Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Though in my first book I demonstrated the falsity of the gods' religions — for those beings whose varied and disparate cults were embraced across the whole earth by a foolish popular consensus were themselves mortal, and having finished their lives, surrendered to death under divine necessity — still, so that no doubt remains, this second book will expose the very wellspring of these errors and lay bare every reason men were misled: first into believing gods existed at all, and later, gripped by inveterate conviction, into clinging most perversely to the cults they had adopted. For now that their emptiness stands convicted and mankind's impious vanity laid bare, I long to proclaim the grandeur of the single God, taking up instead a weightier and more valuable charge: to call men back from crooked roads and reconcile them to themselves, so that they will not — as certain philosophers do — hold themselves in such contempt, nor imagine themselves feeble, superfluous, worthless, born for absolutely nothing; a notion that drags most of them down into vice. Believing, as they do, that no god cares for us at all, or that nothing remains after death, they hand themselves over entirely to their appetites, and, supposing it permitted, throw themselves thirstily into swallowing every pleasure — a course that carries them heedlessly into death's own snares. They are simply ignorant of what constitutes man's true reason; had they been willing to grasp it, they would above all recognize their own Lord, follow after justice and virtue, refuse to lay their souls beneath earthly illusions, refuse to hunger after the lethal delights of lust, and finally hold themselves in high regard, grasping that man contains more than meets the eye — a power and nature that can be kept intact only once depravity is set aside and the worship of their true Father embraced. Indeed, as often as I turn my thoughts, as one should, to the sum of things, I find myself amazed that the grandeur of the one God who upholds and governs everything has sunk into such forgetfulness that the sole being deserving worship is, of all things, the one chiefly ignored — and that men have been driven into a blindness so deep they set dead things above the true and living God, ranking the earthbound and the buried above the very founder of the earth itself. Yet this human impiety might still be excused if the mistake sprang purely from not knowing the divine name at all. But when we so often observe the very worshipers of the gods both admitting and proclaiming a supreme deity, what excuse can they possibly count on for their irreverence, seeing they refuse to honor the one being no man is permitted to remain entirely unaware of? Indeed, whenever they swear an oath, make a wish, or offer thanks, it is not Jupiter or a crowd of gods they invoke, but God — so forcefully does truth, driven by nature itself, break loose even from reluctant hearts. This, though, does not happen in good times. It is precisely when men are enjoying his gifts and owe honor to his divine generosity that God slips most completely from their memory. But should some grave necessity press upon them, that is when God comes back to mind — should the terror of warfare thunder, should some plague's deadly force settle in, should a lasting drought starve the crops, should a savage storm or hail come crashing down. Then people flee to God, beg him for aid, pray for his rescue. If a man is being tossed about at sea by a raging wind, it is God he calls on; if some other force is crushing him, it is God he begs instead; and if a man, driven to the extremity of begging, pleads for his food, he calls on God alone, seeking mercy from other men in the name of that one divine God. So it is only amid misfortune that God ever crosses their minds; the moment fear subsides and danger has passed, they rush eagerly instead to the temples of the gods, pouring libations, offering sacrifice, hanging garlands — while toward the God they had begged in their hour of crisis, they do not utter so much as a single word of thanks. That is how prosperity breeds excess, and excess, like every other vice, breeds irreverence toward God in turn. What cause should we suppose lies behind this, if not some twisted power, forever at war with truth, that revels in human error and whose single unending task is to pour out darkness and blind men's minds — so that they will not see the light, will not even look up at the sky, and will not keep faith with their body's own nature? For while every other creature, its body bent forward, gazes at the ground, since it was given no reason or wisdom, we alone were granted an upright frame and a face held aloft by God the maker — which shows plainly that the cults of the gods have nothing to do with human reason, since they force a creature born for heaven to bow down before earthly objects of worship. For our sole Parent, when shaping man — a creature possessed of understanding and reason — lifted him up out of the dust and set him standing to contemplate his own maker. A gifted poet captured this precisely: while all other creatures look bowed toward the earth, man was given a face held high and told to gaze upon the heavens, lifting his eyes upright toward the stars. That is exactly why the Greeks call him ánthrōpos — because he looks upward. Those who look downward instead of up therefore disown themselves and give up any claim to the name of man — unless, that is, they suppose our upright form was given to us for no reason whatsoever. God certainly did not intend for us to look upon the sky for no purpose. Birds do it, after all, and nearly every mute creature can see the sky; but only we were given the particular gift of viewing it while standing firm and upright, so that we might search for religion there, contemplating with the mind — since the eyes cannot manage it — the God whose dwelling that is; something no one does, of course, who instead worships bronze or stone, mere earthly things. It is utterly wrongheaded that while the body's posture — a merely temporary thing — stands upright, the soul, which is everlasting, should be bent low; since our shape and stance signify nothing except that a man's mind ought to look toward whatever his face looks toward, and that the soul should stand as upright as the body, so that the ruling part follows the model set by what it rules. But men, forgetting both their own name and their reason, drop their eyes from on high, fasten them to the ground, and cower before objects shaped by their own hands — as if anything crafted could outrank its own craftsman.
What lunacy is it, then, to mold objects that one will later dread, or to dread objects one has molded oneself? 'It is not the objects themselves we fear,' they say, 'but those beings whose likeness was shaped and whose names were used to consecrate them.' But surely your fear comes from supposing these beings dwell in heaven — for if they truly are gods, nothing else is possible. Heaven lies open above you, and yet your gaze never lifts toward it, your voice never calls their names there, nor do your rites ever unfold beneath that open sky. Why do walls, timber, and stone draw your gaze more than the place where you actually believe they reside? What purpose do temples serve, or altars, or, finally, the statues themselves, which stand as memorials to either the dead or the absent? The whole custom of shaping likenesses was, after all, devised by human beings for one purpose — to hold onto the memory of those removed by death or kept apart by absence. So under which heading shall we file the gods? Among the dead — but then who could be foolish enough to worship them? Among the absent — but then worship makes no sense either, if they can neither watch our deeds nor hear our prayers. And if gods cannot in fact be absent at all — since, being divine, they see and hear everything no matter where in the world they happen to be — then their statues serve no purpose, given that they are already present everywhere; simply speaking their names in prayer to these listeners would be enough. 'But,' comes the reply, 'they are present nowhere except beside their own images.' Precisely — the way ordinary folk imagine the souls of the dead hovering around their graves and the remains of their bodies. Yet once that god has actually arrived in person, his statue serves no further purpose. Consider this: suppose someone repeatedly gazes at a portrait of a man traveling abroad, drawing comfort from it during his absence — would that same person still seem sane if, once the man had returned and stood right there, he kept staring at the portrait and chose it over the sight of the living man himself? Certainly not. So then, a man's portrait seems needed while he is far off, but becomes pointless once he arrives; whereas any image of God — whose power and spirit, poured out everywhere, can never actually be absent — is, without exception, always pointless. But they worry that their whole religion would collapse into emptiness if they had nothing visible before them to worship, and this is why they set up statues — which, being images modeled on the dead, resemble the dead in one respect: they possess no capacity for sensation whatsoever. But whatever represents the everlasting, living God ought itself to be alive and capable of feeling. And if the very word 'image' derives from 'resemblance,' how can objects that neither feel nor stir be judged to resemble God at all? The true image of God, then, is not the thing shaped by human fingers out of stone, bronze, or any other substance, but the human being himself, who feels, moves, and carries out countless significant acts. Nor do these thoroughly foolish men grasp that, had their statues actually been able to feel and move, the statues themselves would have turned around and worshiped the man who carved them — mere rough, jagged stone or shapeless raw matter, had he not given them shape. Man, then, should be reckoned something like their parent, since it was by his hands they came into being and through him they first acquired shape, appearance, and beauty — and so whoever does the making surpasses whatever gets made. Yet nobody looks up to or shows reverence for the maker himself; instead people dread what he has produced — as if the product could somehow outdo its own producer. Seneca puts it well in his Moral Essays: people venerate the statues of the gods, kneel to beg from them, worship them, spend whole days seated or standing at their side, throw coins at them, and slaughter victims for them — and yet, for all this reverence toward the statues, they scorn the very craftsmen who carved them. Could anything be more inconsistent than looking down on the sculptor while bowing to the statue, refusing even to invite to your table the man who fashions your gods for you? What force, then, what capability could these objects possibly possess, when their own maker lacks it himself? He could not even pass on to them the abilities he did possess — sight, hearing, speech, motion. Could anyone really be foolish enough to believe there is something divine within a statue of a god, when it contains nothing even of a man beyond his mere outline? But no one stops to think this through, since they have been poisoned by an empty conviction, and their minds have soaked up folly's venom to the core. So it is that beings who can feel bow to things that cannot, beings gifted with reason bow to things without it, the living bow to the lifeless, and creatures born of heaven bow to mere dirt. So I am moved, as though standing on some high watchtower where everyone could hear me, to shout out that line from Persius: 'O souls bowed toward the earth, empty of anything heavenly!' Turn your gaze upward to the sky instead — the very sight your maker, God, roused you to behold. He gave you a face lifted high, yet you stoop it toward the dirt; minds set high, standing erect toward their own Parent along with your bodies, you push down toward lower things, as if regretting you were not born walking on four legs. It is unfitting for a creature of heaven to be leveled with earthbound things sinking toward the ground. Why strip yourselves of heaven's gifts, bending face-first into the dust of your own free will? Wretched as you are, you wallow on the ground, hunting downward for what you should have sought on high. These frail toys shaped by mortal fingers, made from whatever raw material comes to hand, are nothing but the earth they were born from. Why then submit to things beneath you? Why heap earth on top of your own heads? By bowing yourselves to earth and lowering yourselves beneath it, you plunge yourselves willingly down toward the underworld and sentence yourselves to death, since only death and the underworld rank lower and baser than earth. Should such a fate ever be worth avoiding, scorn for the ground beneath your feet is what it would take, all while your frame stayed upright as it was made — upright so that both eye and mind might be turned together toward the one who fashioned you. And to despise and trample the earth means nothing more than refusing to worship statues, since they are molded from earth, and likewise refusing to crave riches and scorning bodily pleasure, since wealth and the very body we inhabit are themselves earth. Worship the living, so that you may live — for whoever hands over himself and his soul to the dead is bound to die.