Celsus on temples, altars and images

Come, let us look also at what follows, where he says this: “But let us stop there. They cannot bear the sight of temples and altars and images. Nor, for that matter, can the Scythians, nor the Nomads of Libya, nor the godless Seres, nor other nations, the most unholy and lawless. And that the Persians too hold this view, Herodotus records in these words: ‘I know that the Persians follow these customs: it is not their custom to set up images and altars and temples; rather, they even charge those who make them with folly, because, as it seems to me, they did not think, as the Greeks do, that the gods are of human nature’ (Herodotus, Histories 1.131). And indeed Heraclitus too declares something like this: ‘And they pray to these images, as if one were to chat with houses, knowing nothing of gods or heroes, who they are’ (Heraclitus, fragment 5 Diels-Kranz).

“What wiser thing, then, do they teach us than Heraclitus? He at any rate hints, in a deeply veiled way, that it is foolish to pray ‘to the images’ if one does not know ‘gods and heroes, who they are’. So much for Heraclitus; but these men openly dishonour the images. If it is because stone or wood or bronze or gold, which this man or that has made, could not be a god, their wisdom is ridiculous. For who else, unless he is a complete child, thinks these things are gods, and not offerings to the gods and images of them? But if it is because one must not even suppose them to be divine likenesses, since the form of God is different, as the Persians also think, then they do not notice that they refute themselves when they say that ‘God made man’ his own ‘image’ (Genesis 1:26–27), and his form like himself. They will agree, indeed, that these things exist in honour of certain beings, whether like them or unlike them in form; but they will say that those to whom they are dedicated are not gods but demons, and that whoever reveres God must not serve demons.”