The Apocriticus (Answers to the Pagan Critic) 2.16–3.1

[The philosopher's objection on “You cannot hear my word; you are of your father the devil” (John 8:43–44).] Come, let us hear that other theatrical saying, addressed thus to the Jews: “You cannot,” he says, “hear my word, because you are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father.” Make clear to us, then, who the devil is who is the father of the Jews. For those who carry out the desires of their father do so fittingly, yielding to their father's will and honouring him; and if the father is bad, the charge of the evil should not be fastened on the children. Who then is that father, doing whose desires they did not listen to Christ? For when the Jews say, “We have one father, God,” he cancels this statement by declaring, “You are of your father the devil,” that is, you are of the devil. Who then is that devil? Where is he? And whom did he slander, to have received this name? For he seems to have it not as a proper name but from something that happened. When we learn this, we shall understand properly. For if he is called devil from slander, among whom did he appear and carry out the forbidden act? For in this too it will be seen that it is the one who readily accepts the slander who is at fault, and the one slandered who is chiefly wronged; and the devil himself will be seen to have done no wrong, but rather the one who furnished him the pretext for slander. For as when someone fixes a stake in the road at night, it is not the one who walks along and strikes it who is liable, but the one who drove it in who bears the charge, so the one who laid down an occasion for slander does more wrong, not the one who seizes on it or the one who receives it. And tell me this: is the slanderer subject to passion or free from it? If free from passion, he would never have slandered; if subject to passion, he ought to be pardoned. For no one troubled by natural diseases is judged as a wrongdoer; he is pitied by all as one who suffers.

[The Christian (Macarius) answers the objection on the disagreement of the Evangelists about the Passion (2.12).] When the man who champions Greek opinion with his boasting had declaimed so much on these points too, we were neither struck in soul by the din of what was said nor afraid; but, though from habit we shrank from speaking the essential word, we spoke as divine grace helped us; and showing that the Evangelists, by varying the wording, kept one sense of one account, we explained it clearly, saying: No one seeks the truth in the nature of things from syllables or letters; one judges the difference of expressions by the thing itself. So, for example, if someone says “human being,” and another says “mortal,” and another “speaker,” and yet another “man,” he will say many things in words, but the subject is one: whether one says mortal, or man, or speaker, he says nothing other than human being. Likewise with a garment: whether someone says cloak, or clothing, or robe, or woven stuff, he does not say many things, but one thing by a change of names. So the earnest men among the Evangelists, writing down what was done at the cross, though each said it differently, did not corrupt the history. Whether one said vinegar and another wine, they made no mistake at all. And as for the sponge and the hyssop, do not be surprised to hear, “They bound a vessel of vinegar to hyssop and gave him to drink,” and again, “They filled a sponge with vinegar and brought it to him.” For the reed and the sponge and the hyssop seem to have one manner of coming into being: each of them grows up unsown, and when grown is cut. So, though he should have said reed, he said hyssop because of the similar manner of growing and cutting — and above all because they keep the law of history and write nothing beyond what was said at that time in the seething tumult of madness. For the accusers were Jews and the judges Romans, both barbarian nations, neither of them laying claim to the speech of the free nor possessing the refinement of Greek education. Everything then was shaken with turmoil: the earth was quaking from below, as if from a counter-blow; rocks were bursting and struck with a crash; then suddenly a darkness that could be felt came down, as the sun hid its own light. No one was sober then; all were dazed by the confusion of the elements, as the depths of the air, of the earth, and above the earth were so shaken. There was dread that the whole world, suddenly breaking from its order, would make land into sea and day into night; that the dry land, shaken by a violent rush, would in one place be split open into furrowed channels and in another collapse and burst open into bellowing chasms of caverns; fear that, as the mountains suddenly dashed together, streams of unquenchable fire would pour out from their hard and unyielding friction. Darkness held all things except the abode above the world, which is undefiled. Creation, seeing its Creator insulted in a creature, trembled not a little, and was making ready an unbearable scourge of punishment against the senseless. Tell me, then: who in such a condition was sound in mind? Who was strong in soul? Who was not struck in understanding? Who did not have his thinking shaken? Who did not chew his words as though in wine? Who did not talk nonsense like a tavern-keeper? Who did not see what was happening as a deep vision and a long dream? Not man, not woman, not old man, not old woman, not virgin, not small child kept a firm and steady reasoning; all were dumbfounded, as though deafened by thunder from the sky, and each one, in his frenzy, did something different, keeping neither sequence, nor reason, nor order. So the writers wrote down their drunken folly and the outlandish things then done in deed and word, unseemly as they were, falsifying nothing. For it is not lawful for a historian to write anything beyond what was done or said, even if the expression is barbarous. You have, yourself, the elegant historian Herodotus, who was not a barbarian yet wrote barbarian words in his history — barbarian names of mountains and rivers, names never used except where he himself made inquiry and wrote them down — caring, at great labour, not for purity of style but for truth. So it is no wonder if the Evangelists seem to write some odd things, since it was not their wish to polish what was said, but their concern to preserve the truth of what was spoken: if some woman or man said something incoherent or ungrammatical, their concern was only to record that. For they judged that the history would thus be beyond suspicion to the world, if its writing were found not over-elaborate but plain. For those who wrote these things were not the offspring of educated men or grammarians; and even if they had been educated, they ought not to have robbed the history of its unlearned writing and decked out what was done with cleverness of words, but to have kept the character of the speakers as it was spoken.

[The Christian (Macarius) answers the objection on the piercing of Christ's side (2.13).] So do not let that heading trouble you either, that only John says, “When they came to Jesus, they did not break his legs,” while the others did not say it. It is not because he alone said it that he is unworthy of acceptance; rather, since he recorded this with zeal, he is rightly to be praised. For in saying this he has said something greater: he preserves the mystery of the economy and sets out the account of the wonder, saying, “One of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear,” so that the opened side might unlock the closed entrance to the enclosures of cleansing; so that, as blood and water flowed out like a spring, those who had lived in the land of captivity might be rescued by the blood, and those who bore the wounds of their sins might be washed by the water. So this was done not idly but by design, divine providence, as it were, arranging for it to happen. For since … from a side, the occasion of salvation also had to flow from a side: from a side the blow, from a side the spring; from a side the disease, from a side the healing; from a side the wandering, from a side the return; from a side the …, from a side the freedom from suffering. John is the one witness of this, since it is one hidden thing: John bears witness to the hidden thing; John has cried aloud that the wound of a side is set right by a side. And this is true, even if he alone says it and the other three do not, since another too tells the truth in recounting poor Lazarus and the boastful rich man, though the other three do not tell of them. So much on this.

[The Christian (Macarius) answers the objection on the resurrection appearances (2.14).] Now let us examine for you the proceeding that seems not to have been well handled: why the Saviour, having overcome the power of death and come up from the depths on the third day after the Passion, is not seen by Pilate. It was so that those who have learned to undo good things might not undo the achievement; so that no base suspicion, cropping up from base men, might rob the Lord's Passion of its truth; so that the credulous might not think the deed a lie; so that the tongues of the Jews might not again hiss out a serpent's venom; so that the achievement might not become a stumbling block to the whole world. For at once — at once — had he met Pilate and the men of rank about him, they would have spoken out, seasoning their story with sorcery: that Pilate had nailed one man to the cross in place of another by some trick of concealment, either deceived or else persistently begged by him, as such things often happen before one's very eyes. “So,” they would say, “as if by a plot he has risen and met him, wishing by authority to proclaim as having happened a resurrection that did not happen, and contriving to strengthen the story of the deceit with Roman power. The thing was played as a game; the earnest business became a stage play. He who did not suffer, as though he had suffered and conquered death, walks solemnly about inside the praetorium; one of the men condemned to death was handed over to the cross in his place. A trick was played in the court: by subtle art and by sorcery the prisoner was released, and another of the condemned was bound without suspicion. And now Pilate, who formerly judged this man in pretence, no longer does even that in pretence, but embraces the accused as a friend. A great new drama has been staged against Judaea, beyond the evils that went before. Great is the laughter that has arisen in the East. We Hebrews have an indelible disgrace: we waged war on one man and did not defeat him. See what a fraud the deceiver worked, both living and by art dying: he had another fastened to the wood in his place and wounded him, and persuades the governor that he himself underwent the fatal stroke of death, and deceives his officers with glib words, saying that he proved stronger than death and returned from the underworld on the third day. Carried away by these words, or doing a favour for friendship's sake, Pilate may persuasively report to the emperor what did not happen as though it had happened; and then, by edict of the world-ruling authority and power, we may be compelled to believe in a man accused of countless crimes. The world has received a great stumbling block; the apparition has enslaved much of what is under heaven. By deceit he has brought all the authorities under him, so that, having the leading men of mankind as his subjects, he might readily subject those beneath them. Without reckoning we joined battle with an unconquerable evil; senselessly we dared to war against the terrible man; our battle-line was disorderly, lacking the preparation the matter required. The error of our blunder cannot be put right — we who ought to have weighed what he said, and chewed over that saying of his, when, boasting before those present, he went away saying, ‘Behold, the Son of Man will be handed over into the hands of the chief priests and elders, and they will scourge him and crucify him, and on the third day he will rise.’ For he uttered these things trusting in his invincible daring and confident in great sorcery, knowing that it was easy for him to blind the officers, to throw a veil over the people, to … the judge's vote by his verdict, and to prevail over all by an account of sufficient art. Look, he has shown by deeds how much the practice of sorcery can do. Hence we have earned incurable slanders before the whole race of men; we have stirred up an indelible hatred of slander, as men who insulted the common benefactor of the world and crucified the saviour of the whole race. Now we have no clear air, no free face that can look up; we are the shame of our fathers, the bruises of our forebears, the stains and wrinkles of our ancestors. Who will be seen to sympathize with us in such a state? Who will pity us and grieve with us in our fall? East and West surge against us over what has happened; the report of the matter has swiftly seized north and south; the whole belt of the world has been shaken on learning that a man crucified and dead, as we thought, has been raised on the third day — not in out-of-the-way and obscure places, but holding high festival in the court of rulers and judges. Ah, what shall we do now? Where shall we flee, wretches that we are, caught, alas, in the middle of such a drama?” Since such nonsense, perhaps, and more like it, was going to come from the Jews, he did not, after rising from the dead, meet Pilate, so that what was nobly done might not be judged a trick of villainy and deceit. Nor does he approach the notable men of the Roman cohort, so that he might not seem to need human cooperation and alliance to confirm the account of the resurrection. Instead he appears to women, who could neither help nor persuade anyone about the resurrection, and then in the same way to the disciples, who were themselves powerless and had long been hidden away because of their humble station. He did this fittingly and very well, so that the word of the resurrection might be proclaimed not with help from the power of world-rulers, but might be ratified and confirmed through men who were humble and of no account in this life according to the flesh — so that the proclamation might be not human but divine.

[The Christian (Macarius) answers the objection on “Now is the judgment of the world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out” (2.15).] Since these points are thus soundly upheld, it is time for you to go over that timely saying added here: “Now is the judgment of the world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out” — or, as some of the copies have, “will be cast down” — “and I, if I am lifted up, will draw all to myself.” For here he uses “world” figuratively for humanity — not heaven, nor the parts of heaven, not earth, not sea, not the parts of creation. For the so-called ruler did not rule these, but men, because they have free will; to rule lifeless things is impossible for him, because they are under another's authority. And he calls “ruler” not the Creator, as they supposed, nor the lawgiver, but a certain chief demon, a cultivator of evil and inventor of wickedness, who became ruler of the careless through their carelessness and by craft enslaved those who have free will. He did not rule by force of any sovereignty; he took hold of the rational flock, which he here calls “world” by metaphor, by persuasion and varied sophistry. For man is fittingly called a world: the ornament of the world and the noble work of the Creator, a precious creature made for honour. Out of this world, he says, he will cast the ruler, by a just judgment freeing those under tyranny from the inhuman tyranny, saying, “Now is the judgment of the world” — that is: “Now I shall appear as the court of this oppressed world; now I shall cast down the ruler of this world, who ruled and prevailed not justly but unjustly, who has held power until now by the weapon of disobedience and by deceit taken for faith, this one of the air who hides in all, invisible and bodiless, who wishes to slaughter the bodiless soul. For I have not called him universal, nor ruler and master of the whole. He would be just, if he ruled the whole; he would be unassailable, if he gave orders to all; he would be legitimate, if he commanded the universe; he would be without beginning, if he possessed universal power. But as it is, he is a recent ruler, ruling from wickedness; he has now begun from an evil doctrine; he is ruler not of a crowd, but of this world — or rather of a part of the world.” For the world of the universe is vast and beyond men's grasp; but he says the whole world has suffered when a part of the world was taken into tyranny. For as, when one limb in a body is in pain, we say the whole man is in pain and suffering, so a part of the world, sick with deceit, shows that the whole world has suffered; and as, when the hem of a garment has been torn away, the whole garment is said to be damaged, so, when man was pierced by the sting of sin, he says the world has been wounded and suffers with him. For if anyone speaks of the universal world, he will spend a long time, and while thinking he has said everything, he will not yet have set out the beginning of the whole. For what could he rightly and truly recount of the world, when he does not even give an accurate account of the nature of visible things? He will not speak truly of earth or sea; he will not understand the nature of springs and rivers. And if in speaking of these he does not speak clearly, how could he speak truly of what lies beyond them? How of the thin air, the broad and widest bosom of the living winds, held between heaven and earth like a vessel containing countless bodies; or the finest aether lying above it, which burns without ceasing with fiery luminaries; or the heaven suspended higher than these; or the revolution of the circling vault, and the many-formed torchlight and lightning of the stars, and the unseen belt of the world, and the hidden bond that holds the belt together; or the beings that surpass these, whose lot is an invisible place and way of life, such as the countless dignity of Thrones, the unspeakable rank of Dominions, and the indescribable glory of Powers, their vast and hardly expressible multitude and weight; or the company of those called the First-born; or the fervent liturgy of the Seraphim, the driving of the cherubic chariots? For all these together are the world, understood in different substances of bodies; these fill up the universal and invisible world. But here he speaks of human nature as a part of the world. For divine teaching and usage regularly names and speaks of the whole from the part and of the part from the whole. So when someone who lives as a philosopher says, “The world has been crucified to me, and I to the world,” he does not say that heaven or earth or sea has been crucified (for these are the world and the parts of the world) — that would be uneducated — but that bodily wickedness has been nailed down, that the fleshly way no longer lives for him, nor does he himself exist and live in fleshly thoughts, but that he has been crucified by not living in worldly doctrine and thought, by not living by the rule of the flesh, and by the ways of the flesh no longer luxuriating in him. If, then, the law of the flesh is named “world,” and if Paul in his hardships crucified it, it was right for the Saviour to call “world” the whole tribe and race of men, carried this way and that by disorderly impulses. He declared that it would be judged when the cross was fixed; he foretells that its ruler will be cast out because of sin, and threatens to throw him down from his power. For this ruler truly sows pleasures and revelry and outlandish, unreasonable drunkenness; and since humanity bore the command of his error, he necessarily rules, leading those who obey him to his own will. But Christ, wishing to vindicate those subdued by the demon in wickedness and oppressed, says, “Now is the judgment of the world; now the ruler of this world will be cast down, and I, if I am lifted up, will draw all to myself.” For by the cord of his body he vindicated his kin, and as man, having joined human substance with Godhead, he drew it up, as from a great and very deep abyss, out of this toilsome and bitter life, when he was lifted up to the abodes on high. For as if by a rope — the saving body — the flock of men lying below, bound to it, went up with it into the heavenly abodes. So the ruler of the world's being cast down is nothing other than his being thrown out of his ruling authority. Here he hints not at a change of place, but at the stripping of the dignity that he had acquired in deeds, being served by base men. For as today a king who removes a governor who wrongs a province stops his power of office and takes away all his authority, and everyone talks of such a man as cast down by the king — not from some upper room or lofty house, but from rank and power — and it turns out that the same man, remaining in the same dwelling in the province where he lived when he had power, lofty to those there and feared by all, is cast down once stripped of office and comes to share the life of the lowly: so the one who held power over the world by soul-destroying wickedness and used the free as slaves, seized by the one who is master by nature and judged, was cast down, humbled in his pride. In this affair he did not descend from some hill in space, but was stripped of the authority of power that he had. For as a man condemned by a king, once he has received his sentence, is of no further use and of no account, even if he walks about in the royal courts, so the devil, stripped by the master's nod of the insolence he had from boasting, has been cast out of the rule in which he boasted, and has no strength or power anywhere, even if he lingers in the very middle of the world. So the strong and powerful ruler of before — since Christ is stronger and more powerful — the powerful one became weak, cast out, in a sense, from his power.

[The Christian (Macarius) answers the objection on “You are of your father the devil” (2.16).] These things being so, as far as we have been able to say, it is time for you to resolve that other perplexing saying spoken by Christ to the Jews: “You cannot hear my word, because you are of the father of the devil.” From here on, if you will, attend more carefully to what is about to be said on the heading before us, so that we may be able to explain properly this chief point: who here is the devil's father, and how the Jews called upon him, fell away from the nobility of their ancestors, were cut off from their natural root, and were joined without discernment to what is against nature. The subject is truly great, and very hard to put into words, since it tells of a devil and a devil's father. For the devil is not the father of the Jews. If what was said had that sense, it would have had to be written, “You are of your father the devil”; but as it is, it is not written so, but, “You are of the father of the devil,” so that the devil has some father. For the devil is not a devil of himself, but plainly from another: when slander was sown in him, he began to slander, or rather to shatter the laws of good disposition, so that the father is devil in the son, and the son, in the father, the most bloodthirsty craftsman of deceit and slander. This can be learned also from a comparison with what is better, since Christ says, “I am in the Father, and the Father in me.” So, as those who believe in Christ become heirs of Christ's Father, made known to the Father through the Son, so those who obey the devil's will have dealings through him with the devil's father. For the devil knows nothing else to do than to drag man away from divine grace and bring him to his own begetter; so that, as Christ brings the holy to God the Father, the antichrist brings to the anti-god those who obey him. Who then is the devil's father? You wish to inquire. Being fond of inquiry, you have surely heard of the place of paradise, of its planter and its husbandman, and indeed of its keeper and its worker; you have heard also of the serpent and of the slander that came from the serpent. You know — as some tell it — the drama that was staged there; you know the many-voiced tragedy of deceit there; you know the sophistries; you know the words spoken there; you know the artful prattle of speech and the festival of destruction held then; you know the change of things that came to the worst — if you have examined the narrative of the account — how the founder of human nature, accepting the serpent's slander without examination, was cast out of the divine enclosure, thrust out of that blessed abode, and estranged from the heavenly dwellings, having become a stranger to the all-blessed planting. From there the drama of disaster burst like a riot upon the race; from there the rational flock fell; from there we, cast out, now wander; from there a tyrant's army grew up against us; from there came murderous and inhuman passions; from there the ways and lessons of irrational cattle and herds; from there the coin of freedom was stolen and the counterfeit denarius of slavery appeared; from there the soul received the bruises of wickedness; from there the mind acquired its stains; from there our reasonings were dulled by suffering; from there we carry a blemish hard to heal; from there the eye of thought is clouded; from there come the bruises and fractures of evils; from there the cloud of disorder grows thick; from there the arrows of death were forged; from there Hades widened itself and grew rich; from there the devil and the devil's dreadful father press upon us. The serpent is rightly called devil, since he slandered man to God and God to man, and he rightly acquired the name from what he did. And the father of this devil is clearly the deceiving angel who settled on him and made his dwelling in him, a bodiless power torn away from the government of the Better, of whom one of the ancients spoke, saying, “He stiffened his neck before the Lord Almighty, and ran against him” — breaking the bond of love by insolence, without reason. Finding the serpent a fit servant, he sows in him the seeds of slander, or rather, in a manner, taking him, he begot him, as it were, and made him a devil. Since, then, the Jews sneered at the Son of God, not obeying what he said nor receiving his Father through him, but obeyed deceitful doctrines and, as though led by the hand by the serpent's wickedness, stood off from the kingdom of God, as though turning aside to the apostate father of the serpent and fighting with him against the sovereignty of God — for this reason Christ, judging from what they did and from their wrong belief, since they were friends not of Christ and through him of God, but obeyed the antichrist and through him the anti-god, said to them, “You cannot hear my word, because you are of the father of the devil.” So much on this. If you like, let us solemnly close the debate here, since it has been sufficiently discussed; and at another time, if any perplexing heading comes up, we shall meet it and speak, with the divine gift helping us.

[Macarius to Theosthenes: preface to the third debate.] This third contest our much-admired opponent prepared for us when he engaged us, having gathered a notable theatre of hearers — and this, Theosthenes, we now make plain to your incomparable wisdom, recounting as well as we can the propositions he put forward by design. For when we had come to a quiet place, we spent a long day in discussion. And he began to roll down upon us the great hill of his Attic eloquence, so that the very large company sitting with us almost became anxious, when they saw the fearful terror of his frowning brow. Then, like a runner coming down some slope, driven on by the force of his tongue, he alarmed us. The beginning of his speech to us was this:

[The philosopher's objection.] 1. How Jesus endured to be crucified with insult. Why did Christ, when brought before the high priest or before the governor, say nothing worthy of a wise and divine man, nothing that could instruct the judge and the bystanders and make them better, but endured to be struck with a reed, spat upon, and crowned with thorns? Why did he not, like Apollonius, speak boldly to the emperor Domitian, vanish from the royal court, and after not many hours appear, in full view, in the city of Dicaearchia, now called Puteoli? Even if Christ had to suffer by God's commands, he should indeed have endured the punishment, yet not undergone the suffering without bold speech; he should have spoken some earnest and wise words to Pilate the judge, and not been insulted like one of the rabble from the crossroads.