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Ancient
Antinous Documents
ATHANASIUS
Exhortation to the Pagans
"And such a one is the new God Antinous,
that was the Emperor Hadrian's minion and slave of his unlawful pleasures;
a wretch, whom those that worshipped in obedience to the Emperor's command,
and for fear of his vengeance, knew and confessed to be a man, and not
a good and deserving man neither, but a sordid and loathsome instrument
of his master's lust. This shameless and scandalous boy died in Egypt
when the court was there; and forthwith his Imperial Majesty issued out
an order or edict strictly requiring and commanding his loving subjects
to acknowledge his departed page a deity and to pay him his quota of divine
reverences and honors as such: a resolution and act which did more effectively
publish and testify to the world how entirely the Emperor's unnatural
passion survived the foul object of it; and how much his master was devoted
to his memory, than it recorded his own crime and condemnation, immortalized
his infamy and shame, and bequeathed to mankind a lasting and notorious
specimen of the true origin and extraction of all idolatry."
The various developments of idolatry:
worship of the heavenly bodies, the elements, natural objects, fabulous
creatures, personified lusts, men living and dead. The case of Antinous,
and of the deified Emperors. For now the understanding of mankind leaped
asunder from God; and going lower in their ideas and imaginations, they
gave the honour due to God first to the heaven and the sun and moon and
the stars, thinking them to be not only gods, but also the causes of the
other gods lower than themselves
In our own time Antinous, favourite of
Hadrian, Emperor of the Romans, whom, although men know he was a mere
man, and not a respectable man, but on the contrary, full of licentiousness,
yet they worship for fear of him that enjoined it. For Hadrian having
come to sojourn in the land of Egypt, when Antinous the minister of his
pleasure died, ordered him to be worshipped; being indeed himself in love
with the youth even after his death, but for all that offering a convincing
exposure of himself, and a proof against all idolatry, that it was discovered
among men for no other reason than by reason of the lust of them that
imagined it. According as the wisdom of God testifies beforehand when
it says, "The devising of idols was the beginning of fornication."
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