Idol, Idolater, Idolatry: idol comes from the Greek, ειδοσ, image , ειδολοσ, representation of an image , λατρευιν, to serve, to revere, to adore . This word adore [adorer] is Latin and has many different meanings: it signifies to bring the hand to the mouth while speaking with respect; to bow, to go down on the knee, to salute , and commonly, in short, to render supreme worship .

It is worth remarking here that the dictionary of Trévoux begins this article by saying that all the Pagans were idolaters and that the Indians are still idolatrous peoples. IN the first place, no one was called a pagan before Theodosius the younger; this name was given at this time to the inhabitants of the burgs of Italy, pagorum incoloe pagani , who retained their ancient religion; secondly, Industan is Mahometan, and the Mahometans are implacable enemies of images and of idolatry ; thirdly, one must not at all refer to as idolatrous the many peoples of India who belong to the ancient religion of the Persians, nor [those of] certains coasts that have no idols .

Whether there has ever been an idolatrous government. It appears that there has never been any people on the earth who took for themselves the name of idolater . This word is an insult that the Gentiles, the Polytheists seemed to deserve; but it is certain that if one had asked at the senate of Rome, at the areopagus of Athens, at the court of the kings of Persia, " Are you idolaters? " they would hardly haveunderstood the question. No one would have replied, "We worship images, idols ." One finds the words, idolater , idolatry , neither in Homer, nor in Hesiod, nor in Herodotus, nor in any religious author of the Gentiles. There has never been any edict, any law which commanded that people should worship idols , that they should serve them as gods, that they should believe them gods.

When the Roman and Carthaginian captains sealed a treaty, they called all the gods to witness. "It is in their presence," they said, "that we shall swear peace." Now the statues of these gods, of which the number was very long, were not in the general's tent. They regarded the gods as present in the actions of men, as witnesses, as judges, and it was assuredly not the simulacrum which constituted divinity.

With what eye, therefore, did they see the statues of their false divinities in the temples? With the same eye, if it be permitted to express oneself in this way, that we see the images of the true objects of our veneration. The error was not adoring a piece of wood or of marble, but adoring a false divinity represented by this wood and that marble. The difference between them and us is not that they had images and we have none, that they said prayers before images and we say none: the difference is that their images represented fantastic beings within a false religion and that our represent real beings within a veritable religion.

When the consul Pliny addresses his prayers to the immortal gods, in the exordium of the panegyric of Trajan, it is not to images that he addresses them; these images were not immortal.

Neither the last eras of paganism, nor those more remote, offer one single fact which might make one conclude that anyone truly worshiped [adorât] an idol . Homer speaks only of the gods who inhabit high Olympus—the Palladium, although fallen from the sky, was but a sacred guarantee of the protection of Pallas: it was her whom one worshiped [adorait] in the palladium.

But the Romans and the Greeks went down on bended knee before statues, adorned them with crowns, incense, flowers, paraded them in triumph in public places: we have sanctified these customs, and we are not idolaters .

Women, in times of drought, would carry statues of false gods after having fasted. They would walk barefooted, hair disheveled, and all of a sudden the skies would open up with rain, as Petronius says ironically, et statim urceatim pluebat . We have consacrated this practice illegitimate among the Gentiles and legitimate among us. In how many cities do they not carry the saints barefoot in order to obtain the kindnesses of the Supreme Being by their intercession?

If a Turk, or a learned Chinese, were witness to these ceremonies, he could in ignorance at first accuse us of putting our trust in the sumulacra that we parade in such manner in procession; but one word would suffice to disabuse him.

One is surprised at the prodigious number of declamations spouted against the idolatry of the Romans and the Greeks; and then one is more surprised still when one sees that in fact they were not idolaters ; that their law did not at all command them to orient their cult toward simulacra.

Some temples, there were, more privileged than others; the great Diana of Ephesus had more reknown than a Diana of some village, or than another of her temples. The statue of Olympian Jupiter attracted more oferings than that of Paphlagonian Jupiter. But since it is necessary always to contrast here the customs of a true religion to those of a false religion, have we not for several centuries now given more devotion to certain altars than to others? Would it not be ridiculous to seize this pretexte in order to accuse us of idolatry ?

People imagined only one Diana, only one Apollo an only one Aesclepius, not so many Apollos, Dianas and Aesclepiuses as they had temples and statues. It is therefore demonstrated as far as a point of history can be, that the ancients did not believe that a statue was a divinity, that the cult could be centered on this statue, on this idol , and that consequently the ancients were not in any sense idolaters .

A crude and supersitious populace who did not reason, who neither knew how to doubt, nor to deny, nor to believe, who rushed to the temples out of idleness, and because the small are there equal to the great; qui carried its offering by habit, qui spoke continually about miracles without having examined any, and waho stood barely above the victims that is brought forth; this populace, I say, might well, at the sight of mighty Diana and of thundering Jupiter, be stricken with religious horror and worship without realizing it the statue itself. This is just what has happened several times in our temples to our rude countryfolk; and we did not fail to teach them that it was to the blessed, to the immortals taken up in the sky, that they had to issue their demand for intercession, and not to these figures of wood and rock, and that they must reserve worship for God alone.

The Greeks and the Romans increased the number fo their gods by apotheoses; the Greeks deified conquerors, such as Bacchus, Hercules, Perseus. Rome raised alters to its emperors. Our apotheoses are of a type much more sublime; we pay no attention either to rank or to conquests. We have built temples to simply virtuous men who would be for the most part unknown on the earth if they were not placed in the sky.The apotheoses of the ancients result from flattery; ours from respect for virtue. But these ancient apotheoses are still a convincing proof that the Greeks and the Romans were by no means idolaters . It is clear that they did not admit a divine power in the statue of Augustus and Claudius any more than in their medals. Cicero in his philosophical works leaves no suspicion but that one might be mistaken about the statues of the gods and confound them with the gods themselves. His interlocuters fulminate against established religion; but none of them imagine accusing the Romans of taking marble and bronze for divinities.

Lucretius does not reproach anyone for this foolishness, he who reproaches all the superstitious: thus again once more, this opinion did not exist, and the error of polytheism was not an error of idolatry

Horace makes a statue of Priapus speak: he has him say, I was once the trunk of a fig tree; a carpenter not knowing whether to make of me a god or a bench, decided in the end to make me a god, etc. What's the result of this pleasantry? Priapus was one of these little subaltern divinities, abandonned to the mockers; and this pleasantry is itself the strongest proof that this figure of Priapus that was placed in the vegetable gardens to scare away the birds, was not very much revered.

Dacier, a worthy commentator, has not failed to observe that Baruc had foreseen this adventure, saying, they will not be what the workers will want ; but he could observe also that as much can be said about all statues: out of a block of marble one can as easily carve a wash-bowl as a figure of Alexander or of Jupiter, or of something more respectable. The matter from which were formed the cherubim of the holy of holies could equally have served the vilest functions. A torso, an altar are they the less revered because the craftsman might also have made of them a kitchen table?

Instead of concluding that the Romans worshipped the statue of Priapus and that Baruc had predicted it, ought therefore to conclude that the Romans were making fun of it. Consult all of the authors who talk about statues of their gods, you will not find one who speaks of idolatry ; they expressly say the contrary; as you see in Martial: Qui finxit sacros auro vel marmore vultus, Non facit ille eos. In Ovid: Colitur pro Jove forma Jovis . IN Statius: Nulla autem effigies nulli commissa metallo. Forma Dei montes habitare ac numina gaudet . In Lucan: Est-ne Dcei nisi terra et pontus et aer?

One could make a volume of all the passages that dispose of images that were but images.

It is only in the case where statues would bring back oracles that could give pause for thinking that these statues possessed in them something of the divine; but certainly the reigning opinion was that the gods had chosed certain altars, certain simulacra, in which to come to reside on occasion, to give audience there to men, in order to respond to them. One sees in Homer, and in the choruses of Greek tragedies, only prayers to Apollo, who delivers his oracles in the montainsm in such and such temple, in such and such city; in all of antiquity there is not one case of a prayer addressed to a statue.

Those who professed magic, who believe it a science, or who feigned believing this, claimed to have the sevret of making the gods descend into statues—not the great gods, but the secondary gods, the genii. This is what Mercury Trismegistus called making the gods ; and this is what St. Augustine refutes in his city of God; but this itself plainly shows that it was not believed that simulacra had in them any divine power, since a magician was needed in order to animate them; and it seems to me that it happened quite rarely that a magician was skillful enough to give a soul to a statue so as to make it speak.

In a word, the images of the gods were not gods; Jupiter and not his image hurled the thunderbolt. It was not the statue of Neptune that roiled the seas, nor that of Apollo that gave light; the Greeks and the Romans were gentiles, were polytheists, but were not idolaters .

Whether the Persians, the Sabians, the Egyptians, the Tartars, the Turks were idolaters, and of what antiquity is the origin of the simulacra called idols; abridged history of their cult . It is an abuse of terms to call idolaters the peoples who rendered worship to the sun and stars. These nations did not long have simulacra or temples; if they were deceived, it was in rendering to the stars what they owed to the creator of the stars: still, the dogmas of Zoroaster, or Zardust, gathered in the Sadder, teach of a supreme avenger and remunerator; and that is quite far indeed from idolatry . The government of China never had an idol; it has always preserved the simple worship of the master of the sky Kingtien , while tolerating pagodas of the people. Genghis Khan among the Tartars was not an idolater , and had no simulacra; the Muslims who fill Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, India and Africa call the Christians idolaters , giaour , because they believe that the Christians render worship to images. They broke all the statues that found in Constantinople in Hagia Sophia, in the church of the holy Apostles and in the others which they converted into mosques. The appearance deceived them sometimes as it deceived men always; it made them believe that the temples dedicated to the saints who had been men at other times, the images of the saints revered on bended knee, the miracles worked in the temples, were invincible proofs of the most somplete idolatry ; this however is nothing. Christians adore in effect only one Godand only respect in the blessed the virtue itself of God who works through his saints. The Idonoclasts and the Protestants have spoken the same reproach of idolatry against the Church; and it has given them the same response.

Since men very rarely have precise ideas, and still less do they express them in precise words and without equivocation, we have called the Gentiles, and above all the Polytheists, by the name idolaters . Immense volumes have been written; folks have spouted out different sentiments on the origin of the worship given to God, or to several gods, under guise of sensible figures: this multitude of books and opinions only demonstrates ignorance.

It is not known who invented clothes and shoes, yet one wants to know who first invented idols ! Of what use a passage of Sanconiaton who lived before the Trojan war? What does he teach us, when he says that chaos, spirit, which is to say the breath, in love with its principles, drew out of them the lemon, that it turned the air luminous, that the wind Colp and his wife Bau engendered Eon, and that Eon engendered Jenos? That Cronos their offspring had two eyes on the back, as on the front, that he became a god and that he gave Egypt to his son, Taut? There you have one of the most respectable monuments of antiquity.

Orpheus, prior to Sanconiaton, teaches us no more about the matter in his theogony, which Damascius has preserved for us; he represents the principle of the world under the figure of a two-headed dragon, the one a bull, the other a lion, with a face in the middle that he calls god-face and with golden wings on its shoulders.

Yet you can extract from these bizarre ideas two great truths: one, that sensible images and hieroglyphs are of the greatest antiquity; the other, that all the ancient philosophers recognized a first principle.

As for polytheism, good sense will inform you that once there were men, which is to say weak animals, capaple of reason, subject to all sorts of accidents, to illness and to death, these men felt their weakness and their dependence; they readily recognized that there is something more powerful than them. They felt a force in the earth that produces their food; one in the air that often destroys it; one in the fire that consumes and in the water that submerges. What more natural in ignorant men than to imagine beings who preside over these elements! What more natural than to revere the invisible force that made the sun and the stars to shine in their eyes? And as soon as one wished to form an idea of these powers superior to man, what more natural again than to configure them in some sensible manner? The Jewish religion which preceded our own, and which was was ordained by God himself, was totally filled with these images under which God was represented. He deigned to speak human language from a bush; he appeared on a mountain. The celestial spirits that he sends all come in a human form. Finally, the sanctuary is replete with cherubim, which are human bodies with wings and the heads of animals. This is what led to the crude mistake of Plutarch, of Tacitus, of Appius and so many others, to reproach the Jews for worshiping the head of an ass. God, in spite of his prohibition against the painting and sculpting of any figure, therefore deigned to proportion himself to human weakness, which required that one should speak to the senses by means of images.

Isaiah, in Chap. IV , sees the Lord seated on a throne, the bottom of his robe filling the temple. The Lord stretches out his hand and touches the mouth of Jeremiah in Chap. I of this prophet. Ezekiel, in Chap. III , sees a throne of sapphire, and God appears to himi as a man seated on this throne. These images do not alter the purity of the Jewish religion, which never used pictures, statues, idols , in order to represent God to the eyes of the people.

The well-read Chinese, the Persians, the ancient Egyptians had no idols ; but Isis and Osiris were soon enough figured; soon Bel was a great column in Babylon; Brahma was a strange monster in the Indian peninsula. The Greeks above all multiplied the names of their gods, statues and temples, but always attributing the supreme power to their Zeus , named by the Latins Jupiter , ruler of gods and men. The Romans imitated the Greeks: these peoples always placed all the gods in heaven without fully knowing what they meant by heaven or by their Olympus. There is no evidence that these superior beings lived in the clouds, which are nothing but water. They were placed at first seven of them in the seven planets, among which was counted the sun; but afterward, the normal abode of all the gods was the vast extent of the sky.

The Romans had their twelve great gods, six male and six female, which they named dii maiorum gentium : Jupiter, Neptune, Apollo, Vulcan, Mars, Mercury, Juno, Vesta, Minerva, Ceres, Venus, Diana. Pluto was forgotten at the time; Vesta took his place.

Next came the gods minorum gentium , the indigent, the heros, such as Bacchus, Hercules, Aesclepius; the infernal gods, Pluto, Proserpine; those of the sea, such as Thetis, Amphitrite, the Neriads, Glaucus; then the Driads, the Naiads, the gods of the gardens, those of the shepherds. There were some for every profession, for every activity of life, for chiodren, for nubile girls, for the espoused, for the pregnant; they had the god Fart. [1] Finally, the emperors were deified: neither the emperors, nor the god Fart, nor the goddess Pertunda, nor Priapus, nor Rumilia the goddess of nipples, nor Sercutius the god of the wardrobe, were in truth regarded as masters of land and sky. The emperors sometimes held temples; the little gods, the Penates, had none at all; but all had their figure, their idol .

It was with small treasure hoards that rooms were decorated; these were the amusements of old women and children, who were not sanctioned by any public cult. People were left to their own liking to pursue any particular superstition. One still finds these little idols in the ruins of ancient cities.

If noone knows when men began to make idols , it is known that they are of the remotest antiquity; Thare, father of Abraham, made some of them at Ur in Chaldea; Rachel stole and carried away the idols of her father-in-law Laban: one cannot go back further.

But what precise notion did the ancient nations have about all these simulacra? What virtue, what power was attributed to them? Was it believed that the gods descended from heaven in order to come hide themselved in these statues? Or that they (the gods) communicated to them (the statues) some portion of the divine spirit? Or that they did not transfere to them anything at all? On this, people have so far written very little of use; it is clear that each man judges of them according to his degree of reason, or credulity, or fanaticism. It is evident that the priests attach the greatest divinity to their statues, in order to attract more offerings; it is known that the Philosophers detested these superstitions; that the warriors mocked them; that the megistrates tolerated them, and that the people, absurd as ever, did not know what it was doing: suchi, in a few words, is the history of all the nations to whom God did not make himself known.

One can get the same idea of the worship that all Egypt rendered to an ox, and that many cities gave to a dog, to a monkey, to a cat, to onions. There is strong evidence that these were emblems at first: then a certain ox, Apis, and certain dog, named Anubis , were adored. People still ate oxen and onions; but it is difficult to know what the old women of Egypt thought about sacred onions and oxen.

Idols would speak frequently enough: there was a commemoration in Rome on the day of the feast of Cybele, for the beautiful words that the statue had pronounced when it was being moved out the palace of king Attalus:

The statue of fortune had spoken; the Scipios, the Ciceros, the Caesars believed none of it in truth; but the old lady, to whom Encolpus gave a coin in order to purchase gooses and gods, was able to believe it very strongly indeed.

Idols would also bring back oracles, and the priests, hidden in the hollow of the statues would speak in the name of the divinity.

How, in the midst of so many gods and so many different theogonies and particular cults, was there never any war of religion among the peoples called idolatrous ? This peace was a boon born of an ill from the error itself: for each nation, recognizing many inferior gods, found it good that its neighbors should also have theirs. If you except Cambises, who was criticized for having killed the ox Apis, one does not find in profane history any conqueror who mistreated the gods of a conquered people. The Gentiles had not exclusive religion; and the priests only dreampt of multiplying offerings and sacrifices.

The first offerings were fruits; soon afterward, animals were needed for the table of the priests, who slit their throats themselves; they became butchers and cruel: in the end they introduced the horrific practice of sacrificing human victims, and above all infants and young girls. Never were the Chinese, the Persians, the Indians, guilty of these abominations; but at Heliopolis in Egypt, in Porphyry's report, they burned men. In Tauris, strangers were sacrificed; fortunately, the priests of Tauris did not have to perform a lot of these rites. The first Greeks, the Cypriots, the Phoenecians, the Tyrians, the Carthaginians, considered this superstition abominable. The Romans themselves fell into this crime of religion; and plutarch reports that they burned two Greeks and two Frenchmen in order to expiate the romantic excapades of three vestal virgins. Procopius, a contemporary of Theodbert, king of the Franks, says that the Franks immolated men when they entered Italy with this prince: the Gauls, the Germans, ordinarily made such frightful sacrifices.

One can hardly read history without conceiving some horror for the human race. It is true that among the Jews Jephta sacrificed his daughter, and that Saul was prepared to burn his son. It is true that those who were dedicated to the Lord by anathema, were not able to be redeemed, in the manner that beasts are redeemed, and that it was necessary that they should perish: but God, who created men, can take away their life when he pleases and as he pleases: and it is not up to men to put themselves in the place of the master of life and death, and to usurp the rights of the Supreme Being.

In order to console the human race for the horrific picture of these pious sacrifices, it is important to know that among almost all the nations called idolatrous , there was sacred Theology , and popular error; secret worship, and public ceremonies; the religion of the wise, and that of the vulgar. The teaching about one sole God was for the initiates of the mysteries only; one only needs to cast one's eyes upon the hymn attributed to Orpheus, which was sung in the mysteries of Eleusian Ceres, so famous throughout Europe and Asia.

Again, let this passage be read, from the philosopher Maximus of Madaurus, in his letter to Saint Augustine: "What man is so uncultured, so stupid, as to doubt that there should be a God, supreme, eternal, infinite, who made nothing like unto himself, and who is the common father of all things?" There are a thousand testimonies that the wise abhorred not only idolatry , but even polytheism.

Epictetus, that model of resignation and patience, that man so great in so base a condition, never speaks but of one sole God. Here is one of his maxims: "God created me, God is within me; I carry him everywhere; could I stain him with obscene thoughts, unjust actions, scandalous desires? My duty is to thank God for everything, to proaise him for everything and not to cease blessing him until I cease to live." All the ideas of Epictetus proceed from this principle.

Marcus Aurelius, as great perhaps on the throne of the Roman Empire as Epictetus in slavery, speaks often about the truth of the gods, whether so as to conform to common parlance, or whether so as to express mediating beings between the Supreme Being and men. But in how many places is it not possible to see that he did not recognize but one God, eternal, infinite? Our soul , he says, is an emanation of the divinity; my children, my body, my wits come from God .

The Stoics, the Platonists admitted a divine and universal nature; the Epicureans denied it; the pontiffs spoke only of one sole God in the mysteries; where then were the idolaters ?

As for the rest, it is one of the great errors of Moreri's Dictionary, to say that from the time of Theodosius the younger, there no longer remained idolaters except in remote countries of Asia and Africa. There were in Italy still many Gentile peoples, even in the seventh century: the north of Germany since the Vezer was not Christian in the age of Charlemagne; Poland and all the Septentrion remained for a long time after him what one calls idolatrous : half of Africa, all the realms beyond the Ganges, Japan, the populace of China, a hundred hordes of Tartars have retained their ancient worship. There are no longer in Europe but a few Lapps, a few Samoyeds, a few Tartars, who have persevered in the religion of their ancestors. See Oracles, Religion [Religion (Theology), Religion], Superstition, Sacrifices, Temples.)

Notes

1. With the French, Pet , the author is here referring to Crepitus , the Roman god of gas and flatulence, mentioned below.