The Fountain and the Broken Cisterns

Since all this stands as I have shown, it is plain that no other hope of life is held out to anyone except this: that he lay aside empty things and wretched error, come to know God and serve God; that he give up this temporary life and train himself by the rules of righteousness for the practice of true religion. For we were created on this condition — that we pay the just obedience we owe to the God who made us, and that we know him alone and follow him alone. We are tied and bound to God by this chain of piety, and that is where religion gets its name — not, as Cicero explained it, from gathering things up again. For in the second book of his work on the nature of the gods he says this: [a]

“Not only the philosophers but our own ancestors separated superstition from religion. People who spent whole days praying and sacrificing so that their children might outlive them were called superstitious. But those who went back over everything belonging to the worship of the gods and carefully gathered it up again were called religious, from gathering up again — the way some are called elegant, from choosing out, and diligent, from selecting with care, and intelligent, from understanding. In all these words there is the same sense of gathering that there is in the word religious. So it has come about that of the two names, superstitious and religious, the one names a fault and the other belongs to praise.”

How senseless this explanation is we can see from the thing itself. If both religion and superstition are occupied with the worship of the same gods, there is little difference between them — or rather none at all. What reason will he give for holding that to pray once for your sons’ health is the mark of a religious man, but to do the same ten times the mark of a superstitious one? If it is a fine thing to pray once, how much finer to pray more often. If it is good to do it at the first hour of the day, it is good to do it all day long. If one animal at the altar makes the god favorable, then plainly many will make him more favorable, since services repeated put him under obligation rather than give offense. Servants who are constant and attentive do not strike us as hateful, but as more dearly loved. Why then should a man be at fault, and get a name that carries blame, for loving his children more, or for honoring the gods enough — while the man who loves them less is praised?

The argument holds from the other side too. If it is wrong to pray and sacrifice all day long, then it is wrong to do it once. If it is a fault to wish often for our children’s safety, then the man who wishes it even rarely is superstitious as well. Or why should the name of a fault be drawn from something than which nothing more honorable, nothing more just, could possibly be wished? And as for his saying that men who take up again with care the things belonging to the worship of the gods are called religious from their gathering up again — how is it that men who do this many times a day lose the name of religious, when their very persistence shows that they gather more carefully the things by which the gods are worshipped?

What is it, then? The truth is that religion is the practice of what is true, and superstition of what is false. And what makes the whole difference is what you worship, not how you worship, or what prayer you offer. But because the worshippers of the gods think themselves religious when they are superstitious, they can neither tell religion from superstition nor say what the names mean. I have said that the name of religion is drawn from the bond of piety, because God has tied a man to himself and bound him fast; for we must serve him as a master and obey him as a father. So Lucretius explained the word better when he speaks of loosening the knots of religion. As for the superstitious — they are not the people who want their children to outlive them, since we all want that. They are either those who keep up the worship of the surviving memory of the dead, or those who, having outlived their own parents, honored their portraits at home as household gods. People who took up new rites of their own, so as to honor the dead as gods — supposing them taken from among men and received into heaven — were the ones called superstitious; and those who worshipped the public and ancient gods were called religious. That is why Virgil says:

But since we find that the ancient gods too were made gods in the same way, after their death, it follows that the superstitious are the men who worship many false gods, and that we are the religious, who make our prayers to the one true God.

Someone may ask how it is that, while we say we worship one God only, we still assert two: God the Father and God the Son. That claim has driven many into serious error. When the rest of what we say strikes them as reasonable, they suppose that on this one point we fail — that we confess another God, and a mortal one. I have already spoken about his mortality; now let me teach about his oneness with the Father. When we speak of God the Father and God the Son, we are not speaking of two different beings, and we do not separate them. The Father cannot exist without the Son, nor can the Son be cut off from the Father: no one is called Father without a Son, and no Son is born without a Father. Since, then, the Father makes the Son and the Son the Father, the two have one mind, one spirit, one substance. But the Father is like a fountain welling over, and the Son like a stream flowing out of it; the Father like the sun, and the Son like a ray reaching out from the sun. And since he is faithful to the Most High Father and loved by him, he is not separated from him, any more than the stream is separated from the fountain or the ray from the sun. The water of the fountain is in the stream, and the light of the sun is in the ray — just as a voice cannot be separated from the mouth, or a man’s strength or his hand from his body. So when the prophets also call him the hand and the strength and the word of God, there is plainly no separation; the tongue, which serves speech, and the hand, in which a man’s strength sits, are parts of the body that cannot be detached from it. [j]

Here is an example nearer home. Suppose a man has a son he especially loves, still living in the house and under his father’s authority. Even if the father grants him the title and the powers of a master, by the civil law the house is one house, and one man is called its master. In the same way this world is God’s one house, and the Son and the Father, who live in it in complete agreement, are one God: the one is as good as two, and the two are as good as one. That is no surprise, since the Son is in the Father — for the Father loves the Son — and the Father is in the Son, since the Son faithfully obeys the Father’s will and has never done anything except what the Father either willed or commanded. Finally, Isaiah showed that the Father and the Son are one God, in the passage I brought forward earlier, where he said: “They will fall down before you and plead with you, since God is in you, and there is no other God besides you.” He says the same thing in another place: “This is what God the King of Israel says, and his Redeemer, the everlasting God: I am the first and I am the last, and besides me there is no God.” He had set out two persons — one of God the King, that is, Christ, and the other of God the Father, who raised him from the dead after his suffering, as I said earlier that the prophet Hosea showed when he said: “I will redeem him from the power of the grave.” Even so, of each person alike he wrote, “and besides me there is no God,” when he might have said “besides us.” But it would not have been right for a relationship so close to be split apart by the use of a plural. For there is one God alone, free, most high, without any beginning; he is himself the beginning of all things, and in him both the Son and everything else are contained at once. So, since the mind and the will of the one is in the other — or rather, since there is one mind and will in both — both are rightly called one God. Whatever is in the Father flows on into the Son, and whatever is in the Son comes down from the Father. That is why the highest and matchless God cannot be worshipped except through the Son. A man who thinks he worships the Father only does not worship the Son, and so does not worship even the Father. But the man who welcomes the Son and carries his name worships the Father together with the Son, since the Son is the Most High Father’s envoy and messenger and priest. He is the door of the greatest temple, he is the road of light, he is the guide to salvation, he is the gate of life.

But since many heresies have arisen, and the people of God have been torn into parties at the prompting of demons, I must mark out the truth briefly and set it in its own proper dwelling, so that anyone who wants to draw the water of life will not be carried off to broken cisterns that hold no water, but will find the overflowing fountain of God, and be watered from it, and enjoy unending light. [t]

Before anything else, we ought to know that he himself and his envoys foretold that there would be many sects and heresies, which would break the harmony of the sacred body; and that they warned us to be on our guard with the greatest care, so that we never fall into the traps and tricks of that enemy of ours whom God has willed us to fight. Then we ought to know that he gave us definite commands, which we should always keep stored in our minds. Many have forgotten them, left the road to heaven, and made themselves side tracks among the twists and the drop-offs, by which they might lead away the careless and simple part of the people into the darkness of death. Let me explain how that happened.

There were some of our own religion whose faith was less settled, or who were less learned or less careful, and they tore the unity and divided the church. Those whose faith was slippery, while pretending that they knew and worshipped God, were aiming at more money and more honor, and reached for the highest priestly office. When they were beaten by men stronger than themselves, they preferred to break away with their own supporters rather than put up with men set over them — men over whom they had wanted to be set themselves.

Others had not been taught enough of the learning of heaven. They could not answer the accusers of the truth, who objected that it was impossible, or out of keeping, that God should be shut up in a woman’s womb; that the Majesty of heaven could not be brought down to such weakness as to become an object of contempt and derision, a reproach and a joke among men; and last of all, that he should even endure torture and be nailed to the accursed cross. When they could neither defend nor refute any of it, by ability or by learning, because they did not really grasp its force and its meaning, they were twisted off the right road and corrupted the sacred writings, putting together for themselves a new teaching with no root and no stability. Others were drawn away by the predictions of false prophets — men whom the true prophets, and he himself, had foretold — and they fell away from the knowledge of God and left the true tradition behind.

All of them were caught in the frauds of demons, which they ought to have seen coming and guarded against, and by their own carelessness they lost the name and the worship of God. When they are called Phrygians, or Novatians, or Valentinians, or Marcionites, or Anthropians, or Arians, or by any other name, they have stopped being Christians: they have lost the name of Christ and taken on human names from outside. So it is the universal church alone that keeps the true worship.

This is the fountain of truth, this is the home of faith, this is the temple of God. Anyone who does not go into it, or who goes out of it, is a stranger to the hope of life and lasting salvation. No one should flatter himself by keeping the quarrel going. What is at stake is life and salvation, and unless a man watches it carefully and closely, it will be lost and put out. But since every one of the breakaway assemblies calls itself Christian ahead of the rest, and thinks that the universal church is its own, this must be known: the true universal church is the one in which there is confession and repentance, the one that treats in a healthy way the sins and the wounds that the weakness of the flesh is open to.

I have set all this down for the moment as a warning, so that no one who wants to avoid error may be tangled in a worse error while he does not know the inner room where the truth is kept. Later, in a work of its own, I will contend more fully and at greater length against every division of falsehood. And since we have now said enough about true religion and wisdom, it follows that in the next book we take up the subject of justice.