Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
I could have been content with what I have already set out, but much still remains needed for the work I have undertaken. For although, by demolishing the very head of the religions, I have overthrown them all at once, still I wish to pursue the rest and refute more fully this inveterate persuasion, so that men will finally feel shame and remorse over their own mistakes. Here is a weighty labor, one fit for a man: to go on loosening religion's knots from the minds it binds, as Lucretius puts it—though he himself never managed to do this, since nothing true supported his effort. This is our task, since we both assert the true God and refute the false ones. Those, then, who suppose that the gods came from mere fictions the poets dreamed up, and yet believe that goddesses exist as women and worship them, are unwittingly rolled back to the very thing they had denied: that these beings mate and give birth. For it cannot be otherwise, since two sexes were established for the purpose of generation. But once they accept a difference of sexes, they fail to see the consequence: that they must conceive—which cannot happen in the case of God. Yet this is exactly what they think, since they claim some are offspring of Jupiter and the rest of the divine company. New gods, then, are born, indeed every day; for they are not outdone by men in fecundity. So everything is full of innumerable gods, since of course none of them dies. For men are countless already, beyond any reckoning of their multitude, and yet, being born, must also die in turn — so what count should we imagine for gods who, generation upon generation across the centuries, never once lost their immortality? Why, then, are so few of them worshipped? Unless perhaps we are to think that the two sexes of the gods exist not for the sake of generation but only for the taking of pleasure, and that they do the very things which shame little human beings to do or to suffer. But if some are said to have been born of others, it follows that they are always being born, since they were indeed born at some time; or if they have ceased to be born, we ought to know why or when they ceased. Not without wit does Seneca, in his books of moral philosophy, ask: 'What is the reason, then, that among the poets the most lustful Jupiter has stopped fathering children? Has he turned sixty, and has the Papian law fastened a clasp on him? Or has he obtained the right of three children? Or has it finally occurred to him that one should expect from another what one has done to another, and does he now dread that somebody could someday treat him the way he once treated Saturn?' Now let those who insist gods exist explain how they answer the case I am about to lay before them: grant the gods two sexes, and coupling must follow; and once they come together, houses become a necessity for them too — for surely they possess enough virtue and modesty not to act promiscuously or out in the open, the way we watch dumb beasts behave. Grant them houses, and cities must follow just as surely — and here Naso himself is our authority, saying: 'the common folk dwell scattered in various places; in front, the mighty gods of heaven, the illustrious ones, have set their own homes.' Grant them cities, and fields cannot be far behind. What comes next is plain to anyone: tilling and plowing the ground, which exists purely to provide food — and that alone proves they are mortal. Run the same chain in reverse and it holds just as firmly: strip away the fields and the cities go too; strip away the cities and no houses remain; without houses there is no coupling; and without coupling, no female sex among them at all. Yet females plainly exist among the gods — so gods they cannot be. Let whoever is able unravel this chain of reasoning. Each link pulls the next so tightly that the final conclusion cannot be refused. Nor will anyone unravel this either: between the two sexes one is stronger and one weaker, since males are the sturdier and females the frailer. Weakness, though, has no place in God — so the female sex has none either. Add to this the conclusion already reached above: they cannot be gods, precisely because females are found among them.
For these reasons the Stoics interpret the gods in another direction, and since they do not clearly see what the truth is, they try to connect them with the reasoning of natural phenomena. Cicero, following them, delivered this opinion about the gods and their religions: 'Do you not see, then, how reasoning drawn from natural phenomena well and usefully discovered has been dragged over to invented and fictitious gods? Out of that came false beliefs, unruly errors, and superstitions fit almost for old women. We even know the gods' shapes, their ages, their clothing and finery, and beyond that their families, marriages, and kinships—all of it recast in the image of human frailty.' What could be said more plainly, what more truly? Rome's foremost philosopher, a man crowned with the highest priesthood, charges the gods with being invented and fictitious, declares that the worship paid them is a superstition fit almost for old women, and laments how thoroughly false beliefs and unruly errors ensnare mankind. Indeed his whole third volume treating the nature of the gods overturns and utterly destroys every religion. What more, then, is expected of us? Can we surpass Cicero in eloquence? Certainly not; but confidence failed him, since the truth eluded him, as he himself candidly confesses in that same work. For he says he can more easily say what a thing is not than what it is—that is, he understands falsehoods but does not know the truth. It is clear, then, that those who are thought to be gods were men, and after their deaths that reputation was simply enshrined as worship. That is why their ages differ and each has a fixed likeness: because their images were shaped in that appearance and at that age at which death overtook each one. Let us consider, if you please, the miseries of these unfortunate gods. A son was lost to Isis, a daughter to Ceres; and Latona, driven out and flung across the whole earth, barely managed to find some tiny island in which to give birth. The Mother of the Gods fell in love with a handsome youth, and upon discovering him with a rival she cut off his manhood, leaving him half a man—hence her rites are performed to this day by the Galli, her gelded priests. Juno pursued her rivals most fiercely, since she herself could bear no child by her own brother. Varro writes that Samos was once called Parthenia, since it was there that Juno grew to womanhood and there too that she wed Jupiter. Hence her most ancient and revered temple stands on Samos, her statue is carved wearing bridal attire, and every year her rites are performed like a wedding celebration. If, then, she grew up, if she was a girl before she became a wife, then whoever fails to grasp that she was simply human is confessing himself an animal. Why should I speak of the shamelessness of Venus, prostituted to the lusts not only of gods but of men as well? Her notorious affair with Mars gave her Harmonia, Mercury gave her the androgynous Hermaphroditus, Jupiter gave her Cupid, Anchises gave her Aeneas, and Butes gave her Eryx; from Adonis, though, she could bear nothing, since a boar's tusk killed him while he was still a boy. She, as is recorded in the Sacred History, was the first to establish the trade of the courtesan, and it was she who instructed Cyprian women to profit from selling their bodies openly—commanding this precisely so that she alone would not stand out among women as shameless and man-hungry. Does even this being have anything of divinity, whose adulteries are counted as more numerous than her offspring? Yet not even her supposed virgins managed to preserve an unstained chastity. Take the birth of Erichthonius, for instance—where do we suppose that came from? Sprung from the soil, the way poets would have us imagine? The facts themselves shout otherwise. Once Vulcan had forged weapons for the gods, and Jupiter, granting him first pick of whatever reward he wanted, had sworn by the infernal marsh, as was customary, to refuse nothing, the lame craftsman asked to marry Minerva. Bound by so solemn a vow, Jupiter, best and greatest, could not refuse—yet he cautioned Minerva to fight him off and guard her honor. It was during that very tussle, so the story goes, that Vulcan's seed spilled onto the ground, giving rise to Erichthonius, whose name derives from the Greek words for strife and earth—that is, drawn straight from the struggle and the soil itself. Why, then, did the virgin goddess seal that boy away with a serpent and hand him, sealed shut, to Cecrops's three daughters? A plain case of incest, to my mind, one that admits no explaining away. Then there is the goddess who, on the verge of losing the lover torn apart by his own bolting horses, called in the finest physician, Asclepius, to restore the young man; and once he was healed she tucked him away in hidden quarters, entrusting him to the nymph Egeria and her sacred grove, so that, alone, deep in the forests of Italy, he could live out an unnoticed life under a new name, Virbius. What is the meaning of such careful, such anxious nursing? What do the hidden quarters mean? What does the banishment mean—so distant, or to a woman, or into solitude? What, further, does changing his name mean? And finally, what does his unrelenting dread of horses mean? What do all these details point to, if not a guilty conscience over an affair, and a passion far from chaste? She had every reason to labor so hard on behalf of so devoted a young man, one who had spurned the advances of a stepmother infatuated with him.
At this point we must also refute those who not only admit that the gods were made out of men, but even boast of it in praising them—whether for virtue, as with Hercules, or for gifts, as with Ceres and Liber, or for arts discovered, as with Aesculapius and Minerva. Taking up each matter in turn, I mean to show just how absurd it all is and how far beneath the cost men pay for it—defiling themselves with an inexpiable crime and becoming enemies of the true God—when, having spurned Him, they take up the rites of the dead. They say that virtue is what raises a man to heaven—not that virtue of which the philosophers speak, which lies in the goods of the soul, but this bodily kind called strength; and since this was especially prominent in Hercules, he is believed to have earned immortality. Who is so foolishly stupid as to judge bodily strength something divine, or even something excellent for a man, when even beasts of burden possess it in greater measure, and it is often broken by a single illness or diminished and collapses with old age itself? And so this same Hercules, when he saw his own muscles disfigured by sores, wished neither to be healed nor to grow old, lest he should ever seem lesser or uglier than himself. Men supposed that he ascended to heaven from the pyre on which he had burned himself alive, and, most foolishly admiring these very things, they set them up wrought and consecrated in statues and images, so that monuments to their vanity might stand forever—men who believed that killing wild beasts could make one a god. But perhaps this is the fault of the Greeks, who always regarded the flimsiest things as the greatest. What of our own people? Are they any wiser? They despise athletic prowess, because it does no harm, but royal power, because it commonly does great harm far and wide, they so admire that they suppose brave and warlike commanders are placed in the company of the gods; nor do they think there is any other road to immortality than to lead armies, lay waste to others' lands, destroy cities, raze towns, and either slaughter free peoples or reduce them to slavery. Clearly, the more men they have crushed, plundered, and killed, the nobler and more illustrious they consider themselves, and, captivated by the appearance of empty glory, they attach the name of virtue to their crimes. I would rather, at this point, that their gods had sprung from killing wild animals than that men should endorse so bloody a road to immortality. If someone slays a single man, he is held polluted and wicked, and they think it unlawful for him to be admitted even to this earthly dwelling-place of the gods. But the man who has slaughtered countless thousands of men, flooded the fields with blood, and stained the rivers, is admitted not merely into the temple but into heaven itself. In Ennius, Africanus speaks thus: 'If it is permitted for anyone to ascend into the regions of the heaven-dwellers, to me alone the greatest gate of heaven stands open'—clearly because he destroyed and wiped out a great part of the human race. O in how great a darkness you moved, Africanus—or rather, O poet, who supposed that the ascent to heaven for men lies open through slaughter and blood! To this vanity even Cicero gave his assent. 'It is indeed so, Africanus,' he says, 'for that same gate stood open to Hercules too'—as though he himself had plainly been the doorkeeper of heaven when it happened. For my part I cannot decide whether I ought rather to grieve or to laugh, when I see grave and learned men, men who in their own eyes seem wise, tossed about in such a pitiable flood of errors. If this is the virtue that makes us immortal, I would rather die than bring destruction upon as many as possible. If immortality cannot be obtained in any other way except through blood, what will happen if all men agree in concord? And this could certainly happen, if, having cast off their ruinous and impious frenzy, they were willing to be innocent and just. Will no one, then, be worthy of heaven? Will virtue perish, because men will not be permitted to rage against other men? But these men, who reckon the overthrow of cities and peoples as the highest glory, will not tolerate public peace; they will plunder and rage, and by inflicting injuries with insolence they will break the covenant of human society, so as to have an enemy whom they may destroy no more wickedly than they provoked him. Now let us go on to the rest. The gift of certain benefits gave Ceres and Liber the name of gods. I could show from the divine writings that wine and grain were in use among men even before the offspring of Caelus and Saturn; but let us grant, for argument's sake, that these were truly discovered by them. Can it seem a greater or more important thing to have gathered grain and taught men, once it was ground, to make bread from it, or to have pressed grapes gathered from vines and made wine, than to have brought forth the grain itself, or the vines themselves, out of the earth? Suppose God did leave these things to be discovered by human ingenuity; still it cannot be otherwise than that all things belong to Him, who gave man the very wisdom by which to discover, and also the things capable of being discovered in the first place. The arts too are said to have won immortality for their inventors, as medicine did for Aesculapius, and metalworking for Vulcan. Let us, then, also worship those who taught fulling or shoemaking. Why is no honor paid to the inventor of pottery? Is it because the wealthy despise Samian ware? There are also other arts whose inventors have been of the greatest benefit to human life: why have temples not been assigned to them as well? But no doubt it is Minerva who discovered them all, and that is why craftsmen pray to her. So Minerva rises to heaven out of these humble trades. Is there really any reason for anyone to abandon Him who created the earth with its living creatures, the heavens with their stars and lights, in order to venerate her who taught the weaving of cloth? And what of the figure credited with teaching how bodily wounds get healed? Could he outrank the one who shaped bodies in the first place, granted the very capacity to feel and to live, and both devised and produced the herbs and everything else on which the healing art depends?
But someone will object that reverence is due not only to the maker of all things but also to those who did some partial good. Yet it has never once happened, and cannot happen, that a worshipper of these lesser beings has also worshipped God; grant others equal honor, and He goes entirely unworshipped, since His religion rests on nothing less than believing Him singular and alone. The greatest of the poets proclaims that all who improved life through their discovered arts now dwell among the dead, and that even the inventor of medicine, master of that very craft, was hurled by a thunderbolt into the Stygian waters—so we might grasp just how powerful the almighty Father is, capable of striking down even gods with his bolts. Clever men perhaps reasoned among themselves along these lines: a god cannot be struck by lightning, so plainly this never occurred. But the truth runs the other way—precisely because it did occur, the man in question was clearly no god. The poets' falsehood lies not in the event but in the label attached to it: fearing trouble, they shrank from admitting the plain truth against popular opinion. Yet if it is agreed among the pagans themselves that these gods started out as men, why do they refuse to trust the poets' account of their flights, wounds, deaths, wars, and affairs? From these very details one can grasp that becoming gods was never possible for them at all, given that they were not even decent men, and their conduct in life earned nothing but everlasting death.