T.H. BINDLEY, The Apology of Tertullian (1890)
Q. S. F. Tertulliani Apologeticus Adversus Gentes pro Christianis. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by T. H. BINDLEY, M.A., Merton College, Oxford. (Clarendon Press.)
Spectator, Sept. 28. "The Apology for the Christians is one of the most interesting and useful of Tertullian's treatises, and we welcome this scholarly edition with especial pleasure. The work might advantageously be recommended to Candidates for Holy Orders by the Bishops' examining chaplains, for it contains within a brief compass much that is valuable on questions of dogmatics, apologetics, and early Church history. . . . The plan and execution of this edition are both good, the annotations being an advance upon anything of the kind we have seen in English."
Saturday Review, Nov. 9. "We have to thank Mr. Bindley for a good edition of one of the most interesting documents of the early Church, the Apology of Tertullian. Mr. Bindley has read up his subject thoroughly, and gives the results of his studies in a compact and serviceable form. Language, doctrine, ritual, and archaeology have, each and all, received due attention, and for examination purposes, perhaps, nothing more could be desired."
THE APOLOGY
OF
TERTULLIAN
FOR THE CHRISTIANS.
Translated with Introduction, Analysis, and Appendix
containing the Letters of Pliny and Trajan
respecting the Christians,
BY
T. HERBERT BINDLEY, M.A.
MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD.
--------o---------
Parker and Co.
6 SOUTHAMPTON-STREET, STRAND, LONDON
AND BROAD-STREET, OXFORD.
1890.
PRINTED BY PARKER AND CO.,
CROWN YARD. OXFORD.
THE present volume grew naturally out of my special study of the APOLOGETICUS of Tertullian when preparing an annotated edition for the Delegates of the Clarendon Press. It is hoped that this translation may be helpful to Theological students who are at work upon the original text, and for them it has been more particularly prepared. Yet it is not unlikely that there will also be some English readers interested in the early records of Christianity who may be glad to possess this famous apologetic tract of the second century, and to whom its presentation in an English dress will be acceptable. The translation is made from the text of the Clarendon Press edition (Oxford : 1889).
T. H. B.
Ixworth,
November 19, 1889.
CORRIGENDA.
----
Page 4, line 5 from bottom, for of which the criminal is proud, read to be found guilty of which is a man's pride,
Page 23, line 2, for II. 1. read II. i.
Page 30 note, for Latiari. read Latiaris.
Page 34, line 21, for II. I. read ii. i.
THE life of Tertullian, so far as we know it, may be briefly told. He was born at Carthage about the year A.D. 160, and was brought up amid the pagan surroundings of that provincial metropolis. His father, whose name is not known, was a centurion in attendance upon the proconsul of Africa, and he took care that his son, who was probably intended for public life, should receive an excellent education in the celebrated schools of his native city. Before his conversion it is believed that Tertullian practised in the provincial law-courts; and the constant recurrence of legal phraseology in his writings bears out the truth of Eusebius' statement that he was intimately acquainted with Roman law (H. E. ii. 2). That he was also well versed in the art of rhetoric, the reader of the APOLOGY will at once admit: the arguments are accumulated with the skill, and sometimes with the one-sidedness, of an advocate holding a brief in his own case, and pleading with an impassioned earnestness born of deep personal conviction.
Tertullian's conversion may be dated in 196 1, and he was ordained priest in the Carthaginian Church. He was married, but childless. His character reflects |viii the typical African temperament,—fervid, impatient, impetuous, and with a considerable vein of latent puritanism. It was this unrestrained impulsiveness of nature that soon beguiled him to break away from the wise moderation of rhe Church and to embrace the heresy of Montanus,—a Phrygian fanatic, who claimed to be the recipient of a new Revelation of the Paraclete, and whose system of discipline was rigorously severe. The lapse of so gifted a champion of the faith was, as Vincent of Lerins tells us (Common. 18), a severe temptation to the Church, and his later error naturally 'cast some discredit on the authority of his approved writings' (Hil. in Matt. 5).
Tertullian lived to an extreme old age, according to the report mentioned by Jerome (de vir. illustr. 53), and his death may be placed about the year 240. A small sect, called after him 'Tertullianists,' lingered in Carthage to the time of Augustine (Haer. 86).
The APOLOGY was written in the year 197, very soon after his conversion, and the reader may, happily, forget the subsequent lapse of its author into heresy. The work is one of the best and most interesting examples of Western apologetic writings, both on account of the cogency and brilliance of its defensive pleading for Christianity, and from the graphic picture which it portrays of paganism as it existed in the great metropolis of Africa particularly, and in the Roman Empire generally, at the close of the second century. It may be said at once that there is much in this picture which is painful; few English readers will have been prepared for the hideous disclosures |ix which Tertullian's exposure of heathenism necessarily entails; yet it may prove a useful lesson, if it in any way brings home to us what and how deep was the moral darkness of the world which it was the divine office of the Christian Church to enlighten and purify.
The immediate purpose of the APOLOGY was to protest against the wholesale condemnation of a body of men on the mere presumption of a criminality which had never been proved. The inveterate hostility manifested towards the Christians forbade them the rights even of ordinary criminals. They were prosecuted under the laws, and persecuted by a panic-stricken populace, whose unreasoning animosity, and ignorance of the true nature of the Christian religion, led to the formulation of execrable charges which the Christian Apologists had to meet and repel 2. Some of these, e.g. those in ch. 7—9, were due to the close bonds which united the Christians together in a true fraternity, and to the care with which they shielded the higher mysteries of their religious worship from any risk of profanation by the heathen outsiders 3. Others again, e.g. those in ch. 40-44, arose from mere popular irrational dislike, which seized anything as a handle against a section of society whose purity and integrity of life were a standing rebuke to the dissolute morals of the age.
The two main charges brought against the Christians,—Sacrilege and Disloyalty to the Emperor,— |x stood on a different base. They were reasonable enough from the heathen point of sight, and the Apologist could only refute them by attacking the whole groundwork and fabric of the Roman religion of the time. This attack upon paganism is carried on simultaneously with the defence of Christianity. Tertullian's favourite weapon is sarcastic retort, and his pagan readers must have winced, not once nor twice only, under the lash of his stinging epigrams and biting irony.
The APOLOGY naturally contains but few references to the internal life of the Church. Sufficient is related to disarm the suspicions of the heathen, but no more. A full statement of Christian doctrine or mode of worship is not to be looked for. This reserve, which is maintained by all the Apologists when addressing those outside the Church, is significant of their jealous reverence for the sanctity of their faith. Hence those passages are the more valuable and interesting which treat of the Being of God, of the Divinity of Christ, the God-Man, and His earthly life (ch. 17—21), and of the nature of the bond of Christian unity (ch. 39). It will be observed that the only passage adduced from the New Testament4 in the whole of the APOLOGY (i Tim. ii. 2; see ch. 31) is quoted merely in self-defence on a point of Christian practice. |xi
1. a So Pusey and others : see, however, Plummer, Church of the Early Fathers, p. 112.
2. b Comp. Lightfoot, Philippians, pp. 26 ff.
3. c Comp. Gore, Christian Ministry, pp. 30 f.
4. d See Lightfoot, Supernatural Religion, p. 275, where for 'New Testament' we should, I think, read 'Gospels.' So Westcott in the passage referred to in Lightfoot's note (History of the Canon, pp. 116 f.).
I. PREFACE.
1. It is unjust to condemn the Christian religion unheard and unknown (ch. i).
We are denied the rights of ordinary criminals, and the use of torture is most inconsistently employed in our case.
The mere name of 'Christian' is made criminal (ch. 2).
The blindness of your hatred over-reaches itself and involuntarily eulogizes us (ch. 3).
2. We propose to refute and retort every charge you bring against us; but first let us examine the nature of the laws under which we are condemned (ch. 4). They are to be traced to an ancient decree, and to the rescripts of the worst emperors (ch. 5). But your ancient decrees are perpetually being ignored by yourselves, both as regards personal and social questions, as well as religious restrictions (ch. 6).
II. REFUTATION OF THE PRINCIPAL ACCUSATIONS.
i. Secret crimes.
We are accused of infamous secret atrocities,—infanticide, a feast of blood, and incest; though no proof has ever been forthcoming, and only rumour is responsible for the charge (ch. 7). Whereas natural instinct would revolt from such crimes, and the burdened conscience of one unwittingly led to perpetrate them would be intolerable (ch. 8).
You yourselves are guilty of sacrificing children and adults in your worship of various deities, and of eating blood in several loathsome rites and horrible repasts; |xii whereas your knowledge of our horror of eating blood is evidenced by the tests which you apply to us. Incest, too, is one of your commonest crimes (ch. 9).
ii. Open crimes.
I. Sacrilege.
We are accused of Sacrilege and Disloyalty to the emperor.
We shall prove that your gods are no gods, for they once were men (ch. 10); and no reasons exist for their subsequent deification, since their aid in Nature is, and always has been, unnecessary, while their gross immoralities would rather condemn them to Tartarus than raise them to Heaven (ch. II).
Your gods are nothing but names of dead men, and images made of the commonest materials, which you treat with the same indignities that you heap upon us (ch. 12). In fact, you act most sacrilegiously towards your gods, whether private or public (ch. 13); for you cheat them in your sacrifices, and mock them in your poetic and philosophic literature (ch. 14). You insult them in your burlesques and at your theatres (ch. 15).
You hold grotesque views respecting our Deity. We neither worship an ass's head, nor the Cross, nor the Sun, nor a biformed monstrosity resembling some of your gods (ch. 16).
We worship one God, the Omnipotent and Invisible Creator, to Whom Nature and the human soul bear witness (ch. 17), Who hath given us a revelation of Himself through Scriptures and Prophets, whose writings are open to all (ch. 18). The antiquity of these writings proves their trustworthiness; for they are more ancient than your oldest records (ch. 19); and their majesty and divinity are proved by the daily fulfilment of their predictions (ch. 20). |xiii
We worship the same God as the Jews, but, Unlike them, we acknowledge Christ, the Son of God, to be God. He is the True Word, Reason, and Power of God, Who, begotten eternally by His Father, and being Co-essential with Him was made Flesh. The Jews misunderstood His Advent, His Work, and His Doctrine. They put Him to death, but He rose from the dead, as was predicted, and after forty days ascended into Heaven. Meanwhile His gospel is being spread throughout the world by His disciples (ch. 21).
We, with your philosophers, assert the existence of daemons, spiritual beings of malefic power, who falsely claim to be divine (ch. 22). These daemons and your gods are identical, as their own confession when confronted by a Christian will prove. Further, you may learn from them Who is the True God. Our dominion over them is derived from the power of Christ (ch. 23).
Your charge of sacrilege thus falls to the ground, for there can be no religious duties towards gods that have no existence. In any case, we claim the civil right of religious liberty, which you grant to every one but us (ch. 24).
You assert that Roman prosperity is due to Roman piety. Yet your chief deities are foreigners, who once reigned on earth, and therefore must some time have worshipped your earliest deities. Besides, your elaborate piety is of later growth than your prosperity, which has in reality been advanced by your impieties (ch. 25).
All rule and sovereignty are in the gift of the One God Who is above all (ch. 26).
Your animosity against us is incited by daemoniacal agency (ch. 27).
2. Disloyalty.
You are driven by the same evil influence to |xiv force us to sacrifice for the emperor's welfare. This we refuse to do, and are therefore accused, secondly, of Disloyalty to Caesar (ch. 28).
The gods are the creatures of Caesar, and cannot therefore have his welfare in their keeping (ch. 29).
We offer for Caesar's welfare prayers and true sacrifices to the True God, in Whose hands alone it is (ch. 30). And our prayers for him are no pretence, but part of our bounden religious duty (ch. 31), and rendered necessary by our belief that the continuance of the Roman Empire delays the end of the world (ch. 32).
We are in fact far more truly loyal than you are; for we recognize the Divine will in the appointment of the Caesars, although we refuse to acknowledge the divinity of the Caesars themselves (ch. 33).
'Lord' is no proper title of Caesar, but belongs to God (ch. 34). Yet we are called 'public enemies ' because we refuse to join in your useless acts of worship and disgraceful festivities. The real traitors are always found amongst yourselves, whether in the lower or higher ranks of society (ch. 35). We are necessarily well-disposed to every man whether Caesar or neighbour (ch. 36).
We are forbidden to retaliate, otherwise we might easily take our revenge, either by secret means, or as open enemies, or even by merely withdrawing from your midst, and leaving you defenceless against the attacks of the daemons (ch. 37). The Christian society ought to be recognized by the law, since it is a harmless and unambitious association (ch. 38).
III. REFUTATION OF MINOR CHARGES.
1. The purposes of our assembly are pious, pure, and charitable. Our well-known love for each other is |xv blamed, and our simple 'love-feast' denounced as extravagant (ch. 39).
2. Our existence is supposed to provoke the gods to send calamities and disasters upon the empire; yet such occurrences happened before the rise of Christianity. Your very gods, too, suffer in the calamities which are supposed to come from them. In reality, the presence of the Christians has mitigated the violence of God's judgements upon the world (ch. 40); for these judgements are attributable to your misdeeds (ch. 41).
3. You accuse us of worthlessness to trade,—a charge which is sufficiently refuted by our habits of life (ch. 42). We are certainly profitless to the bad, but this is a real gain (ch. 43).
The real loss to the state, which is involved in your injustice to us, is overlooked (ch. 44).
Our ethical standard is far higher and more awe-inspiring than yours (ch. 45).
4. Our sect is regarded as a school of philosophy; yet you refuse us the licence allowed to philosophers. Really we differ from the philosophers both in the extent and definiteness of our knowledge, and in our moral standard (ch. 46).
Philosophers have derived their wisdom from our Scriptures, which they distorted; and they have vainly speculated on subjects not revealed. Heretics, similarly, have distorted the New Testament; and many of our doctrines have been anticipatorily counterfeited by the agency of evil spirits (ch. 47).
The philosophical speculation on the transmigration of souls is admitted, but our doctrine of the resurrection of the body scouted; although Nature illustrates it, and the mystery of our present existence forbids a hasty rejection of our belief respecting the future. On this subject Revelation must suffice (ch. 48). |xvi
IV. CONCLUSION.
Why do you censure us for holding tenets which are at least harmless, if not positively beneficial (ch. 49)?
Our sufferings are our glory and triumph. How is it that in your view our endurance redounds to our discredit, while the fortitude of others meets with your approbation? You may gain popularity by your injustice, but our sufferings and practical example continually attract new converts (ch. 50).
CHAPTER I.
I. 1. The injustice of condemning the Christian Religion unheard and unknown.
IF it be not permitted you, provincial governors of the Roman Empire, presiding for the administration of justice in your open and appointed court almost at the very head of the state, to publicly investigate and openly examine what are the clear facts in the case of the Christians;—if your authority either fears or is ashamed to enquire in public concerning the clue exercise of justice in respect of this kind of offence alone;—if, in fine, hostility to this sect, carried to extremes (as was recently the case) in judgements passed upon members of your own households, bars the way to its defence;—let the truth reach your ears at all events by the secret agency of a silent writing.
Christianity pleads no excuse for her cause, for neither does she marvel at her present position. She knows that she is a sojourner upon the earth, that amongst strangers she readily finds enemies, but that her nativity, her home, her hope, her favour, her dignity are in Heaven. One boon meantime she craves, that she be not condemned unknown. What |2 is there in this request derogatory to the laws, supreme in their own sphere, if she be heard? Will not their power rather be extolled hereby, that they will condemn the truth even after she has been heard? Whereas if men condemn her unheard, besides the odium of an injustice done, they will be suspected, and justly, of not being altogether unconscious that they are refusing to hear that which, if they heard, they could not condemn.
This, then, is the first point we bring before you, —the injustice of your hatred of the Christian name. And the very pretext which seems to excuse this injustice, namely ignorance, both aggravates and clenches it. For what ran be more unjust than for men to hate that of which they are ignorant, even supposing it to deserve their hatred? For then only does it deserve hatred when it is ascertained whether it deserve it. But if a knowledge of the deserts be wanting, how is the justice of the hatred defended, which ought to be proved not from the mere existence of the hatred but from cognizance of the case? When, however, men hate because they are ignorant of the nature of the object of their hatred, what is there to prevent it really being of a nature such as they ought not to hate?
Thus in both ways we prove them wrong; namely, that they are ignorant in their hatred, and that in their ignorance they hate unjustly. A proof of their ignorance, which while it excuses their injustice, also condemns it, is found in the fact that all, who formerly hated because they were ignorant of the |3 nature of what they hated, at once cease to hate as soon as they cease to be ignorant. From being such, they become Christians, particularly when they have gained full knowledge; and they begin to hate what they had been, and to profess what they had hated; and our numbers are as great as we are computed to be. The cry is that the state is beset, that the Christians are in the rural districts, in the villages, and in the islands; it is deplored as a public calamity that persons of both sexes, of every age, of every class, even people of high rank, are going over to this name 5.
And yet not even from this very fact do men mentally advance to an appreciation of some possible good latent in our religion; they do not allow themselves a more consistent surmise; they do not welcome a closer investigation. Respecting this subject alone the natural curiosity of men lies dormant: they love to remain ignorant, while others rejoice to have learnt. How much more might Anarcharsis have stigmatized these men,—the inexperienced passing judgement on the experienced,—than the unmusical criticizing the musical! They prefer to remain ignorant, because they already hate; and by this preference they prejudge that of which they are ignorant to be such as, if known, would preclude their hatred; since if no just ground for hatred be found, the right course would obviously be to cease hating so unjustly; whereas if the justice of their hatred were to be established, not only would the hatred lose none of |4 its force, but it would actually gain a reason for its continuance from the sanction of justice itself.
'But,' it may be said, 'a thing is not therefore good because it attracts the many. What numbers are previously disposed to evil! How many desert to the side of error!' Who denies it? Nevertheless that which is truly evil, not even do those whom it sweeps along dare to defend as being good. There is a sense of shrinking or shame instinctively attached to all evil. Lastly, evil-doers crave concealment, they shun publicity, they quake when detected, they deny when accused, not even when put to the rack do they readily or invariably confess. They are undoubtedly disconsolate when condemned; in their consciences they recount their deeds, but impute to fate or the stars the promptings of an evil mind; for they refuse to acknowledge as their own what they recognize as evil. But with Christians the case is totally different. No one is ashamed; no one feels regret, except indeed that he did not become a Christian sooner. If he is censured, he glories in it; if accused, he pleads no defence; if interrogated, he even voluntarily confesses; if condemned, he gives thanks. What kind of evil, then, is this, which lacks the essential characteristics of evil,— fear, shame, prevarication, regret, sorrow? What kind of evil is this of which the criminal is proud, to be accused of which is his prayer, and to be punished for it his happiness? You cannot call this madness,—you, whose ignorance of the subject is clearly proved. |5
CHAPTER II.
We are denied the rights of ordinary criminals, and the use of torture is most inconsistently employed in our case. The name alone of 'Christian' is made criminal.
EVEN if it is certain that we as a matter of fact are the most guilty of men, why do we fare at your hands otherwise than our fellow-criminals, when surely the same treatment ought to be applied to offences of a similar nature? When others are charged with similar crimes to those we are charged with, they employ both their own right of speech and a hired advocate to maintain their innocence. The opportunity of rejoinder and cross-examination is open to them, since it is illegal for them to be altogether condemned undefended and unheard. But Christians alone are forbidden to say anything either in self-exculpation, or in defence of the truth, or in hindrance of a miscarriage of justice : attention is given to that only which is required by the public hatred,— namely, a confession of the name, not an enquiry into the charge. Whereas when you judicially examine into the case of some criminal, you are not content to pronounce the verdict at once upon his confession of the mere name of murderer, or sacrilegious or incestuous person, or public enemy (to adopt our own indictments), without eliciting the attendant circumstances,—the nature of the deed, its frequency, the place, the method, the time, the accessories, the accomplices. Yet in our case you do nothing of the |6 kind; although the information ought just as much to be extorted (whichever the charge may be that is falsely cast in our teeth), as to how many murdered infants each had already tasted of, how often incest had been committed under cover of the darkness, who were the cooks, what dogs were present. O how high would be the reputation of that magistrate who had unearthed any one who had already eaten one hundred infants! And yet we find enquiry into our case forbidden! For Pliny Secundus, when governor of a province, after the condemnation of some Christians and the degradation of others, being distressed at their very number notwithstanding, consulted Trajan the Emperor6 as to what he should do in the future, alleging that beyond their obstinate refusal to sacrifice, all he had discovered was that they were in the habit of assembling at dawn to sing to Christ as God 7, and to bind themselves together under a strict rule, forbidding homicide, adultery, fraud, perfidy, and all other crimes. Then Trajan wrote back that persons of this class were not indeed to be enquired after, but if brought up before the court, were to be punished.
What an inevitably inconsistent decision! It forbids them to be inquired after, as though innocent, and yet bids them be punished, as though guilty. It is at once lenient and merciless; it ignores while it |7 punishes. How strangely does this judgement overreach itself! If it condemns, why does it not also institute enquiry? if it does not institute enquiry, why does it not also acquit? Military stations are appointed by lot throughout every province for tracking robbers; against traitors and public enemies every civilian is in arms; the enquiry is extended further to their confederates and accomplices. The Christian is the only person against whom an enquiry may not be set on foot, though he may be produced in court;—just as if the enquiry was for any other purpose than the production before the magistrates! And so you condemn the man brought before you, though no one wished him to be sought out; a man, I take it, who did not at first deserve punishment because he was guilty, but because, being forbidden to be sought out, he was found!
Nor likewise in another point do you act towards us according to your ordinary procedure in judging criminals; for you apply torture to others, when denying, to make them confess; to the Christians alone, to make them deny; whereas if there were criminality, we should indeed deny, and you as surely would compel us under torture to confess. Nor could you pretend that an investigation of Christian criminality might be dispensed with on the ground that the mere profession of Christianity would prove it; for to this day, although cognizant of what constitutes murder, you nevertheless elicit from a confessed murderer the circumstances attendant upon the committal of the deed : whence, still more perversely, |8 having assumed our guilt from our confession of the name, you compel us under torture to retract our confession, so that in our denial of the name we may of course equally deny also the crimes of which you had presumed us guilty from our Christian profession. I must suppose of course that you do not wish us to perish, whom you believe to be the worst of men! It is doubtless your custom thus to speak to a murderer : 'Deny it;' to order one who is guilty of sacrilege to be torn in pieces if he persists in confessing it! If, then, you do not so act in the case of criminals, you thereby adjudge us to be quite free from guilt; since, assuming our perfect innocence, you will not have us persist in that confession which you know you are bound to condemn—on grounds of necessity however, not of justice.
A man exclaims, 'I am a Christian.' He tells you what he is; you wish to hear what he is not. Presiding judicially with the object of eliciting the truth, it is from us alone that you are at pains to hear falsehood. 'I am,' says he, 'that which you ask whether I am; why torture me to get a false statement? You torture me if I confess, what would you do if I denied?' Truly you are not so accommodatingly credulous in the case of others who deny; to us, upon our denial, you give immediate credence. Let this crooked dealing of yours lead you to suspect the existence of some secret hidden power, which compels you to act in opposition to the recognized forms and essentials of legal trial,—nay, in opposition to the very laws themselves. For, unless I am |9 mistaken, the laws order evil-doers to be unearthed, not to be concealed; they enjoin that confession shall lead to condemnation, not to acquittal. This is laid down by the decrees of the senate, by the commands of emperors, and by the government whose servants you are. The authority vested in you is a constitutional, not a despotic one. For with despots torture is made use of as a form of punishment; with you its use is moderated and confined to purposes of examination only. Abide by your law in this respect up to the time of confession, and if torture is anticipated by confession, it will be superfluous. Sentence must be pronounced : the culprit must be discharged from the obligation of the penalty by undergoing it, and must not be released from it. No one, in fact, desires to acquit him; it is not lawful to wish it; and therefore no compulsion is put upon any one to deny. You regard a Christian as a man guilty of every crime, hostile to the gods, to the emperors, to the laws, to morals, to all the dictates of nature; and yet you compel him to deny that you may be able to acquit him; for his denial will alone allow you to do so. You are in collusion to defeat the laws. You wish him to deny that he is guilty, so that you may return him as guiltless (though very much indeed against his will), and not as a criminal, in respect of his past life. Whence comes this perversion of intellect which neither leads you to grasp the fact that more credit is to be given to a voluntary confession than to a compulsory denial, nor to consider the possibility that, if the accused is compelled to deny, |10 he may deny untruly, and when acquitted, straightway behind your tribunal laugh at your malevolence, a Christian once more?
Accordingly, since in every particular you deal with us otherwise than with other criminals, by directing your efforts solely towards excluding us from the use of this name (for we are excluded if we consent to perform certain actions like others who are not Christians 8), you can well understand that there is no question of crime in the case, but only of a name,— a name persecuted by some system of malevolent agency which aims primarily at making men refuse to gain a clear knowledge of what they know they are clearly ignorant of. Consequently they both believe things of us which are unproven, and they refuse to have them enquired into, fearing that they should be proved to be other than they prefer men to believe them to be; their object being that the name which is opposed to that hostile system may be, by its own confession alone, condemned on the presumption, not the proof, of criminality. Hence we are tortured if we confess, and are punished if we persist, and are acquitted if we deny, because the contention is about a name. |11
Why, lastly, do you read out from the judicial tablet that so and so is a Christian, why not add that he is a murderer? If a Christian be a murderer, why not also a committer of incest, or anything else you credit us with being? Is it in our case alone that you are too much ashamed or disgusted to give the exact names of our offences when you pronounce the verdict? If a Christian is guilty of no crime, it is indeed a dangerous name if the crime lies in the name alone.
CHAPTER III.
The blindness of your hatred over-reaches itself, and involuntarily eulogizes us.
WHY, the majority in their blindness are so driven into hatred of it, that even while bearing good testimony to any one they join with it reproach of the name: 'A good man, Caius Seius, only he is a Christian.' Or again, 'I wonder at a sensible man like Lucius suddenly becoming a Christian.' No one considers whether it is not because he is a Christian that Caius is good, and Lucius prudent, or therefore a Christian because prudent and good. They praise what they know, they blame what they are ignorant of; and what they do know they mar by their ignorance, although it would be more equitable to form a judgement upon the hidden from the seen than to condemn the seen from the hidden.
Others stigmatize on the very grounds on which they praise them, those whom they knew formerly in |12 their pre-Christian days as vagabonds, worthless, and base. In the blindness of their hatred they are driven into pronouncing a eulogium. 'What a woman! how wanton, how gay! What a youth! how profligate, how licentious! They have become Christians.' Thus the name is credited with their reform. Some even strike a bargain between their own interests and such hatred, being content to suffer loss, provided only they can rid their homes of the objects of their hatred. The husband, no longer jealous, casts off his wife now chaste : the father, formerly patient, disinherits his son now dutiful: the master, formerly mild, banishes from his sight his slave now faithful: each one, as he is reformed by this name, becomes offensive. The improvement counts for nothing in comparison with hatred of the Christians.
Now then, if this hatred is directed against the name, what is the guilt attaching to names? What accusation can be brought against words, except that a certain pronunciation of a name sounds barbarous, or is unlucky or abusive or obscene? But 'Christian,' as far as its etymology goes, is derived from 'anointing.' And even when it is incorrectly pronounced by you 'Chrestian 9' (for not even is your acquaintance with the name accurate), it is formed from 'sweetness' or 'kindness.' In innocent men, therefore, even an innocent name is hated.
But you will say that the sect is hated at all events on account of its Founder's name. Yet what is there |13 novel in the fact of any school taking an appellation for its adherents from its master's name? Are not the philosophers named from their masters, Platonists, Epicuraeans, Pythagoreans? and even from their places of meeting and resort, Stoics, Academics? physicians too from Erasistratus, grammarians from Aristarchus, and even cooks from Apicius? Nor does this adoption of the name, transmitted with the system from its founder, offend any one. Of course if any one proves the sect to be a bad one, and consequently its Founder to be a bad man, he will also prove the name bad and deserving of hatred from the guilt of the sect and its Founder. It were therefore proper, before hating the name, first to form a judgement either of the sect from its Founder, or of its Founder from the sect. But now, without any investigation or knowledge of either, the name is seized upon and made the subject of attack, and a single word pre-condemns the sect and its Founder, both alike unknown,—and all because they are so named, not because they are convicted of guilt.
CHAPTER IV.
2. We propose to refute and retort every charge you bring against us; but first let us examine the nature of the laws under which we are condemned.
AND so, having as it were prefaced thus much for the purpose of holding up to contempt the injustice of the public hatred towards us, I will now take up |14 a position for the defence of our innocence; nor shall I merely refute what is laid to our charge, but also retort the charges upon those who make them; so that from this also all may know that those crimes are not to be found amongst Christians which our accusers are well aware do exist amongst themselves; and that at the same time they may be put to the blush, being as they are accusers (respecting whom I will not say that they are the worst of men posing as accusers of the best, but) of those who are from their point of view their fellow-criminals. We shall reply to each charge, both those which we are accused of perpetrating in secret, and those which we are detected in committing openly; those in which we are deemed wicked, those in which we are deemed foolish; those for which we are to be condemned, those for which we are to be ridiculed.
But whereas, since the truth of our cause meets you at every point, as a last resort the authority of the laws is set up as a barrier against it, so that either it is said that no question ought to be reopened after the laws have once decided it, or else that, however unwillingly, the necessity of obedience takes precedence of any care for the truth, I will first engage you in argument on this point of the laws, regarding you as their guardians.
First, then, how sternly you lay down this decision : 'Your existence is illegal!' And this you lay down as a preliminary objection without any more lenient modification. You exhibit violence and unjust tyrrany from out of your citadel if you therefore say it |15 is unlawful merely because you wish it, not because it ought to be so. Of course if you do not wish it to be lawful because it ought not to be so, without doubt what is wrong ought not to be lawful. And as a matter of fact, on this very ground it is already decided that what is right is lawful. If I shall find that to be good which your law has forbidden, does it not surely by that pre-decision lose the power to forbid me that which, if it were wrong, it would rightly forbid? What if your law has erred? it is I suppose of human origin, for it did not fall from heaven. Is it a matter for wonder either that man should err in framing a law, or that he should become sensible again in repealing it? Were not the laws of Lycurgus himself revised by the Spartans, and did not this revision inflict such grief upon their author that he starved himself to death in retirement? Do not you yourselves, too, day by day, in your attempts to illumine the darkness of past ages, cut down and fell with the new axes of imperial rescripts and edicts the whole of that old and tangled forest of laws? Did not Severus, that steadiest of princes, only the other day repeal those ridiculous Papian laws which bade children be brought up before the Julian law enforced marriage,—laws whose antiquity gave them such high authority? But there were laws also formerly which authorized those sentenced under them to be cut in pieces by their creditors, yet by common consent this cruelty was afterwards abolished, and a mark of disgrace substituted for capital punishment; it was thought better |16 to bring about, by the appointment of a confiscation of goods, the flush of shame rather than the rush of life-blood 10. How many laws needing amendment yet lie hidden, which neither their own antiquity nor the dignity of their framers, but their intrinsic justice alone commends; and therefore when proved to be unjust, they are deservedly to be condemned, although they condemn.
Nor are they merely unjust; they are stupid too, if they condemn a mere name. If, however, they punish deeds, why in our case do they punish deeds on the ground of a name alone,—deeds which it is determined in other cases must be proved by the committal of them, not by a name? I am guilty of incest; why do they not enquire into it? or infanticide; why do they not extort the details? I commit a crime against the gods, or against the Caesars; why am I not heard when I have means of exculpating myself? No law forbids the investigation of a prohibited act; because no judge can rightly inflict punishment unless he knows that an illegal act has been committed. Nor can any citizen loyally obey the law, if ignorant of the nature of punishable offences. No law is bound to satisfy itself alone as to its own intrinsic justice, but also those from whom it looks for obedience. A law excites suspicion if it is not willing to be approved, and it is unjust if, when disapproved, it tyrannizes. |17
CHAPTER V.
They are to be traced to an old decree, and to the rescripts of the worst emperors.
Now, to consider somewhat concerning the origin of laws of this kind. There was an old decree 11 that no god should be consecrated by the emperor without the approval of the senate. Marcus Aemilius is a witness of this in the case of his god Alburnus. And this makes in our favour, that amongst you divinity is weighed out at human caprice. Unless a god shall have pleased man, he shall not be a god; man must now be propitious to a god. Tiberius, then, in whose time the Christian name entered into the world, laid before the senate 12 tidings from Palestine which had revealed to him the truth of that Divine Power there manifested, and supported the motion with his own first vote. The senate, because it did not itself approve, rejected the proposal. Caesar maintained his own opinion, and threatened danger to those who accused the Christians. Consult your own records : there you will find that Nero was the first to furiously attack with the imperial sword this sect then rising into notice especially at Rome 13. But in such an originator of our condemnation we |18 indeed glory. For whoever knows him can understand that nothing but what was sublimely good was condemned by Nero. Domitian also, somewhat of a Nero in cruelty, attempted the same, but inasmuch as he had some human feelings, he soon stopped the proceedings, and those whom he had banished were recalled 14. Such have ever been our persecutors,— the unjust, the impious, the base, whom you yourselves have been accustomed to condemn, and to restore those condemned by them.
But out of so many princes from that time down to the present, men versed in every system of knowledge, produce if you can one persecutor of the Christians. We, however, can on the other side produce a protector, if the letters of the most grave Emperor Marcus Aurelius 15 be searched, in which he testifies that the well-known Germanic drought was dispelled |19 by the shower obtained through the prayers of Christians who happened to be in the army. And although he did not openly abolish the penalty incurred by members of that sect, yet in another way he openly averted it by the addition of a condemnatory sentence on the accusers, and that a more terrible one.
Of what kind, then, are those laws of yours, which only the impious, the unjust, the base, the foolish, the insane, put in force against us; which Trajan partially frustrated by forbidding Christians to be enquired for; which no Hadrian, although a keen investigator of all things curious; no Vespasian 16, although the vanquisher of the Jews; no Pius, no Verus, sanctioned? It might be thought that the worst of men would surely be rooted out by all the best, as being their opponents, more readily than by their own accomplices.
CHAPTER VI.
Your ancient decrees are perpetually being ignored by yourselves, both as regards personal and social questions, as well as religious restrictions.
Now I wish these most religious guardians and devotees of laws and ancestral institutions to answer |20 for their own loyalty and respect and devotion to the decrees of their forefathers, and to say if they have not broken away or deviated from any of them, or if they have not annulled some which were necessary and excellently adapted to secure propriety generally. What, pray, has become of those laws which checked extravagance and ostentation 17? which decreed that not more than one hundred pence should be allowed for a supper, nor more than one fowl, and that not specially fattened, served up; which banished from the senate on a grave charge of ostentation a patrician who possessed ten pounds weight of plate; which immediately suppressed the theatres as they sprang up to the deterioration of morals; which allowed the distinctions belonging to rank and honourable birth to be assumed neither rashly nor with impunity? For I see suppers now which can only be called 'centenarian' from the 'hundreds' of pounds spent upon them 18; and silver mines wrought into dishes,—it were of little moment if it were only for senators, and not for freedmen, or those still in slavery. I see also theatres, for one is no longer sufficient, nor may they be uncovered. It was of course lest immodest pleasure should be chilled, particularly in winter, that the Spartans first invented the disgrace of a cloak at the games! I see, too, no distinction left in dress between matrons and prostitutes. With regard to women, indeed, even those regulations of our ancestors which |21 protected modesty and sobriety have fallen into disuse; when no woman knew aught of gold, save on the one especial finger which her spouse had pledged to himself with the wedding-ring; when women abstained from wine so rigorously that her own relatives starved to death a matron for breaking open the bins of a wine-cellar. In the time of Romulus a woman who had touched wine was put to death with impunity by her husband Mecenius. Hence arose the necessity of their offering kisses to near relatives, that they might be judged by their breath. Where is that conjugal happiness, so successful in the point of morals at all events, by reason of which not one family for nearly six hundred years from the foundation of the city took action for a divorce? But now in the case of women every limb is heavy with gold, no kiss is free on account of wine; moreover a divorce is now the subject of prayer, as though it were the natural fruit of marriage.
Even as regards your gods themselves, what your ancestors wisely decreed, you, their most obsequious sons, have rescinded. Father Bacchus with his mysteries, the consuls by the authority of the senate banished, not only from the city but from the whole of Italy. Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates with his dog-headed Anubis, Piso and Gabinius the consuls, who at any rate were not Christians, forbade the Capitol, that is, expelled from the assembly of the gods, and rejected, having overthrown their altars; thus restraining the vices of shameful and idle superstitions. Upon these gods, whom you restored, you |22 have conferred the highest majesty. Where is your religious awe? where the veneration due from you to your ancestors? In dress, in food, in style of living, in sentiment, nay in language itself, you have renounced your progenitors. You are ever praising the past, yet you live day by day in a round of novelty. From which it is clear that, in departing from the virtuous regulations of your ancestors, you retain and preserve customs which you ought not, whilst you fail to preserve those which you ought. Besides, that very tradition of your forefathers which now for the first time you seem to most faithfully guard, in respect of which you pronounce the Christians principally guilty of transgression, I mean zeal in the worship of the gods,—a matter on which antiquity especially erred,—although you may have rebuilt the altars of the now Roman Serapis, although you may have offered your phrenzied orgies to the now Italian Bacchus,—that very tradition I will in its proper place 19 shew that you have equally despised and neglected and destroyed in the face of their authority. At present I shall reply to that disgraceful report of our secret atrocities, and so clear the way to deal with our more open crimes. |23
CHAPTER VII.
II. i. We are accused of infamous secret atrocities,— infanticide, a feast of blood, and incest, although no proof has ever been forthcoming, and only rumour is responsible for the charge.
WE are called the most infamous of men on the charge of an infanticidal religious rite and a banquet thereat, and incest after the feast;—incest which dogs that overturn the lights (our pimps forsooth) bring about through the shamelessness which is occasioned by the darkness and impious lusts. Yet we are ever but called so, nor are you at any pains to drag into light what we have been so long charged with. Either therefore elicit the facts if you believe them, or forego belief if you have not brought them to light. Your want of straightforwardness lays you open to the preliminary objection that what you do not dare to investigate has in fact no existence. A very different duty from investigation is that which you bid your executioner carry out against the Christians, namely, not to make them say what they do, but to make them deny what they are.
The origin of this religion dates, as I have already said, from the time of Tiberius. On its first appearance the Truth encountered hostility from the prejudice it always excites. She had as many enemies as there were strangers to her: the Jews indeed peculiarly so, from jealousy; the soldiers, from habits of |24 extortion; even those of our own households 20, from the force of circumstances. We are daily beset, daily betrayed, we are unexpectedly seized, and oftenest in our actual assemblies and meetings. Yet who even thus ever chanced on a squalling infant? Who ever kept us for the judge with our mouths bloody as he found them, like Cyclops and Sirens? Who ever detected in their wives any traces of un-chastity? Who ever first found out and then concealed such crimes, or sold his information with the culprits in his grasp? If we are always escaping detection, when was our guilt made known? nay, by whom could it be divulged? Certainly not by the criminals themselves, since the duty of secrecy is imperatively demanded in all mysteries. The Samothracian and Eleusinian mysteries are kept secret; how much more, then, such as, if disclosed, would at once provoke human punishment and for which Divine wrath would be reserved? If then they are not themselves their own betrayers, it follows that outsiders must have furnished the information. And whence have outsiders derived their acquaintance with the facts? when from religious initiations the profane are always excluded, and precautions are taken against witnesses,—unless indeed the impious know less of fear!
The nature of rumour is known to all. As your own poet says 21—
'Rumour is an ill, and none more swift.'
Why is Rumour an ill? because swift? because a |25 talebearer? or because generally false? for not even when in the act of bringing true news is it free from the taint of falsehood,—detracting from, adding to, altering the truth. Why, such is its condition of being, that it would not steadily persist unless it spread falsehood, and it only flourishes so long as it offers no proofs; since, when it has brought proofs, it ceases to exist, and hands over the fact as if its duty of news-bearing were discharged; and thenceforward it is held as a fact, and is called a fact. Nor does any one say for instance: 'They say this happened at Rome;' or, 'There is a rumour that he is appointed to the province;' but, 'He is appointed to the province;' and, 'This happened at Rome.' Rumour, a name for uncertainty, has no place where certainty exists. For would any but a rash man believe Rumour? A wise man trusts not to the uncertain. Any one can judge this, no matter how wide the circuit of its diffusion, no matter how strengthened by emphatic assertion. A tale which has originated at some time or other with a single authority, from him is bound to insinuate itself into the propagating channels of tongues and ears. And a flaw in the insignificant source so obscures the rest of the report, that it never strikes any one whether the first lips did not originate a falsehood, as often happens either from a jealous imagination or whimsical suspicion, or the mere love of lying which in some persons is not an acquirement, but innate. Well is it, then, that according to your own proverbs and maxims, 'time reveals all things,' in the |26 order of Nature which has so arranged it that nothing be long hidden, even though rumour has not disseminated it.
Justly, therefore, has Rumour alone all this time been privy to the crimes of the Christians. This is the informer you produce against us,—one which has never yet been able up to the present time to prove the charge it in times past cast in our teeth, though in so long a period of time it has strengthened it into a general belief.
CHAPTER VIII.
Whereas natural instinct would revolt from such crimes, and the burdened conscience of one unwittingly led to perpetrate them would be intolerable.
Now in order that I may appeal to the trustworthy testimony of Nature herself against those who assume the credibility of such crimes, lo, we place before you the reward of these atrocities; Eternal Life is promised in return. Believe it for the time being, for argument's sake. And then I ask you this; whether, although you believe it, you think it worth while to attain it at such a cost to your conscience. Come, plunge your knife into an infant, harmless, innocent, and helpless; or if this be the duty of another, do you at least stand by while this human being dies before it has really lived; wait for the flight of the newly-entered soul; catch the immature blood; soak your bread in it; feed freely upon it. |27 Meantime reclining at the feast, note the positions of your mother and sister; observe them diligently, so that when the darkness has been ushered in by the dogs, you may make no mistake. For you will contract pollution unless you commit incest. Thus initiated and sealed, you will live for ever. I want you to say whether Eternity is worth all this; and if it is not, in that case it ought not to be believed to be so. Even if you did believe it, I say that you would not do it; and even if you wished to do it, I say that you could not. Why, then, should others be capable of doing what you cannot? why should not you be able to do it if others can? We, I suppose, are of another nature—monstrosities like the Cynopse or Sciapodes! with different rows of teeth, and other nerves for incestuous lust! You who can believe these things of a human being can also do them. You, too, are a man yourself, and so is also a Christian. You who cannot do it ought not to believe it. For even a Christian is a man; and whatever else you are yourself, he is also.
But you may say that deceit and imposition are practised upon the ignorant neophytes. For they might be unaware of any such assertions about the Christians as ought at any rate to have been enquired into and investigated with all carefulness. And yet it occurs to me that it is customary for those who are desirous of being initiated to go first to the director of the sacred ritual and to take down the requisite preparations. He of course would say: 'An infant is indispensable, one quite young, and |28 ignorant of the meaning of death, who will smile under your knife; bread likewise, in which to soak up the juicy blood; candlesticks, too, and lights, and some dogs and bits of offal to make them strain forward and overturn the lights; above all, you must bring your mother and sister with you.' What if they will not come; or if you have none? What, in fine, are solitary candidates without relatives to do? He will not be a valid Christian, I suppose, who is not a brother or a son. Grant, if you like, that all these preliminaries have been prepared for neophytes without their knowledge; at least they learn them afterwards, and bear up under the shock, and condone it. They fear, you say, lest they should be punished; whereas if they were to proclaim the infamy they would deserve every protection, and they would prefer even voluntary death to life with such a consciousness of guilt. But granting that they are afraid; why do they still continue Christians? For it follows that you no longer wish to be that which you never would have become, had you known beforehand. |29
CHAPTER IX.
You yourselves are guilty of sacrificing children and adults in your worship of various deities, and of eating blood in several loathsome rites and horrible repasts. Your knowledge of our horror of eating blood is evidenced by the tests which you apply to us. Incest, too, is one of your commonest crimes.
FOR a more thorough refutation of these charges I will shew what deeds are performed by you partly in public, partly in secret, whence perhaps you have been led to credit them also about us.
In Africa infants were openly sacrificed to Saturn down to the proconsulate of Tiberius 22, who exposed the priests themselves on the very trees that overshadowed their own temple of crimes, as on votive crosses; as the soldiery of our own country23 who did that work for the proconsul can testify. And even now this accursed crime is secretly continued. It is not the Christians alone who defy you; no crime is permanently eradicated, nor does any god change his character. Since Saturn did not spare his own sons, he naturally persisted in not sparing the children of others; whom indeed the parents themselves used to offer to him and present as |30 willing victims, the infants being caressed lest they should be sacrificed weeping. And yet this parental child-murder is much more heinous than manslaughter.
Adults were sacrificed to Mercury amongst the Gauls. I dismiss the Tauric fables to the theatres where they belong. Lo, in that most religious city of the pious descendants of Aeneas there is a certain Jupiter 24 whom in his own games they deluge with human blood. 'But,' you say, 'only the blood of a criminal condemned to the beasts.' And therefore, I suppose, of less moment than the blood of a man! Is it not rather worse, because that of a bad man? At all events the blood is shed in manslaughter. Jupiter must be Christian, as your view of Christian goes; and the only son of his father for cruelty!
But since in the case of infanticide it matters nothing whether it be committed under religious sanctions or out of mere caprice (although it does matter whether it is parental child-murder or manslaughter), I will appeal to the people. How many of those who stand around panting for the blood of the Christians,—how many, think you, of yourselves even, magistrates most just and severe against us, shall I prick in their consciences, who are in the habit of strangling the children born to them? Since there is a difference, too, in the kind of death, surely that is the more cruel method by which you squeeze out their breath under water, or expose |31 them to cold and hunger and the dogs; for an adult, too, would choose death by the knife in preference. But to us, to whom murder has once for all been forbidden, it is unlawful even to destroy the fetus in the womb whilst the blood is still forming into a human being. Prevention of birth is premature murder; nor does it alter the question whether one takes away a life already born, or destroys one which is in process of formation. That also is a human being, which is about to become one, just as every fruit exists already in the seed.
As for feeding upon blood and tragic dishes of that kind, read whether it is not somewhere related (it is in Herodotus 25, I think) that certain nations have appointed the tasting of blood, drawn from the arms of both parties, for the ratification of a treaty. Some such tasting there was, too, under Catiline. They say also that among certain Scythian tribes a dead person is eaten by his own relatives. I am going far afield. To-day, at home, blood from an incised thigh, caught in a shield and given to her own worshippers, seals those dedicated to Bellona. What about those, too, who for the cure of epilepsy at the gladiatorial show in the arena drink with greedy thirst the fresh blood flowing from the throats of the criminals?
What about those, likewise, who sup off the flesh of wild beasts from the arena, and eat a meal off boar or stag? That boar in the struggle wiped the blood off the victim whom he first made |32 bloody; that stag wallowed in the blood of a gladiator. The paunches of the very bears are eagerly desired, loaded with as yet undigested human entrails. Flesh which has fed on man is immediately rejected by man's stomach. You that eat these things, how far are you removed in your repasts from the feasts of the Christians? But do they do less who with beastly lust open their mouths to human bodies, because they devour what is alive? Are they the less consecrated to filth by human blood because they lick up only what is about to become blood? They eat not infants indeed, but rather adults. Your crime may well blush in the presence of Christians, who do not reckon the blood even of animals amongst articles of food, and who accordingly abstain also from things strangled26, and those that have died of themselves 27, lest we should be defiled by any blood secreted in the entrails.
Lastly, among the tests applied to the Christians you present to them sausage-skins filled with blood, simply because you are quite certain that it is unlawful for them, and you wish through it to inveigle them into error. Moreover, what folly it is for you to credit with a thirst for human blood the very people on whom you confidently rely to shrink with horror from the blood of cattle,—unless perchance you have found the former more palateable. And |33 indeed this also ought to be applied as a test to the Christians in the same manner as the brazier and the incense-box. For they would be tested just as much by their desire for human blood as by their refusal to sacrifice; and in other respects they would have to be put to death if they tasted, just as if they had refused to sacrifice. And, at all events, you would never be in want of human blood at your trials and condemnations of prisoners.
Similarly again, who are more incestuous than those whom Jupiter himself has taught? Ctesias relates that the Persians cohabit with their own mothers. The Macedonians, too, are suspected of the same, because, when they first heard the tragedy of Oedipus, they laughed at the incestuous king's grief, and exclaimed, h1laune th_n mhte/ra. Just consider now what opportunities there are for the contraction of incestuous unions, the promiscuousness of your profligacy supplying the occasions. In the first place, you expose your children to be taken up by any passing stranger who may be moved to pity them, or you surrender them to be adopted by better parents. All memory of a progeny thus cast off must some time or other be lost; and should a mistake once occur, thence the propagation of the incest will still go on, progeny and crime creeping on together. Secondly, wherever you are, at home, abroad, or over the sea, lust is your companion; and your promiscuous embraces may easily anywhere beget children to you unawares, even from however small a portion of the seed; so that the progeny thus scattered may through |34 human intercourse meet with members of its own kin and not recognize them as unions of incestuous blood. We, on the contrary, are protected from such a consequence by a most persevering and most constant chastity; and in proportion as we are safe from carnal defilements and all post-nuptial infidelity, so are we also from the possibility of incest. Some, far less troubled, completely withstand the attack of this sin by a virgin continence,—old men in years, children in innocence.
If you would only observe how that these sins are to be found amongst yourselves, you would at the same time perceive that they do not exist amongst Christians. The same eyes would have informed you on both points. But two kinds of blindness readily go together; so that those who see not what is, seem to see what is not. I shall shew this to be the case throughout.
Now I come to our more open crimes.
CHAPTER X.
II. i. We are accused of sacrilege and disloyalty. We shall prove that your gods are no gods; for they once were men.
'You do not worship the gods,' you say to us, 'and you do not offer sacrifices for the emperors.' It follows that we do not sacrifice for others, for the same reason that we do not sacrifice for ourselves— |35 in a word, from our not worshipping the gods. Consequently we are judicially charged with sacrilege and disloyalty. This is the chief point in the case, or rather it is the whole case, and it certainly demands investigation, if neither prejudice nor injustice is to be the judge, the one despairing of, and the other rejecting the truth. We cease to worship your gods from that moment when we recognize that they do not exist. This, therefore, you ought to demand,— that we prove these gods to have no existence, and on that ground that they ought not to be worshipped, since worship would only be due to them in the event of their being really gods. Then, too, it will of course follow that the Christians must be punished, if it remains an established fact that those gods do exist, whom they refused to worship because they believed them to have no such existence.
'But,' you say, 'to us they are gods.' We protest, and appeal from yourselves to your conscience : let that judge us, let that condemn us, if it can deny that all those gods of yours were men. But if it itself contest the point, it shall be convicted from its own documents of antiquity, from whence it learnt about them, which testify to this day both to the cities where they were born, and to the localities where they left marks of their work, and even where they are shewn to be buried. Nor shall I go through all one by one, many and important as they are,— new, old, barbarian, Greek, Roman, foreign, captive, adopted, peculiar, common, male, female, rural, urban, nautical, military,—it is tedious enough even to |36 recount their titles; but I will deal with them concisely; and this, not that you may learn, but that you may be reminded, for you certainly act the part of those who have forgotten.
Previous to Saturn there is with you no god : from him is the beginning of all, even of more powerful and better known divinity. Consequently, whatever shall be established of the source will also hold good of the succession. Saturn, then, as far as literature teaches, neither Diodorus the Greek, nor Thallus, nor Cassius Severus, nor Cornelius Nepos, nor any other writer on this particular kind of antiquities, has proclaimed to be anything but a man : and so far as the evidence of facts goes, nowhere do I find any more trustworthy than in Italy itself, where Saturn, after many expeditions, and after partaking of Attic hospitality, settled, being received by Janus, or Janes, as the Salians prefer it. The mountain which he inhabited was called Saturnius; the state which he founded is even to this day Saturnia; in fact the whole of Italy, after being Oenotria, was named Saturnia. By him writing-tablets were first introduced, and a stamped coinage, and for that reason he presides over the treasury. Yet if Saturn was a man, surely he sprang from a man; and since he came into being by a man, he certainly cannot be from Heaven and Earth. But it easily came about that he, whose parents were unknown, was called the son of those whose children we may all of us also be deemed to be. For who may not call Heaven and Earth father and mother, for the sake of respect and |37 honour, or in deference to that general custom by which persons unknown or unexpectedly appearing are said to have dropped from the sky. Just so it happened to Saturn, unexpectedly appearing everywhere, to be called celestial. For those whose birth is uncertain are commonly termed sons of earth. I do not make a point of the fact that men in those ages were so ignorant as to be moved by the appearance, as though divine, of any strange man; since, cultured as they are at the present day, they consecrate as gods those whom a few days before they have admitted by a public mourning to be dead 28.
We have dealt quite sufficiently, although briefly, with Saturn. We will shew that even Jupiter himself was both a man and sprung from a man; and that thereafter the whole swarm of his progeny were both mortal and like their source.
CHAPTER XI.
And no reasons exist for their subsequent deification, since their aid in Nature is, and always has been, unnecessary; while their gross immoralities would rather condemn them to Tartarus than exalt them to Heaven.
AND since, as you dare not deny that these deities were men, you have decided to assert that they were made gods after their death, let us examine the causes which may have urged this. |38
In the first place, indeed, you must allow that there is some superior God, and absolute proprietor of divinity, who made them gods out of men. For neither could they assume to themselves a divinity which they did not possess, nor could any other but he whose peculiar possession it was, give it to them that had it not. If, however, there is no one who made them gods, it is absurd for you to represent them as having been made gods, and at the same time to deny them a maker. Certainly if they could have made themselves gods, they would never have been men; since they would in that case have possessed in themselves the power of enjoying a nobler state of being. If, then, there is any one who makes gods, I turn back to examine the reasons for making gods out of men; nor do I find any, except it be that that great God felt the want of their services and aid in the discharge of his divine duties.
But in the first place it is unworthy of him that he should need the help of any one, and especially of a dead man; since he, who was fated to feel the want of a dead man, might more worthily have created some god from the beginning. Nor do I see any room for such aid. For the whole body of this universe (whether spontaneously generated, as Pythagoras held, or formed and created, as Plato believed) was surely found to have been once for all in its very construction arranged and furnished and ordered under the guidance of an all-embracing plan. That could not be imperfect which perfectly discharged all its functions. Nothing waited for the intervention of |39 Saturn and his race. Men would be fools if they were not quite convinced that from the very beginning the rain has fallen from the sky and the stars have gleamed, and the sun and moon have been bright, and the thunder has muttered, and Jupiter himself has feared those lightnings which you place in his hand. Likewise every kind of fruit sprang forth abundantly from the earth before Bacchus and Ceres and Minerva, nay, even before the time of the very first man; for nothing that was devised for the preservation and support of man could be introduced after man himself.
Lastly, the gods are said to have discovered those necessaries of life, not to have made them. But that which is discovered must already be in existence; and therefore will not be accounted his who discovered it, but his who made it. For it was in existence before it could be discovered. If, however, Bacchus be a god because he first pointed out the use of the vine, Lucullus, who first introduced the cherry into Italy from Pontus, has been unfairly treated, in that he has not been on that account deified, as the author of a new fruit, because its discoverer and notifier.
Wherefore, if the universe has been established from the beginning both furnished and ordered on fixed plans for the discharge of its proper functions, no reason exists from this point of view for electing men into the rank of gods; because the positions and powers which you assign to them have existed just as much from the beginning as they would have |40 done even had you not created those gods of yours.
But you turn to another reason, and reply that divinity was conferred upon them as the reward of their merits. And with this statement you will of course grant that that god-making Deity is conspicuous for justice, and would not rashly nor unworthily nor prodigally dispense so great a reward.
I want therefore to review their merits, and to see if they are of such a kind as should exalt them to Heaven, and not rather plunge them down to the lowest Tartarus, which you, with many 29, affirm to be the prison house of infernal punishments. For thither the impious are accustomed to be thrust, and such as have committed incest with parents or sisters, and adulterers, and ravishers of virgins, and corruptors of boys, and the passionate, and murderers, and thieves, and deceivers, and whosoever resemble some god of yours, not one of whom could you prove free from crime or vice, unless you deny that he was a man. And yet, though you cannot deny them to have been men, there are those infamous marks in addition which forbid our believing them to have been deified afterwards. For if you judicially preside for the punishment of such men,—if such as are upright amongst you decline the society, conversation, and intimacy of the wicked and base, but yet that great |41 God has admitted such beings to a partnership in his own majesty,—why do you condemn those whose fellows in sin you worship? Your administration of justice is an affront upon heaven. To please your gods you must deify all your greatest criminals; for the deification of their fellows is an honour to them.
But not to dwell upon the question of their unworthiness, let us suppose that they were upright and pure and good. How many better men, nevertheless, have you left in the lower world? some Socrates in wisdom, some Aristides in justice, some Themistocles in military skill, some Alexander in magnanimity, some Polycrates in happiness, some Crcesus in wealth, some Demosthenes in eloquence! Which of those gods of yours was graver and wiser than Cato, juster and more strict than Scipio? which was more magnanimous than Pompey, more successful than Sulla, wealthier than Crassus, more eloquent than Cicero? How much more worthily would that great God have waited for such men as these to be called up into the rank of gods, especially as he must have had foreknowledge of these nobler characters! He was hasty, I suppose, and closed the entrance to heaven once for all; and now doubtless blushes to see better men murmuring with indignation in the realm below. |42
CHAPTER XII.
Your gods are nothing but names of dead men, images made of the commonest materials, which you treat with the same indignities that you inflict upon us.
BUT I now pass from these points, well aware that I shall by the very force of truth indicate what your gods are not by shewing what they are.
With regard to your gods, then, I see merely names of certain dead men of old time, and I hear stories, and I recognize religious rites founded upon the stories. And with regard to the images themselves, I find that they are nothing else but twin substances with vessels and utensils in common use; or even made out of these very vessels and utensils, as if they changed their destination by consecration, and were transformed by the capricious freak of skilled handicraft, the very process of transformation being carried out both most insultingly and sacrilegiously; so that in very truth, to us especially who are punished on account of these very gods, it may be some solace in our punishments to reflect that they themselves undergo the same things also in the process of their manufacture. You place the Christians on crosses and stakes : what image does not take its first shape in plastic clay fixed on a cross and stake? It is on the gibbet that the body of your god is first originated. You tear the sides of the Christians with claws : but to your gods axes and planes and files are more vigorously |43 applied over every limb. We surrender our necks: your gods are headless before the application of solder and glue and nails. We are cast to the beasts; those surely which you attach to Bacchus and Cybele and Caelestis 30. We are burned in the fire: so, too, are the gods in their original mass. We are condemned to the mines: it is from thence that your gods derive their origin. We are banished to the islands: it is in islands that some god of yours is generally born or dies. If by these means a divinity is constituted, then those who are so punished are deified, and tortures must be hailed as tokens of divinity. True, your gods do not feel the injuries and insults attendant upon their manufacture, any more than they perceive the devotion you render them. 'O impious words! O sacrilegious abuse!' Yes, gnash your teeth and foam with rage! You are the same persons who approve of a Seneca inveighing against your superstition at greater length and more bitterly. If therefore we do not worship statues and cold images, the very facsimiles of their dead originals, which the kites and mice and spiders have an accurate knowledge of, do we not deserve praise rather than punishment for our repudiation of a recognized error? For can we appear to injure those who we are convinced have no existence at all? that which is non-existent suffers nothing from any one, simply because it is non-existent. |44
CHAPTER XIII.
In fact, you act most sacrilegiously towards your deities, both private and public.
'BUT to us they are gods,' you say. How is it, then, that you on the contrary are convicted of acting impiously and sacrilegiously and irreverently towards your gods; seeing that you neglect those whose existence you assume, destroy those whom you fear, and ridicule those whom you even avenge? Consider if I am not speaking the truth. In the first place, when some of you worship one god and some another, of course you offend those whom you do not worship. Your preference for one cannot but issue in the slight of another, since choice implies rejection. Therefore you undoubtedly insult those whom you reject, and to whom you are not afraid of giving offence by your rejection. For the case of each god, as we touched upon before 31, depended upon the judgement of the senate. He was no god at all whom a man, when consulted upon the point, had refused to deify, and by his refusal had condemned.
Over your household gods, whom you call Lares, you exercise a household authority, pawning them, selling them, changing them, — sometimes from a Saturn into a cooking-pot, sometimes from a Minerva into a fire-pan,—as each god has become worn out or battered from being long worshipped, or as each |45 master of the house has found his domestic necessity more sacred.
Equally you profane your public gods by public right, by putting them in an auction-catalogue 32 as sources of revenue. The Capitol and the vegetable-market are bid for in identically the same way; under the same voice of the crier, under the same hammer, under the same booking of the bids by the quaestor, divinity is taken on lease, knocked down to the highest bidder. Yet lands burdened with a tax are less valuable, and persons who are subject to assessment for a poll-tax are less noble; for these are the marks of serfdom. But gods are the more holy the more they are subject to tribute; nay, they are holier in proportion to the amount of tribute they pay. Their very majesty is prostituted into a source of gain. Religion goes the round of the taverns begging. You demand payment for standing on temple ground, for access to the sacred rites; one is not allowed to get acquainted with the gods for nothing: they are on sale. What do you do at all to honour them that you do not also confer on your deceased friends? The temples and the altars serve for both alike. Their dress is the same, and the ornaments on their statues. Just as the dead man has his age, his craft, his occupation, so has the god. Wherein lies the difference between a funeral feast for an old man and a feast of Jupiter? between the |46 sacrificial and the funeral chalice? between the augur and the embalmer? for an augur, too, is in attendance on the dead. But worthily do you assign the honour of divinity to your deceased emperors, since you ascribe it to them even while living. Your gods will give you credit for it; nay, they will be grateful that their masters have been made their equals. But when you worship Larentina, a common prostitute (I wish it had at least been Lais or Phryne) amongst your Junos and Ceres and Dianas; when you invest Simon Magus with sanctity by a statue and an inscription of a 'holy god 33;' when you make some vicious court-page or other a god of the sacred synod;—although your ancient gods were no nobler in character, yet they will account themselves insulted by you, in that you have allowed to others also what antiquity conferred on them alone.
CHAPTER XIV.
For you cheat them in your sacrifices, and mock them in your poetic and philosophic literature.
I AM unwilling to review your sacred rites; I do not mention your conduct in sacrificing which leads |47 you to slay all your worn-out and diseased and scurfy animals; to cut off all the superfluous parts from the fat and sound beasts,—the heads and hoofs, which at home you would have set apart for your slaves or the dogs; to lay not a third part of the tithe of Hercules on his altar. I rather praise your wisdom which leads you to save something at all events from being lost.
But I turn to your literature, whence you derive instruction in prudence and the honourable duties of life; and what travesties do I find! gods, engaged like pairs of gladiators, fighting one another on account of Trojans and Greeks : Venus wounded by an arrow shot by human hands, because she wished to rescue her own son Aeneas, who was nearly killed by the same Diomede: Mars in chains for thirteen months, well-nigh wasted away: Jupiter, lest he should experience the same violence from the rest of the celestials, freed by the aid of some monster; and at one time weeping for the death of Sarpedon, and at another foully lusting after his sister, with an enumeration of his mistresses not for long since loved so much as she. Thenceforward what poet is there who is not found to be a culumniator of the gods on the authority of his master 34? One assigns Apollo to King Admetus to feed his cattle : another hires out the architectural services of Neptune to Laomedon; and there is the celebrated lyric poet (I mean Pindar) who sings that |48 Aesculapius was deservedly punished by a thunderbolt for his covetousness, which induced him to practise medicine wrongfully. Wicked Jupiter, if the bolt was his, acting unnaturally towards his grandson, and jealously towards the skilful physician. These things, amongst such very religious people, ought neither to be revealed if true, nor invented if false. Nor, again, do the tragic or comic writers spare them, so as to refrain from relating in their prologues the troubles or the failings of the family of some god.
I say nothing about the philosophers, content with the evidence of Socrates, who, in contempt of the gods, used to swear by an oak, a goat, and a dog. 'But for that very reason Socrates was condemned,' you may say, 'because he overthrew the gods.' True, because then, as always, truth met with hatred. Yet, when the Athenians, regretting their decision, afterwards punished Socrates' accusers, and placed a golden statue of him in a temple, the reversion of the condemnation restored the validity of Socrates' testimony to my contention. Moreover Diogenes, too, somewhere or other scoffs at Hercules, and Varro, the Roman Cynic, introduces three hundred headless Joves, or, as one should say, Jupiters.
CHAPTER XV.
You insult them in your burlesques and at your theatres.
THE rest of your ingenious amusements, too, minister to your pleasures through the dishonour of the |49 gods. Examine the choice farces of your Lentuli and Hostilii, and see whether in the jokes and tricks it is the actors or your gods that you laugh at:—'the adulterer Anubis;' 'the male Luna;' 'the scourged Diana;' the recital of 'the will of the deceased Jupiter;' and 'the three starved Hercules' held up to derision. Moreover, the literature of the stage depicts all their foulness. The Sun mourns for his son cast out of heaven, and you are delighted: Cybele sighs for her scornful shepherd 35, and you blush not for shame. You allow the criminal record of Jupiter to be sung; and Juno, Venus, and Minerva to be judged by a shepherd 36. Why, actually the mask of your god clothes an ignominious and infamous head : a body impure and rendered fit for the part by emasculation represents a Minerva or a Hercules! Is not their majesty outraged and their divinity prostituted, whilst you applaud?
You are, I presume, more religious in the theatre, where your gods in the same way dance over human blood, the stains resulting from penalties undergone, and supply the arguments and stories for the criminals —except that the criminals themselves often impersonate your very gods. We have sometimes seen Atys, that god from Pessinus, mutilated 37; and one burnt alive who had assumed the part of Hercules. We have smiled, too, amidst the sportive cruelties of the noon-day combats, at Mercury examining the dead with a branding iron. We have seen the brother |50 of Jupiter dragging off the corpses of the gladiators with his hammer in his hand.
But who can go through all your farces up to date one by one? If they destroy the honour of the divinity of the gods, if they obliterate the traces of their majesty, such burlesques find their origin surely in the contempt in which the gods are held both by those who perform them, and by those for whose amusement they are performed.
'But these are stage plays,' you say. If, however, I shall add, what the consciences of all will no less admit,—that adulteries are committed in the temples, that the pander's trade is carried on amidst the altars, that lust is consummated generally in the very abodes of the sacristans and priests, under the self-same fillets and sacred caps and purple vestments, while the incense is burning,—I know not whether your gods have not more reason to complain of you than of the Christians. Certainly those guilty of sacrilege are ever detected from among yourselves. For Christians never enter your temples even in the daytime. They, too, might perchance despoil them, if they, too, reverenced them. What then do they worship Avho worship not such things? It may indeed already be easily understood that they who are not devotees of falsehood are worshippers of the truth; for they no longer err in a matter wherein they ceased to err on the recognition of their previous error. Receive this first, and then from it, after certain false notions about it have been rebutted, deduce the whole system of our religion. |51
CHAPTER XVI.
You hold grotesque views respecting our Deity. We neither worship an ass's head, nor the Cross, nor the sun, nor a biformed monstrosity, resembling some of your gods.
FOR you, as certain others have done, have dreamed that our God is an ass's head. Cornelius Tacitus 38 introduced this suspicion. For in the fifth book of his "Histories," having begun his account of the Jewish war with the origin of the nation itself, having also drawn what conclusions he wished respecting both the origin and the name and the religion of the Jewish nation, he relates that, when the Jews had been liberated, or as he thought banished, from Aegypt, and were tortured by thirst in the deserts of Arabia, where water is exceedingly scarce, they availed themselves of wild asses to guide them to a spring, thinking that the animals would most likely be seeking water after feeding, and he states that for this service they consecrated as a deity the head of a similar animal. And thence, I take it, it was presumed that we, too, being nearly allied to the Jewish religion, were devotees of the same effigy. But yet this same Cornelius Tacitus, really a most loquacious man in falsehoods, relates in the same history that Cnaeus Pompeius, after his capture of Jerusalem and consequent entrance into the Temple for the purpose of investigating the secret mysteries of the Jewish |52 religion, found there no image. Yet surely if the object of their worship was ever represented under any effigy, it would be exhibited nowhere more appropriately than in its own shrine; and the more so, as there would be no fear of outsiders as witnesses, however foolish the cult. For it was only lawful for the priests to enter there, and the gaze of all others was cut off by a veil spread between. Yet you will not deny that all kinds of beasts and whole mules, along with their own protecting goddess Epona, are worshipped by you. It is perchance on this ground that we are denounced, because amongst worshippers of cattle and beasts of all kinds, we are worshippers of the ass alone.
Again, he who believes us to be devotees of the Cross will also be our fellow-worshipper. As long as it is some piece of wood that is propitiated, the fashion of it matters nothing, provided that the quality of the substance is the same; the shape matters nothing, provided that it is the very body of the god. And yet how far is the Athenian Pallas to be distinguished from the stock of a cross; or the Pharian Ceres, who stands forth publicly without an effigy as a rude stake and shapeless piece of wood. Every wooden post which is fixed in an upright position is part of a cross; we, if at all, worship the god whole and entire 39. We have mentioned that |53 the earliest form of your gods is moulded by potters on a cross. But you also worship Victories, and crosses form the interiors of the memorial trophies of these. The whole camp - religion of the Romans consists in venerating the standards, swearing by the standards, and setting the standards above all the gods 40. Yet all those crests of images on the standards are necklaces of crosses, and those flags on your ensigns and banners are the robes of crosses. I praise your scrupulousness: you would not deify crosses bare and undraped.
Others, certainly more naturally and with greater likelihood, believe the Sun to be our god. If this be the case, we must be accounted as Persians, although we do not adore it painted on linen, since we everywhere have the Sun itself in its own vault of heaven. This notion is in fact derived from our well-known habit of praying towards the east 41. But very |54 many of yourselves, too, moved sometimes by an affectation of adoring the celestial bodies as well, move your lips towards the sun-rise. Similarly, if we devote the day of the Sun to rejoicing, for a reason very far removed from any religious reverence for the Sun, we are only second, to those who set apart Saturn's day for idleness and feasting, and who themselves deviate from the Jewish custom which they misunderstand 42.
But now a new representation of our God has been published in the very next city 43, since a certain wretch, who hired himself out to trick the wild beasts in the arena, exhibited a picture with an inscription of this sort: "The god of the Christians conceived of an ass 44." It had ass's ears, was hoofed in one foot, carried a book, and wore a toga. We laughed both at its name and shape. But they ought to have forthwith adored such a biformed deity; since they have received as gods creatures compounded of a dog's and a lion's head; others having the horns of a goat and a ram; others formed like goats from the loins |55 and like serpents from the legs; others winged on the heel or the back.
We have treated of these matters at length, lest we should have omitted any unrefuted rumour, as though privy to its truth. And having disposed of all these false notions, I now turn to the clear declaration of what our religion is.
CHAPTER XVII.
We worship One God, the omnipotent and invisible Creator, to whom Nature and the human Soul bear witness.
THE object of our worship is One God, who, through the Word by which He commanded, through the Reason by which He ordered, through the Power by which He was able, framed out of nothing the whole mass of this universe with all its equipment of elements, bodies, and spirits, for the enhancing of His own majesty: and hence the Greeks have applied the word ko&smoj 45 to the world. He is invisible, although He may be seen : He is incomprehensible to touch, yet may be made present through grace 46: He is inestimable, yet may be estimated by the human senses: He is therefore the True and the |56 Great God. That, however, which can be commonly seen, that which can be comprehended by touch, that which can be estimated, is less than the eyes by which it is discerned, than the hands by which it is defiled, and than the senses by which its properties are discovered. But that which is immeasurable is known to itself alone. This it is which leads us to form an idea of God, although He does not admit of being estimated. Thus the force of His greatness presents Him to men at once as known and unknown. And this is the chief point of offence in those who refuse to recognize Him of whom they cannot be ignorant. Will you have this proved from His many and great works whereby we are preserved, sustained, delighted, and even terrified? will you have it proved from the testimony of the soul itself? For the soul, although limited by the prison-house of the body, although hindered by evil customs, although weakened by lusts and desires, although enslaved to false gods, yet, when it recovers its senses, as if from intoxication or sleep or any infirmity, and enjoys its own proper sanity, names God by this name alone, as being the proper name of the True God : 'Great God,' 'Good God,' and 'Which God grant' are common expressions. It also testifies to Him as Judge : 'God sees,' 'I leave it to God,' and 'God will repay me.' O testimony of the soul naturally Christian 47! Lastly, |57 when uttering these expressions, it looks not to the Capitol but to Heaven. For it knows the abode of the living God; from Him and from thence it came down.
CHAPTER XVIII.
And He hath given us a revelation of Himself through the Scriptures and the Prophets, whose writings are open to all.
BUT that we might approach more fully and impressively both to Himself and His ordinances and will, He gave in addition the document 48 of Scripture, in case any one should wish to enquire about God, and having enquired, to find Him, and having found, to believe, in Him, and having believed, to serve Him. For from the beginning He sent into the world men overflowing with the Divine Spirit, and worthy by reason of their justice and blamelessness to know God and to reveal Him, in order that they might preach Him as the Only God, Who founded the universe, and formed man from the ground (for He is the true Prometheus); Who ordered the course of the world according to the fixed arrangements and issues of the seasons; Who afterward proclaimed the signs of His majesty in judgement by water and fire; Who laid down those ordinances, by keeping of which His favour might be obtained, which you either know not or forsake; Who hath appointed rewards |58 for those that keep them, in order that, when the allotted time of this world has come to an end, He may adjudge to His own worshippers the recompense of eternal life, and sentence the profane to fire equally perpetual and lasting;—all who have died from the beginning of time having been raised up and reformed and called to account for the balancing of each one's deserts. These things we also once laughed at: we were one of yourselves; Christians are made Christians and not born so.
Those preachers whom we have spoken of are called prophets from their office of foretelling. Their words and the miracles, too, which they performed to establish the trustworthiness of their divine mission, remain in the storehouses of literature; nor are they concealed at this day. For the most erudite of the Ptolemies, whom they name Philadelphus 49, a man deeply read in all literature, when he was endeavouring, I suppose, to excel Pisistratus 50, in his eagerness to collect books, amongst other records which either their antiquity or curiousness rendered famous, demanded books from the Jews also, at the suggestion of Demetrius Phalereus 51, at that time the most eminent of philologists, to whom he had entrusted the superintendence of the collection. They were writings which the Jews alone possessed, peculiar to themselves, and in their own original tongue. For |59 the prophets were themselves of their nation, and had ever pleaded with the Jews, as being the household and family of God in consequence of the favour shewn towards the patriarchs. Those who are now Jews were formerly Hebrews: consequently their literature and language is Hebrew. Moreover, to guard against any misapprehension, Ptolemy was also allowed by the Jews to employ seventy-two interpreters 52 whom Menedemus also, the philosopher and the maintainer of a Providence, regarded with esteem on account of their agreement in opinion 53. These matters Aristeas 54 also has declared to you. Thus Ptolemy left the records open to the public, translated into the Greek language. And the libraries of Ptolemy are to be seen at this day in the Serapeum with the identical Hebrew writings. But the Jews also constantly read them publicly,—a taxed liberty 55; and there is common access to them every sabbath. He who hears them will find God; and he who is at pains to understand them will also be compelled to believe. |60
CHAPTER XIX.
The antiquity of these writings ensures their trustworthiness, for they are more ancient than your oldest records.
THEIR very high antiquity, then, claims the first authority for these documents. Amongst yourselves, too, it is almost a part of your religion to base the trustworthiness of a statement upon its antiquity.
[56 For Moses, the first prophet, who began by setting forth from bygone ages the creation of the world and the birth of the human race, and the subsequent violence of the deluge which avenged the iniquity of that time, related also by the spirit of prophecy events down to his own days, and thence, through contemporary occurrences, the figures of future events. And in his writings the order of events arranged from the beginning exhibits the computation of the world's time. He is found to precede by about three hundred years the oldest hero you have, Danaus, who came into Argos; and he is upwards of one thousand years earlier than the Trojan war, and therefore also earlier than Saturn himself. For according to the history of Thallus, in which is related the war of the Assyrians, and how Saturn, the king of the Titans, fought with Jupiter, it is plain that that war |61 preceded the fall of Troy by three hundred and twenty-two years. By the hand of this Moses, moreover, their own special law was sent to the Jews by God. Thereafter the other prophets, too, all older than your literature, foretold many things. For even he who prophesied last, either preceded by a short time, or was at least contemporaneous with, your sages and lawgivers. For Zacharias lived in the reign of Cyrus and Darius, at which time Thales, the first of natural philosophers, stirred no doubt by the words of the prophets, could give no definite answer about the Deity to the enquiring Croesus. Solon proclaimed to the same king that the end of a long life must be contemplated, in no very different language to that of the prophets 57. Yet one can look back and see that he was the originator alike of your laws and of your studies in law and divinity. That which precedes must necessarily be the source. Hence it is that you hold certain tenets in common with us, or closely resembling ours. As regards wisdom, the love of it has been wont to be called philosophy; as regards prophecy, the pretence to it has counted as poetic foresight. Men lusting for fame, having found something that they could appropriate, have corrupted it: it also happens to fruits to degenerate from the seed.
I might in many ways take up a position in defence of the antiquity of the sacred writings, if they did not possess a greater authority for their trustworthiness |62 in the very force of their intrinsic truth than would be at hand in the mere records of their age. For what could furnish a more powerful defence of their testimony than the daily checking off and fulfilment of some prophecy by the events of history, when the disposal of kingdoms, the fall of cities, the destruction of nations, and the state of the times correspond in every particular with what was foretold a thousand years before? And hence also our hope, which you deride, takes its life; and our confidence, which you call presumption, is strengthened. For it is natural that an examination of the past should lead us to place confidence in future fulfilments : the same voices have predicted both, the same writings have noted them. Time is but one with them, which to us seems to be broken up into parts. Thus everything which yet remains unproved is to us proved 58, because predicted along with those events which then were future but now have been proved. You also have, as I know, a Sibyl, inasmuch as a true prophetess of the True God has been called by that term everywhere, before all the rest who seemed to prophesy, so that your Sibyls counterfeited their name from the truth, just as your gods in their case did likewise 59.] |63
Consequently all the subject-matter and historical materials, antiquities, chronicles, and series of each of your ancient compositions, most nations likewise, and distinguished cities, your venerable records and memorials, and in fact hieroglyphics themselves, the witnesses and guardians of events, nay (and I am still within the mark), I say your very gods, temples and oracles and sacred rites,—all these meanwhile the roll of a single prophet surpasses in antiquity by centuries; and it will be found to be a literary store-house in which are brought together all the particulars of the Jewish religion, and thence of ours also.
If you have heard of a certain Moses, he is contemporary with the Argive Inachus; he precedes Danaus, himself also of remotest antiquity amongst you, by four hundred years nearly, for it is seven short of that number; he is earlier than the fall of Troy by about one thousand years, and Homer by, I might say, five hundred more, following some authorities. As regards also the rest of the prophets, although they lived after the time of Moses, yet the very latest of them will be found to be earlier than the first of your sages and law-givers and historians.
For us to explain on what lines these points might be proved is not so much a difficult as it would be a vast task; not so laborious as lengthy. We must betake ourselves to many documents with intricate calculations. We must lay open, too, the archives of the most ancient nations, the Aegyptians, the Chaldaeans, the Phoenicians; we must likewise summon to |64 our aid the fellow-countrymen of those from whom our knowledge is gained, some Egyptian Manetho, some Chaldaean Berosus, some Phoenician Iromus, king of Tyre; their disciples too, Ptolemy of Mendes, and Menander of Ephesus, and Demetrius of Phalerum; and king Juba, and Appion, and Thallus; and their critic, Josephus the Jew, the native defender of Jewish antiquities, who either confirms their accounts or convicts them of error. The Greek censors' lists, too, must be compared, and the dates of occurrences, that the sequences of events may be shewn, by which the reckonings of the annals may be evident. We must thoroughly explore the histories and literature of the world. And yet we have already produced as it were a part of our proof by indicating the sources whence proof is possible. But it is better to postpone doing this, lest we should either in our haste not follow it out far enough, or in following it out digress too far.
CHAPTER XX.
Their majesty and divinity are proved by the daily fulfilment of their predictions.
IN the place of this adjourned proof, we now present rather to your notice the majesty of the Scriptures instead of their age; we prove them to be divine, even if the question of their antiquity be undecided. Nor does this have to be learnt by slow processes and distant proofs; your instructors,—the world, the age, and its events,— are before you. |65 Whatever is taking place was foretold; whatever is seen was heard of before. That the earth swallows up cities, that the sea engulphs islands, that foreign and civil wars rend states, that kingdoms press violently against kingdoms, that famine and pestilence and local calamities and wild beasts lay waste many places, that the humble are exalted and the lofty abased, that equity is diminishing and iniquity increasing, that zeal for all wholesome discipline grows lax, that even the functions of the seasons and the duties of the elements are out of course, that the natural shape of animals is distorted by monstrosities and prodigies,—all these things have been foreknown and written of. Whilst we suffer them we read of them, whilst we are examining them they are proved. The verification of a prophecy is, I take it, the proper proof of its divine origin. Hence, therefore, we have also a sure confidence in future events, regarding them as in fact already proved, because they were predicted at the same time with those which are being verified daily. The same voices pronounce them, the same writings note them, the same Spirit impels them. To prophecy foretelling the future, time is all one; with men it is naturally broken up into parts while it is being fulfilled, while the present is being assigned out of the future, and then the past out of the present. How do we err, I ask you, in believing in future fulfilments, when we have already learnt to believe in them through the verifications in the two other stages of time? |66
CHAPTER XXI.
We worship the same God as the Jews, but, unlike them, we acknowledge Christ the Son of God to be God. He is the true Word, Who, begotten eternally by His Father, and being co-essential with Him, was made Flesh. The Jews misunderstood His Advent, His work, and His doctrine. They put Him to death, but He rose from the dead, as was predicted, and after forty days ascended into Heaven. Meanwhile His Gospel is spread throughout the world by His disciples.
BUT since we have proclaimed that this our sect is supported by the very ancient documents of the Jews, although most people know, and we ourselves declare, that it is a somewhat recent one, being of the Tiberian age, perhaps a further point may be raised concerning its nature on this ground,—as if it hid something of its own presumption under the shelter of a very distinguished, or at any rate a legalized, religion; or because, besides the difference in antiquity, we observe neither the distinctions of meats, nor the solemnities of days, nor the seal itself of the body 60, nor any association in name with the Jews, as we surely ought to do if we were worshippers of the same God. But even the common people now know something about Christ, regarding Him indeed as a man, such as the Jews judged Him to be; so |67 that from this we might more naturally be regarded as the worshippers of a man. But neither are we ashamed of Christ 61, since we rejoice to be convicted and condemned under His Name, nor yet is our conception of God different from that of the Jews 62.
We must therefore say a few words concerning Christ as God. So highly were the Jews favoured by God because of the conspicuous righteousness and faith of their early progenitors, from which cause also their numerous race and their glorious kingdom flourished, and so great was their blessedness, that they were forewarned by oracles of God which taught them how to obtain His favour and how to avoid offending Him. How greatly, notwithstanding they transgressed, puffed up even to madness by reliance on the privileges of their forefathers, turning aside from their special ordinances to a profane mode of life, their latter end at this day proves, even if they themselves confess it not. Scattered abroad, wanderers, exiles from their own sky and soil, they roam over the world without either man or God for their king, nor is it permitted to them so much as to set foot upon their native land, not even in the character |68 of strangers 63. And the same holy oracles, which used to threaten them beforehand with these disasters, were all ever urging the fact that in the last courses of the world God would, out of every nation and people and clime, choose for Himself other more faithful worshippers, to whom He would transfer His favour, and that, indeed, in richer abundance on account of the capacity of a more enlarged oeconomy. [He came therefore, the very Christ, the Son of God, Who it was foretold should come from God to establish and illuminate it.] The Son of God, therefore, was announced as the Ruler and Master of this grace and dispensation, the Illuminator and Guide of the human race; not born in any wise so as to be ashamed of the name of 'Son,' or of His descent from His Father; not born, for example, from a sister's incest or a daughter's violation, or from adultery with another's wife; nor had He, for His Father, a god in the form of a scaled or horned or feathered lover, or one transformed into gold :—for such are the divine appearances of your Jupiter. But the Son of God has no mother from any impure connexion; nay, even she whom He seems to have, had not married.
But first I will declare His essence, and in this way the nature of His nativity will be understood. We have already said that God constructed this universe of the world by His Word, Reason, and Power. Amongst your wise men also it is agreed that lo&goj, |69 that is, Word and Reason, should be regarded as the artificer of the universe. For Zeno decides that he is the maker who formed everything in its regular order, and that he be called Fate and God and Mind of Jupiter and Universal Necessity. These titles Cleanthes accumulates on the Spirit which, he affirms, pervades the universe. And we, too, ascribe Spirit as the proper essence of the Word and Reason and Power by Which we have said God constructed all things; in which Divine Nature, when authoritatively speaking, the Word is contained; with which, when ordering, the Reason is present; and in virtue of which, when perfecting, the Power presides. We have learnt that He came forth from God and was generated by that procession, and therefore is called Son of God, and GOD, from unity of essence with Him. For God also is Spirit 64. Thus when a ray is put forth from the sun, it is a portion from the whole; yet the sun will be in the ray, because the ray is a part of the sun, and the substance is not divided but extended. So Spirit comes forth from Spirit, and God from God, as light is kindled from light. The original parent matter remains whole and unimpaired, although you derive from it many off-shoots transmitting its qualities: so also That Which has come forth from God is God, and Son of God, and Both are One. So also Spirit from Spirit and God from God makes another, not in number but in mode, not in condition but in order, and has not separated from the Original but come forth of it. That Ray of |70 God, therefore, as was ever foretold in times past 65, descending into a certain Virgin, and becoming Flesh in her womb, is born Man united with God. His Flesh informed with the Divine Nature is nourished, groweth up, speaketh, teacheth, worketh, and is CHRIST.
Receive this story for the time being (it resembles your own), whilst we shew how Christ is approved. Those who supplied you beforehand with rival stories resembling the truth in order to destroy it, were aware of what was to come to pass. The Jews also knew that Christ was to come, because the prophets used to speak of it to them. And even now they look for His Advent; nor is there any other contention between them and us greater than this, because they do not believe that He has already come. For while two Advents of Him are indicated,—the first, which has already been accomplished, in the humility of a human lot; the second, which impends at the close of this age, in the exaltation of manifested glory, —they, by misunderstanding the first, have regarded the second, which has been more clearly predicted, and for which they hope, as the only one. For it was the desert of their transgression that they should not understand the first coming, inasmuch as they would have believed had they understood, and would have attained salvation had they believed. They themselves read that it has been thus written,— that they have been deprived of their wisdom and understanding and the use of their eyes and ears 66. |71
And when they had hastily decided from His humility that therefore He was merely man, it followed that they regarded Him from His power as a magician; when He by a word cast out daemons from men, restored their sight to blind men, cleansed lepers, reinvigorated paralytics, and even at a word restored the dead to life, made the very elements His servants, restraining the winds and walking upon the sea, shewing that He was the lo&goj of God, that is, the Primordial Word, First-begotten, attended by Power and Reason and sustained by Spirit, the Selfsame Who both was making and had made all things at a word.
But at His doctrine, by which the masters and leaders of the Jews were convicted, they were so exasperated, especially when a vast multitude turned away after Him, that at last they brought Him up before Pontius Pilate, at that time the procurator of Syria under the Roman government, and by the violence of their votes extorted from him the sentence that He should be surrendered to them for crucifixion. He Himself had predicted that they would so act. This would not, perhaps, be of great weight had not the prophets of old also foretold the same. And yet when He was crucified He spontaneously yielded up His Spirit with a word, and anticipated the duty of the executioner. At the same moment, while the sun was pointing to midday, the daylight was withdrawn. Those who were ignorant that this also was predicted of Christ thought that it was merely an eclipse [but no reason being found for it, they then |72 denied the fact]; and yet you have this event that befel the world registered in your archives 67. After that the Jews took Him down from the cross and placed Him in a sepulchre, which they in their great care even surrounded with a military guard, lest, as He had predicted His resurrection from the dead on the third day, His disciples should stealthily remove the body and deceive the suspicious rulers. But lo, on the third day there was suddenly an earthquake, and the stone was rolled away which closed the sepulchre, and the guard was scattered through fear; yet no disciples appeared, nor was anything found in the sepulchre but the grave-clothes. Yet none the less the rulers, to whose interest it was both to circulate a lie, and to recal the enthralled and servile people to themselves from the faith, bruited it abroad that He was stolen by His disciples.
For He did not shew Himself forth to the people, lest they should be delivered from their wicked error, and in order that faith, destined to receive no mean reward, should not stand firm without difficulty. But He passed forty days with certain of His disciples in Galilee, a region of Judaea, teaching them what they were to teach. Afterwards having commissioned them to the duty of preaching throughout the world, He was taken up into Heaven enveloped in a cloud, much more truly than your Proculi are wont to assert |73 of Romulus. All these things concerning Christ, Pilate, himself also already a Christian in his own conscience, announced to Tiberius the Caesar at that time. Moreover the Caesars, too, would have believed on Christ, if either Caesars had not been necessary for the age or if Caesars could have been Christians too. His disciples also scattered throughout the world obeyed the command of God their Master, and they themselves, too, endured many things at the hands of the persecuting Jews, suffering willingly indeed from their reliance on the truth; and lastly by the cruelty of Nero they sowed the seed of their Christian blood in Rome. But we will shew you that those very beings that you adore are efficient witnesses to Christ. It is a great point if, to make you believe the Christians, I can employ those on whose account you now disbelieve them. Meantime this is the plan of our system; we have declared the origin of our sect and name, and Who was its Author.
Let no one henceforth cast infamy upon us, let no one think any otherwise about us than this, since it is of course impossible to lie about one's religion. For when one dissimulates the real object of his worship, he denies his God and transfers his worship and honour to another, and by so doing ceases to worship what he has denied. We affirm and affirm openly, and cry out, torn and bleeding under your tortures, 'We worship God through Christ.' Regard Him as a man: through Him and in Him God wishes to be known and worshipped. For, to answer |74 the Jews,—they themselves also learnt to worship God through Moses; to meet the Greeks,—Orpheus in Pieria, Musseus in Athens, Melampus in Argos, Trophonius in Boeotia, bound men down under their rites; and to look to yourselves, the masters of the world,—Numa Pompilius was a man, who burdened the Romans with the most elaborate superstitions. And so it was allowable for Christ, too, to set forth in a scheme His own Divinity, not as a means whereby He might, like Numa, win to humane feelings men rude and hitherto barbarous, astonished by the great number of gods to be propitiated, but so as to open to the recognition of the truth the eyes of men already cultured, and deluded by their very refinement. Seek, then, and see if that Divinity of Christ be true. If it be such that by knowledge of it one may be reclaimed to good, it follows that any other which is found contrary to it must be pronounced a false divinity—and especially on every ground that counterfeit which, skulking under the names and images of the dead, by certain signs and miracles and oracles gains a credence for its own divinity.
CHAPTER XXII.
We with your philosophers assert the existence of demons, spiritual beings of malefic power, who falsely claim to be divine.
AND we thus affirm the existence of certain spiritual substances; nor is the name a new one. The philosophers are acquainted with daemons; for |75 Socrates himself waited upon the will of a daemon. And why not? when a daemon is said to have attended him from boyhood as a dissuader,—doubtless from good. The poets are acquainted with daemons; even the untaught vulgar often make use of them in cursing; for they name also Satan 68, the chief of this evil race, in their word of execration, just as if from an innate consciousness of the soul. Angels 69, too, Plato also does not deny; and to the names of both the magicians, for example, are witnesses at hand. Moreover how from certain angels, corrupted of their own free will, a still more corrupt race of daemons has issued, condemned by God, along with the authors of the race and him whom we have spoken of as their chief, may be learnt in the sacred writings 70. It will be sufficient now to explain the method of their operation. Their business is the ruin of man; thus spiritual wickedness began to act from the very first for the destruction of man. Consequently they inflict on the body diseases and many grievous mishaps, and violently visit the mind with sudden and extraordinary aberrations. Their wonderful subtilty and tenuity gives them access to both parts of man. Spiritual agencies possess great powers; so that, being invisible and unperceived by the senses,