But even if some things do touch us as well, because we are bound up with you, we rather rejoice at the confirmation of the divine predictions, which indeed strengthen the assurance and faith of our hope. But if all evils come upon you from those whom you worship, for our sake, why do you persist in worshipping such ungrateful, such unjust beings, who ought rather to have helped and vindicated you in the affliction of the Christians? XLII. But we are accused under yet another head of injuries: we are said to be unprofitable in business. How so, being men who live among you, with the same food, dress, and manner of life, subject to the same necessities of life? For we are not Brahmans or the gymnosophists of the Indians, forest-dwellers and exiles from life.
We remember that we owe thanks to God, the Lord and Creator; we reject no fruit of His works, we merely temper ourselves, lest we use them beyond measure or amiss. And so we dwell together with you in this world, not without the forum, not without the market, not without the baths, shops, workshops, inns, your fairs, and the rest of commerce. We too sail with you, serve in the army, till the fields, and likewise engage in trade; we make our crafts and our labors public for your use. How we seem unprofitable to your business, with whom and by whom we live, I do not understand. But if I do not frequent your ceremonies, still even on that day I am a man. I do not bathe at dawn during the Saturnalia, lest I lose both night and day;
still I do bathe at an honorable and wholesome hour, one which preserves for me both warmth and blood; I can be stiff and pale, like a corpse, after bathing. I do not recline in public at the Liberalia, as is the custom for those who dine at their last supper before the beasts; yet I dine wherever I please from your supplies. I do not buy a garland for my head; what is it to you how I use the flowers, which I buy nonetheless? I think it more pleasing when they are free, loose, and hanging on every side; but even if they are compressed into a garland, we know a garland by the nostrils; let those see to it who smell through their hair! We do not attend the shows; yet if I should desire what is sold at those gatherings, I will more freely obtain it from its proper places. Frankincense, plainly, we do not buy;
if the Arabias complain, let the Sabaeans know that more and costlier of their wares are lavished on burying Christians than on fumigating the gods. "Certainly," you say, "the revenues of the temples are dwindling day by day; how few now cast in an offering?" For we cannot afford to bring aid both to men and to your begging gods, nor do we think anything should be bestowed except on those who ask. In short, let Jupiter stretch out his hand and receive, while in the meantime our compassion spends more from street to street than your religion does from temple to temple.
But the other revenues will give thanks to the Christians, who pay what is due out of good faith, in that we abstain from defrauding another's property; so that, if a reckoning were made of how much is lost to the revenues through the fraud and lying of your declarations, the complaint on one head could easily be offset by the gain from all the other accounts. XLIII. Plainly I will confess who, if any, could truly complain of the barrenness of the Christians. First will be the pimps, the panders, and the water-carriers of the baths; then the assassins, the poisoners, the magicians; likewise the soothsayers, the diviners, the astrologers. To be unprofitable to these is a great profit. And yet, whatever loss there is to your affairs through this sect, it can be compensated by some safeguard.
At what price do you value them — I will no longer say those who drive out demons from you, I will no longer say those who also pour out prayers to the true God on your behalf, since perhaps you do not believe it — but those from whom you can fear nothing at all? XLIV. But indeed, no one takes note of that loss to the commonwealth, as great as it is true, no one weighs that injury to the state, when so many just men are expended, when so many innocent are put to death. For we now call your own records to witness, you who daily preside over the judging of prisoners, who cancel debts by your sentences. So many guilty men are catalogued by you under various charges of crimes: which of them there is an assassin, which a cutpurse, which a temple-robber, or a seducer, or a bath-thief? which of them is also enrolled as a Christian?
Or, when Christians are presented under their own title, which of them is such as those so many guilty men? From your ranks the prison is always steaming, from your ranks the mines are always sighing, from your ranks the beasts are always fattened, from your ranks the impresarios of the shows always feed their herds of condemned men. No one there is a Christian, unless plainly only for being a Christian; or, if he is anything else besides, he is no longer a Christian. XLV. We, then, are the only innocent ones! What wonder, if it must be so? Indeed it must be so. Taught innocence by God, we both know it perfectly, as revealed by a perfect Master, and faithfully keep it, as commanded by an inspector who cannot be despised. But to you human estimation handed down innocence, and human dominion commanded it;
and therefore your disciplines are neither complete nor sufficiently to be feared as regards the truth of innocence. As great is man's wisdom for demonstrating the good, so great is his authority for exacting it; both are as easy to deceive as to despise. And indeed, which is fuller: to say, "Thou shalt not kill," or to teach, "Do not even be angry"? Which is more perfect: to forbid adultery, or to restrain even from the solitary lust of the eyes? Which is more learned: to interdict evil-doing, or evil-speaking as well? Which is more thorough: not to allow injury, or not even to permit retaliation for injury? Yet know that your very laws too, which seem to aim at innocence, are borrowed from the divine law as from a more ancient model. We have already spoken of the age of Moses.
But how great is the authority of human laws, when it is possible for a man both to evade them, often by lurking hidden in his misdeeds, and sometimes to despise them, transgressing either by will or by necessity? Reflect on these things also in view of the brevity of any punishment, which is not, however, to remain beyond death. Thus Epicurus too disparages all torment and pain, pronouncing a moderate one indeed contemptible, but a great one not long-lasting.
But indeed we, who are judged under God the observer of all, and who foresee eternal punishment from Him, with good reason are alone in attaining to innocence — both by the fullness of our knowledge, and by the impossibility of hiding, and by the magnitude of a torment that is not long-lasting but everlasting — fearing Him whom even the very one who judges the fearful will have to fear: fearing God, not the proconsul. XLVI. We have taken our stand, as I think, against the pressing of every charge which demands the blood of the Christians; we have set forth our whole condition, and by what means we can prove that it is just as we have set it forth — namely, from the trustworthiness and antiquity of the divine writings, and likewise from the confession of the spiritual powers.
Who will dare to refute us — not by art of words, but by the same method by which we have established our proof — concerning the truth? But while our truth is being made manifest to each one, meanwhile unbelief, while it is prejudiced against the good of this sect — which by use and by commerce has now become known — supposes it to be, not indeed a divine business, but rather a kind of philosophy. "The philosophers," it says, "also counsel and profess the same things: innocence, justice, patience, sobriety, chastity." Why then, since we are compared to them in discipline, are we not likewise put on a par with them as to the license and impunity of their discipline? Or why are they too, as our equals, not pressed to those duties which we, by not performing, are endangered?
For who compels a philosopher to sacrifice, or to swear, or to bring out useless lamps at midday? Nay rather, they even openly demolish your gods and accuse your superstitions in their treatises, while you applaud. Most of them even bark against the emperors, while you bear with them, and are more readily rewarded with statues and salaries than sentenced to the beasts. But rightly so; for they are named philosophers, not Christians. This name of philosophers does not put demons to flight. Why not? Since philosophers reckon demons next to the gods. It is a saying of Socrates:
"If my daemon permits." The same man, even when he had some inkling of the truth in denying the gods, nevertheless at his very end ordered a cock to be sacrificed to Aesculapius — I suppose in honor of his father, since Apollo had proclaimed Socrates the wisest of all men. O inconsiderate Apollo! He rendered testimony of wisdom to that man who denied that the gods exist. In proportion as truth burns with hatred, so much does he who presents it in good faith give offense; but he who adulterates and merely feigns it, on this very account chiefly wins favor among the persecutors of truth. The philosophers, hostile mockers and corrupters, feign after truth, and by feigning corrupt it, as men who chase after glory; the Christians both necessarily seek it out and present it whole, as men who care for their own salvation.
So then, neither in knowledge nor in discipline, as you suppose, are we on a par with them. For what certainty did Thales, that prince of natural philosophers, report to Croesus when he inquired about the divinity, having so often failed of his granted periods of deliberation? Any Christian craftsman both finds God and shows Him, and thereupon assigns in fact the whole of what is sought concerning God — although Plato affirms that the Maker of the universe is neither easily found, nor, when found, easy to declare to all. Moreover, if we are challenged on the score of chastity, I read a portion of the Attic sentence pronounced against Socrates as a corrupter of youths. The Christian does not even change the female sex. I know too of the harlot Phryne, quenching the ardor of Diogenes as he lay upon her;
I hear too that a certain Speusippus, of Plato's school, perished in adultery. The Christian is born male for his own wife alone. Democritus, by blinding himself because he could not look upon women without lust and grieved if he did not possess them, professes his incontinence by his very remedy. But the Christian, with his eyes intact, does not see women; in mind he is blind to lust. If I should defend on the score of uprightness — behold, Diogenes with muddy feet tramples upon Plato's proud couches with a pride of another kind; the Christian is not proud even toward a poor man. If I should contend on the score of moderation — behold, Pythagoras among the Thurians and Zeno among the Prienians aspire to tyranny; but the Christian aspires not even to the aedileship.
If I should engage on the score of equanimity — Lycurgus chose death by starvation (apocarteresis) because the Spartans had amended his laws; the Christian, even when condemned, gives thanks. If I should compare on the score of good faith — Anaxagoras denied a deposit to his hosts; the Christian is called faithful even outside his own circle. If I should stand on the score of sincerity — Aristotle disgracefully made his friend Hermias give up his place; the Christian does not injure even his enemy. The same Aristotle flatters Alexander, whom he ought rather to have guided, as basely as Plato was hawked about by Dionysius for his belly's sake. Aristippus, in purple beneath a great show of gravity, plays the wastrel; Ichthyas, while plotting ambushes against the state, is killed. For the sake of his own people, however cruelly scattered, no Christian ever attempted this.
But someone will say that some of our people too fall away from the rule of discipline. Yet such men cease to be counted as Christians among us; but those philosophers, with such deeds, persevere in the name and honor of wisdom. So then, what similarity is there between a philosopher and a Christian — the disciple of Greece and the disciple of heaven, the trader in fame and the trader in life, the worker of words and the worker of deeds, the builder of things and the destroyer of them, the friend and the enemy of error, the falsifier and the restorer and the expresser of truth, the thief of it and the guardian of it? XLVII. Truth is more ancient than all things, unless I am mistaken: and this antiquity of the divine literature, established beforehand, avails me, so that it may readily be believed to have been a treasury to every later wisdom.
And were I not now sparing the bulk of this volume, I would run out into this proof as well. Which of the poets, which of the sophists, has not drunk altogether from the fountain of the prophets? From thence, therefore, the philosophers watered the thirst of their own genius, so that, in the things they have from us, they place us on a level with them. From thence too, I think, philosophy was even cast out by certain peoples — I mean by the Thebans, the Spartans, and the Argives.
While these men — men, as we said, lusting after glory and eloquence alone — strove after our things, if they happened upon anything in the holy Scriptures, sifting it out of their habit of curiosity, they turned it to their own works, neither believing sufficiently that these things were divine (so as to keep from tampering with them), nor understanding them sufficiently, since even then they were still veiled in mist, overshadowed even to the Jews themselves, whose property they seemed to be. For even if there was some simplicity of truth, so much the more did human scrupulosity, disdaining faith, waver, whereby they mingled into uncertainty even what they had found certain. For having found God only, they disputed about Him not as they had found Him, so that they might wrangle about His quality, His nature, and His abode.
Some assert that He is incorporeal, others corporeal, as both the Platonists and the Stoics; some say He is made of atoms, others of numbers, as Epicurus and Pythagoras; another of fire, as it seemed to Heraclitus; and the Platonists indeed hold Him to be caring for things, whereas the Epicureans hold Him idle and unemployed and, so to speak, a nobody in human affairs; the Stoics place Him outside the world, so that like a potter He whirls this mass from without; the Platonists place Him within the world, so that after the example of a helmsman He remains within that which He governs. So too they vary concerning the world itself: whether it is born or unborn, whether it shall pass away or endure; so too concerning the state of the soul, which some contend is divine and eternal, others dissoluble; each, as he thought, so also inferred or refashioned it.
Nor is it any wonder if the ingenuity of the philosophers has perverted the Old Testament. From their seed certain men have adulterated this our new provision as well, according to their own opinions, into philosophical tenets, and from one way have cut out many crooked and inextricable byways. This I would suggest for this reason, lest the well-known diversity of this sect should seem in this respect too to put us on a level with the philosophers, and lest anyone should judge the truth from the diversity of its defenses. But we readily prescribe against our adulterators that the rule of truth is that which comes transmitted from Christ through His companions, to whom those various later commentators will be proved to be considerably posterior.
All things have been constructed against the truth out of the truth itself, the spirits of error working up this rivalry. By these have such adulterations of the saving discipline been suborned, by these too have certain fables been introduced, which by their similarity might weaken faith in the truth, or rather win it over to themselves — so that one might on this account think the Christians not to be believed, because neither the poets nor the philosophers are, or, on the contrary, might think the poets and philosophers the more to be believed, because they are not the Christians. And so we are laughed at for proclaiming that God will judge. For thus even the poets and philosophers set up a tribunal in the underworld. And if we threaten Gehenna, which is a treasury of hidden fire underground for punishment, we are just as thoroughly derided.
For thus among the dead there is also the river Pyriphlegethon. And if we name paradise, a place of divine loveliness appointed for the reception of the spirits of the saints, separated from the knowledge of the common world by a certain wall of that fiery zone, the Elysian Fields have taken over the credit. Whence, I ask you, come these things so very similar among the philosophers or poets? From nowhere but our sacraments. If from our sacraments, then as from the earlier source, therefore our teachings are more trustworthy and more to be believed, the very images of which also find belief. But if from their own imaginings, then our sacraments will be held to be images of things later — which the nature of things does not allow; for never does a shadow precede a body, nor an image the truth. XLVIII.
Come now, if some philosopher should affirm — as Laberius says, following the opinion of Pythagoras — that a man becomes a mule, a snake becomes a woman, and should distort all his arguments into that opinion by the power of his eloquence, will he not sway assent and fix belief? Might not someone even be persuaded on that account to abstain from animals, lest he perchance dine on beef made of some great-grandfather of his? But if a Christian should promise that a man will return from a man, and Gaius himself back from Gaius, he will be driven off by the people rather with stones, nor even allowed to hold assemblies. If there is some principle governing the returning of human souls into bodies, why should they not return into the same substance, since this is what it means to be restored: to be that which one had been?
They are no longer the same as they had been, because they could not be what they were not, unless they cease to be what they had been. In many places, too, it would be a work born of leisure, if we wished to run riot on this point — as to who might be seen transformed into what beast. But rather to our own defense, we who propose that it is by all means far more worthy to believe that a man will return from a man, anyone in place of anyone, provided a man returns, so that the same quality of soul may be restored to the same condition, even if not the same outward form. Certainly, because the principle of restitution is the destination of judgment, the very same one who had existed will necessarily be brought forth, in order that he may receive from God the judgment of good or of contrary desert.
And therefore the bodies too will be brought back, because the soul alone cannot suffer anything without stable matter, that is, without flesh; and because what the souls must altogether suffer by the judgment of God, they did not deserve apart from the flesh, within which they did all things. "But how," you say, "can matter that has been dissolved be brought forth again?" Consider yourself, O man, and you will find belief in the thing. Think back on what you were before you existed. Surely nothing; for you would remember it, if you had been anything. You, then, who were nothing before you existed, being likewise made nothing when you have ceased to be — why can you not exist again out of nothing, by the will of that same Author who willed you to be out of nothing? What new thing will befall you? You who were not, were made; when again you shall not be, you shall be made.
Render, if you can, an account of how you were made, and then ask how you shall be made! And yet you will surely be made more easily what you once were, since you were made — no less easily — what you never once were. There will be doubt, I suppose, about the powers of God, who imposed this whole vast body of the world out of that which was not — no less than out of the death of vacancy and emptiness — animated by the Spirit who animates all souls, itself marked and set forth as an example of human resurrection, for a testimony to you. The light, slain daily, shines again, and darkness in turn succeeds by withdrawing; the dead stars come to life again; the seasons begin where they end; fruits are consummated and return; seeds, certainly, do not rise up more fruitfully except when corrupted and dissolved;
all things are preserved by perishing, all things are refashioned out of destruction. Will you, O man — so great a name — if you understand yourself, learning it even from the inscription of the Pythia, lord of all things dying and rising again, die for this end, that you should perish? Wherever you are dissolved, whatever matter destroys you, swallows you up, abolishes you, reduces you to nothing, it will render you back again. His is the very nothing whose is also the whole. "Then," you say, "one must always be dying and always rising again?" If the Lord of things had so appointed, you would experience the law of your condition against your will. But as it is, He has appointed no otherwise than He proclaimed.
The same principle which composed the universe out of diversity, so that all things might subsist in unity out of rival substances — out of the void and the solid, out of the animate and the inanimate, out of the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, out of light and darkness, out of life itself and death — that same principle has also so joined the age together with an ordained and distinct condition, that this first part, from the beginning of things, which we inhabit, flows down in temporal duration to its end; but the following part, which we await, is propagated into infinite eternity.
When therefore the end and boundary, the intervening midpoint that lies gaping between, shall have arrived — so that even the very fashion of the world itself, likewise temporal, which was spread out before that dispensation of eternity like a curtain, shall be removed — then shall the whole human race be restored, to render an account of what in this age it deserved of good or of evil, and thereafter to be recompensed into the immense perpetuity of eternity. And therefore there will be no more death, nor again and again resurrection, but we shall be the same as we now are, and no others afterward: the worshippers of God indeed forever with God, clothed over with the proper substance of eternity; but the profane, and those who are not wholly turned to God, in the punishment of a fire likewise perpetual, having from its very nature that divine, to be sure, supplying of incorruptibility.
The philosophers too have known the difference between the hidden fire and the common fire. So that fire which appears for human use is far other than that which appears for the judgment of God, whether it strikes lightnings from heaven, or belches forth from the earth through the peaks of mountains; for it does not consume what it burns, but while it expends, it repairs. And so the mountains remain ever burning, and he who is struck by fire from heaven is safe, so that he is by now consumed to ashes by no fire. And this will be a testimony of the eternal fire, this an example of the perpetual judgment that feeds the punishment: the mountains burn and endure. What then of the guilty and the enemies of God? XLIX. These are what in us alone are called presumptions, but in the philosophers and poets the height of learning and marks of eminent genius. They are the prudent, we the foolish;
they are to be honored, we to be mocked — nay, even beyond that, to be punished as well. Let the things they maintain now be false, and rightly a presumption, yet necessary; foolish, yet useful, since those who believe them are compelled to become better, through the fear of eternal punishment and the hope of eternal refreshment. And so it is not expedient to call false, nor to hold foolish, things which it is expedient to presume true. Under no title at all is it permissible to condemn things which are beneficial. In you, therefore, is this very presumption which condemns useful things. Accordingly, neither can they be foolish. Certainly, even if false and foolish, they are yet harmful to no one. For they are like many other things also, on which you inflict no penalties — vain and fabulous, unaccused and unpunished, as being harmless.
But indeed in matters of this kind, if anything, judgment ought to be passed with mockery, not with swords and fires and crosses and wild beasts. At this iniquity of cruelty not only does this blind mob exult and heap insults, but even certain of you, who court the mob's favour by such injustice, glory in it; as though the whole of what you can do against us were not our own choice. Assuredly, if I so will, I am a Christian. Then only will you condemn me, if I am willing to be condemned. But since what you can do to me you cannot do unless I will it, then what you can do belongs already to my will, not to your power. Accordingly the mob too rejoices in vain over our harassment. For the joy which it claims for itself is in fact ours, since we would rather be condemned than fall away from God.
On the contrary, those who hate us ought to have grieved rather than rejoiced, since we have obtained what we chose. 'Then,' you say, 'why do you complain that we persecute you, if you wish to suffer, seeing that you ought to love those through whom you suffer what you desire?' Plainly we are willing to suffer, but in the same manner as the soldier is willing to face war. No one indeed suffers gladly, since it involves both trembling and peril; yet a man fights with all his strength, and he who once grumbled about the battle rejoices when victorious in it, because he wins both glory and spoil. Our battle is that we are summoned before the tribunals, that there, with our life at stake, we may contend for the truth. And the victory is to obtain that for which you have contended.
That victory has both the glory of pleasing God and the spoil of living for ever. But we are put to death. Yes, once we have prevailed. Therefore we conquer when we are slain; in short, we escape when we are led away to execution. Though now you call us 'faggot-men' and 'half-axle-men,' because we are burned bound to a stake half an axle high, hedged about with faggots, this is the garb of our victory, this our palm-embroidered robe; in such a chariot do we triumph. Rightly, then, do we not please the vanquished; for on that account we are reckoned desperate and lost. But this desperation and ruin, among you, in the cause of glory and fame, raise aloft the banner of virtue. Mucius willingly left his right hand upon the altar: O loftiness of soul! Empedocles gave his whole self to the fires of Etna: O vigour of mind!
A certain foundress of Carthage gave herself to the pyre rather than to a second marriage: O proclamation of chastity! Regulus, that one man might not live at the cost of many enemies, endured a cross over his whole body: O brave man, victor even in captivity! Anaxarchus, while being pounded in a mortar with a pestle as though barley for gruel, kept saying: 'Pound, pound the pouch of Anaxarchus; for Anaxarchus you do not pound!' O the magnanimity of the philosopher, who even jested about such an end of his own! I pass over those who bargained for praise by their own sword or by some other gentler kind of death. For behold, even the contests of torture are crowned by you.
An Attic courtesan, when the executioner was already worn out, at last bit off her own tongue and spat it into the face of the raging tyrant, so that she might spit out her voice as well, lest she should be able to betray the conspirators, even if, once overcome, she should have wished to. Zeno of Elea, when asked by Dionysius what philosophy could offer, having replied 'Contempt of death,' exposed unmoved to the tyrant's scourges, sealed his own verdict even unto death. Assuredly the scourges of the Spartans, made all the harsher under the very eyes of kinsmen who urged them on, confer upon their house as much honour of endurance as they shed of blood.
O glory permitted, because it is human, to which neither reckless presumption nor desperate obstinacy is imputed in the contempt of death and of every kind of atrocity, to which it is allowed to suffer as much for country, for empire, for friendship, as is not permitted for God! And yet for all those men you cast statues and inscribe portraits and cut titles for eternity. So far as you can by monuments, you yourselves too in a manner grant the dead a resurrection. Yet he who hopes for the true resurrection from God, if he suffers for God, is mad! But go to, good governors, far better in the people's eyes if you sacrifice Christians to them: torture, rack, condemn, grind us down; for your iniquity is the proof of our innocence.