How Idolatry Began

Now the soul of humankind, not content with devising evil, began little by little to venture on what is worse still. She had experienced all kinds of pleasures and was wrapped in forgetfulness of divine things. She took delight in the passions of the body and kept in view nothing but present things and opinions about them. So she ceased to think that anything existed beyond what is seen, or that anything was good except temporal and bodily things. Turning away like this, and forgetting that she was in the image of the good God, she no longer sees, by the power that is in her, God the Word, in whose likeness she was made. Having gone out of herself, she imagines and makes up what is not. For by the tangles of bodily cravings she has hidden the mirror that is, as it were, within her, by which alone she had the power to see the Image of the Father. So she no longer sees what a soul ought to look at, but is carried about by everything, and sees only the things that come under the senses. Weighed down, then, with every fleshly desire, and distracted among the impressions these things make, she imagines that the God whom her understanding has forgotten is to be found in bodily things, the things of the senses. She gives the name of God to things that are seen, and glorifies only the things she desires and that are pleasant to her eyes. [a]

So evil is the cause that brings idolatry in its train. For people, having learned to contrive evil, which is nothing real in itself, in the same way made up for themselves, as gods, beings that had no real existence. It is just as if a man had plunged into the depths of the sea and no longer saw the light, or what the light shows, because his eyes are turned downward and the water is all above him. Seeing only the things in the deep, he thinks that nothing exists besides them, and that the things he sees are the only true realities. So the people of former times, having lost their reason and plunged into the cravings and imaginings of fleshly things, and having forgotten the knowledge and glory of God, with their reasoning dulled, or rather following unreason, made gods for themselves of things that are seen. They glorified the creature rather than the Creator, and made gods of the works rather than of the Master, God, their Cause and Maker.

But just as, in the picture above, those who plunge into the deep go into darker and deeper places the further down they go, so it is with humankind. They did not keep to idolatry in a simple form, nor did they stay with what they began with. The longer they went on in their first condition, the more new superstitions they invented. Not satisfied with the first evils, they filled themselves again with others, going further into utter shamefulness and outdoing themselves in impiety. The divine Scripture testifies to this when it says, “When the wicked comes into the depth of evils, he despises.”