even by those who believe that there are other gods, and who
CHAP. YIL] god supreme IN EXCELLENCE AND POWER. 1
CuAP. Yi. In ivhat sense God is ineffable.
6. Have I spoken of God, or uttered His praise, in any worthy way ? Nay, I feel that I have done nothing more than desire to speak ; and if I have said anything, it is not what I desired to say. How do I know this, except from the fact that God is unspeakable ? But what I have said, if it had been unspeakable, could not have been spoken. And so God is not even to be called " unspeakable," because to say even this is to speak of Him. Thus there arises a curious contradiction of words, because if the unspeakable is what cannot be spoken of, it is not unspeakable if it can be called unspeakable. And this opposition of words is rather to be avoided hy silence than to be ex^^lained away by speech. And yet God, although nothing worthy of His greatness can be said of Him, has condescended to accept the worship of men's mouths, and has desired us through the medium of our own words to rejoice in His praise. For on this principle it is that He is called Deus (God). Tor the sound of those two syllables in itseK conveys no true knowledge of His nature ; but yet all who know the Latin tongue are led, when that sound reaches their ears, to think of a nature supreme in excellence and etei:nal in existence.
Chap. vir.— What all men understand hy the term God.
7. For when the one supreme God of gods is thought of, even by those who believe that there are other gods, and who call them by that name, and worship them as gods, their thought takes the form of an endeavour to reach the conception of a nature, than which nothing more excellent or more exalted exists. And since men are moved by different kinds of pleasures, partly by those which pertain to the bodily senses, partly by those which pertain to the intellect and soul, those of them who are in bondage to sense think that eitlier the heavens, or what appears to be most brilliant in the heavens, or the universe itself, is God of gods : or if they try to get beyond the universe, they picture to themselves something of dazzling brightness, and think of it vaguely as infinite, or of the most beautiful form conceivable ; or they represent it in the form of the human body, if they think that superior