A Plea for the Christians 25–37

These angels, then, who fell from heaven and haunt the air and the earth, no longer able to rise to the realms above the heavens, together with the souls of the giants, are the demons who wander about the world. Both produce similar movements: the demons according to the natures they received, the angels according to the desires they conceived. The ruler of matter, as one can see from what happens, directs and administers things contrary to the goodness of God. “Often has this care come over my mind: whether chance or a divinity rules the affairs of mortals, bringing some, against hope and against justice, falling from their homes without a livelihood, and others to prosperity.” That people fare well or badly against hope and justice left Euripides at a loss to know whose is this administration of earthly things, under which one might say: “How, then, seeing these things, can we say that there is a race of gods, or live by laws?” This also made Aristotle say that the things below heaven are not under providence, although the eternal providence of God remains over us equally (“The earth, by necessity, whether it will or not, grows grass and fattens my cattle”), while his particular providence goes, in truth and not in appearance, to the worthy, and all the rest are provided for in common by the law of reason governing their constitution. But the demonic movements and operations that come from the adverse spirit produce these disorderly assaults, moving people from within and from without, one in one way and another in another, as individuals and as nations, separately and in common, according to the reason of matter and their affinity with divine things. For this reason some whose reputation is not small have thought that this universe was not constituted by any order, but is driven and carried about by irrational chance. They do not know that in the constitution of the whole world nothing is disorderly or neglected, but each thing has come into being by reason, and so they do not transgress the order appointed for them. The human being too, as far as his Maker is concerned, is well ordered: in the nature of his birth, which has one common principle; in the disposition of his formation, which does not transgress the law set for it; and in the end of his life, which remains the same and common to all. But according to his own individual reason, and the operation of the ruler who holds sway and of the demons who attend him, each is carried and moved in a different direction, though all have within them a common power of reasoning.

Those who draw people to the idols are the demons I have mentioned, who cling to the blood of the sacrificial victims and lick it up; while the gods who please the many and whose names are given to the images were, as one can learn from the accounts about them, human beings. That it is the demons who usurp the names is proved by what each of them does. Some castrate themselves: those devoted to Rhea. Others cut and gash themselves: those devoted to Artemis; and the Artemis among the Taurians murders strangers. I pass over those who torture themselves with knives and knucklebones, and all the kinds of demons; for it is not God's part to move people to things contrary to nature. “When the demon prepares evils for a man, he first harms his mind.” But God, being perfectly good, is eternally doing good. The greatest proof that those who produce the effects are different from those for whom the images are set up is Troas and Parium. Troas has statues of Neryllinus, a man of our own time, and Parium has statues of Alexander and of Proteus; the tomb and statue of Alexander are still in the marketplace. The other statues of Neryllinus are a public ornament, if indeed a city is adorned by such things; but one of them is thought to give oracles and to heal the sick, and for this the people of Troas sacrifice to the statue, gild it, and crown it. As for the statues of Alexander and of Proteus (you know that Proteus threw himself into the fire near Olympia), the statue of Proteus too is said to give oracles, and to that of Alexander [“Evil Paris, fairest in form, mad for women”] public sacrifices and feasts are held, as to a god who hears prayers. Is it Neryllinus, Proteus, and Alexander who produce these effects around the statues, or the constitution of the matter? But the matter is bronze. What can bronze do by itself, when it can be made over into another shape, as Amasis did with the footbath in Herodotus? And what more can Neryllinus, Proteus, and Alexander do for the sick? For what the image is now said to do, it was doing while Neryllinus was still alive and ill.

What, then, is the explanation? First, the irrational and fanciful movements of the soul in forming opinions produce different images at different times: some they draw from matter, others they shape and conceive for themselves. The soul suffers this especially when it takes on the material spirit and is blended with it, looking not up to heavenly things and their Maker but down to earthly things, wholly toward the earth, becoming mere blood and flesh and no longer pure spirit. These irrational and fanciful movements of the soul, then, give birth to fantasies mad for idols. And when a tender and impressionable soul, which has never heard sound teaching and has no experience of it, which has never contemplated the truth or considered the Father and Maker of all things, has false opinions about him stamped upon it, the demons who hover about matter, greedy for the smell of burnt fat and the blood of victims, and deceivers of human beings, seize on these deluded movements of the souls of the many. Usurping their thoughts, they make fantasies flow into them as if from the idols and statues; and whenever the soul, being immortal, moves rationally by its own power, either foretelling the future or healing present ills, the demons reap the glory for it.

Perhaps it is necessary, in view of what has been said, to say a little about the names of the gods. Herodotus, and Alexander son of Philip in his letter to his mother (both are said to have conversed with the priests at Heliopolis, Memphis, and Thebes), say that they learned from the priests that the gods had been human beings. Herodotus says: “They showed that those whose statues these were had been men of this kind, far removed from gods. Before these men, however, gods had been the rulers in Egypt, dwelling together with human beings, and one of them was always supreme; the last to reign over it was Horus son of Osiris, whom the Greeks call Apollo; he put down Typhon and was the last king of Egypt. Osiris is Dionysus in the Greek language.” So the others, and last of all Horus, were kings of Egypt. From them the names of the gods passed to the Greeks. Apollo is the son of Dionysus and Isis, as Herodotus again says: “They say that Apollo and Artemis are children of Dionysus and Isis, and that Leto became their nurse and preserver.” These, as if they had come from heaven, they had as their first kings; partly from ignorance of true piety toward the divine, partly out of gratitude for their rule, they held them to be gods together with their wives. “All Egyptians sacrifice pure bulls and bull calves, but they may not sacrifice cows, for these are sacred to Isis; for the statue of Isis is a woman with a cow's horns, as the Greeks portray Io.” Who would be more believable in saying these things than those who inherit, son from father, the priesthood and the history together? For it is not likely that the temple-keepers, who make the idols venerable, would falsely say that they were human beings. If Herodotus alone had said that the Egyptians tell of the gods as of human beings, since he also says, “The divine parts of the accounts I heard I am not eager to relate, except only their names,” one might have had to disbelieve him as a teller of myths. But since Alexander, and Hermes called Trismegistus, who joined their own lineage to the gods, and countless others (not to list them one by one) say the same, there is no room left to doubt that they were kings who came to be regarded as gods. That they were human beings is shown by the most learned of the Egyptians, who, while calling the ether, the earth, the sun, and the moon gods, regard the others as mortal human beings and their tombs as temples; Apollodorus shows it too in his work On the Gods. Herodotus even calls their sufferings mysteries: “How they celebrate the festival of Isis in the city of Busiris I have described before. For after the sacrifice all of them, men and women, a great many thousands of people, beat their breasts; but for whom they beat them it is not holy for me to say.” If they are gods, they are also immortal; but if people beat their breasts for them, and their sufferings are mysteries, they are human beings. So Herodotus himself says: “There are also at Sais, in the temple of Athena, behind the shrine and along the whole wall of Athena's temple, the burial places of one whose name I think it unholy to reveal in such a matter. There is a lake beside it, adorned all around with a stone rim, in size, it seems to me, as large as the one at Delos called the Wheel. On this lake the Egyptians enact by night the representations of his sufferings, which they call mysteries.” And not only is the tomb of Osiris shown, but also his embalming: “When a corpse is brought to them, they show those who bring it wooden models of corpses, painted to look lifelike; and they say that the most elaborate of these is the model of one whose name I think it unholy to name in such a matter.”

The wise men of the Greeks in poetry and history also speak in the same way. Of Heracles: “Wretch, he respected neither the watchful eye of the gods nor the table he had set before his guest; and then he killed him too.” Being such a man, it is natural that he went mad, and natural that he lit a pyre and burned himself. Of Asclepius Hesiod says: “The father of men and gods was angry, and hurling a smoky thunderbolt from Olympus he killed Leto's dear son, stirring up his wrath.” And Pindar: “But even wisdom is bound by gain. Gold appearing in his hand turned him too, with a lordly fee. Then the son of Kronos, hurling with his hands through both of them, swiftly took the breath from their breasts, and the blazing thunderbolt struck them dead.” Either, then, they were gods and had no desire for gold (“O gold, fairest welcome for mortals, for neither a mother nor children give such delights”; for the divine lacks nothing and is above desire), and they did not die; or they were human beings, wicked through ignorance and slaves to money. Why should I say more, mentioning Castor or Polydeuces or Amphiaraus, who, so to speak, were human beings born of human beings only yesterday or the day before, and are considered gods, when people even think that Ino became a goddess after her madness and all she suffered in it: “Those who wander the sea will call her Leucothea,” and her son: “Holy Palaemon he will be called by sailors”?

For if even those who were detestable and hated by the gods gained the reputation of being gods; if Semiramis, the daughter of Derceto, a lustful and bloodthirsty woman, was thought a Syrian goddess, and because of Derceto the Syrians worship doves and Semiramis (for the woman, impossible as it is, was changed into a dove; the myth is in Ctesias): what wonder is it that some were called gods by their subjects because of their rule and sovereignty (the Sibyl, whom Plato also mentions, says: “And then it was the tenth generation of mortal men since the flood came upon the men of old; and Kronos reigned, and Titan, and Iapetus, the noblest children of Earth and Heaven, whom men called by these names, giving them the names of Earth and Heaven, because they were the first of mortal men”), others because of their strength, like Heracles and Perseus, and others because of their art, like Asclepius? Those to whom either their subjects or the rulers themselves gave honor came to share the name, some out of fear, others out of reverence. Antinous too, through the kindness of your ancestors toward their subjects, came to be considered a god. And those who came afterward accepted it without examination. “The Cretans are always liars; for the Cretans, O lord, built a tomb for you; but you did not die.” You believe, Callimachus, in the birth of Zeus, yet disbelieve in his tomb; and thinking to obscure the truth, you proclaim even to those who do not know it that he is dead. If you look at the cave, you are reminded of Rhea's childbearing; if you see the coffin, you cast a shadow over the dead man; not knowing that the uncreated God alone is eternal. For either the myths told by the many and by the poets about the gods are not to be believed, and piety toward them is superfluous (for beings about whom the stories are false do not exist); or, if their births, loves, murders, thefts, castrations, and thunderbolts are true, they no longer exist, having ceased to be, since they came into being from not being. For what reason is there to believe some of the stories and disbelieve others, when the poets wrote their histories to glorify them? Those who made them venerable by their histories, and through whom they came to be considered gods, would not have invented their sufferings. That we are not atheists, then, since we acknowledge as God the Maker of this universe and the Word that comes from him, has been proved as far as I am able, even if not as the subject deserves.

They also invent godless feasts and unions against us, so that they may seem to have reason for hating us, and they think that by frightening us they will either draw us away from our way of life or make the rulers harsh and implacable by the enormity of the charges. But they are trifling with people who know that from of old, and not in our case only, it has been the rule, by a kind of divine law and reason, that vice makes war on virtue. So Pythagoras was burned with three hundred others; Heraclitus and Democritus were driven out, the one from the city of the Ephesians, the other from that of the Abderites, who charged him with madness; and the Athenians condemned Socrates to death. But just as they were no worse in point of virtue because of the opinion of the many, so the indiscriminate slander of some casts no shadow on the uprightness of our life; for we are in good repute with God. Nevertheless I will answer these charges too. To you, I know well, I have already made my defense by what I have said. For you, who surpass everyone in understanding, know that those whose life is ruled by God as by a measuring line, so that each of us may be blameless and irreproachable before him, will never even entertain the thought of the slightest sin. If we were convinced that we would live only this present life, one might suspect us of sinning, as slaves to flesh and blood or overcome by gain or desire. But we know that God watches over what we think and what we say, night and day, and that, being wholly light, he sees even what is in our hearts. So we are convinced that when we are released from this life we shall live another life, better than the one here, heavenly and not earthly (for we shall abide with God and in God's company, steadfast and free from passion in soul, not as flesh, even though we have flesh, but as heavenly spirit); or else, if we fall with the rest, a worse life, in fire. For God did not make us like sheep or beasts of burden, as a by-product, only to perish and be destroyed. In view of this, it is not likely that we would choose to do wrong and hand ourselves over to the great Judge to be punished.

It is no wonder that they invent about us the stories they tell about their own gods; they even exhibit the gods' sufferings as mysteries. But if they were going to judge free and indiscriminate intercourse a terrible thing, they ought to have hated Zeus, who had children by his mother Rhea and his daughter Kore, and took his own sister as wife; or Orpheus, the author of these stories, for making Zeus more unholy and abominable than Thyestes. For Thyestes lay with his daughter in obedience to an oracle, wanting to gain the kingdom and be avenged. But we are so far from indiscriminate intercourse that we are not even allowed to look with desire. “He who looks at a woman,” it says, “to desire her has already committed adultery in his heart.” We may not use our eyes for anything more than what God made them for, to be a light to us; for us, to look with pleasure is adultery, since the eyes were made for other purposes; and we shall be judged even for our thoughts. How then could such people be disbelieved when they say they are chaste? For our account is not with human laws, which a wicked man might even escape (I assured you at the beginning, sovereigns, that our teaching is taught by God), but we have a law that makes the measure of righteousness to treat our neighbors as ourselves. That is why, according to their age, we think of some as sons and daughters, regard others as brothers and sisters, and give to the older the honor due to fathers and mothers. Those, then, whom we think of as brothers and sisters and by the other names of kinship, we take great care that their bodies remain unviolated and undefiled. For the Word says to us again, “If anyone kisses a second time because it gave him pleasure …”; and adds, “So the kiss, or rather the greeting of reverence, must be given with the greatest care, since if it is clouded even a little by an impure thought, it shuts us out of eternal life.”

Having, then, the hope of eternal life, we despise the things of this life, even the pleasures of the soul. Each of us regards as his wife the woman he has married according to the laws laid down among us, and that only for the purpose of having children. For as the farmer casts his seed into the ground and waits for the harvest, and does not sow more on top of it, so for us the begetting of children is the limit of desire. You would find many among us, both men and women, growing old unmarried in the hope of being closer to God. If remaining a virgin and a eunuch brings one nearer to God, while even a thought or a desire leads one away, then, since we flee the thoughts, much more do we reject the deeds. For our concern is not with practicing speeches but with showing and teaching by deeds that a person should either remain as he was born or be content with one marriage; for a second marriage is a respectable adultery. “For whoever puts away his wife,” it says, “and marries another, commits adultery”; so he permits neither putting away her whose virginity one has ended, nor marrying again. For he who deprives himself of his first wife, even if she has died, is a covert adulterer: he transgresses the hand of God, because in the beginning God formed one man and one woman, and he dissolves the joining of flesh to flesh in unity for the fellowship of the race.

But such people (how shall I speak of things unspeakable?) make us hear the proverb, “The harlot reproaches the chaste woman.” They have set up a market for prostitution and established lawless haunts for the young, for every kind of shameful pleasure, and they do not spare even males: males with males commit shocking deeds, outraging in every way all the noblest and most comely bodies, and dishonoring the beautiful work of God (for beauty on earth is not self-made, but sent by the hand and will of God). These people, who know what they themselves do, and ascribe the same things to their own gods, boasting of them as noble and worthy of the gods, revile us for these very things: adulterers and pederasts insult the celibate and the once-married. They live like fish, which swallow whatever falls in their way, the stronger chasing the weaker. This is what it is to feed on human flesh: to do violence, against the very laws that you and your ancestors laid down after examining them for all justice, to such a degree that not even the provincial governors you send out are enough to try the cases, and to do it to people who are not allowed, when struck, to refuse to offer themselves, nor, when reviled, to refuse to bless. For it is not enough for us to be just (justice is to return like for like); we are required to be good and to bear wrong patiently.

Who in his right mind, then, would say that we, being such people, are murderers? For one cannot eat human flesh without first killing someone. Their first charge is a lie; as for the second, if anyone asks them whether they have seen what they describe, no one is so shameless as to say that he has. And yet we have slaves, some of us more and some fewer, from whom nothing can be hidden; but not one of them has ever told such lies about us. For who could accuse of murder or cannibalism people who, as they know, cannot bear to watch even a man being justly put to death? Who does not eagerly attend the contests of gladiators and of wild beasts, especially those you put on? But we, considering that to watch a man being put to death is close to killing him, have renounced such spectacles. How then can we commit murder, when we will not even watch, lest we bring guilt and pollution on ourselves? We say that women who use drugs to bring on abortion commit murder and will have to give account to God for the abortion; on what principle, then, would we commit murder? For it is not consistent to regard even the fetus in the womb as a living being, and therefore an object of God's care, and then to kill it once it has come into life; nor to refuse to expose a newborn child, on the ground that those who expose children are child-murderers, and then to do away with a child that has been reared. No, we are in all things always alike and consistent, being servants of reason and not its masters.

Who, believing in a resurrection, would offer himself as a tomb for bodies that are going to rise? For it is not consistent both to be convinced that our bodies will rise and to eat them as though they will not rise, and to believe that the earth will give back its own dead, but that those whom one has buried inside oneself will not be demanded back. On the contrary, it is likely that those who think they will give no account of their present life, whether bad or good, and that there is no resurrection, and reckon that the soul perishes with the body and is, as it were, extinguished with it, will stop at no outrage. But those who are convinced that nothing will go unexamined before God, and that the body which served the irrational impulses and desires of the soul will be punished together with it, have no reason to commit even the slightest sin. If it seems to anyone utter nonsense that the body which has rotted, been dissolved, and vanished should be put together again, we could not reasonably, on account of those who do not believe, be thought wicked, but only simple; for by the arguments with which we deceive ourselves, if we do, we wrong no one. That bodies will rise, not only according to us but also according to many of the philosophers, it would be superfluous to show at present, lest we seem to bring in arguments foreign to the matter at hand, speaking of intelligible and perceptible things and their constitution, or of how incorporeal things are older than bodies and intelligible things precede perceptible ones, even though we come upon perceptible things first, bodies being constituted from incorporeal things by the combination of intelligibles, and perceptible things from intelligible ones. For according to Pythagoras and Plato nothing prevents bodies, once they have been dissolved, from being put together again from the same elements from which they were constituted in the first place. But let the discussion of the resurrection be deferred.

And you, who are in every way, by nature and by education, good, moderate, humane, and worthy of your rule: now that I have refuted the charges and shown that we are godly, gentle, and disciplined in soul, bow your royal heads in assent. For who are more deserving to obtain what they ask than we, who pray for your rule, that you may, son from father, as is most just, succeed to the kingdom, and that your empire may grow and increase as all things are brought under your hand? This is also to our advantage, that we may lead a quiet and peaceful life, and may ourselves readily do all that is commanded.