Lactantius, Divine Institutes 5

Let us set aside the testimony of the prophets, lest the proof seem less fitting for matters that are not believed at all. Instead, let us turn to the authors whom our opponents customarily cite against us—the poets and philosophers—and call them as witnesses to the truth. From these sources we must demonstrate one God, not because they possessed a full knowledge of the truth, but because the power of truth itself is so great that no one can be so blind as to miss the divine clarity forced upon his eyes. The poets, although they adorned the gods with songs and magnified their deeds with the highest praise, nevertheless confess again and again that all things are contained and governed by a single spirit or mind. Orpheus, the most ancient of the poets and a contemporary of the gods themselves—since 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 else yet existed, he first appeared and stood forth from the infinite. Since he could not grasp this God's origin and nature in his mind, he declared that he was born from the vast air: 'Protogonos Phaethon, son of boundless air.' He had nothing further to say. Orpheus calls this God the parent of all the gods, for whose sake he founded the heavens and provided for his children, so that they might share a common dwelling and seat: 'He established an imperishable home for the immortals.' Guided by nature and reason, he therefore understood that a supreme power exists, the creator of heaven and earth. He could not say that Jupiter was the first principle, since Jupiter was born of Saturn, nor Saturn himself, who was said to be born of heaven; yet he dared not make heaven the first god, because he saw that heaven is an element of the world, and an element needs an author. Reason thus led him to that primal God, to whom he assigns and attributes sovereignty. Homer can give us nothing that pertains to the truth, for he wrote of human rather than divine matters. Hesiod might have, since he encompassed the genealogy of the gods in a single work; yet he contributed nothing, because he took his starting point not from the Creator God but from Chaos, a confused mass of raw and disordered matter, when he ought first to have explained whence, when, and how Chaos itself began to exist. Just as all things are ordered and fashioned by some craftsman, so this matter itself must have been made by someone. Who made it, if not God, to whose power all things are subject? But Hesiod shrinks from this, shuddering at the unknown truth. That song on Helicon was not poured out by the instinct of the Muses, as he wished to appear; he came to it after meditation and preparation. Our own first poet, Vergil, was not far from the truth. Speaking 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 Titans' stars; and the mind, infused through every part, moves the whole mass and mingles with the great body.' And lest anyone be ignorant of who this spirit is that wields such power, Vergil declared elsewhere: 'For God goes through all lands and the tracts of the sea and the deep heaven; from him come the flocks and herds and men and every kind of wild beast, and every nascent life is summoned.' Ovid also, at the start of his renowned work, confesses without disguise that the world was ordered by God, whom he calls the world's maker and the craftsman of things. If Orpheus or our poets, led by nature, had defended forever what they perceived, they would have held the same doctrine we follow, having grasped the truth. So much for the poets. Let us turn to the philosophers, whose authority is weightier and judgment more certain, because they are believed to have studied not fictions but the investigation of truth. Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Sages and the first to seek natural causes, said that water is the source from which all things are born, and that God is the mind which formed all things from water. Thus he placed the material of things in moisture, and established 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 allows many popular gods, but one natural God—that is, the craftsman of the whole. Cleanthes and Anaximenes call the highest God the ether, an opinion our poet Vergil endorsed: 'Then the omnipotent Father, with fertile rains, descends into the bosom of his joyful consort, and nourishes all the great offspring, mixed with the great body.' Chrysippus names the natural power endowed with divine reason—sometimes calling it divine necessity—God; likewise, Zeno calls the natural and divine law God. The opinions of all these, though uncertain, nevertheless converge on the same point: they agree that there is one providence. Whether you call it nature, ether, reason, mind, fatal necessity, divine law, or anything else, it is the same as what we call God. Nor does the diversity of names obstruct this, since all are reduced to a single signification by their very meaning. Aristotle, although he contradicts himself and says and thinks opposing things, nevertheless testifies that one mind presides over the world. Plato, judged the wisest of all, defends the monarchy plainly and openly; he does not name the ether, or reason, or nature, but calls him God: 'From him this world was made perfect and wonderful.' Cicero, following and imitating Plato in many respects, frequently confesses and calls the supreme God in the books he wrote on the laws, and argues that the world is ruled by him when he disputes the nature of the gods: 'Nothing is more excellent than God. Therefore the world must be ruled by him. For God is not subject to any nature, nor obedient to it. Therefore he himself rules all nature.' Because he is God, I pass over the question of his association; nor can God himself, as we understand him, be understood in any other way than as a mind that is free and released, set apart from all mortal concretion, perceiving and moving all things. Annaeus Seneca, the keenest Stoic among the Romans, how often does he extol the supreme 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 divinities which we individually adore and worship are suspended?' Likewise in his Exhortations: 'When he laid the first foundations of this most beautiful structure and began to arrange it so that all things might proceed 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 our own! I defer those now, because they are more opportune in other places. 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 the entrenched custom of perverse opinions—opinions by which they believed there are other gods, and that the things God made for human use are to be revered and worshiped as gods.