These things I cannot ask of any other than Him from whom I know I shall obtain them, since He is both the one who alone bestows them and I am the one to whom the granting is due — His servant, who alone regard Him, who am slain for the sake of His discipline, who offer to Him a rich and greater victim which He Himself has commanded: prayer proceeding from a chaste flesh, from an innocent soul, from a holy spirit — not grains of incense worth a single as, tears of an Arabian tree, nor two drops of unmixed wine, nor the blood of a rejected ox longing to die, and after all these defilements a filthy conscience too: so that I marvel, when victims are examined among you by the most vicious of priests, why the entrails of the sacrifices are scrutinised rather than of the sacrificers themselves.
So then, while we are thus stretched out toward God, let the claws dig into us, let crosses hang us up, let fires lick us, let swords cut off our throats, let beasts leap upon us: the very posture of a praying Christian is prepared for every torture. Do this, good governors, wring out the soul that is beseeching God for the emperor! Here shall be the crime, where truth and devotion to God are! XXXI. Have we now flattered the emperor, and lied about the vows we have spoken, in order to escape violence, forsooth? Plainly that deceit is to our profit; for you allow us to prove whatever we defend. You, then, who have supposed that we care nothing for the welfare of the Caesars, look into the words of God, our own Scriptures, which we neither ourselves suppress and which many a chance carries over to strangers.
Know from them that it is enjoined upon us, to the overflowing of kindness, to pray to God even for our enemies and to beseech blessings for our persecutors. Who are more the enemies and persecutors of Christians than those on account of whose majesty we are arraigned for crime? Nay, but expressly and by name: 'Pray,' it says, 'for kings and for princes and powers, that all things may be tranquil for you!' For when the empire is shaken, and its other members shaken with it, we too, though we be reckoned strangers to the crowds, are surely found somewhere in the disaster. XXXII.
There is also another and greater necessity for us to pray for the emperors, and indeed for the whole state of the empire and for Roman affairs: for we know that the mighty force which threatens the whole world, and the very close of the age menacing dreadful calamities, is delayed by the respite granted to the Roman empire. And so, since we do not wish to experience these things, in praying that they be deferred we favour the long continuance of Rome. Moreover, we swear — not by the Genii of the Caesars, but by their welfare, which is more august than all Genii. Do you not know that the Genii are called demons, and thence, by the diminutive, demonia? We reverence in the emperors the judgment of God, who has set them over the nations.
We know that in them there is that which God has willed, and therefore we also wish that to be safe which God has willed, and we hold this for a great oath. As for demons, that is, the Genii, we are wont to adjure them, so that we may drive them out of men, not to swear by them, so as to confer on them the honour of divinity. XXXIII. But why should I say more about the reverence and piety of Christians toward the emperor? Him we must needs regard as one whom our Lord has chosen; so that I may rightly say:
'Caesar is more ours, appointed by our God.' And so, as being my own, I labour the more for his welfare, since I not only ask it of Him who can bestow it, or ask it as one such as may deserve to obtain it, but also, in that, tempering the majesty of Caesar to a level below God, I commend him the more to God, to whom alone I subject him; but I subject him to one to whom I do not equate him. For I will not call the emperor God, whether because I know not how to lie, or because I dare not mock him, or because he himself will not wish to be called God. If he be a man, it is in a man's interest to yield to God; let him be content to be called emperor: this too is a great name, which is handed down from God. He who calls him God denies him to be emperor; unless he be a man, he is not emperor.
That he is a man he is reminded even while triumphing on that most lofty chariot; for it is whispered to him from behind: 'Look back! Remember that you are a man!' And assuredly he rejoices all the more to gleam with such glory, that the reminder of his condition is necessary to him. He would be less, if he were then called a god, because it would not be truly said. He is greater who is recalled, lest he think himself a god. XXXIV. Augustus, the founder of the empire, would not even be called lord. For this too is a title of God. I will indeed call the emperor lord, but in the common way, but when I am not compelled to call him lord in the place of God. For the rest, I am free toward him; for my Lord is one, God almighty, eternal, the same who is his also. He who is father of his country, how is he lord?
But the name of piety is also more pleasing than that of power; even in households men are called fathers rather than lords. So far is it from being fitting that the emperor should be called God — which cannot be believed — by an adulation not merely most base but also pernicious. As if, having one emperor, you should call another by that name, would you not incur the greatest and inexorable offence of him whom you had, to be feared even by the one himself whom you had named? Be religious toward God, you who wish Him to be propitious to the emperor! Cease to believe another to be God, and thus also to call him God who has need of God! If such adulation, calling a man God, does not blush for the lie, let it at least fear for the ill omen: it is a curse to name Caesar a god before his apotheosis. XXXV.
Therefore, then, Christians are public enemies, because they do not accord to the emperors empty or lying or rash honours; because, being men of the true religion, they celebrate the festivals of the emperors with the conscience rather than with wantonness. A grand duty forsooth, to bring forth hearths and couches into the streets, to feast from street to street, to blot out the city under the guise of a tavern, to work up mud with wine, to run about in troops to insults, to shamelessness, to the enticements of lust! Is public joy thus expressed by public disgrace? Do such things befit the festal days of princes, which do not befit other days?
Those who observe discipline out of regard for Caesar, these forsake it for Caesar's sake, and the licence of evil manners will be counted piety, an occasion of luxury will be reckoned religion! O how deservedly we are to be condemned! For why do we, chaste and sober and upright, discharge the vows and joys of the Caesars? Why on the glad day do we not overshadow our doorposts with laurels nor break in upon the daylight with lamps? It is an honourable thing, when a public solemnity demands it, to clothe your house in the garb of some new brothel!
Yet I would wish, in this matter also of the second majesty — concerning which we Christians are arraigned for a second sacrilege in not celebrating with you the festivals of the Caesars, in a manner which neither modesty nor decency nor chastity permit to be celebrated, but which occasion of pleasure rather than any worthy reason has recommended — to demonstrate your good faith and truth, lest perchance even here those be found worse than Christians who will not have us reckoned Romans, but rather enemies of the Roman princes. I appeal to the very Quirites themselves, to the very native-born common folk of the seven hills, whether that Roman tongue spares any Caesar of its own: the Tiber is witness, and the schools of the beasts.
Now if nature had overlaid our breasts with some transparent material for seeing through, whose heart would not appear engraved with the scene of one new Caesar after another presiding at the distribution of a largess — even at that very hour when they acclaim: 'From our years may Jupiter add years to you!' Such things a Christian knows no more how to utter than to wish for a new Caesar. 'But it is the mob,' you say. Granted it is the mob, yet they are Romans, and none more demand the punishment of Christians than the mob. Plainly the other orders are religious in proportion to their authority, out of loyalty; nothing hostile breathes from the senate itself, from the knights, from the camps, from the very palaces! Whence then the Cassii and the Nigri and the Albini? Whence those who beset Caesar between the two laurels?
Whence those who practise the wrestler's art for throttling his very windpipe? Whence those who, armed, burst into the palace, bolder than all your many Sigerii and Partheniï? From Romans, if I mistake not, that is, from non-Christians. And indeed all those, up to the very outbreak of their impiety, were both performing sacred rites for the welfare of the emperor and swearing by his Genius — some outwardly, some inwardly — and, to be sure, they were giving to Christians the name of public enemies.
But also those who are daily now being unmasked as allies or applauders of the wicked factions — the gleaning that survives after the vintage of the parricides — how with the freshest and most branching laurels they used to build up their doorposts, how with the loftiest and brightest lamps they used to becloud their vestibules, how with the most elegant and most sumptuous couches they used to divide the forum among themselves; not that they might celebrate the public joys, but that they might now already rehearse their own vows amid another's festival, and consecrate as it were a pattern and image of their own hope, changing in their heart the name of the prince.
The same offices are performed by those who consult astrologers and soothsayers and augurs and magicians about the head of the Caesars — arts which, as betrayed by the deserting angels and forbidden by God, Christians do not employ even in their own affairs. But to whom is there need to search out things concerning Caesar's welfare, save to one by whom something is plotted or wished against it, or hoped for and awaited after it? For it is not with the same mind that inquiry is made concerning dear ones as concerning masters. The anxiety of blood-kinship is one thing, that of servitude another. XXXVI. If these things are so, that those are caught out as enemies who were called Romans, why are we, who are reckoned enemies, denied to be Romans? We cannot both not be Romans and be enemies, since they are found to be enemies who were held to be Romans.
Indeed, the piety and religion and loyalty owed to the emperors does not consist in offices of this kind, in which hostility too can rather serve to veil itself, but in those manners which divinity commands to be exhibited as truly toward the emperors as it must needs be exhibited toward all men. For these works of a good mind are not owed by us to the emperors alone. We administer no good thing with an exception of persons, because we do it for ourselves, who catch at no payment of praise or reward from man, but from God, the exactor and rewarder of an impartial kindness. We are the same toward the emperors as toward our neighbours. For to wish ill, to do ill, to speak ill, to think ill of anyone whatever, we are equally forbidden.
Whatever is not lawful against the emperor, is not lawful against anyone; what is lawful against no one, is perhaps for that very reason all the less lawful against him who is so great through God. XXXVII. If, as we have said above, we are commanded to love our enemies, whom have we to hate? Likewise, if we are forbidden to return like for like when injured, lest by the deed we become their equals, whom can we injure? For as to this, recognise it yourselves! For how often do you rage against the Christians, partly in obedience to your own dispositions, partly to the laws! How often too, even without your leave, does the hostile mob assail us by its own right with stones and fires! With the very frenzies of the Bacchanals they do not spare even dead Christians, but tear them from the rest of the tomb, from that asylum as it were of death, now already mangled, now not even entire, and rend, cut, and drag them apart.
And yet what have we ever, for all our being so banded together, so animated even unto death in requital of injury, been marked down for — when even a single night with a few little torches could work vengeance in abundance, were it permitted among us to requite evil with evil? But far be it that either a divine sect should avenge itself by human fire, or should grieve to suffer that in which it is proved! For if we wished to act as open enemies, not merely as secret avengers, would there be lacking to us force of numbers and of troops? The Moors, forsooth, and the Marcomanni and the Parthians themselves, or any nations however great, being yet of one place and their own boundaries, are more numerous than the whole world. We are but of yesterday, and we have filled all that is yours — cities, islands, forts, towns, assembly-places, the camps themselves, the tribes, the decuries, the palace, the senate, the forum;
we have left you only the temples. For what war should we not have been fit and ready, even though unequal in troops, we who are so willingly butchered — were it not that under this our discipline it is more lawful to be slain than to slay? We could have fought against you even unarmed and not in rebellion, but merely as dissidents, by the mere odium of a secession. For if so great a force of men had broken away from you into some corner of a remote world, the loss of citizens of whatever sort would surely have covered your dominion with shame — nay, would even have punished you by that very desertion. Without doubt you would have been aghast at your own solitude, at the silence of affairs and a kind of stupor as of a dead world; you would have sought whom you might rule; more enemies than citizens would have remained to you.
For now you have fewer enemies in proportion to the multitude of Christians, having as Christians almost all the citizens of almost all the cities. But you have preferred to call us enemies of the human race rather than of human error. Yet who would snatch you from those hidden enemies, everywhere laying waste your minds and your bodily health — I mean from the assaults of demons, which we drive off from you without reward, without pay? This alone would have sufficed for our revenge, that thenceforth an empty possession would lie open to the unclean spirits. Nay, not even reckoning the compensation of so great a protection, you have chosen to judge as enemies a class that is not only not troublesome to you but even necessary — enemies indeed we are, yet not of the human race, but rather of its error.
XXXVIII. Accordingly, this sect ought to have been reckoned somewhat more leniently among the unlawful associations, since nothing of that sort is committed by it which is wont to be feared from unlawful associations. For, unless I am mistaken, the reason for prohibiting associations rests on foresight for public order, lest the state be split into parties — a thing which might easily disturb the comitia, the councils, the senate-houses, the assemblies, even the spectacles, by the clashing rivalries of factions, once men had begun to make of their own violence a venal and mercenary business. But for us, cold to every ardour of glory and dignity, there is no necessity of forming a body, nor is anything more foreign to us than public affairs. We recognise one commonwealth of all: the world.
In like manner we renounce your spectacles, in so far as we do their origins, which we know were conceived out of superstition, while we hold ourselves aloof from the very things which are transacted in them. We have nothing to do, in word, sight, or hearing, with the madness of the circus, with the shamelessness of the theatre, with the savagery of the arena, with the vanity of the wrestling-school. The Epicureans were permitted to decree another truth of pleasure, namely, tranquillity of mind: in what do we offend you, if we assume other pleasures? If in the end we do not wish to be entertained, the loss is ours, if there is any, not yours. But we reject what pleases you; nor do our things delight you. XXXIX. I will now myself set forth the doings of the Christian society, that, having refuted the evil, I may show the good.
We are a body knit together by a common religious conviction, by unity of discipline, and by the bond of hope. We come together into a gathering and congregation, that, as if with a hand mustered, we may throng about God with our prayers as we pray. This violence is pleasing to God. We pray also for the emperors, for their ministers and the powers, for the state of the age, for the quiet of affairs, for the delay of the end. We assemble for the recalling of the divine writings, if the character of the present times compels us either to be forewarned of anything or to recall it to mind. Assuredly we feed our faith with the holy words, we raise up our hope, we fix fast our confidence, and no less do we strengthen our discipline by inculcating the precepts. There too are exhortations, chastisements, and divine censure.
For judgment too is passed with great weight, as among those assured of God's presence, and it is the highest foretaste of the judgment to come, if anyone has so sinned as to be banished from the fellowship of prayer and of the assembly and of all holy intercourse. Certain approved elders preside, having attained this honour not by price but by testimony; for no matter of God's stands upon a price. And if there is any kind of treasury, it is not gathered from an honorary sum, as of a religion bought. Each one lays by a modest contribution on a monthly day, or when he will, and only if he will, and only if he can; for no one is compelled, but each contributes of his own accord. These are, as it were, the deposits of piety.
For from it there is dispensed nothing for banquets nor drinking-bouts nor thankless eating-houses, but for feeding and burying the poor, and for boys and girls destitute of means and of parents, and now for aged folk confined to the house, likewise for the shipwrecked, and if any be in the mines, or in the islands, or in prisons — provided it be for the cause of God's sect — they become the foster-children of their own confession. But this very working of love brands us, in the eyes of some, with a mark. 'See,' they say, 'how they love one another' — for they themselves hate one another — 'and how ready they are to die for one another'; for they themselves would be readier to kill one another.
But also as to our calling ourselves brothers, they rave, I think, on no other ground than that among themselves every name of kindred is feigned out of affectation. Yet we are your brothers too, by the right of nature our one mother, even though you are too little men, because bad brothers. But how much more worthily are they both called and held brothers, who have acknowledged one Father, God; who have drunk of one Spirit of holiness; who out of one womb of the same ignorance have come forth trembling to the one light of truth! But perhaps we are esteemed the less legitimate on this account, that no tragedy makes an outcry over our brotherhood, or because we are brothers as regards our family substance, which among you generally dissolves brotherhood. And so we who are mingled in mind and soul have no hesitation about the sharing of our goods.
All things are undivided among us except our wives. On this point alone do we dissolve partnership — the one point in which the rest of men exercise partnership, who not only usurp the marriages of their friends, but also most patiently supply their own to their friends — out of that discipline, I suppose, of their elders and wisest men, the Greek Socrates and the Roman Cato, who shared their wives, whom they had led into matrimony for the sake of children, with friends, to beget children elsewhere too — unwilling ones, indeed, for all I know; for what would they care about the chastity which the husbands had so easily given away? O the example of Attic wisdom, of Roman gravity: the philosopher is a pander, and the censor too! What wonder, then, if so great a love holds a common feast?
For our little suppers too, besides being infamous as a crime, you decry as prodigal. It was of us, forsooth, that the saying of Diogenes was uttered: 'The Megarians provision themselves as if they were to die tomorrow, but build as if they were never to die.' But a man more easily discerns a straw in another's eye than a beam in his own. With so many tribes and curiae and decuriae belching, the air turns sour; for the Salii about to dine a creditor will be needful; the account-clerks will reckon up the cost of the Herculanean tithes and of the sacrificial banquets; for the Apaturia, the Dionysia, the Attic mysteries a levy of cooks is proclaimed; at the smoke of a feast of Serapis the firemen will be roused up — yet it is only over the dining-room of the Christians that men carp. Our supper shows the reason of itself by its very name:
it is called by the name which among the Greeks means love. Whatever the cost at which it stands, it is gain to make expense in the name of piety, since with this refreshment we aid all the needy — not in the way in which, among you, parasites aspire to the glory of enslaving their liberty under the bond of the belly, to be fattened amid insults, but in the way in which, before God, greater is the regard for the lowly. If the occasion of the banquet is honourable, weigh the remaining order of its discipline by that occasion! Whatever pertains to the duty of religion admits nothing of baseness, nothing of immodesty. There is no reclining to table until prayer to God is first tasted beforehand; there is eaten as much as they take who are hungry; there is drunk as much as is useful to the chaste.
They are so satisfied as men who remember that even through the night they must adore God; they so converse as men who know that the Lord hears. After water for the hands and lights, each one is invited into the midst to sing to God, according as he is able, from the holy Scriptures or from his own wit; hence it is proved how he has drunk. Prayer likewise breaks up the feast. Thence men depart, not into bands of brawling nor into squadrons of gadding about nor into outbreaks of wantonness, but to the same care of modesty and chastity, as those who have supped not so much on a supper as on discipline. This gathering of the Christians is deservedly unlawful indeed, if it be like the unlawful ones; deservedly to be condemned, if any complain of it on the ground on which complaint is made of factions.
For whose ruin have we ever assembled? We are the same when gathered as when dispersed, the same all together as each one alone: injuring no one, grieving no one. When upright men, when good men come together, when the devout, when the chaste are assembled, it is not to be called a faction, but a senate. XL. On the contrary, the name of faction ought rather to be applied to those who conspire in hatred of the good and the upright, who cry out against the blood of the innocent, cloaking their hatred, to be sure, with that vanity too by which they suppose that the Christians are the cause of every public calamity, of every misfortune of the people. If the Tiber has risen against the walls, if the Nile has not risen over the fields, if the sky has stood still, if the earth has quaked, if there is famine, if there is plague, at once the cry goes up:
"The Christians to the lion!" So many to a single beast? I ask you: before Tiberius, that is, before the coming of Christ, how many calamities befell the world and its cities! We read that the islands Hiera, Anaphe, Delos, Rhodes, and Cos perished together with many thousands of men. Plato too records that a land greater than Asia or Africa was swept away by the Atlantic sea. The earthquake likewise drank up the Corinthian sea, and the force of the waves tore off Lucania and banished it under the name of Sicily. These things surely could not have happened without harm to the inhabitants. But where then were — I will not say the Christians who despise your gods — but your very gods themselves, when the deluge blotted out the whole world, or, as Plato thought, only the plains?
For that those cities are of later date than the calamity of the flood is attested by the very cities in which men were born and died, and even by those which they founded; for these could not otherwise stand to this day unless they too were survivors of that calamity. Palestine had not yet received the swarm of Jews out of Egypt, nor had the origin of the Christian sect yet settled there, when a rain of fire consumed the regions bordering on it, Sodom and Gomorrah. The land still reeks with the burning, and if there are any fruits of trees there, they exist only to the eye, but at a touch they crumble to ashes. But neither did Etruria nor Campania then complain of Christians, when fire poured over Volsinii from heaven and over Pompeii from its own mountain.
No one at Rome yet worshipped the true God, when Hannibal at Cannae measured out his slaughter of the Romans by the bushel of their rings. All your gods were worshipped by all men, when the Senones seized the very Capitol. And it is well that, if any disaster befell the cities, the same calamities came upon the temples as upon the walls, so that I may now refute the notion that these things come from the gods, since they befell the gods themselves. The human race has always deserved ill of God: first, indeed, as failing in duty to Him, since, though it knew Him in part, it did not seek Him out, but even invented other gods besides for itself to worship; then, because by not seeking out the teacher of innocence and the judge and avenger of guilt, it grew hardened in every vice and crime.
But if it had sought Him out, it would have followed that it should come to know the One sought, and having recognized Him should observe Him, and observing Him should find Him gracious rather than angry. It ought therefore to know Him as still angry even now, just as He was ever angry before, even before the Christians were named. It enjoyed His good gifts, given before it fashioned gods for itself; why then does it not understand that evils too come from Him, whose good gifts it did not perceive? It is guilty before Him toward whom it is also ungrateful. And yet, let us compare the former calamities: lighter things now befall, since the world received the Christians from God. For from that time innocence has tempered the iniquities of the age, and men have begun to be intercessors with God.
In short, when the summer rains hold back from winter's supply and the year's harvest hangs in doubt, you indeed, fed daily and about to dine at once, while the baths, taverns, and brothels ply their trade, offer up rain-sacrifices (aquilicia) to Jupiter, proclaim barefoot processions to the people, seek heaven at the Capitol, and expect clouds from the paneled ceilings, turned away from the very God and heaven. But we, dried out with fasting and wrung dry with all abstinence, holding back from every fruit of life, rolling in sackcloth and ashes, assail heaven with importunity, touch God, and, when we have wrung out His mercy — Jupiter gets the honor! XLI. You therefore are the burdensome ones to human affairs, you are the guilty parties, ever the enticers of public misfortunes, among whom God is despised and statues adored.
For it ought to be held more credible that He who is neglected is angry, than they who are worshipped; otherwise those gods are most unjust if, on account of the Christians, they harm even their own worshippers, whom they ought to separate from the deserts of the Christians! "This," you say, "recoils upon your God too, if He likewise suffers His own worshippers to be harmed on account of the profane." First admit His dispensations, and you will not turn the charge back. For He who once appointed an eternal judgment after the end of the age does not hasten the separation, which is the condition of judgment, before the end of the age. Meanwhile He is impartial over the whole human race, both indulgent and rebuking;
He willed that both benefits and misfortunes should be common, both to the profane and to His own, so that by an equal sharing we might all experience both His gentleness and His severity. Because we have learned these things thus from Him, we love His gentleness and fear His severity; you, on the contrary, despise both. And it follows that all the plagues of the age come to us, if perchance they come, for admonition, but to you from God for chastisement. And yet we are in no way harmed: first, because nothing concerns us in this life save to depart from it as quickly as possible; then, because if any adversity is inflicted, it is charged to your deserts.