Chapter VI. That We Had Good Reason for Withdrawing From Their More Physical Theory of the Gods, and Preferring the Only True Theology

SUCH then were the notions received among the Egyptians, which are recorded as more ancient than all the doctrines of the Greeks. Therefore, you have in addition to the mythical theology that of a more physical character common to Greeks and Egyptians, who devised of old the superstition of polytheism; and you have learnt that among them nothing at all was known of the truly divine, incorporeal, and intelligent natures.

However, let it be granted and allowed to these stargazers that they speak truth and are right in their physical explanation of the allegories; and let their sun become now Apollo, and now again Horus, and the same sun again Osiris, and numberless other things, as many as they would wish; and the moon in like manner either Isis or Artemis, or as many names as any one would choose to enumerate.

For grant that these are not names indicative of mortal men, but of the real celestial luminaries: we should then have to worship the sun and the moon and the stars and the other parts of the cosmos as gods.

In this way, therefore, the noble philosophy of the Greeks appears as it were ‘ex machina,’ on the one hand highly exalting the promise of the word, but on the other lowering the thought of the wise down to the sensible and visible workmanship of God, and deifying, through the celestial luminaries, nothing else than fire, and the nature of heat, and the parts of the cosmos, to which we may add the liquid and the solid elements and the composition of bodies.

Must not then the gospel of Jesus our Saviour, the Christ of God, be great and admirable, as teaching all mankind to worship with befitting thoughts the God and Lord of sun and moon, and Maker of the whole cosmos, who is Himself high above and beyond the universe, and to celebrate in hymns not the elements of bodies, but Him who is the sustainer of life itself, and dispenser of all good things? For that gospel teaches us not to stand in awe of the visible parts of the cosmos and all that can be apprehended by fleshly sense, as they must be of perishable nature; but to marvel only at the mind which in all these exists unseen, and which creates both the whole and each several part; and to regard as God one sole Divine Power pervading and ordering all things, being in its nature incorporeal and intelligent, or rather impossible to describe and to conceive, which shows itself through all things whereby it works, and incorporeally pervades and traverses them all without intermixture, and throughout all things, not only in heaven but also upon earth, both the universal elements and the several parts, exhibits the perpetual mighty working of the Godhead, and presides over all in a manner which our sight and sense cannot perceive, and governs the whole cosmos by laws of ineffable wisdom.

After we have given so many proofs in confutation of their inconsistent theology, both the more mythical so-called, and that which is forsooth of a higher and more physical kind which the ancient Greeks and Egyptians were shown to magnify, it is time to survey also the refinements of the younger generations who make a profession of philosophy in our own time: for these have endeavoured to combine the doctrines concerning a creative mind of the universe, and those concerning incorporeal ideas and intelligent and rational powers,----doctrines invented long ages afterwards by Plato, and thought out with accurate reasonings,----with the theology of the ancients, exaggerating with yet greater conceit their promise concerning the legends. Listen then to their physiology also, and observe with what boastfulness it has been published by Porphyry. [1]