Apology 48–50

Come now, if some philosopher were to affirm, as Laberius says following the opinion of Pythagoras, that a man is made from a mule and a snake from a woman, and were to twist every argument to that opinion by the power of his eloquence, would he not win assent and fix belief, even to the point of abstaining from animals on that account? Would anyone be persuaded of it, lest by chance he dine on beef from some great-grandfather of his? But if a Christian promises that a man will return from a man, and Gaius himself from Gaius, he will be driven out by the people with stones rather than be granted even a hearing. If any reasoning governs the return of human souls into bodies, why should they not return into the same substance, since this is to be restored, to be what one had been? Otherwise they are no longer the same as they had been, because they could not be what they were not unless they ceased to be what they had been. We would also need much leisure in many places if we wished to make sport of this subject: who seemed to be re-formed into which beast. But rather for our own defense: we propose that it is much more worthy of belief that a man will return from a man, any given man as himself, so long as a man, so that the same quality of soul may be restored to the same condition, even if not to the same appearance. Certainly, since the reason for restoration is the appointment of judgment, the very same one who had been will necessarily be presented, to receive from God the judgment of good or contrary desert. And therefore bodies too will be brought back, both because the soul alone can suffer nothing without stable matter, that is, flesh, and because what souls must suffer at all from God's judgment they did not deserve without the flesh, within which they did everything. “But how,” you say, “can matter that has been dissolved be presented?” Consider yourself, O man, and you will find belief in the thing. Recall what you were before you were. Nothing, surely; for you would remember if you had been anything. You, then, who were nothing before you were, and will become the same nothing when you cease to be, why could you not be again from nothing by the will of the same author who willed you to be from nothing? What new thing will happen to you? You who were not were made; when again you are not, you will be made. Give, if you can, the reason by which you were made, and then ask the reason by which you will be made. And yet you will surely be made more easily what you once were, since you were made with equal ease what you never were before. There will be doubt, I suppose, about the powers of God, who set up this great body of the world from what had not been, no less than from a death of emptiness and void, animated by the Spirit who animates all souls, itself stamped as an example of human resurrection, as a testimony to you. Light, slain daily, shines again, and darkness, by equal turns, departs and comes after; the stars that have died come to life again; the seasons begin where they end; fruits are consumed and come back; seeds certainly do not rise more fruitfully unless corrupted and dissolved; all things are preserved by perishing, all are re-formed from destruction. Will you, O man, so great a name, if you understand yourself, learning it even from the inscription of the Pythian, lord of all things that die and rise, die for this, that you may perish? Wherever you have been dissolved, whatever matter has destroyed you, swallowed you, abolished you, squandered you into nothing, it will give you back. Nothingness itself belongs to him to whom the whole belongs. “So,” you say, “we shall always have to die and always rise again?” If the Lord of things had so appointed, you would experience the law of your condition against your will. But in fact he has appointed nothing other than he has proclaimed. The reason that composed the universe from diversity, so that all things should stand together in unity from rival substances, from void and solid, from animate and inanimate, from comprehensible and incomprehensible, from light and darkness, from life itself and death, that same reason has also joined the ages together by a condition so appointed and distinguished that this first part, which we inhabit from the beginning of things, flows down through a temporal age to an end, while the following one, which we await, extends into infinite eternity. When, therefore, the end and the boundary that gapes between them has come, so that even the form of the world itself, equally temporal, which is spread like a curtain before that dispensation of eternity, is changed, then the whole human race will be restored to settle the account of what it has deserved in this age, good or evil, and from then on to be paid out into the boundless perpetuity of eternity. And so there will be no more death, nor resurrection again and again, but we shall be the same as now, and not others afterward: the worshipers of God always with God, clothed over with the proper substance of eternity; but the profane, and those not wholly given to God, in the punishment of fire equally unceasing, having from its very nature, of course, a divine supply of incorruptibility. The philosophers too know the difference between secret and common fire. So the fire that serves human use is very different from the one that appears at God's judgment, whether striking thunderbolts from heaven or belching from the earth through the peaks of mountains; for it does not consume what it burns, but restores while it spends. So the mountains remain always burning, and one who is struck from heaven is safe, so that he is no longer reduced to ashes by any fire. And this will be a testimony to eternal fire, an example of the unceasing judgment that keeps its punishment alive. The mountains burn and endure. What of the guilty and the enemies of God?

These are the things that in us alone are called presumptions, but in philosophers and poets the highest knowledge and remarkable genius. They are wise, we foolish; they are to be honored, we to be laughed at, indeed, more than that, to be punished. Suppose now that what we defend is false and rightly called presumption: yet it is necessary; foolish, yet useful; since those who believe it are compelled to become better, by fear of eternal punishment and hope of eternal refreshment. So it is not expedient that things should be called false or held foolish which it is expedient to presume true. By no title is it lawful to condemn at all what is beneficial. In you, then, is this very presumption, which condemns what is useful. So they cannot be foolish either; certainly, even if false and foolish, yet harmful to no one. For they are like many other things on which you inflict no penalties, vain and fabulous, unaccused and unpunished as harmless. But in such matters, if at all, the judgment is ridicule, not swords and fires and crosses and beasts; at the injustice of this cruelty not only does this blind mob exult and insult, but some of you too boast, who court the favor of the mob by injustice. As if all that you can do against us were not at our own choice! Certainly I am a Christian if I will. So you will condemn me only if I will to be condemned; and since what you can do against me you cannot do unless I will, what you can do is a matter of my will, not of your power. So too the mob rejoices in vain over our harassment. For the joy it claims for itself is ours, since we prefer to be condemned rather than to fall away from God; on the contrary, those who hate us ought to grieve, not rejoice, since we have obtained what we chose.

“Then why,” you say, “do you complain that we persecute you, if you want to suffer, when you ought to love those through whom you suffer what you want?” Plainly we want to suffer, but in the way a soldier wants war. No one indeed suffers willingly, since he must fear and face danger. Yet he fights with all his strength, and, winning in battle, he rejoices who complained of battle, because he gains both glory and booty. It is our battle that we are summoned to the tribunals, to contend there for the truth at the risk of our lives. And victory is to obtain that for which you have contended. That victory has both the glory of pleasing God and the booty of living forever. “But we are executed.” Certainly, when we have won. So we have conquered when we are killed; in short, we escape when we are executed. Call us now, if you like, faggot-men and half-axle men, because we are burned, bound to a stake half an axle long, surrounded by bundles of brushwood. This is the dress of our victory, this our palm-embroidered robe; in such a chariot we triumph. Rightly, then, we do not please the conquered; for that is why we are thought desperate and lost. But this desperation and lostness among you raise the banner of virtue in the cause of glory and fame. Mucius willingly left his right hand on the altar: O loftiness of soul! Empedocles gave his whole self to the fires of Aetna at Catana: O vigor of mind! A certain foundress of Carthage gave herself to the pyre rather than to a second marriage: O glorious proclamation of chastity! Regulus, lest he alone should live in exchange for many enemies, suffered crosses over his whole body: O brave man, a conqueror even in captivity! Anaxarchus, as he was being pounded to death with a pestle like barley, said, “Pound, pound the bag of Anaxarchus; for Anaxarchus you are not pounding”: O magnanimity of the philosopher, who even joked about such a death! I pass over those who have bargained for praise with their own sword or with some gentler kind of death. For see, even contests of torture are crowned by you. An Athenian courtesan, when the executioner was already tired, at last spat her bitten-off tongue into the face of the raging tyrant, so as to spit out her voice too, lest she be able to betray the conspirators even if, overcome, she should wish to. Zeno of Elea, asked by Dionysius what philosophy provided, answered, contempt of death; and, exposed unflinching to the tyrant's scourges, he sealed his opinion even to death. Certainly the scourgings of the Spartans, made harsher under the eyes of their relatives, who even urged them on, confer as much honor of endurance on their house as they have shed blood. O glory that is lawful because it is human, to which neither lost presumption nor desperate conviction is imputed in its contempt of death and of every kind of atrocity, which is permitted to suffer as much for fatherland, for empire, for friendship, as is not lawful for God! And yet for all these you cast statues, inscribe images, and cut inscriptions for eternity. As far as you can by monuments, you yourselves grant the dead a kind of resurrection. One who hopes for the true resurrection from God is insane if he suffers for God! But go on, good governors; you will be much better in the people's eyes if you sacrifice Christians to them: crucify, torture, condemn, grind us down; for your injustice is the proof of our innocence. That is why God allows us to suffer these things. For recently, by condemning a Christian woman to the pimp rather than to the lion, you confessed that among us a stain on chastity is reckoned more terrible than any punishment and any death. Yet none of your more refined cruelty accomplishes anything; it is rather an enticement to our school. We become more numerous every time we are mown down by you: the blood of Christians is seed. Many among you urge endurance of pain and death, like Cicero in the Tusculans, Seneca in the Chances, Diogenes, Pyrrho, Callinicus. Yet their words do not find as many disciples as Christians do by teaching with deeds. That very obstinacy that you reproach is a teacher. For who, contemplating it, is not shaken to inquire what is really inside the matter? who, when he has inquired, does not come over? and when he has come over, does not long to suffer, so that he may purchase the whole grace of God, so that he may obtain from him full pardon at the price of his blood? For all sins are forgiven to this deed. That is why we give thanks for your sentences on the spot. As there is a rivalry between divine and human things, when we are condemned by you, we are acquitted by God.