Lactantius — Divine Institutes 1.7

For Apollo, whom they think more divine and prophetic than the rest, dwelling at Colophon—where I believe he had migrated from Delphi, drawn by Asia's pleasantness—answered someone asking who or what God altogether is in twenty-one verses, whose beginning is: self-grown, untaught, motherless, unshaken, a name not contained even by speech, dwelling in fire—this is God; but we angels are a small portion of God. Can anyone suspect this was said of Jupiter, who both had a mother and a name?

What of this—that the thrice-great Mercury, whom I mentioned above, calls God not only motherless as Apollo does, but also fatherless, because He has no origin from elsewhere? For He who Himself generated all things cannot have been generated by anyone. I have shown, I think, enough both by arguments and confirmed by witnesses what is clear enough of itself: that there is one king of the world, one father, one Lord.

But someone may ask of us the same thing Hortensius asks in Cicero: if God is one, what blessed solitude can there be?—as if, because we say one, we say He is deserted and solitary. For He has ministers whom we call messengers. And that is true which I reported above Seneca said in his Exhortations: that God generated ministers of His kingdom. But these are neither gods nor wish to be called or worshiped as gods, since they do nothing beyond God's command and will. Nor yet are they those who are commonly worshiped, whose number is both small and fixed.

But if the worshipers of the gods think they worship those very ones whom we call ministers of the highest God, there is nothing for which they should envy us who say one God and deny many. If multitude delights them, we do not say twelve or three hundred sixty-five as Orpheus, but that they are innumerable. We refute their errors in the opposite direction—those who think there are so few. Yet let them know by what name they ought to be called, lest they violate the true God, whose name they spread while assigning it to many. Let them believe their own Apollo, who in that same response as he took the principate from Jupiter, so also took the name of gods from the rest. For the third verse shows that God's ministers ought to be called not gods but angels.

About himself indeed that one lied, who, though of the number of demons, joined himself to God's angels; finally in other responses he confessed he is a demon. For when asked how he wished to be entreated, he answered thus: Hear, O all-wise, all-teaching, much-turning demon. Again when asked to produce a prayer to Smynthian Apollo, he began from this verse: Harmony of the world, light-bearer, all-wise demon. What then remains except that by his own confession he be subject to the whips of the true God and to everlasting punishment? For in another response he also said: Demons who roam about the earth and about the sea are subdued under the scourge of the tireless God.

We will treat of both kinds in the second book. Meanwhile it is enough for us that while he wished to honor himself and place himself in heaven, he confessed—what the matter holds—how those who always stand by God are to be named. Therefore let humans draw back from errors and, casting away crooked religions, recognize their parent and Lord, whose power cannot be estimated nor greatness perceived nor beginning grasped. When the intention and sharpness and memory of the human mind has reached Him, as if all paths were withdrawn and consumed, it stops, sticks, fails, and there is nothing further to which it can advance. But because it cannot be that what is began to be at some time—wait: rather, since it cannot be otherwise than that what exists began somehow—yet the consequence is that, since nothing was before Him, He Himself was brought forth before all things from Himself, and therefore is named by Apollo self-grown, by the Sibyl self-generated and unbegotten and unmade. Which Seneca, a sharp man, saw in his Exhortations: We, he says, hang from elsewhere. And so we look to someone to whom we owe what is best in us. Another brought us forth, another instructed us: God Himself made Himself.