Theologoumena Pantodapa (Book III: De Theologia Noachica Postdiluviana)

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2 Pet. iii. 5-7, The new heaven and new earth — What the old world was — The new world, Isa. li. 15, 16; lxv. 17; lxvi. 22 — The age to come — The future world — Noah a just man — The antediluvian had faith — Theology restored and enlarged in his family after the flood — The first express mention of the divine covenant — Promise and restipulation pertain to the nature of the covenant — In what respect the promise is called a covenant — The Hebrew word for covenant: its origin — It often signifies a bare promise, 2 Sam. xxiii. 5; Jer. xxxi. 31, 32 — Diatheke, syntheke — Covenant: its origin — How covenants were formerly ratified, Jer. xxxiv. 18 — On the sign of the covenant — The rainbow in the cloud — Why the sign of the covenant is called a covenant — The nature of the Noachic covenant — Precepts of theology added — Gen. ix. 5, 6, exposition of the first postdiluvian precept, on not shedding blood — The manner of judicial punishment by the magistrate established therein — The opinion of Onkelos — The origin of the lex talionis — Exposition of the second precept, on not eating flesh with blood, Gen. ix. 2, 3 — The seven Noachide precepts given — What the Hebrews understand by them — The fictitious speech of Noah to his sons in Inghirami — The restoration of the Noachic church — Its duration — The sin of Ham — The trifles of the Jews — The origin of the fable of Saturn's castration — Why Canaan was cursed — New promises given to the reformed church — Its fresh apostasy — The occasion of the apostasy — A general account of the apostasy of the Noachic church.

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I. In our previous dissertation we set forth the origin and progress of that mute theology, which consisted partly in the dictate of natural law or right reason, or in the remnants of innate theology, and partly in the revelation made to Adam after the entrance of sin. We also briefly showed there the various stages of its apostasy, which finally brought about the almost total defection of the whole world from God, and the dreadful punishment and utter destruction of apostate theologians. We now turn, in the next place, to setting forth the restoration, growth, progress, and events of this theology from the flood up to the calling of Abraham. Now blessed Peter presents this entire divine dispensation as follows: "For they willfully overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, by which the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men," 2 Pet. iii. 5-7.

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II. Here the apostle makes mention of two "worlds": that ancient one which had perished by water, and the one then present which was to be consumed by fire; after the destruction of which he foretells in verse 13 the coming of a third: "But according to His promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells." In neither passage does the apostle treat of the visible heaven and earth with respect to their substance. For when the ancient world was destroyed by water, the fabric of the heavens and earth nevertheless remained. That "world," therefore, consisted of the men living in the world. After these were destroyed by the flood, another world had to be raised up for the proper performance of the worship of God. God laid the foundations of this world in the family of Noah, and the erection and adornment of the Jewish church completed the whole structure. And this was the world which blessed Peter foretold would immediately be dissolved by fire, speaking, that is, in the prophetic style. So we read in Isaiah, ch. li. 15, 16: "I am the Lord your God, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar — the Lord of hosts is His name: and I have put My words in your mouth and covered you in the shadow of My hand, planting the heavens and laying the foundations of the earth, and saying to Zion, 'You are My people.'"

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tasized and hastened toward destruction by fire, just as that ancient world had plunged headlong into the flood. By the burning of the temple and city, the fabric of that world was dissolved. But since the consummation of the age had not yet come, the apostle commands believers to await another world — new heavens and a new earth — according to the promise of God. That promise is found in Isaiah ch. lxv., verse 17, and in the same words in ch. lxvi., verse 22. "For behold," he says, "I will create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind." The prophet in these passages depicts the state of the church after the coming of Christ — namely, the time when God would take from the Gentiles those to serve as priests and Levites, as the words of the last chapter's verse 21 have it; that is, when He would establish the evangelical ministry. Hence that state of the church, before the conflagration of this second world, was designated "the age to come" and "the future world," as Paul teaches us in the Epistle to the Hebrews, ch. ii. ver. 5, and also ch. vi. ver. 5. Thus the first or ancient world perished by the flood of water; the apostle foretells that the second, then present, will perish by fire, and confirms that the future one will endure until the consummation of the age. But let us return from this digression to the main road.

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V. We have previously divided the theology of the antediluvian sinners into three parts: the promise of grace, the law of nature, and the prescription of instituted worship. By the new revelation made to Noah, the first was further enlarged, the second was more fully expounded, and the third was established. For now for the first time God makes express mention of a covenant, Gen. ix. 9: "And I, behold, I establish My covenant with you." We have previously proved that God ratified with Adam a gracious compact, exhibiting spiritual benefits in the Mediator, in that most celebrated promise of the Seed. For the full solemnity of the divine covenant there is indeed required a promise of life and of all the means necessary for obtaining it by grace, together with the express exaction of obedience and restipulation. But it is not necessary that all these things be expressed together in every place where a covenant alone is treated. VI. A promise always includes the requirement of obedience. For obedience is nothing other than the due observance of the means appointed for obtaining the promised life. But where the obedience required in a covenant is merely moral, and therefore has its general foundation elsewhere than in the covenant itself — namely in the law of nature — and is rendered acceptable and pleasing to God through the covenant alone, when the promise is purely one of revelation, the name of covenant is specially ascribed to the promise. And this is what happens in this passage; the promise is called a covenant. But there are also other reasons why promise and covenant sound the same; this is not the place to set them out. A few things may be added concerning the word itself: some prefer to derive the Hebrew word for covenant from the root meaning "to cut" or "to cut off." So Grotius, in his Annotationes to the beginning of the Gospel according to Matthew, because in covenants victims were slain. Others derive it from a root meaning —

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"to choose" and also "to arrange"; and this derivation of the name is favored by that learned and pious man Cocceius, De Foedere Dei, ch. i. Another root is held to mean "to choose" and "to purify," by Mercerus at the root entry. Whatever its origin, the word often signifies a bare "promise," 2 Sam. xxiii. 5; Jer. xxxi. 31, 32; also a gratuitous and irrevocable "gift," Num. xviii. 9; and a "statute" or decree of God, Jer. xxxii. 21. And it is very frequently used where there is no place at all for a solemn agreement or compact between parties. In the New Testament it is rendered by diatheke, which word is as broad in scope as the Hebrew. Grotius attests that it is used of laws, pledges, and testaments. The word syntheke, which properly signifies "covenant," is not used in the New Testament for the explanation of the Hebrew word. The elder translators, the Seventy, always render that word by diatheke; Aquila and Symmachus do otherwise, using syntheke as well. Our Ballius, in his treatise De Foedere Divino, ch. i., asserts that the Seventy render the Hebrew word by syntheke at Isa. xxviii. 15. But the learned man is mistaken; for the word they translate there by syntheke is a different Hebrew word, which properly signifies "vision"; and at the beginning of the verse, according to their usual custom, they put diatheke in place of the other Hebrew word for covenant. The same Grotius gives the best account of the matter: "Synthekai," he says, "receive the force of a binding obligation from the concurring testimony of two wills; but what Moses and others call by the Hebrew word is generally of such a nature that it requires no consent of the other party, since the power to bind inheres in it by God's command and authority alone." So it is: God's covenant is not suspended upon our will, nor upon any conditions to be performed by us; it has all its virtue and effect from the authority, grace, and faithfulness of God Himself. For the promise of grace is absolute, and there is no condition of the covenant that is not already contained in the promise itself. They therefore act absurdly and perversely who attempt to expound the nature of the divine covenant from the nature of a covenant customarily ratified among men. Nor does "covenant" among the Latin authors always denote a solemn

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compact between parties, but sometimes denotes a law or ordinance: so in Virgil, Aen. i. 66: "And he gave a king, who, by a fixed law, when bidden, should know both how to curb and how to give free rein."

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We acknowledge, however, that this promise had the true nature of a covenant; and therefore Chrysostom interprets the diatheke of the Seventy in this passage by syntheke, in Homily xxviii. on Genesis. VII. Furthermore, "covenant" (foedus) is derived from "striking" (feriendo); the origin of the name comes from a foul superstition. Polybius, among others, recounts the custom of entering into covenants from which the origin of the name derives, in book iii. ch. xxv.: "The fetial," he says, "taking a stone in his hands, after agreement on the covenant between the parties had been reached, spoke these words: 'If I make this covenant and this oath rightly and without deceit, may the gods grant me every blessing; but if I act or think otherwise, while all else remains safe — in their own laws, their own households, their own temples, their own tombs — may I alone perish, as this stone falls from my hands.'" Others record that covenants were entered into differently, and that the fetial used these words: 'So may great Jupiter strike me foully,

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as I foully slay this pig, if I do not keep the compact of the covenant.' And with that, striking the pig with a blow of a stone, he killed it. Nearly the same account is given by Livy, book i. ch. xxiv.: "'Hear, Jupiter; hear, father pater patratus: as those things were publicly recited from those tablets or wax, from first to last, without deceit, and as they are here this day most rightly understood, the Roman people shall not be the first to depart from those laws. If the Roman people shall first depart, by public counsel, with evil intent, then, O Jupiter Diespiter, strike the Roman people as I today strike this pig; and strike them the more, the more you are able and powerful.' When he had said this, he struck the pig with a flint stone." In the same sense the poet writes: "Armed, they stood before the altars of Jupiter, holding the bowls, and ratified the covenant with a slain pig." — Aen. lib. viii. 640.

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"And the priest in pure vestment brought the offspring of the bristled swine...." — Lib. xii. 169.

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preceded the single combat between Paris and Menelaus: "that they cut the lambs." On which words Eustathius comments: "The cutting is the ancient custom among Homer and Herodotus — the sacrificial victims for oaths" — for the Ionic form is used in place of the standard term. In this manner the covenant was established between the princes of Judah and the king of Babylon, which God calls His own covenant on account of the invocation of His name, Jer. xxxiv. 18: "I will deliver the men who have transgressed My covenant, who have not fulfilled the words of the covenant which they made before Me, when they passed between the parts of the calf which they cut in two." And again, ver. 19: "Who passed between the parts of the calf." Those who passed between the parts of the victim loaded themselves with a curse, devoting themselves to such a cutting apart if they did not stand by the appointed terms. Thus Agamemnon prays to the gods, Iliad III.279:—

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"Whoever shall swear falsely —"

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"Be you witnesses, and guard the faithful covenants: — Whoever shall have sworn falsely, be you witnesses, and guard the faithful covenants."

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"He spoke, and with harsh iron cut the throats of the lambs —"

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"He spoke, and with harsh iron cut the throats of the lambs" — devoting perjurers to a like death. Neh. x. 29: "We made a covenant and an oath to walk in the law of God." Hence perhaps is that threat against the unfaithful servant: the Lord, Matt. xxiv. 51, will cut him in pieces on account of neglect of the covenant. And from this cutting of the victim, "to cut" among the Hebrews means "to strike a covenant:" 2 Chron. vii. 18, "And I will establish the throne of your kingdom, as I covenanted with David your father" — the LXX renders it "As I promised"; the Vulgate interpreter, "Pollicitus sum"; our vernacular translation, "As I have covenanted." Literally, "I cut," "I divided" — the same verb is used in the same way in ch. ii. of the prophet Haggai, and at ver. 5. But these things do not pertain to the simple sense.

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X. Furthermore: God now for the first time established a visible sign of the covenant, namely "the bow in the cloud," Gen. ix. 11-13. Not, indeed, that He now for the first time placed a bow in the cloud; but now for the first time He established a bow in the cloud as a sign of the covenant. In this manner the sacraments of the New Testament can apparently be called "signs of the covenant." By reason of this sign also, a promise is called a covenant. For a promise accompanied by a visible sign has the proper nature of a covenant. Hence the sign itself is sometimes called a covenant: "This cup is the new testament," Luc. xxii. 20. It is true that only the temporal benefit is expressly mentioned here, and the sign of the covenant itself directly regards a temporal benefit. Nevertheless, the spiritual grace — that is, the gratuitous love of God toward the faithful — is chiefly intended. For such was the dispensation of religious institutions before Christ was exhibited in the flesh. But all these things were "a shadow of things to come," Heb. x. 1, of which Christ, ch. ix. 11, was the high priest. And this "eternal covenant" existed nowhere except in Christ. A temporal benefit indeed flowed from it to all; but the spiritual grace of the covenant ratified in Christ pertains to the elect alone.

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XII. Furthermore, in order to enlarge this theology, precepts were also added to it, so that after the illustrious fall it might rise more clearly in every respect. The first was concerning homicide — that is, concerning the shedding of human blood. For the preservation of life is indeed the first and last concern; all other things are subordinate to it. The precept stands, Gen. ix. 5, 6: "And surely your blood, the blood of your lives, I will require; at the hand of every beast I will require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed." A solemn vindication of the shedding of human blood is here established. The shedding itself was prohibited by the law of nature. This is taught by both the crime and the punishment of Cain. Indeed, all violence against others so greatly rises against the dictate of right reason that that unbridled rage by which the antediluvian sinners, as though in a rush of violence, assaulted one another, was the gravest cause of the flood itself. But the solemn mode of punishing violence through a magistrate — extending beyond the bounds of private households and established by the mutual consent of many — had not yet been constituted. God therefore, granting the habitable world to the sons of Noah, burdened all with this condition: namely, that for the sake of maintaining political society and public peace among all, they should establish a magistracy among themselves. Hence the magistracy is a human ordinance; yet it is erected upon no foundation other than the firm one — namely, the command of God.

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XIV. The paraphrast Onkelos therefore rightly expounds these words: "Whoever sheds the blood of a man, by witnesses, by the sentence of a judge, shall his blood be shed." By the phrase "in man" he understands competent witnesses among men. Nor does Jonathan differ: "Whoever sheds the blood of a man, by witnesses, the judges shall condemn him to death; but whoever sheds blood without witnesses, the Lord of the world will take vengeance on him in the day of the great judgment." Grotius thinks that the natural right of retaliation is implied here, "because public courts had not yet been established." But the natural right of retaliation did not originate only now. And although public courts had not yet been established, provision was nevertheless made here that, as the human race increased — so that the grievous antediluvian age filled with unbridled violence might not return — they should be established. The magistrate is therefore instituted by God and the sword is placed in his hands, so that he might rightly succeed in his office.

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XV. To this precept was also added that one concerning not eating flesh with the blood, which is the life of the flesh. The investigation of this matter

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requires more labor than it yields in usefulness; so, having offered a brief explanation of it, let us set it aside.

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XVI. Most affirm that it was not permitted to men before the flood to eat flesh. For whatever privilege exists in the eating of flesh appears to have been granted only at Gen. 9:3 — the Hebrew words there are appended to those by which dominion over all animals is granted to man, ver. 2. This passage, compared with that other one by which God granted sustenance to the antediluvians, plainly shows that they did not use flesh for food. From this the reputation of abstinence from animals reached the nations. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I, fable 3, v. 103:

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"Content with foods created without any compulsion, they gathered the fruits of the arbutus tree, and mountain strawberries, and cornel berries, and blackberries clinging to the hard brambles, and acorns that had fallen from the wide-spreading tree of Jove." And again, Book XV, fable 2, v. 96:

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"But that ancient age, which we have called Golden, was blessed with the fruits of trees and with herbs that the earth brings forth, and it did not defile the mouth with blood. Then too the birds moved their wings safely through the air, and the hare wandered unafraid in the midst of the fields; nor had its own trustfulness hung the fish upon the hook." Virgil also, Georgics, II, v. 536:

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"Even before the scepter of the Dictaean king, and before the impious race feasted on slaughtered bullocks, Saturn led this golden life on earth." And from our own writers, Tertullian, On the Food of the Jews — if he is indeed the author of that book — chapter 2: "The first food of men," he says, "was solely the fruits and produce of trees." Hence the philosophers dispute at length as to how it came about that men were ever induced to eat flesh. After skillfully examining how this came to pass, Plutarch attributes it to necessity, in his oration on flesh-eating. Porphyry argues at greater length that this custom flowed from the practice of participating in sacrifices, in Book II of his work on abstinence from animal food. Casaubon shows from this that the ancient Greeks called all animals that are slaughtered by a sacred term, in his Animadversions on Athenaeus, Book I, chapter 11, because they ate no flesh except from those animals that had been slaughtered for use in sacrifices. Thus only whole burnt offerings were in use before the flood. After the eating of flesh was permitted, feasts from the sacred offerings accompanied the sacrifices — this is probable even before the law, although Selden argues the contrary in his work On the Natural Law among the Hebrews, Book III, chapter 8. For the origins of eating flesh, consult Bereshit Rabbah, Parasha 34, and Joseph Albo, Sefer ha-Ikkarim, part 3, chapter 14.

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XVII. Once flesh was permitted, the eating of it with the blood is forbidden, ver. 4 — the Hebrew reads: "But flesh in its life, in its blood, you shall not eat." It is not the eating of blood itself that is forbidden, but the eating of flesh together with the blood. It has been shown that the long-lived men of the ancient age were prone to cruelty. Hence the earth before the flood was filled with violence. Experience among the American Indians teaches that men are made savage by eating raw flesh and blood still nearly quivering in its movement. This prohibition of eating flesh with blood was given to counter that vice, into the vicinity of which, above all else, the human race, destitute of the word of God, seems to be placed. Some understand the reference to a limb torn from a living animal, which they say the barbarous Americans still relish as food. So Aben Ezra on this passage: "Because I have granted you the eating of the flesh of animals, you ought not to be cruel to the beasts themselves, so as to eat a limb from a living animal." Grotius holds that the more recent Jews have been led to this interpretation out of hatred for Christians — that is, for the Greeks among them — who, as Tertullian says, still abstain from sausages stuffed with blood. It scarcely seems to me that the eating of blood that has already grown cold is forbidden here. Nor can this be proven from the text by any adequate argument. Indeed, blood itself is not primarily, directly, or altogether prohibited; much less is the eating of it when separated from the flesh. The object of the prohibition is flesh affected in a particular manner — in its life, that is, while it is still animated by living blood. And it seems to me that Stephanus Curcellaeus has labored in vain in his Posthumous Disputation on the Eating of Blood, in which he contends that this question is of some moment in Christian practice. See Ludovicus De Dieu on this passage. But whether it is a limb from a living animal — that is, while the blood is still flowing — or the blood of a still-living animal, that is, blood still pulsating in the flesh, that is forbidden, remains uncertain.

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XVIII. To this chapter also belong those seven widely celebrated precepts which tradition holds God gave to the Noachides. They are commonly enumerated as follows:

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1. [Hebrew], Concerning the worship of a foreign god. 2. [Hebrew], Concerning the cursing of the Name or the Divine Power. 3. [Hebrew], Concerning the shedding of blood. 4. [Hebrew], Concerning the uncovering of shameful things. 5. [Hebrew], Concerning robbery. 6. [Hebrew], Concerning legal judgments.

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7. [Hebrew], Concerning a limb of a living animal.

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XIX. By the first of these, every kind of idolatry is forbidden. Concerning the sense and interpretation of the second, the learned do not agree; the dispute arises from the ambiguous use of the Hebrew word, which signifies both to bless and to curse. There are those who render the words affirmatively, wishing them to intend the blessing of the divine name, or true worship, as opposed to that foreign worship. More interpret it negatively, as a prohibition against cursing the name of God. The third concerns homicide. The fourth concerns adultery and every kind of illicit cohabitation. The fifth expresses the eighth commandment of the Decalogue. Political governance is established by the sixth; and the last teaches mortals to turn away from all cruelty.

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XX. Genebrardus asserts that these precepts were given to Noah and his sons in the first year after the flood; see his Chronicle, anno mundi 1656: "Seven precepts are given," he says, "which the Hebrews call in part the precepts of the sons of Noah, and in part the precepts of nature, and they hold that these oblige the nations as well." This persuasion, of course, flowed from the traditions of the Jews. Mention of them is very frequent in both Talmuds and in the writings of many rabbis. But it is false that the Jews affirm these precepts were given to Noah and his sons — that is, to those four men — immediately after the flood. By Noachides or sons of Noah, they understand all nations distinct from themselves; but they call themselves Abrahamides and sons of Israel, in opposition to the sons of Noah — absurdly, as if Abraham and Israel were not themselves sons of Noah. But they are fond of speaking this way. By Noachides they understand all those who, descended from Noah, enjoyed no spiritual privilege. When they affirm that these precepts were given to such persons, they mean nothing other than that these are the general dictates of right reason, or the chief principles of natural law having binding force over all those who are destitute of supernatural revelation — while they themselves are bound additionally by the written law. Hence the Seder Olam, chapter 5, and Sefer ha-Melakhim, chapter 9, affirm that the first six precepts were handed down to Adam — showing, namely, that they are the common dictates of nature, or the universal first principles of natural law. The last is asserted to have been added for Noah; and by it they interpret that commandment concerning not eating flesh with blood. See Manasseh, Conciliator, question 2 on Deuteronomy. Moreover, it is well known that John Selden has illuminated these precepts with most learned commentaries, to which we refer the reader who is eager to study these matters.

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XXI. I do not wish to insert here the speech of Noah to his descendants, whom he brought with him into Italy, which Curtius Inghiramius brought to light among the fragments of Etruscan antiquities, as though it might occupy some place in this exposition of antediluvian theology. For that entire drama concerning the discovered little globes, which were supposed to contain enclosed little histories of the antiquities of Etruria, from the arrival of Noah in Italy all the way to the Catilinarian war, seems to me — and not to me alone — the most labored fiction of a man certainly learned, but one who abused his leisure and his talents to excess, indeed impiously. However, since the author of this drama observed a certain propriety in the speech attributed to Noah, I judged it fitting to submit it here to the reader's judgment. The title of the little globe in which the speech was deposited is this: "Noa Vanprimon." Then: "These are the words of the great Vandimon, which I, Ancus Cecinna, have transcribed." The speech itself runs: "Hear, my sons and grandsons, my words, and receive with your ears what your father speaks to you. Blessed be God, in whose sight I found grace, who, having rescued me from the waters, preserved me for the repairing of the human race, which had been destroyed by the floods and rains of an angry God, lest what God had made should utterly perish. Therefore, be not ungrateful to the most great Alsar; fear Him alone; serve Him with your hearts, because He is worthy, and because He has done many good things for you, and because He is God. If the most great Alsar shall always be God to you, nothing shall be wanting to you. Let His altar not be polluted; let no one seek the life of his brother, as Cain did. Let there be among you a bond of peace, and let it never be broken. You have this city, which I built on this mountain; when this is not sufficient for you (for you ought to multiply), you will be able to build others on the same mountain; and if the mountain is not sufficient for you, choose healthy places in which you may build others. And if there are no dissensions among you, all things will prosper for you. Whoever does not fear God, and whoever dissents from his brothers, let him be expelled from you, because a brother's discord corrupts everything. Do not, my sons, again provoke God through fornication, iniquity, and wickedness, but remember God who made you, who delivered you from the waters, and who created all things for your sake and subjected all things to you. God destroys the impious from among the good; love Him alone, and do all things in fear of Him; for doing these things, you will be filled with an abundance of grain, wine, and oil, and the sons of your brothers will serve you. Your kingdom will endure forever. Keep always the sacred rites and ceremonies and all things handed down to you; and teach these to your sons. May God bless you and fill you with every blessing; and may He soon send a king to deliver you from foreign power." So much for him; I marvel that such nonsense ever pleased any learned men, since not a single page of the whole book fails to indicate its fraud and imposture sufficiently. XXII. And such was postdiluvian theology: namely, that natural theology of Adam, destined to a new end through the promise of the Messiah and committed to new uses, conformed to that condition into which Satan had by sin craftily drawn all men — enlarged and renewed by new revelation, by the solemn renewal of the covenant, by a visible sign, and by various precepts — which the church of eight souls held as the rule of faith, obedience, and all divine worship. We have no reason to doubt that many who were equipped with it passed their lives with the highest reverence toward God, with piety, faith, love, and obedience; and toward their own kind with gentleness, charity, mercy, justice, and faithfulness. For holiness of heart, purity and integrity of life, beneficence toward others, simplicity and uprightness of all conduct, and the remaining virtues by which men are renewed to the image of God — these flourished even at the lowest external degree of revelation, provided the Holy Spirit was present, illuminating the minds of men with His saving light. XXIII. By virtue of this theology, the reformed church, as regards external profession and administration, continued on earth pure and acceptable to God for about forty years. For nothing that in any way defiled it was recorded except after the birth, and perhaps the advancement to some years of age, of Canaan, the fourth and youngest son of Ham. At last Ham's long-concealed impiety broke forth. What its nature was, the Holy Spirit shows in Gen. ix. 22. The sin was against the dictates of right reason, which, as Aristotle testifies, all peoples teach as being natural. So also Plutarch, in his work on brotherly love, writes as follows — the Greek text of which, though heavily damaged in transmission, Owen himself renders in Latin: "All men say and sing that nature and the law of nature have appointed the first and greatest honor, next after the gods, to parents; nor do men please the gods more than when they cheerfully discharge to their parents and those who reared them the old debts of gratitude, compounded with new ones. Nor, on the other hand, is there a greater proof of impiety and lack of moral training than contempt of parents and injury done to them. And so it is forbidden to us to harm others; but for a man not to give himself to his mother and father in such a way that he always says and does those things which give them joy, even if he causes no additional distress, is held to be impious and unjust." This he says excellently. Hierocles has similar sentiments, and nearly the entire chorus of the wise. It is therefore remarkable that some, on account of the words of Gen. ix. 24 — "And he knew what his younger son had done to him" — contend that Canaan, and not Ham, must be understood. "For what," they say, "did Ham do to his father? He was merely a messenger to his brothers of his father's shame." These are the words of the great Scaliger in his Elenchus of the oration of David Paraeus. He did this, I say: he openly and publicly transgressed the law of nature, which is clearly established from the act of his brothers, set in contrast to his impiety. He exposed the nakedness of his father to his brothers, as Josephus correctly states in Antiquities, Book I, ch. 1. He therefore sinned against the highest principles of that theology which was the foundation and standard of the church, of worship, and of obedience. XXIV. The sin of Ham, therefore, as we have shown, Holy Scripture expounds quite clearly. What some add to that narrative are conjectures — indeed, the ravings of dreamers. The Rabbis, Rashi on Gen. ch. ix, babble that he not only saw or gazed with pleasure and a certain mockery at his father's nakedness, but that he cut off his genitals, or bewitched him by magical arts so that he could no longer beget sons. Boissardus in his work on Apollonius of Tyana clings to these fables, and Athanasius Kircher in his work on the Origin of Letters and Obelisks, ch. i, seems to give them credence. From this, nearly everyone suspects that the myth of Saturn cutting off the genitals of his father Heaven, as Lactantius relates in Book I, ch. xii, or of Jupiter cutting Saturn with a sickle, had its origin. And this indeed is very probable, although, to confess the truth, Porphyry in his book on the Cave of the Nymphs at Ithaca so skillfully accommodates the entire myth to cryptic natural theology that I could almost believe the first mythmakers had something of this sort in mind. As for the curse, it is expressly pronounced against Canaan: either because he was at that time most particularly his father's delight, being indeed his youngest son; or because he stood by his father in the sin and that wicked spectacle; or because that family among the descendants of Ham was to be the first to depart from the true church and the worship of God; or for the consolation of the Israelites, who, about to enter the promised land, might understand that the people with whom they were about to engage in war was accursed, and had long been appointed to servitude and destruction. Whatever the case, it is most certain that Ham himself was cursed in the person of his son — that is, expelled from the family of God. Remarkable, or rather laughable, are the things which some of the ancients prattle about the passion of Christ being prefigured in Noah's drunkenness — the cross, the sacraments, the Gentiles, the Jews, the ministers of the word — all of which they imagined they could see in the wine, in Ham, in Japheth, in the garment. XXV. On account of this sin, therefore, by which his long-concealed hypocrisy broke out to the gravest scandal of the church and displayed itself openly, Ham was cursed by his father, who still presided over the whole church under God with paternal authority. In his expulsion from the fellowship of the godly, moreover, we have another illustrious example of ecclesiastical reformation. For the reformation of the church is to be attempted first through the removal of the sinning from the assembly and communion of those who rightly worship God through faith. We gave an earlier example of this in the post-lapsarian church of Adam. But when the band of the rebellious grows strong, the separation of the faithful from their assemblies takes its place. XXVI. In this manner, therefore, the reformation of the new church was instituted. For such is the weakness of all and the wickedness of many, that no church has ever from the beginning of the world been able to endure long without some notable reformation. To this newly reformed church new promises were given: partly for the consolation of their most wretched condition, and partly to serve as spurs to more exact obedience, and to living a life of the utmost care and diligence before God. Gen. ix. 26, 27: "Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and may God allure Japheth, that he may dwell in the tents of Shem." XXVII. That Ham, driven away from the solemn worship of God by the paternal curse, also fled all the assemblies of the godly, there is no doubt. But the time had not yet come when the human race was to be dispersed into the various parts of the earth. Therefore Ham and his household continued to dwell under the same quarter of the sky with his brothers and their descendants. Hence arose a new corruption of evil; hence again sprouted the seat of defection in the church, so recently emerged from the flood and newly reformed. No one doubts that Noah, Shem, Japheth, and their pious sons and grandsons endeavored to preserve intact in the church the purity of the worship of God according to the canons of that theology in which they had been instructed. Both their own piety and their duty toward others required this. But from their descendants very many, swept away by the impious seductions and examples of the Hamites, and having themselves also a nature headlong toward every wickedness, shamefully and almost universally defected from the governance and worship of God within a few years, as we shall understand from what followed. For in the one hundred and first year after the flood, a senseless, arrogant, and obstinate crowd of apostates, steeped in crimes, openly setting aside the authority, discipline, and warnings of Noah, rushed headlong into every wickedness. And since the humble, peaceable, and godly manner of life of Noah was most displeasing to them, they went off into everything contrary to it. Having therefore cast aside all reverence for God, and puffed up with some inexplicable pride, they set themselves to building a tower by which they might acquire a name and glory for themselves.

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Noah — The myth of Saturn and Rhea arising from this — Janus — A herald of justice — The fictitious Sibylline Oracles — Authors of the Sibylline poems — The origin of the name "Sibyl" — Traditions mixed into their oracles — A specimen — The builders of the tower of Babylon; the reason and cause of its building — What was the primeval language — The opinion of Grotius examined — Why the Hebrew language is called the holy tongue, Gen. x. 21; Jos. xxiv. 2, 3 — The monstrous fables of Uzziell the Targumist — Abraham called "the Hebrew" from Eber — The time of the division of languages.

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I. That Noah was a "man of the earth" — that is, one occupied with a humble manner of life — Scripture notes in Gen. ix. 20. This befitted the wretched condition of sinners on earth, and his own in particular, who had witnessed the dreadful judgments of God upon the antediluvian world. Hence the mythmakers called Saturn the husband of Rhea, that is, of the Earth. This is the conjecture of Bochart, Geog. Sac., lib. i. cap. i. Whatever later ages may have thought of him, it is plain that this manner of life was displeasing to the ungodly of his age. He also planted a vineyard and drank of the wine; hence he was called Janus. That he was a preacher of righteousness in the antediluvian age, the apostle affirms in 2 Pet. ii. 5. Faithfully discharging that office, he condemned the world — which he could not heal — by his faith and deeds, Heb. xi. 7. His preaching is remembered in the poems called the Sibylline Oracles, in these and other verses:

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O men, stained with wickedness and wickedness, trusting in mortal breath: you have not called upon God with a cry. For the immortal Savior, all-governing, who sent me as His messenger, knows all things — do not wander from the path of the righteous.

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Cease from evils, putting aside wickedness; stop injuring one another violently, having a murderous heart,

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defiling the earth with human bloodshed, practicing impiety widely.

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This is the Sibyl who, shortly afterwards, pretends that she was Noah's daughter-in-law and was with him and her husband in the ark. But everything that circulates under the name of the Sibyls is fabricated. I marvel that any mortal could ever have been of so abject credulity as to think otherwise. Their authors not only drew very much from the Holy Scriptures, but were Christians — and heretics at that. It is not improbable that Priscilla and Maximilla, the prophetesses of Montanus, composed these chants, if women were the authors of that work. The mysteries of the Christian religion were drawn from the Sibylline Oracles only after their prophecies had been published. I would not deny that certain prophetic women whom they called Sibyls, as though privy to the more secret counsels of the gods (for, as Diodorus says in lib. iv. 61, to be divinely inspired is what is meant by the word sibyllaino), lived among the nations. But all historical testimony teaches that their lots and oracles were diabolical. Let one consult what Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Cicero, Varro, Livy, Tacitus, Zosimus, and others — who have recorded what was drawn from their books at various times by order of the Roman Senate — have attested; everything smacks of diabolical superstition and Hellenism. Cornelius Tacitus sums up all of it in Annals xv. cap. xliv: "It was customary," he says, "to seek expiations from the gods, and the Sibylline books were consulted, from which supplications were made to Vulcan, Ceres, and Proserpina, and Juno was propitiated by the matrons, first on the Capitol, then at the nearest shore." Perhaps, however, the ancient serpent — after his custom of making truth suspect and gaining credit for falsehoods — did mix some true things in with the false. Even those things which, through a faint tradition of the first promise and of other divine revelations, had penetrated the earlier ages of the world concerning the future kingdom of the Messiah, may have been drawn into pagan gaps and intermingled with these oracles. Such seems to be the passage that Marcus Tullius mentions in lib. ii. de Divinatione, cap. liv.: "We observe," he says, "the verses of the Sibyl, which she is said to have poured forth in a frenzy; of which it was recently reported by common rumor that I was about to say in the Senate that he whom we truly had as king should also be called king, if we wished to be safe. If this is in the books, to what man and to what time does it refer? For he who composed those verses was clever in this respect: he omitted any specification of persons and times, so that whatever came to pass might appear to have been predicted." He notes Lucius Cotta, one of the quindecimviri, who — at the instigation of Antony, who sought to add even the name of royal power to the ambition of Julius Caesar — attempted to satisfy public expectation of that era concerning a coming great king. The same oracle is expounded in nearly the same words by the most eminent of Roman historians, Suetonius and Tacitus: the former in the Life of Vespasian, the latter in the fifth book of the Histories. Suetonius calls it "an old and established opinion." Tacitus calls it "a persuasion from the ancient books of the priests" — namely: from the East one will prevail, and one who goes forth from Judea will gain dominion. But these things have nothing to do with our verses.

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III. Holy Scripture clearly indicates that Noah himself, and all the pious, abstained from that mad enterprise of the apostates. Those who undertook that deed were the "sons of men," Gen. xi. 5 — that is, "sons of men." These are set in opposition to the "sons of God" — that is, the pious and God-fearing. For from the days of Enosh, both before and after the flood, the "sons of God" were the pious men who adhered to the Adamic theology and divine worship, while the "sons of men" were deserters and apostates. The Holy Spirit here therefore indicates the ungodly apostates and deserters of the church. Boys have dreamed up a giant-myth born from this passage. But they built the tower not in order to ascend into heaven. Nor is it credible that those whom God prevented from completing what they had begun (v. 6) were mad with that particular insanity. Nor did they undertake that deed in order to secure themselves against another flood. They could not have been ignorant that there would be no more universal floods. Nor for that reason would they have descended from the highest mountains of the whole earth into a very deep valley. But Moses expressly testifies that, lifted up with pride and vainglory, they had resolved among themselves to acquire a NAME and glory for themselves by that work, v. 4.

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IV. Much is debated in various places about the confusion of languages, but this is not the place for it. Let us add a few words about the primeval language and the reason for the name it afterward obtained. We have said that the "sons of God" in no way made themselves accomplices in the crime. With them, therefore, and their descendants, the use of the primeval language remained. Learned men are nearly unanimous that this language was Hebrew — the language, namely, that was afterward called by that name. The distinguished Bochart correctly states [Geog. Sac.], lib. i. cap. x.: "While the languages of others were confused, these" (that is, the pious participants in the covenant) "retained their own — namely, that most ancient tongue which, from Heber, was called Hebrew, because it remained whole and intact among the posterity of Heber." As far as I know, among more recent writers Grotius alone holds a different opinion, in his Annotations on Gen. cap. xi. 1, "The earth was of one lip." "That language," he says, "the Hebrews call their own; the Syrians call it their own." This is correct; the Hebrews say so, and say so consistently. So the Targum of Jonathan: "They spoke in the holy tongue in which the world was created from the beginning." The Jerusalem Targum uses the same words. Rabbi Solomon Jarchi on this passage: "One lip is the holy tongue." So also Aben Ezra and all the ancient Christians, with the exception of Theodoret. "But the Syrians think it was their language," says Grotius. This too is true. In that opinion are the Maro-

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nites, after Theodoret. That they think so is clearly quite absurd. All who have any understanding in the analogy of these languages acknowledge that the Syriac language derives from the Hebrew, not the Hebrew from the Syriac. The purity and simplicity of the Hebrew language itself proclaims this. "The Syrian Maronites," says Joseph Scaliger in his letter to Richard Thomson, "contend with any pledge that Syriac is more ancient than Hebrew; but this is the height of ignorance: for it is just as if one were to say that Italian is more ancient than Latin. For certainly Hebrew is prior to Aramaic, and we can bring forward many other arguments to overcome this obstinacy." "But the Hebrew language," says Grotius, "is the language of sojourners from Chaldea. For this is the origin of the name 'Hebrews,' not from Heber. See Jos. xxiv. 2, 3. Therefore that Hebrew language of Abraham and his posterity, through their sojourn in Canaan, drew ever closer and closer to the Canaanite language." So says he — nothing sound. V. I confess that this etymology — of 'Hebrew' and 'Hebrews' — has pleased, and still pleases, certain learned men. Erpenius collected the arguments for that position in his Oratio de Lingua Hebraica, which Fullerus refutes in Miscellaneorum Sacrorum lib. iv. cap. iv., and Rivetus in his Exercitationes on Genesis, Exercit. lxvi.; and we have shown above that Bochart rejects that derivation of those words. It was indeed a great thing in former times to have come out of Mesopotamia, for the peoples whom, as Philostratus says, "the rivers hold in their embrace — the confused ones" — considered themselves islanders, as it were, saying that they went down to the sea when they went to the rivers, and made the circuit of the rivers the boundary of the earth, as Philostratus says in the Life of Apollonius, lib. i. cap. xiv. But that Abraham was called a Hebrew from this, and the holy Hebrew language the language of sojourners — that is, him a transitory person, and this the language of those passing through — is altogether incredible. Moses says "that Shem was the father of all the sons of Heber," Gen. x. 21. What else can this be but "the father of all the Hebrews"? VI. Therefore the sons of Heber are the Hebrews, and the Hebrews are the sons of Heber. And this is the basis of that etymology. Some say these words can mean "that Shem was the father of all those beyond the river." But this is said without any example and is entirely without plausibility. If the Holy Spirit had said "He himself is the father of all the Hebrews" — that conjecture would not have been so futile. But the words stand as they are — namely, "to the posterity of Heber" — and it is clear from the common usage of the holy tongue that no others are denoted. Nor can any plausible reason be given why Shem should be called preeminently the father of all those beyond the river, since the greatest part of his own posterity always dwelt on this side of the river, while very many families descended from Ham crossed over it. Moreover, what we have said about Heber is expressly affirmed by Balaam in his last oracle, Num. xxiv. 24: "Ships from Chittim shall afflict Asshur, and shall afflict Eber" — where interpreters agree that the prophet uses gentile names and patronymics in place of conjugates, so much so that the Vulgate renders it "Assyrians and Hebrews."

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VII. But Grotius sends us to Jos. xxiv. 3. Joshua does indeed say in that place that God took Abraham from beyond the river, "from the crossing of the river," or from the place that was beyond the river. Grotius therefore concludes that Abraham was called a Hebrew from this — as one might say, a "crosser" — and that for this reason, namely because Abraham crossed the river, that name was put into use by the Holy Spirit to become the surname of all his posterity, so that they would be called crossers for all time, or the people of those who cross over. But no parallel or similar basis for such an etymology exists anywhere in the records of any people. Not even a trace of the reason for such a conjecture appears here. Nor was Abraham the only one in that age who had crossed the Euphrates in order to migrate to the land of Canaan. For that reason — and not because he had dwelt in Mesopotamia — he was no more to be called a crosser or a trans-fluvian than very many others. Indeed, it is most certain that the greater part of the Canaanites, descended of course from Ham, crossed the Euphrates not long after the Babylonian dispersion. They therefore, on the basis of this derivation of the word, would have to be called Hebrews no less than Abraham himself and his posterity, and could have boasted no less than the apostle Paul that they were Hebrews of the Hebrews.

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VIII. It is gratuitously said — indeed, falsely presumed — by some in this matter that Abraham was first called a Hebrew by the Canaanites, as though they wished to denote his crossing over, which they had almost, as they say, seen with their own eyes, by that name. For he was first marked with that surname by the Holy Spirit Himself, in Gen. xiv. 13: "He came," it says, "who had escaped, and reported to Abraham the Hebrew." These are the words of the Holy Spirit, not of the Canaanites. It is true that among the Canaanites he was first called by that name — but not by the Canaanites. But the LXX (Septuagint) renders those words "to Abraham the crosser." Chrysostom too was quite incautious in thinking that Abraham was therefore called Abram, and that that name carries such a signification, in his Homily on Gen. xxxv.: "From the beginning," he says, "the parents imposed the name prophesying of him his

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From there he passed over: "For because he had crossed over the Euphrates and was coming into Palestine, for this reason also Abraham was called" — "From the beginning his parents had given him this name, signifying beforehand that he would migrate from there. For he was called Abram because he was about to cross over the Euphrates and come into Palestine." Would that this most learned man had erred from ignorance of the Hebrew language in this place alone. But that the meaning of this name is altogether different, even children know. Some think that the LXX (Septuagint) called Abraham a "passer-over" from a certain word. But the force of the word plainly deceives them. They rendered the interpretation of the word, not the word itself. That this was their custom, Jerome observes, on Isa. 27:12, where on the contrary they render a Hebrew word by "Rhinocurura." "For the stream of Egypt," he says, "the LXX (Septuagint) translated 'Rhinocurura,' which is a town on the border of Egypt and Palestine, expressing not so much the words of the Scriptures as the sense of the words." Thus deceived by the similarity of letters, they more than once translated the word for "Hebrew" as "servant." For they read Daleth in place of Resh. At Isa. 41:3, a Hebrew phrase — "Let the Hebrews hear" — the LXX (Septuagint) renders as "The servants were contemptuous." What that rendering means, I do not know. And at Jon. 1:9, a Hebrew phrase — "I am a Hebrew" — the LXX (Septuagint) renders as "I am a servant of the Lord," where they add "of the Lord" on their own, in order to give some color to their error. There is therefore no reason why their interpretation of this name should move us in the least. But if Moses had wished to call him a passer-over and not a Hebrew, he would not have used the word that is plainly a patronymic — as Augustine, Steuchus, and Buxtorf show — but another form. The reason for the derivation from a proper name is ready at hand. The entire nation of the Canaanites, which was eventually to be extirpated, had at that time been formed from many families which had been driven from their eastern seats by various accidents, or impelled by a certain impulse from God, and had been led into that land under various leaders. And all of them were distinguished from one another by surnames taken from the most well-known founders of their families (not from Ham, not from Canaan himself, just as Abraham was not named from Shem), which Moses enumerates in Gen. 10:15–18. This one was an Amorite, that one a Jebusite, another a Hivite, and another a Hittite. Each one was named from his own stock, or the founder of his stock. Abraham, dwelling among them, was called by the name of the most famous founder of the family from which he had descended, and was thus separated from the entire line of Ham, even by his familiar designation. For in the very same passage where Abraham is first called "Hebrew," his ally Mamre is called an "Amorite"; so that we can easily perceive that the rationale for both surnames was the same, for both are equally patronymics. Just as therefore all the peoples of that land were distinguished from one another by being marked with some patronymic name, so Abraham was called "Hebrew" from the most celebrated founder of his stock — and it is in a different sense that the Targumists take this word. Whoever consults Ben Uzziel on this passage will encounter a fable which I thought should be expounded here, so that the reader may understand what coals instead of treasure those will find who happen to fall upon this Talmudic fabulist; for scarcely anywhere does he reveal his character more than here. His account of Gen. 14:13 runs thus: "And Og came, who had escaped from the men who had died in the flood; and he had ridden upon the ark, and there was a covering on its top, and he was fed from Noah's food; and he was not rescued by his own righteousness, but that the inhabitants of the world might see his strength and say: Did not the giants who were from the beginning rebel against the Lord of the world, and were they not destroyed from the earth? And he came to Abraham, at the close of the Day of Passover, and found him making unleavened cakes." To these add his account of the end of this same antediluvian Og, which he narrates at Num. 22 thus: "And it came to pass that after the wicked Og... saw the camp of the Israelites, which extended six miles, he said to himself, I will array a battle line against this people, so that they do not do to me as they did to Sihon."

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Sihon. He went and tore up a mountain six miles in extent, and placed it upon his head to hurl it at them. Immediately the word of the Lord prepared a worm which gnawed through the mountain and bored through it, and his head was plunged into the middle of it; he wished to draw his head out of it" (not as it is in the London translation, "He wished to draw it out from his head") "but could not, because his teeth and molars had been drawn out to one side and the other; Moses went and took an axe ten cubits long, and leaped ten cubits, and struck him on the heel of his foot, and falling he died." Such are his tales — worthy to be counted among Aesop's fables; and yet not worthy of that, since they are insipid, and in every way useless, indeed harmful. The Quran of Muhammad teems with no more shameless lies than this Pentateuch of Ben Uzziel. And he is all the more to be detested for this, that this trifler set out to defile the sacred oracles of God. Targum Onkelos has the Hebrew word for "Hebrew"; and at Exod. 2:6, it renders the Hebrew word for "Hebrews" as "Jews"; and at Deut. 15:12, the phrase "your brother the Hebrew" is rendered as "your brother the son of Israel." For Onkelos, Hebrew, Jew, and son of Israel are the same thing; and this is what that patronymic name signifies.

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IX. Some object that no probable reason can be assigned why the entire family was named after Heber rather than after others, namely Shem or Arphaxad; or why Abraham, rather than other descendants of Heber, should be called "Hebrew" from Heber. But a probable cause and a rationale for both are not lacking. That Heber was highly distinguished among the new people is probable from the fact that, setting aside the rest, Shem is pointedly said to be "the father of all the children of Heber" in Gen. 10:21. And no reason can be assigned by which he could have attained that degree of honor except through holiness and virtue toward God. Furthermore, of all the patriarchs who were born after the flood, he was the longest-lived, and he outlived his own son Peleg. After Peleg's death there can be no doubt that he took special care of his grandchildren and was to them in the place of an immediate parent. Thus, although Aram was the youngest son of Shem, yet because he lived longer than all his brothers, the Syriac language, which very many others besides his own progeny used, was called Aramaic — as Elias Levita teaches us in his preface to the Methurgamim. Heber also lived, distinguished for piety, at the time when the languages were confused and the earth was divided; and in view of this specimen of adorable divine providence, he gave his son the name Peleg. He also appears to have been the leader of those who did not consent to the building of the tower, as evidenced by the preservation of the primeval language in his family. It was therefore not without the weightiest reasons that his name was passed down to his descendants. That they constituted a family or tribe separately from the rest of Shem's posterity is most plainly apparent from those words of Moses which we cited earlier.

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X. Furthermore: it is evident from the outcome that not only did all the sons of Joktan, who was the younger son of Heber, join themselves to the apostate crowd, but also that very many of those descended from Peleg himself mingled with them and bade farewell to the paternal family in which the pure worship of God had flourished. But Abraham followed the footsteps of the pious ancestors, and indeed of Heber himself, more than any of the rest — although he himself also was not free from the stain of the common defection. At length, however, by God's leading and by the benefit of new revelations, he restored the ancient piety and the worship of God that had been banished from the earth. Should it therefore seem strange — especially since he became celebrated above all other mortals of his age and was constituted the head and founder of a most glorious nation — that he claimed for himself and his posterity the celebrated patronymic name (which his apostasy had rejected, or at least held in no esteem, in what remained of that kinship)? Nor was the crossing of a river of such importance that from it a name enduring forever should be given to him and to the entire holy nation. The migration of Abraham from his homeland and the land of his kindred, in order to follow God, to a place he did not know, was indeed an illustrious demonstration of his faith. But he judges wrongly who thinks that this Abrahamic obedience is to be estimated from the crossing of the river, which he had in common with countless others. That, obedient to God's word, complying with His will and commands, he left his paternal home and his own dwelling, and the superstitious worship in which he had been reared, drawn by no hope of a better condition, to follow God to a place he did not know — this, among countless other things, commends his faith. If the crossing of the river is compared with these things, it will be a matter of no importance. But that this migration so greatly pleased God that for this reason he received the promises — that his posterity would possess by hereditary right the land into which he would journey, and that in him all the families of the earth would be blessed — as some affirm, is false and absurd. False, because he had received those promises before he had crossed the Tigris, let alone the Euphrates, as can be seen in Gen. 12:1–4. And it is absurd because it teaches that this is in any way to be attributed to Abraham's obedience, when it is most certain that it came entirely from mere grace. For that God gave those promises to Abraham without any regard to any preceding obedience is more fully acknowledged than to need proofs. Regarding this origin of the name of the Hebrews, those among the Jews who agree with us are: Josephus, Antiq., lib. i. cap. vi.; the Threefold Targum; Aben Ezra on Exod. 1; Kimchi, root; Elias Levita, Methurgam. — Among the Fathers and ancient Christians: Eusebius, Preepar. Evangel., lib. vii. cap. ii; Jerome, Quaest. in Gen.; Augustine, de Civitat. Dei, lib. xvi. cap. iii.; Eucherius in Gen., lib. 2. cap. vi.; Zonaras, Annal., lib. i. — Among the more recent writers: Calvin on Gen. 10:20; Pererius on Gen. 20; Mercerus on Gen. 14:13, and in the Lexicon of Pagninus, root; Munster on Gen. 11:16; Drusius on Gen. 14:13; Paraeus on Gen. 14:15; Junius, Orat. de Ling. Heb.; Cornelius a Lapide on Gen. 14; Buxtorf, Dissertat. de Ling. Heb. Conservat.; Sigonius, de Repub. Heb.; Schindler in the Lexicon, root; Bochart, lib. i. cap. x., and countless others.

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He concedes that Hebrew was the language of Abraham; but what that language was, since that ancient language was not coeval with the world, he does not show. "Chaldean," says Cappellus, in Chronol. Sac. Not. ad Tab. Secundam. "That language of Abraham and his posterity, through their dwelling in Canaan, drew nearer and nearer to the Canaanite language," says Grotius. That he learned the Canaanite language — which he claims was that primeval language now called Hebrew — from the Canaanites, Cappellus asserts. We grant that the language of the Canaanites (from which the Punic language derived) closely approached the Hebrew language. This has been shown most plainly, after others, by the distinguished Bochart in his truly admirable work, the argument being drawn from the proper names of cities and men. But that those who were without doubt among the chief builders of the tower of Babylon retained the pure, primeval, holy language, while those who religiously abstained from that crime — among whom, if any, were the ancestors of Abraham — had forgotten it: this surpasses all belief. Joseph Scaliger preceded Cappellus in this opinion, in his Epist. ad Thomsonum and Animad. Euseb. ad num. Deccry. But we are about to show that the Hebrew language was the primeval language. The loss of that language was a punishment. Whether anyone can bring himself to seriously believe that those who had never consented to the crime which merited that punishment were penalized by ignorance or corruption of that language, I strongly doubt. That some of them deviated somewhat from the purity of the dialect over the course of time is probable. Elias, in his preface to the Methurgamim, affirms that such a deviation was the origin of the Chaldean language. But that the accursed Canaanites, devoted to eternal destruction, retained the pure primeval language; that Abraham also learned their language, whatever it was; and that he communicated that language alone to his posterity, to whom it was most strictly forbidden to have anything in common with those Canaanites whom they were to exterminate from the face of the earth — these things seem absurd.

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Becanus attempted to claim the honor of primeval antiquity for his own vernacular language — but in vain, for the matter has been settled here against all such claims. That God wished to record His oracles in a language that was a mixture of others, each equally corrupt, does not seem credible. But the most learned Mercerus long since replied to these objections, and we need no other words to refute the vanity of these exceptions. His words are as follows: "I hold it for certain and persuaded and beyond doubt that that primogenial language was Hebrew, although some who are more unfavorable to this view say that proper names were changed by Moses and translated into his own language which he favored; as if historians did not commonly retain proper names even of barbarian peoples unchanged, though they sometimes change them when, over the course of time, the names of regions or places have been altered. But they generally retain men's names unchanged, only accommodated to the inflection and structure of their own language, somewhat twisted and corrupted; yet in such a way that the origin is easily recognized. Add to this: the etymology of all proper names before the flood, and after it up to the division of the languages, cannot be attributed to any other language; and neither can those of others after that time which Moses uses, than to Hebrew — as Eve from a Hebrew word meaning 'life,' and another meaning 'mother of the living.' Cain, Abel, Seth, Mahalaleel, Kenan, Noah, etc., of all of whom and of the rest the source can only be Hebrew." These words of his are learned and pious.

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XIII. But whether it is probable that all these proper names of men were translated into another language by Moses, when for most of them no adequate reason for such a translation can be given, let the learned judge. A Hebrew name meaning "appointed" is derived from a Hebrew verb meaning "he placed," because God "placed another seed," etc. What also will they say about the wordplays drawn from the Hebrew language, which are the very opposite of their argument? Such as that saying, "God enlarge Japheth." But some say that these words were also in use in the Chaldean or Syriac language; but their pretension is plainly met by those words of Adam, "She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man" — a Hebrew word for "woman" derived from a Hebrew word for "man" — whereas among the Chaldeans the word for "woman" is one thing and the word for "man" is quite another, between which words no such affinity exists as the first-former implies.

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Selden holds, in Prolegom. ii. de Diis Syris. And thus Elias Levita teaches us in his preface, saying in Hebrew: "The Aramaic language is a corrupt form of the holy language." Elsewhere he proves from Rabbi Aben Ezra that it is nearer to the holy language than all other languages; and he adds furthermore: "It is evident that this language was already corrupted in the time of the patriarchs. The proof of this is the Aramaic phrase 'jegar sahaddutha'; it therefore seems to me that it must be said to have become corrupted as soon as Abraham left Chaldea. For without doubt he and his fathers spoke the holy language, just as they received it from Adam down to Noah, one from the mouth of another."

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XVII. But when it had been driven into this state and condition

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CHAP. TITLE.] ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY. 179 nearly the whole human race, and had been left to the counsel of its own mind — after, that is, weariness of the true God and of His worship had seized them — it poured itself gradually into every form of idolatry. The earlier ages, to be sure, could not entirely cast aside all the knowledge of God that they had received either from the instruction of their parents or from vague tradition. We accordingly find that very many of them — as is the manner of men convicted by the small sparks of divine light — did indeed fear God, yet at the same time served idols. But as time went on, all revealed theology being gradually rejected, and the memory of the solemn promise and of the divine covenant being utterly abolished, the whole world polluted itself universally with unspeakable and most vile idolatries. It is therefore our purpose to investigate here more carefully the origin and progress of those idolatries, as we promised above.

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OR CONCERNING THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY, OR OF WILL-WORSHIP.—CHAPTER 1.

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The origins of idolatry most uncertain — Diversity of opinions concerning them — Reasons for a new investigation — Adamic idolatry in paradise — The apostasy and superstition of Cain — The Enoshian reformation of the church — Before the flood, no idolatry properly so called — The "golden age" after the flood — In it no traces of idolatry — Whence men were called mortal — The time of the division of languages and the dispersion of the human race — The builders of the tower of Babylon, what sort of men they were — What purpose they had in building it — Among them the origins of idolatry are to be sought.

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Whoever conjectures best, consider him the truest prophet. — [Eurip. Frag. inc. 128.]

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"Call him the best prophet who conjectures well." Thus Cicero renders that verse from Euripides. Some think that idolatry occupied the world before the flood. This is the view of most of the Jews, especially Maimonides, at the beginning of his work on the Worship of the Stars, whom Selden follows in the Prolegomena to his Syntagma on the Syrian Gods. Others think that when they came out of the ark, Satan first sprinkled this poison upon them. The Targumists specifically lay this crime upon Ham. To others it seems that no sure traces or express monuments of arbitrary and profane worship can be found before the building of the tower of Babylon, which the stubborn and proud descendants of Noah undertook in memory of their immortality. Here, therefore, we must pause for a moment, and investigate the sources of this Nile — most fertile of monsters — from which, indeed —

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180 THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY. [Book II.] came forth — the sources must be investigated. This is a most fruitful field for surveying the records of ancient time; and although great intellects have cultivated it, yet, as commonly happens in investigating the most obscure origins of things, and of those concerning which —

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“Scarce a faint breath of fame reaches us” — there remains here still much ground in which others may long and profitably exercise themselves. The reader will easily see from what we are about to present on this topic that, after the most abundant harvests of others, there has been no lack of reasons for bringing forth these gleanings of our own. For if we cannot bring new light to the things themselves — that is, to the origins of foreign worship, which are shrouded in more than sufficient darkness — yet we are led to some hope that we shall set forth at least what relation they bore to the worship of God, and by what deceits the most ancient impostor beguiled the human race and led it into error; and other things quietly passed over by learned men who have cultivated this topic with great erudition — things not unwelcome to the reader, lending some light to a most obscure truth. My intention is to touch only on the chief points of these matters, so that I may freely satisfy the work I have proposed and keep to the path I have set out.

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II. We showed above that God instilled in man, created for His own glory, a law of obedience encompassing all those things that necessarily follow from his nature, condition, and ultimate end. He never permitted that law to be the complete rule and revelation of all divine worship. To it, in the state of creation before the entrance of sin, He added the ordinance concerning not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In that act, with respect to the external deed, the rational creature made the beginning of defection from God. But the foundation of the defect was laid in moral worship. For by placing faith in the serpent against God’s threatening, man held the serpent in God’s place to that extent. And this was a certain species of idolatry — indeed the worst — which still flourishes among all those who, setting aside the authority of the divine promises and threatenings, make themselves obedient to Satan. Yet this is not that proper idolatry whose origins we are investigating.

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III. After the entrance of sin, God restored natural theology enlarged by new revelations and the institution of sacrifices, and consecrated to new ends. In the worship thus instituted, sin was immediately committed again, preceded by unbelief. We have explained above the nature and outcome of that sin. We also showed that Cain, cursed by God, entirely abandoned His solemn worship. It is indeed probable that he, and the citizens of Enoch over whom he presided (Gen. 4), repudiated that worship — namely, of sacrifices — from which he had drawn the first stain of evil, and usurped new rites of his own devising, worshipping with self-chosen devotion. That he obtained for himself new gods, as the Scripture says (Judg. 5:8), there are obstacles to our believing. For it was not possible for Cain to so strip off his humanity as to fabricate other gods for himself after that express and open communication which had passed between him and Jehovah, the Creator of all things.

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IV. As time went on, and some of the Sethites had also lapsed into the ways of the Cainites, the pious Enoshians, together with a reformation of divine worship — so that it might be preserved more purely and for a longer time for duly calling upon the name of God — instituted separate assemblies, and from this they were called "sons of God." Gen. 4, at the end: "Then men began to call upon the name of the Lord." We also showed above that some falsely suppose those words to mark the origin of foreign worship. For the Holy Spirit indicates not a profanation of the divine name, but a reformation of the church.

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V. God Himself complains that before the flood all flesh had corrupted its way. Nor is there any doubt that the apostates most openly declared war against God and religion. But that they were bound by this particular crime — namely, idolatry — there is no testimony, no foundation for making a probable conjecture. Since we have demonstrated this clearly with arguments above, I do not wish to go over ground already covered here. We therefore necessarily pass over the antediluvian ages in this inquiry. For the opinion of Justin Martyr does not please me; who interprets the sons of God, who, captivated by love for the daughters of men, united them to themselves, as angels; and that from them were born demons who immediately gave themselves to the promotion of idolatry: Apol. to the Roman Senate.

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VI. What the Targumists and other Jews wildly imagine concerning Ham’s idolatry and magical incantations, and the nature of that crime, does not belong here. That age which intervened between the flood and the Babylonic dispersion of the nations left very few traces, or none at all, in the surviving monuments of history. Whatever that span of time was, Noah, the great paterfamilias, held the entire human race descended from him under his godly and fatherly governance. That was the Golden Age, about which the ancient fabulists say a great deal.

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They sought all things in common; and the earth itself freely brought forth all things, no one demanding it.” And Martial, Epigrams, book xii.:— “O great king of the ancient Pole, and of the former world, under whom there was lazy ease and no toil at all, no thunderbolt too regal, and no earth deserving the thunderbolt, nor cleft open to the shades, but rich with its own produce.” Both of these refer to Saturn, drawing from Hesiod; for so he writes, Works and Days, 111:—

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Those who lived in the time of Kronos, when he reigned over heaven; they lived like gods, with hearts free from care, apart from toil and sorrow—

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182 ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY. [Book III.

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The oaks themselves gave honey,”’ etc.

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Lucian has similar things in his work on the Kronia, chapter 7. He introduces Saturn speaking — and because of this he appointed times of rest, feasting, games, equality of all, both slaves and free men, for no one was a slave under him — all of which refers to Noah’s fatherly governance and the undivided earth. Plutarch, in the Life of Numa, relates that from this the license of slaves during the Saturnalia among the Romans originated.

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VII. For Noah was Saturn. He was the greatest herald of righteousness among the antediluvians, 2 Pet. 1:5, and the contempt shown to his warnings was followed by the dreadful destruction of the human race. Therefore, so long as his sons and grandsons either stood in awe of his authority or showed themselves obedient to his words and preaching, it is not equitable for us to suppose that they committed this crime against themselves. VIII. Most believe that the confusion of languages occurred in the one hundred and first or second year after the flood. Then men came to be called meropes and were so designated — a race of meropes among men, as Homer says in the Iliad, A. 250: “cities of men of varied speech.” Meropes, that is, those who have their speech divided, or, as Didymus says, those whose voice is organized into syllables and articulate — that is, because men have their tongue divided and prepared for pronouncing syllables, or because they use articulate speech; whereas the sounds of other animals are inarticulate. Hesychius agrees with the scholiast: meropes are men, because their speech is divided or articulated. Eustathius likewise cites this same interpretation first; to which he adds the view of those more learned: that it was the common opinion of the ancient Christians that men were called meropes from that division of languages which they suffered in the building of the tower of Babylon, being scattered everywhere throughout the earth. John of Antioch, surnamed Malalas, has similar things: the languages were divided; and from this, men are called meropes, because their speech was divided into many tongues and voices; the languages were parceled out, and from this men are called meropes, Chron. Theol. Log. Deut. Now just as men were called meropes on account of the division of languages, so the place in which this punishment was inflicted on the rebels is called Babel, as if to say confusion came: or

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The word Babel is used for Babylon, meaning "confusion," with the middle lamed dropped to avoid cacophony. Peleg was born in the one hundred and first year after the flood. That name was given to him, as Gen. 10:25 states, "because in his days the earth was divided." And the verb is used elsewhere in the same sense, in Ps. 55:10, "Divide their tongue." Most of the Jews affirm that this name was given to Heber's son by a spirit of prophecy. Cornelius a Lapide and Augustine Torniellus are of the same opinion: the former in his Commentaries on Gen., the latter in his Annals at the year of the world 1931. Thus Noah's godly parents, in the naming of Noah, seem to have looked forward to things that would not be fulfilled until six hundred years later. The Jews, led by arguments not altogether inept, maintain that the Tower of Babylon was built in the two hundredth year of Peleg's life. Whatever pertains to understanding or rightly establishing this chronological dispute, the most distinguished Buxtorf the son set forth in a special dissertation on the origin of multiple languages. Seth Calvisius in his Chronology, Pererius, Pareus, Rivetus in his Commentaries and Disputations on Genesis; Torniellus in his Annals of the World; Masius in his Commentary on Joshua; Usher in his Sacred Chronology, and very many others, both theologians and chronologists, have woven the same web.

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IX. Those who assert that the division of languages occurred at the birth of Peleg, and that his name was given to him on account of that event, appear in some men's opinion to posit too short an interval from the flood — shorter than what would have been needed for the human population to grow to the multitude that set itself to building the tower; for, as we said, the birth of Peleg falls in the one hundred and first year after the flood. Those, on the other hand, who think that the name was given to Peleg by a spirit of prophecy, and who place the dispersion of the human race at the end of his life, are thereby forced to place the coming of Abraham into the land of Canaan in the year of the world 1996, eighty-eight years after that dispersion — a span that likewise seems too short for the erection of those kingdoms which sacred history reports to have been founded in those times. Buxtorf therefore denies that Peleg was the firstborn of Heber, or that he was born in the seventy-fourth year of his father's life, and instead pushes his birth, and consequently the division of languages, to a much later time. But Johannes Temporarius shows, in the second of his Chronological Demonstrations, that within 102 years of Noachic stock 1,554,420 males and females could have been born; Usher, in Sacred Chronology, book 5, accepts half that number, and there most learnedly refutes the madness and notorious audacity of Johannes Morin in rejecting the Hebrew chronology. Let us therefore grant that the building of the Tower of Babylon and the division of languages occurred in the year of the world 1757, 101 or 102 years after the flood. Up to that time, there remains nothing to testify that any traces, any monuments, any evidences of idolatry existed or had ever existed; at least no traces of it survive.

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X. The Jerusalem Targum teaches that the builders of the Tower of Babylon had in their minds to place an image on the summit of that impious pile, which they intended to worship with religious devotion. "They said," it records, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower, whose top shall reach to the height of the heavens, and let us make for ourselves something to worship on its summit, and let us put a sword in its hand." Jonathan Ben Uzziel adds nearly the same story in almost the same words. It is the common opinion of learned men that this tower stood for a long time after the confusion of languages. And it appears to be none other than the structure which Herodotus describes at length under the name of the temple of Bel, in book 1, chapter 181. It consisted of eight towers placed one upon another (of which the first at least, if not each one, was a stade in height). Of the topmost he speaks as follows: "In the last tower there is a great shrine, and in the shrine a great couch is splendidly laid," etc. Thus, not long after the confusion of languages, that mad edifice was turned into a temple of an idol, that is, of the sun. But the Jews seek the origin of their interpretation elsewhere; they think that the words which Moses records, by which the builders exhorted one another to take up the work, hint at that design. "And let us make for ourselves a name" — meaning, they say, "an idol of great name." For they maintain that the word for any deity, true or false, is used absolutely in this way. The word does indeed signify "God" emphatically in some places, Lev. 24:11; but "name" absolutely nowhere, nor does it mean "idol." If this were true, nowhere could anyone find a more illustrious document for the origin of idolatry among the nations. Nor would it be necessary to think that this crime crept upon the world gradually and by various degrees, seizing upon various occasions as pretexts; rather, a deliberate apostasy of the human race from God would have given it its origin. But this is a rabbinical delusion; and the words which the builders used plainly look in a different direction. Being mortal, and subject to various misfortunes, and especially to dispersion into the remote regions of the earth, they intended to achieve an immortal fame and glory. That intention of their minds they expressed in the words, "Let us make for ourselves a name" — that is, let us leave behind to our posterity a hereditary title of praise and glory. Nor is it credible that nearly all the families of the entire world conspired, as if in a single gust of wind, against the living God, and, casting off all reverence and worship of the Creator, simultaneously resolved to worship idols.

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Col. iii. 11 — Epiphanius’s distinction of the various religions — Two kinds of idolatry: Sabaism and Hellenism — The peculiar superstition of the Druids — The beginning of idolatry in the worship of celestial bodies, Job xxxi. 26-28 — The exposition of the ancients noted — The time when Job lived — The beginning of error in the seduction of the heart, Deut. xi. 16 — The mode of the most ancient worship — What adoration is — Religious salutation — The ecstasy of Socrates — Catulus — Pompey — The kiss — Religious adoration, Ps. ii. 12 — The rendering of the LXX (Septuagint) noted — Jerome on Hos. xiii. 2 — The custom of adoration by kisses, from Pliny, Apuleius, Lucian, Minutius Felix — The rationale for bodily bowing in adoration — The first sacrifices to idols without blood — The opinion of Porphyry — Reconciliation of opinions on the origin of sacrifices, Gen. iv. 4, viii. 20 — The offering of grain added to adoration, Hos. ii. 8 — The origin of other ceremonies — The nature and desert of idolatry — The Egyptians as the first worshippers of the stars — The Chaldeans and Persians join them — Whether the sun alone was God among the Persians — The opinion of Herodotus — The number of gods continually increased with the succession of time — Writers on the history of the Magi — The practice of the Greeks and Romans in cataloguing the gods of other nations — The gods of the Germans and Gauls — Tacitus noted — The sun as the most ancient god of the Carthaginians — Also of the Greeks, as Plato testifies — The rationale for the siting of sacred places — The beginnings of idolatry — The folly and blasphemies of Cardanus — Nimrod among the builders of the tower of Babylon — The trifles of the Jews — The universality of solar worship, its polyonymy.

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I. Paul the apostle, in the third chapter of the Epistle to the Colossians, teaches that in Jesus Christ there is neither Greek, nor Jew, nor Barbarian, nor Scythian. From this Epiphanius, in the first book against Heresies, draws out various species of religion: Barbarism, Scythism, Hellenism, and Judaism. He writes that Barbarism prevailed from Adam to Noah; Scythism from Noah to the age of Serug, at which point Hellenism was introduced; and he traces the beginning of Judaism from the circumcision of Abraham. But since he holds that the entry of idolatry into the world occurred after the flood, it is clear that by Barbarism he understands that ferocity and violence of morals which laid waste the antediluvian world. Between Scythism and Hellenism he places this distinction: that image-worship was introduced by the latter, from which the former was free. Whether he has distinguished these things rightly or not, let others judge; Petavius denies it in his annotations on that passage. We, for our part, hold that all that idolatrous worship which occupied nearly the whole world was of two kinds, one of which may be called Sabaism, and the other Hellenism. But since there were many peculiarities in the superstition of the Druids, we will describe that separately in a few words. Sabaism consisted in the worship and religion of the sky, the sun, the moon, and the stars; Hellenism added to it the veneration of deceased men and of demons. The adoration of images, likenesses, and stars was common to both. But the crowd of idolaters worshipped the heavens before they worshipped fictitious celestial beings. Thus idolatry had its beginning in Sabaism, that is, in the worship of celestial things. This we will first demonstrate. Then we will show in brief what handles of corrupt superstition the human race seized upon, and by what vain reasonings Satan drew men into deceit and error; and, as far as we are able to determine by conjecture, we will mark the time of the origin of this most pernicious error.

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II. That idolatry established its beginning in the world in the worship of the sky and the sun is proved by all the monuments of past ages. For there exist in the Old Testament, beyond all the credibility of profane history and the most ancient memory of events among the nations, illustrious testimonies of this crime. To this effect, the most ancient writer — whether he was Moses, which is most probable, or another divinely inspired man of equal age, through whom the Holy Spirit entrusted the history of Job to the faith of the church — records the apologetic words of that most holy man: cap. xxxi. 26-28, “If I have seen the sun when it shone, and the moon walking honorably; and my heart has secretly seduced itself, and my mouth has kissed my hand: this also would have been iniquity deserving judgment, because I would have denied God who is above.” With due respect to them, I would say that what Chrysostom, Nilus, Olympiodorus, and other ancients comment on this passage is most inept. They deny that idolatry is being discussed here, and claim that Job, in denying that his hand kissed his mouth, meant to say that he had never felt so arrogantly about his own virtues and works — which he denotes by the sun — or about the fame of his name, which he attributes to the moon, as to have kissed his own hand, as if whatever help or ability he possessed he had achieved from himself alone. These things, I say, are inept, and contrary both to the scope of the passage and to its very words. The holy man is speaking most openly about the worship of celestial bodies. Moreover, while he carefully separates this crime from himself, he makes plain that very many others in that time were engaged in it. Job lived some 350 years after the Babylonian dispersion, in the year of the world 2100, or thereabouts. The words show that in that century this superstition had made progress and had spread far and wide. But Job attributes the beginning of error to the seduction of the heart.

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The Holy Spirit also elsewhere reveals this source of idolatry: Deut. xi. 16, “Beware lest your heart deceive you, and turn you away to foreign gods.” All other things are naturally suited to point toward the true God; all the danger lies in the human heart alone. Therefore, deceived by the appearance of empty reasonings — which would have had no force, unless they had first been wholly turned away from love of God and of spiritual things — the most ancient idolaters worshipped the sun and moon religiously, at first in secret, and then openly. We will set forth those shadows of reasoning in the next chapter. The mode of worship that he mentions is simple adoration. Now adoration is a religious salutation expressed by bringing the hand to the mouth. In this the error of the heart first expressed itself; other religious ceremonies were introduced gradually. Thus Plato relates that Socrates greeted the sun, and sometimes underwent a state of ecstasy in that form of worship. Although superstition grew immensely, yet that simple adoration endured through all the ages of ancient ignorance. Catulus, in Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, book i. chap. xxviii.: “I had stopped, as it happened, greeting the rising dawn, when suddenly Roscius arose on my left.”

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For they especially worshipped the rising sun. Hence the contemptuous gibe of Pompey against the declining dominion of Sulla: “More people worship the rising sun than the setting sun” — Plutarch, Life of Pompey. And from this, temples were built facing the rising of the sun. Nor does the ancient custom among Christians of bowing toward the east and worshipping come from any other source — though other reasons are put forward for that superstitious practice — for they are all plainly futile.

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III. Furthermore, Job denies that his hand, brought to his mouth, had kissed it, or had pressed a kiss. For the kiss was indeed a pledge and sign of religious worship. So the Psalmist, Ps. ii. 12, in Hebrew, “Kiss the Son” — that is, worship with religious reverence. The LXX (Septuagint) corrupts the sense of the passage, rendering the words as “Lay hold of instruction,” and the Vulgate interpreter follows them. Jerome acknowledges that religious worship is intended, and therefore renders the words, “Worship purely.” The veneration of idols by kisses was also an ancient practice, and remains so: Hos. xiii. 2, in Hebrew, “Let them kiss the calves” — that is, let them worship — as the same Jerome states in Against Rufinus, book i. “They were accustomed,” says Cicero in the Verrine Orations iv., “not only to venerate the statues of Hercules, but also to kiss them.” “In adoring, we bring the right hand to a kiss, and turn the whole body around,” as Pliny, book xxviii. chap. ii. Plutarch, in the Life of Numa, gives the rationale for this turning or bending of the body. He says it was instituted at Numa’s direction that those who worship should turn around. He adds: “The turning of those who worship is said to be an imitation of the revolution of the world” — that is, of the circuit of the heavens which the sun traverses. But this bending of the body seems to have been introduced after temples facing the east were built. For since those who worshipped idols in them were compelled to face toward the west —

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— they turned their bodies around, in order to show that they were directing themselves primarily toward the sun. Lucian, in On the Dance, affirms that the Indians added dancing to kisses in adoration. Also Apuleius, in the fourth book of The Golden Ass, speaking of a beautiful maiden whom they admired as a goddess: “Many of the citizens,” he says, “bringing their right hand to their mouths, with the forefinger resting upon the upright thumb, worshipped her with religious adorations as if she were the goddess Venus herself.” When statues were erected, they kissed them directly; but in the worship of celestial bodies — namely, the sun and moon, as being absent — they were accustomed only to bring the hand to the mouth; and they did the same with other statues as well, when they could not, while passing by, take the time to perform full religious devotion. So Minutius Felix relates that Caecilius, upon noticing a statue of Serapis, “brought his hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss with his lips.”

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IV. In the age of Job, sacrifice had not yet been offered to the sun, to horses, to bats, to mice, and to other creeping things (concerning which Maimonides, in the third part of the Guide of the Perplexed, cap. xxix.), nor to grain, still less with human blood, as was done afterward. After simple adoration — that is, the worship of the heart expressing itself solely through bodily acts and bowings — offerings of the fruits of the earth followed. For up to this point we agree with the opinion of Porphyry in the second book of On Abstinence from Animal Food. The first sacrifices offered to idols consisted not of animals and blood, but of the fruits of the earth. It is most certain that the first sacrifice pleasing to God was a blood sacrifice, Gen. iv. 4; and also after the flood, Gen. viii. 20. Nor is there any doubt that, as long as men worshipped the true God alone with religious devotion, they honored Him with blood sacrifices. When they turned to idols, they did not dare immediately, nor until a long time afterward, to offer them sacrifices from animals. Their first sacrifices, after adoration, were from the fruits of the earth. Thus the prophet complains that the Israelites offered grain, wine, and oil to Baal — that is, to the sun — Hos. 1. 8. And in the poet,—

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“Those, turned with eyes toward the rising sun, offer salted grain with their hands.” — Aen. xii. 172.

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The Pythagoreans, abstaining from the blood of animals, added hymns to adoration. These hymns also were a most well-known part of true or superstitious religious worship. Such were those of Homer and Callimachus, which are extant. Many other ceremonies were afterward received among the nations, which derived partly from the very obscure fame of Mosaic legislation, and partly from Satan’s cunning malice.

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V. Then the most holy man adds the nature and desert of this crime. He teaches that its nature consists in the denial of the omnipotent God who is above, who governs all things, who disposes all things, and who created the sun itself. “I would have denied,” he says, “God who is above.” This is perhaps contrary to what has seemed right to many who are entangled in that error. Most mortals scarcely consider all religious worship of creatures to be a denial of God the Creator. But he significantly adds the word meaning “above” or “from on high”; for since the chief reason for solar worship has always been that men have seen it carried above all things, he indicates that God alone is exalted above all things. Rightly, in this sense, Maimonides, On Idolatry, book ii., states in Hebrew: “He who turns to idolatry falls away from the whole law.” And a little before: “Behold, here you learn that he who takes up idolatry denies the whole law, and all the prophets, and whatever was commanded to the prophets, from the first man to the end of the world.”

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VI. He adds that this kind of worship of the sun and moon was declared an iniquity deserving judgment — that is, most worthy of the severe judgment and punishment of God, or justly to be abominated by all the godly. For “sun” the text has the Hebrew word for light by way of preeminent denomination. Hence the sun was called Horus.

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Clio, ch. 216: "They worship," he says, "the sun alone of the gods, and sacrifice horses to him." Mithras also was the greatest, if not the only, god among the ancient Persians: "The Persians believed Mithras to be the sun" — Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 1 against Julian. Similarly Strabo: "They believe that the sun alone is God, and to him they sacrificed." X. All seem to affirm that the sun was the sole god of the ancient Persians. The distinguished Vossius denies this in book 2 of his work On Idolatry, and, citing testimonies from Plutarch and Hesychius against Herodotus, he teaches that they admitted other gods. Yet it is by no means established that they had not, after the manner customary among idolaters, enrolled others in the number of gods before the time of Plutarch, whom they had not yet worshipped in the days of Herodotus. For after the human race had, by its own authority, granted itself the right of fabricating divine powers, the number of gods increased daily. Varro counted thirty thousand. Concerning the earlier ages, the Satirist aptly remarks (Juv. Sat. 12:46):

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"Nor was the throng of gods such as it is today; and the stars, content with a few divine powers, pressed upon wretched Atlas with a lighter burden." But neither does Herodotus say absolutely that the sun is the sole divine power among the Persians; rather, he says that of all the gods whom Greece worshipped, only the sun was held in divine honor among the Persians. For he mentions elsewhere that other stars and elements as well, which stand in the same relation as the sun, are among the Persian sacred objects [Clio, ch. 131]: "They sacrifice," he says, "to the sun, moon, earth, fire, water, and winds." For the worship of these has accompanied solar worship almost everywhere. "To these alone," he adds, "they have offered sacred rites from the beginning." In these things idolatry had its origin. "From others they learned to worship the host of heaven with sacrifices."

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XV. That the Greeks themselves also originally worshipped no gods other than the sun, moon, and stars, Plato is a witness in the Cratylus, where Socrates says: "It seems to me that those who first held Greece reckoned as gods only those whom many of the barbarians still worship today — namely, the sun, moon, earth, stars, and heaven; and since they saw all these things perpetually moving and running, it was from this notion of running (thein) that they named them gods (theous)." Nor is the etymology of that name, theos, which he offers, inappropriate, as we shall see.

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XVI. And hence it was that all temples of antiquity, being erected to the sun, faced toward the east, yet also had sacred gates on the south side. Thus Homer describes his sacred Ithacan cave as having two entrances; and the southern gate he declares sacred to the gods, Odyssey N (Book 13), vv. 109-112: "But there are two gates: one facing toward the north, by which men descend; the other on the south side, more divine, by which those who enter do not go — it is the path of the immortals."

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It belongs to man, and provides a way to the immortals alone." Now the only reason for this positioning of sacred places was that at midday the sun looks directly upon the southern door, as Porphyry attests. "Know," he says, "that this is also a symbol of the south, and of the meridian, toward which the door faces, as God presides at midday." The same custom is still retained everywhere in arranging the places they call sacred.

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XVII. Let what has been said about several nations by way of preface suffice. We will show the same thing afterward specifically regarding the eastern peoples. This, I say, is how idolatry made its beginning in the world. Images or likenesses had not yet been invented; no pillars or columns had yet been erected for the sake of religion; no deceased men had yet been assigned to the rank of divine beings: the first error was in the heavens, and in the sun. It has pleased God to cover with deep darkness the primary authors of this crime, the precise time, and the places where it arose.

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XX. Within the space of not many centuries, it is established that nearly all nations accepted the divine sovereignty of the sun. So it was with the Phoenicians, as Sanchuniathon attests. "This one," he says — that is, the sun — "they considered the sole Lord of heaven, calling him Belsamen, which is in the Phoenician tongue 'lord of heaven.'" — "They believed this one to be the sole lord of heaven, and therefore called him Belsamen, that is, in the Phoenician tongue, lord of heaven."

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XXI. The worship of it therefore obtained universality; and the sun itself, by many names, was the same as Saturn, Jupiter, Hammon, Mithra, Horus, Adonis, Mars, Apollo, Osiris, Pan, Bacchus, Liber, Jupiter Sabazius, Hercules, Janus, Belenus, Abellio, and what not. Hence Plutarch calls the Sun and Moon "all-named" ones. For by heaping up epithets and piling on titles, they thought to capture the divine being and thereby to move it to the greatest honor; so that in the end what had been only different names of superstition came, as error spread, to be regarded as different divine beings — as the most learned Rivetus rightly notes on Hos. ii. 8. In the "many-namedness" there was also a certain form of worship. Hence Ovid, Fasti, book vi, 213:

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Many are they who call upon Phoebus, many who invoke him as lord, many who share his name — but I make my way to Carneion. From the diverse manner of the sun's worship, from the ceremonies by which it was venerated, from the goods sought from it, from its benefactions, from the places in which it was solemnly adored, the sun acquired new names and new titles, and in the course of time thrust forward new and diverse divine beings. From this circumstance the Jews, perverting Scripture, assert that God granted the sun and moon to the gentiles for worship. They gather this from the words of Moses, Deut. 4:19: "Lest perhaps you lift up your eyes to heaven, and see the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and all the host of heaven, and be driven and bow down to them, and serve them" — which the Lord your God has apportioned to all peoples under all heaven. This is a most powerful argument for restraining the minds of peoples from the worship of heavenly bodies. That dominion which they attribute to the sun and moon is one of servitude, destined for the use of all

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194 THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY. [Book III.] nations that are under heaven, destined for their use. But the Jews twist these things in another direction. God, they say, calling Israel to His own worship, set before the other nations the sun and moon as objects of adoration. So argues Trypho in Justin's Dialogue. "Tell us of another God," he says, "being careful to speak of the sun and moon, which, as it is written, God permitted to the gentiles to worship as gods" — being cautious about naming sun and moon, since it is written that they were permitted by God to the gentiles to worship them as gods. The Vulgate translator renders the sense of the passage most aptly: "Which the Lord your God created for the service of all nations," Matt. 5:45.

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The occasions of the origin of idolatry — The report of the dominion of the sun and moon — In what sense the sun and moon are the two great lights — The monstrous fiction of Jonathan the Targumist — Delegated dominion as a corrupt basis for worship — The vain reasonings of idolaters, Rom. 1:21 — The influence and operations of the sun and moon upon earthly things, Jer. 44:17, 18, Acts 14:17 — God alone is the author even of earthly goods — The ornament, course, and glory of the stars as an enticement — God who is above — Some confine God to the heavens; others assign the omnipresence of Christ to His human nature, Deut. 4:19 — The opinion of Lactantius and Diodorus Siculus on the occasions and beginnings of idolatry — The opinion of the philosopher Plotinus on the worship of the stars, Ps. 19:4 — The LXX (Septuagint) noted, and the Vulgate translator — The error of Marsilio Ficino — The ancient Syriac translation — A summary of the vain reasonings. I. We have set forth in the preceding chapter the beginnings of idolatry in the worship of the sun and moon. Before we proceed to expound the advances which this error evidently made in the course of events, it is worth briefly setting out in advance certain handles and occasions of the worship of the celestial stars which the first idolaters appear to have seized upon, together with those vain reasonings by which they had led themselves astray.

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II. And first, it seems to me that there settled in the minds of men a tradition concerning the dominion of day and night committed to the sun and moon. For it was necessary that they should believe that those things which they worshipped had been established in authority. The report of those things that are now consecrated to eternal memory in the first chapter of Genesis had spread widely: God made two great lights — the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night — and the stars. Dominion is here attributed to the sun and moon; that is, from the very beginning of all things. But all lords must be honored. It was believed, however, that the sun and moon are called two great lights not properly, but by a kind of synecdoche accommodated to the grasp and understanding of the common people. Why so? Because certain stars are larger than the moon. But is the moon therefore not to be called a great light, or is it not set over the peculiar governance of the night? Surely it is called a great light not with respect to its substance, but with respect to its light; which, however borrowed, is greater than that of all the stars combined. Now to this knot — which is in reality no knot at all — the Jews apply the wedge of their most monstrous fiction. “God made,” says the Targum of Jonathan, “two great lights, and they were equal in glory for twenty-one years, less six hundred and seventy-two parts of an hour” (so that we may know he has here attained most precise truth!), “and afterwards the moon brought a complaint against the sun and was diminished; and He set the sun, the greater light, to rule the day, and the moon, which was the lesser light, to govern the night.” In this manner that paraphraser defiles the sacred page almost everywhere — as we have already noted more than once — nor does he seem to have been born for any other purpose, so thoroughly do all his peculiar contributions stink. No one will emerge from reading him either more learned or more virtuous. Yet it is probable that the report of this dominion became known to the nations. Satan made use of it as an enticement to idolatry, even while all knowledge of the true God had not yet been abolished. For what would they honor next after God, if not those things to which God had committed authority over day and night, and thus over the whole of human life? Hence the poet depicted Juno herself as a suppliant to Aeolus, who is said to have presided over the winds: —

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“Juno, supplicating, used these words: Aeolus, (for to you the divine father and king of men has granted both to calm the waves and to raise them with the wind,)”

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III. This, then, was the primary occasion of idolatry in the worship of the sun and of the whole host of the heavens, for those men who had willingly cast away the true knowledge of God. The report of the dominion of day and night delegated to the sun and moon, corrupted by depraved traditions, drew into the snare of error those who had cast off almost all true religion toward God. Hence the sun is called king, anax, and by whatever term finally denotes rule and dominion. Add to this that they were eyewitnesses of those things which they had heard by report; they saw that the regulation of the movement and course of the sun and moon, of days and nights, and accordingly of all things that are measured by time, depended on these bodies, so that every ground for doubt seemed to have been removed.

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IV. They were also carried into this impious opinion by other vain reasonings. For the apostle traces the beginning of idolatry to the fact that men had become vain in their reasonings, Rom. 1:21. For when the minds of men were utterly empty of spiritual and heavenly things, and turned away from God, they burned excessively with desire for earthly things. They would never have worshipped what they first had not loved — the creature rather than the Creator. And they seemed to themselves to have clearly perceived how much depended upon the operations and influence of the sun and moon for earthly things to turn out prosperously and happily. They thought that no conjecture was needed here — they were eyewitnesses. And they easily persuaded themselves that whatever was above them and able to help them in those things about which they cared most must be God,

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196 THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY. [Book III.] for those things about which they had the greatest concern — this they easily persuaded themselves. It was by no other reasoning that the idolatrous Israelites, deceived into the worship of the host of heaven and the queen, that is, the worship of the moon and stars, fell into error, than because they experienced all earthly things as prosperous as a result of that religion: Jer. 44:17, 18, “When,” they say, “we burned incense to the queen of heaven, we were satisfied with food, and were merry, and saw no evil. But since we left off burning incense to the queen of heaven, and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have been in want of all things.” God, therefore, intending to bring that people back to better conduct and to His own worship, recalls to their minds that those vanities of the nations had been unable to give rain, Jer. 14:22. And the apostle Paul, severely reproving the Gentiles themselves for their wicked idolatries and charging them with folly, asserts that God alone, the Creator of all things, had given to men rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, Acts 14:17, clearly indicating that the nations had been drawn into the worship of idols by the hope and expectation of earthly blessings. And this was the second source of that most ruinous error. V. Furthermore, the psalmist affirms that the ornament of the heavens, the course of the stars, the order of the celestial bodies, declares the glory of God, Ps. 19:1, and the apostle says the same in Rom. 1:20. But the apostates had transferred all the glory that belonged to the Creator and assigned it to the creatures themselves. They supposed that the ornament which came from God was itself God. There is also an innate persuasion in the human mind that what ought to be worshipped is in the heavens and above itself. Hence it was always the custom of those in danger, when the presence of God was needed, to stretch out both hands toward the stars. God is therefore described by Hesiod as one “who inhabits the highest dwelling-places.” Our Lord Jesus Christ also taught us to invoke our Father who is in the heavens, where He makes His glory manifest in a manner entirely special. Yet the Socinian writer, Bidellus, wrongly confines and encloses God within the heavens in his Catechism, which entirely overthrows the divine nature; while others, assigning to the human nature of Christ, which the heavens contain, either the omnipresence of all things or the omnipresence of each thing, no less effectively destroy it — that is, this is the itch for disputing that afflicts the great majority of those who call themselves Christians. For those, then, who were unwilling to think beyond sense perception, the sun appeared above all to occupy the place of God in the heavens. The Holy Spirit Himself points to this origin and enticement of the worship of the stars in Deut. 4:19, saying, “Lest perhaps you lift up your eyes to the heavens, and see the sun and the moon and the stars, even all the host of heaven, and being driven by impulse you worship them.” The impulse of the heart follows the sight of the eyes and leads to idolatry. Drawn by the beauty, glory, order, and movement of the stars, and carried away by excessive admiration, since they did not know how to learn from these things the glory of the true God which they declare — having previously cast away all knowledge of Him — they were gradually impelled into the worship of them. Lest the same thing happen to the Israelites, precaution is taken here and elsewhere.

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VI. Lactantius long ago detected this source of error, in his work On the Origin of Error, Book II, chap. 24: “When,” he says, “in Egypt, on account of the pleasant constitution of the land, they seldom kept themselves indoors in halls and huts, but spent the whole night sleeping under a clear sky not subject to any malign influences, by the frequent sight of the celestial bodies and the constant law of the advancing stars, they gradually arrived at the opinion that the stars were gods and the preservers of the universe, whom they worshipped with various rites and ceremonies.” Diodorus Siculus, in the Bibliotheca, Book I, chap. 11, at the beginning, narrates similarly: that the most ancient inhabitants of Egypt, gazing up at the world and contemplating the nature of the universe, and marveling not without astonishment, supposed that the sun and moon were the first and eternal gods — calling the one Osiris and the other Isis — “that is, the most ancient inhabitants of Egypt, contemplating the world above them and the nature of the universe, and admiring it not without wonder, supposed that the sun and moon were eternal and primary gods, the former being called Osiris, the latter Isis.” From this he himself declares that the two primary and eternal gods were the sun and the moon.

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VII. From these things the reason for the divine precaution mentioned above appears most clearly. For since very many nations had been driven into the worship of the stars by the very sight, contemplation, and admiration of them, He sternly warns them lest the same thing happen to His own people. And indeed not without cause: Maimonides affirms that he had learned the reasons for many laws from the idolatrous worship of the Sabaeans, in the third part of the Moreh Nevuchim, chap. 29; and that work above all should be consulted by the reader who is devoted to the study of these matters. How great, furthermore, were the reasonings drawn from contemplation of the order and movement of the stars among those ignorant of the true God, for the purpose of ascribing a divine nature to them, Plotinus shows after many centuries, in the Enneads, II.9: “The stars,” he says, “which are in the lower spheres, and those that shine in the highest, why they should not be gods cannot be conceived, inasmuch as they are carried in order and are united in ornament.” Hence, after the Christian religion had spread its rays far and wide, the followers of the Platonic philosophy, who with most absurd rivalry attempted to oppose the authority of their wisdom to it, rejected the innumerable fictitious gods of the ancient Gentiles, yet contended that the Sun and other stars must be worshipped, and accordingly attributed sight and hearing to them. This same Plotinus teaches us in the Enneads, IV.4: “But now,” he says, “since we have said that memory is superfluous in the stars, we have given them senses; and not only sight, but also hearing, and moreover we have granted them to hear prayers, which we direct to the sun; and likewise certain other men direct them to other stars, and they believe that they will obtain many things from them by prayers.” That this star-madness appeared to be supported — to add the observation in passing — by the most famous interpreter of Plotinus, using for that purpose that passage of the psalmist: “In the sun He has placed His tabernacle,”

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198 THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY. [Book III.] “He has placed His tabernacle in the sun,” Ps. 19:4. For it is thus that the Vulgate translator renders the words of the psalmist from the Greek translation of the LXX (Septuagint), as it is called. But the Hebrew truth has a far different sense: in them — that is, in those heavens — He has placed a tabernacle for the sun, as our translators render the words. Now this version greatly vexed the ancients. Question 63 to the Orthodox reads as follows: “Since some have interpreted that saying ‘In the sun He has placed His tabernacle’ variously and obscurely, teach us its meaning” — that is: “Because some have interpreted it variously and obscurely, namely, ‘In the sun He has placed His tabernacle,’ instruct us in its explanation.” The most learned author of the answers replies: “That phrase, ‘In the sun He has placed His tabernacle,’ means that He placed the tabernacle of the heavens”

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of the sun; or thus it was made: in them He placed the tabernacle of the sun. In this way it is certainly not read in the Syriac version that now exists; and that version, even for other reasons as well, does not appear to be that ancient Syriac translation known to many of the ancients.

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VIII. And these were the chief heads of the most vain reasonings by which the wicked apostates led themselves into the worship of the stars. First, a depraved and corrupt tradition occupied their minds concerning the dominion of the sun and moon over day and night. Next, they seemed to themselves to perceive that the yield of all earthly goods — that is, of temporal blessings, with the care and pursuit of which alone they were occupied — depended chiefly upon the influence of those bodies. Entangled and impeded by these vain opinions, when they contemplated the admirable ornament of the heavens, full of august majesty, the course of all the stars, the splendor and efficacy of the sun, and their position in the heavens, they rushed headlong into this star-madness, for from the admiration of these things the transition to their worship follows.

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OR, ON THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY. — Chap. IV.

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Another corruption of natural theology — The pretext of some for worshipping natural things under the mask of dead men — The allegorical exposition of the so-called physical theology — The renewed method of philosophizing — The theology of the Stoics, of Zeno and Chrysippus, refuted by Philo of Byblos and by Eusebius — Idolatrous confusion — Whether the Sun and Apollo are the same — The tradition of the history of Jacob in the service of Apollo — The absurdities of philosophers in excusing the ancient idolaters — A comparison of ancient and modern idolaters — The deceits of charlatans in excusing men's sins — Of the Pharisees, of the Jesuits — The art of exorcising demons common to Gentiles, Jews, and papists.

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I. We have shown that the sun, and the rest of the host of heaven, first occupied in the world the place and dominion of the divine being, through the depraved superstition of men. From this, as time went on, another and most pernicious superstition sprang up, which they call physical theology. We shall also recount its beginnings, but in passing, and as it were by way of digression.

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II. According to the precepts of natural theology, the works of nature were designed for the promotion of the true worship of the Creator of all things. We demonstrated this in the exposition of that theology in Book One. The first idolaters taught that religious worship was owed to those very works — which we likewise showed. They called their worship natural theology, because the things that were worshipped were natural things; whereas natural theology truly teaches that evidence is to be drawn from natural things for the promotion of the worship of the Author of nature. We shall see below that another kind of idolatry was introduced in the course of time. It drew its origin from fabulous traditions and the impious and imaginary inventions of ungodly men. But after some had begun to philosophize somewhat more rigorously, and more refined opinions concerning the divine nature had prevailed among many, the wise began to be ashamed of those gods which the iron ages had put forward, wholly given over to ignorance and darkness. They therefore contended that all the things commonly celebrated about the fictitious gods — Jupiter, that is, and the whole sacred pageantry of Hellenism — had been figurative representations of natural things among the ancient mythologists. This theology they call physical, claiming it was nothing other than the allegorical teaching of natural science. Diodorus Siculus, lib. i., and Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris, begin to weave this web, as do very many others in Eusebius, that most excellent treasury. Thus Jupiter was nothing but the Sun or the Air; Juno, the Moon or the Earth; and the other idols of earlier ages, whose origins we shall show later, were either elements or natural causes of things. Later poets also hint at this everywhere. Thus Juvenal, Sat. v. 78:

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"When the spring sky would roar fiercely with hail,"

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Jupiter." And before him Virgil, Georgics, ii, 324-327: "In spring the earth swells, and calls for the seeds of generation. Then the almighty Father, the Aether, descends with fertile rains into the lap of his joyful spouse, and, mingled with her great body, nourishes all her offspring."

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And before him Lucretius the Epicurean, lib. ii, v. 654-658: "If anyone decides to call the sea Neptune, and grain Ceres, and prefers to misuse the name of Bacchus rather than to give the liquid its proper name, let us grant that he calls the circle of the earth the Mother of the Gods, provided that in reality he refrains from defiling his mind with foul religion." And earlier Greek authors: Orpheus: "Demeter, the mother of all things" — for Demeter was the Earth, as Diodorus testifies. Also Empedocles, in the verses which Athenagoras records in his Apology: "Jupiter the flashing fire, Juno the life-giving, and Pluto the lowest of the gods, and Nestis whose tears are the source of moisture for mortals." And another: Ennius, in Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, lib. iii, Cap. XXV:

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"Look upon this thing shining on high, whom all invoke as Jupiter."

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200. The Origin and Progress of Idolatry. [Book III.

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III. Such also were the opinions of the Stoics. Thus concerning Zeno, Velleius the Epicurean in Cicero, lib. i, On the Nature of the Gods, cap. xiv., says: "When he interprets Hesiod's Theogony," he says, "he entirely removes the usual and received conceptions of the gods; for he does not reckon Jupiter, Juno, Vesta, or anyone who is called by such a name, among the gods, but teaches that names have been assigned by a certain symbolic usage to inanimate and speechless things." And shortly after, concerning Chrysippus: "He likewise argues that the Aether is that which men call Jupiter; and that the air which flows through the seas is Neptune; and that the earth is what is called Ceres." Seneca, in his Natural Questions, lib. iv, cap. vi-vii, observes that sacrifices were offered to the clouds, lest they send down hail and storms.

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IV. The later Platonic-Pythagoreans followed the same path: Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Amelius, Eumenius, and others. Let the fable of Porphyry serve as an example — the allegorical interpretation of Saturn castrating his father Heaven and Jupiter, and its application to celestial causes of things. Saturn, he says, is bound and castrated, just as Heaven is, because the theologian — that is, Musaeus — hints that divine essences are bound by the allurement of pleasure and led down into generation, and that certain powers, released by pleasure, are scattered abroad; hence Heaven, descending into the Earth out of desire to unite with her, is castrated by Saturn: for Saturn and his sphere are the first to move contrary to Heaven, and certain powers descend both from Heaven and from the wandering stars. But the powers of Heaven Saturn receives; and those of Saturn Jupiter receives in turn. So he says, in the book On the Cave of the Nymphs in Homer. He maintains, that is, that the procreative power of Heaven is received by Saturn, who nearest to it moves contrary to its motion, in such a way that it cannot descend immediately into the earth; and that the influence of Saturn is in turn intercepted by the power of Jupiter — this, he contends, is what that fable signifies. By this fabrication, I say, they labored to disguise with a veneer the stupidity of the first idolaters and the madness of Hellenism.

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V. Philo of Byblos, in Eusebius, On the Preparation of the Gospel, lib. i, cap. ix., shows at length that the philosophers fabricated these things most absurdly, when the matter was altogether different: "But," he says, "the more recent theologians, setting aside the things that happened from the beginning, invented allegories and myths, and, having fabricated a certain affinity with the phenomena of the universe, established mysteries."

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VII. Among the ancients, however, all was confused and uncertain. Plutarch debates at length whether Apollo was distinct from the sun, in the book On Why the Pythia No Longer Gives Oracles in Verse. The most ancient poets teach in their very same hymns that he is the sun, and set forth where he was born and who his parents were. Thus the Arcadians could claim to be older not only than the Moon but also than the Sun. They also add myths stitched together from ancient traditions. Such is what they write about the pastoral exile of Apollo, which Callimachus celebrates in such a way that I would almost believe the fable represents Jacob leading that manner of life with Laban the Syrian. He teaches that the cause of the journey and the undertaking was love.

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"Inflamed with love for the youth Admetus" —

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— just as the cause of Jacob's pastoral servitude was love. Now, in assigning the cause of Apollo's servitude, since Callimachus departs from the rest of the crowd of poets, there is no doubt that the report of some obscure tradition gave him the occasion for doing so. He then splendidly depicts the remarkable increase of the young livestock under Apollo's care.

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"Easily the pasturage abounded for the herds, nor did the she-goats lack young, nor did the ewes mixed among the sheep, to whose eyes Apollo, as he tended them, gave his care; nor were the sheep without milk, nor barren, but all had lambs beneath them, and she who had been a bearer of one became straightway a bearer of twins."

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THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY. [Book III. Title.

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"Easily the pasturage abundeth for the herds, nor do the she-goats lack young mixed among the sheep, to which Apollo as they grazed turned his eye, nor were the sheep without milk, nor barren, but all had lambs beneath them, and she who had borne one became straightway a bearer of twins." If one were pleased to examine the poet's words separately, very many things would be found which marvelously fit the history of Jacob; but since a diligent reader will perceive this at first glance, and we have other business, it does not please us to dwell on them here. VIII. Now this new mystical natural theology was the most putrid fabrication of men blinded in ignorance and malice. Very many mortals worshipped the sun, moon, and other stars of heaven with divine honors, long before the fables of Hellenism had origin or occasion. Greece was, so to speak, the fatherland of man-made gods and the workshop of idols. That the Greeks themselves in antiquity worshipped no gods other than the sun, moon, and stars, we have shown above from Plato. But the new teachers thus took pleasure in championing the ignorance and darkness of ancient times, being themselves no whit wiser than those of whom they were most ashamed. In the same way today the Jewish rabbis twist all the monstrosities of the Talmud into I know not what allegories; it is remarkable why the Jesuits did not do the same with their own legends. They would perhaps have acted more prudently and modestly if, following the example of the philosophers and rabbis, they had devised clever falsehoods to win credence for those legends, rather than — after having led so many thousands of men through the byways of the most abominable errors for so many years — bringing this about by rejecting them thoroughly and openly. But you will say, it is an injury, nay, even an outrage, to wish to compare and equate the most holy fathers of the Society of Jesus with philosophers and rabbis. Come then, let us consider by one example (or perhaps two), of the greatest importance, whether they follow in their footsteps or not. No one can inflict a more atrocious injury upon the immortal souls of mortals, upon human society, upon the obedience owed to the supreme Being, than he who so labors in cloaking and excusing the crimes of sins that men thereby take heart to commit them yet further and more freely. What the masked hierophants among the pagans accomplished to this end, the divine philosopher teaches at length in the second book on the Republic. Vagabond priests and soothsayers, he says, come to the doors of the rich and persuade them that it is in their power, through sacrifices and incantations provided by the gods, to expiate with pleasures and festivals whatever sin has been committed by the man himself or by his ancestors, and that if one wishes to do harm to an enemy, they can for a small outlay harm both the just and the unjust alike, since by certain enticements and binding-spells they persuade the gods, as they claim, to serve them. And to these discourses they adduce as witnesses the poets, those who teach about the ease of vice —

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That the road of virtue is rough and steep at the outset, but that it leads upward by a smooth and easy path, as those who invoke Homer attest, since he also says somewhere that the gods themselves —

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And some by sacrifices and easy vows can be propitiated,

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With libations and the savor of burnt offerings,

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— praying to be released, since there is a respite for those who go to extreme and shameless living. And those who lead people astray by displaying the writings of Musaeus and Orpheus, as they say the sons of the Moon and the Muses, and who convince not only private persons but also whole cities that there are indeed releases and purifications from sin through sacrifices and pleasurable games — both for the living and for those who have died — which they call initiations, and which deliver us from the evils of the next world, while terrible fates await those who have not performed the rites. — Vagabond priests and soothsayers who frequent the houses of the rich declare that they possess a certain power, granted them by divine authority, whereby they can expiate by certain rites of sacrifices and incantations any crime whatsoever, whether committed by the man himself or by his ancestors, so that pleasure and festivity follow; and if anyone wishes to take vengeance on an enemy, this can be done at small expense by those who are within the power of both the just and the unjust; they allure and win over all the gods to themselves by certain incantations and binding-spells, so that even the gods obey them. To these monstrous discourses they adduce the testimonies of poets, who teach how easy is the descent to vices — indeed,—

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"Vice seizes mortal minds with a headlong onset —"

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Compressed together: "The way is equal, and indeed nearer and more accessible to them; yet the gods themselves have set toils before virtue, and a long and strange path." But they bring forward Homer as a witness that the gods can be moved and turned from their purpose by men, since he said: "The very divinity of the gods is bent; for vows and prayers and the smoke of sacrifice and libations and burnt offerings soften them, whenever any man has sinned and made supplication." And they stir up a great heap of books from Musaeus and Orpheus, who are said to be descended from the Moon and the Muses; and according to their prescriptions they perform sacred rites, persuading not only private persons but also whole cities that there are deliverances and purifications from crimes, accomplished through sacrifices and festive entertainments — for the benefit of both the living and the dead; these they call initiatory rites of purification for the shades of the departed, which they say will free men from the penalty of those evils after death; but for those who have not sacrificed, severe punishments remain. This superstition, inasmuch as it works the confusion of all duties and indeed the ruin and destruction of all of life, the philosopher rebukes at length. IX. Let the reader learn from this that there is scarcely anything new in the schemes of those who, putting on the mask of religion, either serve the various lusts of the flesh, or covet wealth, or lust after dominion over the consciences of blinded men. That the Pharisees among the Jews — most like these mountebanks in wickedness, audacity, and superstition — devised twin falsehoods from their schemes, by which they might extract an excuse for sins, our most holy

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our Savior showed — He who is the way, the life, and the truth, Matt. 5, 7. That among the Jesuits there is equal greed, like dishonesty, the same shamelessness, and twin audacity — in minimizing, excusing, and atoning for the sins and crimes of the most villainous scoundrels, in sharpening and inflaming men's minds toward vices, in blunting every prick of conscience — was not long ago made publicly known by one who exposed their secrets in a special book. Let the reader compare what we have adduced from Plato with what the learned man has excerpted from the books of the Jesuits; he will scarcely find egg more like egg than the dogmas of these men resemble the opinions of those mountebanks.

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X. I will add another example, which also pertains to profit-seeking and vainglory. Let us take it from the exorcisms of demons. Philostratus, in book 4 of the Life of Apollonius, ch. 6, narrating the casting out of a demon from a young man by Apollonius, and having set forth the frenzy and licentiousness of the possessed youth, adds: And the many thought that his wantonness and unruly youth were the cause of all these things. But the youth was acting under the impulse of a demon, and seemed to rave when Apollonius fixed his gaze upon the raging spirit. The apparition, uttering cries now of one who fears, now of one who is enraged, and such as are the cries of those weeping or in some torment, swore that it would release the youth and enter into no one else. Apollonius then addressed it with the words that masters use against slaves, calling it shifty, wicked, and shameless, and with threatening anger commanded it, upon giving some sign of its departure, to leave the youth — specifically, to throw down a certain statue, indicating one of those that stood in the royal portico, beside which these events were taking place. With these words the statue then, first nodding slightly, fell. Whether these things truly happened in this way I do not know. Eusebius repeatedly caught Philostratus lying in his work against Hierocles. But I know that things like these are done or feigned daily among the fathers of the Society. It is also remarkable how much agreement there is between them and him. You would think you were hearing Mengus, Thyraeus, Sprenger. Now, just as that Apollonius was more perceptive than other mortals — so much so that he could discern a demon in a drunken youth, when all others saw nothing in him except what they judged should be attributed to licentiousness and wantonness — so it very often happens that the fathers of the Society perceive impure

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1 Les Provinciales, by B. Pascal, 1658, etc. — Ed. spirits in them, especially in young men and girls, in whom other mortals — blinder than moles, of course — can discern nothing at all, except what they judge should be attributed to some persons' ravings or others' illusions. Furthermore, the apparition of Philostratus did not tremble any more at the presence and sight of the magician Apollonius than it is customary for Jesuit apparitions to do at the presence, gaze, or touch of a pontifical priest. Among others, the petty priest Edmundus himself instructs us in this, in his miraculous account of events that occurred in England around the year 1585 and thereafter. "Scarcely had I begun," he says, "the exorcisms and laid hands upon the head, when he" (the Jesuit youth) "immediately began to rage, to be hurled upward, to struggle with hands and feet, to thrust away the priest's hand, to fill everything with cries, oaths, and blasphemous curses" — so that this youth of Philostratus was plainly no match for him. But as regards the abuse that must be directed at the demon, it will be plainly evident that Apollonius was a mere child, if compared with our present masters. He called the spirit shifty, wicked, and shameless. But if anyone wishes to consult Mengus, Fustis Daemonum Exorcista, ch. 4, he will easily perceive how worthless those are compared to the terms which he teaches the fathers to use in exorcisms: "Hear, says the priest, you senseless one, you false one, you reprobate, master of demons, most miserable creature, tempter of men, deceiver of wicked angels, deceiver of souls, leader of heretics, father of lies, you foolish, brutish, senseless, drunken one, infernal plunderer, most iniquitous serpent, most rapacious wolf, lean and famished and most unclean sow, scabrous beast, most truculent beast, cruel beast, blood-soaked beast, most bestial beast of all beasts, spirit of Acheron, sooty spirit, spirit of Tartarus." Away with the trifles of Apollonius; let the demon himself learn from here how to be reviled. The spirit must be truly untameable and utterly stubborn that is not terrified by such abuse. Without doubt the holy Michael did not dare to use such a torrent of blasphemies, Jude 9. These new masters also imitate the overturning of the statue at the demon's departure. But here they sink far below Apollonius in a shameful way. For they rarely proceed beyond the extinguishing of a candle or the breaking of a window. To cast down statues is not within the power of just any petty priest. Moreover, the Jews received this art of exorcising demons from the Gentiles; the papists received it from both. As Justin Martyr says in the Dialogue with Trypho: "Your exorcists certainly now use some art, just as the Gentiles do in their adjurations, and they employ incense and bonds."

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XI. But we must return from the digression to the main road. The worship of the heavens and of the sun flourished for a long series of years, when it had not yet entered men's minds to elevate those like themselves to the throne of God; nor did he escape punishment even among the Greeks themselves who said that the Sun was nothing but glowing fire.

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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.

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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.

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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 Heb. 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.

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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 Judg. 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.

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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.

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

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

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"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:"

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VI. For this reason, the Israelites in the desert compelled Aaron to cast the golden calf, Exod. 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.

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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, Rom. 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.

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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 III, 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

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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 whatsoever, 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

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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. X. 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.

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The progress of idolatry — The first visible objects of superstitious worship — Pointed columns (pyramidal pillars), rough unhewn stones, stelae, their meaning — The testimony of Clement, of Phoronides, of Eumelos — The origin of stelae according to Clement — A truer opinion — A columnar stone in the field of Colchester — Rough stones (argoi) — The testimonies of Pausanias, Maximus of Tyre, Suidas — The term theandros — Stonehenge — Agabalus; the mother-idea — The Persians destroy and mock images (agalmata) — The image of Diana of the Ephesians — The idols of the Germans; sacred groves devoid of images: oaks — The most ancient temples without images — No images (agalmata) in antiquity — Rough and square stones — Baityloi — Sacred stones — The testimony of Sanchuniathon — He feigns that stones called living were invented by Uranus — Most of what Eusebius draws from him is ridiculous — The ancients feigned that certain stones were life-bearing (psychikoi) — Baitylos in Hesychius: the proverb "fallen from heaven" and its origin — Baitylos in Damascius and Photius — What ovarion means — Anointed stones in Clement and Arnobius — Whence the name Baitylai is derived — The conjecture of Scaliger — The erection of the stone at Bethel by Jacob — What the word signifies — The nature of Jacob's act — And to what end? Why the common interpreter renders the title — The epiphanies of the gods: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Cicero — The feast of the Christians — The Bethulic stone worshipped among the Phoenicians — The progress of idolatry — Images dedicated to the sun in the likeness of a human face, and many other things

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— as the memory of the earliest visible objects of worship survives in the records of things. These were of two kinds in antiquity: namely, pointed pyramidal columns (kiones pyramoeideis), that is, tapering columns; and rough unhewn stones (lithoi argoi), crude and unformed stones, to which the Baityloi may be added. Only after a long subsequent course of time were images fashioned in human form, namely when the cult of the dead had been introduced through Hellenism.

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II. The Greeks call sacred columns stelai. The LXX (Septuagint) thus renders the Hebrew word matzevah; these are prohibited in Lev. 26:1, Deut. 16:22. "Matzevah," says Kimchi, "is a stone erected for the purpose of worship." The root is natzav, "he set up." Thus the Aguieus of Apollo was a pyramid, according to Hesychius, that is, a column tapering to a point at the top. Concerning these things Clement of Alexandria writes, in book i.: "For before the forms of statues (agalmaton) were distinguished, the ancients set up columns and regarded them as images of the deity." An agalma of this kind is an image that serves as, so to speak, the seat of a divinity. This is what we said: since images (agalmata) were not yet accurately fashioned, they erected columns to receive the power of absent divine beings and so to become, as it were, the seats of the gods. An agalma, on the other hand, is an image artfully fabricated. "That by which one is delighted" (agalletai), says Suidas; that is, that which so feeds the eyes as to affect the mind with a certain joy.

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The janitrix who precedes the Olympian queen —

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— the Argive Hera, whom they adorned with fillets and headbands —

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— first adorned her around the tall upright column. "Callithoe, the doorkeeper of Argive Juno, whom they first adorned with priestly bands and fillets, around the column of the queen." The poet calls it tall (makron), because the stele was erected upright in its full length; unlike the rough stones (lithoi argoi). Thus in Homer the word kion is sometimes called makros (tall) and sometimes hupsos (high). He also cites similar things from Eumelos, namely:

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— who at the mountain's peak and the topmost heights —

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— hung trophies from beams and from a mortal column. Although perhaps Eumelos meant nothing other than that akrothinia (first-fruits and spoils) were customarily hung from pilasters and columns; which is a most well-known practice.

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IV. But Clement writes that demons invented these things in imitation of that column which went before the Israelites in the desert. Others may judge of this; I do not doubt that at the very time when the tabernacle was erected, columns of this kind and stelai were in common use among many nations. From this source perhaps arose the Anthelian gods, presiders over doorways; small columns placed at the doors of temples and other houses. Hesychius: "Anthelian gods are those found before the doors," and Athenaeus, book x., upon the forecourt; that is, at the first entrance of a house under the open sky. The making of statues (agalmatopoiia) or the making of images (eikonopoiia) had not yet entered into human minds when they first set up columns and stelai for religious purposes. For since they regarded only the celestial bodies as divinities, there was no reason why they should erect images fashioned and fabricated in human form to represent them. This indeed came about as superstition grew stronger, when, for example, the sun was at the same time identified with some —

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to see; upon which subsequent centuries imposed the image of the cross, and once again consecrated it for the use of a new superstition.

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V. Then, along with those pointed pillars, they used rough stones for the same purpose. Thus Pausanias in the Achaica says — an illustrious testimony: "Near the image, approximately thirty stones are erected, quadrangular in shape; the Pharenses venerate each one, calling them by the names of certain gods; and indeed it was the ancestral custom among the Greeks to worship rough stones in place of images of the gods." He also makes mention of such stones in the Boeotia. This, I say, was the custom of those most ancient Greeks, whom we have shown from Plato to have worshipped the sun, the moon, and the other stars of heaven, and these alone. And Maximus of Tyre, on the Arabs, Dissertation 38, says: the Arabs venerate some deity whose image they have never seen, but which they saw was a quadrangular stone. The sign of the unknown God was a quadrangular stone. But that God was called Dusares. This is, says Suidas, the god Ares, that is, the god Mars — in which interpretation he is without doubt mistaken; he adds, however, whoever that one among the gods was: "The image is a black stone, square, having no figure carved into it, that is, rough, four feet in height, two in breadth, resting on a golden base; to this they sacrifice and pour out the blood of victims, and this is their libation."

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VI. Of this kind were perhaps the stones here in England in the Salisbury plain — huge and rough stones, rough stones, as Pausanias calls them. Jones, a most skilled architect, proves by a special treatise that these were sacred places. That the ancient Britons worshipped the moon under the name of Andraste —

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that they worshipped her — Dio Cassius is the authority, Histories, Book 12. And to the sun and the moon, stones of this kind were erected.

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VII. We have shown above that the worshippers of the stars erected these stones and pillars so that they might have at hand in them the power and energy of the divine beings they worshipped — the power of protecting and of doing good. They believed this could occur through the descent of the Ethereal Spirit. Eventually the stones themselves came to be called gods or divine beings. Lampridius, in the Life of Heliogabalus, writes: "He wished to carry away the stones, which are called Divine, from the temple of Diana of Laodicea, and the image from its inner sanctuary, in which Orestes had placed it." Nothing but

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stones of this kind — rough stones consecrated to the sun and the moon — does the historian understand; which in the course of time came to be reckoned under the name of gods. Hence arose the custom of swearing by Jupiter the Stone. And concerning the idol Agabalus, from which that monster of a man, the pseudo-Antoninus, took his name, Herodian writes: a stone

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— "a very great stone, rounded on top, tapering to a point at the base" — that is, "the greatest stone, with a circular base, coming to a cone." Also, Elagabalus means the round lord; by which name they denoted the sun itself; unless the sun was rather called El-Gabal in Syriac, that is, God of the Gabalites, the name taken from the place of worship — as Baal Peor. The Idaean mother, whom with such great religious devotion the whole city placed in the temple of Victory after she had been brought from Pessinus to Rome, was a stone of this kind, as Livy testifies, Book 29, Chapter 11.

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VIII. Thus in ancient times among many nations, images were in no use, nor were they known, and by some they were even held in hatred. Concerning the Persians, Herodotus in the Clio says — an illustrious testimony, Chapter 131: "It is not their custom to erect images, nor temples, nor altars; indeed they charge those who do so with folly, because, as it seems to me, they do not believe, as the Greeks do, that the gods are of human origin." We showed above that the Persians pursued the worship of the sun and moon with religious devotion. Holding fast to that superstition received from the first practitioners of idolatry, they never admitted the divine beings that Hellenism introduced, and for that reason they had no images. Hence they relate that Xerxes, in the European expedition, rightfully removed images — "took down the images according to the discipline of the Magi" — as those who wrote the history of the Magi report, in Diogenes Laertius in the preface of his work. Indeed, they not only removed such images, but also gently mocked them. For when Cambyses entered the temple of Vulcan at Memphis, he laughed greatly at the image — Herodotus, Book 3: "He received the image with much laughter"; and in the shrine of the Cabiri, "he burned the images, mocking them greatly" — "He burned the images, making many jokes at them." He burned them according to ancestral custom, because they were images of men; he mocked them because they were ridiculously made. For the same reason he gave all the Asian temples to the fire, as Solinus testifies, except only that of Diana of Ephesus, whose image was a pointed trunk of elm or beech. So Callimachus teaches us, in the hymn to Artemis.

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and the shoot of the elm, pointing upward, the image of the child-nourishing goddess

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"Once in Ephesus the Amazons set up, beneath an elm tree, an image." But the father of history does not say that the Persians had no statues whatsoever; they had no images because they did not believe that the gods were of human origin. But he does not say, nor is it true, that they repudiated all pillars and stelae. Tacitus says the same concerning the Germans, On the Customs of Germany, Chapter 9: "Moreover, they do not think it consistent with the greatness of heavenly beings to confine gods within walls, or to represent them in any likeness of the human face; they consecrate groves and woodlands, and they call by the names of gods that mystery which they perceive only through reverence." But a little earlier he had said: "They believe God is present with those fighting, and they carry certain images and standards, taken from the groves, into battle," ibid., Chapter 7. Therefore, they were not without all effigies or standards, but only without those of the kind that are formed into any likeness of the human face.

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IX. Perhaps also in place of the stones and pillars that the eastern peoples erected, the Germans made use of living oaks or ancient trunks of oak trees. For we have shown from Maimonides that the heavenly stars were also worshipped in trees. Hence Claudian, In Praise of Stilicho: "So that one may hunt safely far off through the vast silences of the Hercynian forest, and through the groves fierce with ancient religion, and the oaks that stand in the likeness of the barbarian deity." Also: "The oaks, inhabited by the Greeks, gave oracles" — Virgil, Georgics, Book 2, line 16. And the Gauls, in Lucan, Book 3, line 412: "And the gloomy images of the gods lack artistic skill, and stand shapeless from hewn trunks."

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Maximus of Tyre also teaches that the Celts, that is, the Gauls, worship Jupiter, whose symbol is the tallest oak. Procopius of Caesarea likewise, in his History of the Goths, book iv, affirms that the Abasgi, a people situated from the Pontic Sea to the foothills of the Caucasus, "right up to his own time," that is, the time of the Emperor Justinian, "had venerated groves and sacred woods with superstition, and in their barbarous simplicity had believed trees to be gods." Similarly, the earliest Huns, who drove the Goths from their ancient Scythian seats, and whom Jordanes in his On the Deeds of the Goths, ch. xxiv, seized by remarkable credulity, reports as having been begotten by wicked women, whom they called Aliorumas, from unclean spirits; the remnants of these people in Lithuania are reported by historians to have worshipped trees down to a late period, until King Jagello cut them down with his own hand. Philostratus also relates that a most ancient temple dedicated to Hercules existed at Gades. In it, he says, there were no images, but only divine altars. He further shows that the inhabitants of that place had stelae inscribed with unknown letters; and these were quadrangular, like anvils. See Apollonius, book v, ch. i. Silius Italicus writes of the same temple: "But no likeness or well-known images of the gods." Curtius, book iv, ch. i, relates that the Tyrians, from whom the people of Gades descend, worshipped Apollo or the sun in Hercules. So true is what Themistius says in Oration xv: that before Daedalus, not only were the images of Mercury fashioned in a rough and shapeless mass, but the rest of the statues of men were also made by Daedalus in the same crude way; but when Daedalus distinguished the feet of the statues, he was believed to fashion them alive and breathing. More on these things later.

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X. To these first principles also belong the baetyls. The first to mention them is Sanchuniathon in Eusebius, in the Theology of the Phoenicians.

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"Moreover," he says, "the god Uranus devised baetyls, animated stones fashioned by art." A most learned scholar judges that Sanchuniathon did not write "living stones," but rather (with B and Y transposed) "anointed stones," as he says. For it is absurd, he argues, to imagine that Uranus made "animated stones." And indeed it is truly absurd; yet it does not thereby follow that Sanchuniathon did not write it thus, since everything that Eusebius produces in that place from Sanchuniathon is wholly absurd and ridiculous, arising partly from a dreadful confusion and partly from a mixture of the most monstrous trifles; nor are they cited for any other purpose than to make plain how absurd they are, and how abhorrent to all theology, indeed to reason itself. Furthermore, Uranus devised these stones so that they might be ready at hand and of assistance to him in the war he was contriving against Saturn for the recovery of his kingdom; for which he had need of living stones rather than anointed ones. It is also very well known that the ancients feigned such stones to be animated, no less than the self-moving statues of Daedalus. Hesychius derives the word differently: "Baetylus: this is the name given to the stone that was given to Saturn in place of Jupiter."

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A very well-known fable. Hence the proverb, "You would even swallow a Baetylus"—

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XI. It is certain, however, that there were other stones appointed for sacred uses and called baetyls, besides the one given to Saturn in place of Jupiter. The author of the life of the philosopher Isidore, cited by Photius, whom Suidas identifies as Damascius, in Codex 242, says that he himself had seen the Baetylus moved through the air, at times concealed within garments, and sometimes also carried in the hands of the attendant; and that the name of the one who ministered to the Baetylus was Eusebius. So those words are quite absurdly interpreted by Andreas Scottus, otherwise a learned man: "The Baetylus moved in the air, sometimes covered with garments, sometimes also carried in the hands of the physician. The name of the physician who carried the Baetylus was Eusebius." For what does a physician have to do with a Baetylus? They know quite well what it means to minister to the gods and to perform sacred service around the gods. This Eusebius was a temple-servant who ministered in the sacred rites of the Baetylus; he sometimes carried it in his hands, and at other times pretended that it moved of itself through the air. The name of the one who ministered to the Baetylus in the sacred rites was Eusebius. Julius Pollux, Onomasticon, book i, on sacred service: "The names of those who minister to the gods are: temple-ministers, priests, temple-wardens." Damascius himself further teaches how this Eusebius worshipped the Baetylus with religious devotion and drew oracles from it. And this stone was of the class called sacred stones; Isidore asserted that it was moved and as it were animated by a demon not of the worst sort: for there was a certain demon, he said, who moved it, neither one of the destructive kind nor one of the exceedingly mischievous. For as time went on, wherever an idol of this sort was erected, demons at once took possession of it, as we shall show later. Damascius mentions shortly afterward other stones also dedicated to the Sun, which he calls heliotropes.

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XII. It must be acknowledged, however, that the ancient idolaters were accustomed to anoint these stones, so that they could be called anointed no less than living. Clement, in Stromata vii, says they worshipped every smooth stone, and what is called Astarte. And Arnobius, speaking of himself when he was still a pagan: "Whenever I had caught sight of a polished stone, smeared with olive oil, I would pay it homage as though some present power resided in it."

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XIII. The first, as far as I know, to conjecture most acutely that these stones were called baetyls from the stone which Jacob erected at Bethel, or from Bethel, as the place where he erected it has been called from that time forward, was the admirable Joseph Scaliger; others judge that from this the whole practice of erecting rough stones for superstitious uses arose out of Satan's malicious imitation. Jacob's act is recorded in Gen. 28:18, 19. He took the stone he had placed under his head, and set it up as a pillar; the Latin Vulgate renders it "in titulum," and the Greeks render it as a stele. The Hebrew word translated "he set up" is the same as the word for "statue," as we noted earlier; the same term is used in the prohibition of idolatry in Lev. 26:1; Deut. 7:5, 12:3. A rough stone found by chance in the field, erected in this manner, he anointed with oil; and he was the first of mortals to make a formal vow to God expressed in explicit words. He promises, among other things, that this stone shall henceforth be to him a house of God, Gen. 28:22, that is, that he would solemnly perform the worship of God in that place when he had at hand the things he might offer to God, of all of which he was then entirely destitute. Afterward, admonished by God, he discharged his vow, ch. 35:6, 7.

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XIV. Whether Jacob acted rightly or otherwise in erecting the pillar, interpreters ask. Abulensis gives two answers. First, that this was lawful before the law, and afterward prohibited. Second, that Jacob erected this pillar as a memorial of the event, not in order to worship it. A great many others concur with his opinion. There was, without doubt, before the law was given, a lawful practice for godly men to erect altars in any place and to offer sacrifices upon them. That Jacob erected this stone as a memorial of the angelic vision granted to him there, and did not employ it in religious worship, is established by the fact that long afterward, admonished by God concerning his vow, he built an altar in the same place, ch. 35:7. The Latin interpreter renders it "titulum," from the customary practice of inscribing such sacred stones with titles indicating to which god they were dedicated. So also Damascius: "He also showed us letters inscribed on the stone, that is, on the baetyl, written in the color they call tingabaric."

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XV. From this act of Jacob, who was calling to remembrance a vision of the true God, there afterward emanated the superstitious custom of erecting pillars in honor of the feigned appearances of the gods. Many have recorded the appearances of the gods. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, book ii, ch. 68:

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218. The Origin and Progress of Idolatry. [Book III.

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He recounts how the goddess, appearing to virgins in danger, brought them aid. "That is remarkable, how the goddess appearing brought help to the virgins who were in peril." To this he appends the mockery of the Epicureans, who, since they denied the gods any governance, and called God himself merely by that name, scoffed at the appearances of the gods, denying the presences of the gods, as Cicero explains that expression. Athenaeus also, book xii, from Carystius of Pergamon, reports that Demetrius Phalereus observed the appearance of his brother Himerus, who had been killed by Antipater, with religious veneration, which stirred up great hatred of him among the Athenians. For after he had pretended, as it seems, that his dead brother had appeared to him, he paid him religious honor, and thereby introduced a strange demon, which was unlawful at Athens, as Acts 17:18. On these epiphanies, Cicero in the second book On the Nature of the Gods, ch. ii: "And so, both among our own people and among others, the worship of the gods and the sanctities of religion grow greater and better day by day. And this happens not rashly, nor by chance, but because the divine beings often declare their own presence." And let us take note from what workshop that festival came forth among Christians which they call Epiphany; concerning which a certain priest was in doubt whether it was male or female, but boldly declared it to have been a great holy thing.

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XVI. The Jews affirm that the Phoenicians afterward worshipped this Bethylian stone; and it is quite probable that those rough rocks which they erected to their gods were called Baetylian from Bethel. XVII. In this manner, therefore, the worship of the sun grew: to simple adoration were added columns and Bethylian stones, to which first anointing was joined, then the offering of fruits and flowers, and lastly sacrifices of animals.

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XVIII. In the course of time it came about that the sun itself was worshipped by means of statues fashioned in the likeness of a human face. Of this kind was the Colossus of Rhodes, seventy cubits high. Macrobius also records that the Egyptians and Assyrians were accustomed to carry in solemn procession a statue of the sun holding a thunderbolt and stalks of grain in its left hand, and raising its right hand with a whip after the manner of a charioteer — Saturnalia, Book I, Chapter 23. And Pliny, Book XXXIV, Chapter 7, says: "Zenodorus made the Colossus destined to be a statue of the Emperor Nero, one hundred and ten feet in length; it was dedicated to the veneration of the sun, after the crimes of that emperor had been condemned." This was done by Vespasian, as Suetonius attests, Life of Vespasian, Chapter 17: "He rewarded the restorer of the Colossus with a distinguished gift and great pay." Upon the restored colossus the sun's head, bearing seven rays, was placed in the position where Nero's had been. This was afterward removed by Commodus, who placed his own head upon it, as Herodian attests, Chapter 48: removing the head from that greatest colossal statue which the Romans venerate as bearing the image of the Sun, he set up his own in its place. The corrupt passage is supplemented by Scaliger with the words "and substituting his own." But this was not done until after deceased men had been admitted into the number of the gods, and some Apollo or other had been substituted for the sun.

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XIX. Just as Jeroboam erected golden calves, lest the people, deprived of every visible sign of the divine presence, should return to Jerusalem to perform the true worship of God — perhaps to the great harm and ruin of his kingdom — so Satan, consulting the interests of his own kingdom, which he had obtained in the world by so many varied arts and manifold deceit, lest those who were set amid the dangers of idolatry, and anxious for help, attending to the voice of nature itself crying out to the Lord of nature, should begin to seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him, though He is not far from every one of them, as the apostle says — lest they should thus withdraw themselves from Satan's dominion — he grafted this new error upon the other, by which, being raised up to a false hope, they could not be removed from their wicked prejudice.

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XX. Clement of Alexandria excellently expounds this progress of superstition in his Oration to the Gentiles: "The Scythians," he says, "in ancient times worshipped a scimitar, the Arabs a stone, the Persians a river; and among other men, those who were yet more ancient, erected notable wooden posts and set up columns of stone — which were also called Xoana, because they were scraped and smoothed out of the raw material. On the island of Icarus, certainly, the image of Diana was an unworked piece of wood, and the Juno of Cithaeron at Thespiae was a hewn-out tree trunk; and the Juno of Samos (as Aethlius says) was at first a plank, but afterward, when Procleus was archon, was fashioned into the form of a statue. After statues began to be formed, they were called bretas, from brotoi, because they were made to resemble men. At Rome, moreover, the writer Varro says that the ancient statue of Mars was a spear, since the craftsmen had not yet attained to this art, beautiful indeed in appearance, but dishonest in its purpose. But after the art flourished, the error increased. That they therefore made images from stones and wood resembling men is now plain." So he; and he then enumerates in order who in each place were the first makers of images.

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XXI. And this was the first success and good fortune of Satan's war against the human race, left destitute of divine revelations and abandoned to itself. This was the origin of the total defection from the foundation of natural theology. Here the prince of darkness laid the foundations of that dominion which he exercised far and wide over the greater part of mankind through an innumerable succession of years.

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The further progress of idolatry — Polytheism ending in the worship of human beings as gods — What Hellenism is — Its origins uncertain and obscure — The opinion of the author of the book called the Wisdom of Solomon — Gods and goddesses arising from flattery — The mother of Demetrius worshipped by Adimantus, and Lamia, the harlot of Poliorcetes, by the Athenians and Thebans — The taunt of Demetrius against the Athenians — The opinion of Lactantius and of Eusebius — The rationale of apotheosis — The Jews fabricate that Terah, the father of Abraham, was the first maker of idols.

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The origin of the fable — The agreement of ancient Christians regarding it — The testimony of Epiphanius, Suidas, and John of Antioch — Haran died before his father — He was not the first to die since the creation of the world, as Epiphanius maintained — Terah a holy man — Pindar ascribes the invention of statues to the Rhodians; Isidore to Prometheus; several others to Daedalus — Why he is said to have made statues that moved of themselves — The statue of Memnon in Philostratus — And many other things.

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I. Satan had not yet brought to its final outcome what he was wickedly contriving against God and men. Emboldened by the success previously described, a more fierce and exalted desire to occupy the throne of God pressed upon him. In Hellenism — that is, in the worship of deceased men — he attains his wish. Under pretext of that superstition, without any circuitous approach, he presented himself openly as the object of religious worship to miserable little men. And so polytheism ends in the worship of human beings as gods. Yet this summit of impiety and spiritual wickedness was not reached until after the passage of many years, and perhaps of many centuries. For the human race did not immediately, from the first defection, furnish itself with gods in human form. In the worship of such beings Hellenism consisted. Wearied with the heavenly bodies, which, moved by an inviolable law, could not satisfy the vanity and fickleness of the human mind, men chose gods like themselves — easy of access, propitious — whose morals they might imitate and whose honors they might share. Although, therefore, by the term Hellenism, that summary of false religions, a certain confusion in the worship of heaven, the sun, and other heavenly bodies, of demons, of deceased men, of images, and of fictitious phantoms — in short, the whole ancient mania of idolatry — may rightly be understood; nevertheless, we shall here consider it separately from Sabaism, or the superstition of worshipping the heavenly bodies, insofar as it introduced the religion of deceased men and of images fashioned in the likeness of the human face.

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III. Well known is the opinion of the author of the book called the Wisdom of Solomon, chap. xiv. 13-20. For he says: "For it was not from the beginning, nor will it continue forever. For the vanity of men entered the world, and therefore a swift end was devised for them. For a father, consumed by untimely grief for a son taken away too soon, made an image of the child who was then dead, and now honored as a god what was once a dead man, and transmitted to those under him mysteries and sacred rites. Then in time the impious custom grew strong and was observed as law, and graven images were worshipped at the command of tyrants." He adds much more to this effect. And indeed what happened afterward lends credence to this opinion. Flattery created innumerable gods and goddesses. Let us bring forward one or two examples: the flatterers of King Demetrius around Adimantus of Lampsacus built a temple and erected statues in Thryum, under the title of Venus Phila, and named the place Philaea after Phila, the mother of Demetrius, as Leonidas of Tarentum reports. These are the words of Athenaeus, bk. vi: "Among the flatterers of King Demetrius, Adimantus of Lampsacus built a temple and placed statues in Thryum under the title of Venus Phila, and named the place Philaea from Phila, the mother of Demetrius." Moreover, Demochares the historian, the cousin of Demosthenes, wrote that the entire people of Athens consecrated temples to Lamia, the harlot of Demetrius Poliorcetes, and paid her divine honors; and the Thebans likewise — while Demetrius himself detested the shameful flattery and openly declared that "among the shades below, no Athenian citizen of great and lofty spirit would ever be found."

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IV. There are those, therefore, who think that human affection first placed images for the dead, lest they be buried in oblivion along with the common multitude, and that from this, in the course of time, some seized an occasion for superstition in their worship; there are others who think that the same superstition first enrolled them in the number of the gods, and then at last placed images for them. Lactantius traces the beginning of erecting images and worshipping dead men with divine honors to the zeal of foolish peoples for their dead kings — so that to place an image for someone and to enroll him in the number of the gods appears to be one and the same thing. Eusebius, in the Chronicle against the Preparations, narrates things plausibly consistent with this: "From the race of Iapetus there came Cecrops, (which we have noted above as a forerunner,) who was the first author of Hellenism and the founder of idolatry; for both he himself and those of his generation who came after him — whether warriors, rulers, or those who had performed deeds of justice or merit worthy of remembrance — honored them with human ancestral steles (we have shown above that idolatrous stelae were erected long before it entered anyone's mind to pay divine honors to dead men), and worshipped them as gods and sacrificed to them. But those who came after, ignorant of the intention of their forebears — namely, that they had honored them with mere memorial rites as ancestors and benefactors — revered them as heavenly gods." What he adds there regarding the rationale and form of apotheosis is most worthy of consideration — things which the ecclesiastical diptychs record, and the corrupt superstition which emanated from them: "For the manner of the apotheosis," he says, "was as follows: in their sacred books the names of those who had died were enrolled, and at that season they held a festival in their honor, saying that their souls had gone to the isles of the blessed and would no longer be judged or burned by fire." Having inserted the names of the dead into the sacred books, they established annual memorial festivals, believing that their souls had been received into the abodes of the blessed and were not tormented by purgatorial fire.

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V. The Jews fabricate that Terah, the father of Abraham, was the first maker of images and idols. This fable serves the equally fabulous story of Abraham cast into the fire for refusing to worship the image of Nimrod. It is remarkable, indeed, with what great consensus of the ancients this rotten fiction is confirmed. Epiphanius: "From Nachor was born Terah; from that time the making of idols from clay and potter's work arose —

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222 THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY. [BOOK III. — through the craft of Terah" — "From Nachor, Terah was born; from that time images from clay and pottery were invented, Terah being the craftsman." Similarly Suidas: "Terah was a maker of idols, fashioning images from various materials, and declaring that these both were gods and ought to be worshipped as the authors of good things" — "Terah was a maker of idols, fashioning images from diverse materials, and affirming that they were gods and ought to be worshipped as the sources of blessings." And John of Antioch Malalas, bk. i: "For Terah was a maker of idols, a sculptor, forming gods from stones and wood, and selling them, and he ensnared men in the superstitions of image-making and idolatry, through the craftsmanship of the ancients — especially of those who are said to have been the inventors of letters and arts" — "Terah was a sculptor who fashioned gods from stones and wood and offered them for sale. He entangled men in the superstitions of images and idolatrous worship, by the fabrication of images in memory of the ancestors, especially of those who had been the inventors of letters" (of whom in truth not one had yet existed anywhere at that time) "and of the arts."

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VI. That Haran, the son of Terah, died before him, Scripture teaches us. But Epiphanius notes that this occurred at last — from the creation of the world — as a punishment upon his impious father. "Never," he says, "among the men of earlier times had any son died before his father; but fathers, surviving their children, left behind their sons as their successors" — Heresy, bk. i, chap. 1 — "Nor had any son among earlier men yet died before his father, but fathers, having outlived their children, left their sons behind them." He replies that, after the example of Abel, Haran was carried off by a violent death. But the learned man was manifestly deceived; for not only did Lamech, who lived before the flood, die some years before his own father, but the same thing also befell Peleg, the great-great-great-grandfather of Terah, who died about two hundred years before Heber his father. But this was the common opinion of the ancients. I have no doubt that a grievous wrong is done to the memory of a pious and holy man — who had left his homeland with the intention of going to Canaan (doubtless having been divinely instructed, Gen. xi. 31) — by these fables. For the accusation lacks any semblance of probability, and it is plainly a Jewish fiction. Pindar seems to ascribe to the Rhodians some particular skill in the making of statues, Olymp. Od. vii. v. 91-98.

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By the skill of their hands they adorned all things with divine workmanship —

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With all-skilled hands to work in gold. Their works, like living beings, walked the streets. Great was their fame.

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"But lofty Minerva herself furnished them with skill, so that they surpassed all mortals in the excellence of their working hands; and their works bore a likeness to living animals and reptiles; and the glory was great." The Rhodians in-

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[Cap. I.] The Origin and Progress of Idolatry. 223

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The poet remarked that craftsmen of this kind were such that they were accustomed to produce lifelike images of living creatures and reptiles, so that they seemed to move as if in motion and in the act of running. Isidorus, in book vii., affirms that Prometheus first fashioned likenesses of men from clay, and that from him the art of erecting images and statues was born; and for this reason the poets invented the story that men were made by him.

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VII. More celebrated is the opinion of those who ascribe this art to Daedalus. Hence the ancients called all images by the name Daedalic. Others write that he invented self-moving and self-acting images. These are also mentioned in the proverb "the works of Daedalus." Most of the ancients held this view. As Plato says: "Soc. Since you did not notice the statues of Daedalus, perhaps they are not found among you. Men. What do you mean by that? Soc. Because these, unless they are bound, run away and escape" — in the Meno. Hence the image of Hercules among the Tyrians, and of Bacchus among the Chians, were fastened to their bases with chains, because they were believed to be self-moving. Aristotle also mentions this, in the Politics, i.: "For if," he says, "it were possible for each instrument to perform its own work when commanded or even anticipating the command, as they say the statues of Daedalus do" — "If it could come about that each instrument, whether commanded or sensing its purpose in advance, would carry out its own work, just as they say the statues of Daedalus do." But they say he achieved this by pouring quicksilver into the statues; which the same Aristotle shows in On the Soul, book one; a certain Philippus said that someone made a wooden Venus that moved, by pouring in quicksilver.

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VIII. The occasion of the myth was undoubtedly the fact that Daedalus was the first among the Greeks to have fashioned images to the likeness of the face and human form, with the feet in particular separated, and one advanced beyond the line of the other, as if they were prepared to walk. Thus Tzetzes solves the riddle:

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The statues before the time of Daedalus

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were crafted without hands, without feet, without eyes; but Daedalus first gave them hands, feet, separated legs, and eyelids and the rest.

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"Hence the myth came to speak of the works of Daedalus as self-moving." So it is: the earliest images were indeed crude, without hands, feet, or eyes; but when Daedalus had imposed upon the figures everything belonging to the external form of a man, the story grew widespread that he had made self-moving images. Similar accounts are found in Diodorus Siculus, Palaephatus, and others.

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IX. Indeed, Plato sufficiently indicates that the images fashioned by Daedalus were quite rough — in Socrates, in the Hippias Major, near the beginning — as the beginnings of all things, discovered from imperfect origins, are themselves imperfect: "For if now," he says, "O Hippias, Bias were to come back to life, he would be laughed at among us, just as" — and so too the statuaries of those times speak of Daedalus,

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224 THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY. [Book III.

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that if he were now alive, he would work in such a manner as the statuaries of our time do — he would seem ridiculous. "If indeed now, O Hippias, Bias were to come back to life, he would provoke laughter among you; just as the statuaries of this age report of Daedalus, that if he were now alive and produced such works as those from which he obtained his fame and name, he would be made a laughingstock."

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X. But it was a great thing to erect images in the form of a man, with hands extended and feet separated; since after columns, stelae, rough stones, and rude figures dedicated to the sun, moon, and stars, the most ancient images of this kind appear to have been such as are exhibited from the monuments of Egypt, with no hands, or with hands fastened to the sides, with feet joined together, or rather with the figures tapering into a base. Hence Philostratus, in book vi., chapter iii., of the Life of Apollonius, ascribing something peculiar to the statue of Memnon, says that it was made of black stone and that both feet touched the ground, in accordance with the Daedalic art of statue-making. The translator renders these words thus: "It is a statue made of black stone, and touching the ground with both feet, according to the art of Daedalus the statue-maker." Concerning this interpretation, Scaliger, in his Animadversions on Eusebius at Number 737, employs the phrase meaning "nothing of the kind," and renders it himself as "having its feet joined together." He similarly interprets the words of Apollodorus concerning the Palladium: "It was three cubits in height, with its feet joined together" — so some render it; others, "with its feet arranged so that it seemed to walk." From the force of the word, or from its use in this context, nothing certain can be gathered. But if the statue of Memnon had been made with feet joined together — that is, in truth without any form of feet at all, as the figures the Egyptians call mummies show to have been the common practice among them — there would have been nothing peculiar or noteworthy about it in that respect. Furthermore, since it was of the kind made after Daedalus, not before Daedalus, it seems to me that Philostratus sufficiently indicates that it differed from the other Egyptian images in this: that it was fashioned with feet separated, after the manner of Daedalus.

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XI. And these are nearly all the things that are found among the ancients concerning the origin of Hellenism and of image-making. To these, many more of the same kind could be added, if it had been decided to report everything rather than only what is sufficient. What seems to us to come nearest to the truth, or at least to be most like what is probable, we shall state in the next place.

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— The fame of deeds accomplished in the East — The acts of the gods — Nectar as Babylonian wine — The first gods of the idolaters were themselves the first apostates from the true God — Some memory of the names of the true God retained after the confusion of tongues — That memory ascribed to idols — On the pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton — The fables of Sanchoniathon: El, Iao, Ieue — Elioun, Adonis — Thoth, Theoth, Theos, Bau — Erebus — Earth, etc.

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I. It can be demonstrated by certain arguments that all those who were first enrolled in the number of gods lived in the East. From that region of the world, immediately after the confusion of tongues, leaders of tribes and families led colonies into all parts of the earth. These men, in the course of time, became what the Hebrew calls men renowned for their fame. Yet wherever they directed their journey, there can be no doubt that the new bands retained some fame, though faint and obscure, even of their great ancestors — namely Noah, Shem, Ham, and others. Recalling these as the founders of their race, and those others as the blessed guides of their wanderings, and being by now given over to every superstition — with the traditions concerning the rank and deeds of those men gradually increasing, as is wont to happen — they imagined that those men had possessed something of the divine beyond the common lot of the human race. And since they knew that those men had lived on earth in the company of all, they felt it right to suppose either that those men had descended from heaven to accomplish outstanding deeds among men, or that by the merit of their deeds they had been translated to the heavens in some manner after death.

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II. The Greeks were the chief manufacturers of gods, so much so that Greece is not inaptly called the homeland and workshop of the gods; and that superstition which consists in their religious worship is what we are treating — namely, Hellenism. To them, the East was the realm of the gods above; the West, however, and whatever turned toward the northern regions of the world, they called the realm of the dead below. Those who had crossed over into those parts of the world, they supposed had sailed to the underworld or passed through it in some manner — for no other reason than that they had received all their gods from the East. The river Lethe is in Galicia in Spain; Avernus is in Italy; the Cimmerians and Scythians are near the Maeotian marsh, later called Huns; and certain others are in Italy itself. Hence in religious worship, the eastern parts were assigned to gods, and the western parts to demons — as Porphyry attests in his work on the Cave of the Nymphs in the Ithaca of Homer. And so, although, as we taught above, the ancient temples dedicated to the sun had their sacred doors toward the south, the sacred precincts established for these idols always had their entrances on the east side, with the statues facing east, which those entering venerated while looking back toward the west. The one exception was Jupiter Capitolinus, who from ancient times had been placed with his face toward the west, but was turned to face the east at the advice of the haruspices, during the consulship of Cicero, as Cicero himself testifies in his Oration against Catiline to the People. Porphyry himself teaches us this, saying: that almost all temples have their sacred statues and their entrances facing

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toward the east; and those entering, facing toward the west, when they have completed their circuit of the sacred statues, stand facing the statues toward the gods and offer worship and service — Almost all temples have their statues and their entrances facing east; and those entering look westward, where, standing with their faces turned toward the statues, they render honor and worship to the gods. It was the custom of certain ancient Christians, in order to oppose this superstition, to bow and to worship as they entered the temples facing east.

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III. The first gods of the nations who arose from men — whom they enrolled in the number of gods (after having worshipped the stars of heaven for several centuries) — were leaders of families and tribes, either those who had been distinguished in the East, or those who had been guides for peoples seeking new homes, leading them out from the East. The fame of these men, mingled with fables, gradually passed into belief; and their memory passed into worship. And so, whatever they had received by fame or by any tradition concerning the life, deeds, character, and wars of those great men — true and false alike, but mostly false mixed with true — was recounted as the deeds and acts of divine beings, as if it had fallen down from heaven. Nectar itself, the drink of the gods, was Babylonian wine. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, book i, cites Chaereas: that in Babylon there is a wine called nectar by the natives — Chaereas reports that in Babylon there is a wine which the natives call nectar. Hence nectar, the drink of the gods — which Suidas foolishly supposes to be called quasi neoktap, from the Greek for making its drinkers young — that which makes those who drink it young. And the author of the Etymologicon: Nectar, the drink of the gods, as it were that which keeps those who drink it in youth. Others propose various Greek etymologies for the word, all of them absurd, since it came to Greece from the East along with the gods themselves. Hence Strabo wisely cautions that Greek etymologies should not be sought for the names of barbarian nations. It has long since been shown by others that Noah was Saturn, Janus, and Bacchus; Ham was Jupiter Ammon; Japheth was Iapetus and Neptune; Shem was Pluto and Dis. There is no need to rehearse here the transformation of these and others from the most common fables. As for those who afterward swelled the number of gods in Greece itself, their history is too recent and too well-known for me to dwell upon it.

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V. Furthermore: after the confusion of tongues, the builders of the tower, scattered here and there, retained in their memory in whatever manner some of the names of the true God, to pass them on to their sons and grandsons. But these, in the course of time, being ignorant of what or whom those great and venerable names referred to, applied them all to those new gods they had taken to themselves. Thus Sanchoniathon, among the Phoenician progenitors who were afterward enrolled in the number of gods, mentions Elioun or Hypsistos, that is, the Most High; and he writes that he begot heaven and earth. And Iao, who is nothing other than the true God. The name of Jupiter, Jova, and Jupiter — Sanchoniathon renders that name as Ieue, since he narrates that he learned many things from Hierombalus the priest of the god Ieue. Diodorus, in book i, says that the God to whom Moses ascribed his laws was called Iao; with which agrees the oracle cited by Macrobius, Saturnalia, book i:

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Learn that Iao is the highest of all gods.

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By this, Satan strives to ascribe the incommunicable name to other idols. Eusebius, in Demonstratio Evangelica, book iv, final chapter, says: Joshua moreover is Iao salvation, that is, the salvation of God. Hence it is probable that in that other passage, Eusebius wrote from Sanchoniathon Iao and not Ieue. Iaou appears in Clement of Alexandria, Stromata v, perhaps also corruptly for Iaoe; and Iauia appears in Origen, but certainly corruptly. He says, in Contra Celsum, book vii: According to the Hebrew scriptures, the name Iauia used by the Hebrews, and Sabaoth, and Adonai, and Elohim — these names taken from the scriptures are synonyms of the one and only God; which the ignorant, not understanding this, as even they themselves confess, supposed Iao to be one god and Sabaoth another. He is speaking of heretics who had drawn their monstrous fabrications from the cesspools of paganism. Furthermore, whether they learned those names — epithets of the one true God — from the scriptures or from ancient tradition, it amounts to the same thing. From each individual name, a new deity is constructed. Moreover, Iauia is a corrupt reading for Iao Iao. Reynolds was the first to suspect the error, in De Idololatria, book ii, chapter iii. Sandford restored the true reading, in his first book De Descensu Christi ad Inferos; after him Grotius, on Matt. 22, and others.

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He first made it known to them, when He adopted the entire nation as His peculiar people and church — Exod. 3. For although the name YHWH had been known to all the faithful from the foundation of the world, God had never used it in any confirmation of His covenant, in any promise, but only the name El Shaddai. Therefore, after that nation ceased to be the people of God and the church, it voluntarily cast off all memory of that name of God which He graciously revealed in that covenant compact by which He adopted them as His peculiar people — or it has been punished with forgetfulness of it.

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VII. Next, the Hebrew names for "God the Mighty, the Most High" were transformed into Heros. Adon was Adonis; Evan and Evius derived their origin from Eheie; Elelei came from Elohim. Plutarch in his Theseus says of those who "hasten and exult" to cry out that word: "those who rush forward and shout for joy." The word Hierum, which refers to all sacred things, is written to be derived from Io, which has no meaning at all in Greek; and it is nothing other than the Hebrew term for it. From the Hebrew word for "dust" (adamah) came Hades, after God had said to Adam "you shall return to the dust" — that is, to the adamah. Jupiter Sabasius comes from Jehovah Sabaoth. I would weary the reader if I were to enumerate everything of this kind that presents itself.

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VIII. Sanchuniathon invents that the names of the chief things recorded in the creation of the world were the titles of men, sages, and kings, and from that foundation he spins out his lengthy fables. Hesiod wove his own theogony from no other source. From the Hebrew word for "earth" (erets) comes Hertha, the greatest goddess among the English and the other peoples of Germany, as Tacitus attests in his Germania, chapter 40: "In common," he says, "they worship Airthum, that is, Mother Earth." The Hebrew letters tav-vav-tav and tav-vav-tav-he are Thoth and Theoth (from which also the Greek Theos), and Bau. The Hebrew word for "darkness" (ereb) is Erebus; and from that order of words found in Gen. 1 — "and there was evening and there was morning" — many peoples have preferred night to day. Of the Germans, Tacitus says: "They count not the number of days but of nights; thus they make their appointments, thus they agree on dates; night appears to lead the day." And in truth it did lead; for light came forth from darkness. The same custom still holds among the English to this day. For a week we say "seven-night," and "fortnight," that is, "fourteen nights," for two weeks. And likewise the ancient Britons, whom we now call Welsh, for whom a week is "Withos," that is, eight nights; and two weeks, "Pymthec nos," that is, fifteen nights — which is also a monument of Celtic origin. The same custom prevailed among the ancient Gauls, flowing from the same source of traditions, and not, as Caesar supposed, because they believed themselves to be descended from Father Dis. Such were the beginnings of Hellenism, or rather of that confused superstition which spread over nearly the entire world.

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British idolatry — The most ancient inhabitants of the island are unknown; and whence Britain was so called — The origins of peoples and nations are obscure — The causes of that obscurity — How great is the ignorance in tracing them — The ignorance and bad faith of the Greeks and Latins — The ancients buried Jewish antiquities under falsehoods — Hence their testimony is untrustworthy to others — Peculiar causes of ignorance regarding British origins — The island's situation — The ambition and cunning of the wise in concealing past matters — The islands of Europe occupied by the posterity of Japheth, Gen. x. 5 — From the first habitation to Caesar's arrival on this island, all things wrapped in darkness — Caesar's testimony — The interior of the island unknown to the Gauls — He holds the interior inhabitants to be aborigines (autochthones) — Tacitus: a mixture of many peoples; both writers speak absurdly — The attempt of Camden and Boxhorn to prove that the Britons and Gauls used the same language and were the same people — Gomer, the firstborn son of Japheth — From him the Cimbri are descended — The Britons call themselves Komeros or Cymeros — The Gomerians, or Cimbri — What the word signifies — The Britons as Cimbri — Another etymology of the name Cymro — Camber, son of Brutus — Hence Cambria — Whence Britain is named — Various proposed etymologies rejected — Prytaneia — Brytona, a Cretan nymph — Britannia in Gaul — Bridanium — Prid Cain — Most think it was so named from Brutus the Trojan — That opinion contested by Camden — Camden's conjecture — Brith, Tania — Learned men support it — Arguments against it — Bochart's most probable conjecture — This island known to the Tyrians — Called "barat anac," or the field of tin — Defense of the conjecture against Hornius — British idolatry — The chief priests of British sacred rites, well known — Origen writes that the Druids worshipped one God — That God was the Sun — Tacitus: they shared the same rites as the Gauls — The custom of pouring out prayers with hands spread toward heaven — Andraste, and Andate, Astarte, the Moon — Boadicea, a vow made to her — Among the Gauls according to Caesar; received from the Massilian Greeks — Unknown to the Britons — The most ancient Gauls had no images — Their gods: Teutates, Hesus, and Taranis — Teutates from Diw Taith, leader of the way — The Sun, its worship — Hesus, and Haud — Taranis; hence Taran meaning thunder among the Welsh, Thunder, Donder, Thursday — The images of these gods — The Druids as chief priests — The spread of their superstition into Gaul and Germany — Its origin in Britain — Whence the Druids are so called — Druys, king of the Celts — Bardus succeeded him — Drw the magician — Dru and Trou: truthful divine — The true etymology from the word drus — Drw in British meaning oak — The seat of superstition in oak groves — The same persons called Saronidae for the same reason — Who the Bards were — Their office — Their memory among the Cambro-Britons, and their name — Strabo noted — The distinctive dress of the Druids: white vestments in sacred rites — Their academy and studies — The gathering of young men for their instruction — The reasons for this, their privileges and authority — The custom of teaching in schools; the duration of study; the advancement of students — The philosophy they taught — Magic — What kind of medicine they practised — Their distinctive theology — The chief dogma thereof: the immortality of souls; the end of the world — They also taught rhetoric, geography, astronomy, natural philosophy, ethics — The rank of Druids among themselves — Their authority in the commonwealth — Under the pretext of religion they mixed in all affairs — The excommunication of transgressors — Their sacred rites: sacrifices; two kinds of human victims — The custom of human sacrifice, from Diodorus, Caesar, Strabo, Dio, and others — The fruitless Roman attempt to abolish the superstition — Britain freed through the gospel — The beginnings of the Christian religion on this island — Joseph of Arimathaea — Claudia — Pudens; concerning King Lucius — The epistolary exchange between him and Eleutherius — Bede, the author of the history — An error in assigning the time — Henry of Erfurt — Ado — The letter

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III. We have said that the inhabitants of the islands of Europe are descended from the sons and posterity of Japheth. Now his firstborn son was called Gomer. Most hold that the Cimbri are descended from him. The Welsh, who alone are the genuine posterity of the ancient Britons, call themselves Kymroes — that is, Gomerians — and call their nation Cumro, and their language Cumraec. From this Camden argues that the ancient Britons were Cimbri, and that they crossed over here from neighbouring Gaul, since the Gauls, Cimbri, and Celts are one and the same. Add to this that Gomer means "ending" or "completing," from a root meaning "to end" — as if there were an omen in the very culmination of his genealogy, that he had been foreordained to occupy the ends of the earth. These things are indeed quite plausible, and I shall embrace them until someone teaches better. It should not, however, pass unnoticed that most of the Britons think they are called Kymroes or Cambros, and that Cambros comes from Cambria — the name given to that part of the island which fell by lot to Camber, the son of Brutus. We leave all these matters in the same state in which we found them, content to have reported them where no more certain account is available.

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IV. So much regarding the inhabitants themselves. The name of Britain is very ancient. Many etymologies of it have been devised by various persons, most of them false if not all, and some of them ridiculous. Eliota, a noble and learned man, in the dictionary which Cooper published with his additions, holds that Britain was named from the Greek word prytaneia. The prytanis at Athens was the director of the marketplace; and the prytaneia was that Prytanic dignity; and they also sometimes used prytaneia to mean public markets. Since the Greeks therefore perceived that this island abounded in goods suitable for trade, they called it prytaneia, from which the name Britannia arose. But this conjecture errs in many ways: first, it renders these islands not merely known to the most ancient Greeks but quite familiar to them, whereas Herodotus testifies that he did not know from where tin was brought, which they obtained from no other source than these islands. Then, although I would by no means agree with Camden that these regions were entirely unknown to the Greeks before Caesar's arrival, I have no doubt that they were called British long before anyone could pretend that Athenians had landed here, since their prytaneia was a comparatively recent institution. Balaeus derives the British name from Brytona, a Cretan nymph who, to escape the violence of Minos attempting to dishonour her, threw herself headlong into the waters. Lying Greece will supply six hundred fables of this kind to anyone who asks. Bede derives it from a Britannia in Gaul — formerly called Armorica — which received its name from Britons who crossed over there from here. But the folly of all is surpassed by the madness of Goropius Becanus, who wishes Britain to be called as if "Bri-danium" — that is, as he himself interprets it, "free Denmark" — when the name of Britain was celebrated throughout the entire world before the name of Denmark or the Danes was known or even existed. Humfredus Lluddus derives the name from Prid and Cain, two little British words meaning "bright form." Of this conjecture, I know of no one who supports it, though it is not more absurd than those others which have found their champions.

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VI. Samuel Bochart, a man most learned in every respect, brings forward a new conjecture to untangle the truth, in his Geographia Sacra, Part II, ch. 39. For after he has shown that these islands surrounded by the ocean were known to the Greeks and were called the Cassiterides from the lead and tin with which they most abundantly abound, he teaches that this island was also known to the Tyrians and was for the same reason called "barat anac," meaning "field" or "land of tin"; and from this, he shows, the name Britannia appears to have flowed among Greeks and Latins. The matter is too long for me to dwell upon while I have other things to attend to. I will briefly say what I think: whether because — when all the other etymologies, considered carefully and at length, are either wholly displeasing or less pleasing — this conjecture of that eminent man recommends itself by its very novelty, or whether because the mind senses that some light of truth shines forth from it amid the greatest darkness, I confess that it pleases me more than all the others. I know that this derivation of the British name has been attacked and rejected by the most learned George Hornius, in his "Introduction to Ancient Geography" and in his "Preface to the Gallic Origins" of Boxhorn. On what grounds? On this ground, namely, that the Phoenicians only very late — and that after other peoples in the seventh or eighth place, among whom were some Greeks — obtained mastery of the sea and sailed into these waters. And so by the same effort he seeks both to reject the etymology of Britain and to overthrow and demolish the foundation of several other things which Bochart seemed to me to have unearthed from darkness with heroic effort and with marvellous success. I do not wish to put my sickle into another man's harvest; I will only say that it seems to me remarkable that any man relying on the authority and credibility of the Greeks could bring himself to believe that the Phoenicians, who had actually

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VII. Whatever ultimately may be the true origin of the name of this island, whoever the most ancient inhabitants may have been, it is most certain that the Britons were most deeply polluted by idolatrous superstition. Yet from the most remote antiquity, the priestly overseers of British sacred rites were more widely known — inasmuch as their discipline spread far and wide among other nations — than the very deities which the Britons worshipped through their ministry. These were the Druidae or Druides, of whom we must treat hereafter. That they "taught that one God is to be worshipped," Origen affirms in his commentary on Ezek. chap. iv. If that is true, this one god was the Sun itself, not the most holy Creator of heaven and earth, the knowledge of whom the savage superstition of the Druids was very far from possessing. To this they added the Moon, worshipped by women. Hence Dio, Hist. lib. lxii, records that Boadicea, raising her hand toward heaven, said: "I give thanks to you, Andraste" (perhaps Astarte), "and I, a woman, invoke you as woman to woman." The Moon was commonly regarded as queen of heaven and, among the Britons, as the bestower of victory. And because they worshipped the heavenly bodies, Tacitus, in his Life of Agricola, relates that they poured out their prayers with hands raised to the sky — as does Dio regarding Boadicea. Caesar affirms, in lib. vi of the Gallic War, chap. xii, that the superstition of the Druids originated in Britain: "The discipline," he says, "is believed to have been discovered in Britain and to have been brought over from there into Gaul; and now those who wish to study it more carefully generally travel there for the purpose of learning." Tacitus also adds, in order to prove that the Gauls had occupied the neighboring territory: "You may recognize their sacred rites by the persuasion of the superstitions." Caesar reports that the Gauls worshipped Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva. We have shown elsewhere that both the names and the worship of these deities they received from the Greek inhabitants of Massilia. From them also they learned the use of images and statues, which was unknown to the ancient Gauls, as Lucan attests: "And the gloomy images of the gods"

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Lack all art, and stand as shapeless forms hewn from felled trunks.

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Teutates, and Esus bristling at his savage altars, and Taranis, whose altar is no milder than that of Scythian Diana." Some hold that Teutates derived from Duw Taith. These are British words signifying "guide of the journey." We showed above, however, that nearly all the nations dispersed from Babylon worshipped the Sun as the guide of their journeys and wanderings. That the idol of Moloch among the Ammonites was the Sun, all the learned agree. We will describe his rites in our exposition of Jewish idolatry. Almost nowhere in the superstition of the nations does anything equal or similar to these things occur, except for what Caesar has preserved in memory concerning the Gauls, who received all religious worship from the Britons, in the Gallic War, lib. vi. chap. xvi: "They have," he says, "images of immense size, whose limbs, woven from wicker, they fill with living men; and when these are set on fire, the men, surrounded by the flames, perish." Teutates, therefore, is the Sun. Who Esus was is uncertain; and so that you may see the uncertainty of conjectures: Gosselinus, in Bochart, derives the name from the Hebrew word chizzus, meaning "the strong one"; Camden derives it from Haud, a British word meaning "dog."

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IX. That they worshipped any anthropomorphic gods, there is no testimony or memory whatsoever. Yet in the course of time they placed various images alongside these idols, as Gildas attests: "In Britain," he says, "there are diabolical portents themselves, almost surpassing the number of those in Egypt, some of whose features we still behold with grim countenances, stiffened in their customary manner, within or outside the desolate walls." Nor are many more things recorded concerning the idols of the Britons, although without doubt the chaos of superstition among them was very great. But the superstition of these islands was better known from its ministers than from its gods; of these, therefore, we must treat.

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X. The Druides or Druid presided over British sacred rites. By that name they were renowned throughout the entire Celtic, or Cimbrian, nation. Diogenes Laertius, in the Proem of his work, says: "Among the Celts and Galatians are those called Druids." We showed previously from Caesar that Britain gave origin to this order of men and to this superstition. Scholars do not agree on the etymology of the word. Most uncertain are the things related concerning Dryide and his successor Bardo, kings of the Celts, and other matters which Balzus collected. Montanus says that Dry means "magician," and that from this the Druids were so named by the Greeks because they were magi. Vossius holds that the name derived from Dru, or Trou, a German word meaning veracious and faithful, as the English "true" signifies. The more common, and without doubt the truer, derivation of the word is that which Pliny first transmitted, in lib. xvi. chap. last: "Nothing," he says, "is more sacred to the Druids than mistletoe and the tree on which it grows, provided it is an oak. They choose oak groves for their own sake, and they perform no sacred rite without that foliage, so that from this they might also seem, by Greek interpretation, to be called Druids." For apis means "oak"; and Druids comes from drus. Add to this that dru sounds the same in British. That the Druids performed their sacred rites in oak groves and oak forests, all acknowledge. "Groves cut down, sacred to savage superstitions," says Tacitus, Annals lib. xiv. chap. xxx. For the same reason also they were called Saronides.

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Diodorus, lib. v. chap. xxxi, says they call the theologians Saronides — from the oaks, that is. Hence Callimachus, Hymn to Jupiter: "Certainly the wet Jao bore many oaks from above." On which passage the scholiast writes, "Saronidas drus" — that is, Saronides from the oak — and subjoins the reasoning of the word. Maximus of Tyre also attests that the sign of Jupiter among the Celts was the tallest oak. XI. Whether the Bards were Druids assigned to a particular function, or a different class of men, is uncertain. Lucan celebrates their office, lib. i. 447:—

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"You also, O bards, who commit to the long ages the brave souls that perished in war with your praises, poured forth in safety your many songs." And Marcellinus: "The Bards sang in heroic verses the illustrious deeds of brave men, accompanied by the sweet strains of the lyre." And before him Diodorus, as above: "There are also among them," he says, "lyric poets whom they call Bards." Similarly Possidonius also, in Athenaeus, lib. vi: "Their attendants are those called Bards, who are poets, and they happen upon their praises by singing." There are also still among the Cambro-Britons some occupied with composing verses and genealogies, whom they call bards.

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XII. Strabo, lib. iv, distributes the priestly overseers of sacred rites among the Celts into three classes: namely, Bards, Vates, and Druids. He would have spoken more accurately had he said two classes of seers, Bards and Druids; for he assigns to the Vates those things which were proper to the Druids. For he says: "The Vates sacrifice and contemplate or teach the nature of things." We have shown from Caesar that the Druids presided over all sacred rites.

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The chief dogma of their theology was that souls do not perish, nor does the world. "They declare souls and the world to be immortal," says Strabo — "They hold that souls and the world are immortal." And Caesar, as cited above, ch. xiv.: "Above all they wish to persuade men that souls do not perish, but after death pass from some to others; and they think that by this belief men are greatly stirred to valor, with the fear of death set aside." These words of Caesar Lucan thus expresses, lib. i. 454:

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They also taught that the world would ultimately be destroyed by fire and water. "Destruction by fire and water," as Strabo says — it is doubtful whether the minds of those were rightly understood who perhaps, from ancient tradition, taught that the world was once destroyed by water and is to be consumed again by fire.

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XVIII. To theology they also added geography and astronomy. The same Mela: "These men profess to know the size and shape of the earth and the world, the motions of the heavens and of the stars." And Caesar himself, as cited above, ch. xiv.: "They dispute and hand down to the youth much concerning the stars and their movements, the size of the world and of the lands, and concerning the nature of things" (natural philosophy). To these they added ethics, as Diogenes testifies, Proem. sect. 6: "They say that the Druids philosophize obscurely and by maxims" (to be learned by heart, of course) "worshipping the gods, doing no evil, and practicing courage."

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XX. But the same author teaches us with what grace and authority they prevailed among the peoples. "They," he says, "are present at divine matters, they arrange public and private sacrifices, they interpret religious observances. They decide on nearly all public and private controversies; and if any crime has been committed, if a murder has been done, if there is a dispute about inheritance or boundaries, they are the ones who judge and impose penalties." Thus, meddling in others’ affairs, they intruded themselves under the pretext of religion into all public and private matters, while they themselves were meanwhile exempt from every duty owed to the commonwealth, tending their own power in another’s domain. But since they did not ordinarily bear the office of magistrate, and therefore had neither the rods nor the axes nor the power of life and death—which are entirely necessary for exacting obedience—it may rightly be asked how they compelled the peoples to remain within the bounds of duty and to be obedient to them in all things. To this inconvenience, therefore, relief was supplied by the invention of a politico-religious excommunication; and thus a certain Caesareo-papal authority was made complete. "If anyone," the same Caesar says, "whether a private person or a public one, has not abided by their decree, they forbid him from the sacrifices. This penalty is among them the most severe. Those thus forbidden are reckoned in the number of the impious and the wicked; all withdraw from them, flee their approach and their conversation, lest they receive some harm from contact with them;

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nor is justice granted to them when they seek it, nor is any honor shared with them." There is no one, or he is of no account, who does not understand that this entire mystery of iniquity was long ago carried over into Christianity.

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XXI. There remain the sacred rites and the worship of the gods. These were varied and nearly all of them monstrous. After Caesar’s first landing on this island and his withdrawal—or rather his flight—"the Britons, performing various sacrifices, gave themselves to the slaughter of cattle; they offered there forty thousand oxen, and a hundred thousand sheep, and birds of various kinds which could not easily be counted, and besides these thirty thousand wild beasts of every kind that had been gathered." These are the words of Geoffrey, book 1, chapter 24; that is, a man of the most reckless audacity and shamelessness in fabricating anything. The chief thing recorded about the sacrifices of the Druids by trustworthy authors is human sacrifice. There were indeed two kinds of human victims among them: the first was private, namely when someone devoted either himself or another for the salvation of a third party. "Those who are afflicted with more serious diseases, and those who are engaged in battles and dangers, either sacrifice men as victims or vow that they will sacrifice themselves, and they employ the Druids as ministers for these sacrifices; for they believe that unless a human life is given in return for a human life, the divine power of the immortal gods cannot otherwise be appeased," says Caesar, in the same work, chapter 16. This, however, as is evident from Strabo and others, was the form of that immolation. When the victim was brought to the altar, the priest sprinkled wine—or, where this was lacking, some other liquid—on its forehead; then, seizing the foremost hairs with his left hand, he poured libations into the fire, at the same time performing prayers or vows to the gods, and then the victim itself was struck with a sword, as Cluverius observes. The second kind was public, and not unlike, as we noted before, the worship of Moloch in the East. "And publicly," says Caesar in the same place, "they have images of immense size, whose limbs, woven of wicker, they fill with living men; these being set on fire, the men, surrounded by the flame, are killed." So much he says about the Gauls, who received the Druids themselves and this entire superstition from the Britons. Strabo likewise says in book 4: a man struck down with a sword while they watched his death-throes for purposes of divination—and this not without the Druids—and other forms of human sacrifice are mentioned; for they would shoot some with arrows, and crucify them in the temples, and constructing a large figure, they would herd cattle of all sorts and various animals and men into it and burn them. Beyond the one mentioned by Caesar, he here records three other kinds of public sacrifice in which men were sacrificed: for either those to be sacrificed were struck with a sword, or they were pierced with arrows, or they were even put on crosses; and to these he adds that custom of burning men enclosed in colossal images. Yet another kind of death used in these sacrifices is recorded by Diodorus, book 5, chapter 32. The criminals, he says, they keep for five years and then impale them on stakes as a sacrifice to the gods, and together with many other first-fruits they burn them on

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great pyres—"Criminals kept for five years they sacrifice to the gods, fixed upon stakes, and together with other first-fruits they burn them on great pyres." By fire, therefore, by sword, by arrows, by the cross, by sharpened stakes, they dispatched those to be sacrificed as they pleased. Nor was this crime perpetrated only against the guilty: "They also descend to the punishment of the innocent," says Caesar in the same place. And with what savage ferocity the Britons conducted themselves in public sacrifices, Dio testifies in book 62 of his Histories: to the captive men under her command nothing of the most terrible kind failed to happen. And the most terrible and most brutal thing they did was this: they stripped naked the noblest and most distinguished women, and cut off their breasts and sewed them to their mouths, so that they appeared to be eating them, and after this they impaled the women on sharp stakes driven lengthwise through their whole bodies; and all these things they did while simultaneously performing sacred rites, feasting, and behaving wantonly, both in their other temples and especially in the grove of Andatae—that is, "But the men who were captured suffered every extremity. And the most cruel and most savage thing was this: they hung up the noblest and most virtuous women naked, and cut off their breasts and sewed them to their own mouths, so that they seemed to eat them. Then they ran stakes sharpened at the end through their whole bodies lengthwise; and all these things they did while at the same time performing sacred rites, feasting, and conducting themselves wantonly, both in other sacred places and especially in the grove of Andatae." And such slaves of Satan were we Britons.

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XXII. On account of these unspeakable sacrifices the Romans attempted to abolish the entire superstition of the Druids. Strabo concerning the Gauls, book 4, chapter 4: "The Romans turned them away from these things, and from the rites of sacrifice and divination that were contrary to our customs"—that is, "The Romans led them away from these practices and from the rites of sacrifice and divination which were in conflict with our laws." And Suetonius in his Life of Claudius, chapter 25: "The religion of the Druids among the Gauls, being of dire savagery and only forbidden to Roman citizens under Augustus, he utterly abolished." That is, he intended to do so in Gaul, but in vain; the seat and origin of the superstition, Britain, was left untouched. The Druids were slain only on the island of Mona, and the groves were cut down by Suetonius Paulinus. Tacitus narrates the event in the Annals, book 14, chapter 30: "There stood," he says, "on the shore a battle-line of varied composition, dense with arms and men, with women rushing between the ranks, and Druids round about, pouring out dreadful prayers with hands raised to heaven; and the novelty of the sight struck the soldiers with such awe that, as though their limbs were paralyzed, they offered their motionless bodies to be wounded. Then, at the exhortations of their general, and urging one another not to be frightened by a womanish and fanatical band, they advanced the standards, cut down all who opposed them, and wrapped them in their own fire. A garrison was then placed over the vanquished, and the groves sacred to savage superstitions were cut down: for they considered it lawful to drench their altars with the blood of captives and to consult their gods through human entrails."

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of the sanctuary, which went out to heal the nations—most remote from it—yet God graciously arranging this matter, the heralds and preachers of divine grace were brought to it almost from the very cradle of the gospel. That Peter preached the gospel here is asserted by Simeon Metaphrastes and the Menologium; that Paul did so, by Theodoret and Sophronius; that Simon the Zealot did, by Dorotheus; that Aristobulus—whom Paul mentions in the Epistle to the Romans—did, by Nicephorus; that Joseph of Arimathea did, nearly all assert, especially the more recent among our own countrymen: Bale, Parker, Fox, Camden, and others; and about Joseph scarcely anyone doubts. From this, the most ancient Christian writers, Tertullian and Origen, record that Britain received the Christian faith: Origen in his Commentary on Ezekiel, chapter 4; Tertullian in his book Against the Jews, chapter 7. Martial also celebrates Claudia Rufina, a British woman of the highest nobility and learning, in book 11, Epigram 54: "Since Claudia Rufina is sprung from the blue-painted Britons, why does she have the heart of the Latin people? What beauty of form! Italian mothers can believe her Roman, Attic ones their own." That this was the same Claudia whom Paul mentions in 2 Tim. 4:21, learned men believe, and the dates agree. Add to this that he associates her with Pudens, whom the same Martial also celebrates in book 7, Epigram 10: "You compel me with my own pen and hand

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XXV. The history was first committed to memory, as far as I know, by Bede, in his Ecclesiastical History, book 1, chapter 4. He states that Lucius wrote to Eleutherius in the year of the Chronicle 156. Nauclerus follows him; but Baronius demonstrates in his Annals that Eleutherius did not preside over the Roman church before the year of Christ 178. There is therefore an error in the assignment of the date. Henry of Erfurt reports that this occurred in the year 196, the nineteenth year of the Emperor Verus (who by no means reigned that many years). Ado, in his Chronicle, arranges the time more correctly, and writes that Eleutherius lived and governed the Roman church under the Emperor Commodus, which is true; for the end of the third year of Eleutherius falls at the beginning of the reign of Commodus. Let this, then, be the time at which that epistolary exchange between King Lucius and Eleutherius occurred, if it ever occurred at all. Geoffrey of Monmouth narrates at length the success of the undertaking. "Without delay," he says, "the peoples of the nations flocking from all sides follow the king’s example and, cleansed in the same baptism, are restored to the heavenly kingdom. The blessed teachers, therefore (namely Fugatius and Damianus, sent from Rome by Eleutherius), having destroyed paganism throughout nearly the whole island, dedicated to the one God and His saints the temples that had been founded in honor of many gods, and filled them with various bands of ordained ministers. There were at that time in Britain twenty-eight flamens and three archflamens. To their authority the other judges on the island were subject. These, by apostolic command, they rescued from idolatry, and where there had been flamens they placed bishops, and where there had been archflamens they placed archbishops. Now the seats of the archflamens had been in three of the nobler cities, namely in London, in York, and in the City of the Legions, which old walls and buildings testify to have been situated above the river Usk in Glamorgan. To these three, then, the superstition being done away with, twenty-eight bishops are subordinated." So much for Geoffrey, who never knew what it was to be ashamed. How childishly he fabricated all this will immediately be apparent. The British superstition had no more flamens or archflamens than Geoffrey of Monmouth had. Moreover, I would not deny that he rightly exposed the origin of that distinction among the ministers of Christian worship, the Roman church itself acknowledging it in the Decretals, part 1, distinction 21: "Among priests," they say, "a certain gradation has been maintained, so that some are called simply priests, others archpresbyters, others chorepiscopi, others bishops, others archbishops or metropolitans, others primates, others patriarchs, others supreme pontiffs; this gradation was introduced chiefly by the Gentiles, who called their own flamens some simply flamens, others archflamens, others protoflamens." So speaks the author of the distinction, nakedly and openly. More modest, and within the bounds of propriety, is the more learned Leland. "It remains," he says, "for me to indicate the circumstance that removed so great a superstition from the midst. By Roman edict it was provided that no use or esteem of the Druid religion should be displayed in the provinces. Yet the barbarian peoples tenaciously retained the ancestral rites received from the Druids themselves ages before; until Christ the best and greatest Savior, having dispersed the darkness of errors and gross ignorance, poured out a light conspicuous to all the world, with His Spirit as guide. Then that great Lucius, the immortal glory of the Britons, spurning the discipline of the Druids, willingly desired that the gospel teaching should be shared by all his people. Therefore Elvanus and Meduinus, noble British ambassadors, were sent by Lucius to Eleutherius at Rome; and Fugatius together with Damianus, sent back here from Rome, firmly established the religion that shall never die, God in His favor so willing." Certain Bavarians add, as Bale testifies in his British Writers, Century 1, chapter 29, that this Lucius afterward undertook the apostolate and converted their nation to the faith, and they count it to their praise that they were converted by a great king; but our own countrymen object, affirming that Lucius never set foot outside his own kingdom, but died at Gloucester in the twelfth year of his reign. The most learned Camden (whose footsteps Selden follows in his Anglo-British Analects) yields to the common prejudice. For after he had most carefully compiled and set lucidly before all eyes the history of those times from the most trustworthy historians, showing that British affairs had been in such a state and condition from the days of Claudius Caesar, who had reduced the island to the form of a province, that there was no room at all for such a king as this Lucius is imagined to have been who held the whole island under his sway, he nonetheless prudently judged that the history itself should be inserted into his work—a history which the very sequence of facts and times that he laid out cries out must be entirely rejected.

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XXVI. To uproot from the minds of men so great an opinion, so deeply implanted, so ancient, is not within our ability or our purpose. But since falsehood has no strong foundation or force anywhere, if I first obtain from readers what is most fair—that they bring no prejudice to the matter—I have no doubt that I shall persuade the lovers of truth that my suspicion, which is not mine alone, has causes sufficiently just—indeed, most weighty.

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"Behold, he who upon the Britons" — Scaliger restored this reading in his notes on Tibullus, but without doubt the correct reading is: "Behold, he who first laid the yoke upon the mouth of the Thames" — since Claudius was the first to cross the Thames, as noted by the most learned Camden. Annaeus Seneca had earlier sung of this same Claudius, in his Apocolocyntosis of the Emperor Claudius:

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"He commanded the Britons to bow their necks to chains beyond the known world, and the very shores of the sea to tremble; he brought new laws of Rome with the axe, and made the Brigantes tremble before the dark-blue ocean."

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Most elegant also are those epigrams which that great Scaliger brought forth in his Catalecta. It is fitting to append some of them: "A land never violated by Ausonian triumphs, struck by your thunderbolt, Caesar, has fallen. And the ocean looks beyond itself at your altars: what is the end of the world will not be the end of your empire. A people conquered before by none, now at last beheld in triumph, lies unspoiled as a trophy to your honor. Long a legend, hidden in the middle sea, it has now freely bowed its neck to the conqueror. Britain, free, that suffered neither enemy nor king, that lies far off from our world for ever — made happy by adversity and burdened by prosperous fortune, it will be common to us and to you, Caesar. Father Mars, and Quirinus, guardian of our race, and Caesar, both placed under the great Pole Star — behold the Britons, unknown before, now under Latin law: the sun turns back this side of our empire." The Britons, however, again in turmoil on account of civil strife among the petty kings who had submitted to the Roman yoke (for it is a Galfridian dream, and one that no one but he would dream, that one king ruled the island in Caesar's day or thereafter), were suppressed by that same Claudius through the propraetor P. Ostorius. Tacitus has given an accurate record of that war. Under the reign of Nero, the whole nation, and all the peoples in it, stirred up by the wrongs and high spirit of Boadicea, queen of the Iceni — both very great — bravely and vigorously, but in vain, attempted to throw off the Roman yoke from their necks and recover their ancestral liberty. The end of the war, under the administration of Suetonius Paulinus, was the destruction and enslavement of the nation. After Nero's death, while Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian held almost the entire world torn apart by civil war, the Silures, the Ordovices, and other peoples took such courage upon themselves that they gave occasion to that most disastrous war, by which Julius Agricola the propraetor — father-in-law of Tacitus the historian — reduced the whole island to Roman power and compelled it to use Roman law and statutes, with only one petty king left in some part of the island with a precarious authority — namely Cogidunus — so that they might have a king as an instrument of servitude even there. In that war Galgacus was defeated, the last of the Britons. A certain northern part of the island, being rugged and unfruitful, was left to the barbarians; the rest Agricola reduced to a province fully and completely, as Camden puts it, and, as Tacitus testifies, handed it over to his successor quiet and secure. The royal name, and all that authority of petty kings which the peoples had previously revered, being abolished, Britain became an imperial garrisoned province, subject to the Caesars. It was at rest under Nerva's reign; Spartianus records that Trajan brought some who had defected back into order. Hadrian checked the barbarians who were attacking the province from the northern parts of the island with war and raids, by erecting a wall eighty miles long — as that same Spartianus relates. Nor was the rule of the Antonines, of Pius and of the Philosopher, on this island free from wars and disturbances; yet all these were suppressed by the valor of Lollius Urbicus and Calphurnius Agricola. Even under Commodus's reign, everything in the province itself was for a time filled with seditions; and the barbarian peoples, crossing the wall, caused the greatest trouble to both Romans and Britons, and on several occasions inflicted great slaughters on the inhabitants who dwelt nearest to the wall. But all was pacified by the arrival of Ulpius Marcellus, as Dio and Lampridius report, so that until the very death of Commodus nothing appears to have been attempted against the Roman peace. In this state and condition of British affairs, I confess frankly, such is my dullness, I cannot see where that Lucius was, who held this whole island — as he is called in the letter of Eleutherius — as sole deputy under God alone; for it is all too probable that he was not in our Britain at all. It is clearly a different island that he distributed among archbishops and bishops with the consent of the British nobles; a different London, a different York, over which he presided — for these of ours were subject to Roman rule.

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XXIX. It is remarkable that Baronius, a most learned and careful man, did not notice that these arguments are both self-contradictory, and where they contain truth, they strike at the throat of the very case he has undertaken to defend. They are self-contradictory, for they imply that Lucius reigned among the peoples unsubdued by the Romans, and among those who frequently defected from Roman rule, and who wished to set up another emperor against Commodus. For these were plainly distinct groups. The peoples called unsubdued by the Romans were barbarians outside the wall, and they alone. Those who repeatedly rebelled against the Romans were the provincial Britons. Those who wished to set up another emperor were the Roman garrison soldiers — so that it is plainly impossible that one and the same person ruled over all of these. Moreover, Baronius cuts his own throat with his own sword when, on the testimony of Dio, he shows that the British war was utterly extinguished under Commodus by Ulpius Marcellus, and therefore that the whole province had peacefully submitted to Roman power. For in this state of affairs, as we showed earlier, it was impossible for Lucius to hold a kingdom in the province; nor will anyone who knows what a Roman garrisoned province is ever believe it. Furthermore, no writers, worthy of credit or unworthy, have recorded any such defection of the Britons from Roman rule by which they themselves established a king who held the whole island under his dominion — such as, even when they were independent and free, they never had. We have shown that war was stirred up against the Romans at various times, now by one, then by another or several with combined forces — yet it was always extinguished within a short time. That in those disturbances there existed such a king as Geoffrey of Monmouth fabricates as Lucius — and not only the most mendacious Geoffrey but also the Elutherius letter — only those blinded by excessive prejudice could believe. Well known is that saying of Tacitus on the state of the Britons in these times: "Seldom," he says, "do two or three states come together to repel a common danger; thus, while each fights separately, all are conquered" (Agricola, ch. 12). "But in the province itself," says Baronius, "there were always some unsubdued peoples" over whom Lucius could rule. But who, I ask, were those unsubdued peoples? Wretched barbarians, driven from their own homes, without king or law, inhabiting the groves and mountains and the most desolate corners of the island — over whom no historical authority teaches that any king held supreme power; nor would it teach so, even if Geoffrey were to come back to life. Add to this that this conjecture contradicts every tradition, whether of actual or of fictitious events; for it supposes that the rude and unsubdued barbarians received the faith before the provincial people — a fabrication against which all the monuments of antiquity protest, and all the historians who write that in the time of Lucius it was not some few wild and rustic men but the province itself that embraced the faith. Hence Sabellicus says that "Britain was the first of all provinces publicly to receive the name of Christ with ecclesiastical order." The Elutherius letter also protests, which presents Lucius as governing the whole kingdom of Britain by the council of the nobles. Since, therefore, these arguments are altogether weak, the cardinal proceeds in his replies to the objections. "Dio reports," he says, "that the Britons crossed that wall which stood between them and the Roman camps. By this it is plainly indicated that Britain was at that time so

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248 The Rise and Progress of Idolatry. (Book III.) divided at that time, that the Romans occupied that part which lay on this side of the wall, while the Britons freely possessed the other part beyond the wall, and frequently sallied forth past that wall to provoke the Romans to battle. Thus, therefore, nothing prevents Lucius from having been king of Britain; however much the Romans held part of the island, he could still have been king of that further part which the Britons freely possessed." But this is nothing — for first, the translator of Dio misled this most learned man; Dio did not write that the Britons crossed the wall, as the Latin version has it, but that certain nations of the island, most hostile to the Britons properly so called, crossed the wall. For he says: "For those living on the island had crossed the wall" — Book 72. And writers always distinguish those peoples from the Britons; though it cannot be doubted that many of the Britons, or the most ancient inhabitants of the island, lived their lives beyond the wall. In that part of the island, then, which lies beyond Hadrian's wall, the cardinal wants this Lucius to have reigned. But how many of our countrymen, I ask, know where that wall was built and laid? anyone who knows this will believe that what is said of Lucius and the British kingdom fits some petty barbarian king beyond the wall, whoever he may be. Nor is it called into question whether some Lucius somewhere on earth was converted to faith in Christ, but whether such a king as presided over the British kingdom under God alone, whom Eleutherius the Roman bishop was to instruct in the administration of the kingdom, publicly embraced the Christian faith. To say nothing of the archflamens and flamens of Geoffrey, whom this fabrication, together with London, York, and the City of Legions (that is, Caerleon), casts outside Hadrian's wall. Who, I ask, ever heard that Fugatius and Damianus, passing over the Roman province that embraced nearly the whole of the present kingdom of England and Wales, went to the barbarians beyond the wall? That same thing overthrows this fable most thoroughly — namely, that it is most certain and well known that those barbarian peoples who held the parts of the island beyond the wall did not submit to the yoke of Christ until a long time afterward, and not until provincial Britain had publicly received the Christian faith for several centuries — which is sufficiently established from Gildas alone in his work on the destruction of Britain. In the third place, therefore, but incidentally, and as if he himself could scarcely put faith in it, the cardinal adds: "Furthermore, there could also have been some Lucius who was a petty king set over part of Britain under Roman dominion, and subject to Roman rule." Although this reply, in a word, is not at all comparable to what he had put forward before, yet it is most certain that all historical credibility and probability — indeed any color of truth — is lacking unless it be sought from this source. Let us therefore briefly examine whether even this can in any way be reconciled with what is said of Lucius, and what the Elutherius letter proclaims about him. First, then, there is the deepest silence about this petty king among the reliable historians who wrote about British affairs — Dio, Julius Capitolinus, and Lampridius; nor is anything said by them that implies such a petty king throughout the province wielding royal authority; rather, they describe the state and condition of those times in such a way as to indicate that none existed. Furthermore, the letter asserts that Lucius wrote to Eleutherius asking him to see to it that the Roman laws be sent to him — which, while those beyond the wall, as enemies of the Roman name, might do, yet none of the provincial inhabitants needed to send ambassadors to Rome to receive those laws which they saw expounded and administered by the greatest men throughout the whole province. Indeed, that the Britons had a thorough knowledge of Roman law long before these times is suggested by the poet: "Eloquent Gaul taught the Britons to plead cases."

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Nor did those petty kings, whom the Romans tolerated anywhere as instruments of servitude, have such power over their subjects that the choice of which laws they used rested with them. It is indeed absurd that a petty king under Roman dominion, who, as the cardinal says, "obeyed Roman rule," should have sought imperial laws from a Roman bishop. But what does this have to do with Lucius of Eleutherius — to say nothing of Geoffrey's Lucius — who, as God's vicegerent and subject to Him alone, presided over the whole British kingdom and administered it by the council of his subjects? Furthermore, this spurious Eleutherius, whose letter nowhere breathes the spirit of those most ancient times, condemns and rejects the imperial laws as unfit for the civil administration of the kingdom — which the true Eleutherius would neither have done, nor would have dared to do. I myself would by no means deny that some Lucius, perhaps of royal blood and of the greatest authority even among the Britons, embraced the profession of the Christian religion around those times, and promoted the faith to the best of his ability. But that the fabulists transformed him into a supreme king — and, because it was well known that no one had succeeded him in the kingdom, used him as a convenient peg — and that the letter said to be from Eleutherius to him is fictitious, no one, I think, will deny, who turns his mind away from inveterate prejudices toward the knowledge and consideration of truth.

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Knowledge of the true God — He who alone can be known was called unknown — The well-known superstition of the city of Athens — The division of the city according to the names and worship of idols — The twofold superstition among the Jews — What "Pagos" signifies — Most people acknowledge one natural God — Antisthenes, the Brahmins — Sophocles — Menander — The Books of Numa discovered and burned — Valerius Soranus — Orpheus — Homer — Prudentius — The name "unutterable."

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I. Nevertheless, amid these great darknesses and this confusion of all things and all religions, it is clear that very many retained some knowledge and memory of the one true God, infinitely removed from all those fictitious gods whom they worshiped superstitiously. This is taught by the writings of nearly all historians and philosophers. For who among the ancient

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250 THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY. [Book III.] wise men who does not celebrate some divine nature existing above all things, governing all, preserving all, and disposing all things according to His own will? But although this one true God alone exhibits in all things what can be known of Him, so much so that He alone can be known because He alone exists, and cannot be wholly unknown because He is God — yet, because they did not see fit to retain this one true God in their knowledge, He alone was called "unknown." Hence, whenever mention had to be made of the God of the Jews, it was customary to add, "Whoever He finally may be," as in Dio, History, book xxxvi. And in Lucian, in the Philopatris: "By the unknown one worshiped in Athens" — and again, "What do you say? Are the altars of the unknown gods set up in Athens?" as Philostratus says in the Life of Apollonius, book vi, chapter i. — "And these things at Athens, where altars are set up to unknown gods." The inscription read "God" (singular); Philostratus substituted the plural, after the manner of the Pythagoreans. The origin of this religious observance is attributed to Socrates. He, as Justin Martyr testifies in Apology i, urged the Athenians "toward the knowledge of that unknown God through the inquiry of reason."

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II. But whatever Socrates did, it is most certain that Paul seized the occasion of preaching the true God from the inscription on the altar of Epimenides, which among others was dedicated "to the unknown." And these things were at Athens, where almost nothing was not sacred, since the very city was, as Xenophon testifies in his work on the Athenian Republic, entirely devoted to the gods and full of holy things. For they divided the entire city into districts designated by the names of gods: 1. the Pagos of Cronus; 2. the Pagos of Ares; 3. the Pagos of Poseidon; 4. the Pagos of Ares; 5. the Pagos of Hermes, constituted the city. Now "Pagos" among the Greeks signifies not a Latin village (pagus) but a rock. The districts of the city were called thus because upon each was placed some rock (that is, a column or stele) consecrated to this or that idol. From this the use of the word was first transferred to signify some part of the city. The same thing was done at Jerusalem as at Athens: Jer. xi. 13, "For according to the number of your cities are your gods, O Judah! and according to the number of the streets of Jerusalem you have set up altars of shame, altars to offer incense to Baal."

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III. But altars to the unknown God were not set up at Athens alone: "And here there is an altar to unknown gods," as Pausanias says in the Eliaica. They sometimes acknowledged that this unknown God was the one God. "Many gods by popular convention, one by nature," said Antisthenes, as cited by Cicero in On the Nature of the Gods, book i, chapter xiii. "That great living being, and the soul of the world," the Pythagoreans called Him. To this God all assigned, at least, the supreme place in the heavens. So the Brahmins instruct Apollonius, as related by Philostratus, book i, chapter xi: "The first and most perfect seat must be assigned to God, the generator of this living universe, and the second to the gods who govern its several parts" — "The first and most perfect seat is indeed to be assigned to God, the creator of this living being; and the second to the gods who govern its parts."

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IV. Indeed, some advanced so far under the auspices and guidance of reason

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that, for the sake of this one God the Maker, they judged that all idolatrous worship ought to be rejected. Sophocles says this admirably. See Soph. Frag.:—

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There is one God, in truth one God, etc.;—

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And we poor wretches, wandering with restless heart,

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wrought in gold, or cast in metal, or fashioned in ivory — while we sacrifice to these, while on the appointed solemn day

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"We render honors, and we account ourselves pious." And Justin in his Apology to the Emperor: "That which ought not to be worshipped by human hands, to Menander the comic poet and to those who said the same things, we add our agreement" — "That the works of men's hands ought not to be worshipped, with Menander

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the comic poet, and with those who said the same things, we agree."

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V. It is also probable that those books of Numa Pompilius — which, having been found beneath the Janiculum in the year 556 from the founding of the city, the senate ordered to be burned in a public assembly, because, after reading them, Q. Petilius the city praetor gave his sworn word that they tended to the dissolving of religion — taught that one God was to be worshipped, and that without images.

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"Jupiter almighty, begetter of kings, of all things, and of the gods, and mother of the gods, God one and all." Concerning him, that most celebrated golden ode of Orpheus to Musaeus is well known: "[Thee alone, the lord of the whole world, I address... self-begotten; from thee all things take their origin, all things are shaken...]"

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"And He himself contains all things, and no one has ever seen Him, yet He himself sees all things —"

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"Him alone, the king of this world, worship: He is unique, self-existent, who created all things, and is Himself present among them; never perceived by the eye of any mortal, yet He perceives all mortals." And again: "One is Zeus, one is Hades, one is the Sun, one is Bacchus, one God in all things" — "Jupiter is one, Pluto one, and Bacchus one, one Sun, one God in all things." This is he of whom Virgil, following Homer, so often intones that solemn refrain:

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"Father of gods and king of men." They also wished him to be Serapis; as in the epigram: "Seven vowels praise the great, infinite image of God, the lord of imperishable fire of immortal men; the immense, unbounded ruler of all things, whom the celestial echo, responding to Amphion, heralded." For Serapis is a name written in transposed letters; and it was so called, as Hesychius attests — unless one should prefer to think that the name Jehovah is indicated by those seven vowels. Tertullian therefore rightly teaches, Apol. ch. xvii., "Even worshippers of idols, when they are in distress, lift their eyes to heaven, and, forgetting their gods, invoke the one God by nature." Similar things are found in Justin, On the Monarchy of God and in his Apologies; Athenagoras in his Legation; Clement, Strom. iii.; Arnobius, bk. ii. Against the Nations; Lactantius, bk. xi., Preparation for the Gospel, ch. ix.; Theodoret, On the Cure of Greek Affections, bk. ii. Admirably in the Apotheosis, Prudentius, lines 268–277:

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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.

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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:

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

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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 —

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

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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.

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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 —

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

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

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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,

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and all these things would hang in the air suspended.

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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."

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254 THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY. [Book III

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

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

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

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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."

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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 —

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Who around the throne stand as lords, ministers attendant.

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"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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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. v. 1, 4: "Twelve gods, more than there are immortal gods in heaven, are now my helpers and supporters," ibid. v. 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, Geog. book xiii, chap. i. 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, Hist. book vi. These, as Apollodorus testifies, were called in as arbiters between Neptune and Minerva, who were disputing the name of Athens; and 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 (dodekatheou) of Augustus, as recorded by Suetonius, at which so many guests were present adorned in the guise of the gods.

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IX. The origin of this superstition from Egypt, as Herodotus reports, book ii, chap. iv.: "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. X. 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 ii, Scene v, line 23.

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

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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

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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; and 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.

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The progress of idolatry into complete confusion — Peculiar gods of the nations adopted by the nations themselves — The apotheoses of many — The deification of Alexander among the Lacedaemonians — The fable about Tiberius wishing to reckon Christ among the number of the Roman gods — In fashioning images and in depicting gods, contempt for all religion — The madness of the Egyptians — Penalties established by law against foreign gods, inflicted only upon worshipers of the one true God — The truly golden words of Justin Martyr.

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I. We speak of those whom the crowd of idolaters, with consenting votes, have religiously venerated in general and in common throughout nearly the entire world. As polytheism grew stronger, every nation, every city, all peoples adopted whatever gods they wished for themselves. Seriously, in jest, publicly, privately, from ancient tradition, by present authority, by vain affections — an exceedingly abundant crop of divinities sprang up everywhere. Pausanias, in his Attica, book i, reports these origins of new gods: "The Oropians were the first of all to reckon Amphiaraus among the gods; the rest of the Greeks later followed them. I can also enumerate others whom the Greeks honored with divine honors, though they had previously been men, and to whom cities were even dedicated." For the custom ultimately prevailed everywhere that whoever had pleased men should be a god; for every people had the right to reckon whomever they wished among the number of the gods. And from this arose no small controversy between the Roman tax-collectors and the Greeks. For since the censorial law had provided that the lands of the immortal gods should pay no tribute, the tax-collectors vigorously denied that any who had once been men were immortal — as Marcus Tullius testifies, in book iii of On the Nature of the Gods, II. Alexander also, Caligula, Claudius, Domitian, and other monsters of wickedness wished to be reckoned as living gods, perhaps unconcerned because they would be dead in the underworld. Callisthenes elegantly ridicules this madness in Curtius: "So then," he says, "you and I, Cleo, make gods? Is the king about to receive the authority of his divinity from us? I should like to test your power — make someone a king, if you can make someone a god; it is easier to give dominion than heaven." Qu. Curt. lib. viii. cap. v. Force was threatened against the Lacedaemonians for refusing the right of deity, until he was admitted by that custom which Cicero — who so vigorously attacks the Clodian dedication of his house — would deny to be lawful. "Since," they said, "Alexander wishes to be a god, let him be a god." The Athenians also at that time fined the orator Demades ten talents, because he had attempted to persuade them to acknowledge Alexander as a god — as

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Athenaeus testifies, lib. v., although these same Athenians afterward paid divine honors to Demetrius Poliorcetes, a man of far smaller worth than Alexander, while he was still living and present. The apotheosis of Claudius vanished at the sound of thunder; for fleeing into his tent, he said, "This is a god, not Claudius."

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IV. Kings, and also Roman emperors, reckoned whomever they wished in the register of the gods; all of them after Julius were judged by the senate to be either gods or enemies — hence the dying jest of Vespasian: "I think I am becoming a god." Moreover, one who was to be regarded as a god commonly needed to die while still wearing the purple; hence Eutropius, concerning Diocletian: "It befell him, what had befallen no one since men were born, that though he died a private citizen, he was nevertheless numbered among the deified." Yet this is not altogether true. Alexander ordered divine honors to be paid to his friend Hephaestion, and sacrifices to be offered — Curt. lib. x. And Antoninus Caracalla himself, a monster of a man, was placed among the gods by Macrinus, who had killed him, as Aelius Spartianus testifies. Concerning Hadrian — first sacrificing Antinous his favorite, that he might use his entrails for complete victory and union, then reckoning him among the gods, and everywhere setting up images of him — there is a dreadful account in Dio, Hist. lib. lxix., which impiety Clement in his Exhortation and Tertullian in his Apology rightly attack. It was also permitted to private individuals to worship privately whomever they wished. This is attested by Cornelia's saying to her son Gaius Gracchus: "When I am dead, you will perform the funeral rites for me and invoke the divine shades of a parent; at that time let it not shame you to seek the prayers of those gods whom you had abandoned and forsaken while they were living and present."

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V. Indeed, the contempt for all religion and for all notions of deity had progressed so far that it became at last a kind of sport to mix the most shameful crimes with the most disgraceful superstitions. The reader may see what outrages they employed in fashioning and painting images of the gods, in Pliny, lib. xxxv., cap. ix. x. Nothing was more customary for painters (of whom Cicero says, "We know all the gods with that countenance which painters and sculptors desired") than to paint goddesses with the likenesses of harlots whom they admired; which Arellius did, who was always burning with love for some woman. And the image which Clodius consecrated in the house of Cicero, under the name of the Goddess of Liberty, Cicero himself proves, in his Oration to the Pontiffs in Defense of His House, to have been a Tanagran harlot. Thus nowhere more than in religion itself do they appear to have cast off every sense of religion. And so the ancient serpent triumphed over a vanquished human race; nor was it enough for him to hold them in bondage, unless he also held his captives up to mockery and set them fighting among themselves —

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260 THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY, [BOOK III. — and driven them against one another with arms and foul war, for the sake of the most foolish superstitions. Such is that remarkable testimony to the blindness and misery of humanity laboring under the yoke of Satan, which the Satirist exhibits — concerning neighboring peoples of Egypt, as he says — in Sat. xv, v. 33–38. The crocodile, cause of war:—

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I am persuaded that the poet has recorded this incredible savagery of the Egyptians with almost historical credibility, both by the innate and still blind rage of very many persons over disputes concerning matters of almost no moment in religion, and by the crimes of some persons of nearly the same kind which they themselves, being Christians in name only, have perpetrated against innocent professors of the Christian religion.

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VI. But however the idolaters have waged quarrels and enmities among themselves, they all appear to have conspired in this one thing: to despise the one true God and His worship. Although there was a law at Athens that no one should worship an unlawful deity, and a law of the Twelve Tables at Rome that "no one should have gods separately, nor worship privately any new or foreign gods, except those publicly adopted" — yet no one can be found who was prosecuted for violation of religion on account of worshiping any other god besides those who were publicly adopted, except the one who worshiped the one true God. (The sole exception is Socrates, whose accusation was: "Socrates does wrong in not acknowledging the gods the city acknowledges, and in introducing other new divine beings.") But when Christianity began to arise, the madness of men and the envy of Satan broke out most violently. Justin, the most ancient Christian writer, most elegantly reproaches these emperors — who fancied themselves philosophers — for this blindness and rage; and it is fitting to close this digression with his truly golden words. He says: "We alone are put to death for the name of Christ, though we have done no wrong, while those who worship trees and rivers, fire and earth, birds and beasts, and images formed by human hands — and yet not the same things as all others, but different things in different places, so that their worship differs from one another, though all worship the same material things — this alone is charged against us,

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that we do not worship the same gods as they — wherefore they drive us to death and

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...and in writings being observed, and we offer sacrifices — for not from the same source, among those...

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...among some, gods to us; among others, beasts; among still others, things regarded as customary sacrificial offerings — mark this well: "We alone are assailed with hatred on account of the name of Christ; and although we commit nothing against the laws, we are dragged to death as sinners; while others in various places worship trees, and rivers, and mice, and cats, and crocodiles, and many of the irrational animals. And indeed not the same things among all, but different things in different places, so that in the aggregate they are impious toward one another, because they do not worship the same sacred rites. Yet this one charge you have to bring against us as a crime: that we do not worship the same gods as you, nor offer libations to the dead, nor the savor of fat, nor garlands and victims to images and statues — though you certainly know that the same animals are, among some, divine beings; among others, wild beasts; among still others, sacrificial victims."