Qui finxit sacros auro vel marmore vultus
Non facit ille deos, qui rogat ille facit.
"It is Jove whom we adore in the image of Jove," writes Ovid: "Colitur pro Jove, forma Jovis."
"The gods inhabit our minds and bosoms," observes Statius, "and not images in the form of them:"
Nulla autem effigies, nulli commissa metallo.
Forma Dei, mentes habitare et pectora gaudet.
Lucan, too, calls the universe the abode and empire of God: "Estne Dei, sedes, nisi terra, et pontus, et aer?" A volume might be filled with passages asserting idols to be images alone.
There remains but the case in which statues became oracles; notions that might have led to an opinion that there was something divine about them. The predominant sentiment, however, was that the gods had chosen to visit certain altars and images, in order to give audience to mortals, and to reply to them. We read in Homer and in the chorus of the Greek tragedies, of prayers to Apollo, who delivered his responses on the mountains in such a temple, or such a town. There is not, in all antiquity, the least trace of a prayer addressed to a statue; and if it was believed that the divine spirit preferred certain temples and images, as he preferred certain men, it was simply an error in application. How many miraculous images have we? The ancients only boasted of possessing what we possess, and if we are not idolaters for using images, by what correct principle can we term them so?
Those who profess magic, and who either believe, or affect to believe it, a science, pretend to possess the secret of making the gods descend into their statues, not indeed, the superior gods, but the secondary gods or genii. This is what Hermes Trismegistus calls "making" gods—a doctrine which is controverted by St. Augustine in his "City of God." But even this clearly shows that the images were not thought to possess anything divine, since it required a magician to animate them, and it happened very rarely that a magician was successful in these sublime endeavors.
In a word, the images of the gods were not gods. Jupiter, and not his statue, launched his thunderbolts; it was not the statue of Neptune which stirred up tempests, nor that of Apollo which bestowed light. The Greeks and the Romans were Gentiles and Polytheists, but not idolaters.
We lavished this reproach upon them when we had neither statues nor temples, and have continued the injustice even after having employed painting and sculpture to honor and represent our truths, precisely in the same manner in which those we reproach employed them to honor and personify their fiction.