Fire, Water, and Clay

Now that we have refuted the men who hold false opinions about the world and about God who made it, let us come back to God’s own work in making the world — the work we are told about in the secret writings of our holy religion. First of all, then, God made the heavens and hung them on high, to be the seat of God himself, the Creator. Then he laid the earth beneath the heavens, as a dwelling place for man along with the other kinds of living creatures, and he willed that water should surround it and hold it together. But his own dwelling place he furnished and filled with bright lights: he dressed it with the sun, and the shining disk of the moon, and the glittering signs of the twinkling stars. On the earth, on the other hand, he set darkness, which is the opposite of these. For the earth has no light of its own; it has only what it receives from the heavens, where God placed unending light, and the gods above, and eternal life. On the earth, by contrast, he placed darkness, and those who live below, and death. For these things stand as far off from those as evil things stand from good, and vices from virtues. [a]

He also set two parts of the earth itself opposite one another, unlike each other in character — namely the east and the west. Of these the east is assigned to God, because he himself is the fountain of light, and the one who lights up all things, and because he makes us rise to eternal life. But the west is ascribed to that disordered and corrupted mind, because it hides the light, because it is always bringing on darkness, and because it makes men die and perish in their sins. For as light belongs to the east, and the whole course of life depends on light, so darkness belongs to the west — and death and destruction are held inside the darkness. Then in the same way he measured out the other parts, the south and the north, and these two are closely bound to the first two. For the region that glows more with the sun’s warmth is nearest to the east and closely joined to it, while the region numb with cold and unending ice belongs on the same side as the far west. For as darkness is set against light, so cold is set against heat. As heat, then, is nearest to light, so is the south to the east; and as cold is nearest to darkness, so is the northern country to the west. To each of these parts he assigned its own season: spring to the east, summer to the southern region, autumn to the west, winter to the north. In these two parts as well, the southern and the northern, there is a figure of life and of death, because life consists in heat and death in cold. And as heat arises from fire, so cold arises from water. Following the division of these parts he also made day and night, so that by taking turns with one another they might complete the circuits and unending revolutions of time, which we call years. The day, which the first east supplies, must belong to God, as all things do that are of a better sort. But the night, which the far west brings on, belongs to the one we have called God’s rival.

And even in the making of these things God had the future in view, for he made them in such a way that a picture of true religion and of false superstitions might be shown by them. Take the sun. It rises daily, and it is only one — which is why Cicero would have it that the sun is called Sol, because when it appears the stars are blotted out and it alone is seen. Yet since it is a true light, full and complete, with the most powerful heat, it lights up everything with the brightest splendor. In the same way God, although he is one only, possesses perfect majesty, and might, and splendor. But night, which we say is assigned to that corrupted adversary of God, shows by a likeness the many and varied superstitions that belong to him. For although countless stars appear to glitter and shine, they are not full and solid lights; they send out no heat, and they cannot overpower the darkness by their numbers. And so these two things turn out to be the chief ones, with powers that differ from one another and are opposed to one another — heat and moisture, which God designed wonderfully for the support and the production of all things. For since the power of God consists in heat and fire, if he had not tempered its burning and its force by mixing in the stuff of moisture and cold, nothing could have been born or have existed; whatever had begun to exist would have been destroyed at once by burning.

This is also why some philosophers and poets said that the world was made of a discordant concord — though they did not thoroughly understand the matter. Heraclitus said that all things were produced from fire; Thales of Miletus, that they were produced from water. Each saw something of the truth, and each was in error. For if only one element had existed, water could not have been produced from fire, nor fire from water; the truer account is that all things were produced from a mingling of the two. Fire, of course, cannot be mixed with water, because they are opposites, and if they came into collision, whichever proved the stronger must destroy the other. But their substances can be mingled. The substance of fire is heat; the substance of water is moisture. So Ovid is right to say:

For the one element is, as it were, masculine, and the other, as it were, feminine: the one active, the other passive. And that is why it was laid down by the ancients that marriage contracts should be sealed by the solemn rite of fire and water, because the young of animals are furnished with a body by heat and moisture, and are in that way quickened into life. For since every living creature is made up of soul and body, the material of the body is held in moisture and the material of the soul in heat. We can learn this from the young of birds. Though they are full of thick moisture, unless they are kept warm by the maker’s heat the moisture cannot become a body, nor can the body be brought alive. Exiles, too, used to be forbidden the use of fire and water. It still seemed wrong at that time to put any man to death, however guilty, since after all he was a man. So when the use of the things that human life consists of was forbidden him, it was reckoned the same as actually inflicting death on the man who had been sentenced. Such was the importance attached to these two elements: men believed they were necessary for producing a human being and for keeping him alive. One of the two we share with the other animals; the other has been assigned to man alone. For we are a heavenly and immortal living creature, and we make use of fire, which is given to us as evidence of immortality, since fire comes from heaven; and its nature, being movable and rising upward, contains the principle of life. But the other animals, being altogether mortal, make use of water only, which is a bodily and earthly element. And the nature of water, because it is movable and tends downward, shows a figure of death. That is why cattle do not look up at the sky and have no religion in them: the use of fire has been taken away from them. But from what source, or in what manner, God kindled these two chief elements, fire and water, or drew them off — only the one who made them can know.

So when he had finished the world, he commanded that living creatures of various kinds and unlike shapes should be created, both the large and the smaller. And they were made in pairs, that is, one of each sex, and from their offspring the air and the earth and the seas were filled. God gave all of them their food, kind by kind, out of the earth, so that they might be of service to men: some, for instance, for food, others for clothing. Those of great strength he gave so that they might help in working the land, and that is why they are called beasts of burden. And so, when everything had been settled with a wonderful arrangement, he determined to prepare an everlasting kingdom for himself, and to create countless souls on whom he might bestow immortality. Then he made for himself a figure endowed with perception and intelligence — that is, after the likeness of his own image, than which nothing can be more perfect. He formed man out of the dust of the ground, and that is why he was called man, because he was made from the earth. Plato, finally, says that the human form is godlike, and so does the Sibyl, who says: [n]

The poets have not given a different account of this shaping of man, however much they may have spoiled it, for they said that man was made out of clay by Prometheus. They were not mistaken about the thing itself, only about the name of the craftsman. They had never come into contact with a single line of the truth. What had been handed down by the oracles of the prophets and was contained in the sacred strongroom of God, they picked up out of fables and vague report, in a twisted form — the way truth is regularly corrupted by a crowd when it is spread about in one conversation after another, everyone adding something to what he had heard — and that is what they put into their poems. And in this at least they acted foolishly, that they credited so wonderful and divine a work to a man. For what need was there for man to be formed out of clay, when he might have been begotten in the same way Prometheus himself was begotten by Iapetus? If Prometheus was a man, he was able to father a man, but not to make one. And his punishment on Mount Caucasus declares that he was not one of the gods. But nobody counted his father Iapetus, or his uncle Titan, among the gods, since the high dignity of kingship was in Saturn’s hands alone, and it was by that dignity that Saturn obtained the honors of a god, and all his descendants with him. This invention of the poets can be refuted by many arguments. Everyone agrees that the flood took place in order to destroy wickedness and clear it off the earth. Philosophers, poets and writers of ancient history all say the same, and on this point in particular they agree with what the prophets say. If, then, the flood took place in order to destroy the wickedness that had grown with the excessive number of men, how was Prometheus the maker of man, when his son Deucalion is said by these same writers to have been the only one preserved, and preserved on account of his righteousness? How could a single line of descent and a single generation have filled the world with men so quickly? Plainly they have corrupted this account too, as they corrupted the earlier one, since they knew neither when the flood came upon the earth, nor who it was that deserved to be saved for his righteousness when the human race perished, nor how or with whom he was saved. All of that is taught by the writings of the prophets. It is clear, then, that the account they give of the work of Prometheus is false.

But since I said earlier that the poets are not in the habit of saying what is altogether untrue, but of wrapping their accounts in figures and darkening them that way, I do not say that they lied here. I say rather that Prometheus was the first to make the image of a man out of rich, soft clay, and that he was the first to originate the art of making statues and images — since he lived in the days of Jupiter, when temples began to be built and new ways of worshipping the gods were brought in. And so the truth was corrupted by a falsehood, and what was said to have been made by God began to be credited to a man as well, because the man was imitating the divine work. But the making of the true and living man out of clay is the work of God. This is related by Hermes as well. He not only says that man was made by God after the image of God, but even tried to explain with what skill God shaped each limb in the human body, since there is not one of them that is not as useful for necessity as it is for beauty. The Stoics also attempt this when they discuss providence, and Cicero followed them in many places. But he treats a subject so full and so fruitful only briefly, and I pass it by here, because I recently wrote a separate book on it for my pupil Demetrianus. But I cannot leave out here what some mistaken philosophers say — that men and the other animals arose out of the earth with no maker at all. Hence that line of Virgil:

This opinion is held especially by those who deny that there is a divine providence. The Stoics, at any rate, attribute the forming of animals to divine skill. But Aristotle freed himself from the labor and the trouble by saying that the world always existed, and that therefore the human race, and the other things in it, had no beginning, but always had been and always would be. Yet when we see that each animal separately begins to exist, having had no existence before, and then ceases to exist, it must be that the whole race began to exist at some time, and must cease at some time because it had a beginning.

For all things must necessarily fall within three periods of time — the past, the present, and the future. The beginning belongs to the past, existence to the present, dissolution to the future. And all three are seen in the case of individual men: we begin when we are born, we exist while we live, and we cease when we die. That is why they will have it that there are three Parcae — one who warps the web of a man’s life, a second who weaves it, and a third who cuts it off and finishes it. But in the human race as a whole only the present time is seen; from it, though, the past — that is, the beginning — and the future — that is, the dissolution — are inferred. For since the race exists, it is evident that at some time it began to exist, since nothing can exist without a beginning; and because it had a beginning, it is evident that at some time it will have an end. For what is made up of mortal things cannot as a whole be immortal. For as we all die one by one, it is possible that by some calamity all should perish at once: whether through the failure of the earth to bear, which sometimes happens in particular places; or through a general spread of plague, which often empties out separate cities and countries; or by the burning up of the world, as is said to have happened in the case of Phaethon; or by a flood, as is reported in the time of Deucalion, when the whole race was destroyed except for one man. And if that flood happened by chance, then it might just as well have happened that the one survivor should have perished too. But if he was held back by the will of divine providence — and this cannot be denied — in order to make up the human race again, then it is evident that the life and the destruction of the human race are in God’s power. And if it is possible for the race to die altogether, because it dies in parts, it is evident that it had an origin at some time; and as its frailty speaks of a beginning, so it also gives proof of an end. And if these things are true, Aristotle will not be able to maintain that the world itself had no beginning either. But if Plato and Epicurus wrest this from Aristotle, still Plato and Aristotle, who thought that the world would last forever, will be robbed of that too by Epicurus, for all their eloquence, since it follows that what had a beginning must also have an end. But we will speak of these things at greater length in the last book. For now, let us go back to the origin of man.