Chapter VI.--Idolatry Condemned by Baptism. To Make an Idol Is, in Fact, to Worship It.
If no law of God had prohibited idols to be made by us; if no voice of the Holy Spirit uttered general menace no less against the makers than the worshippers of idols; from our sacrament itself we would draw our interpretation that arts of that kind are opposed to the faith. For how have we renounced the devil and his angels, if we make them? What divorce have we declared from them, I say not with whom, but dependent on whom, we live? What discord have we entered into with those to whom we are under obligation for the sake of our maintenance? Can you have denied with the tongue what with the hand you confess? unmake by word what by deed you make? preach one God, you who make so many? preach the true God, you who make false ones? "I make," says one, "but I worship not;" as if there were some cause for which he dare not worship, besides that for which he ought not also to make,--the offence done to God, namely, in either case. Nay, you who make, that they may be able to be worshipped, do worship; and you worship, not with the spirit of some worthless perfume, but with your own; nor at the expense of a beast's soul, but of your own. To them you immolate your ingenuity; to them you make your sweat a libation; to them you kindle the torch of your forethought. More are you to them than a priest, since it is by your means they have a priest; your diligence is their divinity. [199] Do you affirm that you worship not what you make? Ah! but they affirm not so, to whom you slay this fatter, more precious and greater victim, your salvation.
[199] i.e., Unless you made them, they would not exist, and therefore [would not be regarded as divinities; therefore] your diligence gives them their divinity.
Chapter VII.--Grief of the Faithful at the Admission of Idol-Makers into the Church; Nay, Even into the Ministry.
A whole day the zeal of faith will direct its pleadings to this quarter: bewailing that a Christian should come from idols into the Church; should come from an adversary workshop into the house of God; should raise to God the Father hands which are the mothers of idols; should pray to God with the hands which, out of doors, are prayed to in opposition to God; should apply to the Lord's body those hands which confer bodies on demons. Nor is this sufficient. Grant that it be a small matter, if from other hands they receive what they contaminate; but even those very hands deliver to others what they have contaminated. Idol-artificers are chosen even into the ecclesiastical order. Oh wickedness! Once did the Jews lay brands on Christ; these mangle His body daily. Oh hands to be cut off! Now let the saying, "If thy hand make thee do evil, amputate it," [200] see to it whether it were uttered by way of similitude merely. What hands more to be amputated than those in which scandal is done to the Lord's body?
[200] Matt. xviii. 8.
Chapter VIII.--Other Arts Made Subservient to Idolatry. Lawful Means of Gaining a Livelihood Abundant.
There are also other species of very many arts which, although they extend not to the making of idols, yet, with the same criminality, furnish the adjuncts without which idols have no power. For it matters not whether you erect or equip: if you have embellished his temple, altar, or niche; if you have pressed out gold-leaf, or have wrought his insignia, or even his house: work of that kind, which confers not shape, but authority, is more important. If the necessity of maintenance [201] is urged so much, the arts have other species withal to afford means of livelihood, without outstepping the path of discipline, that is, without the confiction of an idol. The plasterer knows both how to mend roofs, and lay on stuccoes, and polish a cistern, and trace ogives, and draw in relief on party-walls many other ornaments beside likenesses. The painter, too, the marble mason, the bronze-worker, and every graver whatever, knows expansions [202] of his own art, of course much easier of execution. For how much more easily does he who delineates a statue overlay a sideboard! [203] How much sooner does he who carves a Mars out of a lime-tree, fasten together a chest! No art but is either mother or kinswoman of some neighbour [204] art: nothing is independent of its neighbour. The veins of the arts are many as are the concupiscences of men. "But there is difference in wages and the rewards of handicraft;" therefore there is difference, too, in the labour required. Smaller wages are compensated by more frequent earning. How many are the party-walls which require statues? How many the temples and shrines which are built for idols? But houses, and official residences, and baths, and tenements, how many are they? Shoe- and slipper-gilding is daily work; not so the gilding of Mercury and Serapis. Let that suffice for the gain [205] of handicrafts. Luxury and ostentation have more votaries than all superstition. Ostentation will require dishes and cups more easily than superstition. Luxury deals in wreaths, also, more than ceremony. When, therefore, we urge men generally to such kinds of handicrafts as do not come in contact with an idol indeed and with the things which are appropriate to an idol; since, moreover, the things which are common to idols are often common to men too; of this also we ought to beware that nothing be, with our knowledge, demanded by any person from our idols' service. For if we shall have made that concession, and shall not have had recourse to the remedies so often used, I think we are not free of the contagion of idolatry, we whose (not unwitting) hands [206] are found busied in the tendence, or in the honour and service, of demons.
[201] See chaps. v. and xii.
[202] See chap. ii., "The expansiveness of idolatry."
[203] Abacum. The word has various meanings; but this, perhaps, is its most general use: as, for instance, in Horace and Juvenal.
[204] Alterius = heteron which in the New Testament is = to "neighbour" in Rom. xiii. 8, etc. [Our author must have borne in mind Cicero's beautiful words--"Etenim omnes artes quæ ad humanitatem pertinent habent quoddam commune vinculum," etc. Pro Archia, i. tom. x. p. 10. Ed. Paris, 1817.]
[205] Quæstum. Another reading is "questum," which would require us to translate "plaint."
[206] "Quorum manus non ignorantium," i.e., "the hands of whom not unwitting;" which may be rendered as above, because in English, as in the Latin, in adjective "unwitting" belongs to the "whose," not to the "hands."