An Image Cannot Show the Form of God

For if the reason the images are fashioned this way is that the deity has human form, why do they give it the forms of unreasoning creatures as well? Or if its form is that of the unreasoning creatures, why do they also embody it in the images of rational creatures? Or if it is both at once, and they think of God as made of the two combined, so that he has the forms both of the rational and of the unreasoning, why do they separate what is joined together? Why do they make the images of animals and of men separately, instead of always carving the deity in both kinds at once, like the creatures of the myths: Scylla, Charybdis, the Hippocentaur, and the dog-headed Anubis of the Egyptians? For they ought either to represent them only with two natures in this way, or, if they have a single form, not to misrepresent them in the other form as well. And again, if their forms are male, why do they also give them female shapes? Or if they are female, why do they also falsify their forms as though they were male? Or if again they are a mixture of both, they ought not to be divided; both ought to be combined, following the type of the so-called hermaphrodites. Then their superstition would offer onlookers a spectacle not only of impiety and slander, but of ridicule as well. [a]

And in general, if they think of the deity as a body, so that they devise for it and portray a belly and hands and feet, and a neck too, and breasts and the other organs that make up a man, see what impiety and godlessness their minds have sunk to, to have such ideas of the deity! For it follows that it must be open to every other bodily mishap as well: to being cut and divided, and even to perishing altogether. But these and similar things are not properties of God, but rather of earthly bodies. For God is bodiless and incorruptible and immortal, needing nothing for any purpose. But these images are corruptible, are the shapes of bodies, and need bodily care, as we said before. For we often see images that have grown old being renewed, and those that time or rain or some animal of the earth has damaged being restored. In this one must condemn their folly. They proclaim as gods things they themselves have made. They ask salvation from objects which they themselves adorn with their arts to keep them from decay. They beg to have their own needs supplied by beings that they well know need care from them. And they are not ashamed to call creatures they shut up in small rooms lords of heaven and of all the earth.