God alone foretells; fire-purification mocked; Greek myths

All my counsel will stand, and all as many as I wish, I will do.’ Alone then from our side will be laid down for the God beyond all, the being able both clearly to discern, and to foretell without wandering the things about to be; yet otherwise nonsense and old-wives’ little myths, buffooneries and trickings, the things from others, who having corrupted the mind speak the things from their own heart, according as it has been written, and make the lie a starting-point of money-talk.

Palladius: True. For it holds thus, and not otherwise.

Cyril: We will hold off then also from this, and having left a twisted path, we will walk the one unto the straight, clinging to God single-turned, and voting the truth for the saints’ voices.

Palladius: Very much.

Cyril: And why will we not also count that hated besides these, and say it is a portion of Greek godlessness—the loving somehow to be purified around by fire and water, and by some other such manners?

Palladius: And very much. Therefore also a divine oracle said clearly: ‘There will not be found in you one purifying his son or his daughter in fire.’

Cyril: How well the law was sounding these things to us, and refused the doing! For I think the matter is full of emptiness, and lacking the all-best and wise reasoning; for in what manner will fire’s nature benefit us? and torches running around in a circle how would they lift out the one who has sinned? For of bronze or then of some other such material, fire’s cast melts out the filth. Yet of mind and soul’s profanation, in what manner will it make disappear? Are these things then not already of laughter, and inventions of empty thoughts?

Palladius: Altogether so.

Cyril: And I would say as most sweetly to the select of Greeks, who have become inventors of such shameful practices, and introducers to the others: What then doing, O noble and wise ones, that Tityos whom you say was born from earth, you punish in Hades, setting vultures around him as diners of the livers, because having admired a little woman’s beauty he was sick with the desire? And for Tantalus you say a stone has been hung, and you mythologize to the young that he pays justices of an unbridled tongue? And having bound Ixion with long and always-moving turns of a wheel, you say he endures a penalty upon this, not out of tune with the gods from your deceit; yet yourselves and others although having fallen into terrible and most out-of-place evils, you free with fire and shoots, as you somehow think, and gift the washing-off of the charges, although very much condemned. And for Tityos, tell me, and those just now named, have you set a hard and inescapable justice—the perhaps coming to be in lack of fire? And indeed the most thieving according to you and carrier of fire to humans—I mean Prometheus, if somehow that one also was at all—was rich with fire’s use, and before