Antidote for the Scorpion's Sting 1–7

From a small thing the earth festers a great evil, the scorpion. As many poisons as kinds, as many destructions as species, as many pains as colours: Nicander writes of them and paints them. And yet all have one gesture of violence, from the tail, not the mouth; and the tail will be whatever is extended from the hind part of the body and strikes. … So too the scorpion's: that series of knots, poisoned within by a fine little vein, rising with an arched thrust, draws tight at the top a hooked sting, on the principle of a torsion engine; hence they also name after the scorpion the war engine that drives its missiles by drawing back. That sting is also a tube of open fineness, and where it pierces it pours the venom into the wound. Summer is the season most familiar with the danger; its savagery sets sail with the south and south-west winds. Among remedies, natural ones are most used; magic too binds something on; medicine meets it with the knife and the draught. For some even drink a protection beforehand, in haste; but intercourse drains it, and they are thirsty again. For us faith is the defence, if it is not itself struck by distrust, in making the sign at once, adjuring the beast, and bringing the heel down on it. In this way we often help even the heathen, endowed by God with that power which the apostle consecrated when he disregarded the viper's bite.

What, then, does this pen promise, if faith is safe on its own? That it may be safe on its own in another way too, when it suffers its own scorpions. These too are a bitter small thing, of various kinds, armed in one way, and made ready at a fixed time, none other than the time of heat. Among Christians this is persecution. So when faith is in a heat and the church is burning, after the figure of the bush, then the Gnostics break out, then the Valentinians creep forth, then all the opponents of martyrdom boil up, hot themselves to strike, to pierce, to kill. For since they know that many are simple and untaught, and weak as well, and that most are Christians as the wind blows and as it pleases them, they understand that such people are never better approached than when fear has loosened the entrances of the soul, especially when some atrocity has already crowned the faith of the martyrs. So first, still trailing the tail, they apply it to the feelings, or lash as if at empty air: “Should innocent men suffer such things?”, so that you would think him a brother, or one of the better heathen. “Is a sect that harms no one to be treated so?” Then they drive it in: “Men are perishing without cause.” For “perishing”, and “without cause”, is the first thrust. Then they strike home: “But simple souls do not know what is written, and how, where and when and before whom one must confess; except that it is not simplicity but vanity, indeed madness, to die for God, when he is the one who is to save me. Will he who ought to save kill? Christ died for us once, was killed once, so that we might not be killed. If he asks for a return, does he too expect salvation from my death? Or does God demand men's blood, especially when he refuses that of bulls and goats? Certainly he prefers the sinner's repentance to his death. And how does he desire the death of those who are not sinners?” Whom would not these, and any other inventions of heretical poisons, fix, if not into ruin, then into doubt; if not into death, then into gall? But you, if faith is awake, dash your anathema on the spot on the scorpion, as with a sandal, and leave it dying in its own pus. But if it has sated its blow, the poison penetrates and hurries to the vitals; at once all the former senses grow numb, the blood of the mind congeals, the flesh of the spirit withers, nausea for the Name grows sharp. Now the mind itself looks for somewhere to vomit, and so the weakness, once struck, breathes out its wounded faith either into heresy or into the world.

And now, in the present state of affairs, it is the middle of the heat, the very dog-days of persecution, from the dog-headed one himself, no doubt. Some Christians fire has proved, some the sword, some the beasts; others, having meanwhile tasted martyrdom by clubs and claws besides, go hungry in prison. We ourselves, like hares marked for the hunt, are besieged from afar, and the heretics go about their usual business. So the time has warned me to mix with my pen a native antidote against our native little beasts. You who read it will drink it. … If the words of the Lord are sweet above honey and the honeycomb, from there come its spices. If God's promise flows with milk and honey, the things that lead there taste of it. But woe to those who turn sweet into bitter and light into darkness! For in the same way those who oppose martyrdoms, interpreting salvation as perdition, change sweet into bitter as much as light into darkness; and so, by preferring this most wretched life to that most blessed one, they put bitter for sweet as much as darkness for light.

But we must learn first not about the good of martyrdom but about the duty of it, and not about its usefulness before its necessity. The divine authority comes first: whether God willed and commanded anything of the kind, so that those who deny that it is good may not be persuaded that it is expedient until they have been subdued. It is fitting that heretics be compelled to their duty, not enticed. Hardness must be conquered, not coaxed. And surely whatever is proved to have been established and commanded by God will be sufficiently judged in advance to be excellent. Let the Gospels wait a little, while I set out their root, the Law, while I draw out God's will from the place where I also recognize God himself: “I am,” he says, “God, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. You shall have no other gods besides me. You shall not make for yourself a likeness of the things that are in heaven, and that are on the earth beneath, and that are in the sea under the earth. You shall not worship them nor serve them. For I am the Lord your God.” Likewise in the same Exodus: “You yourselves have seen that I spoke to you from heaven. You shall not make for yourselves gods of silver, and gods of gold you shall not make for yourselves.” In accordance with these, in Deuteronomy too: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your strength and with all your soul.” And again: “Do not forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall fear the Lord your God and serve him alone and cleave to him, and you shall swear by his name. You shall not go after strange gods, of the gods of the nations that are around you, because the Lord your God is jealous over you, lest he be angry and indignant and destroy you from the face of the earth.” And also, setting out the blessings and curses: “Blessings,” he says, “if you hear the commandments of the Lord your God, whatever I command you today, and do not stray from the way which I have commanded you, going off to serve other gods whom you do not know.” And concerning those gods, which are to be rooted out in every way: “You shall utterly destroy,” he says, “all the places in which the nations whom you will possess as an inheritance served their gods, on the mountains and hills and under the thick trees; and you shall dig up their altars, overthrow and smash their little statues, and cut down their groves, and burn the carved images of their gods with fire, and destroy their name from that place.” He presses further, for the time when they had entered the land of promise and destroyed its nations: “Take heed to yourself, that you do not follow them after they have been destroyed from before you, that you do not seek out their gods, saying, ‘As the nations do to their gods, so I too will do.’” And also: “If a prophet himself,” he says, “arises among you, or one who dreams a dream, and gives you a sign or a wonder, and it comes to pass, and he says, ‘Let us go and serve other gods whom you do not know,’ you shall not listen to the word of that prophet or dreamer, because the Lord your God is testing you, whether you fear God with all your heart and with all your soul. You shall go after the Lord your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and hear his voice, and serve him, and be joined to him. But that prophet or dreamer shall die; for he has spoken to lead you astray from the Lord your God.” And also under another head: “But if your brother, of your father or of your mother, or your son or your daughter, or the wife who is in your bosom, or the friend who is equal to your own soul, entreats you secretly, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ whom you do not know, nor did your fathers, of the gods of the nations that are around you, near or far, you shall not be willing to go with him, and you shall not listen to him. Your eye shall not spare him, nor shall you long for him, nor shall you save him; you shall surely inform against him. Your hands shall be upon him first to kill him, and the hands of your people afterwards, and you shall stone him, and he shall die, because he sought to turn you away from the Lord your God.” He adds also concerning cities, that if any of them was found to have gone over to other gods at the persuasion of wicked men, all its inhabitants should be killed, and everything in it made accursed, and all its spoil gathered into all its streets and burned with fire, with all its vessels and all the people, in the sight of the Lord God; “and it shall not be inhabitable,” he says, “for ever; it shall not be rebuilt any more, nor shall anything of its accursed things cleave to your hands, so that the Lord may turn from the indignation of his anger.” He also began the series of curses with the execration of idols: “Cursed is the man who makes a carved or molten abomination, the work of a craftsman's hands, and sets it up in secret.” In Leviticus, too: “Do not follow idols,” he says, “and you shall not make molten gods for yourselves. I am the Lord your God.” And elsewhere: “The sons of Israel are my servants, my children. These are they whom I brought out of the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. You shall not make for yourselves things made with hands, nor shall you set up for yourselves a carved statue, nor shall you place a stone as a landmark in your land. I am the Lord your God.”

And these first words were spoken through Moses, applying surely to all whom the Lord God of Israel should likewise bring out of the Egypt of a most superstitious world and out of the house of human slavery. But thereafter too every mouth of the prophets sounds with the words of the same God, who heaps up his same law by renewing the same precepts and proclaims nothing else first so emphatically as to beware of all making and worship of idols; as through David: “The gods of the nations are silver and gold; they have eyes and do not see, ears and do not hear, nostrils and do not smell, a mouth and do not speak, hands and do not handle, feet and do not walk. Those who make them and trust in them will be like them.”

Nor should I think it needs discussion whether God rightly forbids his name and honour to be made over to a lie, whether he rightly does not wish those whom he has torn away from the error of superstition to go back again into Egypt, whether he rightly does not allow those whom he has chosen for himself to depart from him. So neither will it be expected of us to reconsider whether he willed the discipline he chose to institute to be observed, and whether he rightly avenges its desertion when he willed it to be observed; since he would have instituted it in vain if he had not willed it to be observed, and would have willed it observed in vain if he had not willed to vindicate it. It follows, then, that I should prove these determinations of God against superstitions to have been both enforced and vindicated, since the whole rationale of martyrdoms will rest on them.

Moses was away with God on the mountain, when the people, impatient of his so necessary absence, sought to produce gods for themselves, by which they rather destroyed themselves. Aaron is pressed, and orders the earrings of their women to be put into the fire. For they were about to lose, to their own condemnation, the true ornaments of the ears, the words of God. The wise fire cast for them the image of a calf, branding them as having their heart where their treasure also was, namely in Egypt, which among other animals consecrates a certain ox too. So three thousand men, slain by their nearest kin because they had offended God, their nearest parent, dedicated both the beginnings and the deserts of transgression. In Numbers, when Israel had turned aside at Shittim, they go off to indulge their lust with the daughters of Moab; they are invited to the idols, so as to commit sexual immorality in spirit too; in short, they eat of their polluted offerings, then worship the gods of the nation and are initiated into Baal of Peor. For this idolatry too, the sister of adultery, twenty-three thousand, cut down by the swords of their own people, appeased the divine wrath. After the death of Joshua son of Nun they forsook the God of their fathers and served idols, the Baals and the Astartes; and the Lord in his anger delivered them into the hands of plunderers, and they were plundered by them and sold to their enemies, and they could not stand at all before the face of their enemies. Wherever they went, his hand was upon them for evil, and they were greatly distressed. After this God set Judges over them, whom we understand as Censors. But they did not persist in obeying these either. As soon as one of the judges had died, they went on to sin more than their fathers, going after the gods of others and serving and worshipping them. So the Lord was angry: “Since,” he says, “this nation has transgressed my covenant, which I made with their fathers, and has not listened to my voice, I too will not turn to remove a man from before them of the nations which Joshua left when he died.” And so through nearly all the annals of the judges and then of the kings, the strength of the surrounding nations being kept in reserve, Israel paid for the wrath of God by war and captivity and the yoke of foreigners, as often as they turned aside from him, above all into idolatry.

If, then, it is clear that idolatry has from the beginning been forbidden by so many and such great precepts, and never committed with impunity, as so many and such great examples show, and that no crime is reckoned so arrogant before God as a transgression of this kind, we ought readily to understand that the purpose of the divine warnings and executions was even then to support martyrdoms, not only as not to be doubted but as to be endured, since he had made room for them by forbidding idolatry. For otherwise martyrdoms would not happen. And surely he had laid down his authority in advance, willing those things to happen for which he had made room. For now we are stung about the will of God, and the scorpion redoubles the blow, denying this will, accusing this will, so as either to insinuate another god whose will this is not, or nonetheless to destroy ours, whose will it is, or to deny God's will altogether, if it cannot deny God himself. But we, who contend elsewhere about God and about the rest of the body of each heretical doctrine, now draw fixed lines in advance for a single kind of encounter, defending as the will of no other god than the God of Israel that will which made room for martyrdoms, both from the precepts by which idolatry was always forbidden and from the judgments by which it was punished. For if in keeping a precept I suffer violence, this will in a way be a precept of keeping the precept: that I suffer that through which I shall be able to keep the precept, namely the violence, whatever it may be, that threatens me as I guard against idolatry. And surely he who imposes a precept exacts obedience. He cannot, then, have been unwilling for those things to happen through which obedience will be established. It is laid down for me that I call no other god God, nor fashion a god even by speaking, with the tongue no less than with the hand, nor worship or in any way venerate another besides that One who so commands, whom I am also ordered to fear, lest I be forsaken by him, and to love with my whole being, so as to die for him. Serving as a soldier under this oath, I am challenged by the enemy. I am their match, unless I surrender to them. In defending this oath I fight it out in the battle line; I am wounded, cut down, killed. Who willed this end for his soldier, if not he who sealed him with such an oath?

You have, then, the will of my God. This blow has been met. Let us now consider another stroke, concerning the character of that will. It would be a long task to show that my God is good, which the Marcionites have already learned from us. Meanwhile it is enough that he is called God for it to be necessary to believe him good. For whoever presumes God to be evil cannot hold to both: he will have either to deny that he whom he has thought evil is God, or to call good him whom he has declared God. Good, then, will be the will also of him who will not be God unless he is good. The goodness of the very thing God has willed, martyrdom, I mean, will prove this too, because only one who is good has willed what is good. I contend that martyrdom is good in the sight of the same God by whom idolatry is both forbidden and punished. For martyrdom resists and opposes idolatry, and only good can resist and oppose evil. Not that I deny there is rivalry both of evils among themselves and of goods; but the case here is different. For martyrdom does not contend with idolatry out of some common rivalry but out of its own grace; for it frees from idolatry. What frees from evil, who will not declare good? What else is the opposition of idolatry and martyrdom but that of death and life? Martyrdom will be reckoned life in the same measure as idolatry is reckoned death. Whoever calls life an evil has death to call good.

This too is a perversity of men: to shake off what saves, to take up what destroys, to seek out what is dangerous, to avoid medicines, in short to desire to die sooner than to be cured. For many flee from the help of medicine: many are foolish, many timid and falsely modest. And certainly medicine has a kind of savagery, with the scalpel and the cautery and the burning of mustard; yet to be cut and burned and stretched and bitten is not evil for that reason, since it brings useful pains; nor will it be refused because it merely grieves, but applied because it grieves of necessity. The fruit excuses the horror of the work. Indeed the man who howls and groans and bellows under the doctor's hands will afterwards load those same hands with fees, proclaim them the best of craftsmen, and deny that they were cruel. So martyrdoms too rage, but for salvation. God too will be permitted to heal for eternal life by fires and swords and every harsh thing. You will even admire the physician in this, that he applies remedies whose qualities are almost equal to those of the complaints, helping as it were by a reversal, bringing relief through the very things from which one suffers. For he checks fevers by loading them further with heat, quenches burning by tormenting it rather with thirst, draws off the excess of bile with bitter little draughts, and stops a flow of blood by opening a little vein besides. But you will think God, and a jealous God at that, is to be blamed if he has chosen to contend with the cause and do good by rivalling the injury: to undo death by death, to scatter killing by killing, to dispel torments by torments, to dissipate punishments by punishments, to confer life by taking it away, to help the flesh by harming it, to save the soul by snatching it away. What you think perversity is reason; what you judge cruelty is grace. So, since God heals eternal things by momentary ones, magnify your God for your good; you have fallen into his hands, but you have fallen happily. He too has fallen into your sicknesses.

Man always makes work for the physician first; in short, he brought the danger of death on himself. He had received from his Lord, as from a physician, a quite useful rule for living according to the law: he might eat of everything and refrain only from one little tree, which the physician himself knew to be unsuitable for the time being. He listened to the one he preferred and broke his abstinence. He ate the forbidden thing and, glutted with transgression, suffered indigestion unto death, fully deserving to perish altogether, because he willed it. But the Lord, bearing with the fever of the offence until the medicine could be tempered in due time, gradually compounded remedies, all the disciplines of faith, themselves rivals of the fault, cancelling the word of death by the word of life, filing away the hearing of transgression by the hearing of devotion. So even when that physician commands us to die, he shuts out the lethargy of death. Why does man now resent suffering from the remedy what he did not resent suffering then from the fault? Does he dislike being killed for salvation who did not dislike being killed for perdition? Will he feel sick at the antidote who gaped for the poison?

But if God had set martyrdoms before us under the name of a contest, in which we might try our strength against the adversary, so that man might now steadfastly overthrow the one by whom he was willingly overthrown, here too it is God's generosity rather than his harshness that presides. For having torn man out of the devil's throat through faith, he willed him now through courage also to trample on him, so that he might not only have escaped the enemy but also have vanquished him. He who had called us to salvation was pleased to invite us to glory as well, so that we who rejoice at being freed may also exult at being crowned. With what favour the world celebrates those games, the contentious festivals and superstitious contests of the Greeks, both of their religions and of their pleasures, Africa too has now been allowed to see. The individual cities still keep pestering Carthage with congratulations on being granted the Pythian games after its stadium had grown old. So among them it has been thought most fitting to hold a trial of pursuits, to weigh the skills of body and voice for excellence, with the prize as informer, the show as judge, and pleasure as the verdict. Where the fights are bare, wounds are not lacking: fists shake, heels butt, gloves mangle, whips lacerate. Yet no one will be found reproaching the president of the games for exposing men to violence. Actions for injury stay outside the stadium. But consider what those bruises and gore and weals trade for: crowns, of course, and glory and dowry, public privileges, civic pensions, portraits, statues, and, such as the world can offer, eternity from fame and resurrection from memory. The boxer himself does not complain that he is in pain, for he wants it; the crown presses on the wounds, the palm hides the blood; he swells more with victory than with injury. Will you think him hurt whom you see happy? Not even the loser will reproach the president of the games with his fall. Will it be unbecoming for God to bring his own arts and disciplines out into the open, into this arena of the world, as a spectacle to men and angels and all the powers? To test flesh and soul for steadfastness and endurance? To give to this one the palm, to this one honour, to that one citizenship, to that one pensions? Even to reject some and remove them in disgrace after punishment? No doubt you prescribe to God at what times or in what ways or places he is to judge his household, as though it did not befit the judge also to judge in advance.

What now, if he had exposed faith to martyrdoms not under the name of a contest but for its own advancement: ought it not to have some crowning of hope, toward which it could press its effort and on which it could hang its prayer, where it might strive to rise, since earthly offices too are eager for promotion? Or how are there many mansions with the Father, if not according to the variety of merits? How will star differ from star in glory, except by the diversity of their rays? Further, if for this reason some extension of brightness also suited the loftiness of faith, such a gain ought to have been something that cost much: labour, torture, torment, death. But consider the compensation, when flesh and soul are paid out, than which nothing in man is dearer, the one the hand of God, the other his breath: the very things are paid out for advancement whose advancement it is, the very things are spent which become gain, the price and the reward are the same. God had also foreseen other weaknesses of the human condition: the snares of the adversary, the deceits of things, the nets of the world, faith endangered even after the bath, many perishing again after salvation, who had soiled the wedding garment, who had not provided oil for their lamps, who had to be sought through mountains and forests and carried back on the shoulders. He therefore set up second comforts and last defences: the combat of martyrdom and the bath of blood that follows. Of its happiness David says: “Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered. Blessed is he to whom God has not imputed sin.” For properly nothing can now be reckoned against martyrs, who in that bath lay down life itself. So “love covers a multitude of sins”: love which, loving God with all its strength, with which it fights in martyrdom, and with all its soul, which it lays down for God, forges a man into a martyr. Will you call these remedies, counsels, judgments, and even spectacles of God cruelty? Does God covet man's blood? And yet I would dare to say he does, if man too covets the kingdom of God, if man too covets sure salvation, if man too covets a second regeneration. No exchange is invidious in which the reckoning of favour or of injury is shared.

Let the scorpion still strike, brandishing a murderous God: I shall certainly shudder at the foul breath of blasphemy stinking from a heretic's mouth; but I shall embrace even such a God, with confidence in the reason by which he himself declared himself more than a murderer, in the person of his Wisdom, by the voice of Solomon. “Wisdom,” he says, “has slaughtered her children.” Sophia is wisdom. Wisely, surely, she slaughtered them, since it was for life; and reasonably, since it was for glory. O ingenious parricide! O artful crime! O argument of cruelty, which kills so that the one it has killed may not die! And what follows then? “Wisdom is sung with hymns at the ways out”: for the departures of martyrs are sung. “Wisdom acts boldly in the streets”: for she does well to slaughter her children. “On the tops of the walls she speaks with confidence,” when indeed, according to Isaiah, one cries out, “I am God's”; and another shouts, “In the name of Jacob”; and another writes, “In the name of Israel.” O good mother! I too wish to be numbered among her children, so as to be killed by her; I wish to be killed, so as to become her son. But does she only slaughter her children, or torture them too? For I hear God say elsewhere as well: “I will burn them as gold is burned, and I will test them as silver is tested”: surely through the tortures of fires and punishments, through martyrdoms that examine faith. The apostle too knows what kind of God he has described when he writes: “If God did not spare his own Son, but delivered him up for us, how has he not also with him given us all things?” You see how divine Wisdom slaughtered even her own proper Son, the firstborn and only-begotten, who was indeed to live, and even to bring the rest back to life. I can say with the Wisdom of God: it is Christ who gave himself up for our sins. So Wisdom has even slain herself. Words have meaning not by their sound alone but by their sense, and they are to be heard not only with the ears but with the mind. He who does not understand believes God cruel. And yet for the one who does not understand, a statement has also been set down to restrain the rashness of understanding otherwise: “For who,” it says, “has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counsellor, to instruct him, or who has shown him the way of understanding?”

But the world, to be sure, has been permitted to appease the Diana of the Scythians, or the Mercury of the Gauls, or the Saturn of the Africans with human victims; and in Latium to this day human blood is given to Jupiter to taste in the middle of the city; and no one questions it, or fails to presume some reason, or an inscrutable will of his god. If our God too had demanded martyrdoms for himself under the name of his own sacrifice, who would have reproached him with a deadly religion, mournful rites, an altar that is a pyre, and a priest who is an undertaker, and not rather have reckoned happy the one whom God had devoured?