Gods Made Out of Men

Since you do not dare deny that these gods of yours were once men, you have taken it upon yourselves to claim that they were made gods after they died. So let us consider what necessity there was for that. In the first place you have to grant that there is one higher God — some wholesale dealer in divinity, who has made gods out of men. For they could not have taken up a divinity that was not theirs, and no one could have conferred it on them who did not have it himself. If there was no one to make gods, it is idle to dream of gods being made, since on those terms you have no god-maker at all. And most certainly, if they could have made themselves gods, with a higher state at their disposal, they would never have been men. [a]

If, then, there is someone able to make gods, I go back to look for any reason there may be for making gods at all — and I find none except this: that the great God needs their service and their help in carrying out the duties of divinity. But it is an unworthy idea to begin with, that he should need the help of a man, and of a dead man at that. If he was going to want this assistance from the dead, he might more fittingly have made someone a god at the very beginning. And I do not see any room left for them to act in. This whole mass of a world — whether it exists of itself and was never made, as Pythagoras holds, or was brought into being by a maker’s hands, as Plato holds — was plainly, once for all at its first construction, arranged and furnished and ordered and supplied with a government of perfect wisdom. What has made everything else perfect cannot itself be unfinished. There was nothing left over, waiting for Saturn and his family to do.

Men make fools of themselves if they refuse to believe that from the very first the rain poured from the sky, and the stars gleamed, and the light shone, and the thunder crashed, and Jupiter himself was afraid of the lightning bolts you put in his hand; and that in the same way, before Bacchus and Ceres and Minerva — before the first man, whoever he was — every kind of fruit burst plentifully out of the lap of the earth. Nothing provided for keeping a man alive and fed could have been brought in after he had come on the scene. And so these necessities of life are said to have been discovered, not created. But what you discover was there before you; and what was there before belongs not to the man who found it but to the one who made it, since of course it had to exist before it could be found. If Bacchus is raised to godhood for discovering the vine, then Lucullus has been badly used: he was the first to bring the cherry from Pontus into Italy, and no divine honors have been awarded him as the creator of a new fruit.

So if the universe existed from the beginning, fully furnished with a system working under fixed laws to do its work, then on this ground there is no reason whatever for electing a human being into divinity. The positions and the powers you have assigned to your gods have been from the beginning exactly what they would have been if you had never deified anyone.

But you turn to another reason, and tell us that conferring godhood was a way of rewarding worth. From that I take it you grant that the god-making God is supremely righteous — one who would not bestow so great a reward rashly, improperly, or for nothing. Then I would have you consider whether the merits of your gods are the kind that should have raised them to heaven, or rather sunk them into the lowest depths of Tartarus, which you, along with many others, regard as the prison house of punishment below. For that is the dreadful place where you are in the habit of throwing everyone who offends against a son’s duty to his parents, and men guilty of incest with their sisters, and seducers of wives, and rapists of unmarried girls, and men who molest boys, and men of raging temper, and murderers and thieves and cheats — everyone, in short, who walks in the footsteps of your gods, not one of whom you can prove free of crime or vice except by denying that he ever lived as a man. But since you cannot deny that, you have those foul stains as one more reason for not believing that they were made gods afterward.

For if you hold power for the very purpose of punishing such deeds; if every decent man among you refuses all dealings, all conversation, all closeness with the wicked and the base — while the God on high has taken their partners up to share his majesty — then on what ground do you condemn the men whose fellow actors you adore? Your goodness is an insult in heaven. Deify your worst criminals, if you want to please your gods. You do them honor by paying divine honors to their companions.

But to say no more about a way of acting so unworthy: there have been men who were virtuous and pure and good. Yet how many of those better men you have left down in the place of the doomed! Socrates, so famous for wisdom; Aristides for justice; Themistocles for generalship; Alexander for greatness of soul; Polycrates for good fortune; Croesus for wealth; Demosthenes for eloquence. Which of these gods of yours is weightier and wiser than Cato, or more just and more warlike than Scipio? Which of them is more magnanimous than Pompey, more successful than Sulla, richer than Crassus, more eloquent than Cicero? How much better it would have been for the God on high to have waited, so that he might take men like these as his companions in heaven — since he must surely have known beforehand that they were the worthier sort. He was in a hurry, I suppose, and shut the gates of heaven at once; and now he must feel ashamed of these worthy men grumbling over their lot down below.

But I leave all that, because I know what your gods are not, and I am going to show it by showing what they are. When I look at them, all I see is the names of dead men out of long ago. All I hear is old stories. All I recognize is sacred rites founded on those stories. As for the images themselves, I take them to be simply lumps of the same material as the pots and dishes in everyday use among us — or material that, in being consecrated, suffers an unlucky change out of those useful articles at the hands of a reckless art, which in the very working of them treats them with contempt and commits sacrilege in the act. So it might be no small comfort to us in all our punishments, since it is because of these same gods that we suffer, that in the making of them they suffer exactly as we do. [h]

You put Christians on crosses and stakes. Is there an image that is not first modeled in clay upon a cross and a stake? The body of your god is first consecrated on a gibbet. You tear the sides of Christians with iron claws; on your own gods the axes and planes and rasps go to work harder still, over every limb. We lay our heads on the block; before the lead and the glue and the nails are brought in, your gods have no heads. We are thrown to wild animals — the very animals you harness to Bacchus and Cybele and Caelestis. We are burned in the flames; so are they, while they are still raw ore. We are condemned to the mines; that is where your gods come from. We are banished to islands; on islands it is a regular thing for your gods to be born or to die. If a god is made this way, then everyone who is punished is being deified, and tortures will have to be declared divinities.

But plainly these objects of your worship have no feeling of the injuries and disgraces done to them in their making, just as they have no awareness of the honors paid to them. “Impious words! Blasphemous abuse!” Gnash your teeth at us; foam at the mouth with rage. You are surely the same people who found fault with a certain Seneca, who spoke against your superstition at much greater length and far more sharply. In a word, if we refuse our worship to statues and cold images that are the exact likeness of their dead originals — images that hawks and mice and spiders know all too well — does it not deserve praise rather than punishment that we have rejected what we have come to see is a mistake? We cannot possibly be shown to injure beings we are certain do not exist. What does not exist is safe from suffering by the very fact that it does not exist.

“But they are gods to us.” So you say. Then how is it that, in complete contradiction of it, you are convicted of impious, sacrilegious, irreligious conduct toward them — neglecting the ones you imagine exist, destroying the ones you are afraid of, mocking the ones whose honor you take vengeance for? [l]

See now whether I overstate the case. First of all, since one of you worships one god and another another, of course you offend the ones you do not worship. You cannot go on preferring one without slighting another, for choosing means rejecting. So you do despise the ones you reject; and in rejecting them it is plain that you have no fear of giving them offense. For, as we have already shown, every god depended on a vote of the senate for his godhood. He was no god whom a man, deliberating, did not want to be one, and so condemned.

The household gods you call Lares you treat with a householder’s authority: you pawn them, sell them, alter them — turning a Saturn into a cooking pot and a Minerva into a fire pan, whichever of them happens to be worn down or broken by its long sacred service, or when the head of the house feels the pressure of some more sacred need at home. In the same way, by public law, you disgrace the gods of the state: you put them in the auction catalogue and make them a source of revenue. Men bid for the Capitol as they bid for the herb market — under the crier’s voice, under the auction spear, under the quaestor’s register. Godhood is knocked down and farmed out to the highest bidder.

But then, land burdened with tribute is worth less, and men under a head tax are less noble, because these things are the marks of a slave. With the gods it is the other way around: a god’s sacredness is great in proportion to the tribute he brings in — indeed, the more sacred the god, the bigger the tax he pays. Majesty is turned into a business. Religion goes around the taverns begging. You charge a price for the right to stand on temple ground and for admission to the rites. No free knowledge of your gods is allowed: you have to buy their favors.

What honors do you pay them, anyway, that you do not pay the dead? You have temples for the one and temples for the other; altars for the one and altars for the other. Their statues wear the same dress and the same emblems. The dead man had his age, his art, his occupation — and so does the god. How does the funeral dinner differ from the feast of Jupiter, or the bowl of the gods from the ladle of the dead, or the corpse-dresser from the diviner, since the diviner too waits upon the dead? It fits perfectly, then, that you should give divine honors to your emperors once they are dead, seeing that you worship them while they are alive. The gods will count themselves in your debt; in fact it will be a matter of high rejoicing among them that their masters have been made their equals.

But when you worship Larentina, a public prostitute — I could have wished it had at least been Lais or Phryne — among your Junos and Cereses and Dianas; when you set up Simon Magus in your Pantheon with a statue and the title Holy God; when you make an infamous court page a god of the sacred assembly — then, although your ancient gods are really no better, they will still think themselves insulted by you, because a privilege that age gave to them alone has now been handed out to others.

Now I want to look over your sacred rites. I pass no judgment on your sacrificing — on your offering the worn-out, the scabby, the rotting; on your cutting away from the fat, sound animals the useless parts, the head and the hoofs, which at home you would have handed to the slaves or the dogs; on your not laying even a third of Hercules’ tithe upon his altar. I am rather inclined to praise your good sense in rescuing something from being wasted. [s]

But when I turn to your books — the ones you are trained in for wisdom and for the nobler duties of life — what utterly ridiculous things I find! That the gods fought each other over Trojans and Greeks like matched pairs of gladiators. That Venus was wounded by a man, because she wanted to rescue her son Aeneas when that same Diomedes was about to kill him. That Mars was nearly wasted away by thirteen months in prison. That Jupiter was saved by a monster’s help from suffering the same violence at the hands of the other gods. That he weeps over Sarpedon’s death one moment, and the next is disgracefully making love to his own sister, reciting to her the list of his old mistresses, none of whom has been so dear to him for a long time now.

After that, what poet is not found copying the example of his chief and disgracing the gods? One hands Apollo over to King Admetus to look after his sheep; another hires out Neptune’s building work to Laomedon. A famous lyric poet — I mean Pindar — sings that Aesculapius got what he deserved when the lightning struck him for practicing his art greedily and wrongly. A wicked act it was of Jupiter’s, if he threw the bolt: unnatural toward his own grandson, and full of envy toward the Physician. Things like this should not be made public if they are true; and if they are false, they should not be invented among people who profess a great respect for religion. Nor do the writers of tragedy or comedy hold back from putting the gods forward as the source of every family disaster and crime.

I will not dwell on the philosophers; I will content myself with mentioning Socrates, who in contempt of the gods used to swear by an oak, a goat, and a dog. In fact that was the very thing Socrates was condemned to death for — that he was overthrowing the worship of the gods. Plainly, at one time as much as another — that is, always — the truth is disliked. Still, when the Athenians came to regret their verdict they punished his accusers and set up a golden statue of him in a temple; the condemnation was cancelled in that very act, and his testimony was restored to its old value. Diogenes, too, makes an utter mockery of Hercules; and Varro, the Roman Cynic, brings on three hundred Joves — or Jupiters, as they ought to be called — all of them without heads.

Other writers of yours, out of sheer wantonness, even cater to your amusement by running the gods down. Look at those charming farces your Lentuli and Hostilii put on, and ask yourself whether it is the clowns or the gods that make you laugh at the jokes and the stage tricks — farces like Anubis the Adulterer, and Luna the Man, and Diana Under the Whip, and The Reading of the Will of the Late Jupiter, and The Three Starving Herculeses. [x]

Your serious drama, too, puts all the vileness of your gods on show. The Sun mourns for his son thrown down out of heaven, and you are delighted. Cybele sighs after the shepherd who scorned her, and you do not blush. You sit through the stage recital of Jupiter’s misdeeds, and through the shepherd judging between Juno, Venus, and Minerva. Then again, when the likeness of a god is put on the head of some disgraced and infamous creature, when a man who is unclean and has been trained for the work in every kind of effeminacy plays a Minerva or a Hercules, is the majesty of your gods not insulted and their divinity dishonored? And you do not merely watch — you applaud.

You are more devout in the arena, I suppose, where your gods dance in the same way on human blood, on the filth of executions, as they act out their plots and their stories — doing their turn for the benefit of the wretched criminals, except that the criminals often put on divinity themselves and actually play the gods. In our own day we have seen a performance of the mutilation of Attis, that famous god of Pessinus, and a man burned alive as Hercules. We have laughed amid the ludicrous cruelties of the noonday show, at Mercury testing the dead with his red-hot iron, and we have watched Jupiter’s brother with a mallet in his hand, hauling out the bodies of the gladiators. But who could go through everything of this kind? If the honor of a god is attacked by such things, if they wipe out every trace of his majesty, then the explanation must be the contempt in which the gods are held — both by the people who do these things and by the people for whose enjoyment they are done.

“All of this is only sport.” But suppose I add — and everyone knows it and will admit it readily enough — that adulteries are arranged in the temples, that pimping is carried on at the altars, that often in the very houses of the temple keepers and the priests, under the sacrificial headbands and the sacred caps and the purple robes, with the incense smoking, acts of licentiousness are committed. Then I am not sure that your gods do not have more to complain of in you than in Christians. It is certainly among the followers of your own religion that temple robbers are always found; Christians do not so much as enter your temples in the daytime. Perhaps they would rob them too, if they worshipped in them.

What, then, do they worship, since what they worship is different from yours? It is already implied, as the consequence of their rejecting the lie, that they pay homage to the truth, and that they no longer stay in an error which they gave up in the very act of recognizing it as an error. Take this in first; and then, when we have cleared away some false opinions to begin with, go on from there to our whole religion.