Against the Nations 1.52–2.7

Come now, let there come, I pray, through the fiery zone, from the inner world, Zoroaster the magus, if we agree with Hermippus as our authority; let that Bactrian also come, whose deeds Ctesias sets out in the first book of his histories; the Armenian grandson of Zostrianus, and Pamphylus the friend of Cyrus; Apollonius, Damigero, and Dardanus; Belus, Julianus, and Baebulus; and anyone else who is said to have held the first place and name in such tricks. Let them allow one of the people to join the lips of the dumb for the task of speaking, to unstop the ears of the deaf, to restore the nature of eyes to those born without sight, and to bring back sense and life to limbs long cold. Or if that is a hard thing, and they cannot grant others the power of such works, let them do it themselves, and do it with their own rites. Whatever evil herbs the bosom of the earth nourishes, whatever power that muttering of words and the added compulsions of spells contain, we do not grudge; let them add them. We do not forbid; let them gather them. We would like to test and to see whether they can accomplish, with their gods, what has been done by rustic Christians with bare commands.

Stop, you ignorant people, turning such great things into abuse. It will do no harm to him who did them, but it will bring danger to you, and no small danger, but danger in matters of the highest and chiefest importance, since the soul is a precious thing, and nothing can be found dearer to a person than himself. There was nothing magical in Christ, as you suppose, nothing merely human, deceptive, or crafty; no fraud lay hidden in him, though you may deride us as usual and dissolve into wanton laughter. He was God on high, God from his inmost root, God sent as Savior from unknown realms by God the Ruler of all; whom neither the sun himself nor any stars, if they have sense, nor the rulers and princes of the world, nor finally the great gods, or those who, pretending to be gods, terrify the whole race of mortals, could know or guess where he came from or who he was. And rightly. When, stripped of the body which he carried about as a small part of himself, he allowed himself to be seen and made known of whom he was and how great, all the elements of the world, terrified by the strangeness of the event, were thrown into confusion; the earth was moved and trembled, the sea was poured back from its depths, the air was wrapped in balls of darkness, and the fiery orb of the sun grew stiff, its heat cooled. For what remained to happen, after God was recognized, who until then was judged to be one of us?

But you do not believe that these things were done. Yet those who saw them happen and saw them done before their eyes, the best witnesses and the surest authorities, both believed them themselves and handed them on to be believed by us who came after, with no slight proofs. Perhaps you ask who these are? Tribes, peoples, nations, and that unbelieving human race, which, unless the matter were plain and, as the saying goes, clearer than daylight itself, would never lend the assent of its belief to things of this kind. Or shall we say that the people of that time were so empty, lying, stupid, and brutish as to pretend they had seen what they never saw, and to report with false testimony, or confirm with childish assertion, things that had not happened at all, and that, when they could live with you in harmony and maintain unoffended relations, they took on hatred for nothing and were held under an accursed name?

But if, as you say, that history of the events is false, how is it that in so short a time the whole world has been filled with this religion, or how could nations separated by regions, divided by the winds and the vaults of the sky, come together into one mind? Were they enticed by bare assertions, led into empty hopes, and did they choose of their own accord, in reckless despair, to throw themselves into danger of their lives, when they had seen nothing of the kind that could rouse them to this worship by the wonder of its newness? No: because they saw all these things done both by him and by his heralds, who, sent through the whole world, carried the benefits and gifts of the Father to ... souls and men, they were conquered by the force of truth itself and gave themselves to God, and did not count it a great loss to throw their bodies to you and offer their flesh to be torn.

'But your writers have set these things out falsely; they have magnified small deeds beyond measure and inflated slight matters with quite ambitious proclamation.' Yet if everything could have been put into writing, both what he himself did and what his heralds accomplished with equal right and power, so great a mass of mighty works would make you still more unbelieving, and perhaps you could seize on a point where it would seem very like the truth that additions had been made to the facts and falsehoods inserted into the writings and records. But neither could everything be written down or reach the ears of all, since many things were done among unknown nations who did not know the use of letters; or, if some things have been committed to letters and writings, some things have been interpolated and added, and partly changed and taken away in words, syllables, and letters, by the malice of the demons, whose care and effort is to intercept this truth, and of men like them, in order to slow the faith of the prudent and corrupt the authority of the deeds. But it will never be that what Christ was should be gathered only from the testimony of writings, since his case has been left to rest on this alone: that if what we say is established as true, he is shown by the confession of all to have been God.

You do not believe our writings, and we do not believe yours. We invent falsehoods about Christ, and you boast empty and false things about your gods; for no god slipped down from heaven, or wrote out your affairs with his own hands, or in similar fashion disparaged our affairs and religion. These were written by men, and those too were written by men, set out in mortal speech; and whatever you mean to say of our writers, take and hold it said with equal weight of yours. You want what is contained in your writings to be true: you must admit that what is recorded in our books is true too. You accuse our affairs of falsehood, and we accuse yours. 'But ours are older,' you say, 'and therefore full of credibility and truth.' As though antiquity were not the most fruitful mother of errors, and had not itself given birth to the things that fashioned the most shameful marks of disgrace for the gods in myths! For could false things not be heard and believed ten thousand years ago? Or is it not most like the truth that credibility belongs rather to things near and neighboring than to things distant by long intervals? For these are asserted by witnesses, those by opinions; and it is much more likely that there is less fiction in recent things than in things removed into ancient obscurity.

'But they were written by unlearned and uncultured men, and so they should not be believed on a ready hearing.' See whether this is not rather a stronger reason why they are stained with no lies: they were set out by a simple mind that knew nothing of enlarging things with allurements. 'The language is common and mean.' For truth has never pursued ornament, nor does what is examined and certain allow itself to be led around through a longer circuit of speech. Syllogisms, enthymemes, definitions, and all those ornaments by which belief is sought for an assertion help those who are guessing; they do not show the features of truth. But one who knows what it is that he is saying neither defines nor draws syllogisms nor pursues any other tricks of words by which hearers are usually caught and brought to assent through the compulsion of a trap.

'Your writings,' he says, 'are full of barbarisms and solecisms and defiled by the ugliness of faults.' A childish and narrow-minded criticism indeed! If we admit it as true, let us throw away from our use certain kinds of fruit because they grow with thorns and other refuse, which can neither nourish us nor yet prevent us from enjoying what comes first and what nature has willed to be most wholesome for us. For what harm does it do, I ask, or what slowness does it bring to the understanding, whether something is said smoothly or with rough harshness, whether what should have been accented acute receives a circumflex, or what should have been circumflexed is made acute? Or how is what is said less true if there is a fault in number or case, preposition, participle, or conjunction? Let that pomp of speech and oration composed by rules be kept for public assemblies, lawsuits, the forum, and the courts, and be given indeed to those who, seeking the charms of pleasure, have spent all their effort on the brilliance of words. When the subject is far removed from display, we must look at what is said, not with what charm it is said, nor at what soothes the ears, but at what benefits it brings to the hearers; especially since we know that even some who devoted themselves to wisdom not only threw away polish of speech, but, though they could speak more ornately and richly, deliberately followed a common plainness, so as not to spoil the strictness of their seriousness and parade themselves rather with sophistic display. Indeed it is the mark of a loose mind to seek pleasure in serious matters, and, when you have to deal with the sick and ailing, to pour sweeter sounds into their ears rather than apply medicine to their wounds. And yet, if you look at the truth, no speech is sound by nature, and likewise none faulty. For what natural reason is there, or what law written in the constitution of the world, that we should say hic paries ('this wall', masculine) and haec sella ('this chair', feminine), when they have no sex divided into feminine and masculine kinds, and not even the most learned man could teach me what hic and haec themselves are, or why one of them designates the male sex while the one that follows is applied to the feminine kind? These are human conventions, and certainly not necessary to all for the use of speech; for haec paries and hic sella could perhaps have been said without any blame, if it had pleased people from the beginning to say it so, and if it had been kept in common speech by the following generations. And yet you who charge our writings with being defiled by the ugliness of faults, do you not have those very blemishes in your greatest and most admired books? Do you not say sometimes haec utria and sometimes hos utres ('wineskins'), caelus and caelum ('heaven'), and likewise pileus and pileum ('cap'), crocus and crocum ('saffron'), fretus and fretum ('strait')? Is it not likewise found among you, hoc pane and hic panis ('bread'), hic sanguis and hoc sanguen ('blood'), candelabrum and iugulum, and on the same principle iugulus and candelaber? For if single nouns cannot have more genders than one, and the same words cannot be of this gender and that, since one gender cannot pass into another, then he who pronounces masculine words by feminine rules errs as much as he who puts masculine articles before feminine nouns. Yet we see you using masculine things in the feminine and feminine in the masculine, and those you call neuter in this way and that, without any distinction. So either there is no fault in using them indifferently, and you say in vain that we are disfigured by the foulness of solecisms; or, if it is fixed by what rules each must be expressed, you too are involved in similar faults, even if you have all your Epicadi, Caesellii, Verrii, Scauri, and Nisi.

'But if Christ was God,' they say, 'why was he seen in the form of a man, and why was he put to death in human fashion?' Could that invisible power, having no bodily substance, bring and lend itself to the world and take part in the assemblies of mortals in any other way than by assuming some covering of more solid matter, which could receive the glance of the eyes and on which the gaze of the dullest observation could fix itself? For which of mortals could see him, which could behold him, if he had willed to bring himself to earth such as his original nature is, and such as he willed himself to be in his own quality or divinity? So he took on the form of a man and enclosed his power under the likeness of our race, so that he could be seen and beheld, could speak and teach, and could carry out all those things for which he had come into the world, observing the command and arrangement of the supreme King.

'What,' he says, 'could the supreme King not accomplish what he had decreed to be done in the world without a pretended man?' If it had been fitting for it to be done as you say, perhaps he would have done it so; because it was not fitting, he did it otherwise. Why he willed it in this way and not in that, the causes lie wrapped up and hardly comprehensible to anyone. You might perhaps have been able to grasp them if you were not long since ready not to grasp them, and did not shape yourself to the stance of unbelief before what you are seeking to learn and hear had been set out to you.

'But he was put to death as a man is.' Not he himself: for the fall of death cannot befall divine things, nor can that which is one and simple, and not compacted by any joining of parts, pass away in the dissolution of destruction. Who then was seen hanging on the gibbet, who died? The man whom he had put on and carried with him. It is incredible to say and wrapped in blind obscurity. If you will, it is not blind, and it rests on a very close comparison. If at the time when the Sibyl was pouring out her presages and uttering those oracles, filled, as you say, with the power of Apollo, she had been cut down and killed by wicked robbers, would Apollo be said to have been slain in her? If Bacis, if Helenus, Marcius, and other soothsayers like them had been deprived of life and light, would anyone say that those who spoke through their mouths and explained the ways of things to inquirers had perished by the law of humanity? That death you speak of was the death of the man assumed, not of himself; of the thing carried, not of the carrier. And he would not have submitted even to suffer it, if so great a thing had not been to be done, and the inexplicable plan of fate to be disclosed in hidden mysteries.

'What are these hidden and obscure mysteries?' you will say. Things which no human beings can know, nor can even those who are called gods of the world reach them in any part by guess or opinion, except those whom he himself has deigned to share the gifts of so great a knowledge and to lead into the hidden recesses of the inner treasure. For what? If he had not wanted hands to be laid on him by anyone, would he have had to strive with the utmost effort to keep his enemies away from himself even with all his power? He who had restored light to the blind, could he not, if he had to, make people blind? He who had given soundness to the weak, did he find it difficult or laborious to make them weak? He who commanded the lame to walk, did he not know how to bind the movements of their limbs by stiffening their sinews? He who drew the dead out of their tombs, was it hard for him to impose death on whomever he wished? But because reason required that what had been destined should be done, and here in this very world, and in no other way than it was done, that inestimable and incredible gentleness, counting men's injuries against him as childish follies, allowed hands to be stretched out against him by savage men and the hardest robbers, and did not think he should consider what their audacity had devised, provided he showed his own what they ought to expect from him. For when, concerning the dangers of souls, ... he, the teacher and author, directed his laws and ordinances to the ends of fitting duties: did he not crush the arrogance of pride, quench the flames of lusts, check the gaping of greed, wrest weapons from hands, and cut off all the seeds of every vice? Finally, was he himself not gentle, peaceable, easy of access, friendly in speech, grieving at human miseries? Did he not pity all without exception who were afflicted with tortures and bodily evils and diseases, with that unique kindness, and give them back and restore them to health?

What then drives you, what urges you to curse and revile and to engage in implacable feuds with him whom no one at all could convict or hold guilty of any crime? Your tyrants and kings, who, setting aside the fear of the gods, plunder and ravage the offerings of the temples, who strip cities of their nobility by proscriptions, exiles, and murders, who by force undermine and wantonly snatch away the chastity of matrons and virgins, you call Indigetes and divine; and those whom you ought to have attacked with sharper hatred you honor with sacred couches, altars, temples, and other worship, with the celebration of games and birthdays. And also all those who, in many-sided writing of books, carp at public morals with biting abuse, who cut, burn, and tear your luxuries and vices, who hand down to posterity the marks of their own time through the permanence of writing; who urge that wives should be held in common; who lie with handsome, wanton, naked boys; who proclaim that you are cattle, runaways, exiles, slaves of the vilest brand, mad and insane: these you exalt to the stars of heaven with admiration and applause, you store them in the recesses of your libraries, you reward them with chariots and statues, and, as far as lies in you, you give them a kind of eternity by the testimony of immortal inscriptions. Christ alone you would assail and tear in pieces, if you could do so to a god; indeed, if it were allowed, you would chew him alone with bloody mouths in the manner of wild beasts and swallow him with his bones crushed. For what fault, I ask, tell me, for the guilt of what sin? What was committed by him to turn aside the course of right and stir you to bitter hatred with furious goads? Because he declared that he had been sent by the only King as the guardian of your souls? Because he brought you immortality, which you trust you have, persuaded by the human assertions of a few? But if you were sure that he spoke falsely and promised even the emptiest hopes, even so I do not see that there was a reason why you should hate him or condemn him with hostile punishment. On the contrary, if your mind had been kind and gentle, you ought to have embraced him for that alone, because he promised you desirable and prosperous things, because he was the messenger of good things, because he proclaimed things that hurt no one's mind but rather filled it with a more confident expectation.

O ungrateful and impious age, prepared for its own ruin by an incredible obstinacy of heart! If some physician had come to you from remote parts and from regions never known to you, promising a medicine that would keep from your bodies absolutely all kinds of diseases and illnesses, would you not all run to him eagerly? Would you not welcome him into your homes with every flattery and honor? Would you not wish that kind of medicine to be most certain and true, which promised that you would be free from so countless afflictions of the body to the very last limits of life? And though the matter were doubtful, you would still entrust yourselves to him, and would not hesitate to drink an unknown potion, with the hope of health set before you and inflamed with love of safety. Christ shone forth and appeared, the messenger of the greatest thing, bringing a happy omen and a saving proclamation to those who believe. What is this cruelty, what so great inhumanity, or rather, to speak more truly, what disdain and arrogance, not only to tear the announcer and bearer of so great a gift with abusive words, but even to pursue him with fierce war and with every shower of weapons and destruction? Do his words not please you, and do you hear them with offense? Count them as playful prophecies. Does he speak the stupidest things and promise foolish gifts? Laugh, like the wise men you are, and leave foolishness to wallow in its own errors. What is this savagery, to repeat what has often been said, what so murderous a lust, to declare implacable war on one who has deserved nothing from you, to want to tear him through the entrails if it were granted, who not only did no harm to anyone, but, kind to enemies alike, told what was being brought to souls for their salvation by God the Ruler, what must be done for them to escape destruction and gain an unknown immortality? And when the novelty of the things and the unheard-of promise troubled the minds of the hearers and made their belief waver, the Lord of all powers and destroyer of death himself allowed his man to be killed, so that from what followed they might know that the hopes they had long since received concerning the salvation of souls were safe, and that they could not escape the danger of death in any other way.

If any opportunity could be given at this point, I would like, turning aside a little from the defense I originally set out on, to exchange words like these with all those to whom the name of Christ is hateful. If you think it no insult to answer something when you are asked, explain to us and say: what is the matter, what is the reason, that you pursue Christ with such fierce wars, or what offenses of his do you hold, that at the mention of his name you boil over with the heat of raging hearts? Did he claim royal power for himself and seize the whole world with most hostile legions, destroying and wiping out some nations that had been at peace from the beginning, and forcing others to obey him with their necks under the yoke? Did he, burning with the heat of greed, claim as his own possession all that wealth with which the human race eagerly strives to fill itself? Did he, eager with the desires of lust, break by force the barriers of chastity, or lie in wait secretly for other men's marriages? Did he, swollen with the disdain of arrogance, inflict wrongs and insults everywhere without distinction of any person?

Did he not rather hold out to all the light of life and remove the danger of ignorance? Even if he were not worthy that you should listen to and believe him, he should not have been despised by you for this very reason, that he showed you saving things and opened to you the ways to heaven and the fulfillment of your hopes of immortality. 'But he deserves hatred because he drove religions out of the world, because he forbade people to approach the worship of the gods.' Is he then accused of destroying religion and introducing impiety, who brought true religion into the world, who opened the doors of piety to people who were blind and truly living in impiety, and showed them to whom they should submit? Or is there any religion truer, more dutiful, more powerful, more just, than to know God the Ruler, to know how to pray to God the Ruler, who alone is the head and everlasting source of all good things, the Father, founder, and maker of all things, by whom all things on earth and in heaven are animated and watered with the motion of life, and without whom there would surely be nothing bearing any name or substance?

Unless perhaps you doubt whether this Ruler of whom we speak exists, and rather believe that Apollo, Diana, Mercury, and Mars exist. Give a true judgment: looking around at all these things we see, one will sooner doubt whether the other gods exist than hesitate about God, whom we all know by nature to exist, whether when we cry out 'O God!', or when we make God the witness of wicked deeds and raise our face to heaven as though he saw us. 'But he forbade men to pray to the lesser gods.' Do you know who the lesser gods are, or where they are? Has any suspicion or mention of them ever touched you, so that you may rightly take it ill that their worship has been abolished and they have been deprived of the bestowal of honor? But if the conceit of mind and what the Greeks call typhos (vanity) did not stand in your way and hinder you, you could long ago have known what he forbade to be done and why, within what limits he wished true religion to stand, how great a danger would arise for you from what you think is service, or from what evils you would emerge if you renounced a treacherous error.

But all this will be set out more clearly and plainly when we have gone further on. For we will show that Christ did not teach the nations impiety, but rescued the ignorance of wretched people from the worst robbers. 'We do not believe,' you say, 'that what he says is true.' What then? Is it clear to you that what you deny to be true is not true, when things that are yet to come and have not yet been experienced cannot be refuted by any reasoning? 'But he himself does not prove what he promises.' That is so; for, as I said, there can be no proof of future things. Since, then, this is the condition of future things, that they cannot be grasped or comprehended by any touch of anticipation, is it not the sounder reasoning, of two uncertain things hanging in doubtful expectation, to believe rather the one that brings some hope than the one that brings none at all? For in the one case there is no danger, if what is said to be coming proves empty and void; in the other there is the greatest loss, namely the loss of salvation, if, when the time comes, it is revealed that it was no lie.

What do you say, you ignorant people, most worthy even of tears and pity? Are you not afraid that perhaps these things you despise and find laughable may be true? Do you not at least turn it over in your hidden thoughts, lest what you today refuse to believe in obstinate perversity be refuted by a time too late and punished by an irrevocable repentance? Do not even these arguments give you ground for believing: that already through all lands, in so short a space of time, the mysteries of this immense name have been spread; that there is now no nation so barbarous in its customs and ignorant of gentleness that it has not, changed by love of him, softened its harshness and passed into peaceful dispositions, having taken on tranquility; that orators endowed with such great talents, grammarians, rhetoricians, lawyers and physicians, and even those who search out the secrets of philosophy, seek this teaching, despising what they trusted a little before; that slaves prefer to be tortured by their masters in whatever way they decide, wives to be divorced from their marriages, children to be disinherited by their parents, rather than break their Christian faith and lay down the oath of the saving army; that though you have set such great kinds of punishment before those who follow the laws of this religion, the thing grows even more, and the people resist more boldly against all threats and fearsome prohibitions, and are roused to the zeal of believing by the very goads of prohibition? Or do you believe that these things happen at random and for nothing, that these minds are taken up by chance impulses? Is this, then, not divine and sacred? Or do such great conversions of their minds happen without God, so that, when the executioner's hooks and countless other tortures, as we said, hang over those who are about to believe, they, seized as it were by a kind of sweetness and love of all virtues, accept the teaching they have come to know and set the friendship of Christ before all the things of the world?

Unless perhaps these people seem dull and foolish to you, who throughout the whole world now agree and come together in the assent of this belief. What then? Do you alone, ... with wisdom and by the pure force of intelligence, see something else, something deep? Do you alone understand that all these things are trifles, you alone that what we promise ourselves will come from the supreme King is mere words and childish nonsense? Where, I ask, was so much wisdom handed down to you, where could you acquire so much sharpness and vigor, or from what branches of knowledge could you draw so much insight, so much divination? Because you know how to decline verbs and nouns through cases and tenses, how to avoid barbarous words and solecisms, because you yourselves know how to produce rhythmical, well-built, and well-arranged speech, or to know when it is unpolished; because you keep the Fornix of Lucilius and the Marsyas of Pomponius sealed in your memory; because you know what the issues are in lawsuits, how many kinds of cases, how many of speeches, what a genus is, what a species, by what rules an opposite is distinguished from a contrary: do you therefore think that you know what is false and what is true, what can or cannot happen, what the nature of the lowest and highest things is? Has that common saying never struck your ears, that the wisdom of man is foolishness with God?

And you yourselves see clearly, whenever you dispute about obscure matters and set out to unlock the secrets of nature, that you do not know even the things you say, assert, and often defend with deadly contention, and that each of you defends his own guesses with stubborn resistance as though they were proved and grasped. For, if I look at the truth, what can we know by ourselves, even if all ages were spent in investigating things, we whom some unknown cause brought forth and ill will put together so blind and proud that, though we know nothing, we nevertheless deceive ourselves completely and are raised to the opinion of knowledge by the swelling of a puffed-up heart? For, to pass over divine things and things sunk in natural obscurity, can any mortal explain what that Socrates could not grasp in the Phaedrus: what man is, or where he comes from, a being two-faced, changeable, fickle, deceitful, manifold, multiform; for what uses he was brought forth; by whose ingenuity he was devised; what he does in the world; why he experiences such swarms of evils; whether the earth, turned by the rotting of some dampness, gave him life like worms or mice, or whether he received these features of body and the shape of his face from the hand of some fashioner and maker? Can he know, I say, these things that lie open to all and are placed within the common senses: for what causes we sink into sleep, for what causes we wake, in what ways dreams and visions come about? Indeed, what Plato questions in the Theaetetus: whether we are ever awake, or whether what is called being awake is part of a perpetual sleep, and what we seem to do is a dream; when we say we see, whether we see by the reaching out of rays and light, or whether images of things fly to us and settle in our pupils; whether taste is in things or comes about by contact with the palate; for what causes hairs lose their natural blackness and grow gray, not all at once but gradually; why all liquids form one body by mixing, but oil alone refuses to allow itself to be mixed and always visibly gathers itself into its own nature, impenetrable; and finally, why the mind itself, which you say is immortal and a god, is sick in the sick, stupid in infants, exhausted in old age, and babbles delirious and mad things? But our weakness and ignorance is the more pitiable because, though it may happen that we sometimes say something true, even this is uncertain to us, whether we have said anything true.