על השיכרות כ״חOn Drunkenness 28
א׳
1[107] He then who has the vision of the Existent knows Him who is the Cause, and honours the things of which He is the cause only as second to Him. He will use no words of flattery, yet acknowledges what is their due. This acknowledgement is most just. I will take nothing from you, but I will take from God, the possessor of all things; yet it may be that I will take through you, for you have been made instruments to minister to His undying acts of grace.
ב׳
2[108] But the man of no discernment, whose understanding, by which alone the Existent can be comprehended, is blinded, has never anywhere seen that Existence, but only the material contents of this world as shewn to him by his senses, and these material things he believes to be the causes of all that comes into being.
ג׳
3[109] And therefore he started fashioning gods and filled the inhabited world with idols of stone and wood and numberless other figures wrought in various materials, and decreed great prizes and magnificent honours public and private to painters and sculptors, whom the lawgiver had banished from the boundaries of his commonwealth. He expected to produce piety; what he accomplished was its opposite, impiety.
ד׳
4[110] For polytheism creates atheism in the souls of the foolish, and God’s honour is set at naught by those who deify the mortal. For it did not content them to fashion images of sun or moon, or, if they would have it so, of all the earth and all the water, but they even allowed irrational plants and animals to share the honour which belongs to things imperishable. Such persons did Abraham rebuke and we shewed that it was with this thought that he raised his hymn of victory.