Tertullian: Apology Part 2
CHAPTER 7
Monsters of wickedness, we are accused of observing a holy rite in which
we kill a little child and then eat it; in which, after the feast, we practice
incest, the dogs — our pimps, forsooth, overturning the lights and getting
us the shamelessness of darkness for our impious lusts. This is what is
constantly laid to our charge, and yet you take no pains to elicit the truth
of what we have been so long accused. Either bring, then, the matter to the
light of day if you believe it, or give it no credit as having never inquired
into it. On the ground of your double dealing, we are entitled to lay it
down to you that there is no reality in the thing which you dare not
expiscate. You impose on the executioner, in the case of Christians, a duty
the very opposite of expiscation: he is not to make them confess what
they do, but to make them deny what they are. We date the origin of our
religion, as we have mentioned before, from the reign of Tiberius. Truth
and the hatred of truth come into our world together. As soon as truth
appears, it is regarded as an enemy. It has as many foes as there are
strangers to it: the Jews, as was to be looked for, from a spirit of rivalry;.
the soldiers, out of a desire to extort money; our very domestics, by their
nature. We are daily beset by foes, we are daily betrayed; we are
oftentimes surprised in our meetings and congregations. Whoever
happened withal upon an infant wailing, according to the common story?
Whoever kept for the judge, just as he had found them, the gory mouths of
Cyclops and Sirens? Whoever found any traces of uncleanness in their
wives? Where is the man who, when he had discovered such atrocities,
concealed them; or, in the act of dragging the culprits before the judge, was
bribed into silence? If we always keep our secrets, when were our
proceedings made known to the world? Nay, by whom could they be
made known? Not, surely, by the guilty parties themselves; even from the
very idea of the thing, the fealty of silence being ever due to mysteries.
The Samothracian and Eleusinian make no disclosures — how much more
will silence be kept in regard to such as are sure, in their unveiling, to call
forth punishment from man at once, while wrath divine is kept in store for
the future? If, then, Christians are not themselves the publishers of their
crime, it follows of course it must be strangers. And whence have they
their knowledge, when it is also a universal custom in religious initiations
to keep the profane aloof, and to beware of witnesses, unless it be that
those who are so wicked have less fear than their neighbors? Every one
knows what sort of thing rumor is. It is one of your own sayings, that
“among all evils, none flies so fast as rumor.” Why is rumor such an evil
thing? Is it because it is fleet? Is it because it carries information? Or is it
because it is in the highest degree mendacious? — a thing, not even when it
brings some truth to us, without a taint of falsehood, either detracting, or
adding, or changing from the simple fact? Nay more, it is the very law of
its being to continue only while it lies, and to live but so long as there is no
proof; for when the proof is given, it ceases to exist; and, as having done
its work of merely spreading a report, it delivers up a fact, and is
henceforth held to be a fact, and called a fact. And then no one says, for
instance, “They say that it took place at Rome,” or, “There is a rumor that
he has obtained a province,” but, “He has got a province,” and, “It took
place at Rome.” Rumor, the very designation of uncertainty, has no place
when a thing is certain. Does any but a fool put his trust in it? For a wise
man never believes the dubious. Everybody knows, however zealously it
is spread abroad, on whatever strength of asseveration it rests, that some
time or other from some one fountain it has its origin. Thence it must.
creep into propagating tongues and ears; and a small seminal blemish so
darkens all the rest of the story, that no one can determine whether the
lips, from which it first came forth, planted the seed of falsehood, as often
happens, from a spirit of opposition, or from a suspicious judgment, or
from a confirmed, nay, in the case of some, an inborn, delight in lying. It is
well that time brings all to light, as your proverbs and sayings testify, by a
provision of Nature, which has so appointed things that nothing long is
hidden, even though rumor has not disseminated it. It is just then as it
should be, that fame for so long a period has been alone aware of the
crimes of Christians. This is the witness you bring against us — one that
has never been able to prove the accusation it some time or other sent
abroad, and at last by mere continuance made into a settled opinion in the
world; so that I confidently appeal to Nature herself, ever true, against
those who groundlessly hold that such things are to be credited.
CHAPTER 8
See now, we set before you the reward of these enormities. They give
promise of eternal life. Hold it meanwhile as your own belief. I ask you,
then, whether, so believing, you think it worth attaining with a conscience
such as you will have. Come, plunge your knife into the babe, enemy of
none, accused of none, child of all; or if that is another’s work, simply take
your place beside a human being dying before he has really lived, await the
departure of the lately given soul, receive the fresh young blood, saturate
your bread with it, freely partake. The while as you recline at table, take
note of the places which your mother and your sister occupy; mark them
well, so that when the dog-made darkness has fallen on you, you may
make no mistake, for you will be guilty of a crime — unless you
perpetrate a deed of incest. Initiated and sealed into things like these, you
have life everlasting. Tell me, I pray you, is eternity worth it? If it is not,
then these things are not to be credited. Even although you had the belief, I
deny the will; and even if you had the will, I deny the possibility. Why
then can others do it, if you cannot? why cannot you, if others can? I
suppose we are of a different nature — are we Cynopae or Sciapodes?
You are a man yourself as well as the Christian: if you cannot do it, you
ought not to believe it of others, for a Christian is a man as well as you..
But the ignorant, forsooth, are deceived and imposed on. They were quite
unaware of anything of the kind being imputed to Christians, or they
would certainly have looked into it for themselves, and searched the matter
out. Instead of that, it is the custom for persons wishing initiation into
sacred rites, I think, to go first of all to the master of them, that he may
explain what preparations are to be made. Then, in this case, no doubt he
would say, “You must have a child still of tender age, that knows not what
it is to die, and can smile under thy knife; bread, too, to collect the gushing
blood; in addition to these, candlesticks, and lamps, and dogs — with
tid-bits to draw them on to the extinguishing of the lights: above all things,
you will require to bring your mother and your sister with you.” But what
if mother and sister are unwilling? or if there be neither the one nor the
other? What if there are Christians with no Christian relatives? He will not
be counted, I suppose, a true follower of Christ, who has not a brother or
a son. And what now, if these things are all in store for them without their
knowledge? At least afterwards they come to know them; and they bear
with them, and pardon them. They fear, it may be said, lest they have to
pay for it if they let the secret out: nay, but they will rather in that case
have every claim to protection; they will even prefer, one might think,
dying by their own hand, to living under the burden of such a dreadful
knowledge. Admit that they have this fear; yet why do they still
persevere? For it is plain enough that you will have no desire to continue
what you would never have been, if you had had previous knowledge of it.
CHAPTER 9
That I may refute more thoroughly these charges, I will show that in part
openly, in part secretly, practices prevail among you which have led you
perhaps to credit similar things about us. Children were openly sacrificed
in Africa to Saturn as lately as the proconsulship of Tiberius, who
exposed to public gaze the priests suspended on the sacred trees
overshadowing their temple — so many crosses on which the punishment
which justice craved overtook their crimes, as the soldiers of our country
still can testify who did that very work for that proconsul. And even now
that sacred crime still continues to be done in secret. It is not only
Christians, you see, who despise you; for all that you do there is neither.
any crime thoroughly and abidingly eradicated, nor does any of your gods
reform his ways. When Saturn did not spare his own children, he was not
likely to spare the children of others; whom indeed the very parents
themselves were in the habit of offering, gladly responding to the call
which was made on them, and keeping the little ones pleased on the
occasion, that they might not die in tears. At the same time, there is a vast
difference between homicide and parricide. A more advanced age was
sacrificed to Mercury in Gaul. I hand over the Tauric fables to their own
theaters. Why, even in that most religious city of the pious descendants of
Aeneas, there is a certain Jupiter whom in their games they lave with
human blood. It is the blood of a beast-fighter, you say. Is it less, because
of that, the blood of a man? Or is it viler blood because it is from the veins
of a wicked man? At any rate it is shed in murder. O Jove, thyself a
Christian, and in truth only son of thy father in his cruelty! But in regard
to child murder, as it does not matter whether it is committed for a sacred
object, or merely at one’s own self-impulse — although there is a great
difference, as we have said, between parricide and homicide — I shall turn
to the people generally. How many, think you, of those crowding around
and gaping for Christian blood, — how many even of your rulers, notable
for their justice to you and for their severe measures against us, may I
charge in their own consciences with the sin of putting their offspring to
death? As to any difference in the kind of murder, it is certainly the more
cruel way to kill by drowning, or by exposure to cold and hunger and dogs.
A maturer age has always preferred death by the sword. In our case,
murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the fetus in
the womb, while as yet the human being derives blood from other parts of
the body for its sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier
man-killing; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born,
or destroy one that is coming to the birth. That is a man which is going to
be one; you have the fruit already in its seed. As to meals of blood and
such tragic dishes, read — I am not sure where it is told (it is in
Herodotus, I think) — how blood taken from the arms, and tasted by both
parties, has been the treaty bond among some nations. I am not sure what
it was that was tasted in the time of Catiline. They say, too, that among
some Scythian tribes the dead are eaten by their friends. But I am going far
from home. At this day, among ourselves, blood consecrated to Bellona,
blood drawn from a punctured thigh and then partaken of, seals initiation.
into the rites of that goddess. Those, too, who at the gladiator shows, for
the cure of epilepsy, quaff with greedy thirst the blood of criminals slain
in the arena, as it flows fresh from the wound, and then rush off — to
whom do they belong? those, also, who make meals on the flesh of wild
beasts at the place of combat — who have keen appetites for bear and
stag? That bear in the struggle was bedewed with the blood of the man
whom it lacerated: that stag rolled itself in the gladiator’s gore. The entrails
of the very bears, loaded with as yet undigested human viscera, are in great
request. And you have men rifting up man-fed flesh? If you partake of
food like this, how do your repasts differ from those you accuse us
Christians of? And do those, who, with savage lust, seize on human
bodies, do less because they devour the living? Have they less the
pollution of human blood on them because they only lick up what is to
turn into blood? They make meals, it is plain, not so much of infants, as of
grown-up men. Blush for your vile ways before the Christians, who have
not even the blood of animals at their meals of simple and natural food;
who abstain from things strangled and that die a natural death, for no other
reason than that they may not contract pollution, so much as from blood
secreted in the viscera. To clench the matter with a single example, you
tempt Christians with sausages of blood, just because you are perfectly
aware that the thing by which you thus try to get them to transgress they
hold unlawful. And how unreasonable it is to believe that those, of whom
you are convinced that they regard with horror the idea of tasting the
blood of oxen, are eager after blood of men; unless, mayhap, you have tried
it, and found it sweeter to the taste! Nay, in fact, there is here a test you
should apply to discover Christians, as well as the fire-pan and the censer.
They should be proved by their appetite for human blood, as well as by
their refusal to offer sacrifice; just as otherwise they should be affirmed to
be free of Christianity by their refusal to taste of blood, as by their
sacrificing; and there would be no want of blood of men, amply supplied
as that would be in the trial and condemnation of prisoners. Then who are
more given to the crime of incest than those who have enjoyed the
instruction of Jupiter himself? Ctesias tells us that the Persians have illicit
intercourse with their mothers. The Macedonians, too, are suspected on
this point; for on first hearing the tragedy of Oedipus they made mirth of
the incest-doer’s grief, exclaiming, hJlaune eijv thra. Even now
reflect what opportunity there is for mistakes leading to incestuous.
comminglings — your promiscuous looseness supplying the materials.
You first of all expose your children, that they may be taken up by any
compassionate passer-by, to whom they are quite unknown; or you give
them away, to be adopted by those who will do better to them the part of
parents. Well, some time or other, all memory of the alienated progeny
must be lost; and when once a mistake has been made, the transmission of
incest thence will still go on — the race and the crime creeping on together.
Then, further, wherever you are — at home, abroad, over the seas — your
lust is an attendant, whose general indulgence, or even its indulgence in the
most limited scale, may easily and unwittingly anywhere beget children, so
that in this way a progeny scattered about in the commerce of life may
have intercourse with those who are their own kin, and have no notion that
there is any incest in the case. A persevering and steadfast chastity has
protected us from anything like this: keeping as we do from adulteries and
all post-matrimonial unfaithfulness, we are not exposed to incestuous
mishaps. Some of us, making matters still more secure, beat away from
them entirely the power of sensual sin, by a virgin continence, still boys in
this respect when they are old. If you would but take notice that such sins
as I have mentioned prevail among you, that would lead you to see that
they have no existence among Christians. The same eyes would tell you of
both facts. But the two blindnesses are apt to go together; so that those
who do not see what is, think they see what is not. I shall show it to be so
in everything. But now let me speak of matters which are more dear.
CHAPTER 10
“You do not worship the gods,” you say; “and you do not offer sacrifices
for the emperors.” Well, we do not offer sacrifice for others, for the same
reason that we do not for ourselves, — namely, that your gods are not at
all the objects of our worship. So we are accused of sacrilege and treason.
This is the chief ground of charge against us — nay, it is the sum-total of
our offending; and it is worthy then of being inquired into, if neither
prejudice nor injustice be the judge, the one of which has no idea of
discovering the truth, and the other simply and at once rejects it. We do
not worship your gods, because we know that there are no such beings.
This, therefore, is what you should do: you should call on us to.
demonstrate their non-existence, and thereby prove that they have no
claim to adoration; for only if your gods were truly so, would there be any
obligation to render divine homage to them. And punishment even were
due to Christians, if it were made plain that those to whom they refused
all worship were indeed divine. But you say, They are gods. We protest
and appeal from yourselves to your knowledge; let that judge us; let that
condemn us, if it can deny that all these gods of yours were but men. If
even it venture to deny that, it will be confuted by its own books of
antiquities, from which it has got its information about them, bearing
witness to this day, as they plainly do, both of the cities in which they
were born, and the countries in which they have left traces of their
exploits, as well as where also they are proved to have been buried. Shall I
now, therefore, go over them one by one, so numerous and so various, new
and old, barbarian, Grecian, Roman, foreign, captive and adopted, private
and common, male and female, rural and urban, naval and military? It were
useless even to hunt out all their names: so I may content myself with a
compend; and this not for your information, but that you may have what
you know brought to your recollection, for undoubtedly you act as if you
had forgotten all about them. No one of your gods is earlier than Saturn:
from him you trace all your deities, even those of higher rank and better
known. What, then, can be proved of the first, will apply to those that
follow. So far, then, as books give us information, neither the Greek
Diodorus or Thallus, neither Cassius Severus or Cornelius Nepos, nor any
writer upon sacred antiquities, have ventured to say that Saturn was any
but a man: so far as the question depends on facts, I find none more
trustworthy than those — that in Italy itself we have the country in
which, after many expeditions, and after having partaken of Attic
hospitalities, Saturn settled, obtaining cordial welcome from Janus, or, as
the Salii will have it, Janis. The mountain on which he dwelt was called
Saturnius; the city he founded is called Saturnia to this day; last of all, the
whole of Italy, after having borne the name of Oenotria, was called
Saturnia from him. He first gave you the art of writing, and a stamped
coinage, and thence it is he presides over the public treasury. But if Saturn
were a man, he had undoubtedly a human origin; and having a human
origin, he was not the offspring of heaven and earth. As his parents were
unknown, it was not unnatural that he should be spoken of as the son of
those elements from which we might all seem to spring. For who does not.
speak of heaven and earth as father and mother, in a sort of way of
veneration and honor? or from the custom which prevails among us of
saying that persons of whom we have no knowledge, or who make a
sudden appearance, have fallen from the skies? In this way it came about
that Saturn, everywhere a sudden and unlooked-for guest, got everywhere
the name of the Heaven-born. For even the common folk call persons
whose stock is unknown, sons of earth. I say nothing of how men in these
rude times were wont to act, when they were impressed by the look of
any stranger happening to appear among them, as though it were divine,
since even at this day men of culture make gods of those whom, a day or
two before, they acknowledged to be dead men by their public mourning
for them. Let these notices of Saturn, brief as they are, suffice. It will thus
also be proved that Jupiter is as certainly a man, as from a man he sprung;
and that one after another the whole swarm is mortal like the primal stock.
CHAPTER 11
And since, as you dare not deny that these deities of yours once were
men, you have taken it on you to assert that they were made gods after
their decease, let us consider what necessity there was for this. In the first
place, you must concede the existence of one higher God — a certain
wholesale dealer in divinity, who has made gods of men. For they could
neither have assumed a divinity which was not theirs, nor could any but
one himself possessing it have conferred it on them. If there was no one to
make gods, it is vain to dream of gods being made when thus you have no
god-maker. Most certainly, if they could have deified themselves, with a
higher state at their command, they never would have been men. If, then,
there be one who is able to make gods, I turn back to an examination of
any reason there may be for making gods at all; and I find no other reason
than this, that the great God has need of their ministrations and aids in
performing the offices of Deity. But first it is an unworthy idea that He
should need the help of a man, and in fact a dead man, when, if He was to
be in want of this assistance from the dead, He might more fittingly have
created some one a god at the beginning. Nor do I see any place for his
action. For this entire world-mass — whether self-existent and uncreated,
as Pythagoras maintains, or brought into being by a creator’s hands, as.
Plato hold — was manifestly, once for all in its original construction,
disposed, and furnished, and ordered, and supplied with a government of
perfect wisdom. That cannot be imperfect which has made all perfect.
There was nothing waiting on for Saturn and his race to do. Men will make
fools of themselves if they refuse to believe that from the very first rain
poured down from the sky, and stars gleamed, and light shone, and
thunders roared, and Jove himself dreaded the lightnings you put in his
hands; that in like manner before Bacchus, and Ceres, and Minerva, nay
before the first man, whoever that was, every kind of fruit burst forth
plentifully from the bosom of the earth, for nothing provided for the
support and sustenance of man could be introduced after his entrance on
the stage of being. Accordingly, these necessaries of life are said to have
been discovered, not created. But the thing you discover existed before;
and that which had a pre-existence must be regarded as belonging not to
him who discovered it, but to him who made it, for of course it had a being
before it could be found. But if, on account of his being the discoverer of
the vine, Bacchus is raised to godship, Lucullus, who first introduced the
cherry from Pontus into Italy, has not been fairly dealt with; for as the
discoverer of a new fruit, he has not, as though he were its creator, been
awarded divine honors. Wherefore, if the universe existed from the
beginning, thoroughly furnished with its system working under certain
laws for the performance of its functions, there is, in this respect, an entire
absence of all reason for electing humanity to divinity; for the positions
and powers which you have assigned to your deities have been from the
beginning precisely what they would have been, although you had never
deified them. But you turn to another reason, telling us that the conferring
of deity was a way of rewarding worth. And hence you grant, I conclude,
that the god-making God is of transcendent righteousness, — one who will
neither rashly, improperly; nor needlessly bestow a reward so great. I
would have you then consider whether the merits of your deities are of a
kind to have raised them to the heavens, and not rather to have sunk them
down into lowest depths of Tartarus, — the place which you regard, with
many, as the prison-house of infernal punishments. For into this dread
place are wont to be cast all who offend against filial piety, and such as are
guilty of incest with sisters, and seducers of wives, and ravishers of
virgins, and boy-polluters, and men of furious tempers, and murderers, and
thieves, and deceivers; all, in short, who tread in the footsteps of your.
gods, not one of whom you can prove free from crime or vice, save by
denying that they had ever a human existence. But as you cannot deny
that, you have those foul blots also as an added reason for not believing
that they were made gods afterwards. For if you rule for the very purpose
of punishing such deeds; if every virtuous man among you rejects all
correspondence, converse, and intimacy with the wicked and base, while,
on the other hand, the high God has taken up their mates to a share of His
majesty, on what ground is it that you thus condemn those whose
fellow-actors you adore? Your goodness is an affront in the heavens. Deify
your vilest criminals, if you would please your gods. You honor them by
giving divine honors to their fellows. But to say no more about a way of
acting so unworthy, there have been men virtuous, and pure, and good. Yet
how many of these nobler men you have left in the regions of doom! as
Socrates, so renowned for his wisdom, Aristides for his justice,
Themistocles for his warlike genius, Alexander for his sublimity of soul,
Polycrates for his good fortune, Croesus for his wealth, Demosthenes for
his eloquence. Which of these gods of yours is more remarkable for gravity
and wisdom than Cato, more just and warlike than Scipio? which of them
more magnanimous than Pompey, more prosperous than Sylla, of greater
wealth than Crassus, more eloquent than Tullius? How much better it
would have been for the God Supreme to have waited that He might have
taken such men as these to be His heavenly associates, prescient as He
must have surely been of their worthier character! He was in a hurry, I
suppose, and straightway shut heaven’s gates; and now He must surely
feel ashamed at these worthies murmuring over their lot in the regions
below.
CHAPTER 12
But I pass from these remarks, for I know and I am going to show what
your gods are not, by showing what they are. In reference, then, to these, I
see only names of dead men of ancient times; I hear fabulous stories; I
recognize sacred rites founded on mere myths. As to the actual images, I
regard hem as simply pieces of matter akin to the vessels and utensils in
common use among us, or even undergoing in their consecration a hapless
change from these useful articles at the hands of reckless art, which in the.
transforming process treats them with utter contempt, nay, in the very act
commits sacrilege; so that it might be no slight solace to us in all our
punishments, suffering as we do because of these same gods, that in their
making they suffer as we do themselves. You put Christians on crosses
and stakes: what image is not formed from the clay in the first instance, set
on cross and stake? The body of your god is first consecrated on the
gibbet. You tear the sides of Christians with your claws; but in the case of
your own gods, axes, and planes, and rasps are put to work more
vigorously on every member of the body. We lay our heads upon the
block; before the lead, and the glue, and the nails are put in requisition,
your deities are headless. We are cast to the wild beasts, while you attach
them to Bacchus, and Cybele, and Caelestis. We are burned in the flames;
so, too, are they in their original lump. We are condemned to the mines;
from these your gods originate. We are banished to islands; in islands it is a
common thing for your gods to have their birth or die. If it is in this way a
deity is made, it will follow that as many as are punished are deified, and
tortures will have to be declared divinities. But plain it is these objects of
your worship have no sense of the injuries and disgraces of their
consecrating, as they are equally unconscious of the honors paid to them.
O impious words! O blasphemous reproaches! Gnash your teeth upon us
— foam with maddened rage against us — ye are the persons, no doubt,
who censured a certain Seneca speaking of your superstition at much
greater length and far more sharply! In a word, if we refuse our homage to
statues and frigid images, the very counterpart of their dead originals, with
which hawks, and mice, and spiders are so well acquainted, does it not
merit praise instead of penalty, that we have rejected what we have come
to see is error? We cannot surely be made out to injure those who we are
certain are nonentities. What does not exist, is in its nonexistence secure
from suffering.
CHAPTER 13
“But they are gods to us,” you say. And how is it, then, that in utter
inconsistency with this, you are convicted of impious, sacrilegious, and
irreligious conduct to them, neglecting those you imagine to exist,
destroying those who are the objects of your fear, making mock of those.
whose honor you avenge? See now if I go beyond the truth. First, indeed,
seeing you worship, some one god, and some another, of course you give
offense to those you do not worship. You cannot continue to give
preference to one without slighting another, for selection implies rejection.
You despise, therefore, those whom you thus reject; for in your rejection
of them, it is plain you have no dread of giving them offense. For, as we
have already shown, every god depended on the decision of the senate for
his godhead. No god was he whom man in his own counsels did not wish
to be so, and thereby condemned. The family deities you call Lares, you
exercise a domestic authority over, pledging them, selling them, changing
them — making sometimes a cooking-pot of a Saturn, a firepan of a
Minerva, as one or other happens to be worn done, or broken in its long
sacred use, or as the family head feels the pressure of some more sacred
home necessity. In like manner, by public law you disgrace your state
gods, putting them in the auction-catalog, and making them a source of
revenue. Men seek to get the Capitol, as they seek to get the herb market,
under the voice of the crier, under the auction spear, under the registration
of the quaestor. Deity is struck off and farmed out to the highest bidder.
But indeed lands burdened with tribute are of less value; men under the
assessment of a poll-tax are less noble; for these things are the marks of
servitude. In the case of the gods, on the other hand, the sacredness is great
in proportion to the tribute which they yield; nay, the more sacred is a
god, the larger is the tax he pays. Majesty is made a source of gain.
Religion goes about the taverns begging. You demand a price for the
privilege of standing on temple ground, for access to the sacred services;
there is no gratuitous knowledge of your divinities permitted — you must
buy their favors with a price. What honors in any way do you render to
them that you do not render to the dead? You have temples in the one case
just as in the other; you have altars in the one case as in the other. Their
statues have the same dress, the same insignia. As the dead man had his
age, his art, his occupation, so it is with the deity. In what respect does
the funeral feast differ from the feast of Jupiter? or the bowl of the gods
from the ladle of the manes? or the undertaker from the soothsayer, as in
fact this latter personage also attends upon the dead? With perfect
propriety you give divine honors to your departed emperors, as you
worship them in life. The gods will count themselves indebted to you;
nay, it will be matter of high rejoicing among them that their masters are.
made their equals. But when you adore Larentina, a public prostitute — I
could have wished that it might at least have been Lais or Phryne —
among your Junos, and Cereses, and Dianas; when you install in your
Pantheon Simon Magus, giving him a statue and the title of Holy God;
when you make an infamous court page a God of the sacred synod,
although your ancient deities are in reality no better, they will still think
themselves affronted by you, that the privilege antiquity conferred on
them alone, has been allowed to others.
CHAPTER 14
I wish now to review your sacred rites; and I pass no censure on your
sacrificing, when you offer the worn-out, the scabbed, the corrupting;
when you cut off from the fat and the sound the useless parts, such as the
head and the hoofs, which in your house you would have assigned to the
slaves or the dogs; when of the tithe of Hercules you do not lay a third
upon his altar (I am disposed rather to praise your wisdom in rescuing
something from being lost); but turning to your books, from which you get
your training in wisdom and the nobler duties of life, what utterly
ridiculous things I find! — that for Trojans and Greeks the gods fought
among themselves like pairs of gladiators; that Venus was wounded by a
man, because she would rescue her son Aeneas when he was in peril of his
life from the same Diomede; that Mars was almost wasted away by a
thirteen months’ imprisonment; that Jupiter was saved by a monster’s aid
from suffering the same violence at the hands of the other gods; that he
now laments the fate of Sarpedon, now foully makes love to his own
sister, recounting (to her) former mistresses, now for a long time past not
so dear as she. After this, what poet is not found copying the example of
his chief, to be a disgracer of the gods? One gives Apollo to king Admetus
to tend his sheep; another hires out the building labors of Neptune to
Laomedon. A well-known lyric poet, too — Pindar, I mean — sings of
Aesculapius deservedly stricken with lightning for his greed in practicing
wrongfully his art. A wicked deed it was of Jupiter — if he hurled the bolt
— unnatural to his grandson, and exhibiting envious feeling to the
Physician. Things like these should not be made public if they are true;
and if false, they should not be fabricated among people professing a great.
respect for religion. Nor indeed do either tragic or comic writers shrink
from setting forth the gods as the origin of all family calamities and sins. I
do not dwell on the philosophers, contenting myself with a reference to
Socrates, who, in contempt of the gods, was in the habit of swearing by an
oak, and a goat, and a dog. In fact, for this very thing Socrates was
condemned to death, that he overthrew the worship of the gods. Plainly, at
one time as well as another, that is, always truth is disliked. However,
when rueing their judgment, the Athenians inflicted punishment on his
accusers, and set up a golden image of him in a temple, the condemnation
was in the very act rescinded, and his witness was restored to its former
value. Diogenes, too, makes utter mock of Hercules and the Roman cynic
Varro brings forward three hundred Joves, or Jupiters they should be
called, all headless.
CHAPTER 15
Others of your writers, in their wantonness, even minister to your
pleasures by vilifying the gods. Examine those charming farces of your
Lentuli and Hostilii, whether in the jokes and tricks it is the buffoons or
the deities which afford you merriment; such farces I mean as Anubis the
Adulterer, and Luna of the masculine gender, and Diana under the lash, and
the reading the will of Jupiter deceased, and the three famishing Hercules
held up to ridicule. Your dramatic literature, too, depicts all the vileness of
your gods. The Sun mourns his offspring cast down from heaven, and you
are full of glee; Cybele sighs after the scornful swain, and you do not
blush; you brook the stage recital of Jupiter’s misdeeds, and the shepherd
judging Juno, Venus, and Minerva. Then, again, when the likeness of a god
is put on the head of an ignominious and infamous wretch, when one
impure and trained up for the art in all effeminacy, represents a Minerva
or a Hercules, is not the majesty of your gods insulted, and their deity
dishonored? Yet you not merely look on, but applaud. You are, I suppose,
more devout in the arena, where after the same fashion your deities dance
on human blood, on the pollutions caused by inflicted punishments, as
they act their themes and stories, doing their turn for the wretched
criminals, except that these, too, often put on divinity and actually play
the very gods. We have seen in our day a representation of the mutilation.
of Attis, that famous god of Pessinus, and a man burnt alive as Hercules.
We have made merry amid the ludicrous cruelties of the noonday
exhibition, at Mercury examining the bodies of the dead with his hot iron;
we have witnessed Jove’s brother, mallet in hand, dragging out the corpses
of the gladiators. But who can go into everything of this sort? If by such
things as these the honor of deity is assailed, if they go to blot out every
trace of its majesty, we must explain them by the contempt in which the
gods are held, alike by those who actually do them, and by those for
whose enjoyment they are done. This it will be said, however, is all in
sport. But if I add — it is what all know and will admit as readily to be the
fact — that in the temples adulteries are arranged, that at the altars
pimping is practiced, that often in the houses of the temple-keepers and
priests, under the sacrificial fillets, and the sacred hats, and the purple
robes, amid the fumes of incense, deeds of licentiousness are done, I am
not sure but your gods have more reason to complain of you than of
Christians. It is certainly among the votaries of your religion that the
perpetrators of sacrilege are always found, for Christians do not enter
your temples even in the daytime. Perhaps they too would be spoilers of
them, if they worshipped in them. What then do they worship, since their
objects of worship are different from yours? Already indeed it is implied,
as the corollary from their rejection of the lie, that they render homage to
the truth; nor continue longer in an error which they have given up in the
very fact of recognizing it to be an error. Take this in first of all, and when
we have offered a preliminary refutation of some false opinions, go on to
derive from it our entire religious system.
CHAPTER 16
For, like some others, you are under the delusion that our god is an ass’s
head. Cornelius Tacitus first put this notion into people’s minds. In the
fifth book of his histories, beginning the (narrative of the) Jewish war with
an account of the origin of the nation; and theorizing at his pleasure about
the origin, as well as the name and the religion of the Jews, he states that
having been delivered, or rather, in his opinion, expelled from Egypt, in
crossing the vast plains of Arabia, where water is so scanty, they were in
extremity from thirst; but taking the guidance of the wild asses, which it.
was thought might be seeking water after feeding, they discovered a
fountain, and thereupon in their gratitude they consecrated a head of this
species of animal. And as Christianity is nearly allied to Judaism, from
this, I suppose, it was taken for granted that we too are devoted to the
worship of the same image. But the said Cornelius Tacitus (the very
opposite of tacit in telling lies) informs us in the work already mentioned,
that when Cneius Pompeius captured Jerusalem, he entered the temple to
see the arcana of the Jewish religion, but found no image there. Yet surely
if worship was rendered to any visible object, the very place for its
exhibition would be the shrine; and that all the more that the worship,
however unreasonable, had no need there to fear outside beholders. For
entrance to the holy place was permitted to the priests alone, while all
vision was forbidden to others by an outspread curtain. You will not,
however, deny that all beasts of burden, and not parts of them, but the
animals entire, are with their goddess Epona objects of worship with you.
It is this, perhaps, which displeases you in us, that while your worship
here is universal, we do homage only to the ass. Then, if any of you think
we render superstitious adoration to the cross, in that adoration he is
sharer with us. If you offer homage to a piece of wood at all, it matters
little what it is like when the substance is the same: it is of no consequence
the form, if you have the very body of the god. And yet how far does the
Athenian Pallas differ from the stock of the cross, or the Pharian Ceres as
she is put up uncarved to sale, a mere rough stake and piece of shapeless
wood? Every stake fixed in an upright position is a portion of the cross;
we render our adoration, if you will have it so, to a god entire and
complete. We have shown before that your deities are derived from shapes
modeled from the cross. But you also worship victories, for in your
trophies the cross is the heart of the trophy. The camp religion of the
Romans is all through a worship of the standards, a setting the standards
above all gods. Well, as those images decking out the standards are
ornaments of crosses. All those hangings of your standards and banners
are robes of crosses. I praise your zeal: you would not consecrate crosses
unclothed and unadorned. Others, again, certainly with more information
and greater verisimilitude, believe that the sun is our God. We shall be
counted Persians perhaps, though we do not worship the orb of day
painted on a piece of linen cloth, having himself everywhere in his own
disk. The idea no doubt has originated from our being known to turn to the.
east in prayer. But you, many of you, also under pretense sometimes of
worshipping the heavenly bodies, move your lips in the direction of the
sunrise. In the same way, if we devote Sun-day to rejoicing, from a far
different reason than Sun-worship, we have some resemblance to those of
you who devote the day of Saturn to ease and luxury, though they too go
far away from Jewish ways, of which indeed they are ignorant. But lately
a new edition of our God has been given to the world in that great city: it
originated with a certain vile man who was wont to hire himself out to
cheat the wild beasts, and who exhibited a picture with this inscription:
The God of the Christians, born of an ass. He had the ears of an ass, was
hoofed in one foot, carried a book, and wore a toga. Both the name and the
figure gave us amusement. But our opponents ought straightway to have
done homage to this biformed divinity, for they have acknowledged gods
dog-headed and lion-headed, with horn of buck and ram, with goat-like
loins, with serpent legs, with wings sprouting from back or foot. These
things we have discussed ex abundanti, that we might not seem willingly
to pass by any rumor against us unrefuted. Having thoroughly cleared
ourselves, we turn now to an exhibition of what our religion really is.
CHAPTER 17
The object of our worship is the One God, He who by His commanding
word, His arranging wisdom, His mighty power, brought forth from
nothing this entire mass of our world, with all its array of elements,
bodies, spirits, for the glory of His majesty; whence also the Greeks have
bestowed on it the name of Ko>smov. The eye cannot see Him, though He
is (spiritually) visible. He is incomprehensible, though in grace He is
manifested. He is beyond our utmost thought, though our human faculties
conceive of Him. He is therefore equally real and great. But that which, in
the ordinary sense, can be seen and handled and conceived, is inferior to
the eyes by which it is taken in, and the hands by which it is tainted, and
the faculties by which it is discovered; but that which is infinite is known
only to itself. This it is which gives some notion of God, while yet beyond
all our conceptions — our very incapacity of fully grasping Him affords
us the idea of what He really is. He is presented to our minds in His
transcendent greatness, as at once known and unknown. And this is the.
crowning guilt of men, that they will not recognize One, of whom they
cannot possibly be ignorant. Would you have the proof from the works of
His hands, so numerous and so great, which both contain you and sustain
you, which minister at once to your enjoyment, and strike you with awe;
or would you rather have it from the testimony of the soul itself? Though
under the oppressive bondage of the body, though led astray by depraving
customs, though enervated by lusts and passions, though in slavery to
false gods; yet, whenever the soul comes to itself, as out of a surfeit, or a
sleep, or a sickness, and attains something of its natural soundness, it
speaks of God; using no other word, because this is the peculiar name of
the true God. “God is great and good” — “Which may God give,” are the
words on every lip. It bears witness, too, that God is judge, exclaiming,
“God sees,” and, “I commend myself to God,” and, “God will repay me.”
O noble testimony of the soul by nature Christian! Then, too, in using
such words as these, it looks not to the Capitol, but to the heavens. It
knows that there is the throne of the living God, as from Him and from
thence itself came down.
CHAPTER 18
But, that we might attain an ampler and more authoritative knowledge at
once of Himself, and of His counsels and will, God has added a written
revelation for the behoof of every one whose heart is set on seeking Him,
that seeking he may find, and finding believe, and believing obey. For from
the first He sent messengers into the world, — men whose stainless
righteousness made them worthy to know the Most High, and to reveal
Him, — men abundantly endowed with the Holy Spirit, that they might
proclaim that there is one God only who made all things, who formed man
from the dust of the ground (for He is the true Prometheus who gave order
to the world by arranging the seasons and their course), — these have
further set before us the proofs He has given of His majesty in His
judgments by floods and fires, the rules appointed by Him for securing
His favor, as well as the retribution in store for the ignoring, forsaking and
keeping them, as being about at the end of all to adjudge His worshippers
to everlasting life, and the wicked to the doom of fire at once without
ending and without break, raising up again all the dead from the beginning,.
reforming and renewing them with the object of awarding either
recompense. Once these things were with us, too, the theme of ridicule.
We are of your stock and nature: men are made, not born, Christians. The
preachers of whom we have spoken are called prophets, from the office
which belongs to them of predicting the future. Their words, as well as the
miracles which they performed, that men might have faith in their divine
authority, we have still in the literary treasures they have left, and which
are open to all. Ptolemy, surnamed Philadelphus, the most learned of his
race, a man of vast acquaintance with all literature, emulating, I imagine,
the book enthusiasm of Pisistratus, among other remains of the past which
either their antiquity or something of peculiar interest made famous, at the
suggestion of Demetrius Phalereus, who was renowned above all
grammarians of his time, and to whom he had committed the management
of these things, applied to the Jews for their writings — I mean the
writings peculiar to them and in their tongue, which they alone possessed,
for from themselves, as a people dear to God for their fathers’ sake, their
prophets had ever sprung, and to them they had ever spoken. Now in
ancient times the people we call Jews bare the name of Hebrews, and so
both their writings and their speech were Hebrew. But that the
understanding of their books might not be wanting, this also the Jews
supplied to Ptolemy; for they gave him seventy-two interpreters — men
whom the philosopher Menedemus, the well-known asserter of a
Providence, regarded with respect as sharing in his views. The same
account is given by Aristaeus. So the king left these works unlocked to all,
in the Greek language. To this day, at the temple of Serapis, the libraries of
Ptolemy are to be seen, with the identical Hebrew originals in them. The
Jews, too, read them publicly. Under a tribute-liberty, they are in the habit
of going to hear them every Sabbath. Whoever gives ear will find God in
them; whoever takes pains to understand, will be compelled to believe.
CHAPTER 19
Their high antiquity, first of all, claims authority for these writings. With
you, too, it is a kind of religion to demand belief on this very ground. Well,
all the substances, all the materials, the origins, classes, contents of your
most ancient writings, even most nations and cities illustrious in the.
records of the past and noted for their antiquity in books of annals, — the
very forms of your letters, those revealers and custodians of events, nay (I
think I speak still within the mark), your very gods themselves, your very
temples and oracles, and sacred rites, are less ancient than the work of a
single prophet, in whom you have the thesaurus of the entire Jewish
religion, and therefore too of ours. If you happen to have heard of a certain
Moses, I speak first of him: he is as far back as the Argive Inachus; by
nearly four hundred years — only seven less — he precedes Danaus, your
most ancient name; while he antedates by a millennium the death of Priam.
I might affirm, too, that he is five hundred years earlier than Homer, and
have supporters of that view. The other prophets also, though of later
date, are, even the most recent of them, as far back as the first of your
philosophers, and legislators, and historians. It is not so much the
difficulty of the subject, as its vastness, that stands in the way of a
statement of the grounds on which these statements rest; the matter is not
so arduous as it would be tedious. It would require the anxious study of
many books, and the fingers busy reckoning. The histories of the most
ancient nations, such as the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Phoenicians,
would need to be ransacked; the men of these various nations who have
information to give, would have to be called in as witnesses. Manetho the
Egyptian, and Berosus the Chaldean, and Hieromus the Phoenician king of
Tyre; their successors too, Ptolemy the Mendesian, and Demetrius
Phalereus, and King Juba, and Apion, and Thallus, and their critic the Jew
Josephus, the native vindicator of the ancient history of his people, who
either authenticates or refutes the others. Also the Greek censors’ lists
must be compared, and the dates of events ascertained, that the
chronological connections may be opened up, and thus the reckonings of
the various annals be made to give forth light. We must go abroad into the
histories and literature of all nations. And, in fact, we have already brought
the proof in part before you, in giving those hints as to how it is to be
effected. But it seems better to delay the full discussion of this, lest in our
haste we do not sufficiently carry it out, or lest in its thorough handling
we make too lengthened a digression..
CHAPTER 20
To make up for our delay in this, we bring under your notice something of
even greater importance; we point to the majesty of our Scriptures, if not
to their antiquity. If you doubt that they are as ancient as we say, we offer
proof that they are divine. And you may convince yourselves of this at
once, and without going very far. Your instructors, the world, and the age,
and the event, are all before you. All that is taking place around you I was
fore-announced; all that you now see with your eye was previously heard
by the ear. The swallowing up of cities by the earth; the theft of islands
by the sea; wars, bringing external and internal convulsions; the collision of
kingdoms with kingdoms; famines and pestilences, and local massacres,
and widespread desolating mortalities; the exaltation of the lowly, and the
humbling of the proud; the decay of righteousness, the growth of sin, the
slackening interest in all good ways; the very seasons and elements going
out of their ordinary course, monsters and portents taking the place of
nature’s forms — it was all foreseen and predicted before it came to pass.
While we suffer the calamities, we read of them in the Scriptures; as we
examine, they are proved. Well, the truth of a prophecy, I think is the
demonstration of its being from above. Hence there is among us an assured
faith in regard to coming events as things already proved to us, for they
were predicted along with what we have day by day fulfilled. They are
uttered by the same voices, they are written in the same books — the
same Spirit inspires them. All time is one to prophecy foretelling the
future. Among men, it may be, a distinction of times is made while the
fulfillment is going on: from being future we think of it as present and then
from being present we count it as belonging to the past. How are we to
blame, I pray you, that we believe in things to come as though they
already were, with the grounds we have for our faith in these two steps?
