Gods Made in Our Likeness

I pass over the rest in silence, and give glory to the Lord. But this much I do say: the souls that truly know go beyond, in the grandeur of their contemplation, the way of life that belongs to each of the holy ranks — the ranks among which the blessed dwellings of the gods are parcelled out. They are counted holy among the holy. They are carried over whole, from among the whole, and they reach places better than the better places. They take hold of the sight of God, not in mirrors or by way of mirrors, but in a sight utterly clear and absolutely pure, a sight that never has enough, which belongs to souls that love intensely. They keep festival through ages without end, and they remain honored with the sameness of every excellence. Such is the sight that “the pure in heart” may reach. [a]

This is the work of the one who truly knows, once he has been brought to completion: to keep company with God through the great High Priest, being made like the Lord as far as he is able, in the whole service of God — a service that aims at people being saved, through his care for the doing of good that has us for its object, and on the other side through worship, through teaching, and through good done in deeds. The one who truly knows even shapes and makes himself; and beyond that, being like God, he puts in order those who listen to him. He brings the moderation that comes of practice, and that tends toward freedom from passion, as near as he can to the One who by his own nature is free from passion; and above all he keeps unbroken company and fellowship with the Lord. Gentleness, I think, and love for people, and outstanding reverence for God are the rules by which a man who knows is made like God. These excellences, I say, “are a sacrifice acceptable in God’s sight,” since Scripture says that “a humbled heart, with right knowledge, is God’s whole burnt offering”; and every man admitted to holiness is given light, so that his union may never be broken.

For both the Gospel and the apostle tell us to take ourselves captive and to put ourselves to death — killing off “the old man, who is being ruined by his cravings,” and raising the new man out of death, out of “the old way of life,” by leaving the passions behind and becoming free of sin.

This is what the Law was hinting at when it ordered the sinner to be cut off, and carried over from death to life, into the freedom from passion that comes of faith. The teachers of the Law did not understand it, since they took the Law to be a quarrelsome thing; and so they handed a weapon to men who make idle attacks on the Law.

And this is why we are right not to offer sacrifice to God, who needs nothing and supplies everyone with everything. We give glory instead to the one who gave himself in sacrifice for us, and we sacrifice ourselves as well — from what needs nothing to what needs nothing, and from what is free of passion to what is free of passion. For God delights in our being saved, and in nothing else. So, with good reason, we offer no sacrifice to one whom pleasures cannot win over: the smoke of the fat rises and stops far below, and does not even reach the thickest clouds, and the beings it does reach are far away from him. God, then, is in need of nothing. He is no lover of pleasure or of gain or of money. He is full, and he supplies all things to everything that has come into being and has needs. God is not won over by sacrifices or offerings, nor on the other side by glory and honor; nothing of that kind sways him. He shows himself only to men who are upright and good, men who will never betray what is right, either out of fear of a threat or for the promise of a large gift.

But some have never seen that the human soul decides for itself, and that in the choice of a life it cannot be treated as a slave. Disgusted at what is done by raw injustice, they conclude that there is no God. Others hold the same opinion: men who fall into loose living among their pleasures, or into heavy pain, or into accidents nobody saw coming, and who, defying what happens to them, say either that there is no God, or that he exists but does not oversee everything. And there are others who are convinced that the beings they take for gods can be talked round by sacrifices and gifts — gods who, so to speak, look kindly on their debauchery; and they will not believe that the only true God is the one who stands unchanging in righteous goodness.

The one who truly knows, then, is the reverent man. He takes care first of himself and then of his neighbors, so that they may become very good. A son pleases a good father by showing himself good and like his father, and a subject pleases his governor in the same way; for believing and obeying are in our own power.

But suppose someone takes the cause of evils to be the weakness of matter, or the involuntary impulses that come of ignorance, or — stupidly — necessities with no reason in them. The man who has come to know has been taught his way to a mastery over these things, as though they were wild animals; and in imitation of God’s own plan he does good to those who are willing, as far as he is able. And if he is ever put in authority he will rule, as Moses did, for the saving of those he governs; and he will tame wildness and faithlessness by recording honor for the best of them and punishment for the wicked, by reason and for the sake of discipline.

For the soul of a righteous man is, above everything else, a divine image, resembling God. Inside it, through obedience to the commands, as in a consecrated place, is shut up and enshrined the Leader of mortals and immortals, the King and Parent of what is good, who is truly law and right and eternal Word — the one Savior, to each man singly and to all in common. He is the true only Son, the exact stamp of the glory of the universal King and Almighty Father; and he presses on the one who truly knows the seal of complete contemplation, after his own image, so that there is now a third divine image, made as like as possible to the Second Cause, the Life that is life itself, through which we live the true life. And so the one who truly knows, as we picture him, is described as moving among things that are sure and wholly unchanging.

Ruling, then, over himself and over what belongs to him, and holding a sure grasp of the knowledge of divine things, he makes a genuine approach to the truth. For the knowledge and grasp of what the mind reaches must be called sure and certain knowledge; and where divine things are concerned, its business is to consider what the First Cause is, and what that is “through whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made”; and on the other hand what things run all the way through, and what holds everything together; what is joined and what is separated; what position each of them holds; and what power and what service each contributes. And then, among human things: what man himself is; what belongs to him by nature and what does not; how it is fitting for him to act and to be acted on; what his excellences are and what his faults; and about things good, bad, and neither; and about courage, good sense, self-control, and the excellence that is complete in every respect — righteousness.

Further, he uses good sense and righteousness in getting wisdom, and courage not only in enduring what happens but also in mastering pleasure and desire, grief and anger — in general, in standing against everything that draws us on, whether by force or by trickery. For we are not required to endure vices and excellences; we are to be persuaded to bear up under what frightens us. Pain, accordingly, turns out to be useful in medicine, in discipline, and in punishment; and by it people’s ways are set right, to their own advantage. The forms of courage are endurance, greatness of soul, high spirit, generosity, and grandeur.

And this is why he meets with neither the blame nor the low opinion of the crowd, and is not laid open to their opinions or their flatteries. But in enduring hard work, and at the same time in the carrying out of whatever duty is his, and in his manly rise above every circumstance, he shows himself truly a man among the rest of humankind. And on the other side, holding on to good sense, he practices moderation in the calm of his soul, taking in what is commanded as belonging to him and turning away from what is base as foreign to him. Having become orderly, and above the world’s order, he does everything with order and in its place, and oversteps in no respect and in nothing. He is rich in the highest degree, in that he desires nothing, having few wants, and lives in the middle of an abundance of every good thing through his knowledge of the Good. For the first thing his righteousness does is to make him love spending his time, and keeping company, with those of his own race, on earth and in heaven. So too he is generous with what he has. And being a lover of people he is a hater of the wicked, turning away completely from all villainy.

He must therefore learn to be trustworthy both to himself and to his neighbors, and obedient to the commands. For the true servant of God is the man who puts himself under God’s commands of his own accord; and the man who is already pure in heart, not through the commands but through knowledge itself, is the friend of God. For we are not born by nature with excellence in us, and it does not grow of itself after we are born, as certain parts of the body do — if it did, it would be neither a matter of choice nor anything to praise. Nor is excellence brought to completion, as speech is, by the practice that comes of everyday events; that is very much the way vice gets its start. Knowledge is not reached by any craft, neither the crafts of getting a living nor those that look after the body. No more does it come from the course of school studies; that is content if it can only prepare the soul and sharpen it. The laws of a city may perhaps be able to hold back bad actions, but persuasive words, which touch only the surface, cannot produce the settled, sure hold on the truth that knowledge gives. Greek philosophy, so to speak, cleans out the soul and prepares it beforehand to receive faith, and on that faith the Truth builds up the house of knowledge.

This is the true athlete — the man who in the great stadium, this beautiful world, is crowned for a real victory over all the passions. For the one who lays down the contest is God Almighty, and the one who awards the prize is the only Son of God; angels and gods are the spectators; and the contest, which takes in every kind of exercise, is “not against flesh and blood,” but against the spiritual powers of passions beyond all measure that work through the flesh. The man who gets the mastery in these bouts, and throws the tempter — who threatens him, as it were, with a set of matches — wins immortality. For God’s sentence, in a judgment perfectly righteous, cannot go wrong. The crowd is called in to the contest; the athletes compete in the stadium; and the one who has obeyed the trainer’s directions carries the day. For all the prizes God sets out are equal for everyone, and he himself is beyond reproach. The man who was able has received mercy, and the man who was willing has been made able.

In the same way we have been given a mind, so that we may know what we are doing. And the maxim “Know yourself” means here to know what we were born for. We were born to obey the commands, if we choose to be willing to be saved. That is Nemesis, and through her there is no running away from God. A man’s duty, then, is obedience to God, who has announced salvation in many forms through the commands. And acknowledging him is thanksgiving; for the one who does us good is the one who began the doing of good. The man who, on fitting grounds, readily receives the commands and keeps them is faithful; and the man who repays kindness with love, as far as he is able, is already a friend. There is one repayment on our side that counts above all the rest: doing what is pleasing to God. Since a man is God’s own handiwork, and a result of a kind with himself, the Teacher and Savior takes the help and the improvement people give one another as a favor and an honor done to himself — just as he counts injuries done to those who believe in him as ingratitude and dishonor to himself. For what other dishonor could touch God? So it is impossible to pay back anything at all equal to the gift we have received from the Lord.

And just as men who abuse property insult its owners, and men who abuse soldiers insult their commander, so the ill-treatment of those consecrated to him is contempt for the Lord. For just as the sun lights up not only the sky and the whole world, shining over land and sea, but also sends its rays through windows and narrow cracks into the innermost corners of a house, so the Word, spread everywhere, turns his glance on the smallest details of the things we do in life.

Now just as the Greeks give their gods human shapes, so they give them human passions as well. And as each people draws those shapes to look like itself — as Xenophanes says, Ethiopians make theirs black and snub-nosed, Thracians make theirs red-haired and blue-eyed — so they also make the gods’ souls like the souls of the men who shape them. Peoples who are not Greeks make them savage and wild; the Greeks make them more civilized, but still subject to passion. [t]

So it stands to reason that the notions bad men have of God are bad, and the notions good men have are the best of all. And that is why the man who is truly kingly in soul, and truly knows — being reverent as well, and free of superstition — is convinced that the one who alone is God is honorable, worthy of awe, majestic, kind, a doer of good, the source of all good things, but not the cause of any evil. As for Greek superstition, I think I have shown enough about it in the book we called The Exhortation, where I made full use of the history that bears on the point. There is no need to make a long story again of what has already been said plainly. But so far as the subject requires it, now that we have come to it, let a few points out of many serve to prove how irreverent those men are who make the Divine resemble the worst of men. For either those gods of theirs are injured by men — and then, being injured by us, they are shown to be lower than we are — or, if they are not, why do they blaze up at people who do them no injury, like a cranky old woman worked into a rage?

They say, for instance, that Artemis was enraged at the Aetolians on account of Oeneus. But how did she, a goddess, fail to take into account that he had left off sacrificing not out of contempt, but by an oversight, or because he supposed he had already sacrificed? And Leto, arguing her case with Athena, who was angry with her for having given birth in the temple, says:

It is only natural, then, that men who live in superstitious dread of gods with tempers like that should take everything that happens for a sign and a cause of evils. If a mouse bores through an altar made of clay, or for lack of anything else gnaws through an oil flask; if a rooster being fattened crows in the evening — they settle it that this is a sign of something. Menander draws such a man for a laugh in his comedy The Superstitious Man:

Antiphon made a clever remark too. A man took it for a bad omen that his sow had eaten her own young; but Antiphon, seeing that the animal had been starved thin by the stinginess of the man who kept her, said, “Congratulate yourself on the omen: hungry as she was, she did not eat your own children.” And Bion says, “What is surprising, if a mouse that can find nothing to eat gnaws through a bag?” The surprising thing, as Arcesilaus argued in fun, would be if the bag had eaten the mouse. Diogenes put it well, too, to a man amazed at finding a snake coiled round a pestle: “Do not be amazed. It would have been more surprising to see the pestle coiled round the snake, and the snake lying straight.”

For animals without reason must run and scurry and fight and breed and die; and since these things are natural to them, they can never be unnatural for us.

And the comic poet Philemon deals with such matters on the stage:

Then men look for health by practicing self-control — and by stuffing themselves and wallowing in drink at their feasts they draw diseases on themselves. There are many, too, who dread the inscriptions people set up. Diogenes was very clever about this. Finding on a bad man’s house the inscription, “Heracles, famed for victory, lives here; let nothing evil come in,” he asked, “Then how does the master of the house get in?”

The same man who worships, as the saying goes, every stick and every oiled stone dreads tufts of red wool and lumps of salt and torches and squills and sulphur, all bewitched by sorcerers in certain unclean rites of purification. But God, the true God, counts nothing holy except the character of the righteous man, and counts nothing unholy except wrong and wickedness. You can see for yourself that eggs taken from people who have been purified will hatch, if they are given the warmth they need; and that could not happen if the sins of the man who was purified had really been transferred into them. And so the comic poet Diphilus writes of sorcerers in comedy, in these words:

For Menander puts it well:

For instance, the tragedy says:

For in truth there is no purity but keeping away from sins. Epicharmus says it excellently:

And we too say that the soul must be cleansed by right reason of corrupt and bad teachings, and only then brought to the recalling of the chief points of the teaching. Even before the mysteries are handed over, they think it right to apply certain purifications to those who are to be initiated; and in the same way people must give up irreverent opinion, and so turn to the true tradition.