Lactantius, Divine Institutes 1.5

We should set aside the prophets’ testimony, lest the proof appear inadequate to those who reject it entirely. Let us turn instead to the authors our opponents themselves invoke—the poets and philosophers—and call them as witnesses to the truth. From them we must establish one God, not because they possessed the truth, but because truth’s power is so great that no one can be so blind as to miss the divine clarity forced upon their eyes. The poets, though they decked the gods in verse and magnified their deeds with highest praise, still confess again and again that all things are held together and governed by a single spirit or mind. Orpheus, most ancient of the poets and a peer of the gods themselves—tradition says he sailed with the Argonauts alongside Castor and Hercules—calls the true and great God ‘Protogonos’, because nothing was generated before him, but all things were generated from him. He also names him ‘Phaneta’, because when nothing yet existed, he first appeared and stood forth from the infinite. Unable to conceive his origin and nature, Orpheus said he was born of vast air: ‘Protogonos Phaethon, son of immeasurable air’; he had nothing further to say. This God, he says, is the parent of all the gods, for whose sake he founded heaven and provided for his children a common dwelling and seat: ‘He built an imperishable house for the immortals’. Guided by nature and reason, Orpheus recognized a supreme power, the creator of heaven and earth. He could not name Jupiter as the first principle, since Jupiter was born of Saturn; nor Saturn, who was said to be born of heaven; nor dare he make heaven itself the first god, because he saw heaven as a world-element that itself required an author. This reasoning led him to that firstborn God, to whom he assigns and attributes sovereignty. Homer offers nothing for the truth, for he wrote of human, not divine, matters. Hesiod might have, since he compressed the gods’ genealogy into a single book; yet he gave no account that did not begin with Chaos—a confused mass of raw, disordered matter—when he ought first to have explained what Chaos is, and whence, when, and how it began to exist. For just as all things are ordered and fashioned by some craftsman, so this matter itself must have been fashioned by someone. Who made it, if not God, to whose power all things are subject? But Hesiod shrinks back, dreading the unknown truth. He did not pour out that song on Helicon by the Muses’ impulse, as he wished to seem, but came prepared and deliberate. Our first poet, Virgil, was not far from the truth. Of the highest God, whom he named Mind and Spirit, he wrote: ‘In the beginning the Spirit nourishes heaven and earth and the fields and the shining globe of the moon and the Titan stars; the Mind, infused throughout, stirs the whole mass and mingles with the great body’. And lest anyone mistake which Spirit wields such power, he declared elsewhere: ‘For God passes through all lands and sea-tracts and deep heaven; from him flocks and herds and men and every kind of wild beast, each living thing new-born, are summoned to life’. Ovid, too, at the start of his great work, without disguising the name, acknowledges that the world was ordered by God, whom he calls the world’s maker and craftsman of things. If Orpheus or our own poets, led by nature, had defended perpetually what they perceived, they would have held the same doctrine we follow, having grasped the truth. So much for the poets. Now to the philosophers, whose authority is weightier and judgment surer, because they are thought to have studied not fictions but the investigation of truth. Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Sages and said to be the first to seek natural causes, said water is the source from which all things are born, but God is the Mind that formed all things from water. Thus he placed the matter of things in moisture and fixed the principle and cause of generation in God. Pythagoras defined God as: ‘The Mind that pervades all parts of the world and all nature, diffused throughout, from which all living creatures receive life’. Anaxagoras says God is an infinite Mind that moves itself. Antisthenes grants many popular gods, but one natural God—that is, the craftsman of the whole. Cleanthes and Anaximenes name the highest God as Ether; our poet assented to this view: ‘Then the Almighty Father, with fertilizing rains, descended into the joyful lap of his Ether-bride, and the great offspring is nourished, mingled with the great body’. Chrysippus calls God the natural power endowed with divine reason, sometimes divine necessity; Zeno calls God the natural and divine law. Though all their opinions are uncertain, they converge on the same point: they agree that there is one Providence. Whether you call it Nature, or Ether, or Reason, or Mind, or Fatal Necessity, or Divine Law, or anything else, it is the same thing we call God. Nor does the diversity of names obstruct, since all are referred by their meaning to one reality. Aristotle, though he contradicts himself and says and thinks opposing things, still testifies that one Mind presides over the world. Plato, judged the wisest of all, defends the monarchy openly and plainly, and does not name Ether, or Reason, or Nature, but calls him God, from whom this world was made perfect and wonderful. Cicero, following and imitating him in many places, frequently confesses God and calls him Supreme in the books he wrote on the laws, arguing that the world is ruled by him when he discusses the nature of the gods: ‘Nothing is more excellent than God. Therefore the world must be ruled by him. For God is subject to no nature, nor obedient to it. Therefore he himself rules all nature.’ That God exists we do not doubt; nor can God himself, as we understand him, be understood in any other way than as a certain Mind, free and separated from all mortal concretion, perceiving and moving all things. Seneca, the keenest Stoic among the Romans, how often does he extol the highest God with deserved praise! When discussing premature death he says: ‘Do you not understand the authority and majesty of your judge, the ruler of earth and heaven and all the gods, from whom those divine powers which we singly adore and worship are suspended?’ Also in his Exhortations: ‘When he laid the first foundations of this most beautiful world and began to order it, so that all things might go under their leaders, although he himself had extended through his whole body, nevertheless God generated the ministers of his kingdom.’ And how many other things he said about God, similar to ours! I omit them now, because they fit better elsewhere. For the present it is enough to show that men of the highest genius have touched the truth and almost grasped it, unless they were dragged back by custom’s corrupt and perverse opinions, by which they believed there were other gods and that the things God made for human use were to be held and worshipped as gods.