Lactantius, Divine Institutes 5

We should set aside the prophets' testimonies, because for those who refuse to believe at all such proof would appear less adequate. Instead, let us turn to the very authors whom our opponents habitually cite against us and call them as witnesses to the truth—I mean the poets and philosophers. From them we must establish that there is one God, not because they possessed the truth, but because the power of truth itself is so great that no one can be so blind as to miss the divine clarity forced upon his eyes.

Although the poets adorned their gods with songs and magnified their deeds with the highest praises, they nevertheless very often confess that all things are contained and governed by a single spirit or mind. Orpheus, the most ancient of the poets and a contemporary of the gods themselves—tradition says he sailed with the Argonauts alongside Castor and Hercules—calls the true and great God ‘Firstborn’, because nothing was generated before Him, but all things were generated from Him. He also names Him ‘Phaneta’, because when nothing else yet existed, He first appeared and stood forth from the infinite. Since Orpheus could not conceive that origin and nature in his mind, he declared that this God was born from the vast air: ‘Firstborn Phaethon, son of boundless air’; he simply had nothing further to say. He asserts that this God is the parent of all the gods, for whose sake He founded heaven and provided for His children so that they might share a common dwelling and seat: ‘He built an imperishable home for the immortals’. Guided by nature and reason, he therefore understood that there exists a supreme power, the creator of heaven and earth. He could not proclaim Jupiter as the first principle, since Jupiter was born of Saturn, nor Saturn, since Saturn was born of heaven; yet he dared not make heaven itself the first god, because he saw that heaven is an element of the world and therefore itself requires an author. This reasoning led him to that Firstborn God, to whom he assigns and attributes sovereignty.

Homer can give us nothing that pertains to the truth, for he wrote of human rather than divine matters. Hesiod might have done so, since he encompassed the genealogy of the gods in a single work, yet he nevertheless offered nothing that did not take its starting point from Chaos—a confused mass of raw, disordered matter—when he ought first to have explained Chaos itself: whence, when, and how it began to exist or subsist. For just as all things are disposed, ordered, and fashioned by some craftsman, so the matter itself must have been fashioned by someone. Who else could have made it but God, to whose power all things are subject? But Hesiod shrank back from this, because he dreaded the unknown truth. That song he poured out on Helicon was not delivered by the instinct of the Muses, as he wished to appear; he came to it after meditation and preparation.

Our first poet, Vergil, was not far from the truth. Of the highest God, whom he names Mind and Spirit, he writes: ‘In the beginning the Spirit nourishes heaven and earth and the plains and the shining globe of the moon and the Titan stars; the Mind, infused throughout, stirs the whole mass and mingles with the great body’. And lest anyone be ignorant of who this Spirit is, who wields such power, Vergil declares in another place: ‘For God goes through all lands and the tracts of the sea and the deep heaven; from Him flocks, herds, men, every kind of wild beast, and each living thing that is born are summoned’. Ovid likewise, at the start of his renowned work, openly confesses that the world was fashioned by God, whom he calls the Maker of the world and the Craftsman of things. If Orpheus or our own poets, who perceived these things by nature, had defended them forever, they would have held the same doctrine we follow, having grasped the truth.

But enough of the poets. Let us turn to the philosophers, whose authority is weightier and judgment more certain, because they are believed to have studied not fictitious things but to have investigated the truth. Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Sages and said to be the first to inquire into natural causes, declared that water is the source from which all things were born, and that God is the Mind that formed all things from water. Thus he placed the matter of things in moisture and established the principle and cause of generation in God. Pythagoras defined God as the Mind that pervades all parts of the world and all nature, from which all living creatures receive life. Anaxagoras says God is an infinite Mind that moves itself. Antisthenes acknowledges many popular gods, yet one natural God—that is, the Craftsman of the whole. Cleanthes and Anaximenes identify the highest God with ether, an opinion our poet Vergil embraced: ‘Then the Almighty Father, with fertile rains, descended into the joyous bosom of His ether bride, and the great fetus is nourished, mingled with the great body’. Chrysippus calls God the natural force endowed with divine reason, sometimes divine necessity; Zeno calls God the natural and divine law. Although the opinions of all these men are uncertain, they nevertheless converge on the same point: they agree that there is a single Providence. For whether you call it Nature, or Ether, or Reason, or Mind, or Fatal Necessity, or Divine Law, or anything else, it is the same reality we call God. Nor does the diversity of names hinder, since by their very signification all are reduced to one.

Aristotle, though he disagrees with himself and utters and thinks contradictory things, nevertheless testifies that one Mind presides over the world. Plato, judged the wisest of all, openly and plainly defends the monarchy of God; he does not name Ether, or Reason, or Nature, but God as He is: ‘From Him this world was made perfect and wonderful’. Cicero, following and imitating Plato in many respects, frequently confesses God and calls Him supreme in the books he wrote On the Laws; and he argues that the world is ruled by Him when he discusses the nature of the gods, in this way: ‘Nothing is more excellent than God. Therefore the world must be ruled by Him. For God is not subject to any nature, nor is He obedient to it. Therefore He Himself rules all nature.’ Because He is God, we must understand Him thus: ‘A mind freed and liberated, separated from all mortal concretion, perceiving and moving all things.’

Annaeus Seneca, the keenest Stoic among the Romans, how often he pursues the highest God with deserved praise! When discussing premature death he says: ‘Do you not understand the authority and majesty of your Judge, the Ruler of earth and heaven and all the gods, from whom those divine powers that we adore and worship are suspended?’ Again, in his Exhortations: ‘When God laid the first foundations of this beautiful world and began to order it, so that all things might go under their leaders, although He had extended Himself throughout the whole body, nevertheless He generated the ministers of His kingdom.’ And how many other things he said about God, similar to ours! I pass them by now because they are more opportune in other places. For the present it is enough to demonstrate that men of the highest genius have touched the truth and almost grasped it, unless they were dragged back by the corrupt and perverse opinions of custom—opinions by which they believed there were other gods, and that the things God made for human use, as if they possessed sensation, ought to be regarded and worshiped as gods.