Christians and Cult Statues
7.62 They cannot bear it when they see temples, altars, and cult statues.
The Scythians also cannot bear it, or the Nomads in Libya, the godless people
of Seres, or any other utterly polluted and lawless nation. Herodotus relates
that the Persians hold this view, commenting, “I know that the Persians have
this custom, thinking it unlawful to set up cult statues, altars, and temples,
and those who do these things they consider foolish. They do these, it seems to
me, because they do not consider the gods to be human in their nature, as
Greeks do.”
. . .
If their teaching is that stone, wood, bronze, and gold crafted by
somebody would not be a god, this wisdom is laughable. Who but a child in understanding
considers these dedications and cult statues of the gods to be god? But if they
assert that we ought not to accept divine images because God has another form
(as the Persians think), they unwittingly refute themselves when they claim
that “God made the human” his own “image”—a form similar to himself. (M. David
Litwa, Celsus in His Own Words: A Translation of The True Teaching [Melbourne,
Australia: Gnosis, 2024], 75)
Further
Reading:
Answering Fundamentalist Protestants and Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox on Images/Icons (cf. John Granger Cook on Origen, Contra Celsum and Opposition to Religious Images; Origen of Alexandria: Jesus never bowed down to images; Eric D. Svendsen, In the Image of God: A Dialogue With a Roman Catholic Apologist on the Veneration of Images)
