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[TRANSLATED BY THE REV. S. THELWALL, LATE SCHOLAR OF CHRIST'S COLLEGE, CANTAB.]
Rulers of the Roman Empire, if, seated for the administration of
justice on your lofty tribunal, under the gaze of every eye, and
occupying there all but the highest position in the state, you may not
openly inquire into and sift before the world the real truth in regard
to the charges made against the Christians; if in this case alone you
are afraid or ashamed to exercise your authority in making public
inquiry with the carefulness which becomes justice; if, finally, the
extreme severities inflicted on our people in recently private
judgments, stand in the way of our being permitted to defend ourselves
before you, you cannot surely forbid the Truth to reach your ears by
the secret pathway of a noiseless book.(2) She has no appeals to make
to you in regard of her condition, for that does not excite her wonder.
She knows that she is but a sojourner on the earth, and that among
strangers she naturally finds foes; and more than this, that her
origin, her dwelling-place, her hope, her recompense, her honours, are
above. One thing, meanwhile, she anxiously desires of earthly
rulers—not to be condemned unknown. What harm can it do to the laws,
supreme in their domain, to give her a hearing? Nay, for that part of
it, will not their absolute supremacy be more conspicuous in their
condemning her, even after she has made her plea? But if, unheard,
sentence is pronounced against her, besides the odium of an unjust
deed, you will incur the merited suspicion of doing it with some idea
that it is unjust, as not wishing to hear what you may not be able to
hear and condemn. We lay this before you as the first ground on which
we urge that your hatred to the name of Christian is unjust. And the
very reason which seems to excuse this injustice (I mean ignorance) at
once aggravates and convicts it. For what is there more unfair than to
hate a thing of which you know nothing, even though it deserve to be
hated? Hatred is only merited when it is known to be merited. But
without that knowledge, whence is its justice to be vindicated? for
that is to be proved, not from the mere fact that an aversion exists,
but from acquaintance with the subject. When men, then, give way to a
dislike simply because they are entirely ignorant of the nature of the
thing disliked, why may it not be precisely the very sort of thing they
should not dislike? So we maintain that they are both ignorant while
they hate us, and hate us unrighteously while they continue in
ignorance, the one thing being the result of the other either way of
it. The proof of their ignorance, at once condemning and excusing their
injustice, is this, that those who once hated Christianity because they
knew nothing about it, no sooner come to know it than they all lay down
at once their enmity. From being its haters they become its disciples.
By simply getting acquainted with it, they begin now to hate what they
had formerly been, and to profess what they had formerly hated; and
their numbers are as great as are laid to our charge. The outcry is
that the State is filled with Christians—that they are in the fields,
in the citadels, in the islands: they make lamentation, as for some
calamity, that both sexes, every age and condition, even high rank, are
passing over to the profession of the Christian faith; and yet for all,
their minds are not awakened to the thought of some good they have
failed to notice in it. They must not allow any truer suspicions to
cross their minds; they have no desire to make closer trial. Here alone
the curiosity of human nature slumbers. They like to be ignorant,
though to others the knowledge has been bliss. Anacharsis reproved the
rude venturing to criticise the cultured; how much more this judging of
those who know, by men who are entirely ignorant, might he have
denounced X Because they already dislike, they want to know no more.
Thus they prejudge that of which they are ignorant to be such, that, if
they came to know it, it could no longer be the object of their
aversion; since, if inquiry finds nothing worthy of dislike, it is
certainly proper to cease from an unjust dislike, while if its bad
character comes plainly out, instead of the detestation entertained for
it being thus diminished, a stronger reason for perseverance in that
detestation is obtained, even under the authority of justice itself.
But, says one, a thing is not good merely because multitudes go over to
it; for how many have the bent of their nature towards whatever is bad!
how many go astray into ways of error! It is undoubted. Yet a thing
that is thoroughly evil, not even those whom it carries away venture to
defend as good. Nature throws a veil either of fear or shame over all
evil. For instance, you find that criminals are eager to conceal
themselves, avoid appearing in public, are in trepidation when they are
caught, deny their guilt, when they are accused; even when they are put
to the rack, they do not easily or always confess; when there is no
doubt about their condemnation, they grieve for what they have done. In
their self-communings they admit their being impelled by sinful
dispositions, but they lay the blame either on fate or on the stars.
They are unwilling to acknowledge that the thing is theirs, because
they own that it is wicked. But what is there like this in the
Christian's case? The only shame or regret he feels, is at not having
been a Christian earlier. If he is pointed out, he glories in it; if he
is accused, he offers no defence; interrogated, he makes voluntary
confession; condemned he renders thanks. What sort of evil thing is
this, which wants all the ordinary peculiarities of evil—fear, shame,
subterfuge, penitence, lamenting? What! is that a crime in which the
criminal rejoices? to be accused of which is his ardent wish, to be
punished for which is his felicity? You cannot call it madness, you who
stand convicted of knowing nothing of the matter.
If, again, it is certain that we are the most wicked of men, why
do you treat us so differently from our fellows, that is, from other
criminals,it being only fair that the same crime should get the same
treatment? When the charges made against us are made against others,
they are permitted to make use both of their own lips and of hired
pleaders to show their innocence. They have full opportunity of answer
and debate; in fact, it is against the law to condemn anybody
undefended and unheard. Christians alone are forbidden to say anything
in exculpation of themselves, in defence of the truth, to help the
judge to a righteous decision; all that is cared about is having what
the public hatred demands—the confession of the name, not examination
of the charge: while in your ordinary judicial investigations, on a
man's confession of the crime of murder, or sacrilege, or incest, or
treason, to take the points of which we are accused, you are not
content to proceed at once to sentence,—you do not take that step till
you thoroughly examine the circumstances of the confession—what is the
real character of the deed, how often, where, in what way, when he has
done it, who were privy to it, and who actually took part with him in
it. Nothing like this is done in our case, though the falsehoods
disseminated about us ought to have the same sifting, that it might be
found how many murdered children each of us had tasted; how many
incests each of us had shrouded in darkness; what cooks, what dogs had
been witness of our deeds. Oh, how great the glory of the ruler who
should bring to light some Christian who had devoured a hundred
infants! But, instead of that, we find that even inquiry in regard to
our case is forbidden. For the younger Pliny, when he was ruler of a
province, having condemned some Christians to death, and driven some
from their stedfastness, being still annoyed by their great numbers, at
last sought the advice of Trajan,(1) the reigning emperor, as to what
he was to do with the rest, explaining to his master that, except an
obstinate disinclination to offer sacrifices, he found in the religious
services nothing but meetings at early morning for singing hymns to
Christ and(2) God, and sealing home their way of life by a united
pledge to be faithful to their religion, forbidding murder, adultery,
dishonesty, and other crimes. Upon this Trajan wrote back that
Christians were by no means to be sought after; but if they were
brought before him, they should be punished. O miserable
deliverance,—under the necessities of the case, a self-contradiction!
It forbids them to be sought after as innocent, and it commands them to
be punished as guilty. It is at once merciful and cruel; it, passes by,
and it punishes. Why dost thou play a game of evasion upon thyself, O
Judgment? If thou condemnest, why dost thou not also inquire. If thou
does not inquire, why dost thou not also absolve? Military stations are
distributed through all the provinces for tracking robbers. Against
traitors and public foes every man is a soldier; search is made even
for their confederates and accessories. The Christian alone must not be
sought, though he may be brought and accused before the judge; as if a
search had any other end than that in view And so you condemn the man
for whom nobody wished a search to be made when he is presented to you,
and who even now does not deserve punishment, I suppose, because of his
guilt, but because, though forbidden to be sought, he was found. And
then, too, you do not in that case deal with us in the ordinary way of
judicial proceedings against offenders; for, in the case of others
denying, you apply the torture to make them confess—Christians alone
you torture, to make them deny; whereas, if we were guilty of any
crime, we should be sure to deny it, and you with your tortures would
force us to confession. Nor indeed should you hold that our crimes
require no i such investigation merely on .the ground that you are
convinced by our confession of the name that the deeds were done,—you
who are daily wont, though you know well enough what murder is, none
the less to extract from the confessed murderer a full account of how
the crime was perpetrated. So that with all the greater perversity you
act, when, holding our crimes proved by our confession of the name of
Christ, you drive us by torture to fall from our confession, that,
repudiating the name, we may in like manner repudiate also the crimes
with which, from that same confession, you had assumed that we were
chargeable. I suppose, though you believe us to be the worst of
mankind, you do not wish us to perish. For thus, no doubt, you are in
the habit of bidding the murderer deny, and of ordering the man guilty
of sacrilege to the rack if he persevere in his acknowledgment! Is that
the way of it? But if thus you do not, deal with us as criminals, you
declare us thereby innocent, when as innocent you are anxious that we
do not persevere in a confession which you know will bring on us a
condemnation of necessity, not of justice, at your hands. "I am a
Christian," the man cries out. He tells you what he is; you wish to
hear from him what he is not. Occupying your place of authority to
extort the truth, you do your utmost to get lies from us. "I am," he
says, "that which you ask me if I am. Why do you torture me to sin? I
confess, and you put me to the rack. What would you do if I denied?
Certainly you give no ready credence to others when they deny. When we
deny, you believe at once. Let this perversity of yours lead you to
suspect that there is some hidden power in the case under whose
influence you act against the forms, against the nature of public
justice, even against the very laws themselves. For, unless I am
greatly mistaken, the laws enjoin offenders to be searched out, and not
to be hidden away. They lay it down that persons who own a crime are to
be condemned, not acquitted. The decrees of the senate, the commands of
your chiefs, lay this clearly down. The power of which you are servants
is a civil, not a tyrannical domination. Among tyrants, indeed,
torments used to be inflicted even as punishments: with you they are
mitigated to a means of questioning alone. Keep to your law in these as
necessary till confession is obtained; and if the torture is
anticipated by confession, there will be no occasion for it: sentence
should be passed; the criminal should be given over to the penalty
which is his due, not released. Accordingly, no one is eager for the
acquittal of the guilty; it is not right to desire that, and so no one
is ever compelled to deny. Well, you think the Christian a man of every
crime, an enemy of the gods, of the emperor, of the laws, of good
morals, of all nature; yet you compel him to deny, that you may acquit
him, which without him denial you could not do. You play fast and loose
with the laws. You wish him to deny his guilt, that you may, even
against his will, bring him out blameless and free from all guilt in
reference to the past! Whence is this strange perversity on your part?
How is it you do not reflect that a spontaneous confession is greatly
more worthy of credit than a compelled denial; or consider whether,
when compelled to deny, a man's denial may not be in good faith, and
whether acquitted, he may not, then and there, as soon as the trial is
over, laugh at your hostility, a Christian as much as ever? Seeing,
then, that in everything you deal differently with us than with other
criminals, bent upon the one object of taking from us our name (indeed,
it is ours no more if we do what Christians never do), it is made
perfectly clear that there is no crime of any kind in the case, but
merely a name which a certain system, ever working against the truth,
pursues with its enmity, doing this chiefly with the object of securing
that men may have no desire to know for certain what they know for
certain they are entirely ignorant of. Hence, too, it is that they
believe about us things of which they have no proof, and they are
disinclined to have them looked into, lest the charges, they would
rather take on trust, are all proved to have no foundation, that the
name so hostile to that rival power—its crimes presumed, not
proved—may be condemned simply on its own confession. So we are put to
the torture if we confess, and we are punished if we persevere, and if
we deny we are acquitted, because all the contention is about a name.
Finally, why do you read out of your tablet-lists that such a man is a
Christian? Why not also that he is a murderer? And if a Christian is a
murderer, why not guilty, too, of incest, or any other vile thing you
believe of us? In our case alone you are either ashamed or unwilling to
mention the very names of our crimes-If to be called a "Christian" does
not imply any crime, the name is surely very hateful, when that of
itself is made a crime.
What are we to think of it, that most people so blindly knock
their heads against the hatred of the Christian name; that when they
bear favourable testimony to any one, they mingle with it abuse of the
name he bears? "A good man," says one, "is Gaius Seius, only that he is
a Christian." So another, "I am astonished that a wise man like Lucius
should have suddenly become a Christian." Nobody thinks it needful to
consider whether Gaius is not good and Lucius wise, on this very
account that he is a Christian; or a Christian, for the reason that he
is wise and good. They praise what they know, they abuse what they are
ignorant of, and they inspire their knowledge with their ignorance;
though in fairness you should rather judge of what is unknown from what
is known, than what is known from what is unknown. Others, in the case
of persons whom, before they took the name of Christian, they had known
as loose, and vile, and wicked, put on them a brand from the very thing
which they praise. In the blindness of their hatred, they fall foul of
their own approving judgment! "What a woman she was! how wanton! how
gay! What a youth he was! how profligate! how libidinous!—they have
become Christians!" So the hated name is given to a reformation of
character. Some even barter away their comforts for that hatred,
content to bear injury, if they are kept free at home from the object
of their bitter enmity. The wife, now chaste, the husband, now no
longer jealous, casts out of his house; the son, now obedient, the
father, who used to be so patient, disinherits; the servant, now
faithful, the master, once so mild, commands away from his presence; it
is a high offence for any one to be reformed by the detested name.
Goodness is of less value than hatred of Christians. Well now, if there
is this dislike of the name, what blame can you attach to names? What
accusation can you bring against mere designations, save that something
in the word sounds either barbarous, or unlucky, or scurrilous, or
unchaste? But Christian, so far as the meaning of the word is
concerned, is derived from anointing. Yes, and even when it is wrongly
pronounced by you "Chrestianus" (for you do not even know accurately
the name you hate), it comes from sweetness and benignity. You hate,
therefore, in the guiltless, even a guiltless name. But the special
ground of dislike to the sect is, that it bears the name of its
Founder. Is there anything new in a religious sect getting for its
followers a designation from its master? Are not the philosophers
called from the founders of their systems—Platonists, Epicureans,
Pythagoreans? Are not the Stoics and Academics so called also from the
places in which they assembled and stationed themselves? and are not
physicians named from Erasistratus, grammarians from Aristarchus, cooks
even from Apicius? And yet the bearing of the name, transmitted from
the original institutor with whatever he has instituted, offends no
one. No doubt, if it is proved that the sect is a bad one, and so its
founder bad as well, that will prove that the name is bad and deserves
our aversion, in respect of the character both of the sect and its
author. Before, therefore, taking up a dislike to the name, it behoved
you to consider the sect in the author, or the author in the sect. But
now, without any sifting and knowledge of either, the mere name is made
matter of accusation, the mere name is assailed, and a sound alone
brings condemnation on a sect and its author both, while of both you
are ignorant, because they have such and such a designation, not
because they are convicted of anything wrong.
And so, having made these remarks as it were by way of preface,
that I might show in its true colours the injustice of the public
hatred against us, I shall now take my stand on the plea of our
blamelessness; and I shall not only refute the things which are
objected to us, but I shall also retort them on the objectors, that in
this way all may know that Christians are free from the very crimes
they are so well aware prevail among themselves, that they may at the
same time be put to the blush for their accusations against
us,—accusations I shall not say of the worst of men against the best,
but now, as they will have it, against those who are only their fellows
in sin. We shall reply to the accusation of all the various crimes we
are said to be guilty of in secret, such as we find them committing in
the light of day, and as being guilty of which we are held to be
wicked, senseless, worthy of punishment, deserving of ridicule. But
since, when our truth meets you successfully at all points, the
authority of the laws as a last resort is set up against it, so that it
is either said that their determinations are absolutely conclusive, or
the necessity of obedience is, however unwillingly, preferred to the
truth, I shall first, in this matter of the laws grapple with you as
with their chosen protectors. Now first, when you sternly lay it down
in your sentences, "It is not lawful for you to exist," and with
unhesitating rigour you enjoin this to be carried out, you exhibit the
violence and unjust domination of mere tyranny, if you deny the thing
to be lawful, simply on the ground that you wish it to be unlawful, not
because it ought to be. But if you would have it unlawful because it
ought not to be lawful, without doubt that should have no permission of
law which does harm; and on this ground, in fact, it is already
determined that whatever is beneficial is legitimate. Well, if I have
found what your law prohibits to be good, as one who has arrived at
such a previous opinion, has it not lost its power to debar me from it,
though that very thing, if it were evil, it would justly forbid to me?
If your law has gone wrong, it is of human origin, I think; it has not
fallen from heaven. Is it wonderful that man should err in making a
law, or come to his senses in rejecting it? Did not the Lacedaemonians
amend the laws of Lycurgus himself, thereby inflicting such pain on
their author that he shut himself up, and doomed himself to death by
starvation? Are you not yourselves every day, in your efforts to
illumine the darkness of antiquity, cutting and hewing with the new
axes of imperial rescripts and edicts, that whole ancient and rugged
forest of your laws? Has not Severus, that most resolute of rulers, but
yesterday repealed the ridiculous Papian laws(1) which compelled people
to have children before the Julian laws allow matrimony to be
contracted, and that though they have the authority of age upon their
side? There were laws, too, in old times, that parties against whom a
decision had been given might be cut in pieces by their creditors;
however, by common consent that cruelty was afterwards erased from the
statutes, and the capital penalty turned into a brand of shame. By
adopting the plan of confiscating a debtor's goods, it was sought
rather to pour the blood in blushes over his face than to pour it out.
How many laws lie hidden out of sight which still require to be
reformed! For it is neither the number of their years nor the dignity
of their maker that commends them, but simply that they are just; and
therefore, when their injustice is recognized, they are deservedly
condemned, even though they condemn. Why speak we of them as unjust?
nay, if they punish mere names, we may well call them irrational. But
if they punish acts, why in our case do they punish acts solely on the
ground of a name, while in others they must have them proved not from
the name, but from the wrong done? I am a practiser of incest (so they
say); why do they not inquire into it? I am an infant-killer; why do
they not apply the torture to get from me the truth? I am guilty of
crimes against the gods, against the Caesars; why am I, who am able to
clear myself, not allowed to be heard on my own behalf? No law forbids
the sifting of the crimes which it prohibits, for a judge never
inflicts a righteous vengeance if he is not well assured that a crime
has been committed; nor does a citizen render a true subjection to the
law, if he does not know the nature of the thing on which the
punishment is inflicted. It is not enough that a law is just, nor that
the judge should be convinced of its justice; those from whom obedience
is expected should have that conviction too. Nay, a law lies under
strong suspicions which does not care to have itself tried and
approved: it is a positively wicked law, if, unproved, it tyrannizes
over men.
To say a word about the origin of laws of the kind to which we
now refer, there was an old decree that no god should be consecrated by
the emperor till first approved by the senate. Marcus AEmilius had
experience of this in reference to his god Alburnus. And this, too,
makes for our case, that among you divinity is allotted at the judgment
of human beings. Unless gods give satisfaction to men, there will be no
deification for them: the god will have to propitiate the man. Ti-
berius(1) accordingly, in whose days the Christian name made its entry
into the world, having himself received intelligence from Palestine of
events which had clearly shown the truth of Christ's divinity, brought
the matter before the senate, with his own decision in favour of
Christ. The senate, because it had not given the approval itself,
rejected his proposal. Caesar held to his opinion, threatening wrath
against all accusers of the Christians. Consult your histories; you
will there find that Nero was the first who assailed with the imperial
sword the Christian sect, making profess then especially at Rome. But
we glory in having our condemnation hallowed by the hostility of such a
wretch. For any one who knows him, can understand that not except as
being of singular excellence did anything bring on it Nero's
condemnation. Domitian, too, a man of Nero's type in cruelty, tried his
hand at persecution; but as he had something of the human in him, he
soon put an end to what he had begun, even restoring again those whom
he had banished. Such as these have always been our persecutors,—men
unjust, impious, base, of whom even you yourselves have no good to say,
the sufferers under whose sentences you have been wont to restore. But
among so many princes from that time to the present day, with anything
of divine and human wisdom in them, point out a single persecutor of
the Christian name. So far from that, we, on the contrary, bring before
you one who was their protector, as you will see by examining the
letters of Marcus Aurelius, that most grave of emperors, in which he
bears his testimony that that Germanic drought was removed by the rains
obtained through the prayers of the Christians who chanced to be
fighting under him. And as he did not by public law remove from
Christians their legal disabilities, yet in another way he put them
openly aside, even adding a sentence of condemnation, and that of
greater severity, against their accusers. What sort of laws are these
which the impious alone execute against us—and the unjust, the vile,
the bloody, the senseless, the insane? which Trajan to some extent made
naught by forbidding Christians to be sought after; which neither a
Hadrian, though fond of searching into all things strange and new, nor
a Vespasian, though the subjugator of the Jews, nor a Pius, nor a
Verus, ever enforced? It should surely be judged more natural for bad
men to be eradicated by good princes as being their natural enemies,
than by those of a spirit kindred with their own.
I would now have these most religious protectors and vindicators
of the laws and institutions of their fathers, tell me, in regard to
their own fidelity and the honour, and submission they themselves show
to ancestral institutions, if they have departed from nothing—if they
have in nothing gone out of the old paths—if they have not put aside
whatsoever is most useful and necessary as rules of a virtuous life.
What has become of the laws repressing expensive and ostentatious ways
of living? which forbade more than a hundred asses to be expended on a
supper, and more than one fowl to be set on the table at a time, and
that not a fatted one; which expelled a patrician from the senate on
the serious ground, as it was counted, of aspiring to be too great,
because he had acquired ten pounds of silver; which put down the
theatres as quickly as they arose to debauch the manners of the people;
which did not permit the insignia of official dignities or of noble
birth to be rashly or with impunity usurped? For I see the Centenarian
suppers must now bear the name, not from the hundred asses, but from
the hundred sestertia(1) expended on them; and that mines of silver are
made into dishes (it were little if this applied only to senators, and
not to freedmen or even mere whip-spoilers(2)). I see, too, that
neither is a single theatre enough, nor are theatres unsheltered: no
doubt it was that immodest pleasure might not be torpid in the
wintertime, the Lacedaemonians invented their woollen cloaks for the
plays. I see now no difference between the dress of matrons and
prostitutes. In regard to women, indeed, those laws of your fathers,
which used to be such an encouragement to modesty and sobriety, have
also fallen into desuetude, when a woman had yet known no gold upon her
save on the finger, which, with the bridal ring, her husband had
sacredly pledged to himself; when the abstinence of women from wine was
carried so far, that a matron, for opening the compartments of a wine
cellar, was starved to death by her friends,—while in the times of
Romulus, for merely tasting wine, Mecenius killed his wife, and
suffered nothing for the deed. With reference to this also, it was the
custom of women to kiss their relatives, that they might be detected by
their breath. Where is that happiness of married life, ever so
desirable, which distinguished our earlier manners, and as the result
of which for about 600 years there was not among us a single divorce?
Now, women have every member of the body heavy laden with gold;
wine-bibbing is so common among them, that the kiss is never offered
with their will; and as for divorce, they long for it as though it were
the natural consequence of marriage. The laws, too, your fathers in
their wisdom had enacted concerning the very gods themselves, you their
most loyal children have rescinded, The consuls, by the authority of
the senate, banished Father Bacchus and his mysteries not merely from
the city, but from the whole of Italy. The consuls Piso and Gabinius,
no Christians surely, forbade Serapis, and Isis, and Arpocrates, with
their dogheaded friend,(1) admission into the Capitol—in the act
casting them out from the assembly of the gods—overthrow their altars,
and expelled them from the country, being anxious to prevent the vices
of their base and lascivious religion from spreading. These, you have
restored, and conferred highest honours on them. What has come to your
religion—of the veneration due by you to your ancestors? In your
dress, in your food, in your style of life, in your opinions, and last
of all in your very speech, you have renounced your progenitors. You
are always praising antiquity, and yet every day you have novelties in
your way of living. From your having failed to maintain what you
should, you make it clear, that, while you abandon the good ways of
your fathers, you retain and guard the things you ought not. Yet the
very tradition of your fathers, which you still seem so faithfully to
defend, and in which you find your principal matter of accusation
against the Christians—I mean zeal in the worship of the gods, the
point in which antiquity has mainly erred—although you have rebuilt
the altars of Serapis, now a Roman deity, and to Bacchus, now become a
god of Italy, you offer up your orgies,—I shall in its proper place
show that you despise, neglect, and overthrow, casting entirely aside
the authority of the men of old. I go on meantime to reply to that
infamous charge of secret crimes, clearing my way to things of open day.
Monsters of wickedness, we are accused of observing a holy rite
in which we kill a little child and then eat it; in which, after the
feast, we practise incest, the dogs—our pimps, forsooth, overturning
the lights and getting us the shamelessness of darkness for our impious
lusts. This is what is constantly laid to our charge, and yet you take
no pains to elicit the truth of what we have been so long accused.
Either bring, then, the matter to the light of day if you believe it,
or give it no credit as having never inquired into it. On the ground of
your double dealing, we are entitled to lay it down to you that there
is no reality in the thing which you dare not expiscate. You impose on
the executioner, in the case of Christians, a duty the very opposite of
expiscation: he is not to make them confess what they do, but to make
them deny what they are. We date the origin of our religion, as we have
mentioned before, from the reign of Tiberius. Truth and the hatred of
truth come into our world together. As soon as truth appears, it is
regarded as an enemy. It has as many foes as there are strangers to it:
the Jews, as was to be looked for, from a spirit of rivalry; the
soldiers, out of a desire to extort money; our very domestics, by their
nature. We are daily beset by foes, we are daily betrayed; we are
oftentimes surprised in our meetings and congregations. Whoever
happened withal upon an infant wailing, according to the common story?
Whoever kept for the judge, just as he had found them, the gory mouths
of Cyclops and Sirens? Whoever found any traces of uncleanness in their
wives? Where is the man who, when he had discovered such atrocities,
concealed them; or, in the act of dragging the culprits' before the
judge, was bribed into silence? If we always keep our secrets, when
were our proceedings made known to the world? Nay, by whom could they
be made known? Not, surely, by the guilty parties themselves; even from
the very idea of the thing, the fealty of silence being ever due to
mysteries. The Samothracian and Eleusinian make no disclosures—how
much more will silence be kept in regard to such as are sure, in their
unveiling, to call forth punishment from man at once, while wrath
divine is kept in store for the future? If, then, Christians are not
themselves the publishers of their crime, it follows of course it must
be strangers. And whence have they their knowledge, when it is also a
universal custom in religious initiations to keep the profane aloof,
and to beware of witnesses, unless it be that those who are so wicked
have less fear than their neighbors? Every one knows what sort of thing
rumour is. It is one of your own sayings, that "among all evils, none
flies so fast as rumour." Why is rumour such an evil thing? Is it
because it is fleet? Is it because it carries information? Or is it
because it is in the highest degree mendacious?—a thing, not even when
it brings some truth to us, without a taint of falsehood, either
detracting, or adding, or changing from the simple fact? Nay more, it
is the very law of its being to continue only while it lies, and to
live but so long as there is no proof; for when the proof is given, it
ceases to exist; and, as having done its work of merely spreading a
report, it delivers up a fact, and is henceforth held to be a fact, and
called a fact. And then no one says, for instance, "They say that it
took place at Rome," or, "There is a rumour that he has obtained a
province," but, "He has got a province," and, "It took place at Rome."
Rumour, the very designation of uncertainty, has no place when a thing
is certain. Does any but a fool put his trust in it? For a wise man
never believes the dubious. Everybody knows, however zealously it is
spread abroad, on whatever strength of asseveration it rests, that some
time or other from some one fountain it has its origin. Thence it must
creep into propagating tongues and ears; and a small seminal blemish so
darkens all the rest of the story, that no one can determine whether
the lips, from which it first came forth, planted the seed of
falsehood, as often happens, from a spirit of opposition, or from a
suspicious judgment, or from a confirmed, nay, in the case of some, an
inborn, delight in lying. It is well that time brings all to light, as
your proverbs and sayings testify, by a provision of Nature, which has
so appointed things that nothing long is hidden, even though rumour has
not disseminated it. It is just then as it should be, that fame for so
long a period has been alone aware of the crimes of Christians. This is
the witness you bring against us—one that has never been able to prove
the accusation it some time or other sent abroad, and at last by mere
continuance made into a settled opinion in the world; so that I
confidently appeal to Nature herself, ever true, against those who
groundlessly hold that such things are to be credited.
See now, we set before you the reward of these enormities. They
give promise of eternal life. Hold it meanwhile as your own belief. I
ask you, then, whether, so believing, you think it worth attaining with
a conscience such as you will have. Come, plunge your knife into the
babe, enemy of none, accused of none, child of all; or if that is
another's work, simply take your place beside a human being dying
before he has really lived, await the departure of the lately given
soul, receive the fresh young blood, saturate your bread with it,
freely partake. The while as you recline at table, take note of the
places which your mother and your sister occupy; mark them well, so
that when the dog-made darkness has fallen on you, you may make no
mistake, for you will be guilty of a crime—unless you perpetrate a
deed of incest. Initiated and sealed into things like these, you have
life everlasting. Tell me, I pray you, is eternity worth it? If it is
not, then these things are not to be credited. Even although you had
the belief, I deny the will; and even if you had the will, I deny the
possibility. Why then can others do it, if you cannot? why cannot you,
if others can? I suppose we are of a different nature—are we Cynopae
or Sciapodes?(1) You are a man yourself as well as the Christian: if
you cannot do it, you ought not to believe it of others, for a
Christian is a man as well as you. But the ignorant, forsooth, are
deceived and imposed on. They were quite unaware of anything of the
kind being imputed to Christians, or they would certainly have looked
into it for themselves, and searched the matter out. Instead of that,
it is the custom for persons wishing initiation into sacred rites, I
think, to go first of all to the master of them, that he may explain
what preparations are to be made. Then, in this case, no doubt he would
say, "You must have a child still of tender age, that knows not what it
is to die, and can smile under thy knife; bread, too, to collect the
gushing blood; in addition to these, candlesticks, and lamps, and
dogs—with tid-bits to draw them on to the extinguishing of the lights:
above all things, you will require to bring your mother and your sister
with you." But what if mother and sister are unwilling? or if there be
neither the one nor the other? What if there are Christians with no
Christian relatives? He will not be counted, I suppose, a true follower
of Christ, who has not a brother or a son. And what now, if these
things are all in store for them without their knowledge? At least
afterwards they come to know them; and they bear with them, and pardon
them. They fear, it may be said, lest they have to pay for it if they
let the secret out: nay, but they will rather in that case have every
claim to protection; they will even prefer, one might think, dying by
their own hand, to living under the burden of such a dreadful
knowledge. Admit that they have this fear; yet why do they still
persevere? For it is plain enough that you will have no desire to
continue what you would never have been, if you had had previous
knowledge of it.
That I may refute more thoroughly these charges, I will show that
in part openly, in part secretly, practices prevail among you which
have led you perhaps to credit similar things about us. Children were
openly sacrificed in Africa to Saturn as lately as the proconsulship of
Tiberius, who exposed to public gaze the priests suspended on the
sacred trees overshadowing their temple—so many crosses on which the
punishment which justice craved overtook their crimes, as the soldiers
of our country still can testify who did that very work for that
proconsul. And even now that sacred. crime still continues to be done
in secret. It is not only Christians, you see, who despise you; for all
that you do there is neither any crime thoroughly and abidingly
eradicated, nor does any of your gods reform his ways. When Saturn did
not spare his own children, he was not likely to spare the children of
others; whom indeed the very parents themselves were in the habit of
offering, gladly responding to the call which was made on them, and
keeping the little ones pleased on the occasion, that they might not
die in tears. At the same time, there is a vast difference between
homicide and parricide. A more advanced age was sacrificed to Mercury
in Gaul. I hand over the Tauric fables to their own theatres. Why, even
in that most religious city of the pious descendants of AEneas, there
is a certain Jupiter whom in their games they lave with human blood. It
is the blood of a beast-fighter, you say. Is it less, because of that,
the blood of a man?(1) Or is it viler blood because it is from the
veins of a wicked man? At any rate it is shed in murder. O Jove,
thyself a Christian, and in truth only son of thy father in his
cruelty! But in regard to child murder, as it does not matter whether
it is committed for a sacred object, or merely at one's own
self-impulse—although there is a great difference, as we have said,
between parricide and homicide—I shall turn to the people generally.
How many, think you, of those crowding around and gaping for Christian
blood,—how many even of your rulers, notable for their justice to you
and for their severe measures against us, may I charge in their own
consciences with the sin of putting their offspring to death? As to any
difference t in the kind of murder, it is certainly the more cruel way
to kill by drowning, or by exposure to cold and hunger and dogs. A
maturer age has always preferred death by the sword. In our case,
murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the foetus
in the womb, while as yet the human being derives blood from other
parts of the body for its sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a
speedier man-killing; nor does it matter whether you take away a life
that is born, or destroy one that is coming to the birth. That is a man
which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in its seed. As to
meals of blood and such tragic dishes, read—I am not sure where it is
told (it is in Herodotus, I think)—how blood taken from the arms, and
tasted by both parties, has been the treaty bond among some nations. I
am not sure what it was that was tasted in the time of Catiline. They
say, too, that among some Scythian tribes the dead are eaten by their
friends. But I am going far from home. At this day, among ourselves,
blood consecrated to Bellona, blood drawn from a punctured thigh and
then partaken of, seals initiation into the rites of that goddess.
Those, too, who at the gladiator shows, for the cure of epilepsy, quaff
with greedy thirst the blood of criminals slain in the arena, as it
flows fresh from the wound, and then rush off—to whom do they belong?
those, also, who make meals on the flesh of wild beasts at the place of
combat—who have keen appetites for bear and stag? That bear in the
struggle was bedewed with the blood of the man whom it lacerated: that
stag rolled itself in the gladiator's gore. The entrails of the very
bears, loaded with as yet undigested human viscera, are in great
request. And you have men rifting up man-fed flesh? If you partake of
food like this, how do your repasts differ from those you accuse us
Christians of? And do those, who, with savage lust, seize on human
bodies, do less because they devour the living? Have they less the
pollution of human blood on them because they only lick up what is to
turn into blood? They make meals, it is plain, not so much of infants,
as of grown-up men. Blush for your vile ways before the Christians, who
have not even the blood of animals at their meals of simple and natural
food; who abstain from things strangled and that die a natural death,
for no other reason than that they may not contract pollution, so much
as from blood secreted in the viscera. To clench the matter with a
single example, you tempt Christians with sausages of blood, just
because you are perfectly aware that the thing by which you thus try to
get them to transgress they hold unlawful.(2) And how unreasonable it
is to believe that those, of whom you are convinced that they regard
with horror the idea of tasting the blood of oxen, are eager after
blood of men; unless, mayhap, you have tried it, and found it sweeter
to the taste! Nay, in fact, there is here a test you should apply to
discover Christians, as well as the fire-pan and the censer. They
should be proved by their appetite for human blood, as well as by their
refusal to offer sacrifice; just as otherwise they should be affirmed
to be free of Christianity by their refusal to taste of blood, as by
their sacrificing; and there would be no want of blood of men, amply
supplied as that would be in the trial and condemnation of prisoners.
Then who are more given to the crime of incest than those who have
enjoyed the instruction of Jupiter himself? Ctesias tells us that the
Persians have illicit intercourse with their mothers. The Macedonians,
too, are suspected on this point; for on first hearing the tragedy of
OEdipus they made mirth of the incest-doer's grief, exclaiming, hlaune
eis thn mhtera . Even now reflect what opportunity there is for
mistakes leading to incestuous comminglings—your promiscuous looseness
supplying the materials. You first of all expose your children, that
they may be taken up by any compassionate passer-by, to whom they are
quite unknown; or you give them away, to be adopted by those who will
do better to them the part of parents. Well, some time or other, all
memory of the alienated progeny must be lost; and when once a mistake
has been made, the transmission of incest thence will still go on—the
race and the crime creeping on together. Then, further, wherever you
are—at home, abroad, over the seas—your lust is an attendant, whose
general indulgence, or even its indulgence in the most limited scale,
may easily and unwittingly anywhere beget children, so that in this way
a progeny scattered about in the commerce of life may have intercourse
with those who are their own kin, and have no notion that there is any
incest in the case. A persevering and stedfast chastity has protected
us from anything like this: keeping as we do from adulteries and all
post-matrimonial unfaithfulness, we are not exposed to incestuous
mishaps. Some of us, making matters still more secure, beat away from
them entirely the power of sensual sin, by a virgin continence, still
boys in this respect when they are old. If you would but take notice
that such sins as I have mentioned prevail among you, that would lead
you to see that they have no existence among Christians. The same eyes
would tell you of both facts. But the two blindnesses are apt to go
together; so that those who do not see what is, think they see what is
not. I shall show it to be so in everything. But now let me speak of
matters which are more dear.
"You do not worship the gods," you say; " and you do not offer
sacrifices for the emperors." Well, we do not offer sacrifice for
others, for the same reason that we do not for ourselves,—namely, that
your gods are not at all the objects of our worship. So we are accused
of sacrilege and treason. This is the chief ground of charge against
us—nay, it is the sum-total of our offending; and it is worthy then of
being inquired into, if neither prejudice nor injustice be the judge,
the one of which has no idea of discovering the truth, and the other
simply and at once rejects it. We do not worship your gods, because we
know that there are no such beings. This, therefore, is what you should
do: you should call on us to demonstrate their non-existence, and
thereby prove that they have no claim to adoration; for only if your
gods were truly so, would there be any obligation to render divine
homage to them. And punishment even were due to Christians, if it were
made plain that those to whom they refused all worship were indeed
divine. But you say, They are gods. We protest and appeal from
yourselves to your knowledge; let that judge us; let that condemn us,
if it can deny that all these gods of yours were but men. If even it
venture to deny that, it will be confuted by its own books of
antiquities, from which it has got its information about them, bearing
witness to this day, as they plainly do, both of the cities in which
they were born, and the countries in which they have left traces of
their exploits, as well as where also they are proved to have been
buried. Shall I now, therefore, go over them one by one, so numerous
and so various, new and old, barbarian, Grecian,Roman, foreign, captive
and adopted, private and common, male and female, rural and urban,
naval and military? It were useless even to hunt out all their names:
so I may content myself with a compend; and this not for your
information, but that you may have what you know brought to your
recollection, for undoubtedly you act as if you had forgotten all about
them. No one of your gods is earlier than Saturn: from him you trace
all your deities, even those of higher rank and better known. What,
then, can be proved of the first, will apply to those that follow. So
far, then, as books give us information, neither the Greek Diodorus or
Thallus, neither Cassius Severus or Cornelius Nepos, nor any writer
upon sacred antiquities, have ventured to say that Saturn was any but a
man: so far as the question depends on facts, I find none more
trustworthy than those —that in Italy itself we have the country in
which, after many expeditions, and after having partaken of Attic
hospitalities, Saturn settled, obtaining cordial welcome from Janus,
or, as the Salii will have it, Janis. The mountain on which he dwelt
was called Saturnius; the city he founded is called Saturnia to this
day; last of all, the whole of Italy, after having borne the name of
Oenotria, was called Saturnia from him. He first gave you the art of
writing, and a stamped coinage, and thence it is he presides over the
public treasury. But if Saturn were a man, he had undoubtedly a human
origin; and having a human origin, he was not the offspring of heaven
and earth. As his parents were unknown, it was not unnatural that he
should be spoken of as the son of those elements from which we might
all seem to spring. For who does not speak of heaven and earth as
father and mother, in a sort of way of veneration and honour? or from
the custom which prevails among us of saying that persons of whom we
have no knowledge, or who make a sudden appearance, have fallen from
the skies? In this way it came about that Saturn, everywhere a sudden
and unlooked-for guest, got everywhere the name of the Heaven-born. or
even the common folk call persons whose stock is unknown, sons of
earth. I say nothing of how men in these rude times were wont to act,
when they were impressed by the look of any stranger happening to
appear among them, as though it were divine, since even at this day men
of culture make gods of those whom, a day or two before, they
acknowledged to be dead men by their public mourning for them. Let
these notices of Saturn, brief as they are, suffice. It will thus also
be proved that Jupiter is as certainly a man, as from a man he sprung;
and that one after another the whole swarm is mortal like the primal
stock.
And since, as you dare not deny that these deities of yours once
were men, you have taken it on you to assert that they were made gods
after their decease, let us consider what necessity there was for this.
In the first place, you must concede the existence of one higher God—a
certain wholesale dealer in divinity, who has made gods of men. For
they could neither have assumed a divinity which was not theirs, nor
could any but one himself possessing it have conferred it on them. If
there was no one to make gods, it is vain to, dream of gods being made
when thus you have no god-maker. Most certainly, if they could have
deified themselves, with a higher state at their command, they never
would have been men. If, then, there be one who is able to make gods, I
turn back to an examination of any reason there may be for making gods
at all; and I find no other reason than this, that the great God has
need of their ministrations and aids in performing the offices of
Deity. But first it is an unworthy idea that He should need the help of
a man, and in fact a dead man, when, if He was to be in want of this
assistance from the dead, He might more fittingly have created some one
a god at the beginning. Nor do I see any place for his action. For this
entire world-mass—whether self-existent and uncreated, as Pythagoras
maintains, or brought into being by a creator's hands, as Plato
hold—was manifestly, once for all in its original construction,
disposed, and furnished, and ordered, and supplied with a government of
perfect wisdom. That cannot be imperfect which has made all perfect.
There was nothing waiting on for Saturn and his race to do. Men will
make fools of themselves if they refuse to believe that from the very
first ram poured down from the sky, and stars gleamed, and light shone,
and thunders roared, and Jove himself dreaded the lightnings you put in
his hands; that in like manner before Bacchus, and Ceres, and Minerva,
nay before the first man, whoever that was, every kind of fruit burst
forth plentifully from the bosom of the earth, for nothing provided for
the support and sustenance of man could be introduced after his
entrance on the stage of being. Accordingly, these necessaries of life
are said to have been discovered, not created. But the thing you
discover existed before; and that which had a pre-existence must be
regarded as belonging not to him who discovered it, hut to him who made
it, for of course it had a being before it could be found. But if, on
account of his being the discoverer of the vine, Bacchus is raised to
godship, Lucullus, who first introduced the cherry from Pontus into
Italy, has not been fairly dealt with; for as the discoverer of a new
fruit, he has not, as though he were its creator, been awarded divine
honours. Wherefore, if the universe existed from the beginning,
thoroughly furnished with its system working under certain laws for the
performance of its functions, there is, in this respect, an entire
absence of all reason for electing humanity to divinity; for the
positions and powers which you have assigned to your deities have been
from the beginning precisely what they would have been, although you
had never deified them. But you turn to another reason, telling us that
the conferring of deity was a way of rewarding worth. And hence you
grant, I conclude, that the god-making God is of transcendent
righteousness,—one who will neither rashly, improperly; nor needlessly
bestow a reward so great. I would have you then consider whether the
merits of your deities are of a kind to have raised them to the
heavens, and not rather to have sunk them down into lowest depths of
Tartarus,—the place which you regard, with many, as the prison-house
of infernal punishments. For into this dread place are wont to be cast
all who offend against filial piety, and such as are guilty of incest
with sisters, and seducers of wives, and ravishers of virgins, and
boy-polluters,and men of furious tempers, and murderers, and thieves,
and deceivers; all, in short, who tread in the footsteps of your gods,
not one of whom you can prove free from crime or vice, save by denying
that they had ever a human existence. But as you cannot deny that, you
have those foul blots also as an added reason for not believing that
they were made gods afterwards. For if you rule for the very purpose of
punishing such deeds; if every virtuous man among you rejects all
correspondence, converse, and intimacy with the wicked and base, while,
on the other hand, the high God has taken up their mates to a share of
His majesty, on what ground is it that you thus condemn those whose
fellow-actors you adore? Your goodness is an affront in the heavens.
Deify your vilest criminals, if you would please your gods. You honour
them by giving divine honours to their fellows. But to say no more
about a way of acting so unworthy, there have been men virtuous, and
pure, and good. Yet how many of these nobler men you have left in the
regions of doom! as Socrates, so renowned for his wisdom, Aristides for
his justice, Themistocles for his warlike genius, Alexander for his
sublimity of soul, Polycrates for his good fortune, Croesus for his
wealth, Demosthenes for his eloquence. Which of these gods of yours is
more remarkable for gravity and wisdom than Cato, more just and warlike
than Scipio? which of them more magnanimous than Pompey, more
prosperous than Sylla, of greater wealth than Crassus, more eloquent
than Tullius? How much better it would have been for the God Supreme to
have waited that He might have taken such men as these to be His
heavenly associates, prescient as He must have surely been of their
worthier character! He was in a hurry, I suppose, and straightway shut
heaven's gates; and now He must surely feel ashamed at these worthies
murmuring over their lot in the regions below.
But I pass from these remarks, for I know and I am going to show
what your gods are not, by showing what they are. In reference, then,
to these, I see only names of dead men of ancient times; I hear
fabulous stories; I recognize sacred rites rounded on mere myths. As to
the actual images, I regard hem as simply pieces of matter akin to the
vessels and utensils in common use among is, or even undergoing in
their consecration a hapless change from these useful articles at the
hands of reckless art, which in the transforming process treats them
with utter contempt, nay, in the very act commits sacrilege; so that it
might be no slight solace to us in all our punishments, suffering as we
do because of these same gods, that in their making they suffer as we
do themselves. You put Christians on crosses and stakes:(1) what image
is not formed from the clay in the first instance, set on cross and
stake? The body of your god is first consecrated on the gibbet. You
tear the sides of Christians with your claws; but in the case of your
own gods, axes, and planes, and rasps are put to work more vigorously
on every member of the body. We lay our heads upon the block; before
the lead, and the glue, and the nails are put in requisition, your
deities are headless. We are cast to the wild beasts, while you attach
them to Bacchus, and Cybele, and Caelestis. We are burned in the
flames; so, too, are they in their original lump. We are condemned to
the mines; from these your gods originate. We are banished to islands;
in islands it is a common thing for your gods to have their birth or
die. If it is in this way a deity is made, it will follow that as many
as are punished are deified, and tortures will have to be declared
divinities. But plain it is these objects of your worship have no sense
of the injuries and disgraces of their consecrating, as they are
equally unconscious of the honours paid to them. O impious words! O
blasphemous reproaches! Gnash your teeth upon us—foam with maddened
rage against us—ye are the persons, no doubt, who censured a certain
Seneca speaking of your superstition at much greater length and far
more sharply! In a word, if we refuse our homage to statues and frigid
images, the very counterpart of their dead originals, with which hawks,
and mice, and spiders are so well acquainted, does it not merit praise
instead of penalty, that we have rejected what we have come to see is
error? We cannot surely be made out to injure those who we are certain
are nonentities. What does not exist, is in its nonexistence secure
from suffering.
"But they are gods to us," you say. And how is it, then, that in
utter inconsistency with this, you are convicted of impious,
sacrilegious, and irreligious conduct to them, neglecting those you
imagine to exist, destroying those who are the objects of your fear,
making mock of those whose honour you avenge? See now if I go beyond
the truth. First, indeed, seeing you worship, some one god, and some
another, of course you give offence to those you do not worship. You
cannot continue to give preference to one without slighting another,
for selection implies rejection. You despise, therefore, those whom you
thus reject; for in your rejection of them, it is plain you have no
dread of giving them offence. For, as we have already shown, every god
depended on the decision of the senate for his godhead. No god was he
whom man in his own counsels did not wish to be so, and thereby
condemned. The family deities you call Lares, you exercise a domestic
authority over, pledging them, selling them, changing them—making
sometimes a cooking-pot of a Saturn, a firepan of a Minerva, as one or
other happens to be worn done, or broken in its long sacred use, or as
the family head feels the pressure of some more sacred home necessity.
In like manner, by public law you disgrace your state gods, putting
them in the auction-catalogue, and making them a source of revenue. Men
seek to get the Capitol, as they seek to get the herb market, under the
voice of the crier, under the auction spear, under the registration of
the quaestor. Deity is struck off and farmed out to the highest bidder.
But indeed lands burdened with tribute are of less value; men under the
assessment of a poll-tax are less noble; for these things are the marks
of servitude. In the case of the gods, on the other hand, the
sacredness is great in proportion to the tribute which they yield; nay,
the more sacred is a god, the larger is the tax he pays. Majesty is
made a source of gain. Religion goes about the taverns begging. You
demand a price for the privilege of standing on temple ground, for
access to the sacred services; there is no gratuitous knowledge of your
divinities permitted—you must buy their favours with a price. What
honours in any way do you render to them that you do not render to the
dead? You have temples in the one case just as in the other; you have
altars in the one case as in the other. Their statues have the same
dress, the same insignia. As the dead man had his age, his art, his
occupation, so it is with the deity. In what respect does the funeral
feast differ from the feast of Jupiter? or the bowl of the gods from
the ladle of the manes? or the undertaker from the soothsayer, as in
fact this latter personage also attends upon the dead? With perfect
propriety you give divine honours to your departed emperors, as you
worship them in life. The gods will count themselves indebted to you;
nay, it will be matter of high rejoicing among them that their masters
are made their equals. But when you adore Larentina, a public
prostitute —I could have wished that it might at least have been Lais
or Phryne—among your Junos, and Cereses, and Dianas; when you instal
in your Pantheon Simon Magus,(1) giving him a statue and the title of
Holy God; when you make an infamous court page a god of the sacred
synod, although your ancient deities are in reality no better, they
will still think themselves affronted by you, that the privilege
antiquity conferred on them alone, has been allowed to others.
I wish now to review your sacred rites; and I pass no censure on
your sacrificing, when you offer the worn-out, the scabbed, the
corrupting; when you cut off from the fat and the sound the useless
parts, such as the head and the hoofs, which in your house you would
have assigned to the slaves or the dogs; when of the tithe of Hercules
you do not lay a third upon his altar (I am disposed rather to praise
your wisdom in rescuing something from being lost); but turning to your
books, from which you get your training in wisdom and the nobler duties
of life, what utterly ridiculous things I find!—that for Trojans and
Greeks the gods fought among themselves like pairs of gladiators; that
Venus was wounded by a man, because she would rescue her son Aeneas
when he was in peril of his life from the same Diomede; that Mars was
almost wasted away by a thirteen months' imprisonment; that Jupiter was
saved by a monster's aid from suffering the same violence at the hands
of the other gods; that he now laments the fate of Sarpedon, now foully
makes love to his own sister, recounting (to her) former mistresses,
now for a long time past not so dear as she. After this, what poet is
not found copying the example of his chief, to be a disgracer of the
gods? One gives Apollo to king Admetus to tend his sheep; another hires
out the building labours of Neptune to Laomedon. A well-known lyric
poet, too—Pindar, I mean—sings of Aesculapius deservedly stricken
with lightning for his greed in practising wrongfully his art. A wicked
deed it was of Jupiter—if he hurled the bolt—unnatural to his
grandson, and exhibiting envious feeling to the Physician. Things like
these should not be made public if they are true; and if false, they
should not be fabricated among people professing a great respect for
religion. Nor indeed do either tragic or comic writers shrink from
setting forth the gods as the origin of all family calamities and sins.
I do not dwell on the philosophers, contenting myself with a reference
to Socrates, who, in contempt of the gods, was in the habit of swearing
by an oak, and a goat, and a dog. In fact, for this very thing Socrates
was condemned to death, that he overthrew the worship of the gods.
Plainly, at one time as well as another, that is, always truth is
disliked. However, when rueing their judgment, the Athenians inflicted
punishment on his accusers, and set up a golden image of him in a
temple, the condemnation was in the very act rescinded, and his witness
was restored to its former value. Diogenes, too, makes utter mock of
Hercules and the Roman cynic Varro brings forward three hundred Joves,
or Jupiters they should be called, all headless.
Others of your writers, in their wantonness, even minister to
your pleasures by vilifying the gods. Examine those charming farces of
your Lentuli and Hostilii, whether in the jokes and tricks it is the
buffoons or the deities which afford you merriment; such farces I mean
as Anubis the Adulterer, and Luna of the masculine gender, and Diana
under the lash, and the reading the will of Jupiter deceased, and the
three famishing Herculeses held up to ridicule. Your dramatic
literature, too, depicts all the vileness of your gods. The Sun mourns
his offspring(1) cast down from heaven, and you are full of glee;
Cybele sighs after the scornful swain,(2) and you do not blush; you
brook the stage recital of Jupiter's misdeeds, and the shepherd(3)
judging Juno, Venus, and Minerva. Then, again, when the likeness of a
god is put on the head of an ignominious and infamous wretch, when one
impure and trained up for the art in all effeminacy, represents a
Minerva or a Hercules, is not the majesty of your gods insulted, and
their deity dishonored? Yet you not merely look on, but applaud. You
are, I suppose, more devout in the arena, where after the same fashion
your deities dance on human blood, on the pollutions caused by
inflicted punishments, as they act their themes and stories, doing
their turn for the wretched criminals, except that these, too, often
put on divinity and actually play the very gods. We have seen in our
day a representation of the mutilation of Attis, that famous god of
Pessinus, and a man burnt alive as Hercules. We have made merry amid
the ludicrous cruelties of the noonday exhibition, at Mercury examining
the bodies of the dead with his hot iron; we have witnessed Jove's
brother,(4) mallet in hand, dragging out the corpses of the gladiators.
But who can go into everything of this sort? If by such things as these
the honour of deity is assailed, if they go to blot out every trace of
its majesty, we must explain them by the contempt in which the gods are
held, alike by those who actually do them, and by those for whose
enjoyment they are done. This it will be said, however, is all in
sport. But if I add—it is what all know and will admit as readily to
be the fact—that in the temples adulteries are arranged, that at the
altars pimping is practised, that often in the houses of the
temple-keepers and priests, under the sacrificial fillets, and the
sacred hats,(5) and the purple robes, amid the fumes of incense, deeds
of licentiousness are done, I am not sure but your gods have more
reason to complain of you than of Christians. It is certainly among the
votaries of your religion that the perpetrators of sacrilege are always
found, for Christians do not enter your temples even in the day-time.
Perhaps they too would be spoilers of them, if they worshipped in them.
What then do they worship, since their objects of worship are different
from yours? Already indeed it is implied, as the corollary from their
rejection of the lie, that they render homage to the truth; nor
continue longer in an error which they have given up in the very fact
of recognizing it to be an error. Take this in first of all, and when
we have offered a preliminary refutation of some false opinions, go on
to derive from it our entire religious system.
For, like some others, you are under the delusion that our god is
an ass's head.(6) Cor- nelius Tacitus first put this notion into
people's minds. In the fifth book of his histories, beginning the
(narrative of the) Jewish war with an account of the origin of the
nation; and theorizing at his pleasure about the origin, as well as the
name and the religion of the Jews, he states that having been
delivered, or rather, in his opinion, expelled from Egypt, in crossing
the vast plains of Arabia, where water is so scanty, they were in
extremity from thirst; but taking the guidance of the wild asses, which
it was thought might be seeking water after feeding, they discovered a
fountain, and thereupon in their gratitude they consecrated a head of
this species of animal. And as Christianity is nearly allied to
Judaism, from this, I suppose, it was taken for granted that we too are
devoted to the worship of the same image. But the said Cornelius
Tacitus (the very opposite of tacit in telling lies) informs us in the
work already mentioned, that when Cneius Pompeius captured Jerusalem,
he entered the temple to see the arcana of the Jewish religion, but
found no image there. Yet surely if worship was rendered to any visible
object, the very place for its exhibition would be the shrine; and that
all the more that the worship, however unreasonable, had no need there
to fear outside beholders. For entrance to the holy place was permitted
to the priests alone, while all vision was forbidden to others by an
outspread curtain. You will not, however, deny that all beasts of
burden, and not parts of them, but the animals entire, are with their
goddess Epona objects of worship with you. It is this, perhaps, which
displeases you in us, that while your worship here is universal, we do
homage only to the ass. Then, if any of you think we render
superstitious adoration to the cross, in that adoration he is sharer
with us. If you offer homage to a piece of wood at all, it matters
little what it is like when the substance is the same: it is of no
consequence the form, if you have the very body of the god. And yet how
far does the Athenian Pallas differ from the stock of the cross, or the
Pharian Ceres as she is put up uncarved to sale, a mere rough stake and
piece of shapeless wood? Every stake fixed in an upright position is a
portion of the cross; we render our adoration, if you will have it so,
to a god entire and complete. We have shown before that your deities
are derived from shapes modelled from the cross. But you also worship
victories, for in your trophies the cross is the heart of the
trophy.(1) The camp religion of the Romans is all through a worship of
the standards, a setting the standards above all gods. Well, as those
images decking out the standards are ornaments of crosses. All those
hangings of your standards and banners are robes of crosses. I praise
your zeal: you would not consecrate crosses unclothed and unadorned.
Others, again, certainly with more information and greater
verisimilitude, believe that the sun is our god. We shall be counted
Persians perhaps, though we do not worship the orb of day painted on a
piece of linen cloth, having himself everywhere in his own disk. The
idea no doubt has originated from our being known to turn to the east
in prayer.(1) But you, many of you, also under pretence sometimes of
worshipping the heavenly bodies, move your lips in the direction of the
sunrise. In the same way, if we devote Sun-day to rejoicing, from a far
different reason than Sun-worship, we have some resemblance to those of
you who devote the day of Saturn to ease and luxury, though they too go
far away from Jewish ways, of which indeed they are ignorant. But
lately a new edition of our god has been given to the world in that
great city: it originated with a certain vile man who was wont to hire
himself out to cheat the wild beasts, and who exhibited a picture with
this inscription: The God of the Christians, born of an ass.(2) He had
the ears of an ass, was hoofed in one foot, carried a book,(3) and wore
a toga. Both the name and the figure gave us amusement. But our
opponents ought straightway to have done homage to this biformed
divinity, for they have acknowledged gods dog-headed and lion-headed,
with horn of buck and ram, with goat-like loins, with serpent legs,
with wings sprouting from back or foot. These things we have discussed
ex abundanti, that we might not seem willingly to pass by any rumor
against us unrefuted. Having thoroughly cleared ourselves, we turn now
to an exhibi-ition of what our religion really is.
The object of our worship is the One God,(4) He who by His
commanding word, His arranging wisdom, His mighty power, brought forth
from nothing this entire mass of our world, with all its array of
elements, bodies, spirits, for the glory of His majesty; whence also
the Greeks have bestowed on it the name of K osmos . The eye cannot see
Him, though He is (spiritually) visible. He is incompre- hensible,
though in grace He is manifested. He is beyond our utmost thought,
though our human faculties conceive of Him. He is therefore equally
real and great. But that which, in the ordinary sense, can be seen and
handled and conceived, is inferior to the eyes by which it is taken in,
and the hands by which it is tainted, and the faculties by which it is
discovered; but that which is infinite is known only to itself. This it
is which gives some notion of God, while yet beyond all our
conceptions—our very incapacity of fully grasping Him affords us the
idea of what He really is. He is presented to our minds in His
transcendent greatness, as at once known and unknown. And this is the
crowning guilt of men, that they will not recognize One, of whom they
cannot possibly be ignorant. Would you have the proof from the works of
His hands, so numerous and so great, which both contain you and sustain
you, which minister at once to your enjoyment, and strike you with awe;
or would you rather have it from the testimony of the soul itself?
Though under the oppressive bondage of the body, though led astray by
depraving customs, though enervated by lusts and passions, though in
slavery to false gods; yet, whenever the soul comes to itself, as out
of a surfeit, or a sleep, or a sickness, and attains something of its
natural soundness, it speaks of God; using no other word, because this
is the peculiar name of the true God. "God is great and good"—"Which
may God give," are the words on every lip. It bears witness, too, that
God is judge, exclaiming, "God sees," and, "I commend myself to God,"
and, "God will repay me." O noble testimony of the soul by nature(1)
Christian! Then, too, in using such words as these, it looks not to the
Capitol, but to the heavens. It knows that there is the throne of the
living God, as from Him and from thence itself came down.
But, that we might attain an ampler and more authoritative
knowledge at once of Himself, and of His counsels and will, God has
added a written revelation for the behoof of every one whose heart is
set on seeking Him, that seeking he may find, and finding believe, and
believing obey. For from the first He sent messengers into the
world,—men whose stainless righteousness made them worthy to know the
Most High, and to reveal Him,—men abundantly endowed with the Holy
Spirit, that they might proclaim that there is one God only who made
all things, who formed man from the dust of the ground (for He is the
true Prometheus who gave order to the world by arranging the seasons
and their course),—these have further set before us the proofs He has
given of His majesty in H judgments by floods and fires, the rules
appointed by Him for securing His favour, as well as the retribution in
store for the ignoring, forsaking and keeping them, as being about at
the end of all to adjudge His worshippers to everlasting life, and the
wicked to the doom of fire at once without ending and without break,
raising up again all the dead from the beginning, reforming and
renewing them with the object of awarding either recompense. Once these
things were with us, too, the theme of ridicule. We are of your stock
and nature: men are made, not born, Christians. The preachers of whom
we have spoken are called prophets, from the office which belongs to
them of predicting the future. Their words, as well as the miracles
which they performed, that men might have faith in their divine
authority, we have still in the literary treasures they have left, and
which are open to all. Ptolemy, surnamed Philadelphus, the most learned
of his race, a man of vast acquaintance with all literature, emulating,
I imagine, the book enthusiasm of Pisistratus, among other remains of
the past which either their antiquity or something of peculiar interest
made famous, at the suggestion of Demetrius Phalereus, who was renowned
above all grammarians of his time, and to whom he had committed the
management of these things, applied to the Jews for their writings—I
mean the writings peculiar to them and in their tongue, which they
alone possessed, for from themselves, as a people dear to God for their
fathers' sake, their prophets had ever sprung, and to them they had
ever spoken. Now in ancient times the people we call Jews bare the name
of Hebrews, and so both their writings and their speech were Hebrew.
But that the understanding of their books might not be wanting, this
also the Jews supplied to Ptolemy; for they gave him seventy-two
interpreters-men whom the philosopher Menedemus, the well-known
asserter of a Providence, regarded with respect as sharing in his
views. The same account is given by Aristaeus. So the king left these
works unlocked to all, in the Greek language.(2) To this day, at the
temple of Serapis, the libraries of Ptolemy are to be seen, with the
identical Hebrew originals in them. The Jews, too, read them publicly.
Under a tribute-liberty, they are in the habit of going to hear them
every Sabbath. Whoever gives ear will find God in them; whoever takes
pains to understand, will be compelled to believe.
Their high antiquity, first of all, claims authority for these
writings. With you, too, it is a kind of religion to demand belief on
this very ground. Well, all the substances, all the materials, the
origins, classes, contents of your most ancient writings, even most
nations and cities illustrious in the records of the past and noted for
their antiquity in books of annals,—the very forms of your letters,
those revealers and custodiers of events, nay (I think I speak still
within the mark), your very gods themselves, your very temples and
oracles, and sacred rites, are less ancient than the work of a single
prophet, in whom you have the thesaurus of the entire Jewish religion,
and therefore too of ours. If you happen to have heard of a certain
Moses, I speak first of him: he is as far back as the Argive Inachus;
by nearly four hundred years—only seven less—he precedes Danaus, your
most ancient name; while he antedates by a millennium the death of
Priam. I might affirm, too, that he is five hundred years earlier than
Homer, and have supporters of that view. The other prophets also,
though of later date, are, even the most recent of them, as far back as
the first of your philosophers, and legislators, and historians. It is
not so much the difficulty of the subject, as its vastness, that stands
in the way of a statement of the grounds on which these statements
rest; the matter is not so arduous as it would be tedious. It would
require the anxious study of many books, and the fingers busy
reckoning. The histories of the most ancient nations, such as the
Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Phoenicians, would need to be ransacked;
the men of these various nations who have information to give, would
have to be called in as witnesses. Manetho the Egyptian, and Berosus
the Chaldean, and Hieromus the Phoenician king of Tyre; their
successors too, Ptolemy the Mendesian, and Demetrius Phalereus, and
King Juba, and Apion, and Thallus, and their critic the Jew Josephus,
the native vindicator of the ancient history of his people, who either
authenticates or refutes the others. Also the Greek censors' lists must
be compared, and the dates of events ascertained, that the
chronological connections may be opened up, and thus the reckonings of
the various annals be made to give forth light. We must go abroad into
the histories and literature of all nations. And, in fact, we have
already brought the proof in part before you, in giving those hints as
to how it is to be effected. But it seems better to delay the full
discussion of this, lest in our haste we do not sufficiently carry it
out, or lest in its thorough handling we make too lengthened a
digression.
To make up for our delay in this, we bring under your notice
something of even greater importance; we point to the majesty of our
Scriptures, if not to their antiquity. If you doubt that they are as
ancient as we say, we offer proof that they are divine. And you may
convince yourselves of this at once, and without going very far. Your
instructors, the world, and the age, and the event, are all be fore
you. All that is taking place around you I was fore-announced; all that
you now see with your eye was previously heard by the ear. The
swallowing up of cities by the earth; the theft of islands by the sea;
wars, bringing external and internal convulsions; the collision of
kingdoms with kingdoms; famines and pestilences, and local massacres,
and widespread desolating mortalities; the exaltation of the lowly, and
the humbling of the proud; the decay of righteousness, the growth of
sin, the slackening interest in all good ways; the very seasons and
elements going out of their ordinary course, monsters and portents
taking the place of nature's forms—it was all foreseen and predicted
before it came to pass. While we suffer the calamities, we read of them
in the Scriptures; as we examine, they are proved. Well, the truth of a
prophecy, I thinks is the demonstration of its being from above. Hence
there is among us an assured faith in regard to coming events as things
already proved to us, for they were predicted along with what we have
day by day fulfilled. They are uttered by the same voices, they are
written in the same books—the same Spirit inspires them. All time is
one to prophecy foretelling the future. Among men, it may be, a
distinction of times is made while the fulfilment is going on: from
being future we think of it as presents and then from being present we
count it as belonging to the past. How are we to blame, I pray you,
that we believe in things to come as though they already were, with the
grounds we have for our faith in these two steps?
But having asserted that our religion is supported by the
writings of the Jews, the oldest which exist, though it is generally
known, and we fully admit that it dates from a comparatively recent
period—no further back indeed than the reign of Tiberius—a question
may perhaps be raised on this ground about its standing, as if it were
hiding something of its presumption under shadow of an illustrious
religion, one which has at any rate undoubted allowance of the law, or
because, apart from the question of age, we neither accord with the
Jews in their peculiarities in regard to food, nor in their sacred
days, nor even in their well-known bodily sign, nor in the possession
of a common name, which surely behoved to be the case if we did homage
to the same God as they. Then, too, the common people have now some
knowledge of Christ, and think of Him as but a man, one indeed such as
the Jews condemned, so that some may naturally enough have taken up the
idea that we are worshippers of a mere human being. But we are neither
ashamed of Christ —for we rejoice to be counted His disciples, and in
His name to suffer—nor do we differ from the Jews concerning God. We
must make, therefore, a remark or two as to Christ's divinity. In
former times the Jews enjoyed much of God's favour, when the fathers of
their race were noted for their righteousness and faith. So it was that
as a people they flourished greatly, and their kingdom attained to a
lofty eminence; and so highly blessed were they, that for their
instruction God spake to them in special revelations, pointing out to
them beforehand how they should merit His favor and avoid His
displeasure. But how deeply they have sinned, puffed up to their fall
with a false trust in their noble ancestors, turning from God's way
into a way of sheer impiety, though they themselves should refuse to
admit it, their present national ruin would afford sufficient proof.
Scattered abroad, a race of wanderers, exiles from their own land and
clime, they roam over the whole world without either a human or a
heavenly king, not possessing even the stranger's right to set so much
as a simple footstep in their native country. The sacred writers
withal, in giving previous warning of these things, all with equal
clearness ever declared that, in the last days of the world, God would,
out of every nation, and people, and country, choose for Himself more
faithful worshippers, upon whom He would bestow His grace, and that
indeed in ampler measure, in keeping with the enlarged capacities of a
nobler dispensation. Accordingly, He appeared among us, whose coming to
renovate and illuminate man's nature was pre-announced by God—I mean
Christ, that Son of God. And so the supreme Head and Master of this
grace and discipline, the Enlightener and Trainer of the human race,
God's own Son, was announced among us, born—but not so born as to make
Him ashamed of the name of Son or of His paternal origin. It was not
His lot to have as His father, by incest with a sister, or by violation
of a daughter or another's wife, a god in the shape of serpent, or ox,
or bird, or lover, for his vile ends transmuting himself into the gold
of Danaus. They are your divinities upon whom these base deeds of
Jupiter were done. But the Son of God has no mother in any sense which
involves impurity; she, whom men suppose to be His mother in the
ordinary way, had never entered into the marriage bond.(1) But, first,
I shall discuss His essential nature, and so the nature of His birth
will be understood. We have already asserted that God made the world,
and all which it contains, by His Word, and Reason, and Power. It is
abundantly plain that your philosophers, too, regard the Logos—that
is, the Word and Reason—as the Creator of the universe. For Zeno lays
it down that he is the creator, having made all things according to a
determinate plan; that his name is Fate, and God, and the soul of
Jupiter, and the necessity of all things. Cleanthes ascribes all this
to spirit, which he maintains pervades the universe. And we, in like
manner, hold that the Word, and Reason, and Power, by which we have
said God made all, have spirit as their proper and essential
substratum, in which the Word has inbeing to give forth utterances, and
reason abides to dispose and arrange, and power is over all to execute.
We have been taught that He proceeds forth from God, and in that
procession He is generated; so that He is the Son of God, and is called
God from unity of substance with God. For God, too, is a Spirit. Even
when the ray is shot from the sun, it is still part of the parent mass;
the sun will still be in the ray, because it is a ray of the sun—there
is no division of substance, but merely an extension. Thus Christ is
Spirit of Spirit, and God of God, as light of light is kindled.(2) The
material matrix remains entire and unimpaired, though you derive from
it any number of shoots possessed of its qualities; so, too, that which
has come forth out of God is at once God and the Son of God, and the
two are one. In this way also, as He is Spirit of Spirit and God of
God, He is made a second in manner of existence—in position, not in
nature; and He did not withdraw from the original source, but went
forth. This ray of God, then, as it was always foretold in ancient
times, descending into a certain virgin, and made flesh in her womb, is
in His birth God and man united. The flesh formed by the Spirit is
nourished, grows up to manhood, speaks, teaches, works, and is the
Christ. Receive meanwhile this fable, if you choose to call it so—it
is like some of your own—while we go on to show how Christ's claims
are proved, and who the parties are with you by whom such fables have
been set agoing to overthrow the truth, which they resemble. The Jews,
too, were well aware that Christ was coming, as those to whom the
prophets spake. Nay, even now His advent is expected by them; nor is
there any other contention between them and us, than that they believe
the advent has not yet occurred. For two comings of Christ having been
revealed to us: a first, which has been fulfilled in the lowliness of a
human lot; a second, which impends over the world, now near its close,
in all the majesty of Deity unveiled; and, by misunderstanding the
first, they have concluded that the second—which, as matter of more
manifest prediction, they set their hopes on—is the only one. It was
the merited punishment of their sin not to understand the Lord's first
advent: for if they had, they would have believed; and if they had
believed, they would have obtained salvation. They themselves read how
it is written of them that they are deprived of wisdom and
understanding—of the use of eyes and ears.(1) As, then, under the
force of their pre-judgment, they had convinced themselves from His
lowly guise that Christ was no more than man, it followed from that, as
a necessary consequence, that they should hold Him a magician from the
powers which He displayed,—expelling devils from men by a word,
restoring vision to the blind, cleansing the leprous, reinvigorating
the paralytic, summoning the dead to life again, making the very
elements of nature obey Him, stilling the storms and walking on the
sea; proving that He was the Logos of God, that primordial
first-begotten Word, accompanied by power and reason, and based on
Spirit,—that He who was now doing all things by His word, and He who
had done that of old, were one and the same. But the Jews were so
exasperated by His teaching, by which their rulers and chiefs were
convicted of the truth, chiefly because so many turned aside to Him,
that at last they brought Him before Pontius Pilate, at that time Roman
governor of Syria; and, by the violence of their outcries against Him,
extorted a sentence giving Him up to them to be crucified. He Himself
had predicted this; which, however, would have signified little had not
the prophets of old done it as well. And yet, nailed upon the cross, He
exhibited many notable signs, by which His death was distinguished from
all others. At His own free-will, He with a word dismissed from Him His
spirit, anticipating the executioner's work. In the same hour, too, the
light of day was withdrawn, when the sun at the very time was in his
meridian blaze. Those who were not aware that this had been predicted
about Christ, no doubt thought it an eclipse. You yourselves have the
account of the world-portent still in your archives.(2) Then, when His
body was taken down from the cross and placed in a sepulchre, the Jews
in their eager watchfulness surrounded it with a large military guard,
lest, as He had predicted His resurrection from the dead on the third
day, His disciples might remove by stealth His body, and deceive even
the incredulous. But, lo, on the third day there a was a sudden shock
of earthquake, and the stone which sealed the sepulchre was rolled
away, and the guard fled off in terror: without a single disciple near,
the grave was found empty of all but the clothes of the buried One. But
nevertheless, the leaders of the Jews, whom it nearly concerned both to
spread abroad a lie, and keep back a people tributary and submissive to
them from the faith, gave it out that the body of Christ had been
stolen by His followers. For the Lord, you see, did not go forth into
the public gaze, lest the wicked should be delivered from their error;
that faith also, destined to a great reward, might hold its ground in
difficulty. But He spent forty days with some of His disciples down in
Galilee, a region of Judea, instructing them in the doctrines they were
to teach to others. Thereafter, having given them commission to preach
the gospel through the world, He was encompassed with a cloud and taken
up to heaven,—a fact more certain far than the assertions of your
Proculi concerning Romulus.(3) All these things Pilate did to Christ;
and now in fact a Christian in his own convictions, he sent word of Him
to the reigning Caesar, who was at the time Tiberius. Yes, and the
Caesars too would have believed on Christ, if either the Caesars had
not been necessary for the world, or if Christians could have been
Caesars. His disciples also, spreading over the world, did as their
Divine Master bade them; and after suffering greatly themselves from
the persecutions of the Jews, and with no unwilling heart, as having
faith undoubting in the truth, at last by Nero's cruel sword sowed the
seed of Christian blood at Rome.(1) Yes, and we shall prove that even
your own gods are effective witnesses for Christ. It is a great matter
if, to give you faith in Christians, I can bring forward the authority
of the very beings on account of whom you refuse them credit. Thus far
we have carried out the plan we laid down. We have set forth this
origin of our sect and name, with this account of the Founder of
Christianity. Let no one henceforth charge us with infamous wickedness;
let no one think that it is otherwise than we have represented, for
none may give a false account of his religion. For in the very fact
that he says he worships another god than he really does, he is guilty
of denying the object of his worship, and transferring his worship and
homage to another; and, in the transference, he ceases to worship the
god he has repudiated. We say, and before all men we say, and torn and
bleeding under your tortures, we cry out, "We worship God through
Christ." Count Christ a man, if you please; by Him and in Him God would
be known and be adored. If the Jews object, we answer that Moses, who
was but a man, taught them their religion; against the Greeks we urge
that Orpheus at Pieria, Musaeus at Athens, Melampus at Argos,
Trophonius in Boeotia, imposed religious rites; turning to yourselves,
who exercise sway over the nations, it was the man Numa Pompilius who
laid on the Romans a heavy load of costly superstitions. Surely Christ,
then, had a right to reveal Deity, which was in fact His own essential
possession, not with the object of bringing boers and savages by the
dread of multitudinous gods, whose favour must be won into some
civilization, as was the case with Numa; but as one who aimed to
enlighten men already civilized, and under illusions from their very
culture, that they might come to the knowledge of the truth. Search,
then, and see if that divinity of Christ be true. If it be of such a
nature that the acceptance of it transforms a man, and makes him truly
good, there is implied in that the duty of renouncing what is opposed
to it as false; especially and on every ground that which, hiding
itself under the names and images of dead, the labours to convince men
of its divinity by certain signs, and miracles, and oracles.
And we affirm indeed the existence of certain spiritual essences;
nor is their name unfamiliar. The philosophers acknowledge there are
demons; Socrates himself waiting on a demon's will. Why not? since it
is said an evil spirit attached itself specially to him even from his
childhood—turning his mind no doubt from what was good. The poets are
all acquainted with demons too; even the ignorant common people make
frequent use of them in cursing. In fact, they call upon Satan, the
demon-chief, in their execrations, as though from some instinctive
soul-knowledge of him. Plato also admits the existence of angels. The
dealers in magic, no less, come forward as witnesses to the existence
of both kinds of spirits. We are instructed, moreover, by our sacred
books how from certain angels, who fell of their own flee-will, there
sprang a more wicked demon-brood, condemned of God along with the
authors of their race, and that chief we have referred to. It will for
the present be enough, however, that some account is given of their
work. Their great business is the ruin of mankind. So, from the very
first, spiritual wickedness sought our destruction. They inflict,
accordingly, upon our bodies diseases and other grievous calamities,
while by violent assaults they hurry the soul into sudden and
extraordinary excesses. Their marvellous subtleness and tenuity give
them access to both parts of our nature. As spiritual, they can do no
harm; for, invisible and intangible, we are not cognizant of their
action save by its effects, as when some inexplicable, unseen poison in
the breeze blights the apples and the grain while in the flower, or
kills them in the bud, or destroys them when they have reached
maturity; as though by the tainted atmosphere in some unknown way
spreading abroad its pestilential exhalations. So, too, by an influence
equally obscure, demons and angels breathe into the soul, and rouse up
its corruptions with furious passions and vile excesses; or with cruel
lusts accompanied by various errors, of which the worst is that by
which these deities are commended to the favour of deceived and deluded
human beings, that they may get their proper food of flesh-fumes and
blood when that is offered up to idol-images. What is daintier food to
the spirit of evil, than turning men's minds away from the true God by
the illusions of a false divination? And here I explain how these
illusions are managed. Every spirit is possessed of wings. This is a
common property of both angels and demons. So they are everywhere in a
single moment; the whole world is as one place to them; all that is
done over the whole extent of it, it is as easy for them to know as to
report. Their swiftness of motion is taken for divinity, because their
nature is unknown. Thus they would have themselves thought sometimes
the authors of the things which they announce; and sometimes, no doubt,
the bad things are their doing, never the good. The purposes of God,
too, they took up of old from the lips of the prophets, even as they
spoke them; and they gather them still from their works, when they hear
them read aloud. Thus getting, too, from this source some intimations
of the future, they set themselves up as rivals of the true God, while
they steal His divinations. But the skill with which their responses
are shaped to meet events, your Croesi and Pyrrhi know too well. On the
other hand, it was in that way we have explained, the Pythian was able
to declare that they were cooking a tortoise(1) with the flesh of a
lamb; in a moment he had been to Lydia. From dwelling in the air, and
their nearness to the stars, and their commerce with the clouds, they
have means of knowing the preparatory processes going on in these upper
regions, and thus can give promise of the rains which they already
feel. Very kind too, no doubt, they are in regard to the healing of
diseases. For, first of all, they make you ill; then, to get a miracle
out of it, they command the application of remedies either altogether
new, or contrary to those in use, and straightway withdrawing hurtful
influence, they are supposed to have wrought a cure. What need, then,
to speak of their other artifices, or yet further of the deceptive
power which they have as spirits: of these Castor apparitions,(2) of
water carried by a sieve, and a ship drawn along by a girdle, and a
beard reddened by a touch, all done with the one object of showing that
men should believe in the deity of stones, and not seek after the only
true God?
Moreover, if sorcerers call forth ghosts, and even make what seem
the souls of the dead to appear; if they put boys to death, in order to
get a response from the oracle; if, with their juggling illusions, they
make a pretence of doing various miracles; if they put dreams into
people's minds by the power of the angels and demons whose aid they
have invited, by whose influence, too, goats and tables are made to
divine,—how much more likely is this power of evil to be zealous in
doing with all its might, of its own inclination, and for its own
objects, what it does to serve the ends of others! Or if both angels
and demons do just what your gods do, where in that case is the
pre-eminence of deity, which we must surely think to be above all in
might? Will it not then be more reasonable to hold that these spirits
make themselves gods, giving as they do the very proofs which raise
your gods to godhead, than that the gods are the equals of angels and
demons? You make a distinction of places, I suppose, regarding as gods
in their temple those whose divinity you do not recognize elsewhere;
counting the madness which leads one man to leap from the sacred
houses, to be something different from that which leads another to leap
from an adjoining house; looking on one who cuts his arms and secret
pans as under a different furor from another who cuts his throat. The
result of the frenzy is the same, and the manner of instigation is one.
But thus far we have been dealing only in words: we now proceed to a
proof of facts, in which we shall show that under different names you
have real identity. Let a person be brought before your tribunals, who
is plainly under demoniacal possession. The wicked spirit, bidden to
speak by a follower of Christ,(3) will as readily make the truthful
confession that he is a demon, as elsewhere he has falsely asserted
that he is a god. Or, if you will, let there be produced one of the
god-possessed, as they are supposed, who, inhaling at the altar,
conceive divinity from the fumes, who are delivered of it by retching,
who vent it forth in agonies of gasping. Let that same Virgin Caelestis
herself the rain-promiser, let Aesculapius discoverer of medicines,
ready to prolong the life of Socordius, and Tenatius, and
Asclepiodotus, now in the last extremity, if they would not confess, in
their fear of lying to a Christian, that they were demons, then and
there shed the blood of that most impudent follower of Christ. What
clearer than a work like that? what more trustworthy than such a proof?
The simplicity of truth is thus set forth; its own worth sustains it;
no ground remains for the least suspicion. Do you say that it is done
by magic, or some trick of that sort? You will not say anything of the
sort, if you have been allowed the use of your ears and eyes. For what
argument can you bring against a thing that is exhibited to the eye in
its naked reality? If, on the one hand, they are really gods, why do
they pretend to be demons? Is it from fear of us? In that case your
divinity is put in subjection to Christians; and you surely can never
ascribe deity to that which is under authority of man, nay (if it adds
aught to the disgrace)of its very enemies. If, on the other hand, they
are demons or angels, why, inconsistently with this, do they presume to
set themselves forth as acting the pan of gods? For as beings who put
themselves out as gods would never willingly call themselves demons, if
they were gods indeed, that they might not thereby in fact abdicate
their dignity; so those whom you know to be no more than demons, would
not dare to act as gods, if those whose names they take and use were
really divine. For they would not dare to treat with disrespect the
higher majesty of beings, whose displeasure they would feel was to be
dreaded. So this divinity of yours is no divinity; for if it were, it
would not be pretended to by demons, and it would not be denied by
gods. But since on beth sides there is a concurrent acknowledgment that
they are not gods, gather from this that there is but a single race—I
mean the race of demons, the real race in both cases. Let your search,
then, now be after gods; for those whom you had imagined to be so you
find to be spirits of evil. The truth is, as we have thus not only
shown from our own gods that neither themselves nor any others have
claims to deity, you may see at once who is really God, and whether
that is He and He alone whom we Christians own; as also whether you are
to believe in Him, and worship Him, after the manner of our Christan
faith and discipline. But at once they will say, Who is this Christ
with his fables? is he an ordinary man? is he a sorcerer? was his body
stolen by his disciples from its tomb? is he now in the realms below?
or is he not rather up in the heavens, thence about to come again,
making the whole world shake, filling the earth with dread alarms,
making all but Christians wail—as the Power of God, and the Spirit of
God, as the Word, the Reason, the Wisdom, and the Son of God? Mock as
you like, but get the demons if you can to join you in your mocking;
let them deny that Christ is coming to judge every human soul which has
existed from the world's beginning, clothing it again with the body it
laid aside at death; let them declare it, say, before your tribunal,
that this work has been allotted to Minos and Rhadamanthus, as Plato
and the poets agree; let them put away from them at least the mark of
ignominy and condemnation. They disclaim being unclean spirits, which
yet we must hold as indubitably proved by their relish for the blood
and fumes and foetid carcasses of sacrificial animals, and even by the
vile language of their ministers. Let them deny that, for their
wickedness condemned already, they are kept for that very judgment-day,
with all their worshippers and their works. Why, all the authority and
power we have over them is from our naming the name of Christ, and
recalling to their memory the woes with which God threatens them at the
hands of Christ as Judge, and which they expect one day to overtake
them. Fearing Christ in God, and God in Christ, they become subject to
the servants of God and Christ. So at our touch and breathing,
overwhelmed bY the thought and realization of those judgment fires,
they leave at our command the bodies they have entered, unwilling, and
distressed, and before your very eyes put to an open shame. You believe
them when they lie; give credit to them, then, when they speak the
truth about themselves. No one plays the liar to bring disgrace upon
his own head, but for the sake of honour rather. You give a readier
confidence to people making confessions against themselves, than
denials in their own behalf. It has not been an unusual thing,
accordingly, for those testimonies of your deities to convert men to
Christianity; for in giving full belief to them, we are led to believe
in Christ. Yes, your very gods kindle up faith in our Scriptures, they
build up the confidence of our hope. You do homage, as I know, to them
also with the blood of Christians. On no account, then, would they lose
those who are so useful and dutiful to them, anxious even to hold you
fast, lest some day or other as Christians you might put them to the
rout,—if under the power of a follower of Christ, who desires to prove
to you the Truth, it were at all possible for them to lie.
This whole confession of these beings, in which they declare that
they are not gods, and in which they tell you that there is no God but
one, the God whom we adore, is quite sufficient to clear us from the
crime of treason, chiefly against the Roman religion. For if it is
certain the gods have no existence, there is no religion in the case.
If there is no religion, because there are no gods, we are assuredly
not guilty of any offence against religion. Instead of that, the charge
recoils on your own head: worshipping a lie, you are really guilty of
the crime you charge on us, not merely by refusing the true religion of
the true God, but by going the further length of persecuting it. But
now, granting that these objects of your worship are really gods, is it
not generally held that there is one higher and more potent, as it were
the world's chief ruler, endowed with absolute power and majesty? For
the common way is to apportion deity, giving an imperial and supreme
domination to one, while its offices are put into the hands of many, as
Plato describes great Jupiter in the heavens, surrounded by an array at
once of deities and demons. It behooves us, therefore, to show equal
respect to the procurators, prefects, and governors of the divine
empire. And yet how great a crime does he commit, who, with the object
of gaining higher favour with the Caesar, transfers his endeavours and
his hopes to another, and does not confess that the appellation of God
as of Emperor belongs only to the Supreme Head, when it is held a
capital offence among us to call, or hear called, by the highest title
any other than Caesar himself! Let one man worship God, another
Jupiter; let one lift suppliant hands to the heavens, another to the
altar of Fides; let one—if you choose to take this view of it—count
in prayer the clouds, and another the ceiling panels; let one
consecrate his own life to his God, and another that of a goat. For see
that you do not give a further ground for the charge of irreligion, by
taking away religious liberty,(1) and forbidding free choice of deity,
so that I may no longer worship according to my inclination, but am
compelled to worship against it. Not even a human being would care to
have unwilling homage rendered him; and so the very Egyptians have been
permitted the legal use of their ridiculous superstition, liberty to
make gods of birds and beasts, nay, to condemn to death any One who
kills a god of their sort. Every province even, and every city, has its
god. Syria has Astarte, Arabia has Dusares, the Norici have Belenus,
Africa has its Caelestis, Mauritania has its own princes. I have
spoken, I think, of Roman provinces, and yet I have not said their gods
are Roman; for they are not worshipped at Rome any more than others who
are ranked as deities over Italy itself by municipal consecration, such
as Delventinus of Casinum, Visidianus of Narnia, Ancharia of Asculum,
Nortia of Volsinii, Valentia of Ocriculum, Hostia of Satrium, Father
Curls of Falisci, in honour of whom, too, Juno got her surname. In,
fact, we alone are prevented having a religion of our own. We give
offence to the Romans, we are excluded from the rights and privileges
of Romans, because we do not worship the gods of Rome. It is well that
there is a God of all, whose we all are, whether we will or no. But
with you liberty is given to worship any god but the true God, as
though He were not rather the God all should worship, to whom all
belong.
I think I have offered sufficient proof upon the question of
false and true divinity, having shown that the proof rests not merely
on debate and argument, but on the witness of the very beings whom you
believe are gods, so that the point needs no further handling. However,
having been led thus naturally to speak of the Romans, I shall not
avoid the controversy which is invited by the groundless assertion of
those who maintain that, as a reward of their singular homage to
religion, the Romans have been raised to such heights of power as to
have become masters of the world; and that so certainly divine are the
beings they worship, that those prosper beyond all others, who beyond
all others honour them.(2) This, forsooth, is the wages the gods have
paid the Romans for their devotion. The progress of the empire is to be
ascribed to Sterculus, the Mutunus, and Larentina! For I can hardly
think that foreign gods would have been disposed to show more favour to
an alien race than to their own, and given their own fatherland, in
which they had their birth, grew up to manhood, became illustrious, and
at last were buried, over to invaders from another shore! As for
Cybele, if she set her affections on the city of Rome as sprung of the
Trojan stock saved from the arms of Greece, she herself forsooth being
of the same race,—if she foresaw her transference(3) to the avenging
people by whom Greece the conqueror of Phrygia was to be subdued, let
her look to it (in regard of her native country's conquest by Greece).
Why, too, even in these days the Mater Magna has given a notable proof
of her greatness which she has conferred as a boon upon the city; when,
after the loss to the State of Marcus Aurelius at Sirmium, on the
sixteenth before the Kalends of April, that most sacred high priest of
hers was offering, a week after, impure libations of blood drawn from
his own arms, and issuing his commands that the ordinary prayers should
be made for the safety of the emperor already dead. O tardy messengers!
O sleepy despatches! through whose fault Cybele had not an earlier
knowledge of the imperial decease, that the Christians might have no
occasion to ridicule a goddess so unworthy. Jupiter, again, would
surely never have permitted his own Crete to fall at once before the
Roman Fasces, forgetful of that Idean cave and the Corybantian cymbals,
and the sweet odour of her who nursed him there. Would he not have
exalted his own tomb above the entire Capitol, that the land which
covered the ashes of Jove might rather be the mistress of the world?
Would Juno have desired the destruction of the Punic city, beloved even
to the neglect of Samos, and that by a nation of AEneadae? As to that I
know, "Here were her arms, here was her chariot, this kingdom, if the
Fates permit, the goddess tends and cherishes to be mistress of the
nations."(1) Jove's hapless wife and sister had no power to prevail
against the Fates! "Jupiter himself is sustained by fate." And yet the
Romans have never done such homage to the Fates, which gave them
Carthage against the purpose and the will of Juno, as to the abandoned
harlot Larentina. It is undoubted that not a few of your gods have
reigned on earth as kings. If, then, they now possess the power of
bestowing empire, when they were kings themselves, from whence had they
received their kingly honours? Whom did Jupiter and Saturn worship? A
Sterculus, I suppose. But did the Romans, along with the native-born
inhabitants, afterwards adore also some who were never kings? In that
case, however, they were under the reign of others, who did not yet bow
down to them, as not yet raised to godhead. It belongs to others, then,
to make gift of kingdoms, since there were kings before these gods had
their names on the roll of divinities. But how utterly foolish it is to
attribute the greatness of the Roman name to religious merits, since it
was after Rome became an empire, or call it still a kingdom, that the
religion she professes made its chief progress! Is it the case now? Has
its religion been the source of the prosperity of Rome? Though Numa set
agoing an eagerness after superstitious observances, yet religion among
the Romans was not yet a matter of images or temples. It was frugal in
its ways, its rites were simple, and there were no capitols struggling
to the heavens; but the altars were offhand ones of turf, and the
sacred vessels were yet of Samian earthen-ware, and from these the
odours rose, and no likeness of God was to be seen. For at that time
the skill of the Greeks and Tuscans in image-making had not yet overrun
the city with the products of their art. The Romans, therefore, were
not distinguished for their devotion to the gods before they attained
to greatness; and so their greatness was not the result of their
religion. Indeed, how could religion make a people great who have owed
their greatness to their irreligion? For, if I am not mistaken,
kingdoms and empires are acquired by wars, and are extended by
victories. More than that, you cannot have wars and victories without
the taking, and often the destruction, of cities. That is a thing in
which the gods have their share of calamity. Houses and temples suffer
alike; there is indiscriminate slaughter of priests and citizens; the
hand of rapine is laid equally upon sacred and on common treasure. Thus
the sacrileges of the Romans are as numerous as their trophies. They
boast as many triumphs over the gods as over the nations; as many
spoils of battle they have still, as there remain images of captive
deities. And the poor gods submit to be adored by their enemies, and
they ordain illimitable empire to those whose injuries rather than
their simulated homage should have had retribution at their hands. But
divinities unconscious are with impunity dishonoured, just as in vain
they are adored. You certainly never can believe that devotion to
religion has evidently advanced to greatness a people who, as we have
put it, have either grown by injuring religion, or have injured
religion by their growth. Those, too, whose kingdoms have become part
of the one great whole of the Roman empire, were not without religion
when their kingdoms were taken from them.
Examine then, and see if He be not the dispenser of kingdoms, who
is Lord at once of the world which is ruled, and of man himself who
rules; if He have not ordained the changes of dynasties, with their
appointed seasons, who was before all time, and made the world a body
of times; if the rise and the fall of states are not the work of Him,
under whose sovereignty the human race once existed without states at
all. How do you allow yourselves to fall into such error? Why, the Rome
of rural simplicity is older than some of her gods; she reigned before
her proud, vast Capitol was built. The Babylonians exercised dominion,
too, before the days of the Pontiffs; and the Medes before the
Quindecemvirs; and the Egyptians before the Salii; and the Assyrians
before the Luperci; and the Amazons before the Vestal Virgins. And to
add another point: if the religions of Rome give empire, ancient Judea
would never have been a kingdom, despising as it did one and all these
idol deities; Judea, whose God you Romans once honoured with victims,
and its temple with gifts, and its people with treaties; and which
would never have been beneath your sceptre but for that last and
crowning offence against God, in rejecting and crucifying Christ
Enough has been said in these remarks to confute the charge of
treason against your re- ligion; for we cannot be held to do harm to
that which has no existence. When we are called therefore to sacrifice,
we resolutely refuse, relying on the knowledge we possess, by which we
are well assured of the real objects to whom these services are
offered, under profaning of images and the deification of human names.
Some, indeed, think it a piece of insanity that, when it is in our
power to offer sacrifice at once, and go away unharmed, holding as ever
our convictions we prefer an obstinate persistence in our confession to
our safety. You advise us, forsooth, to take unjust advantage of you;
but we know whence such suggestions come, who is at the bottom of it
all, and how every effort is made, now by cunning suasion, and now by
merciless persecution, to overthrow our constancy. No other than that
spirit, half devil and half angel, who, hating us because of his own
separation from God, and stirred with envy for the favour God has shown
us, turns your minds against us by an occult influence, moulding and
instigating them to all that perversity in judgment, and that
unrighteous cruelty, which we have mentioned at the beginning of our
work, when entering on this discussion. For, though the whole power of
demons and kindred spirits is subject to us, yet still, as ill-disposed
slaves sometimes conjoin contumacy with fear, and delight to injure
those of whom they at the same time stand in awe, so is it here. For
fear also inspires hatred. Besides, in their desperate condition, as
already under condemnation, it gives them some comfort, while
punishment delays, to have the usufruct of their malignant
dispositions. And yet, when hands are laid on them, they are subdued at
once, and submit to their lot; and those whom at a distance they
oppose, in close quarters they supplicate for mercy. So when, like
insurrectionary workhouses, or prisons, or mines, or any such penal
slaveries, they break forth against us their masters, they know all the
while that they are not a match for us, and just on that account,
indeed, rush the more recklessly to destruction. We resist them,
unwillingly, as though they were equals, and contend against them by
persevering in that which they assail; and our triumph over them is
never more complete than when we are condemned for resolute adherence
to our faith.
But as it was easily seen to be unjust to compel freemen against
their will to offer sacrifice (for even in other acts of religious
service a willing mind is required), it should be counted quite absurd
for one man to compel another to do honour to the gods, when he ought
ever voluntarily, and in the sense of his own need, to seek their
favour, lest in the liberty which is his right he should be ready to
say, "I want none of Jupiter's favours; pray who art thou? Let Janus
meet me with angry looks, with whichever of his faces he likes; what
have you to do with me?" You have been led, no doubt, by these same
evil spirits to compel us to offer sacrifice for the well-being of the
emperor; and you are under a necessity of using force, just as we are
under an obligation to face the dangers of it. This brings us, then, to
the second ground of accusation, that we are guilty of treason against
a majesty more august; for you do homage with a greater dread and an
intenser reverence to Caesar, than Olympian Jove himself. And if you
knew it, upon sufficient grounds. For is not any living man better than
a dead one, whoever he be? But this is not done by you on any other
ground than regard to a power whose presence you vividly realize; so
that also in this you are convicted of impiety to your gods, inasmuch
as you show a greater reverence to a human sovereignty than you do to
them. Then, too, among you, people far more readily swear a false oath
in the name of all the gods, than in the name of the single genius of
Caesar.
Let it be made clear, then, first of all, if those to whom
sacrifice is offered are really able to protect either emperor or
anybody else, and so adjudge us guilty of treason, if angels and
demons, spirits of most wicked nature, do any good, if the lost save,
if the condemned give liberty, if the dead (I refer to what you know
well enough) defend the living. For surely the first thing they would
look to would be the protection of their statues, and images, and
temples, which rather owe their safety, I think, to the watch kept by
Caesar's guards. Nay, I think the very materials of which these are
made come from Caesar's mines, and there is not a temple but depends on
Caesar's will. Yes, and many gods have felt the displeasure of the
Caesar. It makes for my argument if they are also partakers of his
favour, when he bestows on them some gift or privilege. How shall they
who are thus in Caesar's power, who belong entirely to him, have
Caesar's protection in their hands, so that you can imagine them able
to give to Caesar what they more readily get from him? This, then, is
the ground on which we are charged with treason against the imperial
majesty, to wit, that we do not put the emperors under their own
possessions; that we do not offer a mere mock service on their behalf,
as not believing their safety rests in leaden hands. But you are
impious in a high degree who look for it where it is not, who seek it
from those who have it not to give, passing by Him who has it entirely
in His power. Besides this, you persecute those who know where to seek
for it, and who, knowing where to seek for it, are able as well to
secure it.
For we offer prayer for the safety of our princes to the eternal,
the true, the living God, whose favour, beyond all others, they must
themselves desire. They know from whom they have obtained their power;
they know, as they are men, from whom they have received life itself;
they are convinced that He is God alone, on whose power alone they are
entirely dependent, to whom they are second, after whom they occupy the
highest places, before and above all the gods. Why not, since they are
above all living men, and the living, as living, are superior to the
dead? They reflect upon the extent of their power, and so they come to
understand the highest; they acknowledge that they have all their might
from Him against whom their might is nought. Let the emperor make war
on heaven; let him lead heaven captive in his triumph; let him put
guards on heaven; let him impose taxes on heaven! He cannot. Just
because he is less than heaven, he is great. For he himself is His to
whom heaven and every creature appertains. He gets his sceptre where he
first got his humanity; his power where he got the breath of life.
Thither we lift our eyes, with hands outstretched, because free from
sin; with head uncovered, for we have nothing whereof to be ashamed;
finally, without a monitor, because it is from the heart we supplicate.
Without ceasing, for all our emperors we offer prayer. We pray for life
prolonged; for security to the empire; for protection to the imperial
house; for brave armies, a faithful senate, a virtuous people, the
world at rest, whatever, as man or Caesar, an emperor would wish. These
things I cannot ask from any but the God from whom I know I shall
obtain them, both because He alone bestows them and because I have
claims upon Him for their gift, as being a servant of His, rendering
homage to Him alone, persecuted for His doctrine, offering to Him, at
His own requirement, that costly and noble sacrifice of prayer(1)
despatched from the chaste body, an unstained soul, a sanctified
spirit, not the few grains of incense a farthing buys(2)—tears of an
Arabian tree,—not a few drops of wine,—not the blood of some
worthless ox to which death is a relief, and, in addition to other
offensive things, a polluted conscience, so that one wonders, when your
victims are examined by these vile priests, why the examination is not
rather of the sacrificers than the sacrifices. With our hands thus
stretched out and up to God, rend us with your iron claws, hang us up
on crosses, wrap us in flames, take our heads from us with the sword,
let loose the wild beasts on us,—the very attitude of a Christian
praying is one of preparation for all punishment.(3) Let this, good
rulers, be your work: wring from us the soul, beseeching God on the
emperor's behalf. Upon the truth of God, and devotion to His name, put
the brand of crime.
But we merely, you say, flatter the emperor, and feign these prayers of ours to escape persecution. Thank you for your mistake, for you give us the opportunity of proving our allegations. Do you, then, who think that we care nothing for the welfare of Caesar, look into God's revelations, examine our sacred books, which we do not keep in hiding, and which many accidents put into the hands of those who are not of us. Learn from them that a large benevolence is enjoined upon us, even so far as to supplicate God for our enemies, and to beseech blessings on our persecutors.(4) Who, then, are greater enemies and persecutors of Christians, than the very parties with treason against whom we are charged? Nay, even in terms, and most clearly, the Scripture says, "Pray for kings, and rulers, and powers, that all may be peace with you."(5) For when there is disturbance in the empire, if the commotion is felt by its other members, surely we too, though we are not thought to be given to disorder, are to be found in some place or other which the calamity affects.
There is also another and a greater necessity for our offering
prayer in behalf of the emperors, nay, for the complete stability of
the empire, and for Roman interests in general. For we know that a
mighty shock im- pending over the whole earth—in fact, the very end of
all things threatening dreadful woes—-is only retarded by the
continued existence of the Roman empire.(1) We have no desire, then, to
be overtaken by these dire events; and in praying that their coming may
be delayed, we are lending our aid to Rome's duration. More than this,
though we decline to swear by the genii of the Caesars, we swear by
their safety, which is worth far more than all your genii, Are you
ignorant that these genii are called "Daemones," and thence the
diminutive name "Daemonia" is applied to them? We respect in the
emperors the ordinance of God, who has set them over the nations. We
know that there is that in them which God has willed; and to what God
has willed we desire all safety, and we count an oath by it a great
oath. But as for demons, that is, your genii, we have been in the habit
of exorcising them, not of swearing by them, and thereby conferring on
them divine honour.
But why dwell longer on the reverence and sacred respect of
Christians to the emperor, whom we cannot but look up to as called by
our Lord to his office? So that on valid grounds I might say Caesar is
more ours than yours, for our God has appointed him. Therefore, as
having this propriety in him, I do more than you for his welfare, not
merely because I ask it of Him who can give it, or because I ask it as
one who deserves to get it, but also because, in keeping the majesty of
Caesar within due limits, and putting it under the Most High, and
making it less than divine, I commend him the more to the favour of
Deity, to whom I make him alone inferior. But I place him in subjection
to one I regard as more glorious than himself. Never will I call the
emperor God, and that either because it is not in me to be guilty of
falsehood; or that I dare not turn him into ridicule; or that not even
himself will desire to have that high name applied to him. If he is but
a man, it is his interest as man to give God His higher place. Let him
think it enough to bear the name of emperor. That, too, is a great name
of God's giving. To call him God, is to rob him of his title. If he is
not a man, emperor he cannot be. Even when, amid the honours t of a
triumph, he sits on that lofty chariot, he a is reminded that he is
only human. A voice t at his back keeps whispering in his ear, n "Look
behind thee; remember thou art but u a man." And it only adds to his
exultation, that he shines with a glory so surpassing as to require an
admonitory reference to his condition.(2) It adds to his greatness that
he needs such a reminiscence, lest he should think himself divine.
Augustus, the founder of the empire, would not even have the
title Lord; for that, too, is a name of Deity. For my part, I am
willing to give the emperor this designation, but in the common
acceptation of the word, and when I am not forced to call him Lord as
in God's place. But my relation to him is one of freedom; for I have
but one true Lord, the God omnipotent and eternal, who is Lord of the
emperor as well. How can he, who is truly father of his country, be its
lord? The name of piety is more grateful than the name of power; so the
heads of families are called fathers rather than lords. Far less should
the emperor have the name of God. We can only profess our belief that
he is that by the most unworthy, nay, a fatal flattery; it is just as
if, having an emperor, you call another by the name, in which case will
you not give great and unappeasable offence to him who actually
reigns?—an offence he, too, needs to fear on whom you have bestowed
the title. Give all reverence to God, if you wish Him to be propitious
to the emperor. Give up all worship of, and belief in, any other being
as divine. Cease also to give the sacred name to him who has need of
God himself. If such adulation is not ashamed of its lie, in addressing
a man as divine, let it have some dread at least of the evil omen which
it bears. It is the invocation of a curse, to give Caesar the name of
god before his apotheosis.
This is the reason, then, why Christians are counted public
enemies: that they pay no vain, nor false, nor foolish honours to the
emperor; that, as men believing in the true religion, they prefer to
celebrate their festal days with a good conscience, instead of with the
common wantonness. It is, forsooth, a notable homage to bring fires and
couches out before the public, to have feasting from street to street,
to turn the city into one great tavern, to make mud with wine, to run
in troops to acts of violence, to deeds of shamelessness to lust
allurements! What! is public joy manifested by public disgrace? Do
things unseemly at other times beseem the festal days of princes? Do
they who observe the rules of virtue out of reverence for Caesar, for
his sake turn aside from them? Shall piety be a license to immoral
deeds, and shall religion be regarded as affording the occasion for all
riotous extravagance? Poor we, worthy of all condemnation! For why do
we keep the votive days and high rejoicings in honour of the Caesars
with chastity, sobriety, and virtue? Why, on the day of gladness, do we
neither cover our door-posts with laurels, nor intrude upon the day
with lamps? It is a proper thing, at the call of a public festivity, to
dress your house up like some new brothel.(1) However, in the matter of
this homage to a lesser majesty, in reference to which we are accused
of a lower sacrilege, because we do not celebrate along with you the
holidays of the Caesars in a manner forbidden alike by modesty,
decency, and purity,—in truth they have been established rather as
affording opportunities for licentiousness than from any worthy
motive;—in this matter I am anxious to point out how faithful and true
you are, lest perchance here also those who will not have us counted
Romans, but enemies of Rome's chief rulers, be found themselves worse
than we wicked Christians! I appeal to the inhabitants of Rome
themselves, to the native population of the seven hills: does that
Roman vernacular of theirs ever spare a Caesar? The Tiber and the wild
beasts' schools bear witness. Say now if nature had covered our hearts
with a transparent substance through which the light could pass, whose
hearts, all graven over, would not betray the scene of another and
another Caesar presiding at the distribution of a largess? And this at
the very time they are shouting, "May Jupiter take years from us, and
with them lengthen like to you,"—words as foreign to the lips of a
Christian as it is out of keeping with his character to desire a change
of emperor. But this is the rabble, you say; yet, as the rabble, they
still are Romans, and none more frequently than they demand the death
of Christians.(2) Of course, then, the other classes, as befits their
higher rank, are religiously faithful. No breath of treason is there
ever in the senate, in the equestrian order, in the camp, in the
palace. Whence, then, came a Cassius, a Niger, an Albinus? Whence they
who beset the Caesar(3) between the two laurel groves? Whence they who
practised wrestling, that they might acquire skill to strangle him?
Whence they who in full armour broke into the palace,(4) more audacious
than all your Tigerii and Parthenii.(5) If I mistake not, they were
Romans; that is, they were not Christians. Yet all of them, on the very
eve of their traitorous outbreak, offered sacrifices for the safety of
the emperor, and swore by his genius, one thing in profession, and
another in the heart; and no doubt they were in the habit of calling
Christians enemies of the state. Yes, and persons who are now daily
brought to light as confederates or approvers of these crimes and
treasons, the still remnant gleanings after a vintage of traitors, with
what verdant and branching laurels they clad their door-posts, with
what lofty and brilliant lamps they smoked their porches, with what
most exquisite and gaudy couches they divided the Forum among
themselves; not that they might celebrate public rejoicings, but that
they might get a foretaste of their own votive seasons in partaking of
the festivities of another, and inaugurate the model and image of their
hope, changing in their minds the emperor's name. The same homage is
paid, dutifully too, by those who consult astrologers, and soothsayers,
and augurs, and magicians, about the life of the Caesars,—arts which,
as made known by the angels who sinned, and forbidden by God,
Christians do not even make use of in their own affairs. But who has
any occasion to inquire about the life of the emperor, if he have not
some wish or thought against it, or some hopes and expectations after
it? For consultations of this sort have not the same motive in the case
of friends as in the case of sovereigns. The anxiety of a kinsman is
something very different from that of a subject.
If it is the fact that men bearing the name of Romans are found
to be enemies of Rome, why are we, on the ground that we are regarded
as enemies, denied the name of Romans? We may be at once Romans and
foes of Rome, when men passing for Romans are discovered to be enemies
of their country. So the affection, and fealty, and reverence, due to
the emperors do not consist in such tokens of homage as these, which
even hostility may be zealous in performing, chiefly as a cloak to its
purposes; but in those ways which Deity as cerainly enjoins on us, as
they are held to be necessary in the case of all men as well as
emperors. Deeds of true heart-goodness are not due by us to emperors
alone. We never do good with respect of persons; for in our own
interest we conduct ourselves as those who take no payment either of
praise or premium from man, but from God, who both requires and
remunerates an impartial benevolence.(1) We are the same to emperors as
to our ordinary neighbors. For we are equally forbidden to wish ill, to
do ill, to speak ill, to think ill of all men. The thing we must not do
to an emperor, we must not do to any one else: what we would not do tO
anybody, a fortiori, perhaps we should not do to him whom God has been
pleased so highly to exalt.
If we are enjoined, then, to love our enemies, as I have remarked
above, whom have we to hate? If injured, we are forbidden to retaliate,
lest we become as bad ourselves: who can suffer injury at our hands? In
regard to this, recall your own experiences. How often you inflict
gross cruelties on Christians, partly because it is your own
inclination, and partly in obedience to the laws! How often, too, the
hostile mob, paying no regard to you, takes the law into its own hand,
and assails us with stones and flames! With the very frenzy of the
Bacchanals, they do not even spare the Christian dead, but tear them,
now sadly changed, no longer entire, from the rest of the tomb, from
the asylum we might say of death, cutting them in pieces, rending them
asunder. Yet, banded together as we are, ever so ready to sacrifice our
lives, what single case of revenge for injury are you able to point to,
though, if it were held right among us to repay evil by evil, a single
night with a torch or two could achieve an ample vengeance? But away
with the idea of a sect divine avenging itself by human fires, or
shrinking from the sufferings in which it is tried. If we desired,
indeed, to act the part of open enemies, not merely of secret avengers,
would there be any lacking in strength, whether of numbers or
resources? The Moors, the Marcomanni, the Parthians themselves, or any
single people, however great, inhabiting a distinct territory, and
confined within its own boundaries, surpasses, forsooth, in numbers,
one spread over all the world! We are but of yesterday, and we have
filled every place among you—cities, islands, fortresses, towns,
market-places, the very camp, tribes, companies, palace, senate,
forum,—we have left nothing to you but the temples of your gods. For
what wars should we not be fit, not eager, even with unequal forces, we
who so willingly yield ourselves to the sword, if in our religion it
were not counted better to be slain than to slay? Without arms even,
and raising no insurrectionary banner, but simply in enmity to you, we
could carry on the contest with you by an ill-willed severance alone.
For if such multitudes of men were to break away from you, and betake
themselves to some remote corner of the world, why, the very loss of so
many citizens, whatever sort they were, would cover the empire with
shame; nay, in the very forsaking, vengeance would be inflicted. Why,
you would be horror-struck at the solitude in which you would find
yourselves, at such an all-prevailing silence, and that stupor as of a
dead world. You would have to seek subjects to govern. You would have
more enemies than citizens remaining. For now it is the immense number
of Christians which makes your enemies so few,—almost all the
inhabitants of your various cities being followers of Christ.(2) Yet
you choose to call us enemies of the human race, rather than of human
error. Nay, who would deliver you from those secret foes, ever busy
both destroying your souls and ruining your health? Who would save you,
I mean, from the attacks of those spirits of evil, which without reward
or hire we exorcise? This alone would be revenge enough for us, that
you were henceforth left free to the possession of unclean spirits. But
instead of taking into account what is due to us for the important
protection we afford you, and though we are not merely no trouble to
you, but in fact necessary to your well-being, you prefer to hold us
enemies, as indeed we are, yet not of man, but rather of his error.
Ought not Christians, therefore, to receive not merely a somewhat
milder treatment, but to have a place among the law-tolerated
societies, seeing they are not chargeable with any such crimes as are
commonly dreaded from societies of the illicit class? For, unless I
mistake the matter, the prevention of such associations is based on a
prudential regard to public order, that the state may not be divided
into parties, which would naturally lead to disturbance in the
electoral assemblies, the councils, the curiae, the special
conventions, even in the public shows by the hostile collisions of
rival parties; especially when now, in pursuit of gain, men have begun
to consider their violence an article to be bought and sold. But as
those in whom all ardour in the pursuit of glory and honour is dead, we
have no pressing inducement to take part in your public meetings; nor
is there aught more entirely foreign to us than affairs of state. We
ac- knowledge one all-embracing commonwealth—the world. We renounce
all your spectacles, as strongly as we renounce the matters originating
them, which we know were conceived of superstition, when we give up the
very things which are the basis of their representations. Among us
nothing is ever said, or seen, or heard, which has anything in common
with the madness of the circus, the immodesty of the theatre, the
atrocities of the arena, the useless exercises of the wrestling-ground.
Why do you take offence at us because we differ from you in regard to
your pleasures? If we will not partake of your enjoyments, the loss is
ours, if there be loss in the case, not yours. We reject what pleases
you. You, on the other hand, have no taste for what is our delight. The
Epicureans were allowed by you to decide for themselves one true source
of pleasure—I mean equanimity the Christian, on his part, has many
such enjoyments—what harm in that?
I shall at once go on, then, to exhibit the peculiarities of the
Christian society, that, as I have refuted the evil charged against it,
I may point out its positive good.(1) We are a body knit together as
such by a common religious profession, by unity of discipline, and by
the bond of a common hope. We meet together as an assembly and
congregation, that, offering up prayer to God as with united force, we
may wrestle with Him in our supplications. This violence God delights
in. We pray, too, for the emperors, for their ministers and for all in
authority, for the welfare of the world, for the prevalence of peace,
for the delay of the final consummation.(2) We assemble to read our
sacred writings, if any peculiarity of the times makes either
forewarning or reminiscence needful.(3) However it be in that respect,
with the sacred words we nourish our faith, we animate our hope, we
make our confidence more stedfast; and no less by inculcations of God's
precepts we confirm good habits. In the same place also exhortations
are made, rebukes and sacred censures are administered. For with a
great gravity is the work of judging carried on among us, as befits
those who feel assured that they are in the sight of God; and you have
the most notable example of judgment to come when any one has sinned so
grievously as to require his severance from us in prayer, in the
congregation and in all sacred intercourse. The tried men of our elders
preside over us, obtaining that honour not by purchase, but by
established character. There is no buying and selling of any sort in
the things of God. Though we have our treasure-chest, it is not made up
of purchase-money, as of a religion that has its price. On the monthly
day,(4) if he likes, each puts in a small donation; but only if it be
his pleasure, and only if he be able: for there is no compulsion; all
is voluntary. These gifts are, as it were, piety's deposit fund. For
they are not taken thence and spent on feasts, and drinking-bouts, and
eating-houses, but to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants
of boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and of old persons
confined now to the house; such, too, as have suffered shipwreck; and
if there happen to be any in the mines, or banished to the islands, or
shut up in the prisons, for nothing but their fidelity to the cause of
God's Church, they become the nurslings of their confession. But it is
mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon
us. See, they say, how they love one(5) another, for themselves are
animated by mutual hatred; how they are ready even to die for one
another, for they themselves will sooner put to death. And they are
wroth with us, too, because we call each other brethren; for no other
reason, as I think, than because among themselves names of
consanguinity are assumed in mere pretence of affection. But we are
your brethren as well, by the law of I our common mother nature, though
you are hardly men, because brothers so unkind. At the same time, how
much more fittingly they are called and counted brothers who have been
led to the knowledge of God as their common Father, who have drunk in
one spirit of holiness, who from the same womb of a common ignorance
have agonized into the same light of truth! But on this very account,
perhaps, we are regarded as having less claim to be held true brothers,
that no tragedy makes a noise about our brotherhood, or that the family
possessions, which generally destroy brotherhood among you, create
fraternal bonds among us. One in mind and soul, we do not hesitate to
share our earthly goods with one another. All things are common among
us but our wives. We give up our community where it is practised alone
by others, who not only take possession of the wives of their friends,
but most tolerantly also accommodate their friends with theirs,
following the example, I believe, of those wise men of ancient times,
the Greek Socrates and the Roman Cato, who shared with their friends
the wives whom they had married, it seems for the sake of progeny both
to themselves and to others; whether in this acting against their
partners' wishes, I am not able to say. Why should they have any care
over their chastity, when their husbands so readily bestowed it away? O
noble example of Attic wisdom, of Roman gravity—the philosopher and
the censor playing pimps! What wonder if that great love of Christians
towards one another is desecrated by you! For you abuse also our humble
feasts, on the ground that they are extravagant as well as infamously
wicked. To us, it seems, applies the saying of Diogenes: "The people of
Megara feast as though they were going to die on the morrow; they build
as though they were never to die!" But one sees more readily the mote
in another's eye than the beam in his own. Why, the very air is soured
with the eructations of so many tribes, and curioe, and decurioe. The
Salii cannot have their feast without going into debt; you must get the
accountants to tell you what the tenths of Hercules and the sacrificial
banquets cost; the choicest cook is appointed for the Apaturia, the
Dionysia, the Attic mysteries; the smoke from the banquet of Serapis
will call out the firemen. Yet about the modest supper-room of the
Christians alone a great ado is made. Our feast explains itself by its
name The Greeks call it agape, i.e., affection. Whatever it costs, our
outlay in the name of piety is gain, since with the good things of the
feast we benefit the needy; not as it is with you, do parasites aspire
to the glory of satisfying their licentious propensities, selling
themselves for a belly-feast to all disgraceful treatment,—but as it
is with God himself, a peculiar respect is shown to the lowly. If the
object of our feast be good, in the light of that consider its further
regulations. As it is an act of religious service, it permits no
vileness or immodesty. The participants, before reclining, taste first
of prayer to God. As much is eaten as satisfies the cravings of hunger;
as much is drunk as befits the chaste. They say it is enough, as those
who remember that even during the night they have to worship God; they
talk as those who know that the Lord is one of their auditors. After
manual ablution, and the bringing in of lights, each(1) is asked to
stand forth and sing, as he can, a hymn to God, either one from the
holy Scriptures or one of his own composing,—a proof of the measure of
our drinking. As the feast commenced with prayer, so with prayer it is
closed. We go from it, not like troops of mischief-doers, nor bands of
vagabonds, nor to break out into licentious acts, but to have as much
care of our modesty and chastity as if we had been at a school of
virtue rather than a banquet. Give the congregation of the Christians
its due, and hold it unlawful, if it is like assemblies of the illicit
sort: by all means let it be condemned, if any complaint can be validly
laid against it, such as lies against secret factions. But who has ever
suffered harm from our assemblies? We are in our congregations just
what we are when separated from each other; we are as a community what
we are individuals; we injure nobody, we trouble nobody. When the
upright, when the virtuous meet together, when the pious, when the pure
assemble in congregation, you ought not to call that a faction, but a
curia—[i.e., the court of God.]
On the contrary, they deserve the name of faction who conspire to
bring odium on good men and virtuous, who cry out against innocent
blood, offering as the justification of their enmity the baseless plea,
that they think the Christians the cause of every public disaster, of
every affliction with which the people are visited. If the Tiber rises
as high as the city walls, if the Nile does not send its waters up over
the fields, if the heavens give no rain, if there is an earthquake, if
there is famine or pestilence, straightway the cry(2) is, "Away with
the Christians to the lion!" What! shall you give such multitudes to a
single beast? Pray, tell me how many calamities befell the world and
particular cities before Tiberius reigned—before the coming, that is,
of Christ? We read of the islands of Hiera, and Anaphe, and Delos, and
Rhodes, and Cos, with many thousands of human beings, having been
swallowed up. Plato informs us that a region larger than Asia or Africa
was seized by the Atlantic Ocean. An earthquake, too, drank up the
Corinthian sea; and the force of the waves cut off a part of Lucania,
whence it obtained the name of Sicily. These things surely could not
have taken place without the inhabitants suffering by them. But
where—I do not say were Christians, those despisers of your gods—but
where were your gods themselves in those days, when the flood poured
its destroying waters over all the world, or, as Plato thought, merely
the level portion of it? For that they are of later date than that
calamity, the very cities in which they were born and died, nay, which
they founed, bear ample testimony; for the cities could have no
existence at this day unless as belonging to postdiluvian times.
Palestine had not yet received from Egypt its Jewish swarm (of
emigrants), nor had the race from which Christians sprung yet settled
down there, when its neighbors Sodom and Gomorrah were consumed by fire
from heaven. The country yet smells of that conflagration; and if there
are apples there upon the trees, it is only a promise to the eye they
give—you but touch them, and they turn to ashes. Nor had Tuscia and
Campania to complain of Christians in the days when fire from heaven
overwhelmed Vulsinii, and Pompeii was destroyed by fire from its own
mountain. No one yet worshipped the true God at Rome, when Hannibal at
Cannae counted the Roman slain by the pecks of Roman rings. Your gods
were all objects of adoration, universally acknowledged, when the
Senones closely besieged the very Capitol. And it is in keeping with
all this, that if adversity has at any time befallen cities, the
temples and the walls have equally shared in the disaster, so that it
is clear to demonstration the thing was not the doing of the gods,
seeing it also overtook themselves. The truth is, the human race has
always deserved ill at God's hand. First of all, as undutiful to Him,
because when it knew Him in part, it not only did not seek after Him,
but even invented other gods of its own to worship; and further,
because, as the result of their willing ignorance of the Teacher of
righteousness, the Judge and Avenger of sin, all vices and crimes grew
and flourished. But had men sought, they would have come to know the
glorious object of their seeking; and knowledge would have produced
obedience, and obedience would have found a gracious instead of an
angry God. They ought then to see that the very same God is angry with
them now as in ancient times, before Christians were so much as spoken
of. It was His blessings they enjoyed—created before they made any of
their deities: and why can they not take it in, that their evils come
from the Being whose goodness they have failed to recognize? They
suffer at the hands of Him to whom they have been ungrateful. And, for
all that is said, if we compare the calamities of former times, they
fall on us more lightly now, since God gave Christians to the world;
for from that time virtue put some restraint on the world's wickedness,
and men began to pray for the averting of God's wrath. In a word, when
the summer clouds give no rain, and the season is matter of anxiety,
you indeed—full of feasting day by day, and ever eager for the
banquet, baths and taverns and brothels always busy—offer up to
Jupiter your rain-sacrifices; you enjoin on the people barefoot
processions; you seek heaven at the Capitol; you look up to the
temple-ceilings for the longed-for clouds—God and heaven not in all
your thoughts. We, dried up with fastings, and our passions bound
tightly up, holding back as long as possible from all the ordinary
enjoyments of life, rolling in sackcloth and ashes, assail heaven with
our importunities—touch God's heart—and when we have extorted divine
compassion, why, Jupiter gets all the honour!
You, therefore, are the sources of trouble in human affairs; on
you lies the blame of public adversities, since you are ever attracting
them—you by whom God is despised and images are worshipped. It should
surely seem the more natural thing to believe that it is the neglected
One who is angry, and not they to whom all homage is paid; or most
unjustly they act, if, on account of the Christians, they send trouble
on their own devotees, whom they are bound to keep clear of the
punishments of Christians. But this, you say, hits your God as well,
since He permits His worshippers to suffer on account of those who
dishonour Him. But admit first of all His providential arrangings, and
you will not make this retort. For He who once for all appointed an
eternal judgment at the world's close, does not precipitate the
separation, which is essential to judgment, before the end. Meanwhile
He deals with all sorts of men alike, so that all together share His
favours and reproofs. His will is, that outcasts and elect should have
adversities and prosperities in common, that we should have all the
same experience of His goodness and severity. Having learned these
things from His own lips, we love His goodness, we fear His wrath,
while both by you are treated with contempt; and hence the sufferings
of life, so far as it is our lot to be overtaken by them, are in our
case gracious admonitions, while in yours they are divine punishments.
We indeed are not the least put about: for, first, only one thing in
this life greatly concerns us, and that is, to get quickly out of it;
and next, if any adversity befalls us, it is laid to the door of your
transgressions. Nay, though we are likewise involved in troubles
because of our close connection with you, we are rather glad of it,
because we recognize in it divine foretellings, which, in fact, go to
confirm the confidence and faith of our hope. But if all the evils you
endure are inflicted on you by the gods you worship out of spite to us,
why do you continue to pay homage to beings so ungrateful, and unjust;
who, instead of being angry with you, should rather have been aiding
and abetting you by persecuting Christians—keeping you clear of their
sufferings?
But we are called to account as harm-doers on another(1) ground,
and are accused of being useless in the affairs of life. How in all the
world can that be the case with people who are living among you, eating
the same food wearing the same attire, having the same habits, under
the same necessities of existence? We are not Indian Brahmins or
Gymnosophists, who dwell in woods and exile themselves from ordinary
human life. We do not forget the debt of gratitude we owe to God, our
Lord and Creator; we reject no creature of His hands, though certainly
we exercise restraint upon ourselves, lest of any gift of His we make
an immoderate or sinful use. So we sojourn with you in the world,
abjuring neither forum, nor shambles, nor bath, nor booth, nor
workshop, nor inn, nor weekly market, nor any other places of commerce.
We sail with you, and fight with you,(2) and till the ground with you;
and in like manner we unite with you in your traffickings—even in the
various arts we make public property of our works for your benefit. How
it is we seem useless in your ordinary business, living with you and by
you as we do, I am not able to understand. But if I do not frequent
your religious ceremonies, I am still on the sacred day a man. I do not
at the Saturnalia bathe myself at dawn, that I may not lose both day
and night; yet I bathe at a decent and healthful hour, which preserves
me both in heat and blood. I can be rigid and pallid like you after
ablution when I am dead. I do not recline in public at the feast of
Bacchus, after the manner of the beast-fighters at their final banquet.
Yet of your resources I partake, wherever I may chance to eat. I do not
buy a crown for my head. What matters it to you how I use them, if
nevertheless the flowers are purchased? I think it more agreeable to
have them free and loose, waving all about. Even if they are woven into
a crown, we smell the crown with our nostrils: let those look to it who
scent the perfume with their hair. We do not go to your spectacles; yet
the articles that are sold there, if I need them, I will obtain more
readily at their proper places. We certainly buy no frankincense. If
the Arabias complain of this, let the Sabaeans be well assured that
their more precious and costly merchandise is expended as largely in
the burying of Christians(3) as in the fumigating of the gods. At any
rate, you say, the temple revenues are every day falling off:(4) how
few now throw in a contribution! In truth, we are not able to give alms
both to your human and your heavenly mendicants; nor do we think that
we are required to give any but to those who ask for it. Let Jupiter
then hold out his hand and get, for our compassion spends more in the
streets than yours does in the temples. But your other taxes will
acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Christians; for in the faithfulness
which keeps us from fraud upon a brother, we make conscience of paying
all their dues: so that, by ascertaining how much is lost by fraud and
falsehood in the census declarations—the calculation may easily be
made—it would be seen that the ground of complaint in one department
of revenue is compensated by the advantage which others derive.
I will confess, however, without hesitation, that there are some who in a sense may complain of Christians that they are a sterile race: as, for instance, pimps, and panders, and bath-suppliers; assassins, and poisoners, and sorcerers; soothsayers, too, diviners, and astrologers. But it is a noble fruit of Christians, that they have no fruits for such as these. And yet, whatever loss your interests suffer from the religion we profess, the protection you have from us makes amply up for it. What value do you set on persons, I do not here urge who deliver you from demons, I do not urge who for your sakes present prayers before the throne of the true God, for perhaps you have no belief in that—but from whom you can have nothing to fear?
Yes, and no one considers what the loss is to the common weal,—a
loss as great as it is real, no one estimates the injury entailed upon
the state, when, men of virtue as we are, we are put to death in such
numbers; when so many of the truly good suffer the last penalty. And
here we call your own acts to witness, you who are daily presiding at
the trials of prisoners, and passing sentence upon crimes. Well, in
your long lists of those ac- cased of many and various atrocities, has
any assassin, any cutpurse, any man guilty of sacrilege, or seduction,
or stealing bathers' clothes, his name entered as being a Christian
too? Or when Christians are brought before you on the mere ground of
their name, is there ever found among them an ill-doer of the sort? It
is always with your folk the prison is steaming, the mines are sighing,
the wild beasts are fed: it is from you the exhibitors of gladiatorial
shows always get their herds of criminals to feed up for the occasion.
You find no Christian there, except simply as being such; or if one is
there as something else, a Christian he is no longer.(1)
We, then, alone are without crime. Is there ought wonderful in
that, if it be a very necessity with us? For a necessity indeed it is.
Taught of God himself what goodness is, we have both a perfect
knowledge of it as revealed to us by a perfect Master; and faithfully
we do His will, as enjoined on us by a Judge we dare not despise. But
your ideas of virtue you have got from mere human opinion; on human
authority, too, its obligation rests: hence your system of practical
morality is deficient, both in the fulness and authority requisite to
produce a life of real virtue. Man's wisdom to point out what is good,
is no greater than his authority to exact the keeping of it; the one is
as easily deceived as the other is despised. And so, which is the
ampler rule, to say, "Thou shalt not kill," or to teach, "Be not even
angry?" Which is more perfect, to forbid adultery, or to restrain from
even a single lustful look? Which indicates the higher intelligence,
interdicting evil-doing, or evil-speaking? Which is more thorough, not
allowing an injury, or not even suffering an injury done to you to be
repaid? Though withal you know that these very laws also of yours,
which seem to lead to virtue, have been borrowed from the law of God as
the ancient model. Of the age of Moses we have already spoken. But what
is the real authority of human laws, when it is in man's power both to
evade them, by generally managing to hide himself out of sight in his
crimes, and to despise them sometimes, if inclination or necessity
leads him to offend? Think of these things, too, in the light of the
brevity of any punishment you can inflict—never to last longer than
till death. On this ground Epicurus makes light of all suffering and
pain, maintaining that if it is small, it is contemptible; and if it is
great, it is not long-continued. No doubt about it, we, who receive our
awards under the judgment of an all-seeing God, and who look forward to
eternal punishment from Him for sin,—we alone make real effort to
attain a blameless life, under the influence of our ampler knowledge,
the impossibility of concealment, and the greatness of the threatened
torment, not merely long-enduring but everlasting, fearing Him, whom he
too should fear who the fearing judges,—even God, I mean, and not the
proconsul.
We have sufficiently met, as I think, the accusation of the
various crimes on the ground of which these fierce demands are made for
Christian blood. We have made a full exhibition of our case; and we
have shown you how we are able to prove that our statement is correct,
from the trustworthiness, I mean, and antiquity of our sacred writings,
and from the confession likewise of the powers of spiritual wickedness
themselves. Who will venture to undertake our refutation; not with
skill of words, but, as we have managed our demonstration, on the basis
of reality? But while the truth we hold is made clear to all, unbelief
meanwhile, at the very time it is convinced of the worth of
Christianity, which has now become well known for its benefits as well
as from the intercourse of life, takes up the notion that it is not
really a thing divine, but rather a kind of philosophy. These are the
very things, it says, the philosophers counsel and profess—innocence,
justice, patience, sobriety, chastity. Why, then, are we not permitted
an equal liberty and impunity for our doctrines as they have, with
whom, in respect of what we teach, we are compared? or why are not
they, as so like us, not pressed to the same offices, for declining
which our lives are imperilled? For who compels a philosopher to
sacrifice or take an oath, or put out useless lamps at midday? Nay,
they openly overthrow your gods, and in their writings they attack your
superstitions; and you applaud them for it. Many of them even, with
your countenance, bark out against your rulers, and are rewarded with
statues and salaries, instead of being given to the wild beasts. And
very right it should be so. For they are called philosophers, not
Christians. This name of philosopher has no power to put demons to the
rout. Why are they not able to do that too? since philosophers count
demons inferior to gods. Socrates used to say, "If the demon grant
permission." Yet he, too, though in denying the existence of your
divinities he had a glimpse of the truth, at his dying ordered a cock
to be sacrificed to Aesculapius, I believe in honour of his father,(1)
for Apollo pronounced Socrates the wisest of men. Thoughtless Apollo!
testifying to the wisdom of the man who denied the existence of his
race. In proportion to the enmity the truth awakens, you give offence
by faithfully standing by it; but the man who corrupts and makes a mere
pretence of it precisely on this ground gains favour with its
persecutors. The truth which philosophers, these mockers and corrupters
of it, with hostile ends merely affect to hold, and in doing so
deprave, caring for nought but glory, Christians both intensely and
intimately long for and maintain in its integrity, as those who have a
real concern about their salvation. So that we are like each other
neither in our knowledge nor our ways, as you imagine. For what certain
information did Thales, the first of natural philosophers, give in
reply to the inquiry of Croesus regarding Deity, the delay for further
thought so often proving in vain? There is not a Christian workman but
finds out God, and manifests Him, and hence assigns to Him all those
attributes which go to constitute a divine being, though Plato affirms
that it is far from easy to discover the Maker of the universe; and
when He is found, it is difficult to make Him known to all. But if we
challenge you to comparison in the virtue of chastity, I turn to a part
of the sentence passed by the Athenians against Socrates, who was
pronounced a corrupter of youth. The Christian confines himself to the
female sex. I have read also how the harlot Phryne kindled in Diogenes
the fires of lust, and how a certain Speusippus, of Plato's school,
perished in the adulterous act. The Christian husband has nothing to do
with any but his own wife. Democritus, in putting out his eyes, because
he could not look on women without lusting after them, and was pained
if his passion was not satisfied, owns plainly, by the punishment he
inflicts, his incontinence. But a Christian with grace-healed eyes is
sightless in this matter; he is mentally blind against the assaults of
passion. If I maintain our superior modesty of behaviour, there at once
occurs to me Diogenes with filth-covered feet trampling on the proud
couches of Plato, under the influence of another pride: the Christian
does not even play the proud man to the pauper. If sobriety of spirit
be the virtue in debate, why, there are Pythagoras at Thurii, and Zeno
at Priene, ambitious of the supreme power: the Christian does not
aspire to the aedileship. If equanimity be the contention, you have
Lycurgus choosing death by self-starvation, because the Lacons had made
some emendation of his laws: the Christian, even when he is condemned,
gives thanks.(2) If the comparison be made in regard to
trustworthiness, Anaxagoras denied the deposit of his enemies: the
Christian is noted for his fidelity even among those who are not of his
religion. If the matter of sincerity is to be brought to trial,
Aristotle basely thrust his friend Hermias from his place: the
Christian does no harm even to his foe. With equal baseness does
Aristotle play the sycophant to Alexander, instead of exercising to
keep him in the right way, and Plato allows himself to be bought by
Dionysius for his belly's sake. Aristippus in the purple, with all his
great show of gravity, gives way to extravagance; and Hippias is put to
death laying plots against the state: no Christian ever attempted such
a thing in behalf of his brethren, even when persecution was scattering
them abroad with every atrocity. But it will be said that some of us,
too, depart from the rules of our discipline. In that case, however, we
count them no longer Christians; but the philosophers who do such
things retain still the name and the honour of wisdom. So, then, where
is there any likeness between the Christian and the philosopher?
between the disciple of Greece and of heaven? between the man whose
object is fame, and whose object is life? between the talker and he
doer? between the man who builds up and the man who pulls down? between
the friend and the foe of error? between one who corrupts the truth,
and one who restores and teaches it? between its chief and its
custodier?
Unless I am utterly mistaken, there is nothing so old as the
truth; and the already proved antiquity of the divine writings is so
far of use to me, that it leads men more easily to take it in that they
are the treasure-source whence all later wisdom has been taken. And
were it not necessary to keep my work to a moderate size, I might
launch forth also into the proof of this. What poet or sophist has not
drunk at the fountain of the prophets? Thence, accordingly, the
philosophers watered their arid minds, so that it is the things they
have from us which bring us into comparison with them. For this reason,
I imagine, philosophy was banished by certain states—I mean by the
Thebans, by the Spartans also, and the Argives—its disciples sought to
imitate our doctrines; and ambitious, as I have said, of glory and
eloquence alone, if they fell upon anything in the collection of sacred
Scriptures which displeased them, in their own peculiar style of
research, they perverted it to serve their purpose: for they had no
adequate faith in their divinity to keep them from changing them, nor
had they any sufficient understanding of them, either, as being still
at the time under veil—even obscure to the Jews themselves, whose
peculiar possession they seemed to be. For so, too, if the truth was
distinguished by its simplicity, the more on that account the
fastidiousness of man, too proud to believe, set to altering it; so
that even what they found certain they made uncertain by their
admixtures. Finding a simple revelation of God, they proceeded to
dispute about Him, not as He had revealed to them, but turned aside to
debate about His properties, His nature, His abode. Some assert Him to
be incorporeal; others maintain He has a body,—the Platonists teaching
the one doctrine, and the Stoics the other. Some think that He is
composed of atoms, others of numbers: such are the different views of
Epicurus and Pythagoras. One thinks He is made of fire; so it appeared
to Heraclitus. The Platonists, again, hold that He administers the
affairs of the world; the Epicureans, on the contrary, that He is idle
and inactive, and, so to speak, a nobody in human things. Then the
Stoics represent Him as placed outside the world, and whirling round
this huge mass from without like a potter; while the Platonists place
Him within the world, as a pilot is in the ship he steers. So, in like
manner, they differ in their views about the world itself, whether it
is created or uncreated, whether it is destined to pass away or to
remain for ever. So again it is debated concerning the nature of the
soul, which some contend is divine and eternal, while others hold that
it is dissoluble. According to each one's fancy, He has introduced
either something new, or refashioned the old. Nor need we wonder if the
speculations of philosophers have perverted the older Scriptures. Some
of their brood, with their opinions, have even adulterated our
new-given Christian revelation, and corrupted it into a system of
philosophic doctrines, and from the one path have struck off many and
inexplicable by-roads.(1) And I have alluded to this, lest any one
becoming acquainted with the variety of parties among us, this might
seem to him to put us on a level with the philosophers, and he might
condemn the truth from the different ways in which it is defended. But
we at once put in a plea in bar against these tainters of our purity,
asserting that this is the rule of truth which comes down from Christ
by transmission through His companions, to whom we shall prove that
those devisers of different doctrines are all posterior. Everything
opposed to the truth has been got up from the truth itself, the spirits
of error carrying on this system of opposition. By them all corruptions
of wholesome discipline have been secretly instigated; by them, too,
certain fables have been introduced, that, by their resemblance to the
truth, they might impair its credibility, or vindicate their own higher
claims to faith; so that people might think Christians unworthy of
credit because the poets or philosophers are so, or might regard the
poets and philosophers as worthier of confidence from their not being
followers of Christ. Accordingly, we get ourselves laughed at for
proclaiming that God will one day judge the world. For, like us, the
poets and philosophers set up a judgment-seat in the realms below. And
if we threaten Gehenna, which is a reservoir of secret fire under the
earth for purposes of punishment, we have in the same way derision
heaped on us. For so, too, they have their Pyriphlegethon, a river of
flame in the regions of the dead. And if we speak of Paradise,(2) the
place of heavenly bliss appointed to receive the spirits of the saints,
severed from the knowledge of this world by that fiery zone as by a
sort of enclosure, the Elysian plains have taken possession of their
faith. Whence is it, I pray you have all this, so like us, in the poets
and philosophers? The reason simply is, that they have been taken from
our religion. But if they are taken from our sacred things, as being of
earlier date, then ours are the truer, and have higher claims upon
belief, since even their imitations find faith among you. If they
maintain their sacred mysteries to have sprung from their own minds, in
that case ours will be reflections of what are later than themselves,
which by the nature of things is impossible, for never does the shadow
precede the body which casts it, or the image the reality.(3)
Come now, if some philosopher affirms, as Laberius holds,
following an opinion of Pythagoras, that a man may have his origin from
a mule, a serpent from a woman, and with skill of speech twists every
argument to prove his view, will he not gain acceptance for and work in
some the conviction that, on account of this, they should even abstain
from eating animal food? May any one have the persuasion that he should
so abstain, lest by chance in his beef he eats of some ancestor of his?
But if a Christian promises the return of a man from a man, and the
very actual Gaius from Gaius,(1) the cry of the people will be to have
him stoned; they will not even so much as grant him a hearing. If there
is any ground for the moving to and fro of human souls into different
bodies, why may they not return into the very substance they have left,
seeing this is to be restored, to be that which had been? They are no
longer the very things they had been; for they could not be what they
were not, without first ceasing to be what they had been. If we were
inclined to give all rein upon this point, discussing into what various
beasts one and another might probably be changed, we would need at our
leisure to take up many points. But this we would do chiefly in our own
defence, as setting forth what is greatly worthier of belief, that a
man will come back from a man—any given person from any given person,
still retaining his humanity; so that the soul, with its qualities
unchanged, may be restored to the same condition, thought not to the
same outward framework. Assuredly, as the reason why restoration takes
place at all is the appointed judgment, every man must needs come forth
the very same who had once existed, that he may receive at God's hands
a judgment, whether of good desert or the opposite. And therefore the
body too will appear; for the soul is not capable of suffering without
the solid substance (that is, the flesh; and for this reason, also)
that it is not right that souls should have all the wrath of God to
bear: they did not sin without the body, within which all was done by
them. But how, you say, can a substance which has been dissolved be
made to reappear again? Consider thyself, O man, and thou wilt believe
in it! Reflect on what you were before you came into existence.
Nothing. For if you had been anything, you would have remembered it.
You, then, who were nothing before you existed, reduced to nothing also
when you cease to be, why may you not come into being again out of
nothing, at the will of the same Creator whose will created you out of
nothing at the first? Will it be anything new in your case? You who
were not, were made; when you cease to be again, you shall be made.
Explain, if you can, your original creation, and then demand to know
how you shall be re-created. Indeed, it will be still easier surley to
make you what you were once, when the very same creative power made you
without difficulty what you never were before. There will be doubts,
perhaps, as to the power of God, of Him who hung in its place this huge
body of our world, made out of what had never existed, as from a death
of emptiness and inanity, animated by the Spirit who quickens all
living things, its very self the unmistakable type of the resurrection,
that it might be to you a witness—nay, the exact image of the
resurrection. Light, every day extinguished, shines out again; and,
with like alternation, darkness succeeds light's outgoing. The defunct
stars re-live; the seasons, as soon as they are finished, renew their
course; the fruits are brought to maturity, and then are reproduced.
The seeds do not spring up with abundant produce, save as they rot and
dissolve away;—all things are preserved by perishing, all things are
refashioned out of death. Thou, man of nature so exalted, if thou
understandest thyself, taught even by the Pythian(2) words, lord of all
these things that die and rise,—shalt thou die to perish evermore?
Wherever your dissolution shall have taken place, whatever material
agent has destroyed you, or swallowed you up, or swept you away, or
reduced you to nothingness, it shall again restore you. Even
nothingness is His who is Lord of all. You ask, Shall we then be always
dying, and rising up from death? If so the Lord of all things had
appointed, you would have to submit, though unwillingly, to the law of
your creation. But, in fact, He has no other purpose than that of which
He has informed us. The Reason which made the universe out of diverse
elements, so that all things might be composed of opposite substances
in unity—of void and solid, of animate and inanimate, of
comprehensible and incomprehensible, of light and darkness, of life
itself and death—has also disposed time into order, by fixing and
distinguishing its mode, according to which this first portion of it,
which we inhabit from the beginning of the world, flows down by a
temporal course to a close; but the portion which succeeds, and to
which we look forward continues forever. When, therefore, the boundary
and limit, that millennial interspace, has been passed, when even the
outward fashion of the world itself—which has been spread like a veil
over the eternal economy, equally a thing of time—passes away, then
the whole human race shall be raised again, to have its dues meted out
according as it has merited in the period of good or evil, and
thereafter to have these paid out through the immeasurable ages of
eternity. Therefore after this there is neither death nor repeated
resurrections, but we shall be the same that we are now, and still
unchanged—the servants of God, ever with God, clothed upon with the
proper substance of eternity; but the profane, and all who are not true
worshippers of God, in like manner shall be consigned to the punishment
of everlasting fire—that fire which, from its very nature indeed,
directly ministers to their incorruptibility. The philosophers are
familiar as well as we with the distinction between a common and a
secret fire. Thus that which is in common use is far different from
that which we see in divine judgments, whether striking as thunderbolts
from heaven, or bursting up out of the earth through mountain-tops; for
it does not consume what it scorches, but while it burns it repairs. So
the mountains continue ever burning; and a person struck by lighting is
even now kept safe from any destroying flame. A notable proof this of
the fire eternal! a notable example of the endless judgment which still
supplies punishment with fuel! The mountains burn, and last. How will
it be with the wicked and the enemies of God?(1)
These are what are called presumptuous speculations in our case
alone; in the philosophers and poets they are regarded as sublime
speculations and illustrious discoveries. They are men of wisdom, we
are fools. They are worthy of all honour, we are folk to have the
finger pointed at; nay, besides that, we are even to have punishments
inflicted on us. But let things which are the defence of virtue, if you
will, have no foundation, and give them duly the name of fancies, yet
still they are necessary; let them be absurd if you will, yet they are
of use: they make all who believe them better men and women, under the
fear of never-ending punishment and the hope of never-ending bliss. It
is not, then, wise to brand as false, nor to regard as absurd, things
the truth of which it is expedient to presume. On no ground is it right
positively to condemn as bad what beyond all doubt is profitable. Thus,
in fact, you are guilty of the very presumption of which you accuse us,
in condemning what is useful. It is equally out of the question to
regard them as nonsensical; at any rate, if they are false and foolish,
they hurt nobody. For they are just (in that case) like many other
things on which you inflict no penalties—foolish and fabulous things,
I mean, which, as quite innocuous, are never charged as crimes or
punished. But in a thing of the kind, if this be so indeed, we should
be adjudged to ridicule, not to swords, and flames, and crosses, and
wild beasts, in which iniquitous cruelty not only the blinded populace
exults and insults over us, but in which some of you too glory, not
scrupling to gain the popular favour by your injustice. As though all
you can do to us did not depend upon our pleasure. It is assuredly a
matter of my own inclination, being a Christian. Your condemnation,
then, will only reach me in that case, if I wish to be condemned; but
when all you can do to me, you can do only at my will, all you can do
is dependent on my will, and is not in your power. The joy of the
people in our trouble is therefore utterly reasonless. For it is our
joy they appropriate to themselves, since we would far rather be
condemned than apostatize from God; on the contrary, our haters should
be sorry rather than rejoice, as we have obtained the very thing of our
own choice.
In that case, you say, why do you complain of our persecutions?
You ought rather to be grateful to us for giving you the sufferings you
want. Well, it is quite true that it is our desire to suffer, but it is
in the way that the soldier longs for war. No one indeed suffers
willingly, since suffering necessarily implies fear and danger. Yet the
man who objected to the conflict, both fights with all his strength,
and when victorious, he rejoices in the battle, because he reaps from
it glory and spoil. It is our battle to be summoned to your tribunals
that there, under fear of execution, we may battle for the truth. But
the day is won when the object of the struggle is gained. This victory
of ours gives us the glory of pleasing God, and the spoil of life
eternal. But we are overcome. Yes, when we have obtained our wishes.
Therefore we conquer in dying;(2) we go forth victorious at the very
time we are subdued. Call us, if you like, Sarmenticii and Semaxii,
because, bound to a half-axle stake, we are burned in a circle-heap of
fagots. This is the attitude in which we conquer, it is our
victory-robe, it is for us a sort of triumphal, car. Naturally enough,
therefore, we do not please the vanquished; on account of this, indeed,
we are counted a desperate, reckless race. But the very desperation and
recklessness you object to in us, among yourselves lift high the
standard of virtue in the cause of glory and of fame. Mucius of his own
will left his right hand on the altar: what sublimity of mind!
Empedocles gave his whole body at Catana to the fires of AEtna: what
mental resolution! A certain foundress of Carthage gave herself away in
second marriage to the funeral pile: what a noble witness of her
chastity! Regulus, not wishing that his one life should count for the
lives of many enemies, endured these crosses over all his frame: how
brave a man—even in captivity a conqueror! Anaxarchus, when he was
being beaten to death by a barley-pounder, cried out, "Beat on, beat on
at the case of Anaxarchus; no stroke falls on Anaxarchus himself." O
magnanimity of the philosopher, who even in such an end had jokes upon
his lips! I omit all reference to those who with their own sword, or
with any other milder form of death, have bargained for glory. Nay, see
how even torture contests are crowned by you. The Athenian courtezan,
having wearied out the executioner, at last bit off her tongue and spat
it in the face of the raging tyrant, that she might at the same time
spit away her power of speech, nor be longer able to confess her
fellow-conspirators, if even overcome, that might be her inclination.
Zeno the Eleatic, when he was asked by Dionysius what good philosophy
did, on answering that it gave contempt of death, was all unquailing,
given over to the tyrant's scourge, and sealed his opinion even to the
death. We all know how the Spartan lash, applied with the utmost
cruelty under the very eyes of friends encouraging, confers on those
who bear it honor proportionate to the blood which the young men shed.
O glory legitimate, because it is human, for whose sake it is counted
neither reckless foolhardiness, nor desperate obstinacy, to despise
death itself and all sorts of savage treatment; for whose sake you may
for your native place, for the empire, for friendship, endure all you
are forbidden to do for God! And you cast statues in honour of persons
such as these, and you put inscriptions upon images, and cut out
epitaphs on tombs, that their names may never perish. In so far you can
by your monuments, you yourselves afford a son of resurrection to the
dead. Yet he who expects the true resurrection from God, is insane, if
for God he suffers! But go zealously on, good presidents, you will
stand higher with the people if you sacrifice the Christians at their
wish, kill us, torture us, condemn us, grind us to dust; your injustice
is the proof that we are innocent. Therefore God suffers that we thus
suffer; for but very lately, in condemning a Christian woman to the law
rather than to the leo you made confession that a taint on our purity
is considered among us something more terrible than any punishment and
any death.(1) Nor does your cruelty, however exquisite, avail you; it
is rather a temptation to us. The oftener we are mown down by you, the
more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed.(2) Many of
your writers exhort to the courageous bearing of pain and death, as
Cicero in the Tusculans, as Seneca in his Chances, as Diogenes,
Pyrrhus, Callinicus; and yet their words do not find so many disciples
as Christians do, teachers not by words, but by their deeds. That very
obstinacy you rail against is the preceptress. For who that
contemplates it, is not excited to inquire what is at the bottom of it?
who, after inquiry, does not embrace our doctrines? and when he has
embraced them, desires not to suffer that he may become partaker of the
fulness of God's grace, that he may obtain from God complete
forgiveness, by giving in exchange his blood? For that secures the
remission of all offences. On this account it is that we return thanks
on the very spot for your sentences. As the divine and human are ever
opposed to each other, when we are condemned by you, we are acquitted
by the Highest. ELUCIDATIONS.
(Arrangement, p. 4, supra.)
THE arrangement I have adopted in editing these Edinburgh
Translations of Tertullian is a practical one. It will be found logical
and helpful to the student, who is referred to the Prefatory pages of
this volume for an Elucidation of the difficulties, with which any
arrangement of these treatises is encumbered. For, first, an attempt to
place them in chronological order is out of the question;(1) and,
second, all efforts to separate precisely the Orthodox from the
Montanistic or Montanist works of our author have hitherto defied the
acumen of critics. It would be mere empiricism for me to attempt an
original classification in the face of questions which even experts
have been unable to determine.
If we bear in mind, however, a few guiding facts, we shall see
that difficulties are less than might appear, assuming our object to be
a practical one.(1.) Only four of these essays were written against
Orthodoxy;(2.) five more are reckoned as wholly uncertain, which
amounts to saying that they are not positively heretical. (3.) Again,
five are colourless, as to Montanism, and hence should be reputed
Orthodox. (4.) Of others, written after the influences of Montanism
had, more or less, tainted his doctrine, the whole are yet valuable and
some are noble defences of the Catholic Faith. (5.) Finally eight or
ten of his treatises were written while he was a Catholic, and are
precious contributions to the testimony of the Primitive Church.
From these facts, we may readily conclude that the mass of
Tertullian's writings is Orthodox. Some of them are to be read with
caution; others, again, must be rejected for their heresy; but yet all
are most instructive historically, and as defining even by errors "the
faith once delivered to the Saints." I propose to note those which
require caution as we pass them in review. Those written against the
Church are classed by themselves, at the end of the list, and all the
rest may be read with confidence. A most interesting inquiry arises in
connection with the quotations from Scripture to be found in our
author. Did a Latin version exist in his day, or does he translate from
the Greek of the New Testament and the LXX? A paradoxical writer
(Semler) contends that Tertullian "never used a Greek MS." (see Kaye,
p. 106.) But Tertullian's rugged Latin betrays everywhere his
familiarity with Greek idioms and forms of thought. He wrote, also, in
Greek, and there is no reason to doubt that he knew the Greek
Scriptures primarily, if he knew any Greek whatever. Possibly we owe to
Tertullian the primordia of the Old African Latin Versions, some of
which seem to have contained the disputed text I. John v. 7; of which
more when we come to the Praxeas. For the present in the absence of
definite evidence we must infer that Tertullian usually translated from
the LXX, and from the originals of the New Testament. But Mosheim
thinks the progress of the Gospel in the West was now facilitated by
the existence of Latin Versions. Observe, also, Kaye's important note,
p. 293, and his reference to Lardner, Cred. xxvii. 19.
II.
(Address to Magistrates, cap. i., p. 17.)
The Apology comes first in order, on logical grounds. It is
classed with our author's orthodox works by Neander, and pronounced
colourless by Kaye. It is the noblest of his productions in its purpose
and spirit, and it falls in with the Primitive System of Apologetics. I
have placed next in order to it several treatises, mostly unblemished,
which are of the same character; which defend the cause of Christians
against Paganism, against Gentile Philosophy, and against Judaism;
closing this portion by the two books Ad Nationes, which may be
regarded as a recapitulation of the author's arguments, especially
those to be found in the Apology. In these successive works, as
compared with those of Justin Martyr, we obtain a fair view of the
progressive relations of the Church with the Korean Empire and with
divers antagonistic systems in the East and West.
III.
(History of Christians, cap. ii., p. 18.)
The following Chronological outline borrowed from the
Benedictines and from Bishop Kaye, will prove serviceable here.(1)
Tertullian born (circa) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A.D. 150.
" converted (surmise) . . . . . . . . . . 185.
" married (say) . . . . . .. . . . . . . . 186.
" ordained presbyter (circa) . . . . . . . 192.
" lapsed (circa) . . . . . . . .. . . . . 200.
" deceased (extreme surmise) . . . . . . . 240.
The Imperial history of his period may be thus arranged:
Birth of Caracalla . . . . . . . . . . . . . A.D. 188.
" Geta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189.
Reign of Severus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193.
Defeat of Niger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195.
Caracalla made a Caesar. . . . . . . . . . . 196.
Capture of Byzantium . . . . . . . . . . . . 196.
Defeat of Albinus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197.
Geta made a Caesar . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198.
Caracalla called Augustus . . . . . . . . . . 198.
Caracalla associated in the Empire . . . . . 198.
War against the Parthians. . . . . . . . . . 198.
Severus returns from the war. . . . . . . . . 203.
Celebration of the Secular Games . . . . . . 204.
Plautianus put to death (circa) . . . . . . 205.
Geta called Augustus . . . . . . . . . . . . 208.
War in Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208.
Wall of Severus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210.
Death of Severus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211.
IV.
(Tiberlus, capp. v. and xxiv., pp. 22 and 35.)
A fair examination of what has been said on this subject, pro and
con, may be found in Kaye's Tertullian,(2) pp. 102-105. In his abundant
candour this author leans to the doubters, but in stating the case he
seems to me to fortify the position of Lardner and Mosheim. What the
brutal Tiberius may have thought or done with respect to Pilate's
report concerning the holy victim of his judicial injustice is of
little importance to the believer. Nevertheless, as matter of history
it deserves attention. Great stress is to be placed on the fact that
Tertullian was probably a jurisconsult, familiar with the Roman
archives, and influenced by them in his own acceptance of Divine Truth.
It is not supposable that such a man would have hazarded his bold
appeal to the records, in remonstrating with the Senate and in the very
faces of the Emperor and his colleagues, had he not known that the
evidence was irrefragable.
V.
The darkness at the Crucifixion, cap. xxi., p. 35.)
Kaye disappoints us (p. 150) in his slight notice of this most
interesting subject Without attempting to discuss the story of Phlegon
and other points which afford Gibbon an opportunity for misplaced
sneering, such as even a Pilate would have rebuked, while it may be
well to recall the exposition of Milman,(1) at the close of Gibbon's
fifteenth chapter, I must express my own preference for another view.
This will be found candidly summed up and stated, in the Speaker's
Commentary, in the concise note on St. Matt., xxvii. 45.
VI.
(Numbers of the Faithful, cap. xxxvii., p. 45.)
Kaye, as usual, gives this vexed question a candid survey.(2)
Making all allowances, however, I accept the conjecture of some
reputable authorities, that there were 2,000,000 of Christians, in the
bounds of the Roman Empire at the close of the Second Century. So
mightily grew the testimony of Jesus and prevailed. When we reflect
that only a century intervened between the times of Tertullian and the
conversion of the Roman Emperor, it is not easy to regard our author's
language as merely that of fervid genius and of rhetorical hyperbole.
He could not have ventured upon exaggeration without courting scorn as
well as defeat. What he affirms is probable in the nature of the case.
Were it otherwise, then the conditions, which, in a single century
rendered it possible for Constantine to effect the greatest revolution
in mind and manners that has ever been known among men, would be a
miracle compared with which that of his alleged Vision of the Cross
sinks into insignificance. To this subject it will be necessary to
recur hereafter.
VII.
(Christian usages, cap. xxxix., p. 46.)
A candid review of the matters discussed in this chapter will be
found in Kaye (pp. 146, 209.) The important fact is there clearly
stated that "the primitive Christians scrupulously complied with the
decree pronounced by the Apostles at Jerusalem in abstaining from
things strangled and from blood" (Acts xv. 20). On this subject consult
the references given in the Speaker's Commentary, ad locum. The Greeks,
to their honour, still maintain this prohibition, but St. Augustine's
great authority relaxed the Western scruples on this matter, for he
regarded it is a decree of temporary obligation, while the Hebrew and
Gentile Christians were in peril of misunderstanding and
estrangement.(3)
On the important question as to the cessation of miracles Kaye
takes a somewhat original position. But see his interesting discussion
and that of the late Professor Hey, in Kaye's Tertullian, pp. 80-102,
151-161. I do not think writers on these subjects have sufficiently
distinguished between miracles properly so called, and providences
vouchsafed in answer to prayer. There was no miracle in the case of the
Thundering Legion, assuming the story to be true; and I dare to affirm
that marked answers to prayer, by providential interpositions,
but wholly distinct from miraculous agencies, have never ceased
among those who "ask in the Son's Name." Such interpositions are often
preternatural only; that is, they economize certain powers which,
though natural in themselves, lie outside of the System of Nature with
which we happen to be familiar. This distinction has been overlooked.
VIII.
(Multitudes, cap. xl., p. 47.)
Note the words—"multitudes to a single beast." Can it be
possible that Tertullian would use such language to the magistrates, if
he knew that such sentences were of rare occurrence? The disposition of
our times to minimize the persecutions of our Christian forefathers
calls upon us to note such references, all the more important because
occurring obiter and mentioned as notorious. Note also, the closing
chapter of this Apology, and reference to the outcries of the populace,
in Cap. xxxv.(1) See admirable remarks on the benefits derived by the
Church from the sufferings of Christian martyrs, with direct reference
tO Tertullian, Wordsworth, Church Hist. to Council of Nicoea, cap.
xxiv., p. 374.
IX.
(Christian manners, cap. xlii., p. 49.)
A study of the manners of Christians, in the Ante-Nicene Age, as
sketched by the unsparing hand of Tertullian, will convince any
unprejudiced mind of the mighty power of the Holy Ghost, in framing
such characters out of heathen originals. When, under Montanistic
influences our severely ascetic author complains of the Church's
corruptions, and turns inside-out the whole estate of the faithful, we
see all that can be pressed on the other side; but, this very important
chapter must be borne in mind, together with the closing sentence of
chap. xliv., as evidence that whatever might be said by a rigid
disciplinarian, the Church, as compared with our day, was still a
living embodiment of Philip, iv. 8.
X.
(Paradise, cap. xlvii., p. 52.)
See Kaye, p. 248. Our author seems not always consistent with
himself in his references to the Places of departed spirits. Kaye
thinks he identifies Paradise with the Heaven of the Most High, in one
place (the De Exhort. Cast., xiii.) where he probably confuses the
Apostle's ideas, in Galat. v., 12, and Ephes. v., 5. Commonly, however,
though he is not consistent with himself, this would be his scheme:—
1. The Inferi, or Hades, where the soul of Dives was in one continent
and that of Lazarus in another, with a gulf between. Our author
places "Abraham's bosom"in Hades.
2. Paradise. In Hades, but in a superior and more glorious
region. This more blessed abode was opened to the souls of the martyrs
and other greater saints, at our Lord's descent into the place of the
dead. After the General Resurrection and Judgment, there remain:
1. Gehenna, for the lost, prepared for the devil and his angels.
2. The Heaven Heavens, the eternal abode of the righteous, in
the vision of the Lord and His Eternal Joy.
Tertullian's variations on this subject will force us to recur
to it hereafter; but, here it may be noted that the confusions of Latin
Christianity received their character in this particular, from the
genius of our author. Augustine caught from him a certain indecision 60
about the terms and places connected with the state of the departed which has continued, to this day, to perplex theologians in the West. Taking advantage of such confusions, the stupendous Roman system of "Purgatory" was fabricated in the middle ages; but the Greeks never accepted it, and it differs fundamentally from what the earlier Latin Fathers, including Tertullian, have given us as speculations.
XI.
(The Leo and the Leno, cap. I., p. 55.)
Here we find the alliterative and epigrammatic genius of
Tertullian anticipating a similar poetic charm in Augustine. The
Christian maid or matron preferred the Leo to the leno; to be devoured
rather than to be debauched. Our author wrests a tribute to the
chastity of Christian women from the cruelty of their judges, who
recognizing this fact, were accustomed as a refinement of their
injustice to give sentence against them, refusing the mercy of a
horrible death, by committing them to the ravisher: "damnando
Christianam ad lenonem potius quam ad leonem."
XII.
(The Seed of the Church, cap. I., p. 55.)
Kaye has devoted a number of his pages(1) to the elucidation of
this subject, not only showing the constancy of the martyrs, but
illustrating the fact that Christians, like St. Paul, were forced to
"die daily," even when they were not subjected to the fiery trial. He
who confessed himself a Christian made himself a social outcast. All
manner of outrages and wrongs could be committed against him with
impunity. Rich men, who had joined themselves to Christ,(2) were forced
to accept "the spoiling of their goods." Brothers denounced brothers,
and husbands their wives; "a man's foes were they of his own
household." But the Church triumphed through suffering, and "out of
weakness was made strong."