For by the very fact that a man says something else is worshipped by him than what he actually worships, he denies what he worships, and transfers his worship and honour to another, and in transferring it he no longer worships what he has denied. We say, and openly say, and, torn and bloodied while you torment us, we cry aloud: "We worship God through Christ." Reckon Him a man, if you will; through Him and in Him God wills to be known and worshipped. To answer the Jews — they too learned to worship God through the man Moses; to meet the Greeks — Orpheus in Pieria, Musaeus at Athens, Melampus at Argos, Trophonius in Boeotia bound men fast by their initiations; and to look at you too, lords of the nations — Numa Pompilius was a man, who burdened the Romans with the most laborious superstitions.
Christ too, then, may well have been permitted to devise divinity, a thing that was His own — not, as Numa did, to temper rude and still savage men to humanity by making a multitude thunderstruck at so many deities to be propitiated, but that He might open the eyes of men already polished, and deceived by that very refinement, to the recognition of the truth. Seek, therefore, whether this divinity of Christ be true — whether it is such that, once known, a man is reformed to the good — from which it follows that the false must be renounced, once you have discovered, above all, that whole system which, lurking under the names and images of dead men, works belief in its divinity by certain signs and miracles and oracles. XXII. And indeed we say that there are certain spiritual substances. Nor is the name new;
the philosophers know of demons, since Socrates himself waited upon the will of his daemon. Why not? Since he too is said to have had a daemon clinging to him from boyhood — plainly one that dissuaded him from the good. All the poets know of them; even the unlearned crowd employs the name freely in cursing. For Satan too, the prince of this evil race, they proclaim in the same voice of execration, drawn from the very consciousness of the soul. Angels too even Plato did not deny. Witnesses to both names are at hand — even the magi. But how, from certain angels corrupted of their own accord, there arose a still more corrupt race of demons, condemned by God together with the authors of the race and with him whom we have named as their prince, is learned in due order in the holy Scriptures. Now it will suffice to expound their operation.
Their operation is the overthrow of man; thus spiritual wickedness from the beginning took its start in the ruin of man. And so upon bodies they inflict both diseases and various grievous mishaps, but upon the soul sudden and extraordinary derangements by violence. To approach both substances of man there suffices to them their own subtlety and thinness. Much is permitted to spiritual powers, so that, being invisible and imperceptible, they appear rather in their effect than in their act — as when some hidden blight of the air casts down apples or crops in the blossom, kills them in the bud, wounds them in ripening, or as when the air, tainted by some obscure cause, pours forth its pestilent draughts.
By the same obscurity of contagion, then, the breath of demons and of fallen angels also works corruptions of the mind as well, through frenzies and foul madnesses, or through savage lusts attended by manifold errors, of which this is the chief: that it commends those gods of yours to the captive and circumscribed minds of men, so that it may procure for itself its own proper food of the reek and blood offered to statues and images. And what more delicate pasture is there for it than to turn a man away from the thought of the true divinity by false illusions? These very illusions, and how it works them, I will explain. Every spirit is winged: this is true of angels and demons. Therefore in a moment they are everywhere. The whole world is one place to them; what is being done anywhere they know as easily as they report it.
Their swiftness is believed to be divinity, because their substance is not known. Thus at times they even wish to seem the authors of the things they announce; and they are indeed sometimes the authors of evils, but of goods never. God's dispositions too they filch — both then, when the prophets were proclaiming them, and now, when the readings resound. So, taking from this source certain lots of the times, they emulate divinity while they steal divination. But by what cleverness they temper the ambiguities of their oracles to fit the outcomes, the tales of Croesus know, the tales of Pyrrhus know. Moreover, that a tortoise was being boiled with the flesh of a beast, the Pythian god reported in the manner we have said above: in a moment he had been in Lydia.
Having, from their dwelling in the air and their nearness to the stars and their commerce with the clouds, the power to know the celestial preparations, they promise even the rains which they already feel coming. Beneficent too, plainly, in matters of health: for first they injure, then they prescribe remedies, new to the point of miracle or contrary to nature; after which they cease injuring, and are believed to have cured. Why then should I discourse of their other devices, or even the powers of spiritual deceit — the phantoms of the Castors, and water carried in a sieve, and a ship moved by a girdle, and a beard reddened at a touch — that stones might be believed to be deities, and the true God not sought? XXIII.
Further, if the magi too produce phantoms, and defame the souls of the already dead, if they dash boys into the utterance of an oracle, if they play off many marvels by juggling tricks, if they even send dreams, having once for all the power of the angels and demons they have invited standing ready at hand — by whom even goats and tables have been wont to divine — how much more will that power, of its own choice and on its own account, strive with all its might to work that which it renders to another's business! Or if angels and demons work the same things as your gods too, where then is the pre-eminence of divinity, which must at all events be believed to be superior to every power?
Will it not then be more worthily assumed that they themselves are the very beings who make themselves gods, since they produce the same things which make gods believed in, than that gods are on a par with angels and demons? A difference of places distinguishes them, I suppose, so that you reckon those as gods from their temples whom elsewhere you do not call gods; so that he who flits over sacred towers seems to rave in one way, and he who leaps over a neighbour's roof in another, and one power is pronounced in him who cuts his genitals or his arms, another in him who cuts his throat. The issue of the frenzy is comparable, and the mode of instigation is one. But enough of words; now from here comes the demonstration of the thing itself, by which we shall show that the quality of both names is one. Let there be brought forward here, right there before your tribunals, some one who is agreed to be driven by a demon;
commanded by any Christian to speak, that spirit will as truly confess himself a demon out of truth as elsewhere he claims to be a god out of falsehood. Let there likewise be brought forward some one of those who are supposed to suffer from a god — those who, inhaling at the altars, conceive divinity from the reek, who are cured by belching, who prophesy by panting. That very Virgin of Heaven, the promiser of rains; that very Aesculapius, the discoverer of medicines, supplier of life on another day to Socordius and Thanatius and Asclepiodotus, who were about to die — unless they confess themselves demons, not daring to lie to a Christian, then there, on the spot, pour out the blood of that most audacious Christian! What is plainer than this deed? What more trustworthy than this proof? The simplicity of truth is in the midst; its own power attends it;
nothing will be permitted to suspect. You will say it is done by magic or some such deceit — if your eyes and ears allow you. For what can be brought against that which is displayed in naked sincerity? If, on the one hand, they are truly gods, why do they lie themselves to be demons? Is it to comply with us? Then your divinity is already subject to Christians; nor is that to be reckoned divinity which is subjected to a man, and, if it does anything to its own disgrace, to its own rivals. If, on the other hand, they are demons or angels, why do they answer that elsewhere they act as gods?
For just as those who are held to be gods would not have wished to call themselves demons, if they were truly gods — namely, lest they depose themselves from majesty — so too these, whom you directly know to be demons, would not dare elsewhere to act as gods, if any of those were gods at all whose names they use; for they would fear to abuse the majesty of superiors, who are without doubt to be feared. So utterly non-existent is that divinity which you hold, since, if it existed, it would neither be affected into confession by the demons nor be denied by the gods. Since, then, both parties concur in the confession, each denying that it is a god, recognize that there is one kind, that is, demons on both sides. Now seek the gods; for those whom you had presumed to be gods, you recognize to be demons.
But by these same works of ours, since these same gods of yours disclose not only this — that neither are they themselves gods nor is any other — you also learn at once that which is truly God: both whether He exists, and whether He is the only one whom we Christians profess, and whether He is to be so believed and worshipped as the faith and discipline of Christians has been ordered. They will say there too who that "Christ with His tale" is: whether a man of common condition, whether a magician, whether after death stolen from the tomb by His disciples, whether now at last among the dead below — or rather not in the heavens, and thence about to come with the shaking of the whole world, with the horror of the globe, with the wailing of all, but not of Christians, as the Power of God, and the Spirit of God, and the Word, and Wisdom, and Reason, and the Son of God.
Whatever you laugh at, let them laugh with you; let them deny that Christ will judge every soul from the beginning of the age, with its body restored; let them say this from the tribunal, if perchance Minos and Rhadamanthus have obtained this lot, according to the consensus of Plato and the poets. Let them at least refute the mark of their own ignominy and condemnation: let them renounce that they are unclean spirits — which ought to be understood even from their food, blood and smoke and the putrid pyres of cattle, and from the most impure tongues of their very own prophets; let them deny that on account of their malice they have been condemned beforehand unto the same day of judgement, together with all their worshippers and their works.
And yet all this dominion and power of ours over them is effective by the naming of Christ and by the reminder of those things which they, at God's hand through Christ the arbiter, expect as impending upon them. Fearing Christ in God, and God in Christ, they are made subject to the servants of God and of Christ. Thus at our touch and our breathing, seized by the contemplation and representation of that fire, they depart even from bodies at our command, unwilling and grieving and, in your presence, blushing for shame. Believe them when they speak the truth about themselves, you who believe them when they lie! No one lies to his own disgrace, but rather to his honour. Belief is nearer at hand toward those confessing against themselves than toward those denying on their own behalf.
These testimonies of your gods, in short, have been wont to make Christians; for the most part, by believing them, we come to believe in God through Christ. They themselves kindle faith in our Scriptures; they themselves build up confidence in our hope. You worship them, so far as I know, even with the blood of Christians. They would therefore be unwilling to lose you, so fruitful, so serviceable to them — or lest they be at some time put to flight by you as Christians — if it were lawful for them to lie, when a Christian, wishing to prove the truth to you, is present. XXIV. All this confession of theirs, whereby they deny that they are gods, and whereby they answer that there is no other God save the one to whom we are bound, is quite sufficient to repel the charge, above all, of injury to the Roman religion.
For if they are certainly not gods, then there is certainly no religion; if there is no religion, because there are no gods either, then certainly neither are we certainly guilty of injury to religion. But on the contrary, the reproach will rebound upon you, who, worshipping a lie and not only neglecting but even assailing the true religion of the true God, commit against the truth the real crime of true irreligion. Now, granting that it were established that they are gods, do you not concede, from the common estimation, that some one is more sublime and more powerful, as it were the prince of the world, of perfected majesty?
For thus most people too dispose of divinity, wishing the sovereignty of supreme dominion to rest with one, but his offices with many — as Plato describes great Jupiter in heaven attended by an army of gods and demons alike; and so it behooves that both the procurators and the prefects and the governors be looked up to alike. And yet what crime does he commit who transfers his service and his hope rather to Caesar, to win his favour, and does not confess the appellation of god, any more than that of emperor, in another than the sovereign — when it is judged a capital offence both to speak of and to hear of another besides Caesar? Let one worship God, another Jupiter; let one stretch out suppliant hands to heaven, another to the altar of Faith; let one (if you think it so) count the clouds while praying, another the panels of the ceiling;
let one vow his own soul to his god, another the soul of a he-goat. For see that this too does not concur toward the reproach of irreligion — to take away the freedom of religion and to forbid the choice of divinity, so that it be not lawful for me to worship whom I will, but I be compelled to worship whom I will not. No one, not even a man, will wish to be worshipped by an unwilling worshipper. And indeed, even to the Egyptians was granted the power of such vain superstition, to consecrate birds and beasts, and to condemn to death anyone who should kill any such god. To each province too and city there is its own god: as Atargatis to Syria, Dusares to Arabia, Belenus to Noricum, Caelestis to Africa, and their petty kings to Mauretania.
I have set forth Roman provinces, I think, and yet not Roman gods of theirs, since at Rome they are worshipped no more than those who throughout Italy itself are reckoned by municipal consecration: the Delventinus of the Casinienses, the Visidianus of the Narnenses, the Ancharia of the Asculani, the Nortia of the Volsinienses, the Valentia of the Ocriculani, the Hostia of the Sutrini; among the Faliscans, in honour of the father, Curris, and Juno received a surname besides. But we alone are debarred from the peculiarity of a religion. We injure the Romans, and are not held Romans, we who do not worship the god of the Romans. It is well that He is the God of all, whose, whether we will or not, we all are. But among you it is lawful to worship whatever you please except the true God, as though He were not rather the God of all, whose we all are. XXV.
I seem to myself, indeed, to have sufficiently proved the matter of false and true divinity, since I have demonstrated how the proof stands, not merely by disputations, nor by argumentations, but even by the testimonies of those very ones whom you believe to be gods, so that nothing now remains to be reconsidered for this case. Nevertheless, since mention of the Roman name has properly occurred, I will not omit the engagement which that presumption provokes — the presumption of those who say that the Romans, for the merit of their most diligent religiosity, have been raised to such a height of sublimity that they have taken possession of the world, and that these are gods to such a degree that they flourish above all others who above all others do them service. Namely, this reward has been paid out to the Roman name by the Roman gods in return for their favour: Sterculus and Mutunus and Larentina advanced the empire.
For I would not suppose that foreign gods would have wished to do more for an alien nation than for their own, and to have given over to those beyond the sea the ancestral soil in which they were born, grew up, were ennobled, and buried. Let Cybele see to it, if she loved the city of Rome as the memorial of the Trojan race — her own kinsfolk, of course, protected against the arms of the Achaeans — if she foresaw passing over to the avengers, whom she knew would subdue Greece, the conqueror of Phrygia. And so, in our own age too, she set forth a great proof of her majesty conferred upon the city, when, upon M.
When Marcus Aurelius had been taken from the commonwealth at Sirmium on the sixteenth day before the Kalends of April, that most holy archigallus, on the ninth day before those same Kalends — on which, by mutilating himself, he offered up his impure blood, and his arms as well — issued as usual the customary prayers for the safety of the emperor Marcus, who was already dead. O tardy messengers! O sleepy dispatches! Through whose fault Cybele did not learn of the emperor's death before — lest Christians should laugh at such a goddess! But Jupiter too would not straightway have suffered his own Crete to be shaken by the Roman rods, forgetful of that Idaean cave and the Corybantic cymbals and the most pleasant fragrance there of his nurse. Would he not have set that mound of his own above the whole Capitol, that the earth which covered the ashes of Jupiter might rather excel all the world?
Would Juno too have wished the Punic city — beloved by her "above Samos" — to be destroyed by a nation of the sons of Aeneas, of all things? As far as I know: "here were her arms, here was her chariot; that this should be the realm of nations, if by any means the fates permitted, even then the goddess both aimed and cherished." That wretched "wife and sister of Jupiter" prevailed nothing against the fates! Plainly "by fate Jupiter himself stands fast." And yet the Romans did not consecrate so great an honour to the fates, which handed Carthage over to them against the appointed will and vow of Juno, as to that most prostituted she-wolf Larentina. It is certain that several of your gods reigned. Therefore, if they hold the power of conferring empire — when they themselves reigned, from whom had they received that favour? Whom had Saturn and Jupiter worshipped? Some Sterculus, I suppose.
But afterwards the Romans, with their indigitamenta. Even those who did not reign were nevertheless ruled over by others who were not yet their worshippers, inasmuch as they were not yet held to be gods. Therefore it belongs to others to give a kingdom, since men were ruled long before those gods were carved out. But how vain it is to attribute the eminence of the Roman name to the merits of religiosity, since religion made progress only after the empire, or rather while it was still a kingdom — come now, only after affairs prospered did religion prosper. For, even though a superstitious curiosity was conceived by Numa, nevertheless divine worship among the Romans did not yet consist either of images or of temples.
Thrifty was their religion, and poor their rites, and there were no Capitols vying with heaven, but rash altars of turf, and vessels still of Samian ware, and a scanty reek, and the god himself nowhere. For not yet at that time had the genius of the Greeks and Tuscans inundated the city with the fashioning of images. Therefore the Romans were not religious before they were great, and so they were not great on this account, because they were religious. Yet how could they be great on account of religion, when their greatness came from irreligion? For, unless I am mistaken, every kingdom or empire is acquired by wars and propagated by victories. Moreover, wars and victories consist for the most part in the taking and overthrowing of cities. This business is not without injury to the gods;
the same ruins fall upon walls and temples, alike is the slaughter of citizens and of priests, and not dissimilar the plundering of sacred and of profane riches. Therefore there are as many sacrileges of the Romans as trophies, as many triumphs over gods as over nations, as many spoils as there yet remain images of captive gods. And so they endure to be adored even by their enemies, and decree to those "empire without end" whose injuries they ought rather to have requited than their flatteries. But those who feel nothing are as harmlessly injured as they are vainly worshipped. Certainly it cannot square with credibility that they should seem to have grown great through the merits of religion, who, as we have suggested, either grew by injuring religion or injured it by growing.
Even those whose kingdoms were fused into the sum of the Roman empire were not without their religions when they lost them. XXVI. See therefore, lest He dispense kingdoms whose is both the world that is ruled and the very man who rules; lest He have ordained the vicissitudes of dominions at their appointed times in the age, He who was before all time and made the age the body of times; lest He exalt or cast down cities, under whom there was once a race of men without cities! Why do you err? Woodland Rome is older than some of her gods; she reigned before she built up so vast a circuit of the Capitol.
The Babylonians too had reigned before there were pontiffs, and the Medes before the fifteen commissioners, and the Egyptians before the Salii, and the Assyrians before the Luperci, and the Amazons before the Vestal Virgins. And lastly, if the Roman religions bestow dominion, then Judaea, which despised all these common divinities of yours, would never have reigned in times past — Judaea, whose God, whose temple, and whose people you Romans for a while honoured with victims, with gifts, and with treaties, over which you would never have gained the mastery had it not at the last sinned against Christ. XXVII. Let this suffice against the charge of insulting your divinity, that we may not seem to insult that which we have shown to have no existence.
Therefore, when we are challenged to sacrifice, we plant our feet firm in the loyalty of our conscience, whereby we are certain to whom these services actually reach, under the prostitution of images and the consecration of human names. But some think it madness that, when we might both sacrifice on the spot and depart unharmed while keeping our resolve in our hearts, we should prefer obstinacy to safety. You are indeed giving us advice by which we might cheat you; but we recognise the source from which such counsels are suggested, who it is that sets all this in motion, and how he works, now by the cunning of persuasion, now by the harshness of cruelty, to overthrow our steadfastness:
It is, of course, that spirit of demonic and angelic origin who, being our rival on account of the estrangement and envious on account of the grace of God, wages war upon us out of your own minds, which he has by secret inspiration tuned and suborned to every perversity of judgment and iniquity of cruelty against us, such as we set forth at the beginning. For although the whole force of demons and of spirits of that kind is subject to us, yet, as wicked slaves sometimes mingle defiance with fear and long to injure those whom otherwise they dread — for fear breathes hatred as well — and besides, their desperate condition, arising from their fore-condemnation, reckons it a solace to enjoy their malice in the meantime, during the delay of punishment.
And yet, when they are seized, they are subdued and yield to their true condition, and those whom from afar they assault, from close at hand they entreat. And so, when in the manner of slaves rebelling from their workhouses or prisons or mines or servitude of that penal kind, they break out against us in whose power they are, though certain that they are unequal and thereby the more undone, we resist them unwillingly-grudged as equals, and we fight back, persevering in the very point they attack; and we never triumph over them more than when we are condemned for our faithful obstinacy. XXVIII. But since it might easily seem unjust that free men should be driven against their will to sacrifice —
for in other divine services too a willing mind is required — it would surely be thought absurd if a man were compelled by another to honour gods whom for his own sake he ought of his own accord to propitiate, lest he should have it ready by the right of his liberty to say: 'I do not want Jupiter propitious to me; who are you? Let Janus meet me in wrath with whatever face he please; what business have you with me?' You have been shaped by these same spirits so as to compel us to sacrifice for the emperor's welfare, and the necessity of compelling is laid upon you as much as the obligation of being endangered upon us. We have come, then, to the second charge, that of injured majesty in a more august sense, since with greater dread and more crafty timidity you regard Caesar than Olympian Jove himself. And rightly so, if you but knew it.
For who among the living, whoever he be, is not superior to a dead man? But you do not even do this from reason rather than from regard for present power; so that in this very matter you will be caught being irreligious toward your own gods, since you assign more of fear to human dominion. In short, among you a man will sooner perjure himself by all the gods than by the single Genius of Caesar. XXIX. Let it first, then, be established whether these to whom sacrifice is offered can bestow welfare upon the emperors or upon any man whatever; and on that ground condemn us of the crime of treason, if angels or demons, being in substance the vilest of spirits, work any benefit, if the lost preserve, if the damned set free, if in short — as is in your own conscience — the dead protect the living.
For surely they would first protect their own statues and images and shrines, which, as I suppose, the soldiers of the Caesars keep safe by their watches. But I think that these very materials come from the mines of the Caesars, and whole temples stand by the nod of Caesar. In fine, many gods have had Caesar angry with them; it makes for our case, if he is also propitious, when he confers upon them some liberality or privilege. So then, those who are in Caesar's power, whose they wholly are, how shall they have Caesar's welfare in their power, so as to seem able to bestow that which they themselves would more easily obtain from Caesar?
For this reason, then, we are said to offend against the majesty of the emperors, because we do not subject them to their own belongings, because we do not make a mockery of the duty of their welfare, seeing that we do not think it lies in leaden hands! But you are the irreligious ones, who seek it where it is not, ask it of those from whom it cannot be given, passing over Him in whose power it lies; and on top of that you make war on those who know how to ask it, who are even able to obtain it, since they know how to ask! XXX. For we invoke, for the welfare of the emperors, the eternal God, the true God, the living God, whom the emperors themselves prefer to have propitious to them above all others. They know who has given them their empire; they know, as men, who has also given them life;
they feel that He alone is God, in whose power alone they are, from whom they are second, after whom first, before and above all gods. And why not? Since they are above all men, who at any rate are alive and take precedence of the dead. They reflect how far the strength of their empire prevails, and so they understand God: against whom they cannot prevail, through Him they recognise that they themselves prevail. Let the emperor, in short, make war on heaven, lead heaven captive in his triumph, set watches over heaven, impose tribute on heaven! He cannot. He is great for this very reason, that he is less than heaven; for he himself belongs to Him whose is both heaven and every creature. Thence he is emperor, whence he was also a man before he was emperor; thence comes his power, whence also his breath.
Looking up thither, we Christians, with hands outspread because harmless, with head bare because we do not blush, without a prompter, in fine, because we pray from the heart, are ever making supplication for all the emperors: for them a long life, a secure rule, a safe household, brave armies, a faithful senate, an upright people, a quiet world, whatever are the wishes of a man and of a Caesar.