Chapter 7: The Age of Serug and the Spread of Idolatry

The beginnings of idolatry assigned by the ancients to the age of Serug without reason or authority — Eusebius's Chronicle — Suidas interpolated — Serug from the family of Shem — Whether Terah the father of Abraham was a maker of statues — The opinion of Epiphanius on the origin of idolatry, and of Tertullian — The pictorial and sculptural arts in the service of idolatry — The rude beginnings of the pictorial art — According to Pliny and Athenagoras, who were its authors — The distinction between skia and eikon, Heb. 10:1 — The sun and moon as the first idols — The first worship of idols was simple adoration — Its progress — The worship of God as natural — All superstition full of fluctuations — The absence of new gods — Elijah's mockery of idolaters on account of the absence of their idols — The Ithyphallic hymn sung by the Athenians to Demetrius Poliorcetes — The occasion for making the calf of Aaron — The general influences of the celestial bodies — The madness and hardening of idolaters — The occasions for a new kind of superstition — The origin of pillars, stelae, and images — The testimony of Maimonides and of Plotinus — The method of making images; the idolatry of astrologers — The folly of ancient and more recent image-worship.

I. Nearly all the ancients assign the beginnings of idolatry to the age of Serug. Serug was born in the sixty-third year after the Babylonian dispersion. They hold that period of time to have been free from this crime. We do not doubt that, immediately from the dispersion, the greatest part of the apostate multitude said farewell to the worship of the one true God. Nor is any reason given why the age of Serug should be believed to have given a beginning to this crime in a special way. Very many follow Eusebius in the Chronicle. He asserts that Serug was from the tribe or family of Japheth, of whom Shem was the great-great-great-grandfather. The words of Eusebius are cited twice in Suidas; in both places Serug is said to have been from the family of Japheth, for a great many things are inserted in that work two or three times that are additions by later hands. But what they ascribe to Serug pertains to Hellenism; for they invent that he was the first to enter upon the way of paying religious honor to the dead, which they say Terah the father of Abraham promoted by the making of statues. Epiphanius writes this concerning Serug: "Not yet had that superstitious worship attached itself to carved images or engraved stones or wood or silver statues or those of any other material; but there was nothing other than colors and likenesses, in which the mind of men devised a new kind of wickedness peculiar to itself." At that time the whole preparation of idolatry, as Tertullian says, consisted in paintings and colors.

II. It would be easy to prove that the pictorial and sculptural arts had their beginnings in the service of idolatry; but that the former anticipated the latter in that work is another matter. The art of painting remained quite crude for several centuries, and was not suited to representing the gods unless they were first fashioned from some solid material. Pliny teaches that it had its beginning in skiagraphia, a rough likeness traced from the observation of a man's shadow. So Athenagoras, in the Legatio pro Christianis: "Saurias discovered shadow-painting, tracing the outline of a horse's shadow in the sun." But to paint in shadow the very Sun, whom they held to be virtually the first and only God, was quite difficult. He adds: "Craton was the first to show graphic art" (which of course added colors to lines) "who delineated the shadows of a man and a woman on a whitened tablet." Others added other things. From this comes that distinction of the apostle in (Hebrews 10:1), "For the law, having a shadow of the good things to come, not the very image of those things." Serug was the grandson of Terah through his son Nahor; that he practiced the potter's and sculptor's art and fashioned images was the invention of the Jews, and was believed by most of the ancient Christians.

III. The image-making of Terah therefore followed the idolatry of Serug by approximately eighty or a hundred years. And this is commonly assigned as the first advance of idolatry. We have entered upon other lines of reasoning in our investigation of the beginnings of superstitious worship; we will continue further on the path we have begun. The "new gods" — as the Holy Spirit speaks in (Judges 5:8) — which the apostates dispersed from Babylon first procured for themselves were the sun and moon, as we have shown, and other celestial bodies. They used these as guides, as it were, on their wanderings. The first worship consisted in simple adoration. The human race gradually slipped into other seeds of error and the most foul rites of superstition. We will set this forth briefly as the matter and the time allow.

IV. That some God be held and worshiped is demanded by that reason by which we are human beings. Hence the stings of conscience torment those who have forgotten the true God until they take up false ones. Thus the first apostates turned to the sun, the moon, and the celestial stars. The novelty of the thing, and the name of gods, was pleasing for a time. But into new difficulties of affairs, compelled by the peril of those most dear to them, the stings and terrors of conscience afflicted them with new anxiety and distress. For truly to enjoy tranquility of soul, where by superstition

by corrupt superstition war is declared against the true God, no one can. Therefore, at first these deities did not seem sufficiently present; for unless God is present, He is not to be regarded as a deity. We are imbued with the same natural instinct by which we are persuaded both that God exists and that He is present. Nor can the use of a deity suffice to repel dangers — for those who are the wisest among men in earthly matters only — if that deity is not more present than every danger, and therefore is not God. Hence Elijah rebukes the Baal-worshipping Israelites for the absence of their idol, in (1 Kings 18:27): "Cry with a loud voice, for he is a god; for either he is in conversation, or he is pursuing something, or he is on a journey; perhaps he is asleep." By a severe manifestation he strips the idol of every divine nature and every attribute befitting God, and thereby robs it of all power and removes it from divine sovereignty.

208 THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY. [Book 3.

V. And this consideration always kept all idolaters in such a state of suspense and anxiety that, although they attempted to remedy their fear and fluctuation by means of sacred pillars and images, as we shall see presently, yet it could not but happen that that uncertainty of mind by which they were agitated would at times break out and betray itself. From this it came about that the Athenian people, receiving Demetrius Poliorcetes, the liberator of the city, with divine honors, inserted among other things in the Ithyphallic hymn, or sacred song, sung to him as he entered the city walls, the following:

"O son of the most powerful Poseidon and of Aphrodite:"

"The other gods are either far away or lack ears"

"Or they do not exist, or they do not hear us, or they do not attend to us; but you we see present before us, not of wood nor of stone, but truly real:"

"Hail, son of Neptune, the most powerful of gods, and of Venus: other gods are indeed either far away, or lack ears, or do not exist, or do not turn their attention to caring for our affairs; but you we perceive as present, not a stony or wooden deity, but a true divinity." This is reported by Athenaeus in the Deipnosophistae, book 6, from Duris of Samos.

VI. For this reason, the Israelites in the desert compelled Aaron to cast the golden calf (Exodus 32:1). "Moses is absent," they said; "arise therefore, and make us gods who will go before us." They do not ask for other gods, nor for gods in an absolute sense, but for "gods who will go before us" and be present to assist them. For they were not demanding a god other than Jehovah, but rather some visible sign of the divine presence, to which they might flee in doubtful and difficult circumstances. And signs of this kind were afterward granted by God to that carnal people, though instituted by Him alone. And this was the beginning of the transgression fatal to that people. Hence it passed into a proverb: "No punishment has come upon you, O Israel, that does not contain an ounce of the iniquity of the calf." Frivolous and most characteristically Jewish is the attempt of certain rabbis to transfer the sin of forming the calf onto the rabble of the Egyptians — on the basis of Aaron's words, "I cast the gold into the fire, and this calf came out" — as though it had leapt forth unexpectedly, without any such intention on his part; for among those Egyptians there were certain magicians, by whose art it was brought about, they claim, that the calf came forth beyond the expectation of all.

VII. To the first idolaters, therefore, after they had judged that the stars of heaven were to be held in the place of deity, an occasion of a new superstition arose. As every lie is full and fruitful of others, so especially the greatest of all lies. Nor is there any error that does not either suggest enticements to many who are going astray, or bring necessity upon them. Those deities were absent. But in dangers, in doubtful and difficult circumstances, the presence of God was needed. Cast into these straits, they ought, by the dictate of right reason, to have returned to the God who is everywhere present. "But it did not seem good to them to retain that true God in their knowledge," as the apostle says (Romans 1:28); and therefore God gave them over to a mind devoid of all judgment. And deprived of right understanding, they had to do something by which they might make the gods they had chosen present to themselves.

VIII. Furthermore, since the effects of the operations of the celestial bodies were common and equal to all, it was exceedingly difficult to understand in what particular way each person might make himself a partaker of those benefits which they believed to flow from them. For one who is God of all in such a way that he takes no care of individuals, and benefits no one otherwise than when he bestows something upon all, is in truth God of no one. One who is not my God is not God to me. And from this they would most easily recognize that they had plunged themselves into incredible difficulties. But the die had been cast, and it was necessary to press on in the direction they had begun. By common notions, therefore, violence had to be done to nature itself. The defection of the human race from the rule and government of the one God cost no less than this. Once new, sensible gods had been established, what remained of right reason protested that they were not present, that they did not take care of individuals, and therefore were not gods to be worshipped or feared. A bad wedge was applied to bad knots, and lies were covered with lies, lest rain should fall through. For, with Satan's help, to meet this twofold deficiency arising from the first and greatest sin of idolatry, the idolaters entered upon new paths by which they might make their absent deities appear present, draw forth their beneficial influences, and concentrate them into some present object exposed to each individual. And this was the origin of sacred pillars, stelae, statues, and idols; which we shall set forth in what follows. IX. There were, as we said, two inconveniences under which the idolaters felt themselves pressed in the choice of new gods: first, that those gods were absent and far distant; second, that they took no care of individuals. They wished to remedy these by the erection of pillars and stelae. For they believed that by means of the relationship of these objects to the sun, moon, and stars — whether induced by diabolical incantations or imposed by the force of dedication — the very stars could be made present through a certain ethereal Spirit, and that their salutary influences could be drawn from them by the prayers and vows of any individual. This is what Maimonides teaches us from the ancient monuments of the Sabaeans in the Guide for the Perplexed, part 3, chapter 29: "According to the opinions of those Sabaeans," he says, "they erected images to the stars; and indeed, golden images to the sun, silver images to the moon, and so they divided the metals and the climates of the earth among the stars. For they said of the climates: such-and-such a god and such-and-such a star. Then they built shrines and placed images in them, believing that the powers of the stars flow into those images, and that those images possess the capacity of understanding, of imparting to men the gift of prophecy, and finally of indicating what is useful and beneficial to them. Thus they speak of trees that belong to the covenant of those stars, saying that when a tree

Is dedicated to a particular star, it is planted in that star's name and cultivated in this or that manner, so that the spiritual powers of the star may be infused into that tree. Plotinus sets forth the entire mystery in the Enneads, IV, book ii, chapter 11: "But the ancient wise men," he says, "who wished the gods to be present with them" (those whom they saw with their own eyes to be far removed from them), "making sacred objects and statues, directed the eye of the mind to the very nature of the universe; and they observed from this that the nature of the soul is everywhere very easy to lead and very prone to receive, and that it can most easily of all be captured, if anyone should fashion something suited to be readily acted upon by it, and thereby obtain some portion from it." This is what we have taught — namely, that the idolaters, those Plotinian wise men, hoped to capture the power or virtue of the soul of the heavens and the stars, and to enclose it in stelae or statues, so that it would always be present with them. And to show that this could indeed be done, he adds: "That which is readily susceptible is easily acted upon, being in whatever manner apt for imitation — like a mirror able to seize a certain image." That is, when an image or idol is erected to a celestial power, that power is prone to descend into it, so as to correspond to the imagination of its maker; and the image immediately seizes it, just as a mirror seizes the likeness of a body placed before it. "For," he says, "the nature of the universe fashions all things by a certain wonderful art, in imitation of those whose rational principles it possesses within itself" — that is, there is nothing among these lower things that was not fashioned after the likeness of some power that previously existed in the mind of the universe; which is the Platonic doctrine of ideas. The philosopher continues: "Since therefore each thing comes to be in matter as a rational principle, which is formed according to the higher rational principle prior to matter, it is conjoined to that God according to whom it was made, and toward whom the soul looked and had its being while it was making it." These words complete the entire mystery. A certain rational principle is given to the matter shaped into an idol, which corresponds exactly to that celestial rational principle which existed before that matter, and from this arises the relationship between the idol and that very thing to which it is consecrated. But why this particular idol, or this portion of matter, should have this particular god, or this particular portion of celestial power joined to it, rather than any other whatever, is not yet established. He shows that this comes about for a twofold reason. First, because it was fashioned according to that god: "It was conjoined to that God according to whom it came to be." But how could the fashioner of the idol know according to the power of which god

Chapter 7. The Origin and Progress of Idolatry. 211 that matter formed by him in such a way flowed forth? He can discern this from his own soul; for the god toward whom the soul looked when it made the image is the one according to whom it is fashioned. Whether, however, today's image-worshippers are able to give better reasons why this or that image refers to this or that saint rather than to any other, I very much doubt. Moreover, to add this in passing, this idolatrous delusion still openly persists among many who peddle the wicked art under the name of judicial astrology. For they make figures and images which they pretend correspond to the forms of the celestial bodies; and from this they persuade the foolish that those images acquire power and marvelous effects from the celestial figure. They also have statues and images, in which they say the spirits of the stars are enclosed. But whether those spirits are the powers of the celestial bodies or demons attending upon the stars, they do not know. All these things savor of gross idolatry, though Albertus Magnus in his Mirror, Marsilio Ficino in On Drawing Down Celestial Life, Girolamo Cardano, and others were not ashamed to thrust these most absurd prodigies of the pagan nations upon the Christian world, without either truth or modesty. In these things consists the whole rationale of magic; from which crime I am by no means able to free the consecration of the small images among the papists — which they call Agnus Dei — of wax candles, of holy water, and of other such things.