To the Nations 2.4

Some say that they were called gods (theoi) because theein and seiesthai, “to run” and “to be moved,” is the interpretation. So this word is not one of any majesty, for it is formed from running and motion, not from their dominion as divine. But since the one God whom we worship is also named theos, and yet no motion or running of his appears, since he is not visible to anyone, it is plain that the word was taken from elsewhere, and was found as the proper name of divinity, being native to it. So, setting aside the cleverness of that interpretation, it is more likely that the theoi were not so called from running and motion, but that the name was borrowed from the designation of the true God, so that you named theoi those whom you had likewise forged as gods. Indeed, proof that this is so is at hand, since you call all your gods in common theoi, even those in whom no function of running or motion is observed. So if they are all alike theoi and alike immobile, the interpretation of the word is abandoned, and so too the opinion of their divinity, which, being framed from running and motion, is cut away. But if that name is proper to divinity, simple and not a matter of interpretation in that God, and is misapplied in the other things that you would have be gods, show also that there is a fellowship of nature among them, so that the partnership in the name may rightly rest on a communion of substance. Now that theos, by this alone, that he is not in view, is exempt from comparison with the things that are in view both to sight and to the senses (though to the senses enough), which is a declaration bearing witness to the difference between the hidden and the manifest. If the elements are set openly before all, while God, on the contrary, is set before none, how can you bring the things you see into company with that side which you have not seen? Since, then, you cannot join them by sense or by reason, why do you join them by a word, so as to join them also in power? For see, Zeno too separates the matter of the world from God, or says that he passed through it like honey through the combs. So matter and God are two words and two things. According to the distinction of the words, the things too are separated; the condition of matter also follows its word. But if God is not matter, as the very name prescribes, how will the things that are in matter, that is, the elements, be held gods, since members cannot be foreign to their body? But why do I deal with physiological arguments? The mind ought to have ascended upward from the state of the world, not descended into uncertainties. The Platonic shape of the world is round. Others imagined it square and angular … But Epicurus, who had said, “What is above us is nothing to us,” when he too wished to look at the sky, found the sun's disk to be a foot across. Frugality, no doubt, was still practised even in the heavens! Then, as ambition advanced, the sun too extended its beam; so the Peripatetics declared its disk to be larger. I ask you, what wisdom is there in this lust for conjectures? What does it prove, this idleness of affected fastidiousness, decked out with the art of eloquence, with such presumption of assertion? Rightly, then, did Thales of Miletus, while examining the whole sky and walking with his eyes on it, fall shamefully into a well, much mocked by that Egyptian: “On earth,” she said, “you saw nothing; do you think you should gaze at the sky?” So his fall marks the philosophers figuratively: those, that is, who exercise a stupid curiosity on the things of nature rather than first on its maker and ruler, and who will have their study for nothing.