Made to Stand Upright

So anyone who is anxious to keep up the duties a human being owes, and to hold on to a proper regard for his own nature, should lift himself off the ground. He should raise his mind and turn his eyes toward the sky. He should not look for God under his feet, or dig some object of worship out of the dirt he walks on, since whatever lies beneath a human being is necessarily lower than a human being. Let him look for it high up instead; let him look for it in the highest place there is. Nothing can be greater than a human being except what is above a human being — and God is greater than a human being. So God is above, not below, and he is not to be looked for in the lowest region but in the highest. [a]

There is no doubt about it, then: wherever there is an image, there is no religion. For if religion is made up of divine things, and there is nothing divine except in what belongs to heaven, it follows that images have no religion in them, because there can be nothing heavenly in a thing made out of earth. And a wise man can see this from the very name of the thing. Whatever is an imitation must be false; nothing that counterfeits the truth by trickery and imitation can be given the name of the real thing. And if imitation of any kind is not exactly serious business, but a sort of game and a joke, then there is no religion in images at all — only a mimicry of religion.

What is true, therefore, is to be preferred to everything that is false. Earthly things are to be trampled underfoot so that we may get hold of heavenly ones. That is how the case stands. Whoever throws his soul down to the shades below and to the lowest things — his soul, which has its origin in heaven — must fall to the place he has thrown himself. So he ought to keep his own nature and station in mind, and always strain and aim at what is above. Anyone who does that will be judged wise in every way, and just, and truly a human being. In short, he will be judged worthy of heaven: the one his Parent will recognize, not cringing on the ground and bent toward the earth the way four-footed animals are, but standing straight and upright, the way he made him.

Unless I am mistaken, a large and difficult part of the work I took on has now been finished; the majesty of heaven supplied the power to speak, and we have driven off errors that had settled in long ago. But now a greater and harder contest is set before us, this one with the philosophers, whose learning and eloquence tower over me like some massive building. In the earlier case we were weighed down by sheer numbers, and by something close to the agreement of every nation on earth. In this one we are weighed down by the authority of men who stand out in every kind of distinction. But who could fail to know that there is more weight in a smaller number of learned men than in a larger number of ignorant ones? [f]

Still, we must not give up hope that these men too, with God and the truth to guide us, may be turned aside from their opinion. I do not think they will be so stubborn as to deny that they are looking at the sun in its full brightness with sound and open eyes. Let one thing only be true — the thing they themselves are in the habit of professing, that they are gripped by the desire to investigate — and I will certainly succeed in getting them to believe that the truth they have looked for so long has at last been found, and to admit that human ability could never have found it.