Made to Look Up

In the first book I showed that the worship of the gods is false, because the beings in whose honor the whole world, by a foolish common agreement, took up all its various and unlike rites were mortal men. They finished out their span of life, gave way to the necessity God appoints, and died. Still, so that no doubt is left, this second book will open up the very spring of these errors and set out all the causes by which men were deceived — first into believing that these were gods, and afterward into keeping up, with a settled conviction, the rites they had so perversely taken on. [a]

Now that I have proved these things empty, Emperor Constantine, and brought the godless folly of men into the open, I want to press the claim of the one God’s majesty. I take up the more useful and greater work: calling men back out of the crooked paths and bringing them back onto good terms with themselves, so that they will not despise themselves as some philosophers do, or think themselves weak and useless and of no account, born for nothing at all. That idea drives many people into vicious ways of living. Imagining that they are no concern of any God, or that they will not exist at all after death, they hand themselves over entirely to their appetites; and thinking it is allowed them, they throw themselves into the enjoyment of pleasures, by which, without noticing, they run into the traps of death. They do not know what conduct suits a human being. If they wanted to understand that, they would first of all acknowledge their Lord, and would go after virtue and justice. They would not put their souls under the power of fictions born out of the earth, or go looking for the deadly charms of their own lusts. In short, they would value themselves highly. They would understand that there is more in a man than shows, and that men cannot keep their power and standing unless they lay depravity aside and take up the worship of their true Parent. Turning the sum of the matter over, as I ought to do often, I never stop wondering at this: that the majesty of the one God, which holds all things together and rules them, has come to be so forgotten that the one object worth worshiping is, above all others, the one neglected. Men have sunk into such blindness that they prefer the dead to the true and living God, and prefer those who came from the earth and are buried in the earth to the One who made the earth itself.

And yet this irreverence of theirs might be allowed some excuse if the mistake came entirely from not knowing the divine name. But we often see the worshipers of other gods confessing and acknowledging the supreme God themselves. What pardon can they hope for, then, when they refuse to acknowledge the worship of the very One that a human being cannot be altogether ignorant of? In swearing, in wishing, in giving thanks, they do not name Jupiter or a crowd of gods, but God — so completely does the truth break out on its own, by sheer force of nature, even from unwilling mouths. This does not happen to men while things are going well. That is exactly when God slips out of their memory, at the very time when the enjoyment of his gifts ought to make them honor his kindness. But let some heavy need press them, and then they remember God. If the alarm of war has sounded; if the force of an epidemic hangs over them; if a long drought has starved the crops; if a violent storm or hail has struck them — then they take themselves to God, then help is begged from God, God is entreated to come to their aid. A man tossed at sea in a raging wind calls on this God. A man under the hand of violence begs his help. A man reduced to the last extremity of poverty and begging for food appeals to God alone, and by that divine and matchless name alone tries to win the pity of other men. So they never remember God except while they are in trouble. Once the fear has left them and the danger has withdrawn, they are quick enough to hurry off to the temples of the gods: they pour out drink offerings to them, they sacrifice to them, they crown them with garlands. But to God, the one they called on in the middle of the need itself, they do not give thanks even in a word. So out of prosperity comes indulgence, and out of indulgence, along with every other vice, comes contempt for God.

What can we take to be the cause of this? Only that there is some twisted power, always at war with the truth, which delights in the errors of men, and whose one and only business is to keep scattering darkness and blinding men’s minds so that they will not see the light — so that they will not, in the end, look up at the sky and take notice of the make of their own bodies. Where that came from I will tell in its own place; for now, let me refute the falsehoods. The other animals look down at the ground, their bodies bent forward, because they have not been given reason and wisdom; we were given an upright stance and a lifted face by God our Maker. It is plain, then, that these rites paid to gods do not fit a human being’s reason, since they bend a creature sprung from heaven down to the worship of things of earth. For that one and only Parent of ours, when he made man — an animal with understanding, able to use reason — raised him up from the ground and lifted him toward the sight of his Maker. A gifted poet put it well:

It was plainly from this that the Greeks got their word for a human being, anthrōpos — because he looks upward. So people who look not up but down are denying themselves and giving up the name of man; unless they suppose that our standing upright was assigned to us for no reason at all. God meant us to look up at the sky, and certainly not without a purpose. Birds and nearly all the dumb creatures see the sky; but it is given to us in our own particular way to look at the sky standing straight up, so that we may look for religion there. Since we cannot see God with our eyes, we may take him in with the mind, whose throne is there — and that certainly cannot be done by a man who worships bronze and stone, which are things of earth. But it is thoroughly wrong that the body’s nature, which is temporary, should be upright while the soul itself, which is everlasting, is groveling. The shape and the posture mean nothing else than this: that a man’s mind should look the way his face looks, and his soul should stand as upright as his body, so that it copies the thing it is meant to rule. But men, forgetting both their name and their nature, cast their eyes down from the sky and fix them on the ground, and are afraid of the works of their own hands — as though anything could be greater than its own maker.

What madness is it, then, either to shape the things you will afterward be afraid of, or to be afraid of the things you have shaped? But we do not fear the images themselves, they say; we fear the beings they were shaped to look like, the ones whose names they carry. You fear them, no doubt, because you think they are in heaven; if they are gods, it cannot be otherwise. Why, then, do you not lift your eyes to the sky, call on their names, and offer your sacrifices in the open air? Why do you look at walls and wood and stone rather than at the place where you believe them to be? What is the point of temples and altars? What, in the end, is the point of the images themselves, which are reminders of the dead or of the absent? Making likenesses was invented by men for exactly this reason: so that it would be possible to hold on to the memory of people who had either been taken away by death or separated by distance. Which of the two classes, then, shall we count the gods in? If among the dead — who is foolish enough to worship them? If among the absent, then they are not to be worshiped, since they neither see what we do nor hear what we pray. But if the gods cannot be absent — for, being divine, they see and hear everything, whatever part of the universe they are in — then it follows that images are pointless, since the gods are present everywhere already, and it is enough to call on the names of those who hear us. And if they are present, they cannot fail to be there at their own images. It is entirely as the common people imagine it: that the spirits of the dead wander around the tombs and the remains of their bodies. But once the god has begun to be near, there is no further need of his statue. [h]

Let me put a question. Suppose a man often looks at the portrait of someone who has settled in a foreign country, so as to comfort himself over the man who is away. If that man came home and stood in front of him, and he went on looking at the portrait, and preferred the enjoyment of it to the sight of the man himself — would he seem to be in his right mind? Certainly not. A man’s likeness looks necessary at the time when he is far away, and becomes pointless when he is at hand. But God’s spirit and power are spread everywhere and can never be absent, so it is plain that an image of him is always pointless. What they are afraid of is that their religion will be altogether hollow and empty if they see nothing in front of them to adore; so they set up images. And since these are representations of the dead, they are like the dead: there is no perception in them at all. But the image of the ever-living God ought to be alive and able to perceive. If the thing got its name from resemblance, how can these be supposed to resemble God, when they have neither perception nor movement? So the image of God is not the thing shaped by men’s fingers out of stone or bronze or any other material, but man himself, since he has both perception and movement and does many great things. And the fools do not understand that if images could perceive and move, they would adore men of their own accord — the men who dressed and decorated them — since they would be nothing but rough unworked stone, or coarse unshaped timber, if a man had not shaped them.

So man is to be reckoned the parent of these images. They were produced by his work; through him they first had shape, form and beauty. The one who made them, therefore, is greater than the things that were made. And yet nobody looks up to the Maker himself, or shows him reverence: a man fears the things he has made, as though there could be more power in the work than in the workman. Seneca is right, then, when he says in his moral writings: “They worship the images of the gods; they beg from them on bended knee; they adore them; they sit or stand beside them the whole day long; they throw them coins; they kill victims for them. And while they value these images so highly, they look down on the craftsmen who made them. What could be more inconsistent than to despise the sculptor and adore the statue — and not even to admit into your own company the man who makes your gods? What force, what power can they have, when the man who made them has none? He could not even give them the powers he had himself: sight, hearing, speech, movement. Is anyone foolish enough to suppose that there is anything in the image of a god, when there is nothing in it even of a man except the bare resemblance?” But nobody thinks about any of this. Men are soaked in this conviction, and their minds have drunk the sham of folly right down. And so beings with sense adore senseless objects; rational beings adore irrational ones; the living adore the lifeless; those sprung from heaven adore things of earth. It is a pleasure to me, then, as though I were standing on a high watchtower where everyone can hear, to call out that line of Persius:

Look at the sky instead — the sight God your Maker raised you up for. He gave you a lifted face; you bend it down to the ground. Those high minds of yours, which are raised toward their parent along with their bodies, you press down to the things below, as though you were sorry not to have been born four-footed. It is not fitting for a creature of heaven to make itself equal to earthly things and lean toward the earth. Why do you rob yourselves of the good things of heaven and fall flat on the ground of your own accord? You wallow miserably on the ground when you look for down here what you ought to have looked for above. As for those empty, breakable playthings, the work of men’s hands — whatever the material they are made from, what are they but earth, which they were produced out of? Why, then, do you put yourselves under lower things? Why do you set the earth above your own heads? When you lower yourselves to the earth and bring yourselves down, you sink of your own accord to the world below, and sentence yourselves to death; for nothing is lower and more humble than the earth, except death and the place of the dead. If you wanted to escape those, you would despise the earth lying under your feet, and would keep the posture of the body you received, which is upright, so as to be able to turn your eyes and your mind toward the One who made it. But to despise the earth and trample on it means nothing else than this: to refrain from adoring images, because they are made of earth; and also not to want riches, and to despise the pleasures of the body — because wealth, and the body itself, which we use as a lodging, is nothing but earth. Worship a living being, so that you may live; for a man who has signed himself and his soul over to the dead must necessarily die.