Pagans who worship statues and images do not believe that the gods they worship are actually the physical objects that they offer religious veneration to, but that these images are aids to worship and tools for instruction through which they show respect for their gods. Ironically, these exact same arguments were repeated at the Seventh Ecumenical Council to argue for the veneration of icons. The following quotations are from pagan writers to show how similar their arguments for idol worship are to arguments for the veneration of icons:
“Those rendering proper worship to the gods do not believe the god to be in the wood or stone or bronze from which the image is built. . . . For the statues and the temples were built by the ancients as reminders so that those who went there might be at leisure and be purer hereafter and might come to think of the god; or that they might approach it and offer prayers and supplications each asking for him what he needs. For even if someone makes a portrait of a friend, he does not believe the friend himself to be in it nor that the limbs of his body are confined within the parts of the painting, but that the respect for the friend is shown through the portrait” (Porphyry, Against the Christians. As cited by Paul J. Alexander, The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople: Ecclesiastical Policy and Image Worship in the Byzantine Empire, p. 27).
“The thoughts of a wise theology, wherein man indicated God and God’s powers by images akin to sense, and sketched invisible things in visible forms, I will show to those who have learned to read from the statues as from books the things there written concerning the gods. Nor is it any wonder that the utterly unlearned regard the statues as wood and stone, just as those who do not understand the written letters look upon the monuments as mere stones, and on the tablets as bits of wood, and on books as woven papyrus” (Porphyry, Concerning Statues or Peri Agalmaton. As cited by Paul J. Alexander, The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople: Ecclesiastical Policy and Image Worship in the Byzantine Empire, p. 29-30).
“Our fathers established statues and altars, and the maintenance of undying fire, and generally speaking everything of the sort as symbols of the presence of the gods, not that we should regard such things as gods, but that we may worship the gods through them. For since we are corporeal it was in bodily wise that we must needs perform our service to the gods, though they are themselves without bodies; they therefore revealed to us in the first images the class of gods second in rank to the first, even those that revolve in a circle about the whole heavens. But since not even to these can due worship be offered in bodily wise – for they are by nature not in need of anything – a third class of images was invented on the earth, and by performing our worship to them we shall make the gods propitious to ourselves. For just as those who make offerings to the statues of the emperors, who are in need of nothing, nevertheless induce goodwill to the images of the gods, though the gods need nothing, do nevertheless thereby persuade them to help and to care for them. . . . Therefore, when we look at the images of the gods, let us not indeed think they are stones or wood, but neither let us think they are the gods themselves; and indeed we do not say that the statues of the emperors are mere wood and stone and bronze, nor that they are the emperor themselves, but that they are images of the emperors. He therefore who loves the emperor delights to see the emperor’s statue, and he who loves his son delights to see his father’s statue. It follows that he who loves the gods delights to gaze on the images of the gods and their likeness, and he feels reverence and shudders in awe of the gods who look at him from the unseen world” (Emperor Julian, Contra Christianos. As cited by Paul J. Alexander, The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople: Ecclesiastical Policy and Image Worship in the Byzantine Empire, p. 28).
“As the images of the gods are carried in the procession at the Circensian Games, and the bearers are generally the leading men of the province. These men, with their heads shaved, and purified by a long period of abstinence, go as the spirit of the god moves them and carry the statue not of their own will but whithersoever the god directs them, just as at Antium we see the images of the two goddesses of Fortune move forward to give their oracles” (Macrobius, Saturnalia, I, 23, 13).
“I think, therefore, that those ancient sages, who sought to secure the presence of the divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues, showed insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though this Soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the more readily when an appropriate receptacle is elaborated, a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, or representing it and serving like a mirror to catching an image of it” (Plotinus, Problems of the Soul, Enneads IV, 3, 11).
James Attebury 