The Testimony of the Soul

Great research and far greater memory are needed for the study, if anyone wishes to excerpt from the most accepted writings of the philosophers or poets or of any teachers of worldly learning and wisdom testimonies to the Christian truth, so that its rivals and persecutors may be convicted from their own proper documents, both of error toward themselves and of injustice toward us. Some indeed, in whom the labor of research and the retentiveness of memory from their former literary studies have persisted, have composed little works among us in this way: recording and attesting on each point the reasoning, origin, tradition, and arguments of the opinions, by which it may be recognized that we have taken up nothing either new or monstrous for which even common and public literature does not plead in our support, whether we have rejected some error or admitted some equity. But human hardness in unbelief has not inclined its trust even to its own teachers, otherwise most approved and most select, wherever they stumble into arguments for the Christian defense. Then the poets are foolish, when they portray the gods with human passions and fables; then the philosophers are harsh, when they knock at the doors of truth. A man will be held wise and prudent only so far as he has spoken almost as a Christian; whereas if he has affected any prudence or wisdom, whether by spitting on ceremonies or by convicting the world, he is branded as a Christian. Now, therefore, we will have nothing to do with the literature and teaching of a perverted happiness, which is believed rather in what is false than in what is true. Let them see to it, if some have spoken of the one and only God. Indeed, let nothing at all be reported that a Christian may recognize, lest he be able to reproach them with it. For even what has been reported not all know, and those who know are not confident that it is established. So far are people from assenting to our writings, to which no one comes unless he is already a Christian. I call a new witness, or rather one better known than all literature, more discussed than all teaching, more widespread than every publication, greater than the whole man: that is, the whole of what belongs to man. Stand in the midst, O soul. Whether you are a divine and eternal thing, as many philosophers hold, the less will you lie; or not divine at all, since you are mortal, as seems to Epicurus alone, the less ought you to lie; whether you are received from heaven or conceived from earth, whether you are composed of numbers or of atoms, whether you begin with the body or are introduced after the body, from wherever and in whatever manner, you make man a rational animal, most capable of perception and knowledge. But I do not call upon you as you are when, formed in the schools, trained in libraries, fed in the academies and porches of Athens, you belch out wisdom. I address you simple and rough and unpolished and untaught, such as they have you who have you alone, that very soul, all of you, from the crossroads, the street corner, the weaving shop. It is your inexperience I need, since no one believes your little bit of experience. I demand those things which you bring with you into man, which you have learned to perceive either from yourself or from your author, whoever he is. You are not, so far as I know, Christian; for a soul is accustomed to become Christian, not to be born so. Yet Christians now demand testimony from you, an outsider, against your own, so that they may be ashamed even before you, because they hate and mock us on account of those very things which now hold you as their accomplice.

We do not please when we proclaim God, the one God under this one name, from whom all things are and under whom the universe is. Give your testimony, if you know it to be so. For we hear you too, openly and with full freedom, which is not allowed to us, at home and abroad, speaking thus: “What God has given,” and “If God wills.” By that expression you both signify that there is someone, and confess that all power belongs to him to whose will you look; at the same time you deny that the others are gods, while you call them by their own names: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Minerva. For you affirm him alone as God whom you name simply “God,” so that, when you do sometimes call those others gods, you seem to have used the word as something foreign, as if on loan. Nor is the nature of the God whom we proclaim hidden from you. “God is good,” “God does good” is your saying. Plainly you add, “But man is evil,” that is, by a contrary statement, reproaching man indirectly and figuratively as evil precisely because he has departed from the good God. Again, since with the God of goodness and kindness every blessing is among us the highest sacred bond of our discipline and way of life, you say “God bless you” as easily as a Christian must; and when you turn the blessing of God into a curse, by that very saying you confess, as we do, that all his power over us stands firm. There are some who, while not denying God, certainly do not consider him an overseer and arbiter and judge; in this above all they reject us, who fly over to this discipline for fear of the judgment that is preached. They honor God, as they think, by freeing him from the cares of watching and the troubles of punishing, and they do not even ascribe anger to him. “For if God is angry,” they say, “he is corruptible and subject to passion; and what suffers and is corrupted can also undergo destruction, which God does not undergo.” Yet the same people elsewhere confess that the soul is divine and bestowed by God, and so fall into the testimony of the soul itself, which is to be turned against their former opinion. For if the soul is either divine or given by God, it doubtless knows its giver; and if it knows him, it certainly also fears him, and fears him so much, after all, as its author. Or does it not fear him whom it would rather have gracious than angry? Where, then, does the soul's natural fear of God come from, if God does not know how to be angry? How is one feared who cannot be offended? What is feared except anger? Where does anger come from except from punishment? Where does punishment come from except from judgment? Where does judgment come from except from power? Whose power is supreme except God's alone? From this, then, O soul, from your consciousness, it comes readily to you, at home and abroad, with no one mocking or forbidding, to proclaim: “God sees all,” and “I commend it to God,” and “God will repay,” and “God will judge between us.” Where do you get this, you who are not Christian? And indeed very often, crowned with the fillet of Ceres, clad in the scarlet cloak of Saturn, in the linen of the goddess Isis, in the very temples, in short, you call on God as judge. You stand under Aesculapius, you adorn Juno in bronze, you … Minerva's helmet with dark shapes, and you call none of the gods present to witness. In your own forum you appeal to a judge from elsewhere; in your own temples you allow another God. O testimony of the truth, which makes you a witness for the Christians even in the presence of demons!

Indeed, when we affirm that demons exist (as though we did not also prove it, we who alone drive them out of bodies), some follower of Chrysippus mocks. Your curses answer both that they exist and that they are objects of loathing. You call a man a “demon” who is offensive, whether through filth or malice or insolence or any stain which we assign to demons, to the point of necessary hatred. Finally, in every vexation, contempt, and detestation you pronounce the name of Satan, whom we call the angel of wickedness, the artificer of all error, the corrupter of the whole world, by whom man was deceived from the beginning so as to transgress the commandment of God, and, therefore given over to death, thereafter made the whole race, infected from his seed, the transmitter of his condemnation too. You sense, then, your destroyer; and although only Christians, or whatever sect is with the Lord, know him, you too know him while you hate him.

Now as to the opinion of yours that is more necessary, inasmuch as it concerns your very state: we affirm that you remain after the end of life and await the day of judgment, and according to your deserts are assigned either to torment or to refreshment, both everlasting. To bear these, your former substance, and the matter and memory of the same person, must necessarily return to you, both because you could feel nothing evil or good without the faculty of the flesh that can suffer, and because there is no reason for judgment without the presence of the very one who deserved the suffering of judgment. This Christian opinion, though far more honorable than the Pythagorean, which does not transfer you into beasts; though fuller than the Platonic, which even gives back to you the dowry of the body; though weightier than the Epicurean, which defends you from destruction: yet because of its name it is reckoned mere vanity and stupidity and, as they say, presumption. But we do not blush if our presumption will be yours too. First, when you remember someone who has died, you call him “poor fellow,” certainly not as one snatched from the good of life, but as one already assigned to punishment and judgment. At other times, however, you call the dead “free from care.” You profess both the trouble of life and the benefit of death. You call them “free from care,” moreover, when now and then you go out beyond the gate with delicacies and dainties, making an offering rather to yourself at the tombs, or return from the tombs somewhat the worse for drink. But I require your sober opinion. You call the dead “poor fellows” when you speak from your own mind, when you are far from them. For at their banquet, as though they were present and reclining with you, you could not reproach them with their lot; you have to flatter those on whose account you live more merrily. Do you then call him “poor fellow” who feels nothing? What of the fact that you curse him as one who feels, when you recall his memory with the sting of some offense? You pray that the earth may lie heavy on him, and torment in the underworld for his ashes. Likewise, on the good side, for one to whom you owe thanks, you pray refreshment for his bones and ashes, and desire that he may rest well in the underworld. If there is no suffering for you after death, if there is no persistence of sensation, if in short you are nothing once you have left the body, why do you lie against yourself, as if you could suffer anything further? Indeed, why do you fear death at all, if there is nothing for you to fear after death, since there is nothing to experience after death? For even if it can be said that death is feared not because it threatens anything further but because it cuts off the advantage of life, yet since you likewise leave behind the far more numerous disadvantages of life, you dissolve the fear by gaining the weightier part, and the loss of goods is no longer to be feared, being balanced by another good, namely peace from troubles. What frees us from everything to be feared is not to be feared. If you fear to depart from life because you know it to be very good, surely you ought not to fear death, which you do not know to be bad. But when you fear it, you know it is bad. And you would not know it to be bad, nor fear it, unless you knew that there is something after death that makes it bad, so that you fear it. Let us leave aside now the natural way of fearing death: let no one fear what he cannot escape. From the other side I engage the more joyful hope after death. For in almost all there is an inborn desire for fame after death. It would take long to recount the Curtii and the Reguli, or the Greek men, whose praises for despising death for the sake of posthumous fame are innumerable. Who today is not so eager to have his memory often recalled after death that he preserves his name either by works of literature or by the simple praise of his character or by the display of his very tomb? Whence does the soul today aim at something it wants after death and prepare so earnestly what it will enjoy after its departure? It would certainly care nothing about the future if it knew nothing about the future. But perhaps you are surer about sensation after your departure than about the resurrection some day, of which we are branded presumptuous champions. Yet this too is proclaimed by the soul. For if anyone asks about someone long dead as if he were alive, it comes readily to hand to say, “He has gone, and he must come back.”

These testimonies of the soul are as simple as they are true, as common as they are simple, as universal as they are common, as natural as they are universal, as divine as they are natural. I do not think they can seem trivial and ridiculous to anyone who reflects on the majesty of nature, from which the authority of the soul is reckoned. As much as you grant to the teacher, so much will you award to the pupil. Nature is the teacher, the soul the pupil. Whatever the one has taught or the other has learned has been handed down by God, the teacher, that is, of the teacher herself. What the soul can presume about its chief instructor, you can judge from the soul that is in you. Perceive her who makes you perceive. Consider her a prophet in presentiments, an augur in omens, a foreseer in events. Is it any wonder if, given by God to man, she knows how to divine? Just as little a wonder if she knows him by whom she was given. Even when deceived by the adversary, she remembers her author, his goodness and his decree, her own end, and the adversary himself. So is it any wonder if, given by God, she sings the same things that God has given his own to know? But whoever has not thought such outbursts of the soul to be the teaching of nature and things silently entrusted to an inborn and innate consciousness will say rather that the habit, and as it were the vice, of speaking this way has been strengthened by the opinions of published literature spread abroad among the common people. Surely the soul is earlier than the letter, speech earlier than the book, thought earlier than the pen, and man himself earlier than the philosopher and the poet. Must we believe, then, that before literature and its spreading abroad people lived mute of such utterances? Did no one speak of God and his goodness, no one of death, no one of the underworld? Speech was beggarly, I suppose; indeed there could have been none at all, if those things were lacking even then without which even today it cannot be richer, fuller, or wiser, if the things that are so easy, so constant, so near today, born as it were on the very lips, did not exist in the past, before letters sprouted in the world, before Mercury, I suppose, was born. And whence, I ask, did letters themselves come to know, and to spread for the use of speech, what no mind had ever conceived, no tongue uttered, no ear received? But indeed, since the divine Scriptures, which are in the keeping of us or of the Jews, into whose wild olive we have been grafted, precede worldly literature by a great age (or, of some of it, by at least a modest one), as we have shown in its place to demonstrate their trustworthiness; if the soul took these sayings from literature, we must surely believe she took them from ours, not yours, because for instructing the soul the earlier are more effective than the later, which themselves were waiting to be instructed by the earlier. And even if we grant that she was instructed from yours, the tradition still belongs to its first source, and whatever you have happened to take from ours and hand on is wholly ours. This being so, it matters little whether the consciousness of the soul was formed by God or by the writings of God. Why then, man, will you have it that these sayings came from the human opinions of your literature into the hardened habit of common use?

Believe, then, your own writings, and of our commentaries believe the divine ones all the more; but, from the judgment of the soul itself, believe nature equally. Choose which of these you will observe as the more faithful sister of truth. If you doubt your own writings, neither God nor nature lies. That you may believe both nature and God, believe the soul; so it will come about that you believe yourself. She certainly is the one whom you value as much as she makes you of value, to whom you wholly belong, who is everything to you, without whom you can neither live nor die, for whose sake you neglect God. For when you fear to become a Christian, consult her. Why does she name God while worshiping another? Why, when she brands spirits as accursed, does she pronounce them demons? Why does she call heaven to witness and curse by the earth? Why does she serve in one place and call upon an avenger in another? Why does she pass judgment on the dead? Why does she have the words of Christians, whom she does not wish either to hear or to see? Why has she either given those words to us or received them from us? Why has she either taught or learned them? You hold suspect this agreement in speech amid such disagreement in way of life. You are foolish if you attribute such things to this language alone, or to Greek, which are thought to be close to each other, so as to deny the universality of nature. The soul does not fall from heaven for Latins and Greeks alone. Man is one in all nations, the name differs; the soul is one, the voice differs; the spirit is one, the sound differs; each nation has its own speech, but the substance of speech is common. God is everywhere and the goodness of God is everywhere; the demon is everywhere and the cursing of the demon is everywhere; the invocation of divine judgment is everywhere; death is everywhere and the awareness of death is everywhere; and the testimony is everywhere. Every soul by its own right proclaims aloud what we are not allowed even to mutter. Rightly, then, is every soul both defendant and witness: defendant for error as far as she is witness for the truth; and she will stand before the courts of God on the day of judgment with nothing to say. “You proclaimed God and did not seek him; you loathed demons and worshiped them; you appealed to the judgment of God and did not believe it existed; you anticipated the punishments of the underworld and took no precautions; you knew the taste of the Christian name and persecuted the Christian name.”