Apology 9–17

To refute these things the more, I will show that they are done by you, partly in the open, partly in secret, which is perhaps why you have believed them of us too. In Africa infants were sacrificed to Saturn openly until the proconsulship of Tiberius, who exposed those same priests on the very trees of their temple that had overshadowed their crimes, as on votive crosses; witness the soldiery of our own country, which carried out that very task for that proconsul. But even now this sacred crime goes on in secret. Christians are not the only ones who defy you; no crime is rooted out forever, and no god changes his ways. Since Saturn did not spare his own children, he naturally persisted in not sparing others', whom their own parents offered, answering gladly and fondling the infants so that they would not be sacrificed in tears. And yet parricide differs greatly from homicide. Among the Gauls people of riper age are sacrificed to Mercury. I leave the Taurian tales to their own theaters. Look, in that most religious city of the pious descendants of Aeneas there is a certain Jupiter whom they drench with human blood at his games. “But it is a beast-fighter's,” you say. Is it, I suppose, less than a man's? Or is it more shameful because it is a bad man's? Certainly it is shed from a killing. A Jupiter who is a Christian, and his father's only son in cruelty! But since in infanticide it makes no difference whether it is committed as a rite or at will, although parricide differs from homicide, I will turn to the people. How many of these who stand round gaping for Christian blood, how many even of you yourselves, governors most just and most severe toward us, shall I knock at the conscience of, as people who kill the children born to them? For if there is a difference too in the manner of death, you surely act more cruelly in choking out their breath in water, or exposing them to cold and hunger and dogs; even an older person would prefer to die by the sword. But for us, murder being once for all forbidden, it is not lawful to destroy even what is conceived in the womb, while blood is still being drawn into a human being. To prevent birth is a hastening of murder; it makes no difference whether one takes away a life already born or destroys one that is being born. He too is a human being who is to be one; the whole fruit is already in the seed. As for feeding on blood and such tragic dishes, read whether it is not related somewhere (it is in Herodotus, I think) that certain nations sealed a treaty by tasting from each other blood drawn from their arms. Something was tasted under Catiline too. They say also that among certain Scythian tribes every dead man is eaten by his own people. I digress too far. Today, here among us, blood consecrated to Bellona, caught in the palm from a gashed thigh and given to be eaten, seals her devotees. Again, where are those who at a gladiatorial show, as a cure for epilepsy, catch and carry off with greedy thirst the fresh blood of slain criminals as it runs from the throat? Where, again, are those who dine on wild-beast meat from the arena, who seek boar, who seek venison? That boar, in the struggle, wiped off the blood of the man he had bloodied. That stag wallowed in a gladiator's blood. The very bellies of the bears are sought, still undigested with human entrails. So flesh fed on man is belched up by man. You who eat these things, how far are you from the banquets of the Christians? And do those do less who with savage lust gape after human bodies, because they devour the living? Are they less consecrated to filth by human blood, because they lick up what is to become blood? They do not eat infants, plainly, but rather grown youths. Let your error blush before the Christians, who do not even have the blood of animals among our foods, who for that reason abstain also from things strangled and things that die of themselves, lest we be in any way defiled by blood, even blood buried in the flesh. Indeed, among the tests of Christians you offer them sausages stuffed with blood, being quite sure, of course, that the very thing by which you want them to go astray is unlawful among them. Then how is it that you believe that those whom you are sure shudder at the blood of cattle gape after human blood, unless perhaps you have tried it and found it sweeter? It ought, then, to have been applied as a test of Christians, like the brazier, like the incense box. For they would be proved by craving human blood just as by refusing sacrifice; otherwise to be denied as Christians if they had not tasted it, just as if they had sacrificed; and surely you would have no lack of human blood at the hearing and condemnation of prisoners. Then again, who are more incestuous than those whom Jupiter himself taught? Ctesias reports that the Persians have intercourse with their own mothers. The Macedonians too are suspect, because, when they first heard the tragedy Oedipus, they laughed at the grief of the incestuous man and said, “He drove on into his mother!” Now consider how much room there is for mistakes that bring about incest, the promiscuity of lust supplying the material. First of all you expose your children, to be taken up by some passing kindness of strangers, or you give them up to be adopted by better parents. The memory of a family so estranged must at some time be lost, and once a mistake has occurred, from then on the line of incest will spread, the family creeping on with the crime. Then, further, in whatever place, at home, abroad, across the seas, lust is your companion, and its leaps everywhere can easily beget children somewhere unknown to the father, even from some small portion of seed, so that a family thus scattered through human dealings runs into its own kin, and the blind man does not recognize them as of incestuous blood. From that outcome a most careful and faithful chastity has fenced us off; and as far as we are safe from sexual immorality and from every excess after marriage, so far are we safe from the chance of incest. Some, much more secure, drive off the whole force of this error by virgin continence: old men who are still boys. If you considered that these things are in you, you would likewise see that they are not in Christians. The same eyes would have reported both. But two kinds of blindness easily go together, so that those who do not see what is, seem to see what is not. So I will show in everything. Now I will speak of the more open charges.

“You do not worship the gods,” you say, “and you do not offer sacrifices for the emperors.” It follows that for the same reason we do not sacrifice for others, since we do not even for ourselves, once we do not worship the gods. So we are charged with sacrilege and treason. This is the chief point of the case, indeed the whole of it, and certainly worth examining, if neither presumption nor injustice is the judge, the one despairing of the truth, the other refusing it. We stopped worshiping your gods from the time we came to know that they are not gods. This, then, is what you ought to demand: that we prove that they are not gods, and therefore not to be worshiped, because they ought to have been worshiped only if they had been gods. Then Christians too would deserve punishment, if it were established that those whom they did not worship, because they thought they did not exist, were gods. “But to us,” you say, “they are gods.” We appeal from you to your conscience: let it judge us, let it condemn us, if it can deny that all these gods of yours were men. If even it denies it, it will be refuted by its own documents of antiquity, from which it learned about them; witness to this day the cities in which they were born and the regions in which they left traces of things they did, in which their graves too are shown. Shall I now run through them one by one, so many and so great, new, old, barbarian, Greek, Roman, foreign, captured, adopted, private, common, male, female, rustic, urban, naval, military? It is idle even to pursue their titles; let me gather them into a summary, and that not so that you may learn but so that you may recall; for you certainly act as if you had forgotten. Before Saturn there is no god among you; from him dates the origin of all divinity, or at least of the more powerful and better known. So what is established about the origin will hold for the descendants too. As for Saturn, then: so far as literature teaches, neither Diodorus the Greek nor Thallus, neither Cassius Severus nor Cornelius Nepos, nor any writer on antiquities of that kind has declared him anything but a man; so far as material evidence goes, I find it nowhere more trustworthy than in Italy itself, where Saturn settled after many expeditions and after enjoying hospitality in Attica, received by Janus, or Janes, as the Salii prefer. The hill he had lived on was called Saturnius; the city he had marked out is still Saturnia; in short, all Italy, after being called Oenotria, was named Saturnia. From him first came writing tablets and coin stamped with an image, and so he presides over the treasury. Yet if Saturn was a man, he was certainly born of a man; and because from a man, certainly not from heaven and earth. But since his parents were unknown, it was easy to call him the son of those whose children we all may seem to be. For who would not, out of veneration and honor, call heaven and earth his father and mother? Or it came from human custom, by which people who are unknown, or who appear unexpectedly, are said to have come down from heaven. So it happened that Saturn, appearing suddenly everywhere, was called heavenly; for the common people also call those whose ancestry is uncertain sons of earth. I say nothing of the fact that people were then still so rude that they were moved by the sight of any new man as by something divine, when today, polished as they are, they consecrate as gods those whom a few days before they acknowledged dead with public mourning. Enough now of Saturn, though briefly. We will show that Jupiter too was as much a man as born of a man, and then the whole swarm of the family as mortal as its seed.

And since, just as you do not dare deny that they were men, so you have taken to asserting that they became gods after death, let us examine the reasons that required this. First of all, you must grant that there is some higher god, a kind of contractor of divinity, who made gods out of men. For they could not have taken divinity on themselves, since they did not have it, nor could anyone else give it to those who lacked it except one who possessed it properly. But if there were no one to make gods, you presume in vain that gods were made, while you remove their maker. Certainly, if they could have made themselves, they would never have been men, since they would have possessed the power of a better condition. If, then, there is one who makes gods, I return to examining the reasons for making gods out of men, and I find none, unless that great god wanted servants and helpers for his divine duties. First, it is unworthy of him to need anyone's help, and a dead man's at that, when, if he was going to want a dead man's help, it would have been more worthy to make some god from the beginning. But I see no room for help either. For this whole body of the world, whether unborn and unmade according to Pythagoras, or born and made according to Plato, was certainly found, once for all in its construction, arranged, equipped, and ordered with every guidance of reason. What has perfected all things could not have been imperfect. It waited for nothing from Saturn and the race of Saturn. People will be foolish unless they are sure that from the beginning rains fell from heaven, and stars shone, and lights blazed, and thunders roared, and Jupiter himself feared the thunderbolts you put in his hand; likewise that every crop sprang abundantly from the earth before Liber and Ceres and Minerva, indeed before that first man, whoever he was, because nothing provided to maintain and sustain man could have been brought in after man. In short, they are said to have discovered these necessities of life, not to have established them. But what is discovered existed, and what existed will be credited not to the one who discovered it but to the one who established it; for it was there before it was discovered. Besides, if Liber is a god because he showed the vine, Lucullus has been badly treated, who first brought cherries from Pontus to Italy, because he has not been consecrated for it as the author of a new fruit, being the one who showed it. Therefore, if the universe has stood from the beginning both equipped and arranged with fixed principles for carrying out its functions, there is on this side no reason for enrolling humanity into divinity, since the stations and powers you have assigned to them existed from the beginning just as they would have existed even if you had not created these gods. But you turn to another reason, answering that the conferring of divinity was a way of rewarding merits. And here, I suppose, you grant that the god who makes gods excels in justice, since he has not dispensed so great a reward rashly, unworthily, or lavishly. I want, then, to review their merits, whether they are such as to have raised them to heaven and not rather to have plunged them into the depths of Tartarus, which you affirm, when you choose, to be the prison of infernal punishments. For there are usually thrust down those who are impious to their parents, and incestuous with their sisters, and adulterers with wives, and ravishers of virgins, and corrupters of boys, and those who rage, and those who kill, and those who steal, and those who deceive, and all who resemble some god of yours, none of whom you will be able to prove free of crime or vice unless you deny he was a man. And yet, so that you cannot deny they were men, these marks are added too, which do not allow us to believe that they became gods afterward either. For if you preside over punishing such people, if all the upright among you reject dealings, conversation, and life in common with the wicked and base, while that god has admitted their equals to share his majesty, why then do you condemn those whose colleagues you adore? Your justice is an affront to heaven. Make gods of all the most criminal, so as to please your gods. It is an honor to them to have their equals consecrated. But to set aside further treatment of this unworthiness, suppose they were upright and blameless and good. Yet how many better men you have left in the underworld! a Socrates for wisdom, an Aristides for justice, a Themistocles for war, an Alexander for greatness, a Polycrates for good fortune, a Croesus for wealth, a Demosthenes for eloquence. Which of those gods of yours is graver and wiser than Cato, more just and more warlike than Scipio? Who is greater than Pompey, more fortunate than Sulla, richer than Crassus, more eloquent than Tullius? How much more worthily would that god have waited to take these as gods, since he certainly foreknew the better ones! He was in a hurry, I suppose, and closed heaven once for all, and now surely blushes while the better men grumble in the underworld.

I stop here, knowing that I shall show from the truth itself what they are not, when I have shown what they are. As far as your gods are concerned, then, I see only the names of certain men long dead, and I hear stories, and I recognize rites based on the stories. As for the images themselves, I find nothing else to object to than that their materials are sisters of common vessels and implements, or come from those very vessels and implements, changing their destiny, as it were, by consecration, while the license of art transforms them, and that most insultingly and sacrilegiously in the very working; so that for us especially, who are punished on account of these very gods, it can truly be a comfort in our punishments that they themselves suffer the same things in order to come into being. You put Christians on crosses and stakes. What image is not first modeled in clay laid over a cross and a stake? It is on a gibbet that the body of your god is first dedicated. You scrape the sides of Christians with claws. But on your gods axes and planes and rasps work harder over every limb. We lay down our necks. Before the lead and glue and pegs, your gods are headless. We are driven to the beasts: certainly to those you attach to Liber and Cybele and Caelestis. We are burned with fire: so are they, from their first lump. We are condemned to the mines: that is where your gods come from. We are banished to islands: some god of yours is wont to be born or to die on an island. If any divinity is established by these things, then those who are punished are consecrated, and tortures will have to be called divine powers. But plainly your gods do not feel these injuries and insults of their manufacture, any more than they feel acts of homage. “O impious words! O sacrilegious abuse!” Gnash your teeth, foam at the mouth! You are the same people who rebuked a Seneca, of course, when he declaimed at greater length and more bitterly against your superstition! If, then, we do not adore statues and cold images, so very like their dead originals, which kites and mice and spiders understand well enough, did not the rejection of an error once recognized deserve praise rather than punishment? For can we be thought to injure those whom we are sure do not exist at all? What does not exist suffers nothing from anyone, because it does not exist.

“But to us they are gods,” you say. And how is it that you, on the contrary, are found impious, sacrilegious, and irreligious toward your gods, you who neglect those you presume to exist, destroy those you fear, and mock those you even avenge? Check whether I am lying. First, since you worship different gods, you certainly offend those you do not worship. Preferring one cannot proceed without insulting another, because there is no choosing without rejecting. So you already despise those you reject, and in rejecting them you do not fear to offend them. For, as we touched on above, the status of each god depended on the senate's estimate. He was no god whom a man, when consulted, did not want and, by not wanting, condemned. Your household gods, which you call Lares, you treat with household authority, pawning them, selling them, changing them sometimes from a Saturn into a cooking pot, sometimes from a Minerva into a ladle, as each was worn out and battered by long worship, or as each master found his household need holier. Your public gods you likewise defile by public law, holding them as sources of revenue at the auction. So the Capitol is bid for, so the vegetable market: under the same cry of the auctioneer, under the same spear, under the same entry of the quaestor, divinity is knocked down and leased. But fields burdened with tax are cheaper, and persons assessed for poll tax less noble (for these are marks of captivity); yet gods, the more tributary they are, the holier, or rather, the holier, the more tributary. Majesty is made a source of profit. Religion goes begging round the taverns. You demand a fee for the ground of a temple, for entry to the rite. It is not lawful to know the gods for nothing; they are for sale. What do you do at all to honor them that you do not also bestow on your dead? Temples just the same, altars just the same. The same dress and insignia on the statues. As the dead man's age, art, or business was, so is the god. How does Jupiter's banquet differ from the funeral meal? the sacrificial ladle from the jug for the dead? the soothsayer from the undertaker? For the soothsayer too attends the dead. But you do well to give the honor of divinity to dead emperors, since you assign it to them even while they live. Your gods will take it kindly, indeed will congratulate themselves, that their masters become their equals. But when you adore Larentina, a public prostitute (I could at least wish it were Lais or Phryne), among your Junos and Cereses and Dianas; when you consecrate Simon Magus with a statue and the inscription “Holy God”; when you make some boy from the palace schools a god of the assembly: then, though the old gods are no nobler, they will still count it an insult from you that what antiquity granted to them alone has been allowed to others too.

I want to review your rites too. I do not speak of how you behave in sacrificing, when you slaughter every worn-out, wasted, and mangy beast; when from the choice and sound ones you cut off all the useless parts, the heads and hooves, which at home you would have given to the slave boys or the dogs; when of the tithe owed to Hercules you do not put even a third on his altar (I will rather praise your wisdom in rescuing something from what is lost). But turning to your literature, by which you are trained in wisdom and the liberal duties, what mockeries I find! That the gods fought one another over the Trojans and the Achaeans, matched like pairs of gladiators; that Venus was wounded by a human arrow because she wanted to snatch away her son Aeneas, who had almost been killed by the same Diomedes; that Mars was almost worn away by thirteen months in chains; that Jupiter, lest he suffer the same violence from the other heavenly beings, was set free by the help of some monster; and that he now weeps for the fall of Sarpedon, now lusts foully for his sister, recalling mistresses of long ago not so dearly loved. After that, what poet is not found, on the authority of his chief, to be a dishonorer of the gods? One assigns Apollo to King Admetus to pasture his flocks; another hires out Neptune's labor as a builder to Laomedon. There is also that one among the lyric poets (I mean Pindar) who sings that Aesculapius was deservedly judged with a thunderbolt for his greed, because he practiced medicine harmfully. A bad Jupiter, if the thunderbolt is his: impious toward his grandson, jealous of a craftsman. Such things, if true, ought not to have been divulged, nor, if false, invented, among the most religious of people. Nor do the tragic or comic poets spare them either, but they set out in their prologues the troubles or wanderings of some god's house. I say nothing of the philosophers, content with Socrates, who to insult the gods swore by an oak, a goat, and a dog. “But Socrates was condemned for that very reason, because he was destroying the gods.” Plainly, long ago, that is, always, truth is hated. Yet since the Athenians later, repenting of the sentence, punished Socrates' accusers and set up a golden image of him in a temple, the rescinding of the condemnation restored Socrates' testimony. Diogenes too makes some jest or other against Hercules, and the Roman Cynic Varro brings in three hundred Joves, or Jupiters as they should be called, without heads.

Other wanton talents also serve your pleasures through the dishonor of the gods. Examine the elegant pieces of the Lentuli and the Hostilii, whether in their jokes and tricks you are laughing at the mimes or at your gods: Anubis the Adulterer, Luna as a Man, Diana Flogged, the Reading of the Will of the Dead Jupiter, and Three Starving Herculeses Mocked. The literature of the actors too depicts all their foulness. The Sun mourns his son thrown down from heaven, while you rejoice; Cybele sighs for a disdainful shepherd, and you do not blush; you endure the scandals of Jupiter being sung, and Juno, Venus, and Minerva being judged by a shepherd. When the image of your god covers an infamous and disgraceful head, when a body impure and trained for that art by effeminacy represents some Minerva or Hercules, is not majesty violated and divinity defiled while you applaud? You are plainly more religious in the amphitheater, where over human blood, over the filth of punishments, your gods dance in the same way, supplying plots and stories for the condemned, except that the condemned often wear the costumes of your gods themselves. We have seen at times Attis, that god from Pessinus, castrated, and a man who was being burned alive had been dressed as Hercules. Among the ludicrous cruelties of the midday show we have also laughed at Mercury testing the dead with a branding iron; we have seen Jupiter's brother, too, dragging off the corpses of gladiators with a hammer. Who could track down every one of these things? If they disturb the honor of divinity, if they wear away the traces of majesty, they are surely to be put down to contempt, both of those who do such things and of those for whom they do them. But let these be mere shows. If, however, I add what the consciences of all will recognize no less, that adulteries are arranged in temples, that pimping is done among the altars, that very often in the very lodgings of the temple-keepers and priests, under the same fillets and caps and purple, with the incense burning, lust is satisfied, I do not know whether your gods do not complain more of you than of the Christians. Certainly temple-robbers are always caught among your own. For Christians do not know the temples even by day; perhaps they too would rob them, if they too adored them. What, then, do those worship who do not worship such things? It is now open to understand that those are worshipers of the truth who are not worshipers of falsehood, and that they no longer err in that in which, by recognizing that they had erred, they have ceased to err. Take this in first, and from here draw the whole order of our religion, though only after false opinions have first been refuted.

For, like some others, you have dreamed that an ass's head is our god. Cornelius Tacitus planted this suspicion of such a god. For in the fifth book of his Histories, beginning the Jewish war from the origin of the nation, and arguing as he pleased about both the origin and the name and the religion of the nation, he relates that the Jews, set free from Egypt or, as he thought, expelled, were wasting away with thirst in the vast and waterless regions of Arabia, and used as guides to a spring some wild asses that were thought to be going from pasture to drink; and in gratitude for this they consecrated the likeness of that beast. And so from this, I suppose, it was presumed that we too, as near relations of the Jewish religion, are initiated into the same image. But that same Cornelius Tacitus, truly the most talkative of liars, relates in the same history that Gnaeus Pompey, when he had taken Jerusalem and had therefore entered the temple to inspect the secrets of the Jewish religion, found no image there. And surely, if what was worshiped was represented by some likeness, it would be displayed nowhere more than in its sanctuary, all the more because, however vain the worship, it had no fear of outside witnesses there. For only the priests were allowed to approach; even the sight of it was forbidden to others by a curtain drawn across. You, however, will not deny that you worship all beasts of burden and whole stables of nags, together with their Epona. Perhaps we are blamed for this, that among worshipers of all cattle and beasts we are worshipers of asses only. And whoever thinks us devotees of the cross will be our fellow-devotee. When some piece of wood is propitiated, never mind its appearance, since the quality of the material is the same; never mind its shape, so long as it is the very body of the god. And yet how far is the Attic Pallas, or the Pharian Ceres, which are set up without form as a rough stake and shapeless wood, from the stake of a cross? Every timber fixed in an upright position is part of a cross. We, if it comes to that, worship a god complete and whole. We have said that your gods take their origin from the modelers on a cross. But you also adore Victories, though in trophies crosses are the inner frames of the trophies. The religion of the Romans, a camp religion through and through, venerates the standards, swears by the standards, sets the standards before all the gods. All those masses of images on the standards are necklaces of crosses; those hangings of the banners and flags are robes of crosses. I praise your care: you did not want to consecrate crosses unadorned and bare. Others, plainly more humanely and more plausibly, believe that the sun is our god. We shall be reckoned with the Persians, perhaps, though we do not adore the sun painted on linen, having it everywhere in its own disk. In fact the suspicion comes from its being known that we pray toward the region of the east. But many of you too, affecting sometimes to adore even the heavenly bodies, move your lips toward the sunrise. Likewise, if we give the day of the sun to rejoicing, for a reason far different from worship of the sun, we stand second to those who set apart the day of Saturn for rest and feasting, themselves too departing from the Jewish custom, of which they are ignorant. But a new representation of our god has lately been published in this city, ever since a certain criminal, hired to dodge the beasts, put up a picture with an inscription of this kind: THE GOD OF THE CHRISTIANS, ONOKOITES. He had ass's ears, was hoofed in one foot, carried a book, and wore a toga. We laughed at both the name and the form. But they ought to have adored at once a two-formed deity, since they have accepted gods compounded with dog's heads and lion's heads, horned like goats and rams, goats from the loins, serpents from the legs, winged on the foot or the back. We have said these things more than was needed, lest we should seem to pass over any rumor unrefuted, as if from a guilty conscience. Having cleared all these away, we turn now to the demonstration of our religion.

What we worship is the one God, who by the word by which he commanded, the reason by which he arranged, and the power by which he was able, brought forth from nothing this whole mass with all its equipment of elements, bodies, and spirits, as an adornment of his majesty; whence the Greeks too gave the world the name kosmos (“adornment”). He is invisible, though he is seen; incomprehensible, though he is made present by grace; beyond reckoning, though he is reckoned by human senses. That is why he is true and so great. Whatever can be seen, comprehended, and reckoned in the ordinary way is less than the eyes by which it is taken in, the hands by which it is soiled, and the senses by which it is found; but what is immeasurable is known to itself alone. This is what makes God to be reckoned, that he cannot be grasped by reckoning. So the force of his greatness presents him to men as both known and unknown. And this is the sum of the guilt of those who will not acknowledge him whom they cannot fail to know. Do you want us to prove him from his own works, so many and so great, by which we are held together, sustained, delighted, and even terrified? Do you want us to prove him from the testimony of the soul itself? Though it is pressed down in the prison of the body, though hemmed in by perverse teachings, though enfeebled by lusts and desires, though enslaved to false gods, yet when it comes to its senses, as from drunkenness, as from sleep, as from some illness, and enjoys its health, it names God, by this name alone, because this is properly the one true God. “Good God,” “Great God,” and “May God grant it” are on everyone's lips. It also calls him to witness as judge: “God sees,” and “I commend it to God,” and “God will repay me.” O testimony of the soul naturally Christian! Finally, as it says these things, it looks not to the Capitol but to heaven. For it knows the seat of the living God; from him and from there it came down.