Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
1| Let us now speak of what comes next and make plain the reason why so great a Word of God made his descent among human beings. This Word of God who presides over heaven and earth, begotten as from a spring out of the Father's divinity, which lies remotest of all; who is ever present in this way to the world and abides with it, and who gives clear signs of his providence and of his care for humankind: this Word a race of senseless people failed to reason their way to, and they bestowed the venerable title on the sun and moon, on heaven and the stars.
2| Nor did they stop there. They deified the earthy nature too, and the fruits of the earth, and bodily foods of every kind, making idols of Demeter and Kore and Dionysus and others of the same family. Nor did they stop there. They did not shrink from proclaiming as gods even the reasonings of their own minds, and the very speech that interprets those reasonings, naming thought Athena and speech Hermes, and calling the faculties that lay hold of learning Mnemosyne and the Muses. Nor did they stop there. Swelling their absurdity still further by an excess of impiety, they deified their own passions, which they ought to have turned away from and cured by sober reason: desire itself, the passionate and unbridled sickness of souls, the parts and members of the body that draw toward shameful acts, and the incontinence of base pleasures, they proclaimed to be Eros and Priapus and Aphrodite and other figures akin to these.
3| Nor did they stop there. Sinking down to the generation of bodies and to the mortal life below, they deified mortal men, and after the death common to all they declared them heroes and gods, supposing that the immortal and divine essence hovers about monuments and tombs. Nor did they stop there. They honored with the venerable title every kind of irrational animal and the most harmful of reptiles. Nor did they stop there. Cutting down oaks, hewing out rocks, and searching out the metals of the earth, bronze and iron and the rest of such material, they molded figures of women and shapes of men, forms of beasts and of reptiles, and then invested these with honors.
4| Nor did they stop there. To wicked demons that lurk in strange places, sunk deep in dark recesses, and that greedily lick at the libations and the savor of sacrifices, they gave the same name of gods. Nor did they stop there. By binding spells of forbidden sorcery, by lawless and compelling songs and incantations, they drew to themselves, as their familiars, unseen powers that flit about the air. Different peoples deified different mortal men. The children of the Greeks honored Dionysus and Heracles and Asclepius and Apollo and certain other men with the title of heroes and gods; the Egyptians held Horus and Isis and Osiris, and many men like them, to be gods. And these sages, though they boasted of a surpassing wisdom in the discovery of geometry, astronomy and arithmetic, did not know or understand how to weigh within themselves the measures of God's power and to reckon its difference from a mortal and irrational nature.
5| So they did not shrink from calling every kind of ugly monster, creatures of every sort, venomous reptiles and wild beasts, gods; the Phoenicians in turn proclaimed Melcathar and Usoros and certain other, more obscure mortal men to be gods, as the children of the Arabs did a certain Dusares and Obodas, the Getae Zamolxis, the Cilicians Mopsus, the Thebans Amphiaraus, and among other peoples others again named still others, men no different in nature from mortals and in truth nothing but men. Thus all together, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, and the whole mortal race wherever the sun's rays give light, held as gods the parts of the world and its elements, the fruits that spring from the earth, their own passions, and indeed demonic frenzies and apparitions, and before these, mortal men who had met with human misfortunes, who in their lifetime founded no schools of virtue, labored to teach humankind no lessons of temperate living, showed no philosophical doctrines, performed no beneficial work, left behind no disciples of virtue, handed down no discourses or writings tending to a good life, but were busy with women and shameful pleasures. At random, as chance would have it, through the error of some demonic activity, they proclaimed these men gods and heroes and honored them with sacrifices and rites together with the deceits of sorcery, building temples and sanctuaries for them in city and country, while the one who is beyond the world, the only true Word of God, all-sovereign and maker of the universe, they held in no account at all. They were driven to such a pitch of madness and derangement that they paraded as gods any men who happened along, and at once attached to these the sufferings of mortals, ascribing to them unlawful loves, shameful acts, and the endings of life and deaths. Then, though such stories were not told against them by others but they were themselves the witnesses of them, confessing their wanderings, griefs and deaths, and before these their adulteries, their corruptions of males and their abductions of women, they nonetheless filled all cities, villages and lands with temples, statues and shrines, and by imitating the ways of those gods they destroyed their own souls besides.
6| Gods, then, and children of gods, heroes and good demons, one could hear of among them in word, but in deed it was the very opposite. They venerated the very opposite of what they professed, as if someone wishing to show another the sun and the lights of heaven did not raise his eyes up on high, but, throwing his hands down to the earth and flinging himself on the ground, sought the heavenly powers in mud and mire. So too the human race, through derangement and the deceit of evil demons, was persuaded that the divine and intelligible essence beyond heaven and the world was somewhere below, in the begetting of bodies and in the sufferings and deaths of mortals. And they were driven to such folly that they sacrificed what they held dearest to them and spared not even nature itself, but slaughtered even their only-begotten and beloved children in madness and distraction of mind.
7| And what could be more insane than to sacrifice human beings and to defile whole cities and their own houses with the murder of kinsmen? Do not the children of the Greeks bear witness to this, and is not all history full of the memory of it? The Phoenicians every year sacrificed their beloved only-begotten children to Cronus, and in Rhodes, in the month Metageitnion, on the sixth day, they slaughtered men to the same god. At Salamis, within a single enclosure shared by Athena Agraulis and Diomedes, a man was driven on, ran three times around the altar, and then the priest struck him with a spear in the throat and so burned him whole on the heaped-up pyre. Very many killings of men took place in Egypt too; three men a day were sacrificed to Hera in Heliopolis, until King Amosis, seeing the horror of it, ordered that the same number of wax figures be offered instead. In Chios they tore a man to pieces and sacrificed him to Dionysus Omadius, and in Tenedos likewise; in Lacedaemon they performed the human sacrifice to Ares. In Crete too they did this very thing, sacrificing men to Cronus. A maiden was sacrificed every year to Athena in Laodicea in Syria, but now a deer. Moreover the Libyans and Carthaginians propitiated their gods with human sacrifices. The Dumatenes of Arabia, too, every year sacrificed a boy and buried him beneath the altar; and history teaches that all the Greeks, before they went out to war, killed a man, and the Thracians and Scythians likewise. The Athenians recall the daughters of Leos and the daughter of Erechtheus who were slaughtered in sacrifice. But even now, who does not know that in the great city, at the festival of Zeus Latiaris, a man is slaughtered?
8| These things the most esteemed of the philosophers have attested to be so; and Diodorus, who epitomized the libraries, says that the Libyans publicly sacrificed to Cronus two hundred of the most distinguished boys, and that another three hundred, no fewer, volunteered themselves for the sacrifice; and Dionysius, the writer of Roman history, says that Zeus himself and Apollo demanded human sacrifices in Italy from the people called Aborigines. Those who were asked, he says, offered the due portion of all the fruits to the gods, but because they did not sacrifice human beings as well, they fell into every kind of misfortune and found no end of their evils until they tithed themselves; and so, by taking tithes of human beings and sacrificing them, they brought desolation on the land. With such evils the whole race of men was in ancient times worn down.
9| Yet to fare ill in these ways was not enough; they were enslaved to countless other incurable calamities. For together the nations throughout the whole inhabited world, Greek and barbarian alike, stung as if by some demonic activity, were torn by a dreadful and most grievous disease of faction, since the human race was unmixing and irreconcilable with itself, the great body of the common nature being torn apart here and there, men in every corner of the earth standing apart from one another and fighting one another over their laws and their forms of government,
10| and not only this, but growing ever wilder in frequent risings against one another, so that all their life long they were forever busy with battles and wars against one another; no one who wished could go anywhere unless armed in the manner of an enemy; in the fields and villages the farmers carried swords and kept armed equipment rather than tools for farming; and plundering and enslaving their neighbors was counted as part of virtue.
11| And not only this, but from the very tales they had invented about their own gods they took provisions for a shameful and lawless life, and corrupted their souls together with their bodies by every manner of licentiousness. And not only this, but overstepping the limits of nature they went further into unspeakable practices and into outrages against one another beyond belief: "males working shame with males, and receiving in themselves the recompense that was due for their error," as the sacred oracles say.
12| And not only this, but twisting the natural conceptions of God they supposed that everything here was without providence and without guardian, and ascribed the essence and constitution of the universe to an irrational and spontaneous nature and the necessity of fate.
13| And not only this, but, assuming that their souls perish together with their bodies, they led a beastlike existence and a life not worth living, neither inquiring into the essence of the soul, nor looking for the tribunals of divine judgment, nor for the prizes of virtue, nor taking into account any punishments for an unjust life.
14| And now whole nations were wasting away in a beastlike life under many forms of vice, some having intercourse with their mothers in unlawful and utterly lawless union, others marrying their sisters, others corrupting their own daughters; some slaughtering foreigners who came among them, others tasting human flesh, others strangling the aged with a noose and then feasting on them, others throwing them to dogs while still alive. Time would fail me to recount all the ancient disease that has mastered the entire human race,
15| These things, and countless others akin to them, were the reason why the Word of God, the lover of humankind, taking pity on the rational flock among men, long ago through certain of his prophets, and still earlier through other men dear to God, and after them through the disciples of later times, kept calling the despairing back to their own healing, laying down among human beings, by laws and exhortations and teachings of every kind, what were so to speak the preludes and first elements of godliness. But when the mortal race no longer needed a human power but a helper greater than any human one, wandering as it was here and there and mercilessly torn, not by wolves and untamed beasts but by dreadful, savage demons and by cruel, soul-destroying spirits, then at last the Word of God came to us himself, with great eagerness, and was present in our camp, obedient to the nod of the all-good Father.
16| The cause of his presence here was what has been set out. For the sake of all these things he came into the company of mortals, and he did not do what was customary for him, bodiless as he is, moving invisibly through the whole world and displaying his mighty works through the very works of heaven and earth; he acted in a newer manner, departing from his usual one. For he took up his converse and sojourn with mortals through a mortal instrument, taking forethought to save the mortal through what was like it.
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