Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But if I should further set before you the images themselves to examine, you will find on approaching them that custom is truly nonsense, since you turn in worship to insensate "works of men's hands." Long ago the Scythians worshipped the scimitar, the Arabs a stone, the Persians a river, and other men still more ancient set up conspicuous pieces of wood and raised pillars of stone, which indeed were called xoana ("carved images") because they were hewn out of the material. At any rate, at Icarus the image of Artemis was an unworked piece of wood, and that of the Cithaeronian Hera at Thespiae was a felled tree-trunk; and the image of the Samian Hera, as Aethlius says, was formerly a plank, but later, in the archonship of Procles, took the form of a statue. Once xoana began to be fashioned in the likeness of men, they earned the name bretas from brotoi ("mortals"). In Rome, the writer Varro says, the ancient image of Ares was a spear, the craftsmen not yet having set out upon this attractive-faced mischief-craft. But once the art flourished, error increased along with it. That men made stones and pieces of wood and, to put it comprehensively, matter itself, into man-shaped images, which you flatter with the pretense of piety while defrauding the truth, is already plain of itself; still, since the topic requires some proof, it must not be shirked. That Phidias fashioned the Zeus at Olympia and the Athena Polias at Athens out of gold and ivory is clear to everyone; that the xoanon of Hera in Samos was made by Smilis son of Eucleides, Olympichus records in his Samian History. Do not doubt, then, that of the goddesses called the Venerable Ones at Athens, Scopas made two of them out of the stone called lychneus, while Calos made the middle one; I can show you Polemon relating this in the fourth book of his work against Timaeus. Nor should you doubt that the statues honoring Zeus and Apollo standing at Patara, in Lycia, were likewise crafted by that same Phidias, just like the accompanying lions dedicated beside them; yet if, as some claim, the craftsmanship instead belongs to Bryaxis, I will not argue against it — either way you have identified an image-maker; attribute it to whichever of the pair you prefer. And indeed, as Philochorus says, the nine-cubit images of Poseidon and Amphitrite worshipped in Tenos are the work of Telesias the Athenian. For Demetrius, in the second book of his Argolica, records that the xoanon of Hera in Tiryns was made of pear-wood, and that its maker was Argus. Many, perhaps, would be astonished to learn that the Palladium, called the one fallen from heaven, which Diomedes and Odysseus are said to have stolen from Troy and deposited with Demophon, was actually constructed from the bones of Pelops, just as the Olympian Zeus was made from other bones, those of an Indian beast. I cite as witness Dionysius, who records this in the fifth part of his Cycle. Apellas, writing in his Delphica, states that two Palladia existed, and that both had been crafted by mortal hands. But so that no one may suppose I have passed over this out of ignorance, I will cite the image of Dionysus Morychus at Athens: it was made, they say, of the stone called phellates, and was the work of Sicon son of Eupalamus, as Polemon states in a certain letter. There were also two other men, Cretan sculptors I believe, named Scyllis and Dipoenus; these made the images of the Dioscuri at Argos, the statue of Heracles at Tiryns, and the xoanon of Artemis Munychia at Sicyon.
And why do I linger over these things, when I may show you outright who that great deity truly was whom, above all others, we hear men have deemed worthy of reverence — the one they have dared to call "not made by hands," the Egyptian Sarapis? According to some accounts, he arrived as a gift of gratitude, sent by the people of Sinope to Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of the Egyptians — for they had been worn down by famine, had sent to him for grain, and were thereby saved from want in Egypt; and this xoanon, they say, was an image of Pluto. Ptolemy, receiving the statue, set it up on the promontory now called Rhacotis, where the temple of Sarapis is honored, and the place lies near those very quarters. Ptolemy also transferred the body of his concubine Blistiche, who had died at Canopus, and buried her beneath that same shrine. Others say that Sarapis was a Pontic image, brought to Alexandria with festal honor. Isidorus alone says that the image was brought from the Seleucians near Antioch, they too having suffered a famine and having been fed by Ptolemy. But Athenodorus, son of Sandon, wishing to make Sarapis out to be ancient, stumbled — I know not how — into proving the very opposite, that the image was a made thing: he says that Sesostris, the Egyptian king, who had subdued most of the peoples among the Greeks, on his return to Egypt brought back skilled craftsmen, and ordered them to fashion with great expense an image of his ancestor Osiris; and the maker was Bryaxis the craftsman — not the Athenian Bryaxis, but another man of the same name — who employed a mixed and varied material for the work. There went into it filings of gold and silver, of bronze and iron and lead, and also of tin, and no Egyptian stone was lacking — fragments of sapphire, hematite, emerald, and even topaz. Having ground all these together and mixed them, he tinted it with dark blue, on account of which the color of the image is rather black; and kneading it all together with the residue of the embalming ointment left over from the funerals of Osiris and Apis, he shaped Sarapis. And indeed the very name hints at the shared funeral rite and the origin from that burial, being a compound formed from Osiris and Apis: Osirapis.
But a new god besides — one little short of being worshipped even among the Greeks — the emperor of the Romans has reverently set up in Egypt: his beloved, a youth of surpassing beauty. He consecrated Antinous just as Zeus did Ganymede; for desire, when it has no fear to restrain it, is not easily checked. And men now worship the sacred "nights of Antinous," which the lover who kept vigil with him knew well to be shameful. Why do you reckon among the gods one honored by prostitution? Why did you order him to be mourned as a son? Why do you dwell on his beauty? Beauty withered by outrage is shameful. Do not tyrannize over beauty, man, nor commit outrage against the young man in his bloom; keep it pure, that it may remain beautiful. Become a king over beauty, not a tyrant; let it remain free; then I will acknowledge your beauty, when you have kept the image undefiled; then I will bow before beauty, when it is the true archetype of beautiful things. But already there is a tomb of the beloved, a temple of Antinous, and even a city; and just as, I suppose, temples are marveled at, so too are tombs — pyramids, mausoleums, and labyrinths, other temples for the dead, just as those are tombs of the gods. As a teacher for you I will set forth the prophetess Sibyl, no false oracle-speaker of Phoebus, whom foolish men have called a god, though they falsely name her a seer; rather she speaks of the great God, whom no human hands have shaped in the likeness of speechless, stone-hewn idols. She indeed calls the temples ruins, foretelling that the temple of the Ephesian Artemis will be swallowed "by chasms and earthquakes" thus: 'And Ephesus, flung on her back, shall wail, weeping by her banks and seeking the temple that no longer dwells there.' And of the temple of Isis and Sarapis in Egypt she says it will be brought down and burned: 'Isis, thrice-wretched goddess, you remain by the streams of the Nile, alone, a voiceless maenad upon the sands of Acheron' — and then, lowering her voice further: 'and you too, Sarapis, buried beneath heaps of useless stone, shall lie there as the greatest wreck within an Egypt thrice cursed.' Should you refuse to heed a prophetess, then at least give ear to a philosopher of your own, Heraclitus of Ephesus, who reproaches these very images for their insensibility: "And they pray to these images, as if one were to converse with houses." Are not those men monstrous who turn in worship to stones, and then set them up before their gates as though they were active beings, worshipping Hermes as a god and setting up the Guardian of the Street as a doorkeeper? For if they abuse them as insensate things, why do they worship them as gods? And if they suppose them to share in sensation, why do they station them as doorkeepers? The Romans, who ascribe their greatest successes to Fortune and consider her the greatest goddess of all, carried her image into the sewer and dedicated it there, assigning the latrine as a fitting shrine for the goddess.
But indeed, a rich stone or piece of wood or gold, being insensate, cares for nothing at all — not for the savor of roasting flesh, not for blood, not for the smoke by which, while being honored, they are blackened with soot; and indeed they care neither for honor nor for insult; these images are, in fact, more dishonored than any living creature whatsoever. And when I consider how these insensate things have come to be deified, I am at a loss, and I pity those who wander in such folly as wretched men; for even if some living creatures do not possess all the senses — such as worms and caterpillars, and whatever appears crippled from birth, like moles and the shrew-mouse, which Nicander calls "blind and dreadful" — still these are better than these xoana and images, which are altogether deaf and dumb; for they possess at least one sense, say hearing or touch, or the analogue of smell or taste; but the images share in not even a single sense. And there are many living creatures which have neither sight nor hearing nor even voice, such as the class of oysters, yet they live and grow, and moreover are affected in sympathy with the moon; but the images are inert, inactive, insensate — they are bound and nailed down and fastened in place, melted, filed, sawn, scraped all round, and carved. The image-makers do violence to the mute earth, driving it out of its own proper nature, persuading men by their craft to worship it; and those who make gods worship, in my judgment, not gods and spirits at all, but earth and craft — which is exactly what these images are. For an image is in truth dead matter shaped by the hand of a craftsman; but for us, the image is not something perceived by sense out of sensible matter, but something apprehended by the mind. God is an object of thought, not of sense — he alone who is truly God.
And, conversely, in the very circumstances of life, the superstitious themselves, the worshippers of stones, learn by experience not to revere insensate matter, and, overcome by mere necessity, perish through their own superstition; yet even while they hold the images in contempt, unwilling though they be to appear altogether to despise them, they are refuted by the very gods to whom, indeed, these images are dedicated. For Dionysius the younger, the tyrant, stripped the golden cloak from the Zeus in Sicily and ordered a woolen one put on it instead, remarking cleverly that wool suited the god better than gold had, since it kept him cooler through the summer months and warmer through the winter ones. Antiochus of Cyzicus, too, finding himself short of funds, commanded that the golden image of Zeus, fifteen cubits tall, be melted down, then had a comparable statue erected in its place, made from cheaper stuff overlaid with a thin gold leaf. And swallows and most other birds befoul the very images by flying into them, taking no thought at all for Olympian Zeus, nor for Asclepius of Epidaurus, nor even for Athena Polias or the Egyptian Sarapis — from which very birds you may learn the insensibility of the images. There are also, of course, malefactors or enemies who attack them, who out of sordid greed have ravaged the temples and plundered the votive offerings, or even melted down the images themselves. And if some Cambyses or Darius or other madman attempted such things, and if someone killed the Egyptian Apis, I find it laughable that he killed their god, though it angers me that his crime was driven by profit. Accordingly I am glad to set this misdeed aside, counting it merely a symptom of avarice rather than proof that the idols are powerless. But fire and earthquakes are not moved by gain, nor do they fear or stand in awe — not of the spirits, not of the images, any more than the waves fear the pebbles heaped along the shores. I know a fire that convicts and cures superstition; if you wish to cease from your folly, this fire will light your way. This same fire burned down the temple at Argos together with its priestess Chrysis, and the temple of Artemis at Ephesus for the second time after the Amazons, and it has often ravaged the Capitol at Rome; nor did it spare the temple of Sarapis in the city of Alexandria. At Athens it razed the temple of Dionysus Eleuthereus, and the temple of Apollo at Delphi was first plundered by a storm, then obliterated by a sober-minded fire. This is shown you as a preview of what fire promises to do.
And do not the makers of these images themselves put to shame those of you who have any sense, and lead you to despise the matter of which they are made? Phidias the Athenian inscribed on the finger of the Olympian Zeus, "Pantarces is beautiful" — for it was not Zeus who was beautiful to him, but his beloved. And Praxiteles, as Poseidippus makes clear in his work On Cnidus, when fashioning the image of Aphrodite of Cnidus, made it in the likeness of his beloved Cratine, so that the wretched worshippers might have Praxiteles's beloved to bow down to. And when Phryne the courtesan of Thespiae was in her prime, all the painters modeled their images of Aphrodite on Phryne's beauty; just as, again, the sculptors of stone modeled the Hermae at Athens on Alcibiades. It remains for your own judgment to draw the conclusion, if you are willing also to worship courtesans.
Moved by this, I suppose, the kings of old, holding these myths in contempt, boldly proclaimed themselves gods, safe from any human check, and by this very device taught that those other gods too had been made immortal on account of their fame. Ceyx, son of Aeolus, was Zeus to his wife Alcyone, and Alcyone in turn was called Hera by her husband. The fourth Ptolemy took for himself the title Dionysus, and Mithridates of Pontus likewise styled himself after Dionysus. Alexander also wished to be thought a son of Ammon, and had himself represented by the image-makers as horned, eager to disfigure the fair face of a man with a horn. And it was not kings alone, but private individuals too, who dignified themselves with divine titles, as Menecrates the physician, who was styled Zeus. Need I list Alexarchus — a man learned by profession as a grammarian, as Aristus of Salamis relates, who fashioned himself into the likeness of the Sun? Need I mention Nicagoras — a native of Zeleia, who lived in the time of Alexander, who was called Hermes and wore the garb of Hermes, as he himself attests? And this when whole nations and cities, en masse, stooping to flattery, cheapen the myths told of the gods, fashioning men into the equals of gods, puffed up with vainglory, voting themselves extravagant honors — now decreeing that Philip the Macedonian, son of Amyntas, from Pella, be worshipped in the Cynosarges, "the man with the broken collarbone and the crippled leg," who had his eye gouged out; and again, proclaiming Demetrius a god in his own right — and where he dismounted from his horse on entering Athens, there stands a shrine of Demetrius the Descender, and altars everywhere; and the Athenians prepared for him a marriage with Athena herself. But he scorned the goddess, being unable to marry a mere image; instead he took the courtesan Lamia up to the Acropolis and defiled the bridal chamber of Athena, displaying to the ancient virgin the manners of his new courtesan. There is, then, no cause for indignation even at Hippo for immortalizing his own death; this Hippo ordered the following elegiac couplet inscribed on his tomb: 'This is the tomb of Hippo, whom Fate made equal to the deathless gods when he perished.' Well done, Hippo — you show us well the wandering folly of mankind! For if men did not believe you while you spoke, let them at least become disciples of a corpse. This is an oracle of Hippo's; let us take note of it. Those whom you worship, having once been men, are now, in fact, dead; but myth and time have honored them. For it is somehow the way of things that present matters are despised through familiarity, while things long past, removed from immediate scrutiny, are honored through the fiction bred by the obscurity of time — some things disbelieved, others marveled at. Thus the ancient dead, made venerable by the great span of time devoted to error, come to be reckoned gods by those who follow after. Your proof of this lies in your own mysteries, your festivals, the bonds and wounds and weeping gods: 'Ah, woe is me, that it is fated that Sarpedon, dearest of men to me, be slain beneath Patroclus son of Menoetius.' The will of Zeus is overpowered, and your Zeus wails, defeated, on account of Sarpedon. You yourselves, then, have rightly called these beings idols and spirits, since Homer himself, having honored Athena and the other gods with such disreputable conduct, called them spirits: 'And she had gone to Olympus, to the halls of aegis-bearing Zeus, to join the other spirits.' How, then, can idols and spirits still be gods — truly loathsome and unclean spirits, acknowledged by all to be earthbound and befouled, weighed down below, "wandering about tombs and monuments," around which indeed there faintly appear "shadowy phantoms"? These are your gods — the idols, the shadows, and besides these, those "lame" and "wrinkled, squinting-eyed" ones, the Prayers — offspring of Thersites, not of Zeus — so that, as I recall, Bion made the witty remark: how could men reasonably beg Zeus for fine children, when he himself could not manage to produce any? Alas for such godlessness! You bury the incorrupt substance, so far as it depends on you, and you have heaped tombs upon that which is unstained and holy, plundering the divine of its truly real substance. Why, then, have you assigned the honors due to God to those who are not gods? Why have you abandoned heaven and honored the earth instead? For what else are gold or silver or adamant or iron or bronze or ivory or precious stones, but earth, and out of earth? Are not all these things you see the offspring of one mother, the earth? Why then, O vain and empty-minded men (for I shall return to this again), having blasphemed the region above the heavens, have you dragged piety down to the ground, fashioning for yourselves earthbound gods, and, pursuing these created things ahead of the uncreated God, fallen into a deeper darkness? Parian marble has beauty, yet it is not Poseidon; ivory has beauty, yet it is not the god of Olympus; matter always stands in need of craftsmanship, whereas God stands in need of nothing at all. Art has advanced, matter has been clothed in form, and the richness of the substance, though marketable for profit, becomes an object of reverence only by virtue of its shape. Your image is gold, is wood, is stone, is earth, if you consider it from the higher vantage, having received its shape from the craftsman. But I have trained myself to tread the earth underfoot, not to worship it; for it is not right for me ever to entrust the hopes of the soul to lifeless things.
So we must go as close as possible to the statues, so that their kinship to error may be exposed even by their appearance; for the disposition of the daimons has been stamped quite clearly onto the forms of the statues. If someone, wandering about, were to look at the paintings and the statues, he would recognize your gods at once from their disgraceful attributes: Dionysus from his dress, Hephaestus from his craft, Deo from her calamity, Ino from her veil, Poseidon from his trident, Zeus from his swan; the pyre points to Heracles, and if one sees a naked woman depicted, he thinks of the "golden" Aphrodite. So the Cyprian Pygmalion fell in love with a statue of ivory; the statue was of Aphrodite and was naked; the Cyprian is overcome by its form and unites with the statue, and Philostephanus records this. Another Aphrodite in Cnidus was a stone, and beautiful, and another man fell in love with her and had intercourse with the stone; Posidippus records it, the first in his work On Cyprus, the second in his On Cnidus. So powerful was the deceit that art, having become a procurer for men in love, brought them to the pit. The craftsman's skill is effective, but it is not able to deceive a rational being, nor those who have lived according to reason; for through likeness in painting, doves have flown to shadow-painted doves, and horses have neighed at well-painted horses. They say a girl fell in love with a picture, and a handsome youth with the statue at Cnidus, but the eyes of the spectators had been deceived by the art. For no self-controlled man would have embraced a goddess, or been buried with a corpse, or fallen in love with a daimon and a stone. But you are deceived by another kind of sorcery of art, even if it does not lead you to love, but to honor and worship both the statues and the paintings. The painting is of the same kind; let the craft be praised, but let it not deceive a man into taking it for truth. The horse stands quietly, the dove is motionless, its wing idle, but the wooden cow made by Daedalus captured a wild bull, and art, deceiving it, compelled the beast to mount a woman in heat. So great a frenzy have the arts, practicing their evil craft, produced in the senseless. Yet those who raise and tend apes marvel at them, because nothing made of wax or clay likenesses and dolls deceives them; but you will prove yourselves worse than apes, clinging to little statues of stone and wood and gold and ivory, and to paintings. Such destructive playthings you owe to their makers: the stone-carvers and sculptors, and painters too, and builders, and poets, who bring in besides a great crowd of this sort — amid the meadows the Satyrs and Pan-spirits, amid the timberlands the mountain Nymphs and the tree-Nymphs, and by the waters and rivers and springs the Naiads, and about the sea the Nereids. Magicians, too, already boast of daimons as servants of their own impiety, having registered them as their own household slaves, having made them slaves compelled by their spells. Marriages still, and begettings of children and childbirths of gods remembered, and adulteries sung, and feasts made into comedy, and laughter brought in over the wine — these things drive me to cry out, even when I wish to be silent. Alas for such godlessness! You have made the heavens into a stage, and the divine has become your drama, and you have turned the holy into comedy with the masks of daimons, mocking true reverence for God with superstition. "But he, striking the lyre, began a beautiful song" — sing to us, Homer, that lovely voice, of the love of Ares and fair-crowned Aphrodite, how they first lay together in the house of Hephaestus, in secret; and he gave many gifts, and shamed the bed and marriage-couch of lord Hephaestus. Stop the song, Homer; it is not beautiful, it teaches adultery; but we have refused even to let our ears hear of fornication. For we, we are the ones who carry about the image of God in this living and moving statue, the human being — a co-dwelling image, a counselor, a companion, a hearth-fellow, one who shares our feeling, who feels for us beyond measure; we have become an offering dedicated to God on behalf of Christ: "we are a chosen lineage, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation, a people claimed as his own, once not a people at all, yet now are God's own people"; men who, as John states it, belong not "to what lies below," but instead have been taught the whole of it by the one descending from on high, grasping thereby the design of God, and practicing what it means to "walk in newness of life."
But most people do not think this way; casting off shame and fear, they inscribe on the walls of their own homes the lewd acts of the daimons. Fixing their attention on certain painted tablets set up on high, they have decorated their bedchambers with licentiousness, counting indecency as piety; and reclining on their couches, in the very midst of their embraces, they gaze at that naked Aphrodite, bound fast in her adultery, and at the amorous bird hovering over Leda, welcoming the depiction of her femininity — they stamp these images onto their signet-rings, using as their seal one fitting for the licentiousness of Zeus. These are the archetypes of your voluptuousness, these are the theologies of your outrage, these are the teachings of the gods who join you in your fornication; for "each man supposes to be true whatever he wishes," as the Athenian orator says. And what other images do you have besides — small satyr-figures and unclothed maidens and wine-sodden Pans with members erect, stripped bare in the paintings, condemned by their own intemperance. Already, openly, viewing the forms of utter licentiousness displayed before the whole populace, you feel no shame, but rather guard them the more carefully as dedicated objects, just as you do the images of your gods — consecrating at home monuments to shamelessness, recording the postures of Philaenis on equal terms with the labors of Heracles. Of these we declare an amnesty not only from use but even from sight and from hearing itself. Your ears have played the harlot, your eyes have fornicated, and — strangest of all — before any embrace your very glances have already committed adultery on your behalf. O you who have done violence to man and knocked away the divine mark of proof stamped on his making, you disbelieve everything so that you may be thrown into passion; you put your faith in idols, emulating their intemperance, yet you disbelieve God, refusing to bear self-control; you have hated the better things and honored the worse, becoming spectators of virtue but contestants in vice.
"Blessed," then, one might almost say, are all those who, with one accord, according to the Sibyl, will renounce all the temples once they see them, and the altars — vain foundations of stone, deaf things — and stone-carved images and hand-made statues, defiled with living blood and with sacrifices, the slaughter of four-footed beasts, of two-footed beasts, and of wild birds. And indeed it has been forbidden us to practice openly this deceiving art. "For you shall not make," says the prophet, "a likeness of anything, of what is in heaven above or what is on the earth below." Could we then still suppose Praxiteles' Demeter and Kore and the mystic Iacchus to be gods, or the works of Lysippus, or the hands of Apelles, which have clothed matter with the outward form of divine glory? But you, whatever it takes, persist in seeing that the statue is carved as beautifully as possible, while you take no care that you yourselves, through lack of perception, do not end up resembling the statues. Quite plainly and briefly the word of the prophets refutes this custom, saying that "all the gods of the nations are idols of daimons, yet it was God who fashioned the heavens" -- and everything heaven holds. Some, wandering astray from this point, I know not how, give worship to sun and moon alike, and the remaining company of stars — a divine craft, yet not God — mistakenly supposing these, the instruments of time, to be gods. "By his utterance were they set in place, and every force they hold comes from the breath of his mouth." But human craft fashions houses and ships and cities and paintings; God — how could I say all that he makes? Look at the whole cosmos: it is his work; heaven itself, the sun, angels, and mankind alike are "the handiwork of his fingers" -- how vast is God's might! His will alone is the making of the world; for God alone made it, since he alone is truly God; by the mere act of willing he creates, and upon his simply wishing it, being follows. Here the chorus of philosophers goes astray, agreeing that man was made most beautifully for the contemplation of heaven, yet worshiping the things that appear in heaven and are perceived by sight. For even if the works in heaven are not made by human hands, still they have been made for the sake of human beings. None among you should give the sun worship, but should yearn instead for whoever made the sun; let none deify the cosmos, but seek out the maker of the cosmos. The only refuge left, it seems, for the one who intends to reach the saving doors is divine wisdom; from there, as from some inviolable sanctuary, a man striving toward salvation becomes no longer subject to seizure by any of the daimons.
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