Against the Pagans 1

Since I have learned that certain men — who in their own conceits believe themselves to be exceedingly wise — rave and rage and, as if uttering something ready-made from an oracle, declare: that ever since the Christian people began to be in the world, the circle of the earth has perished, the human race has been afflicted with manifold evils, and even the heaven-dwellers themselves, abandoning the solemn cares with which they were once wont to attend to our affairs, have been banished from the regions of the earth —

I have resolved, according to my capacity and the modesty of my powers of speech, to oppose this malice and to dissolve these slanderous accusations, lest either they should seem to themselves, while they put forth popular catchwords, to be saying something great, or, if we hold ourselves back from such disputes, they should suppose they have won their case — a case in truth conquered by its own defect, not abandoned merely by the silence of its defenders. For neither would I deny that this accusation is most valid and that we are deserving of hostile hatred, if it were established that among us lie the causes by which the world has strayed from its laws, the gods have been driven far away, and such vast swarms of mortal sorrows have been brought upon the ages.

Let us therefore examine the mind of this opinion, and of what sort this thing is that is said; and, all zeal for wrangling being set aside — by which the contemplation of things is wont to be obscured and overlaid — let us weigh, by an examination of equal weights, whether what is said is true. For it will assuredly be brought about, by the linking together of consequent reasonings, that not we rather, but they themselves are found guilty of this very crime, they who profess to be worshippers of the divinities and devoted to inveterate religions. And first, of these we inquire in friendly and calm discourse:

after the name of the Christian religion began to be on earth, what unusual thing, what unknown thing, what thing contrary to the principally established laws did that very thing which is called and named 'nature' either feel or suffer? Were those first elements, out of which all things are agreed to be compounded, changed into contrary qualities? Was the construction of this machine and mass, by which we all, enclosed, are covered and contained, in any part loosened or dissolved? Did this whirling of the world, exceeding the governance of its primeval motion, begin either to creep more slowly or to be swept along in headlong revolution?

Did the stars begin to raise themselves from the western quarters, and did the setting of the constellations begin to turn into risings? Did the sun itself, prince of the heavenly bodies, by whose light all things are clothed and by whose warmth they are quickened, blaze up, cool down, and corrupt into contrary states the temperings of its accustomed governance? Did the moon cease to renew herself and to carry herself over into her old shapes by the ever-recurring restoration of new ones? Did the colds, the heats, the middle warmths perish in confusions of unequal seasons? Did winter begin to have long days, and did the summer night begin to call back the slowest daylights?

Did the winds breathe out their souls, and, their blasts being dead, is the sky not gathered into clouds, nor do the fields succeed in being moistened by rains? Does the earth refuse to receive the seeds entrusted to it, or do the trees refuse to put forth leaves? Has the savor been changed for the edible grains and for the liquors of the vine? Is foul gore squeezed from the sprigs of the olives, so that nothing is supplied for the extinguished lamp? Do the animals accustomed to the land and those living in the waters not mate, not conceive, nor guard the offspring conceived in their wombs according to their own habits and their own law? Do men themselves, finally, whom their first and beginning birth has scattered along the habitable coasts of the earth, not join marriages by the just solemnities of weddings? Do they not procreate the sweetest offspring of children?

Do they not conduct public business, private and household affairs? Do they not, as it has pleased each man, direct their talents through the various methods of arts and disciplines, and reap the returns of diligent activity? Do they not reign, do they not command, those to whom the lot of such matters has been assigned? Do they not daily grow greater in dignities and powers, preside over the pleadings of the courts, interpret the laws and the statutes? Do not all men, each among their own peoples, celebrate all the other things by which human life is girded and held together, according to the institutions of their ancestral customs?

Since, therefore, these things are so, and no novelty has burst in that, by breaking their continuity, has torn apart the perpetual course of things, what is this that is said — that ruin has been brought upon the earth after the Christian religion introduced itself to the world and laid open the sacred mysteries of hidden truth? 'But,' they say, 'pestilences and droughts, wars, dearth of crops, locusts, mice, and hail, and other harmful things by which human affairs are assailed — these the gods bring upon us, exasperated by your injuries and offenses.'

If, in matters that are plain and require no defense, it were not a mark of dullness to linger too long, I would surely show, by unrolling the earlier ages, that these evils of which you speak are not unknown, and that these calamities did not burst in suddenly and only after our nation earned to be endowed with the felicity of this name, nor only then begin to infest mortal affairs with a variety of dangers. For if we are the cause, and these plagues have been devised to requite our crime, whence did antiquity know these names of miseries? Whence did it assign a term to wars? By what reasoning could it name pestilences and hailstorms, or take them up among the very words by which speech was unfolded?

For if these evils are new and draw their causes from recent offenses, how could it have come to pass that antiquity framed words for those things which it neither knew itself to have experienced nor had learned to have been done repeatedly in any times of the forefathers? 'The dearth,' he says, 'of crops and the straits of the grain-supply press us more sorely.' Were then the ancient and most venerable ages at any time free of this hardship? Do not the very names by which these evils are reckoned bear witness and cry aloud that no mortal ever went free of them? But if the matter were hard to believe, we could proceed by the testimonies of authors — how great, how often, and what peoples felt dreadful famine and perished in heaped-up desolation.

'Most frequent cases of hail occur and grind everything to pieces.' But do we not see it recorded and set down in ancient writings that even stony rains often shattered whole regions? 'Excessive rains make the crops die and bring barrenness upon the lands.' But was antiquity free from these evils, when we know that even mighty rivers grew hideous with dried-up slime? 'Pestilences and contagions consume the human race.' Run through the writings of the annals, set down in the diversities of tongues: you will learn that all nations were very often desolated and widowed of their inhabitants. 'By locusts and by mice every kind of crop is cut down and gnawed away.'

Go through your own histories, and you will be instructed by them how often the earlier age was afflicted and came to the miseries of poverty. 'Cities, shaken by the most violent earthquakes, totter even to the point of peril.' What? Did not earlier ages see cities swallowed up by vast chasms together with their peoples, or did they hold their fortunes secure from misfortunes of this kind? When was the human race destroyed by floods of waters? — Was it not before us? When was the world set ablaze and dissolved into embers and ashes? — Not before us? When were the most ample cities covered over by the waves of the sea? — Not before us? When were wars waged with wild beasts and battles fought with lions? — Not before us?

When was destruction dealt to peoples by venomous serpents? — Not before us? For as to the fact that you are accustomed to cast in our teeth the causes of frequent wars, the devastations of cities, the German and Scythian incursions — with your leave and by your good grace let me say it — you do not see, in your appetite for slander, what sort of thing this is that is being said. That, ten thousand years ago, from the island called Neptune's Atlantis (as Plato demonstrates [Tim. 25b]) a great force of men should have burst forth and utterly destroyed and blotted out innumerable nations — were we the cause?

That between the Assyrians and the Bactrians, under Ninus once and Zoroaster as their leaders, there was contention not only with iron and with force, but even with magic and with the recondite disciplines of the Chaldeans — was this the fruit of ill-will toward us? That Helen, carried off with the gods themselves as guides and instigators, proved a dread doom both to her own people and to the ages to come — was this charged to the crime of our religion? That that monstrous Xerxes let the sea in upon the lands and crossed the seas on foot — was this the effect of wrath against our name? That one young man, arisen from the borders of Macedonia, subjugated the kingdoms and peoples of the East to captivity and servitude — did we make and stir up the causes?

That the Romans, of late, like some torrential river, submerged and overwhelmed all nations — was it we, forsooth, who cast the deities headlong into frenzy? But if there is no man who would dare to charge our own times with the things done long ago, how can we be the cause of present miseries, since nothing new comes to pass, but all things are ancient and unheard-of by no antiquity? And yet it is not difficult to prove that those very wars which you say are stirred up out of ill-will toward our religion have, since Christ was heard in the world, not only not been increased but even, for the greater part, diminished by the repression of the furies.

For since we have received from His teachings and laws that so great a body of men ought not to repay evil with evil, that it is more excellent to endure a wrong than to inflict one, and to shed one's own blood rather than to stain one's hands and conscience with another's — the ungrateful world has long had a benefit from Christ, through whom the madness of savagery has been softened and hostile hands have begun to hold themselves back from the blood of a kindred living being.

But if absolutely all who understand themselves to be men, not by the outward form of their bodies but by the power of reason, were willing to lend their ear a little while to His saving and peaceable decrees, and, not puffed up with haughtiness and disdain, would trust their own senses less than His admonitions, then long ago the whole world, having converted its practices to gentler works, would pass its life in the softest tranquility of the sword and would come together into saving concord by the unbroken sanctions of its covenants. 'But if through you,' they say, 'nothing is made troublesome to human affairs, whence come these evils by which pitiable mortality has long been urged and pressed?' — You demand of me a verdict in no way necessary to this case.

For the disputation now present and placed in my hands has not been undertaken by me in order that I might show or prove by what causes and reasons each thing comes to pass, but in order that I might show that the reproaches of so great a crime are far from us. And if I furnish this — if by fact and by weighty arguments the truth of the matter is unfolded — I do not care whence these evils are, or from what fountains and first principles they flow. And yet, that I may not seem, when questioned, to bring forth nothing at all of what I think about matters of this kind, I can say: what if the first matter, which has been distributed into the four elements of things, holds the causes of all miseries wrapped up within its own workings?

What if the movements of the stars, by fixed signs, portions, seasons, and lines, give birth to these evils and bring upon the things beneath them the necessities of various dangers? What if at fixed seasons the vicissitudes of things come about, and, as in the tides of the sea prosperity now flows in and now again ebbs away with alternating evils, so it is with the world? What if this dregs of matter, which we tread beneath our steps, has this law laid upon it, that it exhales the most noxious vapors, by which this air, corrupted, both brings ruin upon bodies and weakens human affairs?

What if — which is nearest to the truth — whatever seems adverse to us is not an evil to the world itself, and we, judging all that happens by our own conveniences, blame by wicked opinions the outcomes of nature? Plato, that sublime summit and pinnacle of the philosophers, has handed down in his writings that those savage floods and conflagrations are a purgation of the earth; nor did the prudent man shrink from calling the overthrow, disaster, ruins, destructions, and deaths of the human race an innovation of things, and from holding that a certain youthfulness is procured for them when their strength is renewed. 'The heaven does not rain,' he says, 'and we suffer from some dearth of grain or other.'

For why do you demand that the elements be subservient to your necessities, and that, so that you may be able to live more softly and delicately, the compliances of the seasons ought to yield themselves to your conveniences? For what if, on this same principle, a man most eager for sailing should complain that for a long time there have been no winds and that the breezes of the sky have grown still? Is it therefore to be said that that tranquility of the world is ruinous, because it hinders the wishes of the voyagers? What if someone accustomed to scorch himself in the sun and to gain dryness for his body should, by like reasoning, complain that the pleasantness of clear weather has been taken from him by the most frequent clouds?

Are the clouds therefore to be called hostile, hanging with their overcast covering, because it is not permitted to his lust to glow idly with sun-flames and to prepare occasions for his drinking? All these outcomes, which come about and befall beneath this mass of the world, are to be weighed not by our petty conveniences but by its own reasons and the orders of nature. Nor, if something happens which has cherished ourselves or our affairs with less than joyful success, is it straightway an evil and to be reckoned as a ruinous thing. The world rains, or it does not rain: it rains, or does not rain, for its own sake; and — what perhaps you may not know — either it boils away excessive moisture by the heat of drought, or it tempers the aridity of a very long stretch of time by the outpourings of rains.

It brings on pestilences, diseases, famines, and other ruinous forms of evils: how are you to know but that it thus removes what runs to excess, so that by these very losses it may set a limit to things growing riotous? Do you dare to say: this and that is an evil in the world, though you can neither explain nor resolve its origin and cause, and, because perhaps it hinders the pleasures of your delights and lusts, do you call it ruinous and harsh? What then? Because cold is adverse to your limbs and is wont to freeze and constrict the fervor of your blood, ought there therefore to be no winter in the world? And because you cannot endure and bear the most blazing suns, ought summer to be taken away from the year, and ought nature again to be ordered otherwise by other laws?

Hellebore is poison to men: ought it therefore, on this account, not to have come into being? The wolf lies in ambush for the sheepfolds: is nature at fault because it has produced a most troublesome beast for the wool-bearing flocks? The serpent by its bite takes away life: shall I therefore curse the first beginnings of things, because they have added such savage portents to breathing creatures at their birth? It is an exceedingly arrogant thing that, when you yourself do not belong to yourself and are, moreover, engaged upon another's property, you should wish to lay down terms to the more powerful — that what you desire should come to pass, and not what you have found established in things by their ancient constitutions.

Wherefore, if you men wish your complaints to have any standing, you must first teach us whence or who you are, whether the world was born and fashioned for you, or whether you came into it as lodgers from foreign regions. And since it is not for you to say this, nor can you explain for the sake of what thing you dwell beneath this vault of heaven, cease to suppose that anything pertains to you, since the things that happen do not happen for a part, but return and are referred to the sum-total of the whole. 'Because of the Christians,' they say, 'the gods sow all evils, and destruction is contrived for the crops by those above.' I ask: when you say these things, do you not perceive that you calumniate wickedly amid open and manifest lies?

It is nearly three hundred years, a little more or less, since we began to be Christians and to be numbered in the circle of the earth: were there in all these years continuous wars, continuous barren seasons, no peace on earth, was there straightway no cheapness or abundance of goods? For this is what must first be established by the one who accuses us: that these calamities were perpetual and unbroken, that mortal affairs never once caught their breath again, and, without any respite (as the saying is), endured the forms of manifold dangers. But we see that, in the very midst of these years and of these times, innumerable victories were carried off from vanquished enemies, that the boundaries of the empire were extended, and that nations of unheard-of name were reduced under its power:

that very often there were the greatest yields of the years, and such cheapness and abundance of goods that all commerce stood astonished, the authority of prices being laid low. For how could business have been carried on, and how could the mortal race have endured up to this present time, if the fertility of things did not supply all that the use of life required? But there were, at times, certain seasons of scarcity: and they were again relaxed by abundances; certain wars were waged against our will: and were afterward set right by victories and successes. What then? Shall we say that the gods are now mindful of our injuries, and now again unmindful of them?

If at whatever time there is famine they are said to be angry, it follows that in a time of abundance they are not angry and harsh; and so the matter is brought to this pass, that by laughable alternations they both lay down and take up their wrath again, and, the recollection of their offenses being dropped, always restore themselves to their whole former state. And yet, what sort of thing this is that is said cannot be grasped by any comprehensible understanding. If they willed the Alamanni, the Persians, the Scythians to be vanquished on this account, because Christians dwelt and lived among their peoples, how did they grant victory to the Romans, when Christians dwelt and lived among their peoples too? If in Asia and Syria they willed the mice and locusts

to swarm up prodigiously, because by like reasoning Christians dwelt among their peoples — then in Spain and Gaul, why at the same time was none of these things produced, when innumerable Christians were living in these provinces too? If among the Gaetuli and the people of Tingis they sent drought and barrenness upon the crops for the sake of this same cause, why in that very year did they grant the most ample harvests to the Moors and Numidians, when a like religion was practiced in these regions too? If in some one city they caused very many to die of famine out of aversion to our name, why in that same place, amid the dearth of the grain-supply, did they render not only bodies that were not ours, but even the Christians themselves, richer and most abundantly wealthy?

Either, then, all peoples ought to have had nothing joyful, if we are the cause of evils — for we exist among all nations — or else, since you see prosperity mingled with misfortunes, cease to ascribe to us that which harms your affairs, since we obstruct nothing that is joyful and prosperous. 6. For if I act so that things go badly, why do I not likewise stand in the way so that they may go well? If my name is the cause that scarcity should be great, why do I not hinder there being the utmost fertility? If, when a wound is received in war, I am said to bring the mischance, why, when enemies perish, am I not a favorable omen, and why do I not in adversity turn good hopes to ruin by the foulness of an ill-boding sign?

And yet, O great worshippers and high priests of the divine powers, why do you assert that those most august gods are angry with Christian peoples? Do you thus not perceive, not see, what base passions, what unseemly frenzies you attribute to the divine powers? 2. For what else is it to be angry than to be insane, than to rave, than to be carried away into a lust for vengeance and, with the estrangement of a savage breast, to run riot upon the tortures of another's pain? 3. This, then, do the great gods know, endure, and feel — the very thing which wild beasts possess, which brutes possess, which the deadly water-snakes hold in their venomous fang. 4. That which in a man is a mark of levity, that which in an earthly living creature is blameworthy, you assert that that surpassing nature, standing firm in the steadfastness of perpetual virtue, knows: 5.

— and what then necessarily follows, except that from their eyes fiery sparks flash out, the panting breast seethes, foam is cast from the mouth, and from the burning words the dryness of the lips whitens? 18.1. But if this is true, and it is ascertained and known, that the gods boil over with anger and are tossed about by such an agitation and disturbance, then they are not immortal and everlasting, nor to be reckoned in the estimation of any divinity. 2. For where, as it seems to the wise, there is any passion, there of necessity there is suffering; where suffering is placed, it is consistent that disturbance should follow; where there is disturbance, there is grief and sickness; where there is grief and sickness, there is already room for diminution and corruption;

and if these two afflict, then destruction is near at hand, death that ends all things and takes life away from all who have feeling. 19.1. What of this — that in this way you introduce them not only as fickle and hot-tempered, but also (which it befits to be far removed from the gods) as unjust and iniquitous, and as holding no account whatever even of moderate equity? 2. For what is so unjust as to be angry with some and to injure others, to complain of men and to tear apart the harmless grain-crops, to hate the Christian name and to ruin their own worshippers with every loss? 20.1. But do they on that account also rage against you, so that, roused by these inward wounds, you may rise up to avenge them?

— Do the gods, then, seek human patronage, and, unless they are protected by your championing, are they themselves not competent to ward off and defend their own affronts? 2. Nay rather, if it is true that they burn with anger, grant to them the power over themselves — let them defend themselves and, in avenging their offended majesty, let them put forth and try their inner powers. 3. They can, if they will, destroy us by heat, by most harmful cold, by pestilential winds, by the most obscure causes of diseases; they can consume us and utterly banish us from all mortal fellowship. 4. Or, if it is an evil plan to attack us by force, let them send forth some sign of their judgment, by which it may be made clear to all that we dwell beneath heaven wholly against their will.

21.1. Let them grant to you favorable states of health, but to us adverse and the worst. Let them water your fields with timely showers, and drive away from our little plots whatever dews of rain there are. Let them take care that your flocks be multiplied with numerous young, and bring an ill-omened barrenness upon our herds. 2. Let them make your fields yield a full autumn harvest from your olives and vineyards, but forbid that from ours even a single drop of the vine-shoot be pressed out. 3. Lastly and finally, let them command that in your mouth the crops keep their own nature, but in ours that the honey become bitter, that the streams of olive-oil grow rancid, and that under the very drinking, at the lips, the wine be suddenly changed into the treachery of sourness. 22.1. But since the very facts testify that this by no means happens,

and it is established that no evil overflows to us any more than the greatest good overflows to you from the life-giving benefits, what is this so great lust to contend that the gods are the foes and enemies of Christians — men whom in the saddest and in the most joyful of circumstances you may see to differ in no respect by any reasoning from yourself? 2. If you allow the truth to be told you, and without any flatteries, these are but words, mere words — indeed matters believed through slanders, not proved by the testimony of any real knowledge. 23.1. For the rest, the true gods, and those who are worthy to hold and bear the authority of this name, neither grow angry nor become indignant nor devise, by insidious contrivances, that which may harm another. 2.

Indeed, in truth it is impious and surpasses all sacrilege to believe that that wise and most blessed nature reckons it any great matter if someone submits himself to it with fawning humility, and, if this has not been done, believes itself despised and fallen from the height of its supreme summit. 3. It is childish, petty, and paltry, scarcely befitting even those whom the experience of learned men has long since called wandering demons, not to know heavenly things and to be engaged, in this coarser matter, with the lot of their own condition. 24.1. These notions are yours, yours — irreligiously conceived and still more irreligiously believed. 2.

Nay rather, to speak more truly, it is the soothsayers, the interpreters of omens, the diviners, the prophets, and the ever-empty fanatics who have concocted these fables — men who, lest their arts perish and lest they fail to shake out even the meager fees from consultants now grown rare, whenever they have learned that you wish some matter to fall into disrepute, 3. cry out: 'The gods are neglected, and in the temples there is now the utmost scarcity; the ancient ceremonies lie in derision, and the once most venerable rites of the sacred things have perished before the superstitions of new religions; and deservedly is the human race pressed by the straits of so many miseries, tormented by the hardships of so many toils.' 4.

And men — a brutish race, and one which, being placed beneath the light, is unable, through inborn blindness, to see — dare, in their frenzy, to assert what you, in your soundness of mind, do not blush to believe. 25.1. But lest anyone should think that we, through distrust of our reply, endow the gods with the gifts of tranquillity, feigning for them minds that are harmless and removed from every disturbance, let us grant, as it has pleased you, that they direct their wrath against us, that they thirst for our blood, and that they have long desired to remove us mortals from the world. 2.

But if it is not troublesome, not burdensome, if it is a matter of common duty, to weigh the points of this dispute not out of favor but out of truth, we beg to hear from you what this reasoning is, what the cause is on account of which the gods above rage against us alone, and men, provoked, blaze up. 3. 'You practice,' they say, 'impious religions and unheard-of cults throughout the world of lands.' — What is it, O you who share in reason, that you dare to declare of men, what to blurt out, what by the desperation of a rash voice do you attempt to bring forth? 4.

To adore God the Prince, the Lord of all things whatsoever that are, who holds the supreme height of all supreme beings; to invoke Him with venerable submission; in weary circumstances to embrace Him, so to speak, with all our senses; to love Him, to look up to Him — is this an execrable and ill-omened religion, full of impiety and sacrilege, defiling with the superstition of its newness the ceremonies established of old? 26.1. Is this, I ask, that bold and monstrous crime on account of which the greatest heavenly ones

aim at us the stings of their angers and indignations — on account of which you yourselves, when a savage lust has come over you, strip us of our goods, banish us from the seats of our fathers, inflict capital punishments, torture, tear apart, burn us up, and, at the last, cast us to wild beasts and to the manglings of brutes? 2. Whoever condemns this in us, or reckons it to be placed among any accusation, he is either to be called by the name of a man — however much he may seem otherwise to himself — or else must be believed to be a god, however much he himself may profess through a thousand seers that he is one? 3.

Does the Dodonaean Trophonius or Jupiter name us impious, and is he too to be called a god and reckoned in the order of divine powers — he who either fastens the charge of impiety upon those serving the supreme King, or is himself tortured that His majesty and worship should be preferred to his own? 4. Are the Delian or Clarian, the Didymaean, Philesian, Pythian Apollo also to be held divine — he who either does not know the supreme Emperor, or is ignorant that He is supplicated by us with daily prayers? 5. And if he did not know the secrets of our hearts nor recognize what we hold in our inmost feelings, he could yet, either by his ears know that we invoke the supreme God and pray to Him for what we ask, or by the very sound of the voice which we use in prayers discern it. 27.1.

It is not yet the place for us to explain who all these are that condemn us, and whence they are, how much they can do or know, why they tremble at the mention of Christ, and why they hold His disciples as foes and hateful; yet let us fix this one thing together in a single definition for those who promise a human understanding: we Christians are nothing else than worshippers of the supreme King and Prince under Christ our Master; nothing else, if you consider it, will you find to be involved in this religion. 2.

This is the sum of the whole action, this the appointed goal of our divine duties; this the end; before Him we all, according to custom, prostrate ourselves; Him with united prayers we adore; from Him we demand things just and honorable and worthy of His hearing — not that He Himself desires us to be suppliants or loves to see the veneration of so many thousands laid low; this is our advantage, and looks to the account of our own benefit. 3. For because, by the fault of our inborn weakness, we are prone to faults and to the various appetites of lust, He suffers Himself always to be conceived by our thoughts, so that, while we pray to Him and strive to deserve His gifts, we may receive the will to innocence and cleanse ourselves from every stain by the cutting away of all our transgressions. 28.1.

What do you say, O sacred ones, what, O divine interpreters of the law? Are those of a better cause who adore the Grundulian Lares, the Aii Locutii, the Limentini, than are we all who worship the God, the Father of all things, and demand from Him protection for our weary and languishing affairs? 2. And do those seem to you shrewd, wise, most prudent, and worthy of no reproach who revere the Fauns, the Fatuae, and the geniuses of cities, who reverence the Terrors and the Bellonas — while we are pronounced dull, stupid, foolish, blunted, and brutish, who have given ourselves to God, by whose nod and will everything that is stands firm and is fixed fast in the perpetuity of its own essence? 3.

Is this the judgment you pronounce, this the law you establish, this you promulgate — that whoever adores your little slaves should be honored with the amplest honors, while whoever has supplicated you yourselves, the masters, should deserve the extreme punishment of the cross? 4. In the greatest cities and among the more powerful peoples, sacred rites are publicly performed to harlots once let out for hire and prostituted to common lust: there is no swelling of indignation in the gods. Temples with lofty gables have been raised on high to cats, to beetles, and to heifers: the derided powers of the divinities are silent, nor are they touched by any envy, because they behold the sanctities of vile animals set on a par with themselves. 5.

To us alone are they hostile, to us are the gods most bitter enemies, because we venerate their Father — through whom, if they exist, they have begun to be and to have the substance of their own name and majesty, from whom, so to speak, they feel that they have obtained their very deity and recognize themselves in the number of created things, by whose will and choice they both perish and are dissolved, and yet can neither be dissolved nor perish? 6. For if we all concede that there is one sole Prince, whom no other thing precedes in the antiquity of time, after Him it must needs be that all things have been both born and brought forth and have leapt forth into the nature of their own name. 7. And if this is fixed and settled, it will be consequent for us to confess that even the gods are born, and that they derive the origin of their beginning from the Prince, the fountain of things.

And if they are born and begotten, they are assuredly also near to destructions and perils. 8. 'But,' you say, 'they are believed to be immortal, everlasting, and sharing in no end whatever.' — Then this is the gift and bounty of God the Father, that they have merited to be the same throughout unending ages, though by nature they are frail and dissoluble. 29.1. And would that it were granted, with the whole world gathered into the likeness of one assembly, to use this address and to be placed within the hearing of the human race. 2. Are we, then, in your eyes guilty of an impious religion, and, because we approach the Head and pillar of things with venerable submissions, are we called (to use your own reproach) ill-omened and atheists? 3.

And who more rightly shall bear the odium of these names than he who either knows, or seeks after, or believes in some other god in preference to this One? 4. Do we not all owe to Him this very first thing, that we are, that we are called men, that by Him we are held together, whether as souls sent forth or fallen through the blindness of this body? Does it not come to us from Him that we move, that we breathe and live, and by that very power of living does He not bring it about that we exist and are stirred by animal motion? 5. Do not the causes flow from Him by which our welfare is upheld with the bounty of various pleasures? This world in which you live — whose is it, or who has granted you to retain the enjoyment and possession of it? 6.

Who, that you might discern the things placed beneath, that you might touch and consider them, gave this public light? Who, lest the vital elements should grow numb, fixed fast in the torpor of sluggishness, established the fires of the sun, destined for the increase of things? 7. Since you believe the Sun to be a god, do you not inquire after his Founder and Maker? Since among you the Moon is a goddess, do you not likewise take care to know who is her Begetter and Fashioner? 30.1.

Does not the thought come upon you to consider and inquire in whose possession you dwell, in whose property you are, whose is this earth which you weary, whose is this air which you draw back and forth with your vital breath, whose fountains you use, whose liquid, who has arranged the blasts of the winds, who has devised the billowing clouds, who has distinguished the fruit-bearing powers of the seeds with the proper character of their reckonings? 2. Does Apollo rain for you, does Mercury rain for you; have Aesculapius, Hercules, or Diana fashioned the plan of rains and storms? And how can this be, since you profess that in the world they were born and at a fixed time took up their vital consciousness? 3.

For if the world surpasses them in the antiquity of time, and, before they were born, nature already knew rains and storms, then those born later have no right to make rain, nor can they insert themselves into those systems which they found already at work here and being administered by a greater Author. 31.1. O greatest, O supreme Procreator of things invisible! O Thou Thyself unseen and never comprehended by any natures! Worthy, worthy art Thou in truth — if only Thou must be called worthy by a mortal mouth — that every breathing and intelligent nature should never cease both to hold and to render Thee thanks; to Whom the whole of life should fittingly fall down on bended knee and supplicate with unbroken prayers. 2.

For Thou art the First Cause, the place and space of things, the foundation of all things whatsoever that are, infinite, unbegotten, immortal, everlasting, sole, whom no bodily form delineates, whom no circumscription bounds, devoid of quality, of quantity, without place, motion, and disposition, concerning whom nothing can be said or expressed by mortals through the signification of words; who, that Thou mayest be understood, must be kept in silence, and, that erring conjecture may track Thee through a shadow, of whom nothing at all must be muttered. 3. Grant pardon, O supreme King, to those who persecute Thy servants, and — as is proper to Thy kindness — forgive those who flee the worship of Thy name and religion. It is no wonder if Thou art unknown: it is a matter of greater wonder if Thou art known;

unless perchance someone dares — for this is what remains to frenzied madness — to hesitate and doubt whether this God exists or not, and whether He has been believed in through the tested truth of faith or through the opinion of empty rumor. 4. For we hear that certain men, given to the study of philosophizing, partly deny that there is any divine power, partly daily ask whether there is; while others construct the sum of things out of fortuitous chances and rash collisions and fabricate it by the impulse of diversity — with whom at this time we shall have no contest at all over such obstinacy. 5. For those who think soundly say that to contradict foolish things is a mark of greater folly. 32.1.

Our discourse is with those who, while agreeing that the race of gods is divine, doubt about the greater ones, since they confess that these same are plebeian and of a humbler sort. What then? Shall we strive and labor to maintain matters so great by arguments? Far, far away let this depart from us — far, I say, as the saying goes, let this madness be averted. 2. For it is as dangerous to approach the proving of God the Prince by arguments as it is to wish to know by reasoning of this kind that He exists. Nor does it make any difference or discrepancy whether you deny Him or assert Him and confess that He exists, since both such assertion of a thing and the denial of an incredulous refuter lie under the same fault. 33.1. Is there any of mankind who has not entered the day of his first birth with the notion of this Prince?

In whom is it not inborn, not affixed, nay, almost impressed and implanted upon him in the very generative parts of his mother, that there is a King and Lord, the Governor of all things whatsoever that are? 2. In short, if the dumb living creatures themselves could gape open in speech, if they could be loosed into the facility of our tongues — nay, if trees, clods, rocks, animated with vital sense, could produce the sound of a voice and articulate the joints of words — would they not, with nature as their guide and mistress, in the good faith of an uncorrupted simplicity, both understand that God exists and cry out that He alone is Lord of all things? 34.1.

'But in vain,' one says, 'do you assail and attack us with a false and slanderous charge, as though we went about to deny that there is a greater God, since by us Jupiter is both named and held to be best and greatest, and since to him we have established most august seats and the immense Capitols.' 2. — You attempt to couple unlike things and to force them, with the confusion you have introduced, into one appearance. For God the Almighty is known, by the one mind of all and by the common assent of mortality, neither to have been begotten nor ever to have been brought forth into a new light, nor to have begun to be from any point of time or age. 3. For He Himself is the fount of things, the sower of ages and of times. For these do not exist of themselves, but from His perpetuity they proceed, perpetual and infinite, in ever-continued succession. 4.

But Jupiter, as you relate, has both a father and a mother, grandfathers, grandmothers, brothers; but lately, formed in the womb of his mother, completed and finished in ten months, he rushed forth with vital sense into a light unknown to him. 5. Therefore, if these things are so, how can Jupiter be a god, since it is agreed that He is everlasting, while the other is alleged by you both to have had a birthday and, terrified by the new circumstance, to have uttered a pitiable wailing? 35.1. But let them be, as you wish, one, and not differing in any force of divine power and majesty: why then do you persecute us with unjust hatreds? Why do you shudder at the mention of our name as of the worst omen, if you worship as a god the very one whom we too worship?

Or why do you contend that in the same cause the gods are friendly to you but foes and most hostile to us? 2. For if there is one religion common to us and to you, the wrath of the heavenly ones ceases; but if they are hostile to us alone, it is manifest that both you and they do not know God, whom it is clear, from the very indignations of the divine powers, is not Jupiter. 36.1. 'But,' one says, 'the gods are not on that account hostile to you, because you worship the Almighty God, but because you contend that a man, born and — what is infamous to base persons — slain by the punishment of the cross, both was God and still survives, and you believe that he yet exists and adore him with daily supplications.' 2.

— If it is agreeable to you, friends, expound who these gods may be who believe that Christ is worshipped by us to their injury: Janus, the founder of the Janiculum, and Saturn, the author of the Saturnian city; Fenta Fatua, the wife of Faunus, who is called the Good Goddess but who was better and more praiseworthy in the drinking of wine; 3. those Indigetes who creep along the river and dwell in the channels of the Numicius among frogs and little fishes; Aesculapius and Father Liber, the one born of Coronis, the other hurled down from the generative parts of his mother by a thunderbolt; Mercury, poured from the womb of Maia and — what is more divine — of a fair one; 4. the bow-bearing Diana and Apollo, carried about through the flights of their mother and to the wandering islands of Virtue; the offspring of Dione, Venus,

the mother of a Trojan household's man and the publisher of her own inner shame; Ceres, born within the bounds of Trinacria, and Proserpina, occupied in gathering flowers; 5. the Theban or the Tyrian Hercules, the one buried within the bounds of Spain, the other burned up in the Oetaean flames; the Tyndarid Castors, the one accustomed to break in horses, the other a good boxer and unconquerable with the raw gauntlet; the Titans and the Moorish Bocchores and the Syrian gods, offspring of eggs; 6. Apis brought forth in the Peloponnese and named Serapis in Egypt; under Ethiopian suns the swarthy Isis, mourning her lost son and her spouse mangled limb from limb;

we pass over and go beyond the royal offspring of Ops, whom your authors in their books have handed down to you as you learn by heart what they were and of what sort: 7. do these, then, receive with wounded ears that Christ is worshipped and taken by us and reckoned as a divine power, and, having forgotten a little before of what lot and condition they were, do they refuse to impart to another that which has been granted to themselves? 8. Is this the justice of the heavenly ones, this the holy judgment of the gods? Is this not a kind of envy and avarice, not a certain sordid disparagement — to wish that their own fortunes alone should stand pre-eminent, and that the estate of others should be pressed down and trampled in despised humility? 37.1. 'We worship a man that was born.' — What then? Do you worship no man that was born? Not one and another? Not countless others?

Nay rather, have you not raised up all whom you now have in your temples out of the number of mortals, and bestowed on them heaven and the stars? 2. For if perchance it has escaped you that they were of a human lot and of a common condition, unroll the most ancient records and run through the writings of those who, being near to antiquity, handed down all things in clear truth without any flatteries. 3. Then assuredly you will learn from what fathers, from what mothers each was begotten, in what region born, of what race, what they did, performed, endured, kept busy doing, and what fortunes of adversity and of prosperity they felt in undertaking their affairs. 4.

But if, knowing that they were carried in wombs and lived on the fruits of the earth, you nonetheless cast at us the worship of a born man, you do things sufficiently unjust — in that you establish that to be damnable in us which you yourselves also constantly practice, or in that you are unwilling that it should be permitted to others in like manner what you allow to be lawful for yourselves. 38.1. But let us concede — for the moment lending a hand to your opinions — that Christ was one of us, of a single frailty and condition of mind, soul, and body: is He not worthy, on account of the grace of such great benefits, to be called by us a god and to be perceived as a god? 2.

For if you have entered into the register of the gods Liber, because he discovered the use of wine; Ceres, because of that of bread; Aesculapius, because of that of herbs; Minerva, because of that of the olive; Triptolemus, because of that of the plow; and finally Hercules, because he overcame and subdued wild beasts, thieves, and the many-headed water-snakes: 3. with how great honors ought He to be endowed by us who, by imparting the truth, has led us away from great errors; who has restored us — wandering, as it were, blindly here and there and without any guide — from broken and pathless places to more level ground: 4. who has shown what that is which is fruitful and, from the beginning, salutary to the human race — God: who He is, how great, and of what sort:

who permitted us both to understand and taught us — so far as our mediocrity was able to grasp — the profound and unutterable depths of Him; 5. who most kindly caused it to be known by what Author, by what Father this world was constituted and founded; who set forth the manner of its birth, and its matter, never before presumed by anyone's knowledge — whence the generative heat of the sun is drawn to its fires, why the moon is always in motion, whether by the same or by other causes it is believed always to resume light and darkness; 6.

what the origin of animals is, what the principles are that the seeds possess, who fashioned man himself, who formed him, or from what kind of matter He confirmed the very construction of bodies; what sense is, what the soul is, whether it flew to us of its own accord or was sown and procreated together with the very inward parts; whether it lives as a partaker of death or has been endowed with the perpetuity of immortality; what state awaits us when, dissolved, we shall have departed from our limbs — whether we are going to see, or shall have no memory and recollection of ourselves and our consciousness; 7. who binds fast our arrogance and has made our necks, lifted up with haughty brow, acknowledge the measure of their own weakness:

who showed that we are shapeless living creatures, that we trust in vain opinions, that we grasp nothing comprehended, know nothing, and do not see the things that are set before our eyes; 8. who — that which surpassed and went beyond all gifts — led us over from false religions to the true religion: who raised us up from inert signs and things fashioned out of the vilest mud to the stars and heaven, and made us mingle words of supplication and the converse of prayers with God the Lord of things. 39.1. I used to venerate, O blindness, but lately the images just brought forth from furnaces, gods upon the anvils and fabricated out of hammers, the bones of elephants, paintings, and fillets on aged trees;

Whenever I had caught sight of a stone made smooth and grimy with the anointing of oil, I fawned upon it and addressed it, as though a present power dwelt within, and I begged favours from a block that felt nothing; and those very gods, whom I had persuaded myself existed, I assailed with grievous insults, since I believed them to be wood, stones, and bones, or to dwell in matter of that kind. 2. Now, led into the paths of truth by so great a Teacher, I know what all these things are, I judge worthy things of what is worthy, I offer no insult to the divine name, and what is owed to each, whether to person or to head, I assign by unconfused ranks and authorities. 3.

Shall Christ then, on this account, not be held by us to be God, nor be honoured with all the worship of that divinity than which nothing greater can even be conceived — He from whom, long since and while yet living, we have received such great gifts, and from whom, when the day shall come, we look for greater still? 40.1. 'But He was fastened to a gibbet and perished.' — What has that to do with the case? For neither the manner nor the disgrace of His death alters His words or His deeds, nor will the authority of His teachings seem the less because He departed from the bonds of the body not by a natural dissolution but withdrew through violence brought upon Him. 2. Pythagoras of Samos was burned alive in a shrine on an unjust suspicion of aiming at tyranny: did the things he taught lose their proper force because he poured out his spirit not willingly but assailed by cruelty?

3. In like manner Socrates, condemned by the judgment of his own city, suffered capital punishment: are the things he discoursed upon concerning morals, virtues, and duties made void because he was unjustly driven out of life? 4. Countless others, strong in glory, virtue, and repute, experienced the forms of most bitter deaths — such as Aquilius, Trebonius, Regulus: were they on that account judged base after life, because they perished torn and tortured not by the public law of the fates but by a most cruel kind of death? 5. No innocent man ever slain wickedly is held in ill repute, nor is he stained with the mark of any disgrace who endures grievous penalties not by his own deserving but through the savagery of his tormentor. 41.1.

And yet, O you who mock us for worshipping a man who died a disgraceful death, do not you yourselves, by the consecration of shrines, deify Father Liber, torn limb from limb by the Titans? 2. Did you not name Aesculapius, the discoverer of remedies, after the penalties and the punishment of the thunderbolt, the guardian and president of health, well-being, and safety? 3. Do you not invite with sacrifices, victims, and burning incense that very great Hercules, whom you yourselves relate to have been burned alive [after punishments] and consumed on his funeral pyre? 4. Do you not, by the loud acclamation of the Galli, testify that Attis the Phrygian, cut off and robbed of his manhood, is the propitious god, the holy god, in the sanctuaries of the Great Mother? 5.

Do you not say that Romulus himself, the father torn to pieces by the hands of the senators, is Quirinus and a son of Mars, and honour him with priests and sacred couches, and adore him in the most splendid temples, and after all this swear that he ascended to heaven? 6. Either, therefore, you too are to be laughed at, who count as gods and worship men slain by the most grievous torments; or, if there is a sure reason why you think you must do this, then permit us also to know for what causes and reasons we do the same. 42.1. 'You worship a man that was born.' — Even were this true, as was said in the passages above, yet for the many and so bounteous gifts which have come to us from Him, He ought to be called and named God. 2.

But since He is God in very truth, and without the ambiguity of any doubt, do you suppose that we would deny that He is worshipped by us in the highest degree and is named the president of our body? 3. 'Then,' some frenzied, angry, and excited man will say, 'is that Christ God?' — 'God,' we shall answer, 'and God of the inner powers, and — what may torment the faithless with most bitter pangs — sent to us for the greatest cause by the supreme King.' 4. He, grown more insane and furious, will perhaps demand that it be proved whether the matter stands as we say. 5.

— There is no greater proof than the trustworthiness of the deeds done by Him, than the newness of His powers, than all those fatal decrees dissolved and undone, which peoples and nations beheld accomplished under His light with none dissenting — which not even they themselves dare to charge with falsity, whose ancient and ancestral laws He showed to be most full of emptiness and of most idle superstition. 43.1. He will perhaps again meet us with those many other slanderous and childish cries: 'He was a magician; He accomplished all those things by secret arts; He stole from the sanctuaries of the Egyptians the names of powerful angels and their recondite disciplines.' 2. — What say you, O little ones, chattering with the garrulity of rash speech about things unknown and unfamiliar to you?

Were then those things which were done the tricks of demons and the sports of magical arts? 3. Can you point out, can you show us from all those magicians who ever existed throughout the ages, one who did anything like Christ, even to a thousandth part? One who did it without any force of incantations, without the juices of herbs and grasses, without any anxious observance of rites, libations, or seasons? 4. For we do not press and inquire what things they promise to do, or in what kinds their whole doctrine and practice is wont to be comprised. 5.

For who does not know that these men either strive to foreknow things impending, which necessarily come by their appointed order whether one will or no; or send deadly wasting upon whomsoever they please; or break asunder the affections of kinsfolk; or unlock without keys the things that are shut; or bind mouths in silence; or in the racecourse weaken, spur on, or hold back the horses; or upon the wives and children of strangers, whether they be male or of the female sex, cast the flames of forbidden love and frenzied lusts; or, if they seem to venture anything useful, do it not by their own power but by the power of those whom they invoke? 44.1.

But it is established that Christ, without any aids of external things, without the observance of any rite or law, accomplished all those works which He did by the mere possibility of His own name; 2. and that — as was proper, fitting, and worthy of the true God — He bestowed on us nothing harmful or hurtful but what was helpful, wholesome, and full of aid, by the munificent generosity of His bounteous power. 45.1. What say you again, O men? Was He then a mortal, or one of us, whose command, whose voice uttered in the common and everyday words of the people, ailments, diseases, fevers, and other torments of the body fled from? 2.

Was He one of us, whose presence, whose very look that race of demons plunged in men's vitals could not bear, and terrified by a new power gave up its possession of the limbs? 3. Was He one of us, at whose command foul leprous blotches obeyed, driven off at once, and left the discoloured flesh restored to a harmony of colours? 4. Was He one of us, at whose light touch the flowings of blood stood still and checked their immoderate discharge? 5. Was He one of us, from whom the dropsical and torpid waters fled, that penetrating fluid vanished, and the swollen vitals subsided in health-giving dryness? 6. Was He one of us who bade the lame to run, and the thing was at once done; who bade the maimed stretch out

their hands, and the joints unfolded their inborn mobility; the crippled in their limbs to rise up, and now they carried back on their own the beds on which, a little before, they had been borne on the necks of others; the deprived of sight to see, and now they beheld heaven and the day with no eyes newly created? 46.1. He was, I say, one of us who healed at a single word, by one intercession, a hundred or even more men afflicted with various weaknesses and diseases? 2. At whose voice, at a simple command, the raging and mad seas laid themselves flat, and the whirlwinds and tempests of the storms subsided? who walked with unwetted foot over the deepest gulfs, trod the sea's back, the very waves being astounded, and nature yielding into servitude? 3.

who fed five thousand of those who followed Him with five loaves, and — that it might not seem a mere illusion to those unbelieving and hard men — heaped up the folds of twelve baskets with the fragments of what was left over? 4. Was He one of us who bade souls, long since breathed forth, return into their bodies; who bade those buried come forth from their mounds, and on the third day after burial be freed from the wrappings of the embalmers? 5. Was He one of us who saw through what each man was pondering, what they kept concealed in dark thoughts within the hearts of the silent? 6. Was He one of us who, when He uttered a single voice, was reckoned by different peoples speaking in discordant tongues to use the familiar sounds of words, each man his own speech? 7.

Was He one of us who, while He delivered to His followers the offices of a sure religion, suddenly filled the whole world, and by the revelation of His name's immensity showed how great and who He was? 8. Was He one of us who, having laid aside His body, showed Himself in ready light to countless numbers of men; who both spoke and heard converse, taught, chastised, and admonished; who — lest they should think themselves deceived by empty imaginings — showed Himself once, again, and often in familiar conversation; who even now appears to most upright, undefiled, and loving men, not through vain dreams but through the aspect of pure simplicity, 9.

whose name, when heard, puts to flight noxious spirits, imposes silence on soothsayers, renders the diviners unable to consult, makes the actions of arrogant magicians come to nothing — not, as you say, by the horror of the name, but by the license of a greater power? 47.1. And these things, indeed, set forth in summary, we have not brought forward as though the greatness of the Doer were to be discerned in these powers alone. For how great these are, or of what triviality and sport they will be found, will be known if it is once handed down to be understood from what kingdoms He came to us, and of what deity He came as minister! 2.

These things indeed were done and accomplished by Him, not that He might vaunt Himself with vain ostentation, but that hard and unbelieving men might know that what was promised was not false, and might from the kindness of the works begin to learn to suspect who the true God was. 3. At the same time we wish this too to be known — since, as has been said, the enumeration of His deeds has been made in summary — that Christ not only had power to do the things He did, but even surpassed the established decrees of the fates. 4. For if, as is clear and certain, weaknesses and sufferings of the body — deafness, maiming, dumbness, the contraction of the sinews, and the loss of sight — happen and are imposed by the decrees of the fates, and if Christ alone corrected, restored, and healed these:

it is clearer than the sun itself that He was more powerful than the fates, since He loosed and conquered those things which had been bound fast by perpetual bonds and by an immovable necessity. 48.1. 'But in vain,' says someone or other, 'do you claim so much for Christ, since we know and have known that other gods too have given remedies to very many sufferers and have cured the diseases and ailments of many men.' 2. — I do not inquire, I do not demand, which god, or at what time, aided whom, or whom, when broken, he restored to health: this alone I desire to hear — whether, without the addition of any material thing, that is, of any medicine, He bade diseases fly away from men at a touch;

whether He commanded and brought it about that the cause of the ailments should die out, and that the bodies of the feeble should return to their proper natures. 3. For Christ is known — either by laying His hand on the ailing parts, or by the command of a simple word — to have opened the ears of the deaf, driven blindness from the eyes, given speech to the dumb, loosed the bonds of the joints, given walking to the crippled, and to have healed with a word and command leprous blotches, agues, dropsies, and all the other kinds of ailments which some cruel importunity willed that human bodies should endure. 4. What have all the gods done like this, by whom you say help was brought to the sick and endangered? Who, if ever, as report has it, they granted a remedy to some, either bade some food be taken, or

drink a potion of some quality, or lay the juices of herbs and grasses upon the troublesome parts, or walk, or rest, or abstain from something that might do harm. 5. That this is nothing great, nor worthy of the amazement of any wonder, is plain, if you will attend: for physicians too heal thus — a creature born of the earth, not resting on the truth of knowledge but placed within a conjectural art, and wavering amid the estimates of guesses. 6. But there is no virtue in removing by medicines the things that hurt: these are benefits of things, not the powers of those who cure; and, though it be praiseworthy to know by what medicine or by what art each may be cured, the place of this praise is set not in a god but in a man. 7.

For it is no disgrace to the latter to have made a man's health better by things taken from without; but it is unbecoming to a god not to be able of Himself and through Himself, but to furnish health and safety by the aids of external things. 49.1. And since you compare the benefits of health given by other deities with those of Christ, how many thousands of the feeble would you have us show you, how many afflicted with wasting diseases who obtained no remedy at all, though they went as suppliants through all the temples, though prostrate before the faces of the gods they swept the very thresholds with kisses, though they wearied Aesculapius himself, the giver, as they proclaim, of health, with prayers and invoked him with most wretched vows, so long as life remained to them? 2.

Do we not know of some who died of their own maladies, others who grew old under the torments of their diseases, others who began to fare more perilously after they had worn away days and nights in continual prayers and in the expectation of piety's reward? What profit is it, then, to point out one or perhaps another who were cured, when to so many thousands none has come to aid, and all the shrines are full of the wretched and unhappy? 3. Unless perchance you will say that help is brought to the good by the gods, but the miseries of the wicked are despised. — Yet Christ helped good and bad alike, nor was anyone repulsed by Him who, in hard straits, sought aid against the assault and injuries of fortune. 4.