There is need of great diligence, and of a far greater memory, for the labour of study, if anyone should wish to excerpt from the most widely received writings of the philosophers, or the poets, or any teachers whatsoever of secular learning and wisdom, testimonies to the Christian truth, so that its rivals and persecutors may be refuted out of their own store—found guilty both of error in themselves and of injustice against us.
Indeed some men, in whom both the labour of ancient literature and the retentiveness of memory have persevered, have composed among us little works after this manner, recalling and attesting in detail the reason and origin and tradition and the grounds of the several opinions, by which it may be recognized that we have taken up nothing either new or monstrous, on behalf of which even the common and public writings do not lend us their patronage as our witnesses—if we have either cast out anything of error or admitted anything of equity. But human credence, through the hardness of its unbelief, has withdrawn its faith from those masters of theirs, otherwise most approved and most choice, wherever they strike upon the arguments of the Christian defence.
Then the poets are vain, when they portray the gods with human passions and fables; then the philosophers are harsh, when they knock at the gates of truth. So far will a man be accounted wise and prudent, as he has pronounced something near to the Christian; whereas, if he has aimed at anything of prudence or wisdom, whether by spitting upon their ceremonies or refuting the world, he is branded for a Christian. Now therefore we shall have nothing to do with the writings and teaching of a perverse felicity, since more credence is given to them in what is false than in what is true. Let them look to it, if any have pronounced anything concerning the one and only God. Nay, let nothing at all be adduced which a Christian may recognize, lest he be able to be reproached. For even what has been adduced, neither do all know, nor do those who know it feel sure that it holds firm.
So far is it from being the case that men should assent to our writings, to which no one comes unless already a Christian. I call to witness a new testimony—nay, one better known than all literature, more current than all doctrine, more published abroad than any edition, greater than the whole man, that is, the whole of what belongs to man. Stand forth in the midst, O soul: whether you are a divine and eternal thing, according to most philosophers—so much the more you will not lie; or whether you are by no means divine, since indeed you are mortal, as to Epicurus alone you seem—so much the more you ought not to lie; whether you are received from heaven, or conceived from earth; whether you are fitted together of numbers or of atoms; whether you begin along with the body, or are introduced after the body—from whatever source and in whatever manner you make man a rational animal, most capable of sense and knowledge.
But it is not you that I summon—you who, shaped by the schools, exercised in libraries, fed in the Attic academies and porticoes, belch forth wisdom. It is you, the simple and rude and unpolished and uncultured, that I address—such as they have you who have you alone; that very soul, whole, from the crossroads, from the street-corner, from the weaving-shed. Your inexperience is what I have need of, since to your little bit of experience no one gives credence. I ask for those things which you bring in to man along with yourself, which you have learned to feel either from your own self or from whatever author of yours. You are not, so far as I know, a Christian. For a soul is wont to become Christian, not to be born so. Yet now the Christians demand a testimony of you—from a stranger against your own—that they may blush even before you, for hating and mocking us on account of those very things which now hold you conscious of them.
We do not please men when we proclaim God under this one name as the one and only, from whom are all things and under whom is the universe. Give your testimony, if you so know it. For we hear you too, openly and with all the liberty that is not permitted to us, at home and abroad, pronounce thus: 'What God shall grant,' and 'If God will.' By that utterance you signify both that someone exists, and you confess to him all power, upon whose will you look; and at the same time you deny that the rest are gods, while you call them by their own names—Saturn, Jove, Mars, Minerva. For you confirm him alone to be God whom you name only 'God,' so that, even when at times you call those others gods, you seem to be using the word from another's store and as it were on loan. Of the nature too of the God whom we proclaim, you are not ignorant. 'God is good,' 'God does good'—that is your utterance.
'Plainly,' you add, 'but man is evil'—reproaching man, by a contrary proposition, obliquely and figuratively, as evil for this reason, that he has departed from the good God. So too, seeing that with God there is all blessing of goodness and kindness, which among us is the highest sacrament of discipline and conduct, 'May God bless you' you pronounce as readily as is necessary for a Christian; but when you turn the saying of God into a curse, in like manner by your very word you confess, according to us, that all his power stands over us.
There are those who, even though they do not deny God, yet do not think him an observer and arbiter and judge—in which point above all they reject us, who fly over to this discipline through fear of the judgement that is proclaimed—thus honouring God, while they absolve him of the cares of watching and the troubles of taking note, to whom they do not even ascribe anger. For if God, they say, grows angry, he is corruptible and subject to passion; and further, what suffers and what is corrupted is able also to meet destruction, which God does not meet. Yet these same men elsewhere, confessing that the soul is divine and bestowed by God, fall into a testimony to be turned back against their former opinion, from the soul itself.
For if the soul is either divine or given by God, without doubt it knows its giver; and if it knows him, assuredly it also fears him, and fears him, in short, as its great enhancer. Or does it not fear him whom it would rather have propitious than angry? Whence then the soul's natural fear toward God, if God knows not how to be angry? How shall he be feared who cannot be offended? What is feared but anger? Whence anger but from taking note? Whence taking note but from judgement? Whence judgement but from power? Whose is the supreme power, but God's alone? Hence therefore, O soul, out of your consciousness it is granted you to proclaim, at home and abroad, with none deriding or forbidding: 'God sees all things,' and 'I commend it to God,' and 'God will requite,' and 'God will judge between us.' Whence have you this, you who are not a Christian?
And so, moreover, very often—crowned with the fillet of Ceres, clad in the scarlet cloak of Saturn, robed in the linen of the goddess Isis—in the very temples, indeed, you implore God as judge. You stand beneath Aesculapius, you deck out Juno in bronze, you fit dark-crested helmet-shapes upon Minerva, and yet you call none of the gods present to witness. In your own forum you appeal to a judge from elsewhere; in your own temples you suffer another God. O testimony of the truth, which even among the very demons produces a witness for Christians! For indeed, when we affirm that demons exist—as if we did not also prove it, we who alone drive them out of bodies—some flatterer of Chrysippus mocks. And that they both exist and endure abomination, your own curses answer.
You call a man a 'demon' who is troublesome by reason of uncleanness or malice or insolence or whatever blemish we impute to demons—troublesome to the point of hatred's necessity. Satan, in short, you pronounce in every vexation and scorn and detestation—him whom we call the angel of malice, the artificer of all error, the corrupter of the whole world, through whom man, circumvented from the beginning so as to transgress God's precept, and therefore given over to death, thereafter made the whole race, infected from his own seed, an heir also of his own condemnation. You perceive, then, your destroyer; and though only Christians know him, or whatever sect there is with the Lord, yet you too know him, in that you hate him.
Now then, as to that opinion of yours which is more necessary, inasmuch as it bears upon your very state, we affirm that you continue after the reckoning-up of life and await the day of judgement, and are assigned according to your deserts either to torment or to refreshment, both everlasting; for the enduring of which your former substance, and the matter and memory of the same man, must necessarily return to you—because you can perceive nothing of evil nor of good without the faculty of passible flesh, and there is no ground for judgement without the very presentation of him who has earned the endurance of judgement.
This opinion is a Christian one, though far more honourable than the Pythagorean, which does not transfer you into beasts; though fuller than the Platonic, which gives you back even the dowry of a body; though weightier than the Epicurean, which defends you from destruction—yet on account of its name alone it is reckoned mere vanity and stupidity, and, as it is said, presumption. But we do not blush, if our presumption shall be with you. For first, when you call to mind someone deceased, you call him 'poor little wretch'—not indeed as one snatched from the good of life, but as one already enrolled unto punishment and judgement. Yet elsewhere you call the departed 'secure.' You profess both the disadvantage of life and the benefit of death.
You call them 'secure,' moreover, whenever you withdraw outside the gate with viands and dainties, to make an offering rather to yourself at the tombs, or return from the tombs somewhat mellowed. But I demand your sober opinion. You call the dead 'poor little wretches' when you speak from your own feeling, when you are far from them. For at their banquet, as though they were present and reclining together with you, you could not reproach them with their lot. You must flatter those on whose account you live more sumptuously. Do you then call 'poor little wretch' one who feels nothing? What of it, that you curse him as if he felt? When you make his memory with the sting of some offence, you imprecate the earth to lie heavy on him, and torment upon his ashes down among the shades. Equally, on the good side, to one to whom you owe gratitude, you invoke refreshment upon his bones and ashes, and desire that he may rest well down among the shades.
If there is for you no suffering after death, if no persistence of sense, if in short there is nothing of you when you have left this body, why do you lie against yourself, as though you could suffer anything beyond? Nay, why do you fear death at all? There is nothing you need fear after death, since there is nothing to be experienced after death. For even if it can be said that death is feared for this reason—not as threatening anything beyond, but as cutting off the advantage of life—yet since the disadvantages of life, far more numerous, likewise pass away together, the gaining of the weightier part dissolves the fear: the loss of goods is no longer to be dreaded, since it is offset by another good, that is, by peace from disadvantages. That is not to be feared which frees us from all that is to be feared.
If you fear to depart from life because you know it to be excellent, surely you ought not to fear death, which you do not know to be evil. But since you do fear it, you know it to be evil. You would not know it to be evil, however—for neither would you fear it—if you did not know that there is something after death which makes it evil, so that you fear. Let us now leave aside the natural manner of fearing death. Let no one fear what he cannot escape. From the other side I engage the more cheerful hope after death. For it is inborn in almost all men to crave fame after death. It would be long to unfold the Curtii and the Reguli and those Greek heroes, of whom there are innumerable eulogies of death despised for the sake of posthumous fame.
Who today does not so strive that his memory may be thronged after death, that he may preserve his name either by works of literature, or by the simple praise of his character, or by the very ambition of his sepulchre? Whence comes it that the soul today aspires to something that it wills after death, and prepares so laboriously what shall be of use after decease? Assuredly it would take no care of the future, if it knew nothing of the future. But perhaps you are more certain of consciousness after your departure than of the resurrection at some time, on account of which we are branded as presumptuous. Yet this too is proclaimed by the soul. For if anyone should inquire about someone long since deceased, as though about one alive, it comes readily to hand to say: 'He is gone now, and must return.'
These testimonies of the soul are as true as they are simple, as simple as they are common, as common as they are universal, as universal as they are natural, as natural as they are divine. I do not think they can seem frivolous or ridiculous to anyone who reflects upon the majesty of Nature, from which the soul derives its authority. As much as you grant to the mistress, so much will you adjudge to the pupil. Nature is the mistress, the soul her pupil. Whatever the one has taught or the other has learned has been handed down by God, who is of course the Master of the mistress herself. What the soul may be able to presage concerning its principal Instructor, it lies within you to estimate from that soul which is within you. Perceive her who brings it about that you perceive.
Consider the seer in his presages, the augur in his omens, the diviner in his forecasts of events. Is it a marvel that man, having received the gift from God, knows how to divine? Is it as great a marvel that he knows Him from whom the gift was given? Even when beset by the adversary, the soul remembers its Author, His goodness and His decree, its own end, and the adversary himself. Is it then a marvel that, given by God, it sings the very things which God has granted His own to know? But whoever has refused to regard such outbursts of the soul as the teaching of nature and the silent depositions of an inborn and unbegotten conscience, will rather say that it is the established habit—now grown almost into a vice—of speaking in this manner, arising from the use of published writings whose opinions have been scattered abroad among the common people.
Surely the soul is prior to the written word, and speech is prior to the book, and sense is prior to the pen, and man himself is prior to the philosopher and the poet. Must we then believe that before literature and its diffusion men lived mute, incapable of such utterances? Did no one speak of God and His goodness, no one of death, no one of the underworld? Speech, I suppose, went begging—nay, it could not even have existed—if, even then, those things were wanting without which even today one cannot be more blessed or richer or wiser; if those things which are today so easy, so constant, so ready at hand, born as it were upon the very lips, did not exist in former times, before letters had sprung up in the world, before Mercury, I suppose, had been born.
And whence, I ask, did it fall to letters themselves to know, and to disseminate for common use in speech, those things which no mind had ever conceived, nor tongue uttered, nor ear received?
But in fact, since the divine Scriptures which are in our keeping—or in that of the Jews, upon whose olive tree we have been grafted—far antedate secular writings, or at least precede them by some little span of time (as we have shown in its own place in demonstrating their claim to belief), even if the soul has borrowed these utterances from written sources, we must certainly believe it borrowed them from ours, not from yours; for the earlier are more powerful to instruct the soul than the later, which themselves had to be instructed by the earlier. And even if we should grant that it was instructed from yours, still the tradition traces back to the original source, and whatever it has chanced to take from ours and hand on to you is altogether ours. Since this is so, it makes little difference whether the soul's conscience was formed by God or by the letters of God.
What then do you want, O man? To have it that these things have passed into the hardened usage of common speech from the human opinions of your own writings? Believe your own writings then; but believe our records so much the more, believe the divine records; yet concerning the judgment of the soul itself, believe likewise Nature. Choose which of these you will keep as the sister of faith, the guardian of truth. If you doubt your own writings, neither God nor Nature lies. That you may believe both Nature and God, believe the soul; so it will come to pass that you also believe yourself. It is indeed she whom you value as much as she values you, whose you are wholly, who is everything to you, without whom you can neither live nor die, and for whose sake you neglect the gods. For when you fear to become a Christian, question her. Why, when she worships another, does she name God?
Why, when she brands the spirits by cursing, does she pronounce them demons? Why does she call heaven to witness and consign to earth by execration? Why does she serve in one place, yet in another summon an avenger? Why does she pass judgment upon the dead? What words of Christians has she, whom she wishes neither to have heard nor seen? Why has she either given us those words or received them from us? Why has she either taught or learned? Hold suspect this agreement of language amid so great a disagreement of conduct. You are vain if you would reckon such things peculiar to this tongue alone, or to Greek, which are held to be closely akin, so as to deny the universality of nature. It is not for Latins or Argives alone that the soul falls from heaven.
Of all nations man is one, though his name is various; the soul is one, though its voice is various; the spirit is one, though its sound is various. Each nation has its own speech, but the matter of speech is common. God is everywhere, and the goodness of God everywhere; the demon everywhere, and the demon's curse everywhere; the invocation of divine judgment everywhere, and the consciousness of death everywhere, and the testimony everywhere. Every soul by its own right proclaims those things which we are not permitted so much as to mutter. Rightly therefore is every soul both defendant and witness—defendant of error in as far as it is witness of truth—and it shall stand before the courts of God on the day of judgment with nothing to say.
You proclaimed God and did not seek Him; you abhorred demons and yet adored them; you appealed to the judgment of God and did not believe it to be; you presumed the punishments of hell and did not guard against them; you had a savour of the Christian name and yet persecuted it.