The Gods Had a Beginning

Now some people say that these are only images, but that there are gods to whom the images belong; that the processions and sacrifices people bring to the images are carried up to those gods and are in fact made to them; and that there is no other way of coming to the gods than this — [a]

And as evidence that this is so, they point to the powers at work in certain idols. Very well: let us examine the power that goes with their names.

Before I begin, greatest of emperors, I ask you to bear with me while I lay out honest reasoning. My aim is not to expose idols; it is to clear away the slanders told against us and to give the reasoning behind the life we have chosen. You are in a position to examine the heavenly kingdom from your own case. All things have been put into your hands, father and son, since you received your kingship from above — “the king’s soul is in God’s hand,” says the prophetic Spirit — and in the same way all things have been made subject to the one God and to the Word who comes from him, whom we understand as Son, inseparable from him.

So consider this before anything else. The gods were not there from the beginning, they say; each of them came into being just as we come into being. On this they all agree. Homer says:

And Orpheus — who was the first to invent their names, who went through their births and told what each of them had done, who is believed among them to speak of the gods more truly than anyone else, and whom Homer follows in most things and above all about the gods — he too traces their first origin to water:

For according to him water was the beginning of everything. Out of the water came mud, and out of the two of them an animal was born: a dragon with a lion’s head grown onto it, and between the two heads the face of a god, whose name was Heracles and Chronos. This Heracles produced an egg of enormous size, which, filled full by the force of the one who begot it, split in two from the rubbing. The part at the top turned out to be heaven, and the part that fell, earth. Earth too came forth as a god, with a body. Ouranos joined with Earth and fathered daughters — Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos — and sons: the hundred-handed Cottys, Gyges and Briareus, and the Cyclopes Brontes, Steropes and Arges. These he bound and hurled down into Tartarus, having learned that his own children would throw him out of his rule. So Earth in her anger gave birth to the Titans:

That is how coming-to-be began, on their account, both for the gods and for everything else. So what are we to make of it? Every one of these beings they treat as divine is thought of as having been there from the start. But if they came into being, not having existed before — which is what those who tell the gods’ story say — then they do not exist. For a thing is either uncreated and everlasting, or created and perishable. [g]

And I do not think one thing here while the philosophers think another. “What is that which always is and never comes to be? And what is that which comes to be and never is?” Discussing the intelligible and the perceptible, Plato teaches that what always is — the intelligible — is uncreated, while what is not — the perceptible — is created, beginning and ceasing. The Stoics say the same sort of thing when they claim that everything will be burned up and will exist again, the world receiving another beginning.

Now they hold that there are two causes: one active and initiating, which is providence, and one passive and shifting, which is matter. And even so it is impossible, they say, for the world to stay in the same state, watched over by providence though it is, because it came to be. Then how does the make-up of these gods hold, when they do not exist by nature but came into being? And in what way are the gods better than matter, when their make-up comes out of water? Not even water is the beginning of all things on their own account. What could be put together out of simple elements all of one kind? Matter needs a craftsman, and the craftsman needs matter. How could anything take shape without matter, or without a craftsman? And it makes no sense for matter to be older than God, since the cause that makes a thing must exist before the things made.

If the unbelievable part of their theology stopped at saying that the gods came to be and got their make-up out of water, then — having shown that nothing which comes to be is not also liable to come apart — I would move on to the rest of the charges. [i]

But they have also laid out the gods’ bodies. They say Heracles is a god in the form of a coiled dragon. They speak of the hundred-handed ones. And of the daughter of Zeus, whom he fathered by his own mother Rhea — or by Demeter herself — they said that she has two eyes in the natural place and two more on her forehead, and an animal’s face on the back of her neck, and horns besides; and that Rhea, terrified at the monster she had borne, ran from her and would not give her the breast, thēlē, which is why in the mysteries she is called Athēlā, and in common speech Phersephone and Kore — though she is not the same as Athena, who is called Kore from the pupil of the eye.

And they have gone through the gods’ doings, exactly as they suppose. Kronos cut off his father’s genitals and threw him down from his chariot, and murdered his own children, swallowing the males of them. Zeus bound his father and hurled him into Tartarus, as Ouranos had done to his sons, and made war on the Titans over the rule. He chased his mother Rhea when she refused to marry him; when she turned into a she-dragon he changed himself into a dragon too, tied her with what is called the Heraclean knot, and had her — the rod of Hermes is a symbol of the posture of that coupling. After that he forced himself on his daughter Phersephone, again in the shape of a dragon, and by her he had a son, Dionysus.

Faced with accounts like these, I have to say at least this much. What is there in such a history that is dignified or useful, that we should believe Kronos and Zeus and Kore and the rest are gods? Is it the way their bodies are arranged? What man with a mind of his own, who has given any time to reflection, would believe that a viper was fathered by a god? Orpheus:

Or who would accept that Phanes himself, the firstborn god — for he is the one who was poured out of the egg — has the body or shape of a dragon, or that he was swallowed by Zeus so that Zeus might grow too large to be contained? If they differ in nothing from the lowest beasts — and it is plain that what is divine must be unlike the things of earth and the things separated out of matter — then they are not gods. Why should we come to them as suppliants at all, when they are born the way cattle are born, and are shaped like animals and ugly to look at?

Even if all they said was that the gods have bodies like flesh, and blood and seed, and the passions of anger and craving, we would still have to count that talk nonsense and a joke. There is no anger in God, no craving or appetite, and no child-making seed. So let them have bodies like flesh — but let them be above rage and anger, so that Athena is not seen like this: [n]

and Hera is not on view like this:

And let them be above grief:

For my part, I call even human beings ignorant and clumsy when they give way to anger and grief. And when “the father of men and gods” mourns his son —

— and for all his mourning cannot snatch him out of danger —

who would not blame the ignorance of people who, on the strength of tales like these, are lovers of the gods — or rather, have no god at all? Let them have bodies like flesh, but then let Aphrodite not be wounded in the body by Diomedes:

or in the soul by Ares:

The one who is terrible in war, Zeus’ ally against the Titans, turns out weaker than Diomedes.

Quiet, Homer. A god does not rage. And you describe the god to me as blood-stained and a ruin to mortals:

and you go through his adultery and his chains:

Do they not throw down this whole great heap of impious nonsense about the gods? Ouranos is castrated. Kronos is bound and hurled into Tartarus. The Titans revolt. Styx dies in the battle. They even show them to be mortal. They fall in love with one another; they fall in love with human beings:

Are they not in love? Do they not suffer? But no — they are gods, and craving will not touch them! And if a god should take on flesh in keeping with a divine plan, is he a slave to craving from that moment?

He is created, he is perishable, with nothing of a god about him. They even hire themselves out to human beings:

and they herd cattle:

So Admetus was better than the god. Prophet, wise one, who see ahead for everybody else what is coming — you did not foresee the murder of the one you loved; you killed your friend with your own hand.

(Aeschylus is abusing Apollo as a false prophet.)

But perhaps all this is poetic wandering, and there is some account of them drawn from nature, like this one from Empedocles: [x]

So if Zeus is fire, and Hera the earth, and Aidoneus the air, and Nestis water — and these are elements, fire and water and air — then not one of them is a god: not Zeus, not Hera, not Aidoneus. Their make-up and their coming-to-be are from matter that God separated out:

These are things that cannot last without Love, since Strife throws them into confusion. How, then, could anyone say they are gods? In Empedocles, Love is what rules; the compounds are what is ruled; and what rules has the mastery. So if we make the power of the ruled and the power of the ruler one and the same, we will be putting perishable, flowing, changeable matter on a level with the God who is uncreated and everlasting and always in agreement with himself — and we will not even notice we have done it.

According to the Stoics, Zeus is the seething substance; Hera is the air, aēr, and the name itself says so if you join it to itself and sound it out; and Poseidon is what is drunk, posis. Different people read them out of nature in different ways. Some call Zeus a twofold air, male and female; others call him the season that turns time toward mild weather, which is why he alone escaped Kronos. To the Stoics this can be said: if you hold that there is one highest God, uncreated and everlasting, and that there are as many compound bodies as there are changes of matter, and if you say that the Spirit of God, passing through matter, takes a different name with each of its variations — then the forms of matter will turn out to be the body of God; and when the elements are destroyed in the great conflagration, the names will necessarily be destroyed along with the forms, and the Spirit of God alone will remain.

Who, then, could believe that bodies like these are gods, when their variation according to matter is a perishable thing? And there are those who say that Kronos is time and Rhea the earth; that she conceives by Kronos and gives birth, which is why she is reckoned the mother of all, while he begets his offspring and consumes them; that the cutting off of the private parts is the intercourse of male with female, which cuts off the seed and casts it into the womb and produces a human being who has the craving in him, which is Aphrodite; that the madness of Kronos is the turn of the season, which destroys living and lifeless things alike; and that the chains and Tartarus are time, changed by the seasons and passing out of sight. To these people we say: if Kronos is time, he changes; if he is a season, he turns; if he is darkness or frost or the wet part of nature, none of these stays put. But what is divine is immortal and unmoved and unalterable. So neither Kronos nor the image made of him is God.

As for Zeus: if he is air born of Kronos, whose male part is called Zeus and whose female part is called Hera — hence sister and wife at once — then he alters; and if he is a season, he turns. But what is divine neither changes nor shifts about.

Why should I trouble you by saying more? You know better than I do what each of the men who read the gods out of nature has said, and what the writers thought about nature: what they say about Athena, whom they call the intelligence that runs through all things; or about Isis, whom they call the birth of the age, from whom all have grown and through whom all exist; or about Osiris, who was slaughtered by his brother Typhon, and whose limbs Isis searched for along with her son Horus, and when she had found them she prepared them for burial — a burial that is called Osirian to this day.

For while they turn up and down among the forms of matter, they miss the God who can be seen only by reason, and they make gods of the elements and their several parts, putting one name on them at one time and another at another. The sowing of the grain they call Osiris — which is why, they say, at the finding of the limbs, or of the fruits, these words are spoken over Isis in the mysteries: “We have found; we rejoice with you!” The fruit of the vine they call Dionysus, and the vine itself Semele, and the sun’s flame the thunderbolt.

And in fact those who make gods out of the myths do anything rather than speak truly about God. They do not see that in the very defense they offer for the gods they confirm the stories told about them. What have Europa and the bull, and the swan and Leda, to do with earth and air, that Zeus’ filthy coupling with these women should be taken for the coupling of earth and air?

But they fall away from the greatness of God, and cannot lift their reason high enough to look out beyond these things — for they have no kinship with the heavenly place — and so they waste away among the forms of matter, and, sinking, they make gods of the turnings of the elements. It is as if a man took the ship he sailed in for the steersman. Just as a ship is no use, however completely it is fitted out, if it has no steersman, so the elements are no help either, however well arranged, apart from the providence that comes from God. The ship will not sail by itself, and the elements will not move without their Maker.