lament prostrate on its banks, weeping and seeking the temple that no longer stands." And she says that the temple of Isis and Sarapis in Egypt will be thrown down and burned: "Isis, thrice-wretched goddess, you remain alone by the streams of the Nile, a voiceless maenad on the sands of Acheron." Then, continuing: "And you, Sarapis, lying under many idle stones, you lie a great corpse in thrice-wretched Egypt." But if you do not heed the prophetess, at least listen to your own philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus, reproaching the insensibility of the statues.

They pray to these statues, as if one were to converse with houses." Is it not monstrous that they turn to stones, and then set them up before their gates as if they were alive? They kiss Hermes as a god and set up the Guardian of the Street as a doorkeeper. For if they insult them as insensible, why do they worship them as gods? And if they think them to possess sensation, why do they set them up as doorkeepers? The Romans, attributing their greatest successes to Fortune and considering her the greatest goddess, have set her up in the privy, deeming a latrine a worthy temple for the goddess. But to insensible stone and wood and rich gold nothing matters—not savor, not blood, not smoke, by which they are honored and blackened; nor honor, nor insult. Statues are more dishonored than any living creature. And how these insensible things have been deified, I am at a loss to understand, and I pity those who are deceived in their folly as wretched creatures. For even if some animals do not possess all the senses, like grubs and caterpillars and those that from the moment of their first birth appear maimed, such as moles and the shrew, which Nicander calls "blind and terrible," yet they are better than these wooden images and statues, which are utterly deaf; for they have at least one sense, say hearing or touch or that corresponding to smell or taste; but statues partake of not a single sense. And there are many animals that have neither sight nor hearing nor voice, such as the class of oysters, but they live and grow, and moreover sympathize with the moon.

The statues are inert, inactive, insensible; they are bound, nailed, and fastened, they are melted, filed, sawn, polished, carved. The image-makers indeed abuse dumb earth, forcing it from its own nature, persuading it by art to be worshipped; and the god-makers worship not gods and demons, as far as my perception goes, but earth and art, which is what the statues are. For a statue is truly dead matter shaped by a craftsman’s hand; but for us the statue is not a thing perceived by sensible matter, but a thing of the intellect. God, the only true God, is intelligible, not sensible. And indeed, conversely, in the very circumstances, the superstitious, the worshippers of stones, learning by experience not to revere insensible matter, are themselves overcome by necessity and perish from superstition; yet, though they despise the statues, not wishing to appear to despise them altogether, they are refuted by the very gods to whom the statues are dedicated. For Dionysius the younger, the tyrant, having taken the golden cloak from Zeus in Sicily, ordered a woolen one to be put on him, wittily saying that this was better than gold, being lighter in summer and warmer in winter. And Antiochus of Cyzicus, being in need of money, ordered the golden statue of Zeus, which was fifteen cubits in size, to be melted down, and another statue of less valuable material, gilded with leaf, to be set up in its place, similar to the former.

Swallows and most birds fly into the statues and defecate on them, caring nothing for Olympian Zeus or Epidaurian Asclepius, nor yet for Athena Polias or Egyptian Sarapis; from these very creatures you should learn the insensibility of the statues. But there are some malefactors or enemies who attack them, who out of base greed have plundered the temples and stolen the votive offerings, or even melted down the statues themselves. And if some Cambyses or Darius or other madman attempted such things, and if someone killed the Egyptian Apis, I laugh that they killed their god, but I am indignant if the offense was committed for gain. I will therefore pass over some of this villainy, considering it the work of greed, not a proof of the impotence of the idols. But fire and earthquakes are certainly not greedy, nor do they fear or respect either the demons or the statues, any more than the waves fear the pebbles heaped on the seashore. I know a fire that is corrective and healing for superstition: if you wish to cease your folly, the fire will enlighten you. This fire burned down the temple in Argos together with the priestess Chrysis, and the temple of Artemis in Ephesus for the second time after the Amazons, and has often consumed the Capitoline in Rome; nor did it spare the temple of Sarapis in the city of Alexandria. In Athens it demolished the temple of Dionysus Eleuthereus, and the temple of Apollo at Delphi was first seized by a storm, then destroyed by a fire that brings wisdom. This fire shows you a prelude of what it promises.

The makers of the statues do not shame you into despising matter with your intelligence? Pheidias the Athenian, having inscribed on the finger of Olympian Zeus, "Pantarkes is beautiful"—for Zeus was not beautiful to him, but his beloved was. And Praxiteles, as Posidippus makes clear in his work On Cnidus, when fashioning the statue of the Cnidian Aphrodite, made her similar in form to his beloved Cratine, so that the wretched might worship Praxiteles' beloved. And when Phryne, the Thespian courtesan, was in her prime, all the painters imitated images of Aphrodite after Phryne's beauty, just as the stone carvers at Athens modeled their Herms after Alcibiades. It remains for your judgment to add the conclusion, if you wish to worship courtesans as well. From this, I think, the ancient kings, moved and despising these myths, because it was safe from men, openly proclaimed themselves gods, teaching that those others had been deified for glory in the same way: Ceyx, son of Aeolus, was called Zeus by his wife Alcyone, and Alcyone in turn was called Hera by her husband. Ptolemy the Fourth was called Dionysus; and Mithridates of Pontus was also Dionysus; and Alexander wished to be thought a son of Ammon and to be fashioned with horns by the sculptors, eager to insult the beautiful face of man with a horn. And not only kings, but

And private individuals dignified themselves with divine titles, as Menecrates the physician, who was called "this Zeus." Why need I recount Alexarchus (a grammarian by profession, as Aristus of Salamis records, who fashioned himself into a Sun)? Why need I even mention Nicagoras (a native of Zeleia, who lived in the time of Alexander; Nicagoras was called Hermes and used the attire of Hermes, as he himself attests), when indeed whole nations and cities, to the last man, putting on flattery, debase the myths about the gods, fashioning themselves as equal to the gods, puffed up with pride, voting for themselves excessive honors? At one time they decree that the Macedonian from Pella, Philip son of Amyntas, be worshipped in the Cynosarges—the one "with a broken collarbone and a crippled leg," who had his eye gouged out; at another they proclaim Demetrius also a god; and where he dismounted from his horse entering Athens, there is a sanctuary of Demetrius the Descender, and altars everywhere; and a marriage to Athena was prepared for him by the Athenians; but he disdained the goddess, being unable to marry the statue, and taking Lamia the courtesan, he went up to the acropolis and defiled the bridal chamber of Athena, displaying to the ancient virgin the postures of the new courtesan. No wonder, then, that even Hippon deified his own death. This Hippon ordered this elegy to be inscribed on his own tomb: "This is the tomb of Hippon, whom Fate made equal to the immortal gods when he perished." Well done, Hippon, you show us human error.

For even if they did not believe you when you spoke, let them become disciples of a dead man. This is an oracle of Hippon; let us understand it. Those whom you worship, having once been men, then indeed died; myth and time have honored them. For it is somehow natural that present things are despised by habit, while past things, separated from immediate refutation by the obscurity of time, are honored by fiction, and that some things are disbelieved, while others are even admired. So, for example, the ancient dead, dignified by the long duration of error, are considered gods by later generations. Your own mysteries, your festivals, bonds and wounds and weeping gods, are proof of these things for you: "Alas for me, when fate decreed that my dearest Sarpedon be subdued by Patroclus, son of Menoetius." The will of Zeus is constrained, and your Zeus laments, conquered, over Sarpedon. You yourselves have fittingly called them idols and daemons, since Homer, honoring Athena herself and the other gods with baseness, addressed them as daemons: "And she went to Olympus, to the house of aegis-bearing Zeus, among the other daemons.

How then are the idols and the demons still gods, truly abominable and unclean spirits, acknowledged by all as earthly and fearful, weighing down below, "rolling about tombs and monuments," around which they also dimly appear as "shadowy phantoms"? These are your gods, the idols, the shadows, and besides these those "lame" and "wrinkled, squinting of eye" ones, the Litai, more the daughters of Thersites than of Zeus, so that Bion seems to me to have wittily said, how could men justly ask from Zeus for good offspring, when he was not able to provide it even for himself? Alas for the godlessness! You bury the pure substance, as far as it depends on you, and you have heaped that undefiled and holy thing upon tombs, having robbed the divine of truly real substance. Why then have you assigned the honors of god to non-gods? Why, having left heaven, have you honored the earth? What else is gold or silver or adamant or iron or bronze or ivory or precious stones? Are they not earth and from earth? And are they not from one mother?

offspring of the earth, all these things that you see? What then, O vain and empty-minded ones (for I will take it up again), have you blasphemed the supercelestial place and dragged piety down to the ground, fashioning for yourselves earthly gods and pursuing these generated things before the ungenerated God, and fallen into a deeper darkness? The Parian stone is beautiful, but it is not yet Poseidon; the ivory is beautiful, but it is not yet Olympian; matter is always in need of art, but God is without need. Art has come forth, matter has been clothed with form, and the richness of substance, while it is marketable for profit, becomes venerable only through the form. Your statue is gold, it is wood, it is stone, it is earth, if you consider it from above, having received form from the craftsman. But I have learned to tread on earth, not to worship it; for it is not lawful for me ever to entrust the hopes of the soul to lifeless things. One must therefore go as close as possible to the statues, so that the error, being familiar, may be refuted even by the sight; for the forms of the statues have very clearly imprinted the disposition of the demons. If, then, someone going around and examining the paintings and statues, he will immediately recognize your gods from their shameful forms: Dionysus from his attire, Hephaestus from his craft, Deo from her misfortune, Ino from her headdress, Poseidon from his trident, Zeus from the swan; the pyre reveals Heracles, and if one sees a naked woman depicted, he thinks of the "golden" Aphrodite. Thus that Cyprian Pygmalion fell in love with an ivory statue; the statue was of Aphrodite and was naked.

The Cyprian is conquered by the form and unites with the statue, and this Philostephanus records. Another Aphrodite in Cnidus was a stone and was beautiful; another man fell in love with her and mingles with the stone. Posidippus records it, the former in his work On Cyprus, the latter in his work On Cnidus. So great was the power of art to deceive, becoming a pander for erotic men into an abyss. The creative art is effective, but not such as to deceive a rational being, nor indeed those who have lived according to reason. For in painting, because of the likeness of a shadow-painting of a dove, doves flew to it, and horses neighed at well-painted mares. They say a maiden fell in love with an image and a young man with a beautiful statue of Cnidus, but the eyes of the spectators were deceived by art. For no one would have intercourse with a goddess, nor be buried with a corpse, nor fall in love with a demon and a stone, if he were a sensible man. But you are deceived by another sorcery of art, even if it does not lead to love, yet it leads to honoring and worshipping both statues and paintings. Similar is the painting: let art be praised, but let it not deceive man as truth. The horse stands still, the dove is motionless, the wing is idle; but the cow of Daedalus, made from wood, drew a wild bull and compelled the beast, art having deceived it to mount a woman in heat.

Such frenzy the arts, by their evil contrivance, have instilled in the foolish. But the apes their keepers and attendants have admired, because nothing deceives them—neither wax nor clay images nor trinkets. Yet you, for your part, will prove worse than apes, clinging to stone, wooden, gold, and ivory statuettes and paintings. So many are the craftsmen of these deadly playthings—stonecutters, sculptors, painters, carpenters, and poets—who introduce a great and motley throng: in the fields, Satyrs and Pans; in the woods, the mountain Nymphs and Hamadryads; and indeed, around the waters, rivers, and springs, the Naiads; and about the sea, the Nereids. And the Magi already boast of their own impiety, having enrolled demons as their servants, making them constrained slaves by their incantations. And so marriages, childbearings, and births of gods are remembered, adulteries are sung, feasts are comically portrayed, and laughter is introduced over drink—all this prompts me to cry out, even if I wish to be silent: Alas for such godlessness! You have made the heaven a stage, the divine has become a drama for you, and you have made the holy a comedy with the masks of demons, satirizing true piety as superstition. "And then the bard, striking up, began to sing a beautiful song for us," Homer, that beautiful voice, about the love of Ares and fair-crowned Aphrodite, how they first mingled in secret in the house of Hephaestus; he gave many gifts, defiled the bed and the couch of lord Hephaestus.

Cease, Homer, your song; it is not beautiful, for it teaches adultery. We have renounced even the hearing of fornication. For we, we are the ones who bear the image of God in this living and moving statue, the human being—a companion image, a counselor, a fellow converser, a table companion, a sympathizer, a supersufferer. We have become an offering to God on behalf of Christ. "We are the chosen race, the royal priesthood, the holy nation, the peculiar people, who once were no people, but now are the people of God." We who, according to John, are not "from those below," but have learned everything from the one who came from above, we who have understood the economy of God, we who have practiced "walking in newness of life." But the many do not think these things; casting off shame and fear, they inscribe at home the lecheries of the demons. For they have decorated their chambers with lewdness, having attended to certain painted tablets hung rather high, considering licentiousness piety; and lying on their couches, even in the midst of their embraces, they gaze at that naked Aphrodite bound in the embrace, and at the bird of lust for femininity fluttering around Leda, approving the painting, they imprint it on their signet rings, using a seal befitting the licentiousness of Zeus. These are the archetypes of your voluptuousness, these are the theologies of your insolence, these are the teachings of the gods who fornicate with you. "For what each one wishes, that he also believes," according to the Athenian orator.

What other images you have—little figures and naked girls and drunken satyrs and erections, stripped bare in your paintings, convicted by your own intemperance. And now, when the postures of all licentiousness are openly depicted and you gaze upon them in public, are you not ashamed? Yet you preserve them even more, as if they were images of your gods, consecrating pillars of shamelessness in your homes, inscribing the postures of Philaenis on equal footing with the labors of Heracles. We proclaim a forgetting not only of the use of these things, but also of the very sight and hearing of them. Your ears have been prostituted, your eyes have fornicated, and—what is newer—your gazes have committed adultery before the embrace. O you who have violated the human being and torn away the divine from the creature, you disbelieve everything in order to be purged of passion; and you believe in the idols, emulating their intemperance, but you disbelieve in God, not bearing self-control; and you have hated the better things and honored the worse, having become spectators of virtue but contestants of vice. "Blessed," then, as the saying goes, are all those alone, according to the Sibyl, who will renounce all temples when they see them, and altars, vain structures of silent stones, and stone statues and hand-made images, defiled with the blood of living creatures and with sacrifices of quadrupeds, bipeds, birds, and the slaughter of wild beasts. For indeed it is forbidden to us to practice deceptive art openly. "For not

You will make," says the prophet, "a likeness of everything, both of what is in the heaven above and of what is on the earth below." How then could we still suppose that the Demeter of Praxiteles, and Kore, and the mystic Iacchus are gods, or the works of Lysippus' art, or the hands of Apelles, which have placed the form of god-belief upon matter? But you, on the one hand, persist in how the statue may be crafted as beautiful as possible, while on the other hand you take no thought for how you yourselves may not, through insensibility, be made like the statues. At any rate, the prophetic word very clearly and concisely refutes the custom: "All the gods of the nations are idols of demons; but God made the heavens" and what is in the heaven. Some, then, are deceived from this, I know not how, and worship divine art, but not God, and also the sun and moon and the rest of the chorus of stars, irrationally supposing these to be gods, the instruments of time. "For by his word they were fixed, and by the breath of his mouth all their power." But human art produces houses and ships and cities and paintings, while God—how could I say all that he makes? Behold the whole cosmos: it is his work; and heaven and sun and angels and men are "works of his fingers." So great is the power of God. His mere will is world-making; for God alone made it, since he alone truly is God; he creates by merely willing, and by his sole desire the thing comes into being.

Here the chorus of philosophers is turned aside, who, while admirably confessing that man was made for the contemplation of the heavens, worship the things that appear in the heavens and are grasped by sight. For even if the works in the heavens are not human, they are at least created for humans. Let none of you worship the sun, but yearn for the maker of the sun; let none deify the cosmos, but seek the creator of the cosmos. Therefore, as it seems, the only refuge left for one who is about to arrive at the saving gates is divine wisdom; from there, as from some inviolable sanctuary, the man hastening toward salvation becomes no longer subject to seizure by any of the demons. Let us run through, if you wish, the opinions of the philosophers, all that they boast concerning the gods, so that we may discover whether philosophy itself, for the sake of vainglory, has idolized matter, and whether we can, in passing, represent it as dreaming the truth while deifying certain demons. Now, Thales of Miletus left water and Anaximenes, also of Miletus, left air as elements and principles, which Diogenes of Apollonia later followed. Parmenides of Elea introduced fire and earth as gods, but only one of them, fire, was considered a god by Hippasus of Metapontum and Heraclitus of Ephesus; for Empedocles of Acragas, falling into multiplicity, in addition to these four elements, enumerates strife and love.

These, then, are also atheists, who with a certain unwise wisdom have worshipped matter, and while not honouring stones or wood, have deified the earth, their mother, and while not fashioning Poseidon, have turned to water itself. For what else is Poseidon but a certain moist substance, named from drinking? Just as, of course, warlike Ares is named from destruction and slaughter. And it seems to me that many, indeed, fix only a sword and sacrifice to it as to Ares; this is a custom of the Scythians, as Eudoxus says in the second book of his *Circuit of the Earth*. And the Sauromatae of the Scythians, as Hicesius says in his *On Mysteries*, revere a dagger. This also those around Heraclitus have suffered, who honour fire as the first principle; for this fire others have named Hephaestus. And the Magi of the Persians have honoured fire, and many of those inhabiting Asia, and also the Macedonians, as Diogenes says in the first book of his *Persica*. Why should I recount the Sauromatae, whom Nymphodorus in his *Barbarian Customs* records as revering fire, or the Persians, Medes, and Magi? Dinon says that these sacrifice in the open air, considering only fire and water as images of the gods. I have not concealed even their ignorance. For although they think they are most of all escaping error, they slip into another deception: they do not suppose that images of the gods are wood and stone, as the Greeks do, nor yet ibises and ichneumons, as the Egyptians do, but fire and water, as philosophers do.

After many subsequent cycles of years, Berossus, in the third book of his Chaldean History, represents them as worshipping human-shaped statues, this being introduced by Artaxerxes, son of Darius, son of Ochus, who first set up the statue of Aphrodite Anaitis in Babylon, and in Susa and Ecbatana pointed out to Persians, Bactrians, Damascus, and Sardis to worship. The philosophers, then, confessing their teachers to be Persians or Sauromatians or Magi, from whom they have learned the atheism of the authorities revered by them, are ignorant of the ruler, the maker of all things and the creator of the authorities themselves, the unbegotten God, and instead turn to these "poor" and "weak" "elements," as the apostle says, made for the service of men. Of the other philosophers, those who, going beyond the elements, inquired into something higher and more extraordinary, some of them hymned the infinite, as Anaximander (a Milesian) and Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and the Athenian Archelaus. These two, indeed, both set their mind on infinity, while the Milesian Leucippus and Metrodorus of Chios left two principles, as it seems, the full and the void; and Democritus of Abdera, taking these two, added the images. For Alcmaeon of Croton thought the stars, being ensouled, were gods. I will not be silent about their shamelessness: Xenocrates (this one a Chalcedonian) hints at seven gods, the planets, and an eighth, the cosmos composed of all the fixed stars.

Nor shall I pass over the Stoics, who say that the divine pervades all matter, even the most dishonorable, and who utterly disgrace philosophy. And I think it no trouble, having come this far, to mention also those of the Peripatos. The very founder of that school, not having understood the father of all things, supposes that the so-called "highest" is the soul of the universe; that is, he takes the soul of the world to be god, and thus impales himself. For he who limits providence to the moon itself, and then considers the world to be god, is confounded, dogmatizing that which has no share of god as god. And that Ephesian, Theophrastus, the disciple of Aristotle, sometimes supposes god to be the heaven, sometimes spirit. I will willingly pass over Epicurus alone, who thinks that god cares for nothing, being impious in every way. And what of Heraclides of Pontus? Does he not too, in some places, drag himself down to the images of Democritus? And a great crowd of such men flows in upon me, introducing, like some bogey, a strange and absurd shadow-painting of daimons, mythologizing with old wives' nonsense. We have great need to forbid men from listening to such words, when we do not even accustom our own children, when they are crying, to be comforted by such myths, fearing to rear in them the atheism proclaimed by these so-called wise men, who know the truth no more than infants. For what, by the—

truth, you show that those who have trusted in you are subject to flux, motion, and disorderly whirlings? Why do you fill life with images, fashioning winds or air or fire or earth or stones or wood or iron into gods, and also making the wandering stars into gods, prating and babbling through this much-vaunted astrology, not astronomy, for those who are truly astray among men? I long for the lord of the spirits, the lord of fire, the creator of the world, the light-bringer of the sun; I seek god, not the works of god. Whom then shall I take from you as a partner in the search? For we have not altogether despaired of you. If you wish, Plato. How then must we track down god, O Plato? "For to find the father and maker of this universe is a task, and having found him, to declare him to all is impossible." Why then, by him? "For it is by no means to be spoken." Well done, O Plato, you have touched upon the truth; but do not grow weary; join with me in the search concerning the good; for in all men without exception, and especially in those who spend their time on words, some divine emanation is instilled. On account of this, even unwillingly they confess that there is one god, imperishable and ungenerated, existing somewhere above the back of the heaven in his own and proper watchtower, truly being always. But what sort of god must I conceive? The one who sees all and is himself unseen, says Euripides. At any rate, Menander seems to me to be in error where he says, "Sun, you must be worshipped first of the gods, through whom it is possible to see the other gods.

For the sun will never be able to show the true god; rather, it is the healthy word, which is the sun of the soul, through which alone, when it rises within, the eye is illuminated in the depth of his mind. Hence Democritus not inappropriately says: "Few of the learned men, raising their hands to what we Greeks now call air, have mythologized that Zeus knows all, gives and takes away, and is king of all." In a similar way, Plato, thinking of God, hints: "Around the king of all are all things, and that is the cause of all good things." Who then is the king of all? God, the measure of the truth of beings. Just as measured things are grasped by the measure, so too by understanding God is truth measured and grasped. And the truly holy Moses says: "There shall not be in your bag a weight and a weight, great or small, nor shall there be in your house a measure great or small, but a true and just weight shall be yours," understanding God as the weight, measure, and number of all things. For the unjust and unequal images are hidden away in the bag and in the soul, so to speak, which is defiled; but the only just measure, the only true God, always equal according to the same things and in the same way, measures and weighs all things, as if with the balance of justice, unswervingly encompassing and sustaining the nature of all things. "God, indeed, as the ancient account says, having beginning and end and middle of all beings, proceeds straight according to nature, moving around in a circle.

To this is always joined justice, the avenger of those who fall away from the divine law." Whence, O Plato, do you hint at truth? Whence does the bountiful supply of words prophesy piety? Wise, he says, are the races of these barbarians. I know your teachers, even if you wish to conceal them: you learn geometry from the Egyptians, astronomy from the Babylonians, you take the salutary incantations from the Thracians, many things the Assyrians have taught you, and the laws that are true and the opinion of God you have benefited from the Hebrews themselves, who do not honor with empty deceptions, nor with golden, bronze, silver, ivory, wooden, and stone images of dead mortals, all that mortals in empty-minded counsel do; but rather they raise pure arms to heaven, rising early from bed, always purifying their skin with water, and honor only the ever-ruling immortal. And do not, O philosophy, present only this one Plato, but strive to present many others as well, who proclaim the one truly only God by his own inspiration, if they have somehow grasped the truth. For Antisthenes, not indeed as a Cynic did he conceive this, but as a disciple of Socrates, says "God resembles no one; therefore no one can learn him from an image." Xenophon the Athenian would have written something explicitly bearing witness to the truth, as Socrates did, had he not feared the Socratic poison; nevertheless he hints at it. "The one who shakes and calms all things," he says, "is manifest as some great and powerful being; but what sort of form he has is invisible.

Nor does the all-bright sun, it seems, allow itself to be looked at directly; if someone shamelessly gazes upon it, it robs them of their sight." Whence, then, does the son of Gryllus derive his wisdom? Evidently from the prophetess of the Hebrews, who speaks in some such manner: "For what flesh can see with its eyes the heavenly and true immortal god, who dwells in the firmament? But not even can men, being mortal, stand opposite the rays of the sun." Cleanthes of Pedasus, the philosopher from the Stoa, sets forth not a poetic theogony but a true theology. He did not conceal what he thought about god: "You ask me what the good is like? Listen then: ordered, just, holy, pious, self-controlled, useful, beautiful, fitting, austere, straightforward, always beneficial, fearless, painless, profitable, without distress, helpful, pleasing, safe, friendly, honorable, consistent, glorious, unpretentious, careful, gentle, intense, enduring, blameless, everlasting." Every man is unfree who looks to reputation, as if he will obtain something good from it. Here, I think, he clearly teaches what god is like, and how common opinion and custom enslave those who follow them, rather than seeking god.

We must not conceal either those around Pythagoras, who say: "God is one, and he is not, as some suppose, outside the ordering of the universe, but within it, whole in the whole circle, overseer of all generation, mixture of all things, always being and worker of his own powers and works, light of all in heaven and father of all, mind and ensoulment of the whole circle, mover of all." These things too are sufficient for the knowledge of God, written down by them under the inspiration of God, and selected by us for one who is able to perceive even a little truth. Let there come to us (for philosophy alone is not sufficient) but even poetry itself, which is wholly occupied with falsehood, now at last barely bearing witness to the truth, or rather confessing to God its mythical deviation; let any poet who wishes come first. Aratus, then, conceives the power of God to pervade all things, so that all things may grow steadfastly, and they always propitiate him as first and last: "Hail, father, great wonder, great boon to men." In this way also the Ascraean Hesiod hints at God: "For he himself is king and ruler of all; no other of the immortals contends with him for power." And already on the stage they partially reveal the truth: one, looking up to the aether and the sky, says, "Consider this to be god," Euripides; and Sophocles, son of Sophillus, says: "In truth, one, one is god, who made the heaven and the broad earth, the bright swell of the sea, and the force of the winds; but we mortals, many in heart, wandering, have set up images of sufferings.

of gods, images made of stone, or bronze, or gold-wrought, or ivory figures; and offering sacrifices to these and empty festivals, we think we are being pious. This man already, and with some risk, introduced the truth to the spectators on the stage. But the Thracian hierophant and poet at once, Orpheus the son of Oiagros, after the hierophancy of the mysteries and the theology of the idols, introduces a palinode of truth, singing the truly sacred word, though late: "I will speak to those for whom it is lawful; close the doors, all you profane ones. And you, Musaeus, offspring of the light-bearing Moon, listen; for I will speak the truth, and may the things that formerly appeared in your breast not deprive you of dear life. But looking to the divine word, attend to it, guiding the intelligent vessel of your heart; and walk well on the path, and behold only the immortal king of the cosmos." Then, subjoining, he explicitly adds: "He is one, self-begotten, all things are born of one; in them he himself moves about, and no mortal sees him, but he himself sees all." Thus indeed Orpheus, after some time, understood, having been led astray. But you, mortal of varied mind, do not delay, but turning back, propitiate God. For even if the Greeks, having taken some sparks of the divine word, uttered a few things of the truth, they bear witness to its power not being hidden, but they convict themselves of weakness, not attaining the end. For I think it is now clear to everyone that those who do or speak anything without the word of truth are like those who force themselves to walk without a base.

The proofs concerning your gods, which the poets, compelled by the truth, ridicule, also shame you into salvation. Menander the comic poet, at any rate, in his drama *The Charioteer* [*The Supposititious Child*] says: "No god pleases me who walks about outside with an old woman, nor one who enters houses on a little board, a begging priest of Cybele; for such are the begging priests of Cybele." Hence Antisthenes naturally said to them when they begged: "I do not feed the mother of the gods, whom the gods feed." Again, the same comic poet in his drama *The Priestess*, angered at the custom, attempts to refute the godless vanity of the error, wisely exclaiming: "For if a man draws the god by cymbals wherever he wishes, the one doing this is greater than the god; but these are instruments of boldness and violence invented for men." And not only Menander, but also Homer and Euripides and many other poets refute your gods and do not fear to revile them, even to the extent they do. For instance, they call Athena "dog-fly" and Hephaestus "lame of both feet," and Helen says to Aphrodite: "May you never return to Olympus with your feet." And concerning Dionysus, Homer writes openly: "who once drove the nurses of raging Dionysus throughout sacred Nysa; and they all cast their sacred implements to the ground at the hands of man-slaying Lycurgus." Euripides, truly worthy of a Socratic school, looking to the truth and disregarding the spectators, at one time refutes Apollo, "who dwells in the navel-stone of the earth, dispensing the clearest oracle to mortals," saying: "Trusting him, I killed the woman who bore me; consider him unholy and kill him.

That one sinned, not I, being more ignorant of the beautiful and of justice, and elsewhere he introduces Heracles as mad and drunk and insatiable; for how not? He, while feasting, ate green figs with his meats, barking in an unmusical way, so that a barbarian might learn. And already in the drama *Ion* he brings the gods on stage with bare head before the theatre; how then is it just that you, who have written laws for mortals, should yourselves incur the charge of injustice? But if—though it will not be—I shall use the argument, you will pay the penalty for violent marriages to men, you and Poseidon, and Zeus, who rules the sky, emptying your temples in payment for injustice. It is time, then, after the other matters have been completed by us in order, to proceed to the prophetic writings. For the oracles, offering us the most evident starting points for piety, lay the foundation of truth. And the divine scriptures and temperate constitutions are concise paths of salvation. Being bare of ornamentation and of external fine speech and loquacity and flattery, they raise up man oppressed by vice, supporting the slippery path of life, healing many things with one and the same voice, turning us away from harmful deception, and clearly urging us toward manifest salvation. So then, let the prophetess Sibyl first sing for us the saving song: "Behold, this is all clear, it is unerring; come, do not pursue darkness and gloom forever. Behold, the sweet-gazing light of the sun shines exceedingly. Know, laying wisdom in your breasts. There is one god who sends rains, winds, earthquakes, lightning, famines, plagues, and grievous sorrows, and snows, frosts; why do I enumerate each one?

He rules heaven, he governs earth, he himself exists. Vehemently inspired, she likens deception to darkness, knowledge of God to the sun and light, and by setting both side by side in comparison, she teaches choice; for falsehood is not dispelled by mere juxtaposition with truth, but is driven out and banished by the use of truth. Jeremiah the prophet, the all-wise—or rather, the Holy Spirit in Jeremiah—reveals God. "I am a God who draws near," he says, "and not a God from afar. If a man does something in secret, will I not see it? Do I not fill the heavens and the earth? Says the Lord." And again through Isaiah: "Who will measure the heaven with a span and the whole earth with a fist?" Behold the greatness of God and be amazed. Let us worship Him, of whom the prophet says, "Before your face mountains will melt, as wax melts before fire." This, he says, is the God "whose throne is heaven, whose footstool is earth," "who, if he opens the heaven, will seize you with trembling." Do you also wish to hear what this prophet says about the idols? "They will be paraded in disgrace before the sun, and their carrion will be food for the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth, and they will rot under the sun and the moon—those things which they loved and which they served—and their city will be burned." And he says that the elements and the world together with them will perish: "The earth," he says, "will grow old and the heaven will pass away," "but the word of the Lord endures forever." And what when God again wishes to reveal himself through Moses?

See, see that I am, and there is no other god besides me. I will kill and I will make alive; I will strike and I will heal, and there is none who will escape from my hands. But do you wish to hear another oracle? You have the whole prophetic chorus, the fellow-revelers of Moses. What does the Holy Spirit say to them through Hosea? I will not hesitate to say: "Behold, I who make firm the thunder and create the wind, whose hands laid the foundation of the army of heaven." And again through Isaiah (and I will recall this utterance for you): "I am, I am," he says, "the Lord who speaks justice and proclaims truth; gather together and come; take counsel together, you who are saved from among the nations. Those who lift up the carving of wood did not know them, and they pray to gods who will not save them." Then, continuing, he says: "I am the God, and there is no just one besides me, and there is no savior except me; turn to me and you who are from the ends of the earth will be saved. I am the God and there is no other; for

I swear by myself." And to the idolaters he says with displeasure, "To what have you likened the Lord? Or to what likeness have you likened him? Did a carpenter make an image, or a goldsmith, having melted gold, gild it?" And so forth. Are you still idolaters, then? But even now beware of the threats; for the carved images and the handiworks will wail, or rather those who trust in them, for matter is insensate. He further says: "The Lord will shake inhabited cities and will seize the whole inhabited world with his hand as a nest." What mysteries of wisdom and utterances from a Hebrew child, cunningly wrought, do I announce to you? "The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works," and "The Lord gives wisdom, and from his face come knowledge and understanding." "How long, sluggard, do you lie down? When will you be roused from sleep? But if you are not idle, your harvest will come to you like a spring," the paternal word, the good lamp, the Lord bringing light, faith and salvation to all. For "the Lord who made the earth by his might," as Jeremiah says, "set the inhabited world upright by his wisdom." For we, having fallen away toward idols, wisdom, which is his word, sets us upright toward the truth. And this is the first resurrection from transgression; whence the divine Moses, turning us away from all idolatry, has most beautifully cried out: "Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God, the Lord is one," and "You shall worship the Lord your God and serve him alone." Now then, understand, O men, according to that blessed psalmist David:

Seize education, lest the Lord become angry and you perish from the righteous path, when his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who trust in him." Already, pitying us deeply, the Lord gives forth the saving strain, like a marching rhythm: "Sons of men, how long will you be heavy-hearted? Why do you love vanity and seek falsehood?" What then is vanity and what is falsehood? The holy apostle of the Lord, accusing the Greeks, will explain to you: "Because, having known God, they did not glorify or thank him as God, but were vain in their reasonings, and exchanged the glory of God for the likeness of a perishable human image, and worshipped the creation rather than the creator." And indeed, this God is the one who "in the beginning made the heaven and the earth"; but you do not understand God, yet you worship the heaven—how are you not impious? Listen again to the prophet saying: "The sun will fail and the heaven will be darkened, but the Almighty will shine forever, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken, and the heavens will be rolled up like a curtain stretched out and drawn together" (for these are the prophetic voices) "and the earth will flee from the face of the Lord." And I could bring forward countless scriptures for you, of which not "a single stroke will pass by" without being fulfilled; "for the mouth of the Lord," the Holy Spirit, "spoke these things." "Therefore, no longer," he says, "my son, neglect the education of the Lord, nor be unstrung when reproved by him." O the exceeding philanthropy!

Not as a teacher to his pupils, nor as a master to his servants, nor as a god to men, but "as a gentle father" he admonishes his sons. Then Moses confesses that he is "full of fear and trembling" when he hears about the Word, but you, hearing the divine Word, are you not afraid? Do you not tremble? Do you not at once both revere and hasten to learn, that is, hasten to salvation, fearing the wrath, loving the grace, longing for the hope, so that you may escape the judgment? Come, come, O my youth: "For unless you become like children again and are reborn," as the Scripture says, you will not recover the truly existing father, "nor will you ever enter into the kingdom of heaven." For how is the stranger permitted to enter? But when, I think, he is enrolled and becomes a citizen and recovers the father, then he will be "in the father's house," then he will be deemed worthy to inherit, then he will share in the paternal kingdom with the true son, the "beloved." For this is the firstborn church, composed of many good children; these are "the firstborn enrolled in the heavens" and celebrating together with so many "myriads of angels." And we are firstborn children, the nurslings of God, the genuine friends of the "firstborn," the first of other men to have understood God, the first to have been torn away from sins, the first to have been separated from the devil. But now some are so much more godless as God is more philanthropic: for he wishes us to become sons from slaves, while they have disdained even to become sons. O the great folly! You are ashamed of the Lord.

He promises freedom, but you sell yourselves into slavery. He bestows salvation, but you fall away to a man. He gives eternal life as a gift, but you await punishment, and you even look ahead to "the fire which the Lord prepared for the devil and his angels." Therefore the blessed apostle says, "I adjure you in the Lord, no longer to walk as the nations walk in the vanity of their mind, being darkened in understanding and estranged from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; who have given themselves over, having become callous in licentiousness, to the practice of every impurity and greed." With such a witness convicting the folly of men and calling upon God, what else remains for the unbelievers but judgment and condemnation? Yet the Lord does not grow weary of exhorting, terrifying, urging, rousing, admonishing; he even awakens and raises up from their darkness those who have gone astray: "Arise," he says, "you who sleep, and stand up from the dead, and the Lord Christ will dawn upon you," the sun of the resurrection, who is born "before the morning star," who bestows life with his own rays. Therefore let no one despise the Word, lest he unwittingly despise himself. For somewhere Scripture says: "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the provocation on the day of trial in the desert, where your fathers were tested in the proving." And what the proving is, if you wish to learn, the Holy Spirit will explain to you: "And I saw my works," it says, "for forty years.

Therefore I was angered at this generation and said, "They are always straying in heart; they themselves have not known my ways, as I swore in my wrath: 'Will they enter into my rest?'" See the threat; see the exhortation; see the honor. Why then do we still exchange grace for wrath, and not, with open ears, receive the Word and, in pure souls, give hospitality to God? For the grace of his promise is great, if we hear his voice today. And this "today" increases day by day, as long as "today" is named. Until the consummation, both "today" and learning endure; and then the true "today," the unceasing day of God, extends through the ages. Therefore let us always hearken to the voice of the divine Word; for "today" is eternal; it is an image of the ages, and day is a symbol of light, and light is the Word for men, through whom we are illumined to see God. Rightly, then, for those who believe and obey, grace will superabound; but for those who are disobedient and straying in heart, and who have not known the Lord's ways—which John commanded to make straight and to prepare—for these God has been angered and threatens. And indeed the ancient ones have enigmatically received the end of the threat.

The Hebrews are wanderers; for they are said not to enter into the rest because of their faithlessness, until, having followed the successor of Moses, they learned late by experience that they could not be saved otherwise, not as those who have believed like Jesus. But the Lord, being philanthropic, calls all men "to the knowledge of the truth," sending the Paraclete. What then is this knowledge? Piety; "and piety is beneficial for all things," according to Paul, "having a promise of life both present and future." How much, confess, O men, if eternal salvation were sold, would you have bought it? Not even if one measured out the whole Pactolus, the mythical stream of gold, would he count out a wage equivalent to salvation. Therefore do not grow weary; it is possible for you, if you wish, to purchase the precious salvation with your own treasure, love and faith, which is the worthy wage of life. This price God gladly receives. "For we have hoped in the living God, who is the savior of all men, especially of the faithful." But the others, clinging to the world like some seaweed to sea-washed rocks, are careless of immortality, just as the Ithacan old man longs not for the truth and the fatherland in heaven, nor for the truly existing light, but for smoke. Piety, making man like God as far as possible, fittingly claims God as teacher, who alone is able to make man like God worthily.

The apostle, knowing this teaching to be truly divine, says, "But you, O Timothy, from infancy know the sacred letters, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ." For truly sacred are the letters that make holy and make divine, from which sacred letters and syllables the composed scriptures, the treatises, the same apostle consistently calls "inspired," "being useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, for education in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, dependent for every good work." No one would be so struck by the exhortations of other saints as by the Lord himself, the lover of mankind; for nothing else but this is his sole work: that man be saved. He himself cries out, hastening to salvation, "The kingdom of heaven has drawn near"; he turns men back who are approaching fear. And the apostle of the Lord, exhorting the Macedonians, becomes interpreter of the divine voice, saying, "The Lord has drawn near, beware lest we be caught empty." But you are so fearless, or rather faithless, that you obey neither the Lord himself nor Paul, and this when he is pleading on behalf of Christ. "Taste and see that the Lord is good." Faith will lead in, experience will teach, scripture will guide, saying, "Come, O children, listen to me, I will teach you the fear of the Lord." Then, as to those who already believe, it briefly adds, "Who is the man who desires life, who loves to see good days?" We are, we will say, the worshipers of the good, the zealots of good things. Listen, then, "you who are far off," listen, "you who are near.

The word was hidden from no one; it is a common light, it shines upon all people. No one is Cimmerian in the word. Let us hasten to salvation, to regeneration; let us hasten to be gathered into one love, the many, according to the union of the monadic essence. Doing good works proportionately, let us pursue unity, seeking the good monad. And the union from many, having taken harmony from polyphony and dispersion, becomes one symphony, following one leader and teacher, the word, resting upon truth itself, saying "Abba, Father." God welcomes this true voice from his children, reaping it as first fruit. But you say, "It is not reasonable to overturn the custom handed down to us from our fathers." And why then do we not use our first food, milk, with which the nurses accustomed us from birth? Why do we increase or decrease the paternal property, and not preserve it equal, as we received it? Why do we no longer gurgle in our fathers' laps, or perform the other things for which, as infants nursed by our mothers, we incurred laughter, but we correct ourselves, even if we did not have good tutors? Then, in the case of falls, deviations, though harmful and dangerous, somehow strike us as sweet, but in the case of life, shall we not abandon the evil, passionate, and godless custom, even if our fathers are angry, and turn aside to the truth and seek the truly existing father, thrusting away habit like a poisonous drug?

This is precisely the finest of all undertakings, to show you that it was from madness and this thrice-wretched custom that reverence for God was hated. For never would so great a good, than which nothing greater has ever been granted by God to the human race, have been hated or forbidden, had you not, carried away by custom, then stopped your ears against us, like hard-necked horses bolting, biting the bits, fleeing from our words, longing to shake us off, the charioteers of your life, and, borne by folly toward the precipices of destruction, you consider the holy word of God accursed. Therefore, according to Sophocles, the wages of your choice follow you: mind gone, ears useless, thoughts empty, and you do not know that this is truer than anything, that the good and reverent will obtain a good reward for honoring the good, while the wicked, from the opposite, will receive the corresponding punishment, and that even the ruler of evil has a penalty hanging over him. For the prophet Zachariah threatens him: "May the one who chose Jerusalem rebuke you; is this not a brand snatched from the fire?" What desire for voluntary death, then, still possesses men? And why have they fled to this death-dealing brand, with which they will be consumed, when it is possible to live well according to God, not according to custom? For God bestows life, while evil custom, after departure from here, inflicts vain repentance together with punishment, "but the fool learns by suffering," as superstition destroys and reverence for God saves.

Let any of you look at those who serve idols, with hair filthy, with squalid and tattered clothing, utterly unacquainted with baths, and with the points of their nails grown wild like beasts, and many even deprived of their genitals, showing in fact that the precincts of the idols are some kind of tombs or prisons. These men seem to me to be mourning, not worshipping the gods, having suffered things worthy of pity rather than of piety. And seeing these things, are you still blind, and will you not look up to the master of all and lord of the universe? Will you not flee, escaping from the prisons here, to the mercy from the heavens? For God, out of great love for humanity, clings to man, just as the mother bird flies over her nestling when it falls from the nest. And if some creeping beast gapes at the nestling, the mother flutters around it, grieving for her dear young. But God, the father, both seeks his creature and heals its transgression, and pursues the beast, and again takes up the nestling, urging it to fly back to the nest. Then, dogs that have gone astray track their master by scent, and horses that have thrown their rider obey their master at a single whistle. "The ox," it is said, "knows its owner, and the ass the manger of its master, but Israel does not know me." What then does the Lord do? He does not bear a grudge; he still pities, he still

demands repentance. And I wish to ask you whether it does not seem absurd to you that you, who are a creation of God, having received your soul from him and being wholly of God, should serve another master, and moreover worship a tyrant instead of the king, and the evil instead of the good. For who, in the name of truth, being of sound mind, abandons the good and consorts with evil? Who, fleeing from God, lives with demons? Who, being able to be a son of God, delights in servitude? Or who, being able to be a citizen of heaven, pursues darkness, when it is possible to cultivate paradise, to traverse heaven, and to partake of the life-giving and pure fountain, following in the track of that luminous cloud walking in the air, like Elijah, beholding the saving rain? But they, like worms, wallowing in marshes and mire, the streams of pleasure, feed on useless and senseless luxuries, men who are swinish. For pigs, it is said, "delight in filth" rather than in clean water, and "revel in rubbish" according to Democritus. Therefore let us not, let us not be enslaved, nor become swinish, but as "genuine children of light" let us look up and gaze at the light, lest the Lord expose us as bastards, as the sun does the eagles. Let us therefore repent and change from ignorance to knowledge, from folly to wisdom, from incontinence to self-control, from injustice to justice, from atheism to God. The risk of deserting to God is a noble one.

Many other good things are to be enjoyed by lovers of righteousness, who pursue eternal salvation, and indeed also those which God himself hints at, speaking through Isaiah: "There is an inheritance for those who serve the Lord." Fair and desirable is that inheritance—not gold, not silver, not clothing, the things of the earth, where moth and thief lurk, eyeing the lowly wealth, but that treasure of salvation, toward which it is necessary to hasten, becoming lovers of reason; and our noble deeds depart with us from here and fly along with the wing of truth. This inheritance the eternal covenant of God places in our hands, providing the eternal gift; and this loving father of ours, the true father, does not cease exhorting, admonishing, educating, loving; nor does he cease saving, but counsels the best: "Be righteous," says the Lord; "you who thirst, go to the water, and all who have no silver, walk and buy and drink without silver." He calls to the bath, to salvation, to illumination, almost shouting and saying: I give you earth and sea, child, and heaven and all the living creatures in them I bestow upon you; only, O child, thirst for the father, and God will be shown to you without payment; truth is not huckstered; he gives you both the birds and the fish and the creatures on the land; these the father has created for your grateful delights.

The bastard will buy himself with silver, being a child of destruction, who has chosen "to serve mammon," but he entrusts his own to you, to the legitimate one, I mean, to the one who loves the father, for whom he still works, to whom alone he also promises, saying: "And the land will not be sold for confirmation;" for it is not ratified by corruption; "for all the land is mine," and it is also yours, if you receive God. Hence the Scripture fittingly proclaims the good news to those who have believed: "But the saints of the Lord will inherit the glory of God and his power." What glory, O blessed one, tell me: "which no eye has seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man; and they will rejoice in the kingdom of their Lord for the ages, amen." You have, O men, the divine promise of grace, and you have heard the other threat of punishment, through which the Lord saves, educating man by fear and grace; why do we delay? Why do we not avoid punishment? Why do we not accept the gift? Why do we not choose the better things, preferring God to the evil one, and wisdom to idolatry, and exchanging life for death? "Behold, I have placed before your face," he says, "death and life." The Lord tests you to choose life, he advises you as a father to obey God. "For if you listen to me," he says, "and are willing, you will eat the good things of the earth," the grace of obedience; "but if you do not listen to me nor are willing, sword and fire will devour you," the judgment of disobedience. "For the mouth of the Lord has spoken these things"; the law of truth is the word of the Lord; do you wish me to become a good counselor for you? But you, listen;

I, if possible, will show you. You ought, O men, when considering the good itself, to bring in an innate faith, a trustworthy witness from within yourselves, openly choosing the best, and not to inquire whether it should be pursued, but to work at the good. For if one must get drunk, for example, one ought to deliberate; but you, before you have examined, get drunk; and if one must commit outrage, you do not investigate, but you commit outrage as quickly as possible. Only whether one ought to practice piety, you inquire, and whether one ought to follow this wise God and Christ, this you deem worthy of counsel and consideration, not having understood what is fitting for God. Believe us, if only as you believe in drunkenness, that you may become sober; believe us, if only as you believe in outrage, that you may live. But if you wish to be persuaded, having beheld the clear faith of the unspeakable, I will set before you, out of abundance, the persuasion concerning the Word. And you, since your ancestral customs no longer detain you from the truth, being already pre-catechized, would now hear how it stands with what follows; and let not shame at this name preoccupy you, which "greatly harms men," turning them aside from salvation. So then, having stripped openly, let us genuinely contend in the stadium of truth, with the holy Word as umpire, and the Lord of all as president of the games. For the prize set before us is no small thing—immortality. Do not then care even a little what some vulgar rabble, godless dancers of superstition, driven by folly and madness into the very abyss, makers of idols and worshippers of stones, call you.

For they have dared to deify men, enrolling Alexander of Macedon as a thirteenth god, "whom Babylon proved to be a corpse." I bring forward the Chian sophist, Theocritus by name; after Alexander's death, Theocritus, mocking the empty opinions that men held about the gods, said to his fellow citizens: "Men, take courage as long as you see the gods dying before men." And indeed, the visible gods and this motley crowd of generated beings, whoever worships and cultivates them, is far more wretched than those very demons. For "God is nowhere and in no way unjust," as the demons are, "but is as just as possible, and nothing is more like him than whoever among us becomes most just." Come, then, to the road, all you working people, who propitiate the grim-eyed Ergane of Zeus as a god with winnowing baskets, foolish craftsmen and worshippers of stones. Your Phidias and your Polyclitus, your Praxiteles and Apelles, and all who pursue the base arts, are earthly workers of earth. For then, as some prophecy says, affairs here will be unfortunate, when they trust in statues. Come, then, again, for I will not cease calling, you petty craftsmen. None of these has ever fashioned a living image, nor molded soft flesh from earth. Who melted marrow, or who fixed bones? Who stretched sinews, who inflated veins? Who poured blood into them, or who stretched skin around? And where would any of them make eyes that see? Who breathed in a soul? Who bestowed justice?

ing him, said, "Who has promised immortality? Only the creator of the universe, the 'father of all craftsmanship,' fashioned us, man, as such a living image. But your Olympian, an image of an image, far removed from the truth, is a mute work of Attic hands. For 'the image of God' is his Word (and the divine Word is the genuine son of the mind, the archetypal light of light), and the true man is the image of the Word, the mind within man, which is said to have been made 'according to the image' of God and 'according to the likeness' for this reason, being likened to the divine Word through the understanding in the heart and thus rational. But of visible, earthborn man, the earthly image—the man-shaped statues—appears as a temporary impression far from the truth. Therefore, life seems to me to have become nothing but full of madness, so great is the zeal spent on matter. Custom, corrupted by empty opinion, has enslaved you and led you into irrational meddling; ignorance of lawful, lawless, and deceitful pretenses is the cause, which, having been contrived, has stained the human race with deadly wax and abominable idols, devising many forms of demons, and has imprinted upon its followers a long death. So take rational water, wash yourselves, you who are polluted, sprinkle yourselves with the true drops from custom; you must ascend to the heavens pure. You are a human being, the most common thing; seek the one who created you. You are a son, the most particular thing; recognize your father. But do you still remain in sins, clinging to pleasures? To whom will the Lord say, 'Yours is the kingdom of heaven'?

It is yours, if you wish, who have set your choice toward God; yours, if you only wish to believe and follow the brevity of the proclamation, by heeding which the Ninevites, in genuine repentance, exchanged the expected capture for fair salvation. How then, one says, shall I ascend to the heavens? "The way" is the Lord, "narrow" indeed, but "from the heavens," narrow indeed, but sending up to the heavens; narrow on earth, overlooked, broad in the heavens, worshipped. Then, the one ignorant of the word has ignorance of error as his excuse, but the one who has taken it into his ears and disobeyed it in his soul bears his disobedience from his own judgment, and the more prudent he seems to be, the more his understanding is for evil, because he has used his prudence as an accuser, not choosing the best; for he is by nature, as a human, disposed toward God. Just as we do not force a horse to plow nor a bull to hunt, but draw each animal to what it is by nature, so too we call the human, born for the contemplation of heaven, a "heavenly plant" truly, to the knowledge of God, having grasped his own, exceptional, and distinctive trait compared to other animals, and we advise him to prepare a sufficient provision for eternity, piety. Cultivate, we say, if you are a farmer, but know God while cultivating; and sail, if you love seafaring, but call upon the heavenly helmsman; if you are a soldier, knowledge has overtaken you; listen to the general who signals what is just.

Just as if weighed down by sleep and drunkenness, rouse yourselves, and after looking about a little, consider what the stones you worship wish from you, and what you spend so earnestly on matter. You consume your wealth and your life, and your very living, into death, for ignorance, finding this alone as the end of your vain hope. You are not even able to pity yourselves, nor do you become fit to be persuaded by those who pity you for your error, being enslaved by evil habit, from which, having broken free of your own accord, you are carried down to destruction until your last breath. "Because the light has come into the world, and men have loved the darkness more than the light," although it is possible to wipe away the obstacles to salvation—both pride and wealth and fear—while uttering this poetic line: "Where then do I carry these many possessions? Where then do I myself wander?" Will you not, then, cast off these empty phantoms and renounce habit itself, saying to vainglory: "Farewell, false dreams; you were nothing after all"? For what do you consider, O men, the Tychon Hermes, and the Andocides Hermes, and the Amyetus Hermes? It is clear to anyone that they are stones, just as the Hermes is. And just as the halo is not a god, and the rainbow is not a god, but are conditions of air and clouds, and just as the day is not a god, nor indeed the year nor the time composed of these, so neither is the sun nor the moon, by which each of the aforementioned is defined. Who, then, being of sound mind, would suppose that Righteousness, Punishment, Justice, and Nemesis are gods?

For neither the Furies nor the Fates nor Destiny are gods, just as neither the constitution nor glory nor wealth are gods—wealth which painters even depict as blind. And if you deify Shame and Love and Aphrodite, then shame, impulse, beauty, and intercourse follow them. So it would no longer be reasonable for Sleep and Death to be considered twin gods among you, since these are natural affections occurring in living beings. Nor would you justly call Doom or Destiny or the Fates goddesses. And if Strife and Battle are not gods, neither are Ares nor Enyo. Further, if lightning, thunderbolts, and rain are not gods, how are fire and water gods? And how are shooting stars and comets, which arise from an affection of the air, gods? And one who calls Fortune a god should also call Action a god. If, then, none of these is considered a god, nor any of those hand-wrought and senseless images, but some providence concerning us from a divine power is manifest, nothing remains but to confess this: that truly the only god who really exists and subsists is the one who truly is. But you foolish men resemble those who have drunk mandrake or some other drug; may God grant you to rouse yourselves from this sleep and to understand that God is not to be imagined as gold or stone or tree or action or passion or disease or fear. "For truly there are thrice ten thousand" "on the much-nourishing earth" "demons," neither "immortal" nor yet mortal (for they have no share in sensation, and thus not in death either), but stone and wooden masters of men, insulting and violating life through habit. "The earth of the Lord," it is said, "and its fullness.

Then why do you dare, while luxuriating in the Lord's possessions, to be ignorant of the master? "Leave my earth," the Lord will say to you, "do not touch the water which I send forth, do not partake of the fruits which I cultivate; give back, O man, the nurture to God; recognize your master; you are the peculiar formation of God; and how could his own property justly become another's?" For that which is alienated, being deprived of its proper relationship, is deprived of truth. Or do you not, in a manner like Niobe, or rather, to speak more mystically to you, like the Hebrew woman (the ancients called her Lot), turn into insensibility? We have received this woman as turned to stone because of her love for Sodom; and the Sodomites are the godless and those who turn to impiety, hard-hearted and foolish. Consider these words as addressed to you from God: "Do not think that stones and wood and birds and serpents are sacred, but that human beings are not"; on the contrary, you should consider human beings as truly sacred, and beasts and stones as what they are. For wretched and miserable men think that God cries out through a raven or a jackdaw, but is silent through a human being, and they have honored the raven as a messenger of God, but persecute the human being of God, who does not croak or caw, but speaks, I think, rationally and

they inhumanely attempt to slay him who kindly instructs them, calling them to righteousness, neither awaiting the grace from above nor shunning punishment. For they do not believe in God nor learn his power. But whose philanthropy is ineffable, his hatred of evil is incomprehensible. Wrath nourishes punishment for sin, but philanthropy does good for repentance. Most pitiable is to be deprived of assistance from God. Now blindness of the eyes and deafness of hearing are more painful than the other excesses of the evil one; for one is deprived of the heavenly vision, the other of divine teaching. But you, maimed and blind in mind toward the truth, and deaf in understanding, do not grieve, do not become indignant, have not desired to see the sky and the maker of the sky, nor have you sought to hear and learn the creator and father of all, joining your choice to salvation; for nothing stands in the way of one hastening to knowledge of God—not lack of education, not poverty, not lack of fame, not lack of possessions; nor does anyone pray to exchange true wisdom "for bronze" or for iron; for this is well said above all: the good one is everywhere saving; for the zealot of justice, as a lover of the self-sufficient, is of few needs, having treasured up the blessedness in no other than in God himself, where there is no moth, no robber, no pirate, but the eternal giver of good things. Therefore you have rightly been likened to those serpents whose ears are closed to the charmers.

For they have wrath," says Scripture, "like that of a serpent, like a deaf asp that stops its ears, which will not hear the voice of charmers." But you have been charmed out of your savagery, and receive the gentle and our word, and spit out the deadly venom, so that you may be granted to shed corruption, as they shed old age. Hear me, and do not stop your ears nor block your hearing, but take what is said into your mind. The medicine of immortality is good; stop your crawling tracks at last. "For the enemies of the Lord will lick dust," it says; lift your heads from the earth to the ether, look up to heaven, marvel, cease lying in wait for the heel of the righteous and obstructing "the way of truth"; become wise and harmless. Perhaps the Lord will grant you the wing of simplicity (he intends to give wings to the earthborn), so that leaving your holes you may dwell in the heavens. Only let us repent with our whole heart, so that we may be able to contain God with our whole heart. "Hope in him," it says, "every assembly of the people, pour out before him all your hearts." He speaks to those empty of wickedness; he has mercy and fills with righteousness. Believe, man, in man and God; believe, man, in the one who suffered and is worshipped; believe, you slaves, in the living God who died; all men, believe in the one God of all men; believe and receive salvation as your reward. "Seek God, and your soul will live." He who seeks God is busy with his own salvation.

You have found God, you have life. Let us therefore seek, that we may also live. The reward of finding is life with God. "Let all who seek you rejoice and be glad, and let them say continually, 'Let God be magnified.'" A beautiful hymn to God is an immortal human being, built up by righteousness, in whom the oracles of truth are engraved. For where else should righteousness be inscribed but in a prudent soul? Where love? Where modesty? Where gentleness? These divine writings, I think, must be sealed in the soul, and one must consider wisdom a fair starting-point for whatever part of life one enters, and the same wisdom a wave-less haven of salvation. Through it, fathers are good to children who have run to the Father, sons are good to parents who have understood the Son, husbands are good to wives who remember the Bridegroom, and masters are good to servants who have been redeemed from the ultimate slavery. O how much more blessed than the error among humans are the beasts: they graze on ignorance, as you do, but they do not pretend the truth; there are no races of flatterers among them, fish are not superstitious, birds do not worship idols, they are struck only by the sky, since they are deemed unworthy of reason and cannot conceive God. Then are you not ashamed that you have made yourselves more irrational than the irrational, you who have worn yourselves out in godlessness through so many ages? You have been children, then youths, then adolescents, then men, but never good. If you respect old age, become prudent at the sunset of life, if at the end of life you come to know God, so that the end of your life may take up the beginning of salvation.

Grow old in superstition, but come as youths to piety; God will admit innocent children. So let the Athenian follow the laws of Solon, the Argive those of Phoroneus, and the Spartan those of Lycurgus; but if you enroll yourself as belonging to God, heaven is your fatherland, and God your lawgiver. And what are the laws? "You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not corrupt boys, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness; you shall love the Lord your God." And there are also the complements of these, rational laws and holy words inscribed in the hearts themselves: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," and "To the one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also," and "You shall not desire, for by desire alone you have committed adultery." How much better, then, is it for men, instead of attaining their desires, to begin by not even wishing to desire what they ought not? But you cannot endure the austerity of salvation; just as we delight in sweet foods because of the smoothness of pleasure, preferring them, while bitter things heal and cure us, roughening the sensation, yet the austerity of medicines strengthens those with weak stomachs, so habit pleases and tickles, but habit pushes into the abyss, while truth leads up to heaven, "rough" at first, "but good, nurse of the young"; and this women's quarters is dignified, and the council of elders is temperate.

Nor is it difficult to approach or impossible to obtain, but it dwells very near to us, as the all-wise Moses hints, residing in our three parts, "hands, mouth, and heart." This is a genuine symbol of truth, which is completed by all three: counsel, action, and speech. Do not fear that the many and pleasant phantoms will rob you of wisdom; you yourself will willingly surpass the folly of habit, just as children, when they become men, cast aside their toys. With unsurpassable speed and ready goodwill, the divine power, shining upon the earth, filled the whole with the seed of salvation. For the Lord could not have accomplished so great a work in so short a time without divine aid, being despised in appearance, yet worshipped in deed—the purifying, saving, and gentle divine Word, the truly most manifest God, who is made equal to the Lord of all because he was his son, and "the Word was in God." He was not disbelieved when first proclaimed, nor was he unknown when he took on the human guise and, clothed in flesh, enacted the saving drama of humanity; for he was a genuine contestant and fellow contestant of the creation. And having been spread to all men more quickly than the sun, rising from the paternal will itself, he shone upon us most easily, revealing God, whence he was.

He himself, who was, through what he taught and revealed, having presented himself, the truce-bearer, reconciler, and savior, our Word, a life-giving, peaceful spring, pouring over the whole face of the earth, through whom, so to speak, everything has already become a sea of goods. And if you wish, consider from above the divine beneficence. The first man, when he played in paradise unbound, was still a child of God; but when, succumbing to pleasure (the serpent allegorically represents pleasure crawling on its belly, earthly evil turning toward matter), he was led astray by desires, the child, growing bold in disobedience and having disobeyed the father, felt shame before God. Such was the power of pleasure: the man, unbound through simplicity, was found bound by sins. The Lord wished to release him from these bonds again, and having been bound in flesh (this is a divine mystery), he subdued the serpent and enslaved the tyrant, death, and, most paradoxically, showed that man, who had been led astray by pleasure, bound to corruption, unbound with outstretched hands. O mystical wonder! The Lord lies down, but man rises, and the one who fell from paradise receives a greater reward than obedience: the heavens. Therefore it seems to me, since the Word himself came to us from heaven, we should no longer go to human teaching, busying ourselves with Athens and the rest of Greece, and also Ionia. For if our teacher, who has filled everything with holy powers—creation, salvation, beneficence, legislation, prophecy, teaching—now instructs everything, the whole has already become Athens and Greece through the Word.

For you do not, on the one hand, believe the poetic myth that records Minos the Cretan as the companion of Zeus, and yet, on the other hand, disbelieve us who have become disciples of God, having taken up the truly true wisdom, which only the highest of philosophy hinted at, but the disciples of Christ both comprehended and proclaimed. And indeed, Christ, so to speak, is not divided; he is neither barbarian nor Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female; he is a new man, remolded by the Holy Spirit of God. Then, other counsels and exhortations are partial and concern particular matters—whether one should marry, whether one should engage in politics, whether one should beget children; but the only universal exhortation, clearly directed to the whole of life, in every time, in every circumstance, tending toward the most essential end, life, is piety; according to which alone it is necessary to live, in order that we may live forever. Philosophy, as the elders say, is a long-lived counsel, wooing the eternal love of wisdom. "The commandment of the Lord is clear, illuminating the eyes." Receive Christ, receive sight, receive your light, so that you may well know both God and man. "Sweet" is the Word that has enlightened us, "beyond gold and precious stone; it is more desirable than honey and the honeycomb." For how could it not be desirable, the one who has made the mind buried in darkness manifest and has sharpened the "light-bearing" eyes of the soul? For just as "if the sun were not, because of the other stars, everything would be night," so if we had not known the Word and been illuminated by it, we would be no different from fattened birds, growing sleek in darkness and nourished by death.