Chapter 13: The Corruption of the Idea of the Supreme God

Or on the Origin and Progress of Idolatry. — Chapter 11.

The novel and pestilential corruption of the notions of the one supreme God — Jupiter of Homer occupies His place — Contempt of the true God — Cicero's judgment on the religion of the Jews — Jupiter of Crete, where he was born and where he died — The opinion of Papinius and Callimachus — The tomb of Jupiter in Crete — The scholiast of Callimachus — The shades of Jupiter — Summanus — Dis Pater, the shades, who and what they are — Images fashioned in the likeness of bodily forms — Souls in the heavens and shades among the dead below — Remnants of Sabaism — Notions of the true God confused with the superstition of Jupiter and the Sun — The twelve gods — The origin of superstition — The ancient worship of divine power, and the unnamed throng of the Fates.

I. Abusing that obscured notion of the one supreme God, the ancient enemy of the human race attacked idolaters with a new and wondrous deception. He substituted one of the fictitious gods in His place. He feigned that all others either sit beside or serve that Most High one. That was the Homeric Jupiter, who boasts most absurdly of his own power over the lesser divine beings, Iliad, Book 8, lines 5–27:

Hear me, all you gods and all you goddesses — hear what my heart within my breast commands me.

Let no goddess and no god attempt this thing, but all of you obey me, so that I may bring these matters to completion as quickly as possible. Whomever I find going apart from the gods with the intention of helping either the Trojans or the Danaans —

whether helping the Trojans or helping the Danaans — he shall come back to Olympus, struck in no fitting manner,

or I shall take him and hurl him into murky Tartarus, far away, where the deepest gulf is beneath the earth, where the gates are of iron and the threshold of bronze, as far below Hades as heaven is above the earth — then he will know how far I am the mightiest of all the gods.

Come now, make trial, all you gods, so that you all may know this: hang a golden chain from heaven, and lay hold of it all you gods and all you goddesses —

yet you could not drag Zeus the supreme counselor down from heaven to the ground,

no matter how hard you toiled and labored with great effort.

But whenever I in turn should be minded to pull with full earnestness, I would draw you up along with the earth itself and the sea itself; and then I would bind the chain about a peak of Olympus,

and all these things would hang in the air suspended.

Such things concerning God, such things concerning men. So says he; and Eustathius vainly attempts to accommodate all of these things to natural matters from the teaching of the Stoics, Plato, and others. But he often leads Homer's words to a destination which Homer himself never suspected they belonged — no differently than what Donatus does in his explanation of the plots of Terence. Plato speaks excellently in the Phaedrus: "If anyone," he says, "having no faith in the poetic fables, wishes to render them into a plausible sense, relying on some sort of rustic wisdom, he will certainly have great need of leisure." But this Jupiter, to whom they assigned the prerogative of supreme dominion and those attributes which they deemed proper to the highest God, was none other than that most notorious scoundrel of Crete — or rather the devil himself, masked by the tradition of that Cretan Jupiter. The greatest orator, in his speech to the pontiffs on behalf of his own house, cap. lvi: "You, O Capitoline, whom the Roman people named Best on account of your benefits, and Greatest on account of your power; and you, Queen Juno," etc. Statius, in the most disgraceful confusion, feigns that the Best and Greatest God, the Capitoline Idol, the Husband of Juno, are all the same — Thebaid, bk. iv. 782: "Like the Berecynthian mother, while she bids the trembling Curetes to leap for joy around the little Thunderer."

II. And so, although they professed one supreme deity, they utterly despised the one God as He had revealed Himself. Hence arose the contempt for the religion of the Jews, who alone possessed knowledge of the one true God. Cicero, in his Oration for Lucius Flaccus, is a most abundant witness. "Each city has its own religion, Laelius," he says, cap. xxviii, "we have ours. While Jerusalem was standing" (that is, while Judea was under its own authority, not yet subject to the Romans, for the city was by no means overthrown at that time), "and the Jews were at peace, nevertheless the religion of those sacred rites was at variance with the splendor of this empire, the dignity of our name, and the institutions of our ancestors: but now all the more so, because that nation showed by arms what it thought of our empire; and how dear it was to the immortal gods, it taught by the fact that it was conquered, dispersed, and made a slave."

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III. Hence they could never fully explain the rational intention regarding that Jupiter of theirs, whom they knew to have been born a man from men. The most learned poet, who acknowledges that his Thunderer was once small but nonetheless denies that he died, Thebaid, i. 277: "Yet this honor of a temple

is a welcome honor to you; guilty Ida pleases, and Crete, which falsely claimed your shades."

Which he had drawn from Callimachus, in the Hymn to Jupiter:

Zeus, they say you were born on the Idaean mountains; Zeus, they say you were born in Arcadia; which of them, O father, lied?

Cretans are always liars; for they even built a tomb for you, O king,

which the Cretans built; but you did not die, for you are forever.

"Jupiter, they say you were born on the Idaean mountains; Jupiter, they say you were born in Arcadia: which of them, O father, lied?

Cretans are always liars; for indeed, O king, your tomb

The Cretans built; but you are not dead, for you are forever. Now, in order to convict the Cretans of falsehood regarding Jupiter's tomb, they devised a not inept fiction, which the ancient scholiast on Callimachus mentions. "In Crete," he says, "on the tomb of Minos, an inscription was written: The tomb of Minos, son of Jupiter; but in the course of time the name of Minos was worn away, so that only Jupiter's tomb remained; and from this the Cretans say that it is Jupiter's tomb" — "In Crete, on the sepulcher of Minos, the title was inscribed, 'The sepulcher of Minos, son of Jupiter'; but when, as time passed, the name of Minos was obliterated, only 'the sepulcher of Jupiter' remained; and on this basis the Cretans declared it to be the sepulcher of Jupiter."

IV. On this account Athenagoras, in his Embassy, mocks Callimachus for believing that his Jupiter was born of human beings, yet not allowing the existence of a mortal man's tomb. He was also foolish when he asked which of the two were lying — the Arcadians or the Cretans — each claiming the birth of Jupiter for themselves, while Cicero, in the third book of On the Nature of the Gods, teaches that there were three Jupiters, of whom he writes that the first two were born of aether and heaven in Arcadia, and the third was born of Saturn in Crete. Philostratus also, in Lives of the Sophists, book ii, records that the sophist Antiochus pleaded the case of the Cretans on account of Jupiter's tomb; and Lactantius, from Euhemerus, proves that he was buried there as well.

V. Pluto himself was nothing other than the shade of the dead Jupiter; and from this he was called Summanus, that is, the chief of the shades. Hence the opening of the imprecatory formula: "Father Dis, whether you are the shade of Jupiter, or by whatever other name it is lawful to name you." For Salmasius rightly notes, in his "Diatriba de Mutuo," that those whose souls had been received into heaven had their shades placed in the underworld. For these shades were, as it were, likenesses of bodies lacking souls, which the Greeks called shadows and phantoms of the underworld; concerning which the most learned Reynolds argues at length and admirably in his Praelectiones against Bellarmine, who maintains that the Greek word for image (eidolon) is only the likeness of a false thing, or of something that never existed. This shade, for Lucretius, is "air deprived of light," book iv. 369. Thus the simulacrum of Hercules —

— though Hercules had long been enrolled in the number of the gods, his simulacrum is placed among the dead by Homer. And that simulacrum of Achilles, which was summoned from the underworld by Apollonius the Magician, demanded of the Thessalians that sacred rites be established for him as if for some god. The soul, therefore, was not the shade that they placed above; nor was it the body, which they saw perishing in the earth; but rather a simulacrum fashioned in the likeness of the body, so that it could be seen and recognized by those who had known the one of whom it was the shade, yet it could not be touched. Aeneas in Virgil, Aen. ii. 771:

"To one seeking... The unhappy simulacrum and very shade of Creusa appeared before my eyes, an image larger than I had known her."

The shade of Deiphobus was also mutilated, after the likeness of his body, which Menelaus had cruelly punished, Aen. vi. 494: "And here he saw Deiphobus, son of Priam, his whole body mangled, his face savagely torn." This Jupiter, then, whom all confessed had been born, and most held had been buried — whose shades they placed in the underworld — they strove to raise to the throne of the supreme God and to exhaust in him all knowledge of the one true God. Hence also in the worship and all the sacred rites of the nations, there was always a wondrous frustration, no less remarkable, and no less ridiculous, than what Plautus invented in his double Amphitryon and double Sosias. VI. Nor does the heap of confusion end there. Among virtually all idolaters everywhere, Sabaism — that is, the worship of heavenly bodies — firmly maintained some footing, if not the same footing it had held from the beginning. In it the Sun alone was supreme, most high, nearly the one and only God. He too occupied the place of the supreme God. We have shown this at length before. Hence a new delusion, a new frustration arose, as if the ancient serpent took delight in making sport of those miserable little men enslaved to blindness and wickedness. The true conceptions of God, the Cretan Jupiter — or Satan masked by that idol — and the Sun, that heavenly body, the best and the worst, were confounded into one idol. VII. But the confusion of this wretched idolatrous superstition advanced yet further. Angels — the most noble of creatures, awaiting His nod in all things — serve the true God in heaven. Some knowledge of this the nations also retained, as in Orpheus:

Who around the throne stand as lords, ministers attendant.

"Angels, such as complete their ministry among mortals." But even here, in this ray of divine light, that word of Jude, verse 10, holds true: "But whatever things they understand by natural instinct, as irrational animals, in these things they are corrupted." These angels they transformed into certain lesser gods — makers of the world and inferior governors — to be worshiped and venerated with the highest devotion and divine honor. In place of these, within Hellenism, they substituted the chief deified men — those they call gods of the greater nations, who always stood at Jupiter's side — embracing, instead of God and the angels, the shades of Jupiter and the gods of the greater nations.

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VIII. They also invented lesser divine powers — lesser deities — as attendants on the Sun. In particular, the twelve signs of the zodiac were invented; and from these, twelve gods of the second order, or eleven, were also admitted into Hellenism along with Jupiter himself. Ennius comprised them all in this couplet:

"Juno, Vesta, Minerva, Ceres, Diana, Venus, Mars, Mercury, Jove, Neptune, Vulcan, Apollo."

Others say that twelve besides Jupiter himself were assigned to him as counselors and assessors. Thus Seneca: "Jupiter indeed sends the thunderbolt, but on the advice of a council; for he summons twelve gods." Hence they were called the consenting gods, because their agreement was sought in every decision to be rendered in heaven. Hence that saying of Augustine: "Who can bear the fact that happiness is established neither among the consenting gods, who are said to be admitted to Jupiter's council, nor among those whom they call the select gods?" Others posit eleven besides Jupiter himself: "If Jupiter brings eleven gods besides himself with him." Plautus, Epid. 5, 1, 4: "Twelve gods, more than there are immortal gods in heaven, are now my helpers and supporters," ibid. 5, 2, 10 — by which he implies that there are as many in heaven. And Demochares: "O Theophrastus, the judges were Athenian men, not the twelve gods who preside." Altars were erected everywhere for all of these together, in the Trojan plain: "From the altar of the twelve gods, next to the monument of Agamemnon" (Strabo, Geography, book 13, chapter 1). And again: "In the Agora where the altars of the twelve gods stood." And at Athens in the very forum by the tyrant Pisistratus, as Thucydides attests (History, book 6). These, as Apollodorus testifies, were called in as arbiters between Neptune and Minerva, who were disputing the name of Athens. Before them Mars, accused of the murder of Halirrhothius, pleaded his capital case on the Areopagus — that is, at the rock, which was thereafter named from that judgment. Hence also the dinner of the twelve gods of Augustus, as recorded by Suetonius, at which so many guests were present adorned in the guise of the gods.

9. The origin of this superstition from Egypt, as Herodotus reports (book 2, chapter 4): "They say," he writes, "that the Egyptians were the first to use the names of the twelve gods, and that the Greeks received them from them." But among the Egyptians the twelve gods were nothing other than the twelve signs of the zodiac. 10. Among these, as we have said, they preferred one above all the rest without measure, and invented the rest as submitting themselves to his authority. Hence that passage of Plautus in Casina, Act 2, Scene 5, line 23.

"So long as this one Jupiter is propitious to you, take care not to make light of those lesser gods." And Ulysses speaks of Hector to Achilles in Homer:

He rages beyond measure, trusting in Jupiter, and reveres neither mortals nor gods.

They believed, therefore, that these had performed a certain mediatory function on behalf of mortals before that supreme God. No theme appears more fre-

quently among the poets than the prayers of second-order gods offered to that supreme one on behalf of those with whom some bond of necessity had intervened. Thus Venus intercedes for the imperiled Trojans in Virgil, Aen. 10, 18-20:

"O father! O eternal power of men and gods! Do you not see how the Rutulians insult us? How Turnus is borne conspicuously through the midst on horseback?" Such also are those words of Pindar, Pyth. ode 6, 23:

Pray to the son of Cronus, the deep-thundering lord of lightning and of the gods, that you may be revered. The mediators themselves, moreover, were pursued by mortals with prayers and supplications; just as even today among the Papists the worship of daemons is practiced; concerning which the most learned Mede, on the Apostasy of the Latter

Times, should be consulted. And so, with God and angels, the sun and the signs of the zodiac, the Cretan Jupiter and other dead men, all confounded together by the dreadful madness of superstition, every notion concerning the one God was rendered thoroughly corrupt, vain, and useless.

11. There is no need for us to say anything about the remaining crowd of gods, whose origin is most uncertain. Plautus divides them into celestial, infernal, and inter medi-

ate gods; elsewhere Plautus divides them into great, least, and dish-gods. Ovid calls them the plebeian rank of the celestials, in his Ibis, 79: "You too, plebeian throng of the celestials, Fauns and Satyrs and Lares, rivers and Nymphs, and the race of demigods." In composing fables about these, the ancients scarcely ever agreed with one another on any point. Hence Pausanias, in his Boetica, after reviewing the opinion of the Thebans concerning certain gods, adds: "And on these matters the Megarians differ from them, and the Greeks generally disagree with one another in many ways." All of them distributed the gods into fixed classes, assigning some to heaven, who were called the supracelestial, transcelestial, and celestials; some to the air, who were called the airy and ethereal; others to earth and sea, who were called collectively earthborn, and specifically the earth-dwelling, underearth-dwelling, sea-dwelling, and sea-traversing; others to the underworld, who were called the subterranean, of Hades, below the earth, and under Hades. From their particular offices they were called the foreshadowers, expounders, purifiers, strangers, ancestral, nuptial, averters, warriors, forerunners, propitiators, escorts, repellers of evil, the averters of wrath, those who grant favor, the great, saviors, those of Cornus, the sea-wandering, the ones turned away, the birthright gods, and so on. There is scarcely anyone, however, who does not know that Papism has introduced this entire theatrical apparatus of pagan religion into the Christian faith.