On the Incarnation: Saint Athanasius (Popular Patristics Series Book 44)

by Athanasius of Alexandria

But human beings, being again foolish, despising the grace thus given to them, so turned away from God and so darkened their own soul, that they not only forgot the concept of God but also fashioned for themselves others instead. They fabricated idols for themselves instead of the truth and honored beings which do not exist rather than God who is, worshipping “the creation rather than the Creator” (Rom 1.25), and, much worse, they even transferred the honor due to God to wood and stones and to every material object, and even to human beings, and went even further than this, as we described in the former treatise. They were so impious that they even thereafter worshipped demons and called them gods, fulfilling their own desires. They sacrificed irrational animals and slaughtered human beings, as we said earlier, as was required of them, ensnaring themselves even more in their own frenzies.