The Many Forms of Idolatry

For now human understanding broke away from God. Sinking lower in their ideas and imaginings, people gave the honor due to God first to the heavens, the sun, the moon and the stars, thinking them to be not only gods but also the causes of the other gods, who were lower than themselves. Then, going still lower in their dark imaginings, they gave the name of gods to the upper ether, and to the air and the things in the air. Next, advancing further in evil, they came to celebrate as gods the elements and the first principles of which bodies are made: heat and cold, dryness and wetness. But just as those who have fallen flat crawl in the mud like land snails, so the most impious of humankind, having fallen lower and lower from the idea of God, then set up as gods human beings and the forms of human beings, some still living, others even after their death. Further, scheming and imagining still worse things, they at last transferred the divine and more than natural name of God even to stones and blocks of wood, to creeping things both of land and water, and to wild beasts without reason. They gave them every divine honor, and turned away from the true and only real God, the Father of Christ. [a]

If only the recklessness of these foolish men had stopped even there, and they had not gone on still further into impious confusion! But some have sunk so deep in their understanding, into such darkness of mind, that they have even invented for themselves and made gods of things that do not exist at all and have no place among created things. Mixing the rational with the irrational, and combining things unlike in nature, they worship the result as gods: such as the dog-headed, snake-headed and donkey-headed gods among the Egyptians, and the ram-headed Ammon among the Libyans. Others again have taken apart the parts of the human body, head, shoulder, hand and foot, and have set up each one as a god and made it divine, as though their religion were not satisfied with the whole body as it is.

Others, pushing impiety to its limit, have made gods of the very motive for inventing these things and for their own wickedness, namely pleasure and lust, and they worship them: such as their Eros, and the Aphrodite at Paphos. Some of them, as if competing with these in depravity, have dared to set up as gods their rulers or even their sons, either out of honor for their princes or from fear of their tyranny: such as the Cretan Zeus, so famous among them, and the Arcadian Hermes; among the Indians, Dionysus; among the Egyptians, Isis, Osiris and Horus; and in our own time Antinous, the favorite of Hadrian, emperor of the Romans. People know that he was a mere man, and not a respectable man either, but on the contrary full of debauchery; yet they worship him for fear of the one who commanded it. For when Hadrian was staying in Egypt, and Antinous, the servant of his pleasure, died, he ordered him to be worshiped. Hadrian was still in love with the youth even after his death. But for all that, he gave a convincing exposure of himself and a proof against all idolatry: that it was invented among men for no other reason than the lust of those who imagined it. As the Wisdom of God testifies beforehand when it says, “The devising of idols was the beginning of sexual immorality.”

Do not be surprised, or think that what we are saying is hard to believe. It is not long ago, if indeed it is not still the case, that the Roman Senate voted a place among the gods to the emperors who have ruled them from the beginning, either to all of them or to those they wished and decided on, and decreed that they be worshiped. Those they are hostile to, they treat as enemies and call men, admitting their real nature; while those who are popular with them they order to be worshiped for their virtue. They act as though it were in their own power to make gods, though they are themselves men and do not claim to be anything other than mortal. Yet if they are to make gods, they ought to be gods themselves. For what makes must be better than what it makes, and the one who judges is necessarily in authority over the one who is judged, and the one who gives at any rate bestows what he has. So, of course, every king, in granting as a favor what he has to give, is greater and higher than those who receive it. If, then, they decree whomever they please to be gods, they ought first to be gods themselves. But the strange thing is this: by dying as men, they themselves expose the falsehood of their own vote about those they made gods.