文集 第 9 章 第 3/7 段

The Sun mourns his son cast down from heaven while you rejoice, and Cybele sighs for her disdainful shepherd while you feel no shame, and you endure to have Jupiter's obituaries sung, and Juno, Venus, and Minerva judged by a shepherd. That the very image of your god should clothe an ignominious and infamous head, that an impure body, trained by effeminacy for that art, should represent some Minerva or Hercules—is not majesty violated and divinity outraged while you applaud? Plainly you are more religious in the arena, where over human blood, over the filth of punishments, your gods likewise dance, furnishing plots and tales to the condemned—except that the condemned too often put on the persons of your very gods.

We once saw Attis castrated, that god from Pessinus, and a man who was being burned alive had put on the person of Hercules. We laughed too, amid the sportive cruelties of the noon-day shows, at Mercury testing the dead with his branding-iron; we saw also Jove's brother dragging off the corpses of gladiators with his mallet. If one could still investigate each of these particulars—whether they disturb the honour of divinity, whether they efface the traces of your gods' majesty—they must certainly be reckoned as marks of contempt, both of those who enact such things and of those for whom they are enacted. But grant that these are mere sport!

But if I add what the conscience of all will no less recognize—that adulteries are arranged in the temples, that pandering is transacted among the altars, that in the very lodgings of the sacristans and priests, under the same fillets and caps and purple robes, lust is discharged while the incense burns—I do not know but that your gods complain more of you than of the Christians. Certainly it is always from your ranks that the sacrilegious are caught; for the Christians know the temples not even by day. They would perhaps despoil them themselves, if they too adored them. What, then, do those worship who do not worship such things? It is now readily understood that they are worshippers of truth who are not of falsehood, and that they no longer err in that in which, by acknowledging that they had erred, they have ceased to err.

Grasp this first, and from it draw the whole order of our sacred mystery, once false opinions have been beaten back. XVI. For, as some of you have done, you have dreamed that our god is an ass's head. This suspicion Cornelius Tacitus insinuated. For he, in the fifth book of his Histories, having begun the Jewish war from the origin of the nation, having argued what he pleased both about that very origin and about the name and religion of the nation, reports that the Jews, when they had been set free from Egypt—or, as he thought, driven out—wandering through the deserts of Arabia in regions most destitute of water, when they were being wasted by thirst, made use of wild asses (which, coming from pasture, were reckoned to be seeking a drink) as guides to a spring, and for that favour consecrated the likeness of a similar beast.

And thus, I suppose, it was thence presumed that we too, as being near of kin to the Jewish religion, are initiated to the same image. But indeed the same Cornelius Tacitus—that man most loquacious of lies, to be sure—reports in the same History that Gnaeus Pompey, when he had taken Jerusalem and on that account entered the temple to spy out the secrets of the Jewish religion, found there no image at all. And surely, if that were worshipped which was represented by some effigy, nowhere would it be displayed more than in its own sanctuary—the more so because it did not even fear outside witnesses, empty though the cult was. For only to the priests was access permitted; even the sight of it was forbidden to all others by a veil hung across.

You will not, however, deny that you yourselves worship all beasts of burden, and whole troops of pack-horses along with their Epona. Perhaps we are censured for this—that among the worshippers of every kind of cattle and beast, we alone are ass-worshippers. But he too who thinks us devotees of the cross will be a fellow-worshipper of ours. When some piece of wood is propitiated, let its shape be considered—since the quality of the material is the same; let its form be considered—provided it is the very body of a god. And yet how much does Attic Pallas differ from the stake of a cross, or Pharian Ceres, who stands forth without an effigy as a rough post and a shapeless piece of wood? Every stout timber that is fixed upright in its station is part of a cross. We, if anything, worship a god whole and entire. We have said that the origin of your gods is derived by the modellers from the cross.

But you also adore Victories on trophies, though crosses are the very entrails of trophies. The whole religion of the Romans, being military, venerates the standards, swears by the standards, sets the standards before all the gods. All those tiers of images on the standards are necklaces of crosses; those hangings of the banners and pennons are the robes of crosses. I praise your care: you were unwilling to consecrate crosses uncultivated and bare. Others, more humanely and more plausibly, believe the Sun to be our god. To the Persians, perhaps, we shall be assigned—though we do not adore the Sun painted on linen, since we have it everywhere on its own disc. In short, thence comes the suspicion, because it has become known that we pray toward the region of the east.

But most of you too, out of an occasional affectation of worshipping heavenly things, move your lips toward the sunrise. Likewise, if we devote the day of the Sun to gladness, it is for a reason far other than the worship of the Sun: we come only second after those who assign the day of Saturn to leisure and feasting, themselves deviating from the Jewish custom, of which they are ignorant. But there has lately been published, in this very city, a new exhibition of our god, ever since a certain hireling condemned to fight the beasts set up a picture with an inscription of this kind: "The God of the Christians, Onokoiotes." It had ass's ears, was hoofed on one foot, carried a book, and wore a toga. We laughed both at the name and at the shape.

But those men ought at once to have adored a two-formed deity, they who have received gods with heads mixed of dog and lion, and horned from goat and ram, and goats from the loins, and serpents from the legs, and winged on foot or on back. This I have said out of superfluity, lest I should have passed over any rumour unrefuted, as though from a bad conscience. All these matters, now that we have turned to the demonstration of our own religion, we shall clear away. XVII. What we worship is one God, who by the word with which he commanded, by the reason with which he ordered, by the power with which he was able, brought forth this whole mass, with all the furniture of elements, bodies, and spirits, out of nothing, for the adornment of his majesty—whence the Greeks too accommodated to the world the name kosmos.

He is invisible, though he is seen; incomprehensible, though he is represented through grace; inestimable, though he is estimated by human senses; and for that reason he is true and so great. But that which can be commonly seen, comprehended, and estimated, is less than the eyes by which it is grasped, than the hands by which it is defiled, than the senses by which it is discovered; whereas what is immense is known to itself alone. This is what makes God able to be conceived, while he cannot be comprehended in the conceiving; thus the force of his greatness presents him to men as both known and unknown. And this is the sum of the offence of those who will not recognize him whom they cannot be ignorant of.

Do you wish us to prove him from his own works, so many and so great, by which we are held together, by which we are sustained, by which we are delighted, and even by which we are terrified? Do you wish us to prove him from the testimony of the soul itself? For though it be pressed by the prison of the body, though it be circumscribed by depraved training, though it be enervated by lusts and desires, though it be enslaved to false gods—yet, when it comes to itself, as from a debauch, as from sleep, as from some sickness, and enjoys its health, it names "God," for this reason alone: because he is properly the true and the one God. "God is good and great," and "what God shall grant"—these are the words of all. It also calls him to witness as judge: "God sees," and "I commend it to God," and "God will requite me." O testimony of a soul naturally Christian!

In short, uttering these words, it looks not to the Capitol but to heaven. For it knows the seat of the living God: from him, and thence, it descended. XVIII. But that we might approach both himself and his dispositions and his wills more fully and more forcibly, he has added the instrument of scripture, in case anyone should wish to inquire concerning God, and having inquired to find him, and having found him to believe, and having believed to serve him. For from the beginning he sent forth into the world men worthy by their innocence to know God and to make him known, flooded with the divine Spirit, that they might proclaim that God is one, who founded the universe, who fashioned man out of the earth—

for he is the true Prometheus—who ordered the world by fixed dispositions and endings of times; who thereafter set forth what signs of his majesty as judge he has displayed through rains, through fires; what disciplines he has determined for winning his favour; what rewards he has appointed for those who ignore, forsake, and observe these—so that he, when he shall come to judge at the end of this present age, will requite his worshippers with the recompense of eternal life, and the profane with fire equally perpetual and unceasing, when all who have died from the beginning have been raised up, and refashioned, and reviewed for the reckoning of either desert. These things we too once laughed at. We are of your number: Christians are made, not born. Those whom we have called preachers are called prophets from the office of foretelling.

Their voices, and likewise the mighty works which they put forth to gain credence for the divinity, remain in the treasuries of literature, nor are these hidden. The most learned of the Ptolemies, whom they surname Philadelphus, and most sagacious in all literature, when in his zeal for libraries he was, I suppose, emulating Pisistratus, among the other memorials for which either antiquity or some curiosity vouched to fame, at the suggestion of Demetrius of Phalerum—then the most approved of grammarians, to whom he had entrusted the charge—demanded books from the Jews as well, their own native writings, which they alone possessed. For from them, and to them, the prophets had always spoken—namely, to the household nation of God, by the grace granted to their fathers. Formerly Hebrews, who are now Jews;

therefore both the letters and the language are Hebrew. But that knowledge might not be lacking, this too was subscribed to Ptolemy by the Jews, seventy-two interpreters being granted, whom Menedemus the philosopher also, a champion of providence, esteemed for their agreement of judgement. Aristeas too has affirmed these things to you. Thus he left the records laid open in the Greek style; to this day, in the Serapeum, they are exhibited together with the very Hebrew originals in Ptolemy's library. But the Jews too read them openly. It is a freedom that pays tribute; the place is commonly resorted to every Sabbath. Whoever will listen will find God; whoever will also study to understand will be compelled to believe as well. XIX. The highest antiquity claims the foremost authority for these instruments;

among you too it is, as it were, a proof of religion to establish credit from the times. (The Fulda Fragment) [F1] The highest antiquity lends authority to writings. For the first prophet, Moses, who from the past set forth the founding of the world and the sprouting-forth of the human race, and soon the avenging force of the cataclysm upon the iniquity of that age, by prophecy down to his own time, and thereafter through his own deeds put forth images of things to come—in whom too the order of the times, arranged from the beginning, has furnished the reckoning of the age—is found to be older by about three hundred years than that most ancient Danaus among you had crossed over to Argos. [F2] In short, he is a thousand years before the Trojan war, and hence also before Saturn himself.

For according to the history of Thallus, in which it is related that Belus king of the Assyrians and Saturn king of the Titans fought against Jove, it is shown that Belus preceded the fall of Ilium by three hundred and twenty-two years. Through this same Moses that law also, proper to the Jews, was sent from God. [F3] Thereafter many other prophets too, more ancient than your literature; for even he who sang last either ran ahead a little, or at least ran alongside in age, of the founders of your wisdom, and even of the framers of your laws. [F4] For Zechariah lived in the reign of Cyrus and Darius, at which time Thales, chief of the natural philosophers, when Croesus questioned him, gave no certain answer about the divinity, being troubled, no doubt, by the voices of the prophets.

Solon foretold to the same king that the end of a long life must be looked to—no otherwise than the prophets. [F5] So plainly can it be perceived that both your laws and your studies conceived their notions from the divine law and from the divine teaching. What is prior must of necessity be the seed. Hence you hold certain things in common with us, or near to us: [F6] from wisdom (sophia), the love of it was named philosophy; from prophecy, the affectation of it accounted poetic vaticination. Men greedy of glory, if they had discovered anything, adulterated it in order to make it their own. It has befallen even fruits to degenerate from the seed. [F7] I could still, in many ways, stand upon the antiquity of the divine writings, were it not that a greater authority accrues to them for belief from the powers of their truth than from the annals of their age.

For what will more powerfully plead the case for their testimony than the daily discharge of the whole world's course—when the dispositions of kingdoms, the falls of cities, the ends of nations, the states of the times, all answer so exactly as they were foretold thousands of years before? [F8] Hence too our hope, which you deride, is animated, and the confidence which you call presumption is strengthened. For the recognition of things past is fitting for arranging confidence in things to come: the same voices proclaimed both parts, the same writings noted them. [F9] With them there is one time, which with us seems to be separated. Thus all things that remain over have now been proved to us, because, together with those which have been proved, they were then being foretold as future.

You have, so far as I know, your Sibyl too, inasmuch as that appellation of a true seer of the true God has been usurped far and wide over the others who seemed to prophesy—just as the name of your Sibyl was falsely counterfeited from the truth, in the same way as that of your gods. Therefore the single archive of one prophet, in which is seen laid up the treasure of the whole Jewish sacrament and thence now of ours, surpasses by ages all the substances and all the materials, the origins, orders, and veins of every one of your ancient styles of writing, and most nations too and cities famous in histories and hoary in memorials, and finally the very forms of letters, the indices and guardians of things, and—I think we still say too little—your very gods, I say, their very temples and oracles and rites.

If you have meanwhile heard of a certain Moses, he is equal in age to Argive Inachus; by nearly four hundred years—for it is seven short of that—he precedes Danaus, himself the most ancient among you; he antedates the destruction of Priam by about a thousand years; I could even say by more than five hundred years also Homer, having those whom I may follow. The other prophets too, though they come after Moses, yet even the very latest of them are not reproached as being more backward than your foremost sages and lawgivers and historians. By what orders these things can be proved, it is not so difficult for us to set forth as it is vast—nor arduous, but for the present long. Much apparatus must be attended to, with the reckoning gestures of the fingers;

the archives even of the most ancient nations must be unlocked—of the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Phoenicians; their fellow-citizens must be called in, through whom the knowledge has been supplied—such as Manetho the Egyptian and Berosus the Chaldean, and also Hieromus the Phoenician, king of Tyre; and their followers too—Ptolemy of Mendes, and Menander of Ephesus, and Demetrius of Phalerum, and King Juba, and Apion, and Thallus, and, whether he approve or refute these, Josephus the Jew, the native champion of Jewish antiquities; the census-lists of the Greeks too must be compared, and the deeds—what things were done and when—must be laid open, that the chains of the times may be disclosed, through which the numbers of the annals may shine forth: one must travel abroad into the histories and literatures of the world.

And yet we have already brought in, as it were, a part of the proof, since we have sprinkled in the means by which it can be proved. But it is better to defer it, lest either we pursue too little by hastening, or wander too long by pursuing. XX. We now offer more in place of this postponement: the majesty of the Scriptures—if we do not prove them divine by their antiquity, if their antiquity is doubted. Nor is this to be learned more slowly or from elsewhere; the things that will teach it are before us: the world, and the age, and their outcomes. Whatever is being done was foretold; whatever is seen was heard.

That the earth swallows up cities, that the seas defraud us of islands, that foreign and civil wars rend us, that kingdom clashes against kingdom, that famine and plague and every local disaster and frequent crowds of deaths lay waste, that the lowly are changed to loftiness and the lofty to lowliness, that justice grows rare and iniquity grows rife, that care for all good disciplines grows torpid, that even the offices of the seasons and the functions of the elements go astray, that the form of natural things is disturbed by monsters and portents—all these have been providently written. While we suffer them, they are read; while we recognize them, they are proved. Fitting testimony to divinity, I think, is the truth of divination.

Hence, therefore, among us the faith even in things to come is secure—things now, of course, already proved, because, together with those which are daily proved, they were being foretold. The same voices sound, the same writings note them, the same Spirit impels; there is one time for the divination that foretells things to come; among men, perhaps, it is distinguished, while it is discharged—while from future it becomes present, and thereafter from present is reckoned past. What do we do amiss, I ask you, in believing also in things to come, we who have already learned to believe him through two grades? XXI.

But since we have declared that this sect is supported by the most ancient records of the Jews, whereas most people know it to be somewhat recent, as of Tiberius's time—as we ourselves confess—perhaps on this account its standing may be called into question, as though under the shade of a most notable religion, one that is certainly permitted, it conceals something of its own presumption; or because, apart from its date, we deal with the Jews neither concerning restrictions of diet, nor concerning the solemnities of days, nor concerning the very seal upon the body, nor concerning the fellowship of the name—which would surely be requisite, if we were bound over to the same God. But the common folk too now know Christ as some man, of the kind the Jews condemned: so that the more readily may anyone suppose us to be worshippers of a man.

But neither are we ashamed of Christ, since it is our joy to be reckoned and condemned under His name, nor do we hold any other opinion of God. It is necessary, therefore, to say a few things about Christ as God. In former times the whole of God's favour rested with the Jews, where there was both eminent righteousness and the faith of their original forefathers. From this sprang their greatness of race, their loftiness of kingdom, and such felicity that they were forewarned by the very oracles of God, by which they were instructed, concerning meriting God and not offending Him. But how greatly they transgressed, puffed up by confidence in their fathers to turn aside, straying from the discipline into a profane manner of life, even if they themselves would not confess it, their present downfall would prove.

Scattered, wandering, exiles from their own soil and sky, they roam through the world without a man, without a God for king, to whom it is not granted even by the right of strangers to greet their fatherland with so much as a footstep. Since those holy oracles forewarned them of these things, the very same oracles always kept declaring that it would come to pass, that in the final courses of the age, out of every nation and people and place, God would choose for Himself worshippers far more faithful, to whom He would transfer His grace, indeed a fuller grace, on account of their capacity for a more enlarged discipline. There came, therefore, He who was foretold as about to come from God to reform and enlighten it, that famous Christ, the Son of God.

The arbiter and master of this grace and discipline, the enlightener and guide of the human race, the Son of God, was proclaimed — not indeed so begotten as to be ashamed of the name of Son or of His Father's seed. He suffered no father-god sprung from incest with a sister, nor from the violation of a daughter or another's wife, no scaly or horned or feathered god, no lover turned into gold for a daughter of Danaus. Such are the divinities of your Jupiter. But the Son of God has no mother born of unchastity; even she whom He seems to have as mother had not been wedded. But first let me expound His substance, and thus the nature of His nativity will be understood. We have already declared that God fashioned this whole universe by His Word, and Reason, and Power.

Among your own philosophers too it is agreed that the Logos, that is, Word and Reason, is seen to be the artificer of the universe. For Zeno defines Him as the maker who formed all things in due arrangement; the same is also called Fate, and God, and the mind of Jupiter, and the necessity of all things. Cleanthes heaps all these upon spirit, which he affirms pervades the universe. And we too ascribe as its proper substance to the Word and Reason, and likewise to the Power by which we have declared God to have fashioned all things, a spirit, in which the Word is present when it speaks, Reason attends when it disposes, and Power presides when it perfects.

This One we have learned was brought forth from God, and by that bringing-forth was begotten, and therefore is called Son of God and God, from the unity of substance; for God too is spirit. And when a ray is extended from the sun, it is a portion from the whole; yet the sun will be in the ray, because the ray is of the sun, nor is the substance separated but extended, [so from spirit comes spirit and from God comes God] as light is kindled from light. The parent matter remains whole and undiminished, even though you borrow many offshoots of its quality from it. So too what has proceeded from God is God and Son of God, and both are one; so too spirit from spirit and God from God, He made another in measure, in number by degree, not in state, and He did not withdraw from the source, but issued forth.

This ray of God, then, as it was always foretold in times past, descending into a certain virgin, and formed as flesh in her womb, is born a man mingled with God. The flesh, furnished with spirit, is nourished, grows up, speaks, teaches, works — and is Christ. Accept meanwhile this tale — it is like your own — while we show how Christ is proved, and who among you have set forth beforehand such rival tales for the destruction of this truth. The Jews too knew that Christ was to come, since it was to them that the prophets spoke. For even now they await His coming, nor is there any greater quarrel between us and them than that they do not believe He has already come.

For since two comings of His were signified — the first, which is already accomplished in the lowliness of the human condition; the second, which hangs over us at the close of the age in the sublimity of divinity displayed — by not understanding the first, they supposed the second alone, which they hope will be more manifestly proclaimed. For not to understand the former was the desert of their offences — since had they understood, they would have believed, and had they believed, they would have obtained salvation. They themselves read that it was so written, that they were punished with the loss of wisdom and understanding and of the fruit of eyes and ears.

Him, then, whom on account of His lowliness they had presumed to be a mere man, it followed that they should reckon a magician on account of His power, since by a word He cast out demons from men, gave sight again to the blind, cleansed lepers, made whole the paralytic, and finally by a word restored the dead to life; He made the very elements serve Him, stilling storms and walking upon the seas, showing that He was the Word of God, that is, that primordial Logos, the firstborn, attended by Power and Reason and upheld by Spirit — the same who by His word both makes all things and had made them.

But at His teaching, by which they were refuted, the masters and chief men of the Jews were so exasperated — chiefly because a vast multitude turned aside to Him — that at last, having handed Him over to Pontius Pilate, who was then governing Syria on Rome's behalf, they wrung out by the violence of their votes that Jesus be given up to them for the cross. He too had foretold that they would so act; a small thing, had not the prophets before Him foretold it as well. And yet, being nailed up, He displayed many marks proper to that death. For of His own accord He dismissed His spirit with a word, anticipating the executioner's office. At the same moment the day was withdrawn, though the sun was marking the middle of its orbit. Those who did not know that this too had been foretold concerning Christ thought it, of course, an eclipse. And yet you have that catastrophe of the world recorded in your own archives.

Then the Jews took Him down and laid Him in a tomb, and beset it with a great military guard and diligent watch, lest — because He had foretold that on the third day He would rise from the dead — His disciples should steal away the body and deceive those who were suspicious. But behold, on the third day the earth was suddenly shaken, and the mass that had blocked the tomb was rolled away, and the guard scattered in terror; and with no disciples appearing, nothing was found in the tomb except the wrappings of the buried. Nevertheless the chief men, whose interest it was both to spread abroad the crime and to recall from the faith a people that was tributary and subject to them, gave out that He had been stolen by His disciples.

For neither did He show Himself to the common crowd, lest the impious be freed from their error, and that faith too, destined for no mean reward, might stand firm through difficulty. But with certain disciples in Galilee, a region of Judaea, He spent up to forty days, teaching them what they should teach. Then, having appointed them to the office of preaching throughout the world, He was received up into heaven, wrapped about with a cloud — far more truly than your writers are wont to affirm concerning Romulus on the word of Proculus. All these things concerning Christ, Pilate — himself already a Christian in his own conscience — reported to Caesar, who was then Tiberius. But the Caesars too would have believed concerning Christ, had either the Caesars not been necessary to the age, or had Christians been able to be Caesars.

The disciples too, spread throughout the world, obeyed the precept of their divine Master; and they themselves, having suffered much from the pursuing Jews, at last, for their confidence in the truth, gladly sowed Christian blood at Rome through Nero's savagery. But we will show you fit witnesses of Christ — those very ones whom you adore. It is much, if I bring them forward that you may believe Christians, on whose account you do not believe Christians. Meanwhile this is the order of our teaching; this we have set forth as the reckoning both of our sect and of our name, together with its author. Let no one now cast infamy upon it, let no one think otherwise, since it is not even lawful for anyone to lie about his own religion.