Chapter II. Recapitulation of the Theology of Other Nations, and its Evil Effects on Their Mode of Life

ALL the rest of mankind, from the very first establishment of social life and for all subsequent time, persisted in attending to bodily sense only, because they had formed no clear conception concerning the soul within them, and believed that nothing more than what was seen had any real subsistence; they therefore referred beauty and utility and the sole good to bodily pleasure. And as they thought that this alone was to be earnestly desired, as being the only good and agreeable and pleasant thing, and sufficient for the enjoyment of a happy life, they believed it to be the greatest of gods, and have deified it; even life itself they did not desire, if there was to be no participation in bodily pleasure, and they cherished life not for the sake of mere living but for living in pleasure, and prayed that this as the only good might be granted to their children.

Hence some conjectured that sun, moon, and stars were the sources of supply for the life in the flesh; and being also struck with a kind of wonder at beholding their light, pronounced them the first gods, and declared them to be sole causes of the universe. But others again have bestowed the title of gods upon the fruits of the earth, and the moist and dry and hot elements, and the other component parts of the world by which their bodies were nourished and fattened, and made the life of the flesh and its pleasure their pursuit: and others, long before them, with barefaced effrontery deified their own passions, and pleasure their mistress, saying that love, and desire, and lust ruled the very gods themselves. By others, certain tyrants and potentates, who had provided and invented pleasures for them, were deified, both during life and after death, in return for the enjoyments which they had gained from them. Others again, by becoming the playthings of evil spirits and daemons, gave yet greater strength to the passionate part of their soul, by procuring pleasures from them also through the customs of their worship. Others, who could not endure any of these things, introduced atheism as far better than such theology as this: and others yet more shameless than all these declared the philosophic and thrice-blessed life to be no other than the life of pleasure, having defined pleasure as the consummation of all good.

And so in this way the whole race of mankind having become enslaved to the goddess, or rather the foul and licentious daemon, pleasure, as to a harsh and most cruel mistress, was involved in all kinds of miseries. ‘For,’ as the holy Apostle says, ‘their women changed the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another, men with men working unseemliness, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was due.’ [1]

In this way both Greeks and barbarians, wise and simple, falling to the ground and on their belly, worshipped pleasure as a goddess; they cast themselves down on their faces like reptiles; they believed in her as an irresistible and inexorable deity, and were content. In songs also and hymns, and in the festivals of gods, and in their public spectacles, they were initiated in the orgies and celebrated the unseemly rites of none other than foul and licentious pleasure; so that this, above all, has been rightly abolished among us. ‘For the devising of idols was the beginning of fornication.’ [2]

So great had been the manifold variety, to speak briefly, of the theology of the other nations, attached to impure and abominable pleasure as its one principle, but. like a hydra of many necks and many heads, carried out into many various divisions and sections.

When therefore they had entrenched themselves in so great an error, naturally in their service of the goddess and evil daemon, pleasure, evils upon evils gathered round them, while they defiled the whole of life with mad passions for women and outrages on men, marriages with mothers, and incest with daughters, and had surpassed in their excess of wickedness the savage nature of wild beasts. Such then was the character of the ancient nations, and of their false theology, as exhibited in the preceding books by the Greek historians and philosophers whom we have brought together.