Images as Letters That Call Down Angels

But to their second defense, the one they call deeper, one might fairly add the following. If you Greeks make these things not so that God himself may appear, but so that angels may be present there, why do you rank the images through which you call on the powers as higher than, and above, the powers you call on? For you carve the figures for the sake of grasping God, as you say, yet you clothe the images themselves with the honor and title of God, and so put yourselves in an unholy position. You admit that the power of God far exceeds the smallness of the images, and for that reason you do not dare to call on God through them, but only on the lesser powers. Yet you yourselves leap over those powers, and have given blocks of wood and stones the title of him whose presence you were afraid of. You call them gods instead of stones and the work of human hands, and you worship them.

For even supposing that they serve you, as you falsely say, as letters for contemplating God, it is not right to give the signs greater honor than what they signify. If a man were to write the emperor’s name, it would not be safe to give the writing more honor than the emperor. On the contrary, such a man incurs the penalty of death; and yet the writing is only something shaped by the skill of the one who wrote it. So you too, if your power of reason were at full strength, would not bring so great a revelation of the divine down to mere matter. Nor would you have given the image greater honor than the man who carved it. For if there is any truth in the plea that, like letters, the images point to the appearing of God, and so, as pointers to God, deserve to be made gods, it would be far more right to make a god of the artist who carved and engraved them. He is far more powerful and divine than they are, since they were cut and shaped as he willed. If the letters deserve admiration, then the writer far exceeds them in wonder, because of his art and the skill of his mind. So if it is not fitting to think the images are gods for this reason, one must question them once again about their madness over the idols, and demand of them the reason why the idols have the form they have.