Wood ‘father’; fake piety; God near sees all

more ancient exchanged golden things for bronze, according to the poets beside Greeks. For having let go the needing to worship God who is according to nature, they turned childishly toward useless random-worship; pouring shame and laughter upon their own head, and having chosen a self-called falling-away from the help from above. And indeed God said: ‘As a thief’s shame when he is caught, so will the sons of Israel themselves be shamed, and their kings, and their rulers, and their priests, and their prophets; to the wood they said, You are my father, and to the stone: You begot me. And they turned backs upon me, and not their faces; and in the time of their evils they will say: Rise and save us. And where are your gods, whom you made for yourself? If they will rise and save you in the time of your ill-treatment? because according to the number of your cities were your gods, Judah, and according to the number of Jerusalem’s ways they were sacrificing to Baal. Why do you speak toward me? All you have lawlessly acted unto me, says the Lord.’

Palladius: Terrible truly is the matter, friend.

Cyril: Yet someone sometimes of those finishing among us, not yet very much fixed, yet having practiced a plastered and bastard love unto Christ, and such as putting around himself as it were a fleece the seeming to be God-loving, will be a bitter and unholy beast, both a monkey and facing-both-ways, so as at home and by night—I mean the having-escaped-notice—to cling to the demons’ worships, and somehow to think reasonably that he himself also can run past God, and out-reason the mind of the unspeakable nature. And one would show even very without-toil that the one for whom these things are present to think has chosen the more shameful things of the Greeks’ silliness. For to the wise beside Greeks it seemed to hold rightly that the sun, being created and begotten—the great light-bearer, and made upon this very thing from beside God—sees all and hears all; for they thought that what has been taken along in a God’s rank must be rich with the dignities of the divine nature. And a dignity of the highest nature is to know and look down upon the all. Yet those ones in these things; and to us God was calling of old: ‘I am a God drawing near, says the Lord, and not a God from far; will anything be hidden from me?’ For nothing would escape the one who is truly God by nature. And let blessed David mystagogue saying: ‘Understand already, senseless ones among the people, and fools, sometime be thoughtful; the one who planted the ear, will he not hear? and the one who shaped eyes, will he not understand?’ Some were saying, I think, from ununderstanding: ‘The Lord will not see, nor will the God of Jacob understand.’ Or is it not altogether silly to say that the supplier of knowledge neither knows, nor to think that the one giving the matter to those come to be from beside him does not hear?