Romans 1:22,23

“ Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of corruptible man, and of birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. ” Futility of thought has reached the character of folly. What, in fact, is Polytheism, except a sort of permanent hallucination, a collective delirium, or as is so well said by M. Nicolas, a possession on a great scale? And this mental disorder rose to a kind of perfection among the very peoples who, more than others, laid claim to the glory of wisdom. When he says: professing to be wise, Paul does not mean to stigmatize ancient philosophy absolutely; he only means that all that labor of the sages did not prevent the most civilized nations, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, from being at the same time the most idolatrous of antiquity. The popular imagination, agreeably served by priests and poets, did not allow the efforts of the wise to dissipate this delirium.

When good is omitted, there always comes in its place an evil committed. As, in respect of the understanding, the refusal of adoration (they did not glorify) became a vain laboring of the mind (they became vain), and, finally, complete estrangement from truth, folly (they became fools); so in respect of the heart, ingratitude was first transformed into darkness; and, finally such is the last term described Romans 1:23 -into monstrous and debasing fetishism. The ungrateful heart did not stop short at not thanking God, it degraded and dishonored Him, by changing Him into His opposite.

The glory of God is the splendor which His manifested perfections cast into the heart of His intelligent creatures; hence, a bright image which is to man the ideal of all that is good. This image had been produced within them. What did they make of it? The sequel tells. While holding the divine person, they wrapped it up, as it were, in the likeness of its opposite; it would have been almost better to leave it in silence, it would not have been so great an affront. The preposition ἐν (which corresponds here to the Hebrew א) exactly describes this imprisonment of the divine glory in a form ignoble and grotesque. This meaning seems to us preferable to that of commentators who, like Meyer, translate ἐν, by, which is less natural with a verb such as change. It is simpler to say “change into,” than “change by. ” The epithet incorruptible is, as it were, a protest beforehand against this degradation; we need not then translate, with Oltramare, immortal. Paul means to say that the glory of God is not reached by this treatment which it has had to undergo. In the phrase: the likeness of the image, we should certainly apply the first term to the material likeness, and the second to the image present to the artist's mind when he conceives the type of God which he is going to represent. The worship of man especially characterizes Greek and Roman Polytheism; that of the different classes of animals, Egyptian and Barbarian paganism. We need only refer to the worship of the bull Apis, the ibis, the cat, the crocodile, etc., among the Egyptians.

Thus idolatry, according to Paul, is not a progressive stage reached in the religious thought of mankind, starting from primeval fetichism. Far from being a first step toward the goal of Monotheism, Polytheism is on the contrary the result of degeneracy, an apostasy from the original Monotheism, a darkening of the understanding and heart, which has terminated in the grossest fetichism. The history of religions, thoroughly studied as it is nowadays, fully justifies Paul's view. It shows that the present heathen peoples of India and Africa, far from rising of themselves to a higher religious state, have only sunk, age after age, and become more and more degraded. It proves that at the root of all pagan religions and mythologies, there lies an original Monotheism, which is the historical starting-point in religion for all mankind.

This statement of the apostle has been regarded as a reflection of that contained in the Book of Wisdom (comp. for example, the passages, Wis 13:1-8; Wis 14:11-20). But what a difference between the tame and superficial explanation of idolatry, which the Alexandrian author gives to his readers, and the profound psychological analysis contained in the preceding verses of St. Paul! The comparison brings out exactly the difference between the penetration of the author enlightened from above, and that of the ordinary Jew seeking to reconstruct the great historic fact of idolatry by his own powers.

The apostle has developed the two terms of Romans 1:18: truth, and repressing the truth. After thus presenting, on the one hand, the divine revelation, and, on the other, the sin of man in quenching it, it remains to him only to expound the third idea of his text: the terrible manifestation of God's wrath on that sin, in which the whole of human impiety was concentrated.