Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
The logic of all these deceptions is hidden from those who have no share in the truth. For men suppose that beings who can do nothing but harm are doing them a service when they simply stop harming them. Someone may perhaps say, then, that these beings ought to be worshipped, so that they will not harm us, since they are indeed capable of harm. They do harm, certainly, but only those by whom they are feared — men whom the mighty and exalted hand of God does not shield, because they are strangers to the mystery of truth. But the righteous, that is, the worshippers of God, these spirits dread; for when adjured in his name they depart from the bodies they possess, and, lashed as it were by the scourge of his words, it is not merely as demons that they admit themselves; they also blurt out their own names — the very ones worshipped in the temples. Such confessions usually occur with their own devotees looking on, not to shame the cult but, if anything, to their own credit, since lying is impossible for them — not before the God who compels them under oath, nor before the righteous whose speech racks them. And so, often with the loudest shrieking, they proclaim that they are being scourged and are burning and are on the point of leaving: such is the power that the knowledge of God and righteousness holds. Whom, then, can they harm, except those whom they hold in their power? Hermes himself affirms that those who have come to know God are safe not only from the assaults of demons but are not even bound by fate. 'Piety,' he says, 'is the one safeguard: for over the pious man neither evil demon nor destiny has mastery. God delivers the pious man from every evil, since piety alone stands as mankind's single good.' As for the nature of piety, he explains it elsewhere: 'For piety is knowledge of God.' Asclepius, his own pupil, developed this same idea more fully, setting it out in the polished treatise he addressed to the king. Both of them affirm that demons are the enemies and tormentors of mankind, whom Trismegistus for that reason calls 'wicked angels' — so well did he know that beings once heavenly had come to be corrupted and earthbound.
It is from these beings that astrology, haruspicy, augury, and the things called oracles, and necromancy, and the magic art, and whatever other evils men practice openly or in secret, took their origin — all of which are false in themselves, as the Erythraean Sibyl testifies: 'since all these things are delusion, which foolish men pursue day after day.' Yet these same authors, by making their presence felt, cause themselves to be believed true; thus, with a feigned divinity, they mock the credulity of men, since it does not suit them to reveal the truth. These are the ones who taught men to fashion images and statues, who, in order to turn men's minds away from the worship of the true God, caused the crafted faces of dead kings, adorned with exquisite beauty, to be set up and consecrated, and put on for themselves the names of those men as though they were masks. But the magicians, and those whom the common people rightly call sorcerers, when they practice their execrable arts, summon these spirits by their true names — the very heavenly names read in the sacred writings. These unclean and wandering spirits, in order to throw everything into confusion and pour errors into human hearts, sow and mix falsehood with truth. For they themselves invented the fiction that the heavenly beings are many and that Jupiter is king of them all, because heaven in fact holds a great many angelic spirits under one single Lord and Father of all — God; but they wrapped the truth in false names and stole it from men's eyes. For God, as I taught at the beginning, has no need of a name, since he is one alone, nor do the angels, being immortal, either allow or wish to be called gods; their one and only office is to serve the will of God and to do nothing at all except by his command. As we put it, God governs the world the way a governor rules a province: no one would call his attendants partners in ruling the province, even though it is their service that keeps the business running. And yet these attendants can do something beyond the governor's orders, through their own ignorance, which belongs to the human condition; but the one who oversees the world and governs the universe — who knows everything, from whose divine sight nothing escapes — alone possesses power over all things, and in the angels there is nothing but the necessity of obedience. And so they wish no honor to be paid to themselves, since all their honor belongs to God; but those who abandoned God's service, being enemies of truth and betrayers of their maker, attempt to seize for themselves the title and worship due to gods — not because the ruined care for honor (for what honor is there for the ruined?), nor in order to harm God, who cannot be harmed, but in order to harm men, whose devotion and understanding of the one true majesty they labor to subvert, lest they should be able to gain the immortality which these spirits themselves lost through their own wickedness. And so they pour out darkness and cloud the truth in fog, so that men will not know their Lord and Father; and to lure them the more easily, they hide themselves in temples, attend all the sacrifices, and often produce prodigies, by which men, struck with amazement, place their trust in the images of a supposed divinity and power. From this comes the story that a stone was cut by a razor at the augur's word, that a wish to move to Rome was voiced through Juno of Veii, that Fortuna Muliebris foretold a danger, that Claudia's hand drew the ship after it, that Juno stripped bare and the Locrian Proserpina and Milesian Ceres took vengeance on the sacrilegious, and Hercules on Appius, and Jupiter on Atinius, and Minerva did the same in Caesar's case; hence too the story that a serpent brought from Epidaurus rid the city of Rome of plague — for the ruling demon himself was carried there in his own shape without any disguise, since the envoys sent for that purpose brought back with them a serpent of wondrous size. But it is above all in the oracles that they deceive, since the profane cannot recognize their trickery for what it is, apart from the truth, and so they suppose that commands and victories and wealth and prosperous outcomes are granted by these very beings — indeed that many a time their nod has rescued the republic from dangers looming over it, dangers which they themselves had announced by their responses and, once appeased by sacrifices, turned aside. But all of this is deception. For since they foresee the dispositions of God, being once his ministers, they insert themselves into these matters, so that whatever has been done or is being done by God may seem, above all, to be their own doing; and whenever, according to God's decree, some good is impending for a people or a city, they promise, by prodigies or dreams or oracles, that they themselves will bring it about — provided temples, honors, and sacrifices are granted them. Once these are given, when the thing that was bound to happen occurs anyway, they win for themselves the highest veneration. That is why temples get dedicated, fresh statues get consecrated, and herds of victims are put to the knife; but even when this is done, the life and safety of those who did it are, none the less, being sacrificed away. And whenever dangers are impending, they profess to be angry for some silly and trivial cause, as Juno was said to be angry with Varro because he had set a handsome boy on the chariot to hold the trappings — and for this reason the Roman name was nearly wiped out at Cannae. Yet if it was a second Ganymede Juno feared, why should Rome's young men have borne the punishment for it? Or if the gods care only for generals and disregard everyone else, why did Varro alone escape, who had done this thing, while Paulus, who had done nothing to deserve it, was killed? Plainly, then, no unjust will of Juno had anything to do with what befell the Romans, when Hannibal destroyed two Roman armies by both cunning and courage. For Juno could not have dared either to defend Carthage, where her weapons and her chariot were kept, or to harm the Romans, since she had heard that a race would arise from Trojan blood one day to overthrow the towers of Tyre. But these are the games of those beings who conceal themselves behind the names of the dead to set traps for the living. And so, whether the danger that threatens can be averted or not, they wish it to seem that, once appeased, they have turned it aside; or if it cannot be averted, they contrive that it should seem to have happened because they were scorned. In this way, among men who do not know them, they build up authority and fear for themselves. By this cunning and these arts they have made the knowledge of the one true God grow stale among all the nations. For, ruined by their own vices, they rage and go on the prowl, seeking to ruin others; and it was for this reason too that they devised human sacrifice — enemies of the human race that they are — so as to devour as many souls as possible.
Someone will say: 'Why then does God allow this to happen, and not come to the rescue against such evil delusions?' So that evil may contend with good, so that vices may stand opposed to virtues, so that he may have some to punish and others to honor. For in the last times he has determined to judge the living and the dead — a judgment I shall discuss in my final book. So he waits until the ages reach their close, when his wrath will be unleashed with heavenly might and power, exactly as the terrifying warnings the righteous prophets foretold make plain. For now, however, he allows men to err and even to be impious against himself, being himself just and gentle and patient. For it cannot be that one in whom virtue is perfect should not also have perfect patience. Hence some suppose that God is not angry at all, since he is not subject to passions, which are disturbances of the mind, because every living thing that is affected and moved is by that very fact frail. This opinion utterly destroys truth and religion. But let us set aside for now this question of the wrath of God, since it is a richer subject and must be pursued more fully in a work of its own. Whoever, then, worships and follows these most wicked spirits will possess neither heaven nor light, which belong to God, but will fall instead into the place which, as I have argued, fell by the allotment of all things to the prince of evil in person — that is, darkness, the underworld, and everlasting punishment. I have shown the worship of the gods to be empty in a threefold way: first, because the images that are worshipped are the likenesses of dead men, and it is perverse and absurd for a man's image to receive the worship owed to a god's image — for one thereby worships what is lesser and weaker; and it is an inexpiable crime to abandon the living to be a slave to the monuments of the dead, who can give neither life nor light to anyone, since they themselves lack both; nor is there any other god beside the single One under whose power and judgment every soul stands subject. Second, because the sacred images themselves, to which the emptiest of men are enslaved, are wholly without sense, since they are earth. And who does not see it is wicked for an upright creature to bend down and worship the earth? — the earth which was placed beneath our feet for this very reason, that it should be trodden underfoot by us, not adored, since we were raised up out of it and given an upright stature above the other living things precisely so that we would not roll back downward nor cast this heavenly face of ours down to the ground, but direct our eyes to the place toward which the very condition of our nature has directed them, and adore nothing else, worship nothing but the one name alone of our maker and father, who for this reason shaped man upright, that we might know we are summoned to what is above and heavenly. Third, because the spirits who preside over these acts of worship, condemned and cast down by God, wander over the earth; and they can offer their worshippers nothing at all, since power over things belongs to the One alone, but they ruin them instead with deadly enticements and errors, since it is their daily task to spread darkness over men, so that the true God will not be sought by them. For that reason worship is not owed to them, since God's sentence already lies upon them. It is indeed the gravest sin to hand oneself over to the power of beings whom, if you follow righteousness, you can master and drive away and put to flight simply by invoking the divine name. And if it is plain that these forms of worship are empty in all the ways I have shown, it is clear that those who make supplication to the dead, or venerate the earth, or hand over their souls to unclean spirits, have lost the reasoning of men, and will pay the penalty of their impiety and wickedness — men who, in rebellion against the Father of the human race, God himself, have broken every law by adopting rites beyond any atonement.
Whoever, then, strives to safeguard the mystery of man and to hold fast to the reason of his own nature must lift himself up from the ground and, with mind raised on high, direct his eyes toward heaven. Let him not seek God beneath his feet, nor dig out of the dust something to worship, because whatever lies beneath a man must necessarily be lower than man; rather let him seek it aloft, seek it at the peak, since only what stands over man can exceed man in greatness. Yet God exceeds man in greatness, and so it is above, not beneath, that he must be sought, in the highest region rather than the lowest. There can be no doubt, then, that there is no true religion wherever there is an image. For if religion belongs to things divine, and nothing is divine except in the heavenly realm, then images are without religion, because nothing heavenly can exist in a thing made from earth. This can indeed be seen, by anyone wise, from the very word itself. For whatever is a copy must necessarily be false, and that which falsely imitates truth by paint and pretense can never take on the name of the true. And if every act of imitation is not, above all, a serious matter, but is rather a kind of game and jest, then what exists in images is not religion but a mere mimicry of religion. All falsehoods, then, must be set aside so that we may lay hold of the true, and earthly things trodden down so that we may attain the heavenly. For this is how things stand: whoever casts his soul, whose origin is from heaven, down to the depths below, falls to the very place to which he has cast himself; and so it is fitting that a man, mindful of his reason and of his standing, should always strive and stretch upward toward the things above. Whoever does this will rightly be judged wise, righteous, truly a man, and indeed worthy of heaven — one whom his own Father will recognize not as bowed low, nor cast down toward the earth like a four-footed beast, but standing upright, just as he made him.
Unless I am mistaken, a great and difficult portion of the task I have undertaken is now finished, and, with the majesty of heaven granting me the power of speech, I have driven off the errors that had grown inveterate among men. But now a greater and harder struggle awaits me, this time with the philosophers, whose towering learning and eloquence stand opposed to me like some massive wall. For just as before I was pressed by the sheer numbers, the near-consensus of all the nations, so now I am pressed by the authority of men outstanding in every kind of praise. Yet who does not know that a few learned men carry more weight than a great many untaught ones? Still, I do not think these men, too, should be despaired of, as though they could not be turned from their opinion, with God and truth as our guides; nor do I think them so stubborn as to deny, with sound and open eyes, that they see the brightest sun. If only what they themselves are accustomed to profess is true — that they hold fast to the pursuit of the discovery of truth — I shall surely bring it about that they believe the truth they sought was, after long searching, at last found, and confess that it could not have been discovered by human intellect alone.