Foolishness of Idols

Sinful mankind gets so wrapped up pursuing its own ends that perception is lost and fantasy becomes reality.  Consider gatherings such as a Star Trek convention, ComicCon, etc. where the purpose is to interact in a realm akin to The Twilight Zone—a dimension, not of sight or of sound, but of mind.  The real world is set aside while people live out characters conceived by another's active imagination.  Most understand this is a respite, a mini-vacation, for two or three days, but there are those who, for whatever psychological or spiritual reason, are engulfed with the persona of the alternative universe and need treatment to interact with every day life once again.  On an individual level, this is considered psychosis.  On a societal level, this is considered the new normal.

Those who worship idols live and interact in such a realm.  Arnobius has made his case that the tales and temples of the gods constructed as they are for posterity are useless and counterproductive.  He is now calling the people to leave their self-imposed blindness (The Case Against the Pagans, Book VI, cap. 14):

We would here, as if all nations on the earth were present, make one speech, and pour into the ears of them all, words which should be heard in common:

Why, pray, is this, O men! that of your own accord you cheat and deceive yourselves by voluntary blindness?  Dispel the darkness now, and, returning to the light of the mind, look more closely and see what that is which is going on, if only you retain your right,¹ and are within the limits of the reason and prudence given to you.

The call is being sounded for the deluded to come to their senses.  The alternative is shame as described by the prophet Isaiah:

All who fashion idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit.  Their witnesses neither see nor know, that they may be put to shame.  Who fashions a god or casts an idol that is profitable for nothing?  Behold, all his companions shall be put to shame, and the craftsmen are only human.  Let them all assemble, let them stand forth.  They shall be terrified; they shall be put to shame together.  (Isa 44:9-11)

This is the certain end of idolaters.  While Arnobius was directing his plea to their reason, as one who understood scriptural themes, he would probably have understood the end of such foolish behavior.  He goes on by stating to the pagans so they might understand what Isaiah had told the people of God of their idols:²

Those images which fill you with terror, and which you adore prostrate upon the ground in all the temples, are bones, stones, brass, silver, gold, clay, wood taken from a tree, or glue mixed with gypsum.  Having been heaped together, it may be, from a harlot’s trinkets or from a respectable woman’s ornaments, from camels’ bones or from the tooth of the Indian beast,³ from cooking-pots and little jars, from candlesticks and lamps, or from other less cleanly vessels, and having been melted down, they were cast into these shapes and came out into the forms which you see, baked in potters’ furnaces, produced by anvils and hammers, scraped with the silversmith’s, and filed down with ordinary files, cleft and hewn with saws, with augers, with axes, dug and hollowed out by the turning of borers, and smoothed with planes.  (Book VI, cap. 14)

The idols are made of inanimate materials: some precious, some common.  They know the source.  They know how they are fashioned.  Yet they are regarded as something more—a doorway to the great beyond; an attempt to reach whoever or whatever can make sense of this world.  And what do people do with these fashioned images?

And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, and falls down to it and worships it.  He prays to it and says, "Deliver me, for you are my god!"  (Isa 44:17)

Arnobius also sees the folly and proceeds with his argument:

Is not this, then, an error?  Is it not, to speak accurately, folly to believe that a god which you yourself made with care, to kneel down trembling in supplication to that which has been formed by you, and while you know, and are assured that it is the product of the labor of your work and fingers—to cast yourself down upon your face, beg aid suppliantly, and, in adversity and time of distress, ask the favor of the propitious deity to succor you with gracious and divine favor?  (Book VI, cap. 14)

We can almost hear him shouting, "How can you willingly continue on this path?  Can you not see what nonsense you are practicing?"  But they cannot.

They know not, nor do they discern, for he has shut their eyes, so that they cannot see, and their hearts, so that they cannot understand.  No one considers, nor is there knowledge or discernment to say, "Half of it I burned in the fire; I also baked bread on its coals; I roasted meat and have eaten.  And shall I make the rest of it an abomination?  Shall I fall down before a block of wood?"  He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself or say, "Is there not a lie in my right hand?"  (Isa 44:18-20)

Sinners left to their own designs will not comprehend the folly of their actions.  They are merely acting according to their nature by chasing after all that is not God and imagining something real has been found.  Men attempt to build and devise without the Lord and fail, but instead of turning to him, they chase after devices that cannot fulfill or help.

Arnobius and Isaiah both gave words of Law to convict people of their sin.  Only the truth of the Gospel—Christ Jesus died for their sin—could change such hardened hearts.


¹ I.e., faculty of discernment, which is properly man’s.
² Compare with Isa 44:12-16.  The same type of argument was also made by Minucius Felix in Octavius, 23.
³ I.e., elephant’s tusk.