At this point of our study, if you please, we will compare the utterance of Plato. Observe then what this philosopher says about the creator, and what words he makes him speak at the time of the generation of the universe, in order that we may compare the cosmogony of Plato with that of Moses. Thus we can perceive who was the better and who more worthy of God, Plato the idolater, or he of whom the Scripture says that God spoke with him face to face:
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was invisible and without form, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters. And God called the firmament Heaven. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear; and it was so. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass for fodder, and the fruit tree yielding fruit. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven that they may be for a light upon the earth. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to rule over the day and over the night."
19. In all this, you observe, Moses does not say that the deep was created by God, or the darkness or the waters. And yet, after saying concerning light that God ordered it to be, and it was, surely he ought to have gone on to speak of night also, and the deep and the waters. But of them he says not a word to imply that they were not already existing at all, though he often mentions them. Furthermore, he does not mention the birth or creation of the angels or in what manner they were brought into being, but deals only with the heavenly and earthly bodies. It follows that, according to Moses, God is the creator of nothing that is incorporeal, but is only the disposer of matter that already existed. For the words, "And the earth was invisible and without form" can only mean that he regards the wet and dry substance as the original matter and that he introduces God as the disposer of this matter.
CYRIL
About Moses there might be many things to say and lengthy expositions made to he who wants to safeguard our reverence for him. He heard God say to him without ambiguity, "I know you out of all humanity, and you have found grace in my eyes!" The manifold virtue that was in him, and the power of the miracles that he worked in Egypt, make a shining demonstration. Indeed he was shown submitted to God almighty, and assisted him in the revolt which He brought about in his servants against the blindness of the Egyptians. What kind of man Plato was, even in the absence of direct testimony, is proclaimed enough by his passage from Athens in Sicily. It is claimed that, not appreciating his flatteries, Dionysius sold him, inflicting on him, as if he wasn't a free man, the most suitable punishment for a slave. But let us give up this argument for a moment, to return to the main subject.
20. The divine Moses does not appear before our eyes as one who composed doubtful stories, nor one who launched himself out on this road from simple ambition. He had in mind primarily to contribute to making lives led better. And in fact he did not attempt to discourse subtly on the nature of the things, by speaking about what the first principles are named, or about the elements which proceed from it; these things are, in my opinion, too obscure, and inaccessible to some minds. His goal was to form the spirits of his contemporaries with the doctrines of the truth: because they were being misled and had taken to worshipping each according to his imagination. Their extreme ignorance made them ignore the one God, God by nature, and to worship his creations. Some thought that the sky was god, others the disc of the sun; there were even some wretched enough to allot the glory of the supreme nature to the moon, the stars, the earth, to plants, to the watery element, birds, or to brute animals! They had come to this, and such a terrible sickness had affected all the inhabitants of the earth, when Moses came to their help and revealed himself as the initiator into knowledge of great value for all. He proclaimed clearly that there exists by nature only one Creator of the universe, and radically distinguished Him from all other realities which He had merely brought into being and existence. Considering what was useful, and as clearly as possible, neglecting every excessively subtle point, he restricted himself to deal only with that which was strictly essential.
21. How was it useful to him to say what is the nature of the waters, and how they were present at the beginning, or to probe the deeps and the nature of the heavens, to detour into the mode of existence of the angels? It would be difficult for anyone to cover such subjects, which I think that no one understands anyway! Would anyone even be able to do it (thanks to a knowledge lent by God, who had been there tell him), or been able to understand a so subtle speech - or rather one so inaccessible to the spirit? In fact, we find among men, at the time when the book of the very wise Moses was written, an ignorance which exceeds even that of the Greeks. That which should have made possible for those people to understand fully the glory of God was lost, it is obvious from the account, in the pit of the deepest stupidity. As the Scripture inspired by God says, the men of that time should have had some idea of the Creator and maker of the universe from the beauty of things created. But they reached such a degree of wrong thinking that the things that should have led them to the knowledge of the truth shows that they were disposed instead to follow a lie. The very wise Paul bears a witness worthy of trust to this idea by writing, "Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse; for although they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their linking and their senseless minds were darkened."
22. This declaration could touch those who invented the vulgar superstitions, coarse and completely unreasonable; the men, for example, to which as I said the book of Moses was addressed. They are revealed as filled up full of stupidity, as we will realize easily by studying the body of doctrines of their successors.
Plutarch, an extremely subtle man, wrote on this subject in book I of his collection of Theories on nature :
"See from where they drew their idea of God: unceasingly the sun, the moon and the other stars, following courses which pass under the earth, rise with always the same colors and identical dimensions, at the same places."
And further in the same book:
"The concept of God is defined thus: an intelligent and fiery breath, lacking form but changing at will and making themselves resemble any thing. Men, in the beginning, conceived an idea like this starting from the beauty of the spectacle which they had before their eyes, because no beautiful thing is born randomly and fortuitously; it needs art to create it!"
I will add to this quotation that which Hermes Trismegistes has written To his spirit (that's the title of the book):
"Thus, do you say, God is invisible? What a heap of blasphemies! Who is more visible than Him? If He created, it is so that this is seen in everything. The excellence of God, his virtue, it is to be visible in everything!"
23. We will find agreement on this point from the accuser of our pious religion, Julian! He professes that the knowledge of God is not taught, that man acquires it by himself; here what he writes:
JULIAN
Our first proof that this is not learned, that it is innate to mankind is the devotion to the divine, a general characteristic of mankind, in private life and in public life, in the individual and in the community. In fact we have faith in something divine, however vague. But to give specific details on this something is a difficult thing for anyone, and even those who know it cannot do so fully.
And further:
To this idea, common to all mankind, is added another: we all have a nature so dependent on the heavens and the gods that are seen there that, even if someone imagines a different god to ours, he always assigns him the heavens as his residence: it is not that he banishes him from earth; but he so to speak establishes the King of the All in the heavens as in the most honourable place of all, and conceives of him as overseeing from there the affairs of this world.
CYRIL
So we see how those pagans who can't endure the crasser errors (worthy of charlatans, and if I might say so, of serfs) and who have abandoned the popular way of looking at things, have not been entirely deprived of the true concept of God. They have worked out what must be the superiority of power of Him who can bring so vast and wonderful a creation under the control of harmonious laws.
24. As for the rest under discussion here, they didn't recognise God through his creation. They were lured away, losing all human common sense. Not content just to worship the heavens, the earth, the moon and the others stars, they also installed in sacred enclosures representations (of them) in varied forms. They engraved there the silhouettes, not only of men, but even of unintelligent animals, of birds and other beasts, and they gave these idols the titles of 'gods' and 'saviours'!
How can we not admire the wisdom of Moses? He concealed from the men of that time everything that was complicated, deep, difficult to assimilate, in order to reveal to them instead what would enable them to recover sane ideas, and something which had the virtue to put them on the right road to an irreproachable teaching -- I mean a teaching of an all-powerful God. In the same way we would congratulate for very good reasons the schoolmaster who puts himself at the intellectual level of his pupils, in order to lead them by the hand, step by step, towards discovering sacred truths, without putting to them, at the very beginning, any too elaborate ideas, or any very hard to grasp. At the same time we would refuse to recognise Moses as worthy of praise, who acted in the same way? But Julian, if Moses doesn't seem to you to have said anything worth hearing, do you want us to look at the teaching which is dearest to you? Let's see rely as best we can on the meticulous Theogony of Hesiod!
25. This poet indeed pretends to hear the voice of the gods and makes as if he were possessed by the Muses (as if that were a significant or desirable thing!)
"Tell me (he writes) how at first the gods and the earth were born,