Philosophers and Poets on God

Let us run over the opinions of the philosophers too, if you like — all the things they boast of saying about the gods. Perhaps we shall catch philosophy herself making an idol out of matter for the sake of her own vanity; or perhaps, in passing, we shall be able to show that even while she treats certain demons as gods she is dreaming of the truth. Some of them left the elements standing as the first principles of everything, and sang their praises: Thales of Miletus praised water, and Anaximenes, also of Miletus, praised air, and Diogenes of Apollonia followed him later. Parmenides of Elea brought in fire and earth as gods; and only one of the two, fire, was taken for a god by Hippasus of Metapontum and by Heraclitus of Ephesus. Empedocles of Acragas fell into plurality: alongside those four elements he counts up Strife and Love as well. [a]

These men too are godless. By a wisdom that is no wisdom they bowed down to matter. They did not honor stones or wood — they made a god of the earth, which is the mother of stones and wood. They did not model a Poseidon — they prayed to water itself. For what is Poseidon, in the end, but some wet substance, named from posis, drinking? Just as warlike Ares, beyond any doubt, is named from arsis, lifting up, and anairesis, doing away with. That, I think, is the main reason why so many people plant a sword upright in the ground and sacrifice to it as to Ares. The Scythians do this, as Eudoxus says in the second book of his Circuit of the Earth; and the Sauromatians, a Scythian people, worship a short sword, as Hicesius says in his book On the Mysteries.

The followers of Heraclitus felt the same way when they worshiped fire as the first thing of all; and this fire is what others named Hephaestus. The Persian Magi have honored fire, and so have many of the peoples of Asia, and the Macedonians besides, as Diogenes says in the first book of his Persian History. Why should I list the Sauromatians, whom Nymphodorus records as worshiping fire in his Customs of Foreign Peoples — or the Persians, or the Medes, or the Magi? Dinon says these people sacrifice under the open sky, because they hold that fire and water are the only statues of the gods.

I have not covered up their ignorance either. However much they think they are escaping the one error, they slide into another. They have not taken wood and stone for statues of the gods, as the Greeks do, nor ibises and mongooses, as the Egyptians do — but fire and water, as philosophers do. All the same, Berossus shows in the third book of his Chaldean History that many cycles of years later they did come to worship statues in human shape. Artaxerxes son of Darius, the father of Ochus, brought that in: he was the first to set up the statue of Aphrodite Anaitis, in Babylon and Susa and Ecbatana, and he taught the Persians and the Bactrians and Damascus and Sardis to worship it.

So let the philosophers own up that their teachers are the Persians, or the Sauromatians, or the Magi — the people from whom they learned this godless treatment of first principles as objects of worship, while they knew nothing of the ruler who made all things and who is the Craftsman of those very first principles, the God who has no beginning. Instead they pray to these poor, weak elements, as the apostle calls them, which were made to serve human beings.

As for the rest of the philosophers — the ones who went past the elements and busied themselves with something higher and more out of the way — some of them sang the praises of the Boundless: Anaximander, who was from Miletus, and Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, and Archelaus of Athens. The last two both set Mind over the Boundless. Leucippus of Miletus and Metrodorus of Chios apparently left two first principles standing: the full and the empty. Democritus of Abdera took those two and added images to them. Alcmaeon of Croton thought that the stars were gods, since they are alive. I will not keep quiet about how shameless these people are. Xenocrates — he was from Chalcedon — hints that the planets are seven gods, and that the universe, put together out of all the fixed stars, is an eighth. Nor will I pass over the men of the Porch, who say that the divine runs through all matter, even the most worthless kind. They simply disgrace philosophy.

And having got this far, I do not think there is any harm in mentioning the men of the Walk as well. The father of that school did not understand the Father of all things: he thinks that the one called the Highest is the soul of the universe — that is, he takes the world’s soul to be God, and so runs himself through with his own weapon. First he fences Providence off at the moon’s orbit, and then he holds the universe to be God; so he refutes himself, since he is teaching that what has no share in God is God. That famous Theophrastus of Eresus, Aristotle’s pupil, guesses that God is the sky one moment and breath the next. Epicurus is the one man I will gladly forget, since he thinks God takes no interest in anything, and there he is irreverent from start to finish. And what about Heraclides of Pontus? Is there any point at which he too is not dragged down to Democritus’ images?

A great crowd of this kind keeps flooding in on me. Like some Mormo, it smuggles in a crude scene-painting of foreign demons and tells its tales in old-womanish drivel. We are a long way from letting grown men listen to talk like that — we who do not even quiet our own crying children, as the saying goes, by telling them stories, because we dread rearing godlessness up alongside them: the godlessness these men announce who only seem wise, and who know the truth no better than infants do. [l]

For why, in the name of truth, do you show the people who have trusted you to be at the mercy of flow and drift and disorderly whirlpools? Why do you fill life up with idols for me, inventing gods out of winds, or air, or fire, or earth, or stones, or wood, or iron, or this universe here? And why do you make gods out of the wandering stars as well, holding forth about the heavens and chattering to people who have really wandered, by way of this much-discussed astrology — astrology, not astronomy?

It is the Lord of the spirits I long for, the Lord of fire, the Craftsman of the universe, the one who brought the sun its light. I am looking for God, not for God’s works. Whom shall I take from you as a partner in the search? We have not given up on you altogether. If you like — Plato. So where should we track God down, Plato? “To find the Father and Maker of this universe is hard work; and once you have found him, to declare him to everyone is impossible.” And why is that? By God himself, tell me. “Because he cannot be put into words at all.” Well done, Plato. You have brushed against the truth. But do not give up now: take up the search with me about the Good.

For into all people without exception, and above all into those who spend their lives on words and reasoning, a certain outflow from God has been instilled. That is why, even against their will, they admit that God is one, that he cannot be destroyed and never came into being, and that somewhere up above, on the back of the sky, in his own proper lookout, he truly and always is.

— so Euripides says. And Menander seems to me to have gone astray where he says:

For the sun could never show me the true God. It is the healthy Word who is the sun of the soul: through him alone, when he rises inside, in the depths of the mind, the soul’s own eye is lit up. So Democritus was not far off when he said: “A few of the learned, lifting up their hands to what we Greeks now call air, say that all of it is Zeus: he knows all things, and gives all things and takes them away, and he is king of all.”

Plato has something of the same in mind when he hints at God: “Around the King of all are all things, and that is the cause of all beautiful things.”

So who is the King of all? God, the measure of the truth of everything that is. As the things measured are grasped by the measure, so truth is measured and grasped by thinking of God. And Moses, who is truly holy, says: “There must not be in your bag one weight and another weight, a large one or a small one; and there must not be in your house one measure and another, a large or a small; but you shall have a weight that is true and just” — taking God to be the weight and the measure and the number of the whole. For the unjust and unequal idols are hidden away at home in the bag, and, so to speak, in a filthy soul. But the one just measure, the one God who truly is, always equal and always the same, measures everything and weighs it, holding the nature of the whole together and holding it up without tipping, with righteousness for a balance beam.

Plato says the same again: “God, as the old saying has it, holds the beginning and the end and the middle of everything that is, and travels straight on his course as he goes round in accordance with nature; and Justice always follows him, punishing those who fall short of the divine law.”

Where does this hint of the truth come from, Plato? Where does this lavish supply of words come from, prophesying reverence for God? “The tribes of those foreigners,” he says, “are wiser than these.” I know your teachers, even if you want to keep them hidden. You learn geometry from the Egyptians and astronomy from the Babylonians; you get the healthy incantations from the Thracians; the Assyrians have taught you a great deal too. But the laws that are true, and your view of God — for those you are in debt to the Hebrews themselves:

And do not stop with this one man, Plato. Philosophy, take the trouble to bring forward many others as well — men who declare that the one who is truly the only God is God, by his own inspiring, in whatever measure they laid hold of the truth. It was not as a Cynic that Antisthenes thought this out; it was as a student of Socrates that he says: “God is like no one; and that is why no one can learn him from an image.”

And Xenophon the Athenian would have written something in his own name, in plain words, bearing witness about the truth as Socrates did, if he had not been afraid of the cup Socrates had to drink. All the same, he hints at it: “The one who shakes all things and himself stays still — that he is great and powerful is plain; but what he is like in form is unseen. Even the sun, which seems to be all-shining, does not appear to allow himself to be looked at; and if anyone stares at him shamelessly, he takes the man’s sight away.”

So where does the son of Gryllus get his wisdom? Plainly from the prophetess of the Hebrews, who declares:

Cleanthes of Pedasus, the philosopher from the Porch, offers no poets’ birth-of-the-gods but a true account of God, and he did not hide what he thought about him:

Here, I think, he teaches plainly what sort of thing God is, and how common opinion and habit make slaves of the people who follow them instead of searching for God.

Nor should we keep the followers of Pythagoras out of sight. They say: “God is one; and he is not, as some suspect, outside the ordered world, but inside it — whole within the whole circle, the overseer of every coming-to-be, the blending of all the ages, the worker of his own powers and of all works, the light-giver in heaven and the Father of all, the mind and the animating life of the whole circle, the movement of all things.”

For the knowledge of God this much is enough, even for a man with only a small ability to look closely at the truth: written down by the men we have named, by God’s own inspiring, and picked out by us.

Let poetry come forward to us as well — philosophy on her own is not enough. Poetry is taken up with falsehood from beginning to end, and only now, and barely, is she going to bear witness to the truth; or rather, she is going to confess to God how far she strayed into fable. Let whichever poet wants to go first come forward. Aratus, then, understands that the power of God runs through everything: [x]

Hesiod of Ascra hints at God in the same way:

And by now they lay the truth bare on the stage as well. One of them looks up to the upper air and the sky and says, “Take this for God” — that is Euripides. And Sophocles, the son of Sophilus, says:

That man brought the truth in front of the audience on stage, and took a real risk in doing it. As for Orpheus of Thrace, the son of Oeagrus — priest of the mysteries and poet at once — after all his initiating in the secret rites and his theology of idols, he brings in a recantation about the truth, singing at long last the word that is truly holy:

Then a little further on he adds it in plain words:

So much for Orpheus. In time he did understand that he had gone wrong:

For even if, at the very most, the Greeks caught a few sparks of the divine Word and uttered some little share of the truth, they do bear witness that the force of truth is not hidden — and at the same time they convict themselves of weakness, since they never reached the end. By now, I think, it has become clear to everyone that people who do or say anything without the word of truth are like men forcing themselves to walk with no feet.

And let the exposures of your gods shame you into being saved — the ones the poets put into their comedies, driven to it by the force of truth. Menander the comic poet, for instance, in his play The Charioteer, says:

That is exactly what the Mother’s beggar-priests are like. So Antisthenes was right to answer them when they asked him for a handout: “I do not feed the Mother of the gods; the gods feed her.”

And the same writer of comedies, in his play The Priestess, loses patience with what everyone takes for granted and tries to expose the godless conceit of the going error, saying sensibly:

And it is not only Menander. Homer too, and Euripides, and a great many other poets show up your gods, and they are not afraid to abuse them, not in the least. They call Athena a dog-fly and Hephaestus lame in both legs. And Helen says to Aphrodite:

And about Dionysus, Homer writes openly:

Euripides is truly worthy of the school of Socrates: he keeps his eye on the truth and thinks nothing of the spectators. At one point he takes Apollo —

and exposes him:

At another point he brings Heracles on stage raving, and somewhere else drunk and never full. How could he not? While he was being entertained as a guest the man ate green figs on top of his meat, howling out of tune, so that even a foreigner could tell what he was. And in his play Ion he wheels the gods out into the theater bare-headed: