Younger Than Their Makers

If we were content with reasoning of that kind, someone might take the teaching we hold to be merely human. But the voices of the prophets stand behind our arguments. I think that you too — men so eager to learn and so far advanced in knowledge — cannot be unacquainted with the writings of Moses, or of Isaiah and Jeremiah and the rest of the prophets. In an ecstasy that displaced their own reasoning, moved by the divine Spirit, they spoke out what was worked in them, the Spirit using them as a piper breathes into his pipe. What, then, do these men say? [a]

The Lord is our God; no other will be reckoned beside him.

And again: I am God, the first, and the one who comes after; and apart from me there is no God.

In the same way: Before me no other god came to be, and after me there will be none. I am God, and there is none besides me.

And about his greatness: Heaven is my throne, and the earth is the footstool of my feet. What kind of house will you build me, or what is the place of my rest?

I leave it to you, when you have the books themselves in hand, to examine their prophecies more carefully, so that on proper grounds you may clear away the abuse that is thrown at us.

So I have shown well enough that we are not atheists. We hold that there is one God — uncreated, eternal, invisible, unable to be acted on, beyond comprehension, contained by nothing, grasped by mind and reason alone, wrapped about with light and beauty and spirit and power beyond describing — by whom the universe came into being through his own Word, and was set in order, and is held together. For we also hold that there is a Son of God. And let no one think it ridiculous that God should have a Son. We do not think about God the Father, or about the Son, the way the poets do in their tales, where they show the gods to be no better than men. The Son of God is the Word of the Father, as form and as active power; for by him and through him all things came to be, the Father and the Son being one. And since the Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son, by the unity and power of spirit, the Son of God is the mind and reason of the Father. [e]

But if, in your great intelligence, it occurs to you to ask what is meant by “the Son,” I will say it briefly. He is the Father’s first offspring — not as something that came into being, for from the beginning God, who is eternal mind, had the Word in himself, having reason in him eternally — but in that he came forth to be the form and the active power of all material things. These lay there like a nature without qualities and useless earth, the coarser particles mixed in among the lighter ones. The prophetic Spirit agrees with what we say: “The Lord,” it says, “created me as the beginning of his ways, for his works.” And that Holy Spirit itself, which does the work in the prophets when they speak out, we say is an outflow from God — flowing out from him and carried back to him again, like a ray of the sun. Who, then, would not be at a loss to hear men called atheists who speak of God the Father and God the Son and the Holy Spirit, and who show both their power in their union and their distinction in their order? And the part of our teaching that concerns God does not stop there. We say there is also a host of angels and ministers, whom God, the world’s creator and maker, distributed and assigned by the Word that comes from him, to be over the elements and the heavens and the world and the things in it, and over the good order of them all.

Do not be surprised that I go into our teaching in detail. I am being exact so that you will not be carried along by the common, unreasoning opinion, but will be able to know the truth. For by the very teachings we hold to — which are not human, but spoken by God and taught by God — we can persuade you not to think of us as atheists. What, then, are the words we are brought up on? I say to you: love your enemies; bless those who curse you; pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become sons of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust. [j]

Allow me at this point to raise my voice — to speak out plainly, loud enough to be heard — since I am making my defense before philosopher kings. Which of the men who resolve syllogisms and clear up ambiguities and explain where words come from, or of those who teach homonyms and synonyms, predicates and axioms, what the subject is and what is said of it, and who promise to make their students happy by lessons like these — which of them has so cleaned out his own soul that he loves his enemies instead of hating them, and blesses the men who started the insults instead of speaking evil of them, when merely holding his tongue would be the least he could do, and prays for the people plotting against his life? On the contrary, they never stop mining these secrets of theirs for harm, always wanting to work some evil, having made their business an art of words and not a display of deeds. But among us you would find uneducated people, and men who work with their hands, and old women, who cannot set out in words the good our teaching does, and yet show by what they do the good that comes of choosing it. They do not recite speeches; they display good deeds. When struck, they do not strike back. When robbed, they do not go to court. They give to those who ask them, and they love their neighbors as themselves.

Would we, then, be scrubbing ourselves clean like this if we did not believe that a God stands over the human race? It cannot be said. But because we are convinced that we will give an account of our whole life here to God, who made us and the world, we choose a life that is moderate and kind to people and easy to despise. We reckon that we will suffer no evil here great enough to matter — even if some take our life from us — compared with what we will receive there from the great Judge for a life that was gentle and kind and considerate. Plato said that Minos and Rhadamanthus will judge and punish the wicked. We say that even if a man is a Minos or a Rhadamanthus, or their own father, not even he will escape the judgment of God. [n]

So then: men who think this present life is all there is — “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” — and who set death down as a deep sleep and a forgetting (“sleep and death, twin brothers”), these are credited with reverence for God. But there are people who reckon the life here to be worth little and small, who are carried through it by one thing only, knowing God and the Word that comes from him: what the oneness of the Son with the Father is, what the fellowship of the Father with the Son is, what the Spirit is, what the union of the three is and what their distinction is while they are united — the Spirit, the Son, the Father. These people know that the life they are waiting for is far better than words can say, if only we come through it pure and clear of every wrong. And they carry kindness so far that they do not merely love their friends — “for if you love,” he says, “those who love you, and lend to those who lend to you, what reward will you have?” Being what we are, then, and living a life like this so that we may escape condemnation at the last — are we to be refused all credit for reverence toward God? These are small things taken out of great ones, and a few out of many, so as not to trouble you further. Even with honey and whey, people test a small part and judge from it whether the whole is good.

Most of those who charge us with atheism have not so much as dreamed what God is. They are ignorant of the study of nature and the study of God, and have never looked into either. They measure reverence by the rule of sacrifices, and they charge us with not holding the same gods as the cities do. So consider both points with me, emperors — and first, our not sacrificing. The Maker and Father of this universe does not need blood, or the smell of burning fat, or the fragrance of flowers and incense. He is himself the perfect fragrance, lacking nothing and needing nothing from anyone. The greatest sacrifice to him is that we should know who stretched the heavens out and rolled them into a sphere, and settled the earth in place like a center; who gathered the water into seas and separated light from darkness; who decorated the sky with stars and made the earth send up every kind of seed; who made the animals and shaped man. When we hold this God, the Maker, who keeps all things together and watches over them all by the knowledge and skill with which he guides them, and when we lift up holy hands to him — what further need has he of a hundred slaughtered oxen? [p]

And what have I to do with whole burnt offerings, which God does not need? What we ought to bring is a bloodless sacrifice, and to offer the worship that belongs to reason.

As for the other complaint — that we do not approach the gods the cities hold, and do not hold them ourselves — it is a very silly argument. The men who charge us with atheism because we do not hold the same gods they know do not even agree with one another about the gods. The Athenians have set up Celeus and Metanira as gods. The Spartans have Menelaus, and sacrifice to him and keep his festival, while the people of Ilium cannot bear even to hear his name and pay their honors to Hector instead. The people of Ceos hold Aristaeus to be both Zeus and Apollo; the Thasians hold Theagenes, who committed a murder at the Olympic games; the Samians hold Lysander, after all his slaughters and all his crimes. Alcman and Hesiod hold Medea, and the Cilicians Niobe; the Sicilians hold Philip son of Butacides, the Amathusians Onesilus, the Carthaginians Hamilcar. The day would give out on me before I finished the list. [s]

So when they disagree among themselves about their own gods, why do they charge us with not going along with them? And look at what the Egyptians do — is it not simply ridiculous? At their festivals they beat their breasts in the temples as though for the dead, and then sacrifice to the same beings as gods. It is no wonder: they treat animals as gods, shave themselves when the animals die, bury them in temples, and raise public mourning for them. If, then, we are guilty of irreverence because we do not worship in common with them, so is every city and every nation — for they do not all hold the same gods.

But suppose they did all hold the same gods. What of it? The crowd cannot tell matter from God, or see how wide the distance between them is, and so they go up to images made out of matter. Because of them, are we to come and bow down to statues — we who do tell the two apart and keep them separate, the uncreated and the created, what is and what is not, what is grasped by the mind and what is perceived by the senses, and who give each of them its proper name? If matter and God are the same thing, two names for one reality, then we are irreverent for not holding stones and wood, gold and silver, to be gods. But if they stand as far apart as anything can — as far as a craftsman stands from the materials of his craft — why are we called to account? As the potter is to the clay (the clay being the matter and the potter the craftsman), so is God the Maker to matter, which obeys him for the purposes of his craft. But just as clay cannot become vessels by itself, without the craft, so matter, which can receive any form, did not receive distinction and shape and order apart from God the Maker. [u]

And just as we do not hold the pottery in higher honor than the man who made it, or the bowls and gold cups above the man who worked the metal, but praise the craftsman if there is anything skillful about them — he is the one who reaps the glory of the vessels — so it is with matter and God. The glory and the honor for the arranging of the ordered world belong by right not to matter but to God, who is its Maker. So if we were to hold the forms of matter to be gods, we would look like people with no sense of the God who really is, putting things that can be dissolved and destroyed on a level with what is eternal.

The world is beautiful, no question — in the greatness it encompasses, in the arrangement of the stars in the slanted circle and of those around the Bear, and in its spherical shape. Yet it is not the world we must worship, but its craftsman. When your subjects come to you, they do not pass over you — their rulers and masters, from whom they will get whatever they need — to pay court to the splendor of your residence. If they happen on the royal house along the way, they give its fine workmanship a passing look of admiration; but it is you they treat as all in all when it comes to honor. You emperors build and furnish your royal residences for yourselves. The world, though, did not come into being because God needed it. God is everything to himself — light no one can approach, a perfect world, spirit, power, reason. So if the world is a tuned instrument moving in rhythm, I bow down to the one who tuned it and strikes the notes and sings the melody that fits, not to the instrument. At the musical contests the judges do not pass over the lyre players and put the crown on their lyres. [w]

Whether the world is God’s craft, as Plato says — then I admire its beauty and go to the craftsman. Or whether it is his substance and body, as the Peripatetics hold — then we do not abandon the worship of God, who is the cause of that body’s motion, and sink down to the poor, weak elements, worshiping matter that can be acted on in an air that, by their account, cannot be. Or if anyone takes the parts of the world to be powers of God — then we do not come up and pay court to the powers, but to the one who made them and is their Master. I do not ask of matter what it does not have, and I do not pass God by to pay court to the elements, which can do no more than they were ordered to do. Even if they are beautiful to look at, by the Maker’s skill, they still have the nature of matter. Plato bears witness to this too. “What is called heaven and world,” he says, “has had a share in many blessings from the Father; but it has also had a share in body, and so it cannot possibly be free of change.” If, then, while I admire the sky and the elements for their artistry, I do not bow down to them as gods, since I know the account of dissolution that hangs over them — how am I to call gods the things whose makers I know to be men? Consider it with me briefly.

A man making a defense has to give more exact arguments — about the names of the gods, that they are recent; and about their images, that they came into being, so to speak, yesterday and the day before. You yourselves know these matters better than most, since in everything, and beyond everyone else, you keep company with the ancients. I say, then, that it was Orpheus and Homer and Hesiod who gave both family lines and names to the beings they call gods. Herodotus bears witness to it as well: My own opinion is that Hesiod and Homer lived four hundred years before me and no more; and it was they who made a birth of the gods for the Greeks, and gave the gods their titles, and divided up their honors and their skills, and made their shapes known. [aa]

As for images: so long as modeling and painting and statue-making did not exist, images were not even in use. They came in when Saurias of Samos and Crato of Sicyon and Cleanthes of Corinth appeared, and the Corinthian girl. Outline drawing was discovered by Saurias, who traced round a horse in the sun; painting by Crato, who smeared in the outlines of a man and a woman on a whitened board; and the modeling of figures came from the girl. She was in love with a man, and traced his shadow on the wall while he slept; then her father — a potter — was so pleased with how exact the likeness was that he cut out the outline and filled it in with clay. That figure is still preserved at Corinth today.

After them, Daedalus and Theodorus of Miletus went on to invent statue-making and modeling. You see, then, how short a time images and the whole business of idols have been going on — short enough that we can name the craftsman of each god. The Artemis at Ephesus; the Athena — or rather Athela, since Athela is what those who speak more in the language of the mysteries call her, and that was the name of the ancient image made from the olive tree — and the seated figure of the same goddess, were made by Endoius, a pupil of Daedalus. The Pythian god is the work of Theodorus and Telecles. The Delian god and Artemis are the craft of Tectaeus and Angelion. The Hera in Samos and the one in Argos came from the hands of Smilis, and the rest of the idols were by Phidias. The Aphrodite at Cnidus, a courtesan, is the work of Praxiteles; the Asclepius at Epidaurus is the work of Phidias. To put it briefly, not one of them has escaped being made by a man. If they are gods, then, why were they not there from the beginning? Why are they younger than the men who made them? Why, in order to come into being at all, did they need men and craft? They are earth and stones and matter and fussy skill.