The Defenses Offered for Images

For what other form do they give them in sculpture but that of men and women, and of creatures lower still and without reason: all kinds of birds, beasts both tame and wild, and creeping things, whatever the land and the sea and the whole realm of the waters produce? People fell into the unreason of their passions and pleasures, and could see nothing beyond pleasures and the cravings of the flesh. Because they kept their minds among these unreasoning things, they imagined the divine to be in unreasoning things, and carved a host of gods to match the variety of their passions. For among them there are images of beasts and creeping things and birds, just as the interpreter of the divine and true religion says: “They became futile in their reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and of birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things. That is why God gave them up to vile passions.” For having first infected their souls, as I said above, with the unreason of pleasures, they then came down to this making of gods. And once they had fallen, from then on, as though abandoned in their rejection of God, they wallow in these things, and portray God, the Father of the Word, in the shapes of unreasoning creatures. [a]

On this point, those among the Greeks who pass for philosophers and men of learning are driven to admit that their visible gods are the forms and figures of men and of unreasoning creatures. But they say in their defense that they keep such things so that through them the deity may answer them and be made known; because otherwise they could not know the invisible God except through such statues and rites. Others, who claim to give still deeper and more philosophical reasons than these, say that idols are prepared and fashioned in order to call down divine angels and powers and make them appear, so that, appearing by these means, they may teach people about the knowledge of God. They say that the idols serve people as letters: by turning to them, people may learn to grasp God, through the appearing of the divine angels that the idols bring about. Such, then, is their mythology; for far be it from us to call it a theology. But if anyone examines the argument carefully, he will find that the opinion of these people too is false, no less than that of those spoken of before.