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| That the Platonists Themselves Have Determined that God Alone Can Confer Happiness Either on Angels or Men, But that It Yet Remains a Question Whether Those Spirits Whom They Direct Us to Worship, that We May Obtain Happiness, Wish Sacrifice to Be Offered to Themselves, or to the One God Only. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Chapter 1.—That the Platonists
Themselves Have Determined that God Alone Can Confer Happiness
Either on Angels or Men, But that It Yet Remains a Question Whether
Those Spirits Whom They Direct Us to Worship, that We May Obtain
Happiness, Wish Sacrifice to Be Offered to Themselves, or to the
One God Only.
It is the
decided opinion of all who use their brains, that all men desire to
be happy. But who are happy, or how they become so, these are
questions about which the weakness of human understanding stirs
endless and angry controversies, in which philosophers have wasted
their strength and expended their leisure. To adduce and discuss
their various opinions would be tedious, and is unnecessary. The
reader may remember what we said in the eighth book, while making a
selection of the philosophers with whom we might discuss the
question regarding the future life of happiness, whether we can
reach it by paying divine honors to the one true God, the Creator
of all gods, or by worshipping many gods, and he will not expect us
to repeat here the same argument, especially as, even if he has
forgotten it, he may refresh his memory by reperusal. For we made
selection of the Platonists, justly esteemed the noblest of the
philosophers, because they had the wit to perceive that the human
soul, immortal and rational, or intellectual, as it is, cannot be
happy except by partaking of the light of that God by whom both
itself and the world were made; and also that the happy life which
all men desire cannot be reached by any who does not cleave with a
pure and holy love to that one supreme good, the unchangeable
God. But as even these philosophers, whether accommodating to the
folly and ignorance of the people, or, as the apostle says,
“becoming vain in their imaginations,”369 supposed or allowed others to
suppose that many gods should be worshipped, so that some of them
considered that divine honor by worship and sacrifice should be
rendered even to the demons (an error I have already exploded), we
must now, by God’s help, ascertain what is thought about our
religious worship and piety by those immortal and blessed spirits,
who dwell in the heavenly places among dominations, principalities,
powers, whom the Platonists call gods, and some either good demons,
or, like us, angels,—that is to say, to put it more plainly,
whether the angels desire us to offer sacrifice and worship, and to
consecrate our possessions and ourselves, to them or only to God,
theirs and ours.
For this is the worship which is
due to the Divinity, or, to speak more accurately, to the Deity;
and, to express this worship in a single word as there does not
occur to me any Latin term sufficiently exact, I shall avail
myself, whenever necessary, of a Greek word. Λατρεία, whenever
it occurs in Scripture, is rendered by the word service. But that
service which is due to men, and in reference to which the apostle
writes that servants must be subject to their own masters,370 is usually
designated by another word in Greek,371
371 Namely,
δουλεία: comp. Quæst in
Exod. 94; Quæst. in Gen. 21; Contra Faustum, 15.
9, etc. | whereas the service which is paid
to God alone by worship, is always, or almost always, called
λατρεία in
the usage of those who wrote from the divine oracles. This cannot
so well be called simply “cultus,” for in that case it would
not seem to be due exclusively to God; for the same word is applied
to the respect
we pay either to the memory or
the living presence of men. From it, too, we derive the words
agriculture, colonist, and others.372
372 Agricolæ, coloni,
incolæ. | And the heathen call their gods
“cœlicolæ,” not because they worship heaven, but because they
dwell in it, and as it were colonize it,—not in the sense in
which we call those colonists who are attached to their native soil
to cultivate it under the rule of the owners, but in the sense in
which the great master of the Latin language says, “There was an
ancient city inhabited by Tyrian colonists.”373 He called them colonists, not
because they cultivated the soil, but because they inhabited the
city. So, too, cities that have hived off from larger cities are
called colonies. Consequently, while it is quite true that, using
the word in a special sense, “cult” can be rendered to none but
God, yet, as the word is applied to other things besides, the cult
due to God cannot in Latin be expressed by this word
alone.
The word “religion” might seem
to express more definitely the worship due to God alone, and
therefore Latin translators have used this word to represent
θρησκεία;
yet, as not only the uneducated, but also the best instructed, use
the word religion to express human ties, and relationships, and
affinities, it would inevitably introduce ambiguity to use this
word in discussing the worship of God, unable as we are to say that
religion is nothing else than the worship of God, without
contradicting the common usage which applies this word to the
observance of social relationships. “Piety,” again, or, as
the Greeks say,
εὐσέβεια, is
commonly understood as the proper designation of the worship of
God. Yet this word also is used of dutifulness to parents. The
common people, too, use it of works of charity, which, I suppose,
arises from the circumstance that God enjoins the performance of
such works, and declares that He is pleased with them instead of,
or in preference to sacrifices. From this usage it has also come
to pass that God Himself is called pious,374 in which sense the Greeks never
use
εὐσεβεῖν,
though
εὐσέβεια is
applied to works of charity by their common people also. In some
passages of Scripture, therefore, they have sought to preserve the
distinction by using not
εὐσέβεια, the
more general word, but
θεοσέβεια, which literally
denotes the worship of God. We, on the other hand, cannot express
either of these ideas by one word. This worship, then, which in
Greek is called
λατρεία, and in Latin
“servitus” [service], but the service due to God only; this
worship, which in Greek is called
θρησκεία, and in Latin
“religio,” but the religion by which we are bound to God only;
this worship, which they call
θεοσέβεια, but which we
cannot express in one word, but call it the worship of God,—this,
we say, belongs only to that God who is the true God, and who makes
His worshippers gods.375 And therefore, whoever these
immortal and blessed inhabitants of heaven be, if they do not love
us, and wish us to be blessed, then we ought not to worship them;
and if they do love us and desire our happiness, they cannot wish
us to be made happy by any other means than they themselves have
enjoyed,—for how could they wish our blessedness to flow from one
source, theirs from another?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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