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It is the decided opinion of all who use their brains, that all men
desire to be happy. But who are happy, or how they become so, these
are questions about which the weakness of human understanding stirs
endless and angry controversies, in which philosophers have wasted
their strength and expended their leisure. To adduce and discuss their
various opinions would be tedious, and is unnecessary. The reader may
remember what we said in the eighth book, while making a selection of
the philosophers with whom we might discuss the question regarding the
future life of happiness, whether we can reach it by paying divine
honors to the one true God, the Creator of all gods, or by
worshipping many gods, and he will not expect us to repeat here the
same argument, especially as, even if he has forgotten it, he may
refresh his memory by reperusal. For we made selection of the
Platonists, justly esteemed the noblest of the philosophers, because
they had the wit to perceive that the human soul, immortal and
rational, or intellectual, as it is, cannot be happy except by
partaking of the light of that God by whom both itself and the world
were made; and also that the happy life which all men desire cannot be
reached by any who does not cleave with a pure and holy love to that one
supreme good, the unchangeable God. But as even these philosophers,
whether accommodating to the folly and ignorance of the people, or, as
the apostle says, "becoming vain in their imaginations," supposed or
allowed others to suppose that many gods should be worshipped, so that
some of them considered that divine honor by worship and sacrifice
should be rendered even to the demons (an error I have already
exploded), we must now, by God's help, ascertain what is thought
about our religious worship and piety by those immortal and blessed
spirits, who dwell in the heavenly places among dominations,
principalities, powers, whom the Platonists call gods, and some
either good demons, or, like us, angels, that is to say, to put it
more plainly, whether the angels desire us to offer sacrifice and
worship, and to consecrate our possessions and ourselves, to them or
only to God, theirs and ours.
For this is the worship which is due to the Divinity, or, to speak
more accurately, to the Deity; and, to express this worship in a
single word as there does not occur to me any Latin term sufficiently
exact, I shall avail myself, whenever necessary, of a Greek word.
Latreia, whenever it occurs in Scripture, is rendered by the word
service. But that service which is due to men, and in reference to
which the apostle writes that servants must be subject to their own
masters, is usually designated by another word in Greek, whereas the
service which is paid to God alone by worship, is always, or almost
always, called latreia in the usage of those who wrote from the divine
oracles. This cannot so well be called simply "cultus," for in that
case it would not seem to be due exclusively to God; for the same word
is applied to the respect we pay either to the memory or the living
presence of men. From it, too, we derive the words agriculture,
colonist, and others. And the heathen call their gods
"coelicolae," not because they worship heaven, but because they
dwell in it, and as it were colonize it, not in the sense in which we
call those colonists who are attached to their native soil to cultivate
it under the rule of the owners, but in the sense in which the great
master of the Latin language says, "There was an ancient city
inhabited by Tyrian colonists." He called them colonists, not
because they cultivated the soil, but because they inhabited the city.
So, too, cities that have hired off from larger cities are called
colonies. Consequently, while it is quite true that, using the word
in a special sense, "cult" can be rendered to none but God, yet,
as the word is applied to other things besides, the cult due to God
cannot in Latin be expressed by this word alone.
The word "religion" might seem to express more definitely the worship
due to God alone, and therefore Latin translators have used this word
to represent qrhskeia; yet, as not only the uneducated, but also the
best instructed, use the word religion to express human ties, and
relationships, and affinities,it would inevitably introduce ambiguity
to use this word in discussing the worship of God, unable as we are to
say that religion is nothing else than the worship of God, without
contradicting the common usage which applies this word to the observance
of social relationships. "Piety," again, or, as the Greeks
say,eusebeia, is commonly understood as the proper designation of the
worship of God. Yet this word also is used of dutifulness to
parents. The common people, too, use it of works of charity,
which, I suppose, arises from the circumstance that God enjoins the
performance of such works, and declares that He is pleased with them
instead of, or in preference to sacrifices. From this usage it has
also come to pass that God Himself is called, pious, in which sense
the Greeks never use eusebein, though eusebeiais applied to works of
charity by their common people also. In some passages of Scripture,
therefore, they have sought to preserve the distinction by using not
eisebeia, the more general word, but qeosebeia, which literally
denotes. the worship of God. We, on the other hand, cannot express
either of these ideas by one word. This worship, then, which in
Greek is called latreia, and in Latin "servitus" [service], but
the service due to God only; this worship, which in Greek is called
qrhskeia, and in Latin "religio," but the religion by which we are
bound to God only; this worship, which they call qeosebeia, but
which we cannot express in one word, but call it the worship of God,
this, we say, belongs only to that God who is the true God, and who
makes His worshippers gods. And therefore, whoever these immortal
and blessed inhabitants of heaven be, if they do not love us, and wish
us to be blessed, then we ought not to worship them; and if they do
love us and desire our happiness, they cannot wish us to be made happy
by any other means than they themselves have enjoyed, for how could
they wish our blessedness to flow from one source, theirs from
another?
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