Second Apology (complete)

Romans, the things that have happened in your city yesterday and the day before under Urbicus, and the things done in the same way everywhere by the governors without reason, have compelled me to compose this address for your sake, since you are men of like passions and brothers, even if you do not know it and do not wish it because of the glory of your supposed dignities. For everywhere, whoever is corrected by father or neighbor or child or friend or brother or husband or wife for some fault (apart from those who have been persuaded that the unjust and licentious will be punished in eternal fire, and that the virtuous and those who have lived like Christ will be with God free from suffering; I mean those who have become Christians), because of their stubbornness and love of pleasure and slowness to move toward the good, and the evil demons, who hate us and hold such judges subject to them and serving them, like rulers possessed by demons, bring it about that we are killed. And so that the cause of all that happened under Urbicus may be plain to you, I will relate what was done.

A certain woman lived with a husband who was licentious, and she herself had formerly been licentious. But when she came to know the teachings of Christ, she became self-controlled, and tried to persuade her husband likewise to be self-controlled, repeating the teachings and telling him of the punishment in eternal fire that will come on those who do not live with self-control and according to right reason. But he, continuing in the same debauchery, made his wife an enemy by his actions. For the woman, thinking it ungodly from then on to share the bed of a husband who sought every means of pleasure contrary to the law of nature and contrary to what is right, wished to be separated from the marriage. And when she was pressed by her family, who advised her to stay a while longer, in hope that her husband would some day change, she forced herself and stayed. But when her husband went to Alexandria and was reported to be behaving still worse, so that she might not become a partner in his wrongs and impieties by remaining in the marriage and sharing his table and his bed, she gave him what you call a repudium and was separated. But her fine and noble husband, who ought to have rejoiced that she had given up the things she once readily did with the servants and hired men, delighting in drunkenness and every vice, and wished him too to give them up, since she had left him against his will, brought an accusation against her, saying that she was a Christian. And she presented a petition to you, the emperor, asking first to be allowed to settle her affairs, and then to answer the accusation after settling them; and you granted this. And her former husband, since he could no longer say anything against her for the present, turned against a certain Ptolemaeus, whom Urbicus summoned, and who had been her teacher in the Christian teachings, in the following way. A centurion who had thrown Ptolemaeus into prison was his friend, and he persuaded him to take hold of Ptolemaeus and ask him this alone: whether he was a Christian. And Ptolemaeus, being a lover of truth and not deceitful or false in mind, confessed that he was a Christian, and the centurion had him put in chains and punished him for a long time in the prison. At last, when the man was brought before Urbicus, he was likewise asked this alone: whether he was a Christian. And again, conscious of the good he owed to the teaching of Christ, he confessed the school of divine virtue. For whoever denies anything either denies it because he condemns the thing, or avoids confessing it because he knows himself unworthy of it and a stranger to it; neither of which is true of the true Christian. And when Urbicus ordered him to be led away, a certain Lucius, who was also a Christian, seeing the judgment given so unreasonably, said to Urbicus: “What is the reason that you have punished this man, who is not convicted of being an adulterer, or a fornicator, or a murderer, or a clothes-thief, or a robber, or of any crime at all, but who confesses that he bears the name of Christian? You do not judge, Urbicus, in a way befitting the emperor called Pius, or the philosopher, Caesar's son, or the sacred senate.” And he, without answering anything else, said to Lucius, “You too seem to me to be one of them.” And when Lucius said, “Certainly,” he ordered him too to be led away. And he professed his thanks, knowing that he was being set free from such wicked masters and was going to the Father and King of the heavens. And a third man came forward and was also sentenced to be punished.

But lest someone should say, “Then kill yourselves, all of you, and go to God at once, and do not give us trouble,” I will say why we do not do this, and why when examined we confess without fear. We have been taught that God did not make the world at random, but for the sake of the human race; and we said before that he takes pleasure in those who imitate his attributes, and is displeased with those who embrace what is evil, in word or in deed. If, then, we all kill ourselves, we shall be the cause, as far as it is in our power, of no one being born and instructed in the divine teachings, or even of the human race not existing; and if we do this, we ourselves shall be acting against the will of God. But when we are examined we do not deny, because we are conscious of nothing evil in ourselves, but consider it ungodly not to speak the truth in everything, which we also know is pleasing to God, and because we are now eager to free you from your unjust prejudice.

But if this thought should also occur to someone, that if we confessed God as our helper we would not, as we say, be overpowered and punished by the unjust, I will resolve this too. God, having made the whole world, and subjected earthly things to men, and arranged the heavenly elements for the growth of fruits and the changes of the seasons, and appointed a divine law for them, which things also he evidently made for men, committed the care of men and of the things under heaven to angels, whom he appointed over them. But the angels transgressed this order and were overcome by intercourse with women, and begot children, who are those called demons. And besides, they then enslaved the human race to themselves: partly by magical writings, partly by fears and the punishments they brought, and partly by teaching them sacrifices and incense and libations, of which they came to be in need after they were enslaved to the passions of lust; and they sowed among men murders, wars, adulteries, licentiousness, and every evil. Hence the poets and mythologists, not knowing that it was the angels and the demons born of them who did these things to men and women and cities and nations, which they wrote about, ascribed them to God himself and to those who were thought to be his sons by seed, and to those called his brothers, Poseidon and Pluto, and likewise to their children. For they called each by the name that each of the angels had given to himself and to his children.

But no name is given to the Father of all, since he is unbegotten; for whoever is called by a name has someone older than himself who gave him the name. “Father” and “God” and “Creator” and “Lord” and “Master” are not names, but titles drawn from his benefits and works. And his Son, who alone is properly called Son, the Word who was with him and was begotten before the things made, when in the beginning he created and ordered all things through him, is called Christ because he was anointed and because God ordered all things through him; this name too contains an unknown meaning, just as the title “God” is not a name, but a notion implanted in human nature of a thing hard to explain. But “Jesus” has the name and meaning of both “man” and “savior.” For, as we said before, he also became man, born according to the will of God the Father for the sake of believing men and for the destruction of the demons; and even now you can learn this from what happens before your eyes. For many of our people, the Christians, adjuring many who were possessed by demons throughout the whole world and in your city by the name of Jesus Christ, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, have healed them and still heal them, when they had not been healed by all the other exorcists and enchanters and sorcerers, overpowering and driving out the demons who possess the people.

Therefore God delays bringing about the confusion and dissolution of the whole world, by which the evil angels and demons and men would be no more, because of the seed of the Christians, which he knows is the cause in nature. For if it were not so, it would not even be possible for you to do these things any longer and to be driven by the evil demons, but the fire of judgment would come down and freely separate all things, just as formerly the flood left no one but the one man, with his family, whom we call Noah and you call Deucalion, from whom again so many have come, some of them wicked and others good. For in this way we say the conflagration will come, and not, as the Stoics say, according to the principle of the change of all things into one another, which seemed most shameful. Nor do we say that men do what they do or suffer what happens by fate; but that each does right or sins by free choice, and that by the working of the evil demons good men, such as Socrates and those like him, are persecuted and imprisoned, while Sardanapalus and Epicurus and those like them seem to be happy in abundance and glory. Not understanding this, the Stoics declared that all things happen by the necessity of fate. But since God in the beginning made the race of angels and of men with free will, they will justly receive the punishment in eternal fire for whatever wrongs they commit. And this is the nature of everything that has come into being: to be capable of vice and virtue; for none of them would be praiseworthy if it did not also have the power to turn either way. This is shown also by those men everywhere who have made laws and practiced philosophy according to right reason, by their prescribing that some things be done and others avoided. And the Stoic philosophers too, in their teaching on ethics, strongly honor the same things, so that it is plain that in their teaching on first principles and incorporeal things they do not go the right way. For if they say that what men do happens by fate, or that God is nothing other than things that turn and change and dissolve into the same things forever, they will appear to have a conception only of perishable things, and to hold that God himself, both in his parts and in the whole, comes to be in every vice; or else that there is no such thing as vice or virtue; which is contrary to every sound notion and reason and mind.

And we know that those who followed the Stoic teachings, since they were orderly at least in their ethical teaching, as the poets also were in some respects, because of the seed of the Word implanted in every race of men, were hated and put to death: Heraclitus, as we said before, and in our own times Musonius, and others. For, as we indicated, the demons have always brought it about that all who strive in any way at all to live according to reason and to flee vice are hated. And it is nothing wonderful if the demons, when they are exposed, work to make much more hated those who live not according to a part of the seminal Word, but according to the knowledge and contemplation of the whole Word, who is Christ. They will receive their just punishment and penalty when they are shut up in eternal fire. For if they are already defeated by men through the name of Jesus Christ, this is a lesson of the punishment in eternal fire that is to come on them and on those who serve them. For so all the prophets foretold it would be, and so Jesus our teacher taught.

I too, therefore, expect to be plotted against and fixed to the stake by one of those I have named, or perhaps by Crescens, that lover of noise and boasting. For the man is not worthy to be called a philosopher, since he publicly testifies against us about things he does not understand, saying that the Christians are atheists and ungodly, and does this to win the favor and pleasure of the many who are led astray. For if he attacks us without having read the teachings of Christ, he is utterly wicked and much worse than the uneducated, who often take care not to discuss or bear false witness about things they do not understand. Or if he has read them and did not understand their greatness, or understood them and does this so as not to be suspected of being a Christian, he is much more base and utterly wicked, being overcome by vulgar and irrational opinion and fear. For I want you to know that I put certain questions of this kind to him and questioned him, and learned and proved that he truly knows nothing. And to show that I speak the truth, if the exchanges of our discussion have not been reported to you, I am ready to hold the questioning again in your presence; and this would be a work fitting for rulers. But if my questions and his answers have been made known to you, it is plain to you that he knows nothing of our teachings; or, if he knows, he does not dare to say so because of his hearers, and so, as I said before, he shows himself to be not a lover of wisdom but a lover of glory, since he does not even honor that saying of Socrates, which deserves to be loved: “But a man must not be honored before the truth.” But it is impossible for a Cynic, who has made indifference his goal, to know the good, except indifference.

And so that no one may say what is said by those who are thought to be philosophers, that our saying that the unjust are punished in eternal fire is mere boasting and a bogey, and that we want people to live virtuously through fear and not because it is good and pleasing, I will answer this briefly: if this is not so, either there is no God, or, if there is, he does not care for men, and neither virtue nor vice is anything, and, as we said before, lawgivers unjustly punish those who transgress good ordinances. But since these are not unjust, nor is their Father, who teaches them through the Word to do the same things as himself, those who agree with them are not unjust. And if anyone brings up the different laws of men, saying that among some men these things are thought good and those shameful, while among others what is shameful to the first is good, and what is good is thought shameful, let him hear what is said to this too. We know that the wicked angels laid down laws like their own wickedness, in which men who have become like them take pleasure; and right reason, when it came, shows that not all opinions nor all teachings are good, but some evil and some good; so that to such people I will say the same things and things like them, and will say more if there is need. But now I return to the subject.

Our teachings, then, are clearly greater than all human teaching, because the whole rational principle became Christ, who appeared for our sake: body, and Word, and soul. For whatever the philosophers and lawgivers ever rightly said and discovered, they worked out by discovery and contemplation according to a part of the Word. But since they did not know all that belongs to the Word, who is Christ, they often contradicted themselves. And those who lived before Christ, when they tried by human reason to consider and examine things, were brought before the courts as ungodly and meddlesome. Socrates, who was more earnest in this than all of them, was accused of the same things as we are; for they said that he introduced new divinities and did not believe in the gods the city recognizes. But he taught men to reject the evil demons, and those who did the things the poets told of, casting Homer and the other poets out of the state, and urged them to seek the knowledge of the God unknown to them by the search of reason, saying: “The Father and Maker of all it is not easy to find, nor, having found him, safe to declare him to all.” This our Christ did by his own power. For no one trusted Socrates so far as to die for this teaching; but Christ, who was known in part even by Socrates (for he was and is the Word who is in everything, who foretold what was to come both through the prophets and through himself when he became of like passions with us and taught these things), has been trusted not only by philosophers and scholars, but also by craftsmen and people wholly uneducated, who despised glory and fear and death; since he is the power of the ineffable Father, and not the vessel of human reason.

But we would not be put to death, and unjust men and demons would not be stronger than we, if death were not in any case owed by every man who is born; and so we give thanks as we pay the debt. And yet we think it good and timely now to tell Crescens and those who are as senseless as he that story of Xenophon's. Xenophon said that Heracles, coming to a place where three roads met, found Virtue and Vice appearing in the forms of women. And Vice, in luxurious clothing and with a face made seductive and blooming by such arts, and at once enchanting to the eyes, said to Heracles that if he would follow her, she would make him always live in pleasure and adorned with the most splendid adornment, like her own. And Virtue, who was squalid in face and dress, said: “But if you obey me, you will adorn yourself not with the adornment or beauty that flows away and perishes, but with eternal and beautiful adornments.” And we are persuaded that anyone at all who flees the things that seem good, and pursues those thought hard and unreasonable, receives happiness. For Vice, putting on as a screen for her own deeds the qualities that belong to Virtue and are truly good, by imitating incorruptible things (for she has and can make nothing incorruptible), enslaves the groveling among men, casting her own evils over Virtue. But those who have understood what truly belongs to the good are also incorruptible by virtue. This every sensible person must suppose of the Christians, and of those from the contest, and of men who did such things as the poets said of the so-called gods, drawing the inference from our despising even the death that others flee.

For I myself, too, when I delighted in the teachings of Plato, and heard the Christians slandered, but saw them fearless before death and all other things thought fearful, understood that it was impossible that they were living in vice and love of pleasure. For what lover of pleasure or incontinent man, or one who thinks it good to feed on human flesh, could welcome death, so as to be deprived of his good things, and would not rather try by every means to go on living this present life forever and escape the notice of the rulers, much less denounce himself to be put to death? Now the evil demons have even brought it about through certain wicked men that this was done. For these men, having put some to death on the false charges brought against us, dragged to torture servants of our people, or children, or poor women, and by fearful torments forced them to confess those fabled things which they themselves openly do; and since none of these things belongs to us, we do not care, having the unbegotten and ineffable God as witness of our thoughts and deeds. For why did we not also publicly confess these things to be good, and show them to be divine philosophy, saying that we perform the mysteries of Kronos in killing a man, and in being filled with blood, as it is said, doing the same as is done for the idol honored among you, on which not only the blood of irrational animals is sprinkled but also human blood, the pouring out of the blood of the slain being done by the most distinguished and noble man among you; and that, becoming imitators of Zeus and the other gods in the corruption of males and in shameless intercourse with women, we bring as our defense the writings of Epicurus and of the poets? But since we persuade people to flee these teachings and those who have done and imitate them, as we have now striven to do in this address, we are attacked in many ways; but we do not care, since we know that God is the just overseer of all. Would that even now someone would stand on a high platform and cry out with a tragic voice: “Be ashamed, be ashamed, you who charge the innocent with what you openly do, and cast on these men what belongs to yourselves and to your gods, of which they have not the least share. Change your minds; become sober.”

For I myself too, when I learned that the evil demons had thrown a wicked disguise over the divine teachings of the Christians to turn other people away from them, laughed both at those who told these lies and at the disguise and at the opinion of the crowd. I confess that I both pray and strive with all my might to be found a Christian; not because the teachings of Plato are foreign to Christ's, but because they are not in every way the same, as neither are those of the others, the Stoics and poets and historians. For each of them, seeing what was akin to it by a part of the seminal divine Word, spoke well; but those who have contradicted themselves on the more important points evidently did not have the knowledge that cannot fail and the understanding that cannot be refuted. Whatever things, then, have been rightly said among all people belong to us Christians. For next to God we worship and love the Word who is from the unbegotten and ineffable God, since he also became man for our sake, so that by sharing in our sufferings he might also bring about their healing. For all the writers were able to see the realities dimly through the seed of the Word implanted in them. For the seed and imitation of something, given according to one's capacity, is one thing, and the thing itself, of which the participation and imitation come about according to the grace that is from him, is another.

We ask you, then, to add whatever you think fit and publish this little book, so that our views may be known to others too, and that they may be freed from false opinion and ignorance of what is good. They become liable to punishment by their own fault, because the power to recognize good and shameful is in human nature; and because they condemn us, whom they do not know to do such shameful things as they say; and because they delight in gods who did such things and even now demand the like from men; so that by inflicting death or chains or some other such thing on us, as though we did such things, they condemn themselves, so that there is no need of other judges.

[And I despised the ungodly and deceitful teaching of Simon among my own nation.] And if you publish this, we will make it known to all, so that, if they can, they may change their minds; for this alone we composed this address. And our teachings, by sober judgment, are not shameful, but higher than all human philosophy; and if not, they are at least not like the teachings of Sotades and Philaenis and Archestratus and Epicurus and other such poetic writings, which all are allowed to read, both spoken and written. And we will now stop, having done what was in our power, and having prayed besides that all people everywhere may be counted worthy of the truth. May you, then, judge rightly for yourselves, as befits piety and philosophy.