Slaves Cannot Be Gods

Why do we not turn instead to the far more human explanation — the one that can plainly be shown to come from people’s common sense and from an inference nobody had to be taught? Varro keeps it in mind himself. He says the elements are taken to be divine because nothing whatever can be produced, or nourished, or brought to the support of human life and of the earth without their vote; not even our own bodies and souls could have been enough by themselves without the tempering the elements give them. This is what makes the world habitable at all, and the result is held together by its division into zones — except where extreme cold or heat has made it impossible for anyone to live. [a]

On this account men have counted as gods the sun, because it gives out the light of day from itself, ripens the crops with its warmth, and measures the year by its fixed turnings; the moon, which is at once the relief of the night and the controller of the months by its governing; the stars as well, since they are sure indications of the seasons to be watched in working our fields; and last of all the very sky under which, and the earth over which, and the space in between within which, everything works together for the good of man.

It is not only from their kindly influence, though, that a belief in the divinity of the elements has been thought reasonable, but from their opposite qualities as well — the sort that come from what one might call their rage and anger: thunder, and hail, and drought, and plague-bearing winds, and floods too, and the ground splitting open, and earthquakes. All of these are fairly enough reckoned gods, whether their nature becomes an object of reverence because it is favorable, or of fear because it is terrible. The elements are the sovereign mistress, in fact, both of the help and of the harm.

But in the practical conduct of ordinary life, this is how men act and feel: they do not give thanks to, or find fault with, the very things the help or the injury comes from, so much as with those by whose strength and power the things are made to work. Even at your entertainments you do not award the crown to the flute or the harp, but to the musician who handles that flute or harp by the force of his delightful skill. In the same way, when a man is ill you do not offer your acknowledgments to the woolen wraps, or the medicines, or the poultices, but to the doctors whose care and good sense made the remedies work. And so in disasters: men wounded with a sword do not charge the injury to the sword or the spear, but to the enemy or the robber; men buried under a falling house do not blame the tiles or the stones, but the age of the building; and shipwrecked sailors put their loss down not to the rocks and the waves, but to the storm.

And they are right to. It is certain that whatever happens must be credited not to the instrument with which but to the agent by whom it takes place, since he is the head of the deed who appoints both the event itself and the means by which it comes about. There are these three particular things in everything: the fact itself, its instrument, and its cause. The one who wills a thing to happen comes into view before the thing he wills, and before the instrument by which it happens.

On every other occasion, then, your conduct is right enough, because you look for the author. But in the phenomena of nature your rule runs against the very principle that makes you judge wisely in every other case: you put the author’s supreme place out of sight, and consider the things that happen rather than the one by whom they happen. So it comes about that you suppose the power and the mastery belong to the elements, which are only the slaves and the officials. Do we not, in tracing out a craftsman and a master within, expose the contrived arrangement of their servitude out of the fixed duties of the very elements you credit with power? But gods are not slaves; therefore whatever is servile in character is not a god. Otherwise you must prove to us that, in the ordinary course of things, liberty is established by unrestrained license, and despotism by liberty, and that by despotism divine power is meant.

For if the bodies overhead never forget to complete their courses in fixed orbits, at regular seasons, at their proper distances and at equal intervals — appointed in the manner of a law for the revolutions of time and for the guidance of it — then can it fail to follow, from the very keeping of their terms and the faithfulness of their working, that you will be convinced, both by the return of their orbital courses and by the accuracy of their changes, and remembering how the return never stops, that a governing power presides over them, one that the whole business of the world obeys, reaching even to the benefit and the harm of the human race? For you cannot claim that these bodies act and care for themselves alone, contributing nothing to the advantage of mankind, when the only reason you give for calling the elements divine is that you feel benefit or injury from them yourself. If they benefit only themselves, you owe them nothing.

Come now: do you grant that the Divine Being not only has nothing servile in its course, but exists in unbroken wholeness, and ought not to be diminished, or suspended, or destroyed? Then all its blessedness would vanish if it were ever subject to change. But look at the bodies of the stars. They do undergo change, and they give plain evidence of the fact. The moon tells us how great its loss has been, as it recovers its full shape; its greater losses you are already used to measuring in a mirror of water, so that I need no longer believe anything at all that the magians have claimed. The sun, too, is often put to the trial of an eclipse. Explain the manner of these accidents in the sky as best you can: it is impossible for God either to become less or to stop existing. [d]

So let them look to themselves, these props of human learning, which by their artful way of weaving guesses together give the lie to both wisdom and truth. Besides, it happens in your natural way of thinking that the man who has spoken best is supposed to have spoken most truly, instead of the man who has spoken the truth being held to have spoken best. Now anyone who looks carefully into things will surely allow that it is likelier for the elements we have been discussing to be under some rule and direction than to have a motion of their own — and that, being under government, they cannot be gods. If a man is going to be wrong about this, it is better to be wrong plainly than by theory, like your natural philosophers.

At the same time, if you consider what the mythic school is like and set it beside the physical, the mistake we have just watched frail humanity make in the second is really the more respectable of the two, since it credits a divine nature to things it supposes to be more than human in what they can feel — whether in their position, their power, their size, or their divinity. For whatever you suppose to be higher than man, you believe to be very close to God.

But let us pass to the mythic class of gods, the one we assigned to the poets. I hardly know whether I ought merely to try to put them on a level with our own human mediocrity, or whether they have to be declared gods, with proofs of divinity, like the African Mopsus and the Boeotian Amphiaraus. For the moment I will touch on this class only lightly; it will be looked at more fully in the proper place. In the meantime, that these were only human beings is clear from the fact that you do not consistently call them gods, but heroes. [g]

Why argue the point at all? Even granting that divine honors had to be given to dead men, they were of course not given to them as dead men. Look at your own practice, when with the same excess of presumption you defile heaven with the tombs of your kings. Is it not the men famous for justice, courage, devotion and every excellence of that kind whom you honor with the blessedness of being made gods — content even to be despised for perjuring yourselves on behalf of such characters? And on the other side, do you not strip the godless and the disgraceful even of the old prizes of human glory: tearing up their decrees and titles, pulling down their statues, and beating their portraits off the coins in circulation?

Will he, though, who beholds all things, who approves the good and even rewards them, hand out to the common crowd the gift of his own inexhaustible kindness and mercy? And are men to be allowed a special measure of care and right judgment, so that they may be wise about picking their gods and handing the honor around? Are the attendants of kings and princes to be purer than those who wait on the Supreme God? You turn away in horror from outcasts and exiles, from the poor and the weak, from the obscurely born and the badly brought up — and yet you honor, by law itself, men who were unchaste, adulterers, robbers, and murderers of their own parents. Are we to treat it as a joke or as an outrage, that characters like these are believed to be gods who are not fit to be men?

And then, in this mythic class of yours that the poets celebrate, how unsteady you are about purity of conscience and the keeping of it! Whenever we hold up the wretched, shameful and atrocious examples of your gods for execration, you defend them as mere stories, on the plea of poetic license. Whenever we go out of our way to pass that same poetic license over in silence, you are not only untroubled by any horror of it — you go so far as to show it respect, and to count it one of the indispensable arts. Indeed you carry on the education of your gentlemen’s sons by means of it, as the very thing that initiates them into literature. Plato was of the opinion that poets ought to be banished as slanderers of the gods, and would have had Homer himself expelled from his republic, although, as you are aware, Homer was the crowned head of them all.

But while you admit them and keep them, why should you not believe them when they disclose such things about your gods? And if you do believe your poets, how is it that you worship gods like the ones they describe? If you worship them simply because you do not believe the poets, why do you heap praise on such lying authors, with no fear at all of offending the gods whose slanderers you honor? Truthfulness, of course, is not to be expected of poets.

But when you say that the poets only turn men into gods after their death, are you not admitting that before their death these gods of yours were merely human? And what is strange in the fact that men who were once men should be polluted by human accidents, or crimes, or stories? In fact, do you not put your faith in your poets, when it is according to their tales that you have arranged some of your very rituals? Why is the priestess of Ceres carried off, if it is not because Ceres suffered that same outrage? Why are other people’s children sacrificed to Saturn, if it is not because he did not spare his own? Why is a man mutilated in honor of the Idaean goddess Cybele, unless it is because the youth who was too disdainful of her advances was castrated, when she was vexed at his daring to cross her love? Why was Hercules no dainty dish to the good ladies of Lanuvium, if it was not for the offence women gave him at the beginning?

The poets are liars, no doubt. Yet that is not why you call them liars — not for telling us that your gods did such things while they were human beings, and not for crediting a divine state with scandals fit for gods. For it seemed to you more believable that there should be gods, though not of that character, than that there should be characters like that who were not gods.

That leaves the gentile class of gods, the ones belonging to the separate nations. These were taken up out of sheer whim, not out of any knowledge of the truth, and what we know about them comes from the private notions of different races. God, I take it, is known everywhere, present everywhere, powerful everywhere — someone whom everyone ought to worship and everyone ought to serve. Since it turns out, then, that even the gods the whole world worships in common fall short of the evidence of real divinity, how much more must that happen to the ones whose own townspeople have never managed to find them out! For what useful authority could possibly stand behind a theology so defective that fame has never even heard of it? [n]

How many people have ever seen or heard of the Syrian Atargatis, the African Caelestis, the Moorish Varsutina, the Arabian Obodas and Dusares, or Belenus of Noricum, or the ones Varro mentions — Deluentinus of Casinum, Visidianus of Narnia, Numiternus of Atina, Ancharia of Asculum? And who has any clear notion of the Nortia of Volsinii? There is no difference in the worth of even their names, apart from the human surnames that tell them apart. I laugh often enough at these little town-council gods in each municipality, with their honors shut up inside their own city walls. And how far this license of adopting gods has been pushed, the superstitions of the Egyptians show us: they worship even their own local animals — cats, crocodiles, and their snake.

So it is a small matter that they have also made a god of a man — the one, I mean, whom not Egypt only, or Greece, but the whole world worships, and the Africans swear by. Everything that helps our guesses about his case, and gives our knowledge some appearance of truth, is set down in our own sacred literature. For that Serapis of yours was originally one of our own holy men, called Joseph.

He was the youngest of his brothers, but ahead of them in intelligence, and out of envy he was sold into Egypt and became a slave in the household of Pharaoh, the king of the country. The queen made her demands on him, and when he would not do what she wanted she turned on him and reported him to the king, who put him in prison. There he displayed the power of his divine inspiration by interpreting some of his fellow prisoners’ dreams correctly. Meanwhile the king too had terrible dreams. Joseph, sent for and brought before him, was able to expound them. He told him first of the proofs of true interpretation he had already given in the prison, and then opened up the dream to him: those seven fat and fine-looking cows meant that many years of plenty, and in the same way the seven starved ones foretold scarcity for the seven years that followed. So he advised that precautions be taken, out of the plenty they had, against the famine to come. The king believed him. The way it all turned out showed how wise he was, how unfailingly holy, and now how necessary. So Pharaoh set him over all Egypt, to make sure of its grain supply and to administer its government from then on.

They called him Serapis, from the head-dress that crowned his head. The head-dress is shaped like a grain measure, and that marks the memory of his provisioning; while the very ears of grain that decorate its rim are the evidence that the care of the supplies was all on his head. For the same reason they consecrated the figure of a dog — the one they take for a sentry in the world below — and put it under his right hand, because the care of the Egyptians was gathered under his hand. And they put at his side Pharia, whose name shows her to have been the king’s daughter. For on top of all his other kind gifts and rewards, Pharaoh had given him his own daughter in marriage.

But since they had begun to worship both wild animals and human beings, they combined the two figures under the single form of Anubis — in which one may rather see the plain proofs of its own character and condition, enshrined by a nation at war with itself, defiant toward its kings, despised among foreigners, with even the appetite of a slave and the filthy nature of a dog.