Against the Nations 1.1–1.28

I have found that some people who think themselves very wise in their own convictions are raving, running wild, and declaring, as though uttering something straight from an oracle, that since the Christian people began to exist in the world the world has gone to ruin, the human race has been struck with evils of many forms, and even the heavenly gods themselves, abandoning the customary care with which they once used to look after our affairs, have been driven out of the regions of the earth. So I have resolved, as far as my ability and my modest powers of speech allow, to oppose this ill will and to refute these slanderous charges, so that neither they may think they are saying something great when they repeat the talk of the crowd, nor, if we hold back from such disputes, may they think they have won a case that was lost by its own fault and not abandoned through the silence of its defenders. For I would not deny that this is a very grave accusation, and that we deserve the hatred due to enemies, if it were established that the causes lie with us through which the world has strayed from its laws, the gods have been driven far away, and such swarms of sorrows have been brought upon the generations of mortals.

Let us therefore examine the sense of that opinion and what sort of thing it is that is being said, and, setting aside all eagerness for dispute, by which the view of things is usually obscured and covered over, let us weigh with an even balance whether what is said is true. For it will surely come about, by a chain of consequent reasoning, that not we but they themselves are found guilty of that charge, who profess to be worshipers of the deities and devoted to long-established religions. And first we ask them this in friendly and gentle speech: since the name of the Christian religion began to exist on earth, what unusual thing, what unknown thing, what thing contrary to the laws laid down in the beginning has the so-called and so-named 'nature of things' felt or suffered? Have those first elements, from which it is agreed all things are compounded, been changed into opposite qualities? Has the structure of this machine and mass, by which we are all covered and held enclosed, been loosened or broken up in any part? Has this revolution of the universe, departing from the regulation of its original motion, begun either to creep too slowly or to be swept along in headlong rotation? Have the stars begun to rise in the west and the constellations to set in the east? Has the sun himself, the prince of the stars, whose light clothes all things and whose heat gives them life, blazed up or grown lukewarm, and changed into opposite conditions the balance of his usual regulation? Has the moon ceased to renew herself and to bring herself back into her old shapes by the constant restoration of new ones? Have the cold, the heat, the moderate warmth between the unequal seasons perished through confusion of the seasons? Has winter begun to have long days, and the night of summer to call back the slowest dawns? Have the winds breathed out their breath, so that with their blasts dead the sky is not gathered into clouds and the fields do not ... become wet with rain? Does the earth refuse to receive the seeds entrusted to it, or will the trees not put forth leaves? Has the taste of edible crops and the juice of the vine been changed? Is foul blood pressed out of the olive berries, and is oil no longer supplied to the extinguished lamp? Do animals that live on land and in the water not mate, not conceive, not protect according to their own habits and their own law the young conceived in their wombs? Finally, do human beings themselves, whom their first and original birth scattered over the two habitable zones of the earth, not join in marriage with the proper rites of weddings? Do they not beget the sweetest offspring of children? Do they not carry on public business, private affairs, and family matters? Do they not, as each one pleases, direct their talents to the various branches of the arts and learning, and reap the interest of their diligent industry? Do those to whom the lot of such things has been assigned not reign and command? Do people not rise daily in rank and power, preside over the hearing of lawsuits, and interpret the laws and rights? Do not all people in their own nations observe everything else by which human life is supported and maintained, according to the institutions of their ancestral customs?

Since this is so, and no novelty has broken in to split the unbroken course of things by interrupting its continuity, what is this that is said, that a plague was brought upon the earth after the Christian religion entered the world and revealed the mysteries of hidden truth? 'But pestilences,' they say, 'and droughts, wars, crop failures, locusts, mice, hailstorms, and other harmful things by which human affairs are assailed, the gods bring upon us, provoked by your wrongs and offenses.' If it were not foolish to linger long over things that are obvious and need no defense, I would show, by unrolling past ages, that these evils you speak of are not unknown, and that these plagues did not break in suddenly, and begin to afflict mortal affairs with various disasters, after our people earned the happiness of being given this name. For if we are the cause, and these plagues were devised as the deserved punishment of our guilt, how did antiquity know the names of these miseries? How did it give wars a name? By what reasoning could it mark pestilence and hail with a word, or take them among the terms by which speech was set out? For if these evils are new and draw their causes from recent offenses, how could it happen that antiquity formed words for things which it neither knew it had experienced nor had learned had ever occurred in the times of its ancestors? 'Shortage of crops,' he says, 'and scarcity of grain press hard upon us.' Were the ancient and very old ages ever free of this necessity? Do not the very names by which these evils are called testify and cry out that no mortal was ever exempt from them? If the matter were hard to believe, we could argue from the testimony of authors how great, how often, and which nations experienced dreadful famine and perished in heaped-up devastation. Hailstorms very often occur and destroy everything. Do we not find it recorded and set down in ancient literature that even showers of stones often crushed whole regions? Unfavorable rains make the crops die and impose barrenness on the land. Was antiquity free of these evils, when we know that even great rivers grew rough with dried mud? Contagions of pestilence consume the human race. Run through the records of the annals written in different languages: you will learn that all nations have often been laid waste and bereft of their inhabitants. Every kind of crop is cut down and gnawed away by locusts and mice. Go through your own histories and you will be taught by these plagues how often an earlier age was afflicted and came to the miseries of poverty. Cities shaken by violent earthquakes totter to the point of danger: what, did former times not see cities with their peoples swallowed up in huge chasms, or did they have fortunes secure from disasters of this kind?

When was the human race destroyed by floods of water? Was it not before us? When was the world set on fire and dissolved into embers and ashes? Was it not before us? When were very great cities covered by the waves of the sea? Was it not before us? When were wars waged with wild beasts and battles with lions? Was it not before us? When was destruction brought on peoples by venomous snakes? Was it not before us? As for your habit of blaming us for the causes of frequent wars, the laying waste of cities, the invasions of the Germans and Scythians, with your leave and your good pardon let me say it: you do not see, in your eagerness to slander, what sort of thing it is that you are saying.

Ten thousand years ago, when, as Plato shows, a great multitude of men burst out from the island called Atlantis of Neptune and utterly destroyed and wiped out countless nations, were we the cause? When between the Assyrians and the Bactrians, under the leadership once of Ninus and Zoroaster, war was waged not only with the sword and with strength but also with the secret arts of the Magi and the Chaldeans, was this ill will toward us? When Helen was carried off with the gods as leaders and instigators, and became a dreadful fate for her own people and for times to come, was that charged to the guilt of our religion? When that monstrous Xerxes let the sea in upon the land and crossed the seas on foot, was this brought about by the wrong done by our name? When a single young man rising from the borders of Macedonia subjected the kingdoms and peoples of the East to captivity and slavery, did we create and stir up the causes? When just now the Romans, like some rushing torrent, overwhelmed and swamped all nations, was it we, of course, who drove the gods into a frenzy? But if there is no one who dares to charge to our times what was done long ago, how can we be the causes of present miseries, when nothing new is happening, but all things are old and none of them unheard of in antiquity?

And yet it would not be hard to prove that these wars you speak of, since Christ was heard in the world, have not only not increased because of hatred of our religion, but have for the most part been reduced by the restraint of passions. For since so great a multitude of people has received from his teaching and laws that evil ought not to be repaid with evil, that it is better to suffer wrong than to inflict it, that one should shed one's own blood rather than stain one's hands and conscience with another's, the ungrateful world has long enjoyed a benefit from Christ, through whom the madness of savagery has been softened and has begun to hold back hostile hands from the blood of a fellow creature. But if all without exception who understand that they are human not by the shape of their bodies but by the power of reason were willing to lend an ear for a little while to his saving and peaceful commands, and did not, swollen with pride and disdain, trust their own opinions rather than his admonitions, the whole world would long ago have turned the use of iron to gentler works and would be living in the softest tranquility, and would come together in wholesome concord, with the terms of its treaties kept inviolate.

'But if human affairs suffer no harm through you,' they say, 'where do these evils come from by which wretched mortality has long been pressed and burdened?' You ask of me an opinion that my case does not require at all. For the present dispute in hand was not undertaken by me in order to show or prove from what causes and reasons each thing comes about, but to show that the reproach of so great a crime is far from us. If I achieve this, if I do it, and the truth of the matter is set out by clear arguments, I do not care where these evils come from, or from what sources and beginnings they flow.

And yet, so that I may not seem, when asked, to say nothing at all of what I think about such matters, I can say this. What if the primary matter, which has been divided into the four elements of things, holds the causes of all miseries wrapped up in its own constitution? What if the motions of the stars, in certain signs, regions, times, and lines, give birth to these evils and bring on those below them the necessity of various disasters? What if at fixed times changes in things occur, and, as in the tides of the sea, prosperity now flows in and now ebbs again, with evils coming back in turn? What if this dregs of matter which we tread under our feet has had this law given to it, to breathe out most harmful vapors, by which this air is corrupted and brings disease to bodies and weakens human affairs? What if, which is nearest the truth, whatever seems adverse to us is not an evil for the world itself, and, measuring everything that happens by our own advantage, we find fault with the events of nature through wrong opinions? Plato, that lofty summit and pillar of philosophers, taught in his writings that those savage floods and conflagrations of the world are a purging of the earth, and that wise man was not afraid to call the overthrow of the human race, its disaster, ruin, destruction, and deaths a renewal of things, and to compare it to a kind of youth restored by renewed strength.

'The sky does not rain,' he says, 'and we are suffering from some shortage of grain.' Why, do you demand that the elements serve your needs, and that the seasons must yield their compliance to your convenience so that you can live more softly and luxuriously? What if, on the same principle, a man very eager to sail were to complain that for a long time there have been no winds and the breezes of the sky have fallen still? Must we therefore say that the calm of the world is harmful, because it hinders the wishes of travelers? What if someone accustomed to bake himself in the sun and to give his body dryness were to complain on similar grounds that the pleasure of fair weather had been taken away by frequent clouds? Must we therefore say that the clouds hang overhead with a hostile covering, because his desire is not allowed to redden itself idly in the flames and to work up a thirst for drinking? All these events that occur and happen within the mass of this world are to be weighed not by our petty conveniences but by the reasons and order of nature itself.

Nor, if something has happened that has favored us or our affairs with less happy results, is it at once an evil and to be counted a ruinous thing. The world rains or does not rain: it rains or does not rain for itself, and, what you perhaps do not know, it either dries up excessive dampness with the heat of drought or tempers the dryness of a very long time by pouring out rain. It brings on pestilences, diseases, famines, and other deadly forms of evil: how do you know whether it is not removing what is in excess, so as to set a limit, by its own losses, to things that are growing rank?

Would you dare to say: 'This and that thing in the world is evil', when you can neither explain nor unravel its origin or its cause, and call it harmful and harsh because perhaps it hinders the pleasures of your luxuries and desires? What then, because cold is hostile to your limbs and usually freezes and constricts the warmth of your blood, ought there therefore to be no winter in the world? And because you cannot bear and endure the most blazing suns, must summer be taken out of the year, and nature be arranged again differently under other laws? Hellebore is poison to men: ought it for that reason not to have been produced? The wolf lies in wait for sheepfolds: is nature at fault because it brought forth a most troublesome beast for the flocks? The serpent takes away life with its bite: curse the first beginnings of things, then, because they added such savage monsters to living creatures!

It is an excessively arrogant thing, when you are not your own master and live in another's property, to want to impose terms on those more powerful, so that what you desire happens rather than what you have found fixed in things by ancient ordinances. So if you want your complaints to have any standing, men, you must first teach us where you come from or who you are, whether the world was begotten and fashioned for you, or whether you came into it as tenants from foreign regions. Since it is not for you to say this, and you cannot explain for what purpose you dwell under this vault of heaven, stop thinking that anything concerns you, since what happens does not happen for parts but returns and is referred to the sum of the whole.

'Because of the Christians,' they say, 'the gods heap all evils upon us, and destruction is prepared for the crops by the powers above.' I ask you, when you say this, do you not see that you are wickedly slandering with open and manifest lies? It is about three hundred years, a little less or more, since we began to be Christians and to be counted in the world. Through all these years have there been continual wars, continual barren seasons, no peace on earth, and never any cheapness or abundance of goods at all? For this is the first thing that one who accuses us must prove: that these calamities have been perpetual and unbroken, that mortal affairs have never breathed again at all, and have endured the forms of manifold dangers without any holidays, as the saying goes.

Yet we see that during these years and these times countless victories have been won over conquered enemies, the boundaries of the empire extended, and nations of unheard-of name brought under its power; that there have very often been the greatest harvests, and such cheapness and abundance of goods that all trade stood amazed, with the level of prices laid low. For how could affairs be carried on, and the human race have lasted until this time, if the fertility of the earth had not supplied everything that the needs of life demanded?

'But there have been some times of want.' Yes, and they were relieved again by times of plenty. 'Some wars have gone against our will.' Yes, and they were afterward set right by victories and successes. What then, shall we say that the gods are at one time mindful of the wrongs done to them by us and at another forgetful? If they are said to be angry at a time of famine, it follows that at a time of plenty they are not angry and hard to please; and so the matter comes to this, that by playful alternations they lay aside and take up their anger again, and always restore themselves anew by recalling their offenses.

And yet what sort of thing this is that is being said cannot be grasped by any intelligible understanding. If the gods wished the Alamanni, Persians, and Scythians to be conquered because Christians lived and dwelt among their peoples, how did they give the victory to the Romans, when Christians also lived and dwelt among their peoples? If they wished mice and locusts to swarm prodigiously in Asia and Syria because, on the same reasoning, Christians lived among their peoples, why did nothing of the kind arise in Spain and Gaul at the same time, when countless Christians lived in these provinces too? If among the Gaetulians and ... they sent drought and dryness to the crops for this reason, why in that same year did they give the most abundant harvests to the Moors and the Nomads, when the same religion was practiced in these regions too? If in any one city they caused very many to die of hunger out of aversion to our name, why in that same place did they make not only people not of our body but even Christians richer and very wealthy by the high price of grain? So either no one at all ought to have had anything happy, if we are the cause of evils, for we are in all nations; or, since you see happy things mixed with troubles, stop ascribing to us what harms your affairs, since we do not hinder happy and prosperous things at all. For if I bring it about that things go badly, why do I not prevent them from going well? If my name is the cause of great want, why do I not hinder in the least the greatest fertility? If I am said to bring the fortune of receiving wounds in wars, why, when enemies perish, am I not a bad omen, and do not turn good fortune into adverse by the foulness of an evil portent?

And yet, O great worshipers and high priests of the deities, why do you insist that those most august gods are angry with the Christian peoples? Do you not notice, do you not see, what shameful passions, what unseemly madness you ascribe to the deities? For what else is being angry but raving, going mad, being carried away by the lust for revenge, and rioting in the derangement of a savage heart amid the torments of another's pain? So the great gods know, suffer, and feel what wild beasts and monsters and deadly water snakes with their venomous fangs contain. What is blameworthy in a human being as fickleness, in an earthly creature, you insist that that surpassing nature, standing in the firmness of perpetual excellence, knows. And what follows necessarily, then, but that fiery sparks flash from their eyes, their panting breast heaves, foam is thrown from their mouths, and the dryness of their lips grows white from their burning words?

But if this is true, and it is ascertained and known that the gods boil over with anger and are tossed by such emotion and disturbance, they are not immortal and everlasting, nor are they to be counted as having any divinity at all. For wherever there is any emotion, as the wise hold, there must be passion; where passion is found, disturbance naturally follows; where there is disturbance, there is pain and sickness; where there is pain and sickness, there is room at once for decline and corruption; and if these two afflict, destruction is near, death that ends all things and takes life from all that feel.

What of this, that in this way you represent them not only as fickle and hot-tempered but also, what ought to be far removed from gods, as unfair and unjust, and holding no measure of even the slightest equity? For what is so unjust as to be angry with some and to harm others, to complain of men and tear up the harmless crops, to hate the Christian name and ruin their own worshipers with every kind of loss? Or do they perhaps rage against us too for this reason,

so that you, stirred by wounds within, may rise up to avenge them? So the gods seek human protection, and unless they are protected by your support they are not able themselves to repel and defend themselves against insults. Rather, if it is true that they burn with anger, allow them power over themselves: let them defend themselves and put forth and try out their inward powers in vengeance for their offended majesty. They can, if they wish, kill us with heat, with most harmful cold, with pestilential winds, with the most hidden causes of disease; they can destroy us and banish us completely from all human society. Or if it is bad policy to attack us with force, let them send out some sign of their judgment, by which it may be clear to all that we live under heaven against their extreme will.

Let them give you good health and us bad and the worst. Let them water your fields with timely showers and drive whatever drops of rain there are away from our little plots. Let them see that your flocks multiply with numerous young, and bring an ill-omened barrenness on our herds. Let them make a full autumn harvest flow from your olive groves and vineyards, but forbid a single drop to be pressed from our vines. Finally and at last, let them command that in your mouths the crops keep their own nature, but in ours honey turn bitter, the streams of olive oil go rancid, and wine at the very lip of the cup suddenly change into treacherous sourness.

Since the facts themselves testify that this does not happen at all, and it is clear that no less comes to us and no more to you from the benefits that sustain life, what great desire is this, to maintain that the gods are enemies and foes of the Christians, when you see that in the saddest and the happiest circumstances they differ from you in no respect? If you allow the truth to be told to you, without any flattery: these are words, words, things believed through slanders, not proved by the testimony of any real knowledge.

But the true gods, those worthy to have and bear the dignity of this name, are neither angry nor indignant, nor do they devise harm to anyone by treacherous schemes. For truly it is impious and surpasses every sacrilege to believe that that wise and most blessed nature thinks it a great thing if someone submits himself to it with flattering humility, and, if this is not done, believes itself despised and fallen from the height of its supreme summit. It is childish, petty, and mean, hardly fitting even for those whom the experience of the learned has long called demons and heroes, beings who do not know heavenly things and dwell, by the lot of their condition, in this grosser matter of things.

These are your ideas, yours, irreligiously conceived and more irreligiously believed. Or rather, to speak more truly, it is soothsayers, interpreters of omens, diviners, prophets, and fanatics who are never not deluded who have strung these tales together. So that their arts may not perish, and so that they may not fail to shake small coins from their clients, who are already few, whenever they find you willing to have the matter made odious, they cry out: 'The gods are neglected, and there is now the greatest scarcity of worshipers in the temples; the ancient ceremonies lie ridiculed, and the very old rites of sacred things once observed have fallen before the superstitions of new religions; and rightly is the human race pressed by the straits of so many miseries and tortured by the hardships of so many toils.' And men, a dull race, unable through inborn blindness to see what lies in the light, dare in their madness to assert what you, in your right mind, do not blush to believe.

But so that no one may think that we, from lack of an answer, credit the gods with the gift of tranquility and ascribe to them minds that are harmless and removed from all disturbance, let us grant, as you please, that they direct their anger against us, that they thirst for our blood, and that they have long desired to remove us from the ages of mortals. But if it is not troublesome, not burdensome, if it is a matter of common duty to weigh the points of this dispute not by favor but by the truth, we ask to hear from you what this reason is, what cause, for which the gods above rage so against us and men burn with such bitterness. 'You practice impious religions,' they say, 'and unheard-of rites throughout the world.' What do you dare to say, you men who share in reason? What do you attempt to blurt out, to bring forth, with the recklessness of a rash tongue? To adore God the Supreme, the Lord of all things that exist, who holds the summit of all that is highest; to call upon him with reverent obedience; in our weariness to embrace him, so to speak, with all our senses, to love him, to look up to him: is this an accursed and ill-omened religion, full of impiety and sacrilege, polluting with the superstition of its novelty the ceremonies instituted of old?

Is this, I ask, that bold and monstrous crime, on account of which the greatest heavenly beings aim at us the stings of their anger and indignation, on account of which you yourselves, when savage lust comes over you, strip us of our goods, drive us from the homes of our fathers, inflict capital punishments on us, torture, tear, and burn us, and finally throw us to wild beasts to be mangled by monsters? Whoever condemns this in us, or thinks it should be counted in any charge, should he be called by the name of a man, however much he may seem so to himself, or be believed to be a god, though he declare himself one through a thousand prophets? Does Jupiter of Dodona call us profane and impious, and will he himself be called a god and be counted in the order of deities, who either charges with impiety those who serve the supreme King, or is tormented that God's majesty and worship are set above his own? Is Apollo of Delos or of Claros, of Didyma, the Philesian, the Pythian ... to be held divine, who either does not know the supreme Ruler or is unaware that we pray to him in daily prayers? Even if he did not know the secrets of our hearts, nor recognize what we hold in our inmost thoughts, he could still know by his ears that we call upon the supreme God and ask from him what we request, or recognize it from the very sound of the voice we use in prayer.

It is not yet the place to explain who all those are who condemn us, where they come from, how much power or knowledge they have, why they tremble at the mention of Christ, and why they hold his disciples as enemies and hated. But for those who lay claim to human understanding let us fix this in one definition: we Christians are nothing else but worshipers of the supreme King and Ruler, under Christ as our teacher. If you consider it, you will find nothing else involved in this religion. This is the sum of our whole practice, this is the set goal of our divine services, this is the end: before him we all prostrate ourselves according to custom, him we adore in joint prayers, from him we ask things just and honorable and worthy of his hearing. Not that he himself needs us to be suppliants, or loves to see the veneration of so many thousands laid at his feet: this is for our benefit and has regard to our advantage. For since we are prone to faults and to the various cravings of desire through the defect of our inborn weakness, he allows himself always to be conceived in our thoughts, so that while we pray to him and strive to deserve his gifts, we may receive the will to innocence and cleanse ourselves from every stain by cutting away all our sins.

What do you say, you sacred men, you interpreters of divine law? Have those a better case who adore the Grundulian Lares, the Aius Locutius, the Limentini, than all of us who worship God the Father of all things and ask of him protection in our weariness and weakness? And do those seem to you shrewd, wise, most prudent, and beyond all reproach, who revere Fauns and Fatuae and the geniuses of cities, Terrors and Bellonas, while we are pronounced dull, stupid, foolish, blunt, and brutish, who have given ourselves up to God, by whose nod and will all that exists stands and is fixed in the permanence of his decree? Is this the judgment you bring forth, the law you establish and promulgate, that whoever adores your little slaves should be granted the highest honors, while whoever prays to the masters themselves deserves the worst of crosses? In the greatest cities and among the more powerful peoples, rites are performed publicly in honor of women who were once hired prostitutes, prostituted to common lust: there is no swelling of indignation among the gods. Temples have been raised with lofty roofs to cats, beetles, and heifers: the powers of the deities, mocked, are silent, and are not stirred by any jealousy when they see the sanctity of vile animals set on a level with themselves. To us alone are the gods hostile, to us alone the bitterest enemies, because we worship their Father, through whom, if they exist, they began to be and to have the substance of their divinity and majesty; from whom, as they are aware, they received their very deity, so to speak, and are recognized in the number of things that exist; by whose will and pleasure they can both perish and be dissolved, and can neither be dissolved nor perish. For if we all agree that there is one sole First Principle, whom nothing else precedes in length of time, it is necessary that after him all things were born and brought forth and sprang into the nature of their own name. If this is fixed and settled, it will follow that we must confess that the gods too were born and draw the origin of their beginning from the primal source of things. And if they are born and begotten, they are surely also near to destruction and dangers. But they are believed to be immortal, everlasting, and never subject to any end. Therefore this is the gift and bounty of God the Father, that they have been granted to remain the same through endless ages, though they are by nature liable to fall and to be dissolved.