THE EARLY CHURCH FATHERS WRITINGS - VOLUME 5
Tertullian in Defence of the Faith, on the Soul and on the Resurrection, with the Fragments of Clement
c. AD 190 – 220

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Texts are public domain except where marked in Sources and Credits.

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INTRODUCTION TO THIS VOLUME
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HOW THIS BOOK IS ARRANGED

This is the fifth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church in
order of date, from the generation after the apostles down to the eighth century. This
volume opens with the shorter works of Clement of Alexandria, and then begins the writings
of Tertullian of Carthage.

Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any
passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section
numbers.

THE TRANSLATIONS

The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for
SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation.
In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been
altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the
back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the
works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations.

IN THIS VOLUME

Tertullian wrote at Carthage in North Africa from about AD 197 to about AD 220 and was the
first great Christian author in Latin. His writings run through the whole life of the
African church: its defence before the Roman magistrates, its fight against false
teaching, and its rules for worship and daily conduct. They are divided between this
volume and the two that follow.

The first part of this volume gathers the writings in defence of the faith and on
martyrdom, beginning with the Apology, which he addressed to the rulers of the Roman
provinces. The second part gathers his teaching on the soul, on the flesh of Christ and on
the resurrection of the body, which he wrote against the Gnostic denial of the flesh.

Later in life Tertullian joined the Montanists, a movement that claimed fresh prophecy and
a stricter discipline. Some works in this volume, such as On Flight in Persecution, come
from that later period; the introduction to each work notes what is known.

DATES AND AUTHORSHIP

Dates are approximate and are debated by scholars. Each work begins with a short
introduction that states what is known about its author and its date, and what is
uncertain.


EXCERPTS OF THEODOTUS
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EXCERPTS OF THEODOTUS Clement of Alexandria

c. AD 150–215

Christian teacher in Alexandria who engaged Greek learning.

EXCERPTS OF THEODOTUS

1 Excerpts of Theodotus; or, Selections from the Prophetic Scriptures. I. Those around
Sedrach, Misak, and Abednago in the furnace of fire say as they praise God, “Bless, ye
heavens, the Lord; praise and exalt Him for ever;” then, “Bless, ye angels, the Lord;”
then, “Bless the Lord, all ye waters that are above heaven.” So the Scriptures assign the
heavens and the waters to the class of pure powers as is shown in Genesis. Suitably, then,
inasmuch as “power” is used with a variety of meaning, Daniel adds, “Let every power bless
the Lord;” then, further, “Bless the Lord, sun and moon;” and, “Bless the Lord, ye stars
of heaven. Bless the Lord, all ye that worship Him; praise and confess the God of gods,
for His mercy is for ever.” It is written in Daniel, on the occasion of the three children
praising in the furnace. II. “Blessed art Thou, who lookest on the abysses as Thou sittest
on the cherubim,” says Daniel, in agreement with Enoch, who said, “And I saw all sorts of
matter.” For the abyss, which is in its essence boundless, is bounded by the power of God.
These material essences then, from which the separate genera and their species are
produced, are called abysses; since you would not call the water alone the abyss, although
matter is allegorically called water, the abyss.

2 III. “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth,” both terrestrial and
celestial things. And that this is true, the Lord said to Osee, “Go, take to thyself a
wife of fornication, and children of fornication: because the land committing fornication,
shall commit fornication, departing from the Lord.” For it is not the element of earth
that he speaks of, but those that dwell in the element, those who have an earthly
disposition. IV. And that the Son is the beginning or head, Hosea teaches clearly: “And it
shall be, that in the place in which it was said to them, Ye are not my people, they shall
be called the children of the living God: and the children of Judah and the children of
Israel shall be gathered to the same place, and they shall place over them one head, and
they shall come up out of the land; for great is the day of Jezreel.” For whom one
believes, him He chooses. But one believes the Son, who is the head; wherefore also he
said in addition: “But I will have mercy on the sons of Judah, and will save them by the
Lord their God.” Now the Saviour who saves is the Son of God. He is then the head.

3 V. The Spirit by Osee says, “I am your Instructor;” “Blow ye the trumpet upon the hills
of the Lord; sound upon the high places.” And is not baptism itself, which is the sign of
regeneration, an escape from matter, by the teaching of the Saviour, a great impetuous
stream, ever rushing on and bearing us along? The Lord accordingly, leading us out of
disorder, illumines us by bringing us into the light, which is shadowless and is material
no longer. VI. This river and sea of matter two prophets cut asunder and divided by the
power of the Lord, the matter being bounded, through both divisions of the water. Famous
leaders both, by whom the signs were believed, they complied with the will of God, so that
the righteous man may proceed from matter, having journeyed through it first. On the one
of these commanders also was imposed the name of our Saviour.

4 VII. Now, regeneration is by water and spirit, as was all creation: “For the Spirit of
God moved on the abyss.” And for this reason the Saviour was baptized, though not Himself
needing to be so, in order that He might consecrate the whole water for those who were
being regenerated. Thus it is not the body only, but the soul, that we cleanse. It is
accordingly a sign of the sanctifying of our invisible part, and of the straining off from
the new and spiritual creation of the unclean spirits that have got mixed up with the
soul. VIII. “The water above the heaven.” Since baptism is performed by water and the
Spirit as a protection against the twofold fire,—that which lays hold of what is visible,
and that which lays hold of what is invisible; and of necessity, there being an immaterial
element of water and a material, is it a protection against the twofold fire. And the
earthly water cleanses the body; but the heavenly water, by reason of its being immaterial
and invisible, is an emblem of the Holy Spirit, who is the purifier of what is invisible,
as the water of the Spirit, as the other of the body.

5 IX. God, out of goodness, hath mingled fear with goodness. For what is beneficial for
each one, that He also supplies, as a physician to a sick man, as a father to his
insubordinate child: “For he that spareth his rod hateth his son.” And the Lord and His
apostles walked in the midst of fear and labours. When, then, the affliction is sent in
the person of a righteous man, it is either from the Lord rebuking him for a sin committed
before, or guarding him on account of the future, or not preventing by the exercise of His
power an assault from without,—for some good end to him and to those near, for the sake of
example. X. Now those that dwell in a corrupt body, like those who sail in an old ship, do
not lie on their back, but are ever praying, stretching their hands to God.

6 XI. The ancients were exceedingly distressed, unless they had always some suffering in
the body. For they were afraid, that if they received not in this world the punishment of
the sins which, in numbers through ignorance, accompany those that are in the flesh, they
would in the other world suffer the penalty all at once. So that they preferred curative
treatment here. What is to be dreaded is, then, not external disease, but sins, for which
disease comes, and disease of the soul, not of the body: “For all flesh is grass,” and
corporeal and external good things are temporary; “but the things which are unseen are
eternal.” 7 XII. As to knowledge, some elements of it we already possess; others, by what
we do possess, we firmly hope to attain. For neither have we attained all, nor do we lack
all. But we have received, as it were, an earnest of the eternal blessings, and of the
ancestral riches. The provisions for the Lord’s way are the Lord’s beatitudes. For He
said: “Seek,” and anxiously seek, “the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added
to you: for the Father knoweth what things ye have need of.” Thus He limits not only our
occupations, but our cares. For He says: “Ye cannot, by taking thought, add aught to your
stature.” For God knows well what it is good for us to have and what to want. He wishes,
therefore, that we, emptying ourselves of worldly cares, should be filled with that which
is directed towards God. “For we groan, desiring to be clothed upon with that which is
incorruptible, before putting off corruption.” For when faith is shed abroad, unbelief is
nonplussed. Similarly also with knowledge and righteousness. We must therefore not only
empty the soul, but fill it with God. For no longer is there evil in it, since that has
been made to cease; nor yet is there good, since it has not yet received good. But what is
neither good nor evil is nothing. “For to the swept and empty house return,” if none of
the blessings of salvation has been put in, the unclean spirit that dwelt there before,
taking with him seven other unclean spirits. Wherefore, after emptying the soul of what is
evil, we must fill with the good God that which is His chosen dwelling-place. For when the
empty rooms are filled, then follows the seal, that the sanctuary may be guarded for God.

8 XIII. “By two and three witnesses every word is established.” By Father, and Son, and
Holy Spirit, by whose witness and help the prescribed commandments ought to be kept. XIV.
Fasting, according to the signification of the word, is abstinence from food. Now food
makes us neither more righteous nor less. But mystically it shows that, as life is
maintained in individuals by sustenance, and want of sustenance is the token of death; so
also ought we to fast from worldly things, that we may die to the world, and after that,
by partaking of divine sustenance, live to God. Especially does fasting empty the soul of
matter, and make it, along with the body, pure and light for the divine words. Worldly
food is, then, the former life and sins; but the divine food is faith, hope, love,
patience, knowledge, peace, temperance. For “blessed are they that hunger and thirst
after” God’s “righteousness; for they shall be filled.” The soul, but not the body, it is
which is susceptible of this craving.

9 XV. The Saviour showed to the believing apostles prayer to be stronger than faith in the
case of a demoniac, whom they could not cleanse, when He said, Such things are
accomplished by prayer. He who has believed has obtained forgiveness of sins from the
Lord; but he who has attained knowledge, inasmuch as he no longer sins, obtains from
himself the forgiveness of the rest. XVI. For as cures, and prophecies, and signs are
performed by the agency of men, God working in them, so also is Gnostic teaching. For God
shows His power through men. And the prophecy rightly says, “I will send to them a man who
will save them.” Accordingly He sends forth at one time prophets, at another apostles, to
be saviours of men. Thus God does good by the agency of men. For it is not that God can do
some things, and cannot do others: He is never powerless in anything. No more are some
things done with, and some things against His will; and some things by Him, and some
things by another. But He even brought us into being by means of men, and trained us by
means of men.

10 XVII. God made us, having previously no existence. For if we had a previous existence,
we must have known where we were, and how and why we came hither. But if we had no pre-
existence, then God is the sole author of our creation. As, then, He made us who had no
existence; so also, now that we are made, He saves us by His own grace, if we show
ourselves worthy and susceptible; if not, He will let us pass to our proper end. For He is
Lord both of the living and the dead. XVIII. But see the power of God, not only in the
case of men, in bringing to existence out of non-existence, and making them when brought
into being grow up according to the progress of the time of life, but also in saving those
who believe, in a way suitable to each individual. And now He changes both hours, and
times, and fruits, and elements. For this is the one God, who has measured both the
beginning and the end of events suitably to each one.

11 XIX. Advancing from faith and fear to knowledge, man knows how to say Lord, Lord; but
not as His slave, he has learned to say, Our Father. Having set free the spirit of
bondage, which produces fear, and advanced by love to adoption, he now reverences from
love Him whom he feared before. For he no longer abstains from what he ought to abstain
from out of fear, but out of love clings to the commandments. “The Spirit itself,” it is
said, “beareth witness when we cry, Abba, Father.” XX. Now the Lord with His precious
blood redeems us, freeing us from our old bitter masters, that is, our sins, on account of
which the spiritual powers of wickedness ruled over us. Accordingly He leads us into the
liberty of the Father,—sons that are co-heirs and friends. “For,” says the Lord, “they
that do the will of my Father are my brethren and fellow-heirs.” “Call no man, therefore,
father to yourselves on earth.” For it is masters that are on earth. But in heaven is the
Father, of whom is the whole family, both in heaven and on earth. For love rules willing
hearts, but fear the unwilling. One kind of fear is base; but the other, leading us as a
pedagogue to good, brings us to Christ, and is saving.

12 XXI. Now if one has a conception of God, it by no means corresponds with His
worthiness. For what can the worthiness of God be? But let him, as far as is possible,
conceive of a great and incomprehensible and most beautiful light; inaccessible,
comprehending all good power, all comely virtue; caring for all, compassionate,
passionless, good; knowing all things, foreknowing all things, pure, sweet, shining,
stainless. XXII. Since the movement of the soul is self-originated, the grace of God
demands from it what the soul possesses, willingness as its contribution to salvation. For
the soul wishes to be its own good; which the Lord, however, gives it. For it is not
devoid of sensation so as to be carried along like a body. Having is the result of taking,
and taking of willing and desiring; and keeping hold of what one has received, of the
exercise of care and of ability. Wherefore God has endowed the soul with free choice, that
He may show it its duty, and that it choosing, may receive and retain.

13 XXIII. As through the body the Lord spake and healed, so also formerly by the prophets,
and now by the apostles and teachers. For the Church is the minister of the Lord’s power.
Thence He then assumed humanity, that by it He might minister to the Father’s will. And at
all times, the God who loves humanity invests Himself with man for the salvation of
men,—in former times with the prophets, and now with the Church. For it is fitting that
like should minister to like, in order to a like salvation. XXIV. For we are of the
earth.…Cæsar is the prince, for the time being, whose earthly image is the old man, to
which he has returned. To him, then, we are to render the earthly things, which we bore in
the image of the earthly, and the things of God to God. For each one of the passions is on
us as a letter, and stamp, and sign. Now the Lord marks us with another stamp, and with
other names and letters, faith instead of unbelief, and so forth. Thus we are translated
from what is material to what is spiritual, “having borne the image of the heavenly.”

14 XXV. John says: “I indeed baptize you with water, but there cometh after me He that
baptizeth with the Spirit and fire.” But He baptized no one with fire. But some, as
Heraclius says, marked with fire the ears of those who were sealed; understanding so the
apostolic saying, “For His fan is in His hand, to purge His floor: and He will gather the
wheat into the garner; but the chaff He will burn with fire unquenchable.” There is
joined, then, the expression “by fire” to that “by the Spirit;” since He separates the
wheat from the chaff, that is, from the material husk, by the Spirit; and the chaff is
separated, being fanned by the wind: so also the Spirit possesses a power of separating
material forces. Since, then, some things are produced from what is unproduced and
indestructible,—that is, the germs of life,—the wheat also is stored, and the material
part, as long as it is conjoined with the superior part, remains; when separated from it,
it is destroyed; for it had its existence in another thing. This separating element, then,
is the Spirit, and the destroying element is the fire: and material fire is to be
understood. But since that which is saved is like wheat, and that which grows in the soul
like chaff, and the one is incorporeal, and that which is separated is material; to the
incorporeal He opposes spirit, which is rarefied and pure—almost more so than mind; and to
the material He opposes fire, not as being evil or bad, but as strong and capable of
cleansing away evil. For fire is conceived as a good force and powerful, destructive of
what is baser, and conservative of what is better. Wherefore this fire is by the prophets
called wise.

15 XXVI. Thus also, then, when God is called “a consuming fire,” it is because a name and
sign, not of wickedness, but of power, is to be selected. For as fire is the most potent
of the elements, and masters all things; so also God is all-powerful and almighty, who is
able to hold, to create, to make, to nourish, to make grow, to save, having power of body
and soul. As, then, fire is superior to the elements, so is the Almighty Ruler to gods,
and powers, and principalities. The power of fire is twofold: one power conduces to the
production and maturing of fruits and of animals, of which the sun is the image; and the
other to consumption and destruction, as terrestrial fire. When, then, God is called a
consuming fire, He is called a mighty and resistless power, to which nothing is
impossible, but which is able to destroy.

16 Respecting such a power, also, the Saviour says, “I came to send fire upon the earth,”
indicating a power to purify what is holy, but destructive, as they say, of what is
material; and, as we should say, disciplinary. Now fear pertains to fire, and diffusion to
light. 17 XXVII. Now the more ancient men did not write, as they neither wished to
encroach on the time devoted to attention bestowed on what they handed down, in the way of
teaching, by the additional attention bestowed on writing, nor spent the time for
considering what was to be said on writing. And, perhaps convinced that the function of
composition and the department of teaching did not belong to the same cast of mind, they
gave way to those who had a natural turn for it. For in the case of a speaker, the stream
of speech flows unchecked and impetuous, and you may catch it up hastily. But that which
is always tested by readers, meeting with strict examination, is thought worthy of the
utmost pains, and is, so to speak, the written confirmation of oral instruction, and of
the voice so wafted along to posterity by written composition. For that which was
committed in trust to the elders, speaking in writing, uses the writer’s help to hand
itself down to those who are to read it. As, then, the magnet, repelling other matter,
attracts iron alone by reason of affinity; so also books, though many read them, attract
those alone who are capable of comprehending them. For the word of truth is to some
“foolishness,” and to others a “stumbling-block;” but to a few “wisdom.” So also is the
power of God found to be. But far from the Gnostic be envy. For it is for this reason also
that he asks whether it be worse to give to the unworthy, or not commit to the worthy; and
runs the risk, from his abundant love of communicating, not only to every one who is
qualified, but sometimes also to one unworthy, who asks importunately; not on account of
his entreaty (for he loves not glory), but on account of the persistency of the petitioner
who bends his mind towards faith with copious entreaty.

18 XXVIII. There are those calling themselves Gnostics who are envious of those in their
own house more than strangers. And, as the sea is open to all, but one swims, another
sails, and a third catches fish; and as the land is common, but one walks, another
ploughs, another hunts,—somebody else searches the mines, and another builds a house: so
also, when the Scripture is read, one is helped to faith, another to morality, and a third
is freed from superstition by the knowledge of things. The athlete, who knows the Olympic
stadium, strips for training, contends, and becomes victor, tripping up his antagonists
who contend against his scientific method, and fighting out the contest. For scientific
knowledge is necessary both for the training of the soul and for gravity of conduct;
making the faithful more active and keen observers of things. For as there is no believing
without elementary instruction, so neither is there comprehension without science.

19 XXIX. For what is useful and necessary to salvation, such as the knowledge of the
Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit, and also of our own soul, are wholly requisite; and it
is at once beneficial and necessary to attain to the scientific account of them. And to
those who have assumed the lead in doing good, much experience is advantageous; so that
none of the things which appear to be known necessarily and eruditely by others may escape
their notice. The exposition, too, of heterodox teaching affords another exercise of the
inquiring soul, and keeps the disciple from being seduced from the truth, by his having
already had practice beforehand in sounding all round on warlike instruments of music.
XXX. The life of the Gnostic rule, (as they say that Crete was barren of deadly animals,)
is pure from every evil deed, and thought, and word; not only hating no one, but beyond
envy and hatred, and all evil-speaking and slander.

20 XXXI. In length of days, it is not on account of his having lived long that the man is
to be regarded happy, to whose lot it has also fallen, through his having lived, to be
worthy of living for ever. He has pained no one, except in instructing by the word the
wounded in heart, as it were by a salutary honey, which is at once sweet and pungent. So
that, above all, the Gnostic preserves the decorous along with that which is in accordance
with reason. For passion being cut away and stript off from the whole soul, he henceforth
consorts and lives with what is noblest, which has now become pure, and emancipated to
adoption. XXXII. Pythagoras thought that he who gave things their names, ought to be
regarded not only the most intelligent, but the oldest of the wise men. We must, then,
search the Scriptures accurately, since they are admitted to be expressed in parables, and
from the names hunt out the thoughts which the Holy Spirit, propounding respecting things,
teaches by imprinting His mind, so to speak, on the expressions; that the names used with
various meanings, being made the subject of accurate investigation, may be explained, and
that that which is hidden under many integuments may, being handled and learned, come to
light and gleam forth. For so also lead turns white as you rub it; white lead being
produced from black. So also scientific knowledge (gnosis), shedding its light and
brightness on things, shows itself to be in truth the divine wisdom, the pure light, which
illumines the men whose eyeball is clear, unto the sure vision and comprehension of truth.

21 XXXIII. Lighting, then, our torch at the source of that light, by the passionate desire
which has it for its object, and striving as much as possible to be assimilated to it, we
become men full of light, Israelites indeed. For He called those friends and brethren who
by desire and pursuit aimed after likeness to the Divinity. XXXIV. Pure places and meadows
have received voices and visions of holy phantasms. But every man who has been perfectly
purified, shall be thought worthy of divine teaching and of power. XXXV. Now I know that
the mysteries of science (gnosis) are a laughing-stock to many, especially when not
patched up with sophistical figurative language. And the few are at first startled at
them; as when light is suddenly brought into a convivial party in the dark. Subsequently,
on getting used and accustomed, and trained to reasoning, as if gladdened and exulting for
delight, they praise the Lord.…For as pleasure has for its essence release from pain; so
also has knowledge the removal of ignorance. For as those that are most asleep think they
are most awake, being under the power of dream-visions very vivid and fixed; so those that
are most ignorant think that they know most. But blessed are they who rouse themselves
from this sleep and derangement, and raise their eyes to the light and the truth.

22 XXXVI. It is, therefore, equally requisite for him who wishes to have a pupil who is
docile, and has blended faith with aspiration, to exercise himself and constantly to study
by himself, investigating the truth of his speculations; and when he thinks himself right,
to descend to questions regarding things contiguous. For the young birds make attempts to
fly in the nest, exercising their wings. XXXVII. For Gnostic virtue everywhere makes man
good, and meek, and harmless, and painless, and blessed, and ready to associate in the
best way with all that is divine, in the best way with men, at once a contemplative and
active divine image, and turns him into a lover of what is good by love. For what is good,
as there it is contemplated and comprehended by wisdom, is here by self-control and
righteousness carried into effect through faith: practising in the flesh an angelic
ministry; hallowing the soul in the body, as in a place clear and stainless.

23 XXXVIII. Against Tatian, who says that the words, “Let there be light,” are
supplicatory. If, then, He is supplicating the supreme God, how does He say, “I am God,
and beside me there is none else?” We have said that there are punishments for
blasphemies, for nonsense, for outrageous expressions; which are punished and chastised by
reason. XXXIX. And he said, too, that on account of their hair and finery, women are
punished by the Power that is set over these matters; which also gave to Samson strength
in his hair; which punishes the women who allure to fornication through the adornment of
their hair. XL. As by the effluence of good, people are made good; in like manner are they
made bad. Good is the judgment of God, and the discrimination of the believing from the
unbelieving, and the judgment beforehand, so as not to fall into greater judgment—this
judgment being correction.

24 XLI. Scripture says that infants which are exposed are delivered to a guardian angel,
and that by him they are trained and reared. “And they shall be,” it says, “as the
faithful in this world of a hundred years of age.” Wherefore also Peter, in the
Revelation, says: “And a flash of fire, leaping from those infants, and striking the eyes
of the women.” For the just shines: forth as a spark in a reed, and will judge the
nations. XLII. “With the holy Thou wilt be holy.” “According to thy praise is thy name
glorified;” God being glorified through our knowledge, and through the inheritance. Thus
also it is said, “The Lord liveth,” and “The Lord hath risen.” XLIII. “A people whom I
knew not hath served me;”—by covenant I knew them not, alien sons, who desired what
pertained to another. XLIV. “Magnifying the salvations of His king.” All the faithful are
called kings, brought to royalty through inheritance.

25 XLV. Long-suffering is sweetness above honey; not because it is long-suffering, but in
consequence of the fruit of long-suffering. Since, then, the man of self-control is devoid
of passion, inasmuch as he restrains the passions, not without toil; but when habit is
formed, he is no longer a man of self-control, the man having come under the influence of
one habit and of the Holy Spirit. XLVI. The passions that are in the soul are called
spirits,—not spirits of power, since in that case the man under the influence of passion
would be a legion of demons; but they are so called in consequence of the impulse they
communicate. For the soul itself, through modifications, taking on this and that other
sort of qualities of wickedness, is said to receive spirits. XLVII. The Word does not bid
us renounce property; but to manage property without inordinate affection; and on anything
happening, not to be vexed or grieved; and not to desire to acquire. Divine Providence
bids keep away from possession accompanied with passion, and from all inordinate
affection, and from this turns back those still remaining in the flesh.

26 XLVIII. For instance, Peter says in the Apocalypse, that abortive infants shall share
the better fate; that these are committed to a guardian angel, so that, on receiving
knowledge, they may obtain the better abode, having had the same experiences which they
would have had had they been in the body. But the others shall obtain salvation merely, as
being injured and pitied, and remain without punishment, receiving this reward. XLIX. The
milk of women, flowing from the breasts and thickening, says Peter in the Apocalypse, will
produce minute beasts, that prey on flesh, and running back into them will consume them:
teaching that punishments arise for sins. He says that they are produced from sins; as it
was for their sins that the people were sold. And for their want of faith in Christ, as
the apostle says, they were bitten by serpents. L. An ancient said that the embryo is a
living thing; for that the soul entering into the womb after it has been by cleansing
prepared for conception, and introduced by one of the angels who preside over generation,
and who knows the time for conception, moves the woman to intercourse; and that, on the
seed being deposited, the spirit, which is in the seed, is, so to speak, appropriated, and
is thus assumed into conjunction in the process of formation. He cited as a proof to all,
how, when the angels give glad tidings to the barren, they introduce souls before
conception. And in the Gospel “the babe leapt” as a living thing. And the barren are
barren for this reason, that the soul, which unites for the deposit of the seed, is not
introduced so as to secure conception and generation.

27 LI. “The heavens declare the glory of God.” The heavens are taken in various meanings,
both those defined by space and revolution, and those by covenant,—the immediate operation
of the first-created angels. For the covenants caused a more especial appearance of
angels,—that in the case of Adam, that in the case of Noah, that in the case of Abraham,
that in the case of Moses. For, moved by the Lord, the first-created angels exercised
their influence on the angels attached to the prophets, considering the covenants the
glory of God. Furthermore, the things done on earth by angels were done by the first-
created angels to the glory of God. LII. It is the Lord that is principally denominated
the Heavens, and then the First-created; and after these also the holy men before the Law,
as the patriarchs, and Moses, and the prophets; then also the apostles. “And the firmament
showeth His handiwork.” He applies the term “firmament” to God, the passionless and
immoveable, as also elsewhere the same David says, “I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength
and my refuge.” Accordingly, the firmament itself shows forth the work of His hands,—that
is, shows and manifests the work of His angels. For He shows forth and manifests those
whom He hath made.

28 LIII. “Day unto day uttereth speech.” As the heavens have various meanings, so also has
day. Now speech is the Lord; and He is also frequently called day. “And night unto night
showeth forth knowledge.” The devil knew that the Lord was to come. But he did not believe
that He was God; wherefore also he tempted Him, in order to know if He were powerful. It
is said, “he left Him, and departed from Him for a season;” that is, he postponed the
discovery till the resurrection. For he knew that He who was to rise was the Lord.
Likewise also the demons; since also they suspected that Solomon was the Lord, and they
knew that he was not so, on his sinning. “Night to night.” All the demons knew that He who
rose after the passion was the Lord. And already Enoch had said, that the angels who
transgressed taught men astronomy and divination, and the rest of the arts.

29 LIV. “There are no speeches or words whose voices are not heard,” neither of days nor
nights. “Their sound is gone forth unto all the earth.” He has transferred the discourse
to the saints alone, whom he calls both heavens and days. LV. The stars, spiritual bodies,
that have communications with the angels set over them, and are governed by them, are not
the cause of the production of things, but are signs of what is taking place, and will
take place, and have taken place in the case of atmospheric changes, of fruitfulness and
barrenness, of pestilence and fevers, and in the case of men. The stars do not in the
least degree exert influences, but indicate what is, and will be, and has been. LVI. “And
in the sun hath He set His tabernacle.” There is a transposition here. For it is of the
second coming that the discourse is. So, then, we must read what is transposed in its due
sequence: “And he, as a bridegroom issuing from his chamber, will rejoice as a giant to
run his way. From heaven’s end is his going forth; and there is no one who shall hide
himself from his heat;” and then, “He hath set His tabernacle in the sun.”

30 Some say that He deposited the Lord’s body in the sun, as Hermogenes. And “His
tabernacle,” some say, is His body, others the Church of the faithful. 31 Our Pantænus
used to say, that prophecy utters its expressions indefinitely for the most part, and uses
the present for the future, and again the present for the past. Which is also seen here.
For “He hath set” is put both for the past and the future. For the future, because, on the
completion of this period, which is to run according to its present constitution, the Lord
will come to restore the righteous, the faithful, in whom He rests, as in a tent, to one
and the same unity; for all are one body, of the same race, and have chosen the same faith
and righteousness. But some as head, some as eyes, some as ears, some as hands, some as
breasts, some as feet, shall be set, resplendent, in the sun. “Shine forth as the sun,” or
in the sun; since an angel high in command is in the sun. For he is appointed for rule
over days; as the moon is for ruling over night. Now angels are called days. Along with
the angels in the sun, it is said, they shall have assigned to them one abode, to be for
some time and in some respects the sun, as it were the head of the body which is one. And,
besides, they also are the rulers of the days, as that angel in the sun, for the greater
purpose for which he before them migrated to the same place. And again destined to ascend
progressively, they reach the first abode, in accordance with the past “He hath set:” so
that the first-created angels shall no longer, according to providence, exercise a
definite ministry, but may be in repose, and devoted to the contemplation of God alone;
while those next to them shall be promoted to the post which they have left; and so those
beneath them similarly.

32 LVII. There are then, according to the apostle, those on the summit, the first-created.
And they are thrones, although Powers, being the first-created, inasmuch as God rests in
them, as also in those who believe. For each one, according to his own stage of
advancement possesses the knowledge of God in a way special to himself; and in this
knowledge God reposes, those who possess knowledge being made immortal by knowledge. And
is not “He set His tabernacle in the sun” to be understood thus? God “set in the sun,”
that is, in the God who is beside Him, as in the Gospel, Eli, Eli, instead of my God, my
God. And what is “above all rule, and authority, and power, and every name that is named,”
are those from among men that are made perfect as angels and archangels, so as to rise to
the nature of the angels first-created. For those who are changed from men to angels are
instructed for a thousand years by the angels after they are brought to perfection. Then
those who have taught are translated to archangelic authority; and those who have learned
instruct those again who from men are changed to angels. Thus afterwards, in the
prescribed periods, they are brought to the proper angelic state of the body.

33 LVIII. “The law of God is perfect, converting souls.” The Saviour Himself is called Law
and Word, as Peter in “the Preaching,” and the prophet: “Out of Zion shall go forth the
Law, and the Word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” LIX. “The testimony of the Lord is sure,
making children wise.” The covenant of the Lord is true, making wise children; those free
from evil, both the apostles, and then also us. Besides, the testimony of the Lord,
according to which He rose again after His passion, having been verified by fact, led the
Church to confirmation in faith. LX. “The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring for ever.” He
says that those who have been turned from fear to faith and righteousness endure for ever.
“The judgments of the Lord are true,”—sure, and incapable of being overturned; and giving
rewards according to what is right, bringing the righteous to the unity of the faith. For
this is shown in the words, “justified for the same.” “Such desires are above gold and
precious stone.”

34 LXI. “For also Thy servant keeps them.” Not that David alone is called servant; but the
whole people saved is called the servant of God, in virtue of obedience to the command.
LXII. “Cleanse me from my secret faults;”—thoughts contrary to right reason—defects. For
He calls this foreign to the righteous man. LXIII. “If they have not dominion over me,
then shall I be innocent.” If those who persecute me as they did the Lord, do not have
dominion over me, I shall not be innocent. For no one becomes a martyr unless he is
persecuted; nor appears righteous, unless, being wronged, he takes no revenge; nor
forbearing…


FRAGMENTS
=========

FRAGMENTS Clement of Alexandria

c. AD 150–215

Christian teacher in Alexandria who engaged Greek learning.

I.-COMMENTS ON THE FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER.

1 Chap. I. 3. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who by His great
mercy hath regenerated us." For if God generated us of matter, He afterwards, by progress
in life, regenerated us. "The Father of our Lord, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ:
"who, according to your faith, rises again in us; as, on the other hand, He dies in us,
through the operation of our unbelief. For He said again, that the soul never returns a
second time to the body in this life; and that which has become angelic does not become
unrighteous or evil, so as not to have the opportunity of again sinning by the assumption
of flesh; but that in the resurrection the soul returns to the body, and both are joined
to one another according to their peculiar nature, adapting themselves, through the
composition of each, by a kind of congruity like a building of stones.

2 Besides, Peter says, "Ye also, as living stones, are built up a spiritual house;
"meaning the place of the angelic abode, guarded in heaven . "For you," he says, "who are
kept by the power of God, by faith and contemplation, to receive the end of your faith,
the salvation of your souls." Hence it appears that the soul is not naturally immortal;
but is made immortal by the grace of God, through faith and righteousness, and by
knowledge. "Of which salvation," he says, "the prophets have inquired and searched
diligently," and what follows. It is declared by this that the prophets spake with wisdom,
and that the Spirit of Christ was in them, according to the possession of Christ, and in
subjection to Christ. For God works through archangels and kindred angels, who are called
spirits of Christ. "Which are now," he says, "reported unto you by them that have preached
the Gospel unto you." The old things which were done by the prophets and escape the
observation of most, are now revealed to you by the evangelists. "For to you," he says,
"they are manifested by the Holy Ghost, who was sent; "that is the Paraclete, of whom the
Lord said, "If I go not away, He will not come." "Unto whom," it is said, "the angels
desire to look; "not the apostate angels, as most suspect, but, what is a divine truth,
angels who desire to obtain the advantage of that perfection.

3 "By precious blood," he says, "as of a lamb without blemish and without spot." Here he
touches on the ancient Levitical and sacerdotal celebrations; but means a soul pure
through righteousness which is offered to God. "Verily foreknown before the foundation of
the world." In as much as He was foreknown before every creature, because He was Christ.
"But manifested in the last times" by the generation of a body."Being born again, not of
corruptible seed." The soul, then, which is produced along with the body is corruptible,
as some think. "But the word of the Lord," he says, "endureth for ever: "as well prophecy
as divine doctrine. "But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood." That we are a
chosen race by the election of God is abundantly clear. He says royal, because we are
called to sovereignty and belong to Christ; and priesthood on account of the oblation
which is made by prayers and instructions, by which are gained the souls which are offered
to God.

4 "Who, when He was reviled," he says, "reviled not; when He suffered, threatened not."
The Lord acted so in His goodness and patience. "But committed Himself to him that judged
Him unrighteously: " whether Himself, so that, regarding Himself in this way, there is a
transposition. He indeed gave Himself up to those who judged according to an unjust law;
because He was unserviceable to them, in as much as He was righteous: or, He committed to
God those who judged unrighteously, and without cause insisted on His death, so that they
might be instructed by suffering punishment. "For he that will love life, and see good
days; " that is, who wishes to become eternal and immortal. And He calls the Lord life,
and the days good, that is holy. "For the eyes of the Lord," he says, "are upon the
righteous, and His ears on their prayers: "he means the manifold inspection of the Holy
Spirit. "The"face of the Lord is on them that do evil ; " that is, whether judgment, or
vengeance, or manifestation.

5 "But sanctify the Lord Christ," he says, "in your hearts." For so you have in the Lord's
prayer, "Hallowed be Thy name." "For Christ,"he says, "hath once suffered for our sins,
the just for the unjust, that he might present us to God; being put to death in the flesh,
but quickened in the spirit." He says these things, reducing them to their faith. That is,
He became alive in our spirits. "Coming," he says, "He preached to those who were once
unbelieving." They saw not His form, but they heard His voice. "When the long-suffering of
God" holds. out. God is so good, as to work the result by the teaching of salvation. "By
the resurrection," it is said, "of Jesus Christ: "that, namely, which is effected in us by
faith."Angels being subjected to Him," which are the first order; and "principalities"
being subject, who are of the second order; and "powers" being also subject,"which are
said to belong to the third order.

6 "Who shall give account," he says, "to Him who is ready to judge the quick and the
dead." These are trained through previous judgments. Therefore he adds, "For this cause
was the Gospel preached also to the dead"-to us, namely, who were at one time unbelievers.
"That they might be judged according to men," he says, "in the flesh, but live according
to God in the spirit. Because, that is, they have fallen away from faith; whilst they are
still in the flesh they are judged according to preceding judgments, that they might
repent. Accordingly, he also adds, saying, "That they might live according to God in the
spirit." So Paul also; for he, too, states something of this nature when he says, "Whom I
have delivered to Satan, that he might live in the spirit; " that is, "as good stewards of
the manifold grace of God." Similarly also Paul says, "Variously, and in many ways, God of
old spake to our fathers."

7 "Rejoice," it is said, "that ye are partakers in the sufferings of Christ: "that is, if
ye are righteous, ye suffer for righteousness' sake, as Christ suffered for righteousness.
"Happy are ye, for the Spirit of God, who is the Spirit of His glory and virtue, resteth
on you." This possessive "His" signifies also an an angelic spirit: in as much as the
glory of God those are, through whom, according to faith and righteousness, He is
glorified, to honourable glory, according to the advancement of the saints who are brought
in. "The Spirit of God on us," may be thus understood; that is, who through faith comes on
the soul, like a gracefulness of mind and beauty of soul. "Since," it is said, "it is time
for judgment beginning at the house of God." For judgment will overtake these in the
appointed persecutions. "But the God of all grace," he says. "Of all grace," he says,
because He is good, and the giver of all good things. "Marcus, my son, saluteth you."
Mark, the follower of Peter, while Peter publicly preached the Gospel at Rome before some
of Caesar's equites, and adduced many testimonies to Christ, in order that thereby they
might be able to commit to memory what was spoken, of what was spoken by Peter wrote
entirely what is called the Gospel according to Mark. As Luke also may be recognised by
the style, both to have composed the Acts of the Apostles, and to have translated Paul's
Epistle to the Hebrews.

II.-COMMENTS ON THE EPISTLE OF JUDE.

1 Jude, who wrote the Catholic Epistle, the brother of the sons of Joseph, and very
religious, whilst knowing the near relationship of the Lord, yet did not say that he
himself was His brother. But what said he? "Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ,"-of Him as
Lord; but "the brother of James. For this is true; he was His brother, (the son) of
Joseph. "For certain men have entered unawares, ungodly men, who had been of old ordained
and predestined to the judgment of our God; "not that they might become impious, but that,
being now impious, they were ordained to judgment. "For the Lord God," he says, "who once
delivered a people out of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not; "that is,
that He might train them through punishment. For they were indeed punished, and they
perished on account of those that are saved, until they turn to the Lord. "But the
angels," he says, "that kept not their own pre-eminence," that, namely, which they
received through advancement, "but left their own habitation," meaning, that is, the
heaven and the stars, became, and are called apostates. "He hath reserved these to the
judgment of the great day, in chains, under darkness. He means the place near the earth,
that is, the dark air. Now he called "chains" the loss of the honour in which they had
stood, and the lust of feeble things; since, bound by their own lust, they cannot be
converted. "As Sodom and Gomorrha," he says. ...

2 By which the Lord signifies that pardon had been granted; and that on being disciplined
they had repented. "Similarly to the same," he says, "also those dreamers,"-that is, who
dream in their imagination lusts and wicked desires, regarding as good not that which is
truly good, and superior to all good,-defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil
of majesty," that is, the only Lord, who is truly our Lord, Jesus Christ, and alone worthy
of praise. They "speak evil of majesty," that is, of the angels. 3 "When Michael, the
archangel, disputing with the devil, debated about the body of Moses." Here he confirms
the assumption of Moses. He is here called Michael, who through an angel near to us
debated with the devil. "But these," he says, "speak evil of those things which they know
not; but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in these things they corrupt
themselves." He means that they eat, and drink, and indulge in uncleanness, and says that
they do other things that are common to them with animals, devoid of reason. "Woe unto
them!" he says, "for they have gone in the way of Cain." For so also we lie under Adam's
sin through similarity of sin. "Clouds," he says, "without water; who do not possess in
themselves the divine and fruitful word." Wherefore, he says, "men of this kind are
carried about both by winds and violent blasts." "Trees," he says, "of autumn, without
fruit,"-unbelievers, that is, who bear no fruit of fidelity. "Twice dead," he says: once,
namely, when they sinned by transgressing, and a second time when delivered up to
punishment, according to the predestined judgments of God; in as much as it is to be
reckoned death, even when each one does not forthwith deserve the inheritance. "Waves," he
says, "of a raging sea." By these words he signifies the life of the Gentiles, whose end
is abominable ambition. "Wandering stars,"-that is, he means those who err and are
apostates are of that kind of stars which fell from the seats of the angels-" to whom,"
for their apostasy, "the blackness of darkness is reserved for ever. Enoch also, the
seventh from Adam," he says, "prophesied of these." In these words he verities the
prophecy.

4 "Those," he says, "separating" the faithful from the unfaithful, be convicted according
to their own unbelief. And again those separating from the flesh. He says, "Animal not
having the spirit; "that is, the spirit which is by faith, which supervenes through the
practice of righteousness. "But ye, beloved," he says, "building up yourselves on your
most holy faith, in the Holy Spirit." "But some," he says, "save, plucking them from the
fire; " "but of some have compassion in fear," that is, teach those who fall into the fire
to free themselves. "Hating," he says, "that spotted garment, which is carnal: "that of
the soul, namely; the spotted garment is a spirit polluternal lusts. "Now to Him," he
says, "who is able to keep you without stumbling, and present you faultless before the
presence of His glory in joy." In the presence of His glory: he means in the presence of
the angels, to be presented faultless having become angels. When Daniel speaks of the
people and comes into the presence of the Lord, he does not say this, because he saw God:
for it is impossible that any one whose heart is not pure should see God; but he says
this, that everything that the people did was in the sight of God, and was manifest to
Him; that is, that nothing is hid from the Lord.

5 Now, in the Gospel according to Mark, the Lord being interrogated by the chief of the
priests if He was the Christ, the Son of the blessed God, answering, said, "I am; and ye
shall see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of power. But powers mean the holy
angels. Further, when He says "at the right hand of God," He means the self-same [beings],
by reason of the equality and likeness of the angelic and holy powers, which are called by
the name of God. He says, therefore, that He sits at the right hand; that is, that He
rests in pre-eminent honour. In the other Gospels, however, He is said not to have replied
to the high priest, on his asking if He was the Son of God. But what said He? "You say."
Answering sufficiently well. For had He said, It is as you understand, he would have said
what was not true, not confessing Himself to be the Son of God; [for] they did not
entertain this opinion of Him; but by saying "You say," He spake truly. For what they had
no knowledge of, but expressed in words, that he confessed to be true.

III.-COMMENTS ON THE FIRST EPISTLE OF JOHN.

1 Chap. 1 John 1:1. "That which was from the beginning; which we have seen with our eyes;
which we have heard." Following the Gospel according to John, and in accordance with it,
this Epistle also contains the spiritual principle. What therefore he says, "from the
beginning," the Presbyter explained to this effect, that the beginning of generation is
not separated from the beginning of the Creator. For when he says, "That which was from
the beginning," he touches upon the generation without beginning of the Son, who is co-
existent with the Father. There was; then, a Word importing an unbeginning eternity; as
also the Word itself, that is, the Son of God, who being, by equality of substance, one
with the Father, is eternal and uncreate. That He was always the Word, is signified by
saying, "In the beginning was the Word." But by the expression, "we have seen with our
eyes," he signifies the Lord's presence in the flesh, "and our hands have handled," he
says, "of the Word of life." He means not only His flesh, but the virtues of the Son, like
the sunbeam which penetrates to the lowest places,-this sunbeam coming in the flesh became
palpable to the disciples. It is accordingly related in traditions, that John, touching
the outward body itself, sent his hand deep down into it, and that the solidity of the
flesh offered no obstacle, but gave way to the hand of the disciple.

2 "And our hands have handled of the Word of life; "that is, He who came in the flesh
became capable of being touched. As also, Ver. 1 John 1:2. "The life was manifested." For
in the Gospel he thus speaks: "And what was made, in Him was life, and the life was the
light of men." "And we show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was
manifested unto you." He signifies by the appellation of Father, that the Son also existed
always, without beginning. Ver. 1 John 1:5. "For God," he says, "is light." He does not
express the divine essence, but wishing to declare the majesty of God, he has applied to
the Divinity what is best and most excellent in the view of men. Thus also Patti, when he
speaks of "light inaccessible." But John himself also in this same Epistle says, "God is
love: " pointing out the excellences of God, that He is kind and merciful; and because He
is light, makes men righteous, according to the advancement of the soul, through charity.
God, then, who is ineffable in respect of His substance, is light.

3 "And in Him is no darkness at all,"-that is, no passion, no keeping up of evil
respecting any one, [He] destroys no one but gives salvation to all. Light moreover
signifies, either the precepts of the Law, or faith, or doctrine. Darkness is the opposite
of these things. Not as if there were another way; since there is only one way according
to the divine precepts. For the work of God is unity. Duality and all else that exists,
except unity, arises from perversity of life. Ver. 1 John 1:7. "And the blood of Jesus
Christ His Son," he says, "cleanses us." For the doctrine of the Lord, which is very
powerful, is called His blood. Ver. 1 John 1:10. "If we say that we have not sinned, we
make Him a liar, and His word is not in us." His doctrine, that is, or word is truth.
Chap. 1 John 2:1. "And if any man sin," he says, "we have an advocate with the Father,
Jesus Christ." For so the Lord is an advocate with the Father for us. So also is there, an
advocate, whom, after His assumption, He vouchsafed to send. For these primitive and
first-created virtues are unchangeable as to substance, and along with subordinate angels
and archangels, whose names they share, effect divine operations. Thus also Moses names
the virtue of the angel Michael, by an angel near to himself and of lowest grade. The like
also we find in the holy prophets; but to Moses an angel appeared near and at hand. Moses
heard him and spoke to him manifestly, face to face. On the other prophets, through the
agency of angels, an impression was made, as of beings hearing and seeing.

4 On this account also, they alone heard, and they alone saw; as also is seen in the case
of Samuel. Elisaeus also alone heard the voice by which he was called. If the voice had
been open and common, it would have been heard by all. In this instance it was heard by
him alone in whom the impression made by the angel worked. Ver. 1 John 2:2. "And not only
for our sins,"-that is for those of the faithful,-is the Lord the propitiator, does he
say, "but also for the whole world." He, indeed, saves all; but some [He saves],
converting them by punishments; others, however, who follow voluntarily [He saves] with
dignity of honour; so "that every knee should bow to Him, of things in heaven, and things
on earth, and things under the earth; " that is, angels, men, and souls that before His
advent have departed from this temporal life.

5 Ver. 1 John 2:3. "And by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments."
For the Gnostic [he who knows also does the Works which pertain to the province of virtue.
But he who performs the works is not necessarily also a Gnostic. For a man may be a doer
of right works, and yet not a knower of the mysteries of science. Finally, knowing that
some works are performed from fear of punishment, and some on account of the promise of
reward, he shows the perfection of the man gifted with knowledge, who fulfils his works by
love. Further, he adds, and says:- Ver. 1 John 2:5. "But whoso keepeth His word, in him
verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in Him,"-by faith and
love. Ver. 1 John 2:7. "I write no new commandment unto you, but an old commandment, which
ye had from the beginning,"-through the Law, that is, and the prophets; where it is said,
God is one. Accordingly, also, he infers, "For the old commandment is the word which ye
have heard." Again, however, he says:-

6 Ver. 1 John 2:8. "This is the commandment; for the darkness" of perversion, that is,
"has passed away, and, lo, the true light hath already shone,"-that is, through "faith",
through knowledge, through the Covenant working in men, through prepared judgments. Ver. 1
John 2:9. "He that saith he is in the light,"-in the light, he means in the truth,-"and
hateth," he says, "his brother." By his brother, he means not only his neighbour, but also
the Lord. For unbelievers hate Him and do not keep His commandments. Therefore also he
infers:- Ver. 1 John 2:10. "He that loveth his brother abideth in the light; and there is
none occasion of stumbling in him." Vers. 1 John 2:12-14. He then indicates the stages of
advancement and progress of souls that are still located in the flesh; and calls those
whose sins have been forgiven, for the. Lord's name's sake, "little children," for many
believe on account of the name only. He styles "fathers" the perfect, "who have known what
was from the beginning," and received with understanding,-the Son, that is, of whom he
said above, "that which was from the beginning."

7 "I write," says he, "to you, young men, because ye have overcome the wicked one." Young
man strong in despising pleasures. "The wicked one" points out the eminence of the devil.
"The children," moreover, know the Father; having fled from idols and gathered together to
the one God. Ver. 1 John 2:15. "For the world," he says, "is in the wicked one." Is not
the world, and all that is in the. world, called God's creation and very good? Yes. But,
Ver. 1 John 2:16. "The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the ambition of the
world," which arise from the perversion of life, "are not of the Father, but of the
world," and of you. Ver. 1 John 2:17. "Therefore also the world shall pass away, and the
lust thereof; but he that doeth the will of God" and His commandments "abideth for ever."
Ver. 1 John 2:19. "They went out from us; but they were not of us "-neither the apostate
angels, nor men falling away;-"but that they may be manifested that they are not of us."
With sufficient clearness he distinguishes the class of the elect and that of the lost,
and that which remaining in faith "has an unction from the Holy One," which comes through
faith. He that abideth not in faith.

8 Ver. 1 John 2:22. "A liar" and "an antichrist, who denieth that Jesus is the Christ."
For Jesus, Saviour and Redeemer, is also Christ the King. Ver. 1 John 2:23. "He who denies
the Son," by ignoring Him, "has not the Father, nor does he know Him." But he who knoweth
the Son and the Father, knows according to knowledge, and when the Lord shall be
manifested at His second advent, shall have confidence and not be confounded. Which
confusion is heavy punishment. Ver. 1 John 2:29. "Every one," he says, "who doeth
righteousness is born of God; "being regenerated, that is, according to faith. Chap. 1
John 3:1. "For the world knoweth us not, as it knew Him not." He means by the world those
who live a worldly life in pleasures. Ver. 1 John 3:2. "Beloved," says he, "now are we the
sons of God," not by natural affection, but because we have God as our Father. For it is
the greater love that, seeing we have no relationship to God, He nevertheless loves us and
calls us His sons. "And it hath not yet appeared what we shall be; "that is, to what kind
of glory we shall attain. "For if He shall be manifested,"-that is, if we are made
perfect,-"we shall be like Him," as reposing and justified, pure in virtue, "so that we
may see Him" (His countenance) "as He is," by comprehension.

9 Ver. 1 John 3:8. "He that doeth unrighteousness is of the devil," that is, of the devil
as his father, following and choosing the same things. "The devil sinneth from the
beginning," he says. From the beginning from which he began to sin, incorrigibly
persevering in sinning. Ver. 1 John 3:9. He says, "Whosoever is born of God does not
commit sin, for His seed remaineth in him; "that is, His word in him who is born again
through faith. Ver. 1 John 3:10. "Thus we know the children of God, as likewise the
children of the devil," who choose things like the devil; for so also they are said to be
of the wicked one. Ver. 1 John 3:15. "Every one who hateth his brother is a murderer." For
in him through unbelief Christ dies. Rightly, therefore, he continues, "And ye know that
no murderer and unbeliever hath eternal life abiding in him." For the living Christ abides
in the believing soul.

10 Ver. 1 John 3:16. "For He Himself laid down His life for us; "that is, for those who
believe; that is, for the apostles. If then He laid down His life for the apostles, he
means His apostles themselves: us if he said, We, I say, the apostles, for whom He laid
down His life, "ought to lay down our lives for the brethren; "for the salvation of their
neighbours was the glory of the apostles. Ver. 1 John 3:20. He says, "For God is greater
than our heart; "that is, the virtue of God [is greater] than conscience, which will
follow the soul. Wherefore he continues, and says, "and knoweth all things." Ver. 1 John
3:21. "Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, it will have confidence before God." Ver. 1
John 3:24. "And hereby we know that He dwelleth in us by His Spirit, which He hath given
us; "that is, by superintendence and foresight of future events.

11 Chap. 1 John 4:18. He says, "Perfect love casteth out fear." For the perfection of a
believing man is love. Chap. v. 1 John 4:6. He says, "This is He who came by water and
blood; "and again,- Ver. 1 John 4:8. "For there are three that bear witness, the spirit,"
which is life, "and the water," which is regeneration and faith, "and the blood," which is
knowledge; "and these three are one." For in the Saviour are those saving virtues, and
life itself exists in His own Son. Ver. 1 John 4:14. "And this is the confidence which we
have towards Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He will hear us." He does
not say absolutely what we shall ask, but what we ought to ask. Ver. 1 John 4:19 "And the
whole word lieth in the wicked one; "not the creation, but worldly men, and those who live
according to their lusts.

12 Ver. 1 John 4:20. "And the Son of God hath come and given us understanding," which
comes to us, that is, by faith, and is also called the Holy Spirit.

IV.-COMMENTS ON THE SECOND EPISTLE OF JOHN.

The second Epistle of John, which is written to Virgins, is very simple. It was written to
a Babylonian lady, by name Electa, and indicates the election of the holy Church. He
establishes in this Epistle that the following out of the faith is not without charity,
and so that no one divide Jesus Christ; but only to believe that Jesus Christ has come in
the flesh. For he who has the Son by apprehension in his intellect knows also the Father,
and grasps with his mind intelligibly the greatness of His power working without beginning
of time. Ver. 2 John 10. He says, "If any come unto you and bring not this doctrine,
receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed; for he that biddeth him God
speed is partaker of his evil deeds." He forbids us to salute such, and to receive them to
our hospitality. For this is not harsh in the case of a man of this sort. But he
admonishes them neither to confer nor dispute with such as are not able to handle divine
things with intelligence, lest through them they be seduced from the doctrine of truth,
influenced by plausible reasons. Now, I think that we are not even to pray with such,
because in the prayer which is made at home, after rising from prayer, the salutation of
joy is also the token of peace.

I.-JOB 1:21.

1 But Job's words may be more elegantly understood of evil and sin thus: "Naked" was
formed from the earth at the beginning, as if from a "mother's womb: naked to the earth
shall I also depart; "naked, not of possessions, for that were a trivial and common thing,
but of evil and sin, and of the unsightly shape which follows those who have led bad
lives. Obviously, all of us human beings are born naked, and again are buried naked,
swathed only in grave-clothes. For God hath provided for us another life, and made the
present life the way for the course which leads to it; appointing the supplies derived
from what we possess merely as provisions for the way; and on our quitting this way, the
wealth, consisting of the things which we possessed, journeys no farther with us. For not
a single thing that we possess is properly our own: of one possession alone, that is
godliness, are we properly owners. Of this, death, when it overtakes us, will not rob us;
but from all else it will eject us, though against our will. For it is for the support of
life that we all have received what we possess; and after enjoying merely the use of it,
each one departs, obtaining from life a brief remembrance. For this is the end of all
prosperity; this is the conclusion of the good things of this life. Well, then, does the
infant, on opening its eyes, after issuing from the womb, immediately begin with crying,
not with laughter.

2 For it weeps, as if bewailing life, at whose hands from the outset it tastes of deadly
gifts. For immediately on being bern its hands and feet are swaddled; and swathed in bonds
it takes the breast. O introduction to life, precursor of death! The child has but just
entered on life, and straightway there is put upon it the raiment of the dead: for nature
reminds those that are born of their end. Wherefore also the child, on being born, wails,
as if crying plaintively to its mother. Why, O mother, didst thou bring me forth to this
life, in which prolongation of life is progress to death? Why hast thou brought me into
this troubled world, in which, on being born, swaddling bands are my first experience? Why
hast thou delivered me to such a life as this, in which both a pitiable youth wastes away
before old age, and old age is shunned as under the doom of death? Dreadful, O mother, is
the course of life, which has death as the goal of the runner. Bitter is the road of life
we travel, with the grave as the wayfarer's inn. Perilous the sea of life we sail; for it
has Hades as a pirate to attack us. Man alone is born in all respects naked, without a
weapon or clothing born with him; not as being inferior to the other animals, but that
nakedness and your bringing nothing with you may produce thought;

3 and that thought may bring out dexterity, expel sloth, introduce the arts for the supply
of our needs, and beget variety of contrivances. For, naked, man is full of contrivances,
being pricked on by his necessity, as by a goad, how to escape rains, how to elude cold,
how to fence off blows, how to till the earth, how to terrify wild beasts; how to subdue
the more powerful of them. Wetted with rain, he contrived a roof; having suffered from
cold, he invented clothing; being struck, he constructed a breastplate; bleeding his hands
with the thorns in tilling the ground, he availed himself of the help of tools; in his
naked state liable to become a prey to wild beasts, he discovered from his fear an art
which frightened what frightened him. Nakedness begat one accomplishment after another; so
that even his nakedness was a gift and a master-favour. Accordingly, Job also being made
naked of wealth, possessions, of the blessing of children, of a numerous offspring, and
having lost everything in a short time, uttered this grateful exclamation: "Naked came I
out of the womb, naked also shall I depart thither; "-to God, that is, and to that blessed
lot and rest.

II.-FROM THE SAME.

Job 34:7. Calmness is a thing which, of all other things, is most to be prized. As an
example of this, the word proposes to us the blessed Job. For it is said of him, "What man
is like Job, who drinketh up scorning like water? "For truly enviable, and, in my
judgment, worthy of all admiration, a man is, if he has attained to such a degree of long-
suffering as to be able with ease to grapple with the pain, truly keen, and not easily
conquered by everybody, which arises from being wronged.

III.-FROM NICETAS CATENA ON MATTHEW.

Matthew 5:42. Alms are to be given, but with judgment, and to the deserving, that we may
Obtain a recompense from the Most Hitch. But woe to those who have and who take under
false pretences, or who are able to help themselves and want to take from others. For he
who has, and, to carry out false pretences or out of laziness, takes, shall be condemned.

IV.-FROM THE SAME.

Matthew 13:31. The word which proclaims the kingdom of heaven is sharp and pungent as
mustard, and represses bile, that is, anger, and checks inflammation, that is, pride; and
from this word the soul's true health and eternal soundness flow. To such increased size
did the growth of the word come, that the tree which sprang from it (that is the Church of
Christ established over the whole earth) filled the world, so that the fowls of the air-
that is, divine angels and lofty souls-dwelt in its branches.

V.-FROM THE SAME.

Matthew 13:46. A pearl, and that pellucid and of purest ray, is Jesus, whom of the
lightning flash of Divinity the Virgin bore. For as the pearl, produced in flesh and the
oyster-shell and moisture, appears to be a body moist and transparent, full of light and
spirit; so also God the Word, incarnate, is intellectual light, sending His rays, through
a body luminous and moist.

3.-FROM THE CATENA ON LUKE, EDITED BY CORDERIUS

Luke 3:22. God here assumed the "likeness" not of a man, but "of a dove," because He
wished, by a new apparition of the Spirit in the likeness of a dove, to declare His
simplicity and majesty. Luke 16:17. Perhaps by the iota and tittle His righteousness
cries, "If ye come right unto Me, I will also come right to you; but if crooked, I also
will come crooked, saith the Lord of hosts; "intimating that the ways of sinners are
intricate and crooked. For the way right and agreeable to nature which is intimated by the
iota of Jesus, is His goodness, which constantly directs those who believe from hearing,
"There shall not, therefore, pass from the law one iota or one tittle," neither from the
right and good the mutual promises, nor from the crooked and unjust the punishment
assigned to them. "For the Lord doeth good to the good, but those who turn aside into
crooked ways God will lead with the workers. of iniquity."

4.-FROM THE BOOKS OF THE HYPOTYPOSES

Oecumenius from Book III. On 1 Corinthians 11:10.

1 "Because of the angels." By the angels he means righteous and virtuous men. Let her be
veiled then, that she may not lead them to stumble into fornication. For the real angels
in heaven see her though veiled.

The Same, Book IV. On 2 Corinthians 5:16.

2 "And if we have known Christ after the flesh." As "after the flesh" in our case is being
in the midst of sins, and being out of them is "not after the flesh; "so also" after the
flesh" in the case of Christ was His subjection to natural affections, and His not being
subject to them is to be "not after the flesh." But, he says, as He was released, so also
are we.

The Same, Book IV. On 2 Corinthians 6:11.

3 "Our heart is enlarged," to teach you all things. But ye are straitened in your own
bowels, that is, in love to God, in which ye ought to love me.

The Same, Book V. On Galatians 5:24.

4 "And they that are Christ's [have crucified] the flesh." And why mention one aspect of
virtue after another? For there are some who have crucified themselves as far as the
passions are concerned, and the passions as far as respects themselves. According to this
interpretation the "and" is not superfluous. "And they that are Christ's"-that is,
striving after Him-"have crucified their own flesh."

Moschus: Spiritual Meadow, Book V. Chap. 176.

5 Yes, truly, the apostles were baptised, as Clement the Stromatist relates in the fifth
book of the Hypotyposes. For, in explaining the apostolic statement, "I thank God that I
baptised none of you," he says, Christ is said to have baptised Peter alone, and Peter
Andrew, and Andrew John, and they James and the rest.

Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History, Book VI. II. X.

6 Now Clement, writing in the sixth book of the Hypotyposes, makes this statement. For he
says that Peter and James and John, after the Saviour's ascension, though pre-eminently
honoured by the Lord, did not contend for glory, but made James the Just, bishop of
Jerusalem.

Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History, II. 15.

7 So, then, through the visit of the divine word to them, the power of Simon was
extinguished, and immediately was destroyed along with the man himself. And such a ray of
godliness shone forth on the minds of Peter's hearers, that they were not satisfied with
the once hearing or with the unwritten teaching of the divine proclamation, but with all
manner of entreaties importuned Mark, to whom the Gospel is ascribed, he being the
companion of Peter, that he would leave in writing a record of the teaching which had been
delivered to them verbally; and did not let the man alone till they prevailed upon him;
and so to them we owe the Scripture called the "Gospel by Mark." On learning what had been
done, through the revelation of the Spirit, it is said that the apostle was delighted with
the enthusiasm of the men, and sanctioned the composition for reading in the Churches.
Clemens gives the narrative in the sixth book of the Hypotyposes.

Eusebius: Ibid.

8 Then, also, as the divine Scripture says, Herod, on the execution of James, seeing that
what was done pleased the Jews, laid hands also on Peter; and having put him in chains,
would have presently put him to death, had not an angel in a divine vision appeared to him
by night, and wondrously releasing him from his bonds, sent him away to the ministry of
preaching.

Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History, VI. 14.

9 And in the Hypotyposes, in a word, he has made abbreviated narratives of the whole
testamentary Scripture; and has not passed over the disputed books,-I mean Jude and the
rest of the Catholic Epistles and Barnabas, and what is called the Revelation of Peter.
And he says that the Epistle to the Hebrews is Paul's, and was written to the Hebrews in
the Hebrew language; but that Luke, having carefully translated it, gave it to the Greeks,
and hence the same colouring in the expression is discoverable in this Epistle and the
Acts; and that the name "Paul an Apostle" was very properly not pre-fixed, for, he says,
that writing to the Hebrews, who were prejudiced against him and suspected, he with great
wisdom did not repel them in the beginning by putting down his name.

Eusebius: Book VII.

10 1 Timothy 2:6. "In his times; "that is, when men were in a condition of fitness for
faith. 1 Timothy 3:16. "Was seen of angels." O mystery! The angels saw Christ while He was
with us, not having seen Him before. Not as by men. 1 Timothy 5:8. "And especially those
of his own house." He provides for his own and those of his own house, who not only
provides for his relatives, but also for himself, by extirpating the passions. 1 Timothy
5:10. "If she have washed the feet of saints; "that is, if she has performed without shame
the meanest offices for the saints. 1 Timothy 5:21. "Without prejudice; " that is, without
falling under the doom and punishment of disobedience through making any false step. 1
Timothy 6:13. "Who witnessed before Pontius Pilate." For He testified by what he did that
He was Christ the Son of God.

11 2 Timothy 2:2. "By many witnesses; " that is, the law and the prophets. For these the
apostle made witnesses of his own preaching.

Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History, Book. VII. II. 1.

12 To James the Just, and John and Peter, the Lord after His resurrection imparted
knowledge (th/n gnw=sin.) These imparted it to the rest of the apostles, and the rest of
the apostles to the Seventy, of whom Barnabas was one.

Eusebius: the Same, II. 2.

13 And of this James, Clement also relates an anecdote worthy of remembrance in the
seventh book of the Hypotyposes, from a tradition of his predecessors. He says that the
man who brought him to trial, on seeing him bear his testimony, was moved, and confessed
that he was a Christian himself. Accordingly, he says, they were both led away together,
and on the way the other asked James to forgive him. And he, considering a little, said,
"Peace be to thee" and kissed him. And so both were beheaded together.

Eusebius: the Same, VI. 14.

14 And now, as the blessed Presbyter used to say, since the Lord, as the Apostle of the
Almighty, was sent to the Hebrews, Paul, as having been sent to the Gentiles, did not
subscribe himself apostle of the Hebrews, out of modesty and reverence for the Lord, and
because, being the herald and apostle of the Gentiles, his writing to the Hebrews was
something over and above [his assigned function.]

Eusebius: the Same.

15 Again, in the same books Clement has set down a tradition which he had received from
the elders before him, in regard to the order of the Gospels, to the following effect. He
says that the Gospels containing the genealogies were written first, and that the Gospel
according to Mark was composed in the following circumstances:-Peter having preached the
word publicly at Rome, and by the Spirit proclaimed the Gospel, those who were present,
who were numerous, entreated Mark, in as much as he had attended him from an early period,
and remembered what had been said, to write down what had been spoken. On his composing
the Gospel, he handed it to those who had made the request to him; which coming to Peter's
knowledge, he neither hindered nor encouraged. But John, the last of all, seeing that what
was corporeal was set forth in the Gospels, on the entreaty of his intimate friends, and
inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel.

5.-FROM THE BOOK ON PROVIDENCE

S. Maximus, Vol. II. 114.

1 Being is in God. God is divine being, eternal and without beginning, incorporeal and
illimitable, and the cause of what exists. Being is that which wholly subsists. Nature is
the truth of things, or the inner reality of them. According to others, it is the
production of what has come to existence; and according to others, again, it is the
providence of God, causing the being, and the manner of being, in the things which are
produced.

S. Maximus: in the Same, P. 152.

2 Willing is a natural power, which desires what is in accordance with nature. Willing is
a natural appetency, corresponding with the nature of the rational creature. Willing is a
natural spontaneous movement of the self-determining mind, or the mind voluntarily moved
about anything. Spontaneity is the mind moved naturally, or an intellectual self-
determining movement of the soul.

6.-FROM THE BOOK ON THE SOUL

Maximus and Antonius Melissa.

1 Souls that breathe free of all things, possess life, and though separated from the body,
and found possessed of a longing for it, are borne immortal to the bosom of God: as in the
winter season the vapours of the earth attracted by the sun's rays rise to him.

The Barocc. Ms.

2 All souls are immortal, even those of the wicked, for whom it were better that they were
not deathless. For, punished with the endless vengeance of quenchless fire, and not dying,
it is impossible for them to have a, period put to their misery.

7.-FRAGMENT FROM THE BOOK ON SLANDER

Antonius Melissa, Book. II. Sermon 69.

1 Never be afraid of the slanderer who addresses you. But rather say, Stop, brother; I
daily commit more grievous errors, and how can I judge him? For you will gain two things,
healing with one plaster both yourself and your neighbour. He shows what is really evil.
Whence, by these arguments, God has contrived to make each one's disposition manifest.

Antonius Melissa, Book I. Sermon 64, and Book II. Sermon 87. Also Maximus, Sermon 59, P.
669; John of Damascus, Book II.

2 It is not abstaining from deeds that justifies the believer, but purity and sincerity of
thoughts.

8.-OTHER FRAGMENTS FROM ANTONIUS MELISSA

I.-Book I. Sermon 17, on Confession.

1 Repentance then becomes capable of wiping out every sin, when on the occurrence of the
soul's fault it admits no delay, and does not let the impulse pass on to a long space of
time. For it is in this way that evil will be unable to leave a trace in us, being plucked
away at the moment of its assault like a newly planted plant. As the creatures called
crabs are easy to catch, from their going sometimes forward and sometimes backward; so
also the soul, which at one time is laughing, at another weeping, and at another giving
way to luxury, can do no good. He who is sometimes grieving, and is sometimes enjoying
himself and laughing, is like a man pelting the dog of voluptuousness with bread, who
chases it in appearance, but in fact invites it to remain near him.

2. Book I. Sermon 51, on Praise.

2 Some flatterers were congratulating a wise man. He said to them, If you stop praising
me, I think myself something great after your departure; but if you do not stop praising
me, I guess my own impurity. Feigned praise is worth less than true censure.

3. Book II. Sermon 46, on the Lazy and Indolent.

3 To the weak and infirm, what is moderate appears excessive.

4. Book II. Sermon 55, on Your Neighbour-That You are to Bear His Burdens, Etc.

4 The reproof that is given with knowledge is very faithful. Sometimes also the knowledge
of those who are condemned is found to be the most perfect demonstration.

5. Book IL Sermon 74, on the Proud, and Those Desirous of Vainglory.

5 To the man who exalts and magnifies himself is attached the quick transition and the
fall to low estate, as the divine word teaches.

6. Book II. Sermon 87.

6 Pure speech and a spotless life are the throne and true temple of God.

9.-FRAGMENT OF THE TREATISE ON MARRIAGE

Maximus, Sermon III. P. 538, on Modesty and Chastity. Also, John of Damascus, Book
III.-Parallel Chap. 27.

It is not only fornication, but also the giving in marriage prematurely, that is called
fornication; when, so to speak, one not of ripe age is given to a husband, either of her
own accord or by her parents.

10.-FRAGMENTS OF OTHER LOST BOOKS

Maximus, Sermon 2.-John of Damascus, II. Chap. 70.-Antonius Melissa, Book I. Sermon 52.

1 Flattery is the bane of friendship. Most men are accustomed to pay court to the good
fortune of princes, rather than to the princes themselves.

Maximus, Sermon 13, P. 574.-Antonius Melissa, Sermon 32, P. 45, and Sermon 33, P. 57.

2 The lovers of frugality shun luxury as the bane of soul and body. The possession and use
of necessaries has nothing injurious in quality, but it has in quantity above measure.
Scarcity of food is a necessary benefit.

Maximus, Sermon 52, P. 654.-Antonius Melissa, Book I. Sermon 54.

3 The vivid remembrance of death is a check upon diet; and when the diet is lessened, the
passions are diminished along with it.

Maximus, Sermon 55, P. 661.

4 Above all, Christians are not allowed to correct with violence the delinquencies of
sins. For it is not those that abstain from wickedness from compulsion, but those that
abstain from choice, that God crowns. It is impossible for a man to be steadily good
except by his own choice. For he that is made good by compulsion of another is not good;
for he is not what he is by his own choice. For it is the freedom of each one that makes
true goodness and reveals real wickedness. Whence through these dispositions God contrived
to make His own disposition manifest.

11.-FRAGMENTS FOUND IN GREEK ONLY IN THE OXFORD EDITION

From the Last Work on the Passover. (Quoted in the Paschal Chronicle.)

Accordingly, in the years gone by, Jesus went to eat the passover sacrificed by the Jews,
keeping the feast. But when he had preached He who was the Passover, the Lamb of God, led
as a sheep to the slaughter, presently taught His disciples the mystery of the type on the
thirteenth day, on which also they inquired, "Where wilt Thou that we prepare for Thee to
eat the passover? " It was on this day, then, that both the consecration of the unleavened
bread and the preparation for the feast took place. Whence John naturally describes the
disciples as already previously prepared to have their feet washed by the Lord. And on the
following day our Saviour suffered, He who was the Passover, propitiously sacrificed by
the Jews.

The Same.

Suitably, therefore, to the fourteenth day, on which He also suffered, in the morning, the
chief priests and the scribes, who brought Him to Pilate, did not enter the Praetorium,
that they might not be defiled, but might freely eat the passover in the evening. With
this precise determination of the days both the whole Scriptures agree, and the Gospels
harmonize. The resurrection also attests it. He certainly rose on the third day, which
fell on the first day of the weeks of harvest, on which the law prescribed that the priest
should offer up the sheaf.

Macarius Chrysocephalus: Parable of the Prodigal Son, Luke 15. Oration on Luke 15.,
Towards the Close.

1. What choral dance and high festival is held in heaven, if there is one that has become
an exile and a fugitive from the life led under the Father, knowing not that those who put
themselves far from Him shall perish; if he has squandered the gift, and substance, and
inheritance of the Father; if there is one whose faith has failed, and whose hope is
spent, by rushing along with the Gentiles into the same profligacy of debauchery; and
then, famished and destitute, and not even filled with what the swine eat, has arisen and
come to his Father! But the kind Father waits not till the son comes to Him. For perchance
he would never be able or venture to approach, did he not find Him gracious. Wherefore,
when he merely wishing, when he straightway made a beginning, when he took the first step,
while he was yet a great way off, He [the Father] was moved with compassion, and ran, and
fell upon his neck and kissed him. And then the son, taking courage, confessed what he had
done.

Wherefore the Father bestows on him the glory and honour that was due and meet, putting on
him the best robe, the robe of immortality; and a ring, a royal signet and divine
seal,-impress of consecration, signature of glory, pledge of testimony (for it is said,
"He hath set to his seal that God is true,") and shoes, not those perishable ones which he
hath set his foot on holy ground is bidden take off, nor such as he who is sent to preach
the kingdom of heaven is forbidden to put on, but such as wear not, and ate suited for the
journey to heaven, becoming and adorning the heavenly path, such as unwashed feet never
put on, but those which are washed by our Teacher and Lord. Many, truly, are the shoes of
the sinful soul, by which it is bound and cramped. For each man is cramped by the cords of
his own sins. Accordingly, Abraham swears to the king of Sodom, "I will not take of all
that is thine, from a thread to a shoe-latchet." On account of these being defiled and
polluted on the earth, every kind of wrong and selfishness engrosses life. As the Lord
reproves Israel by Amos, saying, "For three iniquities of Israel, yea, for four, I will
not turn him back; because they have given away the righteous for silver, and the needy
for a pair of shoes, which tread upon the dust of the ground."

2. Now the shoes which the Father bids the servant give to the repentant son who has be-
taken himself to Him, do not impede or drag to the earth (for the earthly tabernacle
weighs down the anxious mind); but they are buoyant, and ascending, and waft to heaven,
and serve as such a ladder and chariot as he requires who has turned his mind towards the
Father. For, beautiful after being first beautifully adorned with all these things
without, he enters into the gladness within. For "Bring out" was said by Him who had first
said, "While he was yet a great way off, he ran and fell upon his neck." For it is here
that all the preparation for entrance to the marriage to which we are invited must be
accomplished. He, then, who has been made ready to enter will say, "This my joy is
fulfilled." But the unlovely and unsightly man will hear, "Friend, how camest thou in
here, without having a wedding garment? " And the fat and unctuous food,-the delicacies
abundant and sufficing of the blessed,-the fatted calf is killed; which is also again
spoken of as a lamb (not literally); that no one may suppose it small; but it is the great
and greatest. For not small is "the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world," who
"was led as a sheep to the slaughter," the sacrifice full of marrow, all whose fat,
according to the sacred law, was the Lord's. For He was wholly devoted and consecrated to
the Lord; so well grown, and to such excessive size, as to reach and extend over all, and
to fill those who eat Him and feed upon Him. For He is both flesh and bread, and has given
Himself as both to us to be eaten.

To the sons, then, who come to Him, the Father gives the calf, and it is slain and eaten.
But those who do not come to Him He pursues and disinherits, and is found to be a most
powerful bull. Here, by reason of His size and prowess, it is said of Him, "His glory is
as that of an unicorn." And the prophet Habakkuk sees Him bearing horns, and celebrates
His defensive attitude-"horns in His hands." Wherefore the sign shows His power and
authority,-horns that pierce on both sides, or rather, on all sides, and through
everything. And those who eat are so strengthened, and retain such strength from the life-
giving food in them, that they themselves are stronger than their enemies, and are all but
armed with the horns of a bull; as it is said, "In thee shall we butt our enemies." 3.
Gladness there is, and music, and dances; although the eider son, who had ever been with
and ever obedient to the Father, takes it ill, when he who never had himself been
dissipated or profligate sees the guilty one made happy.

Accordingly the Father calls him, saying, "Son, thou art ever with me." And what greater
joy and feast and festivity can be than being continually with God, standing by His side
and serving Him? "And all that is mine is thine." And blessed is the heir of God, for whom
the Father holds possession,-the faithful, to whom the whole world of possessions belongs.
"It was meet that we should be glad, and rejoice; for thy brother was dead, and is alive
again." Kind Father, who givest all things life, and raisest the dead. "And was lost, and
is found." And "blessed is the man whom Thou hast chosen and accepted," and whom having
sought, Thou dost find. "Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven, whose sins are
covered." It is for man to repent of sins; but let this be accompanied with a change that
will not be checked. For he who does not act so shall be put to shame, because he has
acted not with his whole heart, but in haste.

And it is ours to flee to God. And let us endeavour after this ceaselessly and
energetically. For He says, "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I
will give you rest." And prayer and confession with humility are voluntary acts. Wherefore
it is enjoined, "First tell thy sins, that thou mayest be justified." What afterwards we
shall obtain, and what we shall be, it is not for us to judge. 4. Such is the strict
meaning of the parable. The repentant son came to the pitying Father, never hoping for
these things,-the best robe, and the ring, and the shoes,-or to taste the fatted calf, or
to share in gladness, or enjoy music and dances; but he would have been contented with
obtaining what in his own estimation he deemed himself worth. "Make me," he had made up
his mind to say, "as one of thy hired servants." But when he saw the Father's welcome
meeting him, he did not say this, but said what he had in his mind to say first, "Father,
I have sinned against Heaven, and before thee." And so both his humility and his
accusation became the cause of justification and glory. For the righteous man condemns
himself in his first words. So also the publican departed justified rather than the
Pharisee. The son, then, knew not either what he was to obtain, or how to take or use or
put on himself the things given him; since he did not take the robe himself, and put; it
on. But it is said, "Put it on him." He did not himself put the ring on his finger, but
those who were bidden "Put a ring on his hand." Nor did he put the shoes on himself, but
it was they who heard, "and shoes on his feet."

And these things were perhaps incredible to him and to others, and unexpected before they
took place; but gladly received and praised were the gifts with which he was presented. 5.
The parable exhibits this thought, that the exercise of the faculty of reason has been
accorded to each man. Wherefore the prodigal is introduced, demanding from his father his
portion, that is, of the state of mind, endowed by reason. For the possession of reason is
granted to all, in order to the pursuit of what is good, and the avoidance of what is bad.
But many who are furnished by God with this make a bad use of the knowledge that has been
given them, and land in the profligacy of evil practices, and wickedly waste the substance
of reason,-the eye on disgraceful sights, the tongue on blasphemous words, the smell on
foetid licentious excesses of pleasures, the mouth on swinish gluttony, the hands on
thefts, the feet on running into plots, the thoughts on impious counsels, the inclinations
on indulgence on the love of ease, the mind on brutish pastime. They preserve nothing of
the substance of reason unsquandered. Such an one, therefore, Christ represents in the
parable,-as a rational creature, with his reason darkened, and asking from the Divine
Being what is suitable to reason; then as obtaining from God, and making a wicked use of
what had been given, and especially of the benefits of baptism, which had been vouchsafed
to him; whence also He calls him a prodigal; and then, after the dissipation of what had
been given him, and again his restoration by repentance, [He represents] the love of God
shown to him.

6. For He says, "Bring hither the fatted calf, kill it, and let us eat and be merry; for
this my son"-a name of nearest relationship, and significative of what is given to the
faithful-"was dead and lost,"-an expression of extremest alienation; for what is more
alien to the living than the lost and dead? For neither can be possessed any more. But
having from the nearest relationship fallen to extremest alienation, again by repentance
he returned to near relationship. For it is said, "Put on him the best robe," which was
his the moment he obtained baptism. I mean the glory of baptism, the remission of sins,
and the communication of the other blessings, which he obtained immediately he had touched
the font. "And put a ring on his hand." Here is the mystery of the Trinity; which is the
seal impressed on those who believe. "And put shoes on his feet," for "the preparation of
the Gospel of peace," and the whole course that leads to good actions.

7. But whom Christ finds lost, after sin committed since baptism, those Novatus, enemy of
God, resigns to destruction. Do not let us then reckon any fault if we repent; guarding
against falling, let us, if we have fallen, retrace our steps. And while dreading to
offend, let us, after offending, avoid despair, and be eager to be confirmed; and on
sinking, let us haste to rise up again. Let us obey the Lord, who calls to us, "Come unto
Me, all ye that labour, and I will give you rest." Let us employ the gift of reason for
actions of prudence. Let us learn now abstinence from what is wicked, that we may not be
forced to learn in the future. Let us employ life as a training school for what is good;
and let us be roused to the hatred of sin. Let us bear about a deep love for the Creator;
let us cleave to Him with our whole heart; let us not wickedly waste the substance of
reason, like the prodigal. Let us obtain the joy laid up, in which Paul exulting,
exclaimed, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? " To Him belongs glory and
honour, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, world without end. Amen.

Macarius Chrysocephalus: Oration VIII. On Matthew 8, and Book VII. On Luke 13.

Therefore God does not here take the semblance of man, but of a dove, because He wished to
show the simplicity and gentleness of the new manifestation of the Spirit by the likeness
of the dove. For the law was stem, and punished with the sword; but grace is joyous, and
trains by the word of meekness. Hence the Lord also says to the apostles, who said that He
should punish with fire those who would not receive Him, after the manner of Elias: "Ye
know not what manner of spirit ye are of."

From the Same.-Book XIII. Chap. IX.

Possibly by the "iota and the tittle" His righteousness exclaims, "If ye come right to me,
I also will come right to you; if ye walk crooked, I also will walk crooked, saith the
Lord of hosts," alluding to the offences of sinners under the name of crooked ways. For
the straight way, and that according to nature, which is pointed out by the iota of Jesus,
is His goodness, which is immoveable towards those who have obediently believed. There
shall not then pass away from the law neither the iota nor the tittle; that is, neither
the promise that applies to the straight in the way, nor the punishment threatened against
those that diverge. For the Lord is good to the straight in the way; but "those that turn
aside after their crooked ways He shall lead forth with those that work iniquity." "And
with the innocent He is innocent, and with the froward He is froward; " and to the crooked
He sends crooked ways. His own luminous image God impressed as with a seal, even the
greatest,-on man made in His likeness, that he might be ruler and lord over all things,
and that all things might serve him. Wherefore God judges man to be wholly His, and His
own image. He is invisible; but His image, man, is visible. Whatever one, then, does to
man, whether good or bad, is referred to Himself. Wherefore from Him judgment shall
proceed, appointing to all according to desert; for He will avenge His own image.

12.-FRAGMENTS NOT GIVEN IN THE OXFORD EDITION

1. In Anastasius Sinaita, Quest. 96.

1 As it is possible even now for man to form men, according to the original formation of
Adam, He no longer now creates, on account of His having granted once for all to man the
power of generating men, saying to our nature, "Increase, and multiply, and replenish the
earth." So also, by His omnipotent and omniscient power, He arranged that the dissolution
and death of our bodies should be effected by a natural sequence and order, through the
change of their elements, in accordance with His divine knowledge and comprehension.

2. Joannes Veccus, Patriarch of Constantinople, on the Procession of the Spirit. In Leo
Allatius, Vol. I. P. 248.

2 Further, Clement the Stromatist, in the various definitions which he framed, that they
might guide the man desirous of studying theology in every dogma of religion, defining
what spirit is, and how it is called spirit, says: "Spirit is a substance, subtle,
immaterial, and which issues forth without form." 3. From the Unpublished Disputation
Against Iconoclasts, of Nicephorus of Constantinople; Edited in Greek and Latin by Le
Nourry in His Apparatus to the Library of the Fathers, Vol. I. P. 1334 a.b. From Clement
the Presbyter of Alexandria's Book Against Judaizers. Solomon the son of David, in the
books styled "The Reigns of the Kings," comprehending not only that the structure of the
true temple was celestial and spiritual, but had also a reference to the flesh, which He
who was both the son and Lord of David was to build up, both for His own presence, where,
as a living image, He resolved to make His shrine, and for the church that was to rise up
through the union of faith, says expressly, "Will God in very deed dwell with men on the
earth? " page n='585'

3 He dwells on the earth clothed in flesh, and His abode with men is effected by the
conjunction and harmony which obtains among the righteous, and which build and rear a new
temple. For the righteous are the earth, being still encompassed with the earth; and
earth, too, in comparison with the greatness of the Lord. Thus also the blessed Peter
hesitates not to say, "Ye also, as living stones, are built up, a spiritual house, a holy
temple, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ." And with
reference to the body, which by circumscription He consecrated as a hallowed place for
Himself upon earth, He said," Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up
again. The Jews therefore said, In forty-six years was this temple built, and wilt thou
raise it up in three days? But He spake of the temple of His body."

4. From Ms. Marked 2431 in the Library of the Most Christian King.-Ibid. P. 1336 a. From
the Very Holy and Blessed Clement, Presbyter of Alexandria, the Stromatist's Book on
Providence.

4 What is God? "God," as the Lord saith, "is a Spirit." Now spirit is properly substance,
incorporeal, and uncircumscribed. And that is incorporeal which does not consist of a
body, or whose existence is not according to breadth, length, and depth. And that is
uncircumscribed which has no place, which is wholly in all, and in each entire, and the
same in itself.

5. From the Same Ms.-Ibid. 1335 D.

5 Fu/sij (nature) is so called from to\ pefuke/nai (to be born). The first substance is
everything which subsists by itself, as a stone is called a substance. The second is a
substance capable of increase, as a plant grows and decays. The third is animated and
sentient substance, as animal, horse. The fourth is animate, sentient, rational substance,
as man. Wherefore each one of us is made as consisting of all, having an immaterial soul
arid a mind, which is the image of God.

6. In John of Damascus-Parallel-Vol. II. P. 307.

6 The fear of God, who is impassible, is free of perturbation. For it is not God that one
dreads, but the falling away from God. He who dreads this, dreads falling into what is
evil, and dreads what is evil. And he that fears a fall wishes himself to be immortal and
passionless.

7.the Same, P. 341.

7 Let there be a law against those who dare to look at things sacred and divine
irreverently, and in a way unworthy of God, to inflict on them the punishment of
blindness.

8. The Same, P. 657.

8 Universally, the Christian is friendly to solitude, and quiet, and tranquillily, and
peace.

9. From the Catena on the Pentateuch, Published in Latin by Francis Zephyrus, P. 146.

9 That mystic name which is called the Tetragrammaton, by which alone they who had access
to the Holy of Holies were protected, is pronounced Jehovah, which means, "Who is, and who
shall be." The candlestick which stood at the south of the altar signified the seven
planets, which seem to us to revolve around the meridian, on either side of which rise
three branches; since the sun also like the lamp, balanced in the midst of the planets by
divine wisdom, illumines by its light those above and below. On the other side of the
altar was situated the table on which the loaves were displayed, because from that quarter
of the heaven vital and nourishing breezes blow.

10. From J. A. Cramer's Catenae Graecorum Patrum in Nov. Test. Oxford 1840 Vol. III.

10 On Acts 7:24. The mystics say that it was by his word alone that Moses slew the
Egyptian ; as certainly afterwards it is related in the Acts that [Peter] slew with his
word those who kept back part of the price of the land, and lied.

II. The Same, Vol. IV. P. 291.

11 On Romans 8:38. "Or life, that of our present existence," and "death,"-that caused by
the assault of persecutors, and "angels, and principalities, and powers," apostate
spirits.

12. P. 369, Chap. X. 3.

12 And having neither known nor done the requirement of the law, what they conceived, that
they also thought that the law required. And they did not believe the law, as prophesying,
but the bare word; and followed it from fear, but not with their disposition and in faith.

13. Vol. VI. P. 385.

13 On 2 Corinthians 5:16. "And if we have known Christ after the flesh." And so far, he
says, no one any longer lives after the flesh. For that is not life, but death. For Christ
also, that He might show this, ceased to live after the flesh. How? Not by putting off the
body! Far be it! For with it as His own He shall come, the Judge of all. But by divesting
Himself of physical affections, such as hunger, and thirst, and sleep, and weariness. For
now He has a body incapable of suffering and of injury. As "after the flesh" in our case
is being in the midst of sins, and being out of them is to be "not after the flesh; "so
also after the flesh, in the case of Christ, was His subjection to natural affections, and
not to be subject to them was not to be "after the flesh.""But," he says, "as He was
released, so also are we." Let there be no longer, he says, subjection to the influences
of the flesh. Thus Clement, the fourth book of the Hypotyposes.

14. From the Same, P. 391.

14 On 2 Corinthians 6:11. "Our heart is enlarged." For as heat is wont to expand, so also
love. For love is a thing of warmth. As if he would say, I love you not only with mouth,
but with heart, and have you all within. Wherefore he says: "ye are not straitened in us,
since desire itself expands the soul." "Our heart is enlarged" to teach you all things;
"but ye are straitened in your own bowels," that is, in love to God, in which you ought to
love me. Thus Clement, in the fourth book of the Hypotyposes.

15. From Vol. III. V. 286.

15 Hebrews 1:1. "At sundry times and divers manners." Since the Lord, being the Apostle of
the Almighty, was sent to the Hebrews, it was out of modesty that Paul did not subscribe
himself apostle of the Hebrews, from reverence for the Lord, and because he was the herald
and apostle of the Gentiles, and wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews in addition [to his
proper work].

16. From the Same.

16 The same work contains a passage from The Instructor, book i. chap. vi. The passage is
that beginning, "For the blood is found to be," down to "potent charms of
affection."Portions, however, are omitted. There are a good many various readings; but
although the passage in question, as found in Cramer's work, is printed in full in Migne's
edition, on the alleged ground of the considerable variation from the text of Clement, the
variation is not such as to make a translation of the passage as found in Cramer of any
special interest or value. We have noted the following readings:- ginetai, where, the verb
being omitted, we have inserted is: There is an obstruction, etc. su/riggaj, tubes,
instead ofj, raggaj (hollows), hollows of the breasts. geitniazousw=n, for geitniousw=n
neighbouring (arteries). e0pilh/yei, for e0mperilh/yei interruption (such as this).
a0poklh/rwsij, occurs as in the text, for which the emendationa0polh/rhsij, as specified
in the note, has been adopted.

17 h !tij e0sti/, omitted here, which is"sweet through grace," is supplied.

P. 142.

18 ga/la, milk, instead of ma/nna, manna, (that food) manna.

P. 149.

19 xrh\ de\ katanoh=sai th\ n fu/sin, (but it is necessary to consider nature), for ou0
katanenohko/tej, t. f., through want of consideration of nature. katakleiome/nh, agreeing
with food, for katakleiome/nw, agreeing with heat (enclosed within). gi/netai for ga\ r
(which is untranslated), (the blood) is (a preparation) for milk.

P. 144.

20 toi/nun to\ n lo/gon is supplied, and ei0ko/twj omitted in the clause, Paul using
appropriate figurative language.

P. 145.

21 plh\ n is supplied before a0lla\ to\ e/n au0th=|, and the blood in it, etc., is
omitted.

P. 146.

22 "For Diogenes Apolloniates will have it" is omitted.pa/nth, rendered"in all respects,"
is connected with the preceding sentence.

P. 147.

23 o\ #ti to/inun, for 9Wj d'. And that (milk is produced). thnikau=ta for thnika/de in
the clause, "and the grass and meadows are juicy and moist," not translated.
proeirhme/nw|, above mentioned (milk), omitted. trufh=j for trofh=j, (sweet) nutriment.
tw=| omitted before glukei=, sweet (wine), and kaqa/per, "as, when suffering." to\
liparo/n for tw=| liparw=|, and a0ridh/lwj fora0ridh/lou, in the sentence: "Further, many
use the fat of milk, called butter, for the lamp, plainly," etc. N. B. [Le Nourry decides
that the Adumbrations were not translated from the Hypotyposes, but Kaye (p. 473) thinks
on insufficient grounds. See, also (p. 5), Kaye's learned note.]


FRAGMENTS
=========

FRAGMENTS continued

WHO IS THE RICH MAN THAT SHALL BE SAVED?

1 [Translated by Rev. William Wilson, M.a.] 2 I.Those who bestow laudatory addresses on
the rich appear to me to be rightly judged not only flatterers and base, in vehemently
pretending that things which are disagreeable give them pleasure, but also godless and
treacherous; godless, because neglecting to praise and glorify God, who is alone perfect
and good, "of whom are all things, and by whom are all things, and for whom are all
things," they invest with divine honours men wallowing in an execrable and abominable
life, and, what is the principal thing, liable on this account to the judgment of God; and
treacherous, because, although wealth is of itself sufficient to puff up and corrupt the
souls of its possessors, and to turn them from the path by which salvation is to be
attained, they stupefy them still more, by inflating the minds of the rich with the
pleasures of extravagant praises, and by making them utterly despise all things except
wealth, on account of which they are admired; bringing, as the saying is, fire to fire,
pouring pride on pride, and adding conceit to wealth, a heavier burden to that which by
nature is a weight, from which somewhat ought rather to be removed and taken away as being
a dangerous and deadly disease. For to him who exalts and magnifies himself, the change
and downfall to a low condition succeeds in turn, as the divine word teaches.

3 For it appears to me to be far kinder, than basely to flatter the rich and praise them
for what is bad, to aid them in working out their salvation in every possible way; asking
this of God, who surely and sweetly bestows such things on His own children; and thus by
the grace of the Saviour healing their souls, enlightening them and leading them to the
attainment of the truth; and whosoever obtains this and distinguishes himself in good
works shall gain the prize of everlasting life. Now prayer that runs its course till the
last day of life needs a strong and tranquil soul; and the conduct of life needs a good
and righteous disposition, reaching out towards all the commandments of the Saviour. 4 II.
Perhaps the reason of salvation appearing more difficult to the rich than to poor men, is
not single but manifold. For some, merely hearing, and that in an off-hand way, the
utterance of the Saviour, "that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven," despair of themselves as not
destined to live, surrender all to the world, cling to the present life as if it alone was
left to them, and so diverge more from the way to the life to come, no longer inquiring
either whom the Lord and Master calls rich, or how that which is impossible to man becomes
possible to God. But others rightly and adequately comprehend this, but attaching slight
importance to the works which tend to salvation, do not make the requisite preparation for
attaining to the objects of their hope. And I affirm both of these things of the rich who
have learned both the Saviour's power and His glorious salvation. With those who are
ignorant of the truth I have little concern.

5 III. Those then who are actuated by a love of the truth and love of their brethren, and
neither are rudely insolent towards such rich as are called, nor, on the other hand,
cringe to them for their own avaricious ends, must first by the word relieve them of their
groundless despair, and show with the requisite explanation of the oracles of the Lord
that the inheritance of the kingdom of heaven is not quite cut off from them if they obey
the commandments; then admonish them that they entertain a causeless fear, and that the
Lord gladly receives them, provided they are willing; and then, in addition, exhibit and
teach how and by what deeds and dispositions they shall win the objects of hope, in as
much as it is neither out of their reach, nor, on the other hand, attained without effort;
but, as is the case with athlete"-to compare things small and perishing with things great
and immortal-let the man who is endowed with worldly wealth reckon that this depends on
himself. For among those, one man, because he despaired of being able to conquer and gain
crowns, did not give in his name for the contest; while another, whose mind was inspired
with this hope, and yet did not submit to the appropriate labours, and diet, and
exercises, remained uncrowned, and was balked in his expectations.

6 So also let not the man that has been invested with worldly wealth proclaim himself
excluded at the outset from the Saviour's lists, provided he is a believer and one who
contemplates the greatness of God's philanthropy; nor let him, on the other hand, expect
to grasp the crowns of immortality without struggle and effort, continuing untrained, and
without contest. But let him go and put himself under the Word as his trainer, and Christ
the President of the contest; and for his prescribed food and drink let him have the New
Testament of the Lord; and for exercises, the commandments; and for elegance and ornament,
the fair dispositions, love, faith, hope, knowledge of the truth, gentleness, meekness,
pity, gravity: so that, when by the last trumpet the signal shall be given for the race
and departure hence, as from the stadium of life, he may with a good conscience present
himself victorious before the Judge who confers the rewards, confessedly worthy of the
Fatherland on high, to which he returns with crowns and the acclamations of angels.

7 IV. May the Saviour then grant to us that, having begun the subject from this point, we
may contribute to the brethren what is true, and suitable, and saving, first touching the
hope itself, and, second, touching the access to the hope. He indeed grants to those who
beg, and teaches those who ask, and dissipate signorance and dispels despair, by
introducing again the same words about the rich, which become their own interpreters and
infallible expounders. For there is nothing like listening again to the very same
statements, which till now in the Gospels were distressing you, hearing them as you did
without examination, and erroneously through puerility: "And going forth into the way, one
approached and kneeled, saying, Good Master, what good thing shall I do that I may inherit
everlasting life? And Jesus saith, Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but one,
that is, God. Thou knowest the commandments. Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not
steal, Do not bear false witness, Defraud not, Honour thy father and thy mother. And he
answering saith to Him, All these have I observed. And Jesus, looking upon him, loved him,
and said, One thing thou lackest. If thou wouldest be perfect, sell what thou hast and
give to the poor, and thou shall have treasure in heaven: and come, follow Me. And he was
sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he was rich, having great possessions.

8 And Jesus looked round about, and saith to His disciples, How hardly shall they that
have riches enter into the kingdom of God! And the disciples were astonished at His words.
But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that
trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God! More easily shall a camel enter through
the eye of a needle than a rich man into the kingdom of God. And they were astonished out
of measure, and said, Who then can be saved? bend He, looking upon them, said, What is
impossible with men is possible with God. For with God all things are possible. Peter
began to say to Him, Lo, we have left all and followed Thee. And Jesus answered and said,
Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall leave what is his own, parents, and brethren, and
possessions, for My sake and the Gospel's, shall receive an hundred-fold now in this
world, lands, and possessions, and house, and brethren, with persecutions; and in the
world to come is life everlasting. But many that are first shall be last, and the last
first."

9 V. These things are written in the Gospel according to Mark; and in all the rest
correspondingly; although perchance the expressions vary slightly in each, yet all show
identical agreement in meaning. But well knowing that the Saviour teaches nothing in a
merely human way, but teaches all things to His own with divine and mystic wisdom, we must
not listen to His utterances carnally; but with due investigation and intelligence must
search out and learn the meaning hidden in them. For even those things which seem to have
been simplified to the disciples by the Lord Himself are found to require not less, even
more, attention than what is expressed enigmatically, from the surpassing superabundance
of wisdom in them. And whereas the things which are thought to have been explained by Him
to those within-those called by Him the children of the kingdom-require still more
consideration than the things which seemed to have been expressed simply, and respecting
which therefore no questions were asked by those who heard them, but which, pertaining to
the entire design of salvation, and to be contemplated with admirable and supercelestial
depth of mind, we must not receive superficially with our ears, but with application of
the mind to the very spirit of the Saviour, and the unuttered meaning of the declaration.

10 VI. For our Lord and Saviour was asked pleasantly a question most appropriate for
Him,-the Life respecting life, the Saviour respecting salvation, the Teacher respecting
the chief doctrines taught, the Truth respecting the true immortality, the Word respecting
the word of the Father, the Perfect respecting the perfect rest, the Immortal respecting
the sure immortality. He was asked respecting those things on account of which He
descended, which He inculcates, which He teaches, which He offers, in order to show the
essence of the Gospel, that it is the gift of eternal life. For He foresaw as God, both
what He would be asked, and what each one would answer Him. For who should do this more
than the Prophet of prophets, and the Lord of' every prophetic spirit? And having been
called "good," and taking the starting note from this first expression, He commences His
teaching with this, turning the pupil to God, the good, and first and only dispenser of
eternal life, which the Son, who received it of Him, gives to us.VII. Wherefore the
greatest and chiefest point of the instructions which relate to life must be implanted in
the soul from the beginning,-to know the eternal God, the giver of what is eternal, and by
knowledge and comprehension to possess God, who is first, and highest, and one, and good.

11 For this is the immutable and immoveable source and support of life, the knowledge of
God, who really is, and who bestows the things which really are, that is, those which are
eternal, from whom both being and the continuance of it are derived to other beings. For
ignorance of Him is death; but the knowledge and appropriation of Him, and love and
likeness to Him, are the only life.VIII. He then who would live the true life is enjoined
first to know Him "whom no one knows, except the Son reveal (Him). Next is to be learned
the greatness of the Saviour after Him, and the newness of grace; for, according to the
apostle, "the law was given by Moses, grace and truth came by Jesus Christ; " and the
gifts granted through a faithful servant are not equal to those bestowed by the true Son.
If then the law of Moses had been sufficient to confer eternal life, it were to no purpose
for the Saviour Himself to come and suffer for us, accomplishing the course of human life
from His birth to His cross; and to no purpose for him who had done all the commandments
of the law from his youth to fall on his knees and beg from another immortality. For he
had not only fulfilled the law, but had begun to do so from his very earliest youth. For
what is there great or pre-eminently illustrious in an old age which is unproductive of
faults?

12 But if one in juvenile frolicsomeness and the fire of youth shows a mature judgment
older than his years, this is a champion admirable and distinguished, and hoary pre-
eminently in mind. 13 But, nevertheless, this man being such, is perfectly persuaded that
nothing is wanting to him as far as respects righteousness, but that he is entirely
destitute of life. Wherefore he asks it from Him who alone is able to give it. And with
reference to the law, he carries confidence; but the Son of God he addresses in
supplication. He is transferred from faith to faith. As perilously tossing and occupying a
dangerous anchorage in the law, he makes for the Saviour to find a haven. IX. Jesus,
accordingly, does not charge him with not having fulfilled all things out of the law, but
loves him, and fondly welcomes his obedience in what he had learned; but says that he is
not perfect as respects eternal life, in as much as he had not fulfilled what is perfect,
and that he is a doer indeed of the law, but idle at the true life. Those things, indeed,
are good. Who denies it? For "the commandment is holy," as far as a sort of training with
fear and preparatory discipline goes, leading as it did to the culmination of legislation
and to grace. But Christ is the fulfilment "of the law for righteousness to every one that
believeth; "and not as a slave making slaves, but sons, and brethren, and fellow-heirs,
who perform the Father's will.

14 X. "If thou wilt be perfect. Consequently he was not yet perfect. For nothing is more
perfect than what is perfect. And divinely the expression "if thou wilt" showed the self-
determination of the soul holding converse with Him. For choice depended on the man as
being free; but the gift on God as the Lord. And He gives to those who are willing and are
exceedingly earnest, and ask, that so their salvation may become their own. For God
compels not (for compulsion is repugnant to God), but supplies to those who seek, and
bestows on those who ask, and opens to those who knock. If thou wilt, then, if thou really
wiliest, and art not deceiving thyself, acquire what thou lackest. One thing is lacking
thee,-the one thing which abides, the good, that which is now above the law, which the law
gives not, which the law contains not, which is the prerogative of those who live. He
forsooth who had fulfilled all the demands of the law from his youth, and had gloried in
what was magnificent, was not able to complete the whole with this one thing which was
specially required! by the Saviour, so as to receive the eternal life which he desired.
But he departed displeased, vexed at the commandment of the life, on account of which he
supplicated. For he did not truly wish life, as he averred, but aimed at the mere
reputation of the good choice. And he was capable of busying himself about many things;

15 but the one thing, the work of life, he was powerless, and disinclined, and unable to
accomplish. Such also was what the Lord said to Martha, who was occupied with many things,
and distracted and troubled with serving; while she blamed her sister, because, leaving
serving, she set herself at His feet, devoting her time to learning: "Thou art troubled
about many things, but Mary hath chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from
her. So also He bade him leave his busy life, and cleave to One and adhere to the grace of
Him who offered everlasting life. 16 XI. What then was it which persuaded him to flight,
and made him depart from the Master, from the entreaty, the hope, the life, previously
pursued with ardour?-"Sell thy possessions." And what is this? He does not, as some
conceive off-hand, bid him throw away the substance he possessed, and abandon his
property; but bids him banish from his soul his notions about wealth, his excitement and
morbid feeling about it, the anxieties, which are the thorns of existence, which choke the
seed of life. For it is no great thing or desirable to be destitute of wealth, if without
a special object,-not except on account of life. For thus those who have nothing at all,
but are destitute, and beggars for their daily bread, the poor dispersed on the streets,
who know not God and God's righteousness, simply on account of their extreme want and
destitution of subsistence, and lack even of the smallest things, were most blessed and
most dear to God, and sole possessors of everlasting life.

17 Nor was the renunciation of wealth and the bestowment of it on the poor or needy a new
thing; for many did so before the Saviour's advent,-some because of the leisure (thereby
obtained) for learning, and on account of a dead wisdom; and others for empty fame and
vainglory, as the Anaxagorases, the Democriti, and the Crateses. 18 XII. Why then command
as new, as divine, as alone life-giving, what did not save those of former days? And what
peculiar thing is it that the new creature the Son of God intimates and teaches? It is not
the outward act which others have done, but something else indicated by it, greater, more
godlike, more perfect, the stripping off of the passions from the soul itself and from the
disposition, and the cutting up by the roots and casting out of what is alien to the mind.
For this is the lesson peculiar to the believer, and the instruction worthy of the
Saviour. For those who formerly despised external things relinquished and squandered their
property, but the passions of the soul, I believe, they intensified. For they indulged in
arrogance, pretension, and vainglory, and in contempt of the rest of mankind, as if they
had done something superhuman. How then would the Saviour have enjoined on those destined
to tire for ever what was injurious and hurtful with reference to the life which He
promised? For although such is the case, one, after ridding himself of the burden of
wealth, may none the less have still the lust and desire for money innate and living; and
may have abandoned the use of it, but being at once destitute of and desiring what he
spent, may doubly grieve both on account of the absence of attendance, and the presence of
regret. For it is impossible and inconceivable that those in want of the necessaries of
life should not be harassed in mind, and hindered from better things in the endeavour to
provide them somehow, and from some source.

19 XIII. And how much more beneficial the opposite case, for a man, through possessing a
competency, both not himself to be in straits about money, and also to give assistance to
those to whom it is requisite so to do! For if no one had anything, what room would be
left among men for giving? And how can this dogma fail to be found plainly opposed to and
conflicting with many other excellent teachings of the Lord? "Make to yourselves friends
of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when ye fail, they may receive you into the
everlasting habitations." "Acquire treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust
destroys, nor thieves break through." How could one give food to the hungry, and drink to
the thirsty, clothe the naked, and shelter the houseless, for not doing which He threatens
with fire and the outer darkness, if each man first divested himself of all these things?
Nay, He bids Zaccheus and Matthew, the rich tax-gathers, entertain Him hospitably. And He
does not bid them part with their property, but, applying the just and removing the unjust
judgment, He subjoins, "To-day salvation has come to this house, for as much as he also is
a son of Abraham." He so praises the use of property as to enjoin, along with this
addition, the giving a share of it, to give drink to the thirsty, bread to the hungry, to
take the houseless in, and clothe the naked. But if it is not possible to supply those
needs without substance, and He bids people abandon their substance, what else would the
Lord be doing than exhorting to give and not to give the same things, to feed and not to
feed, to take in and to shut out, to share and not to share? which were the most
irrational of all things.

20 XIV. Riches, then, which benefit also our neighbours, are not to be thrown away. For
they are possessions, in as much as they are possessed, and goods, in as much as they are
useful and provided by God for the use of men; and they lie to our hand, and are put under
our power, as material and instruments which are for good use to those who know the
instrument. If you use it skilfully, it is skilful; if you are deficient in skill, it is
affected by your want of skill, being itself destitute of blame. Such an instrument is
wealth. Are you able to make a right use of it? It is subservient to righteousness. Does
one make a wrong use of it? It is, on the other hand, a minister of wrong. For its nature
is to be subservient, not to rule. That then which of itself has neither good nor evil,
being blameless, ought not to be blamed; but that which has the power of using it well and
ill, by reason of its possessing voluntary choice. And this is the mind and judgment of
man, which has freedom in itself and self-determination in the treatment of what is
assigned to it. So let no man destroy wealth, rather than the passions of the soul, which
are incompatible with the better use of wealth. So that, becoming virtuous and good, he
may be able to make a good use of these riches. The renunciation, then, and selling of all
possessions, is to be understood as spoken of the passions of the soul.

21 XV. I would then say this. Since some things are within and some without the soul, and
if the soul make a good use of them, they! also are reputed good, but if a bad,
bad;-whether does He who commands us to alienate our possessions repudiate those things,
after the removal of which the passions still remain, or those rather, on the removal of
which wealth even becomes beneficial? If therefore he who casts away worldly wealth can
still be rich in the passions, even though the material [for their gratification] is
absent,-for the disposition produces its own effects, and strangles the reason, and
presses it down and inflames it with its inbred lusts,-it is then of no advantage to him
to be poor in purse while he is rich in passions. For it is not what ought to be cast away
that he has east away, but what is indifferent; and he has deprived himself of what is
serviceable, but set on fire the innate fuel of evil through want of the external means
[of gratification]. We must therefore renounce those possessions that are injurious, not
those that are capable of being serviceable, if one knows the fight use of them. And what
is managed with wisdom, and sobriety, and piety, is profitable; and what is hurtful must
be east away. But things external hun not. So then the Lord introduces the use of external
things, bidding us put away not the means of subsistence, but what uses them badly. And
these are the infirmities and passions of the soul.

22 XVI. The presence of wealth in these is deadly to all, the loss of it salutary. Of
which, making the soul pure,-that is, poor and bare,-we must hear the Saviour speaking
thus, "Come, follow Me." For to the pure in heart He now becomes the way. But into the
impure soul the grace of God finds no entrance. And that (soul) is unclean which is rich
in lusts, and is in the throes of many worldly affections. For he who holds possessions,
and gold, and silver, and houses, as the gifts of God; and ministers from them to the God
who gives them for the salvation of men; and knows that he possesses them more for the
sake of the brethren than his own; and is superior to the possession of them, not the
slave of the things he possesses; and does not carry them about in his soul, nor bind and
circumscribe his life within them, but is ever labouring at some good and divine work,
even should he be necessarily some time or other deprived of them, is able with cheerful
mind to bear their removal equally with their abundance. This is he who is blessed by the
Lord, and cared poor in spirit, a meet heir of the kingdom of heaven, not one who could
not live rich.

23 XVII. But he who carries his riches in his soul, and instead of God's Spirit bears in
his heart gold or land, and is always acquiring possessions without end, and is
perpetually on the outlook for more, bending downwards and fettered in the toils of the
world, being earth and destined to depart to earth,-whence can he be able to desire and to
mind the kingdom of heaven,-a man who carries not a heart, but land or metal, who must
perforce be found in the midst of the objects he has chosen? For where the mind of man is,
there is also his treasure. The Lord acknowledges a twofold treasure,-the good: "For the
good man, out of the good treasure of his heart, bringeth forth good; " and the evil: for
"the evil man, out of the evil treasure, bringeth forth evil: for out of the abundance of
the heart the mouth speaketh." As then treasure is not one with Him, as also it is with
us, that which gives the unexpected great gain in the finding, but also a second, which is
profitless and undesirable, an evil acquisition, hurtful; so also there is a richness in
good things, and a richness in bad things, since we know that riches and treasure are not
by nature separated from each other. And the one sort of riches is to be possessed and
acquired, and the other not to be possessed, but to be cast away.

24 In the same way spiritual poverty is blessed. Wherefore also Matthew added, "Blessed
are the poor." How? "In spirit." And again, "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after
the righteousness of God." Wherefore wretched are the contrary kind of poor, who have no
part in God, and still less in human property, and have not tasted of the righteousness of
God. XVIII. So that (the expression) rich men that shall with difficulty enter into the
kingdom, is to be apprehended in a scholarly way, not awkwardly, or rustically, or
carnally. For if the expression is used thus, salvation does not depend on external
things, whether they be many or few, small or great, or illustrious or obscure, or
esteemed or disesteemed; but on the virtue of the soul, on faith, and hope, and love, and
brotherliness, and knowledge, and meekness, and humility, and truth, the reward of which
is salvation. For it is not on account of comeliness of body that any one shall live, or,
on the other hand, perish. But he who uses the body given to him chastely and according to
God, shall live; and he that destroys the temple of God shall be destroyed. An ugly man
can be profligate, and a good-looking man temperate. Neither strength and great size of
body makes alive, nor does any of the members destroy. But the soul which uses them
provides the cause for each. Bear then, it is said, when struck on the face; which a man
strong and in good health can obey. And again, a man who is feeble may transgress from
refractoriness of temper. So also a poor and destitute man may be found intoxicated with
lusts; and a man rich in worldly goods temperate, poor in indulgences, trustworthy,
intelligent, pure, chastened.

25 If then it is the soul which, first and especially, is that which is to live, and if
virtue springing up around it saves, and vice kills; then it is clearly manifest that by
being poor in those things, by riches of which one destroys it, it is saved, and by being
rich in those things, riches of which ruin it, it is killed. And let us no longer seek the
cause of the issue elsewhere than in the state and disposition of the soul in respect of
obedience to God and purity, and in respect of transgression of the commandments and
accumulation of wickedness. 26 XIX. He then is truly and rightly rich who is rich in
virtue, and is capable of making a holy and faithful use of any fortune; while he is
spuriously rich who is rich, according to the flesh, and turns life into outward
possession, which is transitory and perishing, and now belongs to one, now to another, and
in the end to nobody at all. Again, in the same way there is a genuine poor man, and
another counterfeit and falsely so called. He that is poor in spirit, and that is the
right thing, and he that is poor in a worldly sense, which is a different thing. To him
who is poor in worldly goods, but rich in vices, who is not poor in spirit and rich toward
God, it is said, Abandon the alien possessions that are in thy soul, that, becoming pure
in heart, thou mayest see God; which is another way of saying, Enter into the kingdom of
heaven. And how may you abandon them? By selling them. What then? Are you to take money
for effects, by effecting an exchange of riches, by turning your visible substance into
money? Not at all. But by introducing, instead of what was formerly inherent in your soul,
which you desire to save, other riches which deify and which minister everlasting life,
dispositions in accordance with the command of God; for which there shall accrue to you
endless reward and honour, and salvation, and everlasting immortality. It is thus that
thou dost rightly sell the possessions, many are superfluous, which shut the heavens
against thee by exchanging them for those which are able to save. Let the former be
possessed by the carnal poor, who are destitute of the latter. But thou, by receiving
instead spiritual wealth, shalt have now treasure in the heavens.

27 XX. The wealthy and legally correct man, not understanding these things figuratively,
nor how the same man can be both poor and rich, and have wealth and not have it, and use
the world and not use it, went away sad and downcast, leaving the state of life, which he
was able merely to desire but not to attain, making for himself the difficult impossible.
For it was difficult for the soul not to be seduced and ruined by the luxuries and flowery
enchantments that beset remarkable wealth; but it was not impossible, even surrounded with
it, for one to lay hold of salvation, provided he withdrew himself from material wealth,
-to that which is grasped by the mind and taught by God, and learned to use things
indifferent rightly and properly, and so as to strive after eternal life. And the
disciples even themselves were at first alarmed and amazed. Why were they so on hearing
this? Was it that they themselves possessed much wealth? Nay, they had long ago left their
very nets, and hooks, and rowing boats, which were their sole possessions. Why then do
they say in consternation, "Who can be saved? "They had heard well and like disciples what
was spoken in parable and obscurely by the Lord, and perceived the depth of the words. For
they were sanguine of salvation on the ground of their want of wealth.

28 But when they became conscious of not having yet wholly renounced the passions (for
they were neophytes and recently selected by the Saviour), they were excessively
astonished, and despaired of themselves no less than that rich man who clung so terribly
to the wealth which he preferred to eternal life. It was therefore a fit subject for all
fear on the disciples' part; if both he that possesses wealth and he that is teeming with
passions were the rich, and these alike shall be expelled from the heavens. For salvation
is the privilege of pure and passionless souls. 29 XXI. But the Lord replies, "Because
what is impossible with men is possible with God." This again is full of great wisdom. For
a man by himself working and toiling at freedom from passion achieves nothing. But if he
plainly shows himself very desirous and earnest about this, he attains it by the addition
of the power of God. For God conspires with willing souls. But if they abandon their
eagerness, the spirit which is bestowed by God is also restrained. For to save the
unwilling is the part of one exercising compulsion; but to save the willing, that of one
showing grace. Nor does the kingdom of heaven belong to sleepers and sluggards, "but the
violent take it by force." For this alone is commendable violence, to force God, and take
life from God by force. And He, knowing those who persevere firmly, or rather violently,
yields and grants. For God delights in being vanquished in such things.

30 Therefore on hearing those words, the blessed Peter, the chosen, the pre-eminent, the
first of the disciples, for whom alone and Himself the Saviour paid tribute, quickly
seized and comprehended the saying. And what does he say? "Lo, we have left all and
followed Thee? Now if by all he means his own property, he boasts of leaving four oboli
perhaps in all, and forgets to show the kingdom of heaven to be their recompense. But if,
casting away what we were now speaking of, the old mental possessions and soul diseases,
they follow in the Master's footsteps, this now joins them to those who are to be enrolled
in the heavens. For it is thus that one truly follows the Saviour, by aiming at
sinlessness and at His perfection, and adorning and composing the soul before it as a
mirror, and arranging everything in all respects similarly. 31 XXII."And Jesus answering
said, Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall leave what is his own, parents, and children,
and wealth, for My sake and the Gospel's, shall receive an hundredfold." But let neither
this trouble you, nor the still harder saying delivered in another place in the words,
"Whoso hateth not father, and mother, and children, and his own life besides, cannot be My
disciple." For the God of peace, who also exhorts to love enemies, does not introduce
hatred and dissolution from those that are dearest. But if we are to love our enemies, it
is in accordance with right reason that, ascending from them, we should love also those
nearest in kindred. Or if we are to hate our blood-relations, deduction teaches us that
much more are we to spurn from us our enemies. So that the reasonings would be shown to
destroy one another. But they do not destroy each other, nor are they near doing so. For
from the same feeling and disposition, and on the ground of the same rule, one loving his
enemy may hate his father, in as much as he neither takes vengeance on an enemy, nor
reverences a father more than Christ. For by the one word he extirpates hatred and injury,
and by the other shamefacedness towards one's relations, if it is detrimental to
salvation. If then one's father, or son, or brother, be godless, and become a hindrance to
faith and an impediment to the higher life, let him not be friends or agree with him, but
on account of the spiritual enmity, let him dissolve the fleshly relationship.

32 XXIII. Suppose the matter to be a law-suit. Let your father be imagined to present
himself to you and say, "I begot and reared thee. Follow me, and join with me in
wickedness, and obey not the law of Christ; "and whatever a man who is a blasphemer and
dead by nature would say. But on the other side hear the Saviour: "I regenerated thee, who
wert ill born by the world to death. I emancipated, healed, ransomed thee. I will show
thee the face of the good Father God. Call no man thy father on earth. Let the dead bury
the dead; but follow thou Me. For I will bring thee to a rest of ineffable and unutterable
blessings, which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of men;
into which angels desire to look, and see what good things God hath prepared for the
saints and the children who love Him." I am He who feeds thee, giving Myself as bread, of
which he who has tasted experiences death no more, and supplying day by day the drink of
immortality. I am teacher of supercelestial lessons. For thee I contended with Death, and
paid thy death, which thou owedst for thy former sins and thy unbelief towards God."

33 Having heard these considerations on both sides, decide for thyself and give thy vote
for thine own salvation. Should a brother say the like, should a child, should a wife,
should any one whosoever, in preference to all let Christ in thee be conqueror. For He
contends in thy behalf. XXIV. You may even go against wealth. Say, "Certainly Christ does
not debar me from property. The Lord does not envy." But do you see yourself overcome and
overthrown by it? Leave it, throw it away, hate, renounce, flee. "Even if thy right eye
offend thee," quickly "cut it out." Better is the kingdom of God to a man with one eye,
than the fire to one who is unmutilated. Whether hand, or foot, or soul, hate it. For if
it is destroyed here for Christ's sake, it will be restored to life yonder. 34 XXV. And to
this effect similarly is what follows. "Now at this present time not to have lands, and
money, and houses, and brethren, with persecutions." For it is neither penniless, nor
homeless, nor brotherless people that the Lord calls to life, since He has also called
rich people; but, as we have said above, also brothers, as Peter with Andrew, and James
with John the sons of Zebedee, but of one mind with each other and Christ. And the
expression "with persecutions" rejects the possessing of each of those things. There is a
persecution which arises from without, from men assailing the faithful, either out of
hatred, or envy, or avarice, or through diabolic agency. But the most painful is internal
persecution, which proceeds from each man's own soul being vexed by impious lusts, and
diverse pleasures, and base hopes, and destructive dreams; when, always grasping at more,
and maddened by brutish loves, and inflamed by the passions which beset it like goads and
stings, it is covered with blood, (to drive it on) to insane pursuits, and to despair of
life, and to contempt of God.

35 More grievous and painful is this persecution, which arises from within, which is ever
with a man, and which the persecuted cannot escape; for he carries the enemy about
everywhere in himself. Thus also burning which attacks from without works trial, but that
from within produces death. War also made on one is easily put an end to, but that which
is in the soul continues till death. With such persecution, if you have worldly wealth, if
you have brothers allied by blood and other pledges, abandon the whole wealth of these
which leads to evil; procure peace for yourself, free yourself from protracted
persecutions; turn from them to the Gospel; choose before all the Saviour and Advocate and
Paraclete of your soul, the Prince of life. "For the things which are seen are temporary;
but the things which are not seen are eternal." And in the present time are things
evanescent and insecure, but in that to come is eternal life.

36 XXVI. "The first shall be last, and the last first." This is fruitful in meaning and
exposition, but does not demand investigation at present; for it refers not only to the
wealthy alone, but plainly to all men, who have once surrendered themselves to faith. So
let this stand aside for the present. But I think that our proposition has been
demonstrated in no way inferior to what we promised, that the Saviour by no means has
excluded the rich on account of wealth itself, and the possession of property, nor fenced
off salvation against them; if they are able and willing to submit their life to God's
commandments, and prefer them to transitory objects, and if they would look to the Lord
with steady eye, as those who look for the nod of a good helmsman, what he wishes, what he
orders, what he indicates, what signal he gives his mariners, where and whence he directs
the ship's course. For what harm does one do, who, previous to faith, by applying his mind
and by saving has collected a competency? Or what is much less reprehensible than this, if
at once by God, who gave him his life, he has had his home given him in the house of such
men, among wealthy people, powerful in substance, and pre-eminent in opulence? For if, in
consequence of his involuntary birth in wealth, a man is banished from life, rather is he
wronged by God, who created him, in having vouchsafed to him temporary enjoyment, and in
being deprived of eternal life. And why should wealth have ever sprung from the earth at
all, if it is the author and patron of death?

37 But if one is able in the midst of wealth to turn from its power, and to entertain
moderate sentiments, and to exercise self-command, and to seek God alone, and to breathe
God and walk with God, such a poor man submits to the commandments, being free, unsubdued,
free of disease, unwounded by wealth. But if not, "sooner shall a camel enter through a
needle's eye, than such a rich man reach the kingdom of God." Let then the camel, going
through a narrow and strait way before the rich man, signify something loftier; which
mystery of the Saviour is to be learned in the "Exposition of first Principles and of
Theology." XXVII. Well, first let the point of the parable, which is evident, and the
reason why it is spoken, be presented. Let it teach the prosperous that they are not to
neglect their own salvation, as if they had been already fore-doomed, nor, on the other
hand, to cast wealth into the sea, or condemn it as a traitor and an enemy to life, but
learn in what way and how to use wealth and obtain life. For since neither does one perish
by any means by fearing because he is rich, nor is by any means saved by trusting and
believing that he shall be saved, come let them look what hope the Saviour assigns them,
and how what is unexpected may become ratified, and what is hoped for may come into
possession.

38 The Master accordingly, when asked, "Which is the greatest of the commandments? "says,
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul, and with all thy strength; " that no
commandment is greater than this (He says), and with exceeding good reason; for it gives
command respecting the First and the Greatest, God Himself, our Father, by whom all things
were brought into being, and exist, and to whom what is saved returns again. By Him, then,
being loved beforehand, and having received existence, it is impious for us to regard
ought else older or more excellent; rendering only this small tribute of gratitude for the
greatest benefits; and being unable to imagine anything else whatever by way of recompense
to God, who needs nothing and is perfect; and gaining immortality by the very exercise of
loving the Father to the extent of one's might and power. For the more one loves God, the
more he enters within God.

39 XXVIII. The second in order, and not any less than this, He says, is, "Thou shalt love
thy neighbour as thyself," consequently God above thyself. And on His interlocutor
inquiring, "Who is my neighbour? " He did not, in the same way with the Jews, specify the
blood-relation, or the fellow-citizen, or the proselyte, or him that had been similarly
circumcised, or the man who uses one and the same law. But He introduces one on his way
down from the upland region from Jerusalem to Jericho,and represents him stabbed by
robbers, cast half-dead on the way, passed by the priest, looked sideways at by the
Levite, but pitied by the vilified and excommunicated Samaritan; who did not, like those,
pass casually, but came provided with such things as the man in danger required, such as
oil, bandages, a beast of burden, money for the inn-keeper, part given now, and part
promised. "Which," said He, "of them was neighbour to him that suffered these things? "and
on his answering, "He that showed mercy to him," (replied), Go thou also, therefore, and
do likewise, since love buds into well-doing.

40 XXIX. In both the commandments, then, He introduces love; but in order distinguishes
it. And in the one He assigns to God the first part of love, and allots the second to our
neighbour. Who else can it be but the Saviour Himself? or who more than He has pitied us,
who by the rulers of darkness were all but put to death with many wounds, fears, lusts,
passions, pains, deceits, pleasures? Of these wounds the only physician is Jesus, who cuts
out the passions thoroughly by the root,-not as the law does the bare effects, the fruits
of evil plants, but applies His axe to the roots of wickedness. He it is that poured wine
on our wounded souls (the blood of David's vine), that brought the oil which flows from
the compassions of the Father, and bestowed it copiously. He it is that produced the
ligatures of health and of salvation that cannot be undone,-Love, Faith, Hope. He it is
that subjected angels, and principalities, and powers, for a great reward to serve us. For
they also shall be delivered from the vanity of the world through the revelation of the
glory of the sons of God. We are therefore to love Him equally with God. And he loves
Christ Jesus who does His will and keeps His commandments. "For not every one that saith
unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of
My Father." And "Why call ye Me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? " "And
blessed are ye who see and hear what neither righteous men nor prophets" (have seen or
heard), if ye do what I say.

41 XXX. He then is first who loves Christ; and second, he who loves and cares for those
who have believed on Him. For whatever is done to a disciple, the Lord accepts as done to
Himself, and reckons the whole as His. "Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom
prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was an hungered, and ye gave Me
to eat: I was thirsty, and ye gave Me to drink: and I was a stranger, and ye took Me in: I
was naked and ye clothed Me: I was sick, and ye visited Me: I was in prison, and ye came
to Me. Then shall the righteous answer, saying, Lord, when saw we Thee hungry, and fed
Thee? or thirsty, and gave Thee drink? And when saw we Thee a stranger, and took Thee in?
or naked, and clothed Thee? Or when saw we Thee sick, and visited Thee? or in prison, and
came to Thee? And the King answering, shall say to them, Verily I say unto you, in as much
as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me."

42 Again, on the opposite side, to those who have not performed these things, "Verily I
say unto you, in as much as ye have not done it unto one of the least of these, ye have
not done it to Me." And in another place, "He that receiveth you; receiveth Me; and he
that receiveth not you, rejecteth Me." XXXI. Such He names children, and sons, and little
children, and friends, and little ones here, in reference to their future greatness above.
"Despise not," He says, "one of these little ones; for their angels always behold the face
of My Father in heaven." And in another place, "Fear not, little flock, for it is your
Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom of heaven." Similarly also He says that
"the least in the kingdom of heaven" that is His own disciple "is greater than John, the
greatest among those bern of women." And again, "He that receiveth a righteous man or a
prophet in the name of a righteous man or a prophet, shall receive their reward; and he
that giveth to a disciple in the name of a disciple a cup of cold water to drink, shall
not lose his reward." Wherefore this is the only reward that is not lost. And again, "Make
to you friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that, when ye fail, they may receive you
into everlasting habitations; " showing that by nature all property which a man possesses
in his own power is not his own. And from this unrighteousness it is permitted to work a
righteous and saving thing, to refresh some one of those who have an everlasting
habitation with the Father.

43 See then, first, that He has not commanded you to be solicited or to wait to be
importuned, but yourself to seek those who are to be benefited and are worthy disciples of
the Saviour. Excellent, accordingly, also is the apostle's saying, "For the Lord loveth a
cheerful giver; " who delights in giving, and spares not, sowing so that he may also thus
reap, without murmuring, and disputing, and regret, and communicating, which is pure
beneficence. But better than this is the saying spoken by the Lord in another place, "Give
to every one that asketh thee." For truly such is God's delight in giving. And this saying
is above all divinity, -not to wait to be asked, but to inquire oneself who deserves to
receive kindness. 44 XXXII. Then to appoint such a reward for liberality,-an everlasting
habitation! O excel lent trading! O divine merchandise! One purchases immortality for
money; and, by giving the perishing things of the world, receives in exchange for these an
eternal mansion in the heavens! Sail to this mart, if you are wise, O rich man! If need
be, sail round the whole world. Spare not perils and toils, that you may purchase here the
heavenly kingdom. Why do transparent stones and emeralds delight thee so much, and a house
that is fuel for fire, or a plaything of time, or the sport of the earthquake, or an
occasion for a tyrant's outrage? Aspire to dwell in the heavens, and to reign with God.
This kingdom a man imitating God will give thee. By receiving a little here, there through
all ages He will make thee a dweller with Him. Ask that you may receive; haste; strive;
fear lest He disgrace thee. For He is not commanded to receive, but thou to give. The Lord
did not say, Give, or bring, or do good, or help, but make a friend. But a friend proves
himself such not by one gift, but by long intimacy. For it is neither the faith, nor the
love, nor the hope, nor the endurance of one day, but "he that endureth to the end shall
be saved."

45 XXXIII. How then does man give these things? For I will give not only to friends, but
to the friends of friends. And who is it that is the friend of God? Do not you judge who
is worthy or who is unworthy. For it is possible you may be mistaken in your opinion. As
in the uncertainty of ignorance it is better to do good to the undeserving for the sake of
the deserving, than by guarding against those that are less good to fail to meet in with
the good. For though sparing, and aiming at testing, who will receive meritoriously or
not, it is possible for you to neglect some that are loved by God; the penalty for which
is the punishment of eternal fire. But by offering to all in turn that need, you must of
necessity by all means find some one of those who have power with God to save. "Judge not,
then, that ye be not judged. With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again;
good measure, pressed and shaken, and running over, shall be given to you." Open thy
compassion to all who are enrolled the disciples of God; not looking contemptuously to
personal appearance, nor carelessly disposed to any period of life. Nor if one appears
penniless, or ragged, or ugly, or feeble, do thou fret in soul at this and turn away. This
form is cast around us from without, the occasion of our entrance into this world, that we
may be able to enter into this common school. But within dwells the hidden Father, and His
Son, who died for us and rose with us.

46 XXXIV. This visible appearance cheats death and the devil; for the wealth within, the
beauty, is unseen by them. And they rave about the carcase, which they despise as weak,
being blind to the wealth within; knowing not what a "treasure in an earthen vessel" we
bear, protected as it is by the power of God the Father, and the blood' of God the Son,
and the dew of the Holy Spirit. But be not deceived, thou who hast tasted of the truth,
and been reckoned worthy of the great redemption. But contrary to what is the case with
the rest of men, collect for thyself an unarmed, an unwarlike, a bloodless, a passionless,
a stainless host, pious old men, orphans dear to God, widows armed with meekness, men,
adorned with love. Obtain with thy money such guards, for body and for soul, for whose
sake a sinking ship is made buoyant, when steered by the prayers of the saints alone; and
disease at its height is subdued, put to flight by the laying on of hands; and the attack
of robbers is disarmed, spoiled by pious prayers; and the might of demons is crushed, put
to shame in its operations by strenuous commands.

47 XXXV. All these warriors and guards are trusty. No one is idle, no one is useless. One
can obtain your pardon from God, another comfort you when sick, another weep and groan in
sympathy for you to the Lord of all, another teach some of the things useful for
salvation, another admonish with confidence, another counsel with kindness. And all can
love truly, without guile, without fear, without hypocrisy, without flattery, without
pretence. O sweet service of loving [souls]! O blessed thoughts of confident [hearts]! O
sincere faith of those who fear God alone! O truth of words with those who cannot lie! O
beauty of deeds with those who have been commissioned to serve God, to persuade God, to
please God, not to touch thy flesh! to speak, but to the King of eternity dwelling in
thee. 48 XXXVI. All the faithful, then, are good and godlike, and worthy of the name by
which they are encircled as with a diadem. There are, besides, some, the elect of the
elect, and so much more or less distinguished by drawing themselves, like ships to the
strand, out of the surge of the world and bringing themselves to safety; not wishing to
seem holy, and ashamed if one call them so; hiding in the depth of their mind the
ineffable mysteries, and disdaining to let their nobleness be seen in the world; whom the
Word calls "the light of the world, and the salt of the earth." This is the seed, the
image and likeness of God, and His true son and heir, sent here as it were on a sojourn,
by the high administration and suitable arrangement of the Father, by whom the visible and
invisible things of the world were created; some for their service, some for their
discipline, some for their instruction; and all things are held together so long as the
seed remains here; and when it is gathered, these things shall be very quickly dissolved.

49 XXXVII. For what further need has God of the mysteries of love? And then thou shalt
look into the bosom of the Father, whom God the only-begotten Son alone hath declared. And
God Himself is love; and out of love to us became feminine. In His ineffable essence He is
Father; in His compassion to us He became Mother. The Father by loving became feminine:
and the great proof of this is He whom He begot of Himself; and the fruit brought forth by
love is love. For this also He came down. For this He clothed Himself with man. For this
He voluntarily subjected Himself to the experiences of men, that by bringing Himself to
the measure of our weakness whom He loved, He might correspondingly bring us to the
measure of His own strength. And about to be offered up and giving Himself a ransom, He
left for us a new Covenant-testament: My love I give unto you. And what and how great is
it? For each of us He gave His life,-the equivalent for all. This He demands from us in
return for one another. And if we owe our lives to the brethren, and have made such a
mutual compact with the Saviour, why should we any more hoard and shut up worldly goods,
which are beggarly, foreign to us and transitory? Shall we shut up from each other what
after a little shall be the property of the fire? Divinely and weightily John says," He
that loveth not his brother is a murderer," the seed of Cain, a nursling of the devil. He
has not God's compassion. He has no hope of better things. He is sterile; he is barren; he
is not a branch of the ever-living supercelestial vine. He is cut off; he waits the
perpetual fire.

50 XXXVIII. But learn thou the more excellent way, which Paul shows for salvation. "Love
seeketh not her own," but is diffused on the brother. About him she is fluttered, about
him she is soberly insane. "Love covers a multitude of sins." "Perfect love casteth out
fear." "Vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in
the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all
things. Love never faileth. Prophecies are done away, tongues cease, gifts of healing fail
on the earth. But these three abide, Faith, Hope, Love. But the greatest of these is
Love." And rightly. For Faith departs when we are convinced by vision, by seeing God. And
Hope vanishes when the things hoped for come. But Love comes to completion, and grows more
when that which is perfect has been bestowed. If one introduces it into his soul, although
he be born in sins, and has done many forbidden things, he is able, by increasing love,
and adopting a pure repentance, to retrieve his mistakes. For let not this be left to
despondency and despair by you, if you learn who the rich man is that has not a place in
heaven, and what way he uses his property.

51 XXXIX. If one should escape the superfluity of riches, and the difficulty they
interpose in the way of life, and be able to enjoy the eternal good things; but should
happen, either from ignorance or involuntary circumstances, after the seal and redemption,
to fall into sins or transgressions so as to be quite carried away; such a man is entirely
rejected by God. For to every one who has turned to God in truth, and with his whole
heart, the doors are open, and the thrice-glad Father receives His truly repentant son.
And true repentance is to be no longer bound in the same sins for which He denounced death
against Himself, but to eradicate them completely from the soul. For on their extirpation
God takes up His abode again in thee. For it is said there is great and exceeding joy and
festival in the heavens with the Father and the angels when one sinner turns and repents.
Wherefore also He cries, "I will have mercy, and not sacrifice." "I desire not the death,
but the repentance of the sinner." "Though your sins be as scarlet wool, I will make them
white as snow; though they be blacker than darkness, I will wash and make them like white
wool." For it is in the power of God alone to grant the forgiveness of sins, and not to
impute transgressions; since also the Lord commands us each day to forgive the repenting
brethren. "And if we, being evil, know to give good gifts," much more is it the nature of
the Father of mercies, the good Father of all consolation, much pitying, very merciful, to
be long-suffering, to wait for those who have turned. And to turn is really to cease from
our sins, and to look no longer behind.

52 XL. Forgiveness of past sins, then, God gives; but of future, each one gives to
himself. And this is to repent, to condemn the past deeds, and beg oblivion of them from
the Father, who only of all is able to undo what is done, by mercy proceeding from Him,
and to blot out former sins by the dew of the Spirit. "For by the state in which I find
you will I judge," also, is what in each case the end of all cries aloud. So that even in
the case of one who has done the greatest good deeds in his life, but at the end has run
headlong into wickedness, all his former pains are profitless to him, since at the
catastrophe of the drama he has given up his part; while it is possible for the man who
formerly led a bad and dissolute life, on afterwards repenting, to overcome in the time
after repentance the evil conduct of a long time. But it needs great carefulness, just as
bodies that have suffered by protracted disease need regimen and special attention. Thief,
dost thou wish to get forgiveness? steal no more. Adulterer, burn no more. Fornicator,
live for the future chastely. Thou who hast robbed, give back, and give back more than
[thou tookest]. False witness, practise truth. Perjurer, swear no more, and extirpate the
rest of the passions, wrath, lust, grief, fear; that thou mayest be found at the end to
have previously in this world been reconciled to the adversary. It is then probably
impossible all at once to eradicate inbred passions; but by God's power and human
intercession, and the help of brethren, and sincere repentance, and constant care, they
are corrected.

53 XLI. Wherefore it is by all means necessary for thee, who art pompous, and powerful,
and rich, to set over thyself some man of God as a trainer and governor. Reverence, though
it be but one man; fear, though it be but one man. Give yourself to hearing, though it be
but one speaking freely, using harshness, and at the same time healing. For it is good for
the eyes not to continue always wanton, but to weep and smart sometimes, for greater
health. So also nothing is more pernicious to the soul than uninterrupted pleasure. For it
is blinded by melting away, if it remain unmoved by bold speech. Fear this man when angry;
be pained at his groaning; and reverence him when making his anger to cease; and
anticipate him when he is deprecating punishment. Let him pass many sleepless nights for
thee, interceding for thee with God, influencing the Father with the magic of familiar
litanies. For He does not hold out against His children when they beg His pity. And for
you he will pray purely, held in high honour as an angel of God, and grieved not by you,
but for you. This is sincere repentance. "God is not mocked," nor does He give heed to
vain words. For He alone searches the marrow and reins of the heart, and hears those that
are in the fire, and listens to those who supplicate in the whale's belly; and is near to
all who believe, and far from the ungodly if they repent not.

54 XLII. And that you may be still more confident, that repenting thus truly there remains
for you a sure hope of salvation, listen to a tale, which is not a tale but a narrative,
handed down and committed to the custody of memory, about the Apostle John. For when, on
the tyrant's death, he returned to Ephesus from the isle of Patmos, he went away, being
invited, to the contiguous territories of the nations, here to appoint bishops, there to
set in order whole Churches, there to ordain such as were marked out by the Spirit. 55
Having come to one of the cities not far off (the name of which some give ), and having
put the brethren to rest in other matters, at last, looking to the bishop appointed, and
seeing a youth, powerful in body, comely in appearance, and ardent, said, "This (youth) I
commit to you in all earnestness, in the presence of the Church, and with Christ as
witness." And on his accepting and promising all, he gave the same injunction and
testimony. And he set out for Ephesus. And the presbyter taking home the youth committed
to him, reared, kept, cherished, and finally baptized him. After this he relaxed his
stricter care and guardianship, under the idea that the seal of the Lord he had set on him
was a complete protection to him. But on his obtaining premature freedom, some youths of
his age, idle, dissolute, and adepts in evil courses, corrupt him. First they entice him
by many costly entertainments; then afterwards by night issuing forth for highway robbery,
they take him along with them. Then they dared to execute together something greater. And
he by degrees got accustomed; and from greatness of nature, when he had gone aside from
the right path, and like a hard-mouthed and powerful horse, had taken the bit between his
teeth, rushed with all the more force down into the depths. And having entirely despaired
of salvation in God, he no longer meditated what was insignificant, but having perpetrated
some great exploit, now that he was once lost, he made up his mind to a like fate with the
rest. Taking them and forming a hand of robbers, he was the prompt captain of the bandits,
the fiercest, the bloodiest, the cruelest.

56 Time passed, and some necessity having emerged, they send again for John. He, when he
had settled the other matters on account of which he came, said, "Come now, O bishop,
restore to us the deposit which I and the Saviour committed to thee in the face of the
Church over which you preside, as witness. The other was at first confounded, thinking
that it was a false charge about money which he did not get; and he could neither believe
the allegation regarding what he had not, nor disbelieve John. But when he said "I demand
the young man, and the soul of the brother," the old man, groaning deeply, and bursting
into tears, said, "He is dead. "How and what kind of death? ""He is dead," he said, "to
God. For he turned wicked and abandoned, and at last a robber; and now he has taken
possession of the mountain in front of the church, along with a band like him. Rending,
therefore, his clothes, and striking his head with great lamentation, the apostle said,
"It was a fine guard of a brother's soul I left! But let a horse be brought me, and let
some one be my guide on the way. He rode away, just as he was, straight from the church.
On coming to the place, he is arrested by the robbers' outpost; neither fleeing nor
entreating, but crying, "It was for this I came. Lead me to your captain; "who meanwhile
was waiting, all armed as he was.

57 But when he recognized John as he advanced, he turned, ashamed, to flight. The other
followed with all his might, forgetting his age, crying, "Why, my son, dost thou flee from
me, thy father, unarmed, old? Son, pity me. Fear not; thou hast still hope of life. I will
give account to Christ for thee. If need be, I will willingly endure thy death, as the
Lord did death for us. For thee I will surrender my life. Stand, believe; Christ hath sent
me." 58 And he, when he heard, first stood, looking down; then threw down his arms, then
trembled and wept bitterly. And on the old man approaching, he embraced him, speaking for
himself with lamentations as he could, and baptized a second time with tears, concealing
only his right hand. The other pledging, and assuring him on oath that he would find
forgiveness for himself from the Saviour, beseeching and failing on his knees, and kissing
his right hand itself, as now purified by repentance, led him back to the church. Then by
supplicating with copious prayers, and striving along with him in continual fastings, and
subduing his mind by various utterances of words, did not depart, as they say, till he
restored him to the Church, presenting in him a great example of true repentance and a
great token of regeneration, a trophy of the resurrection for which we hope; when at the
end of the world, the angels, radiant with joy, hymning and opening the heavens, shall
receive into the celestial abodes those who truly repent; and before all, the Saviour
Himself goes to meet them, welcoming them; holding forth the shadowless, ceaseless light;
conducting them, to the Father's bosom, to eternal life, to the kingdom of heaven.

59 Let one believe these things, and the disciples of God, and God, who is surety, the
Prophecies, the Gospels, the Apostolic words; living in accordance with them, and lending
his ears, and practising the deeds, he shall at his decease see the end and demonstration
of the truths taught. For he who in this world welcomes the angel of penitence will not
repent at the time that he leaves the body, nor be ashamed when he sees the Saviour
approaching in His glory and with His army. He fears not the fire. But if one chooses to
continue and to sin perpetually in pleasures, and values indulgence here above eternal
life, and turns away from the Saviour, who gives forgiveness; let him no more blame either
God, or riches, or his having fallen, but his own soul, which voluntarily perishes. But to
him who directs his eye to salvation and desires it, and asks with boldness and vehemence
for its bestowal, the good Father who is in heaven will give the true purification and the
changeless life. To whom, by His Son Jesus Christ, the Lord of the living and dead, and by
the Holy Spirit, be glory, honour, power, eternal majesty, both now and ever, from
generation to generation, and from eternity to eternity. Amen.


TO THE MARTYRS
==============

TO THE MARTYRS Tertullian

c. AD 155–220

North African lawyer and the first great Latin theologian.

INTRODUCTION

(Translated by the Rev. S. Thelwall.)

CHAPTER I.

1 Blessed Martyrs Designate,-Along with the provision which our lady mother the Church
from her bountiful breasts, and each brother out of his private means, makes for your
bodily wants in the prison, accept also from me some contribution to your spiritual
sustenance; for it is not good that the flesh be feasted and the spirit starve: nay, if
that which is weak be carefully looked to, it is but right that that which is still weaker
should not be neglected. Not that I am specially entitled to exhort you; yet not only the
trainers and overseers, but even the unskilled, nay, all who choose, without the slightest
need for it, are wont to animate from afar by their cries the most accomplished
gladiators, and from the mere throng of onlookers useful suggestions have sometimes come;
first, then, O blessed, grieve not the Holy Spirit, who has entered the prison with you;
for if He had not gone with you there, you would not have been there this day. Do you give
all endeavour, therefore, to retain Him; so let Him lead you thence to your Lord. The
prison, indeed, is the devil's house as well, wherein he keeps his family. But you have
come within its walls for the very purpose of trampling the wicked one under foot in his
chosen abode. You had already in pitched battle outside utterly overcome him; let him have
no reason, then, to say to himself, "They are now in my domain;

2 with vile hatreds I shall tempt them, with defections or dissensions among themselves.
Let him fly from your presence, and skulk away into his own abysses, shrunken and torpid,
as though he were an outcharmed or smoked-out snake. Give him not the success in his own
kingdom of setting you at variance with each other, but let him find you armed and
fortified with concord; for peace among you is battle with him. Some, not able to find
this peace in the Church, have been used to seek it from the imprisoned martyrs. And so
you ought to have it dwelling with you, and to cherish it, and to guard it, that you may
be able perhaps to bestow it upon others.

CHAPTER II.

1 Other things, hindrances equally of the soul, may have accompanied you as far as the
prison gate, to which also your relatives may have attended you. There and thenceforth you
were severed from the world; how much more from the ordinary course of worldly life and
all its affairs! Nor let this separation from the world alarm you; for if we reflect that
the world is more really the prison, we shall see that you have gone out of a prison
rather than into one. The world has the greater darkness, blinding men's hearts. The world
imposes the more grievous fetters, binding men's very souls. The world breathes out the
worst impurities-human lusts. The world contains the larger number of criminals, even the
whole human race. Then, last of all, it awaits the judgment, not of the proconsul, but of
God. Wherefore, O blessed, you may regard yourselves as having been translated from a
prison to, we may say, a place of safety. It is full of darkness, but ye yourselves are
light; it has bonds, but God has made you free. Unpleasant exhalations are there, but ye
are an odour of sweetness. The judge is daily looked for, but ye shall judge the judges
themselves. Sadness may be there for him who sighs for the world's enjoyments. The
Christian outside the prison has renounced the world, but in the prison he has renounced a
prison too. It is of no consequence where you are in the world-you who are not of it.

2 And if you have lost some of life's sweets, it is the way of business to suffer present
loss, that after gains may be the larger. Thus far I say nothing of the rewards to which
God invites the martyrs. Meanwhile let us compare the life of the world and of the prison,
and see if the spirit does not gain more in the prison than the flesh loses. Nay, by the
care of the Church and the love of the brethren, even the flesh does not lose there what
is for its good, while the spirit obtains besides important advantages. You have no
occasion to look on strange gods, you do not run against their images; you have no part in
heathen holidays, even by mere bodily mingling in them; you are not annoyed by the foul
fumes of idolatrous solemnities; you are not pained by the noise of the public shows, nor
by the atrocity or madness or immodesty of their celebrants; your eyes do not fall on
stews and brothels; you are free from causes of offence, from temptations, from unholy
reminiscences; you are free now from persecution too. The prison does the same service for
the Christian which the desert did for the prophet. Our Lord Himself spent much of His
time in seclusion, that He might have greater liberty to pray, that He might be quit of
the world. It was in a mountain solitude, too, He showed His glory to the disciples. Let
us drop the name of prison;

3 let us call it a place of retirement. Though the body is shut in, though the flesh is
confined, all things are open to the spirit. In spirit, then, roam abroad; in spirit walk
about, not setting before you shady paths or long colonnades, but the way which leads to
God. As often as in spirit your footsteps are there, so often you will not be in bonds.
The leg does not feel the chain when the mind is in the heavens. The mind compasses the
whole man about, and whither it wills it carries him. But where thy heart shall be, there
shall be thy treasure. Be there our heart, then, where we would have our treasure.

CHAPTER III.

1 Grant now, O blessed, that even to Christians the prison is unpleasant; yet we were
called to the warfare of the living God in our very response to the sacramental words.
Well, no soldier comes out to the campaign laden with luxuries, nor does he go to action
from his comfortable chamber, but from the light and narrow tent, where every kind of
hardness, roughness and unpleasantness must be put up with. Even in peace soldiers inure
themselves to war by toils and inconveniences-marching in arms, running over the plain,
working at the ditch, making the testudo, engaging in many arduous labours. The sweat of
the brow is on everything, that bodies and minds may not shrink at having to pass from
shade to sunshine, from sunshine to icy cold, from the robe of peace to the coat of mail,
from silence to clamour, from quiet to tumult. In like manner, O blessed ones, count
whatever is hard in this lot of yours as a discipline of your powers of mind and body. You
are about to pass through a noble struggle, in which the living God acts the part of
superintendent, in which the Holy Ghost is your trainer, in which the prize is an eternal
crown of angelic essence, citizenship in the heavens, glory everlasting.

2 Therefore your Master, Jesus Christ, who has anointed you with His Spirit, and led you
forth to the arena, has seen it good, before the day of conflict, to take you from a
condition more pleasant in itself, and has imposed on you a harder treatment, that your
strength might be the greater. For the athletes, too, are set apart to a more stringent
discipline, that they may have their physical powers built up. They are kept from luxury,
from daintier meats, from more pleasant drinks; they are pressed, racked, worn out; the
harder their labours in the preparatory training, the stronger is the hope of victory.
"And they," says the apostle, "that they may obtain a corruptible crown. We, with the
crown eternal in our eye, look upon the prison as our training-ground, that at the goal of
final judgment we may be brought forth well disciplined by many a trial; since virtue is
built up by hardships, as by voluptuous indulgence it is overthrown.

CHAPTER IV.

1 From the saying of our Lord we know that the flesh is weak, the spirit willing. Let us
not, withal, take delusive comfort from the Lord's acknowledgment of the weakness of the
flesh. For precisely on this account He first declared the spirit willing, that He might
show which of the two ought to be subject to the other-that the flesh might yield
obedience to the spirit-the weaker to the stronger; the former thus from the latter
getting strength. Let the spirit hold convene with the flesh about the common salvation,
thinking no longer of the troubles of the prison, but of the wrestle and conflict for
which they are the preparation. The flesh, perhaps, will dread the merciless sword, and
the lofty cross, and the rage of the wild beasts, and that punishment of the flames, of
all most terrible, and all the skill of the executioner in torture. But, on the other
side, let the spirit set clearly before both itself and the flesh, how these things,
though exceeding painful, have yet been calmly endured by many,-and, have even been
eagerly desired for the sake of fame and glory; and this not only in the case of men, but
of women too, that you, O holy women, may be worthy of your sex. It would take me too long
to enumerate one by one the men who at their own self-impulse have put an end to
themselves. As to women, there is a famous case at hand:

2 the violated Lucretia, in the presence of her kinsfolk, plunged the knife into herself,
that she might have glory for her chastity. Mucius burned his right hand on an altar, that
this deed of his might dwell in fame. The philosophers have been outstripped,-for instance
Heraclitus, who, smeared with cow dung, burned himself; and Empedocles, who leapt down
into the fires of ¦tna; and Peregrinus, who not long ago threw himself on the funeral
pile. For women even have despised the flames. Dido did so, lest, after the death of a
husband very dear to her, she should be compelled to marry again; and so did the wife of
Hasdrubal, who, Carthage being on fire, that she might not behold her husband suppliant as
Scipio's feet, rushed with her children into the conflagration, in which her native city
was destroyed. Regulus, a Roman general, who had been taken prisoner by the Carthaginians,
declined to be exchanged for a large number of Carthaginian captives, choosing rather to
be given back to the enemy. He was crammed into a sort of chest; and, everywhere pierced
by nails driven from the outside, he endured so many crucifixions. Woman has voluntarily
sought the wild beasts, and even asps, those serpents worse than bear or bull, which
Cleopatra applied to herself, that she might not fall into the hands of her enemy. But the
fear of death is not so great as the fear of torture.

3 And so the Athenian courtezan succumbed to the executioner, when, subjected to torture
by the tyrant for having taken part in a conspiracy, still making no betrayal of her
confederates, she at last bit off her tongue and spat it in the tyrant's face, that he
might be convinced of the uselessness of his torments, however long they should be
continued. Everybody knows what to this day is the great Lacedµmonian solemnity-the
diamastu/gwsij, or scourging; in which sacred rite the Spartan youths are beaten with
scourges before the altar, their parents and kinsmen standing by and exhorting them to
stand it bravely out. For it will be always counted more honourable and glorious that the
soul rather than the body has given itself to stripes. But if so high a value is put on
the earthly glory, won by mental and bodily vigour, that men, for the praise of their
fellows, I may say, despise the sword, the fire, the cross, the wild beasts, the torture;
these surely are but trifling sufferings to obtain a celestial glory and a divine reward.
If the bit of glass is so precious, what must the true pearl be worth? Are we not called
on, then, most joyfully to lay out as much for the true as others do for the false?

CHAPTER V.

I leave out of account now the motive of glory. All these same cruel and painful
conflicts, a mere vanity you find among men-in fact, a sort of mental disease-as trampled
under foot. How many ease-lovers does the conceit of arms give to the sword? They actually
go down to meet the very wild beasts in vain ambition; and they fancy themselves more
winsome from the bites and scars of the contest. Some have sold themselves to fires, to
run a certain distance in a burning tunic. Others, with most enduring shoulders, have
walked about under the hunters' whips. The Lord has given these things a place in the
world, O blessed, not without some reason: for what reason, but now to animate us, and on
that day to confound us if we have feared to suffer for the truth, that we might be saved,
what others out of vanity have eagerly sought for to their ruin?

CHAPTER VI.

Passing, too, from examples of enduring constancy having such an origin as this, let us
turn to a simple contemplation of man's estate in its ordinary conditions, that mayhap
from things which happen to us whether we will or no, and which we must set our minds to
bear, we may get instruction. How often, then, have fires consumed the living! How often
have wild beasts torn men in pieces, it may be in their own forests, or it may be in the
heart of cities, when they have chanced to escape from their dens! How many have fallen by
the robber's sword! How many have suffered at the hands of enemies the death of the cross,
after having been tortured first, yes, and treated with every sort of contumely! One may
even suffer in the cause of a man what he hesitates to suffer in the cause of God. In
reference to this indeed, let the present time bear testimony, when so many persons of
rank have met with death in a mere human being's cause, and that though from their birth
and dignities and bodily condition and age such a fate seemed most unlikely; either
suffering at his hands if they have taken part against him, or from his enemies if they
have been his partisans.


THE APOLOGY
===========

THE APOLOGY Tertullian

c. AD 155–220

North African lawyer and the first great Latin theologian.

INTRODUCTION

[Translated by the Rev. S. Thelwall, Late Scholar of Christ's College, Cantab.]

CHAPTER I.

1 Rulers of the Roman Empire, if, seated for the administration of justice on your lofty
tribunal, under the gaze of every eye, and occupying there all but the highest position in
the state, you may not openly inquire into and sift before the world the real truth in
regard to the charges made against the Christians; if in this case alone you are afraid or
ashamed to exercise your authority in making public inquiry with the carefulness which
becomes justice; if, finally, the extreme severities inflicted on our people in recently
private judgments, stand in the way of our being permitted to defend ourselves before you,
you cannot surely forbid the Truth to reach your ears by the secret pathway of a noiseless
book. She has no appeals to make to you in regard of her condition, for that does not
excite her wonder. She knows that she is but a sojourner on the earth, and that among
strangers she naturally finds foes; and more than this, that her origin, her dwelling-
place, her hope, her recompense, her honours, are above. One thing, meanwhile, she
anxiously desires of earthly rulers-not to be condemned unknown. What harm can it do to
the laws, supreme in their domain, to give her a hearing? Nay, for that part of it, will
not their absolute supremacy be more conspicuous in their condemning her, even after she
has made her plea?

2 But if, unheard, sentence is pronounced against her, besides the odium of an unjust
deed, you will incur the merited suspicion of doing it with some idea that it is unjust,
as not wishing to hear what you may not be able to hear and condemn. We lay this before
you as the first ground on which we urge that your hatred to the name of Christian is
unjust. And the very reason which seems to excuse this injustice (I mean ignorance) at
once aggravates and convicts it. For what is there more unfair than to hate a thing of
which you know nothing, even though it deserve to be hated? Hatred is only merited when it
is known to be merited. But without that knowledge, whence is its justice to be
vindicated? for that is to be proved, not from the mere fact that an aversion exists, but
from acquaintance with the subject. When men, then, give way to a dislike simply because
they are entirely ignorant of the nature of the thing disliked, why may it not be
precisely the very sort of thing they should not dislike? So we maintain that they are
both ignorant while they hate us, and hate us unrighteously while they continue in
ignorance, the one thing being the result of the other either way of it.

3 The proof of their ignorance, at once condemning and excusing their injustice, is this,
that those who once hated Christianity because they knew nothing about it, no sooner come
to know it than they all lay down at once their enmity. From being its haters they become
its disciples. By simply getting acquainted with it, they begin now to hate what they had
formerly been, and to profess what they had formerly hated; and their numbers are as great
as are laid to our charge. The outcry is that the State is filled with Christians-that
they are in the fields, in the citadels, in the islands: they make lamentation, as for
some calamity, that both sexes, every age and condition, even high rank, are passing over
to the profession of the Christian faith; and yet for all, their minds are not awakened to
the thought of some good they have failed to notice in it. They must not allow any truer
suspicions to cross their minds; they have no desire to make closer trial. Here alone the
curiosity of human nature slumbers. They like to be ignorant, though to others the
knowledge has been bliss. Anacharsis reproved the rude venturing to criticise the
cultured; how much more this judging of those who know, by men who are entirely ignorant,
might he have denounced! Because they already dislike, they want to know no more.

4 Thus they prejudge that of which they are ignorant to be such, that, if they came to
know it, it could no longer be the object of their aversion; since, if inquiry finds
nothing worthy of dislike, it is certainly proper to cease from an unjust dislike, while
if its bad character comes plainly out, instead of the detestation entertained for it
being thus diminished, a stronger reason for perseverance in that detestation is obtained,
even under the authority of justice itself. But, says one, a thing is not good merely
because multitudes go over to it; for how many have the bent of their nature towards
whatever is bad! how many go astray into ways of error! It is undoubted. Yet a thing that
is thoroughly evil, not even those whom it carries away venture to defend as good. Nature
throws a veil either of fear or shame over all evil. For instance, you find that criminals
are eager to conceal themselves, avoid appearing in public, are in trepidation when they
are caught, deny their guilt, when they are accused; even when they are put to the rack,
they do not easily or always confess; when there is no doubt about their condemnation,
they grieve for what they have done. In their self-communings they admit their being
impelled by sinful dispositions, but they lay the blame either on fate or on the stars.
They are unwilling to acknowledge that the thing is theirs, because they own that it is
wicked.

5 But what is there like this in the Christian's case? The only shame or regret he feels,
is at not having been a Christian earlier. If he is pointed out, he glories in it; if he
is accused, he offers no defence; interrogated, he makes voluntary confession; condemned
he renders thanks. What sort of evil thing is this, which wants all the ordinary
peculiarities of evil-fear, shame, subterfuge, penitence, lamenting? What! is that a crime
in which the criminal rejoices? to be accused of which is his ardent wish, to be punished
for which is his felicity? You cannot call it madness, you who stand convicted of knowing
nothing of the matter.

CHAPTER II.

1 If, again, it is certain that we are the most wicked of men, why do you treat us so
differently from our fellows, that is, from other criminals, it being only fair that the
same crime should get the same treatment? When the charges made against us are made
against others, they are permitted to make use both of their own lips and of hired
pleaders to show their innocence. They have full opportunity of answer and debate; in
fact, it is against the law to condemn anybody undefended and unheard. Christians alone
are forbidden to say anything in exculpation of themselves, in defence of the truth, to
help the judge to a righteous decision; all that is cared about is having what the public
hatred demands-the confession of the name, not examination of the charge: while in your
ordinary judicial investigations, on a man's confession of the crime of murder, or
sacrilege, or incest, or treason, to take the points of which we are accused, you are not
content to proceed at once to sentence,-you do not take that step till you thoroughly
examine the circumstances of the confession-what is the real character of the deed, how
often, where, in what way, when he has done it, who were privy to it, and who actually
took part with him in it. Nothing like this is done in our case, though the falsehoods
disseminated about us ought to have the same sifting, that it might be found how many
murdered children each of us had tasted;

2 how many incests each of us had shrouded in darkness; what cooks, what dogs had been
witness of our deeds. Oh, how great the glory of the ruler who should bring to light some
Christian who had devoured a hundred infants! But, instead of that, we find that even
inquiry in regard to our case is forbidden. For the younger Pliny, when he was ruler of a
province, having condemned some Christians to death, and driven some from their
stedfastness, being still annoyed by their great numbers, at last sought the advice of
Trajan, the reigning emperor, as to what he was to do with the rest, explaining to his
master that, except an obstinate disinclination to offer sacrifices, he found in the
religious services nothing but meetings at early morning for singing hymns to Christ and
God, and sealing home their way of life by a united pledge to be faithful to their
religion, forbidding murder, adultery, dishonesty, and other crimes. Upon this Trajan
wrote back that Christians were by no means to be sought after; but if they were brought
before him, they should be punished. O miserable deliverance,-under the necessities of the
case, a self-contradiction! It forbids them to be sought after as innocent, and it
commands them to be punished as guilty. It is at once merciful and cruel; it, passes by,
and it punishes. Why dost thou play a game of evasion upon thyself, O Judgment? If thou
condemnest, why dost thou not also inquire.

3 If thou does not inquire, why dost thou not also absolve? Military stations are
distributed through all the provinces for tracking robbers. Against traitors and public
foes every man is a soldier; search is made even for their confederates and accessories.
The Christian alone must not be sought, though he may be brought and accused before the
judge; as if a search had any other end than that in view And so you condemn the man for
whom nobody wished a search to be made when he is presented to you, and who even now does
not deserve punishment, I suppose, because of his guilt, but because, though forbidden to
be sought, he was found. And then, too, you do not in that case deal with us in the
ordinary way of judicial proceedings against offenders; for, in the case of others
denying, you apply the torture to make them confess-Christians alone you torture, to make
them deny; whereas, if we were guilty of any crime, we should be sure to deny it, and you
with your tortures would force us to confession. Nor indeed should you hold that our
crimes require no i such investigation merely on the ground that you are convinced by our
confession of the name that the deeds were done,-you who are daily wont, though you know
well enough what murder is, none the less to extract from the confessed murderer a full
account of how the crime was perpetrated.

4 So that with all the greater perversity you act, when, holding our crimes proved by our
confession of the name of Christ, you drive us by torture to fall from our confession,
that, repudiating the name, we may in like manner repudiate also the crimes with which,
from that same confession, you had assumed that we were chargeable. I suppose, though you
believe us to be the worst of mankind, you do not wish us to perish. For thus, no doubt,
you are in the habit of bidding the murderer deny, and of ordering the man guilty of
sacrilege to the rack if he persevere in his acknowledgment! Is that the way of it? But if
thus you do not, deal with us as criminals, you declare us thereby innocent, when as
innocent you are anxious that we do not persevere in a confession which you know will
bring on us a condemnation of necessity, not of justice, at your hands. "I am a
Christian," the man cries out. He tells you what he is; you wish to hear from him what he
is not. Occupying your place of authority to extort the truth, you do your utmost to get
lies from us. "I am," he says, "that which you ask me if I am. Why do you torture me to
sin? I confess, and you put me to the rack. What would you do if I denied? Certainly you
give no ready credence to others when they deny. When we deny, you believe at once.

5 Let this perversity of yours lead you to suspect that there is some hidden power in the
case under whose influence you act against the forms, against the nature of public
justice, even against the very laws themselves. For, unless I am greatly mistaken, the
laws enjoin offenders to be searched out, and not to be hidden away. They lay it down that
persons who own a crime are to be condemned, not acquitted. The decrees of the senate, the
commands of your chiefs, lay this clearly down. The power of which you are servants is a
civil, not a tyrannical domination. Among tyrants, indeed, torments used to be inflicted
even as punishments: with you they are mitigated to a means of questioning alone. Keep to
your law in these as necessary till confession is obtained; and if the torture is
anticipated by confession, there will be no occasion for it: sentence should be passed;
the criminal should be given over to the penalty which is his due, not released.
Accordingly, no one is eager for the acquittal of the guilty; it is not right to desire
that, and so no one is ever compelled to deny. Well, you think the Christian a man of
every crime, an enemy of the gods, of the emperor, of the laws, of good morals, of all
nature; yet you compel him to deny, that you may acquit him, which without him denial you
could not do. You play fast and loose with the laws.

6 You wish him to deny his guilt, that you may, even against his will, bring him out
blameless and free from all guilt in reference to the past! Whence is this strange
perversity on your part? How is it you do not reflect that a spontaneous confession is
greatly more worthy of credit than a compelled denial; or consider whether, when compelled
to deny, a man's denial may not be in good faith, and whether acquitted, he may not, then
and there, as soon as the trial is over, laugh at your hostility, a Christian as much as
ever? Seeing, then, that in everything you deal differently with us than with other
criminals, bent upon the one object of taking from us our name (indeed, it is ours no more
if we do what Christians never do), it is made perfectly clear that there is no crime of
any kind in the case, but merely a name which a certain system, ever working against the
truth, pursues with its enmity, doing this chiefly with the object of securing that men
may have no desire to know for certain what they know for certain they are entirely
ignorant of. Hence, too, it is that they believe about us things of which they have no
proof, and they are disinclined to have them looked into, lest the charges, they would
rather take on trust, are all proved to have no foundation, that the name so hostile to
that rival power-its crimes presumed, not proved-may be condemned simply on its own
confession.

7 So we are put to the torture if we confess, and we are punished if we persevere, and if
we deny we are acquitted, because all the contention is about a name. Finally, why do you
read out of your tablet-lists that such a man is a Christian? Why not also that he is a
murderer? And if a Christian is a murderer, why not guilty, too, of incest, or any other
vile thing you believe of us? In our case alone you are either ashamed or unwilling to
mention the very names of our crimes-If to be called a "Christian" does not imply any
crime, the name is surely very hateful, when that of itself is made a crime.

CHAPTER III.

1 What are we to think of it, that most people so blindly knock their heads against the
hatred of the Christian name; that when they bear favourable testimony to any one, they
mingle with it abuse of the name he bears? "A good man," says one, "is Gaius Seius, only
that he is a Christian. So another, "I am astonished that a wise man like Lucius should
have suddenly become a Christian. Nobody thinks it needful to consider whether Gaius is
not good and Lucius wise, on this very account that he is a Christian; or a Christian, for
the reason that he is wise and good. They praise what they know, they abuse what they are
ignorant of, and they inspire their knowledge with their ignorance; though in fairness you
should rather judge of what is unknown from what is known, than what is known from what is
unknown. Others, in the case of persons whom, before they took the name of Christian, they
had known as loose, and vile, and wicked, put on them a brand from the very thing which
they praise. In the blindness of their hatred, they fall foul of their own approving
judgment! "What a woman she was! how wanton! how gay! What a youth he was! how profligate!
how libidinous!-they have become Christians! So the hated name is given to a reformation
of character. Some even barter away their comforts for that hatred, content to bear
injury, if they are kept free at home from the object of their bitter enmity.

2 The wife, now chaste, the husband, now no longer jealous, casts out of his house; the
son, now obedient, the father, who used to be so patient, disinherits; the servant, now
faithful, the master, once so mild, commands away from his presence; it is a high offence
for any one to be reformed by the detested name. Goodness is of less value than hatred of
Christians. Well now, if there is this dislike of the name, what blame can you attach to
names? What accusation can you bring against mere designations, save that something in the
word sounds either barbarous, or unlucky, or scurrilous, or unchaste? But Christian, so
far as the meaning of the word is concerned, is derived from anointing. Yes, and even when
it is wrongly pronounced by you "Chrestianus" (for you do not even know accurately the
name you hate), it comes from sweetness and benignity. You hate, therefore, in the
guiltless, even a guiltless name. But the special ground of dislike to the sect is, that
it bears the name of its Founder. Is there anything new in a religious sect getting for
its followers a designation from its master? Are not the philosophers called from the
founders of their systems-Platonists, Epicureans, Pythagoreans? Are not the Stoics and
Academics so called also from the places in which they assembled and stationed themselves?
and are not physicians named from Erasistratus, grammarians from Aristarchus, cooks even
from Apicius?

3 And yet the bearing of the name, transmitted from the original institutor with whatever
he has instituted, offends no one. No doubt, if it is proved that the sect is a bad one,
and so its founder bad as well, that will prove that the name is bad and deserves our
aversion, in respect of the character both of the sect and its author. Before, therefore,
taking up a dislike to the name, it behoved you to consider the sect in the author, or the
author in the sect. But now, without any sifting and knowledge of either, the mere name is
made matter of accusation, the mere name is assailed, and a sound alone brings
condemnation on a sect and its author both, while of both you are ignorant, because they
have such and such a designation, not because they are convicted of anything wrong.

CHAPTER IV.

1 And so, having made these remarks as it were by way of preface, that I might show in its
true colours the injustice of the public hatred against us, I shall now take my stand on
the plea of our blamelessness; and I shall not only refute the things which are objected
to us, but I shall also retort them on the objectors, that in this way all may know that
Christians are free from the very crimes they are so well aware prevail among themselves,
that they may at the same time be put to the blush for their accusations against
us,-accusations I shall not say of the worst of men against the best, but now, as they
will have it, against those who are only their fellows in sin. We shall reply to the
accusation of all the various crimes we are said to be guilty of in secret, such as we
find them committing in the light of day, and as being guilty of which we are held to be
wicked, senseless, worthy of punishment, deserving of ridicule. But since, when our truth
meets you successfully at all points, the authority of the laws as a last resort is set up
against it, so that it is either said that their determinations are absolutely conclusive,
or the necessity of obedience is, however unwillingly, preferred to the truth, I shall
first, in this matter of the laws grapple with you as with their chosen protectors.

2 Now first, when you sternly lay it down in your sentences, "It is not lawful for you to
exist," and with unhesitating rigour you enjoin this to be carried out, you exhibit the
violence and unjust domination of mere tyranny, if you deny the thing to be lawful, simply
on the ground that you wish it to be unlawful, not because it ought to be. But if you
would have it unlawful because it ought not to be lawful, without doubt that should have
no permission of law which does harm; and on this ground, in fact, it is already
determined that whatever is beneficial is legitimate. Well, if I have found what your law
prohibits to be good, as one who has arrived at such a previous opinion, has it not lost
its power to debar me from it, though that very thing, if it were evil, it would justly
forbid to me? If your law has gone wrong, it is of human origin, I think; it has not
fallen from heaven. Is it wonderful that man should err in making a law, or come to his
senses in rejecting it? Did not the Lacedµmonians amend the laws of Lycurgus himself,
thereby inflicting such pain on their author that he shut himself up, and doomed himself
to death by starvation? Are you not yourselves every day, in your efforts to illumine the
darkness of antiquity, cutting and hewing with the new axes of imperial rescripts and
edicts, that whole ancient and rugged forest of your laws?

3 Has not Severus, that most resolute of rulers, but yesterday repealed the ridiculous
Papian laws which compelled people to have children before the Julian laws allow matrimony
to be contracted, and that though they have the authority of age upon their side? There
were laws, too, in old times, that parties against whom a decision had been given might be
cut in pieces by their creditors; however, by common consent that cruelty was afterwards
erased from the statutes, and the capital penalty turned into a brand of shame. By
adopting the plan of confiscating a debtor's goods, it was sought rather to pour the blood
in blushes over his face than to pour it out. How many laws lie hidden out of sight which
still require to be reformed! For it is neither the number of their years nor the dignity
of their maker that commends them, but simply that they are just; and therefore, when
their injustice is recognized, they are deservedly condemned, even though they condemn.
Why speak we of them as unjust? nay, if they punish mere names, we may well call them
irrational. But if they punish acts, why in our case do they punish acts solely on the
ground of a name, while in others they must have them proved not from the name, but from
the wrong done? I am a practiser of incest (so they say); why do they not inquire into it?
I am an infant-killer; why do they not apply the torture to get from me the truth?

4 I am guilty of crimes against the gods, against the Caesars; why am I, who am able to
clear myself, not allowed to be heard on my own behalf? No law forbids the sifting of the
crimes which it prohibits, for a judge never inflicts a righteous vengeance if he is not
well assured that a crime has been committed; nor does a citizen render a true subjection
to the law, if he does not know the nature of the thing on which the punishment is
inflicted. It is not enough that a law is just, nor that the judge should be convinced of
its justice; those from whom obedience is expected should have that conviction too. Nay, a
law lies under strong suspicions which does not care to have itself tried and approved: it
is a positively wicked law, if, unproved, it tyrannizes over men.

CHAPTER V.

1 To say a word about the origin of laws of the kind to which we now refer, there was an
old decree that no god should be consecrated by the emperor till first approved by the
senate. Marcus ¦milius had experience of this in reference to his god Alburnus. And this,
too, makes for our case, that among you divinity is allotted at the judgment of human
beings. Unless gods give satisfaction to men, there will be no deification for them: the
god will have to propitiate the man. Tiberius accordingly, in whose days the Christian
name made its entry into the world, having himself received intelligence from Palestine of
events which had clearly shown the truth of Christ's divinity, brought the matter before
the senate, with his own decision in favour of Christ. The senate, because it had not
given the approval itself, rejected his proposal. Caesar held to his opinion, threatening
wrath against all accusers of the Christians. Consult your histories; you will there find
that Nero was the first who assailed with the imperial sword the Christian sect, making
profess then especially at Rome. But we glory in having our condemnation hallowed by the
hostility of such a wretch. For any one who knows him, can understand that not except as
being of singular excellence did anything bring on it Nero's condemnation. Domitian, too,
a man of Nero's type in cruelty, tried his hand at persecution;

2 but as he had something of the human in him, he soon put an end to what he had begun,
even restoring again those whom he had banished. Such as these have always been our
persecutors,-men unjust, impious, base, of whom even you yourselves have no good to say,
the sufferers under whose sentences you have been wont to restore. But among so many
princes from that time to the present day, with anything of divine and human wisdom in
them, point out a single persecutor of the Christian name. So far from that, we, on the
contrary, bring before you one who was their protector, as you will see by examining the
letters of Marcus Aurelius, that most grave of emperors, in which he bears his testimony
that that Germanic drought was removed by the rains obtained through the prayers of the
Christians who chanced to be fighting under him. And as he did not by public law remove
from Christians their legal disabilities, yet in another way he put them openly aside,
even adding a sentence of condemnation, and that of greater severity, against their
accusers. What sort of laws are these which the impious alone execute against us-and the
unjust, the vile, the bloody, the senseless, the insane? which Trajan to some extent made
naught by forbidding Christians to be sought after; which neither a Hadrian, though fond
of searching into all things strange and new, nor a Vespasian, though the subjugator of
the Jews, nor a Pius, nor a Verus, ever enforced?

3 It should surely be judged more natural for bad men to be eradicated by good princes as
being their natural enemies, than by those of a spirit kindred with their own.

CHAPTER VI.

1 I would now have these most religious protectors and vindicators of the laws and
institutions of their fathers, tell me, in regard to their own fidelity and the honour,
and submission they themselves show to ancestral institutions, if they have departed from
nothing-if they have in nothing gone out of the old paths-if they have not put aside
whatsoever is most useful and necessary as rules of a virtuous life. What has become of
the laws repressing expensive and ostentatious ways of living? which forbade more than a
hundred asses to be expended on a supper, and more than one fowl to be set on the table at
a time, and that not a fatted one; which expelled a patrician from the senate on the
serious ground, as it was counted, of aspiring to be too great, because he had acquired
ten pounds of silver; which put down the theatres as quickly as they arose to debauch the
manners of the people; which did not permit the insignia of official dignities or of noble
birth to be rashly or with impunity usurped? For I see the Centenarian suppers must now
bear the name, not from the hundred asses, but from the hundred sestertia expended on
them; and that mines of silver are made into dishes (it were little if this applied only
to senators, and not to freedmen or even mere whip-spoilers ). I see, too, that neither is
a single theatre enough, nor are theatres unsheltered:

2 no doubt it was that immodest pleasure might not be torpid in the wintertime, the
Lacedµmonians invented their woollen cloaks for the plays. I see now no difference between
the dress of matrons and prostitutes. In regard to women, indeed, those laws of your
fathers, which used to be such an encouragement to modesty and sobriety, have also fallen
into desuetude, when a woman had yet known no gold upon her save on the finger, which,
with the bridal ring, her husband had sacredly pledged to himself; when the abstinence of
women from wine was carried so far, that a matron, for opening the compartments of a wine
cellar, was starved to death by her friends,-while in the times of Romulus, for merely
tasting wine, Mecenius killed his wife, and suffered nothing for the deed. With reference
to this also, it was the custom of women to kiss their relatives, that they might be
detected by their breath. Where is that happiness of married life, ever so desirable,
which distinguished our earlier manners, and as the result of which for about 600 years
there was not among us a single divorce? Now, women have every member of the body heavy
laden with gold; wine-bibbing is so common among them, that the kiss is never offered with
their will; and as for divorce, they long for it as though it were the natural consequence
of marriage.

3 The laws, too, your fathers in their wisdom had enacted concerning the very gods
themselves, you their most loyal children have rescinded, The consuls, by the authority of
the senate, banished Father Bacchus and his mysteries not merely from the city, but from
the whole of Italy. The consuls Piso and Gabinius, no Christians surely, forbade Serapis,
and Isis, and Arpocrates, with their dogheaded friend, admission into the Capitol-in the
act casting them out from the assembly of the gods-overthrow their altars, and expelled
them from the country, being anxious to prevent the vices of their base and lascivious
religion from spreading. These, you have restored, and conferred highest honours on them.
What has come to your religion-of the veneration due by you to your ancestors? In your
dress, in your food, in your style of life, in your opinions, and last of all in your very
speech, you have renounced your progenitors. You are always praising antiquity, and yet
every day you have novelties in your way of living. From your having failed to maintain
what you should, you make it clear, that, while you abandon the good ways of your fathers,
you retain and guard the things you ought not.

4 Yet the very tradition of your fathers, which you still seem so faithfully to defend,
and in which you find your principal matter of accusation against the Christians-I mean
zeal in the worship of the gods, the point in which antiquity has mainly erred-although
you have rebuilt the altars of Serapis, now a Roman deity, and to Bacchus, now become a
god of Italy, you offer up your orgies,-I shall in its proper place show that you despise,
neglect, and overthrow, casting entirely aside the authority of the men of old. I go on
meantime to reply to that infamous charge of secret crimes, clearing my way to things of
open day.

CHAPTER VII.

1 Monsters of wickedness, we are accused of observing a holy rite in which we kill a
little child and then eat it; in which, after the feast, we practise incest, the dogs-our
pimps, forsooth, overturning the lights and getting us the shamelessness of darkness for
our impious lusts. This is what is constantly laid to our charge, and yet you take no
pains to elicit the truth of what we have been so long accused. Either bring, then, the
matter to the light of day if you believe it, or give it no credit as having never
inquired into it. On the ground of your double dealing, we are entitled to lay it down to
you that there is no reality in the thing which you dare not expiscate. You impose on the
executioner, in the case of Christians, a duty the very opposite of expiscation: he is not
to make them confess what they do, but to make them deny what they are. We date the origin
of our religion, as we have mentioned before, from the reign of Tiberius. Truth and the
hatred of truth come into our world together. As soon as truth appears, it is regarded as
an enemy. It has as many foes as there are strangers to it: the Jews, as was to be looked
for, from a spirit of rivalry; the soldiers, out of a desire to extort money; our very
domestics, by their nature. We are daily beset by foes, we are daily betrayed;

2 we are oftentimes surprised in our meetings and congregations. Whoever happened withal
upon an infant wailing, according to the common story? Whoever kept for the judge, just as
he had found them, the gory mouths of Cyclops and Sirens? Whoever found any traces of
uncleanness in their wives? Where is the man who, when he had discovered such atrocities,
concealed them; or, in the act of dragging the culprits' before the judge, was bribed into
silence? If we always keep our secrets, when were our proceedings made known to the world?
Nay, by whom could they be made known? Not, surely, by the guilty parties themselves; even
from the very idea of the thing, the fealty of silence being ever due to mysteries. The
Samothracian and Eleusinian make no disclosures-how much more will silence be kept in
regard to such as are sure, in their unveiling, to call forth punishment from man at once,
while wrath divine is kept in store for the future? If, then, Christians are not
themselves the publishers of their crime, it follows of course it must be strangers. And
whence have they their knowledge, when it is also a universal custom in religious
initiations to keep the profane aloof, and to beware of witnesses, unless it be that those
who are so wicked have less fear than their neighbors? Every one knows what sort of thing
rumour is. It is one of your own sayings, that "among all evils, none flies so fast as
rumour. Why is rumour such an evil thing?

3 Is it because it is fleet? Is it because it carries information? Or is it because it is
in the highest degree mendacious?-a thing, not even when it brings some truth to us,
without a taint of falsehood, either detracting, or adding, or changing from the simple
fact? Nay more, it is the very law of its being to continue only while it lies, and to
live but so long as there is no proof; for when the proof is given, it ceases to exist;
and, as having done its work of merely spreading a report, it delivers up a fact, and is
henceforth held to be a fact, and called a fact. And then no one says, for instance, "They
say that it took place at Rome," or, "There is a rumour that he has obtained a province,"
but, "He has got a province," and, "It took place at Rome. Rumour, the very designation of
uncertainty, has no place when a thing is certain. Does any but a fool put his trust in
it? For a wise man never believes the dubious. Everybody knows, however zealously it is
spread abroad, on whatever strength of asseveration it rests, that some time or other from
some one fountain it has its origin. Thence it must creep into propagating tongues and
ears;

4 and a small seminal blemish so darkens all the rest of the story, that no one can
determine whether the lips, from which it first came forth, planted the seed of falsehood,
as often happens, from a spirit of opposition, or from a suspicious judgment, or from a
confirmed, nay, in the case of some, an inborn, delight in lying. It is well that time
brings all to light, as your proverbs and sayings testify, by a provision of Nature, which
has so appointed things that nothing long is hidden, even though rumour has not
disseminated it. It is just then as it should be, that fame for so long a period has been
alone aware of the crimes of Christians. This is the witness you bring against us-one that
has never been able to prove the accusation it some time or other sent abroad, and at last
by mere continuance made into a settled opinion in the world; so that I confidently appeal
to Nature herself, ever true, against those who groundlessly hold that such things are to
be credited.

CHAPTER VIII.

1 See now, we set before you the reward of these enormities. They give promise of eternal
life. Hold it meanwhile as your own belief. I ask you, then, whether, so believing, you
think it worth attaining with a conscience such as you will have. Come, plunge your knife
into the babe, enemy of none, accused of none, child of all; or if that is another's work,
simply take your place beside a human being dying before he has really lived, await the
departure of the lately given soul, receive the fresh young blood, saturate your bread
with it, freely partake. The while as you recline at table, take note of the places which
your mother and your sister occupy; mark them well, so that when the dog-made darkness has
fallen on you, you may make no mistake, for you will be guilty of a crime-unless you
perpetrate a deed of incest. Initiated and sealed into things like these, you have life
everlasting. Tell me, I pray you, is eternity worth it? If it is not, then these things
are not to be credited. Even although you had the belief, I deny the will; and even if you
had the will, I deny the possibility. Why then can others do it, if you cannot? why cannot
you, if others can? I suppose we are of a different nature-are we Cynopµ or Sciapodes? You
are a man yourself as well as the Christian:

2 if you cannot do it, you ought not to believe it of others, for a Christian is a man as
well as you. But the ignorant, forsooth, are deceived and imposed on. They were quite
unaware of anything of the kind being imputed to Christians, or they would certainly have
looked into it for themselves, and searched the matter out. Instead of that, it is the
custom for persons wishing initiation into sacred rites, I think, to go first of all to
the master of them, that he may explain what preparations are to be made. Then, in this
case, no doubt he would say, "You must have a child still of tender age, that knows not
what it is to die, and can smile under thy knife; bread, too, to collect the gushing
blood; in addition to these, candlesticks, and lamps, and dogs-with tid-bits to draw them
on to the extinguishing of the lights: above all things, you will require to bring your
mother and your sister with you. But what if mother and sister are unwilling? or if there
be neither the one nor the other? What if there are Christians with no Christian
relatives? He will not be counted, I suppose, a true follower of Christ, who has not a
brother or a son. And what now, if these things are all in store for them without their
knowledge? At least afterwards they come to know them; and they bear with them, and pardon
them.

3 They fear, it may be said, lest they have to pay for it if they let the secret out: nay,
but they will rather in that case have every claim to protection; they will even prefer,
one might think, dying by their own hand, to living under the burden of such a dreadful
knowledge. Admit that they have this fear; yet why do they still persevere? For it is
plain enough that you will have no desire to continue what you would never have been, if
you had had previous knowledge of it.

CHAPTER IX.

1 That I may refute more thoroughly these charges, I will show that in part openly, in
part secretly, practices prevail among you which have led you perhaps to credit similar
things about us. Children were openly sacrificed in Africa to Saturn as lately as the
proconsulship of Tiberius, who exposed to public gaze the priests suspended on the sacred
trees overshadowing their temple-so many crosses on which the punishment which justice
craved overtook their crimes, as the soldiers of our country still can testify who did
that very work for that proconsul. And even now that sacred. crime still continues to be
done in secret. It is not only Christians, you see, who despise you; for all that you do
there is neither any crime thoroughly and abidingly eradicated, nor does any of your gods
reform his ways. When Saturn did not spare his own children, he was not likely to spare
the children of others; whom indeed the very parents themselves were in the habit of
offering, gladly responding to the call which was made on them, and keeping the little
ones pleased on the occasion, that they might not die in tears. At the same time, there is
a vast difference between homicide and parricide. A more advanced age was sacrificed to
Mercury in Gaul. I hand over the Tauric fables to their own theatres. Why, even in that
most religious city of the pious descendants of ¦neas, there is a certain Jupiter whom in
their games they lave with human blood.

2 It is the blood of a beast-fighter, you say. Is it less, because of that, the blood of a
man? Or is it viler blood because it is from the veins of a wicked man? At any rate it is
shed in murder. O Jove, thyself a Christian, and in truth only son of thy father in his
cruelty! But in regard to child murder, as it does not matter whether it is committed for
a sacred object, or merely at one's own self-impulse-although there is a great difference,
as we have said, between parricide and homicide-I shall turn to the people generally. How
many, think you, of those crowding around and gaping for Christian blood,-how many even of
your rulers, notable for their justice to you and for their severe measures against us,
may I charge in their own consciences with the sin of putting their offspring to death? As
to any difference t in the kind of murder, it is certainly the more cruel way to kill by
drowning, or by exposure to cold and hunger and dogs. A maturer age has always preferred
death by the sword. In our case, murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy
even the foetus in the womb, while as yet the human being derives blood from other parts
of the body for its sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing; nor
does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to
the birth.

3 That is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in its seed. As to
meals of blood and such tragic dishes, read-I am not sure where it is told (it is in
Herodotus, I think)-how blood taken from the arms, and tasted by both parties, has been
the treaty bond among some nations. I am not sure what it was that was tasted in the time
of Catiline. They say, too, that among some Scythian tribes the dead are eaten by their
friends. But I am going far from home. At this day, among ourselves, blood consecrated to
Bellona, blood drawn from a punctured thigh and then partaken of, seals initiation into
the rites of that goddess. Those, too, who at the gladiator shows, for the cure of
epilepsy, quaff with greedy thirst the blood of criminals slain in the arena, as it flows
fresh from the wound, and then rush off-to whom do they belong? those, also, who make
meals on the flesh of wild beasts at the place of combat-who have keen appetites for bear
and stag? That bear in the struggle was bedewed with the blood of the man whom it
lacerated: that stag rolled itself in the gladiator's gore. The entrails of the very
bears, loaded with as yet undigested human viscera, are in great request. And you have men
rifting up man-fed flesh? If you partake of food like this, how do your repasts differ
from those you accuse us Christians of?

4 And do those, who, with savage lust, seize on human bodies, do less because they devour
the living? Have they less the pollution of human blood on them because they only lick up
what is to turn into blood? They make meals, it is plain, not so much of infants, as of
grown-up men. Blush for your vile ways before the Christians, who have not even the blood
of animals at their meals of simple and natural food; who abstain from things strangled
and that die a natural death, for no other reason than that they may not contract
pollution, so much as from blood secreted in the viscera. To clench the matter with a
single example, you tempt Christians with sausages of blood, just because you are
perfectly aware that the thing by which you thus try to get them to transgress they hold
unlawful. And how unreasonable it is to believe that those, of whom you are convinced that
they regard with horror the idea of tasting the blood of oxen, are eager after blood of
men; unless, mayhap, you have tried it, and found it sweeter to the taste! Nay, in fact,
there is here a test you should apply to discover Christians, as well as the fire-pan and
the censer. They should be proved by their appetite for human blood, as well as by their
refusal to offer sacrifice; just as otherwise they should be affirmed to be free of
Christianity by their refusal to taste of blood, as by their sacrificing;

5 and there would be no want of blood of men, amply supplied as that would be in the trial
and condemnation of prisoners. Then who are more given to the crime of incest than those
who have enjoyed the instruction of Jupiter himself? Ctesias tells us that the Persians
have illicit intercourse with their mothers. The Macedonians, too, are suspected on this
point; for on first hearing the tragedy of îdipus they made mirth of the incest-doer's
grief, exclaiming, h9laune ei0j th\ n mhte/ra. Even now reflect what opportunity there is
for mistakes leading to incestuous comminglings-your promiscuous looseness supplying the
materials. You first of all expose your children, that they may be taken up by any
compassionate passer-by, to whom they are quite unknown; or you give them away, to be
adopted by those who will do better to them the part of parents. Well, some time or other,
all memory of the alienated progeny must be lost; and when once a mistake has been made,
the transmission of incest thence will still go on-the race and the crime creeping on
together. Then, further, wherever you are-at home, abroad, over the seas-your lust is an
attendant, whose general indulgence, or even its indulgence in the most limited scale, may
easily and unwittingly anywhere beget children, so that in this way a progeny scattered
about in the commerce of life may have intercourse with those who are their own kin, and
have no notion that there is any incest in the case.

6 A persevering and stedfast chastity has protected us from anything like this: keeping as
we do from adulteries and all post-matrimonial unfaithfulness, we are not exposed to
incestuous mishaps. Some of us, making matters still more secure, beat away from them
entirely the power of sensual sin, by a virgin continence, still boys in this respect when
they are old. If you would but take notice that such sins as I have mentioned prevail
among you, that would lead you to see that they have no existence among Christians. The
same eyes would tell you of both facts. But the two blindnesses are apt to go together; so
that those who do not see what is, think they see what is not. I shall show it to be so in
everything. But now let me speak of matters which are more dear.

CHAPTER X.

1 "You do not worship the gods," you say; "and you do not offer sacrifices for the
emperors. Well, we do not offer sacrifice for others, for the same reason that we do not
for ourselves,-namely, that your gods are not at all the objects of our worship. So we are
accused of sacrilege and treason. This is the chief ground of charge against us-nay, it is
the sum-total of our offending; and it is worthy then of being inquired into, if neither
prejudice nor injustice be the judge, the one of which has no idea of discovering the
truth, and the other simply and at once rejects it. We do not worship your gods, because
we know that there are no such beings. This, therefore, is what you should do: you should
call on us to demonstrate their non-existence, and thereby prove that they have no claim
to adoration; for only if your gods were truly so, would there be any obligation to render
divine homage to them. And punishment even were due to Christians, if it were made plain
that those to whom they refused all worship were indeed divine. But you say, They are
gods. We protest and appeal from yourselves to your knowledge; let that judge us; let that
condemn us, if it can deny that all these gods of yours were but men.

2 If even it venture to deny that, it will be confuted by its own books of antiquities,
from which it has got its information about them, bearing witness to this day, as they
plainly do, both of the cities in which they were born, and the countries in which they
have left traces of their exploits, as well as where also they are proved to have been
buried. Shall I now, therefore, go over them one by one, so numerous and so various, new
and old, barbarian, Grecian, Roman, foreign, captive and adopted, private and common, male
and female, rural and urban, naval and military? It were useless even to hunt out all
their names: so I may content myself with a compend; and this not for your information,
but that you may have what you know brought to your recollection, for undoubtedly you act
as if you had forgotten all about them. No one of your gods is earlier than Saturn: from
him you trace all your deities, even those of higher rank and better known. What, then,
can be proved of the first, will apply to those that follow. So far, then, as books give
us information, neither the Greek Diodorus or Thallus, neither Cassius Severus or
Cornelius Nepos, nor any writer upon sacred antiquities, have ventured to say that Saturn
was any but a man:

3 so far as the question depends on facts, I find none more trustworthy than those -that
in Italy itself we have the country in which, after many expeditions, and after having
partaken of Attic hospitalities, Saturn settled, obtaining cordial welcome from Janus, or,
as the Salii will have it, Janis. The mountain on which he dwelt was called Saturnius; the
city he founded is called Saturnia to this day; last of all, the whole of Italy, after
having borne the name of Oenotria, was called Saturnia from him. He first gave you the art
of writing, and a stamped coinage, and thence it is he presides over the public treasury.
But if Saturn were a man, he had undoubtedly a human origin; and having a human origin, he
was not the offspring of heaven and earth. As his parents were unknown, it was not
unnatural that he should be spoken of as the son of those elements from which we might all
seem to spring. For who does not speak of heaven and earth as father and mother, in a sort
of way of veneration and honour? or from the custom which prevails among us of saying that
persons of whom we have no knowledge, or who make a sudden appearance, have fallen from
the skies? In this way it came about that Saturn, everywhere a sudden and unlooked-for
guest, got everywhere the name of the Heaven-born. or even the common folk call persons
whose stock is unknown, sons of earth.

4 I say nothing of how men in these rude times were wont to act, when they were impressed
by the look of any stranger happening to appear among them, as though it were divine,
since even at this day men of culture make gods of those whom, a day or two before, they
acknowledged to be dead men by their public mourning for them. Let these notices of
Saturn, brief as they are, suffice. It will thus also be proved that Jupiter is as
certainly a man, as from a man he sprung; and that one after another the whole swarm is
mortal like the primal stock.

CHAPTER XI.

1 And since, as you dare not deny that these deities of yours once were men, you have
taken it on you to assert that they were made gods after their decease, let us consider
what necessity there was for this. In the first place, you must concede the existence of
one higher God-a certain wholesale dealer in divinity, who has made gods of men. For they
could neither have assumed a divinity which was not theirs, nor could any but one himself
possessing it have conferred it on them. If there was no one to make gods, it is vain to,
dream of gods being made when thus you have no god-maker. Most certainly, if they could
have deified themselves, with a higher state at their command, they never would have been
men. If, then, there be one who is able to make gods, I turn back to an examination of any
reason there may be for making gods at all; and I find no other reason than this, that the
great God has need of their ministrations and aids in performing the offices of Deity. But
first it is an unworthy idea that He should need the help of a man, and in fact a dead
man, when, if He was to be in want of this assistance from the dead, He might more
fittingly have created some one a god at the beginning. Nor do I see any place for his
action.

2 For this entire world-mass-whether self-existent and uncreated, as Pythagoras maintains,
or brought into being by a creator's hands, as Plato hold-was manifestly, once for all in
its original construction, disposed, and furnished, and ordered, and supplied with a
government of perfect wisdom. That cannot be imperfect which has made all perfect. There
was nothing waiting on for Saturn and his race to do. Men will make fools of themselves if
they refuse to believe that from the very first ram poured down from the sky, and stars
gleamed, and light shone, and thunders roared, and Jove himself dreaded the lightnings you
put in his hands; that in like manner before Bacchus, and Ceres, and Minerva, nay before
the first man, whoever that was, every kind of fruit burst forth plentifully from the
bosom of the earth, for nothing provided for the support and sustenance of man could be
introduced after his entrance on the stage of being. Accordingly, these necessaries of
life are said to have been discovered, not created. But the thing you discover existed
before; and that which had a pre-existence must be regarded as belonging not to him who
discovered it, hut to him who made it, for of course it had a being before it could be
found. But if, on account of his being the discoverer of the vine, Bacchus is raised to
godship, Lucullus, who first introduced the cherry from Pontus into Italy, has not been
fairly dealt with;

3 for as the discoverer of a new fruit, he has not, as though he were its creator, been
awarded divine honours. Wherefore, if the universe existed from the beginning, thoroughly
furnished with its system working under certain laws for the performance of its functions,
there is, in this respect, an entire absence of all reason for electing humanity to
divinity; for the positions and powers which you have assigned to your deities have been
from the beginning precisely what they would have been, although you had never deified
them. But you turn to another reason, telling us that the conferring of deity was a way of
rewarding worth. And hence you grant, I conclude, that the god-making God is of
transcendent righteousness,-one who will neither rashly, improperly; nor needlessly bestow
a reward so great. I would have you then consider whether the merits of your deities are
of a kind to have raised them to the heavens, and not rather to have sunk them down into
lowest depths of Tartarus,-the place which you regard, with many, as the prison-house of
infernal punishments. For into this dread place are wont to be cast all who offend against
filial piety, and such as are guilty of incest with sisters, and seducers of wives, and
ravishers of virgins, and boy-polluters, and men of furious tempers, and murderers, and
thieves, and deceivers;

4 all, in short, who tread in the footsteps of your gods, not one of whom you can prove
free from crime or vice, save by denying that they had ever a human existence. But as you
cannot deny that, you have those foul blots also as an added reason for not believing that
they were made gods afterwards. For if you rule for the very purpose of punishing such
deeds; if every virtuous man among you rejects all correspondence, converse, and intimacy
with the wicked and base, while, on the other hand, the high God has taken up their mates
to a share of His majesty, on what ground is it that you thus condemn those whose fellow-
actors you adore? Your goodness is an affront in the heavens. Deify your vilest criminals,
if you would please your gods. You honour them by giving divine honours to their fellows.
But to say no more about a way of acting so unworthy, there have been men virtuous, and
pure, and good. Yet how many of these nobler men you have left in the regions of doom! as
Socrates, so renowned for his wisdom, Aristides for his justice, Themistocles for his
warlike genius, Alexander for his sublimity of soul, Polycrates for his good fortune,
Croesus for his wealth, Demosthenes for his eloquence. Which of these gods of yours is
more remarkable for gravity and wisdom than Cato, more just and warlike than Scipio? which
of them more magnanimous than Pompey, more prosperous than Sylla, of greater wealth than
Crassus, more eloquent than Tullius?

5 How much better it would have been for the God Supreme to have waited that He might have
taken such men as these to be His heavenly associates, prescient as He must have surely
been of their worthier character! He was in a hurry, I suppose, and straightway shut
heaven's gates; and now He must surely feel ashamed at these worthies murmuring over their
lot in the regions below.

CHAPTER XII.

1 But I pass from these remarks, for I know and I am going to show what your gods are not,
by showing what they are. In reference, then, to these, I see only names of dead men of
ancient times; I hear fabulous stories; I recognize sacred rites rounded on mere myths. As
to the actual images, I regard hem as simply pieces of matter akin to the vessels and
utensils in common use among is, or even undergoing in their consecration a hapless change
from these useful articles at the hands of reckless art, which in the transforming process
treats them with utter contempt, nay, in the very act commits sacrilege; so that it might
be no slight solace to us in all our punishments, suffering as we do because of these same
gods, that in their making they suffer as we do themselves. You put Christians on crosses
and stakes: what image is not formed from the clay in the first instance, set on cross and
stake? The body of your god is first consecrated on the gibbet. You tear the sides of
Christians with your claws; but in the case of your own gods, axes, and planes, and rasps
are put to work more vigorously on every member of the body. We lay our heads upon the
block; before the lead, and the glue, and the nails are put in requisition, your deities
are headless. We are cast to the wild beasts, while you attach them to Bacchus, and
Cybele, and Cµlestis.

2 We are burned in the flames; so, too, are they in their original lump. We are condemned
to the mines; from these your gods originate. We are banished to islands; in islands it is
a common thing for your gods to have their birth or die. If it is in this way a deity is
made, it will follow that as many as are punished are deified, and tortures will have to
be declared divinities. But plain it is these objects of your worship have no sense of the
injuries and disgraces of their consecrating, as they are equally unconscious of the
honours paid to them. O impious words! O blasphemous reproaches! Gnash your teeth upon us-
foam with maddened rage against us-ye are the persons, no doubt, who censured a certain
Seneca speaking of your superstition at much greater length and far more sharply! In a
word, if we refuse our homage to statues and frigid images, the very counterpart of their
dead originals, with which hawks, and mice, and spiders are so well acquainted, does it
not merit praise instead of penalty, that we have rejected what we have come to see is
error? We cannot surely be made out to injure those who we are certain are nonentities.
What does not exist, is in its nonexistence secure from suffering.

CHAPTER XIII.

1 "But they are gods to us," you say. And how is it, then, that in utter inconsistency
with this, you are convicted of impious, sacrilegious, and irreligious conduct to them,
neglecting those you imagine to exist, destroying those who are the objects of your fear,
making mock of those whose honour you avenge? See now if I go beyond the truth. First,
indeed, seeing you worship, some one god, and some another, of course you give offence to
those you do not worship. You cannot continue to give preference to one without slighting
another, for selection implies rejection. You despise, therefore, those whom you thus
reject; for in your rejection of them, it is plain you have no dread of giving them
offence. For, as we have already shown, every god depended on the decision of the senate
for his godhead. No god was he whom man in his own counsels did not wish to be so, and
thereby condemned. The family deities you call Lares, you exercise a domestic authority
over, pledging them, selling them, changing them-making sometimes a cooking-pot of a
Saturn, a firepan of a Minerva, as one or other happens to be worn done, or broken in its
long sacred use, or as the family head feels the pressure of some more sacred home
necessity. In like manner, by public law you disgrace your state gods, putting them in the
auction-catalogue, and making them a source of revenue.

2 Men seek to get the Capitol, as they seek to get the herb market, under the voice of the
crier, under the auction spear, under the registration of the quµstor. Deity is struck off
and farmed out to the highest bidder. But indeed lands burdened with tribute are of less
value; men under the assessment of a poll-tax are less noble; for these things are the
marks of servitude. In the case of the gods, on the other hand, the sacredness is great in
proportion to the tribute which they yield; nay, the more sacred is a god, the larger is
the tax he pays. Majesty is made a source of gain. Religion goes about the taverns
begging. You demand a price for the privilege of standing on temple ground, for access to
the sacred services; there is no gratuitous knowledge of your divinities permitted-you
must buy their favours with a price. What honours in any way do you render to them that
you do not render to the dead? You have temples in the one case just as in the other; you
have altars in the one case as in the other. Their statues have the same dress, the same
insignia. As the dead man had his age, his art, his occupation, so it is with the deity.
In what respect does the funeral feast differ from the feast of Jupiter? or the bowl of
the gods from the ladle of the manes?

3 or the undertaker from the soothsayer, as in fact this latter personage also attends
upon the dead? With perfect propriety you give divine honours to your departed emperors,
as you worship them in life. The gods will count themselves indebted to you; nay, it will
be matter of high rejoicing among them that their masters are made their equals. But when
you adore Larentina, a public prostitute-I could have wished that it might at least have
been Lais or Phryne-among your Junos, and Cereses, and Dianas; when you instal in your
Pantheon Simon Magus, giving him a statue and the title of Holy God; when you make an
infamous court page a god of the sacred synod, although your ancient deities are in
reality no better, they will still think themselves affronted by you, that the privilege
antiquity conferred on them alone, has been allowed to others.

CHAPTER XIV.

1 I wish now to review your sacred rites; and I pass no censure on your sacrificing, when
you offer the worn-out, the scabbed, the corrupting; when you cut off from the fat and the
sound the useless parts, such as the head and the hoofs, which in your house you would
have assigned to the slaves or the dogs; when of the tithe of Hercules you do not lay a
third upon his altar (I am disposed rather to praise your wisdom in rescuing something
from being lost); but turning to your books, from which you get your training in wisdom
and the nobler duties of life, what utterly ridiculous things I find!-that for Trojans and
Greeks the gods fought among themselves like pairs of gladiators; that Venus was wounded
by a man, because she would rescue her son ¦neas when he was in peril of his life from the
same Diomede; that Mars was almost wasted away by a thirteen months' imprisonment; that
Jupiter was saved by a monster's aid from suffering the same violence at the hands of the
other gods; that he now laments the fate of Sarpedon, now foully makes love to his own
sister, recounting (to her) former mistresses, now for a long time past not so dear as
she. After this, what poet is not found copying the example of his chief, to be a
disgracer of the gods? One gives Apollo to king Admetus to tend his sheep; another hires
out the building labours of Neptune to Laomedon.

2 A well-known lyric poet, too-Pindar, I mean-sings of Aesculapius deservedly stricken
with lightning for his greed in practising wrongfully his art. A wicked deed it was of
Jupiter-if he hurled the bolt-unnatural to his grandson, and exhibiting envious feeling to
the Physician. Things like these should not be made public if they are true; and if false,
they should not be fabricated among people professing a great respect for religion. Nor
indeed do either tragic or comic writers shrink from setting forth the gods as the origin
of all family calamities and sins. I do not dwell on the philosophers, contenting myself
with a reference to Socrates, who, in contempt of the gods, was in the habit of swearing
by an oak, and a goat, and a dog. In fact, for this very thing Socrates was condemned to
death, that he overthrew the worship of the gods. Plainly, at one time as well as another,
that is, always truth is disliked. However, when rueing their judgment, the Athenians
inflicted punishment on his accusers, and set up a golden image of him in a temple, the
condemnation was in the very act rescinded, and his witness was restored to its former
value. Diogenes, too, makes utter mock of Hercules and the Roman cynic Varro brings
forward three hundred Joves, or Jupiters they should be called, all headless.

CHAPTER XV.

1 Others of your writers, in their wantonness, even minister to your pleasures by
vilifying the gods. Examine those charming farces of your Lentuli and Hostilii, whether in
the jokes and tricks it is the buffoons or the deities which afford you merriment; such
farces I mean as Anubis the Adulterer, and Luna of the masculine gender, and Diana under
the lash, and the reading the will of Jupiter deceased, and the three famishing Herculeses
held up to ridicule. Your dramatic literature, too, depicts all the vileness of your gods.
The Sun mourns his offspring cast down from heaven, and you are full of glee; Cybele sighs
after the scornful swain, and you do not blush; you brook the stage recital of Jupiter's
misdeeds, and the shepherd judging Juno, Venus, and Minerva. Then, again, when the
likeness of a god is put on the head of an ignominious and infamous wretch, when one
impure and trained up for the art in all effeminacy, represents a Minerva or a Hercules,
is not the majesty of your gods insulted, and their deity dishonored? Yet you not merely
look on, but applaud. You are, I suppose, more devout in the arena, where after the same
fashion your deities dance on human blood, on the pollutions caused by inflicted
punishments, as they act their themes and stories, doing their turn for the wretched
criminals, except that these, too, often put on divinity and actually play the very gods.

2 We have seen in our day a representation of the mutilation of Attis, that famous god of
Pessinus, and a man burnt alive as Hercules. We have made merry amid the ludicrous
cruelties of the noonday exhibition, at Mercury examining the bodies of the dead with his
hot iron; we have witnessed Jove's brother, mallet in hand, dragging out the corpses of
the gladiators. But who can go into everything of this sort? If by such things as these
the honour of deity is assailed, if they go to blot out every trace of its majesty, we
must explain them by the contempt in which the gods are held, alike by those who actually
do them, and by those for whose enjoyment they are done. This it will be said, however, is
all in sport. But if I add-it is what all know and will admit as readily to be the fact-
that in the temples adulteries are arranged, that at the altars pimping is practised, that
often in the houses of the temple-keepers and priests, under the sacrificial fillets, and
the sacred hats, and the purple robes, amid the fumes of incense, deeds of licentiousness
are done, I am not sure but your gods have more reason to complain of you than of
Christians. It is certainly among the votaries of your religion that the perpetrators of
sacrilege are always found, for Christians do not enter your temples even in the day-time.
Perhaps they too would be spoilers of them, if they worshipped in them.

3 What then do they worship, since their objects of worship are different from yours?
Already indeed it is implied, as the corollary from their rejection of the lie, that they
render homage to the truth; nor continue longer in an error which they have given up in
the very fact of recognizing it to be an error. Take this in first of all, and when we
have offered a preliminary refutation of some false opinions, go on to derive from it our
entire religious system.

CHAPTER XVI.

1 For, like some others, you are under the delusion that our god is an ass's head.
Cornelius Tacitus first put this notion into people's minds. In the fifth book of his
histories, beginning the (narrative of the) Jewish war with an account of the origin of
the nation; and theorizing at his pleasure about the origin, as well as the name and the
religion of the Jews, he states that having been delivered, or rather, in his opinion,
expelled from Egypt, in crossing the vast plains of Arabia, where water is so scanty, they
were in extremity from thirst; but taking the guidance of the wild asses, which it was
thought might be seeking water after feeding, they discovered a fountain, and thereupon in
their gratitude they consecrated a head of this species of animal. And as Christianity is
nearly allied to Judaism, from this, I suppose, it was taken for granted that we too are
devoted to the worship of the same image. But the said Cornelius Tacitus (the very
opposite of tacit in telling lies) informs us in the work already mentioned, that when
Cneius Pompeius captured Jerusalem, he entered the temple to see the arcana of the Jewish
religion, but found no image there. Yet surely if worship was rendered to any visible
object, the very place for its exhibition would be the shrine; and that all the more that
the worship, however unreasonable, had no need there to fear outside beholders.

2 For entrance to the holy place was permitted to the priests alone, while all vision was
forbidden to others by an outspread curtain. You will not, however, deny that all beasts
of burden, and not parts of them, but the animals entire, are with their goddess Epona
objects of worship with you. It is this, perhaps, which displeases you in us, that while
your worship here is universal, we do homage only to the ass. Then, if any of you think we
render superstitious adoration to the cross, in that adoration he is sharer with us. If
you offer homage to a piece of wood at all, it matters little what it is like when the
substance is the same: it is of no consequence the form, if you have the very body of the
god. And yet how far does the Athenian Pallas differ from the stock of the cross, or the
Pharian Ceres as she is put up uncarved to sale, a mere rough stake and piece of shapeless
wood? Every stake fixed in an upright position is a portion of the cross; we render our
adoration, if you will have it so, to a god entire and complete. We have shown before that
your deities are derived from shapes modelled from the cross. But you also worship
victories, for in your trophies the cross is the heart of the trophy. The camp religion of
the Romans is all through a worship of the standards, a setting the standards above all
gods.

3 Well, as those images decking out the standards are ornaments of crosses. All those
hangings of your standards and banners are robes of crosses. I praise your zeal: you would
not consecrate crosses unclothed and unadorned. Others, again, certainly with more
information and greater verisimilitude, believe that the sun is our god. We shall be
counted Persians perhaps, though we do not worship the orb of day painted on a piece of
linen cloth, having himself everywhere in his own disk. The idea no doubt has originated
from our being known to turn to the east in prayer. But you, many of you, also under
pretence sometimes of worshipping the heavenly bodies, move your lips in the direction of
the sunrise. In the same way, if we devote Sun-day to rejoicing, from a far different
reason than Sun-worship, we have some resemblance to those of you who devote the day of
Saturn to ease and luxury, though they too go far away from Jewish ways, of which indeed
they are ignorant. But lately a new edition of our god has been given to the world in that
great city: it originated with a certain vile man who was wont to hire himself out to
cheat the wild beasts, and who exhibited a picture with this inscription: The God of the
Christians, born of an ass. He had the ears of an ass, was hoofed in one foot, carried a
book, and wore a toga. Both the name and the figure gave us amusement.

4 But our opponents ought straightway to have done homage to this biformed divinity, for
they have acknowledged gods dog-headed and lion-headed, with horn of buck and ram, with
goat-like loins, with serpent legs, with wings sprouting from back or foot. These things
we have discussed ex abundanti, that we might not seem willingly to pass by any rumor
against us unrefuted. Having thoroughly cleared ourselves, we turn now to an exhibi-ition
of what our religion really is.

CHAPTER XVII.

1 The object of our worship is the One God, He who by His commanding word, His arranging
wisdom, His mighty power, brought forth from nothing this entire mass of our world, with
all its array of elements, bodies, spirits, for the glory of His majesty; whence also the
Greeks have bestowed on it the name of Ko/smoj. The eye cannot see Him, though He is
(spiritually) visible. He is incomprehensible, though in grace He is manifested. He is
beyond our utmost thought, though our human faculties conceive of Him. He is therefore
equally real and great. But that which, in the ordinary sense, can be seen and handled and
conceived, is inferior to the eyes by which it is taken in, and the hands by which it is
tainted, and the faculties by which it is discovered; but that which is infinite is known
only to itself. This it is which gives some notion of God, while yet beyond all our
conceptions-our very incapacity of fully grasping Him affords us the idea of what He
really is. He is presented to our minds in His transcendent greatness, as at once known
and unknown. And this is the crowning guilt of men, that they will not recognize One, of
whom they cannot possibly be ignorant. Would you have the proof from the works of His
hands, so numerous and so great, which both contain you and sustain you, which minister at
once to your enjoyment, and strike you with awe;

2 or would you rather have it from the testimony of the soul itself? Though under the
oppressive bondage of the body, though led astray by depraving customs, though enervated
by lusts and passions, though in slavery to false gods; yet, whenever the soul comes to
itself, as out of a surfeit, or a sleep, or a sickness, and attains something of its
natural soundness, it speaks of God; using no other word, because this is the peculiar
name of the true God. "God is great and good"-"Which may God give," are the words on every
lip. It bears witness, too, that God is judge, exclaiming, "God sees," and, "I commend
myself to God," and, "God will repay me. O noble testimony of the soul by nature
Christian! Then, too, in using such words as these, it looks not to the Capitol, but to
the heavens. It knows that there is the throne of the living God, as from Him and from
thence itself came down.

CHAPTER XVIII.

1 But, that we might attain an ampler and more authoritative knowledge at once of Himself,
and of His counsels and will, God has added a written revelation for the behoof of every
one whose heart is set on seeking Him, that seeking he may find, and finding believe, and
believing obey. For from the first He sent messengers into the world,-men whose stainless
righteousness made them worthy to know the Most High, and to reveal Him,-men abundantly
endowed with the Holy Spirit, that they might proclaim that there is one God only who made
all things, who formed man from the dust of the ground (for He is the true Prometheus who
gave order to the world by arranging the seasons and their course),-these have further set
before us the proofs He has given of His majesty in H judgments by floods and fires, the
rules appointed by Him for securing His favour, as well as the retribution in store for
the ignoring, forsaking and keeping them, as being about at the end of all to adjudge His
worshippers to everlasting life, and the wicked to the doom of fire at once without ending
and without break, raising up again all the dead from the beginning, reforming and
renewing them with the object of awarding either recompense. Once these things were with
us, too, the theme of ridicule. We are of your stock and nature: men are made, not born,
Christians.

2 The preachers of whom we have spoken are called prophets, from the office which belongs
to them of predicting the future. Their words, as well as the miracles which they
performed, that men might have faith in their divine authority, we have still in the
literary treasures they have left, and which are open to all. Ptolemy, surnamed
Philadelphus, the most learned of his race, a man of vast acquaintance with all
literature, emulating, I imagine, the book enthusiasm of Pisistratus, among other remains
of the past which either their antiquity or something of peculiar interest made famous, at
the suggestion of Demetrius Phalereus, who was renowned above all grammarians of his time,
and to whom he had committed the management of these things, applied to the Jews for their
writings-I mean the writings peculiar to them and in their tongue, which they alone
possessed, for from themselves, as a people dear to God for their fathers' sake, their
prophets had ever sprung, and to them they had ever spoken. Now in ancient times the
people we call Jews bare the name of Hebrews, and so both their writings and their speech
were Hebrew. But that the understanding of their books might not be wanting, this also the
Jews supplied to Ptolemy; for they gave him seventy-two interpreters-men whom the
philosopher Menedemus, the well-known asserter of a Providence, regarded with respect as
sharing in his views. The same account is given by Aristµus. So the king left these works
unlocked to all, in the Greek language.

3 To this day, at the temple of Serapis, the libraries of Ptolemy are to be seen, with the
identical Hebrew originals in them. The Jews, too, read them publicly. Under a tribute-
liberty, they are in the habit of going to hear them every Sabbath. Whoever gives ear will
find God in them; whoever takes pains to understand, will be compelled to believe.

CHAPTER XIX.

1 Their high antiquity, first of all, claims authority for these writings. With you, too,
it is a kind of religion to demand belief on this very ground. Well, all the substances,
all the materials, the origins, classes, contents of your most ancient writings, even most
nations and cities illustrious in the records of the past and noted for their antiquity in
books of annals,-the very forms of your letters, those revealers and custodiers of events,
nay (I think I speak still within the mark), your very gods themselves, your very temples
and oracles, and sacred rites, are less ancient than the work of a single prophet, in whom
you have the thesaurus of the entire Jewish religion, and therefore too of ours. If you
happen to have heard of a certain Moses, I speak first of him: he is as far back as the
Argive Inachus; by nearly four hundred years-only seven less-he precedes Danaus, your most
ancient name; while he antedates by a millennium the death of Priam. I might affirm, too,
that he is five hundred years earlier than Homer, and have supporters of that view. The
other prophets also, though of later date, are, even the most recent of them, as far back
as the first of your philosophers, and legislators, and historians. It is not so much the
difficulty of the subject, as its vastness, that stands in the way of a statement of the
grounds on which these statements rest; the matter is not so arduous as it would be
tedious.

2 It would require the anxious study of many books, and the fingers busy reckoning. The
histories of the most ancient nations, such as the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the
Phoenicians, would need to be ransacked; the men of these various nations who have
information to give, would have to be called in as witnesses. Manetho the Egyptian, and
Berosus the Chaldean, and Hieromus the Phoenician king of Tyre; their successors too,
Ptolemy the Mendesian, and Demetrius Phalereus, and King Juba, and Apion, and Thallus, and
their critic the Jew Josephus, the native vindicator of the ancient history of his people,
who either authenticates or refutes the others. Also the Greek censors' lists must be
compared, and the dates of events ascertained, that the chronological connections may be
opened up, and thus the reckonings of the various annals be made to give forth light. We
must go abroad into the histories and literature of all nations. And, in fact, we have
already brought the proof in part before you, in giving those hints as to how it is to be
effected. But it seems better to delay the full discussion of this, lest in our haste we
do not sufficiently carry it out, or lest in its thorough handling we make too lengthened
a digression.

CHAPTER XX.

1 To make up for our delay in this, we bring under your notice something of even greater
importance; we point to the majesty of our Scriptures, if not to their antiquity. If you
doubt that they are as ancient as we say, we offer proof that they are divine. And you may
convince yourselves of this at once, and without going very far. Your instructors, the
world, and the age, and the event, are all be fore you. All that is taking place around
you I was fore-announced; all that you now see with your eye was previously heard by the
ear. The swallowing up of cities by the earth; the theft of islands by the sea; wars,
bringing external and internal convulsions; the collision of kingdoms with kingdoms;
famines and pestilences, and local massacres, and widespread desolating mortalities; the
exaltation of the lowly, and the humbling of the proud; the decay of righteousness, the
growth of sin, the slackening interest in all good ways; the very seasons and elements
going out of their ordinary course, monsters and portents taking the place of nature's
forms-it was all foreseen and predicted before it came to pass. While we suffer the
calamities, we read of them in the Scriptures; as we examine, they are proved. Well, the
truth of a prophecy, I thinks is the demonstration of its being from above.

2 Hence there is among us an assured faith in regard to coming events as things already
proved to us, for they were predicted along with what we have day by day fulfilled. They
are uttered by the same voices, they are written in the same books-the same Spirit
inspires them. All time is one to prophecy foretelling the future. Among men, it may be, a
distinction of times is made while the fulfilment is going on: from being future we think
of it as presents and then from being present we count it as belonging to the past. How
are we to blame, I pray you, that we believe in things to come as though they already
were, with the grounds we have for our faith in these two steps?


THE APOLOGY
===========

THE APOLOGY continued

CHAPTER XXI.

1 But having asserted that our religion is supported by the writings of the Jews, the
oldest which exist, though it is generally known, and we fully admit that it dates from a
comparatively recent period-no further back indeed than the reign of Tiberius-a question
may perhaps be raised on this ground about its standing, as if it were hiding something of
its presumption under shadow of an illustrious religion, one which has at any rate
undoubted allowance of the law, or because, apart from the question of age, we neither
accord with the Jews in their peculiarities in regard to food, nor in their sacred days,
nor even in their well-known bodily sign, nor in the possession of a common name, which
surely behoved to be the case if we did homage to the same God as they. Then, too, the
common people have now some knowledge of Christ, and think of Him as but a man, one indeed
such as the Jews condemned, so that some may naturally enough have taken up the idea that
we are worshippers of a mere human being. But we are neither ashamed of Christ-for we
rejoice to be counted His disciples, and in His name to suffer-nor do we differ from the
Jews concerning God. We must make, therefore, a remark or two as to Christ's divinity. In
former times the Jews enjoyed much of God's favour, when the fathers of their race were
noted for their righteousness and faith.

2 So it was that as a people they flourished greatly, and their kingdom attained to a
lofty eminence; and so highly blessed were they, that for their instruction God spake to
them in special revelations, pointing out to them beforehand how they should merit His
favor and avoid His displeasure. But how deeply they have sinned, puffed up to their fall
with a false trust in their noble ancestors, turning from God's way into a way of sheer
impiety, though they themselves should refuse to admit it, their present national ruin
would afford sufficient proof. Scattered abroad, a race of wanderers, exiles from their
own land and clime, they roam over the whole world without either a human or a heavenly
king, not possessing even the stranger's right to set so much as a simple footstep in
their native country. The sacred writers withal, in giving previous warning of these
things, all with equal clearness ever declared that, in the last days of the world, God
would, out of every nation, and people, and country, choose for Himself more faithful
worshippers, upon whom He would bestow His grace, and that indeed in ampler measure, in
keeping with the enlarged capacities of a nobler dispensation. Accordingly, He appeared
among us, whose coming to renovate and illuminate man's nature was pre-announced by God-I
mean Christ, that Son of God.

3 And so the supreme Head and Master of this grace and discipline, the Enlightener and
Trainer of the human race, God's own Son, was announced among us, born-but not so born as
to make Him ashamed of the name of Son or of His paternal origin. It was not His lot to
have as His father, by incest with a sister, or by violation of a daughter or another's
wife, a god in the shape of serpent, or ox, or bird, or lover, for his vile ends
transmuting himself into the gold of Danaus. They are your divinities upon whom these base
deeds of Jupiter were done. But the Son of God has no mother in any sense which involves
impurity; she, whom men suppose to be His mother in the ordinary way, had never entered
into the marriage bond. But, first, I shall discuss His essential nature, and so the
nature of His birth will be understood. We have already asserted that God made the world,
and all which it contains, by His Word, and Reason, and Power. It is abundantly plain that
your philosophers, too, regard the Logos-that is, the Word and Reason-as the Creator of
the universe. For Zeno lays it down that he is the creator, having made all things
according to a determinate plan; that his name is Fate, and God, and the soul of Jupiter,
and the necessity of all things. Cleanthes ascribes all this to spirit, which he maintains
pervades the universe.

4 And we, in like manner, hold that the Word, and Reason, and Power, by which we have said
God made all, have spirit as their proper and essential substratum, in which the Word has
in being to give forth utterances, and reason abides to dispose and arrange, and power is
over all to execute. We have been taught that He proceeds forth from God, and in that
procession He is generated; so that He is the Son of God, and is called God from unity of
substance with God. For God, too, is a Spirit. Even when the ray is shot from the sun, it
is still part of the parent mass; the sun will still be in the ray, because it is a ray of
the sun-there is no division of substance, but merely an extension. Thus Christ is Spirit
of Spirit, and God of God, as light of light is kindled. The material matrix remains
entire and unimpaired, though you derive from it any number of shoots possessed of its
qualities; so, too, that which has come forth out of God is at once God and the Son of
God, and the two are one. In this way also, as He is Spirit of Spirit and God of God, He
is made a second in manner of existence-in position, not in nature; and He did not
withdraw from the original source, but went forth.

5 This ray of God, then, as it was always foretold in ancient times, descending into a
certain virgin, and made flesh in her womb, is in His birth God and man united. The flesh
formed by the Spirit is nourished, grows up to manhood, speaks, teaches, works, and is the
Christ. Receive meanwhile this fable, if you choose to call it so-it is like some of your
own-while we go on to show how Christ's claims are proved, and who the parties are with
you by whom such fables have been set a going to overthrow the truth, which they resemble.
The Jews, too, were well aware that Christ was coming, as those to whom the prophets
spake. Nay, even now His advent is expected by them; nor is there any other contention
between them and us, than that they believe the advent has not yet occurred. For two
comings of Christ having been revealed to us: a first, which has been fulfilled in the
lowliness of a human lot; a second, which impends over the world, now near its close, in
all the majesty of Deity unveiled; and, by misunderstanding the first, they have concluded
that the second-which, as matter of more manifest prediction, they set their hopes on-is
the only one. It was the merited punishment of their sin not to understand the Lord's
first advent: for if they had, they would have believed; and if they had believed, they
would have obtained salvation.

6 They themselves read how it is written of them that they are deprived of wisdom and
understanding-of the use of eyes and ears. As, then, under the force of their pre-
judgment, they had convinced themselves from His lowly guise that Christ was no more than
man, it followed from that, as a necessary consequence, that they should hold Him a
magician from the powers which He displayed,-expelling devils from men by a word,
restoring vision to the blind, cleansing the leprous, reinvigorating the paralytic,
summoning the dead to life again, making the very elements of nature obey Him, stilling
the storms and walking on the sea; proving that He was the Logos of God, that primordial
first-begotten Word, accompanied by power and reason, and based on Spirit,-that He who was
now doing all things by His word, and He who had done that of old, were one and the same.
But the Jews were so exasperated by His teaching, by which their rulers and chiefs were
convicted of the truth, chiefly because so many turned aside to Him, that at last they
brought Him before Pontius Pilate, at that time Roman governor of Syria; and, by the
violence of their outcries against Him, extorted a sentence giving Him up to them to be
crucified. He Himself had predicted this; which, however, would have signified little had
not the prophets of old done it as well. And yet, nailed upon the cross, He exhibited many
notable signs, by which His death was distinguished from all others.

7 At His own free-will, He with a word dismissed from Him His spirit, anticipating the
executioner's work. In the same hour, too, the light of day was withdrawn, when the sun at
the very time was in his meridian blaze. Those who were not aware that this had been
predicted about Christ, no doubt thought it an eclipse. You yourselves have the account of
the world-portent still in your archives. Then, when His body was taken down from the
cross and placed in a sepulchre, the Jews in their eager watchfulness surrounded it with a
large military guard, lest, as He had predicted His resurrection from the dead on the
third day, His disciples might remove by stealth His body, and deceive even the
incredulous. But, lo, on the third day there a was a sudden shock of earthquake, and the
stone which sealed the sepulchre was rolled away, and the guard fled off in terror:
without a single disciple near, the grave was found empty of all but the clothes of the
buried One. But nevertheless, the leaders of the Jews, whom it nearly concerned both to
spread abroad a lie, and keep back a people tributary and submissive to them from the
faith, gave it out that the body of Christ had been stolen by His followers. For the Lord,
you see, did not go forth into the public gaze, lest the wicked should be delivered from
their error; that faith also, destined to a great reward, might hold its ground in
difficulty.

8 But He spent forty days with some of His disciples down in Galilee, a region of Judea,
instructing them in the doctrines they were to teach to others. Thereafter, having given
them commission to preach the gospel through the world, He was encompassed with a cloud
and taken up to heaven,-a fact more certain far than the assertions of your Proculi
concerning Romulus. All these things Pilate did to Christ; and now in fact a Christian in
his own convictions, he sent word of Him to the reigning Caesar, who was at the time
Tiberius. Yes, and the Caesars too would have believed on Christ, if either the Caesars
had not been necessary for the world, or if Christians could have been Caesars. His
disciples also, spreading over the world, did as their Divine Master bade them; and after
suffering greatly themselves from the persecutions of the Jews, and with no unwilling
heart, as having faith undoubting in the truth, at last by Nero's cruel sword sowed the
seed of Christian blood at Rome. Yes, and we shall prove that even your own gods are
effective witnesses for Christ. It is a great matter if, to give you faith in Christians,
I can bring forward the authority of the very beings on account of whom you refuse them
credit. Thus far we have carried out the plan we laid down. We have set forth this origin
of our sect and name, with this account of the Founder of Christianity. Let no one
henceforth charge us with infamous wickedness;

9 let no one think that it is otherwise than we have represented, for none may give a
false account of his religion. For in the very fact that he says he worships another god
than he really does, he is guilty of denying the object of his worship, and transferring
his worship and homage to another; and, in the transference, he ceases to worship the god
he has repudiated. We say, and before all men we say, and torn and bleeding under your
tortures, we cry out, "We worship God through Christ. Count Christ a man, if you please;
by Him and in Him God would be known and be adored. If the Jews object, we answer that
Moses, who was but a man, taught them their religion; against the Greeks we urge that
Orpheus at Pieria, Musµus at Athens, Melampus at Argos, Trophonius in Boeotia, imposed
religious rites; turning to yourselves, who exercise sway over the nations, it was the man
Numa Pompilius who laid on the Romans a heavy load of costly superstitions. Surely Christ,
then, had a right to reveal Deity, which was in fact His own essential possession, not
with the object of bringing boers and savages by the dread of multitudinous gods, whose
favour must be won into some civilization, as was the case with Numa; but as one who aimed
to enlighten men already civilized, and under illusions from their very culture, that they
might come to the knowledge of the truth. Search, then, and see if that divinity of Christ
be true.

10 If it be of such a nature that the acceptance of it transforms a man, and makes him
truly good, there is implied in that the duty of renouncing what is opposed to it as
false; especially and on every ground that which, hiding itself under the names and images
of dead, the labours to convince men of its divinity by certain signs, and miracles, and
oracles.

CHAPTER XXII.

1 And we affirm indeed the existence of certain spiritual essences; nor is their name
unfamiliar. The philosophers acknowledge there are demons; Socrates himself waiting on a
demon's will. Why not? since it is said an evil spirit attached itself specially to him
even from his childhood-turning his mind no doubt from what was good. The poets are all
acquainted with demons too; even the ignorant common people make frequent use of them in
cursing. In fact, they call upon Satan, the demon-chief, in their execrations, as though
from some instinctive soul-knowledge of him. Plato also admits the existence of angels.
The dealers in magic, no less, come forward as witnesses to the existence of both kinds of
spirits. We are instructed, moreover, by our sacred books how from certain angels, who
fell of their own flee-will, there sprang a more wicked demon-brood, condemned of God
along with the authors of their race, and that chief we have referred to. It will for the
present be enough, however, that some account is given of their work. Their great business
is the ruin of mankind. So, from the very first, spiritual wickedness sought our
destruction. They inflict, accordingly, upon our bodies diseases and other grievous
calamities, while by violent assaults they hurry the soul into sudden and extraordinary
excesses. Their marvellous subtleness and tenuity give them access to both parts of our
nature. As spiritual, they can do no harm;

2 for, invisible and intangible, we are not cognizant of their action save by its effects,
as when some inexplicable, unseen poison in the breeze blights the apples and the grain
while in the flower, or kills them in the bud, or destroys them when they have reached
maturity; as though by the tainted atmosphere in some unknown way spreading abroad its
pestilential exhalations. So, too, by an influence equally obscure, demons and angels
breathe into the soul, and rouse up its corruptions with furious passions and vile
excesses; or with cruel lusts accompanied by various errors, of which the worst is that by
which these deities are commended to the favour of deceived and deluded human beings, that
they may get their proper food of flesh-fumes and blood when that is offered up to idol-
images. What is daintier food to the spirit of evil, than turning men's minds away from
the true God by the illusions of a false divination? And here I explain how these
illusions are managed. Every spirit is possessed of wings. This is a common property of
both angels and demons. So they are everywhere in a single moment; the whole world is as
one place to them; all that is done over the whole extent of it, it is as easy for them to
know as to report. Their swiftness of motion is taken for divinity, because their nature
is unknown. Thus they would have themselves thought sometimes the authors of the things
which they announce;

3 and sometimes, no doubt, the bad things are their doing, never the good. The purposes of
God, too, they took up of old from the lips of the prophets, even as they spoke them; and
they gather them still from their works, when they hear them read aloud. Thus getting,
too, from this source some intimations of the future, they set themselves up as rivals of
the true God, while they steal His divinations. But the skill with which their responses
are shaped to meet events, your Croesi and Pyrrhi know too well. On the other hand, it was
in that way we have explained, the Pythian was able to declare that they were cooking a
tortoise with the flesh of a lamb; in a moment he had been to Lydia. From dwelling in the
air, and their nearness to the stars, and their commerce with the clouds, they have means
of knowing the preparatory processes going on in these upper regions, and thus can give
promise of the rains which they already feel. Very kind too, no doubt, they are in regard
to the healing of diseases. For, first of all, they make you ill; then, to get a miracle
out of it, they command the application of remedies either altogether new, or contrary to
those in use, and straightway withdrawing hurtful influence, they are supposed to have
wrought a cure. What need, then, to speak of their other artifices, or yet further of the
deceptive power which they have as spirits:

4 of these Castor apparitions, of water carried by a sieve, and a ship drawn along by a
girdle, and a beard reddened by a touch, all done with the one object of showing that men
should believe in the deity of stones, and not seek after the only true God?

CHAPTER XXIII.

1 Moreover, if sorcerers call forth ghosts, and even make what seem the souls of the dead
to appear; if they put boys to death, in order to get a response from the oracle; if, with
their juggling illusions, they make a pretence of doing various miracles; if they put
dreams into people's minds by the power of the angels and demons whose aid they have
invited, by whose influence, too, goats and tables are made to divine,-how much more
likely is this power of evil to be zealous in doing with all its might, of its own
inclination, and for its own objects, what it does to serve the ends of others! Or if both
angels and demons do just what your gods do, where in that case is the pre-eminence of
deity, which we must surely think to be above all in might? Will it not then be more
reasonable to hold that these spirits make themselves gods, giving as they do the very
proofs which raise your gods to godhead, than that the gods are the equals of angels and
demons? You make a distinction of places, I suppose, regarding as gods in their temple
those whose divinity you do not recognize elsewhere; counting the madness which leads one
man to leap from the sacred houses, to be something different from that which leads
another to leap from an adjoining house; looking on one who cuts his arms and secret pans
as under a different furor from another who cuts his throat.

2 The result of the frenzy is the same, and the manner of instigation is one. But thus far
we have been dealing only in words: we now proceed to a proof of facts, in which we shall
show that under different names you have real identity. Let a person be brought before
your tribunals, who is plainly under demoniacal possession. The wicked spirit, bidden to
speak by a follower of Christ, will as readily make the truthful confession that he is a
demon, as elsewhere he has falsely asserted that he is a god. Or, if you will, let there
be produced one of the god-possessed, as they are supposed, who, inhaling at the altar,
conceive divinity from the fumes, who are delivered of it by retching, who vent it forth
in agonies of gasping. Let that same Virgin Cµlestis herself the rain-promiser, let
¦sculapius discoverer of medicines, ready to prolong the life of Socordius, and Tenatius,
and Asclepiodotus, now in the last extremity, if they would not confess, in their fear of
lying to a Christian, that they were demons, then and there shed the blood of that most
impudent follower of Christ. What clearer than a work like that? what more trustworthy
than such a proof? The simplicity of truth is thus set forth; its own worth sustains it;
no ground remains for the least suspicion. Do you say that it is done by magic, or some
trick of that sort?

3 You will not say anything of the sort, if you have been allowed the use of your ears and
eyes. For what argument can you bring against a thing that is exhibited to the eye in its
naked reality? If, on the one hand, they are really gods, why do they pretend to be
demons? Is it from fear of us? In that case your divinity is put in subjection to
Christians; and you surely can never ascribe deity to that which is under authority of
man, nay (if it adds aught to the disgrace)of its very enemies. If, on the other hand,
they are demons or angels, why, inconsistently with this, do they presume to set
themselves forth as acting the pan of gods? For as beings who put themselves out as gods
would never willingly call themselves demons, if they were gods indeed, that they might
not thereby in fact abdicate their dignity; so those whom you know to be no more than
demons, would not dare to act as gods, if those whose names they take and use were really
divine. For they would not dare to treat with disrespect the higher majesty of beings,
whose displeasure they would feel was to be dreaded. So this divinity of yours is no
divinity; for if it were, it would not be pretended to by demons, and it would not be
denied by gods.

4 But since on beth sides there is a concurrent acknowledgment that they are not gods,
gather from this that there is but a single race-I mean the race of demons, the real race
in both cases. Let your search, then, now be after gods; for those whom you had imagined
to be so you find to be spirits of evil. The truth is, as we have thus not only shown from
our own gods that neither themselves nor any others have claims to deity, you may see at
once who is really God, and whether that is He and He alone whom we Christians own; as
also whether you are to believe in Him, and worship Him, after the manner of our Christian
faith and discipline. But at once they will say, Who is this Christ with his fables? is he
an ordinary man? is he a sorcerer? was his body stolen by his disciples from its tomb? is
he now in the realms below? or is he not rather up in the heavens, thence about to come
again, making the whole world shake, filling the earth with dread alarms, making all but
Christians wail-as the Power of God, and the Spirit of God, as the Word, the Reason, the
Wisdom, and the Son of God? Mock as you like, but get the demons if you can to join you in
your mocking;

5 let them deny that Christ is coming to judge every human soul which has existed from the
world's beginning, clothing it again with the body it laid aside at death; let them
declare it, say, before your tribunal, that this work has been allotted to Minos and
Rhadamanthus, as Plato and the poets agree; let them put away from them at least the mark
of ignominy and condemnation. They disclaim being unclean spirits, which yet we must hold
as indubitably proved by their relish for the blood and fumes and foetid carcasses of
sacrificial animals, and even by the vile language of their ministers. Let them deny that,
for their wickedness condemned already, they are kept for that very judgment-day, with all
their worshippers and their works. Why, all the authority and power we have over them is
from our naming the name of Christ, and recalling to their memory the woes with which God
threatens them at the hands of Christ as Judge, and which they expect one day to overtake
them. Fearing Christ in God, and God in Christ, they become subject to the servants of God
and Christ. So at our touch and breathing, overwhelmed bY the thought and realization of
those judgment fires, they leave at our command the bodies they have entered, unwilling,
and distressed, and before your very eyes put to an open shame. You believe them when they
lie; give credit to them, then, when they speak the truth about themselves.

6 No one plays the liar to bring disgrace upon his own head, but for the sake of honour
rather. You give a readier confidence to people making confessions against themselves,
than denials in their own behalf. It has not been an unusual thing, accordingly, for those
testimonies of your deities to convert men to Christianity; forin giving full belief to
them, we are led to believe in Christ. Yes, your very gods kindle up faith in our
Scriptures, they build up the confidence of our hope. You do homage, as I know, to them
also with the blood of Christians. On no account, then, would they lose those who are so
useful and dutiful to them, anxious even to hold you fast, lest some day or other as
Christians you might put them to the rout,-if under the power of a follower of Christ, who
desires to prove to you the Truth, it were at all possible for them to lie.

CHAPTER XXIV.

1 This whole confession of these beings, in which they declare that they are not gods, and
in which they tell you that there is no God but one, the God whom we adore, is quite
sufficient to clear us from the crime of treason, chiefly against the Roman religion. For
if it is certain the gods have no existence, there is no religion in the case. If there is
no religion, because there are no gods, we are assuredly not guilty of any offence against
religion. Instead of that, the charge recoils on your own head: worshipping a lie, you are
really guilty of the crime you charge on us, not merely by refusing the true religion of
the true God, but by going the further length of persecuting it. But now, granting that
these objects of your worship are really gods, is it not generally held that there is one
higher and more potent, as it were the world's chief ruler, endowed with absolute power
and majesty? For the common way is to apportion deity, giving an imperial and supreme
domination to one, while its offices are put into the hands of many, as Plato describes
great Jupiter in the heavens, surrounded by an array at once of deities and demons. It
behooves us, therefore, to show equal respect to the procurators, prefects, and governors
of the divine empire.

2 And yet how great a crime does he commit, who, with the object of gaining higher favour
with the Caesar, transfers his endeavours and his hopes to another, and does not confess
that the appellation of God as of Emperor belongs only to the Supreme Head, when it is
held a capital offence among us to call, or hear called, by the highest title any other
than Caesar himself! Let one man worship God, another Jupiter; let one lift suppliant
hands to the heavens, another to the altar of Fides; let one-if you choose to take this
view of it-count in prayer the clouds, and another the ceiling panels; let one consecrate
his own life to his God, and another that of a goat. For see that you do not give a
further ground for the charge of irreligion, by taking away religious liberty, and
forbidding free choice of deity, so that I may no longer worship according to my
inclination, but am compelled to worship against it. Not even a human being would care to
have unwilling homage rendered him; and so the very Egyptians have been permitted the
legal use of their ridiculous superstition, liberty to make gods of birds and beasts, nay,
to condemn to death any One who kills a god of their sort. Every province even, and every
city, has its god. Syria has Astarte, Arabia has Dusares, the Norici have Belenus, Africa
has its Cµlestis, Mauritania has its own princes.

3 I have spoken, I think, of Roman provinces, and yet I have not said their gods are
Roman; for they are not worshipped at Rome any more than others who are ranked as deities
over Italy itself by municipal consecration, such as Delventinus of Casinum, Visidianus of
Narnia, Ancharia of Asculum, Nortia of Volsinii, Valentia of Ocriculum, Hostia of Satrium,
Father Curls of Falisci, in honour of whom, too, Juno got her surname. In, fact, we alone
are prevented having a religion of our own. We give offence to the Romans, we are excluded
from the rights and privileges of Romans, because we do not worship the gods of Rome. It
is well that there is a God of all, whose we all are, whether we will or no. But with you
liberty is given to worship any god but the true God, as though He were not rather the God
all should worship, to whom all belong.

CHAPTER XXV.

1 I think I have offered sufficient proof upon the question of false and true divinity,
having shown that the proof rests not merely on debate and argument, but on the witness of
the very beings whom you believe are gods, so that the point needs no further handling.
However, having been led thus naturally to speak of the Romans, I shall not avoid the
controversy which is invited by the groundless assertion of those who maintain that, as a
reward of their singular homage to religion, the Romans have been raised to such heights
of power as to have become masters of the world; and that so certainly divine are the
beings they worship, that those prosper beyond all others, who beyond all others honour
them. This, forsooth, is the wages the gods have paid the Romans for their devotion. The
progress of the empire is to be ascribed to Sterculus, the Mutunus, and Larentina! For I
can hardly think that foreign gods would have been disposed to show more favour to an
alien race than to their own, and given their own fatherland, in which they had their
birth, grew up to manhood, became illustrious, and at last were buried, over to invaders
from another shore!

2 As for Cybele, if she set her affections on the city of Rome as sprung of the Trojan
stock saved from the arms of Greece, she herself forsooth being of the same race,-if she
foresaw her transference to the avenging people by whom Greece the conqueror of Phrygia
was to be subdued, let her look to it (in regard of her native country's conquest by
Greece). Why, too, even in these days the Mater Magna has given a notable proof of her
greatness which she has conferred as a boon upon the city; when, after the loss to the
State of Marcus Aurelius at Sirmium, on the sixteenth before the Kalends of April, that
most sacred high priest of hers was offering, a week after, impure libations of blood
drawn from his own arms, and issuing his commands that the ordinary prayers should be made
for the safety of the emperor already dead. O tardy messengers! O sleepy despatches!
through whose fault Cybele had not an earlier knowledge of the imperial decease, that the
Christians might have no occasion to ridicule a goddess so unworthy. Jupiter, again, would
surely never have permitted his own Crete to fall at once before the Roman Fasces,
forgetful of that Idean cave and the Corybantian cymbals, and the sweet odour of her who
nursed him there. Would he not have exalted his own tomb above the entire Capitol, that
the land which covered the ashes of Jove might rather be the mistress of the world?

3 Would Juno have desired the destruction of the Punic city, beloved even to the neglect
of Samos, and that by a nation of ¦neadµ? As to that I know, "Here were her arms, here was
her chariot, this kingdom, if the Fates permit, the goddess tends and cherishes to be
mistress of the nations. Jove's hapless wife and sister had no power to prevail against
the Fates! "Jupiter himself is sustained by fate. And yet the Romans have never done such
homage to the Fates, which gave them Carthage against the purpose and the will of Juno, as
to the abandoned harlot Larentina. It is undoubted that not a few of your gods have
reigned on earth as kings. If, then, they now possess the power of bestowing empire, when
they were kings themselves, from whence had they received their kingly honours? Whom did
Jupiter and Saturn worship? A Sterculus, I suppose. But did the Romans, along with the
native-born inhabitants, afterwards adore also some who were never kings? In that case,
however, they were under the reign of others, who did not yet bow down to them, as not yet
raised to godhead. It belongs to others, then, to make gift of kingdoms, since there were
kings before these gods had their names on the roll of divinities. But how utterly foolish
it is to attribute the greatness of the Roman name to religious merits, since it was after
Rome became an empire, or call it still a kingdom, that the religion she professes made
its chief progress!

4 Is it the case now? Has its religion been the source of the prosperity of Rome? Though
Numa set agoing an eagerness after superstitious observances, yet religion among the
Romans was not yet a matter of images or temples. It was frugal in its ways, its rites
were simple, and there were no capitols struggling to the heavens; but the altars were
offhand ones of turf, and the sacred vessels were yet of Samian earthen-ware, and from
these the odours rose, and no likeness of God was to be seen. For at that time the skill
of the Greeks and Tuscans in image-making had not yet overrun the city with the products
of their art. The Romans, therefore, were not distinguished for their devotion to the gods
before they attained to greatness; and so their greatness was not the result of their
religion. Indeed, how could religion make a people great who have owed their greatness to
their irreligion? For, if I am not mistaken, kingdoms and empires are acquired by wars,
and are extended by victories. More than that, you cannot have wars and victories without
the taking, and often the destruction, of cities. That is a thing in which the gods have
their share of calamity. Houses and temples suffer alike; there is indiscriminate
slaughter of priests and citizens; the hand of rapine is laid equally upon sacred and on
common treasure. Thus the sacrileges of the Romans are as numerous as their trophies. They
boast as many triumphs over the gods as over the nations;

5 as many spoils of battle they have still, as there remain images of captive deities. And
the poor gods submit to be adored by their enemies, and they ordain illimitable empire to
those whose injuries rather than their simulated homage should have had retribution at
their hands. But divinities unconscious are with impunity dishonoured, just as in vain
they are adored. You certainly never can believe that devotion to religion has evidently
advanced to greatness a people who, as we have put it, have either grown by injuring
religion, or have injured religion by their growth. Those, too, whose kingdoms have become
part of the one great whole of the Roman empire, were not without religion when their
kingdoms were taken from them.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Examine then, and see if He be not the dispenser of kingdoms, who is Lord at once of the
world which is ruled, and of man himself who rules; if He have not ordained the changes of
dynasties, with their appointed seasons, who was before all time, and made the world a
body of times; if the rise and the fall of states are not the work of Him, under whose
sovereignty the human race once existed without states at all. How do you allow yourselves
to fall into such error? Why, the Rome of rural simplicity is older than some of her gods;
she reigned before her proud, vast Capitol was built. The Babylonians exercised dominion,
too, before the days of the Pontiffs; and the Medes before the Quindecemvirs; and the
Egyptians before the Salii; and the Assyrians before the Luperci; and the Amazons before
the Vestal Virgins. And to add another point: if the religions of Rome give empire,
ancient Judea would never have been a kingdom, despising as it did one and all these idol
deities; Judea, whose God you Romans once honoured with victims, and its temple with
gifts, and its people with treaties; and which would never have been beneath your sceptre
but for that last and crowning offence against God, in rejecting and crucifying Christ

CHAPTER XXVII.

1 Enough has been said in these remarks to confute the charge of treason against your
religion: for we cannot be held to do harm to that which has no existence. When we are
called therefore to sacrifice, we resolutely refuse, relying on the knowledge we possess,
by which we are well assured of the real objects to whom these services are offered, under
profaning of images and the deification of human names. Some, indeed, think it a piece of
insanity that, when it is in our power to offer sacrifice at once, and go away unharmed,
holding as ever our convictions we prefer an obstinate persistence in our confession to
our safety. You advise us, forsooth, to take unjust advantage of you; but we know whence
such suggestions come, who is at the bottom of it all, and how every effort is made, now
by cunning suasion, and now by merciless persecution, to overthrow our constancy. No other
than that spirit, half devil and half angel, who, hating us because of his own separation
from God, and stirred with envy for the favour God has shown us, turns your minds against
us by an occult influence, moulding and instigating them to all that perversity in
judgment, and that unrighteous cruelty, which we have mentioned at the beginning of our
work, when entering on this discussion.

2 For, though the whole power of demons and kindred spirits is subject to us, yet still,
as ill-disposed slaves sometimes conjoin contumacy with fear, and delight to injure those
of whom they at the same time stand in awe, so is it here. For fear also inspires hatred.
Besides, in their desperate condition, as already under condemnation, it gives them some
comfort, while punishment delays, to have the usufruct of their malignant dispositions.
And yet, when hands are laid on them, they are subdued at once, and submit to their lot;
and those whom at a distance they oppose, in close quarters they supplicate for mercy. So
when, like insurrectionary workhouses, or prisons, or mines, or any such penal slaveries,
they break forth against us their masters, they know all the while that they are not a
match for us, and just on that account, indeed, rush the more recklessly to destruction.
We resist them, unwillingly, as though they were equals, and contend against them by
persevering in that which they assail; and our triumph over them is never more complete
than when we are condemned for resolute adherence to our faith.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

But as it was easily seen to be unjust to compel freemen against their will to offer
sacrifice (for even in other acts of religious service a willing mind is required), it
should be counted quite absurd for one man to compel another to do honour to the gods,
when he ought ever voluntarily, and in the sense of his own need, to seek their favour,
lest in the liberty which is his right he should be ready to say, "I want none of
Jupiter's favours; pray who art thou? Let Janus meet me with angry looks, with whichever
of his faces he likes; what have you to do with me? "You have been led, no doubt, by these
same evil spirits to compel us to offer sacrifice for the well-being of the emperor; and
you are under a necessity of using force, just as we are under an obligation to face the
dangers of it. This brings us, then, to the second ground of accusation, that we are
guilty of treason against a majesty more august; for you do homage with a greater dread
and an intenser reverence to Caesar, than Olympian Jove himself. And if you knew it, upon
sufficient grounds. For is not any living man better than a dead one, whoever he be? But
this is not done by you on any other ground than regard to a power whose presence you
vividly realize; so that also in this you are convicted of impiety to your gods, inasmuch
as you show a greater reverence to a human sovereignty than you do to them. Then, too,
among you, people far more readily swear a false oath in the name of all the gods, than in
the name of the single genius of Caesar.

CHAPTER XXIX.

Let it be made clear, then, first of all, if those to whom sacrifice is offered are really
able to protect either emperor or anybody else, and so adjudge us guilty of treason, if
angels and demons, spirits of most wicked nature, do any good, if the lost save, if the
condemned give liberty, if the dead (I refer to what you know well enough) defend the
living. For surely the first thing they would look to would be the protection of their
statues, and images, and temples, which rather owe their safety, I think, to the watch
kept by Caesar's guards. Nay, I think the very materials of which these are made come from
Caesar's mines, and there is not a temple but depends on Caesar's will. Yes, and many gods
have felt the displeasure of the Caesar. It makes for my argument if they are also
partakers of his favour, when he bestows on them some gift or privilege. How shall they
who are thus in Caesar's power, who belong entirely to him, have Caesar's protection in
their hands, so that you can imagine them able to give to Caesar what they more readily
get from him? This, then, is the ground on which we are charged with treason against the
imperial majesty, to wit, that we do not put the emperors under their own possessions;
that we do not offer a mere mock service on their behalf, as not believing their safety
rests in leaden hands. But you are impious in a high degree who look for it where it is
not, who seek it from those who have it not to give, passing by Him who has it entirely in
His power. Besides this, you persecute those who know where to seek for it, and who,
knowing where to seek for it, are able as well to secure it.

CHAPTER XXX.

1 For we offer prayer for the safety of our princes to the eternal, the true, the living
God, whose favour, beyond all others, they must themselves desire. They know from whom
they have obtained their power; they know, as they are men, from whom they have received
life itself; they are convinced that He is God alone, on whose power alone they are
entirely dependent, to whom they are second, after whom they occupy the highest places,
before and above all the gods. Why not, since they are above all living men, and the
living, as living, are superior to the dead? They reflect upon the extent of their power,
and so they come to understand the highest; they acknowledge that they have all their
might from Him against whom their might is nought. Let the emperor make war on heaven; let
him lead heaven captive in his triumph; let him put guards on heaven; let him impose taxes
on heaven! He cannot. Just because he is less than heaven, he is great. For he himself is
His to whom heaven and every creature appertains. He gets his sceptre where he first got
his humanity; his power where he got the breath of life. Thither we lift our eyes, with
hands outstretched, because free from sin; with head uncovered, for we have nothing
whereof to be ashamed; finally, without a monitor, because it is from the heart we
supplicate. Without ceasing, for all our emperors we offer prayer. We pray for life
prolonged; for security to the empire;

2 for protection to the imperial house; for brave armies, a faithful senate, a virtuous
people, the world at rest, whatever, as man or Caesar, an emperor would wish. These things
I cannot ask from any but the God from whom I know I shall obtain them, both because He
alone bestows them and because I have claims upon Him for their gift, as being a servant
of His, rendering homage to Him alone, persecuted for His doctrine, offering to Him, at
His own requirement, that costly and noble sacrifice of prayer despatched from the chaste
body, an unstained soul, a sanctified spirit, not the few grains of incense a farthing
buys -tears of an Arabian tree,-not a few drops of wine,-not the blood of some worthless
ox to which death is a relief, and, in addition to other offensive things, a polluted
conscience, so that one wonders, when your victims are examined by these vile priests, why
the examination is not rather of the sacrificers than the sacrifices. With our hands thus
stretched out and up to God, rend us with your iron claws, hang us up on crosses, wrap us
in flames, take our heads from us with the sword, let loose the wild beasts on us,-the
very attitude of a Christian praying is one of preparation for all punishment. Let this,
good rulers, be your work: wring from us the soul, beseeching God on the emperor's behalf.
Upon the truth of God, and devotion to His name, put the brand of crime.

CHAPTER XXXI.

But we merely, you say, flatter the emperor, and feign these prayers of ours to escape
persecution. Thank you for your mistake, for you give us the opportunity of proving our
allegations. Do you, then, who think that we care nothing for the welfare of Caesar, look
into God's revelations, examine our sacred books, which we do not keep in hiding, and
which many accidents put into the hands of those who are not of us. Learn from them that a
large benevolence is enjoined upon us, even so far as to supplicate God for our enemies,
and to beseech blessings on our persecutors. Who, then, are greater enemies and
persecutors of Christians, than the very parties with treason against whom we are charged?
Nay, even in terms, and most clearly, the Scripture says, "Pray for kings, and rulers, and
powers, that all may be peace with you." For when there is disturbance in the empire, if
the commotion is felt by its other members, surely we too, though we are not thought to be
given to disorder, are to be found in some place or other which the calamity affects.

CHAPTER XXXII.

There is also another and a greater necessity for our offering prayer in behalf of the
emperors, nay, for the complete stability of the empire, and for Roman interests in
general. For we know that a mighty shock im- pending over the whole earth-in fact, the
very end of all things threatening dreadful woes--is only retarded by the continued
existence of the Roman empire. We have no desire, then, to be overtaken by these dire
events; and in praying that their coming may be delayed, we are lending our aid to Rome's
duration. More than this, though we decline to swear by the genii of the Caesars, we swear
by their safety, which is worth far more than all your genii, Are you ignorant that these
genii are called "Dµmones," and thence the diminutive name "Dµmonia" is applied to them?
We respect in the emperors the ordinance of God, who has set them over the nations. We
know that there is that in them which God has willed; and to what God has willed we desire
all safety, and we count an oath by it a great oath. But as for demons, that is, your
genii, we have been in the habit of exorcising them, not of swearing by them, and thereby
conferring on them divine honour.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

1 But why dwell longer on the reverence and sacred respect of Christians to the emperor,
whom we cannot but look up to as called by our Lord to his office? So that on valid
grounds I might say Caesar is more ours than yours, for our God has appointed him.
Therefore, as having this propriety in him, I do more than you for his welfare, not merely
because I ask it of Him who can give it, or because I ask it as one who deserves to get
it, but also because, in keeping the majesty of Caesar within due limits, and putting it
under the Most High, and making it less than divine, I commend him the more to the favour
of Deity, to whom I make him alone inferior. But I place him in subjection to one I regard
as more glorious than himself. Never will I call the emperor God, and that either because
it is not in me to be guilty of falsehood; or that I dare not turn him into ridicule; or
that not even himself will desire to have that high name applied to him. If he is but a
man, it is his interest as man to give God His higher place. Let him think it enough to
bear the name of emperor. That, too, is a great name of God's giving. To call him God, is
to rob him of his title. If he is not a man, emperor he cannot be.

2 Even when, amid the honours of a triumph, he sits on that lofty chariot, he is reminded
that he is only human. A voice at his back keeps whispering in his ear, "Look behind thee;
remember thou art but a man. And it only adds to his exultation, that he shines with a
glory so surpassing as to require an admonitory reference to his condition. It adds to his
greatness that he needs such a reminiscence, lest he should think himself divine.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Augustus, the founder of the empire, would not even have the title Lord; for that, too, is
a name of Deity. For my part, I am willing to give the emperor this designation, but in
the common acceptation of the word, and when I am not forced to call him Lord as in God's
place. But my relation to him is one of freedom; for I have but one true Lord, the God
omnipotent and eternal, who is Lord of the emperor as well. How can he, who is truly
father of his country, be its lord? The name of piety is more grateful than the name of
power; so the heads of families are called fathers rather than lords. Far less should the
emperor have the name of God. We can only profess our belief that he is that by the most
unworthy, nay, a fatal flattery; it is just as if, having an emperor, you call another by
the name, in which case will you not give great and unappeasable offence to him who
actually reigns?-an offence he, too, needs to fear on whom you have bestowed the title.
Give all reverence to God, if you wish Him to be propitious to the emperor. Give up all
worship of, and belief in, any other being as divine. Cease also to give the sacred name
to him who has need of God himself. If such adulation is not ashamed of its lie, in
addressing a man as divine, let it have some dread at least of the evil omen which it
bears. It is the invocation of a curse, to give Caesar the name of god before his
apotheosis.

CHAPTER XXXV.

1 This is the reason, then, why Christians are counted public enemies: that they pay no
vain, nor false, nor foolish honours to the emperor; that, as men believing in the true
religion, they prefer to celebrate their festal days with a good conscience, instead of
with the common wantonness. It is, forsooth, a notable homage to bring fires and couches
out before the public, to have feasting from street to street, to turn the city into one
great tavern, to make mud with wine, to run in troops to acts of violence, to deeds of
shamelessness to lust allurements! What! is public joy manifested by public disgrace? Do
things unseemly at other times beseem the festal days of princes? Do they who observe the
rules of virtue out of reverence for Caesar, for his sake turn aside from them? Shall
piety be a license to immoral deeds, and shall religion be regarded as affording the
occasion for all riotous extravagance? Poor we, worthy of all condemnation! For why do we
keep the votive days and high rejoicings in honour of the Caesars with chastity, sobriety,
and virtue? Why, on the day of gladness, do we neither cover our door-posts with laurels,
nor intrude upon the day with lamps? It is a proper thing, at the call of a public
festivity, to dress your house up like some new brothel.

2 However, in the matter of this homage to a lesser majesty, in reference to which we are
accused of a lower sacrilege, because we do not celebrate along with you the holidays of
the Caesars in a manner forbidden alike by modesty, decency, and purity,-in truth they
have been established rather as affording opportunities for licentiousness than from any
worthy motive;-in this matter I am anxious to point out how faithful and true you are,
lest perchance here also those who will not have us counted Romans, but enemies of Rome's
chief rulers, be found themselves worse than we wicked Christians! I appeal to the
inhabitants of Rome themselves, to the native population of the seven hills: does that
Roman vernacular of theirs ever spare a Caesar? The Tiber and the wild beasts' schools
bear witness. Say now if nature had covered our hearts with a transparent substance
through which the light could pass, whose hearts, all graven over, would not betray the
scene of another and another Caesar presiding at the distribution of a largess? And this
at the very time they are shouting, "May Jupiter take years from us, and with them
lengthen like to you,"-words as foreign to the lips of a Christian as it is out of keeping
with his character to desire a change of emperor. But this is the rabble, you say; yet, as
the rabble, they still are Romans, and none more frequently than they demand the death of
Christians.

3 Of course, then, the other classes, as befits their higher rank, are religiously
faithful. No breath of treason is there ever in the senate, in the equestrian order, in
the camp, in the palace. Whence, then, came a Cassius, a Niger, an Albinus? Whence they
who beset the Caesar between the two laurel groves? Whence they who practised wrestling,
that they might acquire skill to strangle him? Whence they who in full armour broke into
the palace, more audacious than all your Tigerii and Parthenii. If I mistake not, they
were Romans; that is, they were not Christians. Yet all of them, on the very eve of their
traitorous outbreak, offered sacrifices for the safety of the emperor, and swore by his
genius, one thing in profession, and another in the heart; and no doubt they were in the
habit of calling Christians enemies of the state. Yes, and persons who are now daily
brought to light as confederates or approvers of these crimes and treasons, the still
remnant gleanings after a vintage of traitors, with what verdant and branching laurels
they clad their door-posts, with what lofty and brilliant lamps they smoked their porches,
with what most exquisite and gaudy couches they divided the Forum among themselves; not
that they might celebrate public rejoicings, but that they might get a foretaste of their
own votive seasons in partaking of the festivities of another, and inaugurate the model
and image of their hope, changing in their minds the emperor's name.

4 The same homage is paid, dutifully too, by those who consult astrologers, and
soothsayers, and augurs, and magicians, about the life of the Caesars,-arts which, as made
known by the angels who sinned, and forbidden by God, Christians do not even make use of
in their own affairs. But who has any occasion to inquire about the life of the emperor,
if he have not some wish or thought against it, or some hopes and expectations after it?
For consultations of this sort have not the same motive in the case of friends as in the
case of sovereigns. The anxiety of a kinsman is something very different from that of a
subject.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

If it is the fact that men bearing the name of Romans are found to be enemies of Rome, why
are we, on the ground that we are regarded as enemies, denied the name of Romans? We may
be at once Romans and foes of Rome, when men passing for Romans are discovered to be
enemies of their country. So the affection, and fealty, and reverence, due to the emperors
do not consist in such tokens of homage as these, which even hostility may be zealous in
performing, chiefly as a cloak to its purposes; but in those ways which Deity as certainly
enjoins on us, as they are held to be necessary in the case of all men as well as
emperors. Deeds of true heart-goodness are not due by us to emperors alone. We never do
good with respect of persons; for in our own interest we conduct ourselves as those who
take no payment either of praise or premium from man, but from God, who both requires and
remunerates an impartial benevolence. We are the same to emperors as to our ordinary
neighbors. For we are equally forbidden to wish ill, to do ill, to speak ill, to think ill
of all men. The thing we must not do to an emperor, we must not do to any one else: what
we would not do to anybody, a fortiori, perhaps we should not do to him whom God has been
pleased so highly to exalt.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

1 If we are enjoined, then, to love our enemies, as I have remarked above, whom have we to
hate? If injured, we are forbidden to retaliate, lest we become as bad ourselves: who can
suffer injury at our hands? In regard to this, recall your own experiences. How often you
inflict gross cruelties on Christians, partly because it is your own inclination, and
partly in obedience to the laws! How often, too, the hostile mob, paying no regard to you,
takes the law into its own hand, and assails us with stones and flames! With the very
frenzy of the Bacchanals, they do not even spare the Christian dead, but tear them, now
sadly changed, no longer entire, from the rest of the tomb, from the asylum we might say
of death, cutting them in pieces, rending them asunder. Yet, banded together as we are,
ever so ready to sacrifice our lives, what single case of revenge for injury are you able
to point to, though, if it were held right among us to repay evil by evil, a single night
with a torch or two could achieve an ample vengeance? But away with the idea of a sect
divine avenging itself by human fires, or shrinking from the sufferings in which it is
tried. If we desired, indeed, to act the part of open enemies, not merely of secret
avengers, would there be any lacking in strength, whether of numbers or resources?

2 The Moors, the Marcomanni, the Parthians themselves, or any single people, however
great, inhabiting a distinct territory, and confined within its own boundaries, surpasses,
forsooth, in numbers, one spread over all the world! We are but of yesterday, and we have
filled every place among you-cities, islands, fortresses, towns, market-places, the very
camp, tribes, companies, palace, senate, forum,-we have left nothing to you but the
temples of your gods. For what wars should we not be fit, not eager, even with unequal
forces, we who so willingly yield ourselves to the sword, if in our religion it were not
counted better to be slain than to slay? Without arms even, and raising no insurrectionary
banner, but simply in enmity to you, we could carry on the contest with you by an ill-
willed severance alone. For if such multitudes of men were to break away from you, and
betake themselves to some remote corner of the world, why, the very loss of so many
citizens, whatever sort they were, would cover the empire with shame; nay, in the very
forsaking, vengeance would be inflicted. Why, you would be horror-struck at the solitude
in which you would find yourselves, at such an all-prevailing silence, and that stupor as
of a dead world. You would have to seek subjects to govern. You would have more enemies
than citizens remaining. For now it is the immense number of Christians which makes your
enemies so few,-almost all the inhabitants of your various cities being followers of
Christ.

3 Yet you choose to call us enemies of the human race, rather than of human error. Nay,
who would deliver you from those secret foes, ever busy both destroying your souls and
ruining your health? Who would save you, I mean, from the attacks of those spirits of
evil, which without reward or hire we exorcise? This alone would be revenge enough for us,
that you were henceforth left free to the possession of unclean spirits. But instead of
taking into account what is due to us for the important protection we afford you, and
though we are not merely no trouble to you, but in fact necessary to your well-being, you
prefer to hold us enemies, as indeed we are, yet not of man, but rather of his error.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

Ought not Christians, therefore, to receive not merely a somewhat milder treatment, but to
have a place among the law-tolerated societies, seeing they are not chargeable with any
such crimes as are commonly dreaded from societies of the illicit class? For, unless I
mistake the matter, the prevention of such associations is based on a prudential regard to
public order, that the state may not be divided into parties, which would naturally lead
to disturbance in the electoral assemblies, the councils, the curiµ, the special
conventions, even in the public shows by the hostile collisions of rival parties;
especially when now, in pursuit of gain, men have begun to consider their violence an
article to be bought and sold. But as those in whom all ardour in the pursuit of glory and
honour is dead, we have no pressing inducement to take part in your public meetings; nor
is there aught more entirely foreign to us than affairs of state. We ac- knowledge one
all-embracing commonwealth-the world. We renounce all your spectacles, as strongly as we
renounce the matters originating them, which we know were conceived of superstition, when
we give up the very things which are the basis of their representations. Among us nothing
is ever said, or seen, or heard, which has anything in common with the madness of the
circus, the immodesty of the theatre, the atrocities of the arena, the useless exercises
of the wrestling-ground. Why do you take offence at us because we differ from you in
regard to your pleasures? If we will not partake of your enjoyments, the loss is ours, if
there be loss in the case, not yours. We reject what pleases you. You, on the other hand,
have no taste for what is our delight. The Epicureans were allowed by you to decide for
themselves one true source of pleasure-I mean equanimity the Christian, on his part, has
many such enjoyments-what harm in that?

CHAPTER XXXIX.

1 I shall at once go on, then, to exhibit the peculiarities of the Christian society,
that, as I have refuted the evil charged against it, I may point out its positive good. We
are a body knit together as such by a common religious profession, by unity of discipline,
and by the bond of a common hope. We meet together as an assembly and congregation, that,
offering up prayer to God as with united force, we may wrestle with Him in our
supplications. This violence God delights in. We pray, too, for the emperors, for their
ministers and for all in authority, for the welfare of the world, for the prevalence of
peace, for the delay of the final consummation. We assemble to read our sacred writings,
if any peculiarity of the times makes either forewarning or reminiscence needful. However
it be in that respect, with the sacred words we nourish our faith, we animate our hope, we
make our confidence more stedfast; and no less by inculcations of God's precepts we
confirm good habits. In the same place also exhortations are made, rebukes and sacred
censures are administered. For with a great gravity is the work of judging carried on
among us, as befits those who feel assured that they are in the sight of God; and you have
the most notable example of judgment to come when any one has sinned so grievously as to
require his severance from us in prayer, in the congregation and in all sacred
intercourse.

2 The tried men of our elders preside over us, obtaining that honour not by purchase, but
by established character. There is no buying and selling of any sort in the things of God.
Though we have our treasure-chest, it is not made up of purchase-money, as of a religion
that has its price. On the monthly day, if he likes, each puts in a small donation; but
only if it be his pleasure, and only if he be able: for there is no compulsion; all is
voluntary. These gifts are, as it were, piety's deposit fund. For they are not taken
thence and spent on feasts, and drinking-bouts, and eating-houses, but to support and bury
poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and of
old persons confined now to the house; such, too, as have suffered shipwreck; and if there
happen to be any in the mines, or banished to the islands, or shut up in the prisons, for
nothing but their fidelity to the cause of God's Church, they become the nurslings of
their confession. But it is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a
brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one another, for themselves are animated by
mutual hatred; how they are ready even to die for one another, for they themselves will
sooner put to death. And they are wroth with us, too, because we call each other brethren;

3 for no other reason, as I think, than because among themselves names of consanguinity
are assumed in mere pretence of affection. But we are your brethren as well, by the law of
I our common mother nature, though you are hardly men, because brothers so unkind. At the
same time, how much more fittingly they are called and counted brothers who have been led
to the knowledge of God as their common Father, who have drunk in one spirit of holiness,
who from the same womb of a common ignorance have agonized into the same light of truth!
But on this very account, perhaps, we are regarded as having less claim to be held true
brothers, that no tragedy makes a noise about our brotherhood, or that the family
possessions, which generally destroy brotherhood among you, create fraternal bonds among
us. One in mind and soul, we do not hesitate to share our earthly goods with one another.
All things are common among us but our wives. We give up our community where it is
practised alone by others, who not only take possession of the wives of their friends, but
most tolerantly also accommodate their friends with theirs, following the example, I
believe, of those wise men of ancient times, the Greek Socrates and the Roman Cato, who
shared with their friends the wives whom they had married, it seems for the sake of
progeny both to themselves and to others; whether in this acting against their partners'
wishes, I am not able to say.

4 Why should they have any care over their chastity, when their husbands so readily
bestowed it away? O noble example of Attic wisdom, of Roman gravity-the philosopher and
the censor playing pimps! What wonder if that great love of Christians towards one another
is desecrated by you! For you abuse also our humble feasts, on the ground that they are
extravagant as well as infamously wicked. To us, it seems, applies the saying of Diogenes:
"The people of Megara feast as though they were going to die on the morrow; they build as
though they were never to die! But one sees more readily the mote in another's eye than
the beam in his own. Why, the very air is soured with the eructations of so many tribes,
and curiµ, and decuriµ. The Salii cannot have their feast without going into debt; you
must get the accountants to tell you what the tenths of Hercules and the sacrificial
banquets cost; the choicest cook is appointed for the Apaturia, the Dionysia, the Attic
mysteries; the smoke from the banquet of Serapis will call out the firemen. Yet about the
modest supper-room of the Christians alone a great ado is made. Our feast explains itself
by its name The Greeks call it agape, i.e., affection. Whatever it costs, our outlay in
the name of piety is gain, since with the good things of the feast we benefit the needy;

5 not as it is with you, do parasites aspire to the glory of satisfying their licentious
propensities, selling themselves for a belly-feast to all disgraceful treatment,-but as it
is with God himself, a peculiar respect is shown to the lowly. If the object of our feast
be good, in the light of that consider its further regulations. As it is an act of
religious service, it permits no vileness or immodesty. The participants, before
reclining, taste first of prayer to God. As much is eaten as satisfies the cravings of
hunger; as much is drunk as befits the chaste. They say it is enough, as those who
remember that even during the night they have to worship God; they talk as those who know
that the Lord is one of their auditors. After manual ablution, and the bringing in of
lights, each is asked to stand forth and sing, as he can, a hymn to God, either one from
the holy Scriptures or one of his own composing,-a proof of the measure of our drinking.
As the feast commenced with prayer, so with prayer it is closed. We go from it, not like
troops of mischief-doers, nor bands of vagabonds, nor to break out into licentious acts,
but to have as much care of our modesty and chastity as if we had been at a school of
virtue rather than a banquet. Give the congregation of the Christians its due, and hold it
unlawful, if it is like assemblies of the illicit sort:

6 by all means let it be condemned, if any complaint can be validly laid against it, such
as lies against secret factions. But who has ever suffered harm from our assemblies? We
are in our congregations just what we are when separated from each other; we are as a
community what we are individuals; we injure nobody, we trouble nobody. When the upright,
when the virtuous meet together, when the pious, when the pure assemble in congregation,
you ought not to call that a faction, but a curia-[i.e., the court of God.]

CHAPTER XL.

1 On the contrary, they deserve the name of faction who conspire to bring odium on good
men and virtuous, who cry out against innocent blood, offering as the justification of
their enmity the baseless plea, that they think the Christians the cause of every public
disaster, of every affliction with which the people are visited. If the Tiber rises as
high as the city walls, if the Nile does not send its waters up over the fields, if the
heavens give no rain, if there is an earthquake, if there is famine or pestilence,
straightway the cry is, "Away with the Christians to the lion! What! shall you give such
multitudes to a single beast? Pray, tell me how many calamities befell the world and
particular cities before Tiberius reigned-before the coming, that is, of Christ? We read
of the islands of Hiera, and Anaphe, and Delos, and Rhodes, and Cos, with many thousands
of human beings, having been swallowed up. Plato informs us that a region larger than Asia
or Africa was seized by the Atlantic Ocean. An earthquake, too, drank up the Corinthian
sea; and the force of the waves cut off a part of Lucania, whence it obtained the name of
Sicily. These things surely could not have taken place without the inhabitants suffering
by them. But where-I do not say were Christians, those despisers of your gods-but where
were your gods themselves in those days, when the flood poured its destroying waters over
all the world, or, as Plato thought, merely the level portion of it?

2 For that they are of later date than that calamity, the very cities in which they were
born and died, nay, which they founded, bear ample testimony; for the cities could have no
existence at this day unless as belonging to postdiluvian times. Palestine had not yet
received from Egypt its Jewish swarm (of emigrants), nor had the race from which
Christians sprung yet settled down there, when its neighbors Sodom and Gomorrah were
consumed by fire from heaven. The country yet smells of that conflagration; and if there
are apples there upon the trees, it is only a promise to the eye they give-you but touch
them, and they turn to ashes. Nor had Tuscia and Campania to complain of Christians in the
days when fire from heaven overwhelmed Vulsinii, and Pompeii was destroyed by fire from
its own mountain. No one yet worshipped the true God at Rome, when Hannibal at Cannµ
counted the Roman slain by the pecks of Roman rings. Your gods were all objects of
adoration, universally acknowledged, when the Senones closely besieged the very Capitol.
And it is in keeping with all this, that if adversity has at any time befallen cities, the
temples and the walls have equally shared in the disaster, so that it is clear to
demonstration the thing was not the doing of the gods, seeing it also overtook themselves.
The truth is, the human race has always deserved ill at God's hand.

3 First of all, as undutiful to Him, because when it knew Him in part, it not only did not
seek after Him, but even invented other gods of its own to worship; and further, because,
as the result of their willing ignorance of the Teacher of righteousness, the Judge and
Avenger of sin, all vices and crimes grew and flourished. But had men sought, they would
have come to know the glorious object of their seeking; and knowledge would have produced
obedience, and obedience would have found a gracious instead of an angry God. They ought
then to see that the very same God is angry with them now as in ancient times, before
Christians were so much as spoken of. It was His blessings they enjoyed-created before
they made any of their deities: and why can they not take it in, that their evils come
from the Being whose goodness they have failed to recognize? They suffer at the hands of
Him to whom they have been ungrateful. And, for all that is said, if we compare the
calamities of former times, they fall on us more lightly now, since God gave Christians to
the world; for from that time virtue put some restraint on the world's wickedness, and men
began to pray for the averting of God's wrath.

4 In a word, when the summer clouds give no rain, and the season is matter of anxiety, you
indeed-full of feasting day by day, and ever eager for the banquet, baths and taverns and
brothels always busy-offer up to Jupiter your rain-sacrifices; you enjoin on the people
barefoot processions; you seek heaven at the Capitol; you look up to the temple-ceilings
for the longed-for clouds-God and heaven not in all your thoughts. We, dried up with
fastings, and our passions bound tightly up, holding back as long as possible from all the
ordinary enjoyments of life, rolling in sackcloth and ashes, assail heaven with our
importunities-touch God's heart-and when we have extorted divine compassion, why, Jupiter
gets all the honour!

CHAPTER XLI.

1 You, therefore, are the sources of trouble in human affairs; on you lies the blame of
public adversities, since you are ever attracting them-you by whom God is despised and
images are worshipped. It should surely seem the more natural thing to believe that it is
the neglected One who is angry, and not they to whom all homage is paid; or most unjustly
they act, if, on account of the Christians, they send trouble on their own devotees, whom
they are bound to keep clear of the punishments of Christians. But this, you say, hits
your God as well, since He permits His worshippers to suffer on account of those who
dishonour Him. But admit first of all His providential arrangings, and you will not make
this retort. For He who once for all appointed an eternal judgment at the world's close,
does not precipitate the separation, which is essential to judgment, before the end.
Meanwhile He deals with all sorts of men alike, so that all together share His favours and
reproofs. His will is, that outcasts and elect shouldhave adversities and prosperities in
common, that we should have all the same experience of His goodness and severity. Having
learned these things from His own lips, we love His goodness, we fear His wrath, while
both by you are treated with contempt; and hence the sufferings of life, so far as it is
our lot to be overtaken by them, are in our case gracious admonitions, while in yours they
are divine punishments.

2 We indeed are not the least put about: for, first, only one thing in this life greatly
concerns us, and that is, to get quickly out of it; and next, if any adversity befalls us,
it is laid to the door of your transgressions. Nay, though we are likewise involved in
troubles because of our close connection with you, we are rather glad of it, because we
recognize in it divine foretellings, which, in fact, go to confirm the confidence and
faith of our hope. But if all the evils you endure are inflicted on you by the gods you
worship out of spite to us, why do you continue to pay homage to beings so ungrateful, and
unjust; who, instead of being angry with you, should rather have been aiding and abetting
you by persecuting Christians-keeping you clear of their sufferings?

CHAPTER XLII.

1 But we are called to account as harm-doers on another ground, and are accused of being
useless in the affairs of life. How in all the world can that be the case with people who
are living among you, eating the same food wearing the same attire, having the same
habits, under the same necessities of existence? We are not Indian Brahmins or
Gymnosophists, who dwell in woods and exile themselves from ordinary human life. We do not
forget the debt of gratitude we owe to God, our Lord and Creator; we reject no creature of
His hands, though certainly we exercise restraint upon ourselves, lest of any gift of His
we make an immoderate or sinful use. So we sojourn with you in the world, abjuring neither
forum, nor shambles, nor bath, nor booth, nor workshop, nor inn, nor weekly market, nor
any other places of commerce. We sail with you, and fight with you, and till the ground
with you; and in like manner we unite with you in your traffickings-even in the various
arts we make public property of our works for your benefit. How it is we seem useless in
your ordinary business, living with you and by you as we do, I am not able to understand.
But if I do not frequent your religious ceremonies, I am still on the sacred day a man. I
do not at the Saturnalia bathe myself at dawn, that I may not lose both day and night;

2 yet I bathe at a decent and healthful hour, which preserves me both in heat and blood. I
can be rigid and pallid like you after ablution when I am dead. I do not recline in public
at the feast of Bacchus, after the manner of the beast-fighters at their final banquet.
Yet of your resources I partake, wherever I may chance to eat. I do not buy a crown for my
head. What matters it to you how I use them, if nevertheless the flowers are purchased? I
think it more agreeable to have them free and loose, waving all about. Even if they are
woven into a crown, we smell the crown with our nostrils: let those look to it who scent
the perfume with their hair. We do not go to your spectacles; yet the articles that are
sold there, if I need them, I will obtain more readily at their proper places. We
certainly buy no frankincense. If the Arabias complain of this, let the Sabµans be well
assured that their more precious and costly merchandise is expended as largely in the
burying of Christians as in the fumigating of the gods. At any rate, you say, the temple
revenues are every day falling off: how few now throw in a contribution! In truth, we are
not able to give alms both to your human and your heavenly mendicants; nor do we think
that we are required to give any but to those who ask for it.

3 Let Jupiter then hold out his hand and get, for our compassion spends more in the
streets than yours does in the temples. But your other taxes will acknowledge a debt of
gratitude to Christians; for in the faithfulness which keeps us from fraud upon a brother,
we make conscience of paying all their dues: so that, by ascertaining how much is lost by
fraud and falsehood in the census declarations-the calculation may easily be made-it would
be seen that the ground of complaint in one department of revenue is compensated by the
advantage which others derive.

CHAPTER XLIII.

I will confess, however, without hesitation, that there are some who in a sense may
complain of Christians that they are a sterile race: as, for instance, pimps, and panders,
and bath-suppliers; assassins, and poisoners, and sorcerers; soothsayers, too, diviners,
and astrologers. But it is a noble fruit of Christians, that they have no fruits for such
as these. And yet, whatever loss your interests suffer from the religion we profess, the
protection you have from us makes amply up for it. What value do you set on persons, I do
not here urge who deliver you from demons, I do not urge who for your sakes present
prayers before the throne of the true God, for perhaps you have no belief in that-but from
whom you can have nothing to fear?

CHAPTER XLIV.

Yes, and no one considers what the loss is to the common weal,-a loss as great as it is
real, no one estimates the injury entailed upon the state, when, men of virtue as we are,
we are put to death in such numbers; when so many of the truly good suffer the last
penalty. And here we call your own acts to witness, you who are daily presiding at the
trials of prisoners, and passing sentence upon crimes. Well, in your long lists of those
ac- cased of many and various atrocities, has any assassin, any cutpurse, any man guilty
of sacrilege, or seduction, or stealing bathers' clothes, his name entered as being a
Christian too? Or when Christians are brought before you on the mere ground of their name,
is there ever found among them an ill-doer of the sort? It is always with your folk the
prison is steaming, the mines are sighing, the wild beasts are fed: it is from you the
exhibitors of gladiatorial shows always get their herds of criminals to feed up for the
occasion. You find no Christian there, except simply as being such; or if one is there as
something else, a Christian he is no longer.

CHAPTER XLV.

1 We, then, alone are without crime. Is there ought wonderful in that, if it be a very
necessity with us? For a necessity indeed it is. Taught of God himself what goodness is,
we have both a perfect knowledge of it as revealed to us by a perfect Master; and
faithfully we do His will, as enjoined on us by a Judge we dare not despise. But your
ideas of virtue you have got from mere human opinion; on human authority, too, its
obligation rests: hence your system of practical morality is deficient, both in the
fulness and authority requisite to produce a life of real virtue. Man's wisdom to point
out what is good, is no greater than his authority to exact the keeping of it; the one is
as easily deceived as the other is despised. And so, which is the ampler rule, to say,
"Thou shalt not kill," or to teach, "Be not even angry? "Which is more perfect, to forbid
adultery, or to restrain from even a single lustful look? Which indicates the higher
intelligence, interdicting evil-doing, or evil-speaking? Which is more thorough, not
allowing an injury, or not even suffering an injury done to you to be repaid? Though
withal you know that these very laws also of yours, which seem to lead to virtue, have
been borrowed from the law of God as the ancient model. Of the age of Moses we have
already spoken.

2 But what is the real authority of human laws, when it is in man's power both to evade
them, by generally managing to hide himself out of sight in his crimes, and to despise
them sometimes, if inclination or necessity leads him to offend? Think of these things,
too, in the light of the brevity of any punishment you can inflict-never to last longer
than till death. On this ground Epicurus makes light of all suffering and pain,
maintaining that if it is small, it is contemptible; and if it is great, it is not long-
continued. No doubt about it, we, who receive our awards under the judgment of an all-
seeing God, and who look forward to eternal punishment from Him for sin,-we alone make
real effort to attain a blameless life, under the influence of our ampler knowledge, the
impossibility of concealment, and the greatness of the threatened torment, not merely
long-enduring but everlasting, fearing Him, whom he too should fear who the fearing
judges,-even God, I mean, and not the proconsul.


THE APOLOGY
===========

THE APOLOGY continued

CHAPTER XLVI.

1 We have sufficiently met, as I think, the accusation of the various crimes on the ground
of which these fierce demands are made for Christian blood. We have made a full exhibition
of our case; and we have shown you how we are able to prove that our statement is correct,
from the trustworthiness, I mean, and antiquity of our sacred writings, and from the
confession likewise of the powers of spiritual wickedness themselves. Who will venture to
undertake our refutation; not with skill of words, but, as we have managed our
demonstration, on the basis of reality? But while the truth we hold is made clear to all,
unbelief meanwhile, at the very time it is convinced of the worth of Christianity, which
has now become well known for its benefits as well as from the intercourse of life, takes
up the notion that it is not really a thing divine, but rather a kind of philosophy. These
are the very things, it says, the philosophers counsel and profess-innocence, justice,
patience, sobriety, chastity. Why, then, are we not permitted an equal liberty and
impunity for our doctrines as they have, with whom, in respect of what we teach, we are
compared? or why are not they, as so like us, not pressed to the same offices, for
declining which our lives are imperilled? For who compels a philosopher to sacrifice or
take an oath, or put out useless lamps at midday? Nay, they openly overthrow your gods,
and in their writings they attack your superstitions;

2 and you applaud them for it. Many of them even, with your countenance, bark out against
your rulers, and are rewarded with statues and salaries, instead of being given to the
wild beasts. And very right it should be so. For they are called philosophers, not
Christians. This name of philosopher has no power to put demons to the rout. Why are they
not able to do that too? since philosophers count demons inferior to gods. Socrates used
to say, "If the demon grant permission. Yet he, too, though in denying the existence of
your divinities he had a glimpse of the truth, at his dying ordered a cock to be
sacrificed to ¦sculapius, I believe in honour of his father, for Apollo pronounced
Socrates the wisest of men. Thoughtless Apollo! testifying to the wisdom of the man who
denied the existence of his race. In proportion to the enmity the truth awakens, you give
offence by faithfully standing by it; but the man who corrupts and makes a mere pretence
of it precisely on this ground gains favour with its persecutors. The truth which
philosophers, these mockers and corrupters of it, with hostile ends merely affect to hold,
and in doing so deprave, caring for nought but glory, Christians both intensely and
intimately long for and maintain in its integrity, as those who have a real concern about
their salvation. So that we are like each other neither in our knowledge nor our ways, as
you imagine.

3 For what certain information did Thales, the first of natural philosophers, give in
reply to the inquiry of Cr£sus regarding Deity, the delay for further thought so often
proving in vain? There is not a Christian workman but finds out God, and manifests Him,
and hence assigns to Him all those attributes which go to constitute a divine being,
though Plato affirms that it is far from easy to discover the Maker of the universe; and
when He is found, it is difficult to make Him known to all. But if we challenge you to
comparison in the virtue of chastity, I turn to a part of the sentence passed by the
Athenians against Socrates, who was pronounced a corrupter of youth. The Christian
confines himself to the female sex. I have read also how the harlot Phryne kindled in
Diogenes the fires of lust, and how a certain Speusippus, of Plato's school, perished in
the adulterous act. The Christian husband has nothing to do with any but his own wife.
Democritus, in putting out his eyes, because he could not look on women without lusting
after them, and was pained if his passion was not satisfied, owns plainly, by the
punishment he inflicts, his incontinence. But a Christian with grace-healed eyes is
sightless in this matter; he is mentally blind against the assaults of passion. If I
maintain our superior modesty of behaviour, there at once occurs to me Diogenes with
filth-covered feet trampling on the proud couches of Plato, under the influence of another
pride:

4 the Christian does not even play the proud man to the pauper. If sobriety of spirit be
the virtue in debate, why, there are Pythagoras at Thurii, and Zeno at Priene, ambitious
of the supreme power: the Christian does not aspire to the µdileship. If equanimity be the
contention, you have Lycurgus choosing death by self-starvation, because the Lacons had
made some emendation of his laws: the Christian, even when he is condemned, gives thanks.
If the comparison be made in regard to trustworthiness, Anaxagoras denied the deposit of
his enemies: the Christian is noted for his fidelity even among those who are not of his
religion. If the matter of sincerity is to be brought to trial, Aristotle basely thrust
his friend Hermias from his place: the Christian does no harm even to his foe. With equal
baseness does Aristotle play the sycophant to Alexander, instead of exercising to keep him
in the right way, and Plato allows himself to be bought by Dionysius for his belly's sake.
Aristippus in the purple, with all his great show of gravity, gives way to extravagance;
and Hippias is put to death laying plots against the state: no Christian ever attempted
such a thing in behalf of his brethren, even when persecution was scattering them abroad
with every atrocity. But it will be said that some of us, too, depart from the rules of
our discipline. In that case, however, we count them no longer Christians; but the
philosophers who do such things retain still the name and the honour of wisdom.

5 So, then, where is there any likeness between the Christian and the philosopher? between
the disciple of Greece and of heaven? between the man whose object is fame, and whose
object is life? between the talker and he doer? between the man who builds up and the man
who pulls down? between the friend and the foe of error? between one who corrupts the
truth, and one who restores and teaches it? between its chief and its custodier?

CHAPTER XLVII.

1 Unless I am utterly mistaken, there is nothing so old as the truth; and the already
proved antiquity of the divine writings is so far of use to me, that it leads men more
easily to take it in that they are the treasure-source whence all later wisdom has been
taken. And were it not necessary to keep my work to a moderate size, I might launch forth
also into the proof of this. What poet or sophist has not drunk at the fountain of the
prophets? Thence, accordingly, the philosophers watered their arid minds, so that it is
the things they have from us which bring us into comparison with them. For this reason, I
imagine, philosophy was banished by certain states-I mean by the Thebans, by the Spartans
also, and the Argives-its disciples sought to imitate our doctrines; and ambitious, as I
have said, of glory and eloquence alone, if they fell upon anything in the collection of
sacred Scriptures which displeased them, in their own peculiar style of research, they
perverted it to serve their purpose: for they had no adequate faith in their divinity to
keep them from changing them, nor had they any sufficient understanding of them, either,
as being still at the time under veil-even obscure to the Jews themselves, whose peculiar
possession they seemed to be. For so, too, if the truth was distinguished by its
simplicity, the more on that account the fastidiousness of man, too proud to believe, set
to altering it;

2 so that even what they found certain they made uncertain by their admixtures. Finding a
simple revelation of God, they proceeded to dispute about Him, not as He had revealed to
them, but turned aside to debate about His properties, His nature, His abode. Some assert
Him to be incorporeal; others maintain He has a body,-the Platonists teaching the one
doctrine, and the Stoics the other. Some think that He is composed of atoms, others of
numbers: such are the different views of Epicurus and Pythagoras. One thinks He is made of
fire; so it appeared to Heraclitus. The Platonists, again, hold that He administers the
affairs of the world; the Epicureans, on the contrary, that He is idle and inactive, and,
so to speak, a nobody in human things. Then the Stoics represent Him as placed outside the
world, and whirling round this huge mass from without like a potter; while the Platonists
place Him within the world, as a pilot is in the ship he steers. So, in like manner, they
differ in their views about the world itself, whether it is created or uncreated, whether
it is destined to pass away or to remain for ever. So again it is debated concerning the
nature of the soul, which some contend is divine and eternal, while others hold that it is
dissoluble. According to each one's fancy, He has introduced either something new, or
refashioned the old. Nor need we wonder if the speculations of philosophers have perverted
the older Scriptures.

3 Some of their brood, with their opinions, have even adulterated our new-given Christian
revelation, and corrupted it into a system of philosophic doctrines, and from the one path
have struck off many and inexplicable by-roads. And I have alluded to this, lest any one
becoming acquainted with the variety of parties among us, this might seem to him to put us
on a level with the philosophers, and he might condemn the truth from the different ways
in which it is defended. But we at once put in a plea in bar against these tainters of our
purity, asserting that this is the rule of truth which comes down from Christ by
transmission through His companions, to whom we shall prove that those devisers of
different doctrines are all posterior. Everything opposed to the truth has been got up
from the truth itself, the spirits of error carrying on this system of opposition. By them
all corruptions of wholesome discipline have been secretly instigated; by them, too,
certain fables have been introduced, that, by their resemblance to the truth, they might
impair its credibility, or vindicate their own higher claims to faith; so that people
might think Christians unworthy of credit because the poets or philosophers are so, or
might regard the poets and philosophers as worthier of confidence from their not being
followers of Christ. Accordingly, we get ourselves laughed at for proclaiming that God
will one day judge the world. For, like us, the poets and philosophers set up a judgment-
seat in the realms below.

4 And if we threaten Gehenna, which is a reservoir of secret fire under the earth for
purposes of punishment, we have in the same way derision heaped on us. For so, too, they
have their Pyriphlegethon, a river of flame in the regions of the dead. And if we speak of
Paradise, the place of heavenly bliss appointed to receive the spirits of the saints,
severed from the knowledge of this world by that fiery zone as by a sort of enclosure, the
Elysian plains have taken possession of their faith. Whence is it, I pray you have all
this, so like us, in the poets and philosophers? The reason simply is, that they have been
taken from our religion. But if they are taken from our sacred things, as being of earlier
date, then ours are the truer, and have higher claims upon belief, since even their
imitations find faith among you. If they maintain their sacred mysteries to have sprung
from their own minds, in that case ours will be reflections of what are later than
themselves, which by the nature of things is impossible, for never does the shadow precede
the body which casts it, or the image the reality.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

1 Come now, if some philosopher affirms, as Laberius holds, following an opinion of
Pythagoras, that a man may have his origin from a mule, a serpent from a woman, and with
skill of speech twists every argument to prove his view, will he not gain acceptance for
and work in some the conviction that, on account of this, they should even abstain from
eating animal food? May any one have the persuasion that he should so abstain, lest by
chance in his beef he eats of some ancestor of his? But if a Christian promises the return
of a man from a man, and the very actual Gaius from Gaius, the cry of the people will be
to have him stoned; they will not even so much as grant him a hearing. If there is any
ground for the moving to and fro of human souls into different bodies, why may they not
return into the very substance they have left, seeing this is to be restored, to be that
which had been? They are no longer the very things they had been; for they could not be
what they were not, without first ceasing to be what they had been. If we were inclined to
give all rein upon this point, discussing into what various beasts one and another might
probably be changed, we would need at our leisure to take up many points.

2 But this we would do chiefly in our own defence, as setting forth what is greatly
worthier of belief, that a man will come back from a man-any given person from any given
person, still retaining his humanity; so that the soul, with its qualities unchanged, may
be restored to the same condition, thought not to the same outward framework. Assuredly,
as the reason why restoration takes place at all is the appointed judgment, every man must
needs come forth the very same who had once existed, that he may receive at God's hands a
judgment, whether of good desert or the opposite. And therefore the body too will appear;
for the soul is not capable of suffering without the solid substance (that is, the flesh;
and for this reason, also) that it is not right that souls should have all the wrath of
God to bear: they did not sin without the body, within which all was done by them. But
how, you say, can a substance which has been dissolved be made to reappear again? Consider
thyself, O man, and thou wilt believe in it! Reflect on what you were before you came into
existence. Nothing. For if you had been anything, you would have remembered it. You, then,
who were nothing before you existed, reduced to nothing also when you cease to be, why may
you not come into being again out of nothing, at the will of the same Creator whose will
created you out of nothing at the first?

3 Will it be anything new in your case? You who were not, were made; when you cease to be
again, you shall be made. Explain, if you can, your original creation, and then demand to
know how you shall be re-created. Indeed, it will be still easier surely to make you what
you were once, when the very same creative power made you without difficulty what you
never were before. There will be doubts, perhaps, as to the power of God, of Him who hung
in its place this huge body of our world, made out of what had never existed, as from a
death of emptiness and inanity, animated by the Spirit who quickens all living things, its
very self the unmistakable type of the resurrection, that it might be to you a witness-
nay, the exact image of the resurrection. Light, every day extinguished, shines out again;
and, with like alternation, darkness succeeds light's outgoing. The defunct stars re-live;
the seasons, as soon as they are finished, renew their course; the fruits are brought to
maturity, and then are reproduced. The seeds do not spring up with abundant produce, save
as they rot and dissolve away;-all things are preserved by perishing, all things are
refashioned out of death. Thou, man of nature so exalted, if thou understandest thyself,
taught even by the Pythian words, lord of all these things that die and rise,-shalt thou
die to perish evermore?

4 Wherever your dissolution shall have taken place, whatever material agent has destroyed
you, or swallowed you up, or swept you away, or reduced you to nothingness, it shall again
restore you. Even nothingness is His who is Lord of all. You ask, Shall we then be always
dying, and rising up from death? If so the Lord of all things had appointed, you would
have to submit, though unwillingly, to the law of your creation. But, in fact, He has no
other purpose than that of which He has informed us. The Reason which made the universe
out of diverse elements, so that all things might be composed of opposite substances in
unity-of void and solid, of animate and inanimate, of comprehensible and incomprehensible,
of light and darkness, of life itself and death-has also disposed time into order, by
fixing and distinguishing its mode, according to which this first portion of it, which we
inhabit from the beginning of the world, flows down by a temporal course to a close; but
the portion which succeeds, and to which we look forward continues forever. When,
therefore, the boundary and limit, that millennial interspace, has been passed, when even
the outward fashion of the world itself-which has been spread like a veil over the eternal
economy, equally a thing of time-passes away, then the whole human race shall be raised
again, to have its dues meted out according as it has merited in the period of good or
evil, and thereafter to have these paid out through the immeasurable ages of eternity.

5 Therefore after this there is neither death nor repeated resurrections, but we shall be
the same that we are now, and still unchanged-the servants of God, ever with God, clothed
upon with the proper substance of eternity; but the profane, and all who are not true
worshippers of God, in like manner shall be consigned to the punishment of everlasting
fire-that fire which, from its very nature indeed, directly ministers to their
incorruptibility. The philosophers are familiar as well as we with the distinction between
a common and a secret fire. Thus that which is in common use is far different from that
which we see in divine judgments, whether striking as thunderbolts from heaven, or
bursting up out of the earth through mountain-tops; for it does not consume what it
scorches, but while it burns it repairs. So the mountains continue ever burning; and a
person struck by lighting is even now kept safe from any destroying flame. A notable proof
this of the fire eternal! a notable example of the endless judgment which still supplies
punishment with fuel! The mountains burn, and last. How will it be with the wicked and the
enemies of God?

CHAPTER XLIX.

1 These are what are called presumptuous speculations in our case alone; in the
philosophers and poets they are regarded as sublime speculations and illustrious
discoveries. They are men of wisdom, we are fools. They are worthy of all honour, we are
folk to have the finger pointed at; nay, besides that, we are even to have punishments
inflicted on us. But let things which are the defence of virtue, if you will, have no
foundation, and give them duly the name of fancies, yet still they are necessary; let them
be absurd if you will, yet they are of use: they make all who believe them better men and
women, under the fear of never-ending punishment and the hope of never-ending bliss. It is
not, then, wise to brand as false, nor to regard as absurd, things the truth of which it
is expedient to presume. On no ground is it right positively to condemn as bad what beyond
all doubt is profitable. Thus, in fact, you are guilty of the very presumption of which
you accuse us, in condemning what is useful. It is equally out of the question to regard
them as nonsensical; at any rate, if they are false and foolish, they hurt nobody. For
they are just (in that case) like many other things on which you inflict no penalties-
foolish and fabulous things, I mean, which, as quite innocuous, are never charged as
crimes or punished.

2 But in a thing of the kind, if this be so indeed, we should be adjudged to ridicule, not
to swords, and flames, and crosses, and wild beasts, in which iniquitous cruelty not only
the blinded populace exults and insults over us, but in which some of you too glory, not
scrupling to gain the popular favour by your injustice. As though all you can do to us did
not depend upon our pleasure. It is assuredly a matter of my own inclination, being a
Christian. Your condemnation, then, will only reach me in that case, if I wish to be
condemned; but when all you can do to me, you can do only at my will, all you can do is
dependent on my will, and is not in your power. The joy of the people in our trouble is
therefore utterly reasonless. For it is our joy they appropriate to themselves, since we
would far rather be condemned than apostatize from God; on the contrary, our haters should
be sorry rather than rejoice, as we have obtained the very thing of our own choice.

CHAPTER L.

1 In that case, you say, why do you complain of our persecutions? You ought rather to be
grateful to us for giving you the sufferings you want. Well, it is quite true that it is
our desire to suffer, but it is in the way that the soldier longs for war. No one indeed
suffers willingly, since suffering necessarily implies fear and danger. Yet the man who
objected to the conflict, both fights with all his strength, and when victorious, he
rejoices in the battle, because he reaps from it glory and spoil. It is our battle to be
summoned to your tribunals that there, under fear of execution, we may battle for the
truth. But the day is won when the object of the struggle is gained. This victory of ours
gives us the glory of pleasing God, and the spoil of life eternal. But we are overcome.
Yes, when we have obtained our wishes. Therefore we conquer in dying; we go forth
victorious at the very time we are subdued. Call us, if you like, Sarmenticii and Semaxii,
because, bound to a half-axle stake, we are burned in a circle-heap of fagots. This is the
attitude in which we conquer, it is our victory-robe, it is for us a sort of triumphal,
car. Naturally enough, therefore, we do not please the vanquished; on account of this,
indeed, we are counted a desperate, reckless race.

2 But the very desperation and recklessness you object to in us, among yourselves lift
high the standard of virtue in the cause of glory and of fame. Mucius of his own will left
his right hand on the altar: what sublimity of mind! Empedocles gave his whole body at
Catana to the fires of ¦tna: what mental resolution! A certain foundress of Carthage gave
herself away in second marriage to the funeral pile: what a noble witness of her chastity!
Regulus, not wishing that his one life should count for the lives of many enemies, endured
these crosses over all his frame: how brave a man-even in captivity a conqueror!
Anaxarchus, when he was being beaten to death by a barley-pounder, cried out, "Beat on,
beat on at the case of Anaxarchus; no stroke falls on Anaxarchus himself. O magnanimity of
the philosopher, who even in such an end had jokes upon his lips! I omit all reference to
those who with their own sword, or with any other milder form of death, have bargained for
glory. Nay, see how even torture contests are crowned by you. The Athenian courtezan,
having wearied out the executioner, at last bit off her tongue and spat it in the face of
the raging tyrant, that she might at the same time spit away her power of speech, nor be
longer able to confess her fellow-conspirators, if even overcome, that might be her
inclination.

3 Zeno the Eleatic, when he was asked by Dionysius what good philosophy did, on answering
that it gave contempt of death, was all unquailing, given over to the tyrant's scourge,
and sealed his opinion even to the death. We all know how the Spartan lash, applied with
the utmost cruelty under the very eyes of friends encouraging, confers on those who bear
it honor proportionate to the blood which the young men shed. O glory legitimate, because
it is human, for whose sake it is counted neither reckless foolhardiness, nor desperate
obstinacy, to despise death itself and all sorts of savage treatment; for whose sake you
may for your native place, for the empire, for friendship, endure all you are forbidden to
do for God! And you cast statues in honour of persons such as these, and you put
inscriptions upon images, and cut out epitaphs on tombs, that their names may never
perish. In so far you can by your monuments, you yourselves afford a son of resurrection
to the dead. Yet he who expects the true resurrection from God, is insane, if for God he
suffers! But go zealously on, good presidents, you will stand higher with the people if
you sacrifice the Christians at their wish, kill us, torture us, condemn us, grind us to
dust; your injustice is the proof that we are innocent. Therefore God suffers that we thus
suffer;

4 for but very lately, in condemning a Christian woman to the leno rather than to the leo
you made confession that a taint on our purity is considered among us something more
terrible than any punishment and any death. Nor does your cruelty, however exquisite,
avail you; it is rather a temptation to us. The oftener we are mown down by you, the more
in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed. Many of your writers exhort to the
courageous bearing of pain and death, as Cicero in the Tusculans, as Seneca in his
Chances, as Diogenes, Pyrrhus, Callinicus; and yet their words do not find so many
disciples as Christians do, teachers not by words, but by their deeds. That very obstinacy
you rail against is the preceptress. For who that contemplates it, is not excited to
inquire what is at the bottom of it? who, after inquiry, does not embrace our doctrines?
and when he has embraced them, desires not to suffer that he may become partaker of the
fulness of God's grace, that he may obtain from God complete forgiveness, by giving in
exchange his blood? For that secures the remission of all offences. On this account it is
that we return thanks on the very spot for your sentences. As the divine and human are
ever opposed to each other, when we are condemned by you, we are acquitted by the Highest.


TO THE NATIONS
==============

TO THE NATIONS Tertullian

c. AD 155–220

North African lawyer and the first great Latin theologian.

APPENDIX

A Fragment Concerning the Execrable Gods of the Heathen.

1 So great blindness has fallen on the Roman race, that they call their enemy Lord, and
preach the filcher of blessings as being their very giver, and to him they give thanks.
They call those (deities), then, by human names, not by their own, for their own names
they know not. That they are dµmons they understand: but they read histories of the old
kings, and then, though they see that their character was mortal, they honour them with a
deific name. 2 As for him whom they call Jupiter, and think to be the highest god, when he
was born the years (that had elapsed) from the foundation of the world to him were some
three thousand. He is born in Greece, from Saturnus and Ops; and, for fear he should be
killed by his father (or else, if it is lawful to say so, should be begotten anew), is by
the advice of his mother carried down into Crete, and reared in a cave of Ida; is
concealed from his father's search) by (the aid of) Cretans-born men! -rattling their
arms; sucks a she-goat's dugs; flays her; clothes himself in her hide; and (thus) uses his
own nurse's hide, after killing her, to be sure, with his own hand! but he sewed thereon
three golden tassels worth the price of an hundred oxen each, as their author Homer
relates, if it is fair to believe it. This Jupiter, in adult age, waged war several years
with his father; overcame him; made a parricidal raid on his home; violated his virgin
sisters; selected one of them in marriage; drave his father by dint of arms. The remaining
scenes, moreover, of that act have been recorded. Of other folks' wives, or else of
violated virgins, he begat him sons; defiled freeborn boys; oppressed peoples lawlessly
with despotic and kingly sway. The father, whom they erringly suppose to have been the
original god, was ignorant that this (son of his) was lying concealed in Crete;

3 the son, again, whom they believe the mightier god, knows not that the father whom
himself had banished is lurking in Italy. If he was in heaven, when would he not see what
was doing in Italy? For the Italian land is "not in a corner. And yet, had he been a god,
nothing ought to have escaped him. But that he whom the Italians call Saturnus did lurk
there, is clearly evidenced on the face of it, from the fact that from his lurking the
Hesperian tongue is to this day called Latin, as likewise their author Virgil relates.
(Jupiter, ) then, is said to have been born on earth, while (Saturnus his father) fears
lest he be driven by him from his kingdom, and seeks to kill him as being his own rival,
and knows not that he has been stealthily carried off, and is in hiding; and afterwards
the son-god pursues his father, immortal seeks to slay immortal (is it credible? ), and is
disappointed by an interval of sea, and is ignorant of (his quarry's) flight; and while
all this is going on between two gods on earth, heaven is deserted. No one dispensed the
rains, no one thundered, no one governed all this mass of world. For they cannot even say
that their action and wars took place in heaven; for all this was going on on Mount
Olympus in Greece. Well, but heaven is not called Olympus, for heaven is heaven.

4 These, then, are the actions of theirs, which we will treat of first-nativity, lurking,
ignorance, parricide, adulteries, obscenities-things committed not by a god, but by most
impure and truculent human beings; beings who, had they been living in these days, would
have lain under the impeachment of all laws-laws which are far more just and strict than
their actions. "He drave his father by dint of arms. The Falcidian and Sempronian law
would bind the parricide in a sack with beasts. "He violated his sisters. The Papinian law
would punish the outrage with all penalties, limb by limb. "He invaded others' wedlock.
The Julian law would visit its adulterous violator capitally. "He defiled freeborn boys.
The Cornelian law would condemn the crime of transgressing the sexual bond with novel
severities, sacrilegiously guilty as it is of a novel union. This being is shown to have
had no divinity either, for he was a human being; his father's flight escaped him. To this
human being, of such a character, to so wicked a king, so obscene and so cruel, God's
honour has been assigned by men. Now, to be sure, if on earth he were born and grew up
through the advancing stages of life's periods, and in it committed all these evils, and
yet is no more in it, what is thought (of him) but that he is dead? Or else does foolish
error think wings were born him in his old age, whence to fly heavenward?

5 Why, even this may possibly find credit among men bereft of sense, if indeed they
believe, (as they do, ) that he turned into a swan, to beget the Castors; an eagle, to
contaminate Ganymede; a bull, to violate Europa; gold, to violate Danaë; a horse, to beget
Pirithoüs; a goat, to beget Egyppa from a she-goat; a Satyr, to embrace Antiope. Beholding
these adulteries, to which sinners are prone, they therefore easily believe that sanctions
of misdeed and of every filthiness are borrowed from their reigned god. Do they perceive
how void of amendment are the rest of his career's acts which can find credit, which are
indeed true, and which, they say, he did without self transformation? Of Semele, he begets
Liber; of Latona, Apollo and Diana; of Maia, Mercury; of Alcmena, Hercules. But the rest
of his corruptions, which they themselves confess, I am unwilling to record, lest
turpitude, once buried, be again called to men's ears. But of these few (offsprings of
his) I have made mention; off-springs whom in their error they believe to be themselves,
too, gods-born, to wit, of an incestuous father; adulterous births, supposititious births.
And the living, eternal God, of sempiternal divinity, prescient of futurity, immeasurable,
they have dissipated (into nothing, by associating Him) with crimes so unspeakable.

INTRODUCTION

[Translated by Dr. Holmes.]

CHAPTER I. -THE HATRED FELT BY THE HEATHEN AGAINST THE CHRISTIANS IS UNJUST, BECAUSE BASED ON CULPABLE IGNORANCE.

1 One proof of that ignorance of yours, which condemns whilst it excuses your injustice,
is at once apparent in the fact, that all who once shared in your ignorance and hatred (of
the Christian religion), as soon as they have come to know it, leave off their hatred when
they cease to be ignorant; nay more, they actually themselves become what they had hated,
and take to hating what they had once been. Day after day, indeed, you groan over the
increasing number of the Christians. Your constant cry is, that the state is beset (by
us); that Christians are in your fields, in your camps, in your islands. You grieve over
it as a calamity, that each sex, every age-in short, every rank-is passing over from you
to us; yet you do not even after this set your minds upon reflecting whether there be not
here some latent good. You do not allow yourselves in suspicions which may prove too true,
nor do you like ventures which may be too near the mark. This is the only instance in
which human curiosity grows torpid. You love to be ignorant of what other men rejoice to
have discovered; you would rather not know it, because you now cherish your hatred as if
you were aware that, (with the knowledge, ) your hatred would certainly come to an end.
Still, if there shall be no just ground for hatred, it will surely be found to be the best
course to cease from the past injustice.

2 Should, however, a cause have really existed there will be no diminution of the hatred,
which will indeed accumulate so much the more in the consciousness of its justice; unless
it be, forsooth, that you are ashamed to cast off your faults, or sorry to free yourselves
from blame. I know very well with what answer you usually meet the argument from our rapid
increase. That indeed must not, you say, be hastily accounted a good thing which converts
a great number of persons, and gains them over to its side. I am aware how the mind is apt
to take to evil courses. How many there are which forsake virtuous living! How many seek
refuge in the opposite! Many, no doubt; nay, very many, as the last days approach. But
such a comparison as this fails in fairness of application; for all are agreed in thinking
thus of the evil-doer, so that not even the guilty themselves, who take the wrong side,
and turn away from the pursuit of good to perverse ways, are bold enough to defend evil as
good. Base things excite their fear, impious ones their shame. In short, they are eager
for concealment, they shrink from publicity, they tremble when caught; when accused, they
deny; even when tortured, they do not readily or invariably confess (their crime); at all
events, they grieve when they are condemned. They reproach themselves for their past life;
their change from innocence to an evil disposition they even attribute to fate.

3 They cannot say that it is not a wrong thing, therefore they will not admit it to be
their own act. As for the Christians, however, in what does their case resemble this? No
one is ashamed; no one is sorry, except for his former (sins). If he is pointed at (for
his religion), he glories in it; if dragged to trial, he does not resist; if accused, he
makes no defence. When questioned, he confesses; when condemned, he rejoices. What sort of
evil is this, in which the nature of evil comes to a standstill?

CHAPTER II. -THE HEATHEN PERVERTED JUDGMENT IN THE TRIAL OF CHRISTIANS. THEY WOULD BE MORE CONSISTENT IF THEY DISPENSED WITH ALL FORM OF TRIAL. TERTULLIAN URGES THIS WITH MUCH INDIGNATION.

1 In this case you actually conduct trials contrary to the usual form of judicial process
against criminals; for when culprits are brought up for trial, should they deny the
charge, you press them for a confession by tortures. When Christians, however, confess
without compulsion, you apply the torture to induce them to deny. What great perverseness
is this, when you stand out against confession, and change the use of the torture,
compelling the man who frankly acknowledges the charge to evade it, and him who is
unwilling, to deny it? You, who preside for the purpose of extorting truth, demand
falsehood from us alone that we may declare ourselves not to be what we are. I suppose you
do not want us to be bad men, and therefore you earnestly wish to exclude us from that
character. To be sure, you put others on the rack and the gibbet, to get them to deny what
they have the reputation of being. Now, when they deny (the charge against them), you do
not believe them but on our denial, you instantly believe us. If you feel sure that we are
the most injurious of men, why, even in processes against us, are we dealt with by you
differently from other offenders? I do not mean that you make no account of either an
accusation or a denial (for your practice is not hastily to condemn men without an
indictment and a defence);

2 but, to take an instance in the trial of a murderer, the case is not at once ended, or
the inquiry satisfied, on a man's confessing himself the murderer. However complete his
confession, you do not readily believe him; but over and above this, you inquire into
accessory circumstances-how often had he committed murder; with what weapons, in what
place, with what plunder, accomplices, and abettors after the fact (was the crime
perpetrated)-to the end that nothing whatever respecting the criminal might escape
detection, and that every means should be at hand for arriving at a true verdict. In our
case, on the contrary, whom you believe to be guilty of more atrocious and numerous
crimes, you frame your indictments in briefer and lighter terms. I suppose you do not care
to load with accusations men whom you earnestly wish to get rid of, or else you do not
think it necessary to inquire into matters which are known to you already. It is, however,
all the more perverse that you compel us to deny charges about which you have the clearest
evidence. But, indeed, how much more consistent were it with your hatred of us to dispense
with all forms of judicial process, and to strive with all your might not to urge us to
say "No," and so have to acquit the objects of your hatred;

3 but to confess all and singular the crimes laid to our charge, that your resentments
might be the better glutted with an accumulation of our punishments, when it becomes known
how many of those feasts each one of us may have celebrated, and how many incests we may
have committed under cover of the night! What am I saying? Since your researches for
rooting out our society must needs be made on a wide scale, you ought to extend your
inquiry against our friends and companions. Let our infanticides and the dressers (of our
horrible repasts) be brought out,-ay, and the very dogs which minister to our (incestuous)
nuptials; then the business (of our trial) would be without a fault. Even to the crowds
which throng the spectacles a zest would be given; for with how much greater eagerness
would they resort to the theatre, when one had to fight in the lists who had devoured a
hundred babies! For since such horrid and monstrous crimes are reported of us, they ought,
of course, to be brought to light, lest they should seem to be incredible, and the public
detestation of us should begin to cool. For most persons are slow to believe such things,
feeling a horrible disgust at supposing that our nature could have an appetite for the
food of wild beasts, when it has precluded these from all concubinage with the race of
man.

CHAPTER III. -THE GREAT OFFENCE IN THE CHRISTIANS LIES IN THEIR VERY NAME. THE NAME VINDICATED.

1 Since, therefore, you who are in other cases most scrupulous and persevering in
investigating charges of far less serious import, relinquish your care in cases like ours,
which are so horrible, and of such surpassing sin that impiety is too mild a word for
them, by declining to hear confession, which should always be an important process for
those who conduct judicial proceedings; and failing to make a full inquiry, which should
be gone into by such as sue for a condemnation, it becomes evident that the crime laid to
our charge consists not of any sinful conduct, but lies wholly in our name. If, indeed,
any real crimes were clearly adducible against us, their very names would condemn us, if
found applicable, so that distinct sentences would be pronounced against us in this wise:
Let that murderer, or that incestuous criminal, or whatever it be that we are charged
with, be led to execution, be crucified, or be thrown to the beasts. Your sentences,
however, import only that one has confessed himself a Christian. No name of a crime stands
against us, but only the crime of a name. Now this in very deed is neither more nor less
than the entire odium which is felt against us. The name is the cause: some mysterious
force intensified by your ignorance assails it, so that you do not wish to know for
certain that which for certain you are sure you know nothing of;

2 and therefore, further, you do not believe things which are not submitted to proof, and,
lest they should be easily refuted, you refuse to make inquiry, so that the odious name is
punished under the presumption of (real) crimes. In order, therefore, that the issue may
be withdrawn from the offensive name, we are compelled to deny it; then upon our denial we
are acquitted, with an entire absolution for the past: we are no longer murderers, no
longer incestuous, because we have lost that name. But since this point is dealt with in a
place of its own, do you tell us plainly why you are pursuing this name even to
extirpation? What crime, what offence, what fault is there in a name? For you are barred
by the rule which puts it out of your power to allege crimes (of any man), which no legal
action moots, no indictment specifies, no sentence enumerates. In any case which is
submitted to the judge, inquired into against the defendant, responded to by him or
denied, and cited from the bench, I acknowledge a legal charge. Concerning, then, the
merit of a name, whatever offence names may be charged with, whatever impeachment words
may be amenable to, I for my part think, that not even a complaint is due to a word or a
name, unless indeed it has a barbarous sound, or smacks of ill-luck, or is immodest, or is
indecorous for the speaker, or unpleasant to the hearer.

3 These crimes in (mere) words and names are just like barbarous words and phrases, which
have their fault, and their solecism, and their absurdity of figure. The name Christian,
however, so far as its meaning goes, bears the sense of anointing. Even when by a faulty
pronunciation you call us "Chrestians" (for you are not certain about even the sound of
this noted name), you in fact lisp out the sense of pleasantness and goodness. You are
therefore vilifying in harmless men even the harmless name we bear, which is not
inconvenient for the tongue, nor harsh to the ear, nor injurious to a single being, nor
rude for our country, being a good Greek word, as many others also are, and pleasant in
sound and sense. Surely, surely, names are not things which deserve punishment by the
sword, or the cross, or the beasts.

CHAPTER IV. -THE TRUTH HATED IN THE CHRISTIANS; SO IN MEASURE WAS IT, OF OLD, IN SOCRATES. THE VIRTUES OF THE CHRISTIANS.

1 But the sect, you say, is punished in the name of its founder. Now in the first place it
is, no doubt a fair and usual custom that a sect should be marked out by the name of its
founder, since philosophers are called Pythagoreans and Platonists after their masters; in
the same way physicians are called after Erasistratus, and grammarians after Aristarchus.
If, therefore, a sect has a bad character because its founder was bad, it is punished as
the traditional bearer of a bad name. But this would be indulging in a rash assumption.
The first step was to find out what the founder was, that his sect might be understood,
instead of hindering inquiry into the founder's character from the sect. But in our case,
by being necessarily ignorant of the sect, through your ignorance of its founder, or else
by not taking a fair survey of the founder, because you make no inquiry into his sect, you
fasten merely on the name, just as if you vilified in it both sect and founder, whom you
know nothing of whatever. And yet you openly allow your philosophers the right of
attaching themselves to any school, and bearing its founder's name as their own;

2 and nobody stirs up any hatred against them, although both in public and in private they
bark out their bitterest eloquence against your customs, rites, ceremonies, and manner of
life, with so much contempt for the laws, and so little respect for persons, that they
even flaunt their licentious words against the emperors themselves with impunity. And yet
it is the truth, which is so troublesome to the world, that these philosophers affect, but
which Christians possess: they therefore who have it in possession afford the greater
displeasure, because he who affects a thing plays with it; he who possesses it maintains
it. For example, Socrates was condemned on that side (of his wisdom) in which he came
nearest in his search to the truth, by destroying your gods. Although the name of
Christian was not at that time in the world, yet truth was always suffering condemnation.
Now you will not deny that he was a wise man, to whom your own Pythian (god) had borne
witness. Socrates, he said, was the wisest of men. Truth overbore Apollo, and made him
pronounce even against himself since he acknowledged that he was no god, when he affirmed
that that was the wisest man who was denying the gods. However, on your principle he was
the less wise because he denied the gods, although, in truth, he was all the wiser by
reason of this denial. It is just in the same way that you are in the habit of saying of
us:

3 "Lucius Titius is a good man, only he is a Christian; "while another says; "I wonder
that so worthy a man as Caius Seius has become a Christian. "According to the blindness of
their folly men praise what they know, (and) blame what they are ignorant of; and that
which they know, they vitiate by that which they do not know. It occurs to none (to
consider) whether a man is not good and wise because he is a Christian, or therefore a
Christian because he is wise and good, although it is more usual in human conduct to
determine obscurities by what is manifest, than to prejudice what is manifest by what is
obscure. Some persons wonder that those whom they had known to be unsteady, worthless, or
wicked before they bore this name, have been suddenly converted to virtuous courses; and
yet they better know how to wonder (at the change) than to attain to it; others are so
obstinate in their strife as to do battle with their own best interests, which they have
it in their power to secure by intercourse with that hated name. I know more than one
husband, formerly anxious about their wives' conduct, and unable to bear even mice to
creep into their bed-room without a groan of suspicion, who have, upon discovering the
cause of their new assiduity, and their unwonted attention to the duties of home, offered
the entire loan of their wives to others, disclaimed all jealousy, (and) preferred to be
the husbands of she-wolves than of Christian women:

4 they could commit themselves to a perverse abuse of nature, but they could not permit
their wives to be reformed for the better! A father disinherited his son, with whom he had
ceased to find fault. A master sent his slave to bridewell, whom he had even found to be
indispensable to him. As soon as they discovered them to be Christians, they wished they
were criminals again; for our discipline carries its own evidence in itself, nor are we
betrayed by anything else than our own goodness, just as bad men also become conspicuous
by their own evil. Else how is it that we alone are, contrary to the lessons of nature,
branded as very evil because of our good? For what mark do we exhibit except the prime
wisdom, which teaches us not to worship the frivolous works of the human hand; the
temperance, by which we abstain from other men's goods; the chastity, which we pollute not
even with a look; the compassion, which prompts us to help the needy; the truth itself,
which makes us give offence; and liberty, for which we have even learned to die? Whoever
wishes to understand who the Christians are, must needs employ these marks for their
discovery.

CHAPTER V. -THE INCONSISTENT LIFE OF ANY FALSE CHRISTIAN NO MORE CONDEMNS TRUE DISCIPLES OF CHRIST, THAN A PASSING CLOUD OBSCURES A SUMMER SKY.

1 As to your saying of us that we are a most shameful set, and utterly steeped in luxury,
avarice, and depravity, we will not deny that this is true of some. It is, however, a
sufficient testimonial for our name, that this cannot be said of all, not even of the
greater part of us. It must happen even in the healthiest and purest body, that a mole
should grow, or a wart arise on it, or freckles disfigure it. Not even the sky itself is
clear with so perfect a serenity as not to be flecked with some filmy cloud. A slight spot
on the face, because it is obvious in so conspicuous a part, only serves to show purity of
the entire complexion. The goodness of the larger portion is well attested by the slender
flaw. But although you prove that some of our people are evil, you do not hereby prove
that they are Christians. Search and see whether there is any sect to which (a partial
shortcoming) is imputed as a general stain. You are accustomed in conversation yourselves
to say, in disparagement of us, "Why is so-and-so deceitful, when the Christians are so
self-denying? why merciless, when they are so merciful? "You thus bear your testimony to
the fact that this is not the character of Christians, when you ask, in the way of a
retort, how men who are reputed to be Christians can be of such and such a disposition.

2 There is a good deal of difference between an imputation and a name, between an opinion
and the truth. For names were appointed for the express purpose of setting their proper
limits between mere designation and actual condition. How many indeed are said to be
philosophers, who for all that do not fulfil the law of philosophy? All bear the name in
respect of their profession; but they hold the designation without the excellence of the
profession, and they disgrace the real thing under the shallow pretence of its name. Men
are not straightway of such and such a character, because they are said to be so; but when
they are not, it is vain to say so of them: they only deceive people who attach reality to
a name, when it is its consistency with fact which decides the condition implied in the
name. And yet persons of this doubtful stamp do not assemble with us, neither do they
belong to our communion: by their delinquency they become yours once more since we should
be unwilling to mix even with them whom your violence and cruelty compelled to recant. Yet
we should, of course, be more ready to have included amongst us those who have unwillingly
forsaken our discipline than wilful apostates. However, you have no right to call them
Christians, to whom the Christians themselves deny that name, and who have not learned to
deny themselves.

CHAPTER VI. -THE INNOCENCE OF THE CHRISTIANS NOT COMPROMISED BY THE INIQUITOUS LAWS WHICH WERE MADE AGAINST THEM.

1 Whenever these statements and answers of ours, which truth suggests of its own accord,
press and restrain your conscience, which is the witness of its own ignorance, you betake
yourselves in hot haste to that poor altar of refuge, the authority of the laws, because
these, of course, would never punish the offensive sect, if their deserts had not been
fully considered by those who made the laws. Then what is it which has prevented a like
consideration on the part of those who put the laws in force, when, in the case of all
other crimes which are similarly forbidden and punished by the laws, the penalty is not
inflicted until it is sought by regular process? Take, for instance, the case of a
murderer or an adulterer. An examination is ordered touching the particulars of the crime,
even though it is patent to all what its nature is. Whatever wrong has been done by the
Christian ought to be brought to light. No law forbids inquiry to be made; on the
contrary, inquiry is made in the interest of the laws. For how are you to keep the law by
precautions against that which the law forbids, if you neutralize the carefulness of the
precaution by your failing to perceive what it is yon have to keep? No law must keep to
itself the knowledge of its own righteousness, but (it owes it) to those from whom it
claims obedience. The law, however, becomes an object of suspicion when it declines to
approve itself.

2 Naturally enough, then, are the laws against the Christians supposed to be just and
deserving of respect and observance, just as long as men remain ignorant of their aim and
purport; but when this is perceived, their extreme injustice is discovered, and they are
deservedly rejected with abhorrence, along with (their instruments of torture)-the swords,
the crosses, and the lions. An unjust law secures no respect. In my opinion, however,
there is a suspicion among you that some of these laws are unjust, since not a day passes
without your modifying their severity and iniquity by fresh deliberations and decisions.

CHAPTER VII. -THE CHRISTIANS DEFAMED. A SARCASTIC DESCRIPTION OF FAME; ITS DECEPTION AND ATROCIOUS SLANDERS OF THE CHRISTIANS LENGTHILY DESCRIBED.

1 Whence comes it to pass, you will say to us, that such a character could have been
attributed to you, as to have justified the lawmakers perhaps by its imputation? Let me
ask on my side, what voucher they had then, or you now, for the truth of the imputation?
(You answer, ) Fame. Well, now, is not this- "Fama malum, quo non aliud velocius ullum? "
2 Now, why a plague, if it be always true? It never ceases from lying; nor even at the
moment when it reports the truth is it so free from the wish to lie, as not to interweave
the false with the true, by processes of addition, diminution, or confusion of various
facts. Indeed, such is its condition, that it can only continue to exist while it lies.
For it lives only just so long as it fails to prove anything. As soon as it proves itself
true, it falls; and, as if its office of reporting news were at an end, it quits its post:
thenceforward the thing is held to be a fact, and it passes under that name. No one, then,
says, to take an instance, "The report is that this happened at Rome," or, "The rumour
goes that he has got a province; "but, "He has got a province," and, "This happened at
Rome. Nobody mentions a rumour except at an uncertainty, because nobody can be sure of a
rumour, but only of certain knowledge; and none but a fool believes a rumour, because no
wise man puts faith in an uncertainty. In however wide a circuit a report has been
circulated, it must needs have originated some time or other from one mouth;

3 afterwards it creeps on somehow to ears and tongues which pass it on and so obscures the
humble error in which it began, that no one considers whether the mouth which first set it
a-going disseminated a falsehood,-a circumstance which often happens either from a temper
of rivalry, or a suspicious turn, or even the pleasure of feigning news. It is, however,
well that time reveals all things, as your own sayings and proverbs testify; yea, as
nature herself attests, which has so ordered it that nothing lies hid, not even that which
fame has not reported. See, now, what a witness you have suborned against us: it has not
been able up to this time to prove the report it set in motion, although it has had so
long a time to recommend it to our acceptance. This name of ours took its rise in the
reign of Augustus; under Tiberius it was taught with all clearness and publicity; under
Nero it was ruthlessly condemned, and you may weigh its worth and character even from the
person of its persecutor. If that prince was a pious man, then the Christians are impious;
if he was just, if he was pure, then the Christians are unjust and impure; if he was not a
public enemy, we are enemies of our country: what sort of men we are, our persecutor
himself shows, since he of course punished what produced hostility to himself.

4 Now, although every other institution which existed under Nero has been destroyed, yet
this of ours has firmly remained-righteous, it would seem, as being unlike the author (of
its persecution). Two hundred and fifty years, then, have not yet passed since our life
began. During the interval there have been so many criminals; so many crosses have
obtained immortality; so many infants have been slain; so many loaves steeped in blood; so
many extinctions of candles; so many dissolute marriages. And up to the present time it is
mere report which fights against the Christians. No doubt it has a strong support in the
wickedness of the human mind, and utters its falsehoods with more success among cruel and
savage men. For the more inclined you are to maliciousness, the more ready are you to
believe evil; in short, men more easily believe the evil that is false, than the good
which is true. Now, if injustice has left any place within you for the exercise of
prudence in investigating the truth of reports, justice of course demanded that you should
examine by whom the report could have been spread among the multitude, and thus circulated
through the world. For it could not have been by the Christians themselves, I suppose,
since by the very constitution and law of all mysteries the obligation of silence is
imposed. How much more would this be the case in such (mysteries as are ascribed to us),
which, if divulged, could not fail to bring down instant punishment from the prompt
resentment of men!

5 Since, therefore, the Christians are not their own betrayers, it follows that it must be
strangers. Now I ask, how could strangers obtain knowledge of us, when even true and
lawful mysteries exclude every stranger from witnessing them, unless illicit ones are less
exclusive? Well, then, it is more in keeping with the character of strangers both to be
ignorant (of the true state of a case), and to invent (a false account). Our domestic
servants (perhaps) listened, and peeped through crevices and holes, and stealthily got
information of our ways. What, then, shall we say when our servants betray them to you? It
is better, (to be sure, ) for us all not to be betrayed by any; but still, if our
practices be so atrocious, how much more proper is it when a righteous indignation bursts
asunder even all ties of domestic fidelity? How was it possible for it to endure what
horrified the mind and affrighted the eye? This is also a wonderful thing, both that he
who was so overcome with impatient excitement as to turn informer, did not likewise desire
to prove (what he reported), and that he who heard the informer's story did not care to
see for himself, since no doubt the reward is equal both for the informer who proves what
he reports, and for the hearer who convinces himself of the credibility of what he hears.
But then you say that (this is precisely what has taken place): first came the rumour,
then the exhibition of the proof;

6 first the hearsay, then the inspection; and after this, fame received its commission.
Now this, I must say, surpasses all admiration, that that was once for all detected and
divulged which is being for ever repeated, unless, forsooth, we have by this time ceased
from the reiteration of such things (as are alleged of us). But we are called still by the
same (offensive) name, and we are supposed to be still engaged in the same practices, and
we multiply from day to day; the more we are, to the more become we objects of hatred.
Hatred increases as the material for it increases. Now, seeing that the multitude of
offenders is ever advancing, how is it that the crowd of informers does not keep equal
pace therewith? To the best of my belief, even our manner of life has become better known;
you know the very days of our assemblies; therefore we are both besieged, and attacked,
and kept prisoners actually in our secret congregations. Yet who ever came upon a half-
consumed corpse (amongst us)? Who has detected the traces of a bite in our blood-steeped
loaf? Who has discovered, by a sudden light invading our darkness, any marks of impurity,
I will not say of incest, (in our feasts)? If we save ourselves. by a bribe from being
dragged out before the public gaze with such a character, how is it that we are still
oppressed? We have it indeed in our own power not to be thus apprehended at all;

7 for who either sells or buys information about a crime, if the crime itself has no
existence? But why need I disparagingly refer to strange spies and informers, when you
allege against us such charges as we certainly do not ourselves divulge with very much
noise-either as soon as you hear of them, if we previously show them to you, or after you
have yourselves discovered them, if they are for the time concealed from you? For no
doubt, when any desire initiation in the mysteries, their custom is first to go to the
master or father of the sacred rites. Then he will say (to the applicant), You must bring
an infant, as a guarantee for our rites, to be sacrificed, as well as some bread to be
broken and dipped in his blood; you also want candles, and dogs tied together to upset
them, and bits of meat to rouse the dogs. Moreover, a mother too, or a sister, is
necessary for you. What, however, is to be said if you have neither? I suppose in that
case you could not be a genuine Christian. Now, do let me ask you, Will such things, when
reported by strangers, bear to be spread about (as charges against us)? It is impossible
for such persons to understand proceedings in which they take no part. The first step of
the process is perpetrated with artifice; our feasts and our marriages are invented and
detailed by ignorant persons, who had never before heard about Christian mysteries.

8 And though they afterwards cannot help acquiring some knowledge of them, it is even then
as having to be administered by others whom they bring on the scene. Besides, how absurd
is it that the profane know mysteries which the priest knows not! They keep them all to
themselves, then, and take them for granted; and so these tragedies, (worse than those) of
Thyestes or îdipus, do not at all come forth to light, nor find their way to the public.
Even more voracious bites take nothing away from the credit of such as are initiated,
whether servants or masters. If, however, none of these allegations can be proved to be
true, how incalculable must be esteemed the grandeur (of that religion) which is
manifestly not overbalanced even by the burden of these vast atrocities! O ye heathen; who
have and deserve our pity, behold, we set before you the promise which our sacred system
offers. It guarantees eternal life to such as follow and observe it; on the other hand, it
threatens with the eternal punishment of an unending fire those who are profane and
hostile; while to both classes alike is preached a resurrection from the dead. We are not
now concerned about the doctrine of these (verities), which are discussed in their proper
place. Meanwhile, however, believe them, even as we do ourselves, for I want to know
whether you are ready to reach them, as we do, through such crimes. Come, whosoever you
are, plunge your sword into an infant;

9 or if that is another's office, then simply gaze at the breathing creature dying before
it has lived; at any rate, catch its fresh blood in which to steep your bread; then feed
yourself without stint; and whilst this is going on, recline. Carefully distinguish the
places where your mother or your sister may have made their bed; mark them well, in order
that, when the shades of night have fallen upon them, putting of course to the test the
care of every one of you, you may not make the awkward mistake of alighting on somebody
else: you would have to make an atonement, if you failed of the incest. When you have
effected all this, eternal life will be in store for you. I want you to tell me whether
you think eternal life worth such a price. No, indeed, you do not believe it: even if you
did believe it, I maintain that you would be unwilling to give (the fee); or if willing,
would be unable. But why should others be able if you are unable? Why should you be able
if others are unable? What would you wish impunity (and) eternity to stand you in? Do you
suppose that these (blessings) can be bought by us at any price? Have Christians teeth of
a different sort from others? Have they more ample jaws? Are they of different nerve for
incestuous lust? I trow not. It is enough for us to differ from you in condition by truth
alone.

CHAPTER VIII. -THE CALUMNY AGAINST THE CHRISTIANS ILLUSTRATED IN THE DISCOVERY OF PSAMMETICHUS. REFUTATION OF THE STORY.

1 We are indeed said to be the "third race" of men. What, a dog-faced race? Or broadly
shadow-footed? Or some subterranean Antipodes? If you attach any meaning to these names,
pray tell us what are the first and the second race, that so we may know something of this
"third. Psammetichus thought that he had hit upon the ingenious discovery of the primeval
man. He is said to have removed certain new-born infants from all human intercourse, and
to have entrusted them to a nurse, whom he had previously deprived of her tongue, in order
that, being completely exiled from all sound of the human voice, they might form their
speech without hearing it; and thus, deriving it from themselves alone, might indicate
what that first nation was whose speech was dictated by nature. Their first utterance was
Bekkos, a word which means "bread" in the language of Phrygia: the Phrygians, therefore,
are supposed to be the first of the human race. But it will not be out of place if we make
one observation, with a view to show how your faith abandons itself more to vanities than
to verities. Can it be, then, at all credible that the nurse retained her life, after the
loss of so important a member, the very organ of the breath of life, -cut out, too, from
the very root, with her throat mutilated, which cannot be wounded even on the outside
without danger, and the putrid gore flowing back to the chest, and deprived for so long a
time of her food?

2 Come, even suppose that by the remedies of a Philomela she retained her life, in the way
supposed by wisest persons, who account for the dumbness not by cutting out the tongue,
but from the blush of shame; if on such a supposition she lived, she would still be able
to blurt out some dull sound. And a shrill inarticulate noise from opening the mouth only,
without any modulation of the lips, might be forced from the mere throat, though there
were no tongue to help. This, it is probable, the infants readily imitated, and the more
so because it was the only sound; only they did it a little more neatly, as they had
tongues; and then they attached to it a definite signification. Granted, then, that the
Phrygians were the earliest race, it does not follow that the Christians are the third.
For how many other nations come regularly after the Phrygians? Take care, however, lest
those whom you call the third race should obtain the first rank, since there is no nation
indeed which is not Christian. Whatever nation, therefore, was the first, is nevertheless
Christian now. It is ridiculous folly which makes you say we are the latest race, and then
specifically call us the third. But it is in respect of our religion. not of our nation,
that we are supposed to be the third; the series being the Romans, the Jews, and the
Christians after them. Where, then, are the Greeks?

3 or if they are reckoned amongst the Romans in regard to their superstition (since it was
from Greece that Rome borrowed even her gods), where at least are the Egyptians, since
these have, so far as I know, a mysterious religion peculiar to themselves? Now, if they
who belong to the third race are so monstrous, what must they be supposed to be who
preceded them in the first and the second place?

CHAPTER IX. -THE CHRISTIANS ARE NOT THE CAUSE OF PUBLIC CALAMITIES: THERE WERE SUCH TROUBLES BEFORE CHRISTIANITY.

1 But why should I be astonished at your vain imputations? Under the same natural form,
malice and folly have always been associated in one body and growth, and have ever opposed
us under the One instigator of error. Indeed, I feel no astonishment; and therefore, as it
is necessary for my subject, I will enumerate some instances, that you may feel the
astonishment by the enumeration of the folly into which you fall, when you insist on our
being the causes of every public calamity or injury. If the Tiber has overflowed its
banks, if the Nile has remained in its bed, if the sky has been still, or the earth been
in commotion, if death has made its devastations, or famine its afflictions, your cry
immediately is, "This is the fault of the Christians! As if they who fear the true God
could have to fear a light thing, or at least anything else (than an earthquake or famine,
or such visitations). I suppose it is as despisers of your gods that we call down on us
these strokes of theirs. As we have remarked already, three hundred years have not yet
passed in our existence; but what vast scourges before that time fell on all the world, on
its various cities and provinces! what terrible wars, both foreign and domestic! what
pestilences, famines, conflagrations, yawnings, and quakings of the earth has history
recorded! Where were the Christians, then, when the Roman state furnished so many
chronicles of its disasters?

2 Where were the Christians when the islands Hiera, Anaphe, and Delos, and Rhodes, and Cea
were desolated with multitudes of men? or, again, when the land mentioned by Plato as
larger than Asia or Africa was sunk in the Atlantic Sea? or when fire from heaven
overwhelmed Volsinii, and flames from their own mountain consumed Pompeii? when the sea of
Corinth was engulphed by an earthquake? when the whole world was destroyed by the deluge?
Where then were (I will not say the Christians, who despise your gods, but) your gods
themselves, who are proved to be of later origin than that great ruin by the very places
and cities in which they were born, sojourned, and were buried, and even those which they
founded? For else they would not have remained to the present day, unless they had been
more recent than that catastrophe, If you do not care to peruse and reflect upon these
testimonies of history, the record of which affects you differently from us, in order
especially that you may not have to tax your gods with extreme injustice, since they
injure even their worshippers on account of their despisers, do you not then prove
yourselves to be also in the wrong, when you hold them to be gods, who make no distinction
between the deserts of yourselves and profane persons?

3 If, however, as it is now and then very vainly said, you incur the chastisement of your
gods because you are too slack in our extirpation, you then have settled the question of
their weakness and insignificance; for they would not be angry with you for loitering over
our punishment, if they could do anything themselves,-although you admit the same thing
indeed in another way, whenever by inflicting punishment on us you seem to be avenging
them. If one interest is maintained by another party, that which defends is the greater of
the two. What a shame, then, must it be for gods to be defended by a human being!

CHAPTER X. -THE CHRISTIANS ARE NOT THE ONLY CONTEMNERS OF THE GODS. CONTEMPT OF THEM OFTEN DISPLAYED BY HEATHEN OFFICIAL PERSONS. HOMER MADE THE GODS CONTEMPTIBLE.

1 Pour out now all your venom; fling against this name of ours all your shafts of calumny:
I shall stay no longer to refute them; but they shall by and by be blunted, when we come
to explain our entire discipline. I shall content myself now indeed with plucking these
shafts out of our own body, and hurling them back on yourselves. The same wounds which you
have inflicted on us by your charges I shall show to be imprinted on yourselves, that you
may fall by your own swords and javelins. Now, first, when you direct against us the
general charge of divorcing ourselves from the institutions of our forefathers, consider
again and again whether you are not yourselves open to that accusation in common with us.
For when I look through your life and customs, lo, what do I discover but the old order of
things corrupted, nay, destroyed by you? Of the laws I have already said, that you are
daily supplanting them with novel decrees and statutes. As to everything else in your
manner of life, how great are the changes you have made from your ancestors-in your style,
your dress, your equipage, your very food, and even in your speech; for the old-fashioned
you banish, as if it were offensive to you! Everywhere, in your public pursuits and
private duties, antiquity is repealed; all the authority of your forefathers your own
authority has superseded. To be sure, you are for ever praising old customs;

2 but this is only to your greater discredit, for you nevertheless persistently reject
them. How great must your perverseness have been, to have bestowed approbation on your
ancestors' institutions, which were too inefficient to be lasting, all the while that you
were rejecting the very objects of your approbation! But even that very heir-loom of your
forefathers, which you seem to guard and defend with greatest fidelity, in which you
actually find your strongest grounds for impeaching us as violators of the law, and from
which your hatred of the Christian name derives all its life-I mean the worship of the
gods-I shall prove to be undergoing ruin and contempt from yourselves no less than (from
us),-unless it be that there is no reason for our being regarded as despisers of the gods
like yourselves, on the ground that nobody despises what he knows has absolutely no
existence. What certainly exists can be despised. That which is nothing, suffers nothing.
From those, therefore, to whom it is an existing thing, must necessarily proceed the
suffering which affects it. All the heavier, then, is the accusation which burdens you who
believe that there are gods and (at the same time) despise them, who worship and also
reject them, who honour and also assail them. One may also gather the same conclusion from
this consideration, above all: since you worship various gods, some one and some another,
you of course despise those which you do not worship.

3 A preference for the one is not possible without slighting the other, and no choice can
be made without a rejection. He who selects some one out of many, has already slighted the
other which he does not select. But it is impossible that so many and so great gods can be
worshipped by all. Then you must have exercised your contempt (in this matter) even at the
beginning, since indeed you were not then afraid of so ordering things, that all the gods
could not become objects of worship to all. For those very wise and prudent ancestors of
yours, whose institutions you know not how to repeal, especially in respect of your gods,
are themselves found to have been impious. I am much mistaken, if they did not sometimes
decree that no general should dedicate a temple, which he may have vowed in battle, before
the senate gave its sanction; as in the case of Marcus ¦milius, who had made a vow to the
god Alburnus. Now is it not confessedly the greatest impiety, nay, the greatest insult, to
place the honour of the Deity at the will and pleasure of human judgment, so that there
cannot be a god except the senate permit him? Many times have the censors destroyed (a
god) without consulting the people. Father Bacchus, with all his ritual, was certainly by
the consuls, on the senate's authority, cast not only out of the city, but out of all
Italy;

4 whilst Varro informs us that Serapis also, and Isis, and Arpocrates, and Anubis, were
excluded from the Capitol, and that their altars which the senate had thrown down were
only restored by the popular violence. The Consul Gabinius, however, on the first day of
the ensuing January, although he gave a tardy consent to some sacrifices, in deference to
the crowd which assembled, because he had failed to decide about Serapis and Isis, yet
held the judgment of the senate to be more potent than the clamour of the multitude, and
forbade the altars to be built. Here, then, you have amongst your own forefathers, if not
the name, at all events the procedure, of the Christians, which despises the gods. If,
however, you were even innocent of the charge of treason against them in the honour you
pay them, I still find that you have made a consistent advance in superstition as well as
impiety. For how much more irreligious are you found to be! There are your household gods,
the Lares and the Penates, which you possess by a family consecration: you even tread them
profanely under foot, you and your domestics, by hawking and pawning them for your wants
or your whims. Such insolent sacrilege might be excusable, if it were not practised
against your humbler deities; as it is, the case is only the more insolent. There is,
however, some consolation for your private household gods under these affronts, that you
treat your public deities with still greater indignity and insolence.

5 First of all, you advertise them for auction, submit them to public sale, knock them
down to the highest bidder, when you every five years bring them to the hammer among your
revenues. For this purpose you frequent the temple of Serapis or the Capitol, hold your
sales there, conclude your contracts, as if they were markets, with the well-known voice
of the crier, (and) the self-same levy of the quaelig;stor. Now lands become cheaper when
burdened with tribute, and men by the capitation tax diminish in value (these are the
well-known marks of slavery). But the gods, the more tribute they pay, become more holy;
or rather, the more holy they are, the more tribute do they pay. Their majesty is
converted into an article of traffic; men drive a business with their religion; the
sanctity of the gods is beggared with sales and contracts. You make merchandise of the
ground of your temples, of the approach to your altars, of your offerings, of your
sacrifices. You sell the whole divinity (of your gods). You will not permit their
gratuitous worship. The auctioneers necessitate more repairs than the priests.

6 It was not enough that you had insolently made a profit of your gods, if we would test
the amount of your contempt; and you are not content to have withheld honour from them,
you must also depreciate the little you do render to them by some indignity or other.
What, indeed, do you do by way of honouring your gods, which you do not equally offer to
your dead? You build temples for the gods, you erect temples also to the dead; you build
altars for the gods, you build them also for the dead; you inscribe the same
superscription over both; you sketch out the same lineaments for their statues-as best
suits their genius, or profession, or age; you make an old man of Saturn, a beardless
youth of Apollo; you form a virgin from Diana; in Mars you consecrate a soldier, a
blacksmith in Vulcan. No wonder, therefore, if you slay the same victims and burn the same
odours for your dead as you do for your gods. What excuse can be found for that insolence
which classes the dead of whatever sort as equal with the gods? Even to your princes there
are assigned the services of priests and sacred ceremonies, and chariots, and cars, and
the honours of the solisternia and the lectisternia, holidays and games. Rightly enough,
since heaven is open to them; still it is none the less contumelious to the gods:

7 in the first place, because it could not possibly be decent that other beings should be
numbered with them, even if it has been given to them to become divine after their birth;
in the second place, because the witness who beheld the man caught up into heaven would
not forswear himself so freely and palpably before the people, if it were not for the
contempt felt about the objects sworn to both by himself and those who allow the perjury.
For these feel of themselves, that what is sworn to is nothing; and more than that, they
go so far as to fee the witness, because he had the courage to publicly despise the
avengers of perjury. Now, as to that, who among you is pure of the charge of perjury? By
this time, indeed, there is an end to all danger in swearing by the gods, since the oath
by Caesar carries with it more influential scruples, which very circumstance indeed tends
to the degradation of your gods; for those who perjure themselves when swearing by Caesar
are more readily punished than those who violate an oath to a Jupiter. But, of the two
kindred feelings of contempt and derision, contempt is the more honourable, having a
certain glory in its arrogance; for it sometimes proceeds from confidence, or the security
of consciousness, or a natural loftiness of mind. Derision, however, is a more wanton
feeling, and so far it points more directly to a carping insolence.

8 Now only consider what great deriders of your gods you show yourselves to be! I say
nothing of your indulgence of this feeling during your sacrificial acts, how you offer for
your victims the poorest and most emaciated creatures; or else of the sound and healthy
animals only the portions which are useless for food, such as the heads and hoofs, or the
plucked feathers and hair, and whatever at home you would have thrown away. I pass over
whatever may seem to the taste of the vulgar and profane to have constituted the religion
of your forefathers; but then the most learned and serious classes (for seriousness and
wisdom to some extent profess to be derived from learning) are always, in fact, the most
irreverent towards your gods; and if their learning ever halts, it is only to make up for
the remissness by a more shameful invention of follies and falsehoods about their gods. I
will begin with that enthusiastic fondness which you show for him from whom every depraved
writer gets his dreams, to whom you ascribe as much honour as you derogate from your gods,
by magnifying him who has made such sport of them. I mean Homer by this description. He it
is, in my opinion, who has treated the majesty of the Divine Being on the low level of
human condition, imbuing the gods with the falls and the passions of men; who has pitted
them against each other with varying success, like pairs of gladiators:

9 he wounds Venus with an arrow from a human hand; he keeps Mars a prisoner in chains for
thirteen months, with the prospect of perishing; he parades Jupiter as suffering a like
indignity from a crowd of celestial (rebels; ) or he draws from him tears for Sarpedon; or
he represents him wantoning with Juno in the most disgraceful way, advocating his
incestuous passion for her by a description and enumeration of his various amours. Since
then, which of the poets has not, on the authority of their great prince, calumniated the
gods, by either betraying truth or feigning falsehood? Have the dramatists also, whether
in tragedy or comedy, refrained from making the gods the authors of the calamities and
retributions (of their plays)? I say nothing of your philosophers, whom a certain
inspiration of truth itself elevates against the gods, and secures from all fear in their
proud severity and stern discipline. Take, for example, Socrates. In contempt of your
gods, he swears by an oak, and a dog, and a goat. Now, although he was condemned to die
for this very reason, the Athenians afterwards repented of that condemnation, and even put
to death his accusers. By this conduct of theirs the testimony of Socrates is replaced at
its full value, and I am enabled to meet you with this retort, that in his case you have
approbation bestowed on that which is now-a-days reprobated in us. But besides this
instance there is Diogenes, who, I know not to what extent, made sport of Hercules;

10 whilst Varro, that Diogenes of the Roman cut, introduces to our view some three hundred
Joves, or, as they ought to be called, Jupiters, (and all) without heads. Your other
wanton wits likewise minister to your pleasures by disgracing the gods. Examine carefully
the sacrilegious beauties of your Lentuli and Hostii; now, is it the players or your gods
who become the objects of your mirth in their tricks and jokes? Then, again, with what
pleasure do you take up the literature of the stage, which describes all the foul conduct
of the gods! Their majesty is defiled in your presence in some unchaste body. The mask of
some deity, at your will, covers some infamous paltry head. The Sun mourns for the death
of his son by a lightning-flash amid your rude rejoicing. Cybele sighs for a shepherd who
disdains her, without raising a blush on your cheek; and you quietly endure songs which
celebrate the gallantries of Jove. You are, of course, possessed of a more religious
spirit in the show of your gladiators, when your gods dance, with equal zest, over the
spilling of human blood, (and) over those filthy penalties which are at once their proof
and plot for executing your criminals, or else (when) your criminals are punished
personating the gods themselves. We have often witnessed in a mutilated criminal your god
of Pessinum, Attis; a wretch burnt alive has personated Hercules.

11 We have laughed at the sport of your mid-day game of the gods, when Father Pluto,
Jove's own brother, drags away, hammer in hand, the remains of the gladiators; when
Mercury, with his winged cap and heated wand, tests with his cautery whether the bodies
were really lifeless, or only feigning death. Who now can investigate every particular of
this sort although so destructive of the honour of the Divine Being, and so humiliating to
His majesty? They all, indeed, have their origin in a contempt (of the gods), on the part
both of those who practise these personations, as well as of those who are susceptible of
being so represented. I hardly know, therefore, whether your gods have more reason to
complain of yourselves or of us. After despising them on the one hand, you flatter them on
the other; if you fail in any duty towards them, you appease them with a fee; in short,
you allow yourselves to act towards them in any way you please. We, however, live in a
consistent and entire aversion to them.

CHAPTER XI. -THE ABSURD CAVIL OF THE ASS'SHEAD DISPOSED OF.

1 In this matter we are (said to be) guilty not merely of forsaking the religion of the
community, but of introducing a monstrous superstition; for some among you have dreamed
that our god is an ass's head,-an absurdity which Cornelius Tacitus first suggested. In
the fourth book of his histories, where he is treating of the Jewish war, he begins his
description with the origin of that nation, and gives his own views respecting both the
origin and the name of their religion. He relates that the Jews, in their migration in the
desert, when suffering for want of water, escaped by following for guides some wild asses,
which they supposed to be going in quest of water after pasture, and that on this account
the image of one of these animals was worshipped by the Jews. From this, I suppose, it was
presumed that we, too, from our close connection with the Jewish religion, have ours
consecrated under the same emblematic form. The same Cornelius Tacitus, however,-who, to
say the truth, is most loquacious in falsehood-forgetting his later statement, relates how
Pompey the Great, after conquering the Jews and capturing Jerusalem, entered the temple,
but found nothing in the shape of an image, though he examined the place carefully. Where,
then, should their God have been found? Nowhere else, of course than in so memorable a
temple which was carefully shut to all but the priests, and into which there could be no
fear of a stranger entering.

2 But what apology must I here offer for what I am going to say, when I have no other
object at the moment than to make a passing remark or two in a general way which shall be
equally applicable to yourselves? Suppose that our God, then, be an asinine person, will
you at all events deny that you possess the same characteristics with ourselves in that
matter? (Not their heads only, but) entire asses, are, to be sure, objects of adoration to
you, along with their tutelar Epona; and all herds, and cattle, and beasts you consecrate,
and their stables into the bargain! This, perhaps, is your grievance against us, that,
when surrounded by cattle-worshippers of every kind we are simply devoted to asses!

CHAPTER XII. -THE CHARGE OF WORSHIPPING A CROSS. THE HEATHENS THEMSELVES MADE MUCH OF CROSSES IN SACRED THINGS; NAY, THEIR VERY IDOLS WERE FORMED ON A CRUCIAL FRAME.

1 As for him who affirms that we are "the priesthood of a cross," we shall claim him as
our co-religionist. A cross is, in its material, a sign of wood; amongst yourselves also
the object of worship is a wooden figure. Only, whilst with you the figure is a human one,
with us the wood is its own figure. Never mind for the present what is the shape, provided
the material is the same: the form, too, is of no importance, if so be it be the actual
body of a god. If, however, there arises a question of difference on this point what, (let
me ask, ) is the difference between the Athenian Pallas, or the Pharian Ceres, and wood
formed into a cross, when each is represented by a rough stock, without form, and by the
merest rudiment of a statue of unformed wood? Every piece of timber which is fixed in the
ground in an erect position is a part of a cross, and indeed the greater portion of its
mass. But an entire cross is attributed to us, with its transverse beam, of course, and
its projecting seat. Now you have the less to excuse you, for you dedicate to religion
only a mutilated imperfect piece of wood, while others consecrate to the sacred purpose a
complete structure. The truth, however, after all is, that your religion is all cross, as
I shall show. You are indeed unaware that your gods in their origin have proceeded from
this hated cross.

2 Now, every image, whether carved out of wood or stone, or molten in metal, or produced
out of any other richer material, must needs have had plastic hands engaged in its
formation. Well, then, this modeller, before he did anything else, hit upon the form of a
wooden cross, because even our own body assumes as its natural position the latent and
concealed outline of a cross. Since the head rises upwards, and the back takes a straight
direction, and the shoulders project laterally, if you simply place a man with his arms
and hands outstretched, you will make the general outline of a cross. Starting, then, from
this rudimental form and prop, as it were, he applies a covering of clay, and so gradually
completes the limbs, and forms the body, and covers the cross within with the shape which
he meant to impress upon the clay; then from this design, with the help of compasses and
leaden moulds, he has got all ready for his image which is to be brought out into marble,
or clay, or whatever the material be of which he has determined to make his god. (This,
then, is the process: ) after the cross-shaped frame, the clay; after the clay, the god.
In a well-understood routine, the cross passes into a god through the clayey medium. The
cross then you consecrate, and from it the consecrated (deity) begins to derive his
origin.

3 By way of example, let us take the case of a tree which grows up into a system of
branches and foliage, and is a reproduction of its own kind, whether it springs from the
kernel of an olive, or the stone of a peach, or a grain of pepper which has been duly
tempered under ground. Now, if you transplant it, or take a cutting off its branches for
another plant, to what will you attribute what is produced by the propagation? Will it not
be to the grain, or the stone, or the kernel? Because, as the third stage is attributable
to the second, and the second in like manner to the first, so the third will have to be
referred to the first, through the second as the mean. We need not stay any longer in the
discussion of this point, since by a natural law every kind of produce throughout nature
refers back its growth to its original source; and just as the product is comprised in its
primal cause, so does that cause agree in character with the thing produced. Since, then,
in the production of your gods, you worship the cross which originates them, here will be
the original kernel and grain, from which are propagated the wooden materials of your
idolatrous images. Examples are not far to seek. Your victories you celebrate with
religious ceremony as deities; and they are the more august in proportion to the joy they
bring you. The frames on which you hang up your trophies must be crosses:

4 these are, as it were, the very core of your pageants. Thus, in your victories, the
religion of your camp makes even crosses objects of worship; your standards it adores,
your standards are the sanction of its oaths; your standards it prefers before Jupiter
himself, But all that parade of images, and that display of pure gold, are (as so many)
necklaces of the crosses. in like manner also, in the banners and ensigns, which your
soldiers guard with no less sacred care, you have the streamers (and) vestments of your
crosses. You are ashamed, I suppose, to worship unadorned and simple crosses.

CHAPTER XIII. -THE CHARGE OF WORSHIPPING THE SUN MET BY A RETORT.

Others, with greater regard to good manners, it must be confessed, suppose that the sun is
the god of the Christians, because it is a well-known fact that we pray towards the east,
or because we make Sunday a day of festivity. What then? Do you do less than this? Do not
many among you, with an affectation of sometimes worshipping the heavenly bodies likewise,
move your lips in the direction of the sunrise? It is you, at all events, who have even
admitted the sun into the calendar of the week; and you have selected its day, in
preference to the preceding day as the most suitable in the week for either an entire
abstinence from the bath, or for its postponement until the evening, or for taking rest
and for banqueting. By resorting to these customs, you deliberately deviate from your own
religious rites to those of strangers. For the Jewish feasts on the Sabbath and "the
Purification," and Jewish also are the ceremonies of the lamps, and the fasts of
unleavened bread, and the "littoral prayers," all which institutions and practices are of
course foreign from your gods. Wherefore, that I may return from this digression, you who
reproach us with the sun and Sunday should consider your proximity to us. We are not far
off from your Saturn and your days of rest.

CHAPTER XIV. -THE VILE CALUMNY ABOUT ONOCOETES RETORTED ON THE HEATHEN BY TERTULLIAN.

Report has introduced a new calumny respecting our God. Not so long ago, a most abandoned
wretch in that city of yours, a man who had deserted indeed his own religion-a Jew, in
fact, who had only lost his skin, flayed of course by wild beasts, against which he enters
the lists for hire day after day with a sound body, and so in a condition to lose his skin
-carried about in public a caricature of us with this label: Onocoetes. This (figure) had
ass's ears, and was dressed in a toga with a book, having a hoof on one of his feet. And
the crowd believed this infamous Jew. For what other set of men is the seed-plot of all
the calumny against us? Throughout the city, therefore, <i>onocoetes is all the talk. As,
however, it is less then "a nine days' wonder," and so destitute of all authority from
time, and weak enough from the character of its author, I shall gratify myself by using it
simply in the way of a retort. Let us then see whether you are not here also found in our
company. Now it matters not what their form may be, when our concern is about deformed
images. You have amongst you gods with a dog's head, and a lion's head, with the horns of
a cow, and a ram, and a goat, goat-shaped or serpent-shaped, and winged in foot, head, and
back. Why therefore brand our one God so conspicuously? Many an <i>onocoetes is found
amongst yourselves.

CHAPTER XV. -THE CHARGE OF INFANTICIDE RETORTED ON THE HEATHEN.

1 Since we are on a par in respect of the gods, it follows that there is no difference
between us on the point of sacrifice, or even of worship, if I may be allowed to make good
our comparison from another sort of evidence. We begin our religious service, or initiate
our mysteries, with slaying an infant. As for you, since your own transactions in human
blood and infanticide have faded from your memory, you shall be duly reminded of them in
the proper place; we now postpone most of the instances, that we may not seem to be
everywhere handling the selfsame topics. Meanwhile, as I have said, the comparison between
us does not fail in another point of view. For if we are infanticides in one sense, you
also can hardly be deemed such in any other sense; because, although you are forbidden by
the laws to slay new-born infants, it so happens that no laws are evaded with more
impunity or greater safety, with the deliberate knowledge of the public, and the suffrages
of this entire age. Yet there is no great difference between us, only you do not kill your
infants in the way of a sacred rite, nor (as a service) to God. But then you make away
with them in a more cruel manner, because you expose them to the cold and hunger, and to
wild beasts, or else you get rid of them by the slower death of drowning.

2 If, however, there does occur any dissimilarity between us in this matter, you must not
overlook the fact that it is your own dear children whose life you quench; and this will
supplement, nay, abundantly aggravate, on your side of the question, whatever is defective
in us on other grounds. Well, but we are said to sup off our impious sacrifice! Whilst we
postpone to a more suitable place whatever resemblance even to this practice is
discoverable amongst yourselves, we are not far removed from you in voracity. If in the
one case there is unchastity, and in ours cruelty, we are still on the same footing (if I
may so far admit our guilt ) in nature, where cruelty is always found in concord with
unchastity. But, after all, what do you less than we; or rather, what do you not do in
excess of us? I wonder whether it be a small matter to you to pant for human entrails,
because you devour full-grown men alive? Is it, forsooth, only a trifle to lick up human
blood, when you draw out the blood which was destined to live? Is it a light thing in your
view to feed on an infant, when you consume one wholly before it is come to the birth?

CHAPTER XVI. -OTHER CHARGES REPELLED BY THE SAME METHOD. THE STORY OF THE NOBLE ROMAN YOUTH AND HIS PARENTS.

1 I am now come to the hour for extinguishing the lamps, and for using the dogs, and
practising the deeds of darkness. And on this point I am afraid I must succumb to you; for
what similar accusation shall I have to bring against you? But you should at once commend
the cleverness with which we make our incest look modest, in that we have devised a
spurious night, to avoid polluting the real light and darkness, and have even thought it
right to dispense with earthly lights, and to play tricks also with our conscience. For
whatever we do ourselves, we suspect in others when we choose (to be suspicious). As for
your incestuous deeds, on the contrary, men enjoy them at full liberty, in the face of
day, or in the natural night, or before high Heaven; and in proportion to their successful
issue is your own ignorance of the result, since you publicly indulge in your incestuous
intercourse in the full cognizance of broad day-light. (No ignorance, however, conceals
our conduct from our eyes, ) for in the very darkness we are able to recognise our own
misdeeds. The Persians, you know very well, according to Ctesias, live quite promiscuously
with their mothers, in full knowledge of the fact, and without any horror; whilst of the
Macedonians it is well known that they constantly do the same thing, and with perfect
approbation: for once, when the blinded îdipus came upon their stage, they greeted him
with laughter and derisive cheers.

2 The actor, taking off his mask in great alarm, said, "Gentlemen, have I displeased you?
""Certainly not," replied the Macedonians, "you have played your part well enough; but
either the author was very silly, if he invented (this mutilation as an atonement for the
incest), or else îdipus was a great fool for his pains if he really so punished himself;
"and then they shouted out one to the other, $Hlsune ei0j th\ n mhte/ra. But how
insignificant, (say you, ) is the stain which one or two nations can make on the whole
world! As for us, we of course have infected the very sun, polluted the entire ocean!
Quote, then, one nation which is free from the passions which allure the whole race of men
to incest! If there is a single nation which knows nothing of concubinage through the
necessity of age and sex-to say nothing of lust and licentiousness-that nation will be a
stranger to incest. If any nature can be found so peculiarly removed from the human state
as to be liable neither to ignorance, nor error, nor misfortune, that alone may be adduced
with any consistency as an answer to the Christians. Reflect, therefore, on the
licentiousness which floats about amongst men's passions as if they were the winds, and
consider whether there be any communities which the full and strong tides of passion fail
to waft to the commission of this great sin.

3 In the first place, when you expose your infants to the mercy of others, or leave them
for adoption to better parents than yourselves, do you forget what an opportunity for
incest is furnished, how wide a scope is opened for its accidental commission?
Undoubtedly, such of you as are more serious from a principle of self-restraint and
careful reflection, abstain from lusts which could produce results of such a kind, in
whatever place you may happen to be, at home or abroad, so that no indiscriminate
diffusion of seed, or licentious reception thereof, will produce children to you unawares,
such as their very parents, or else other children, might encounter in inadvertent incest,
for no restraint from age is regarded in (the importunities of) lust. All acts of
adultery, all cases of fornication, all the licentiousness of public brothels, whether
committed at home or perpetrated out of doors, serve to produce confusions of blood and
complications of natural relationship, and thence to conduce to incest; from which
consummation your players and buffoons draw the materials of their exhibitions. It was
from such a source, too, that so flagrant a tragedy recently burst upon the public as that
which the prefect Fuscianus had judicially to decide. A boy of noble birth, who, by the
unintentional neglect of his attendants, had strolled too far from home, was decoyed by
some passers-by, and carried off. The paltry Greek who had the care of him, or somebody
else, in true Greek fashion, had gone into the house and captured him.

4 Having been taken away into Asia, he is brought, when arrived at full age, back to Rome,
and exposed for sale. His own father buys him unawares, and treats him as a Greek.
Afterwards, as was his wont, the youth is sent by his master into the fields, chained as a
slave. Thither the tutor and the nurse had already been banished for punishment. The whole
case is represented to them; they relate each other's misfortunes: they, on the one hand,
how they had lost their ward when he was a boy; he, on the other hand, that he had been
lost from his boyhood. But they agreed in the main, that he was a native of Rome of a
noble family; perhaps he further gave sure proofs of his identity. Accordingly, as God
willed it for the purpose of fastening a stain upon that age, a presentiment about the
time excites him, the periods exactly suit his age, even his eyes help to recall his
features, some peculiar marks on his body are enumerated His master and mistress, who are
now no other than his own father and mother, anxiously urge a protracted inquiry. The
slave-dealer is examined, the unhappy truth is all discovered. When their wickedness
becomes manifest, the parents find a remedy for their despair by hanging themselves; to
their son, who survives the miserable calamity, their property is awarded by the prefect,
not as an inheritance, but as the wages of infamy and incest.

5 That one case was a sufficient example for public exposure of the sins of this sort
which are secretly perpetrated among you. Nothing happens among men in solitary isolation.
But, as it seems to me, it is only in a solitary case that such a charge can be drawn out
against us, even in the mysteries of our religion. You ply us evermore with this charge;
yet there are like delinquencies to be traced amongst you, even in your ordinary course of
life.

CHAPTER XVII. -THE CHRISTIAN REFUSAL TO SWEAR BY THE GENIUS OF C¦SAR. FLIPPANCY AND IRREVERENCE RETORTED ON THE HEATHEN.

1 As to your charges of obstinacy and presumption, whatever you allege against us, even in
these respects, there are not wanting points in which you will bear a comparison with us.
Our first step in this contumacious conduct concerns that which is ranked by you
immediately after the worship due to God, that is, the worship due to the majesty of the
Caesars, in respect of which we are charged with being irreligious towards them, since we
neither propitiate their images nor swear by their genius. We are called enemies of the
people. Well, be it so; yet at the same time (it must not be forgotten, that) the emperors
find enemies amongst you heathen, and are constantly getting surnames to signalize their
triumphs-one becoming Parthicus, and another Medicus and Germanicus. On this head the
Roman people must see to it who they are amongst whom there still remain nations which are
unsubdued and foreign to their rule. But, at all events, you are of us, and yet you
conspire against us. (In reply, we need only state) a well-known fact, that we acknowledge
the fealty of Romans to the emperors. No conspiracy has ever broken out from our body: no
Caesar's blood has ever fixed a stain upon us, in the senate or even in the palace; no
assumption of the purple has ever in any of the provinces been affected by us. The Syrias
still exhale the odours of their corpses; still do the Gauls fail to wash away (their
blood) in the waters of their Rhone.

2 our allegations of our insanity I omit, because they do not compromise the Roman name.
But I will grapple with the charge of sacrilegious vanity, and remind you of the
irreverence of your own lower classes, and the scandalous lampoons of which the statues
are so cognizant, and the sneers which are sometimes uttered at the public games, and the
curses with which the circus resounds. If not in arms, you are in tongue at all events
always rebellious. But I suppose it is quite another affair to refuse to swear by the
genius of Caesar? For it is fairly open to doubt as to who are perjurers on this point,
when you do not swear honestly even by your gods. Well, we do not call the emperor God;
for on this point sannam facimus, as the saying is. But the truth is, that you who call
Caesar God both mock him, by calling him what he is not, and curse him, because he does
not want to be what you call him. For he prefers living to being made a god.

CHAPTER XVIII. -CHRISTIANS CHARGED WITH AN OBSTINATE CONTEMPT OF DEATH. INSTANCES OF THE SAME ARE FOUND AMONGST THE HEATHEN.

1 The rest of your charge of obstinacy against us you sum up in this indictment, that we
boldly refuse neither your swords, nor your crosses, nor your wild beasts, nor fire, nor
tortures, such is our obduracy and contempt of death. But (you are inconsistent in your
charges); for in former times amongst your own ancestors all these terrors have come in
men's intrepidity not only to be despised, but even to be held in great praise. How many
swords there were, and what brave men were willing to suffer by them, it were irksome to
enumerate. (If we take the torture) of the cross, of which so many instances have
occurred, exquisite in cruelty, your own Regulus readily initiated the suffering which up
to his day was without a precedent; a queen of Egypt used wild beasts of her own (to
accomplish her death); the Carthaginian woman, who in the last extremity of her country
was more courageous than her husband Asdrubal, only followed the example, set long before
by Dido herself, of going through fire to her death. Then, again, a woman of Athens defied
the tyrant, exhausted his tortures, and at last, lest her person and sex might succumb
through weakness, she bit off her tongue and spat out of her mouth the only possible
instrument of a confession which was now out of her power. But in your own instance you
account such deeds glorious, in ours obstinate. Annihilate now the glory of your
ancestors, in order that you may thereby annihilate us also.

2 Be content from henceforth to repeal the praises of your forefathers, in order that you
may not have to accord commendation to us for the same (sufferings). Perhaps (you will
say) the character of a more robust age may have rendered the spirits of antiquity more
enduring. Now, however, (we enjoy) the blessing of quietness and peace; so that the minds
and dispositions of men (should be) more tolerant even towards strangers. Well, you
rejoin, be it so: you may compare yourselves with the ancients; we must needs pursue with
hatred all that we find in you offensive to ourselves, because it does not obtain currency
among us. Answer me, then, on each particular case by itself. I am not seeking for
examples on a uniform scale. Since, forsooth, the sword through their contempt of death
produced stories of heroism amongst your ancestors, it is not, of course, from love of
life that you go to the trainers sword in hand and offer yourselves as gladiators, (nor)
through fear of death do you enrol your names in the army. Since an ordinary woman makes
her death famous by wild beasts, it cannot but be of your own pure accord that you
encounter wild beasts day after day in the midst of peaceful times.

3 Although no longer any Regulus among you has raised a cross as the instrument of his own
crucifixion, yet a contempt of the fire has even now displayed itself, since one of
yourselves very lately has offered for a wager to go to any place which may be fixed upon
and put on the burning shirt. If a woman once defiantly danced beneath the scourge, the
same feat has been very recently performed again by one of your own (circus-) hunters as
he traversed the appointed course, not to mention the famous sufferings of the Spartans.

CHAPTER XIX. -IF CHRISTIANS AND THE HEATHEN THUS RESEMBLE EACH OTHER, THERE IS GREAT DIFFERENCE IN THE GROUNDS AND NATURE OF THEIR APPARENTLY SIMILAR CONDUCT.

Here end, I suppose, your tremendous charges of obstinacy against the Christians. Now,
since we are amenable to them in common with yourselves, it only remains that we compare
the grounds which the respective parties have for being personally derided. All our
obstinacy, however, is with you a foregone conclusion, based on our strong convictions;
for we take for granted a resurrection of the dead. Hope in this resurrection amounts to a
contempt of death. Ridicule, therefore, as much as you like the excessive stupidity of
such minds as die that they may live; but then, in order that you may be able to laugh
more merrily, and deride us with greater boldness, you must take your sponge, or perhaps
your tongue, and wipe away those records of yours every now and then cropping out, which
assert in not dissimilar terms that souls will return to bodies. But how much more worthy
of acceptance is our belief which maintains that they will return to the same bodies! And
how much more ridiculous is your inherited conceit, that the human spirit is to reappear
in a dog, or a mule, or a peacock! Again, we affirm that a judgment has been ordained by
God according to the merits of every man. This you ascribe to Minos and Rhadamanthus,
while at the same time you reject Aristides, who was a juster judge than either. By the
award of the judgment, we say that the wicked will have to spend an eternity in endless
fire, the pious and innocent in a region of bliss. In your view likewise an unalterable
condition is ascribed to the respective destinations of Pyriphlegethon and Elysium. Now
they are not merely your composers of myth and poetry who write songs of this strain; but
your philosophers also speak with all confidence of the return of souls to their former
state, and of the twofold award of a final judgment.

CHAPTER XX.-TRUTH AND REALITY PERTAIN TO CHRISTIANS ALONE. THE HEATHEN COUNSELLED TO EXAMINE AND EMBRACE IT.

1 How long therefore, O most unjust heathen, will you refuse to acknowledge us, and (what
is more) to execrate your own (worthies), since between us no distinction has place,
because we are one and the same? Since you do not (of course) hate what you yourselves
are, give us rather your right hands in fellowship, unite your salutations, mingle your
embraces, sanguinary with the sanguinary, incestuous with the Incestuous, conspirators
with conspirators, obstinate and vain with those of the selfsame qualities. In company
with each other, we have been traitors to the majesty of the gods; and together do we
provoke their indignation. You too have your "third race; " not indeed third in the way of
religious rite, but a third race in sex, and, made up as it is of male and female in one,
it is more fitted to men and women (for offices of lust). Well, then, do we offend you by
the very fact of our approximation and agreement? Being on a par is apt to furnish
unconsciously the materials for rivalry. Thus "a potter envies a potter, and a smith a
smith. But we must now discontinue this imaginary confession. Our conscience has returned
to the truth, and to the consistency of truth. For all those points which you allege
(against us) will be really found in ourselves alone;

2 and we alone can rebut them, against whom they are adduced, by getting you to listen to
the other side of the question, whence that full knowledge is learnt which both inspires
counsel and directs the judgment. Now it is in fact your own maxim, that no one should
determine a cause without hearing both sides of it; and it is only in our own case that
you neglect (the equitable principle). You indulge to the full that fault of human nature,
that those things which you do not disallow in yourselves you condemn in others, or you
boldly charge against others those things the guilt of which you retain a lasting
consciousness of in yourselves. The course of life in which you will choose to occupy
yourselves is different from ours: whilst chaste in the eyes of others, you are unchaste
towards your own selves; whilst vigorous against vice out of doors, you succumb to it at
home. This is the injustice (which we have to suffer), that, knowing truth, we are
condemned by those who know it not; free from guilt, we are judged by those who are
implicated in it. Remove the mote, or rather the beam, out of your own eye, that you may
be able to extract the mote from the eyes of others. Amend your own lives first, that you
may be able to punish the Christians. Only so far as you shall have effected your own
reformation, will you refuse to inflict punishment on them-nay, so far will you have
become Christians yourselves;

3 and as you shall have become Christians, so far will you have compassed your own
amendment of life. Learn what that is which you accuse in us, and you will accuse no
longer; search out what that is which you do not accuse in yourselves, and you will become
self-accusers. From these very few and humble remarks, so far as we have been able to open
out the subject to you, you will plainly get some insight into (your own) error, and some
discovery of our truth. Condemn that truth if you have the heart, but only after you have
examined it; and approve the error still, if you are so minded, only first explore it. But
if your prescribed rule is to love error and hate truth, why, (let me ask, ) do you not
probe to a full discovery the objects both of your love and your hatred?


TO THE NATIONS
==============

TO THE NATIONS continued

CHAPTER I.-THE HEATHEN GODS FROM HEATHEN AUTHORITIES. VARRO HAS WRITTEN A WORK ON THE SUBJECT. HIS THREEFOLD CLASSIFICATION. THE CHANGEABLE CHARACTER OF THAT WHICH OUGHT TO BE FIXED AND CERTAIN.

1 Our defence requires that we should at this point discuss with you the character of your
gods, O ye heathen, fit objects of our pity, appealing even to your own conscience to
determine whether they be truly gods, as you would have it supposed, or falsely, as you
are unwilling to have proved. Now this is the material part of human error, owing to the
wiles of its author, that it is never free from the ignorance of error, whence your guilt
is all the greater. Your eyes are open, yet they see not; your ears are unstopped, yet
they hear not; though your heart beats, it is yet dull, nor does your mind understand that
of which it is cognizant. If indeed the enormous perverseness (of your worship) could be
broken up by a single demurrer, we should have our objection ready to hand in the
declaration that, as we know all those gods of yours to have been instituted by men, all
belief in the true Deity is by this very circumstance brought to nought; because, of
course, nothing which some time or other had a beginning can rightly seem to be divine.
But the fact is, there are many things by which tenderness of conscience is hardened into
the callousness of wilful error. Truth is beleaguered with the vast force (of the enemy),
and yet how secure she is in her own inherent strength!

2 And naturally enough when from her very adversaries she gains to her side whomsoever she
will, as her friends and protectors, and prostrates the entire host of her assailants. It
is therefore against these things that our contest lies-against the institutions of our
ancestors, against the authority of tradition, the laws of our governors, and the
reasonings of the wise; against antiquity, custom, submission; against precedents,
prodigies, miracles,-all which things have had their part in consolidating that spurious
system of your gods. Wishing, then, to follow step by step your own commentaries which you
have drawn out of your theology of every sort (because the authority of learned men goes
further with you in matters of this kind than the testimony of facts), I have taken and
abridged the works of Varro; for he in his treatise Concerning Divine Things, collected
out of ancient digests, has shown himself a serviceable guide for us. Now, if I inquire of
him who were the subtle inventors of the gods, he points to either the philosophers, the
peoples, or the poets. For he has made a threefold distinction in classifying the gods:
one being the physical class, of which the philosophers treat; another the mythic class,
which is the constant burden of the poets; the third, the gentile class, which the nations
have adopted each one for itself.

3 When, therefore, the philosophers have ingeniously composed their physical (theology)
out of their own conjectures, when the poets have drawn their mythical from fables, and
the (several) nations have forged their gentile (polytheism) according to their own will,
where in the world must truth be placed? In the conjectures? Well, but these are only a
doubtful conception. In the fables? But they are at best an absurd story. In the popular
accounts? This sort of opinion, however, is only promiscuous and municipal. Now all things
with the philosophers are uncertain, because of their variation with the poets all is
worthless, because immoral; with the nations all is irregular and confused, because
dependent on their mere choice. The nature of God, however, if it be the true one with
which you are concerned, is of so definite a character as not to be derived from uncertain
speculations, nor contaminated with worthless fables, nor determined by promiscuous
conceits. It ought indeed to be regarded, as it really is, as certain, entire, universal,
because it is in truth the property of all. Now, what god shall I believe? One that has
been gauged by vague suspicion? One that history has divulged? One that a community has
invented? It would be a far worthier thing if I believed no god, than one which is open to
doubt, or full of shame, or the object of arbitrary selection.

CHAPTER II.-PHILOSOPHERS HAD NOT SUCCEEDED IN DISCOVERING GOD. THE UNCERTAINTY AND CONFUSION OF THEIR SPECULATIONS.

1 But the authority of the physical philosophers is maintained among you as the special
property. of wisdom. You mean of course, that pure and simple wisdom of the philosophers
which attests its own weakness mainly by that variety of opinion which proceeds from an
ignorance of the truth. Now what wise man is so devoid of truth, as not to know that God
is the Father and Lord of wisdom itself and truth? Besides, there is that divine oracle
uttered by Solomon: "The fear of the Lord," says he," is the beginning of wisdom. But fear
has its origin in knowledge; for how will a man fear that of which he knows nothing?
Therefore he who shall have the fear of God, even if he be ignorant of all things else, if
he has attained to the knowledge and truth of God, will possess full and perfect wisdom.
This, however, is what philosophy has not clearly realized. For although, in their
inquisitive disposition to search into all kinds of learning, the philosophers may seem to
have investigated the sacred Scriptures themselves for their antiquity, and to have
derived thence some of their opinions; yet because they have interpolated these deductions
they prove that they have either despised them wholly or have not fully believed them, for
in other cases also the simplicity of truth is shaken by the over-scrupulousness of an
irregular belief, and that they therefore changed them, as their desire of glory grew,
into products of their own mind.

2 The consequence of this is, that even that which they had discovered degenerated into
uncertainty, and there arose from one or two drops of truth a perfect flood of
argumentation. For after they had simply found God, they did not expound Him as they found
Him, but rather disputed about His quality, and His nature, and even about His abode. The
Platonists, indeed, (held) Him to care about worldly things, both as the disposer and
judge thereof. The Epicureans regarded Him as apathetic and inert, and (so to say) a non-
entity. The Stoics believed Him to be outside of the world; the Platonists, within the
world. The God whom they had so imperfectly admitted, they could neither know nor fear;
and therefore they could not be wise, since they wandered away indeed from the beginning
of wisdom," that is, "the fear of God. Proofs are not wanting that among the philosophers
there was not only an ignorance, but actual doubt, about the divinity. Diogenes, when
asked what was taking place in heaven, answered by saying, "I have never been up there.
Again, whether there were any gods, he replied, "I do not know; only there ought to be
gods. When Cr£sus inquired of Thales of Miletus what he thought of the gods, the latter
having taken some time to consider, answered by the word "Nothing. Even Socrates denied
with an air of certainty those gods of yours. Yet he with a like certainty requested that
a cock should be sacrificed to ¦sculapius.

3 And therefore when philosophy, in its practice of defining about God, is detected in
such uncertainty and inconsistency, what "fear" could it possibly have had of Him whom it
was not competent clearly to determine? We have been taught to believe of the world that
it is god. For such the physical class of theologizers conclude it to be, since they have
handed down such views about the gods that Dionysius the Stoic divides them into three
kinds. The first, he supposes, includes those gods which are most obvious, as the Sun,
Moon, and Stars; the next, those which are not apparent, as Neptune; the remaining one,
those which are said to have passed from the human state to the divine, as Hercules and
Amphiaraus. In like manner, Arcesilaus makes a threefold form of the divinity-the
Olympian, the Astral, the Titanian-sprung from C£lus and Terra; from which through Saturn
and Ops came Neptune, Jupiter, and Orcus, and their entire progeny. Xenocrates, of the
Academy, makes a twofold division-the Olympian and the Titanian, which descend from Coelus
and Terra. Most of the Egyptians believe that there are four gods-the Sun and the Moon,
the Heaven and the Earth. Along with all the supernal fire Democritus conjectures that the
gods arose. Zeno, too, will have it that their nature resembles it. Whence Varro also
makes fire to be the soul of the world, that in the world fire governs all things, just as
the soul does in ourselves. But all this is most absurd.

4 For he says, Whilst it is in us, we have existence; but as soon as it has left us, we
die. Therefore, when fire quits the world in lightning, the world comes to its end.

CHAPTER III.-THE PHYSICAL PHILOSOPHERS MAINTAINED THE DIVINITY OF THE ELEMENTS; THE ABSURDITY OF THE TENET EXPOSED.

1 From these developments of opinion, we see that your physical class of philosophers are
driven to the necessity of contending that the elements are gods, since it alleges that
other gods are sprung from them; for it is only from gods that gods could be born. Now,
although we shall have to examine these other gods more fully in the proper place, in the
mythic section of the poets, yet, inasmuch as we must meanwhile treat of them in their
connection with the present class, we shall probably even from their present class, when
once we turn to the gods themselves, succeed in showing that they can by no means appear
to be gods who are said to be sprung from the elements; so that we have at once a
presumption that the elements are not gods, since they which are born of the elements are
not gods. In like manner, whilst we show that the elements are not gods, we shall,
according to the law of natural relationship, get a presumptive argument that they cannot
rightly be maintained to be gods whose parents (in this case the elements) are not gods.
It is a settled point that a god is born of a god, and that what lacks divinity is born of
what is not divine.

2 Now, so far as the world of which your philosophers treat (for I apply this term to the
universe in the most comprehensive sense ) contains the elements, ministering to them as
its component parts (for whatever its own condition may be, the same of course will be
that of its elements and constituent portions), it must needs have been formed either by
some being, according to the enlightened view of Plato, or else by none, according to the
harsh opinion of Epicurus; and since it was formed, by having a beginning, it must also
have an end. That, therefore, which at one time before its beginning had no existence, and
will by and by after its end cease to have an existence, cannot of course, by any
possibility, seem to be a god, wanting as it does that essential character of divinity,
eternity, which is reckoned to be without beginning, and without end. If, however, it is
in no wise formed, and therefore ought to be accounted divine-since, as divine, it is
subject neither to a beginning nor an end of itself-how is it that some assign generation
to the elements, which they hold to be gods, when the Stoics deny that anything can be
born of a god? Likewise, how is it that they wish those beings, whom they suppose to be
born of the elements, to be regarded as gods, when they deny that a god can be born?

3 Now, what must hold good of the universe will have to be predicated of the elements, I
mean of heaven, and of earth, and of the stars, and of fire, which Varro has vainly
proposed that you should believe to be gods, and the parents of gods, contrary to that
generation and nativity which he had declared to be impossible in a god. Now this same
Varro had shown that the earth and the stars were animated. But if this be the case, they
must needs be also mortal, according to the condition of animated nature; for although the
soul is evidently immortal, this attribute is limited to it alone: it is not extended to
that with which it is associated, that is, the body. Nobody, however, will deny that the
elements have body, since we both touch them and are touched by them, and we see certain
bodies fall down from them. If, therefore, they are animated, laying aside the principle
of a soul, as befits their condition as bodies, they are mortal-of course not immortal.
And yet whence is it that the elements appear to Varro to be animated? Because, forsooth,
the elements have motion.

4 And then, in order to anticipate what may be objected on the other side, that many
things else have motion-as wheels, as carriages, as several other machines-he volunteers
the statement that he believes only such things to be animated as move of themselves,
without any apparent mover or impeller from without, like the apparent mover of the wheel,
or propeller of the carriage, or director of the machine. If, then, they are not animated,
they have no motion of themselves. Now, when he thus alleges a power which is not
apparent, he points to what it was his duty to seek after, even the creator and controller
of the motion for it does not at once follow that, because we do not see a thing, we
believe that it does not exist. Rather, it is necessary the more profoundly to investigate
what one does not see, in order the better to understand the character of that which is
apparent. Besides if (you admit) only the existence of those things which appear and are
supposed to exist simply because they appear, how is it that you also admit them to be
gods which do not appear? If, moreover, those things seem to have existence which have
none, why may they not have existence also which do not seem to have it? Such, for
instance, as the Mover of the heavenly beings. Granted, then, that things are animated
because they move of themselves, and that they move of themselves when they are not moved
by another:

5 still it does not follow that they must straightway be gods, because they are animated,
nor even because they move of themselves; else what is to prevent all animals whatever
being accounted gods, moving as they do of themselves? This, to be sure, is allowed to the
Egyptians, but their superstitious vanity has another basis.

CHAPTER IV.-WRONG DERIVATION OF THE WORD QE/OJ. THE NAME INDICATIVE OF THE TRUE DEITY. GOD WITHOUT SHAPE AND IMMATERIAL. ANECDOTE OF THALES.

1 Some affirm that the gods (i.e. qeoi/) were so called because the verbs qe/ein and
sei/sqai signify to run and to be moved. This term, then, is not indicative of any
majesty, for it is derived from running and motion, not from any dominion of godhead. But
inasmuch as the Supreme God whom we worship is also designated Qeo/j, without however the
appearance of any course or motion in Him, because He is not visible to any one, it is
clear that that word must have had some other derivation, and that the property of
divinity, innate in Himself, must have been discovered. Dismissing, then, that ingenious
interpretation, it is more likely that the gods were not called qeoi/ from running and
motion, but that the term was borrowed from the designation of the true God; so that you
gave the name qeoi/ to the gods, whom you had in like manner forged for yourselves. Now,
that this is the case, a plain proof is afforded in the fact that you actually give the
common appellation qeoi/ to all those gods of yours, in whom there is no attribute of
course or motion indicated. When, therefore, you call them both qeoi/ and immoveable with
equal readiness, there is a deviation as well from the meaning of the word as from the
idea of godhead, which is set aside if measured by the notion of course and motion.

2 But if that sacred name be peculiarly significant of deity, and be simply true and not
of a forced interpretation in the case of the true God, but transferred in a borrowed
sense to those other objects which you choose to call gods, then you ought to show to us
that there is also a community of character between them, so that their common designation
may rightly depend on their union of essence. But the true God, on the sole ground that He
is not an object of sense, is incapable of being compared with those false deities which
are cognizable to sight and sense (to sense indeed is sufficient); for this amounts to a
clear statement of the difference between an obscure proof and a manifest one. Now, since
the elements are obvious to all, (and) since God, on the contrary, is visible to none, how
will it be in your power from that part which you have not seen to pass to a decision on
the objects which you see? Since, therefore, you have not to combine them in your
perception or your reason, why do you combine them in name with the purpose of combining
them also in power? For see how even Zeno separates the matter of the world from God: he
says that the latter has percolated through the former, like honey through the comb. God,
therefore, and Matter are two words (and) two things. Proportioned to the difference of
the words is the diversity of the things;

3 the condition also of matter follows its designation. Now if matter is not God, because
its very appellation teaches us so, how can those things which are inherent in matter-that
is, the elements-be regarded as gods, since the component members cannot possibly be
heterogeneous from the body? But what concern have I with physiological conceits? It were
better for one's mind to ascend above the state of the world, not to stoop down to
uncertain speculations. Plato's form for the world was round. Its square, angular shape,
such as others had conceived it to be, he rounded off, I suppose, with compasses, from his
labouring to have it believed to be simply without a beginning. Epicurus, however, who had
said, "What is above us is nothing to us," wished notwithstanding to have a peep at the
sky, and found the sun to be a foot in diameter. Thus far you must confess men were
niggardly in even celestial objects. In process of time their ambitious conceptions
advanced, and so the sun too enlarged its disk. Accordingly, the Peripatetics marked it
out as a larger world. Now, pray tell me, what wisdom is there in this hankering after
conjectural speculations? What proof is afforded to us, notwithstanding the strong
confidence of its assertions, by the useless affectation of a scrupulous curiosity, which
is tricked out with an artful show of language?

4 It therefore served Thales of Miletus quite right, when, star-gazing as he walked with
all the eyes he had, he had the mortification of falling into a well, and was unmercifully
twitted by an Egyptian, who said to him, "Is it because you found nothing on earth to look
at, that you think you ought to confine your gaze to the sky? "His fall, therefore, is a
figurative picture of the philosophers; of those, I mean, who persist in applying their
studies to a vain purpose, since they indulge a stupid curiosity on natural objects, which
they ought rather (intelligently to direct) to their Creator and Governor.

CHAPTER V.-THE PHYSICAL THEORY CONTINUED. FURTHER REASONS ADVANCED AGAINST THE DIVINITY OF THE ELEMENTS.

1 Why, then, do we not resort to that far more reasonable opinion, which has clear proof
of being derived from men's common sense and unsophisticated deduction? Even Varro bears
it in mind, when he says that the elements are supposed to be divine, because nothing
whatever is capable, without their concurrence, of being produced, nourished, or applied
to the sustenance of man's life and of the earth, since not even our bodies and souls
could have sufficed in themselves without the modification of the elements. By this it is
that the world is made generally habitable,-a result which is harmoniously secured by the
distribution into zones, except where human residence has been rendered impracticable by
intensity of cold or heat. On this account, men have accounted as gods-the sun, because it
imparts from itself the light of day, ripens the fruit with its warmth, and measures the
year with its stated periods; the moon, which is at once the solace of the night and the
controller of the months by its governance; the stars also, certain indications as they
are of those seasons which are to be observed in the tillage of our fields; lastly, the
very heaven also under which, and the earth over which, as well as the intermediate space
within which, all things conspire together for the good of man.

2 Nor is it from their beneficent influences only that a faith in their divinity has been
deemed compatible with the elements, but from their opposite qualities also, such as
usually happen from what one might call their wrath and anger-as thunder, and hail, and
drought, and pestilential winds, floods also, and openings of the ground, and earthquakes:
these are all fairly enough accounted gods, whether their nature becomes the object of
reverence as being favourable, or of fear because terrible-the sovereign dispenser, in
fact, both of help and of hurt. But in the practical conduct of social life, this is the
way in which men act and feel: they do not show gratitude or find fault with the very
things from which the succour or the injury proceeds, so much as with them by whose
strength and power the operation of the things is effected. For even in your amusements
you do not award the crown as a prize to the flute or the harp, but to the musician who
manages the said flute or harp by the power of his delightful skill. In like manner, when
one is in ill-health, you do not bestow your acknowledgments on the flannel wraps, or the
medicines, or the poultices, but on the doctors by whose care and prudence the remedies
become effectual. So again, in untoward events, they who are wounded with the sword do not
charge the injury on the sword or the spear, but on the enemy or the robber;

3 whilst those whom a falling house covers do not blame the tiles or the stones, but the
oldness of the building; as again shipwrecked sailors impute their calamity not to the
rocks and waves, but to the tempest. And rightly too; for it is certain that everything
which happens must be ascribed not to the instrument with which, but to the agent by whom,
it takes place; inasmuch as he is the prime cause of the occurrence, who appoints both the
event itself and that by whose instrumentality it comes to pass (as there are in all
things these three particular elements-the fact itself, its instrument, and its cause),
because he himself who wills the occurrence of a thing comes into notice prior to the
thing which he wills, or the instrument by which it occurs. On all other occasions
therefore, your conduct is right enough, because you consider the author; but in physical
phenomena your rule is opposed to that natural principle which prompts you to a wise
judgment in all other cases, removing out of sight as you do the supreme position of the
author, and considering rather the things that happen, than him by whom they happen. Thus
it comes to pass that you suppose the power and the dominion to belong to the elements,
which are but the slaves and functionaries.

4 Now do we not, in thus tracing out an artificer and master within, expose the artful
structure of their slavery out of the appointed functions of those elements to which you
ascribe (the attributes) of power? But gods are not slaves; therefore whatever things are
servile in character are not gods. Otherwise they should prove to us that, according to
the ordinary course of things, liberty is promoted by irregular licence, despotism by
liberty, and that by despotism divine power is meant. For if all the (heavenly bodies)
overhead forget not to fulfil their courses in certain orbits, in regular seasons, at
proper distances, and at equal intervals-appointed in the way of a law for the revolutions
of time, and for directing the guidance thereof-can it fail to result from the very
observance of their conditions and the fidelity of their operations, that you will be
convinced both by the recurrence of their orbital courses and the accuracy of their
mutations, when you bear in mind how ceaseless is their recurrence, that a governing power
presides over them, to which the entire management of the world is obedient, reaching even
to the utility and injury of the human race? For you cannot pretend that these (phenomena)
act and care for themselves alone, without contributing anything to the advantage of
mankind, when you maintain that the elements are divine for no other reason than that you
experience from them either benefit or injury to yourself. For if they benefit themselves
only, you are under no obligation to them.

CHAPTER VI.-THE CHANGES OF THE HEAVENLY BODIES, PROOF THAT THEY ARE NOT DIVINE. TRANSITION FROM THE PHYSICAL TO THE MYTHIC CLASS OF GODS.

1 Come now, do you allow that the Divine Being not only has nothing servile in His course,
but exists in unimpaired integrity, and ought not to be diminished, or suspended, or
destroyed? Well, then, all His blessedness would disappear, if He were ever subject to
change. Look, however, at the stellar bodies; they both undergo change, and give clear
evidence of the fact. The moon tells us how great has been its loss, as it recovers its
full form; its greater losses you are already accustomed to measure in a mirror of water;
so that I need not any longer believe in any wise what magians have asserted. The sun,
too, is frequently put to the trial of an eclipse. Explain as best you may the modes of
these celestial casualties, it is impossible for God either to become less or to cease to
exist. Vain, therefore, are those supports of human learning, which, by their artful
method of weaving conjectures, belie both wisdom and truth. Besides, it so happens,
indeed, according to your natural way of thinking, that he who has spoken the best is
supposed to have spoken most truly, instead of him who has spoken the truth being held to
have spoken the best. Now the man who shall carefully look into things, will surely allow
it to be a greater probability that those elements which we have been discussing are under
some rule and direction, than that they have a motion of their own, and that being under
government they cannot be gods.

2 If, however, one is in error in this matter, it is better to err simply than
speculatively, like your physical philosophers. But, at the same time, if you consider the
character of the mythic school, (and compare it with the physical, ) the error which we
have already seen frail men making in the latter is really the more respectable one, since
it ascribes a divine nature to those things which it supposes to be superhuman in their
sensibility, whether in respect of their position, their power, their magnitude, or their
divinity. For that which you suppose to be higher than man, you believe to be very near to
God.

CHAPTER VII.-THE GODS OF THE MYTHIC CLASS. THE POETS A VERY POOR AUTHORITY IN SUCH MATTERS. HOMER AND THE MYTHIC POETS. WHY IRRELIGIOUS.

1 But to pass to the mythic class of gods, which we attributed to the poets, I hardly know
whether I must only seek to put them on a par with our own human mediocrity, or whether
they must be affirmed to be gods, with proofs of divinity, like the African Mopsus and the
B£otian Amphiaraus. I must now indeed but slightly touch on this class, of which a fuller
view will be taken in the proper place. Meanwhile, that these were only human beings, is
clear from the fact that you do not consistently call them gods, but heroes. Why then
discuss the point? Although divine honours had to be ascribed to dead men, it was not to
them as such, of course. Look at your own practice, when with similar excess of
presumption you sully heaven with the sepulchres of your kings: is it not such as are
illustrious for justice, virtue, piety, and every excellence of this sort, that you honour
with the blessedness of deification, contented even to incur contempt if you forswear
yourselves for such characters? And, on the other hand, do you not deprive the impious and
disgraceful of even the old prizes of human glory, tear up their decrees and titles, pull
down their statues, and deface their images on the current coin? Will He, however, who
beholds all things, who approves, nay, rewards the good, prostitute before all men the
attribute of His own inexhaustible grace and mercy?

2 And shall men be allowed an especial mount of care and righteousness, that they may be
wise in selecting and multiplying their deities? Shall attendants on kings and princes be
more pure than those who wait on the Supreme God? You turn your back in horror, indeed, on
outcasts and exiles, on the poor and weak, on the obscurely born and the low-lived; but
yet you honour, even by legal sanctions, unchaste men, adulterers, robbers, and
parricides. Must we regard it as a subject of ridicule or indignation, that such
characters are believed to be gods who are not fit to be men? Then, again, in this mythic
class of yours which the poets celebrate, how uncertain is your conduct as to purity of
conscience and the maintenance thereof! For whenever we hold up to execration the
wretched, disgraceful and atrocious (examples) of your gods, you defend them as mere
fables, on the pretence of poetic licence; whenever we volunteer a silent contempt of this
said poetic licence, then you are not only troubled with no horror of it, but you go so
far as to show it respect, and to hold it as one of the indispensable (fine) arts; nay,
you carry out the studies of your higher classes by its means, as the very foundation of
your literature. Plato was of opinion that poets ought to be banished, as calumniators of
the gods; he would even have) Homer himself expelled from his republic, although, as you
are aware, he was the crowned head of them all.

3 But while you admit and retain them thus, why should you not believe them when they
disclose such things respecting your gods? And if you do believe your poets, how is it
that you worship such gods (as they describe)? you worship them simply because you do not
believe the poets, why do you bestow praise on such lying authors, without any fear of
giving offence to those whose calumniators you honour? A regard for truth is not, of
course, to be expected of poets. But when you say that they only make men into gods after
their death, do you not admit that before death the said gods were merely human? Now what
is there strange in the fact, that they who were once men are subject to the dishonour of
human casualties, or crimes, or fables? Do you not, in fact, put faith in your poets, when
it is in accordance with their rhapsodies that you have arranged in some instances your
very rituals? How is it that the priestess of Ceres is ravished, if it is not because
Ceres suffered a similar outrage? Why are the children of others sacrificed to Saturn, if
it is not because he spared not his own? Why is a male mutilated in honour of the Idµan
goddess Cybele, unless it be that the (unhappy) youth who was too disdainful of her
advances was castrated, owing to her vexation at his daring to cross her love?

4 Why was not Hercules "a dainty dish" to the good ladies of Lanuvium, if it was not for
the primeval offence which women gave to him? The poets, no doubt, are liars. Yet it is
not because of their telling us that your gods did such things when they were human
beings, nor because they predicated divine scandals of a divine state, since it seemed to
you more credible that gods should exist, though not of such a character, than that there
should be such characters, although not gods.

CHAPTER VIII.-THE GODS OF THE DIFFERENT NATIONS. VARRO'S GENTILE CLASS. THEIR INFERIORITY. A GOOD DEAL OF THIS PERVERSE THEOLOGY TAKEN FROM SCRIPTURE. SERAPIS A PERVERSION OF JOSEPH.

1 There remains the gentile class of gods amongst the several nations: these were adopted
out of mere caprice, not from the knowledge of the truth; and our information about them
comes from the private notions of different races. God, I imagine, is everywhere known,
everywhere present, powerful everywhere-an object whom all ought to worship, all ought to
serve. Since, then, it happens that even they, whom all the world worships in common, fail
in the evidence of their true divinity, how much more must this befall those whom their
very votaries have not succeeded in discovering! For what useful authority could possibly
precede a theology of so defective a character as to be wholly unknown to fame? How many
have either seen or heard of the Syrian Atargatis, the African C£lestis, the Moorish
Varsutina, the Arabian Obodas and Dusaris, or the Norican Belenus, or those whom Varro
mentions-Deluentinus of Casinum, Visidianus of Narnia, Numiternus of Atina, or Ancharia of
Asculum? And who have any clear notions of Nortia of Vulsinii? There is no difference in
the worth of even their names, apart from the human surnames which distinguish them. I
laugh often enough at the little coteries of gods in each municipality, which have their
honours confined within their own city walls. To what lengths this licence of adopting
gods has been pushed, the superstitious practices of the Egyptians show us; for they
worship even their native animals, such as cats, crocodiles, and their snake.

2 It is therefore a small matter that they have also deified a man-him, I mean, whom not
Egypt only, or Greece, but the whole world worships, and the Africans swear by; about
whose state also all that helps our conjectures and imparts to our knowledge the semblance
of truth is stated in our own (sacred) literature. For that Serapis of yours was
originally one of our own saints called Joseph. The youngest of his brethren, but superior
to them in intellect, he was from envy sold into Egypt, and became a slave in the family
of Pharaoh king of the country. Importuned by the unchaste queen, when he refused to
comply with her desire, she turned upon him and reported him to the king, by whom he is
put into prison. There he displays the power of his divine inspiration, by interpreting
aright the dreams of some (fellow-prisoners). Meanwhile the king, too, has some terrible
dreams. Joseph being brought before him, according to his summons, was able to expound
them. Having narrated the proofs of true interpretation which he had given in the prison,
he opens out his dream to the king: those seven fat-fleshed and well-favoured kine
signified as many years of plenty; in like manner, the seven lean-fleshed animals
predicted the scarcity of the seven following years. He accordingly recommends precautions
to be taken against the future famine from the previous plenty. The king believed him. The
issue of all that happened showed how wise he was, how invariably holy, and now how
necessary.

3 So Pharaoh set him over all Egypt, that he might secure the provision of corn for it,
and thenceforth administer its government. They called him Serapis, from the turban which
adorned his head. The peck-like shape of this turban marks the memory of his corn-
provisioning; whilst evidence is given that the care of the supplies was all on his head,
by the very ears of corn which embellish the border of the head-dress. For the same
reason, also, they made the sacred figure of a dog, which they regard (as a sentry) in
Hades, and put it under his right hand, because the care of the Egyptians was concentrated
under his hand. And they put at his side Pharia, whose name shows her to have been the
king's daughter. For in addition to all the rest of his kind gifts and rewards, Pharaoh
had given him his own daughter in marriage. Since, however, they had begun to worship both
wild animals and human beings, they combined both figures under one form Anubis, in which
there may rather be seen clear proofs of its own character and condition enshrined by a
nation at war with itself, refractory to its kings, despised among foreigners, with even
the appetite of a slave and the filthy nature of a dog.

CHAPTER IX. THE POWER OF ROME. ROMANIZED ASPECT OF ALL THE HEATHEN MYTHOLOGY. VARRO'S THREEFOLD DISTRIBUTION CRITICISED. ROMAN HEROES (¦NEAS INCLUDED, ) UNFAVOURABLY REVIEWED.

1 Such are the more obvious or more remarkable points which we had to mention in
connection with Varro's threefold distribution of the gods, in order that a sufficient
answer might seem to be given touching the physical, the poetic, and the gentile classes.
Since, however, it is no longer to the philosophers, nor the poets, nor the nations that
we owe the substitution of all (heathen worship for the true religion) although they
transmitted the superstition, but to the dominant Romans, who received the tradition and
gave it wide authority, another phase of the widespread error of man must now be
encountered by us; nay, another forest must be felled by our axe, which has obscured the
childhood of the de generate worship with germs of superstitions gathered from all
quarters. Well, but even the gods of the Romans have received from (the same) Varro a
threefold classification into the certain, the uncertain, and the select. What absurdity!
What need had they of uncertain gods, when they possessed certain ones? Unless, forsooth,
they wished to commit themselves to such folly as the Athenians did; for at Athens there
was an altar with this inscription: "To The Unknown Gods. Does, then, a man worship that
which he knows nothing of? Then, again, as they had certain gods, they ought to have been
contented with them, without requiring select ones. In this want they are even found to be
irreligious! For if gods are selected as onions are, then such as are not chosen are
declared to be worthless.

2 Now we on our part allow that the Romans had two sets of gods, common and proper; in
other words, those which they had in common with other nations, and those which they
themselves devised. And were not these called the public and the foreign gods? Their
altars tell us so; there is (a specimen) of the foreign gods at the fane of Carna, of the
public gods in the Palatium. Now, since their common gods are comprehended in both the
physical and the mythic classes, we have already said enough concerning them. I should
like to speak of their particular kinds of deity. We ought then to admire the Romans for
that third set of the gods of their enemies, because no other nation ever discovered for
itself so large a mass of superstition. Their other deities we arrange in two classes:
those which have become gods from human beings, and those which have had their origin in
some other way. Now, since there is advanced the same colourable pretext for the
deification of the dead, that their lives were meritorious, we are compelled to urge the
same reply against them, that no one of them was worth so much pains. Their fond father
¦neas, in whom they believed, was never glorious, and was felled with a stone -a vulgar
weapon, to pelt a dog withal, inflicting a wound no less ignoble! But this ¦neas turns out
a traitor to his country; yes, quite as much as Antenor.

3 And if they will not believe this to be true of him, he at any rate deserted his
companions when his country was in flames, and must be held inferior to that woman of
Carthage, who, when her husband Hasdrubal supplicated the enemy with the mild
pusillanimity of our ¦neas, refused to accompany him, but hurrying her children along with
her, disdained to take her beautiful self and father's noble heart into exile, but plunged
into the flames of the burning Carthage, as if rushing into the embraces of her (dear but)
ruined country. Is he "pious ¦neas" for (rescuing) his young only son and decrepit old
father, but deserting Priam and Astyanax? But the Romans ought rather to detest him; for
in defence of their princes and their royal house, they surrender even children and wives,
and every dearest pledge. They deify the son of Venus, and this with the full knowledge
and consent of her husband Vulcan, and without opposition from even Juno. Now, if sons
have seats in heaven owing to their piety to their parents, why are not those noble youths
of Argos rather accounted gods, because they, to save their mother from guilt in the
performance of some sacred rites, with a devotion more than human, yoked themselves to her
car and dragged her to the temple? Why not make a goddess, for her exceeding piety, of
that daughter who from her own breasts nourished her father who was famishing in prison?

4 What other glorious achievement can be related of ¦neas, but that he was nowhere seen in
the fight on the field of Laurentum? Following his bent, perhaps he fled a second time as
a fugitive from the battle. In like manner, Romulus posthumously becomes a god. Was it
because he rounded the city? Then why not others also, who have built cities, counting
even women? To be sure, Romulus slew his brother in the bargain, and trickishly ravished
some foreign virgins. Therefore of course he becomes a god, and therefore a Quirinus ("god
of the spear"), because then their fathers had to use the spear on his account. What did
Sterculus do to merit deification? If he worked hard to enrich the fields stercoribus,
(with manure, ) Augias had more dung than he to bestow on them. If Faunus, the son of
Picus, used to do violence to law and right, because struck with madness, it was more fit
that he should be doctored than deified. If the daughter of Faunus so excelled in
chastity, that she would hold no conversation with men, it was perhaps from rudeness, or a
consciousness of deformity, or shame for her father's insanity. How much worthier of
divine honour than this "good goddess" was Penelope, who, although dwelling among so many
suitors of the vilest character, preserved with delicate tact the purity which they
assailed! There is Sanctus, too, who for his hospitality had a temple consecrated to him
by king Plotius;

5 and even Ulysses had it in his power to have bestowed one more god upon you in the
person of the most refined Alcinous.

CHAPTER X.-A DISGRACEFUL FEATURE OF THE ROMAN MYTHOLOGY. IT HONOURS SUCH INFAMOUS CHARACTERS AS LARENTINA.

1 I hasten to even more abominable cases. Your writers have not been ashamed to publish
that of Larentina. She was a hired prostitute, whether as the nurse of Romulus, and
therefore called Lupa, because she was a prostitute, or as the mistress of Hercules, now
deceased, that is to say, now deified. They relate that his temple-warder happened to be
playing at dice in the temple alone; and in order to represent a partner for himself in
the game, in the absence of an actual one, he began to play with one hand for Hercules and
the other for himself. (The condition was, ) that if he won the stakes from Hercules, he
should with them procure a supper and a prostitute; if Hercules, however, proved the
winner, I mean his other hand, then he should provide the same for Hercules. The hand of
Hercules won. That achievement might well have been added to his twelve labours! The
temple-warden buys a supper for the hero, and hires Larentina to play the whore. The fire
which dissolved the body of even a Hercules enjoyed the supper, and the altar consumed
everything. Larentina sleeps alone in the temple; and she a woman from the brothel, boasts
that in her dreams she had submitted herself to the pleasure of Hercules; and she might
possibly have experienced this, as it passed through her mind, in her sleep. In the
morning, on going out of the temple very early, she is solicited by a young man-"a third
Hercules," so to speak. He invites her home.

2 She complies, remembering that Hercules had told her that it would be for her advantage.
He then, to be sure, obtains permission that they should be united in lawful wedlock (for
none was allowed to have intercourse with the concubine of a god without being punished
for it); the husband makes her his heir. By and by, just before her death, she bequeathed
to the Roman people the rather large estate which she had obtained through Hercules. After
this she sought deification for her daughters too, whom indeed the divine Larentina ought
to have appointed her heirs also. The gods, of the Romans received an accession in her
dignity. For she alone of all the wives of Hercules was dear to him, because she alone was
rich; and she was even far more fortunate than Ceres, who contributed to the pleasure of
the (king of the) dead. After so many examples and eminent names among you, who might not
have been declared divine? Who, in fact, ever raised a question as to his divinity against
Antinous? Was even Ganymede more grateful and dear than he to (the supreme god) who loved
him? According to you, heaven is open to the dead. You prepare a way from Hades to the
stars. Prostitutes mount it in all directions, so that you must not suppose that you are
conferring a great distinction upon your kings.

CHAPTER XI.-THE ROMANS PROVIDED GODS FOR BIRTH, NAY, EVEN BEFORE BIRTH, TO DEATH. MUCH INDELICACY IN THIS SYSTEM.

1 And you are not content to assert the divinity of such as were once known to you, whom
you heard and handled, and whose portraits have been painted, and actions recounted, and
memory retained amongst you; but men insist upon consecrating with a heavenly life I know
not what incorporeal, inanimate shadows, and the mere names of things-dividing man's
entire existence amongst separate powers even from his conception in the womb: so that
there is a god Consevius, to preside over concubital generation; and Fluviona, to preserve
the (growth of the) infant in the womb; after these come Vitumnus and Sentinus, through
whom the babe begins to have life and its earliest sensation; then Diespiter, by whose
office the child accomplishes its birth. But when women begin their parturition,
Candelifera also comes in aid, since childbearing requires the light of the candle; and
other goddesses there are who get their names from the parts they bear in the stages of
travail. There were two Carmentas likewise, according to the general view: to one of them,
called Postverta, belonged the function of assisting the birth of the introverted child;
while the other, Prosa, executed the like office for the rightly born. The god Farinus was
so called from (his inspiring) the first utterance; while others believed in Locutius from
his gift of speech. Cunina is present as the protector of the child's deep slumber, and
supplies to it refreshing rest. To lift them (when fallen) there is Levana, and along with
her Rumina.

2 It is a wonderful oversight that no gods were appointed for cleaning up the filth of
children. Then, to preside over their first pap and earliest drink you have Potina and
Edula; to teach the child to stand erect is the work of Statina, whilst Adeona helps him
to come to dear Mamma, and Abeona to toddle off again; then there is Domiduca, (to bring
home the bride; ) and the goddess Mens, to influence the mind to either good or evil. They
have likewise Volumnus and Voleta, to control the will; Paventina, (the goddess) of fear;
Venilia, of hope; Volupia, of pleasure; Prµstitia, of beauty. Then, again, they give his
name to Peragenor, from his teaching men to go through their work; to Consus, from his
suggesting to them counsel. Juventa is their guide on assuming the manly gown, and
"bearded Fortune" when they come to full manhood. If I must touch on their nuptial duties,
there is Afferenda whose appointed function is to see to the offering of the dower; but
fie on you! you have your Mutunus and Tutunus and Pertunda and Subigus and the goddess
Prema and likewise Perfica. O spare yourselves, ye impudent gods! No one is present at the
secret struggles of married life. Those very few persons who have a wish that way, go away
and blush for very shame in the midst of their joy.

CHAPTER XII. -THE ORIGINAL DEITIES WERE HUMAN-WITH SOME VERY QUESTIONABLE CHARACTERISTICS. SATURN OR TIME WAS HUMAN. INCONSISTENCIES OF OPINION ABOUT HIM.

1 Now, how much further need I go in recounting your gods-because I want to descant on the
character of such as you have adopted? It is quite uncertain whether I shall laugh at your
absurdity, or upbraid you for your blindness. For how many, and indeed what, gods shall I
bring forward? Shall it be the greater ones, or the lesser? The old ones, or the novel?
The male, or the female? The unmarried, or such as are joined in wedlock? The clever, or
the unskilful? The rustic or the town ones? The national or the foreign? For the truth is,
there are so many families, so many nations, which require a catalogue (of gods), that
they cannot possibly be examined, or distinguished, or described. But the more diffuse the
subject is, the more restriction must we impose on it. As, therefore, in this review we
keep before us but one object-that of proving that all these gods were once human beings
(not, indeed, to instruct you in the fact, for your conduct shows that you have forgotten
it)-let us adopt our compendious summary from the most natural method of conducting the
examination, even by considering the origin of their race. For the origin characterizes
all that comes after it. Now this origin of your gods dates, I suppose, from Saturn.

2 And when Varro mentions Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, as the most ancient of the gods, it
ought not to have escaped our notice, that every father is more ancient than his sons, and
that Saturn therefore must precede Jupiter, even as C£lus does Saturn, for Saturn was
sprung from C£lus and Terra. I pass by, however, the origin of C£lus and Terra. They led
in some unaccountable way single lives, and had no children. Of course they required a
long time for vigorous growth to attain to such a stature. By and by, as soon as the voice
of C£lus began to break, and the breasts of Terra to become firm, they contract marriage
with one another. I suppose either Heaven came down to his spouse, or Earth went up to
meet her lord. Be that as it may, Earth conceived seed of Heaven, and when her year was
fulfilled brought forth Saturn in a wonderful manner. Which of his parents did he
resemble? Well, then, even after parentage began, it is certain that they had no child
previous to Saturn, and only one daughter afterwards-Ops; thenceforth they ceased to
procreate. The truth is, Saturn castrated C£lus as he was sleeping. We read this name
C£lus as of the masculine gender. And for the matter of that, how could he be a father
unless he were a male? But with what instrument was the castration effected? He had a
scythe. What, so early as that? For Vulcan was not yet an artificer in iron.

3 The widowed Tetra, however, although still quite young, was in no hurry to marry
another. Indeed, there was no second C£lus for her. What but Ocean offers her an embrace?
But he savours of brackishness, and she has been accustomed to fresh water. And so Saturn
is the sole male child of C£lus and Tetra. When grown to puberty, he marries his own
sister. No laws as yet prohibited incest, nor punished parricide. Then, when male children
were born to him, he would devour them; better himself (should take them) than the wolves,
(for to these would they become a prey) if he exposed them. He was, no doubt, afraid that
one of them might learn the lesson of his father's scythe. When Jupiter was born in course
of time, he was removed out of the way: (the father) swallowed a stone instead of the son,
as was pretended. This artifice secured his safety for a time; but at length the son, whom
he had not devoured, and who had grown up in secret, fell upon him, and deprived him of
his kingdom. Such, then, is the patriarch of the gods whom Heaven and Earth produced for
you, with the poets officiating as midwives. Now some persons with a refined imagination
are of opinion that, by this allegorical fable of Saturn, there is a physiological
representation of Time:

4 (they think) that it is because all things are destroyed by Time, that C£lus and Tetra
were themselves parents without having any of their own, and that the (fatal) scythe was
used, and that (Saturn) devoured his own offspring, because he, in fact, absorbs within
himself all things which have issued from him. They call in also the witness of his name;
for they say that he is called Kro/noj in Greek, meaning the same thing as xro/noj. His
Latin name also they derive from seed-sowing; for they suppose him to have been the actual
procreator-that the seed, in fact, was dropt down from heaven to earth by his means. They
unite him with Ops, because seeds produce the affluent treasure (Opem) of actual life, and
because they develope with labour (Opus). Now I wish that you would explain this
metaphorical statement. It was either Saturn or Time. If it was Time, how could it be
Saturn? If he, how could it be Time? For you cannot possibly reckon both these corporeal
subjects as co-existing in one person. What, however, was there to prevent your
worshipping Time under its proper quality? Why not make a human person, or even a mythic
man, an object of your adoration, but each in its proper nature not in the character of
Time? What is the meaning of that conceit of your mental ingenuity, if it be not to colour
the foulest matters with the feigned appearance of reasonable proofs?

5 Neither, on the one hand, do you mean Saturn to be Time, because you say he is a human
being; nor, on the other hand, whilst portraying him as Time, do you on that account mean
that he was ever human. No doubt, in the accounts of remote antiquity your god Saturn is
plainly described as living on earth in human guise. Anything whatever may obviously be
pictured as incorporeal which never had an existence; there is simply no room for such
fiction, where there is reality. Since, therefore, there is clear evidence that Saturn
once existed, it is in vain that you change his character. He whom you will not deny to
have once been man, is not at your disposal to be treated anyhow, nor can it be maintained
that he is either divine or Time. In every page of your literature the origin of Saturn is
conspicuous. We read of him in Cassius Severus and in the Corneliuses, Nepos and Tacitus,
and, amongst the Greeks also, in Diodorus, and all other compilers of ancient annals. No
more faithful records of him are to be traced than in Italy itself. For, after
(traversing) many countries, and (enjoying) the hospitality of Athens, he settled in
Italy, or, as it was called, înotria, having met with a kind welcome from Janus, or Janes,
as the Salii call him. The hill on which he settled had the name Saturnius, whilst the
city which he rounded still bears the name Saturnia; in short, the whole of Italy once had
the same designation.

6 Such is the testimony derived from that country which is now the mistress of the world:
whatever doubt prevails about the origin of Saturn, his actions tell us plainly that he
was a human being. Since, therefore, Saturn was human, he came undoubtedly from a human
stock; and more, because he was a man, he, of course, came not of C£lus and Terra. Some
people, however, found it easy enough to call him, whose parents were unknown, the son of
those gods from whom all may in a sense seem to be derived. For who is there that does not
speak under a feeling of reverence of the heaven and the earth as his own father and
mother? Or, in accordance with a custom amongst men, which induces them to say of any who
are unknown or suddenly apparent, that "they came from the sky? "Hence it happened that,
because a stranger appeared suddenly everywhere, it became the custom to call him a
heaven-born man, -just as we also commonly call earth-born all those whose descent is
unknown. I say nothing of the fact that such was the state of antiquity, when men's eyes
and minds were so habitually rude, that they were excited by the appearance of every
newcomer as if it were that of a god: much more would this be the case with a king, and
that the primeval one.

7 I will linger some time longer over the case of Saturn, because by fully discussing his
primordial history I shall beforehand furnish a compendious answer for all other cases;
and I do not wish to omit the more convincing testimony of your sacred literature, the
credit of which ought to be the greater in proportion to its antiquity. Now earlier than
all literature was the Sibyl; that Sibyl, I mean, who was the true prophetess of truth,
from whom you borrow their title for the priests of your demons. She in senarian verse
expounds the descent of Saturn and his exploits in words to this effect: "In the tenth
generation of men, after the flood had overwhelmed the former race, reigned Saturn, and
Titan, and Japetus, the bravest of the sons of Tetra and C£lus. Whatever credit,
therefore, is attached to your older writers and literature, and much more to those who
were the simplest as belonging to that age, it becomes sufficiently certain that Saturn
and his family were human beings. We have in our possession, then, a brief principle which
amounts to a prescriptive rule about their origin serving for all other cases, to prevent
our going wrong in individual instances. The particular character of a posterity is shown
by the original founders of the race-mortal beings (come) from mortals, earthly ones from
earthly; step after step comes in due relation -marriage, conception, birth-country,
settlements, kingdoms, all give the clearest proofs. They, therefore who cannot deny the
birth of men, must also admit their death;

8 they who allow their mortality must not suppose them to be gods.

CHAPTER XIII. -THE GODS HUMAN AT FIRST. WHO HAD THE AUTHORITY TO MAKE THEM DIVINE? JUPITER NOT ONLY HUMAN, BUT IMMORAL.

1 Manifest cases, indeed, like these have a force peculiarly their own. Men like Varro and
his fellow-dreamers admit into the ranks of the divinity those whom they cannot assert to
have been in their primitive condition anything but men; (and this they do) by affirming
that they became gods after their death. Here, then, I take my stand. If your gods were
elected to this dignity and deity, just as you recruit the ranks of your senate, you
cannot help conceding, in your wisdom, that there must be some one supreme sovereign who
has the power of selecting, and is a kind of Caesar; and nobody is able to confer on
others a thing over which he has not absolute control. Besides, if they were able to make
gods of themselves after their death, pray tell me why they chose to be in an inferior
condition at first? Or, again, if there is no one who made them gods, how can they be said
to have been made such, if they could only have been made by some one else? There is
therefore no ground afforded you for denying that there is a certain wholesale distributor
of divinity. Let us accordingly examine the reasons for despatching mortal beings to
heaven. I suppose you will produce a pair of them. Whoever, then, is the awarder (of the
divine honours), exercises his function, either that he may have some supports, or
defences, or it may be even ornaments to his own dignity;

2 or from the pressing claims of the meritorious, that he may reward all the deserving. No
other cause is it permitted us to conjecture. Now there is no one who, when bestowing a
gift on another, does not act with a view to his own interest or the other's. This
conduct, however, cannot be worthy of the Divine Being, inasmuch as His power is so great
that He can make gods outright; whilst His bringing man into such request, on the pretence
that he requires the aid and support of certain, even dead persons, is a strange conceit,
since He was able from the very first to create for Himself immortal beings. He who has
compared human things with divine will require no further arguments on these points. And
yet the latter opinion ought to be discussed, that God conferred divine honours in
consideration of meritorious claims. Well, then, if the award was made on such grounds, if
heaven was opened to men of the primitive age because of their deserts, we must reflect
that after that time no one was worthy of such honour; except it be, that there is now no
longer such a place for any one to attain to. Let us grant that anciently men may have
deserved heaven by reason of their great merits. Then let us consider whether there really
was such merit. Let the man who alleges that it did exist declare his own view of merit.

3 Since the actions of men done in the very infancy of time are a valid claim for their
deification, you consistently admitted to the honour the brother and sister who were
stained with the sin of incest-Ops and Saturn. Your Jupiter too, stolen in his infancy,
was unworthy of both the home and the nutriment accorded to human beings; and, as he
deserved for so bad a child, he had to live in Crete. Afterwards, when full-grown, he
dethrones his own father, who, whatever his parental character may have been, was most
prosperous in his reign, king as he was of the golden age. Under him, a stranger to toil
and want, peace maintained its joyous and gentle sway; under him- 4 "Nulli subigebant arva
coloni" "No swains would bring the fields beneath their sway; " 5 and without the
importunity of any one the earth would bear all crops spontaneously. But he hated a father
who had been guilty of incest, and had once mutilated his grandfather. And yet, behold, he
himself marries his own sister; so that I should suppose the old adage was made for him:
Tou= patro\ j to\ paidi/on-" Father's own child. There was "not a pin to choose" between
the father's piety and the son's. If the laws had been just even at that early time,
Jupiter ought to have been "sewed up in both sacks. After this corroboration of his lust
with incestuous gratification, why should he hesitate to indulge himself lavishly in the
lighter excesses of adultery and debauchery? Ever since poetry sported thus with his
character, in some such way as is usual when a runaway slave is posted up in public, we
have been in the habit of gossiping without restraint of his tricks in our chat with
passers-by; sometimes sketching him out in the form of the very money which was the fee of
his debauchery-as when (he personated) a bull, or rather paid the money's worth of one,
and showered (gold. into the maiden's chamber, or rather forced his way in with a bribe;
sometimes (figuring him) in the very likenesses of the parts which were acted -as the
eagle which ravished (the beautiful youth), and the swan which sang (the enchanting song).
Well now, are not such fables as these made up of the most disgusting intrigues and the
worst of scandals?

6 or would not the morals and tempers of men be likely to become wanton from such
examples? In what manner demons, the offspring of evil angels who have been long engaged
in their mission, have laboured to turn men aside from the faith to unbelief and to such
fables, we must not in this place speak of to any extent. As indeed the general body (of
your gods), which took their cue from their kings, and princes, and instructors, was not
of the self-same nature, it was in some other way that similarity of character was exacted
by their authority. But how much the worst of them was he who (ought to have been, but)
was not, the best of them? By a title peculiar to him, you are indeed in the habit of
calling Jupiter "the Best," whilst in Virgil he is "¦quus Jupiter. All therefore were like
him-incestuous towards their own kith and kin, unchaste to strangers, impious, unjust! Now
he whom mythic story left untainted with no conspicuous infamy, was not worthy to be made
a god.

CHAPTER XIV.-GODS, THOSE WHICH WERE CONFESSEDLY ELEVATED TO THE DIVINE CONDITION, WHAT PRE-EMINENT RIGHT HAD THEY TO SUCH HONOUR? HERCULES AN INFERIOR CHARACTER.

1 But since they will have it that those who have been admitted from the human state to
the honours of deification should be kept separate from others, and that the distinction
which Dionysius the Stoic drew should be made between the native and the factitious gods,
I will add a few words concerning this last class also. I will take Hercules himself for
raising the gist of a reply (to the question) whether he deserved heaven and divine
honours? For, as men choose to have it, these honours are awarded to him for his merits.
If it was for his valour in destroying wild beasts with intrepidity, what was there in
that so very memorable? Do not criminals condemned to the games, though they are even
consigned to the contest of the vile arena, despatch several of these animals at one time,
and that with more earnest zeal? If it was for his world-wide travels, how often has the
same thing been accomplished by the rich at their pleasant leisure, or by philosophers in
their slave-like poverty? Is it forgotten that the cynic Asclepiades on a single sorry
cow, riding on her back, and sometimes nourished at her udder, surveyed the whole world
with a personal inspection? Even if Hercules visited the infernal regions, who does not
know that the way to Hades is open to all?

2 If you have deified him on account of his much carnage and many battles, a much greater
number of victories was gained by the illustrious Pompey, the conqueror of the pirates who
had not spared Ostia itself in their ravages; and (as to carnage), how many thousands, let
me ask, were cooped up in one corner of the citadel of Carthage, and slain by Scipio?
Wherefore Scipio has a better claim to be considered a fit candidate for deification than
Hercules. You must be still more careful to add to the claims of (our) Hercules his
debaucheries with concubines and wives, and the swathes of Omphale, and his base desertion
of the Argonauts because he had lost his beautiful boy. To this mark of baseness add for
his glorification likewise his attacks of madness, adore the arrows which slew his sons
and wife. This was the man who, after deeming himself worthy of a funeral pile in the
anguish of his remorse for his parricides, deserved rather to die the unhonoured death
which awaited him, arrayed in the poisoned robe which his wife sent him on account of his
lascivious attachment (to another). You, however, raised him from the pyre to the sky,
with the same facility with which (you have distinguished in like manner) another hero
also, who was destroyed by the violence of a fire from the gods. He having devised some
few experiments, was said to have restored the dead to life by his cures.

3 He was the son of Apollo, half human, although the grandson of Jupiter, and great-
grandson of Saturn (or rather of spurious origin, because his parentage was uncertain, as
Socrates of Argon has related; he was exposed also, and found in a worse tutelage than
even Jove's, suckled even at the dugs of a dog); nobody can deny that he deserved the end
which befell him when he perished by a stroke of lightning. In this transaction, however,
your most excellent Jupiter is once more found in the wrong-impious to his grandson,
envious of his artistic skill. Pindar, indeed, has not concealed his true desert;
according to him, he was punished for his avarice and love of gain, influenced by which he
would bring the living to their death, rather than the dead to life, by the perverted use
of his medical art which he put up for sale. It is said that his mother was killed by the
same stroke, and it was only right that she, who had bestowed so dangerous a beast on the
world, should escape to heaven by the same ladder. And yet the Athenians will not be at a
loss how to sacrifice to gods of such a fashion, for they pay divine honours to ¦sculapius
and his mother amongst their dead (worthies). As if, too, they had not ready to hand their
own Theseus to worship, so highly deserving a god's distinction! Well, why not?

4 Did he not on a foreign shore abandon the preserver of his life, with the same
indifference, nay heartlessness, with which he became the cause of his father's death?

CHAPTER XV.-THE CONSTELLATIONS AND THE GENII VERY INDIFFERENT GODS. THE ROMAN MONOPOLY OF GODS UNSATISFACTORY. OTHER NATIONS REQUIRE DEITIES QUITE AS MUCH.

1 It would be tedious to take a survey of all those, too, whom you have buried amongst the
constellations, and audaciously minister to as gods. I suppose your Castors, and Perseus,
and Erigona, have just the same claims for the honours of the sky as Jupiter's own big boy
had. But why should we wonder? You have transferred to heaven even dogs, and scorpions,
and crabs. I postpone all remarks concerning those whom you worship in your oracles. That
this worship exists, is attested by him who pronounces the oracle. Why; you will have your
gods to be spectators even of sadness, as is Viduus, who makes a widow of the soul, by
parting it from the body, and whom you have condemned, by not permitting him to be
enclosed within your city-walls; there is Cµculus also, to deprive the eyes of their
perception; and Orbana, to bereave seed of its vital power; moreover, there is the goddess
of death herself. To pass hastily by all others, you account as gods the sites of places
or of the city; such are Father Janus (there being, moreover, the archer-goddess Jana ),
and Septimontius of the seven hills.

2 Men sacrifice to the same Genii, whilst they have altars or temples in the same places;
but to others besides, when they dwell in a strange place, or live in rented houses. I say
nothing about Ascensus, who gets his name for his climbing propensity, and Clivicola, from
her sloping (haunts); I pass silently by the deities called Forculus from doors, and
Cardea from hinges, and Limentinus the god of thresholds, and whatever others are
worshipped by your neighbours as tutelar deities of their street doors. There is nothing
strange in this, since men have their respective gods in their brothels, their kitchens,
and even in their prison. Heaven, therefore, is crowded with innumerable gods of its own,
both these and others belonging to the Romans, which have distributed amongst them the
functions of one's whole life, in such a way that there is no want of the other gods.
Although, it is true, the gods which we have enumerated are reckoned as Roman peculiarly,
and as not easily recognised abroad; yet how do all those functions and circumstances,
over which men have willed their gods to preside, come about, in every part of the human
race, and in every nation, where their guarantees are not only without an official
recognition, but even any recognition at all?

CHAPTER XVI.-INVENTORS OF USEFUL ARTS UNWORTHY OF DEIFICATION. THEY WOULD BE THE FIRST TO ACKNOWLEDGE A CREATOR. THE ARTS CHANGEABLE FROM TIME TO TIME, AND SOME BECOME OBSOLETE.

Well, but certain men have discovered fruits and sundry necessaries of life, (and hence
are worthy of deification). Now let me ask, when you call these persons "discoverers," do
you not confess that what they discovered was already in existence? Why then do you not
prefer to honour the Author, from whom the gifts really come, instead of converting the
Author into mere discoverers? Previously he who made the discover, the inventor himself no
doubt expressed his gratitude to the Author; no doubt, too, he felt that He was God, to
whom really belonged the religious service, as the Creator (of the gift), by whom also
both he who discovered and that which was discovered were alike created. The green fig of
Africa nobody at Rome had heard of when Cato introduced it to the Senate, in order that he
might show how near was that province of the enemy whose subjugation he was constantly
urging. The cherry was first made common in Italy by Cn. Pompey, who imported it from
Pontus. I might possibly have thought the earliest introducers of apples amongst the
Romans deserving of the public honour of deification. This, however, would be as foolish a
ground for making gods as even the invention of the useful arts. And yet if the skilful
men of our own time be compared with these, how much more suitable would deification be to
the later generation than to the former! For, tell me, have not all the extant inventions
superseded antiquity, whilst daily experience goes on adding to the new stock? Those,
therefore, whom you regard as divine because of their arts, you are really injuring by
your very arts, and challenging (their divinity) by means of rival attainments, which
cannot be surpassed.

CHAPTER XVII. -CONCLUSION, THE ROMANS OWE NOT THEIR IMPERIAL POWER TO THEIR GODS. THE GREAT GOD ALONE DISPENSES KINGDOMS, HE IS THE GOD OF THE CHRISTIANS.

1 In conclusion, without denying all those whom antiquity willed and posterity has
believed to be gods, to be the guardians of your religion, there yet remains for our
consideration that very large assumption of the Roman superstitions which we have to meet
in opposition to you, O heathen, viz. that the Romans have become the lords and masters of
the whole world, because by their religious offices they have merited this dominion to
such an extent that they are within a very little of excelling even their own gods in
power. One cannot wonder that Sterculus, and Mutunus, and Larentina, have severally
advanced this empire to its height! The Roman people has been by its gods alone ordained
to such dominion. For I could not imagine that any foreign gods would have preferred doing
more for a strange nation than for their own people, and so by such conduct become the
deserters and neglecters, nay, the betrayers of the native land wherein they were born and
bred, and ennobled and buried. Thus not even Jupiter could suffer his own Crete to be
subdued by the Roman fasces, forgetting that cave of Ida, and the brazen cymbals of the
Corybantes, and the most pleasant odour of the goat which nursed him on that dear spot.
Would he not have made that tomb of his superior to the whole Capitol, so that that land
should most widely rule which covered the ashes of Jupiter? Would Juno, too, be willing
that the Punic city, for the love of which she even neglected Samos, should be destroyed,
and that, too, by the fires of the sons of ¦neas? Although I am well aware that

2 "Hic illius arma, Hic currus fuit, hoc regnum des gentibus ease, Si qua fata sinant, jam
tunc tenditque fovetque." "Here were her arms, her chariot here, Here goddess-like, to fix
one day The seat of universal sway, Might fate be wrung to yield assent, E'en then her
schemes, her cares were bent." 3 Still the unhappy (queen of gods) had no power against
the fates! And yet the Romans did not accord as much honour to the fates, although they
gave them Carthage, as they did to Larentina. But surely those gods of yours have not the
power of conferring empire. For when Jupiter reigned in Crete, and Saturn in Italy, and
Isis in Egypt, it was even as men that they reigned, to whom also were assigned many to
assist them. Thus he who serves also makes masters, and the bond-slave of Admetus
aggrandizes with empire the citizens of Rome, although he destroyed his own liberal votary
Cr£sus by deceiving him with ambiguous oracles. Being a god, why was he afraid boldly to
foretell to him the truth that he must lose his kingdom. Surely those who were aggrandized
with the power of wielding empire might always have been able to keep an eye, as it were,
on their own cities. If they were strong enough to confer empire on the Romans, why did
not Minerva defend Athens from Xerxes? Or why did not Apollo rescue Delphi out of the hand
of Pyrrhus? They who lost their own cities preserve the city of Rome, since (forsooth) the
religiousness of Rome has merited the protection! But is it not rather the fact that this
excessive devotion has been devised since the empire has attained its glory by the
increase of its power?

4 No doubt sacred rites were introduced by Numa, but then your proceedings were not marred
by a religion of idols and temples. Piety was simple, and worship humble; altars were
artlessly reared, and the vessels (thereof) plain, and the incense from them scant, and
the god himself nowhere. Men therefore were not religious before they achieved greatness,
(nor great) because they were religious. But how can the Romans possibly seem to have
acquired their empire by an excessive religiousness and very profound respect for the
gods, when that empire was rather increased after the gods had been slighted? Now, if I am
not mistaken, every kingdom or empire is acquired and enlarged by wars, whilst they and
their gods also are injured by conquerors. For the same ruin affects both city-walls and
temples; similar is the carnage both of civilians and of priests; identical the plunder of
profane things and of sacred. To the Romans belong as many sacrileges as trophies; and
then as many triumphs over gods as over nations. Still remaining are their captive idols
amongst them; and certainly, if they can only see their conquerors, they do not give them
their love. Since, however, they have no perception, they are injured with impunity; and
since they are injured with impunity, they are worshipped to no purpose.

5 The nation, therefore, which has grown to its powerful height by victory after victory,
cannot seem to have developed owing to the merits of its religion-whether they have
injured the religion by augmenting their power, or augmented their power by injuring the
religion. All nations have possessed empire, each in its proper time, as the Assyrians,
the Medes, the Persians, the Egyptians; empire is even now also in the possession of some,
and yet they that have lost their power used not to behave without attention to religious
services and the worship of the gods, even after these had become unpropitious to them,
until at last almost universal dominion has accrued to the Romans. It is the fortune of
the times that has thus constantly shaken kingdoms with revolution. Inquire who has
ordained these changes in the times. It is the same (great Being) who dispenses kingdoms,
and has now put the supremacy of them into the hands of the Romans, very much as if the
tribute of many nations were after its exaction amassed in one (vast) coffer. What He has
determined concerning it, they know who are the nearest to Him.


THE SOUL'S TESTIMONY
====================

THE SOUL'S TESTIMONY Tertullian

c. AD 155–220

North African lawyer and the first great Latin theologian.

INTRODUCTION

[by the Rev S. Thelwall.]

CHAPTER I.

1 If, with the object of convicting the rivals and persecutors of Christian truth, from
their own authorities, of the crime of at once being untrue to themselves and doing
injustice to us, one is bent on gathering testimonies in its favour from the writings of
the philosophers, or the poets, or other masters of this world's learning and wisdom, he
has need of a most inquisitive spirit, and a still greater memory to carry out the
research. Indeed, some of our people, who still continued their inquisitive labours in
ancient literature, and still occupied memory with it, have published works we have in our
hands of this very sort; works in which they relate and attest the nature and origin of
their traditions, and the grounds on which opinions rest, and from which it may be seen at
once that we have embraced nothing new or monstrous-nothing for which we cannot claim the
support of ordinary and well-known writings, whether in ejecting error from our creed, or
admitting truth into it. But the unbelieving hardness of the human heart leads them to
slight even their own teachers, otherwise approved and in high renown, whenever they touch
upon arguments which are used in defence of Christianity. Then the poets are fools, when
they describe the gods with human passions and stories; then the philosophers are without
reason, when they knock at the gates of truth. He will thus far be reckoned a wise and
sagacious man who has gone the length of uttering sentiments that are almost Christian;

2 while if, in a mere affectation of judgment and wisdom, he sets himself to reject their
ceremonies, or to convicting the world of its sin, he is sure to be branded as a
Christian. We will have nothing, then, to do with the literature and the teaching,
perverted in its best results, which is believed in its errors rather than its truth. We
shall lay no stress on it, if some of their authors have declared that there is one God,
and one God only. Nay, let it be granted that there is nothing in heathen writers which a
Christian approves, that it may be put out of his power to utter a single word of
reproach. For all are not familiar with their teachings; and those who are, have no
assurance in regard to their truth. Far less do men assent to our writings, to which no
one comes for guidance unless he is already a Christian. I call in a new testimony, yea,
one which is better known than all literature, more discussed than all doctrine, more
public than all publications, greater than the whole man-I mean all which is man's. Stand
forth, O soul, whether thou art a divine and eternal substance, as most philosophers
believe if it be so, thou wilt be the less likely to lie,-or whether thou art the very
opposite of divine, because indeed a mortal thing, as Epicurus alone thinks-in that case
there will be the less temptation for thee to speak falsely in this case:

3 whether thou art received from heaven, or sprung from earth; whether thou art formed of
numbers, or of atoms; whether thine existence begins with that of the body, or thou art
put into it at a later stage; from whatever source, and in whatever way, thou makest man a
rational being, in the highest degree capable of thought and knowledge,-stand forth and
give thy witness. But I call thee not as when, fashioned in schools, trained in libraries,
fed in Attic academies and porticoes, thou belchest wisdom. I address thee simple, rude,
uncultured and untaught, such as they have thee who have thee only; that very thing of the
road, the street, the work-shop, wholly. I want thine inexperience, since in thy small
experience no one feels any confidence. I demand of thee the things thou bringest with
thee into man, which thou knowest either from thyself, or from thine author, whoever he
may be. Thou art not, as I well know, Christian; for a man becomes a Christian, he is not
born one. Yet Christians earnestly press thee for a testimony; they press thee, though an
alien, to bear witness against thy friends, that they may be put to shame before thee, for
hating and mocking us on account of things which convict thee as an accessory.

CHAPTER II.

1 We give offence by proclaiming that there is one God, to whom the name of God alone
belongs, from whom all things come, and who is Lord of the whole universe. Bear thy
testimony, if thou knowest this to be the truth; for openly and with a perfect liberty,
such as we do not possess, we hear thee both in private and in public exclaim, "Which may
God grant," and, "If God so will. By expressions such as these thou declarest that there
is one who is distinctively God, and thou con-fessest that all power belongs to him to
whose will, as Sovereign, thou dost look. At the same time, too, thou deniest any others
to be truly gods, in calling them by their own names of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Minerva;
for thou affirmest Him to be God alone to whom thou givest no other name than God; and
though thou sometimes callest these others gods, thou plainly usest the designation as one
which does not really belong to them, but is, so to speak, a borrowed one. Nor is the
nature of the God we declare unknown to thee: "God is good, God does good," thou art wont
to say; plainly suggesting further, "But man is evil. In asserting an antithetic
proposition, thou, in a sort of indirect and figurative way, reproachest man with his
wickedness in departing from a God so good.

2 So, again, as among us, as belonging to the God of benignity and goodness, "Blessing" is
a most sacred act in our religion and our life, thou too sayest as readily as a Christian
needs, "God bless thee; "and when thou turnest the blessing of God into a curse, in like
manner thy very words confess with us that His power over us is absolute and entire. There
are some who, though they do not deny the existence of God, hold withal that He is neither
Searcher, nor Ruler, nor Judge; treating with especial disdain those of us who go over to
Christ out of fear of a coming judgment, as they think, honouring God in freeing Him from
the cares of keeping watch, and the trouble of taking note,-not even regarding Him as
capable of anger. For if God, they say, gets angry, then He is susceptible of corruption
and passion; but that of which passion and corruption can be affirmed may also perish,
which God cannot do. But these very persons elsewhere, confessing that the soul is divine,
and bestowed on us by God, stumble against a testimony of the soul itself, which affords
an answer to these views. For if either divine or God-given, it doubtless knows its giver;
and if it knows Him, it undoubtedly fears Him too, and especially as having been by Him
endowed so amply. Has it no fear of Him whose favour it is so desirous to possess, and
whose anger it is so anxious to avoid?

3 Whence, then, the soul's natural fear of God, if God cannot be angry? How is there any
dread of Him whom nothing offends? What is feared but anger? Whence comes anger, but from
observing what is done? What leads to watchful oversight, but judgment in prospect? Whence
is judgment, but from power? To whom does supreme authority and power belong, but to God
alone? So thou art always ready, O soul, from thine own knowledge, nobody casting scorn
upon thee, and no one preventing, to exclaim, "God sees all," and "I commend thee to God,"
and "May God repay," and "God shall judge between us. How happens this, since thou art not
Christian? How is it that, even with the garland of Ceres on the brow, wrapped in the
purple cloak of Saturn, wearing the white robe of the goddess Isis, thou invokest God as
judge? Standing under the statue of ¦sculapius, adorning the brazen image of Juno,
arraying the helmet of Minerva with dusky figures, thou never thinkest of appealing to any
of these deities. In thine own forum thou appealest to a God who is elsewhere; thou
permittest honour to be rendered in thy temples to a foreign god. Oh, striking testimony
to truth, which in the very midst of demons obtains a witness for us Christians!

CHAPTER III.

But when we say that there are demons-as though, in the simple fact that we alone expel
them from the men's bodies, we did not also prove their existence-some disciple of
Chrysippus begins to curl the lip. Yet thy curses sufficiently attest that there are such
beings, and that they are objects of thy strong dislike. As what comes to thee as a fit
expression of thy strong hatred of him, thou callest the man a dµmon who annoys thee with
his filthiness, or malice, or insolence, or any other vice which we ascribe to evil
spirits. In expressing vexation, contempt, or abhorrence, thou hast Satan constantly upon
thy lips; the very same we hold to be the angel of evil, the source of error, the
corrupter of the whole world, by whom in the beginning man was entrapped into breaking the
commandment of God. And (the man) being given over to death on account of his sin, the
entire human race, tainted in their descent from him, were made a channel for transmitting
his condemnation. Thou seest, then, thy destroyer; and though he is fully known only to
Christians, or to whatever sect confesses the Lord, yet, even thou hast some acquaintance
with him while yet thou abhorrest him!

CHAPTER IV.

1 Even now, as the matter refers to thy opinion on a point the more closely belonging to
thee, in so far as it bears on thy personal well-being, we maintain that after life has
passed away thou still remainest in existence, and lookest forward to a day of judgment,
and according to thy deserts art assigned to misery or bliss, in either way of it for
ever; that, to be capable of this, thy former substance must needs return to thee, the
matter and the memory of the very same human being: for neither good nor evil couldst thou
feel if thou wert not endowed again with that sensitive bodily organization, and there
would be no grounds for judgment without the presentation of the very person to whom the
sufferings of judgment were due. That Christian view, though much nobler than the
Pythagorean, as it does not transfer thee into beasts; though more complete than the
Platonic, since it endows thee again with a body; though more worthy of honour than the
Epicurean, as it preserves thee from annihilation,-yet, because of the name connected with
it, it is held to be nothing but vanity and folly, and, as it is called, a mere
presumption. But we are not ashamed of ourselves if our presumption is found to have thy
support.

2 Well, in the first place, when thou speakest of one who is dead, thou sayest of him,
"Poor man"-poor, surely, not because he has been taken from the good of life, but because
he has been given over to punishment and condemnation. But at another time thou speakest
of the dead as free from trouble; thou professest to think life a burden, and death a
blessing. Thou art wont, too, to speak of the dead as in repose, when, returning to their
graves beyond the city gates with food and dainties, thou art wont to present offerings to
thyself rather than to them; or when, coming from the graves again, thou art staggering
under the effects of wine. But I want thy sober opinion. Thou callest the dead poor when
thou speakest thine own thoughts, when thou art at a distance from them. For at their
feast, where in a sense they are present and recline along with thee, it would never do to
cast reproach upon their lot. Thou canst not but adulate those for whose sake thou art
feasting it so sumptuously. Dost thou then speak of him as poor who feels not? How happens
it that thou cursest, as one capable of suffering from thy curse, the man whose memory
comes back on thee with the sting in it of some old injury? It is thine imprecation that
"the earth may lie heavy on him," and that there may be trouble "to his ashes in the realm
of the dead.

3 In like manner, in thy kindly feeling to him to whom thou art indebted for favours, thou
entreatest "repose to his bones and ashes," and thy desire is that among the dead he may
"have pleasant rest. If thou hast no power of suffering after death, if no feeling
remains,-if, in a word, severance from the body is the annihilation of thee, what makes
thee lie against thyself, as if thou couldst suffer in another state? Nay, why dost thou
fear death at all? There is nothing after death to be feared, if there is nothing to be
felt. For though it may be said that death is dreadful not for anything it threatens
afterwards, but because it deprives us of the good of life; yet, on the other hand, as it
puts an end to life's discomforts, which are far more numerous, death's terrors are
mitigated by a gain that more than outweighs the loss. And there is no occasion to be
troubled about a loss of good things, which is amply made up for by so great a blessing as
relief from every trouble. There is nothing dreadful in that which delivers from all that
is to be dreaded. If thou shrinkest from giving up life because thy experience of it has
been sweet, at any rate there is no need to be in any alarm about death if thou hast no
knowledge that it is evil. Thy dread of it is the proof that thou art aware of its evil.

4 Thou wouldst never think it evil-thou wouldst have no fear of it at all-if thou weft not
sure that after it there is something to make it evil, and so a thing of terror. Let us
leave unnoted at this time that natural way of fearing death. It is a poor thing for any
one to fear what is inevitable. I take up the other side, and argue on the ground of a
joyful hope beyond our term of earthly life; for desire of posthumous fame is with almost
every class an inborn thing. I have not time to speak of the Curtii, and the Reguli, or
the brave men of Greece, who afford us innumerable cases of death despised for after
renown. Who at this day is without the desire that he may be often remembered when he is
dead? Who does not give all endeavour to preserve his name by works of literature, or by
the simple glory of his virtues, or by the splendour even of his tomb? How is it the
nature of the soul to have these posthumous ambitions and with such amazing effort to
prepare the things it can only use after decease? It would care nothing about the future,
if the future were quite unknown to it. But perhaps thou thinkest thyself surer, after thy
exit from the body, of continuing still to feel, than of any future resurrection, which is
a doctrine laid at our door as one of our presumptuous suppositions. But it is also the
doctrine of the soul;

5 for if any one inquires about a person lately dead as though he were alive, it occurs at
once to say, "He has gone. He is expected to return, then.

CHAPTER V.

1 These testimonies of the soul are simple as true, commonplace as simple, universal as
commonplace, natural as universal, divine as natural. I don't think they can appear
frivolous or feeble to any one, if he reflect on the majesty of nature, from which the
soul derives its authority. If you acknowledge the authority of the mistress, you will own
it also in the disciple. Well, nature is the mistress here, and her disciple is the soul.
But everything the one has taught or the other learned, has come from God-the Teacher of
the teacher. And what the soul may know from the teachings of its chief instructor, thou
canst judge from that which is within thee. Think of that which enables thee to think;
reflect on that which in forebodings is the prophet, the augur in omens, the foreseer of
coming events. Is it a wonderful thing, if, being the gift of God to man, it knows how to
divine? Is it anything very strange, if it knows the God by whom it was bestowed? Even
fallen as it is, the victim of the great adversary's machinations, it does not forget its
Creator, His goodness and law, and the final end both of itself and of its foe. Is it
singular then, if, divine in its origin, its revelations agree with the knowledge God has
given to His own people?

2 But he who does not regard those outbursts of the soul as the teaching of a congenital
nature and the secret deposit of an inborn knowledge, will say that the habit and, so to
say, the vice of speaking in this way has been acquired and confirmed from the opinions of
published books widely spread among men. Unquestionably the soul existed before letters,
and speech before books, and ideas before the writing of them, and man himself before the
poet and philosopher. Is it then to be believed, that before literature and its
publication no utterances of the sort we have pointed out came from the lips of men? Did
nobody speak of God and His goodness, nobody of death, nobody of the dead? Speech went
a-begging, I suppose; nay, (the subjects being still awanting, without which it cannot
even exist at this day, when it is so much more copious, and rich, and wise), it could not
exist at all if the things which are now so easily suggested, that cling to us so
constantly, that are so very near to us, that are somehow born on our very lips, had no
existence in ancient times, before letters had any existence in the world-before there was
a Mercury, I think, at all. And whence was it, I pray, that letters themselves came to
know, and to disseminate for the use of speech, what no mind had ever conceived, or tongue
put forth, or ear taken in?

3 But, clearly, since the Scriptures of God, whether belonging to Christians or to Jews,
into whose olive tree we have been grafted-are much more ancient than any secular
literature, (or, let us only say, are of a somewhat earlier date, as we have shown in its
proper place when proving their trustworthiness); if the soul have taken these utterances
from writings at all, we must believe it has taken them from ours, and not from yours, its
instruction coming more naturally from the earlier than the later works. Which latter
indeed waited for their own instruction from the former, and though we grant that light
has come from you, still it has flowed from the first fountainhead originally; and we
claim as entirely ours, all you may have taken from us and handed down. Since it is thus,
it matters little whether the soul's knowledge was put into it by God or by His book. Why,
then, O man, wilt thou maintain a view so groundless, as that those testimonies of the
soul have gone forth from the mere human speculations of your literature, and got
hardening of common use?

CHAPTER VI.

1 Believe, then, your own books, and as to our Scriptures so much the more believe
writings which are divine, but in the witness of the soul itself give like confidence to
Nature. Choose the one of these you observe to be the most faithful friend of truth. If
your own writings are distrusted, neither God nor Nature lie. And if you would have faith
in God and Nature, have faith in the soul; thus you will believe yourself. Certainly you
value the soul as giving you your true greatness,-that to which you belong; which is all
things to you; without which you can neither live nor die; on whose account you even put
God away from you. Since, then, you fear to become a Christian, call the soul before you,
and put her to the question. Why does she worship another? why name the name of God? Why
does she speak of demons, when she means to denote spirits to be held accursed? Why does
she make her protestations towards the heavens, and pronounce her ordinary execrations
earthwards? Why does she render service in one place, in another invoke the Avenger? Why
does she pass judgments on the dead? What Christian phrases are those she has got, though
Christians she neither desires to see nor hear? Why has she either bestowed them On us, or
received them from us? Why has she either taught us them, or learned them as our scholar?
Regard with suspicion this accordance in words, while there is such difference in
practice.

2 It is utter folly-denying a universal nature-to ascribe this exclusively to our language
and the Greek, which are regarded among us as so near akin. The soul is not a boon from
heaven to Latins and Greeks alone. Man is the one name belonging to every nation upon
earth: there is one soul and many tongues, one spirit and various sounds; every country
has its own speech, but the subjects of speech are common to all. God is everywhere, and
the goodness of God is everywhere; demons are everywhere, and the cursing of them is
everywhere; the invocation of divine judgment is everywhere, death is everywhere, and the
sense of death is everywhere, and all the world over is found the witness of the soul.
There is not a soul of man that does not, from the light that is in itself, proclaim the
very things we are not permitted to speak above our breath. Most justly, then, every soul
is a culprit as well as a witness: in the measure that it testifies for truth, the guilt
of error lies on it; and on the day of judgment it will stand before the courts of God,
without a word to say. Thou proclaimedst God, O soul, but thou didst not seek to know Him:
evil spirits were detested by thee, and yet they were the objects of thy adoration; the
punishments of hell were foreseen by thee, but no care was taken to avoid them; thou hadst
a savour of Christianity, and withal wert the persecutor of Christians.


TO SCAPULA
==========

TO SCAPULA Tertullian

c. AD 155–220

North African lawyer and the first great Latin theologian.

INTRODUCTION

[Translated by the Rev. S. Thelwall.]

CHAPTER I.

We are not in any great perturbation or alarm about the persecutions we suffer from the
ignorance of men; for we have attached ourselves to this sect, fully accepting the terms
of its covenant, so that, as men whose very lives are not their own, we engage in these
conflicts, our desire being to obtain God's promised rewards, and our dread lest the woes
with which He threatens an unchristian life should overtake us. Hence we shrink not from
the grapple with your utmost rage, coming even forth of our own accord to the contest; and
condemnation gives us more pleas-are than acquittal. We have sent, therefore, this tract
to you in no alarm about ourselves, but in much concern for you and for all our enemies,
to say nothing of our friends. For our religion commands us to love even our enemies, and
to pray for those who persecute us, aiming at a perfection all its own, and seeking in its
disciples something of a higher type than the commonplace goodness of the world. For all
love those who love them; it is peculiar to Christians alone to love those that hate them.
Therefore mourning over your ignorance, and compassionating human error, and looking on to
that future of which every day shows threatening signs, necessity is laid on us to come
forth in this way also, that we may set before you the truths you will not listen to
openly.

CHAPTER II.

1 We are worshippers of one God, of whose existence and character Nature teaches all men;
at whose lightnings and thunders you tremble, whose benefits minister to your happiness.
You think that others, too, are gods, whom we know to be devils. However, it is a
fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to
his own convictions: one man's religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is
assuredly no part of religion to compel religion-to which free-will and not force should
lead us-the sacrificial victims even being required of a willing mind. You will render no
real service to your gods by compelling us to sacrifice. For they can have no desire of
offerings from the unwilling, unless they are animated by a spirit of contention, which is
a thing altogether undivine. Accordingly the true God bestows His blessings alike on
wicked men and on His own elect; upon which account He has appointed an eternal judgment,
when both thankful and unthankful will have to stand before His bar. Yet you have never
detected us-sacrilegious wretches though you reckon us to be-in any theft, far less in any
sacrilege. But the robbers of your temples, all of them swear by your gods, and worship
them; they are not Christians, and yet it is they who are found guilty of sacrilegious
deeds. We have not time to unfold in how many other ways your gods are mocked and despised
by their own votaries.

2 So, too, treason is falsely laid to our charge, though no one has ever been able to find
followers of Albinus, or Niger, or Cassius, among Christians; while the very men who had
sworn by the genii of the emperors, who had offered and vowed sacrifices for their safety,
who had often pronounced condemnation on Christ's disciples, are till this day found
traitors to the imperial throne. A Christian is enemy to none, least of all to the Emperor
of Rome, whom he knows to be appointed by his God, and so cannot but love and honour; and
whose well-being moreover, he must needs desire, with that of the empire over which he
reigns so long as the world shall stand-for so long as that shall Rome continue. To the
emperor, therefore, we render such reverential homage as is lawful for us and good for
him; regarding him as the human being next to God who from God has received all his power,
and is less than God alone. And this will be according to his own desires. For thus-as
less only than the true God-he is greater than all besides. Thus he is greater than the
very gods themselves, even they, too, being subject to him. We therefore sacrifice for the
emperor's safety, but to our God and his, and after the manner God has enjoined, in simple
prayer. For God, Creator of the universe, has no need of odours or of blood. These things
are the food of devils. But we not only reject those wicked spirits:

3 we overcome them; we daily hold them up to contempt; we exorcise them from their
victims, as multitudes can testify. So all the more we pray for the imperial well-being,
as those who seek it at the hands of Him who is able to bestow it. And one would think it
must be abundantly clear to you that the religious system under whose rules we act is one
inculcating a divine patience; since, though our numbers are so great-constituting all but
the majority in every city-we conduct ourselves so quietly and modestly; I might perhaps
say, known rather as individuals than as organized communities, and remarkable only for
the reformation of our former vices. For far be it from us to take it ill that we have
laid on us the very things we wish, or in any way plot the vengeance at our own hands,
which we expect to come from God.

CHAPTER III.

1 However, as we have already remarked, it cannot but distress us that no state shall bear
unpunished the guilt of shedding Christian blood; as you see, indeed, in what took place
during the presidency of Hilarian, for when there had been some agitation about places of
sepulture for our dead, and the cry arose, "No areµ-no burial-grounds for the Christians,"
it came that their own areµ, their threshing-floors, were a wanting, for they gathered in
no harvests. As to the rains of the bygone year, it is abundantly plain of what they were
intended to remind men-of the deluge, no doubt, which in ancient times overtook human
unbelief and wickedness; and as to the fires which lately hung all night over the walls of
Carthage, they who saw them know what they threatened; and what the preceding thunders
pealed, they who were hardened by them can tell. All these things are signs of God's
impending wrath, which we must needs publish and proclaim in every possible way; and in
the meanwhile we must pray it may be only local. Sure are they to experience it one day in
its universal and final form, who interpret otherwise these samples of it. That sun, too,
in the metropolis of Utica, with light all but extinguished, was a portent which could not
have occurred from an ordinary eclipse, situated as the lord of day was in his height and
house. You have the astrologers, consult them about it.

2 We can point you also to the deaths of some provincial rulers, who in their last hours
had painful memories of their sin in persecuting the followers of Christ. Vigellius
Saturninus, who first here used the sword against us, lost his eyesight. Claudius Lucius
Herminianus in Cappadocia, enraged that his wife had become a Christian, had treated the
Christians with great cruelty: well, left alone in his palace, suffering under a
contagious malady, he boiled out in living worms, and was heard exclaiming, "Let nobody
know of it, lest the Christians rejoice, and Christian wives take encouragement.
Afterwards he came to see his error in having tempted so many from their stedfastness by
the tortures he inflicted, and died almost a Christian himself. In that doom which
overtook Byzantium, Cµcilius Capella could not help crying out, "Christians, rejoice! Yes,
and the persecutors who seem to themselves to have acted with impunity shall not escape
the day of judgment. For you we sincerely wish it may prove to have been a warning only,
that, immediately after you had condemned Mavilus of Adrumetum to the wild beasts, you
were overtaken by those troubles, and that even now for the same reason you are called to
a blood-reckoning. But do not forget the future.

CHAPTER IV.

1 We who are without fear ourselves are not seeking to frighten you, but we would save all
men if possible by warning them not to fight with God. You may perform the duties of your
charge, and yet remember the claims of humanity; if on no other ground than that you are
liable to punishment yourself, (you ought to do so). For is not your commission simply to
condemn those who confess their guilt, and to give over to the torture those who deny? You
see, then, how you trespass yourselves against your instructions to wring from the
confessing a denial. It is, in fact, an acknowledgment of our innocence that you refuse to
condemn us at once when we confess. In doing your utmost to extirpate us, if that is your
object, it is innocence you assail. But how many rulers, men more resolute and more cruel
than you are, have contrived to get quit of such causes altogether,-as Cincius Severus,
who himself suggested the remedy at Thysdris, pointing out how the Christians should
answer that they might secure an acquittal; as Vespronius Candidus, who dismissed from his
bar a Christian, on the ground that to satisfy his fellow-citizens would break the peace
of the community; as Asper, who, in the case of a man who gave up his faith under slight
infliction of the torture, did not compel the offering of sacrifice, having owned before,
among the advocates and assessors of court, that he was annoyed at having had to meddle
with such a case.

2 Pudens, too, at once dismissed a Christian who was brought before him, perceiving from
the indictment that it was a case of vexatious accusation; tearing the document in pieces,
he refused so much as to hear him without the presence of his accuser, as not being
consistent with the imperial commands. All this might be officially brought Under your
notice, and by the very advocates, who are themselves also under obligations to us,
although in court they give their voice as it suits them. The clerk of one of them who was
liable to be thrown upon the ground by an evil spirit, was set free from his affliction;
as was also the relative of another, and the little boy of a third. How many men of rank
(to say nothing of common people) have been delivered from devils, and healed of diseases!
Even Severus himself, the father of Antonine, was graciously mindful of the Christians;
for he sought out the Christian Proculus, surnamed Torpacion, the steward of Euhodias, and
in gratitude for his having once cured him by anointing, he kept him in his palace till
the day of his death. Antonine, too, brought up as he was on Christian milk, was
intimately acquainted with this man. Both women and men of highest rank, whom Severus knew
well to be Christians, were not merely permitted by him to remain uninjured; but he even
bore distinguished testimony in their favour, and gave them publicly back to us from the
hands of a raging populace.

3 Marcus Aurelius also, in his expedition to Germany, by the prayers his Christian
soldiers offered to God, got rain in that well-known thirst. When, indeed, have not
droughts been put away by our kneelings and our fastings? At times like these, moreover,
the people crying to "the God of gods, the alone Omnipotent," under the name of Jupiter,
have borne witness to our God. Then we never deny the deposit placed in our hands; we
never pollute the marriage bed; we deal faithfully with our wards; we give aid to the
needy; we render to none evil for evil. As for those who falsely pretend to belong to us,
and whom we, too, repudiate, let them answer for themselves. In a word, who has complaint
to make against us on other grounds? To what else does the Christian devote himself, save
the affairs of his own community, which during all the long period of its existence no one
has ever proved guilty of the incest or the cruelty charged against it? It is for freedom
from crime so singular, for a probity so great, for righteousness, for purity, for
faithfulness, for truth, for the living God, that we are consigned to the flames; for this
is a punishment you are not wont to inflict either on the sacrilegious, or on undoubted
public enemies, or on the treason-tainted, of whom you have so many. Nay, even now our
people are enduring persecution from the governors of Legio and Mauritania;

4 but it is only with the sword, as from the first it was ordained that we should suffer.
But the greater our conflicts, the greater our rewards.

CHAPTER V.

1 Your cruelty is our glory. Only see you to it, that in having such things as these to
endure, we do not feel ourselves constrained to rush forth to the combat, if only to prove
that we have no dread of them, but on the contrary, even invite their infliction. When
Arrius Antoninus was driving things hard in Asia, the whole Christians of the province, in
one united band, presented themselves before his judgment-seat; on which, ordering a few
to be led forth to execution, he said to the rest, "O miserable men, if you wish to die,
you have precipices or halters." If we should take it into our heads to do the same thing
here, what will you make of so many thousands, of such a multitude of men and women,
persons of every sex and every age and every rank, when they present themselves before
you? How many fires, how many swords will be required? What will be the anguish of
Carthage itself, which you will have to decimate, as each one recognises there his
relatives and companions, as he sees there it may be men of your own order, and noble
ladies, and all the leading persons of the city, and either kinsmen or friends of those of
your own circle? Spare thyself, if not us poor Christians! Spare Carthage, if not thyself!
Spare the province, which the indication of your purpose has subjected to the threats and
extortions at once of the soldiers and of private enemies.

2 We have no master but God. He is before you, and cannot be hidden from you, but to Him
you can do no injury. But those whom you regard as masters are only men, and one day they
themselves must die. Yet still this community will be undying, for be assured that just in
the time of its seeming overthrow it is built up into greater power. For all who witness
the noble patience of its martyrs, as struck with misgivings, are inflamed with desire to
examine into the matter in question; and as soon as they come to know the truth, they
straightway enrol themselves its disciples.


THE SHOWS, OR DE SPECTACULIS
============================

THE SHOWS, OR DE SPECTACULIS Tertullian

c. AD 155–220

North African lawyer and the first great Latin theologian.

INTRODUCTION

[Translated by the Rev. S. Thelwall.]

CHAPTER I.

1 Ye Servants of God, about to draw near to God. that you may make solemn consecration of
yourselves to Him, seek well to understand the condition of faith, the reasons of the
Truth, the laws of Christian Discipline, which forbid among other sins of the world, the
pleasures of the public shows. Ye who have testified and confessed that you have done so
already, review the subject, that there may be no sinning whether through real or wilful
ignorance. For such is the power of earthly pleasures, that, to retain the opportunity of
still partaking of them, it contrives to prolong swilling ignorance, and bribes knowledge
into playing a dishonest part. To both things, perhaps, some among you are allured by the
views of the heathens who in this matter are wont to press us with arguments, such as
these: (1) That the exquisite enjoyments of ear and eye we have in things external are not
in the least opposed to religion in the mind and conscience; and (2) That surely no
offence is offered to God, in any human enjoyment, by any of our pleasures, which it is
not sinful to partake of in its own time and place, with all due honour and reverence
secured to Him. But this is precisely what we are ready to prove: That these things are
not consistent with true religion and true obedience to the true God.

2 There are some who imagine that Christians, a sort of people ever ready to die, are
trained into the abstinence they practise, with no other object than that of making it
less difficult to despise life, the fastenings to it being severed as it were. They regard
it as an art of quenching all desire for that which, so far as they are concerned, they
have emptied of all that is desirable; and so it is thought to be rather a thing of human
planning and foresight, than clearly laid down by divine command. It were a grievous
thing, forsooth, for Christians, while continuing in the enjoyment of pleasures so great,
to die for God! It is not as they say; though, if it were, even Christian obstinacy might
well give all submission to a plan so suitable, to a rule so excellent.

CHAPTER II.

1 Then, again, every one is ready with the argument that all things, as we teach, were
created by God, and given to man for his use, and that they must be good, as coming all
from so good a source; but that among them are found the various constituent elements of
the public shows, such as the horse, the lion, bodily strength, and musical voice. It
cannot, then, be thought that what exists by God's own creative will is either foreign or
hostile to Him; and if it is not opposed to Him, it cannot be regarded as injurious to His
worshippers, as certainly it is not foreign to them. Beyond all doubt, too, the very
buildings connected with the places of public amusement, composed as they are of rocks,
stones, marbles, pillars, are things of God, who has given these various things for the
earth's embellishment; nay, the very scenes are enacted under God's own heaven. How
skilful a pleader seems human wisdom to herself, especially if she has the fear of losing
any of her delights-any of the sweet enjoyments of worldly existence! In fact, you will
find not a few whom the imperilling of their pleasures rather than their life holds back
from us. For even the weakling has no strong dread of death as a debt he knows is due by
him; while the wise man does not look with contempt on pleasure, regarding it as a
precious gift-in fact, the one blessedness of life, whether to philosopher or fool.

2 Now nobody denies what nobody is ignorant of-for Nature herself is teacher of it-that
God is the Maker of the universe, and that it is good, and that it is man's by free gift
of its Maker. But having no intimate acquaintance with the Highest, knowing Him only by
natural revelation, and not as His "friends"-afar off, and not as those who have been
brought nigh to Him-men cannot but be in ignorance alike of what He enjoins and what He
forbids in regard to the administration of His world. They must be ignorant, too, of the
hostile power which works against Him, and perverts to wrong uses the things His hand has
formed; for you cannot know either the will or the adversary of a God you do not know. We
must not, then, consider merely by whom all things were made, but by whom they have been
perverted. We shall find out for what use they were made at first, when we find for what
they were not. There is a vast difference between the corrupted state and that of primal
purity, just because there is a vast difference between the Creator and the corrupter.
Why, all sorts of evils, which as indubitably evils even the heathens prohibit, and
against which they guard themselves, come from the works of God. Take, for instance,
murder, whether committed by iron, by poison, or by magical enchantments. Iron and herbs
and demons are all equally creatures of God. Has the Creator, withal, provided these
things for man's destruction?

3 Nay, He puts His interdict on every sort of man-killing by that one summary precept,
"Thou shalt not kill. Moreover, who but God, the Maker of the world, put in its gold,
brass, silver, ivory, wood, and all the other materials used in the manufacture of idols?
Yet has He done this that men may set up a worship in opposition to Himself? On the
contrary idolatry in His eyes is the crowning sin. What is there offensive to God which is
not God's? But in offending Him, it ceases to be His; and in ceasing to be His, it is in
His eyes an offending thing. Man himself, guilty as he is of every iniquity, is not only a
work of God-he is His image, and yet both in soul and body he has severed himself from his
Maker. For we did not get eyes to minister to lust, and the tongue for speaking evil with,
and ears to be the receptacle of evil speech, and the throat to serve the vice of
gluttony, and the belly to be gluttony's ally, and the genitals for unchaste excesses, and
hands for deeds of violence, and the feet for an erring life; or was the soul placed in
the body that it might become a thought-manufactory of snares, and fraud, and injustice? I
think not;

4 for if God, as the righteous ex-actor of innocence, hates everything like malignity-if
He hates utterly such plotting of evil, it is clear beyond a doubt, that, of all things
that have come from His hand, He has made none to lead to works which He condemns, even
though these same works may be carried on by things of His making; for, in fact, it is the
one ground of condemnation, that the creature misuses the creation. We, therefore, who in
our knowledge of the Lord have obtained some knowledge also of His foe-who, in our
discovery of the Creator, have at the same time laid hands upon the great corrupter, ought
neither to wonder nor to doubt that, as the prowess of the corrupting and God-opposing
angel overthrew in the beginning the virtue of man, the work and image of God, the
possessor of the world, so he has entirely changed man's nature-created, like his own, for
perfect sinlessness-into his own state of wicked enmity against his Maker, that in the
very thing whose gift to man, but not to him, had grieved him, he might make man guilty in
God's eyes, and set up his own supremacy.

CHAPTER III.

1 Fortified by this knowledge against heathen views, let us rather turn to the unworthy
reasonings of our own people; for the faith of some, either too simple or too scrupulous,
demands direct authority from Scripture for giving up the shows, and holds out that the
matter is a doubtful one, because such abstinence is not clearly and in words imposed upon
God's servants. Well, we never find it expressed with the same precision, "Thou shalt not
enter circus or theatre, thou shalt not look on combat or show; "as it is plainly laid
down, "Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not worship an idol; thou shalt not commit adultery
or fraud. But we find that that first word of David bears on this very sort of thing:
"Blessed," he says, "is the man who has not gone into the assembly of the impious, nor
stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the seat of scorners. Though he seems to have
predicted beforehand of that just man, that he took no part in the meetings and
deliberations of the Jews, taking counsel about the slaying of our Lord, yet divine
Scripture has ever far-reaching applications: after the immediate sense has been
exhausted, in all directions it fortifies the practice of the religious life, so that here
also you have an utterance which is not far from a plain interdicting of the shows. If he
called those few Jews an assembly of the wicked, how much more will he so designate so
vast a gathering of heathens!

2 Are the heathens less impious, less sinners, less enemies of Christ, than the Jews were
then? And see, too, how other things agree. For at the shows they also stand in the way.
For they call the spaces between the seats going round the amphitheatre, and the passages
which separate the people running down, ways. The place in the curve where the matrons sit
is called a chair. Therefore, on the contrary, it holds, unblessed is he who has entered
any council of wicked men, and has stood in any way of sinners, and has sat in any chair
of scorners. We may understand a thing as spoken generally, even when it requires a
certain special interpretation to be given to it. For some things spoken with a special
reference contain in them general truth. When God admonishes the Israelites of their duty,
or sharply reproves them, He has surely a reference to all men; when He threatens
destruction to Egypt and Ethiopia, He surely pre-condemns every sinning nation, whatever.
If, reasoning from species to genus, every nation that sins against them is an Egypt and
Ethiopia; so also, reasoning from genus to species, with reference to the origin of shows,
every show is an assembly of the wicked.

CHAPTER IV.

Lest any one think that we are dealing in mere argumentative subtleties, I shall turn to
that highest authority of our "seal" itself. When entering the water, we make profession
of the Christian faith in the words of its rule; we bear public testimony that we have
renounced the devil, his pomp, and his angels. Well, is it not in connection with
idolatry, above all, that you have the devil with his pomp and his angels? from which, to
speak. briefly-for I do not wish to dilate-you have every unclean and wicked spirit. If,
therefore, it shall be made plain that the entire apparatus of the shows is based upon
idolatry, beyond all doubt that will carry with it the conclusion that our renunciatory
testimony in the layer of baptism has reference to the shows, which, through their
idolatry, have been given over to the devil, and his pomp, and his angels. We shall set
forth, then, their several origins, in what nursing-places they have grown to manhood;
next the titles of some of them, by what names they are called; then their apparatus, with
what superstitions they are observed; (then their places, to what patrons they are
dedicated; ) then the arts which minister to them, to what authors they are traced. If any
of these shall be found to have had no connection with an idol-god, it will be held as
free at once from the taint of idolatry, and as not coming within the range of our
baptismal abjuration.

CHAPTER V.

1 In the matter of their origins, as these are somewhat obscure and but little known to
many among us, our investigations must go back to a remote antiquity, and our authorities
be none other than books of heathen literature. Various authors are extant who have
published works on the subject. The origin of the games as given by them is this. Timµus
tells us that immigrants from Asia, under the leadership of Tyrrhenus, who, in a contest
about his native kingdom, had succumbed to his brother, settled down in Etruria. Well,
among other superstitious observances under the name of religion, they set up in their new
home public shows. The Romans, at their own request, obtain from them skilled performers-
the proper seasons-the name too, for it is said they are called Ludi, from Lydi. And
though Varro derives the name of Ludi from Ludus, that is, from play, as they called the
Luperci also Ludii, because they ran about making sport; still that sporting of young men
belongs, in his view, to festal days and temples, and objects of religious veneration.
However, it is of little consequence the origin of the name, when it is certain that the
thing springs from idolatry. The Liberalia, under the general designation of Ludi, clearly
declared the glory of Father Bacchus; for to Bacchus these festivities were first
consecrated by grateful peasants, in return for the boon he conferred on them, as they
say, making known the pleasures of wine.

2 Then the Consualia were called Ludi, and at first were in honour of Neptune, for Neptune
has the name of Consus also. Thereafter Romulus dedicated the Equiria to Mars, though they
claim the Consualia too for Romulus, on the ground that he consecrated them to Consus, the
god, as they will have it, of counsel; of the counsel, forsooth, in which he planned the
rape of the Sabine virgins for wives to his soldiers. An excellent counsel truly; and
still I suppose reckoned just and righteous by the Romans themselves, I may not say by
God. This goes also to taint the origin: you cannot surely hold that to be good which has
sprung from sin, from shamelessness, from violence, from hatred, from a fratricidal
founder, from a son of Mars. Even now, at the first turning-post in the circus, there is a
subterranean altar to this same Consus, with an inscription to this effect: "Consus, great
in counsel, Mars, in battle mighty tutelar deities. The priests of the state sacrifice at
it on the nones of July; the priest of Romulus and the Vestals on the twelfth before the
Kalends of September. In addition to this, Romulus instituted games in honor of Jupiter
Feretrius on the Tarpeian Hill, according to the statement Piso has handed down to us,
called both Tarpeian and Capitoline. After him Numa Pompilius instituted games to Mars and
Robigo (for they have also invented a goddess of rust); then Tullus Hostilius; then Ancus
Martius; and various others in succession did the like.

3 As to the idols in whose honour these games were established, ample information is to be
fount in the pages of Suetonius Tranquillus. But we need say no more to prove the
accusation of idolatrous origin.

CHAPTER VI.

To the testimony of antiquity is added that of later games instituted in their turn, and
betraying their origin from the titles which they bear even at the present day, in which
it is imprinted as on their very face, for what idol and for what religious object games,
whether of the one kind or the other, were designed. You have festivals bearing the name
of the great Mother and Apollo of Ceres too, and Neptune, and Jupiter Latiaris, and Flora,
all celebrated for a common end; the others have their religious origin in the birthdays
and solemnities of kings, in public successes in municipal holidays. There are also
testamentary exhibitions, in which funeral honours are rendered to the memories of private
persons; and this according to an institution of ancient times. For from the first the
"Ludi" were regarded as of two sons, sacred and funereal, that is in honour of the heathen
deities and of the dead. But in the matter of idolatry, it makes no difference with us
under what name or title it is practised, while it has to do with the wicked spirits whom
we abjure. If it is lawful to offer homage to the dead, it will be just as lawful to offer
it to their gods: you have the same origin in both cases; there is the same idolatry;
there is on our part the same solemn renunciation of all idolatry.

CHAPTER VII.

The two kinds of public games, then, have one origin; and they have common names, as
owning the same parentage. So, too, as they are equally tainted with the sin of idolatry,
their foundress, they must needs be like each other in their pomp. But the more ambitious
preliminary display of the circus games to which the name procession specially belongs, is
in itself the proof to whom the whole thing appertains, in the many images the long line
of statues, the chariots of all sorts, the thrones, the crowns, the dresses. What high
religious rites besides, what sacrifices precede, come between, and follow. How many
guilds, how many priesthoods, how many offices are set astir, is known to the inhabitants
of the great city in which the demon convention has its headquarters. If these things are
done in humbler style in the provinces, in accordance with their inferior means, still all
circus games must be counted as belonging to that from which they are derived; the
fountain from which they spring defiles them. The tiny streamlet from its very spring-
head, the little twig from its very budding, contains in it the essential nature of its
origin. It may be grand or mean, no matter, any circus procession whatever is offensive to
God. Though there be few images to grace it, there is idolatry in one; though there be no
more than a single sacred car, it is a chariot of Jupiter: anything of idolatry whatever,
whether meanly arrayed or modestly rich and gorgeous, taints it in its origin.

CHAPTER VIII.

1 To follow out my plan in regard to places: the circus is chiefly consecrated to the Sun,
whose temple stands in the middle of it, and whose image shines forth from its temple
summit; for they have not thought it proper to pay sacred honours underneath a roof to an
object they have itself in open space. Those who assert that the first spectacle was
exhibited by Circe, and in honour of the Sun her father, as they will have it, maintain
also the name of circus was derived from her. Plainly, then, the enchantress did this in
the name of the parties whose priestess she was-I mean the demons and spirits of evil.
What an aggregation of idolatries you see, accordingly, in the decoration of the place!
Every ornament of the circus is a temple by itself. The eggs are regarded as sacred to the
Castors, by men who are not ashamed to profess faith in their production from the egg of a
swan, which was no other than Jupiter himself. The Dolphins vomit forth in honour of
Neptune. Images of Sessia, so called as the goddess of sowing; of Messia, so called as the
goddess of reaping; of Tutulina, so called as the fruit-protecting deity-load the pillars.
In front of these you have three altars to these three gods-Great, Mighty, Victorious.
They reckon these of Samo-Thrace. The huge Obelisk, as Hermeteles affirms, is set up in
public to the Sun; its inscription, like its origin, belongs to Egyptian superstition.
Cheerless were the demon-gathering without their Mater Magna;

2 and so she presides there over the Euripus. Consus, as we have mentioned, lies hidden
under ground at the Murcian Goals. These two sprang from an idol. For they will have it
that Murcia is the goddess of love; and to her, at that spot, they have consecrated a
temple. See, Christian, how many impure names have taken possession of the circus! You
have nothing to do with a sacred place which is tenanted by such multitudes of diabolic
spirits. And speaking of places, this is the suitable occasion for some remarks in
anticipation of a point that some will raise. What, then, you say; shall I be in danger of
pollution if I go to the circus when the games are not being celebrated? There is no law
forbidding the mere places to us. For not only the places for show-gatherings, but even
the temples, may be entered without any peril of his religion by the servant of God, if he
has only some honest reason for it, unconnected with their proper business and official
duties. Why, even the streets and the market-place, and the baths, and the taverns, and
our very dwelling-places, are not altogether free from idols. Satan and his angels have
filled the whole world. It is not by merely being in the world, however, that we lapse
from God, but by touching and tainting ourselves with the world's sins.

3 I shall break with my Maker, that is, by going to the Capitol or the temple of Serapis
to sacrifice or adore, as I shall also do by going as a spectator to the circus and the
theatre. The places in themselves do not contaminate, but what is done in them; from this
even the places themselves, we maintain, become defiled. The polluted things pollute us.
It is on this account that we set before you to whom places of the kind are dedicated,
that we may prove the things which are done in them to belong to the idol-patrons to whom
the very places are sacred.

CHAPTER IX.

Now as to the kind of performances peculiar to the circus exhibitions. In former days
equestrianism was practised in a simple way on horseback, and certainly its ordinary use
had nothing sinful in it; but when it was dragged into the games, it passed from the
service of God into the employment of demons. Accordingly this kind of circus performances
is regarded as sacred to Castor and Pollux, to whom, Stesichorus tells us, horses were
given by Mercury. And Neptune, too, is an equestrian deity, by the Greeks called Hippius.
In regard to the team, they have consecrated the chariot and four to the sun; the chariot
and pair to the moon. But, as the poet has it, "Erichthonius first dared to yoke four
horses to the chariot, and to ride upon its wheels with victorious swiftness."
Erichthonius, the son of Vulcan and Minerva, fruit of unworthy passion upon earth, is a
demon-monster, nay, the devil himself, and no mere snake. But if Trochilus the Argive is
maker of the first chariot, he dedicated that work of his to Juno. If Romulus first
exhibited the four-horse chariot at Rome, he too, I think, has a place given him among
idols, at least if he and Quirinus are the same. But as chariots had such inventors, the
charioteers were naturally dressed, too, in the colours of idolatry; for at first these
were only two, namely white and red,-the former sacred to the winter with its glistening
snows, the latter sacred to the summer with its ruddy sun: but afterwards, in the progress
of luxury as well as of superstition, red was dedicated by some to Mars, and white by
others to the Zephyrs, while green was given to Mother Earth, or spring, and azure to the
sky and sea, or autumn. But as idolatry of every kind is condemned by God, that form of it
surely shares the condemnation which is offered to the elements of nature.

CHAPTER X.

1 Let us pass on now to theatrical exhibitions, which we have already shown have a common
origin with the circus, and bear like idolatrous designations-even as from the first they
have borne the name of "Ludi," and equally minister to idols. They resemble each other
also in their pomp, having the same procession to the scene of their display from temples
and altars, and that mournful profusion of incense and blood, with music of pipes and
trumpets, all under the direction of the soothsayer and the undertaker, those two foul
masters of funeral rites and sacrifices. So as we went on from the origin of the "Ludi" to
the circus games, we shall now direct our course thence to those of the theatre, beginning
with the place of exhibition. At first the theatre was properly a temple of Venus; and, to
speak briefly, it was owing to this that stage performances were allowed to escape
censure, and got a footing in the world. For ofttimes the censors, in the interests of
morality, put down above all the rising theatres, foreseeing, as they did, that there was
great danger of their leading to a general profligacy; so that already, from this
accordance of their own people with us, there is a witness to the heathen, and in the
anticipatory judgment of human knowledge even a confirmation of our views.

2 Accordingly Pompey the Great, less only than his theatre, when he had erected that
citadel of all impurities, fearing some time or other censorian condemnation of his
memory, superposed on it a temple of Venus; and summoning by public proclamation the
people to its consecration, he called it not a theatre, but a temple, "under which," said
he, "we have placed tiers of seats for viewing the shows. So he threw a veil over a
structure on which condemnation had been often passed, and which is ever to be held in
reprobation, by pretending that it was a sacred place; and by means of superstition he
blinded the eyes of a virtuous discipline. But Venus and Bacchus are close allies. These
two evil spirits are in sworn confederacy with each other, as the patrons of drunkenness
and lust. So the theatre of Venus is as well the house of Bacchus: for they properly gave
the name of Liberalia also to other theatrical amusements-which besides being consecrated
to Bacchus (as were the Dionysia of the Greeks), were instituted by him; and, without
doubt, the performances of the theatre have the common patronage of these two deities.
That immodesty of gesture and attire which so specially and peculiarly characterizes the
stage are consecrated to them-the one deity wanton by her sex, the other by his drapery;
while its services of voice, and song, and lute, and pipe, belong to Apollos, and Muses,
and Minervas, and Mercuries.

3 You will hate, O Christian, the things whose authors must be the objects of your utter
detestation. So we would now make a remark about the arts of the theatre, about the things
also whose authors in the names we execrate. We know that the names of the dead are
nothing, as are their images; but we know well enough, too, who, when images are set up,
under these names carry on their wicked work, and exult in the homage rendered to them,
and pretend to be divine-none other than spirits accursed, than devils. We see, therefore,
that the arts also are consecrated to the service of the beings who dwell in the names of
their founders; and that things cannot be held free from the taint of idolatry whose
inventors have got a place among the gods for their discoveries. Nay, as regards the arts,
we ought to have gone further back, and barred all further argument by the position that
the demons, predetermining in their own interests from the first, among other evils of
idolatry, the pollutions of the public shows, with the object of drawing man away from his
Lord and binding him to their own service, carried out their purpose by bestowing on him
the artistic gifts which the shows require. For none but themselves would have made
provision and preparation for the objects they had in view;

4 nor would they have given the arts to the world by any but those in whose names, and
images, and histories they set up for their own ends the artifice of consecration.

CHAPTER XI.

In fulfilment of our plan, let us now go on to consider the combats. Their origin is akin
to that of the games (ludi). Hence they are kept as either sacred or funereal, as they
have been instituted in honour of the idol-gods of the nations or of the dead. Thus, too,
they are called Olympian in honour of Jupiter, known at Rome as the Capitoline; Nemean, in
honour of Hercules; Isthmian, in honour of Neptune; the rest mortuarii, as belonging to
the dead. What wonder, then, if idolatry pollutes the combat-parade with profane crowns,
with sacerdotal chiefs, with attendants belonging to the various colleges, last of all
with the blood of its sacrifices? To add a completing word about the "place"-in the common
place for the college of the arts sacred to the Muses, and Apollo, and Minerva, and also
for that of the arts dedicated to Mars, they with contest and sound of trumpet emulate the
circus in the arena, which is a real temple-I mean of the god whose festivals it
celebrates. The gymnastic arts also originated with their Castors, and Herculeses, and
Mercuries.

CHAPTER XII.

1 It remains for us to examine the "spectacle" most noted of all, and in highest favour.
It is called a dutiful service (munus), from its being an office, for it bears the name of
"officium" as well as "munus. The ancients thought that in this solemnity they rendered
offices to the dead; at a later period, with a cruelty more refined, they somewhat
modified its character. For formerly, in the belief that the souls of the departed were
appeased by human blood, they were in the habit of buying captives or slaves of wicked
disposition, and immolating them in their funeral obsequies. Afterwards they thought good
to throw the veil of pleasure over their iniquity. Those, therefore, whom they had
provided for the combat, and then trained in arms as best they could, only that they might
learn to die, they, on the funeral day, killed at the places of sepulture. They alleviated
death by murders. Such is the origin of the "Munus. But by degrees their refinement came
up to their cruelty; for these human wild beasts could not find pleasure exquisite enough,
save in the spectacle of men torn to pieces by wild beasts. Offerings to propitiate the
dead then were regarded as belonging to the class of funeral sacrifices; and these are
idolatry: for idolatry, in fact, is a sort of homage to the departed; the one as well as
the other is a service to dead men. Moreover, demons have abode in the images of the dead.

2 To refer also to the matter of names, though this sort of exhibition has passed from
honours of the dead to honours of the living, I mean, to quµstorships and magistracies-to
priestly offices of different kinds; yet, since idolatry still cleaves to the dignity's
name, whatever is done in its name partakes of its impurity. The same remark will apply to
the procession of the "Munus," as we look at that in the pomp which is connected with
these honours themselves; for the purple robes, the fasces, the fillets the crowns, the
proclamations too, and edicts, the sacred feasts of the day before, are not without the
pomp of the devil, without invitation of demons. What need, then, of dwelling on the place
of horrors, which is too much even for the tongue of the perjurer? For the amphitheatre is
consecrated to names more numerous and more dire than is the Capitol itself, temple of all
demons as it is. There are as many unclean spirits there as it holds men. To conclude with
a single remark about the arts which have a place in it, we know that its two sorts of
amusement have for their patrons Mars and Diana.

CHAPTER XIII.

We have, I think, faithfully carried out our plan of showing in how many different ways
the sin of idolatry clings to the shows, in respect of their origins, their titles, their
equipments, their places of celebration, their arts; and we may hold it as a thing beyond
all doubt, that for us who have twice renounced all idols, they are utterly unsuitable.
"Not that an idol is anything," as the apostle says, but that the homage they render is to
demons, who are the real occupants of these consecrated images, whether of dead men or (as
they think) of gods. On this account, therefore, because they have a common source-for
their dead and their deities are one-we abstain from both idolatries. Nor do we dislike
the temples less than the monuments: we have nothing to do with either altar, we adore
neither image; we do not offer sacrifices to the gods, and we make no funeral oblations to
the departed; nay, we do not partake of what is offered either in the one case or the
other, for we cannot partake of God's feast and the feast of devils. If, then, we keep
throat and belly free from such defilements, how much more do we withhold our nobler
parts, our ears and eyes, from the idolatrous and funereal enjoyments, which are not
passed through the body, but are digested in the very spirit and soul, whose purity, much
more than that of our bodily organs, God has a right to claim from us.

CHAPTER XIV.

Having sufficiently established the charge of idolatry, which alone ought to be reason
enough for our giving up the shows, let us now ex abundanti look at the subject in another
way, for the sake of those especially who keep themselves comfortable in the thought that
the abstinence we urge is not in so many words enjoined, as if in the condemnation of the
lusts of the world there was not involved a sufficient declaration against all these
amusements. For as there is a lust of money, or rank, or eating, or impure enjoyment, or
glory, so there is also a lust of pleasure. But the show is just a sort of pleasure. I
think, then, that under the general designation of lusts, pleasures are included; in like
manner, under the general idea of pleasures, you have as a specific class the "shows." But
we have spoken already of how it is with the places of exhibition, that they are not
polluting in themselves, but owing to the things that are done in them from which they
imbibe impurity, and then spirt it again on others.

CHAPTER XV.

1 Having done enough, then, as we have said, in regard to that principal argument, that
there is in them all the taint of idolatry-having sufficiently dealt with that, let us now
contrast the other characteristics of the show with the things of God. God has enjoined us
to deal calmly, gently, quietly, and peacefully with the Holy Spirit, because these things
are alone in keeping with the goodness of His nature, with His tenderness and
sensitiveness, and not to vex Him with rage, ill-nature, anger, or grief. Well, how shall
this be made to accord with the shows? For the show always leads to spiritual agitation,
since where there is pleasure, there is keenness of feeling giving pleasure its zest; and
where there is keenness of feeling, there is rivalry giving in turn its zest to that.
Then, too, where you have rivalry, you have rage, bitterness, wrath and grief, with all
bad things which flow from them-the whole entirely out of keeping with the religion of
Christ. For even suppose one should enjoy the shows in a moderate way, as befits his rank,
age or nature, still he is not undisturbed in mind, without some unuttered movings of the
inner man. No one partakes of pleasures such as these without their strong excitements; no
one comes under their excitements without their natural lapses. These lapses, again,
create passionate desire. If there is no desire, there is no pleasure, and he is
chargeable with trifling who goes where nothing is gotten; in my view, even that is
foreign to us.

2 Moreover, a man pronounces his own condemnation in the very act of taking his place
among those with whom, by his disinclination to be like them, he confesses he has no
sympathy. It is not enough that we do no such things ourselves, unless we break all
connection also with those who do. "If thou sawest a thief," says the Scripture, "thou
consentedst with him. Would that we did not even inhabit the same world with these wicked
men! But though that wish cannot be realized, yet even now we are separate from them in
what is of the world; for the world is God's, but the worldly is the devil's.

CHAPTER XVI.

1 Since, then, all passionate excitement is forbidden us, we are debarred from every kind
of spectacle, and especially from the circus, where such excitement presides as in its
proper element. See the people coming to it already under strong emotion, already
tumultuous, already passion-blind, already agitated about their bets. The prµtor is too
slow for them: their eyes are ever rolling as though along with the lots in his urn; then
they hang all eager on the signal; there is the united shout of a common madness. Observe
how "out of themselves" they are by their foolish speeches. "He has thrown it! they
exclaim; and they announce each one to his neighbour what all have seen. I have clearest
evidence of their blindness; they do not see what is really thrown. They think it a
"signal cloth," but it is the likeness of the devil cast headlong from on high. And the
result accordingly is, that they fly into rages, and passions, and discords, and all that
they who are consecrated to peace ought never to indulge in. Then there are curses and
reproaches, with no cause of hatred; there are cries of applause, with nothing to merit
them. What are the partakers in all this-not their own masters-to obtain of it for
themselves? unless, it may be, that which makes them not their own: they are saddened by
another's sorrow, they are gladdened by another's joy. Whatever they desire on the one
hand, or detest on the other, is entirely foreign to themselves.

2 So love with them is a useless thing, and hatred is unjust. Or is a causeless love
perhaps more legitimate than a causeless hatred? God certainly forbids us to hate even
with a reason for our hating; for He commands us to love our enemies. God forbids us to
curse, though there be some ground for doing so, in commanding that those who curse us we
are to bless. But what is more merciless than the circus, where people do not spare even
their rulers and fellow-citizens? If any of its madnesses are becoming elsewhere in the
saints of God, they will be seemly in the circus too; but if they are nowhere right, so
neither are they there.

CHAPTER XVII.

1 Are we not, in like manner, enjoined to put away from us all immodesty? On this ground,
again, we are excluded from the theatre, which is immodesty's own peculiar abode, where
nothing is in repute but what elsewhere is disreputable. So the best path to the highest
favour of its god is the vileness which the Atellan gesticulates, which the buffoon in
woman's clothes exhibits, destroying all natural modesty, so that they blush more readily
at home than at the play, which finally is done from his childhood on the person of the
pantomime, that he may become an actor. The very harlots, too, victims of the public lust,
are brought upon the stage, their misery increased as being there in the presence of their
own sex, from whom alone they are wont to hide themselves: they are paraded publicly
before every age and every rank-their abode, their gains, their praises, are set forth,
and that even in the hearing of those who should not hear such things. I say nothing about
other matters, which it were good to hide away in their own darkness and their own gloomy
caves, lest they should stain the light of day. Let the Senate, let all ranks, blush for
very shame! Why, even these miserable women, who by their own gestures destroy their
modesty, dreading the light of day, and the people's gaze, know something of shame at
least once a year.

2 But if we ought to abominate all that is immodest, on what ground is it right to hear
what we must not speak? For all licentiousness of speech, nay, every idle word, is
condemned by God. Why, in the same way, is it right to look on what it is disgraceful to
do? How is it that the things which defile a man in going out of his mouth, are not
regarded as doing so when they go in at his eyes and ears-when eyes and ears are the
immediate attendants on the spirit-and that can never be pure whose servants-in-waiting
are impure? You have the theatre forbidden, then, in the forbidding of immodesty. If,
again, we despise the teaching of secular literature as being foolishness in God's eyes,
our duty is plain enough in regard to those spectacles, which from this source derive the
tragic or comic play. If tragedies and comedies are the bloody and wanton, the impious and
licentious inventors of crimes and lusts, it is not good even that there should be any
calling to remembrance the atrocious or the vile. What you reject in deed, you are not to
bid welcome to in word.

CHAPTER XVIII.

But if you argue that the racecourse is mentioned in Scripture, I grant it at once. But
you will not refuse to admit that the things which are done there are not for you to look
upon: the blows, and kicks, and cuffs, and all the recklessness of hand, and everything
like that disfiguration of the human countenance, which is nothing less than the
disfiguration of God's own image. You will never give your approval to those foolish
racing and throwing feats, and yet more foolish leapings; you will never find pleasure in
injurious or useless exhibitions of strength; certainly you will not regard with approval
those efforts after an artificial body which aim at surpassing the Creator's work; and you
will have the very opposite of complacency in the athletes Greece, in the inactivity of
peace, feeds up. And the wrestler's art is a devil's thing. The devil wrestled with, and
crushed to death, the first human beings. Its very attitude has power in it of the serpent
kind, firm to hold-tortures to clasp-slippery to glide away. You have no need of crowns;
why do you strive to get pleasures from crowns?

CHAPTER XIX.

We shall now see how the Scriptures condemn the amphitheatre. If we can maintain that it
is right to indulge in the cruel, and the impious, and the fierce, let us go there. If we
are what we are said to be, let us regale ourselves there with human blood. It is good, no
doubt, to have the guilty punished. Who but the criminal himself will deny that? And yet
the innocent can find no pleasure in another's sufferings: he rather mourns that a brother
has sinned so heinously as to need a punishment so dreadful. But who is my guarantee that
it is always the guilty who are adjudged to the wild beasts, or to some other doom, and
that the guiltless never suffer from the revenge of the judge, or the weakness of the
defence, or the pressure of the rack? How much better, then, is it for me to remain
ignorant of the punishment inflicted on the wicked, lest I am obliged to know also of the
good coming to untimely ends-if I may speak of goodness in the case at all! At any rate,
gladiators not chargeable with crime are offered in sale for the games, that they may
become the victims of the public pleasure. Even in the case of those who are judicially
condemned to the amphitheatre, what a monstrous thing it is, that, in undergoing their
punishment, they, from some less serious delinquency, advance to the criminality of
manslayers! But I mean these remarks for heathen. As to Christians, I shall not insult
them by adding another word as to the aversion with which they should regard this sort of
exhibition; though no one is more able than myself to set forth fully the whole subject,
unless it be one who is still in the habit of going to the shows. I would rather withal be
incomplete than set memory a-working.

CHAPTER XX.

How vain, then-nay, how desperate-is the reasoning of persons, who, just because they
decline to lose a pleasure, hold out that we cannot point to the specific words or the
very place where this abstinence is mentioned, and where the servants of God are directly
forbidden to have anything to do with such assemblies! I heard lately a novel defence of
himself by a certain play-lover. "The sun," said he, "nay, God Himself, looks down from
heaven on the show, and no pollution is contracted." Yes, and the sun, too, pours down his
rays into the common sewer without being defiled. As for God, would that all crimes were
hid from His eye, that we might all escape judgment! But He looks on robberies too; He
looks on falsehoods, adulteries, frauds, idolatries, and these same shows; and precisely
on that account we will not look on them, lest the All-seeing see us. You are putting on
the same level, O man, the criminal and the judge; the criminal who is a criminal because
he is seen, and the Judge who is a Judge because He sees. Are we set, then, on playing the
madman outside the circus boundaries? Outside the gates of the theatre are we bent on
lewdness, outside the course on arrogance, and outside the amphitheatre on cruelty,
because outside the porticoes, the tiers and the curtains, too, God has eyes? Never and
nowhere is that free from blame which God ever condemns; never and nowhere is it right to
do what you may not do at all times and in all places. It is the freedom of the truth from
change of opinion and varying judgments which constitutes its perfection, and gives it its
claims to full mastery, unchanging reverence, and faithful obedience. That which is really
good or really evil cannot be ought else. But in all things the truth of God is immutable.

CHAPTER XXI.

The heathen, who have not a full revelation of the truth, for they are not taught of God,
hold a thing evil and good as it suits self-will and passion, making that which is good in
one place evil in another, and that which is evil in one place in another good. So it
strangely happens, that the same man who can scarcely in public lift up his tunic, even
when necessity of nature presses him, takes it off in the circus, as if bent on exposing
himself before everybody; the father who carefully protects and guards his virgin
daughter's ears from every polluting word, takes her to the theatre himself, exposing her
to all its vile words and attitudes; he, again, who in the streets lays hands on or covers
with reproaches the brawling pugilist, in the arena gives all encouragement to combats of
a much more serious kind; and he who looks with horror on the corpse of one who has died
under the common law of nature, in the amphitheatre gazes down with most patient eyes on
bodies all mangled and torn and smeared with their own blood; nay, the very man who comes
to the show, because he thinks murderers ought to suffer for their crime, drives the
unwilling gladiator to the murderous deed with rods and scourges; and one who demands the
lion for every manslayer of deeper dye, will have the staff for the savage swordsman, and
rewards him with the cap of liberty. Yes and he must have the poor victim back again, that
he may get a sight of his face-with zest inspecting near at hand the man whom he wished
torn in pieces at safe distance from him: so much the more cruel he if that was not his
wish.

CHAPTER XXII.

What wonder is there in it? Such inconsistencies as these are just such as we might expect
from men, who confuse and change the nature of good and evil in their inconstancy of
feeling and fickleness in judgment. Why, the authors and managers of the spectacles, in
that very respect with reference to which they highly laud the charioteers, and actors,
and wrestlers, and those most loving gladiators, to whom men prostitute their souls, women
too their bodies, slight and trample on them, though for their sakes they are guilty of
the deeds they reprobate; nay, they doom them to ignominy and the loss of their rights as
citizens, excluding them from the Curia, and the rostra, from senatorial and equestrian
rank, and from all other honours as well as certain distinctions. What perversity! They
have pleasure in those whom yet they punish; they put all slights on those to whom, at the
same time, they award their approbation; they magnify the art and brand the artist. What
an outrageous thing it is, to blacken a man on account of the very things which make him
meritorious in their eyes! Nay, what a confession that the things are evil, when their
authors, even in highest favour, are not without a mark of disgrace upon them!

CHAPTER XXIII.

1 Seeing, then, man's own reflections, even in spite of the sweetness of pleasure, lead
him to think that people such as these should be condemned to a hapless lot of infamy,
losing all the advantages connected with the possession of the dignities of life, how much
more does the divine righteousness inflict punishment on those who give themselves to
these arts! Will God have any pleasure in the charioteer who disquiets so many souls,
rouses up so many furious passions, and creates so many various moods, either crowned like
a priest or wearing the colours of a pimp, decked out by the devil that he may be whirled
away in his chariot, as though with the object of taking off Elijah? Will He be pleased
with him who applies the razor to himself, and completely changes his features; who, with
no respect for his face, is not content with making it as like as possible to Saturn and
Isis and Bacchus, but gives it quietly over to contumelious blows, as if in mockery of our
Lord? The devil, forsooth, makes it part, too, of his teaching, that the cheek is to be
meekly offered to the smiter. In the same way, with their high shoes, he has made the
tragic actors taller, because "none can add a cubit to his stature. His desire is to make
Christ a liar.

2 And in regard to the wearing of masks, I ask is that according to the mind of God, who
forbids the making of every likeness, and especially then the likeness of man who is His
own image? The Author of truth hates all the false; He regards as adultery all that is
unreal. Condemning, therefore, as He does hypocrisy in every form, He never will approve
any putting on of voice, or sex, or age; He never will approve pretended loves, and
wraths, and groans, and tears. Then, too, as in His law it is declared that the man is
cursed who attires himself in female garments, what must be His judgment of the pantomime,
who is even brought up to play the woman! And will the boxer go unpunished? I suppose he
received these cµstus-scars, and the thick skin of his fists, and these growths upon his
ears, at his creation! God, too, gave him eyes for no other end than that they might be
knocked out in fighting! I say nothing of him who, to save himself, thrusts another in the
lion's way, that he may not be too little of a murderer when he puts to death that very
same man on the arena.

CHAPTER XXIV.

In how many other ways shall we yet further show that nothing which is peculiar to the
shows has God's approval, or without that approval is becoming in God's servants? If we
have succeeded in making it plain that they were instituted entirely for the devil's sake,
and have been got up entirely with the devil's things (for all that is not God's, or is
not pleasing in His eyes, belongs to His wicked rival), this simply means that in them you
have that pomp of the devil which in the "seal" of our faith we abjure. We should have no
connection with the things which we abjure, whether in deed or word, whether by looking on
them or looking forward to them; but do we not abjure and rescind that baptismal pledge,
when we cease to bear its testimony? Does it then remain for us to apply to the heathen
themselves. Let them tell us, then, whether it is right in Christians to frequent the
show. Why, the rejection of these amusements is the chief sign to them that a man has
adopted the Christian faith. If any one, then, puts away the faith's distinctive badge, he
is plainly guilty of denying it. What hope can you possibly retain in regard to a man who
does that? When you go over to the enemy's camp, you throw down your arms, desert the
standards and the oath of allegiance to your chief: you cast in your lot for life or death
with your new friends.

CHAPTER XXV.

Seated where there is nothing of God, will one be thinking of his Maker? Will there be
peace in his soul when there is eager strife there for a charioteer? Wrought up into a
frenzied excitement, will he learn to be modest? Nay, in the whole thing he will meet with
no greater temptation than that gay attiring of the men and women. The very intermingling
of emotions, the very agreements and disagreements with each other in the bestowment of
their favours, where you have such close communion, blow up the sparks of passion. And
then there is scarce any other object in going to the show, but to see and to be seen.
When a tragic actor is declaiming, will one be giving thought to prophetic appeals? Amid
the measures of the effeminate player, will he call up to himself a psalm? And when the
athletes are hard at struggle, will he be ready to proclaim that there must be no striking
again? And with his eye fixed on the bites of bears, and the sponge-nets of the net-
fighters, can he be moved by compassion? May God avert from His people any such passionate
eagerness after a cruel enjoyment! For how monstrous it is to go from God's church to the
devil's-from the sky to the stye, as they say; to raise your hands to God, and then to
weary them in the applause of an actor; out of the mouth, from which you uttered Amen over
the Holy Thing, to give witness in a gladiator's favour; to cry "forever" to any one else
but God and Christ!

CHAPTER XXVI.

Why may not those who go into the temptations of the show become accessible also to evil
spirits? We have the case of the woman-the Lord Himself is witness-who went to the
theatre, and came back possessed. In the outcasting, accordingly, when the unclean
creature was upbraided with having dared to attack a believer, he firmly replied, "And in
truth I did it most righteously, for I found her in my domain." Another case, too, is well
known, in which a woman had been hearing a tragedian, and on the very night she saw in her
sleep a linen cloth-the actor's name being mentioned at the same time with strong
disapproval-and five days after that woman was no more. How many other undoubted proofs we
have had in the case of persons who, by keeping company with the devil in the shows, have
fallen from the Lord! For no one can serve two masters. What fellowship has light with
darkness, life with death?

CHAPTER XXVII.

We ought to detest these heathen meetings and assemblies, if on no other account than that
there God's name is blasphemed-that there the cry "To the lions!" is daily raised against
us -that from thence persecuting decrees are wont to emanate, and temptations are sent
forth. What will you do if you are caught in that heaving tide of impious judgments? Not
that there any harm is likely to come to you from men: nobody knows that you are a
Christian; but think how it fares with you in heaven. For at the very time the devil is
working havoc in the church, do you doubt that the angels are looking down from above, and
marking every man, who speaks and who listens to the blaspheming word, who lends his
tongue and who lends his ears to the service of Satan against God? Shall you not then shun
those tiers where the enemies of Christ assemble, that seat of all that is pestilential,
and the very super incumbent atmosphere all impure with wicked cries? Grant that you have
there things that are pleasant, things both agreeable and innocent in themselves; even
some things that are excellent. Nobody dilutes poison with gall and hellebore: the
accursed thing is put into condiments well seasoned and of sweetest taste. So, too, the
devil puts into the deadly draught which he prepares, things of God most pleasant and most
acceptable. Everything there, then, that is either brave, noble, loud-sounding, melodious,
or exquisite in taste, hold it but as the honey drop of a poisoned cake; nor make so much
of your taste for its pleasures, as of the danger you run from its attractions.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

With such dainties as these let the devil's guests be feasted. The places and the times,
the inviter too, are theirs. Our banquets, our nuptial joys, are yet to come. We cannot
sit down in fellowship with them, as neither can they with us. Things in this matter go by
their turns. Now they have gladness and we are troubled. "The world," says Jesus, "shall
rejoice; ye shall be sorrowful." Let us mourn, then, while the heathen are merry, that in
the day of their sorrow we may rejoice; lest, sharing now in their gladness, we share then
also in their grief. Thou art too dainty, Christian, if thou wouldst have pleasure in this
life as well as in the next; nay, a fool thou art, if thou thinkest this life's pleasures
to be really pleasures. The philosophers, for instance, give the name of pleasure to
quietness and repose; in that they have their bliss; in that they find entertainment: they
even glory in it. You long for the goal, and the stage, and the dust, and the place of
combat! I would have you answer me this question: Can we not live without pleasure, who
cannot but with pleasure die? For what is our wish but the apostle's, to leave the world,
and be taken up into the fellowship of our Lord? You have your joys where you have your
longings.

CHAPTER XXIX.

Even as things are, if your thought is to spend this period of existence in enjoyments,
how are you so ungrateful as to reckon insufficient, as not thankfully to recognize the
many and exquisite pleasures God has bestowed upon you? For what more delightful than to
have God the Father and our Lord at peace with us, than revelation of the truth than
confession of our errors, than pardon of the innumerable sins of our past life? What
greater pleasure than distaste of pleasure itself, contempt of all that the world can
give, true liberty, a pure conscience, a contented life, and freedom from all fear of
death? What nobler than to tread under foot the gods of the nations-to exorcise evil
spirits -to perform cures-to seek divine revealings-to live to God? These are the
pleasures, these the spectacles that befit Christian men-holy, everlasting, free. Count of
these as your circus games, fix your eyes on the courses of the world, the gliding
seasons, reckon up the periods of time, long for the goal of the final consummation,
defend the societies of the churches, be startled at God's signal, be roused up at the
angel's trump, glory in the palms of martyrdom. If the literature of the stage delight
you, we have literature in abundance of our own-plenty of verses, sentences, songs,
proverbs; and these not fabulous, but true; not tricks of art, but plain realities. Would
you have also fightings and wrestlings? Well, of these there is no lacking, and they are
not of slight account. Behold unchastity overcome by chastity, perfidy slain by
faithfulness, cruelty stricken by compassion, impudence thrown into the shade by modesty:
these are the contests we have among us, and in these we win our crowns. Would you have
something of blood too? You have Christ's.

CHAPTER XXX.

1 But what a spectacle is that fast-approaching advent of our Lord, now owned by all, now
highly exalted, now a triumphant One! What that exultation of the angelic hosts! What the
glory of the rising saints! What the kingdom of the just thereafter! What the city New
Jerusalem! Yes, and there are other sights: that last day of judgment, with its
everlasting issues; that day unlooked for by the nations, the theme of their derision,
when the world hoary with age, and all its many products, shall be consumed in one great
flame! How vast a spectacle then bursts upon the eye! What there excites my admiration?
what my derision? Which sight gives me joy? which rouses me to exultation?-as I see so
many illustrious monarchs, whose reception into the heavens was publicly announced,
groaning now in the lowest darkness with great Jove himself, and those, too, who bore
witness of their exultation; governors of provinces, too, who persecuted the Christian
name, in fires more fierce than those with which in the days of their pride they raged
against the followers of Christ. What world's wise men besides, the very philosophers, in
fact, who taught their followers that God had no concern in ought that is sublunary, and
were wont to assure them that either they had no souls, or that they would never return to
the bodies which at death they had left, now covered with shame before the poor deluded
ones, as one fire consumes them!

2 Poets also, trembling not before the judgment-seat of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of the
unexpected Christ! I shall have a better opportunity then of hearing the tragedians,
louder-voiced in their own calamity; of viewing the play-actors, much more "dissolute" in
the dissolving flame; of looking upon the charioteer, all glowing in his chariot of fire;
of beholding the wrestlers, not in their gymnasia, but tossing in the fiery billows;
unless even then I shall not care to attend to such ministers of sin, in my eager wish
rather to fix a gaze insatiable on those whose fury vented itself against the Lord.
"This," I shall say, "this is that carpenter's or hireling's son, that Sabbath-breaker,
that Samaritan and devil-possessed! This is He whom you purchased from Judas! This is He
whom you struck with reed and fist, whom you contemptuously spat upon, to whom you gave
gall and vinegar to drink! This is He whom His disciples secretly stole away, that it
might be said He had risen again, or the gardener abstracted, that his lettuces might come
to no harm from the crowds of visitants! What quµstor or priest in his munificence will
bestow on you the favour of seeing and exulting in such things as these? And yet even now
we in a measure have them by faith in the picturings of imagination. But what are the
things which eye has not seen, ear has not heard, and which have not so much as dimly
dawned upon the human heart?

3 Whatever they are, they are nobler, I believe, than circus, and both theatres, and every
race-course.


ON IDOLATRY
===========

ON IDOLATRY Tertullian

c. AD 155–220

North African lawyer and the first great Latin theologian.

INTRODUCTION

[Translated by the Rev. S. Thelwall.]

CHAPTER I.-WIDE SCOPE OF THE WORD IDOLATRY.

1 The principal crime of the human race, the highest guilt charged upon the world, the
whole procuring cause of judgment, is idolatry. For, although each single fault retains
its own proper feature, although it is destined to judgment under its own proper name
also, yet it is marked off under the general account of idolatry. Set aside names, examine
works, the idolater is likewise a murderer. Do you inquire whom he has slain? If it
contributes ought to the aggravation of the indictment, no stranger nor personal enemy,
but his own self. By what snares? Those of his error. By what weapon? The offence done to
God. By how many blows? As many as are his idolatries. He who affirms that the idolater
perishes not, will affirm that the idolater has not committed murder. Further, you may
recognize in the same crime adultery and fornication; for he who serves false gods is
doubtless an adulterer of truth, because all falsehood is adultery. So, too, he is sunk in
fornication. For who that is a fellow-worker with unclean spirits, does not stalk in
general pollution and fornication? And thus it is that the Holy Scriptures use the
designation of fornication in their upbraiding of idolatry. The essence of fraud, I take
it, is, that any should seize what is another's, or refuse to another his due; and, of
course, fraud done toward man is a name of greatest crime. Well, but idolatry does fraud
to God, by refusing to Him, and conferring on others, His honours;

2 so that to fraud it also conjoins contumely. But if fraud, just as much as fornication
and adultery, entails death, then, in these cases, equally with the former, idolatry
stands unacquitted of the impeachment of murder. After such crimes, so pernicious, so
devouring of salvation, all other crimes also, after some manner, and separately disposed
in order, find their own essence represented in idolatry. In it also are the
cancupiscences of the world. For what solemnity of idolatry is without the circumstance of
dress and ornament? In it are lasciviousnesses and drunkennesses; since it is, for the
most part, for the sake of food, and stomach, and appetite, that these solemnities are
frequented. In it is unrighteousness. For what more unrighteous than it, which knows not
the Father of righteousness? In it also is vanity, since its whole system is vain. In it
is mendacity, for its whole substance is false. Thus it comes to pass, that in idolatry
all crimes are detected, and in all crimes idolatry. Even otherwise, since all faults
savour of opposition to God, and there is nothing which savours of opposition to God which
is not assigned to demons and unclean spirits, whose property idols are; doubtless,
whoever commits a fault is chargeable with idolatry, for he does that which pertains to
the proprietors of idols.

CHAPTER II.-IDOLATRY IN ITS MORE LIMITED SENSE. ITS COPIOUSNESS.

1 But let the universal names of crimes withdraw to the specialities of their own works;
let idolatry remain in that which it is itself. Sufficient to itself is a name so inimical
to God, a substance of crime so copious, which reaches forth so many branches, diffuses so
many veins, that from this name, for the greatest part, is drawn the material of all the
modes in which the expansiveness of idolatry has to be foreguarded against by us, since in
manifold wise it subverts the servants of God; and this not only when unperceived, but
also when cloaked over. Most men simply regard idolatry as to be interpreted in these
senses alone, viz.: if one burn incense, or immolate a victim, or give a sacrificial
banquet, or be bound to some sacred functions or priesthoods; just as if one were to
regard adultery as to be accounted in kisses, and in embraces, and in actual fleshly
contact; or murder as to be reckoned only in the shedding forth of blood, and in the
actual taking away of life. But how far wider an extent the Lord assigns to those crimes
we are sure: when He defines adultery to consist even in concupiscence, "if one shall have
cast an eye lustfully on," and stirred his soul with immodest commotion;

2 when He judges murder to consist even in a word of curse or of reproach, and in every
impulse of anger, and in the neglect of charity toward a brother just as John teaches,
that he who hates his brother is a murderer. Else, both the devil's ingenuity in malice,
and God the Lord's in the Discipline by which He fortifies us against the devil's depths,
would have but limited scope, if we were judged only in such faults as even the heathen
nations have decreed punishable. How will our "righteousness abound above that of the
Scribes and Pharisees," as the Lord has prescribed, unless we shall have seen through the
abundance of that adversary quality, that is, of unrighteousness? But if the head of
unrighteousness is idolatry, the first point is, that we be fore-fortified against the
abundance of idolatry, while we recognise it not only in its palpable manifestations.

CHAPTER III.-IDOLATRY: ORIGIN AND MEANING OF THE NAME.

Idol in ancient times there was none. Before the artificers of this monstrosity had
bubbled into being, temples stood solitary and shrines empty, just as to the present day
in some places traces of the ancient practice remain permanently. Yet idolatry used to be
practised, not under that name, but in that function; for even at this day it can be
practised outside a temple, and without an idol. But when the devil introduced into the
world artificers of statues and of images, and of every kind of likenesses, that former
rude business of human disaster attained from idols both a name and a development.
Thenceforward every art which in any way produces an idol instantly became a fount of
idolatry. For it makes no difference whether a moulder cast, or a carver grave, or an
embroiderer weave the idol; because neither is it a question of material, whether an idol
be formed of gypsum, or of colors, or of stone, or of bronze, or of silver, or of thread.
For since even without an idol idolatry is committed, when the idol is there it makes no
difference of what kind it be, of what material, or what shape; lest any should think that
only to be held an idol which is consecrated in human shape. To establish this point, the
interpretation of the word is requisite. Eidoßs, in Greek, signifies form; eido¦loßn,
derived diminutively from that, by an equivalent process in our language, makes formling.
Every form or forming, therefore, claims to be called an idol. Hence idolatry is "all
attendance and service about every idol." Hence also, every artificer of an idol is guilty
of one and the same crime, unless, the People which consecrated for itself the likeness of
a calf, and not of a man, fell short of incurring the guilt of idolatry.

CHAPTER IV.-IDOLS NOT TO BE MADE, MUCH LESS WORSHIPPED. IDOLS AND IDOL-MAKERS IN THE SAME CATEGORY.

1 God prohibits an idol as much to be made as to be worshipped. In so far as the making
what may be worshipped is the prior act, so far is the prohibition to make (if the worship
is unlawful) the prior prohibition. For this cause-the eradicating, namely, of the
material of idolatry-the divine law proclaims, "Thou shall make no idol; " and by
conjoining, "Nor a similitude of the things which are in the heaven, and which are in the
earth, and which are in the sea," has interdicted the servants of God from acts of that
kind all the universe over. Enoch had preceded, predicting that "the demons, and the
spirits of the angelic apostates, would turn into idolatry all the elements, all the
garniture of the universe, all things contained in the heaven, in the sea, in the earth,
that they might be consecrated as God, in opposition to God. All things, therefore, does
human error worship, except the Founder of all Himself. The images of those things are
idols; the consecration of the images is idolatry. Whatever guilt idolatry incurs, must
necessarily be imputed to every artificer of every idol. In short, the same Enoch fore-
condemns in general menace both idol-worshippers and idol-makers together. And again: "I
swear to you, sinners, that against the day of perdition of blood repentance is being
prepared.

2 Ye who serve stones, and ye who make images of gold, and silver, and wood, and stones
and clay, and serve phantoms, and demons, and spirits in fanes, and all errors not
according to knowledge, shall find no help from them. But Isaiah says, "Ye are witnesses
whether there is a God except Me. "And they who mould and carve out at that time were not:
all vain! who do that which liketh them, which shall not profit them! And that whole
ensuing discourse sets a ban as well on the artificers as the worshippers: the close of
which is, "Learn that their heart is ashes and earth, and that none can free his own soul.
In which sentence David equally includes the makers too. "Such," says he, "let them become
who make them. And why should I, a man of limited memory, suggest anything further? Why
recall anything more from the Scriptures? As if either the voice of the Holy Spirit were
not sufficient; or else any further deliberation were needful, whether the Lord cursed and
condemned by priority the artificers of those things, of which He curses and condemns the
worshippers!

CHAPTER V. -SUNDRY OBJECTIONS OR EXCUSES DEALT WITH.

1 We will certainly take more pains in answering the excuses of artificers of this kind,
who ought never to be admitted into the house of God, if any have a knowledge of that
Discipline. To begin with, that speech, wont to be cast in our teeth, "I have nothing else
whereby to live," may be more severely retorted, "You have, then, whereby to live? If by
your own laws, what have you to do with God? " Then, as to the argument they have the
hardihood to bring even from the Scriptures, "that the apostle has said, `As each has been
found, so let him persevere.'" We may all, therefore, persevere in sins, as the result of
that interpretation! for there is not any one of us who has not been found asa sinner,
since no other cause was the source of Christ's descent than that of setting sinners free.
Again, they say the same apostle has left a precept, according to his own example, "That
each one work with his own hands for a living. If this precept is maintained in respect to
all hands, I believe even the bath-thieves live by their hands, and robbers themselves
gain the means to live by their hands; forgers, again, execute their evil handwritings,
not of course with their feet, but hands; actors, however, achieve a livelihood not with
hands alone, but with their entire limbs. Let the Church, therefore, stand open to all who
are supported by their hands and by their own work;

2 if there is no exception of arts which the Discipline of God receives not. But some one
says, in opposition to our proposition of "similitude being interdicted," "Why, then, did
Moses in the desert make a likeness of a serpent out of bronze? "The figures, which used
to be laid as a groundwork for some secret future dispensation, not with a view to the
repeal of the law, but as a type of their own final cause, stand in a class by themselves.
Otherwise, if we should interpret these things as the adversaries of the law do, do we,
too, as the Marcionites do, ascribe inconsistency to the Almighty, whom they in this
manner destroy as being mutable, while in one place He forbids, in another commands? But
if any feigns ignorance of the fact that that effigy of the serpent of bronze, after the
manner of one uphung, denoted the shape of the Lord's cross, which was to free us from
serpents-that is, from the devil's angels-while, through itself, it hanged up the devil
slain; or whatever other exposition of that figure has been revealed to worthless men no
matter, provided we remember the apostle affirms that all things happened at that time to
the People figuratively. It is enough that the same God, as by law He forbade the making
of similitude, did, by the extraordinary precept in the case of the serpent, interdict
similitude. If you reverence the same God, you have His law, "Thou shall make no
similitude.

3 If you look back, too, to the precept enjoining the subsequently made similitude, do
you, too, imitate Moses: make not any likeness in opposition to the law, unless to you,
too, God have bidden it.

CHAPTER VI.-IDOLATRY CONDEMNED BY BAPTISM. TO MAKE AN IDOL IS, IN FACT, TO WORSHIP IT.

If no law of God had prohibited idols to be made by us; if no voice of the Holy Spirit
uttered general menace no less against the makers than the worshippers of idols; from our
sacrament itself we would draw our interpretation that arts of that kind are opposed to
the faith. For how have we renounced the devil and his angels, if we make them? What
divorce have we declared from them, I say not with whom, but dependent on whom, we live?
What discord have we entered into with those to whom we are under obligation for the sake
of our maintenance? Can you have denied with the tongue what with the hand you confess?
unmake by word what by deed you make? preach one God, you who make so many? preach the
true God, you who make false ones? "I make," says one, "but I worship not; "as if there
were some cause for which he dare not worship, besides that for which he ought not also to
make,-the offence done to God, namely, in either case. Nay, you who make, that they may be
able to be worshipped, do worship; and you worship, not with the spirit of some worthless
perfume, but with your own; nor at the expense of a beast's soul, but of your own. To them
you immolate your ingenuity; to them you make your sweat a libation; to them you kindle
the torch of your forethought. More are you to them than a priest, since it is by your
means they have a priest; your diligence is their divinity. Do you affirm that you worship
not what you make? Ah! but they affirm not so, to whom you slay this fatter, more precious
and greater victim, your salvation.

CHAPTER VII.--GRIEF OF THE FAITHFUL AT THE ADMISSION OF IDOL-MAKERS INTO THE CHURCH; NAY, EVEN INTO THE MINISTRY.

A whole day the zeal of faith will direct its pleadings to this quarter: bewailing that a
Christian should come from idols into the Church; should come from an adversary workshop
into the house of God; should raise to God the Father hands which are the mothers of
idols; should pray to God with the hands which, out of doors, are prayed to in opposition
to God; should apply to the Lord's body those hands which confer bodies on demons. Nor is
this sufficient. Grant that it be a small matter, if from other hands they receive what
they contaminate; but even those very hands deliver to others what they have contaminated.
Idol-artificers are chosen even into the ecclesiastical order. Oh wickedness! Once did the
Jews lay brands on Christ; these mangle His body daily. Oh hands to be cut off! Now let
the saying, "If thy hand make thee do evil, amputate it," see to it whether it were
uttered by way of similitude merely. What hands more to be amputated than those in which
scandal is done to the Lord's body?

CHAPTER VIII.-OTHER ARTS MADE SUBSERVIENT TO IDOLATRY. LAWFUL MEANS OF GAINING A LIVELIHOOD ABUNDANT.

1 There are also other species of very many arts which, although they extend not to the
making of idols, yet, with the same criminality, furnish the adjuncts without which idols
have no power. For it matters not whether you erect or equip: if you have embellished his
temple, altar, or niche; if you have pressed out gold-leaf, or have wrought his insignia,
or even his house: work of that kind, which confers not shape, but authority, is more
important. If the necessity of maintenance is urged so much, the arts have other species
withal to afford means of livelihood, without outstepping the path of discipline, that is,
without the confiction of an idol. The plasterer knows both how to mend roofs, and lay on
stuccoes, and polish a cistern, and trace ogives, and draw in relief on party-walls many
other ornaments beside likenesses. The painter, too, the marble mason, the bronze-worker,
and every graver whatever, knows expansions of his own art, of course much easier of
execution. For how much more easily does he who delineates a statue overlay a sideboard!
How much sooner does he who carves a Mars out of a lime-tree, fasten together a chest! No
art but is either mother or kinswoman of some neighbour art: nothing is independent of its
neighbour. The veins of the arts are many as are the concupiscences of men. "But there is
difference in wages and the rewards of handicraft; "therefore there is difference, too, in
the labour required. Smaller wages are compensated by more frequent earning.

2 How many are the party-walls which require statues? How many the temples and shrines
which are built for idols? But houses, and official residences, and baths, and tenements,
how many are they? Shoe- and slipper-gilding is daily work not so the gilding of Mercury
and Serapis. Let that suffice for the gain of handicrafts. Luxury and ostentation have
more votaries than all superstition. Ostentation will require dishes and cups more easily
than superstition. Luxury deals in wreaths, also, more than ceremony. When, therefore, we
urge men generally to such kinds of handicrafts as do not come in contact with an idol
indeed and with the things which are appropriate to an idol; since, moreover, the things
which are common to idols are often common to men too; of this also we ought to beware
that nothing be, with our knowledge, demanded by any person from our idols' service. For
if we shall have made that concession, and shall not have had recourse to the remedies so
often used, I think we are not free of the contagion of idolatry, we whose (not unwitting)
hands are found busied in the tendence, or in the honour and service, of demons.

CHAPTER IX.-PROFESSIONS OF SOME KINDS ALLIED TO IDOLATRY. OF ASTROLOGY IN PARTICULAR.

1 We observe among the arts also some professions liable to the charge of idolatry. Of
astrologers there should be no speaking even; but since one in these days has challenged
us, defending on his own behalf perseverance in that profession, I will use a few words. I
allege not that he honours idols, whose names he has inscribed on the heaven, to whom he
has attributed all God's power; because men, presuming that we are disposed of by the
immutable arbitrament of the stars, think on that account that God is not to be sought
after. One proposition I lay down: that those angels, the deserters from God, the lovers
of women, were likewise the discoverers of this curious art, on that account also
condemned by God. Oh divine sentence, reaching even unto the earth in its vigour, whereto
the unwitting render testimony! The astrologers are expelled just like their angels. The
city and Italy are interdicted to the astrologers, just as heaven to their angels. There
is the same penalty of exclusion for disciples and masters. "But Magi and astrologers came
from the east. We know the mutual alliance of magic and astrology. The interpreters of the
stars, then, were the first to announce Christ's birth the first to present Him "gifts. By
this bond, [must] I imagine, they put Christ under obligation to themselves? What then?
Shall therefore the religion of those Magi act as patron now also to astrologers?
Astrology now-a-days, forsooth, treats of Christ-is the science of the stars of Christ;

2 not of Saturn, or Mars, and whomsoever else out of the same class of the dead it pays
observance to and preaches? But, however, that science has been allowed until the Gospel,
in order that after Christ's birth no one should thence forward interpret any one's
nativity by the heaven. For they therefore offered to the then infant Lord that
frankincense and myrrh and gold, to be, as it were, the close of worldly sacrifice and
glory, which Christ was about to do away. What, then? The dream-sent, doubtless, of the
will of God-suggested to the same Magi, namely, that they should go home, but by another
way, not that by which they came. It means this: that they should not walk in their
ancient path. Not that Herod should not pursue them, who in fact did not pursue them;
unwitting even that they had departed by another way, since be was withal unwitting by
what way they came. Just so we ought to understand by it the right Way and Discipline. And
so the precept was rather, that thence forward they should walk otherwise. So, too, that
other species of magic which operates by miracles, emulous even in opposition to Moses,
tried God's patience until the Gospel. For thenceforward Simon Magus, just turned
believer, (since he was still thinking somewhat of his juggling sect; to wit, that among
the miracles of his profession he might buy even the gift of the Holy Spirit through
imposition of hands) was cursed by the apostles, and ejected from the faith.

3 Both he and that other magician, who was with Sergius Paulus, (since he began opposing
himself to the same apostles) was mulcted with loss of eyes. The same fate, I believe,
would astrologers, too, have met, if any had fallen in the way of the apostles. But yet,
when magic is punished, of which astrology is a species, of course the species is
condemned in the genus. After the Gospel, you will nowhere find either sophists,
Chaldeans, enchanters, diviners, or magicians, except as clearly punished. "Where is the
wise, where the grammarian, where the disputer of this age? Hath not God made foolish the
wisdom of this age? " You know nothing, astrologer, if you know not that you should be a
Christian. If you did know it, you ought to have known this also, that you should have
nothing more to do with that profession of yours which, of itself, fore-chants the
climacterics of others, and might instruct you of its own danger. There is no part nor lot
for you in that system of yours. He cannot hope for the kingdom of the heavens, whose
finger or wand abuses the heaven.

CHAPTER X.-OF SCHOOLMASTERS AND THEIR DIFFICULTIES.

1 Moreover, we must inquire likewise touching schoolmasters; nor only of them, but also
all other professors of literature. Nay, on the contrary, we must not doubt that they are
in affinity with manifold idolatry: first, in that it is necessary for them to preach the
gods of the nations, to express their names, genealogies, honourable distinctions, all and
singular; and further, to observe the solemnities and festivals of the same, as of them by
whose means they compute their revenues. What schoolmaster, without a table of the seven
idols, will yet frequent the Quinquatria? The very first payment of every pupil he
consecrates both to the honour and to the name of Minerva; so that, even though he be not
said "to eat of that which is sacrificed to idols" nominally (not being dedicated to any
particular idol), he is shunned as an idolater. What less of defilement does he recur on
that ground, than a business brings which, both nominally and virtually, is consecrated
publicly to an idol? The Minervalia are as much Minerva's, as the Saturnalia Saturn's;
Saturn's, which must necessarily be celebrated even by little slaves at the time of the
Saturnalia. New-year's gifts likewise must be caught at, and the Septimontium kept; and
all the presents of Midwinter and the feast of Dear Kinsmanship must be exacted; the
schools must be wreathed with flowers; the flamens' wives and the µdiles sacrifice; the
school is honoured on the appointed holy-days. The same thing takes place on an idol's
birthday; every pomp of the devil is frequented.

2 Who will think that these things are befitting to a Christian master, unless it be he
who shall think them suitable likewise to one who is not a master? We know it may be said,
"If teaching literature is not lawful to God's servants, neither will learning be
likewise; "and, "How could one be trained unto ordinary human intelligence, or unto any
sense or action whatever, since literature is the means of training for all life? How do
we repudiate secular studies, without which divine studies cannot be pursued? "Let us see,
then, the necessity of literary erudition; let us reflect that partly it cannot be
admitted, partly cannot be avoided. Learning literature is allowable for believers, rather
than teaching; for the principle of learning and of teaching is different. If a believer
teach literature, while he is teaching doubtless he commends, while he delivers he
affirms, while he recalls he bears testimony to, the praises of idols interspersed
therein. He seals the gods themselves with this name; whereas the Law, as we have said,
prohibits "the names of gods to be pronounced," and this name to be conferred on vanity.
Hence the devil gets men's early faith built up from the beginnings of their erudition.
Inquire whether he who catechizes about idols commit idolatry. But when a believer learns
these things, if he is already capable of understanding what idolatry is, he neither
receives nor allows them; much more if he is not yet capable.

3 Or, when he begins to understand, it behoves him first to understand what he has
previously learned, that is, touching God and the faith. Therefore he will reject those
things, and will not receive them; and will be as safe as one who from one who knows it
not, knowingly accepts poison, but does not drink it. To him necessity is attributed as an
excuse, because he has no other way to learn. Moreover, the not teaching literature is as
much easier than the not learning, as it is easier, too, for the pupil not to attend, than
for the master not to frequent, the rest of the defilements incident to the schools from
public and scholastic solemnities.

CHAPTER XI.-CONNECTION BETWEEN COVETOUSNESS AND IDOLATRY. CERTAIN TRADES, HOWEVER GAINFUL, TO BE AVOIDED.

1 If we think over the rest of faults, tracing them from their generations, let us begin
with covetousness, "a root of all evils," wherewith, indeed, some having been ensnared,
"have suffered shipwreck about faith. Albeit covetousness is by the same apostle called
idolatry. In the next place proceeding to mendacity, the minister of covetousness (of
false swearing I am silent, since even swearing is not lawful )-is trade adapted for a
servant of God? But, covetousness apart, what is the motive for acquiring? When the motive
for acquiring ceases, there will be no necessity for trading. Grant now that there be some
righteousness in business, secure from the duty of watchfulness against covetousness and
mendacity; I take it that that trade which pertains to the very soul and spirit of idols,
which pampers every demon, falls under the charge of idolatry. Rather, is not that the
principal idolatry? If the selfsame merchandises-frankincense, I mean, and all other
foreign productions-used as sacrifice to idols, are of use likewise to men for medicinal
ointments, to us Christians also, over and above, for solaces of sepulture, let them see
to it. At all events, while the pomps, while the priesthoods, while the sacrifices of
idols, are furnished by dangers, by losses, by inconveniences, by cogitations, by runnings
to and fro, or trades, what else are you demonstrated to be but an idols' agent? Let none
contend that, in this way, exception may be taken to all trades.

2 All graver faults extend the sphere for diligence in watchfulness proportionably to the
magnitude of the danger; in order that we may withdraw not only from the faults, but from
the means through which they have being. For although the fault be done by others, it
makes no difference if it be by my means. In no case ought I to be necessary to another,
while he is doing what to me is unlawful. Hence I ought to understand that care must be
taken by me, lest what I am forbidden to do be done by my means. In short, in another
cause of no lighter guilt I observe that fore-judgment. In that I am interdicted from
fornication, I furnish nothing of help or connivance to others for that purpose; in that I
have separated my own flesh itself from stews, I acknowledge that I cannot exercise the
trade of pandering, or keep that kind of places for my neighbour's behoof. So, too, the
interdiction of murder shows me that a trainer of gladiators also is excluded from the
Church; nor will any one fail to be the means of doing what he subministers to another to
do. Behold, here is a more kindred fore-judgment: if a purveyor of the public victims come
over to the faith, will you permit him to remain permanently in that trade? or if one who
is already a believer shall have undertaken that business, will you think that he is to be
retained in the Church? No, I take it;

3 unless any one will dissemble in the case of a frankincense-seller too. In sooth, the
agency of blood pertains to some, that of odours to others. If, before idols were in the
world, idolatry, hitherto shapeless, used to be transacted by these wares; if, even now,
the work of idolatry is perpetrated, for the most part, without the idol, by burnings of
odours; the frankincense-seller is a something even more serviceable even toward demons,
for idolatry is more easily carried on without the idol, than without the ware of the
frankincense-seller. Let us interrogate thoroughly the conscience of the faith itself.
With what mouth will a Christian frankincense-seller, if he shall pass through temples,
with what mouth will he spit down upon and blow out the smoking altars, for which himself
has made provision? With what consistency will he exorcise his own foster-children, to
whom he affords his own house as store-room? Indeed, if he shall have ejected a demon, let
him not congratulate himself on his faith, for he has not ejected an enemy; he ought to
have had his prayer easily granted by one whom he is daily feeding. No art, then, no
profession, no trade, which administers either to equipping or forming idols, can be free
from the title of idolatry; unless we interpret idolatry to be altogether something else
than the service of idol-tendence.

CHAPTER XII.-FURTHER ANSWERS TO THE PLEA, HOW AM I TO LIVE?

1 In vain do we flatter ourselves as to the necessities of human maintenance, if-after
faith sealed -we say, "I have no means to live? " For here I will now answer more fully
that abrupt proposition. It is advanced too late. For after the similitude of that most
prudent builder, who first computes the costs of the work, together with his own means,
lest, when he has begun, he afterwards blush to find himself spent, deliberation should
have been made before. But even now you have the Lord's sayings, as examples taking away
from you all excuse. For what is it you say? "I shall be in need. But the Lord calls the
needy "happy. "I shall have no food. But "think not," says He, "about food; " and as an
example of clothing we have the lilies. "My work was my subsistence. Nay, but "all things
are to be sold, and divided to the needy. "But provision must be made for children and
posterity. "None, putting his hand on the plough, and looking back, is fit" for work. "But
I was under contract. "None can serve two lords. If you wish to be the Lord's disciple, it
is necessary you "take your cross, and follow the Lord: " your cross; that is, your own
straits and tortures, or your body only, which is after the manner of a cross. Parents,
wives, children, will have to be left behind, for God's sake. Do you hesitate about arts,
and trades, and about professions likewise, for the sake of children and parents?

2 Even there was it demonstrated to us, that both "dear pledges," and handicrafts, and
trades, are to be quite left behind for the Lord's sake; while James and John, called by
the Lord, do leave quite behind both father and ship; while Matthew is roused up from the
toll-booth; while even burying a father was too tardy a business for faith. None of them
whom the Lord chose to Him said, "I have no means to live. Faith fears not famine. It
knows, likewise, that hunger is no less to be contemned by it for God's sake, than every
kind of death. It has learnt not to respect life; how much more food? [You ask] "How many
have fulfilled these conditions? "But what with men is difficult, with God is easy. Let
us, however, comfort ourselves about the gentleness and clemency of God in such wise, as
not to indulge our "necessities" up to the point of affinities with idolatry, but to avoid
even from afar every breath of it, as of a pestilence. [And this] not merely in the cases
forementioned, but in the universal series of human superstition; whether appropriated to
its gods, or to the defunct, or to kings, as pertaining to the selfsame unclean spirits,
sometimes through sacrifices and priesthoods, sometimes through spectacles and the like,
sometimes through holy-days.

CHAPTER XIII.-OF THE OBSERVANCE OF DAYS CONNECTED WITH IDOLATRY.

1 But why speak of sacrifices and priesthoods? Of spectacles, moreover, and pleasures of
that kind, we have already filled a volume of their own. In this place must be handled the
subject of holidays and other extraordinary solemnities, which we accord sometimes to our
wantonness, sometimes to our timidity, in opposition to the common faith and Discipline.
The first point, indeed, on which I shall join issue is this: whether a servant of God
ought to share with the very nations themselves in matters of his kind either in dress, or
in food, or in any other kind of their gladness. "To rejoice with the rejoicing, and
grieve with the grieving," is said.about brethren by the apostle when exhorting to
unanimity. But, for these purposes, "There is nought of communion between light and
darkness," between life and death or else we rescind what is written, "The world shall
rejoice, but ye shall grieve. If we rejoice with the world, there is reason to fear that
with the world we shall grieve too. But when the world rejoices, let us grieve; and when
the world afterward grieves, we shall rejoice. Thus, too, Eleazar in Hades, (attaining
refreshment in Abraham's bosom) and the rich man, (on the other hand, set in the torment
of fire) compensate, by an answerable retribution, their alternate vicissitudes of evil
and good. There are certain gift-days, which with some adjust the claim of honour, with
others the debt of wages. "Now, then," you say, "I shall receive back what is mine, or pay
back what is another's.

2 If men have consecrated for themselves this custom from superstition, why do you,
estranged as you are from all their vanity, participate in solemnities consecrated to
idols; as if for you also there were some prescript about a day, short of the observance
of a particular day, to prevent your paying or receiving what you owe a man, or what is
owed you by a man? Give me the form after which you wish to be dealt with. For why should
you skulk withal, when you contaminate your own conscience by your neighbour's ignorance?
If you are not unknown to be a Christian, you are tempted, and you act as if you were not
a Christian against your neighbour's conscience; if, however, you shall be disguised
withal, you are the slave of the temptation. At all events, whether in the latter or the
former way, you are guilty of being "ashamed of God. But "whosoever shall be ashamed of Me
in the presence of men, of him will I too be ashamed," says He, "in the presence of my
Father who is in the heavens."

CHAPTER XIV.-OF BLASPHEMY. ONE OF ST. PAUL'S SAYINGS.

1 But, however, the majority (of Christians) have by this time induced the belief in their
mind that it is pardonable if at any time they do what the heathen do, for fear "the Name
be blasphemed. Now the blasphemy which must quite be shunned by us in every way is, I take
it, this: If any of us lead a heathen into blasphemy with good cause, either by fraud, or
by injury, or by contumely, or any other matter of worthy complaint, in which "the Name"
is deservedly impugned, so that the Lord, too, be deservedly angry. Else, if of all
blasphemy it has been said, "By your means My Name is blasphemed," we all perish at once;
since the whole circus, with no desert of ours, assails "the Name" with wicked suffrages.
Let us cease (to be Christians) and it will not be blasphemed! On the contrary, while we
are, let it be blasphemed: in the observance, not the overstepping, of discipline; while
we are being approved, not while we are being reprobated. Oh blasphemy, bordering on
martyrdom, which now attests me to be a Christian, while for that very account it detests
me! The cursing of well-maintained Discipline is a blessing of the Name. "If," says he, "I
wished to please men, I should not be Christ's servant. But the same apostle elsewhere
bids us take care to please all: "As I," he says, "please all by all means. No doubt he
used to please them by celebrating the Saturnalia and New-year's day!

2 [Was it so] or was it by moderation and patience? by gravity, by kindness, by integrity?
In like manner, when he is saying, "I have become all things to all, that I may gain all,"
does he mean "to idolaters an idolater? ""to heathens a heathen? ""to the worldly worldly?
"But albeit he does not prohibit us from having our conversation with idolaters and
adulterers, and the other criminals, saying, "Otherwise ye would go out from the world,"
of course he does not so slacken those reins of conversation that, since it is necessary
for us both to live and to mingle with sinners, we may be able to sin with them too. Where
there is the intercourse of life, which the apostle concedes, there is sinning, which no
one permits. To live with heathens is lawful, to die with them is not. Let us live with
all; let us be glad with them, out of community of nature, not of superstition. We are
peers in soul, not in discipline; fellow-possessors of the world, not of error. But if we
have no right of communion in matters of this kind with strangers, how far more wicked to
celebrate them among brethren! Who can maintain or defend this? The Holy Spirit upbraids
the Jews with their holy-days. "Your Sabbaths, and new moons, and ceremonies," says He,
"My soul hateth.

3 By us, to whom Sabbaths are strange, and the new moons and festivals formerly beloved by
God, the Saturnalia and New-year's and Midwinter's festivals and Matronalia are
frequented-presents come and go-New-year's gifts-games join their noise-banquets join
their din! Oh better fidelity of the nations to their own sect, which claims no solemnity
of the Christians for itself! Not the Lord's day, not Pentecost, even it they had known
them, would they have shared with us; for they would fear lest they should seem to be
Christians. We are not apprehensive lest we seem to be heathens! If any indulgence is to
be granted to the flesh, you have it. I will not say your own days, but more too; for to
the heathens each festive day occurs but once annually: you have a festive day every
eighth day. Call out the individual solemnities of the nations, and set them out into a
row, they will not be able to make up a Pentecost.

CHAPTER XV.-CONCERNING FESTIVALS IN HONOUR OF EMPERORS, VICTORIES, AND THE LIKE. EXAMPLES OF THE THREE CHILDREN AND DANIEL.

1 But "let your works shine," saith He; but now all our shops and gates shine! You will
now-a-days find more doors of heathens without lamps and laurel-wreaths than of
Christians. What does the case seem to be with regard to that species (of ceremony) also?
If it is an idol's honour, without doubt an idol's honour is idolatry. If it is for a
man's sake, let us again consider that all idolatry is for man's sake; let us again
consider that all idolatry is a worship done to men, since it is generally agreed even
among their worshippers that aforetime the gods themselves of the nations were men; and so
it makes no difference whether that superstitious homage be rendered to men of a former
age or of this. Idolatry is condemned, not on account of the persons which are set up for
worship, but on account of those its observances, which pertain to demons. "The things
which are Caesar's are to be rendered to Caesar. It is enough that He set in apposition
thereto, "and to God the things which are God's. What things, then, are Caesar's? Those,
to wit, about which the consultation was then held, whether the poll-tax should be
furnished to Caesar or no. Therefore, too, the Lord demanded that the money should be
shown Him, and inquired about the image, whose it was; and when He had heard it was
Caesar's, said, "Render to Caesar what are Caesar's, and what are God's to God;

2 "that is, the image of Caesar, which is on the coin, to Caesar, and the image of God,
which is on man, to God; so as to render to Caesar indeed money, to God yourself.
Otherwise, what will be God's, if all things are Caesar's? "Then," do you say, "the lamps
before my doors, and the laurels on my posts are an honour to God? "They are there of
course, not because they are an honour to God, but to him who is honour in God's stead by
ceremonial observances of that kind, so far as is manifest, saving the religious
performance, which is in secret appertaining to demons. For we ought to be sure if there
are any whose notice it escapes through ignorance of this world's literature, that there
are among the Romans even gods of entrances; Cardea (Hinge-goddess), called after hinges,
and Forculus (Door-god) after doors, and Limentinus (Threshold-god) after the threshold,
and Janus himself (Gate-god) after the gate: and of course we know that, though names be
empty and reigned, yet, when they are drawn down into superstition, demons and every
unclean spirit seize them for themselves, through the bond of consecration. Otherwise
demons have no name individually, but they there find a name where they find also a token.
Among the Greeks likewise we read of Apollo Thyrµus, i.e. of the door, and the Antelii, or
Anthelii, demons, as presiders over entrances.

3 These things, therefore, the Holy Spirit foreseeing from the beginning, fore-chanted,
through the most ancient prophet Enoch, that even entrances would come into superstitious
use. For we see too that other entrances are adored in the baths. But if there are beings
which are adored in entrances, it is to them that both the lamps and the laurels will
pertain. To an idol you will have done whatever you shall have done to an entrance. In
this place I call a witness on the authority also of God; because it is not safe to
suppress whatever may have been shown to one, of course for the sake of all. I know that a
brother was severely chastised, the same night, through a vision, because on the sudden
announcement of public rejoicings his servants had wreathed his gates. And yet himself had
not wreathed, or commanded them to be wreathed; for he had gone forth from home before,
and on his return had reprehended the deed. So strictly are we appraised with God in
matters of this kind, even with regard to the discipline of our family. Therefore, as to
what relates to the honours due to kings or emperors, we have a prescript sufficient, that
it behoves us to be in all obedience, according to the apostle's precept, "subject to
magistrates, and princes, and powers; " but within the limits of discipline, so long as we
keep ourselves separate from idolatry.

4 For it is for this reason, too, that that example of the three brethren has forerun us,
who, in other respects obedient toward king Nebuchodonosor rejected with all constancy the
honour to his image, proving that whatever is extolled beyond the measure of human honour,
unto the resemblance of divine sublimity, is idolatry. So too, Daniel, in all other points
submissive to Darius, remained in his duty so long as it was free from danger to his
religion; for, to avoid undergoing that danger, he feared the royal lions no more than
they the royal fires. Let, therefore, them who have no light, light their lamps daily; let
them over whom the fires of hell are imminent, affix to their posts, laurels doomed
presently to burn: to them the testimonies of darkness and the omens of their penalties
are suitable. You are a light of the world, and a tree ever green. If you have renounced
temples, make not your own gate a temple. I have said too little. If you have renounced
stews, clothe not your own house with the appearance of a new brothel.

CHAPTER XVI.-CONCERNING PRIVATE FESTIVALS.

Touching the ceremonies, however, of private and social solemnities-as those of the white
toga, of espousals, of nuptials, of name-givings-I should think no danger need be guarded
against from the breath of the idolatry which is mixed up with them. For the causes are to
be considered to which the ceremony is due. Those above-named I take to be clean in
themselves, because neither manly garb, nor the marital ring or union, descends from
honours done to any idol. In short, I find no dress cursed by God, except a woman's dress
on a man: for "cursed," saith He, "is every man who clothes himself in woman's attire."
The toga, however, is a dress of manly name as well as of manly use. God no more prohibits
nuptials to be celebrated than a name to be given. "But there are sacrifices appropriated
to these occasions." Let me be invited, and let not the title of the ceremony be
"assistance at a sacrifice," and the discharge of my good offices is at the service of my
friends. Would that it were "at their service" indeed, and that we could escape seeing
what is unlawful for us to do. But since the evil one has so surrounded the world with
idolatry, it will be lawful for us to be present at some ceremonies which see us doing
service to a man, not to an idol. Clearly, if invited unto priestly function and
sacrifice, I will not go, for that is service peculiar to an idol; but neither will I
furnish advice, or expense, or any other good office in a matter of that kind. If it is on
account of the sacrifice that I be invited, and stand by, I shall be partaker of idolatry;
if any other cause conjoins me to the sacrificer, I shall be merely a spectator of the
sacrifice.

CHAPTER XVII.-THE CASES OF SERVANTS AND OTHER OFFICIALS. WHAT OFFICES A CHRISTIAN MAN MAY HOLD.

But what shall believing servants or children do? officials likewise, when attending on
their lords, or patrons, or superiors, when sacrificing? Well, if any one shall have
handed the wine to a sacrificer, nay, if by any single word necessary or belonging to a
sacrifice he shall have aided him, he will be held to be a minister of idolatry. Mindful
of this rule, we can render service even "to magistrates and powers," after the example of
the patriarchs and the other forefathers, who obeyed idolatrous kings up to the confine of
idolatry. Hence arose, very lately, a dispute whether a servant of God should take the
administration of any dignity or power, if he be able, whether by some special grace, or
by adroitness, to keep himself intact from every species of idolatry; after the example
that both Joseph and Daniel, clean from idolatry, administered both dignity and power in
the livery and purple of the prefecture of entire Egypt or Babylonia. And so let us grant
that it is possible for any one to succeed in moving, in whatsoever office, under the mere
name of the office, neither sacrificing nor lending his authority to sacrifices; not
farming out victims; not assigning to others the care of temples; not looking after their
tributes; not giving spectacles at his own or the public charge, or presiding over the
giving them; making proclamation or edict for no solemnity; not even taking oaths:
moreover (what comes under the head of power), neither sitting in judgment on any one's
life or character, for you might bear with his judging about money; neither condemning nor
fore-condemning; binding no one, imprisoning or torturing no one-if it is credible that
all this is possible.

CHAPTER XVIII.-DRESS AS CONNECTED WITH IDOLATRY.

1 But we must now treat of the garb only and apparatus of office. There is a dress proper
to every one, as well for daily use as for office and dignity. That famous purple,
therefore, and the gold as an ornament of the neck, were, among the Egyptians and
Babylonians, ensigns of dignity, in the same way as bordered, or striped, or palm-
embroidered togas, and the golden wreaths of provincial priests, are now; but not on the
same terms. For they used only to be conferred, under the name of honour, on such as
deserved the familiar friendship of kings (whence, too, such used to be styled the
"purpled-men" of kings, just as among us, some, from their white toga, are called
"candidates" ); but not on the understanding that that garb should be tied to priesthoods
also, or to any idol-ceremonies. For if that were the case, of course men of such holiness
and constancy would instantly have refused the defiled dresses; and it would instantly
have appeared that Daniel had been no zealous slave to idols, nor worshipped Bel, nor the
dragon, which long after did appear. That purple, therefore, was simple, and used not at
that time to be a mark of dignity among the barbarians, but of nobility. For as both
Joseph, who had been a slave, and Daniel, who through captivity had changed his state,
attained the freedom of the states of Babylon and Egypt through the dress of barbaric
nobility;

2 so among us believers also, if need so be, the bordered toga will be proper to be
conceded to boys, and the stole to girls, as ensigns of birth, not of power; of race, not
of office; of rank, not of superstition. But the purple, or the other ensigns of dignities
and powers, dedicated from the beginning to idolatry engrafted on the dignity and the
powers, carry the spot of their own profanation; since, moreover, bordered and striped
togas, and broad-barred ones, are put even on idols themselves; and fasces also, and rods,
are borne before them; and deservedly, for demons are the magistrates of this world: they
bear the fasces and the purples, the ensigns of one college. What end, then, will you
advance if you use the garb indeed, but administer not the functions of it? In things
unclean, none can appear clean. If you put on a tunic defiled in itself, it perhaps may
not be defiled through you; but you, through it, will be unable to be clean. Now by this
time, you who argue about "Joseph" and "Daniel," know that things old and new, rude and
polished, begun and developed, slavish and free, are not always comparable. For they, even
by their circumstances, were slaves; but you, the slave of none, in so far as you are the
slave of Christ alone, who has freed you likewise from the captivity of the world, will
incur the duty of acting after your Lord's pattern. That Lord walked in humility and
obscurity, with no definite home:

3 for "the Son of man," said He, "hath not where to lay His head; " unadorned in dress,
for else He had not said, "Behold, they who are clad in soft raiment are in kings' houses:
" in short, inglorious in countenance and aspect, just as Isaiah withal had fore-
announced. If, also, He exercised no right of power even over His own followers, to whom
He discharged menial ministry; if, in short, though conscious of His own kingdom, He
shrank back from being made a king, He in the fullest manner gave His own an example for
turning coldly from all the pride and garb, as well of dignity as of power. For if they
were to be used, who would rather have used them than the Son of God? What kind and what
number of fasces would escort Him? what kind of purple would bloom from His shoulders?
what kind of gold would beam from His head, had He not judged the glory of the world to be
alien both to Himself and to His? Therefore what He was unwilling to accept, He has
rejected; what He rejected, He has condemned; what He condemned, He has counted as part of
the devil's pomp. For He would not have condemned things, except such as were not His; but
things which are not God's, can be no other's but the devil's. If you have forsworn "the
devil's pomp," know that whatever there you touch is idolatry.

4 Let even this fact help to remind you that all the powers and dignities of this world
are not only alien to, but enemies of, God; that through them punishments have been
determined against God's servants; through them, too, penalties prepared for the impious
are ignored. But "both your birth and your substance are troublesome to you in resisting
idolatry. For avoiding it, remedies cannot be lacking; since, even if they be lacking,
there remains that one by which you will be made a happier magistrate, not in the earth,
but in the heavens.

CHAPTER XIX.-CONCERNING MILITARY SERVICE.

1 In that last section, decision may seem to have been given likewise concerning military
service, which is between dignity and power. But now inquiry is made about this point,
whether a believer may turn himself unto military service, and whether the military may be
admitted unto the faith, even the rank and file, or each inferior grade, to whom there is
no necessity for taking part in sacrifices or capital punishments. There is no agreement
between the divine and the human sacrament, the standard of Christ and the standard of the
devil, the camp of light and the camp of darkness. One soul cannot be due to two masters-
God and Caesar. And yet Moses carried a rod, and Aaron wore a buckle, and John (Baptist)
is girt with leather and Joshua the son of Nun leads a line of march; and the People
warred: if it pleases you to sport with the subject. But how will a Christian man war,
nay, how will he serve even in peace, without a sword, which the Lord has taken away? For
albeit soldiers had come unto John, and had received the formula of their rule; albeit,
likewise, a centurion had believed; still the Lord afterward, in disarming Peter, unbe

2 d every soldier. No dress is lawful among us, if assigned to any unlawful action.

CHAPTER XX.-CONCERNING IDOLATRY IN WORDS.

1 But, however, since the conduct according to the divine rule is imperilled, not merely
by deeds, but likewise by words, (for, just as it is written, "Behold the man and his
deeds; " so, "Out of thy own mouth shalt thou be justified" ), we ought to remember that,
even in words, also the inroad of idolatry must be foreguarded against, either from the
defect of custom or of timidity. The law prohibits the gods of the nations from being
named, not of course that we are not to pronounce their names, the speaking of which
common intercourse extorts from us: for this must very frequently be said, "You find him
in the temple of ¦sculapius; "and, "I live in Isis Street; "and, "He has been made priest
of Jupiter; "and much else after this manner, since even on men names of this kind are
bestowed. I do not honour Saturnus if I call a man so, by his own name. I honour him no
more than I do Marcus, if I call a man Marcus. But it says, "Make not mention of the name
of other gods, neither be it heard from thy mouth. The precept it gives is this, that we
do not call them gods. For in the first part of the law, too, "Thou shalt not," saith He,
"use the name of the Lord thy God in a vain thing," that is, in an idol. Whoever,
therefore, honours an idol with the name of God, has fallen into idolatry.

2 But if i speak of them as gods, something must be added to make it appear that I do not
call them gods. For even the Scripture names "gods," but adds "their," viz. "of the
nations: "just as David does when he had named "gods," where he says, "But the gods of the
nations are demons. But this has been laid by me rather as a foundation for ensuing
observations. However, it is a defect of custom to say, "By Hercules, So help me the god
of faith; " while to the custom is added the ignorance of some, who are ignorant that it
is an oath by Hercules. Further, what will an oath be, in the name of gods whom you have
forsworn, but a collusion of faith with idolatry? For who does not honour them in whose
name he swears?

CHAPTER XXI.-OF SILENT ACQUIESCENCE IN HEATHEN FORMULARIES.

1 But it is a mark of timidity, when some other man binds you in the name of his gods, by
the making of an oath, or by some other form of attestation, and you, for fear of
discovery, remain quiet. For you equally, by remaining quiet, affirm their majesty, by
reason of which majesty you will seem to be bound. What matters it, whether you affirm the
gods of the nations by calling them gods, or by hearing them so called? Whether you swear
by idols, or, when adjured by another, acquiesce? Why should we not recognize the
subtleties of Satan, who makes it his aim that, what he cannot effect by our mouth, he may
effect by the mouth of his servants, introducing idolatry into us through our ears? At all
events, whoever the adjurer is, he binds you to himself either in friendly or unfriendly
conjunction. If in unfriendly, you are now challenged unto battle, and know that you must
fight. If in friendly, with how far greater security will you transfer your engagement
unto the Lord, that you may dissolve the obligation of him through whose means the Evil
One was seeking to annex you to the honour of idols, that is, to idolatry! All sufferance
of that kind is idolatry. You honour those to whom, when imposed as authorities, you have
rendered respect. I know that one (whom the Lord pardon!), when it had been said to him in
public during a law-suit, "Jupiter be wroth with you," answered, "On the contrary, with
you.

2 What else would a heathen have done who believed Jupiter to be a god? For even had he
not retorted the malediction by Jupiter (or other such like), yet, by merely returning a
curse, he would have confirmed the divinity of Jove, showing himself irritated by a
malediction in Jove's name. For what is there to be indignant at, (if cursed) in the name
of one whom you know to be nothing? For if you rave, you immediately affirm his existence,
and the profession of your fear will be an act of idolatry. How much more, while you are
returning the malediction in the name of Jupiter himself, are you doing honour to Jupiter
in the same way as he who provoked you! But a believer ought to laugh in such cases, not
to rave; nay, according to the precept, not to return a curse in the name of God even, but
dearly to bless in the name of God, that you may both demolish idols and preach God, and
fulfil discipline.

CHAPTER XXII.-OF ACCEPTING BLESSING IN THE NAME OF IDOLS.

Equally, one who has been initiated into Christ will not endure to be blessed in the name
of the gods of the nations, so as not always to reject the unclean benediction, and to
cleanse it out for himself by converting it Godward. To be blessed in the name of the gods
of the nations is to be cursed in the name of God. If I have given an alms, or shown any
other kindness, and the recipient pray that his gods, or the Genius of the colony, may be
propitious to me, my oblation or act will immediately be an honour to idols, in whose name
he returns me the favour of blessing. But why should he not know that I have done it for
God's sake; that God may rather be glorified, and demons may not be honoured in that which
I have done for the sake of God? If God sees that I have done it for His sake, He equally
sees that I have been unwilling to show that I did it for His sake, and have in a manner
made His precept a sacrifice to idols. Many say, "No one ought to divulge himself; "but I
think neither ought he to deny himself. For whoever dissembles in any cause whatever, by
being held as a heathen, does deny; and, of course, all denial is idolatry, just as all
idolatry is denial, whether in deeds or in words.

CHAPTER XXIII.-WRITTEN CONTRACTS IN THE NAME OF IDOLS. TACIT CONSENT.

1 But there is a certain species of that class, doubly sharpened in deed and word, and
mischievous on either side, although it flatter you, as if it were free of danger in each;
while it does not seem to be a deed, because it is not laid hold of as a word. In
borrowing money from heathens under pledged securities, Christians give a guarantee under
oath, and deny themselves to have done so. Of course, the time of the prosecution, and the
place of the judgment seat, and the person of the presiding judge, decide that they knew
themselves to have so done. Christ prescribes that there is to be no swearing. "I wrote,"
says the debtor, "but I said nothing. It is the tongue, not the written letter, which
kills. Here I call Nature and Conscience as my witnesses: Nature, because even if the
tongue in dictating remains motionless and quiet, the hand can write nothing which the
soul has not dictated; albeit even to the tongue itself the soul may have dictated either
something conceived by itself, or else something delivered by another. Now, lest it be
said, "Another dictated," I here appeal to Conscience whether, what another dictated, the
soul entertains, and transmits unto the hand, whether with the concomitance or the
inaction of the tongue. Enough, that the Lord has said faults are committed in the mind
and the conscience. If concupiscence or malice have ascended into a man's heart, He saith
it is held as a deed. You therefore have given a guarantee;

2 which clearly has "ascended into your heart," which you can neither contend you were
ignorant of nor unwilling; for when you gave the guarantee, you knew that you did it; when
you knew, of course you were willing: you did it as well in act as in thought; nor can you
by the lighter charge exclude the heavier, so as to say that it is clearly rendered false,
by giving a guarantee I for what you do not actually perform. "Yet I have not denied,
because I have not sworn. But you have sworn, since, even if you had done no such thing,
you would still be said to swear, if you have even consented to so doing. Silence of voice
is an unavailing plea in a case of writing; and muteness of sound in a case of letters.
For Zacharias, when punished with a temporary privation of voice, holds colloquy with his
mind, and, passing by his bootless tongue, with the help of his hands dictates from his
heart, and without his mouth pronounces the name of his son. Thus, in his pen there speaks
a hand clearer than every sound, in his waxen tablet there is heard a letter more vocal
that every mouth. Inquire whether a man have spoken who is understood to have spoken. Pray
we the Lord that no necessity for that kind of contract may ever encompass us;

3 and if it should so fall out, may He give our brethren the means of helping us, or give
us constancy to break off all such necessity, lest those denying letters, the substitutes
for our mouth, be brought forward against us in the day of judgment, sealed with the
seals, not now of witnesses, but of angels!

CHAPTER XXIV.-GENERAL CONCLUSION.

Amid these reefs and inlets, amid these shallows and straits of idolatry, Faith, her sails
filled by the Spirit of God, navigates; safe if cautious, secure if intently watchful. But
to such as are washed overboard is a deep whence is no out-swimming; to such as are run
aground is inextricable shipwreck; to such as are engulphed is a whirlpool, where there is
no breathing-even in idolatry. All waves thereof whatsoever suffocate; every eddy thereof
sucks down unto Hades. Let no one say, "Who will so safely foreguard himself? We shall
have to go out of the world!" As if it were not as well worth while to go out, as to stand
in the world as an idolater! Nothing can be easier than caution against idolatry, if the
fear of it be our leading fear; any "necessity" whatever is too trifling compared to such
a peril. The reason why the Holy Spirit did, when the apostles at that time were
consulting, relax the bond and yoke for us, was that we might be free to devote ourselves
to the shunning of idolatry. This shall be our Law, the more fully to be administered the
more ready it is to hand; (a Law) peculiar to Christians, by means whereof we are
recognised and examined by heathens. This Law must be set before such as approach unto the
Faith, and inculcated on such as are entering it; that, in approaching, they may
deliberate; observing it, may persevere; not observing it, may renounce their name. We
will see to it, if, after the type of the Ark, there shall be in the Church raven, kite,
dog, and serpent. At all events, an idolater is not found in the type of the Ark: no
animal has been fashioned to represent an idolater. Let not that be in the Church which
was not in the Ark.


THE CHAPLET, OR DE CORONA
=========================

THE CHAPLET, OR DE CORONA Tertullian

c. AD 155–220

North African lawyer and the first great Latin theologian.

CHAPTER I.

1 Very lately it happened thus: while the bounty of our most excellent emperors was
dispensed in the camp, the soldiers, laurel-crowned, were approaching. One of them, more a
soldier of God, more stedfast than the rest of his brethren, who had imagined that they
could serve two masters, his head alone uncovered, the useless crown in his hand-already
even by that peculiarity known to every one as a Christian-was nobly conspicuous.
Accordingly, all began to mark him out, jeering him at a distance, gnashing on him near at
hand. The murmur is wafted to the tribune, when the person had just left the ranks. The
tribune at once puts the question to him, Why are you so different in your attire? He
declared that he had no liberty to wear the crown with the rest. Being urgently asked for
his reasons, he answered, I am a Christian. O soldier! boasting thyself in God. Then the
case was considered and voted on; the matter was remitted to a higher tribunal; the
offender was conducted to the prefects. At once he put away the heavy cloak, his
disburdening commenced; he loosed from his foot the military shoe, beginning to stand upon
holy ground; he gave up the sword, which was not necessary either for the protection of
our Lord; from his hand likewise dropped the laurel crown;

2 and now, purple-clad with the hope of his own blood, shod with the preparation of the
gospel, girt with the sharper word of God, completely equipped in the apostles' armour,
and crowned more worthily with the white crown of martyrdom, he awaits in prison the
largess of Christ. Thereafter adverse judgments began to be passed upon his conduct-
whether on the part of Christians I do not know, for those of the heathen are not
different-as if he were headstrong and rash, and too eager to die, because, in being taken
to task about a mere matter of dress, he brought trouble on the bearers of the Name, -he,
forsooth, alone brave among so many soldier-brethren, he alone a Christian. It is plain
that as they have rejected the prophecies of the Holy Spirit, they are also purposing the
refusal of martyrdom. So they murmur that a peace so good and long is endangered for them.
Nor do I doubt that some are already turning their back on the Scriptures, are making
ready their luggage, are equipped for flight from city to city; for that is all of the
gospel they care to remember. I know, too, their pastors are lions in peace, deer in the
fight. As to the questions asked for extorting confessions from us, we shall teach
elsewhere. Now, as they forth also the objection-But where are we forbidden to be
crowned?-I shall take this point up, as more suitable to be treated of here, being the
essence, in fact, of the present contention.

3 So that, on the one hand, the inquirers who are ignorant, but anxious, may be
instructed; and on the other, those may be refuted who try to vindicate the sin,
especially the laurel-crowned Christians themselves, to whom it is merely a question of
debate, as if it might be regarded as either no trespass at all, or at least a doubtful
one, because it may be made the subject of investigation. That it is neither sinless nor
doubtful, I shall now, however, show.

CHAPTER II.

1 I affirm that not one of the Faithful has ever a crown upon his head, except at a time
of trial. That is the case with all, from catechumens to confessors and martyrs, or (as
the case may be) deniers. Consider, then, whence the custom about which we are now chiefly
inquiring got its authority. But when the question is raised why it is observed, it is
meanwhile evident that it is observed. Therefore that can neither be regarded as no
offence, or an uncertain one, which is perpetrated against a practice which is capable of
defence, on the ground even of its repute, and is sufficiently ratified by the support of
general acceptance. It is undoubted, so that we ought to inquire into the reason of the
thing; but without prejudice to the practice, not for the purpose of overthrowing it, but
rather of building it up, that you may all the more carefully observe it, when you are
also satisfied as to its reason. But what sort of procedure is it, for one to be bringing
into debate a practice, when he has fallen from it, and to be seeking the explanation of
his having ever had it, when he has left it off? Since, although he may wish to seem on
this account desirous to investigate it, that he may show that he has not done wrong in
giving it up, it is evident that he nevertheless transgressed previously in its
presumptuous observance.

2 If he has done no wrong to-day in accepting the crown he offended before in refusing it.
This treatise, therefore, will not be for those who not in a proper condition for inquiry,
but for those who, with the real desire of getting instruction, bring forward, not a
question for debate, but a request for advice. For it is from this desire that a true
inquiry always proceeds; and I praise the faith which has believed in the duty of
complying with the rule, before it has learned the reason of it. An easy thing it is at
once to demand where it is written that we should not be crowned. But is it written that
we should be crowned? Indeed, in urgently demanding the warrant of Scripture in a
different side from their own, men prejudge that the support of Scripture ought no less to
appear on their part. For if it shall be said that it is lawful to be crowned on this
ground, that Scripture does not forbid it, it will as validly be retorted that just on
this ground is the crown unlawful, because the Scripture does not enjoin it. What shall
discipline do? Shall it accept both things, as if neither were forbidden? Or shall it
refuse both, as if neither were enjoined? But "the thing which is not forbidden is freely
permitted. I should rather say that what has not been freely allowed is forbidden.

CHAPTER III.

1 And how long shall we draw the saw to and fro through this line, when we have an ancient
practice, which by anticipation has made for us the state, i.e., of the question? If no
passage of Scripture has prescribed it, assuredly custom, which without doubt flowed from
tradition, has confirmed it. For how can anything come into use, if it has not first been
handed down? Even in pleading tradition, written authority, you say, must be demanded. Let
us inquire, therefore, whether tradition, unless it be written, should not be admitted.
Certainly we shall say that it ought not to be admitted, if no cases of other practices
which, without any written instrument, we maintain on the ground of tradition alone, and
the countenance thereafter of custom, affords us any precedent. To deal with this matter
briefly, I shall begin with baptism. When we are going to enter the water, but a little
before, in the presence of the congregation and under the hand of the president, we
solemnly profess that we disown the devil, and his pomp, and his angels. Hereupon we are
thrice immersed, making a somewhat ampler pledge than the Lord has appointed in the
Gospel. Then when we are taken up (as new-born children), we taste first of all a mixture
of milk and honey, and from that day we refrain from the daily bath for a whole week.

2 We take also, in congregations before daybreak, and from the hand of none but the
presidents, the sacrament of the Eucharist, which the Lord both commanded to be eaten at
meal-times, and enjoined to be taken by all alike. As often as the anniversary comes
round, we make offerings for the dead as birthday honours. We count fasting or kneeling in
worship on the Lord's day to be unlawful. We rejoice in the same privilege also from
Easter to Whitsunday. We feel pained should any wine or bread, even though our own, be
cast upon the ground. At every forward step and movement, at every going in and out, when
we put on our our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light
the lamps, on couch, on seat, in all the ordinary actions of daily life, we trace upon the
forehead the sign.

CHAPTER IV.

1 If, for these and other such rules, you insist upon having positive Scripture
injunction, you will find none. Tradition will be held forth to you as the originator of
them, custom as their strengthener, and faith as their observer. That reason will support
tradition, and custom, and faith, you will either yourself perceive, or learn from some
one who has. Meanwhile you will believe that there is some reason to which submission is
due. I add still one case more, as it will be proper to show you how it was among the
ancients also. Among the Jews, so usual is it for their women to have the head veiled,
that they may thereby be recognised. I ask in this instance for the law. I put the apostle
aside. If Rebecca at once drew down her veil, when in the distance she saw her betrothed,
this modesty of a mere private individual could not have made a law, or it will have made
it only for those who have the reason which she had. Let virgins alone be veiled, and this
when they are coming to be married, and not till they have recognised their destined
husband. If Susanna also, who was subjected to unveiling on her trial, furnishes an
argument for the veiling of women, I can say here also, the veil was a voluntary thing.
She had come accused, ashamed of the disgrace she had brought on herself, properly
concealing her beauty, even because now she feared to please.

2 But I should not suppose that, when it was her aim to please, she took walks with a veil
on in her husband's avenue. Grant, now, that she was always veiled. In this particular
case, too, or, in fact, in that of any other, I demand the dress-law. If I nowhere find a
law, it follows that tradition has given the fashion in question to custom, to find
subsequently (its authorization in) the apostle's sanction, from the true interpretation
of reason. This instances, therefore, will make it sufficiently plain that you can
vindicate the keeping of even unwritten tradition established by custom; the proper
witness for tradition when demonstrated by long-continued observance. But even in civil
matters custom is accepted as law, when positive legal enactment is wanting; and it is the
same thing whether it depends on writing or on reason, since reason is, in fact, the basis
of law. But, (you say), if reason is the ground of law, all will now henceforth have to be
counted law, whoever brings it forward, which shall have reason as its ground. Or do you
think that every believer is entitled to originate and establish a law, if only it be such
as is agreeable to God, as is helpful to discipline, as promotes salvation, when the Lord
says, "But why do you not even of your own selves judge what is right?

3 " And not merely in regard to a judicial sentence, but in regard to every decision in
matters we are called on to consider, the apostle also says, "If of anything you are
ignorant, God shall reveal it unto you; " he himself, too, being accustomed to afford
counsel though he had not the command of the Lord, and to dictate of himself as possessing
the Spirit of God who guides into all truth. Therefore his advice has, by the warrant of
divine reason, become equivalent to nothing less than a divine command. Earnestly now
inquire of this teacher, keeping intact your regard for tradition, from whomsoever it
originally sprang; nor have regard to the author, but to the authority, and especially
that of custom itself, which on this very account we should revere, that we may not want
an interpreter; so that if reason too is God's gift, you may then learn, not whether
custom has to be followed by you, but why.

CHAPTER V.

1 The argument for Christian practices becomes all the stronger, when also nature, which
is the first rule of all, supports them. Well, she is the first who lays it down that a
crown does not become the head. But I think ours is the God of nature, who fashioned man;
and, that he might desire, (appreciate, become partaker of) the pleasures afforded by His
creatures, endowed him with certain senses, (acting) through members, which, so to speak,
are their peculiar instruments. The sense of hearing he has planted in the ears; that of
sight, lighted up in the eyes; that of taste, shut up in the mouth; that of smell, wafted
into the nose; that of touch, fixed in the tips of the fingers. By means of these organs
of the outer man doing duty to the inner man, the enjoyments of the divine gifts are
conveyed by the senses to the soul. What, then, in flowers affords you enjoyment? For it
is the flowers of the field which are the peculiar, at least the chief, material of
crowns. Either smell, you say, or colour, or both together. What will be the senses of
colour and smell? Those of seeing and smelling, I suppose. What members have had these
senses allotted to them? The eyes and the nose, if I am not mistaken. With sight and
smell, then, make use of flowers, for these are the senses by which they are meant to be
enjoyed;

2 use them by means of the eyes and nose, which are the members to which these senses
belong. You have got the thing from God, the mode of it from the world; but an
extraordinary mode does not prevent the use of the thing in the common way. Let flowers,
then, both when fastened into each other and tied together in thread and rush, be what
they are when free, when loose-things to be looked at and smelt. You count it a crown, let
us say, when you have a bunch of them bound together in a series, that you may carry many
at one time that you may enjoy them all at once. Well, lay them in your bosom if they are
so singularly pure, and strew them on your couch if they are so exquisitely soft, and
consign them to your cup if they are so perfectly harmless. Have the pleasure of them in
as many ways as they appeal to your senses. But what taste for a flower, what sense for
anything belonging to a crown but its band, have you in the head, which is able neither to
distinguish colour, nor to inhale sweet perfumes, nor to appreciate softness? It is as
much against nature to long after a flower with the head, as it is to crave food with the
ear, or sound with the nostril. But everything which is against nature deserves to be
branded as monstrous among all men;

3 but with us it is to be condemned also as sacrilege against God, the Lord and Creator of
nature.

CHAPTER VI.

Demanding then a law of God, you have that common one prevailing all over the world,
engraven on the natural tables to which the apostle too is wont to appeal, as when in
respect. of the woman's veil he says, "Does not even Nature teach you? " -as when to the
Romans, affirming that the heathen do by nature those things which the law requires, he
suggests both natural law and a law-revealing nature. Yes, and also in the first chapter
of the epistle he authenticates nature, when he asserts that males and females changed
among themselves the natural use of the creature into that which is unnatural, by way of
penal retribution for their error. We first of all indeed know God Himself by the teaching
of Nature, calling Him God of gods, taking for granted that He is good, and invoking Him
as Judge. Is it a question with you whether for the enjoyment of His creatures, Nature
should be our guide, that we may not be carried away in the direction in which the rival
of God has corrupted, along with man himself, the entire creation which had been made over
to our race for certain uses, whence the apostle says that it too unwillingly became
subject to vanity, completely bereft of its original character, first by vain, then by
base, unrighteous, and ungodly uses? It is thus, accordingly, in the pleasures of the
shows, that the creature is dishonoured by those who by nature indeed perceive that all
the materials of which shows are got up belong to God, but lack the knowledge to perceive
as well that they have all been changed by the devil. But with this topic we have, for the
sake of our own play-lovers, sufficiently dealt, and that, too, in a work in Greek.

CHAPTER VII.

1 Let these dealers in crowns then recognize in the meantime the authority of Nature, on
the ground of a common sense as human beings, and the certifications of their peculiar
religion, as, according to the last chapter, worshippers of the God of nature; and, as it
were, thus over and above what is required, let them consider those other reasons too
which forbid us wearing crowns, especially on the head, and indeed crowns of every sort.
For we are obliged to turn from the rule of Nature, which we share with mankind in
general, that we may maintain the whole peculiarity of our Christian discipline, in
relation also to other kinds of crowns which seem to have been provided for different
uses, as being composed of different substances, lest, because they do not consist of
flowers, the use of which nature has indicated (as it does in the case of this military
laurel one itself), they may be thought not to come Under the prohibition of our sect,
since they have escaped any objections of nature. I see, then, that we must go into the
matter both with more research, and more fully, from its beginnings on through its
successive stages Of growth to its more erratic developments. For this we need to turn to
heathen literature, for things belonging to the heathen must be proved from their own
documents. The little of this I have acquired, will, I believe, be enough.

2 If there really was a Pandora, whom Hesiod mentions as the first of women, hers was the
first head the graces crowned, for she received gifts from all the gods whence she got her
name Pandora. But Moses, a prophet, not a poet-shepherd, shows us the first woman Eve
having her loins more naturally girt about with leaves than her temples with flowers.
Pandora, then, is a myth. And so we have to blush for the origin of the crown, even on the
ground of the falsehood connected with it; and, as will soon appear, on the ground no less
of its realities. For it is an undoubted fact that certain persons either originated the
thing, or shed lustre on it. Pherecydes relates that Saturn was the first who wore a
crown; Diodorus, that Jupiter, after conquering the Titans, was honoured with this gift by
the rest of the gods. To Priapus also the same author assigns fillets; and to Ariadne a
garland of gold and of Indian gems, the gift of Vulcan, afterwards of Bacchus, and
subsequently turned into a constellation. Callimachus has put a vine crown upon Juno. So
too at Argos, her statue, vine-wreathed, with a lion's skin placed beneath her feet,
exhibits the stepmother exulting over the spoils of her two step-sons. Hercules displays
upon his head sometimes poplar, sometimes wild-olive, sometimes parsley. You have the
tragedy of Cerberus; you have Pindar; and besides Callimachus, who mentions that Apollo,
too when he had killed the Delphic serpent, as a suppliant, put on a laurel garland;

3 for among the ancients suppliants were wont to be crowned. Harpocration argues that
Bacchus the same as Osiris among the Egyptians, was designedly crowned with ivy, because
it is the nature of ivy to protect the brain against drowsiness. But that in another way
also Bacchus was the originator of the laurel crown (the crown) in which he celebrated his
triumph over the Indians, even the rabble acknowledge, when they call the days dedicated
to him the "great crown. If you open, again, the writings of the Egyptian Leo, you learn
that Isis was the first who discovered and wore ears of corn upon her head-a thing more
suited to the belly. Those who want additional information will find an ample exposition
of the subject in Claudius Saturninus, a writer of distinguished talent who treats this
question also, for he has a book on crowns, so explaining their beginnings as well as
causes, and kinds, and rites, that you find all that is charming in the flower, all that
is beautiful in the leafy branch, and every sod or vine-shoot has been dedicated to some
head or other; making it abundantly clear how foreign to us we should judge the custom of
the crowned head, introduced as it was by, and thereafter constantly managed for the
honour of, those whom the world has believed to be gods.

4 If the devil, a liar from the beginning, is even in this matter working for his false
system of godhead (idolatry), he had himself also without doubt provided for his god-lie
being carried out. What sort of thing, then, must that be counted among the people of the
true God, which was brought in by the nations in honour of the devil's candidates, and was
set apart from the beginning to no other than these; and which even then received its
consecration to idolatry by idols and in idols yet alive? Not as if an idol were anything,
but since the things which others offer up to idols belong to demons. But if the things
which others offer to them belong to demons how much more what idols offered to
themselves, when they were in life! The demons themselves, doubtless, had made provision
for themselves by means of those whom they had possessed, while in a state of desire and
craving, before provision had been actually made.

CHAPTER VIII.

1 Hold fast in the meantime this persuasion, while I examine a question which comes in our
way. For I already hear it is said, that many other things as well as crowns have been
invented by those whom the world believes to be gods, and that they are notwithstanding to
be met with both in our present usages and in those of early saints, and in the service of
God, and in Christ Himself, who did His work as man by no other than these ordinary
instrumentalities of human life. Well, let it be so; nor shall I inquire any further back
into the origin of this things. Let Mercury have been the first who taught the knowledge
of letters; I will own that they are requisite both for the business and commerce of life,
and for performing our devotion to God. Nay, if he also first strung the chord to give
forth melody, I will not deny, when listening to David, that this invention has been in
use with the saints, and has ministered to God. Let ¦sculapius have been the first who
sought and discovered cures: Esaias mentions that he ordered Hezekiah medicine when he was
sick. Paul, too, knows that a little wine does the stomach good. Let Minerva have been the
first who built a ship: I shall see Jonah and the apostles sailing. Nay, there is more
than this: for even Christ, we shall find, has ordinary raiment; Paul, too, has his cloak.

2 If at once, of every article of furniture and each household vessel, you name some god
of the world as the originator, well, I must recognise Christ, both as He reclines on a
couch, and when He presents a basin for the feet of His disciples, and when He pours water
into it from a ewer, and when He is girt about with a linen towel -a garment specially
sacred to Osiris. It is thus in general I reply upon the point, admitting indeed that we
use along with others these articles, but challenging that this be judged in the light of
the distinction between things agreeable and things opposed to reason, because the
promiscuous employment of them is deceptive, concealing the corruption of the creature, by
which it has been made subject to vanity. For we affirm that those things only are proper
to be used, whether by ourselves or by those who lived before us, and alone befit the
service of God and Christ Himself, which to meet the necessities of human life supply what
is simply; useful and affords real assistance and honourable comfort, so that they may be
well believed to have come from God's own inspiration, who first of all no doubt provided
for and taught and ministered to the enjoyment, I should suppose, of His own man.

3 As for the things which are out of this class, they are not fit to be used among us,
especially those which on that account indeed are not to be found either with the world,
or in the ways of Christ.

CHAPTER IX.

In short, what patriarch, what prophet, what Levite, or priest, or ruler, or at a later
period what apostle, or preacher of the gospel, or bishop, do you ever find the wearer of
a crown? I think not even the temple of God itself was crowned; as neither was the ark of
the testament, nor the tabernacle of witness, nor the altar, nor the candlestick crowned
though certainly, both on that first solemnity of the dedication, and in that second
rejoicing for the restoration, crowning would have been most suitable if it were worthy of
God. But if these things were figures of us (for we are temples of God, and altars, and
lights, and sacred vessels), this too they in figure set forth, that the people of God
ought not to be crowned. The reality must always correspond with the image. If, perhaps,
you object that Christ Himself was crowned, to that you will get the brief reply: Be you
too crowned, as He was; you have full permission. Yet even that crown of insolent
ungodliness was not of any decree of the Jewish people. It was a device of the Roman
soldiers, taken from the practice of the world,-a practice which the people of God never
allowed either on the occasion of public rejoicing or to gratify innate luxury: so they
returned from the Babylonish captivity with timbrels, and flutes, and psalteries, more
suitably than with crowns; and after eating and drinking, uncrowned, they rose up to play.
Neither would the account of the rejoicing nor the exposure of the luxury have been silent
touching the honour or dishonour of the crown. Thus too Isaiah, as he says, "With
timbrels, and psalteries, and flutes they drink wine," would have added "with crowns," if
this practice had ever had place in the things of God.

CHAPTER X.

1 So, when you allege that the ornaments of the heathen deities are found no less with
God, with the object of claiming among these for general use the head-crown, you already
lay it down for yourself, that we must not have among us, as a thing whose use we are to
share with others, what is not to be found in the service of God. Well, what is so
unworthy of God indeed as that which is worthy of an idol? But what is so worthy of an
idol as that which is also worthy of a dead man? For it is the privilege of the dead also
to be thus crowned, as they too straightway become idols, both by their dress and the
service of deification, which (deification) is with us a second idolatry. Wanting, then,
the sense, it will be theirs to use the thing for which the sense is wanting, just as if
in full possession of the sense they wished to abuse it. When there ceases to be any
reality in the use, there is no distinction between using and abusing. Who can abuse a
thing, when the precipient nature with which he wishes to carry out his purpose is not his
to use it? The apostle, moreover, forbids us to abuse, while he would more naturally have
taught us not to use, unless on the ground that, where there is no sense for things, there
is no wrong use of them.

2 But the whole affair is meaningless, and is, in fact, a dead work so far as concerns the
idols; though, without doubt, a living one as respects the demons to whom the religious
rite belongs. "The idols of the heathen," says David, "are silver and gold. "They have
eyes, and see not; a nose, and smell not; hands, and they will not handle. By means of
these organs, indeed, we are to enjoy flowers; but if he declares that those who make
idols will be like them, they already are so who use anything after the style of idol
adornings. "To the pure all things are pure: so, likewise, all things to the impure are
impure; " but nothing is more impure than idols. The substances are themselves as
creatures of God without impurity, and in this their native state are free to the use of
all; but the ministries to which in their use they are devoted, makes all the difference;
for I, too, kill a cock for myself, just as Socrates did for ¦sculapius; and if the smell
of some place or other offends me, I burn the Arabian product myself, but not with the
same ceremony, nor in the same dress, nor with the same pomp, with which it is done to
idols.

3 If the creature is defiled by a mere word, as the apostle teaches, "But if any one say,
This is offered in sacrifice to idols, you must not touch it," much more when it is
polluted by the dress, and rites, and pomp of what is offered to the gods. Thus the crown
also is made out to be an offering to idols; for with this ceremony, and dress, and pomp,
it is presented in sacrifice to idols, its originators, to whom its use is specially given
over, and chiefly on this account, that what has no place among the things of God may not
be admitted into use with us as with others. Wherefore the apostle exclaims, "Flee
idolatry: " certainly idolatry whole and entire he means. Reflect on what a thicket it is,
and how many thorns lie hid in it. Nothing must be given to an idol, and so nothing must
be taken from one. If it is inconsistent with faith to recline in an idol temple, what is
it to appear in an idol dress? What communion have Christ and Belial? Therefore flee from
it; for he enjoins us to keep at a distance from idolatry-to have no close dealings with
it of any kind. Even an earthly serpent sucks in men at some distance with its breath.
Going still further, John says, "My little children, keep yourselves from idols," -not now
from idolatry, as if from the service of it, but from idols-that is, from any resemblance
to them:

4 for it is an unworthy thing that you, the image of the living God, should become the
likeness of an idol and a dead man. Thus far we assert, that this attire belongs to idols,
both from the history of its origin, and from its use by false religion; on this ground,
besides, that while it is not mentioned as connected with the worship of God, it is more
and more given over to those in whose antiquities, as well as festivals and services, it
is found. In a word, the very doors, the very victims and altars, the very servants and
priests, are crowned. You have, in Claudius, the crowns of all the various colleges of
priests. We have added also that distinction between things altogether different from each
other-things, namely, agreeable, and things contrary to reason-in answer to those who,
because there happens to be the use of some things in common, maintain the right of
participation in all things. With reference to this part of the subject, therefore, it now
remains that the special grounds for wearing crowns should be examined, that while we show
these to be foreign, nay, even opposed to our Christian discipline, we may demonstrate
that none of them have any plea of reason to support it, on the basis of which this
article of dress might be vindicated as one in whose use we can participate, as even some
others may whose instances are cast up to us.

CHAPTER XI.

1 To begin with the real ground of the military crown, I think we must first inquire
whether warfare is proper at all for Christians. What sense is there in discussing the
merely accidental, when that on which it rests is to be condemned? Do we believe it lawful
for a human oath to be superadded to one divine, for a man to come under promise to
another master after Christ, and to abjure father, mother, and all nearest kinsfolk, whom
even the law has commanded us to honour and love next to God Himself, to whom the gospel,
too, holding them only of less account than Christ, has in like manner rendered honour?
Shall it be held lawful to make an occupation of the sword, when the Lord proclaims that
he who uses the sword shall perish by the sword? And shall the son of peace take part in
the battle when it does not become him even to sue at law? And shall he apply the chain,
and the prison, and the torture, and the punishment, who is not the avenger even of his
own wrongs? Shall he, forsooth, either keep watch-service for others more than for Christ,
or shall he do it on the Lord's day, when he does not even do it for Christ Himself? And
shall he keep guard before the temples which he has renounced? And shall he take a meal
where the apostle has forbidden him?

2 And shall he diligently protect by night those whom in the day-time he has put to flight
by his exorcisms, leaning and resting on the spear the while with which Christ's side was
pierced? Shall he carry a flag, too, hostile to Christ? And shall he ask a watchword from
the emperor who has already received one from God? Shall he be disturbed in death by the
trumpet of the trumpeter, who expects to be aroused by the angel's trump? And shall the
Christian be burned according to camp rule, when he was not permitted to burn incense to
an idol, when to him Christ remitted the punishment of fire? Then how many other offences
there are involved in the performances of camp offices, which we must hold to involve a
transgression of God's law, you may see by a slight survey. The very carrying of the name
over from the camp of light to the camp of darkness is a violation of it. Of course, if
faith comes later, and finds any preoccupied with military service, their case is
different, as in the instance of those whom John used to receive for baptism, and of those
most faithful centurions, I mean the centurion whom Christ approves, and the centurion
whom Peter instructs; yet, at the same time, when a man has become a believer, and faith
has been sealed, there must be either an immediate abandonment of it, which has been the
course with many;

3 or all sorts of quibbling will have to be resorted to in order to avoid offending God,
and that is not allowed even outside of military service; or, last of all, for God the
fate must be endured which a citizen-faith has been no less ready to accept. Neither does
military service hold out escape from punishment of sins, or exemption from martyrdom.
Nowhere does the Christian change his character. There is one gospel, and the same Jesus,
who will one day deny every one who denies, and acknowledge every one who acknowledges
God,-who will save, too, the life which has been lost for His sake; but, on the other
hand, destroy that which for gain has been saved to His dishonour. With Him the faithful
citizen is a soldier, just as the faithful soldier is a citizen. A state of faith admits
no plea of necessity; they are under no necessity to sin, whose one necessity is, that
they do not sin. For if one is pressed to the offering of sacrifice and the sheer denial
of Christ by the necessity of torture or of punishment, yet discipline does not connive
even at that necessity; because there is a higher necessity to dread denying and to
undergo martyrdom, than to escape from suffering, and to render the homage required. In
fact, an excuse of this sort overturns the entire essence of our sacrament, removing even
the obstacle to voluntary sins;

4 for it will be possible also to maintain that inclination is a necessity, as involving
in it, forsooth, a sort of compulsion. I have, in fact, disposed of this very allegation
of necessity with reference to the pleas by which crowns connected with official position
are vindicated, in support of which it is in common use, since for this very reason
offices must be either refused, that we may not fall into acts of sin, or martyrdoms
endured that we may get quit of offices. Touching this primary aspect of the question, as
to the unlawfulness even of a military life itself, I shall not add more, that the
secondary question may be restored to its place. Indeed, if, putting my strength to the
question, I banish from us the military life, I should now to no purpose issue a challenge
on the matter of the military crown. Suppose, then, that the military service is lawful,
as far as the plea for the crown is concerned.

CHAPTER XII.

1 But I first say a word also about the crown itself. This laurel one is sacred to Apollo
or Bacchus-to the former as the god of archery, to the latter as the god of triumphs. In
like manner Claudius teaches; when he tells us that soldiers are wont too to be wreathed
in myrtle. For the myrtle belongs to Venus, the mother of the ¦neadµ, the mistress also of
the god of war, who, through Ilia and the Romuli is Roman. But I do not believe that Venus
is Roman as well as Mars, because of the vexation the concubine gave her. When military
service again is crowned with olive, the idolatry has respect to Minerva, who is equally
the goddess of arms-but got a crown of the tree referred to, because of the peace she made
with Neptune. In these respects, the superstition of the military garland will be
everywhere defiled and all-defiling. And it is further defiled, I should think, also in
the grounds of it. Lo the yearly public pronouncing of vows, what does that bear on its
face to be? It takes place first in the part of the camp where the general's tent is, and
then in the temples. In addition to the places, observe the words also: "We vow that you,
O Jupiter, will then have an ox with gold-decorated horns. What does the utterance mean?
Without a doubt the denial (of Christ).

2 Albeit the Christian says nothing in these places with the mouth, he makes his response
by having the crown on his head. The laurel is likewise commanded (to be used) at the
distribution of the largess. So you see idolatry is not without its gain, selling, as it
does, Christ for pieces of gold, as Judas did for pieces of silver. Will it be "Ye cannot
serve God and mammon" to devote your energies to mammon, and to depart from God? Will it
be "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things which are
God's," not only not to render the human being to God, but even to take the denarius from
Caesar? Is the laurel of the triumph made of leaves, or of corpses? Is it adorned with
ribbons, or with tombs? Is it bedewed with ointments, or with the tears of wives and
mothers? It may be of some Christians too; for Christ is also among the barbarians. Has
not he who has carried (a crown for) this cause on his head, fought even against himself?
Another son of service belongs to the royal guards. And indeed crowns are called
(Castrenses), as belonging to the camp; Munificµ likewise, from the Caesarean functions
they perform. But even then you are still the soldier and the servant of another; and if
of two masters, of God and Caesar:

3 but assuredly then not of Caesar, when you owe yourself to God, as having higher claims,
I should think, even in matters in which both have an interest.

CHAPTER XIII.

1 For state reasons, the various orders of the citizens also are crowned with laurel
crowns; but the magistrates besides with golden ones, as at Athens, and at Rome. Even to
those are preferred the Etruscan. This appellation is given to the crowns which,
distinguished by their gems and oak leaves of gold, they put on, with mantles having an
embroidery of palm branches, to conduct the chariots containing the images of the gods to
the circus. There are also provincial crowns of gold, needing now the larger heads of
images instead of those of men. But your orders, and your magistracies, and your very
place of meeting, the church, are Christ's. You belong to Him, for you have been enrolled
in the books of life. There the blood of the Lord serves for your purple robe, and your
broad stripe is His own cross; there the axe is already laid to the trunk of the tree;
there is the branch out of the root of Jesse. Never mind the state horses with their
crown. Your Lord, when, according to the Scripture, He would enter Jerusalem in triumph,
had not even an ass of His own. These (put their trust) in chariots, and these in horses;
but we will seek our help in the name of the Lord our God. From so much as a dwelling in
that Babylon of John's Revelation we are called away; much more then from its pomp. The
rabble, too, are crowned, at one time because of some great rejoicing for the success of
the emperors;

2 at another, on account of some custom belonging to municipal festivals. For luxury
strives to make her own every occasion of public gladness. But as for you, you are a
foreigner in this world, a citizen of Jerusalem, the city above. Our citizenship, the
apostle says, is in heaven. You have your own registers, your own calendar; you have
nothing to do with the joys of the world; nay, you are called to the very opposite, for
"the world shall rejoice, but ye shall mourn. And I think the Lord affirms, that those who
mourn are happy, not those who are crowned. Marriage, too, decks the bridegroom with its
crown; and therefore we will not have heathen brides, lest they seduce us even to the
idolatry with which among them marriage is initiated. You have the law from the patriarchs
indeed; you have the apostle enjoining people to marry in the Lord. You have a crowning
also on the making of a freeman; but you have been already ransomed by Christ, and that at
a great price. How shall the world manumit the servant of another? Though it seems to be
liberty, yet it will come to be found bondage. In the world everything is nominal, and
nothing real. For even then, as ransomed by Christ, you were under no bondage to man; and
now, though man has given you liberty, you are the servant of Christ.

3 If you think freedom of the world to be real, so that you even seal it with a crown, you
have returned to the slavery of man, imagining it to be freedom; you have lost the freedom
of Christ, fancying it is slavery. Will there be any dispute as to the cause of crown-
wearing, which contests in the games in their turn supply, and which, both as sacred to
the gods and in honour of the dead, their own reason at once condemns? It only remains,
that the Olympian Jupiter, and the Nemean Hercules, and the wretched little Archemorus,
and the hapless Antinous, should be crowned in a Christian, that he himself may become a
spectacle disgusting to behold. We have recounted, as I think, all the various causes of
the wearing of the crown, and there is not one which has any place with us: all are
foreign to us, unholy, unlawful, having been abjured already once for all in the solemn
declaration of the sacrament. For they were of the pomp of the devil and his angels,
offices of the world, honours, festivals, popularity huntings, false vows, exhibitions of
human servility, empty praises, base glories, and in them all idolatry, even in respect of
the origin of the crowns alone, with which they are all wreathed. Claudius will tell us in
his preface, indeed, that in the poems of Homer the heaven also is crowned with
constellations, and that no doubt by God, no doubt for man; therefore man himself, too,
should be crowned by God.

4 But the world crowns brothels, and baths, and bakehouses, and prisons, and schools, and
the very amphitheatres, and the chambers where the clothes are stripped from dead
gladiators, and the very biers of the dead. How sacred and holy, how venerable and pure is
this article of dress, determine not from the heaven of poetry alone, but from the
traffickings of the whole world. But indeed a Christian will not even dishonour his own
gate with laurel crowns, if so be he knows how many gods the devil has attached to doors;
Janus so-called from gate, Limentinus from threshold, Forcus and Carna from leaves and
hinges; among the Greeks, too, the Thyrµan Apollo, and the evil spirits, the Antelii.

CHAPTER XIV.

1 Much less may the Christian put the service of idolatry on his own head-nay, I might
have said, upon Christ, since Christ is the Head of the Christian man-(for his head) is as
free as even Christ is, under no obligation to wear a covering, not to say a band. But
even the head which is bound to have the veil, I mean woman's, as already taken possession
of by this very thing, is not open also to a band. She has the burden of her own humility
to bear. If she ought not to appear with her head uncovered on account of the angels, much
more with a crown on it will she offend those (elders) who perhaps are then wearing crowns
above. For what is a crown on the head of a woman, but beauty made seductive, but mark of
utter wantonness,-a notable casting away of modesty, a setting temptation on fire?
Therefore a woman, taking counsel from the apostles' foresight, will not too elaborately
adorn herself, that she may not either be crowned with any exquisite arrangement of her
hair. What sort of garland, however, I pray you, did He who is the Head of the man and the
glory of the woman, Christ Jesus, the Husband of the church, submit to in behalf of both
sexes?

2 Of thorns, I think, and thistles,-a figure of the sins which the soil of the flesh
brought forth for us, but which the power of the cross removed, blunting, in its endurance
by the head of our Lord, death's every sting. Yes, and besides the figure, there is
contumely with ready lip, and dishonour, and infamy, and the ferocity involved in the
cruel things which then disfigured and lacerated the temples of the Lord, that you may now
be crowned with laurel, and myrtle, and olive, and any famous branch, and which is of more
use, with hundred-leaved roses too, culled from the garden of Midas, and with both kinds
of lily, and with violets of all sorts, perhaps also with gems and gold, so as even to
rival that crown of Christ which He afterwards obtained. For it was after the gall He
tasted the honeycomb and He was not greeted as King of Glory in heavenly places till He
had been condemned to the cross as King of the Jews, having first been made by the Father
for a time a little less than the angels, and so crowned with glory and honour. If for
these things, you owe your own head to Him, repay it if you can, such as He presented His
for yours; or be not crowned with flowers at all, if you cannot be with thorns, because
you may not be with flowers.

CHAPTER XV.

1 Keep for God His own property untainted; He will crown it if He choose. Nay, then, He
does even choose. He calls us to it. To him who conquers He says, "I will give a crown Of
life. Be you, too, faithful unto death, and fight you, too, the good fight, whose crown
the apostle feels so justly confident has been laid up for him. The angel also, as he goes
forth on a white horse, conquering and to conquer, receives a crown of victory; and
another is adorned with an encircling rainbow (as it were in its fair colours)-a celestial
meadow. In like manner, the elders sit crowned around, crowned too with a crown of gold,
and the Son of Man Himself flashes out above the clouds. If such are the appearances in
the vision of the seer, of what sort will be the realities in the actual manifestation?
Look at those crowns. Inhale those odours. Why condemn you to a little chaplet, or a
twisted headband, the brow which has been destined for a diadem? For Christ Jesus has made
us even kings to God and His Father. What have you in common with the flower which is to
die? You have a flower in the Branch of Jesse, upon which the grace of the Divine Spirit
in all its fulness rested-a flower undefiled, unfading, everlasting, by choosing which the
good soldier, too, has got promotion in the heavenly ranks.

2 Blush, ye fellow-soldiers of his, henceforth not to be condemned even by him, but by
some soldier of Mithras, who, at his initiation in the gloomy cavern, in the camp, it may
well be said, of darkness, when at the sword's point a crown is presented to him, as
though in mimicry of martyrdom, and thereupon put upon his head, is admonished to resist
and east it off, and, if you like, transfer it to his shoulder, saying that Mithras is his
crown. And thenceforth he is never crowned; and he has that for a mark to show who he is,
if anywhere he be subjected to trial in respect of his religion; and he is at once
believed to be a soldier of Mithras if he throws the crown away-if he say that in his god
he has his crown. Let us take note of the devices of the devil, who is wont to ape some of
God's things with no other design than, by the faithfulness of his servants, to put us to
shame, and to condemn us.


SCORPIACE
=========

SCORPIACE Tertullian

c. AD 155–220

North African lawyer and the first great Latin theologian.

INTRODUCTION

Antidote for the Scorpion's Sting.

[Translated by Rev. S. Thelwall.]

CHAPTER I.

1 The earth brings forth, as if by suppuration, great evil from the diminutive scorpion.
The poisons are as many as are the kinds of it, the disasters as many as are also the
species of it, the pains as many as are also the colours of it. Nicander writes on the
subject of scorpions, and depicts them. And yet to smite with the tail-which tail will be
whatever is prolonged from the hindmost part of the body, and scourges-is the one movement
which they all use when making an assault. Wherefore that succession of knots in the
scorpion, which in the inside is a thin poisoned veinlet, rising up with a bow-like bound,
draws tight a barbed sting at the end, after the manner of an engine for shooting
missiles. From which circumstance they also call after the scorpion, the warlike implement
which, by its being drawn back, gives an impetus to the arrows. The point in their case is
also a duct of extreme minuteness, to inflict the wound; and where it penetrates, it pours
out poison. The usual time of danger is the summer season: fierceness hoists the sail when
the wind is from the south and the south-west. Among cures, certain substances supplied by
nature have very great efficacy; magic also puts on some bandage; the art of healing
counteracts with lancet and cup. For some, making haste, take also beforehand a protecting
draught; but sexual intercourse drains it off, and they are dry again.

2 We have faith for a defence, if we are not smitten with distrust itself also, in
immediately making the sign and adjuring, and besmearing the heel with the beast. Finally,
we often aid in this way even the heathen, seeing we have been endowed by God with that
power which the apostle first used when he despised the viper's bite. What, then, does
this pen of yours offer, if faith is safe by what it has of its own? That it may be safe
by what it has of its own also at other times, when it is subjected to scorpions of its
own. These, too, have a troublesome littleness, and are of different sorts, and are armed
in one manner, and are stirred up at a definite time, and that not another than one of
burning heat. This among Christians is a season of persecution. When, therefore, faith is
greatly agitated, and the Church burning, as represented by the bush, then the Gnostics
break out, then the Valentinians creep forth, then all the opponents of martyrdom bubble
up, being themselves also hot to strike, penetrate, kill. For, because they know that many
are artless and also inexperienced, and weak moreover, that a very great number in truth
are Christians who veer about with the wind and conform to its moods, they perceive that
they are never to be approached more than when fear has opened the entrances to the soul,
especially when some display of ferocity has already arrayed with a crown the faith of
martyrs.

3 Therefore, drawing along the tail hitherto, they first of all apply it to the feelings,
or whip with it as if on empty space. Innocent persons undergo such suffering. So that you
may suppose the speaker to be a brother or a heathen of the better sort. A sect
troublesome to nobody so dealt with! Then they pierce. Men are perishing without a reason.
For that they are perishing, and without a reason, is the first insertion. Then they now
strike mortally. But the unsophisticated souls know not what is written, and what meaning
it bears, where and when and before whom we must confess, or ought, save that this, to die
for God, is, since He preserves me, not even artlessness, but folly, nay madness. If He
kills me, how will it be His duty to preserve me? Once for all Christ died for us, once
for all He was slain that we might not be slain. If He demands the like from me in return,
does He also look for salvation from my death by violence? Or does God importune for the
blood of men, especially if He refuses that of bulls and he-goats? Assuredly He had rather
have the repentance than the death of the sinner. And how is He eager for the death of
those who are not sinners? Whom will not these, and perhaps other subtle devices
containing heretical poisons, pierce either for doubt if not for destruction, or for
irritation if not for death?

4 As for you, therefore, do you, if faith is on the alert, smite on the spot the scorpion
with a curse, so far as you can, with your sandal, and leave it dying in its own
stupefaction? But if it gluts the wound, it drives the poison inwards, and makes it hasten
into the bowels; forthwith all the former senses become dull, the blood of the mind
freezes, the flesh of the spirit pines away, loathing for the Christian name is
accompanied by a sense of sourness. Already the understanding also seeks for itself a
place where it may throw up; and thus, once for all, the weakness with which it has been
smitten breathes out wounded faith either in heresy or in heathenism. And now the present
state of matters is such, that we are in the midst of an intense heat, the very dog-star
of persecution,-a state originating doubtless with the dog-headed one himself. Of some
Christians the fire, of others the sword, of others the beasts, have made trial; others
are hungering in prison for the martyrdoms of which they have had a taste in the meantime
by being subjected to clubs and claws besides. We ourselves, having been appointed for
pursuit, are like hares being hemmed in from a distance; and heretics go about according
to their wont. Therefore the state of the times has prompted me to prepare by my pen, in
opposition to the little beasts which trouble our sect, our antidote against poison, that
I may thereby effect cures.

5 You who read will at the same time drink. Nor is the draught bitter. If the utterances
of the Lord are sweeter than honey and the honeycombs, the juices are from that source. If
the promise of God flows with milk and honey, the ingredients which go to make that
draught have the smack of this. "But woe to them who turn sweet into bitter, and light
into darkness. For, in like manner, they also who oppose martyrdoms, representing
salvation to be destruction, transmute sweet into bitter, as well as light into darkness;
and thus, by preferring this very wretched life to that most blessed one, they put bitter
for sweet, as well as darkness for light.

CHAPTER II.

1 But not yet about the good to be got from martyrdom must we learn, without our having
first heard about the duty of suffering it; nor must we learn the usefulness of it, before
we have heard about the necessity for it. The (question of the)divine warrant goes first-
whether God has willed and also commanded ought of the kind, so that they who assert that
it is not good are not plied with arguments for thinking it profitable save when they have
been subdued. It is proper that heretics be driven to duty, not enticed. Obstinacy must be
conquered, not coaxed. And, certainly, that will be pronounced beforehand quite good
enough, which will be shown to have been instituted and also enjoined by God. Let the
Gospels wait a little, while I set forth their root the Law, while I ascertain the will of
God from those writings from which I recall to mind Himself also: "I am," says He, "God,
thy God, who have brought thee out of the land of Egypt. Thou shalt have no other gods
besides me. Thou shalt not make unto thee a likeness of those things which are in heaven,
and which are in the earth beneath, and which are in the sea under the earth. Thou shalt
not worship them, nor serve them. For I am the Lord thy God. Likewise in the same book of
Exodus: "Ye yourselves have seen that I have talked with you from heaven.

2 Ye shall not make unto you gods of silver, neither shall ye make unto you gods of gold.
To the following effect also, in Deuteronomy: "Hear, O Israel; The Lord thy God is one:
and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy might, and with all
thy soul. And again: "Neither do thou forget the Lord thy God, who brought thee forth from
the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God, and
serve Him only, and cleave to Him, and swear by His name. Ye shall not go after strange
gods, and the gods of the nations which are round about you, because the Lord thy God is
also a jealous God among you, and lest His anger should be kindled against thee, and
destroy thee from off the face of the earth. But setting before them blessings and curses,
He also says: "Blessings shall be yours, if ye obey the commandments of the Lord your God,
whatsoever I command you this day, and do not wander from the way which I have commanded
you, to go and serve other gods whom ye know not. And as to rooting them out in every way:
"Ye shall utterly destroy all the places wherein the nations, which ye shall possess by
inheritance, served their gods, upon mountains and hills, and under shady trees.

3 Ye shall overthrow all their altars, ye shall overturn and break in pieces their
pillars, and cut down their groves, and burn with fire the graven images of the gods
themselves, and destroy the names of them out of that place. He further urges, when they
(the Israelites) had entered the land of promise, and driven out its nations: "Take heed
to thy self, that thou do not follow them after they be driven out from before thee, that
thou do not inquire after their gods, saying, As the nations serve their gods, so let me
do likewise. But also says He: "If there arise among you a prophet himself, or a dreamer
of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, and it come to pass, and he say, Let us go
and serve other gods, whom ye know not, do not hearken to the words of that prophet or
dreamer, for the Lord your God proveth you, to know whether ye fear God with all your
heart and with all your soul. After the Lord your God ye shall go, and fear Him, and keep
His commandments, and obey His voice, and serve Him, and cleave unto Him. But that prophet
or dreamer shall die; for he has spoken to turn thee away from the Lord thy God. But also
in another section.

4 "If, however, thy brother, the son of thy father or of thy mother, or thy son, or thy
daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend who is as thine own soul, solicit thee,
saying secretly, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou knowest not, nor did thy
fathers, of the gods of the nations which are round about thee, very nigh unto thee or far
off from thee, do not consent to go with him, and do not hearken to him. Thine eye shall
not spare him, neither shalt thou pity, neither shalt thou preserve him; thou shall
certainly inform upon him. Thine hand shall be first upon him to kill him, and afterwards
the hand of thy people; and ye shall stone him, and he shall die, seeing he has sought to
turn thee away from the Lord thy God. He adds likewise concerning cities, that if it
appeared that one of these had, through the advice of unrighteous men, passed over to
other gods, all its inhabitants should be slain, and everything belonging to it become
accursed, and all the spoil of it be gathered together into all its places of egress, and
be, even with all the people, burned with fire in all its streets in the sight of the Lord
God; and, says He, "it shall not be for dwelling in for ever:

5 it shall not be built again any more, and there shall cleave to thy hands nought of its
accursed plunder, that the Lord may turn from the fierceness of His anger. He has, from
His abhorrence of idols, framed a series of curses too: "Cursed be the man who maketh a
graven or a molten image, an abomination, the work of the hands of the craftsman, and
putteth it in a secret place. But in Leviticus He says: "Go not ye after idols, nor make
to yourselves molten gods: I am the Lord your God. And in other passages: "The children of
Israel are my household servants; these are they whom I led forth from the land of Egypt:
I am the Lord your God. Ye shall not make you idols fashioned by the hand, neither rear
you up a graven image. Nor shall ye set up a remarkable stone in your land (to worship
it): I am the Lord your God. These words indeed were first spoken by the Lord by the lips
of Moses, being applicable certainly to whomsoever the Lord God of Israel may lead forth
in like manner from the Egypt of a most superstitious world, and from the abode of human
slavery.

6 But from the mouth of every prophet in succession, sound forth also utterances of the
same God, augmenting the same law of His by a renewal of the same commands, and in the
first place announcing no other duty in so special a manner as the being on guard against
all making and worshipping of idols; as when by the mouth of David He says: "The gods of
the nations are silver and gold: they have eyes, and see not; they have ears, and hear
not; they have a nose, and smell not; a mouth, and they speak not; hands, and they handle
not; feet and they walk not. Like to them shall be they who make them, and trust in them."

CHAPTER III.

1 Nor should I think it needful to discuss whether God pursues a worthy course in
forbidding His own name and honour to be given over to a lie, or does so in not consenting
that such as He has plucked from the maze of false religion should return again to Egypt,
or does so in not suffering to depart from Him them whom He has chosen for Himself. Thus
that, too, will not require to be treated by us, whether He has wished to be kept the rule
which He has chosen to appoint, and whether He justly avenges the abandonment of the rule
which He has wished to be kept; since He would have appointed it to no purpose if He had
not wished it kept, and would have to no purpose wished it kept if He had been unwilling
to uphold it. My next step, indeed, is to put to the test these appointments of God in
opposition to false religions, the completely vanquished as well as also the punished,
since on these will depend the entire argument for martyrdoms. Moses was apart with God on
the mountain, when the people, not brooking his absence, which was so needful, seek to
make gods for themselves, which, for his own part, he will prefer to destroy. Aaron is
importuned, and commands that the earrings of their women be brought together, that they
may be thrown into the fire.

2 For the people were about to lose, as a judgment upon themselves, the true ornaments for
the ears, the words of God. The wise fire makes for them the molten likeness of a calf,
reproaching them with having the heart where they have their treasure also,-in Egypt, to
wit, which clothed with sacredness, among the other animals, a certain ox likewise.
Therefore the slaughter of three thousand by their nearest relatives, because they had
displeased their so very near relative God, solemnly marked both the commencement and the
deserts of the trespass. Israel having, as we are I told in Numbers, turned aside at
Sethim, the people go to the daughters of Moab to gratify their lust: they are allured to
the idols, so that they committed whoredom with the spirit also: finally, they eat of
their defiled sacrifices; then they both worship the gods of the nation, and are admired
to the rites of Beelphegor. For this lapse, too, into idolatry, sister to adultery, it
took the slaughter of twenty-three thousand by the swords of their countrymen to appease
the divine anger. After the death of Joshua the son of Nave they forsake the God of their
fathers, and serve idols, Baalim and Ashtaroth; and the Lord in anger delivered them up to
the hands of spoilers, and they continued to be spoiled by them, and to be sold to their
adversaries, and could not at all stand before their enemies. Whithersoever they went
forth, His hand was upon them for evil, and they were greatly distressed.

3 And after this God sets judges (critas), the same as our censors, over them. But not
even these did they continue steadfastly to obey. So soon as one of the judges died, they
proceeded to transgress more than their fathers had done by going after the gods of
others, and serving and worshipping them. Therefore the Lord was angry. "Since, indeed,"
He says, "this nation have transgressed my covenant which I established with their
fathers, and have not hearkened to my voice, I also will give no heed to remove from
before them a man of the nations which Joshua left at his death. And thus, throughout
almost all the annals of the judges and of the kings who succeeded them, while the
strength of the surrounding nations was preserved, He meted wrath out to Israel by war and
captivity and a foreign yoke, as often as they turned aside from Him, especially to
idolatry.

CHAPTER IV.

1 If, therefore, it is evident that from the beginning this kind of worship has both been
forbidden-witness the commands so numerous and weighty-and that it has never been engaged
in without punishment following, as examples so numerous and impressive show, and that no
offence is counted by God so presumptuous as a trespass of this sort, we ought further to
perceive the purport of both the divine threatenings and their fulfilments, which was even
then commended not only by the not calling in question, but also by the enduring of
martyrdoms, for which certainly He had given occasion by forbidding idolatry. For
otherwise martyrdoms would not take place. And certainly He had supplied, as a warrant for
these, His own authority, willing those events to come to pass for the occurrence of which
He had given occasion. At present (it is important), for we are getting severely stung
concerning the will of God, and the scorpion repeats the prick, denying the existence of
this will, finding fault with it, so that he either insinuates that there is another god,
such that this is not his will, or none the less overthrows ours, seeing such is his will,
or altogether denies this will of God, if he cannot deny Himself.

2 But, for our part, contending elsewhere about God, and about all the rest of the body of
heretical teaching, we now draw before us definite lines for one form of encounter,
maintaining that this will, such as to have given occasion for martyrdoms, is that of not
another god than the God of Israel, on the ground of the commandments relating to an
always forbidden, as well as of the judgments upon a punished, idolatry. For if the
keeping of a command involves the suffering of violence, this will be, so to speak, a
command about keeping the command, requiring me to suffer that through which I shall be
able to keep the command, violence namely, whatever of it threatens me when on my guard
against idolatry. And certainly (in the case supposed) the Author of the command extorts
compliance with it. He could not, therefore, have been unwilling that those events should
come to pass by means of which the compliance will be manifest. The injunction is given me
not to make mention of any other god, not even by speaking,-as little by the tongue as by
the hand,-to fashion a god, and not to worship or in any way show reverence to another
than Him only who thus commands me, whom I am both bid fear that I may not be forsaken by
Him, and love with my whole being, that I may die for Him. Serving as a soldier under this
oath, I am challenged by the enemy.

3 If I surrender to them, I am as they are. In maintaining this oath, I fight furiously in
battle, am wounded, hewn in pieces, slain. Who wished this fatal issue to his soldier, but
he who sealed him by such an oath?

CHAPTER V.

1 You have therefore the will of my God. We have cured this prick. Let us give good heed
to another thrust touching the character of His will. It would be tedious to show that my
God is good,-a truth with which the Marcionites have now been made acquainted by us.
Meanwhile it is enough that He is called God for its being necessary that He should be
believed to be good. For if any one make the supposition that God is evil, he will not be
able to take his stand on both the constituents thereof: he will be bound either to affirm
that he whom he has thought to be evil is not God, or that he whom he has proclaimed to be
God is good. Good, therefore, will be the will also of him who, unless he is good, will
not be God. The goodness of the thing itself also which God has willed-of martyrdom, I
mean-will show this, because only one who is good has willed what is good. I stoutly
maintain that martyrdom is good, as required by the God by whom likewise idolatry is
forbidden and punished. For martyrdom strives against and opposes idolatry. But to strive
against and oppose evil cannot be ought but good. Not as if I denied that there is a
rivalry in evil things with one another, as well as in good also; but this ground for it
requires a different state of matters.

2 For martyrdom contends with idolatry, not from some malice which they share, but from
its own kindness; for it delivers from idolatry. Who will not proclaim that to be good
which delivers from idolatry? What else is the opposition between idolatry and martyrdom,
than that between life and death? Life will be counted to be martyrdom as much as idolatry
to be death. He who will call life an evil, has death to speak of as a good. This
frowardness also appertains to men,-to discard what is wholesome, to accept what is
baleful, to avoid all dangerous cures, or, in short, to be eager to die rather than to be
healed. For they are many who flee from the aid of physic also, many in folly, many from
fear and false modesty. And the healing art has manifestly an apparent cruelty, by reason
of the lancet, and of the burning iron, and of the great heat of the mustard; yet to be
cut and burned, and pulled and bitten, is not on that account an evil, for it occasions
helpful pains; nor will it be refused merely because it afflicts, but because it afflicts
inevitably will it be applied. The good accruing is the apology for the frightfulness of
the work. In short, that man who is howling and groaning and bellowing in the hands of a
physician will presently load the same hands with a fee, and proclaim that they are the
best operators, and no longer affirm that they are cruel.

3 Thus martyrdoms also rage furiously, but for salvation. God also will be at liberty to
heal for everlasting life by means of fires and swords, and all that is painful. But you
will admire the physician at least even in that respect, that for the most part he employs
like properties in the cures to counteract the properties of the diseases, when he aids,
as it were, the wrong way, succouring by means of those things to which the affliction is
owing. For he both checks heat by heat, by laying on a greater load; and subdues
inflammation by leaving thirst unappeased, by tormenting rather; and contracts the
superabundance of bile by every bitter little draught, and stops hemorrhage by opening a
veinlet in addition. But you will think that God must be found fault with, and that for
being jealous, if He has chosen to contend with a disease and to do good by imitating the
malady, to destroy death by death, to dissipate killing by killing, to dispel tortures by
tortures, to disperse punishments by punishments, to bestow life by withdrawing it, to aid
the flesh by injuring it, to preserve the soul by snatching it away. The wrongheadedness,
as you deem it to be, is reasonableness; what you count cruelty is kindness. Thus, seeing
God by brief (sufferings) effects cures for eternity, extol your God for your prosperity;
you have fallen into His hands, but have happily fallen. He also fell into your
sicknesses. Man always first provides employment for the physician;

4 in short, he has brought upon himself the danger of death. He had received from his own
Lord, as from a physician, the salutary enough rule to live according to the law, that he
should eat of all indeed (that the garden produced) and should refrain from only one
little tree which in the meantime the Physician Himself knew as a perilous one. He gave
ear to him whom he preferred, and broke through self-restraint. He ate what was forbidden,
and, surfeited by the trespass, suffered indigestion tending to death; he certainly richly
deserving to lose his life altogether who wished to do so. But the inflamed tumour due to
the trespass having been endured until in due time the medicine might be mixed, the Lord
gradually prepared the means of healing-all the rules of faith, they also bearing a
resemblance to (the causes of) the ailment, seeing they annul the word of death by the
word of life, and diminish the trespass-listening by a listening of allegiance. Thus, even
when that Physician commands one to die, He drives out the lethargy of death. Why does man
show reluctance to suffer now from a cure, what he was not reluctant then to suffer from a
disorder? Does he dislike being killed for salvation, who did not dislike being killed for
destruction?-Will he feel squeamish with reference to the counter poison, who gaped for
the poison?

CHAPTER VI.

1 But if, for the contest's sake, God had appointed martyrdoms for us, that thereby we
might make trial with our opponent, in order that He may now keep bruising him by whom man
chose to be bruised, here too generosity rather than harshness in God holds sway. For He
wished to make man, now plucked from the devil's throat by faith, trample upon him
likewise by courage, that he might not merely have escaped from, but also completely
vanquished, his enemy. He who had called to salvation has been pleased to summon to glory
also, that they who were rejoicing in consequence of their deliverance may be in
transports when they are crowned likewise. With what good-will the world celebrates those
games, the combative festivals and superstitious contests of the Greeks, involving forms
both of worship and of pleasure, has now become clear in Africa also. As yet cities, by
sending their congratulations severally, annoy Carthage, which was presented with the
Pythian game after the racecourse had attained to an old age. Thus, by the world it has
been believed to be a most proper mode of testing proficiency in studies, to put in
competition the forms of skill, to elicit the existing condition of bodies and of voices,
the reward being the informer, the public exhibition the judge, and pleasure the decision.
Where there are mere contests, there are some wounds: fists make reel, heels kick like
butting rams, boxing-gloves mangle, whips leave gashes.

2 Yet there will be no one reproaching the superintendent of the contest for exposing men
to outrage. Suits for injuries lie outside the racecourse. But to the extent that those
persons deal in discoloration, and gore, and swellings, he will design for them crowns,
doubtless, and glory, and a present, political privileges, contributions by the citizens,
images, statues, and-of such sort as the world can give-an eternity of fame, a
resurrection by being kept in remembrance. The pugilist himself does not complain of
feeling pain, for he wishes it; the crown closes the wounds, the palm hides the blood: he
is excited more by victory than by injury. Will you count this man hurt whom you see
happy? But not even the vanquished himself will reproach the superintendent of the contest
for his misfortune. Shall it be unbecoming in God to bring forth kinds of skill and rules
of His own into public view, into this open ground of the world, to be seen by men, and
angels, and all powers?-to test flesh and spirit as to stedfastness and endurance?-to give
to this one the palm, to this one distinction, to that one the privilege of citizenship,
to that one pay?-to reject some also, and after punishing to remove them with disgrace?
You dictate to God, forsooth, the times, or the ways, or the places in which to institute
a trial concerning His own troop (of competitors) as if it were not proper for the Judge
to pronounce the preliminary decision also.

3 Well now, if He had put forth faith to suffer martyrdoms not for the contest's sake, but
for its own benefit, ought it not to have had some store of hope, for the increase of
which it might restrain desire of its own, and check its wish in order that it might
strive to mount up, seeing they also who discharge earthly functions are eager for
promotion? Or how will there be many mansions in our Father's house, if not to accord with
a diversity of deserts? How will one star also differ from another star in glory, unless
in virtue of disparity in their rays? But further, if, on that account, some increase of
brightness also was appropriate to loftiness of faith, that gain ought to have been of
some such sort as would cost great effort, poignant suffering, torture, death. But
consider the requital, when flesh and life are paid away-than which in man there is nought
more precious, the one from the hand of God, the other from His breath-that the very
things are paid away in obtaining the benefit of which the benefit consists; that the very
things are expended which may be acquired; that the same things are the price which are
also the commodities. God had foreseen also other weaknesses incident to the condition of
man,-the stratagems of the enemy, the deceptive aspects of the creatures, the snares of
the world; that faith, even after baptism, would be endangered;

4 that the most, after attaining unto salvation, would be lost again, through soiling the
wedding-dress, through failing to provide oil for their torchlets-would be such as would
have to be sought for over mountains and woodlands, and carried back upon the shoulders.
He therefore appointed as second supplies of comfort, and the last means of succour, the
fight of martyrdom and the baptism-thereafter free from danger-of blood. And concerning
the happiness of the man who has partaken of these, David says: "Blessed are they whose
iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord
will not impute sin. For, strictly speaking, there cannot any longer be reckoned ought
against the martyrs, by whom in the baptism (of blood) life itself is laid down. Thus,
"love covers the multitude of sins; " and loving God, to wit, with all its strength (by
which in the endurance of martyrdom it maintains the fight), with all its life (which it
lays down for God), it makes of man a martyr. Shall you call these cures, counsels,
methods of judging, spectacles, (illustrations of) even the barbarity of God? Does God
covet man's blood? And yet I might venture to affirm that He does, if man also covets the
kingdom of heaven, if man covets a sure salvation, if man also covets a second new birth.
The exchange is displeasing to no one, which can plead, in justification of itself, that
either benefit or injury is shared by the parties making it.

CHAPTER VII.

1 If the scorpion, swinging his tail in the air, still reproach us with having a murderer
for our God, I shall shudder at the altogether foul breath of blasphemy which comes
stinking from his heretical mouth; but I will embrace even such a God, with assurance
derived from reason, by which reason even He Himself has, in the person of His own Wisdom,
by the lips of Solomon, proclaimed Himself to be more than a murderer: Wisdom (Sophia),
says He has slain her own children. Sophia is Wisdom. She has certainly slain them wisely
if only into life, and reasonably if only into glory. Of murder by a parent, oh the clever
form! Oh the dexterity of crime! Oh the proof of cruelty, which has slain for this reason,
that he whom it may have slain may not die! And therefore what follows? Wisdom is praised
in hymns, in the places of egress; for the death of martyrs also is praised in song.
Wisdom behaves with firmness in the streets, for with good results does she murder her own
sons. Nay, on the top of the walls she speaks with assurance, when indeed, according to
Esaias, this one calls out, "I am God's; "and this one shouts, "In the name of Jacob; "and
another writes, "In the name of Israel. O good mother! I myself also wish to be put among
the number of her sons, that I may be slain by her; I wish to be slain, that I may become
a son.

2 But does she merely murder her sons, or also torture them? For I hear God also, in
another passage, say, "I will burn them as gold is burned, and will try them as silver is
tried. Certainly by the means of torture which fires and punishments supply, by the
testing martyrdoms of faith. The apostle also knows what kind of God he has ascribed to
us, when he writes: "If God spared not His own Son, but gave Him up for us, how did He not
with Him also give us all things? " You see how divine Wisdom has murdered even her own
proper, first-born and only Son, who is certainly about to live, nay, to bring back the
others also into life. I can say with the Wisdom of God; It is Christ who gave Himself up
for our offences. Already has Wisdom butchered herself also. The character of words
depends not on the sound only, but on the meaning also, and they must be heard not merely
by ears, but also by minds. He who does not understand, believes God to be cruel; although
for him also who does not understand, an announcement has been made to restrain his
harshness in understanding otherwise than aright. "For who," says the apostle," has known
the mind of the Lord? or who has been His counsellor, to teach Him? or who has pointed out
to Him the way of understanding?

3 " But, indeed, the world has held it lawful for Diana of the Scythians, or Mercury of
the Gauls, or Saturn of the Africans, to be appeased by human sacrifices; and in Latium to
this day Jupiter has human blood given him to taste in the midst of the city; and no one
makes it a matter of discussion, or imagines that it does not occur for some reason, or
that it occurs by the will of his God, without having value. If our God, too, to have a
sacrifice of His own, had required martyrdoms for Himself, who would have reproached Him
for the deadly religion, and the mournful ceremonies, and the altar-pyre, and the
undertaker-priest, and not rather have counted happy the man whom God should have
devoured?

CHAPTER VIII.

1 We keep therefore the one position, and, in respect of this question only, summon to an
encounter, whether martyrdoms have been commanded by God, that you may believe that they
have been commanded by reason, if you know that they have been commanded by Him, because
God will not command ought without reason. Since the death of His own saints is precious
is His sight, as David sings, it is not, I think, that one which falls to the lot of men
generally, and is a debt due by all (rather is that one even disgraceful on account of the
trespass, and the desert of condemnation to which it is to be traced), but that other
which is met in this very work-in bearing witness for religion, and maintaining the fight
of confession in behalf of righteousness and the sacrament. As saith Esaias, "See how the
righteous man perisheth, and no one layeth it to heart; and righteous men are taken away,
and no one considereth it: for from before the face of unrighteousness the righteous man
perisheth, and he shall have honour at his burial. Here, too, you have both an
announcement of martyrdoms, and of the recompense they bring. From the beginning, indeed,
righteousness suffers violence. Forthwith, as soon as God has begun to be worshipped,
religion has got ill-will for her portion. He who had pleased God is slain, and that by
his brother.

2 Beginning with kindred blood, in order that it might the more easily go in quest of that
of strangers, ungodliness made the object of its pursuit, finally, that not only of
righteous persons, but even of prophets also. David is persecuted; Elias put to flight;
Jeremias stoned; Esaias cut asunder; Zacharias butchered between the altar and the temple,
imparting to the hard stones lasting marks of his blood. That person himself, at the close
of the law and the prophets, and called not a prophet, but a messenger, is, suffering an
ignominious death, beheaded to reward a dancing-girl. And certainly they who were wont to
be led by the Spirit of God used to be guided by Himself to martyrdoms; so that they had
even already to endure what they had also proclaimed as requiring to be borne. Wherefore
the brotherhood of the three also, when the dedication of the royal image was the occasion
of the citizens being pressed to offer worship, knew well what faith, which alone in them
had not been taken captive, required,-namely, that they must resist idolatry to the death.
For they remembered also the words of Jeremias writing to those over whom that captivity
was impending: "And now ye shall see borne upon (men's) shoulders the gods of the
Babylonians, of gold and silver and wood, causing fear to the Gentiles.

3 Beware, therefore, that ye also do not be altogether like the foreigners, and be seized
with fear while ye behold crowds worshipping those gods before and behind, but say in your
mind, Our duty is to worship Thee, O Lord. Therefore, having got confidence from God, they
said, when with strength of mind they set at defiance the king's threats against the
disobedient: "There is no necessity for our making answer to this command of yours. For
our God whom we worship is able to deliver us from the furnace of fire and from your
hands; and then it will be made plain to you that we shall neither serve your idol, nor
worship your golden image which you have set up. O martyrdom even without suffering
perfect! Enough did they suffer! enough were they burned, whom on this account God
shielded, that it might not seem that they had given a false representation of His power.
For forthwith, certainly, would the lions, with their pent-up and wonted savageness, have
devoured Daniel also, a worshipper of none but God, and therefore accused and demanded by
the Chaldeans, if it had been right that the worthy anticipation of Darius concerning God
should have proved delusive.

4 For the rest, every preacher of God, and every worshipper also, such as, having been
summoned to the service of idolatry, had refused compliance, ought to have suffered,
agreeably to the tenor of that argument too, by which the truth ought to have been
recommended both to those who were then living and to those following in
succession,-(namely), that the suffering of its defenders themselves bespeak trust for it,
because nobody would have been willing to be slain but one possessing the truth. Such
commands as well as instances, remounting to earliest times, show that believers are under
obligation to suffer martyrdom.

CHAPTER IX.

1 It remains for us, lest ancient times may perhaps have had the sacrament (exclusively)
their own, to review the modern Christian system, as though, being also from God, it might
be different from what preceded, and besides, therefore, opposed thereto in its code of
rules likewise, so that its Wisdom knows not to murder her own sons! Evidently, in the
case of Christ both the divine nature and the will and the sect are different from any
previously known! He will have commanded either no martyrdoms at all, or those which must
be understood in a sense different from the ordinary, being such a person as to urge no
one to a risk of this kind as to promise no reward to them who suffer for Him, because He
does not wish them to suffer; and therefore does He say, when setting forth His chief
commands, "Blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven. The following statement, indeed, applies first to all without
restriction, then specially to the apostles themselves: "Blessed shall ye be when men
shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you, for my
sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad, since very great is your reward in heaven; for so
used their fathers to do even to the prophets. So that He likewise foretold their having
to be themselves also slain, after the example of the prophets.

2 Though, even if He had appointed all this persecution in case He were obeyed for those
only who were then apostles, assuredly through them along with the entire sacrament, with
the shoot of the name, with the layer of the Holy Spirit, the rule about enduring
persecution also would have had respect to us too, as to disciples by inheritance, and,
(as it were, )bushes from the apostolic seed. For even thus again does He address words of
guidance to the apostles: "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; "and,
"Beware of men, for they will deliver you up to the councils, and they will scourge you in
their synagogues; and ye shall be brought before governors and kings for my sake, for a
testimony against them and the Gentiles," etc. Now when He adds, "But the brother will
deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child; and the children shall rise up
against their parents, and cause them to be put to death," He has dearly announced with
reference to the others, (that they would be subjected to) this form of unrighteous
conduct, which we do not find exemplified in the case of the apostles. For none of them
had experience of a father or a brother as a betrayer, which very many of us have. Then He
returns to the apostles: "And ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake.

3 How much more shall we, for whom there exists the necessity of being delivered up by
parents too! Thus, by allotting this very betrayal, now to the apostles, now to all, He
pours out the same destruction upon all the possessors of the name, on whom the name.
along with the condition that it be an object of hatred, will rest. But he who will endure
on to the end-this man will be saved. By enduring what but persecution,-betrayal,-death?
For to endure to the end is nought else than to suffer the end. And therefore there
immediately follow, "The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his own
lord; "because, seeing the Master and Lord Himself was stedfast in suffering persecution,
betrayal and death, much more will it be the duty of His servants and disciples to bear
the same, that they may not seem as if superior to Him, or to have got an immunity from
the assaults of unrighteousness, since this itself should be glory enough for them, to be
conformed to the sufferings of their Lord and Master; and, preparing them for the
endurance of these, He reminds them that they must not fear such persons as kill the body
only, but are not able to destroy the soul, but that they must dedicate fear to Him rather
who has such power that He can kill both body and soul, and destroy them in hell. Who,
pray, are these slayers of the body only, but the governors and kings aforesaid-men, I
ween?

4 Who is the ruler of the soul also, but God only? Who is this but the threatener of fires
hereafter, He without whose will not even one of two sparrows falls to the ground; that
is, not even one of the two substances of man, flesh or spirit, because the number of our
hairs also has been recorded before Him? Fear ye not, therefore. When He adds, "Ye are of
more value than many sparrows," He makes promise that we shall not in vain-that is, not
without profit-fall to the ground if we choose to be killed by men rather than by God.
"Whosoever therefore will confess in me before men, in him will I confess also before my
Father who is in heaven; and whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I deny also
before my Father who is in heaven. Clear, as I think, are the terms used in announcing,
and the way to explain, the confession as well as the denial, although the mode of putting
them is different. He who confesses himself a Christian, beareth witness that he is
Christ's; he who is Christ's must be in Christ. If he is in Christ, he certainly confesses
in Christ, when he confesses himself a Christian. For he cannot be this without being in
Christ. Besides, by confessing in Christ he confesses Christ too: since, by virtue of
being a Christian, he is in Christ, while Christ Himself also is in him.

5 For if you have made mention of day, you have also held out to view the element of light
which gives us day, although you may not have made mention of light. Thus, albeit He has
not expressly said, "He who will confess me," (yet) the conduct involved in daily
confession Is not different from what is meant in our Lord's declaration. For he who
confesses himself to be what he is, that is, a Christian, confesses that likewise by which
he is it, that is, Christ. Therefore he who has denied that he is a Christian, has denied
in Christ, by denying that he is in Christ while he denies that he is a Christian; and, on
the other hand, by denying that Christ is in him, while He denies that he is in Christ, he
will deny Christ too. Thus both he who will deny in Christ, will deny Christ, and he who
will confess in Christ will confess Christ. It would have been enough, therefore, though
our Lord had made an announcement about confessing merely. For, from His mode of
presenting confession, it might be decided beforehand with reference to its opposite too-
denial, that is-that denial is repaid by the Lord with denial, just as confession is with
confession.

6 And therefore, since in the mould in which the confession has been cast the state of
(the case with reference to) denial also may be perceived, it is evident that to another
manner of denial belongs what the Lord has announced concerning it, in terms different
from those in which He speaks of confession, when He says, "Who will deny me," not "Who
will deny in me. For He had foreseen that this form of violence also would, for the most
part, immediately follow when any one had been forced to renounce the Christian name,-that
he who had denied that he was a Christian would be compelled to deny Christ Himself too by
blaspheming Him. As not long ago, alas, we shuddered at the struggle waged in this way by
some with their entire faith, which had had favourable omens. Therefore it will be to no
purpose to say, "Though I shall deny that I am a Christian, I shall not be denied by
Christ, for I have not denied Himself. For even so much will be inferred from that denial,
by which, seeing he denies Christ in him by denying that he is a Christian, he has denied
Christ Himself also. But there is more, because He threatens likewise shame with shame (in
return): "Whosoever shall be ashamed of me before men, of him will I also be ashamed
before my Father who is in heaven.

7 For He was aware that denial is produced even most of all by shame, that the state of
the mind appears in the forehead, and that the wound of shame precedes that in the body.

CHAPTER X.

1 But as to those who think that not here, that is, not within this environment of earth,
nor during this period of existence, nor before men possessing this nature shared by us
all, has confession been appointed to be made, what a supposition is theirs, being at
variance with the whole order of things of which we have experience in these lands, and in
this life, and under human authorities! Doubtless, when the souls have departed from their
bodies, and begun to be put upon trial in the several stories of the heavens, with
reference to the engagement (under which they have come to Jesus), and to be questioned
about those hidden mysteries of the heretics, they must then confess before the real
powers and the real men,-the Teleti, to wit, and the Abascanti, and the Acineti of
Valentinus! For, say they, even the Demiurge himself did not uniformly approve of the men
of our world, whom he counted as a drop of a bucket, and the dust of the threshing-floor,
and spittle and locusts, and put on a level even with brute beasts. Clearly, it is so
written. Yet not therefore must we understand that there is, besides us, another kind of
man, which-for it is evidently thus (in the case proposed)-has been able to assume without
invalidating a comparison between the two kinds, both the characteristics of the race and
a unique property.

2 For even if the life was tainted, so that condemned to contempt it might be likened to
objects held in contempt, the nature was not forthwith taken away, so that there might be
supposed to be another under its name. Rather is the nature preserved, though the life
blushes; nor does Christ know other men than those with reference to whom He says, "Whom
do men say that I am? " And, "As ye would that men should do to you, do ye likewise so to,
them. Consider whether He may not have I preserved a race such that He is looking for a
testimony to Himself from them, as well as l consisting of those on whom He enjoins the
interchange of righteous dealing. But if I should urgently demand that those heavenly men
be described to me, Aratus will sketch more easily Perseus and Cepheus, and Erigone, and
Ariadne, among the constellations. But who prevented the Lord from clearly prescribing
that confession by men likewise has to be made where He plainly announced that His own
would be; so that the statement might have run thus: "Whosoever shall confess in me before
men in heaven, I also will confess in him before my Father who is in heaven? "He ought to
have saved me from this mistake about confession on earth, which He would not have wished
me to take part in, if He had commanded one in heaven;

3 for I knew no other men but the inhabitants of the earth, man himself even not having up
to that time been observed in heaven. Besides, what is the credibility of the things
(alleged), that, being after death raised to heavenly places, I should be put to the test
there, whither I would not be translated without being already tested, that I should there
be tried in reference to a command where I could not come, but to find admittance? Heaven
lies open to the Christian before the way to it does; because there is no way to heaven,
but to him to whom heaven lies open; and he who reaches it will enter. What powers,
keeping guard at the gate, do I hear you affirm to exist in accordance with Roman
superstition, with a certain Carnus, Forculus, and Limentinus? What powers do you set in
order at the railings? If you have ever read in David, "Lift up your gates, ye princes,
and let the everlasting gates be lifted up; and the King of glory shall enter in; " if you
have also heard from Amos, "Who buildeth up to the heavens his way of ascent, and is such
as to pour forth his abundance (of waters) over the earth;

4 " know that both that way of ascent was thereafter levelled with the ground, by the
footsteps of the Lord, and an entrance thereafter opened up by the might of Christ, and
that no delay or inquest will meet Christians on the threshold, since they have there to
be not discriminated from one another, but owned, and not put to the question, but
received in. For though you think heaven still shut, remember that the Lord left here to
Peter and through him to the Church, the keys of it, which every one who has been here put
to the question, and also made confession, will carry with him. But the devil stoutly
affirms that we must confess there, to persuade us that we must deny here. I shall send
before me fine documents, to be sure, I shall carry with me excellent keys, the fear of
them who kill the body only, but do nought against the soul: I shall be graced by the
neglect of this command: I shall stand with credit in heavenly places, who could not stand
in earthly: I shall hold out against the greater powers, who yielded to the lesser: I
shall deserve to be at length let in, though now shut out. It readily occurs to one to
remark further, "If it is in heaven that men must confess, it is here too that they must
deny. For where the one is, there both are. For contraries always go together.

5 There will need to be carried on in heaven persecution even, which is the occasion of
confession or denial. Why, then, do you refrain, O most presumptuous heretic, from
transporting to the world above the whole series of means proper to the intimidation of
Christians, and especially to put there the very hatred for the name, where Christ rules
at the right hand of the Father? Will you plant there both synagogues of the Jews-
fountains of persecution-before which the apostles endured the scourge, and heathen
assemblages with their own circus, forsooth, where they readily join in the cry, Death to
the third race? But ye are bound to produce in the same place both our brothers, fathers,
children, mothers-in-law, daughters-in-law and those of our household, through whose
agency the betrayal has been appointed; likewise kings, governors, and armed authorities,
before whom the matter at issue must be contested. Assuredly there will be in heaven a
prison also, destitute of the sun's rays or full of light unthankfully, and fetters of the
zones perhaps, and, for a rack-horse, the axis itself which whirls the heavens round.
Then, if a Christian is to be stoned, hail-storms will be near; if burned, thunderbolts
are at hand; if butchered, the armed Orion will exercise his function; if put an end to by
beasts, the north will send forth the bears, the Zodiac the bulls and the lions. He who
will endure these assaults to the end, the same shall be saved.

6 Will there be then, in heaven, both an end, and suffering, a killing, and the first
confession? And where will be the flesh requisite for all this? Where the body which alone
has to be killed by men? Unerring reason has commanded us to set forth these things in
even a playful manner; nor will any one thrust out the bar consisting in this objection
(we have offered), so as not to be compelled to transfer the whole array of means proper
to persecution, all the powerful instrumentality which has been provided for dealing with
this matter, to the place where he has put the court before which confession should be
made. Since confession is elicited by persecution, and persecution ended in confession,
there cannot but be at the same time, in attendance upon these, the instrumentality which
determines both the entrance and the exit, that is, the beginning and the end. But both
hatred for the name will be here, persecution breaks out here, betrayal brings men forth
here, examination uses force here, torture rages here, and confession or denial completes
this whole course of procedure on the earth. Therefore, if the other things are here,
confession also is not elsewhere; if confession is elsewhere, the other things also are
not here. Certainly the other things are not elsewhere; therefore neither is confession in
heaven.

7 Or, if they will have it that the manner in which the heavenly examination and
confession take place is different, it will certainly be also incumbent on them to devise
a mode of procedure of their own of a very different kind, and opposed to that method
which is indicated in the Scriptures. And we may be able to say, Let them consider
(whether what they imagine to exist does so), if so be that this course of procedure,
proper to examination and confession on earth-a course which has persecution as the source
in which it originates, and which pleads dissension in the state-is preserved to its own
faith, if so be that we must believe just as is also written, and understand just as is
spoken. Here I endure the entire course (in question), the Lord Himself not appointing a
different quarter of the world for my doing so. For what does He add after finishing with
confession and denial? "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth, but a
sword,"-undoubtedly on the earth. "For I am come to set a man at variance against his
father, and the daughter against her mother, and the mother-in-law against her daughter-
in-law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. For so is it brought to pass,
that the brother delivers up the brother to death, and the father the son: and the
children rise up against the parents, and cause them to die. And he who endureth to the
end let that man be saved.

8 So that this whole course of procedure characteristic of the Lord's sword, which has
been sent not to heaven, but to earth, makes confession also to be there, which by
enduring to the end is to issue in the suffering of death.

CHAPTER XI.

1 In the same manner, therefore, we maintain that the other announcements too refer to the
condition of martyrdom. "He," says Jesus, "who will value his own life also more than me,
is not worthy of me," -that is, he who will rather live by denying, than die by
confessing, me; and "he who findeth his life shall lose it; but he who loseth it for my
sake shall find it. Therefore indeed he finds it, who, in winning life, denies; but he who
thinks that he wins it by denying, will lose it in hell. On the other hand, he who,
through confessing, is killed, will lose it for the present, but is also about to find it
unto everlasting life. In fine, governors themselves, when they urge men to deny, say,
"Save your life; "and, "Do not lose your life. How would Christ speak, but in accordance
with the treatment to which the Christian would be subjected? But when He forbids thinking
about what answer to make at a judgment-seat, He is preparing His own servants for what
awaited them, He gives the assurance that the Holy Spirit will answer by them; and when He
wishes a brother to be visited in prison, He is commanding that those about to confess be
the object of solicitude; and He is soothing their sufferings when He asserts that God
will avenge His own elect.

2 In the parable also of the withering of the word after the green blade had sprung up, He
is drawing a picture with reference to the burning heat of persecutions. If these
announcements are not understood as they are made, without doubt they signify something
else than the sound indicates; and there will be one thing in the words, another in their
meanings, as is the case with allegories, with parables, with riddles. Whatever wind of
reasoning, therefore, these scorpions may catch (in their sails), with whatever subtlety
they may attack, there is now one line of defence: an appeal will be made to the facts
themselves, whether they occur as the Scriptures represent that they would; since another
thing will then be meant in the Scriptures if that very one (which seems to be so) is not
found in actual facts. For what is written, must needs come to pass. Besides, what is
written will then come to pass, if something different does not. But, lo! we are both
regarded as persons to be hated by all men for the, sake of the name, as it is written;
and are delivered up by our nearest of kin also, as it is written; and are brought before
magistrates, and examined, and tortured, and make confession, and are ruthlessly killed,
as it is written. So the Lord ordained. If He ordained these events otherwise, why do they
not come to pass otherwise than He ordained them, that is, as He ordained them?

3 And yet they do not come to pass otherwise than He ordained. Therefore, as they come to
pass, so He ordained; and as He ordained, so they come to pass. For neither would they
have been permitted to occur otherwise than He ordained, nor for His part would He have
ordained otherwise than He would wish them to occur. Thus these passages of Scripture will
not mean ought else than we recognise in actual facts; or if those events are not yet
taking place which are announced, how are those taking place which have not been
announced? For these events which are taking place have not been announced, if those which
are announced are different, and not these which are taking place. Well now, seeing the
very occurrences are met with in actual life which are believed to have been expressed
with a different meaning in words, what would happen if they were found to have come to
pass in a different manner than had been revealed? But this will be the waywardness of
faith, not to believe what has been demonstrated, to assume the truth of what has not been
demonstrated.

4 And to this waywardness I will offer the following objection also, that if these events,
which occur as is written, will not be the very ones which are announced, those too (which
are meant) ought not to occur as is written, that they themselves also may not, after the
example of these others, be in danger of exclusion, since there is one thing in the words
and another in the facts; and there remains that even the events which have been announced
are not seen when they occur, if they are announced otherwise than they have to occur. And
how will those be believed (to have come to pass), which will not have been announced as
they come to pass? Thus heretics, by not believing what is announced as it has been shown
to have taken place, believe what has not been even announced.

CHAPTER XII.

1 Who, now, should know better the marrow of the Scriptures than the school of Christ
itself?-the persons whom the Lord both chose for Himself as scholars, certainly to be
fully instructed in all points, and appointed to us for masters to instruct us in all
points. To whom would He have rather made known the veiled import of His own language,
than to him to whom He disclosed the likeness of His own glory-to Peter, John, and James,
and afterwards to Paul, to whom He granted participation in (the joys of) paradise too,
prior to his martyrdom? Or do they also write differently from what they think-teachers
using deceit, not truth? Addressing the Christians of Pontus, Peter, at all events, says,
"How great indeed is the glory, if ye suffer patiently, without being punished as
evildoers! For this is a lovely feature, and even hereunto were ye called, since Christ
also suffered for us, leaving you Himself as an example, that ye should follow His own
steps. And again: "Beloved, be not alarmed by the fiery trial which is taking place among
you, as though some strange thing happened unto you. For, inasmuch as ye are partakers of
Christ's sufferings, do ye rejoice; that, when His glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad
also with exceeding joy. If ye are reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye;
because glory and the Spirit of God rest upon you:

2 if only none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evil-doer, or as a
busybody in other men's matters; yet (if any man suffer) as a Christian, let him not be
ashamed, but let him glorify God on this behalf. John, in fact, exhorts us to lay down our
lives even for our brethren, affirming that there is no fear in love: "For perfect love
casteth out fear, since fear has punishment; and he who fears is not perfect in love. What
fear would it be better to understand (as here meant), than that which gives rise to
denial? What love does he assert to be perfect, but that which puts fear to flight, and
gives courage to confess? What penalty will he appoint as the punishment of fear, but that
which he who denies is about to pay, who has to be slain, body and soul, in hell? And if
he teaches that we must die for the brethren, how much more for the Lord,-he being
sufficiently prepared, by his own Revelation too, forgiving such advice! For indeed the
Spirit had sent the injunction to the angel of the church in Smyrna: "Behold, the devil
shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried ten days. Be thou faithful unto
death, and I will give thee a crown of life. Also to the angel of the church in Pergamus
(mention was made) of Antipas, the very faithful martyr, who was slain where Satan
dwelleth.

3 Also to the angel of the church in Philadelphia (it was signified) that he who had not
denied the name of the Lord was delivered from the last trial. Then to every conqueror the
Spirit promises now the tree of life, and exemption from the second death; now the hidden
manna with the stone of glistening whiteness, and the name unknown ( to every man save him
that receiveth it); now power to rule with a rod of iron, and the brightness of the
morning star; now the being clothed in white raiment, and not having the name blotted out
of the book of life, and being made in the temple of God a pillar with the inscription on
it of the name of God and of the Lord, and of the heavenly Jerusalem; now a sitting with
the Lord on His throne,-which once was persistently refused to the sons of Zebedee. Who,
pray, are these so blessed conquerors, but martyrs in the strict sense of the word? For
indeed theirs are the victories whose also are the fights; theirs, however, are the fights
whose also is the blood. But the souls of the martyrs both peacefully rest in the meantime
under the altar, and support their patience by the assured hope of revenge; and, clothed
in their robes, wear the dazzling halo of brightness, until others also may fully share in
their glory.

4 For yet again a countless throng are revealed, clothed in white and distinguished by
palms of victory, celebrating their triumph doubtless over Antichrist, since one of the
elders says, "These are they who come out of that great tribulation, and have washed their
robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. For the flesh is the clothing of the
soul. The uncleanness, indeed, is washed away by baptism, but the stains are changed into
dazzling whiteness by martyrdom. For Esaias also promises, that out of red and scarlet
there will come forth the whiteness of snow and wool. When great Babylon likewise is
represented as drunk with the blood of the saints, doubtless the supplies needful for her
drunkenness are furnished by the cups of martyrdoms; and what suffering the fear of
martyrdoms will entail, is in like manner shown. For among all the castaways, nay, taking
precedence of them all, are the fearful. "But the fearful," says John-and then come the
others-" will have their part in the lake of fire and brimstone. Thus fear, which, as
stated in his epistle, love drives out, has punishment.

CHAPTER XIII.

1 But how Paul, an apostle, from being a persecutor, who first of all shed the blood of
the church, though afterwards he exchanged the sword for the pen, and turned the dagger
into a plough, being first a ravening wolf of Benjamin, then himself supplying food as did
Jacob, -how he, (I say, ) speaks in favour of martyrdoms, now to be chosen by himself
also, when, rejoicing over the Thessalonians, he says, "So that we glory in you in the
churches of God, for your patience and faith in all your persecutions and tribulations, in
which ye endure a manifestation of the righteous judgment of God, that ye may be accounted
worthy of His kingdom, for which ye also suffer! As also in his Epistle to the Romans:
"And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also, being sure that tribulation worketh
patience, and patience experience, and experience hope; and hope maketh not ashamed. And
again: "And if children, then heirs, heirs indeed of God, and joint-heirs with Christ: if
so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together. For I reckon that
the sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be
revealed in us. And therefore he afterward says: "Who shall separate us from the love of
God? Shall tribulation, or distress, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? (As it
is written: For Thy sake we are killed all the day long;

2 we have been counted as sheep for the slaughter, ) Nay, in all these things we are more
than conquerors, through Him who loved us. For we are persuaded, that neither death, nor
life, nor power, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate
us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. But further, in recounting his
own sufferings to the Corinthians, he certainly decided that suffering must be borne: "In
labours, (he says, ) more abundant, in prisons very frequent, in deaths oft. Of the Jews
five times received I forty stripes, save one; thrice was I beaten with rods; once was I
stoned," and the rest. And if these severities will seem to be more grievous than
martyrdoms, yet once more he says: "Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in
reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake. He also
says, in verses occurring in a previous part of the epistle: "Our condition is such, that
we are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; and are in need, but not in utter want;
since we are harassed by persecutions, but not forsaken; it is such that we are east down,
but not destroyed; always bearing about in our body the dying of Christ. "But though,"
says he, "our outward man perisheth"-the flesh doubtless, by the violence of
persecutions-"yet the inward man is renewed day by day"-the soul, doubtless, by hope in
the promises.

3 "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more
exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but
at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal"-he is
speaking of troubles; "but the things which are not seen are eternal"-he is promising
rewards. But writing in bonds to the Thessalonians, he certainly affirmed that they were
blessed, since to them it had been given not only to believe on Christ, but also to suffer
for His sake. "Having," says he, "the same conflier which ye both saw in me, and now hear
to be in me. "For though I are offered upon the sacrifice, I joy and rejoice with you all;
in like manner do ye also joy and rejoice with me. You see what he decides the bliss of
martyrdom to be, in honour of which he is providing a festival of mutual joy. When at
length he had come to be very near the attainment of his desire, greatly rejoicing in what
he saw before him, he writes in these terms to Timothy: "For I am already being offered,
and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought the good fight, I have finished my
course, I have kept the faith; there is laid up for me the crown which the Lord will give
me on that day" -doubtless of his suffering. Admonition enough did he for his part also
give in preceding passages:

4 "It is a faithful saying: For if we are dead with Christ, we shall also live with Him;
if we suffer, we shall also reign with Him; if we deny Him, He also will deny us; if we
believe not, yet He is faithful: He cannot deny Himself. "Be not thou, therefore, ashamed
of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me His prisoner; " for he had said before: "For God
hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. For
we suffer with power from love toward God, and with a sound mind, when we suffer for our
blamelessness. But further, if He anywhere enjoins endurance, for what more than for
sufferings is He providing it? If anywhere He tears men away from idolatry, what more than
martyrdoms takes the lead, in tearing them away to its injury?

CHAPTER XIV.

No doubt the apostle admonishes the Romans to be subject to all power, because there is no
power but of God, and because (the ruler) does not carry the sword without reason, and is
the servant of God, nay also, says he, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth
evil. For he had also previously spoken thus: "For rulers are not a terror to a good work,
but to an evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou
shall have praise of it. Therefore he is a minister of God to thee for good. But if thou
do that which is evil, be afraid." Thus he bids you be subject to the powers, not on an
opportunity occurring for his avoiding martyrdom, but when he is making an appeal in
behalf of a good life, under the view also of their being as it were assistants bestowed
upon righteousness, as it were handmaids of the divine court of justice, which even here
pronounces sentence beforehand upon the guilty. Then he goes on also to show how he wishes
you to be subject to the powers, bidding you pay "tribute to whom tribute is due, custom
to whom custom," that is, the things which are Caesar's to Caesar, and the things which
are God's to God; but man is the property of God alone. Peter, no doubt, had likewise said
that the king indeed must be honoured, yet so that the king be honoured only when he keeps
to his own sphere, when he is far from assuming divine honours; because both father and
mother will be loved along with God, not put on an equality with Him. Besides, one will
not be permitted to love even life more than God.

CHAPTER XV.

1 Now, then, the epistles of the apostles also are well known. And do we, (you say), in
all respects guileless souls and doves merely, love to go astray? I should think from
eagerness to live. But let it be so, that meaning departs from their epistles. And yet,
that the apostles endured such sufferings, we know: the teaching is clear. This only I
perceive in running through the Acts. I am not at all on the search. The prisons there,
and the bonds, and the scourges, and the big stones, and the swords, and the onsets by the
Jews, and the assemblies of the heathen, and the indictments by tribunes, and the hearing
of causes by kings, and the judgment-seats of proconsuls and the name of Caesar, do not
need an interpreter. That Peter is struck, that Stephen is overwhelmed by stones, that
James is slain as is a victim at the altar, that Paul is beheaded has been written in
their own blood. And if a heretic wishes his confidence to rest upon a public record, the
archives of the empire will speak, as would the stones of Jerusalem. We read the lives of
the Caesars: At Rome Nero was the first who stained with blood the rising faith. Then is
Peter girt by another, when he is made fast to the cross. Then does Paul obtain a birth
suited to Roman citizenship, when in Rome he springs to life again ennobled by martyrdom.

2 Wherever I read of these occurrencer so soon as I do so, I learn to suffer; nor does it
signify to me which I follow as teachers of martyrdom, whether the declarations or the
deaths of the apostles, save that in their deaths I recall their declarations also. For
they would not have suffered ought of a kind they had not previously known they had to
suffer. When Agabus, making use of corresponding action too, had foretold that bonds
awaited Paul, the disciples, weeping and entreating that he would not venture upon going
to Jerusalem, entreated in vain. As for him, having a mind to illustrate what he had
always taught, he says, "Why weep ye, and grieve my heart? But for my part, I could wish
not only to suffer bonds, but also to die at Jerusalem, for the name of my Lord Jesus
Christ. And so they yielded by saying, "Let the will of the Lord be done; "feeling sure,
doubtless, that sufferings are included in the will of God. For they had tried to keep him
back with the intention not of dissuading, but to show love for him; as yearning for (the
preservation of) the apostle, not as counselling against martyrdom.

3 And if even then a Prodicus or Valentinus stood by, suggesting that one must not confess
on the earth before men, and must do so the less in truth, that God may not (seem to)
thirst for blood, and Christ for a repayment of suffering, as though He besought it with
the view of obtaining salvation by it for Himself also, he would have immediately heard
from the servant of God what the devil had from the Lord: "Get thee behind me, Satan; thou
art an offence unto me. It is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only
shalt thou serve. But even now it will be right that he hear it, seeing that, long after,
he has poured forth these poisons, which not even thus are to injure readily any of the
weak ones, if any one in faith will drink, before being hurt, or even immediately after,
this draught of ours.


ON FLIGHT IN PERSECUTION
========================

ON FLIGHT IN PERSECUTION Tertullian

c. AD 155–220

North African lawyer and the first great Latin theologian.

ON FLIGHT IN PERSECUTION

[Translated by the Rev. S. Thelwall.] 1. My brother Fabius, you very lately asked, because
some news or other were communicated, whether or not we ought to flee in persecution For
my part, having on the spot made some observations in the negative suited to the place and
time, I also, owing to the rudeness of some persons, took away with me the subject but
half treated, meaning to set it forth now more fully by my pen; for your inquiry had
interested me in it, and the state of the times had already on its own account pressed it
upon me. As persecutions in increasing number threaten us, so the more are we called on to
give earnest thought to the question of how faith ought to receive them, and the duty of
carefully considering it concerns you no less, who no doubt, by not accepting the
Comforter, the guide to all truth, have, as was natural, opposed us hitherto in regard to
other questions also. We have therefore applied a methodical treatment, too, to your
inquiry, as we see that we must first come to a decision as to how the matter stands in
regard to persecution itself, whether it comes on us from God or from the devil, that with
the less difficulty we may get on firm ground as to our duty to meet it; for of everything
one's knowledge is clearer when it is known from whom it has its origin.

It is enough indeed to lay it down, (in bar of all besides,) that nothing happens without
the will of God. But lest we be diverted from the point before us, we shall not by this
deliverance at once give occasion to the other discussions if one make answer-Therefore
evil and sin are both from God; the devil henceforth, and even we ourselves, are entirely
free. The question in hand is persecution. With respect to this, let me in the meantime
say, that nothing happens without God's will; on the ground that persecution is especially
worthy of God, and, so to speak, requisite, for the approving, to wit, or if you will, the
rejection of His professing servants. For what is the issue of persecution, what other
result comes of it, but the approving and rejecting of faith, in regard to which the Lord
will certainly sift His people? Persecution, by means of which one is declared either
approved or rejected, is just the judgment of the Lord. But the judging properly belongs
to God alone. This is that fan which even now cleanses the Lord's threshing-floor-the
Church, I mean-winnowing the mixed heap of believers, and separating the grain of the
martyrs from the chaff of the deniers; and this is also the ladder of which Jacob dreams,
on which are seen, some mounting up to higher places, and others going down to lower. So,
too, persecution may be viewed as a contest.

By whom is the conflict proclaimed, but by Him by whom the crown and the rewards are
offered? You find in the Revelation its edict, setting forth the rewards by which He
incites to victory-those, above all, whose is the distinction of conquering in
persecution, in very deed contending in their victorious struggle not against flesh and
blood, but against spirits of wickedness. So, too, you will see that the adjudging of the
contest belongs to the same glorious One, as umpire, who calls us to the prize. The one
great thing in persecution is the promotion of the glory of God, as He tries and casts
away, lays on and takes off. But what concerns the glory of God will surely come to pass
by His will. And when is trust in God more strong, than when there is a greater fear of
Him, and when persecution breaks out? The Church is awe-struck. Then is faith both more
zealous in preparation, and better disciplined in fasts, and meetings, and prayers, and
lowliness, in brotherly-kindness and love, in holiness and temperance. There is no room,
in fact, for ought but fear and hope. So even by this very thing we have it clearly proved
that persecution, improving as it does the servants of God, cannot be imputed to the
devil.

2. If, because injustice is not from God, but from the devil, and persecution consists of
injustice (for what more unjust than that the bishops of the true God, that all the
followers of the truth, should be dealt with after the manner o the vilest criminals?),
persecution therefore seems to proceed from the devil, by whom the injustice which
constitutes persecution is perpetrated, we ought to know, as you have neither persecution
without the injustice of the devil, nor the trial of faith without persecution, that the
injustice necessary for the trial of faith does not give a warrant for persecution, but
supplies an agency; that in reality, in reference to the trial of faith, which is the
reason of persecution, the will of God goes first, but that as the instrument of
persecution, which is the way of trial, the injustice of the devil follows. For in other
respects, too, injustice in proportion to the enmity it displays against righteousness
affords occasion for attestations of that to which it is opposed as an enemy, that so
righteousness may be perfected in injustice, as strength is perfected in weakness. For the
weak things of the world have been chosen by God to confound the strong, and the foolish
things of the world to confound its wisdom. Thus even injustice is employed, that
righteousness may be approved in putting unrighteousness to shame.

Therefore, since the service is not of free-will, but of subjection (for persecution is
the appointment of the Lord for the trial of faith, but its ministry is the injustice of
the devil, supplied that persecution may be got up), we believe that persecution comes to
pass, no question, by the devil's agency, but not by the devil's origination. Satan will
not be at liberty to do anything against the servants of the living God unless the Lord
grant leave, either that He may overthrow Satan himself by the faith of the elect which
proves victorious in the trial, or in the face of the world show that apostatizers to the
devil's cause have been in reality His servants. You have the case of Job, whom the devil,
unless he had received authority from God, could not have visited with trial, not even, in
fact, in his property, unless the Lord had said, "Behold, all that he has I put at your
disposal; but do not stretch out your hand against himself. In short, he would not even
have stretched it out, unless afterwards, at his request, the Lord had granted him this
permission also, saying, "Behold, I deliver him to you; only preserve his life. So he
asked in the case of the apostles likewise an opportunity to tempt them, having it only by
special allowance, since the Lord in the Gospel says to Peter, "Behold, Satan asked that
he might sift you as grain; but I have prayed for you that your faith fail not;

" that is, that the devil should not have power granted him sufficient to endanger his
faith. Whence it is manifest that both things belong to God shaking of faith as well as
the shielding of it, when both are sought from Him-the shaking by the devil, the shielding
by the Son. And certainly, when the Son of God has faith's protection absolutely committed
to Him, beseeching it of the Father, from whom He receives all power in heaven and on
earth, how entirely out of the question is it that the devil should have the assailing of
it in his own power! But in the prayer prescribed to us, when we say to our Father, "Lead
us not into temptation " (now what greater temptation is there than persecution?), we
acknowledge that that comes to pass by His will whom we beseech to exempt us from it. For
this is what follows, "But deliver us from the wicked one," that is, do not lead us into
temptation by giving us up to the wicked one, for then are we delivered from the power of
the devil, when we are not handed over to him to be tempted. Nor would the devil's legion
have had power over the herd of swine unless they had got it from God; so far are they
from having power over the sheep of God. I may say that the bristles of the swine, too,
were then counted by God, not to speak of the hairs of holy men.

The devil, it must be owned, seems indeed to have power-in this case really his own-over
those who do not belong to God, the nations being once for all counted by God as a drop of
the bucket, and as the dust of the threshing-floor, and as the spittle of the mouth, and
so thrown open to the devil as, in a sense, a free possession. But against those who
belong to the household of God he may not do ought as by any right of his own, because the
cases marked out in Scripture show when-that is, for what reasons-he may touch them. For
either, with a view to their being approved, the power of trial is granted to him,
challenged or challenging, as in the instances already referred to, or, to secure an
opposite result, the sinner is handed over to him, as though he were an executioner to
whom belonged the inflicting of punishment, as in the case of Saul. "And the Spirit of the
Lord," says Scripture, "departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled and
stifled him; " or the design is to humble, as the apostle tells us, that there was given
him a stake, the messenger of Satan, to buffet him; and even this son of thing is not
permitted in the case of holy men, unless it be that at the same time strength of
endurance may be perfected in weakness.

For the apostle likewise delivered Phygellus and Hermogenes over to Satan that by
chastening they might be taught not to blaspheme. You see, then, that the devil receives
more suitably power even from the servants of God; so far is he from having it by any
fight of his own. 3. Seeing therefore, too, these cases occur in persecutions more than at
other times, as there is then among us more of proving or rejecting, more of abusing or
punishing, it must be that their general occurrence is permitted or commanded by Him at
whose will they happen even partially; by Him, I mean, who says, "I am He who make peace
and create evil," -that is, war, for that is the antithesis of peace. But what other war
has our peace than persecution? If in its issues persecution emphatically brings either
life or death, either wounds or healing, you have the author, too, of this. "I will smite
and heal I will make alive and put to death." "I will burn them," He says, "as gold is
burned; and I will try them," He says, "as silver is tried," for when the flame of
persecution is consuming as, then the stedfastness of our faith is proved. These will be
the fiery darts of the devil, by which faith gets a ministry of burning and kindling; yet
by the will of God. As to this I know not who can doubt, unless it be persons with
frivolous and frigid faith, which seizes upon those who with trembling assemble together
in the church. For you say, seeing we assemble without order, and assemble at the same
time, and flock in large numbers to the church, the heathen are led to make inquiry about
us, and we are alarmed lest we awaken their anxieties. Do ye not know that God is Lord of
all? And if it is God's will, then you shall suffer persecution; but if it is not, the
heathen will be still. Believe it most surely, if indeed you believe in that God without
whose will not even the sparrow, a penny can buy, falls to the ground. But we, I think,
are better than many sparrows.

4. Well, then, if it is evident from whom persecution proceeds, we are able at once to
satisfy your doubts, and to decide from these introductory remarks alone, that men should
not flee in it. For if persecution proceeds from God, in no way will it be our duty to
flee from what has God as its author; a twofold reason opposing; for what proceeds from
God ought not on the one hand to be avoided, and it cannot be evaded on the other. It
ought not to be avoided, because it is good; for everything must be good on which God has
cast His eye. And with this idea has perhaps this statement been made in Genesis, "And God
saw because it is good; "not that He would have been ignorant of its goodness unless He
had seen it, but to indicate by this expression that it was good because it was viewed by
God. There are many events indeed happening by the will of God, and happening to
somebody's harm. Yet for all that, a thing is therefore good because it is of God, as
divine, as reasonable; for what is divine, and not reasonable and good? What is good, yet
not divine? But if to the universal apprehension of mankind this seems to be the case, in
judging, man's faculty of apprehension does not predetermine the nature of things, but the
nature of things his power of apprehension.

For every several nature is a certain definite reality, and it lays it on the perceptive
power to perceive it just as it exists. Now, if that which comes from God is good indeed
in its natural state (for there is nothing from God which is not good, because it is
divine, and reasonable), but seems evil only to the human faculty, all will be right in
regard to the former; with the latter the fault will lie. In its real nature a very good
thing is chastity, and so is truth, and righteousness; and yet they are distasteful to
many. Is perhaps the real nature on this account sacrificed to the sense of perception?
Thus persecution in its own nature too is good, because it is a divine and reasonable
appointment; but those to whom it comes as a punishment do not feel it to be pleasant. You
see that as proceeding from Him, even that evil has a reasonable ground, when one in
persecution is cast out of a state of salvation, just as you see that you have a
reasonable ground for the good also, when one by persecution has his salvation made more
secure. Unless, as it depends on the Lord, one either perishes irrationally, or is
irrationally saved, he will not be able to speak of persecution as an evil, which, while
it is under the direction of reason, is, even in respect of its evil, good.

So, if persecution is in every way a good, because it has a natural basis, we on valid
grounds lay it down, that what is good ought not to be shunned by us, because it is a sin
to refuse what is good; besides that, what has been looked upon by God can no longer
indeed be avoided, proceeding as it does from God, from whose will escape will not be
possible. Therefore those who think that they should flee, either reproach God with doing
what is evil, if they flee from persecution as an evil (for no one avoids what is good);
or they count themselves stronger than God: so they think, who imagine it possible to
escape when it is God's pleasure that such events should occur. 5. But, says some one, I
flee, the thing it belongs to me to do, that I may not perish, if I deny; it is for Him on
His part, if He chooses, to bring me, when I flee, back before the tribunal. First answer
me this: Are you sure you will deny if you do not flee, or are you not sure? For if you
are sure, you have denied already, because by presupposing that you will deny, you have
given yourself up to that about which you have made such a presupposition; and now it is
vain for you to think of flight, that you may avoid denying, when in intention you have
denied already. But if you are doubtful on that point, why do you not, in the incertitude
of your fear wavering between the two different issues, presume that you are able rather
to act a confessor's part, and so add to your safety, that you may not flee, just as you
presuppose denial to send you off a fugitive? The matter stands thus-we have either both
things in our own power, or they wholly lie with God. If it is ours to confess or to deny,
why do we not anticipate the nobler thing, that is, that we shall confess? If you are not
willing to confess, you are not willing to suffer; and to be unwilling to confess is to
deny.

But if the matter is wholly in God's hand, why do we not leave it to His will, recognising
His might and power in that, just as He can bring us back to trial when we flee, so is He
able to screen us when we do not flee; yes, and even living in the very heart of the
people? Strange conduct, is it not, to honour God in the matter of flight from
persecution, because He can bring you back from your flight to stand before the judgment-
seat; but in regard of witness-bearing, to do Him high dishonour by despairing of power at
His hands to shield you from danger? Why do you not rather on this, the side of constancy
and trust in God, say, I do my part; I depart not; God, if He choose, will Himself be my
protector? It beseems us better to retain our position in submission to the will of God,
than to flee at our own will. Rutilius, a saintly martyr, after having ofttimes fled from
persecution from place to place, nay, having bought security from danger, as he thought,
by money, was, notwithstanding the complete security he had, as he thought, provided for
himself, at last unexpectedly seized, and being brought before the magistrate, was put to
the torture and cruelly mangled,-a punishment, I believe, for his fleeing,-and thereafter
he was consigned to the flames, and thus paid to the mercy of God the suffering which he
had shunned.

What else did the Lord mean to show us by this example, but that we ought not to flee from
persecution because it avails us nothing if God disapproves? 6. Nay, says some one, he
fulfilled the command, when he fled from city to city. For so a certain individual, but a
fugitive likewise has chosen to maintain, and others have done the same who are unwilling
to understand the meaning of that declaration of the Lord, that they may use it as a cloak
for their cowardice, although it has had its persons as well as its times and reasons to
which it specially applies. "When they begin," He says, "to persecute you, flee from city
to city," We maintain that this belongs specially to the persons of the apostles, and to
their times and circumstances, as the following sentences will show, which are suitable
only to the apostles: "Do not go into the way of the Gentiles, and into a city of the
Samaritans do not enter: but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But to us
the way of the Gentiles is also open, as in it we in fact were found, and to the very last
we walk; and no city has been excepted. So we preach throughout all the world; nay, no
special care even for Israel has been laid upon us, save as also we are bound to preach to
all nations, Yes, and if we are apprehended, we shall not be brought into Jewish councils,
nor scourged in Jewish synagogues, but we shall certainly be cited before Roman
magistrates and judgment-seats.

So, then, the circumstances of the apostles even required the injunction to flee, their
mission being to preach first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. That, therefore,
this preaching might be fully accomplished in the case of those among whom this behoved
first of all to be carried out-that the sons might receive bread before the dogs, for that
reason He commanded them to flee then for a time-not with the object of eluding danger,
under the plea strictly speaking which persecution urges (rather He was in the habit of
proclaiming that they would suffer persecutions, and of teaching that these must be
endured); but in order to further the proclamation of the Gospel message, lest by their
being at once put down, the diffusion of the Gospel too might be prevented. Neither were
they to flee to any city as if by stealth, but as if everywhere about to proclaim their
message; and for this, everywhere about to undergo persecutions, until they should fulfil
their teaching. Accordingly the Saviour says, "Ye will not go over all the cities of
Israel. So the command to flee was restricted to the limits of Judea. But no command that
shows Judea to be specially the sphere for preaching applies to us, now that the Holy
Spirit has been poured out upon all flesh.

Therefore Paul and the apostles themselves, mindful of the precept of the Lord, bear this
solemn testimony before Israel, which they had now filled with their doctrine-saying, "It
was necessary that the word of God should have been first delivered to you; but seeing ye
have rejected it, and have not thought yourselves worthy of eternal life, lo, we turn to
the Gentiles. And from that time they turned their steps away, as those who went before
them had laid it down, and departed into the way of the Gentiles, and entered into the
cities of the Samaritans; so that, in very deed, their sound went forth into all the
earth, and their words to the end of the world. If, therefore, the prohibition against
setting foot in the way of the Gentiles, and entering into the cities of the Samaritans,
has come to an end, why should not the command to flee, which was issued at the same time,
have come also to an end? Accordingly, from the time when, Israel having had its full
measure, the apostles went over to the Gentiles, they neither fled from city to city, nor
hesitated to suffer.

Nay, Paul too, who had submitted to deliverance from persecution by being let down from
the wall, as to do so was at this time a matter of command, refused in like manner now at
the close of his ministry, and after the injunction had come to an end, to give in to the
anxieties of the disciples, eagerly entreating him that he would not risk himself at
Jerusalem, because of the sufferings in store for him which Agabus had foretold; but doing
the very opposite, it is thus he speaks, "What do ye, weeping and disquieting my heart?
For I could wish not only to suffer bonds, but also to die at Jerusalem, for the name of
my Lord Jesus Christ. And so they all said, "Let the will of the Lord be done. What was
the will of the Lord? Certainly no longer to flee from persecution. Otherwise they who had
wished him rather to avoid persecution, might also have adduced that prior will of the
Lord, in which He had commanded flight. Therefore, seeing even in the days of the apostles
themselves, the command to flee was temporary, as were those also relating to the other
things at the same time enjoined, that [command] cannot continue with us which ceased with
our teachers, even although it had not been issued specially for them; or if the Lord
wished it to continue, the apostles did wrong who were not careful to keep fleeing to the
last.

7. Let us now see whether also the rest of our Lord's ordinances accord with a lasting
command of flight. In the first place, indeed, if persecution is from God, what are we to
think of our being ordered to take ourselves out of its way, by the very party who brings
it on us? For if He wanted it to be evaded, He had better not have sent it, that there
might not be the appearance of His will being thwarted by another will. For He wished us
either to suffer persecution or to flee from it. If to flee, how to suffer? If to suffer,
how to flee? In fact, what utter inconsistency in the decrees of One who commands to flee,
and yet urges to suffer, which is the very opposite! "Him who will confess Me, I also will
confess before My Father. How will he confess, fleeing? How flee, confessing? "Of him who
shall be ashamed of Me, will I also be ashamed before My Father. If I avoid suffering, I
am ashamed to confess. "Happy they who suffer persecution for My name's sake. Unhappy,
therefore, they who, by running away, will not suffer according to the divine command. "He
who shall endure to the end shall be saved. How then, when you bid me flee, do you wish me
to endure to the end? If views so opposed to each other do not comport with the divine
dignity, they clearly prove that the command to flee had, at the time it was given, a
reason of its own, which we have pointed out. But it is said, the Lord, providing for the
weakness of some of His people, nevertheless, in His kindness, suggested also the haven of
flight to them. For He was not able even without flight-a protection so base, and
unworthy, and servile-to preserve in persecution such as He knew to be weak!

Whereas in fact He does not cherish, but ever rejects the weak, teaching first, not that
we are to fly from our persecutors, but rather that we are not to fear them. "Fear not
them who are able to kill the body, but are unable to do ought against the soul; but fear
Him who can destroy both body and soul in hell. And then what does He allot to the
fearful? "He who will value his life more than Me, is not worthy of Me; and he who takes
not up his cross and follows Me, cannot be My disciple. Last of all, in the Revelation, He
does not propose flight to the "fearful," but a miserable portion among the rest of the
outcast, in the lake of brimstone and fire, which is the second death. 8. He sometimes
also fled from violence Himself, but for the same reason as had led Him to command the
apostles to do so: that is, He wanted to fulfil His ministry of teaching; and when it was
finished, I do not say He stood firm, but He had no desire even to get from His Father the
aid of hosts of angels: finding fault, too, with Peter's sword. He likewise acknowledged,
it is true, that His "soul was troubled, even unto death," and the flesh weak; with the
design, (however,) first of all, that by having, as His own, trouble of soul and weakness
of the flesh, He might show you that both the substances in Him were truly human; lest, as
certain persons have now brought it in, you might be led to think either the flesh or the
soul of Christ different from ours; and then, that, by an exhibition of their states, you
might be convinced that they have no power at all of themselves without the spirit. And
for this reason He puts first "the willing spirit," that, looking to the natures
respectively of both the substances, you may see that you have in you the spirit's
strength as well as the flesh's weakness;

and even from this may learn what to do, and by what means to do it, and what to bring
under what,-the weak, namely, under the strong, that you may not, as is now your fashion,
make excuses on the ground of the weakness of the flesh, forsooth, but put out of sight
the strength of the spirit. He also asked of His Father, that if it might be, the cup of
suffering should pass from Him. So ask you the like favour; but as He did, holding your
position,-merely offering supplication, and adding, too, the other words: "but not what I
will, but what Thou wilt. But when you run away, how will you make this request? taking,
in that case, into your own hands the removal of the cup from you, and instead of doing
what your Father wishes, doing what you wish yourself. 9. The teaching of the apostles was
surely in everything according to the mind of God: they forgot and omitted nothing of the
Gospel. Where, then, do you show that they renewed the command to flee from city to city?
In fact, it was utterly impossible that they should have laid down anything so utterly
opposed to their own examples as a command to flee, while it was just from bonds, or the
islands in which, for confessing, not fleeing from the Christian name, they were confined,
they wrote their letters to the Churches. Paul bids us support the weak, but most
certainly it is not when they flee. For how can the absent be supported by you? By bearing
with them? Well, he says that people must be supported, if anywhere they have committed a
fault through the weakness of their faith, just as (he enjoins) that we should comfort the
faint-hearted; he does not say, however, that they should be sent into exile. But when he
urges us not to give place to evil, he does not offer the suggestion that we should take
to our heels, he only teaches that passion should be kept under restraint; and if he says
that the time must be redeemed, because the days are evil, he wishes us to gain a
lengthening of life, not by flight, but by wisdom. Besides, he who bids us shine as sons
of light, does not bid us hide away out of sight as sons of darkness.

He commands us to stand stedfast, certainly not to act an opposite. part by fleeing; and
to be girt, not to play the fugitive or oppose the Gospel. He points out weapons, too,
which persons who intend to run away would not require. And among these he notes the
shield too, that ye may be able to quench the darts of the devil, when doubtless ye resist
him, and sustain his assaults in their utmost force. Accordingly John also teaches that we
must lay down our lives for the brethren; much more, then, we must do it for the Lord.
This cannot be fulfilled by those who flee. Finally, mindful of his own Revelation, in
which he had heard the doom of the fearful, (and so) speaking from personal knowledge, he
warns us that fear must be put away. "There is no fear," says he, "in love; but perfect
love casteth out fear; because fear has torment"-the fire of the lake, no doubt. "He that
feareth is not perfect in love" -to wit, the love of God. And yet who will flee from
persecution, but he who fears? Who will fear, but he who has not loved? Yes; and if you
ask counsel of the Spirit, what does He approve more than that utterance of the Spirit?
For, indeed, it incites all almost to go and offer themselves in martyrdom, not to flee
from it; so that we also make mention of it. If you are exposed to public infamy, says he,
it is for your good;

for he who is not exposed to dishonour among men is sure to be so before the Lord. Do not
be ashamed; righteousness brings you forth into the public gaze. Why should you be ashamed
of gaining glory? The opportunity is given you when you are before the eyes of men. So
also elsewhere: seek not to die on bridal beds, nor in miscarriages, nor in soft fevers,
but to die the martyr's death, that He may be glorified who has suffered for you. 10. But
some, paying no attention to the exhortations of God, are readier to apply to themselves
that Greek versicle of worldly wisdom, "He who fled will fight again; "perhaps also in the
battle to flee again. And when will he who, as a fugitive, is a defeated man, be
conqueror? A worthy soldier he furnishes to his commander Christ, who, so amply armed by
the apostle, as soon as he hears persecution's trumpet, runs off from the day of
persecution. I also will produce in answer a quotation taken from the world: "Is it a
thing so very sad to die? " He must die, in whatever way of it, either as conquered or as
conqueror. But although he has succumbed in denying, he has yet faced and battled with the
torture. I had rather be one to be pitied than to be blushed for. More glorious is the
soldier pierced with a javelin in battle, than he who has a safe skin as a fugitive. Do
you fear man, O Christian?-you who ought to be feared by the angels, since you are to
judge angels; who ought to be feared by evil spirits, since you have received power also
over evil spirits; who ought to be feared by the whole world, since by you, too, the world
is judged. You are Christ-clothed, you who flee before the devil, since into Christ you
have been baptized.

Christ, who is in you, is treated as of small account when you give yourself back to the
devil, by becoming a fugitive before him. But, seeing it is from the Lord you flee, you
taunt all runaways with the futility of their purpose. A certain bold prophet also had
fled from the Lord, he had crossed over from Joppa in the direction of Tarsus, as if he
could as easily transport himself away from God; but I find him, I do not say in the sea
and on the land, but, in fact, in the belly even of a beast, in which he was confined for
the space of three days, unable either to find death or even thus escape from God. How
much better the conduct of the man who, though he fears the enemy of God, does not flee
from, but rather despises him, relying on the protection of the Lord; or, if you will,
having an awe of God all the greater, the more that he has stood in His presence, says,
"It is the Lord, He is mighty. All things belong to Him; wherever I am, I am in His hand:
let Him do as He wills, I go not away; and if it be His pleasure that I die, let Him
destroy me Himself, while I save myself for Him. I had rather bring odium upon Him by
dying by His will, than by escaping through my own anger."

11. Thus ought every servant of God to feel and act, even one in an inferior place, that
he may come to have a more important one, if he has made some upward step by his endurance
of persecution. But when persons in authority themselves-I mean the very deacons, and
presbyters, and bishops-take to flight, how will a layman be able to see with what view it
was said, Flee from city to city? Thus, too, with the leaders turning their backs, who of
the common rank will hope to persuade men to stand firm in the battle? Most assuredly a
good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, according to the word of Moses, when the
Lord Christ had not as yet been revealed, but was already shadowed forth in himself: "If
you destroy this people," he says, "destroy me also along with it. But Christ, confirming
these foreshadowings Himself, adds: "The bad shepherd is he who, on seeing the wolf,
flees, and leaves the sheep to be torn in pieces. Why, a shepherd like this will be tuned
off from the farm; the wages to have been given him at the time of his discharge will be
kept from him as compensation; nay, even from his former savings a restoration of the
master's loss will be required; for "to him who hath shall be given, but from him who hath
not shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have. Thus Zechariah threatens:
"Arise, O sword, against the shepherds, and pluck ye out the sheep;

and I will turn my hand against the shepherds. And against them both Ezekiel and Jeremiah
declaim with kindred threatenings, for their not only wickedly eating of the Sheep,-they
feeding themselves rather than those committed to their charge,-but also scattering the
flock, and giving it over, shepherdless, a prey to all the beasts of the field. And this
never happens more than when in persecution the Church is abandoned by the clergy. If any
one recognises the Spirit also, he will hear him branding the runaways. But if it does not
become the keepers of the flock to flee when the wolves invade it-nay, if that is
absolutely unlawful (for He who has declared a shepherd of this sort a bad one has
certainly condemned him; and whatever is condemned has, without doubt, become unlawful)-on
this ground it will not be the duty of those who have been set over the Church to flee in
the time of persecution. But otherwise, if the flock should flee, the overseer of the
flock would have no call to hold his ground, as his doing so in that case would be,
without good reason, to give to the flock protection, which it would not require in
consequence of its liberty, forsooth, to flee.

12. So far, my brother, as the question proposed by you is concerned, you have our opinion
in answer and encouragement. But he who inquires whether persecution ought to be shunned
by us must now be prepared to consider the following question also: Whether, if we should
not flee from it, we should at least buy ourselves off from it. Going further than you
expected, therefore, I will also on this point give you my advice, distinctly affirming
that persecution, from which it is evident we must not flee, must in like manner not even
be bought off. The difference lies in the payment; but as flight is a buying off without
money, so buying off is money-flight. Assuredly you have here too the counselling of fear.
Because you fear, you buy yourself off; and so you flee. As regards your feet, you have
stood; in respect of the money you have paid, you have run away. Why, in this very
standing of yours there was a fleeing from persecution, in the release from persecution
which you bought; but that you should ransom with money a man whom Christ has ransomed
with His blood, how unworthy is it of God and His ways of acting, who spared not His own
Son for you, that He might be made a curse for us, because cursed is he that hangeth on a
tree, -Him who was led as a sheep to be a sacrifice, and just as a lamb before its
shearer, so opened He not His mouth;

but gave His back to the scourges, nay, His cheeks to the hands of the smiter, and turned
not away His face from spitting, and, being numbered with the transgressors, was delivered
up to death, nay, the death of the cross. All this took place that He might redeem us from
our sins. The sun ceded to us the day of our redemption; hell re-transferred the right it
had in us, and our covenant is in heaven; the everlasting gates were lifted up, that the
King of Glory, the Lord of might, might enter in, after having redeemed man from earth,
nay, from hell, that he might attain to heaven. What, now, are we to think of the man who
strives against that glorious One, nay, slights and defiles His goods, obtained at so
great a ransom-no less, in truth, than His most precious blood? It appears, then, that it
is better to flee than to fall in value, if a man will not lay out for himself as much as
he cost Christ. And the Lord indeed ransomed him from the angelic powers which rule the
world-from the spirits of wickedness, from the darkness of this life, from eternal
judgment, from everlasting death. But you bargain for him with an informer, or a soldier
or some paltry thief of a ruler-under, as they say, the folds of the tunic-as if he were
stolen goods whom Christ purchased in the face of the whole world, yes, and set at
liberty.

Will you value, then, this free man at any price, and possess him at any price, but the
one, as we have said, it cost the Lord,-namely, His own blood? (And if not,) why then do
you purchase Christ in the man in whom He dwells, as though He were some human property?
No otherwise did Simon even try to do, when he offered the apostles money for the Spirit
of Christ. Therefore this man also, who in buying himself has bought the Spirit of Christ,
will hear that word, "Your money perish with you, since you have thought that the grace of
God is to be had at a price! Yet who will despise him for being (what he is), a denier?
For what says that extorter? Give me money: assuredly that he may not deliver him up,
since he tries to sell you nothing else than that which he is going to give you for money.
When you put that into his hands, it is certainly your wish not to be delivered up. But
not delivered up, had you to be held up to public ridicule? While, then, in being
unwilling to be delivered up, you are not willing to be thus exposed; by this
unwillingness of yours you have denied that you are what you have been unwilling to have
it made public that you are.

Nay, you say, While I am unwilling to be held up to the public as being what I am, I have
acknowledged that I am what I am unwilling to be so held up as being, that is, a
Christian. Can Christ, therefore, claim that you, as a witness for Him, have stedfastly
shown Him forth? He who buys himself off does nothing in that way. Before one it might, I
doubt not, be said, You have confessed Him; so also, on the account of your unwillingness
to confess Him before many you have denied Him. A man's very safety will pronounce that he
has fallen while getting out of persecution's way. He has fallen, therefore, whose desire
has been to escape. The refusal of martyrdom is denial. A Christian is preserved by his
wealth, and for this end has his treasures, that he may not suffer, while he will be rich
toward God. But it is the case that Christ was rich in blood for him. Blessed therefore
are the poor, because, He says, the kingdom of heaven is theirs who have the soul only
treasured up. If we cannot serve God and mammon, can we be redeemed both by God and by
mammon? For who will serve mammon more than the man whom mammon has ransomed? Finally, of
what example do you avail yourself to warrant your averting by money the giving of you up?
When did the apostles, dealing with the matter, in any time of persecution trouble,
extricate themselves by money?

And money they certainly had from the prices of lands which were laid down at their feet,
there being, without a doubt, many of the rich among those who believed-men, and also
women, who were wont, too, to minister to their comfort. When did Onesimus, or Aquila, or
Stephen, give them aid of this kind when they were persecuted? Paul indeed, when Felix the
governor hoped that he should receive money for him from the disciples, about which matter
he also dealt with the apostle in private, certainly neither paid it himself, nor did the
disciples for him. Those disciples, at any rate. who wept because he was equally
persistent in his determination to go to Jerusalem, and neglectful of all means to secure
himself from the persecutions which had been foretold as about to occur there, at last
say, "Let the will of the Lord be done. What was that will? No doubt that he should suffer
for the name of the Lord, not that he should be bought off. For as Christ laid down His
life for us, so, too, we should do for Him; and not only for the Lord Himself, nay, but
likewise for our brethren on His account. This, too, is the teaching of John when he
declares, not that we should pay for our brethren, but rather that we should die for them.
It makes no difference whether the thing not to be done by you is to buy off a Christian,
or to buy one.

And so the will of God accords with this. Look at the condition-certainly of God's
ordaining, in whose hand the king's heart is-of kingdoms and empires. For increasing the
treasury there are daily provided so many appliances-registerings of property, taxes in
kind benevolences, taxes in money; but never up to this time has ought of the kind been
provided by bringing Christians under some purchase-money for the person and the sect,
although enormous gains could be reaped from numbers too great for any to be ignorant of
them. Bought with blood, paid for with blood, we owe no money for our head, because Christ
is our Head. It is not fit that Christ should cost us money. How could martyrdoms, too,
take place to the glory of the Lord, if by tribute we should pay for the liberty of our
sect? And so he who stipulates to have it at a price, opposes the divine appointment.
Since, therefore, Caesar has imposed nothing on us after this fashion of a tributary sect-
in fact, such an imposition never can be made,-with Antichrist now close at hand, and
gaping for the blood, not for the money of Christians-how can it be pointed out to me that
there is the command, "Render to Caesar the things which are Caesar's? " A soldier, be he
an informer or an enemy, extorts money from me by threats, exacting nothing on Caesar's
behalf; nay, doing the very opposite, when for a bribe he lets me go-Christian as I am,
and by the laws of man a criminal.

Of another sort is the denarius which I owe to Caesar, a thing belonging to him, about
which the question then was started, it being a tribute coin due indeed by those subject
to tribute, not by children. Or how shall I render to God the things which are
God's,-certainly, therefore, His own likeness and money inscribed with His name, that is,
a Christian man? But what do I owe God, as I do Caesar the denarius, but the blood which
His own Son shed for me? Now if I owe God, indeed, a human being and my own blood; but I
am now in this juncture, that a demand is made upon me for the payment of that debt, I am
undoubtedly guilty of cheating God if I do my best to withhold payment. I have well kept
the commandment, if, rendering to Caesar the things which are Caesar's, I refuse to God
the things which are God's!

13. But also to every one who asks me I will give on the plea of charity, not under any
intimidation. Who asks? He says. But he who uses intimidation does not ask. One who
threatens if he does not receive, does not crave, but compels. It is not alms he looks
for, who comes not to be pitied, but to be feared. I will give, therefore, because I pity,
not because I fear, when the recipient honours God and returns me his blessing; not when
rather he both believes that he has conferred a favour on me, and, beholding his plunder,
says, "Guilt money. Shall I be angry even with an enemy? But enmities have also other
grounds. Yet withal he did not say a, betrayer, or persecutor, or one seeking to terrify
you by his threats. For how much more shall I heap coals upon the head of a man of this
sort, if I do not redeem myself by money? "In like manner," says Jesus, "to him who has
taken away your coat, grant even your cloak also. But that refers to him who has sought to
take away my property, not my faith. The cloak, too, I will grant, if I am not threatened
with betrayal. If he threatens, I will demand even my coat back again. Even now, the
declarations of the Lord have reasons and laws of their own. They are not of unlimited or
universal application.

And so He commands us to give to every one who asks, yet He Himself does not give to those
who ask a sign. Otherwise, if you think that we should give indiscriminately to all who
ask, that seems to me to mean that you would give, I say not wine to him who has a fever,
but even poison or a sword to him who longs for death. But how we are to understand," Make
to yourselves friends of mammon," let the previous parable teach you. The saying was
addressed to the Jewish people; inasmuch as, having managed ill the business of the Lord
which had been entrusted to them, they ought to have provided for themselves out of the
men of mammon, which we then were, friends rather than enemies, and to have delivered us
from the dues of sins which kept us from God, if they bestowed the blessing upon us, for
the reason given by the Lord, that when grace began to depart from them, they, betaking
themselves to our faith, might be admitted into everlasting habitations. Hold now any
other explanation of this parable and saying you like, if only you clearly see that there
is no likelihood of our opposers, should we make them friends with mammon, then receiving
us into everlasting abodes. But of what will not cowardice convince men? As if Scripture
both allowed them to flee, and commanded them to buy off! Finally, it is not enough if one
or another is so rescued.

Whole Churches have imposed tribute en masse on themselves. I know not whether it is
matter for grief or shame when among hucksters, and pickpockets, and bath-thieves, and
gamesters, and pimps, Christians too are included as taxpayers in the lists of free
soldiers and spies. Did the apostles, with so much foresight, make the office of overseer
of this type, that the occupants might be able to enjoy their rule free from anxiety,
under colour of providing (a like freedom for their flocks)? For such a peace, forsooth,
Christ, returning to His Father, commanded to be bought from the soldiers by gifts like
those you have in the Saturnalia! 14. But how shall we assemble together? say you; how
shall we observe the ordinances of the Lord? To be sure, just as the apostles also did,
who were protected by faith, not by money; which faith, if it can remove a mountain, can
much more remove a soldier. Be your safeguard wisdom, not a bribe. For you will not have
at once complete security from the people also, should you buy off the interference of the
soldiers. Therefore all you need for your protection is to have both faith and wisdom: if
you do not make use of these, you may lose even the deliverance which you have purchased
for yourself; while, if you do employ them, you can have no need of any ransoming. Lastly,
if you cannot assemble by day, you have the night, the light of Christ luminous against
its darkness. You cannot run about among them one after another. Be content with a church
of threes. It is better that you sometimes should not see your crowds, than subject
yourselves (to a tribute bondage). Keep pure for Christ His betrothed virgin; let no one
make gain of her. These things, my brother, seem to you perhaps harsh and not to be
endured; but recall that God has said, "He who receives it, let him receive it," that is,
let him who does not receive it go his way. He who fears to suffer, cannot belong to Him
who suffered.

But the man who does not fear to suffer, he will be perfect in love-in the love, it is
meant, of God; "for perfect love casteth out fear. "And therefore many are called, but few
chosen. It is not asked who is ready to follow the broad way, but who the narrow. And
therefore the Comforter is requisite, who guides into all truth, and animates to all
endurance. And they who have received Him will neither stoop to flee from persecution nor
to buy it off, for they have the Lord Himself, One who will stand by us to aid us in
suffering, as well as to be our mouth when we are put to the question.


A TREATISE ON THE SOUL
======================

A TREATISE ON THE SOUL Tertullian

c. AD 155–220

North African lawyer and the first great Latin theologian.

INTRODUCTION

[Translated by Peter Holmes, D.D.]

CHAPTER I.-IT IS NOT TO THE PHILOSOPHERS THAT WE RESORT FOR INFORMATION ABOUT THE SOUL BUT TO GOD.

1 Having discussed with Hermogenes the single point of the origin of the soul, so far as
his assumption led me, that the soul consisted rather in an adaptation of matter than of
the inspiration of God, I now turn to the other questions incidental to the subject; and
(in my treatment of these) I shall evidently have mostly to contend with the philosophers.
In the very prison of Socrates they skirmished about the state of the soul. I have my
doubts at once whether the time was an opportune one for their (great) master-(to say
nothing of the place), although that perhaps does not much matter. For what could the soul
of Socrates then contemplate with clearness and serenity? The sacred ship had returned
(from Delos), the hemlock draft to which he had been condemned had been drunk, death was
now present before him: (his mind) was, as one may suppose, naturally excited at every
emotion; or if nature had lost her influence, it must have been deprived of all power of
thought. Or let it have been as placid and tranquil so you please, inflexible, in spite of
the claims of natural duty, at the tears of her who was so soon to be his widow, and at
the sight of his thenceforward orphan children, yet his soul must have been moved even by
its very efforts to suppress emotion; and his constancy itself must have been shaken, as
he struggled against the disturbance of the excitement around him.

2 Besides, what other thoughts could any man entertain who had been unjustly condemned to
die, but such as should solace him for the injury done to him? Especially would this be
the case with that glorious creature, the philosopher, to whom injurious treatment would
not suggest a craving for consolation, but rather the feeling of resentment and
indignation. Accordingly, after his sentence, when his wife came to him with her
effeminate cry, O Socrates, you are unjustly condemned! he seemed already to find joy in
answering, Would you then wish me justly condemned? It is therefore not to be wondered at,
if even in his prison, from a desire to break the foul hands of Anytus and Melitus, he, in
the face of death itself, asserts the immortality of the soul by a strong assumption such
as was wanted to frustrate the wrong (they had inflicted upon him). So that all the wisdom
of Socrates, at that moment, proceeded from the affectation of an assumed composure,
rather than the firm conviction of ascertained truth. For by whom has truth ever been
discovered without God? By whom has God ever been found without Christ? By whom has Christ
ever been explored without the Holy Spirit? By whom has the Holy Spirit ever been attained
without the mysterious gift of faith? Socrates, as none can doubt, was actuated by a
different spirit.

3 For they say that a demon clave to him from his boyhood-the very worst teacher
certainly, notwithstanding the high place assigned to it by poets and philosophers-even
next to, (nay, along with) the gods themselves. The teachings of the power of Christ had
not yet been given-(that power) which alone can confute this most pernicious influence of
evil that has nothing good in it, but is rather the author of all error, and the seducer
from all truth. Now if Socrates was pronounced the wisest of men by the oracle of the
Pythian demon, which, you may be sure, neatly managed the business for his friend, of how
much greater dignity and constancy is the assertion of the Christian wisdom, before the
very breath of which the whole host of demons is scattered! This wisdom of the school of
heaven frankly and without reserve denies the gods of this world, and shows no such
inconsistency as to order a "cock to be sacrificed to Aesculapius: " no new gods and
demons does it introduce, but expels the old ones; it corrupts not youth, but instructs
them in all goodness and moderation; and so it bears the unjust condemnation not of one
city only, but of all the world, in the cause of that truth which incurs indeed the
greater hatred in proportion to its fulness: so that it tastes death not out of a
(poisoned) cup almost in the way of jollity; but it exhausts it in every kind of bitter
cruelty, on gibbets and in holocausts.

4 Meanwhile, in the still gloomier prison of the world amongst your Cebeses and Phµdos, in
every investigation concerning (man's) soul, it directs its inquiry according to the rules
of God. At all events, you can show us no more powerful expounder of the soul than the
Author thereof. From God you may learn about that which you hold of God; but from none
else will you get this knowledge, if you get it not from God. For who is to reveal that
which God has hidden? To that quarter must we resort in our inquiries whence we are most
safe even in deriving our ignorance. For it is really better for us not to know a thing,
because He has not revealed it to us, than to know it according to man's wisdom, because
he has been bold enough to assume it.

CHAPTER II.-THE CHRISTIAN HAS SURE AND SIMPLE KNOWLEDGE CONCERNING THE SUBJECT BEFORE US.

1 Of course we shall not deny that philosophers have sometimes thought the same things as
ourselves. The testimony of truth is the issue thereof. It sometimes happens even in a
storm, when the boundaries of sky and sea are lost in confusion, that some harbour is
stumbled on (by the labouring ship) by some happy chance; and sometimes in the very shades
of night, through blind luck alone, one finds access to a spot, or egress from it. In
nature, however, most conclusions are suggested, as it were, by that common intelligence
wherewith God has been pleased to endow the soul of man. This intelligence has been caught
up by philosophy, and, with the view of glorifying her own art, has been inflated (it is
not to be wondered at that I use this language) with straining after that facility of
language which is practised in the building up and pulling down of everything, and which
has greater aptitude for persuading men by speaking than by teaching. She assigns to
things their forms and conditions; sometimes makes them common and public, sometimes
appropriates them to private use; on certainties she capriciously stamps the character of
uncertainty; she appeals to precedents, as if all things are capable of being compared
together; she describes all things by rule and definition, allotting diverse properties
even to similar objects; she attributes nothing to the divine permission, but assumes as
her principles the laws of nature.

2 I could bear with her pretensions, if only she were herself true to nature, and would
prove to me that she had a mastery over nature as being associated with its creation. She
thought, no doubt, that she was deriving her mysteries from sacred sources, as men deem
them, because in ancient times most authors were supposed to be (I will not say godlike,
but) actually gods: as, for instance, the Egyptian Mercury, to whom Plato paid very great
deference; and the Phrygian Silenus, to whom Midas lent his long ears, when the shepherds
brought him to him; and Hermotimus, to whom the good people of Clazomenµ built a temple
after his death; and Orpheus; and Musµus; and Pherecydes, the master of Pythagoras. But
why need we care, since these philosophers have also made their attacks upon those
writings which are condemned by us under the title of apocryphal, certain as we are that
nothing ought to be received which does not agree with the true system of prophecy, which
has arisen in this present age; because we do not forget that there have been false
prophets, and long previous to them fallen spirits, which have instructed the entire tone
and aspect of the world with cunning knowledge of this (philosophic) cast? It is, indeed,
not incredible that any man who is in quest of wisdom may have gone so far, as a matter of
curiosity, as to consult the very prophets;

3 (but be this as it may), if you take t he philosophers, you would find in them more
diversity than agreement, since even in their agreement their diversity is discoverable.
Whatever things are true in their systems, and agreeable to prophetic wisdom, they either
recommend as emanating from some other source, or else perversely apply in some other
sense. This process is attended with very great detriment to the truth, when they pretend
that it is either helped by falsehood, or else that falsehood derives support from it. The
following circumstance must needs have set ourselves and the philosophers by the ears,
especially in this present matter, that they sometimes clothe sentiments which are common
to both sides, in arguments which are peculiar to themselves, but contrary in some points
to our rule and standard of faith; and at other times defend opinions which are especially
their, own, with arguments which both sides acknowledge to be valid, and occasionally
conformable to their system of belief. The truth has, at this rate, been well-nigh
excluded by the philosophers, through the poisons with which they have infected it; and
thus, if we regard both the modes of coalition which we have now mentioned, and which are
equally hostile to the truth, we feel the urgent necessity of freeing, on the one hand,
the sentiments held by us in common with them from the arguments of the philosophers, and
of separating, on the other hand, the arguments which both parties employ from the
opinions of the same philosophers.

4 And this we may do by recalling all questions to God's inspired standard, with the
obvious exception of such simple cases as being free from the entanglement of any
preconceived conceits, one may fairly admit on mere human testimony; because plain
evidence of this sort we must sometimes borrow from opponents, when our opponents have
nothing to gain from it. Now I am not unaware what a vast mass of literature the
philosophers have accumulated concerning the subject before us, in their own commentaries
thereon-what various schools of principles there are, what conflicts of opinion, what
prolific sources of questions, what perplexing methods of solution. Moreover, I have
looked into Medical Science also, the sister (as they say) of Philosophy, which claims as
her function to cure the body, and thereby to have a special acquaintance with the soul.
From this circumstance she has great differences with her sister, pretending as the latter
does to know more about the soul, through the more obvious treatment, as it were, of her
in her domicile of the body. But never mind all this contention between them for pre-
eminence! For extending their several researches on the soul, Philosophy, on the one hand,
has enjoyed the full scope of her genius; while Medicine, on the other hand, has possessed
the stringent demands of her art and practice. Wide are men's inquiries into
uncertainties; wider still are their disputes about conjectures. However great the
difficulty of adducing proofs, the labour of producing conviction is not one whit less;

5 so that the gloomy Heraclitus was quite right, when, observing the thick darkness which
obscured the researches of the inquirers about the soul, and wearied with their
interminable questions, he declared that he had certainly not explored the limits of the
soul, although he had traversed every road in her domains. To the Christian, however, but
few words are necessary for the clear understanding of the whole subject. But in the few
words there always arises certainty to him; nor is he permitted to give his inquiries a
wider range than is compatible with their solution; for "endless questions" the apostle
forbids. It must, however, be added, that no solution may be found by any man, but such as
is learned from God; and that which is learned of God is the sum and substance of the
whole thing.

CHAPTER III.-THE SOUL'S ORIGIN DEFINED OUT OF THE SIMPLE WORDS OF SCRIPTURE.

1 Would to God that no "heresies had been ever necessary, in order that they which are;
approved may be made manifest! We should then be never required to try our strength in
contests about the soul with philosophers, those patriarchs of heretics, as they may be
fairly called. The apostle, so far back as his own time, foresaw, indeed, that philosophy
would do violent injury to the truth. This admonition about false philosophy he was
induced to offer after he had been at Athens, had become acquainted with that loquacious
city, and had there had a taste of its huckstering wiseacres and talkers. In like manner
is the treatment of the soul according to the sophistical doctrines of men which "mix
their wine with water. Some of them deny the immortality of the soul; others affirm that
it is immortal, and something more. Some raise disputes about its substance; others about
its form; others, again, respecting each of its several faculties. One school of
philosophers derives its state from various sources, while another ascribes its departure
to different destinations. The various schools reflect the character of their masters,
according as they have received their impressions from the dignity of Plato, or the vigour
of Zeno, or the equanimity of Aristotle, or the stupidity of Epicurus, or the sadness of
Heraclitus, or the madness of Empedocles. The fault, I suppose, of the divine doctrine
lies in its springing from Judµa rather than from Greece. Christ made a mistake, too, in
sending forth fishermen to preach, rather than the sophist.

2 Whatever noxious vapours, accordingly, exhaled from philosophy, obscure the clear and
wholesome atmosphere of truth, it will be for Christians to clear away, both by shattering
to pieces the arguments which are drawn from the principles of things-I mean those of the
philosophers-and by opposing to them the maxims of heavenly wisdom-that is, such as are
revealed by the Lord; in order that both the pitfalls wherewith philosophy captivates the
heathen may be removed, and the means employed by heresy to shake the faith of Christians
may be repressed. We have already decided one point in our controversy with Hermogenes, as
we said at the beginning of this treatise, when we claimed the soul to be formed by the
breathing of God, and not out of matter. We relied even there on the clear direction of
the inspired statement which informs us how that "the Lord God breathed on man's face the
breath of life, so that man became a living soul" -by that inspiration of God, of course.
On this point, therefore, nothing further need be investigated or advanced by us. It has
its own treatise, and its own heretic. I shall regard it as my introduction to the other
branches of the subject.

CHAPTER IV.-IN OPPOSITION TO PLATO, THE SOUL WAS CREATED AND ORIGINATED AT BIRTH.

After settling the origin of the soul, its condition or state comes up next. For when we
acknowledge that the soul originates in the breath of God, it follows that we attribute a
beginning to it. This Plato, indeed, refuses to assign to it, for he will have the soul to
be unborn and unmade. We, however, from the very fact of its having had a beginning, as
well as from the nature thereof, teach that it had both birth and creation. And when we
ascribe both birth and creation to it, we have made no mistake: for being born, indeed, is
one thing, and being made is another,-the former being the term which is best suited to
living beings. When distinctions, however, have places and times of their own, they
occasionally possess also reciprocity of application among themselves. Thus, the being
made admits of being taken in the sense of being brought forth; inasmuch as everything
which receives being or existence, in any way whatever, is in fact generated. For the
maker may really be called the parent of the thing that is made: in this sense Plato also
uses the phraseology. So far, therefore, as concerns our belief in the souls being made or
born, the opinion of the philosopher is overthrown by the authority of prophecy even.

CHAPTER V.-PROBABLE VIEW OF THE STOICS, THAT THE SOUL HAS A CORPOREAL NATURE.

1 Suppose one summons a Eubulus to his assistance, and a Critolaus, and a Zenocrates, and
on this occasion Plato's friend Aristotle. They may very possibly hold themselves ready
for stripping the soul of its corporeity, unless they happen to see other philosophers
opposed to them in their purpose-and this, too, in greater numbers-asserting for the soul
a corporeal nature. Now I am not referring merely to those who mould the soul out of
manifest bodily substances, as Hipparchus and Heraclitus (do) out of fire; as Hippon and
Thales (do) out of water; as Empedocles and Critias (do) out of blood; as Epicurus (does)
out of atoms, since even atoms by their coherence form corporeal masses; as Critolaus and
his Peripatetics (do) out of a certain indescribable quintessence, if that may be called a
body which rather includes and embraces bodily substances;-but I call on the Stoics also
to help me, who, while declaring almost in our own terms that the soul is a spiritual
essence (inasmuch as breath and spirit are in their nature very near akin to each other),
will yet have no difficulty in persuading (us) that the soul is a corporeal substance.
Indeed, Zeno, defining the soul to be a spirit generated with (the body, ) constructs his
argument in this way: That substance which by its departure causes the living being to die
is a corporeal one. Now it is by the departure of the spirit, which is generated with (the
body, ) that the living being dies;

2 therefore the spirit which is generated with (the body) is a corporeal substance. But
this spirit which is generated with (the body) is the soul: it follows, then, that the
soul is a corporeal substance. Cleanthes, too, will have it that family likeness passes
from parents to their children not merely in bodily features, but in characteristics of
the soul; as if it were out of a mirror of (a man's) manners, and faculties, and
affections, that bodily likeness and unlikeness are caught and reflected by the soul also.
It is therefore as being corporeal that it is susceptible of likeness and unlikeness.
Again, there is nothing in common between things corporeal and things incorporeal as to
their susceptibility. But the soul certainly sympathizes with the body, and shares in its
pain, whenever it is injured by bruises, and wounds, and sores: the body, too, suffers
with the soul, and is united with it (whenever it is afflicted with anxiety, distress, or
love) in the loss of vigour which its companion sustains, whose shame and fear it
testifies by its own blushes and paleness. The soul, therefore, is (proved to be)
corporeal from this inter-communion of susceptibility. Chrysippus also joins hands in
fellowship with Cleanthes when he lays it down that it is not at all possible for things
which are endued with body to be separated from things which have not body; because they
have no such relation as mutual contact or coherence. Accordingly Lucretius says:

3 "Tangere enim et tangi nisi corpus nulla potest res." "For nothing but body is capable
of touching or of being touched." (Such severance, however, is quite natural between the
soul and the body); for when the body is deserted by the soul, it is overcome by death.
The soul, therefore, is endued with a body; for if it were not corporeal, it could not
desert the body.

CHAPTER VI.-THE ARGUMENTS OF THE PLATONISTS FOR THE SOUL'S INCORPOREALITY, OPPOSED, PERHAPS FRIVOLOUSLY.

1 These conclusions the Platonists disturb more by subtilty than by truth. Every body,
they say, has necessarily either an animate nature or an inanimate one. If it has the
inanimate nature, it receives motion externally to itself; if the animate one, internally.
Now the soul receives motion neither externally nor internally: not externally, since it
has not the inanimate nature; nor internally, because it is itself rather the giver of
motion to the body. It evidently, then, is not a bodily substance, inasmuch as it receives
motion neither way, according to the nature and law of corporeal substances. Now, what
first surprises us here, is the unsuitableness of a definition which appeals to objects
which have no affinity with the soul. For it is impossible for the soul to be called
either an animate body or an inanimate one, inasmuch as it is the soul itself which makes
the body either animate, if it be present to it, or else inanimate, if it be absent from
it. That, therefore, which produces a result, cannot itself be the result, so as to be
entitled to the designation of an animate thing or an inanimate one. The soul is so called
in respect of its own substance. If, then, that which is the soul admits not of being
called an animate body or an inanimate one, how can it challenge comparison with the
nature and law of animate and inanimate bodies?

2 Furthermore, since it is characteristic of a body to be moved externally by something
else, and as we have already shown that the soul receives motion from some other thing
when it is swayed (from the outside, of course, by something else) by prophetic influence
or by madness, therefore I must be right in regarding that as bodily substance which,
according to the examples we have quoted, is moved by some other object from without. Now,
if to receive motion from some other thing is characteristic of a body, how much more is
it so to impart motion to something else! But the soul moves the body, all whose efforts
are apparent externally, and from without. It is the soul which gives motion to the feet
for walking, and to the hands for touching, and to the eyes for sight, and to the tongue
for speech-a sort of internal image which moves and animates the surface. Whence could
accrue such power to the soul, if it were incorporeal? How could an unsubstantial thing
propel solid objects? But in what way do the senses in man seem to be divisible into the
corporeal and the intellectual classes? They tell is that the qualities of things
corporeal, such as earth and fire, are indicated by the bodily senses-of touch and sight;
whilst (the qualities) of incorporeal things-for instance, benevolence and malignity-are
discovered by the intellectual faculties.

3 And from this (they deduce what is to them) the manifest conclusion, that the soul is
incorporeal, its properties being comprehended by the perception not of bodily organs, but
of intellectual faculties. Well, (I shall be much surprised) if I do not at once cut away
the very ground on which their argument stands. For I show them how incorporeal things are
commonly submitted to the bodily senses-sound, for instance, to the organ of hearing;
colour, to the organ of sight; smell, to the olfactory organ. And, just as in these
instances, the soul likewise has its contact with the body; not to say that the
incorporeal objects are reported to us through the bodily organs, for the express reason
that they come into contact with the said organs. Inasmuch, then, as it is evident that
even incorporeal objects are embraced and comprehended by corporeal ones, why should not
the soul, which is corporeal, be equally comprehended and understood by incorporeal
faculties? It is thus certain that their argument fails. Among their more conspicuous
arguments will be found this, that in their judgment every bodily substance is nourished
by bodily substances; whereas the soul, as being an incorporeal essence, is nourished by
incorporeal aliments-for instance, by the studies of wisdom. But even this ground has no
stability in it, since Soranus, who is a most accomplished authority in medical science,
affords us as answer, when he asserts that the soul is even nourished by corporeal
aliments; that in fact it is, when failing and weak, actually refreshed oftentimes by
food.

4 Indeed, when deprived of all food, does not the soul entirely remove from the body?
Soranus, then, after discoursing about the soul in the amplest manner, filling four
volumes with his dissertations, and after weighing well all the opinions of the
philosophers, defends the corporeality of the soul, although in the process he has robbed
it of its immortality. For to all men it is not given to believe the truth which
Christians are privileged to hold. As, therefore, Soranus has shown us from facts that the
soul is nourished by corporeal aliments, let the philosopher (adopt a similar mode of
proof, and) show that it is sustained by an incorporeal food. But the fact is, that no one
has even been able to quench this man's doubts and difficulties about the condition of the
soul with the honey-water of Plato's subtle eloquence, nor to surfeit them with the crumbs
from the minute nostrums of Aristotle. But what is to become of the souls of all those
robust barbarians, which have had no nurture of philosopher's lore indeed, and yet are
strong in untaught practical wisdom, and which although very starvelings in philosophy,
without your Athenian academies and porches, and even the prison of Socrates, do yet
contrive to live? For it is not the soul's actual substance which is benefited by the
aliment of learned study, but only its conduct and discipline; such ailment contributing
nothing to increase its bulk, but only to enhance its grace.

5 It is, moreover, a happy circumstance that the Stoics affirm that even the arts have
corporeality; since at the rate the soul too must be corporeal, since it is commonly
supposed to be nourished by the arts. Such, however, is the enormous preoccupation of the
philosophic mind, that it is generally unable to see straight before it. Hence (the story
of) Thales falling into the well. It very commonly, too, through not understanding even
its own opinions, suspects a failure of its own health. Hence (the story of) Chrysippus
and the hellebore. Some such hallucination, I take it, must have occurred to him, when he
asserted that two bodies could not possibly be contained in one: he must have kept out of
mind and sight the case of those pregnant women who, day after day, bear not one body, but
even two and three at a time, within the embrace of a single womb. One finds likewise, in
the records of the civil law, the instance of a certain Greek woman who gave birth to a
quint of children, the mother of all these at one parturition, the manifold parent of a
single brood, the prolific produce from a single womb, who, guarded by so many bodies-I
had almost said, a people-was herself no less then the sixth person! The whole creation
testifies how that those bodies which are naturally destined to issue from bodies, are
already (included) in that from which they proceed. Now that which proceeds from some
other thing must needs be second to it.

6 Nothing, however, proceeds out of another thing except by the process of generation; but
then they are two (things).

CHAPTER VII.-THE SOUL'S CORPOREALITY DEMONSTRATED OUT OF THE GOSPELS.

1 So far as the philosophers are concerned, we have said enough. As for our own teachers,
indeed, our reference to them is ex abundanti-a surplusage of authority: in the Gospel
itself they will be found to have the clearest evidence for the corporeal nature of the
soul. In hell the soul of a certain man is in torment, punished in flames, suffering
excruciating thirst, and imploring from the finger of a happier soul, for his tongue, the
solace of a drop of water. Do you suppose that this end of the blessed poor man and the
miserable rich man is only imaginary? Then why the name of Lazarus in this narrative, if
the circumstance is not in (the category of) a real occurrence? But even if it is to be
regarded as imaginary, it will still be a testimony to truth and reality. For unless the
soul possessed corporeality, the image of a soul could not possibly contain a finger of a
bodily substance; nor would the Scripture feign a statement about the limbs of a body, if
these had no existence. But what is that which is removed to Hades after the separation of
the body; which is there detained; which is reserved until the day of judgment; to which
Christ also, on dying, descended? I imagine it is the souls of the patriarchs. But
wherefore (all this), if the soul is nothing in its subterranean abode? For nothing it
certainly is, if it is not a bodily substance.

2 For whatever is incorporeal is incapable of being kept and guarded in any way; it is
also exempt from either punishment or refreshment. That must be a body, by which
punishment and refreshment can be experienced. Of this I shall treat more fully in a more
fitting place. Therefore, whatever amount of punishment or refreshment the soul tastes in
Hades, in its prison or lodging, in the fire or in Abraham's bosom, it gives proof thereby
of its own corporeality. For an incorporeal thing suffers nothing, not having that which
makes it capable of suffering; else, if it has such capacity, it must be a bodily
substance. For in as far as every corporeal thing is capable of suffering, in so far is
that which is capable of suffering also corporeal.

CHAPTER VIII.-OTHER PLATONIST ARGUMENTS CONSIDERED.

1 Besides, it would be a harsh and absurd proceeding to exempt anything from the class cf
corporeal beings, on the ground that it is not exactly like the other constituents of that
class. And where individual creature's possess various properties, does not this variety
in works of the same class indicate the greatness of the Creator, in making them at the
same time different and yet like, amicable yet rivals? Indeed, the philosophers themselves
agree in saying that the universe consists of harmonious oppositions, according to
Empedocles' (theory of) friendship and enmity. Thus, then, although corporeal essences are
opposed to incorporeal ones, they yet differ from each other in such sort as to amplify
their species by their variety, without changing their genus, remaining all alike
corporeal; contributing to God's glory in their manifold existence by reason of their
variety; so various, by reason of their differences; so diverse, in that some of them
possess one kind of perception, others another; some feeding on one kind of aliment,
others on another; some, again, possessing visibility, while others are invisible; some
being weighty, others light. They are in the habit of saying that the soul must be
pronounced incorporeal on this account, because the bodies of the dead, after its
departure from them, become heavier, whereas they ought to be lighter, being deprived of
the weight of a body-since the soul is a bodily substance.

2 But what, says Soranus (in answer to this argument), if men should deny that the sea is
a bodily substance, because a ship out of the water becomes a heavy and motionless mass?
How much truer and stronger, then, is the soul's corporeal essence, which carries about
the body, which eventually assumes so great a weight with the nimblest motion! Again, even
if the soul is invisible, it is only in strict accordance with the condition of its own
corporeality, and suitably to the property of its own essence, as well as to the nature of
even those beings to which its destiny made it to be invisible. The eyes of the owl cannot
endure the sun, whilst the eagle is so well able to face his glory, that the noble
character of its young is determined by the unblinking strength of their gaze; while the
eaglet, which turns away its eye from the sun's ray, is expelled from the nest as a
degenerate creature! So true is it, therefore, than to one eye an object is invisible,
which may be quite plainly seen by another,-without implying any incorporeality in that
which is not endued with an equally strong power (of vision). The sun is indeed a bodily
substance, because it is (composed of) fire; the object, however, which the eaglet at once
admits the existence of, the owl denies, without. any prejudice, nevertheless, to the
testimony of the eagle.

3 There is the selfsame difference in respect of the soul's corporeality, which is
(perhaps) invisible to the flesh, but perfectly visible to the spirit. Thus John, being
"in the Spirit" of God, beheld plainly the souls of the martyrs.

CHAPTER IX.-PARTICULARS OF THE ALLEGED COMMUNICATION TO A MONTANIST SISTER.

1 When we aver that the soul has a body of a quality and kind peculiar to itself, in this
special condition of it we shall be already supplied with a decision respecting all the
other accidents of its corporeity; how that they belong to it, because we have shown it to
be a body, but that even they have a quality peculiar to themselves, proportioned to the
special nature of the body (to which they belong); or else, if any accidents (of a body)
are remarkable in this instance for their absence, then this, too, results from the
peculiarity of the condition of the soul's corporeity, from which are absent sundry
qualities which are present to all other corporeal beings. And yet, notwithstanding all
this, we shall not be at all inconsistent if we declare that the more usual
characteristics of a body, such as invariably accrue to the corporeal condition, belong
also to the soul-such as form and limitation; and that triad of dimensions -I mean length,
and breadth and height-by which philosophers gauge al bodies. What now remains but for us
to give the soul a figure? Plato refuses to do this, as if it endangered the soul's
immortality. For everything which has figure is, according to him, compound, and composed
of parts; whereas the soul is immortal; and being immortal, it is therefore indissoluble;
and being indissoluble, it is figureless: for if, on the contrary, it had figure, it would
be of a composite and structural formation.

2 He, however, in some other manner frames for the soul an effigy of intellectual forms,
beautiful for its just symmetry and tuitions of philosophy, but misshapen by some contrary
qualities. As for ourselves, indeed, we inscribe on the soul the lineaments of corporeity,
not simply from the assurance which reasoning has taught us of its corporeal nature, but
also from the firm conviction which divine grace impresses on us by revelation. For,
seeing that we acknowledge spiritual charismata, or gifts, we too have merited the
attainment of the prophetic gift, although coming after John (the Baptist). We have now
amongst us a sister whose lot it has been to be favoured with sundry gifts of revelation,
which she experiences in the Spirit by ecstatic vision amidst the sacred rites of the
Lord's day in the church: she converses with angels, and sometimes even with the Lord; she
both sees and hears mysterious communications; some men's hearts she understands, and to
them who are in need she distributes remedies. Whether it be in the reading of Scriptures,
or in the chanting of psalms, or in the preaching of sermons, or in the offering up of
prayers, in all these religious services matter and opportunity are afforded to her of
seeing visions. It may possibly have happened to us, whilst this sister of ours was rapt
in the Spirit, that we had discoursed in some ineffable way about the soul.

3 After the people are dismissed at the conclusion of the sacred services, she is in the
regular habit of reporting to us whatever things she may have seen in vision (for all her
communications are examined with the most scrupulous care, in order that their truth may
be probed). "Amongst other things," says she, "there has been shown to me a soul in bodily
shape, and a spirit has been in the habit of appearing to me; not, however, a void and
empty illusion, but such as would offer itself to be even grasped by the hand, soft and
transparent and of an etherial colour, and in form resembling that of a human being in
every respect. This was her vision, and for her witness there was God; and the apostle
most assuredly foretold that there were to be "spiritual gifts" in the church. Now, can
you refuse to believe this, even if indubitable evidence on every point is forthcoming for
your conviction? Since, then, the soul is a corporeal substance, no doubt it possesses
qualities such as those which we have just mentioned, amongst them the property of colour,
which is inherent in every bodily substance. Now what colour would you attribute to the
soul but an etherial transparent one? Not that its substance is actually the ether or air
(although this was the opinion of ¦nesidemus and Anaximenes, and I suppose of Heraclitus
also, as some say of him), nor transparent light (although Heraclides of Pontus held it to
be so).

4 "Thunder-stones," indeed, are not of igneous substance, because they shine with ruddy
redness; nor are beryls composed of aqueous matter, because they are of a pure wavy
whiteness. How many things also besides these are there which their colour would associate
in the same class, but which nature keeps widely apart! Since, however, everything which
is very attenuated and transparent bears a strong resemblance to the air, such would be
the case with the soul, since in its material nature it is wind and breath, (or spirit);
whence it is that the belief of its corporeal quality is endangered, in consequence of the
extreme tenuity and subtilty of its essence. Likewise, as regards the figure of the human
soul from your own conception, you can well imagine that it is none other than the human
form; indeed, none other than the shape of that body which each individual soul animates
and moves about. This we may at once be induced to admit from contemplating man's original
formation. For only carefully consider, after God hath breathed upon the face of man the
breath of life, and man had consequently become a living soul, surely that breath must
have passed through the face at once into the interior structure, and have spread itself
throughout all the spaces of the body; and as soon as by the divine inspiration it had
become condensed, it must have impressed itself on each internal feature, which the
condensation had filled in, and so have been, as it were, congealed in shape, (or
stereotyped).

5 Hence, by this densifying process, there arose a fixing of the soul's corporeity; and by
the impression its figure was formed and moulded. This is the inner man, different from
the outer, but yet one in the twofold condition. It, too, has eyes and ears of its own, by
means of which Paul must have heard and seen the Lord; it has, moreover all the other
members of the body by the help of which it effects all processes of thinking and all
activity in dreams. Thus it happens that the rich man in hell has a tongue and poor
(Lazarus) a finger and Abraham a bosom. By these features also the souls of the martyrs
under the altar are distinguished and known. The soul indeed which in the beginning was
associated with Adam's body, which grew with its growth and was moulded after its form
proved to be the germ both of the entire substance (of the human soul) and of that (part
of) creation

CHAPTER X.-THE SIMPLE NATURE OF THE SOUL IS ASSERTED WITH PLATO. THE IDENTITY OF SPIRIT AND SOUL.

1 It is essential to a firm faith to declare with Plato that the soul is simple; in other
words uniform and uncompounded; simply that is to say in respect of its substance. Never
mind men's artificial views and theories, and away with the fabrications of heresy! Some
maintain that there is within the soul a natural substance-the spirit-which is different
from it: as if to have life-the function of the soul-were one thing; and to emit breath-
the alleged function of the spirit-were another thing. Now it is not in all animals that
these two functions are found; for there are many which only live but do not breathe in
that they do not possess the organs of respiration-lungs and windpipes. But of what use is
it, in an examination of the soul of man, to borrow proofs from a gnat or an ant, when the
great Creator in His divine arrangements has allotted to every animal organs of vitality
suited to its own disposition and nature, so that we ought not to catch at any conjectures
from comparisons of this sort? Man, indeed, although organically furnished with lungs and
windpipes, will not on that account be proved to breathe by one process, and to live by
another; nor can the ant, although defective in these organs, be on that account said to
be without respiration, as if it lived and that was all.

2 For by whom has so clear an insight into the works of God been really attained, as to
entitle him to assume that these organic resources are wanting to any living thing? There
is that Herophilus, the well-known surgeon, or (as I may almost call him) butcher, who cut
up no end of persons, in order to investigate the secrets of nature, who ruthlessly
handled human creatures to discover (their form and make): I have my doubts whether he
succeeded in clearly exploring all the internal parts of their structure, since death
itself changes and disturbs the natural functions of life, especially when the death is
not a natural one, but such as must cause irregularity and error amidst the very processes
of dissection. Philosophers have affirmed it to be a certain fact, that gnats, and ants,
and moths have no pulmonary or arterial organs. Well, then, tell me, you curious and
elaborate investigator of these mysteries, have they eyes for seeing withal? But yet they
proceed to whatever point they wish, and they both shun and aim at various objects by
processes of sight: point out their eyes to me, show me their pupils. Moths also gnaw and
eat: demonstrate to me their mandibles, reveal their jaw-teeth. Then, again, gnats hum and
buzz, nor even in the dark are they unable to find their way to our ears: point out to me,
then, not only the noisy tube, but the stinging lance of that mouth of theirs.

3 Take any living thing whatever, be it the tiniest you can find, it must needs be fed and
sustained by some food or other: show me, then, their organs for taking into their system,
digesting, and ejecting food. What must we say, therefore? If it is by such instruments
that life is maintained, these instrumental means must of course exist in all things which
are to live, even though they are not apparent to the eye or to the apprehension by reason
of their minuteness. You can more readily believe this, if you remember that God manifests
His creative greatness quite as much in small objects as in the very largest. If, however,
you suppose that God's wisdom has no capacity for forming such infinitesimal corpuscles,
you can still recognise His greatness, in that He has furnished even to the smallest
animals the functions of life, although in the absence of the suitable organs,-securing to
them the power of sight, even without eyes; of eating, even without teeth; and of
digestion, even without stomachs. Some animals also have the ability to move forward
without feet, as serpents, by a gliding motion; or as worms, by vertical efforts; or as
snails and slugs, by their slimy crawl. Why should you not then believe that respiration
likewise may be effected without the bellows of the lungs, and without arterial canals?

4 You would thus supply yourself with a strong proof that the spirit or breath is an
adjunct of the human soul, for the very reason that some creatures lack breath, and that
they lack it because they are not furnished with organs of respiration. You think it
possible for a thing to live without breath; then why not suppose that a thing might
breathe without lungs? Pray, tell me, what is it to breathe? I suppose it means to emit
breath from yourself. What is it not to live? I suppose it means not to emit breath from
yourself. This is the answer which I should have to make, if "to breathe" is not the same
thing as "to live. It must, however, be characteristic of a dead man not to respire: to
respire, therefore, is the characteristic of a living man. But to respire is likewise the
characteristic of a breathing man: therefore also to breathe is the characteristic of a
living man. Now, if both one and the other could possibly have been accomplished without
the soul, to breathe might not be a function of the soul, but merely to live. But indeed
to live is to breathe, and to breathe is to live. Therefore this entire process, both of
breathing and living, belongs to that to which living belongs-that is, to the soul. Well,
then, since you separate the spirit (or breath) and the soul, separate their operations
also. Let both of them accomplish some act apart from one another-the soul apart, the
spirit apart.

5 Let the soul live without the spirit; let the spirit breathe without the soul. Let one
of them quit men's bodies, let the other remain; let death and life meet and agree. If
indeed the soul and the spirit are two, they may be divided; and thus, by the separation
of the one which departs from the one which remains, there would accrue the union and
meeting together of life and of death. But such a union never will accrue: therefore they
are not two, and they cannot be divided; but divided they might have been, if they had
been (two). Still two things may surely coalesce in growth. But the two in question never
will coalesce, since to live is one thing, and to breathe is another. Substances are
distinguished by their operations. How much firmer ground have you for believing that the
soul and the spirit are but one, since you assign to them no difference; so that the soul
is itself the spirit, respiration being the function of that of which life also is! But
what if you insist on supposing that the day is one thing, and the light, which is
incidental to the day, is another thing, whereas day is only the light itself? There must,
of course, be also different kinds of light, as (appears) from the ministry of fires. So
likewise will there be different sorts of spirits, according as they emanate from God or
from the devil.

6 Whenever, indeed, the question is about soul and spirit, the soul will be (understood to
be) itself the spirit, just is the day is the light itself. For a thing is itself
identical with that by means of which itself exists.

CHAPTER XI.-SPIRIT-A TERM EXPRESSIVE OF AN OPERATION OF THE SOUL, NOT OF ITS NATURE. TO BE CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHED FROM THE SPIRIT OF GOD.

1 But the nature of my present inquiry obliges me to call the soul spirit or breath,
because to breathe is ascribed to another substance. We, however, claim this (operation)
for the soul, which we acknowledge to be an indivisible simple substance, and therefore we
must call it spirit in a definitive sense-not because of its condition, but of its action;
not in respect of its nature, but of its operation; because it respires, and not because
it is spirit in any especial sense. For to blow or breathe is to respire. So that we are
driven to describe, by (the term which indicates this respiration-that is to say) spirit-
the soul which we hold to be, by the propriety of its action, breath. Moreover, we
properly and especially insist on calling it breath (or spirit), in opposition to
Hermogenes, who derives the soul from matter instead of from the afflatus or breath of
God. He, to be sure, goes flatly against the testimony of Scripture, and with this view
converts breath into spirit, because he cannot believe that the (creature on which was
breathed the) Spirit of God fell into sin, and then into condemnation; and therefore he
would conclude that the soul came from matter rather than from the Spirit or breath of
God. For this reason, we on our side even from that passage, maintain the soul to be
breath and not the spirit, in the scriptural and distinctive sense of the spirit;

2 and here it is with regret that we apply the term spirit at all in the lower sense, in
consequence of the identical action of respiring and breathing. In that passage, the only
question is about the natural substance; to respire being an act of nature. I would not
tarry a moment longer on this point, were it not for those heretics who introduce into the
soul some spiritual germ which passes my comprehension: (they make it to have been)
conferred upon the soul by the secret liberality of her mother Sophia (Wisdom), without
the knowledge of the Creator. But (Holy) Scripture, which has a better knowledge of the
soul's Maker, or rather God, has told us nothing more than that God breathed on man's face
the breath of life, and that man became a living soul, by means of which he was both to
live and breathe; at the same time making a sufficiently clear distinction between the
spirit and the soul, in such passages as the following, wherein God Himself declares: "My
Spirit went forth from me, and I made the breath of each. And the breath of my Spirit
became soul. And again: "He giveth breath unto the people that are on the earth, and
Spirit to them that walk thereon. First of all there comes the (natural) soul, that is to
say, the breath, to the people that are on the earth,-in other words, to those who act
carnally in the flesh;

3 then afterwards comes the Spirit to those who walk thereon,-that is, who subdue the
works of the flesh; because the apostle also says, that "that is not first which is
spiritual, but that which is natural, (or in possession of the natural soul, ) and
afterward that which is spiritual. For, inasmuch as Adam straightway predicted that "great
mystery of Christ and the church," when he said, "This now is bone of my bones, and flesh
of my flesh; therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto
his wife, and they two shall become one flesh," he experienced the influence of the
Spirit. For there fell upon him that ecstasy, which is the Holy Ghost's operative virtue
of prophecy. And even the evil spirit too is an influence which comes upon a man. Indeed,
the Spirit of God not more really "turned Saul into another man," that is to say, into a
prophet, when "people said one to another, What is this which is come to the son of Kish?
Is Saul also among the prophets? " than did the evil spirit afterwards turn him into
another man-in other words, into an apostate. Judas likewise was for a long time reckoned
among the elect (apostles), and was even appointed to the office of their treasurer; he
was not yet the traitor, although he was become fraudulent; but afterwards the devil
entered into him.

4 Consequently, as the spirit neither of God nor of the devil is naturally planted with a
man's soul at his birth, this soul must evidently exist apart and alone, previous to the
accession to it of either spirit: if thus apart and alone, it must also be simple and un-
compounded as regards its substance; and therefore it cannot respire from any other cause
than from the actual condition of its own substance.

CHAPTER XII.-DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE MIND AND THE SOUL, AND THE RELATION BETWEEN THEM.

1 In like manner the mind also, or animus, which the Greeks designate Nous, is taken by us
in no other sense than as indicating that faculty or apparatus which is inherent and
implanted in the soul, and naturally proper to it, whereby it acts, whereby it acquires
knowledge, and by the possession of which it is capable of a spontaneity of motion within
itself, and of thus appearing to be impelled by the mind, as if it were another substance,
as is maintained by those who determine the soul to be the moving principle of the
universe -the god of Socrates, Valentinus' "only-begotten" of his father Bythus, and his
mother Sige. How confused is the opinion of Anaxagoras! For, having imagined the mind to
be the initiating principle of all things, and suspending on its axis the balance of the
universe; affirming, moreover, that the mind is a simple principle, unmixed, and incapable
of admixture, he mainly on this very consideration separates it from all amalgamation with
the soul; and yet in another passage he actually incorporates it with the soul. This
(inconsistency) Aristotle has also observed: but whether he meant his criticism to be
constructive, and to fill up a system of his own, rather than destructive of the
principles of others, I am hardly able to decide.

2 As for himself, indeed, although he postpones his definition of the mind, yet he begins
by mentioning, as one of the two natural constituents of the mind, that divine principle
which he conjectures to be impassible, or incapable of emotion, and thereby removes from
all association with the soul. For whereas it is evident that the soul is susceptible of
those emotions which it falls to it naturally to suffer, it must needs suffer either by
the mind or with the mind. Now if the soul is by nature associated with the mind, it is
impossible to draw the conclusion that the mind is impassible; or again, if the soul
suffers not either by the mind or with the mind, it cannot possibly have a natural
association with the mind, with which it suffers nothing, and which suffers nothing
itself. Moreover, if the soul suffers nothing by the mind and with the mind, it will
experience no sensation, nor will it acquire any knowledge, nor will it undergo any
emotion through the agency of the mind, as they maintain it will. For Aristotle makes even
the senses passions, or states of emotion And rightly too. For to exercise the senses is
to suffer emotion, because to suffer is to feel. In like manner, to acquire knowledge is
to exercise the senses; and to undergo emotion is to exercise the senses; and the whole of
this is a state of suffering.

3 But we see that the soul experiences nothing of these things, in such a manner as that
the mind also is affected by the emotion, by which, indeed, and with which, all is
effected. It follows, therefore, that the mind is capable of admixture, in opposition to
Anaxagoras; and passible or susceptible of emotion, contrary to the opinion of Aristotle.
Besides, if a separate condition between the soul and mind is to be admitted, so that they
be two things in substance, then of one of them, emotion and sensation, and every sort of
taste, and all action and motion, will be the characteristics; whilst of the other the
natural condition will be calm, and repose, and stupor. There is therefore no alternative:
either the mind must be useless and void, or the soul. But if these affections may
certainly be all of them ascribed to both, then in that case the two will be one and the
same, and Democritus will carry his point when he suppresses all distinction between the
two. The question will arise how two can be one-whether by the confusion of two
substances, or by the disposition of one? We, however, affirm that the mind coalesces with
the soul,-not indeed as being distinct from it in substance, but as being its natural
function and agent.

CHAPTER XIII.-THE SOUL'S SUPREMACY.

1 It next remains to examine where lies the supremacy; in other words, which of the two is
superior to the other, so that with which the supremacy clearly lies shall be the
essentially superior substance; whilst that over which this essentially superior substance
shall have authority shall be considered as the natural functionary of the superior
substance. Now who will hesitate to ascribe this entire authority to the soul, from the
name of which the whole man has received his own designation in common phraseology? How
many souls, says the rich man, do I maintain? not how many minds. The pilot's desire,
also, is to rescue so many souls from shipwreck, not so many minds; the labourer, too, in
his work, and the soldier on the field of battle, affirms that he lays down his soul (or
life), not his mind. Which of the two has its perils or its vows and wishes more
frequently on men's lips-the mind or the soul? Which of the two are dying persons, said to
have to do with the mind or the soul? In short, philosophers themselves, and medical men,
even when it is their purpose to discourse about the mind, do in every instance inscribe
on their title-page and table of contents, "De Anima" ("A treatise on the soul"). And that
you may also have God's voucher on the subject, it is the soul which He addresses; it is
the soul which He exhorts and counsels, to turn the mind and intellect to Him.

2 It is the soul which Christ came to save; it is the soul which He threatens to destroy
in hell; it is the soul (or life) which He forbids being made too much of; it is His soul,
too (or life), which the good Shepherd Himself lays down for His sheep. It is to the soul,
therefore, that you ascribe the supremacy; in it also you possess that union of substance,
of which you perceive the mind to be the instrument, not the ruling power.

CHAPTER XIV.-THE SOUL VARIOUSLY DIVIDED BY THE PHILOSOPHERS; THIS DIVISION IS NOT A MATERIAL DISSECTION.

1 Being thus single, simple, and entire in itself, it is as incapable of being composed
and put together from external constituents, as it is of being divided in and of itself,
inasmuch as it is indissoluble. For if it had been possible to construct it and to destroy
it, it would no longer be immortal. Since, however, it is not mortal, it is also incapable
of dissolution and division. Now, to be divided means to be dissolved, and to be dissolved
means to die. Yet (philosophers) have divided the soul into parts: Plato, for instance,
into two; Zeno into three; Panµtius, into five or six; Soranus, into seven; Chrysippus,
into as many as eight; and Apollophanes, into as many as nine; whilst certain of the
Stoics have found as many as twelve parts in the soul. Posidonius makes even two more than
these: he starts with two leading faculties of the soul,-the directing faculty, which they
designate h9gemoniko/n; and the rational faculty, which they call logiko/n,-and ultimately
subdivided these into seventeen parts. Thus variously is the soul dissected by the
different schools. Such divisions, however, ought not to be regarded so much as parts of
the soul, as powers, or faculties, or operations thereof, even as Aristotle himself has
regarded some of them as being. For they are not portions or organic parts of the soul's
substance, but functions of the soul-such as those of motion, of action, of thought, and
whatsoever others they divide in this manner;

2 such, likewise, as the five senses themselves, so well known to all-seeing, hearing,
tasting, touching, smelling. Now, although they have allotted to the whole of these
respectively certain parts of the body as their special domiciles, it does not from that
circumstance follow that a like distribution will be suitable to the sections of the soul;
for even the body itself would not admit of such a partition as they would have the soul
undergo. But of the whole number of the limbs one body is made up, so that the arrangement
is rather a concretion than a division. Look at that very wonderful piece of organic
mechanism by Archimedes,-I mean his hydraulic organ, with its many limbs, parts, bands,
passages for the notes, outlets for their sounds, combinations for their harmony, and the
array of its pipes; but yet the whole of these details constitute only one instrument. In
like manner the wind, which breathes throughout this organ at the impulse of the hydraulic
engine, is not divided into separate portions from the fact of its dispersion through the
instrument to make it play: it is whole and entire in its substance, although divided in
its operation. This example is not remote from (the illustration) of Strato, and
¦nesidemus, and Heraclitus: for these philosophers maintain the unity of the soul, as
diffused over the entire body, and yet in every part the same.

3 Precisely like the wind blown in the pipes throughout the organ, the soul displays its
energies in various ways by means of the senses, being not indeed divided, but rather
distributed in natural order. Now, under what designations these energies are to be known,
and by what divisions of themselves they are to be classified, and to what special offices
and functions in the body they are to be severally confined, the physicians and the
philosophers must consider and decide: for ourselves, a few remarks only will be proper.

CHAPTER XV.-THE SOUL'S VITALITY AND INTELLIGENCE. ITS CHARACTER AND SEAT IN MAN.

1 In the first place, (we must determine) whether there be in the soul some supreme
principle of vitality and intelligence which they call "the ruling power of the soul"-to\
h9gemoniko/n for if this be not admitted, the whole condition of the soul is put in
jeopardy. Indeed, those men who say that there is no such directing faculty, have begun by
supposing that the soul itself is simply a nonentity. One Dicµarchus, a Messenian, and
amongst the medical profession Andreas and Asclepiades, have thus destroyed the (soul's)
directing power, by actually placing in the mind the senses, for which they claim the
ruling faculty. Asclepiades rides rough-shod over us with even this argument, that very
many animals, after losing those parts of their body in which the soul's principle of
vitality and sensation is thought mainly to exist, still retain life in a considerable
degree, as well as sensation: as in the case of flies, and wasps, and locusts, when you
have cut off their heads; and of she-goats, and tortoises, and eels, when you have pulled
out their hearts. (He concludes), therefore, that there is no especial principle or power
of the soul; for if there were, the soul's vigour and strength could not continue when it
was removed with its domiciles (or corporeal organs). However, Dicµarchus has several
authorities against him-and philosophers too-Plato, Strato, Epicurus, Democritus,
Empedocles, Socrates, Aristotle; whilst in opposition to Andreas and Asclepiades (may be
placed their brother) physicians Herophilus, Erasistratus, Diocles, Hippocrates, and
Soranus himself;

2 and better than all others, there are our Christian authorities. We are taught by God
concerning both these questions-viz. that there is a ruling power in the soul, and that it
is enshrined in one particular recess of the body. For, when one reads of God as being
"the searcher and witness of the heart; " when His prophet is reproved by His discovering
to him the secrets of the heart; when God Himself anticipates in His people the thoughts
of their heart, "Why think ye evil in your hearts? " when David prays "Create in me a
clean heart, O God," and Paul declares, "With the heart man believeth unto righteousness,"
and John says, "By his own heart is each man condemned; " when, lastly, "he who looketh on
a woman so as to lust after her, hath already committed adultery with her in his heart,"
-then both points are cleared fully up, that there is a directing faculty of the soul,
with which the purpose of God may agree; in other words, a supreme principle of
intelligence and vitality (for where there is intelligence, there must be vitality), and
that it resides in that most precious part of our body to which God especially looks: so
that you must not suppose, with Heraclitus, that this sovereign faculty of which we are
treating is moved by some external force; nor with Moschion, that it floats about through
the whole body; nor with Plato, that it is enclosed in the head;

3 nor with Zenophanes, that it culminates in the crown of the head; nor that it reposes in
the brain, according to the opinion of Hippocrates; nor around the basis of the brain, as
Herophilus thought; nor in the membranes thereof, as Strato and Erasistratus said; nor in
the space between the eyebrows, as Strato the physician held; nor within the enclosure of
the breast, according to Epicurus: but rather, as the Egyptians have always taught,
especially such of them as were accounted the expounders of sacred truths; in accordance,
too, with that verse of Orpheus or Empedocles: 4 "Namque homini sanguis circumcordialis
est sensus." "Man has his (supreme) sensation in the blood around his heart." Even
Protagoras likewise, and Apollodorus, and Chrysippus, entertain this same view, so that
(our friend) Asclepiades may go in quest of his goats bleating without a heart, and hunt
his flies without their heads; and let all those (worthies), too, who have predetermined
the character of the human soul from the condition of brute animals, be quite sure that it
is themselves rather who are alive in a heartless and brainless state.

CHAPTER XVI.-THE SOUL'S PARTS. ELEMENTS OF THE RATIONAL SOUL.

1 That position of Plato's is also quite in keeping with the faith, in which he divides
the soul into two parts-the rational and the irrational. To this definition we take no
exception, except that we would not ascribe this twofold distinction to the nature (of the
soul). It is the rational element which we must believe to be its natural condition,
impressed upon it from its very first creation by its Author, who is Himself essentially
rational. For how should that be other than rational, which God produced on His own
prompting; nay more, which He expressly sent forth by His own afflatus or breath? The
irrational element, however, we must understand to have accrued later, as having proceeded
from the instigation of the serpent-the very achievement of (the first) transgression-
which thenceforward became inherent in the soul, and grew with its growth, assuming the
manner by this time of a natural development, happening as it did immediately at the
beginning of nature. But, inasmuch as the same Plato speaks of the rational element only
as existing in the soul of God Himself, if we were to ascribe the irrational element
likewise to the nature which our soul has received from God, then the irrational element
will be equally derived from God, as being a natural production, because God is the author
of nature. Now from the devil proceeds the incentive to sin. All sin, however, is
irrational: therefore the irrational proceeds from the devil, from whom sin proceeds;

2 and it is extraneous to God, to whom also the irrationalis an alien principle. The
diversity, then, between these two elements arises from the difference of their authors.
When, therefore, Plato reserves the rational element (of the soul) to God alone, and
subdivides it into two departments the irascible, which they call qumiko/n, and the
concupiscible, which they designate by the term e0piqumhtiko/n (in such a way as to make
the first common to us and lions, and the second shared between ourselves and flies,
whilst the rational element is confined to us and God)-I see that this point will have to
be treated by us, owing to the facts which we find operating also in Christ. For you may
behold this triad of qualities in the Lord. There was the rational element, by which He
taught, by which He discoursed, by which He prepared the way of salvation; there was
moreover indignation in Him, by which He inveighed against the scribes and the Pharisees;
and there was the principle of desire, by which He so earnestly desired to eat the pass
over with His disciples. In our own cases, accordingly, the irascible and the
concupiscible elements of our soul must not invariably be put to the account of the
irrational (nature), since we are sure that in our Lord these elements operated in entire
accordance with reason. God will be angry, with perfect reason, with all who deserve His
wrath; and with reason, too, will God desire whatever objects and claims are worthy of
Himself.

3 For He will show indignation against the evil man, and for the good man will He desire
salvation. To ourselves even does the apostle allow the concupiscible quality. "If any
man," says he, "desireth the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work. Now, by saying
"a good work," he shows us that the desire is a reasonable one. He permits us likewise to
feel indignation. How should he not, when he himself experiences the same? "I would," says
he, "that they were even cut off which trouble you. In perfect agreement with reason was
that indignation which resulted from his desire to maintain discipline and order. When,
however, he says, "We were formerly the children of wrath," he censures an irrational
irascibility, such as proceeds not from that nature which is the production of God, but
from that which the devil brought in, who is himself styled the lord or "master" of his
own class, "Ye cannot serve two masters," and has the actual designation of "father: ""Ye
are of your father the devil. So that you need not be afraid to ascribe to him the mastery
and dominion over that second, later, and deteriorated nature (of which we have been
speaking), when you read of him as "the sewer of tares, and the nocturnal spoiler of the
crop of corn.

CHAPTER XVII.-THE FIDELITY OF THE SENSES, IMPUGNED BY PLATO, VINDICATED BY CHRIST HIMSELF.

1 Then, again, when we encounter the question (as to the veracity of those five senses
which we learn with our alphabet; since from this source even there arises some support
for our heretics. They are the faculties of seeing, and hearing, and smelling, and
tasting, and touching. The fidelity of these senses is impugned with too much severity by
the Platonists, and according to some by Heraclitus also, and Diocles, and Empedocles; at
any rate, Plato, in the Timµus, declares the operations of the senses to be irrational,
and vitiated by our opinions or beliefs. Deception is imputed to the sight, because it
asserts that oars, when immersed in the water, are inclined or bent, notwithstanding the
certainty that they are straight; because, again, it is quite sure that distant tower with
its really quadrangular contour is round; because also it will discredit the fact of the
truly parallel fabric of yonder porch or arcade, by supposing it to be narrower and
narrower towards its end; and because it will join with the sea the sky which hangs at so
great a height above it. In the same way, our hearing is charged with fallacy: we think,
for instance, that is a noise in the sky which is nothing else than the rumbling of a
carriage; or, if you prefer it the other way, when the thunder rolled at a distance, we
were quite sure that it was a carriage which made the noise.

2 Thus, too, are our faculties of smell and taste at fault, because the selfsame perfumes
and wines lose their value after we have used them awhile. On the same principle our touch
is censured, when the identical pavement which seemed rough to the hands is felt by the
feet to be smooth enough; and in the baths a stream of warm water is pronounced to be
quite hot at first, and beautifully temperate afterwards. Thus, according to them, our
senses deceive us, when all the while we are (the cause of the discrepancies, by) changing
our opinions. The Stoics are more moderate in their views; for they do not load with the
obloquy of deception every one of the senses, and at all times. The Epicureans, again,
show still greater consistency, in maintaining that all the senses are equally true in
their testimony, and always so-only in a different way. It is not our organs of sensation
that are at fault, but our opinion. The senses only experience sensation, they do not
exercise opinion; it is the soul that opines. They separated opinion from the senses, and
sensation from the soul. Well, but whence comes opinion, if not from the senses? Indeed,
unless the eye had descried a round shape in that tower, it could have had no idea that it
possessed roundness. Again, whence arises sensation if not from the soul? For if the soul
had no body, it would have no sensation. Accordingly, sensation comes from the soul, and
opinion from sensation;

3 and the whole (process) is the soul. But further, it may well be insisted on that there
is a something which causes the discrepancy between the report of the senses and the
reality of the facts. Now, since it is possible, (as we have seen), for phenomena to be
reported which exist not in the objects, why should it not be equally possible for
phenomena to be reported which are caused not by the senses, but by reasons and conditions
which intervene, in the very nature of the case? If so, it will be only right that they
should be duly recognised. The truth is, that it was the water which was the cause of the
oar seeming to be inclined or bent: out of the water, it was perfectly straight in
appearance (as well as in fact). The delicacy of the substance or medium which forms a
mirror by means of its luminosity, according as it is struck or shaken, by the vibration
actually destroys the appearance of the straightness of a right line. In like manner, the
condition of the open space which fills up the interval between it and us, necessarily
causes the true shape of the tower to escape our notice; for the uniform density of the
surrounding air covering its angles with a similar light obliterates their outlines.

4 So, again, the equal breadth of the arcade is sharpened or narrowed off towards its
termination, until its aspect, becoming more and more contracted under its prolonged roof,
comes to a vanishing point in the direction of its farthest distance. So the sky blends
itself with the sea, the vision becoming spent at last, which had maintained duly the
boundaries of the two elements, so long as its vigorous glance lasted. As for the (alleged
cases of deceptive) hearing, what else could produce the illusion but the similarity of
the sounds? And if the perfume afterwards was less strong to the smell, and the wine more
flat to the taste, and the water not so hot to the touch, their original strength was
after all found in the whole of them pretty well unimpaired. In the matter, however, of
the roughness and smoothness of the pavement, it was only natural and right that limbs
like the hands and the feet, so different in tenderness and callousness, should have
different impressions. In this way, then, there cannot occur an illusion in our senses
without an adequate cause. Now if special causes, (such as we have indicated, ) mislead
our senses add (through our senses) our opinions also, then we must no longer ascribe the
deception to the senses, which follow the specific causes of the illusion, nor to the
opinions we form; for these are occasioned and controlled by our senses, which only follow
the causes. Persons who are afflicted with madness or insanity, mistake one object for
another.

5 Orestes in his sister sees his mother; Ajax sees Ulysses in the slaughtered herd;
Athamas and Agave descry wild beasts in their children. Now is it their eyes or their
phrenzy which you must blame for so vast a fallacy? All things taste bitter, in the
redundancy of their bile, to those who have the jaundice. Is it their taste which you will
charge with the physical prevarication, or their ill state of health? All the senses,
therefore, are disordered occasionally, or imposed upon, but only in such a way as to be
quite free of any fault in their own natural functions. But further still, not even
against the specific causes and conditions themselves must we lay an indictment of
deception. For, since these physical aberrations happen for stated reasons, the reasons do
not deserve to be regarded as deceptions. Whatever ought to occur in a certain manner is
not a deception. If, then, even these circumstantial causes must be acquitted of all
censure and blame, how much more should we free from reproach the senses, over which the
said causes exercise a liberal sway! Hence we are bound most certainly to claim for the
senses truth, and fidelity, and integrity, seeing that they never render any other account
of their impressions than is enjoined on them by the specific causes or conditions which
in all cases produce that discrepancy which appears between the report of the senses and
the reality of the objects. What mean you, then, O most insolent Academy?

6 You overthrow the entire condition of human life; you disturb the whole order of nature;
you obscure the good providence of God Himself: for the senses of man which God has
appointed over all His works, that we might understand, inhabit, dispense, and enjoy them,
(you reproach) as fallacious and treacherous tyrants! But is it not from these that all
creation receives our services? Is it not by their means that a second form is impressed
even upon the world?-so many arts, so many industrious resources, so many pursuits, such
business, such offices, such commerce, such remedies, counsels, consolations, modes,
civilizations, and accomplishments of life! All these things have produced the very relish
and savour of human existence; whilst by these senses of man, he alone of all animated
nature has the distinction of being a rational animal, with a capacity for intelligence
and knowledge-nay, an ability to form the Academy itself! But Plato, in order to disparage
the testimony of the senses, in the Phµdrus denies (in the person of Socrates) his own
ability to know even himself, according to the injunction of the Delphic oracle; and in
the Theµtetus he deprives himself of the faculties of knowledge and sensation; and again,
in the Phµdrus he postpones till after death the posthumous knowledge, as he calls it, of
the truth; and yet for all he went on playing the philosopher even before he died.

7 We may not, I say, we may not call into question the truth of the (poor vilified)
senses, lest we should even in Christ Himself, bring doubt upon the truth of their
sensation; lest perchance it should be said that He did not really "behold Satan as
lightning fall from heaven; " that He did not really hear the Father's voice testifying of
Himself; or that He was deceived in touching Peter's wife's mother; or that the fragrance
of the ointment which He afterwards smelled was different from that which He accepted for
His burial; and that the taste of the wine was different from that which He consecrated in
memory of His blood. On this false principle it was that Marcion actually chose to believe
that He was a phantom, denying to Him the reality of a perfect body. Now, not even to His
apostles was His nature ever a matter of deception. He was truly both seen and heard upon
the mount; true and real was the draught of that wine at the marriage of (Cana in)
Galilee; true and real also was the touch of the then believing Thomas. Read the testimony
of John: "That which we have seen, which we have heard, which we have looked upon with our
eyes, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life. False, of course, and deceptive
must have been that testimony, if the witness of our eyes, and ears, and hands be by
nature a lie.

CHAPTER XVIII.-PLATO SUGGESTED CERTAIN ERRORS TO THE GNOSTICS. FUNCTIONS OF THE SOUL.

1 I turn now to the department of our intellectual faculties, such as Plato has handed it
over to the heretics, distinct from our bodily functions, having obtained the knowledge of
them before death. He asks in the Phµdo, What, then, (do you think) concerning the actual
possession of knowledge? Will the body be a hindrance to it or not, if one shall admit it
as an associate in the search after knowledge? I have a similar question to ask: Have the
faculties of their sight and hearing any truth and reality for human beings or not? Is it
not the case, that even the poets are always muttering against us, that we can never hear
or see anything for certain? He remembered, no doubt, what Epicharmus the comic poet had
said: "It is the mind which sees, the mind that hears-all else is blind and deaf. To the
same purport he says again, that man is the wisest whose mental power is the clearest; who
never applies the sense of sight, nor adds to his mind the help of any such faculty, but
employs the intellect itself in unmixed serenity when he indulges in contemplation for the
purpose of acquiring an unalloyed insight into the nature of things; divorcing himself
with all his might from his eyes and ears and (as one must express himself) from the whole
of his body, on the ground of its disturbing the soul, and not allowing it to possess
either truth or wisdom, whenever it is brought into communication with it.

2 We see, then, that in opposition to the bodily senses another faculty is provided of a
much more serviceable character, even the powers of the soul, which produce an
understanding of that truth whose realities are not palpable nor open to the bodily
senses, but are very remote from men's everyday knowledge, lying in secret-in the heights
above, and in the presence of God Himself. For Plato maintains that there are certain
invisible substances, incorporeal, celestial, divine, and eternal, which they call ideas,
that is to say, (archetypal) forms, which are the patterns and causes of those objects of
nature which are manifest to us, and lie under our corporeal senses: the former,
(according to Plato, ) are the actual verities, and the latter the images and likenesses
of them. Well, now, are there not here gleams of the heretical principles of the Gnostics
and the Valentinians? It is from this philosophy that they eagerly adopt the difference
between the bodily senses and the intellectual faculties,-a distinction which they
actually apply to the parable of the ten virgins: making the five foolish virgins to
symbolize the five bodily senses, seeing that these are so silly and so easy to be
deceived; and the wise virgin to express the meaning of the intellectual faculties, which
are so wise as to attain to that mysterious and supernal truth, which is placed in the
pleroma. (Here, then, we have) the mystic original of the ideas of these heretics. For in
this philosophy lie both their ¦ons and their genealogies.

3 Thus, too, do they divide sensation, both into the intellectual powers from their
spiritual seed, and the sensuous faculties from the animal, which cannot by any means
comprehend spiritual things. From the former germ spring invisible things; from the
latter, visible things which are grovelling and temporary, and which are obvious to the
senses, placed as they are in palpable forms. It is because of these views that we have in
a former passage stated as a preliminary fact, that the mind is nothing else than an
apparatus or instrument of the soul, and that the spirit is no other faculty, separate
from the soul, but is the soul itself exercised in respiration; although that influence
which either God on the one hand, or the devil on the other, has breathed upon it, must be
regarded in the light of an additional element. And now, with respect to the difference
between the intellectual powers and the sensuous faculties, we only admit it so far as the
natural diversity between them requires of us. (There is, of course, a difference) between
things corporeal and things spiritual, between visible and invisible beings, between
objects which are manifest to the view and those which are hidden from it; because the one
class are attributed to sensation, and the other to the intellect.

4 But yet both the one and the other must be regarded as inherent in the soul, and as
obedient to it, seeing that it embraces bodily objects by means of the body, in exactly
the same way that it conceives incorporeal objects by help of the mind, except that it is
even exercising sensation when it is employing the intellect. For is it not true, that to
employ the senses is to use the intellect? And to employ the intellect amounts to a use of
the senses? What indeed can sensation be, but the understanding of that which is the
object of the sensation? And what can the intellect or understanding be, but the seeing of
that which is the object understood? Why adopt such excruciating means of torturing simple
knowledge and crucifying the truth? Who can show me the sense which does not understand
the object of its sensation, or the intellect which perceives not the object which it
understands, in so clear away as to prove to me that the one can do without the other? If
corporeal things are the objects of sense, and incorporeal ones objects of the intellect,
it is the classes of the objects which are different, not the domicile or abode of sense
and intellect; in other words, not the soul (anima) and the mind (animus). By what, in
Short, are corporeal things perceived? If it is by the soul, then the mind is a sensuous
faculty, and not merely an intellectual power;

5 for whilst it understands, it also perceives, because without the perception there is no
understanding. If, however, corporeal things are perceived by the soul, then it follows
that the soul's power is an intellectual one, and not merely a sensuous faculty; for while
it perceives it also understands, because without understanding there is no perceiving.
And then, again, by what are incorporeal things understood? If it is by the mind, where
will be the soul? If it is by the soul, where will be the mind? For things which differ
ought to be mutually absent from each other, when they are occupied in their respective
functions and duties. It must be your opinion, indeed, that the mind is absent from the
soul on certain occasions; for (you suppose) that we are so made and constituted as not to
know that we have seen or heard something, on the hypothesis that the mind was absent at
the time. I must therefore maintain that the very soul itself neither saw nor heard, since
it was at the given moment absent with its active power-that is to say, the mind. The
truth is, that whenever a man is out of his mind, it is his soul that is demented-not
because the mind is absent, but because it is a fellow-sufferer (with the soul) at the
time. Indeed, it is the soul which is principally affected by casualties of such a kind.
Whence is this fact confirmed? It is confirmed from the following consideration:

6 that after the soul's departure, the mind is no longer found in a man: it always follows
the soul; nor does it at last remain behind it alone, after death. Now, since it follows
the soul, it is also indissolubly attached to it; just as the understanding is attached to
the soul, which is followed by the mind, with which the understanding is indissolubly
connected. Granted now that the understanding is superior to the senses, and a better
discoverer of mysteries, what matters it, so long as it is only a peculiar faculty of the
soul, just as the senses themselves are? It does not at all affect my argument, unless the
understanding were held to be superior to the senses, for the purpose of deducing from the
allegation of such superiority its separate condition likewise. After thus combating their
alleged difference, I have also to refute this question of superiority, previous to my
approaching the belief (which heresy propounds) in a superior god. On this point, however,
of a (superior) god, we shall have to measure swords with the heretics on their own
ground. Our present subject concerns the soul, and the point is to prevent the insidious
ascription of a superiority to the intellect or understanding.

7 Now, although the objects which are touched by the intellect are of a higher nature,
since they are spiritual, than those which are embraced by the senses, since these are
corporeal, it will still be only a superiority in the objects-as of lofty ones contrasted
with humble-not in the faculties of the intellect against the senses. For how can the
intellect be superior to the senses, when it is these which educate it for the discovery
of various truths? It is a fact, that these truths are learned by means of palpable forms;
in other words, invisible things are discovered by the help of visible ones, even as the
apostle tells us in his epistle: "For the invisible things of Him are clearly seen from
the creation of the world, being understood by the things that are made; " and as Plato
too might inform our heretics: "The things which appear are the image of the things which
are concealed from view," whence it must needs follow that this world is by all means an
image of some other: so that the intellect evidently uses the senses for its own guidance,
and authority, and mainstay; and without the senses truth could not be attained. How,
then, can a thing be superior to that which is instrumental to its existence, which is
also indispensable to it, and to whose help it owes everything which it acquires? Two
conclusions therefore follow from what we have said:

8 (1) That the intellect is not to be preferred above the senses, on the (supposed) ground
that the agent through which a thing exists is inferior to the thing itself; and (2) that
the intellect must not be separated from the senses, since the instrument by which a
thing's existence is sustained is associated with the thing itself.


A TREATISE ON THE SOUL
======================

A TREATISE ON THE SOUL continued

CHAPTER XIX.-THE INTELLECT COEVAL WITH THE SOUL IN THE HUMAN BEING. AN EXAMPLE FROM ARISTOTLE CONVERTED INTO EVIDENCE FAVOURABLE TO THESE VIEWS.

1 Nor must we fail to notice those writers who deprive the soul of the intellect even for
a short period of time. They do this in order to prepare the way of introducing the
intellect-and the mind also-at a subsequent time of life, even at the time when
intelligence appears in a man. They maintain that the stage of infancy is supported by the
soul alone, simply to promote vitality, without any intention of acquiring knowledge also,
because not all things have knowledge which possess life. Trees, for instance, to quote
Aristotle's example, have vitality, but have not knowledge; and with him agrees every one
who gives a share to all animated beings of the animal substance, which, according to our
view, exists in man alone as his special property,-not because it is the work of God,
which all other creatures are likewise, but because it is the breath of God, which this
(human soul) alone is, which we say is born with the full equipment of its proper
faculties. Well, let them meet us with the example of the trees: we will accept their
challenge, (nor shah we find in it any detriment to our own argument; ) for it is an
undoubted fact, that whilst trees are yet but twigs and sprouts, and before they even
reach the sapling stage, there is in them their own proper faculty of life, as soon as
they spring out of their native beds.

2 But then, as time goes on, the vigour of the tree slowly advances, as it grows and
hardens into its woody trunk, until its mature age completes the condition which nature
destines for it. Else what resources would trees possess in due course for the inoculation
of grafts, and the formation of leaves, and the swelling of their buds, and the graceful
shedding of their blossom, and the softening of their sap, were there not in them the
quiet growth of the full provision of their nature, and the distribution of this life over
all their branches for the accomplishment of their maturity? Trees, therefore, have
ability or knowledge; and they derive it from whence they also derive vitality-that is,
from the one source of vitality and knowledge which is peculiar to their nature, and that
from the infancy which they, too, begin with. For I observe that even the vine, although
yet tender and immature, still understands its own natural business, and strives to cling
to some support, that, leaning on it, and lacing through it, it may so attain its growth.
Indeed, without waiting for the husbandman's training, without an espalier, without a
prop, whatever its tendrils catch, it will fondly cling to, and embrace with really
greater tenacity and force by its own inclination than by your volition. It longs and
hastens to be secure. Take also ivy-plants, never mind how young:

3 I observe their attempts from the very first to grasp, objects above them, and
outrunning everything else, to hang on to the highest thing, preferring as they do to
spread over walls with their leafy web and woof rather than creep on the ground and be
trodden under by every foot that likes to crush them. On the other hand, in the case of
such trees as receive injury from contact with a building, how do they hang off as they
grow and avoid what injures them! You can see that their branches were naturally meant to
take the opposite direction, and can very well understand the vital instincts of such a
tree from its avoidance of the wall. It is contented (if it be only a little shrub) with
its own insignificant destiny, which it has in its foreseeing instinct thoroughly been
aware of from its: infancy, only it still fears even a ruined building. On my side, then,
why should I not contend for these wise and sagacious natures of trees? Let them have
vitality, as the philosophers permit it; but let them have knowledge too, although the
philosophers disavow it. Even the infancy of a log, then, may have an intellect (suitable
to it):

4 how much more may that of a human being, whose soul (which may be compared with the
nascent sprout of a tree) has been derived from Adam as its root, and has been propagated
amongst his posterity by means of woman, to whom it has been entrusted for transmission,
and thus has sprouted into life with all its natural apparatus, both of intellect and of
sense! I am much mistaken if the human person, even from his infancy, when he saluted life
with his infant cries, does not testify to his actual possession of the faculties of
sensation and intellect by the fact of his birth, vindicating at one and the same time the
use of all his senses-that of seeing by the light, that of hearing by sounds, that of
taste by liquids, that of smell by the air, that of touch by the ground. This earliest
voice of infancy, then, is the first effort of the senses, and the initial impulse of
mental perceptions. There is also the further fact, that some persons understand this
plaintive cry of the infant to be an augury of affliction in the prospect of our tearful
life, whereby from the very moment of birth (the soul) has to be regarded as endued with
prescience, much more with intelligence. Accordingly by this intuition the babe knows his
mother, discerns the nurse, and even recognises the waiting-maid; refusing the breast of
another woman, and the cradle that is not his own, and longing only for the arms to which
he is accustomed.

5 Now from what source does he acquire this discernment of novelty and custom, if not from
instinctive knowledge? Holy does it happen that he is irritated and quieted, if not by
help of his initial intellect? It would be very strange indeed that infancy were naturally
so lively, if it had not mental power; and naturally so capable of impression and
affection, if it had no intellect. But (we hold the contrary): for Christ, by "accepting
praise out of the mouth of babes and sucklings," has declared that neither childhood nor
infancy is without sensibility, -the former of which states, when meeting Him with
approving shouts, proved its ability to offer Him testimony; while the other, by being
slaughtered, for His sake of course, knew what violence meant.

CHAPTER XX.-THE SOUL, AS TO ITS NATURE UNIFORM, BUT ITS FACULTIES VARIOUSLY DEVELOPED. VARIETIES ONLY ACCIDENTAL.

1 And here, therefore, we draw our conclusion, that all the natural properties of the soul
are inherent in it as parts of its substance; and that they grow and develope along with
it, from the very moment of its own origin at birth. Just as Seneca says, whom we so often
find on our side: "There are implanted within us the seeds of all the arts and periods of
life. And God. our Master, secretly produces our mental dispositions; "that is, from the
germs which are implanted and hidden in us by means of infancy, and these are the
intellect: for from these our natural dispositions are evolved. Now, even the seeds of
plants have, one form in each kind, but their development varies: some open and expand in
a healthy and perfect state, while others either improve or degenerate, owing to the
conditions of weather and soil, and from the appliance of labour and care; also from the
course of the seasons, and from the occurrence of casual circumstances. In like manner,
the soul may well be uniform in its seminal origin, although multiform by the process of
nativity. And here. local influences, too, must be taken into account. It has been said
that dull and brutish persons are born at Thebes; and the most accomplished in wisdom and
speech at Athens, where in the district of Colythus children speak-such is the precocity
of their tongue-before they are a month old.

2 Indeed, Plato himself tells us, in the Timµus, that Minerva, when preparing to found her
great city, only regarded the nature of the country which gave promise of mental
dispositions of this kind; whence he himself in The Laws instructs Megillus and Clinias to
be careful in their selection of a site for building a city. Empedocles, however, places
the cause of a subtle or an obtuse intellect in the quality of the blood, from which he
derives progress and perfection in learning and science. The subject of national
peculiarities has grown by this time into proverbial notoriety. Comic poets deride the
Phrygians for their cowardice; Sallust reproaches the Moors for their levity, and the
Dalmatians for their cruelty; even the apostle brands the Cretans as "liars. Very likely,
too, something must be set down to the score of bodily condition and the state of the
health. Stoutness hinders knowledge, but a spare form stimulates it; paralysis prostrates
the mind, a decline preserves it. How much more will those accidental circumstances have
to be noticed, which, in addition to the state of one's body or one's health, tend to
sharpen or to dull the intellect! It is sharpened by learned pursuits, by the sciences,
the arts, by experimental knowledge, business habits, and studies; it is blunted by
ignorance, idle habits, inactivity, lust, inexperience, listlessness, and vicious
pursuits. Then, besides these influences, there must perhaps be added the supreme powers.
Now these are the supreme powers: according to our (Christian) notions, they are the Lord
God and His adversary the devil;

3 but according to men's general opinion about providence, they are fate and necessity;
and about fortune, it is man's freedom of will. Even the philosophers allow these
distinctions; whilst on our part we have already undertaken to treat of them, on the
principles of the (Christian) faith, in a separate work. It is evident how great must be
the influences which so variously affect the one nature of the soul, since they are
commonly regarded as separate "natures. Still they are not different species, but casual
incidents of one nature and substance-even of that which God conferred on Adam, and made
the mould of all (subsequent ones). Casual incidents will they always remain, but never
will they become!specific differences. However great, too, at present is the variety of
men's maunders, it was not so in Adam, the founder of their race. But all these
discordances ought to have existed in him as the fountainhead, and thence to have
descended to us in an unimpaired variety, if the variety had been due to nature.

CHAPTER XXI.-AS FREE-WILL ACTUATES AN INDIVIDUAL SO MAY HIS CHARACTER CHANGE.

1 Now, if the soul possessed this uniform and simple nature from the beginning in Adam,
previous to so many mental dispositions (being developed out of it), it is not rendered
multiform by suck various development, nor by the triple form predicated of it in "the
Valentinian trinity" (that we may still keep the condemnation of that heresy in view), for
not even this nature is discoverable in Adam. What had he that was spiritual? Is it
because he prophetically declared "the great mystery of Christ and the church? " "This is
bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman. Therefore shall a man
leave his father and mother, and he shall cleave unto his wife; and they two shall be one
flesh. But this (gift of prophecy) only came on him afterwards, when God infused into him
the ecstasy, or spiritual quality, in which prophecy consists. If, again, the evil of sin
was developed in him, this must not be accounted as a natural disposition: it was rather
produced by the instigation of the (old) serpent as far from being incidental to his
nature as it was from being material in him, for we have already excluded belief in
"Matter.

2 Now, if neither the spiritual element, nor what the heretics call the material element,
was properly inherent in him (since, if he had been created out of matter, the germ of
evil must have been an integral part of his constitution), it remains that the one only
original element of his nature was what is called the animal (the principle of vitality,
the soul), which we maintain to be simple and uniform in its condition. Concerning this,
it remains for us to inquire whether, as being called natural, it ought to be deemed
subject to change. (The heretics whom we have referred to) deny that nature is susceptible
of any change, in order that they may be able to establish and settle their threefold
theory, or "trinity," in all its characteristics as to the several natures, because "a
good tree cannot produce evil fruit, nor a corrupt tree good fruit; and nobody gathers
figs of thorns, nor grapes of brambles. If so, then "God will not be able any longer to
raise up from the stones children unto Abraham; nor to make a generation of vipers bring
forth fruits of repentance. And if so, the apostle too was in error when he said in his
epistle, "Ye were at one time darkness, (but now are ye light in the Lord: )" and, "We
also were by nature children of wrath; " and, "Such were some of you, but ye are washed.
The statements, however, of holy Scripture will never be discordant with truth.

3 A corrupt tree will never yield good fruit, unless the better nature be grafted into it;
nor will a good tree produce evil fruit, except by the same process of cultivation. Stones
also will become children of Abraham, if educated in Abraham's faith; and a generation of
vipers will bring forth the fruits of penitence, if they reject the poison of their
malignant nature. This will be the power of the grace of God, more potent indeed than
nature, exercising its sway over the faculty that underlies itself within us-even the
freedom of our will, which is described as au0tecou/sioj (of independent authority); and
inasmuch as this faculty is itself also natural and mutable, in whatsoever direction it
turns, it inclines of its own nature. Now, that there does exist within us naturally this
independent authority (to\ au0tecou/sion), we have already shown in opposition both to
Marcion and to Hermogenes. if, then, the natural condition has to be submitted to a
definition, it must be determined to be twofold-there being the category of the born and
the unborn, the made and not-made. Now that which has received its constitution by being
made or by being born, is by nature capable of being changed, for it can be both born
again and re-made; whereas that which is not-made and unborn will remain for ever
immoveable.

4 Since, however, this state is suited to God alone, as the only Being who is unborn and
not-made (and therefore immortal and unchangeable), it is absolutely certain that the
nature of all other existences which are born and created is subject to modification and
change; so that if the threefold state is to be ascribed to the soul, it must be supposed
to arise from the mutability of its accidental circumstances, and not from the appointment
of nature.

CHAPTER XXII.-RECAPITULATION. DEFINITION OF THE SOUL.

Hermogenes has already heard from us what are the other natural faculties of the soul, as
well as their vindication and proof; whence it may be seen that the soul is rather the
offspring of God than of matter. The names of these faculties shall here be simply
repeated, that they may not seem to be forgotten and passed out of sight. We have
assigned, then, to the soul both that freedom of the will which we just now mentioned, and
its dominion over the works of nature, and its occasional gift of divination,
independently of that endowment of prophecy which accrues to it expressly from the grace
of God. We shall therefore now quit this subject of the soul's disposition, in order to
set out fully in order its various qualities. The soul, then, we define to be sprung from
the breath of God, immortal, possessing body, having form, simple in its substance,
intelligent in its own nature, developing its power in various ways, free in its
determinations, subject to be changes of accident, in its faculties mutable, rational,
supreme, endued with an instinct of presentiment, evolved out of one (archetypal soul). It
remains for us now to consider how it is developed out of this one original source; in
other words, whence, and when, and how it is produced.

CHAPTER XXIII.-THE OPINIONS OF SUNDRY HERETICS WHICH ORIGINATE ULTIMATELY WITH PLATO.

1 Some suppose that they came down from heaven, with as firm a belief as they are apt to
entertain, when they indulge in the prospect of an undoubted return thither. Saturninus,
the disciple of Menander, who belonged to Simon's sect, introduced this opinion: he
affirmed that man was made by angels. A futile, imperfect creation at first, weak and
unable to stand, he crawled upon the ground like a worm, because he wanted the strength to
maintain an erect posture; but afterwards having, by the compassion of the Supreme Power
(in whose image, which had not been fully understood, he was clumsily formed), obtained a
slender spark of life, this roused and righted his imperfect form, and animated it with a
higher vitality, and provided for its return, on its relinquishment of life, to its
original principle. Carpocrates, indeed, claims for himself so extreme an amount of the
supernal qualities, that his disciples set their own souls at once on an equality with
Christ (not to mention the apostles); and sometimes, when it suits their fancy, even give
them the superiority-deeming them, forsooth, to have partaken of that sublime virtue which
looks down upon the principalities that govern this world. Apelles tells us that our souls
were enticed by earthly baits down from their super-celestial abodes by a fiery angel,
Israel's God; and ours, who then enclosed them firmly within our sinful flesh. The hive of
Valentinus fortifies the soul with the germ of Sophia, or Wisdom;

2 by means of which germ they recognise, in the images of visible objects, the stories and
Milesian fables of their own ¦ons. I am sorry from my heart that Plato has been the
caterer to all these heretics. For in the Phµdo he imagines that souls wander from this
world to that, and thence back again hither; whilst in the Timµus he supposes that the
children of God, to whom had been assigned the production of mortal creatures, having
taken for the soul the germ of immortality, congealed around it a mortal body,-thereby
indicating that this world is the figure of some other. Now, to procure belief in all
this-that the soul had formerly lived with God in the heavens above, sharing His ideas
with Him, and afterwards came down to live with us on earth, and whilst here recollects
the eternal patterns of things which it had learnt before-he elaborated his new formula,
maqh/seij a0namnh/seij, which means that "learning is reminiscence; "implying that the
souls which come to us from thence forget the things amongst which they formerly lived,
but that they afterwards recall them, instructed by the objects they see around them.
Forasmuch, therefore, as the doctrines which the heretics borrow from Plato are cunningly
defended by this kind of argument, I shall sufficiently refute the heretics if I overthrow
the argument of Plato.

CHAPTER XXIV.-PLATO'S INCONSISTENCY. HE SUPPOSES THE SOUL SELF-EXISTENT, YET CAPABLE OF FORGETTING WHAT PASSED IN A PREVIOUS STATE.

1 In the first place, I cannot allow that the soul is capable of a failure of memory;
because he has conceded to it so large an amount of divine quality as to put it on a par
with God. He makes it unborn, which single attribute I might apply as a sufficient
attestation of its perfect divinity; he then adds that the soul is immortal,
incorruptible, incorporeal-since he believed God to be the same-invisible, incapable of
delineation, uniform, supreme, rational, and intellectual. What more could he attribute to
the soul, if he wanted to call it God? We, however, who allow no appendage to God (in the
sense of equality), by this very fact reckon the soul as very far below God: for we
suppose it to be born, and hereby to possess something of a diluted divinity and an
attenuated felicity, as the breath (of God), though not His spirit; and although immortal,
as this is an attribute of divinity, yet for all that passible, since this is an incident
of a born condition, and consequently from the first capable of deviation from perfection
and right, and by consequence susceptible of a failure in memory. This point I have
discussed sufficiently with Hermogenes. But it may be further observed, that if the soul
is to merit being accounted a god, by reason of all its qualities being equal to the
attributes of God, it must then be subject to no passion, and therefore to no loss of
memory;

2 for this defect of oblivion is as great an injury to that of which you predicate it, as
memory is the glory thereof, which Plato himself deems the very safeguard of the senses
and intellectual faculties, and which Cicero has designated the treasury of all the
sciences. Now we need not raise the doubt whether so divine a faculty as the soul was
capable of losing memory: the question rather is, whether it is able to recover afresh
that which it has lost. I could not decide whether that, which ought to have lost memory,
if it once incurred the loss, would be powerful enough to recollect itself, Both
alternatives, indeed, will agree very well with my soul, but not with Plato's. In the
second place, my objection to him will stand thus: (Plato, ) do you endow the soul with a
natural competency for understanding those well-known ideas of yours? Certainly I do, will
be your answer. Well, now, no one will concede to you that the knowledge, (which you say
is) the gift of nature, of the natural sciences can fail. But the knowledge of the
sciences fails; the knowledge of the various fields of learning and of the arts of life
fails; and so perhaps the knowledge of the faculties and affections of our minds fails,
although they seem to be inherent in our nature, but really are not so:

3 because, as we have already said, they are affected by accidents of place, of manners
and customs, of bodily condition, of the state of man's health-by the influences of the
Supreme Powers, and the changes of man's free-will. Now the instinctive knowledge of
natural objects never fails, not even in the brute creation. The lion, no doubt, will
forget his ferocity, if surrounded by the softening influence of training; he may become,
with his beautiful mane, the plaything of some Queen Berenice, and lick her cheeks with
his tongue. A wild beast may lay aside his habits, but his natural instincts will not be
forgotten. He will not forget his proper food, nor his natural resources, nor his natural
alarms; and should the queen offer him fishes or cakes, he will wish for flesh; and if,
when he is ill, any antidote be prepared for him, he will still require the ape; and
should no hunting-spear be presented against him, he will yet dread the crow of the cock.
In like manner with man, who is perhaps the most forgetful of all creatures, the knowledge
of everything natural to him will remain in-eradicably fixed in him,-but this alone, as
being alone a natural instinct. He will never forget to eat when he is hungry; or to drink
when he is thirsty; or to use his eyes when he wants to see; or his ears, to hear; or his
nose, to smell; or his mouth, to taste; or his hand, to touch.

4 These are, to be sure, the senses, which philosophy depreciates by her preference for
the intellectual faculties. But if the natural knowledge of the sensuous faculties is
permanent, how happens it that the knowledge of the intellectual faculties fails, to which
the superiority is ascribed? Whence, now, arises that power of forgetfulness itself which
precedes recollection? From long lapse of time, he says. But this is a shortsighted
answer. Length of time cannot be incidental to that which, according to him, is unborn,
and which therefore must be deemed most certainly eternal. For that which is eternal, on
the ground of its being unborn, since it admits neither of beginning nor end of time, is
subject to no temporal criterion. And that which time does not measure, undergoes no
change in consequence of time; nor is long lapse of time at all influential over it. If
time is a cause of oblivion, why, from the time of the soul's entrance into the body, does
memory fail, as if thenceforth the soul were to be affected by time? for the soul, being
undoubtedly prior to the body, was of course not irrespective of time. Is it, indeed,
immediately on the soul's entrance into the body that oblivion takes place, or some time
afterwards? If immediately, where will be the long lapse of the time which is as yet
inadmissible in the hypothesis? Take, for instance, the case of the infant.

5 If some time afterwards, will not the soul, during the interval previous to the moment
of oblivion, Still exercise its powers of memory? And how comes it to pass that the soul
subsequently forgets, and then afterwards again remembers? How long, too, must the lapse
of the time be regarded as having been, during which the oblivion oppressed the soul? The
whole course of one's life, I apprehend, will be insufficient to efface the memory of an
age which endured so long before the soul's assumption of the body. But then, again, Plato
throws the blame upon the body, as if it were at all credible that a born substance could
extinguish the power of one that is unborn. There exist, however, among bodies a great
many differences, by reason of their rationality, their bulk, their condition, their age,
and their health. Will there then be supposed to exist similar differences in
obliviousness? Oblivion, however, is uniform and identical. Therefore bodily peculiarity,
with its manifold varieties, will not become the cause of an effect which is an invariable
one. There are likewise, according to Plato's own testimony, many proofs to show that the
soul has a divining faculty, as we have already advanced against Hermogenes. But there is
not a man living, who does not himself feel his soul possessed with a presage and augury
of some omen, danger, or joy. Now, if the body is not prejudicial to divination, it will
not, I suppose, be injurious to memory.

6 One thing is certain, that souls in the same body both forget and remember. If any
corporeal condition engenders forgetfulness, how will it admit the opposite state of
recollection? Because recollection, after forgetfulness, is actually the resurrection of
the memory. Now, how should not that which is hostile to the memory at first, be also
prejudicial to it in the second instance? Lastly, who have better memories than little
children, with their fresh, unworn souls, not yet immersed in domestic and public cares,
but devoted only to those studies the acquirement of which is itself a reminiscence? Why,
indeed, do we not all of us recollect in an equal degree, since we are equal in our
forgetfulness? But this is true only of philosophers! But not even of the whole of them.
Amongst so many nations, in so great a crowd of sages, Plato, to be sure, is the only man
who has combined the oblivion and the recollection of ideas. Now, since this main argument
of his by no means keeps its ground, it follows that its entire superstructure must fall
with it, namely, that souls are supposed to be unborn, and to live in the heavenly
regions, and to be instructed in the divine mysteries thereof; moreover, that they descend
to this earth, and here recall to memory their previous; existence, for the purpose, of
course, of supplying to our heretics the fitting materials for their systems.

CHAPTER XXV.-TERTULLIAN REFUTES, PHYSIOLOGICALLY, THE NOTION THAT THE SOUL IS INTRODUCED AFTER BIRTH.

1 I shall now return to the cause of this digression, in order that I may explain how all
souls are derived from one, when and where and in what manner they are produced. Now,
touching this subject, it matters not whether the question be started by the philosopher,
by the heretic, or by the crowd. Those who profess the truth care nothing about their
opponents, especially such of them as begin by maintaining that the soul is not conceived
in the womb, nor is formed and produced at the time that the flesh is moulded, but is
impressed from without upon the infant before his complete vitality, but after the process
of parturition. They say, moreover, that the human seed having been duly deposited ex
concubiter in the womb, and having been by natural impulse quickened, it becomes condensed
into the mere substance of the flesh, which is in due time born, warm from the furnace of
the womb, and then released from its heat. (This flesh) resembles the case of hot iron,
which is in that state plunged into cold water; for, being smitten by the cold air (into
which it is born), it at once receives the power of animation, and utters vocal sound.
This view is entertained by the Stoics, along with ¦nesidemus, and occasionally by Plato
himself, when he tells us that the soul, being quite a separate formation, originating
elsewhere and externally to the womb, is inhaled when the new-born infant first draws
breath, and by and by exhaled with the man's latest breath.

2 We shall see whether this view of his is merely fictitious. Even the medical profession
has not lacked its Hicesius, to prove a traitor both to nature and his own calling. These
gentlemen, I suppose, were too modest to come to terms with women on the mysteries of
childbirth, so well known to the latter. But how much more is there for them to blush at,
when in the end they have the women to refute them, instead of commending them. Now, in
such a question as this, no one can be so useful a teacher, judge, or witness, as the sex
itself which is so intimately concerned. Give us your testimony, then, ye mothers, whether
yet pregnant, or after delivery (let barren women and men keep silence),-the truth of your
own nature is in question, the reality of your own suffering is the point to be decided.
(Tell us, then, ) whether you feel in the embryo within you any vital force other than
your own, with which your bowels tremble, your sides shake, your entire womb throbs, and
the burden which oppresses you constantly changes its position? Are these movements a joy
to you, and a positive removal of anxiety, as making you confident that your infant both
possesses vitality and enjoys it? Or, should his restlessness cease, your first fear would
be for him; and he would be aware of it within you, since he is disturbed at the novel
sound; and you would crave for injurious diet, or would even loathe your food-all on his
account;

3 and then you and he, (in the closeness of your sympathy, ) would share together your
common ailments-so far that with your contusions and bruises would he actually become
marked,-whilst within you, and even on the selfsame parts of the body, taking to himself
thus peremptorily the injuries of his mother! Now, whenever a livid hue and redness are
incidents of the blood, the blood will not be without the vital principle, or soul; or
when disease attacks the soul or vitality, (it becomes a proof of its real existence,
since) there is no disease where there is no soul or principle of life. Again, inasmuch as
sustenance by food, and the want thereof, growth and decay, fear and motion, are
conditions of the soul or life, he who experiences them must be alive. And, so, he at last
ceases to live, who ceases to experience them. And thus by and by infants are still-born;
but how so, unless they had life? For how could any die, who had not previously lived? But
sometimes by a cruel necessity, whilst yet in the womb, an infant is put to death, when
lying awry in the orifice of the womb he impedes parturition, and kills his mother, if he
is not to die himself. Accordingly, among surgeons' tools there is a certain instrument,
which is formed with a nicely-adjusted flexible frame for opening the uterus first of all,
and keeping it open;

4 it is further furnished with an annular blade, by means of which the limbs within the
womb are dissected with anxious but unfaltering care; its last appendage being a blunted
or covered hook, wherewith the entire f£tus is extracted by a violent delivery. There is
also (another instrument in the shape of) a copper needle or spike, by which the actual
death is managed in this furtive robbery of life: they give it, from its infanticide
function, the name of e0mbruosfa/kthj, the slayer of the infant, which was of course
alive. Such apparatus was possessed both by Hippocrates, and Asclepiades, and
Erasistratus, and Herophilus, that dissector of even adults, and the milder Soranus
himself, who all knew well enough that a living being had been conceived, and pitied this
most luckless infant state, which had first to be put to death, to escape being tortured
alive. Of the necessity of such harsh treatment I have no doubt even Hicesius was
convinced, although he imported their soul into infants after birth from the stroke of the
frigid air, because the very term for soul, forsooth, in Greek answered to such a
refrigeration! Well, then, have the barbarian and Roman nations received souls by some
other process, (I wonder; ) for they have called the soul by another name than yuxh/? How
many nations are there who commence life under the broiling sun of the torrid zone,
scorching their skin into its swarthy hue? Whence do they get their souls, with no frosty
air to help them?

5 I say not a word of those well-warmed bed-rooms, and all that apparatus of heat which
ladies in childbirth so greatly need, when a breath of cold air might endanger their life.
But in the very bath almost a babe will slip into life, and at once his cry is heard! if,
however, a good frosty air is to the soul so indispensable a treasure, then beyond the
German and the Scythian tribes, and the Alpine and the Argµan heights, nobody ought ever
to be born! But the fact really is, that population is greater within the temperate
regions of the East and the West, and men's minds are sharper; whilst there is not a
Sarmatian whose wits are not dull and humdrum. The minds of men, too, would grow keener by
reason of the cold, if their souls came into being amidst nipping frosts; for as the
substance is, so must be its active power. Now, after these preliminary statements, we may
also refer to the case of those who, having been cut out of their mother's womb, have
breathed and retained life-your Bacchuses and Scipios. If, however, there be any one who,
like Plato, supposes that two souls cannot, more than two bodies could, co-exist in the
same individual, I, on the contrary, could show him not merely the co-existence of two
souls in one person, as also of two bodies in the same womb, but likewise the combination
of many other things in natural connection with the soul-for instance, of demoniacal
possession;

6 and that not of one only, as in the case of Socrates' own demon; but of seven spirits as
in the case of the Magdalene; and of a legion in number, as in the Gadarene. Now one soul
is naturally more susceptible of conjunction with another soul, by reason of the identity
of their substance, than an evil spirit is, owing to their diverse natures. But when the
same philosopher, in the sixth book of The Laws, warns us to beware lest a vitiation of
seed should infuse a soil into both body and soul from an illicit or debased concubinage,
I hardly know whether he is more inconsistent with himself in respect of one of his
previous statements, or of that which he had just made. For he here shows us that the soul
proceeds from human seed (and warns us to be on our guard about it), not, (as he had said
before, ) from the first breath of the new-born child. Pray, whence comes it that from
similarity of soul we resemble our parents in disposition, according to the testimony of
Cleanthes, if we are not produced from this seed of the soul? Why, too, used the old
astrologers to cast a man's nativity from his first conception, if his soul also draws not
its origin from that moment? To this (nativity) likewise belongs the inbreathing of the
soul, whatever that is.

CHAPTER XXVI.-SCRIPTURE ALONE OFFERS CLEAR KNOWLEDGE ON THE QUESTIONS WE HAVE BEEN CONTROVERTING.

1 Now there is no end to the uncertainty and irregularity of human opinion, until we come
to the limits which God has prescribed. I shall at last retire within our own lines and
firmly hold my ground there, for the purpose of proving to the Christian (the soundness
of) my answers to the Philosophers and the Physicians. Brother (in Christ), on your own
foundation build up your faith. Consider the wombs of the most sainted women instinct with
the life within them, and their babes which not only breathed therein, but were even
endowed with prophetic intuition. See how the bowels of Rebecca are disquieted, though her
child-bearing is as yet remote, and there is no impulse of (vital) air. Behold, a twin
offspring chafes within the mother's womb, although she has no sign as yet of the twofold
nation. Possibly we might have regarded as a prodigy the contention of this infant
progeny, which struggled before it lived, which had animosity previous to animation, if it
had simply disturbed the mother by its restlessness within her. But when her womb opens,
and the number of her offspring is seen, and their presaged condition known, we have
presented to us a proof not merely of the (separate) souls of the infants, but of their
hostile struggles too. He who was the first to be born was threatened with detention by
him who was anticipated in birth, who was not yet fully brought forth, but whose hand only
had been born.

2 Now if he actually imbibed life, and received his soul, in Platonic style, at his first
breath; or else, after the Stoic rule, had the earliest taste of animation on touching the
frosty air; what was the other about, who was so eagerly looked for, who was still
detained within the womb, and was trying to detain (the other) outside? I suppose he had
not yet breathed when he seized his brother's heel; and was still warm with his mother's
warmth, when he so strongly wished to be the first to quit the womb. What an infant! so
emulous, so strong, and already so contentious; and all this, I suppose, because even now
full of life! Consider, again, those extraordinary conceptions, which were more wonderful
still, of the barren woman and the virgin: these women would only be able to produce
imperfect offspring against the course of nature, from the very fact that one of them was
too old to bear seed, and the other was pure from the contact of man. If there was to be
bearing at all in the case, it was only fitting that they should be born without a soul,
(as the philosopher would say, ) who had been irregularly conceived. However, even these
have life, each of them in his mother's womb. Elizabeth exults with joy, (for) John had
leaped in her womb; Mary magnifies the Lord, (for) Christ had instigated her within.

3 The mothers recognise each their own offspring, being moreover each recognised by their
infants, which were therefore of course alive, and were not souls merely, but spirits
also. Accordingly you read the word of God which was spoken to Jeremiah, "Before I formed
thee in the belly, I knew thee. Since God forms us in the womb, He also breathes upon us,
as He also did at the first creation, when "the Lord God formed man, and breathed into him
the breath of life. Nor could God have known man in the womb, except in his entire nature:
"And before thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee. Well, was it then a dead
body at that early stage? Certainly not. For "God is not the God of the dead, but of the
living."

CHAPTER XXVII.-SOUL AND BODY CONCEIVED, FORMED AND PERFECTED IN ELEMENT SIMULTANEOUSLY.

1 How, then, is a living being conceived? Is the substance of both body and soul formed
together at one and the same time? Or does one of them precede the other in natural
formation? We indeed maintain that both are conceived, and formed, and perfectly
simultaneously, as well as born together; and that not a moment's interval occurs in their
conception, so that, a prior place can be assigned to either. Judge, in fact, of the
incidents of man's earliest existence by those which occur to him at the very last. As
death is defined to be nothing else than the separation of body and soul, life, which is
the opposite of death, is susceptible of no other definition than the conjunction of body
and soul. If the severance happens at one and the same time to both substances by means of
death, so the law of their combination ought to assure us that it occurs simultaneously to
the two substances by means of life. Now we allow that life begins with conception,
because we contend that the soul also begins from conception; life taking its commencement
at the same moment and place that the soul does. Thus, then, the processes which act
together to produce separation by death, also combine in a simultaneous action to produce
life. If we assign priority to (the formation of) one of the natures, and a subsequent
time to the other, we shall have further to determine the precise times of the semination,
according to the condition and rank of each.

2 And that being so, what time shall we give to the seed of the body, and what to the seed
of the soul? Besides, if different periods are to be assigned to the seminations then
arising out of this difference in time, we shall also have different substances. For
although we shall allow that there are two kinds of seed-that of the body and that of the
soul-we still declare that they are inseparable, and therefore contemporaneous and
simultaneous in origin. Now let no one take offence or feel ashamed at an interpretation
of the processes of nature which is rendered necessary (by the defence of the truth).
Nature should be to us an object of reverence, not of blushes. It is lust, not natural
usage, which has brought shame on the intercourse of the sexes. It is the excess, not the
normal state, which is immodest and unchaste: the normal condition has received a blessing
from God, and is blest by Him: "Be fruitful, and multiply, (and replenish the earth.)"
Excess, however, has He cursed, in adulteries, and wantonness, and chambering. Well, now,
in this usual function of the sexes which brings together the male and the female in their
common intercourse, we know that both the soul and the flesh discharge a duty together:
the soul supplies desire, the flesh contributes the gratification of it; the soul
furnishes the instigation, the flesh affords the realization.

3 The entire man being excited by the one effort of both natures, his seminal substance is
discharged, deriving its fluidity from the body, and its warmth from the soul. Now if the
soul in Greek is a word which is synonymous with cold, how does it come to pass that the
body grows cold after the soul has quitted it? Indeed (if I run the risk of offending
modesty even, in my desire to prove the truth), I cannot help asking, whether we do not,
in that very heat of extreme gratification when the generative fluid is ejected, feel that
somewhat of our soul has gone from us? And do we not experience a faintness and
prostration along with a dimness of sight? This, then, must be the soul-producing seed,
which arises at once from the out-drip of the soul, just as that fluid is the body-
producing seed which proceeds from the drainage of the flesh. Most true are the examples
of the first creation. Adam's flesh was formed of clay. Now what is clay bug an excellent
moisture, whence should spring the generating fluid? From the breath of God first came the
soul. But what else is the breath of God than the vapour of the spirit, whence should
spring that which we breathe out through the generative fluid?

4 Forasmuch, therefore, as these two different and separate substances, the clay and the
breath, combined at the first creation in forming the individual man, they then both
amalgamated and mixed their proper seminal rudiments in one, and ever afterwards
communicated to the human race the normal mode of its propagation, so that even now the
two substances, although diverse from each other, flow forth simultaneously in a united
channel; and finding their way together into their appointed seed-plot, they fertilize
with their combined vigour the human fruit out of their respective natures. And inherent
in this human product is his own seed, according to the process which has been ordained
for every creature endowed with the functions of generation. Accordingly from the one
(primeval) man comes the entire outflow and redundance of men's souls-nature proving
herself true to the commandment of God, "Be fruitful, and multiply. For in the very
preamble of this one production, "Let us make man," man's whole posterity was declared and
described in a plural phrase, "Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea," etc. And
no wonder: in the seed lies the promise and earnest of the crop.

CHAPTER XXVIII.-THE PYTHAGOREAN DOCTRINE OF TRANSMIGRATION SKETCHED AND CENSURED.

1 What, then, by this time means that ancient saying, mentioned by Plato, concerning the
reciprocal migration of souls; how they remove hence and go thither, and then return
hither and pass through life, and then again depart from this life, and afterwards become
alive from the dead? Some will have it that this is a saying of Pythagoras; Albinus
supposes it to be a divine announcement, perhaps of the Egyptian Mercury. But there is no
divine saying, except of the one true God, by whom the prophets, and the apostles, and
Christ Himself declared their grand message. More ancient than Saturn a good deal (by some
nine hundred years or so), and even than his grandchildren, is Moses; and he is certainly
much more divine, recounting and tracing out, as he does, the course of the human race
from the very beginning of the world, indicating the several births (of the fathers of
mankind) according to their names and their epochs; giving thus plain proof of the divine
character of his work, from its divine authority and word. If, indeed, the sophist of
Samos is Plato's authority for the eternally revolving migration of souls out of a
constant alternation of the dead and the living states, then no doubt did the famous
Pythagoras, however excellent in other respects, for the purpose of fabricating such an
opinion as this, rely on a falsehood, which was not only shameful, but also hazardous.
Consider it, you that are ignorant of it, and believe with us.

2 He feigns death, he conceals himself underground, he condemns himself to that endurance
for some seven years, during which he learns from his mother, who was his sole accomplice
and attendant, what he was to relate for the belief of the world concerning those who had
died since his seclusion; and when he thought that he had succeeded in reducing the frame
of his body to the horrid appearance of a dead old man, he comes forth from the place of
his concealment and deceit, and pretends to have returned from the dead. Who would
hesitate about believing that the man, whom he had supposed to have died, was come back
again to life? especially after hearing from him facts about the recently dead, which he
evidently could only have discovered in Hades itself! Thus, that men are made alive after
death, is rather an old statement. But what if it be rather a recent one also? The truth
does not desire antiquity, nor does falsehood shun novelty. This notable saying I hold to
be plainly false, though ennobled by antiquity. How should that not be false, which
depends for its evidence on a falsehood?-How can I help believing Pythagoras to be a
deceiver, who practises deceit to win my belief? How will he convince me that, before he
was Pythagoras, he had been Aethalides, and Euphorbus, and the fisherman Pyrrhus, and
Hermotimus, to make us believe that men live again after they have died, when he actually
perjured himself afterwards as Pythagoras.

3 In proportion as it would be easier for me to believe that he had returned once to life
in his own person, than so often in the person of this man and that, in the same degree
has he deceived me in things which are too hard to be credited, because he has played the
impostor in matters which might be readily believed. Well, but he recognised the shield of
Euphorbus, which had been formerly consecrated at Delphi, and claimed it as his own, and
proved his claim by signs which were generally unknown. Now, look again at his
subterranean lurking-place, and believe his story, if you can. For, as to the man who
devised such a tricksty scheme, to the injury of his health, fraudulently wasting his
life, and torturing it for seven years underground, amidst hunger, idleness, and darkness-
with a profound disgust for the mighty sky-what reckless effort would he not make, what
curious contrivance would he not attempt, to arrive at the discovery of this famous
shield? Suppose now, that he found it in some of those hidden researches; suppose that he
recovered some slight breath of report which survived the now obsolete tradition; suppose
him to have come to the knowledge of it by an inspection which he had bribed the beadle to
let him have,-we know very well what are the resources of magic skill for exploring hidden
secrets: there are the catabolic spirits, which floor their victims; and the paredral
spirits, which are ever at their side to haunt them;

4 and the pythonic spirits, which entrance them by their divination and ventriloquistic
arts. For was is not likely that Pherecydes also, the master of our Pythagoras, used to
divine, or I would rather say rave and dream, by such arts and contrivances as these?
Might not the self-same demon have been in him, who, whilst in Euphorbus, transacted deeds
of blood? But lastly, why is it that the man, who proved himself to have been Euphorbus by
the evidence of the shield, did not also recognise any of his former Trojan comrades? For
they, too, must by this time have recovered life, since men were rising again from the
dead:

CHAPTER XXIX.-THE PYTHAGOREAN DOCTRINE REFUTED BY ITS OWN FIRST PRINCIPLE, THAT LIVING MEN ARE FORMED FROM THE DEAD.

1 It is indeed, manifest that dead men are formed from living ones; but it does not follow
from that, that living men are formed from dead ones. For from the beginning the living
came first in the order of things, and therefore also from the beginning the dead came
afterwards in order. But these proceeded from no other source except from the living. The
living had their origin in any other source (you please) than in the dead; whilst the dead
had no source whence to derive their beginning, except from the living. If, then, from the
very first the living came not from the dead, why should they afterwards (be said to) come
from the dead? Had that original source, whatever it was, come to an end? Was the form or
law thereof a matter for regret? Then why was it preserved in the case of the dead? Does
it not follow that, because the dead came from the living at the first, therefore they
always came from the living? For either the law which obtained at the beginning must have
continued in both of its relations, or else it must have changed in both; so that, if it
had become necessary for the living afterwards to proceed from the dead, it would be
necessary, in like manner, for the dead also not to proceed from the living. For if a
faithful adherence to the institution was not meant to be perpetuated in each respect,
then contraries cannot in due alternation continue to be re-formed from contraries.

2 We, too, will on our side adduce against you certain contraries, of the born and the
unborn, of vision and blindness, of youth and old age, of wisdom and folly. Now it does
not follow that the unborn proceeds from the born, on the ground that a contrary issues
from a contrary; nor, again, that vision proceeds from blindness, because blindness
happens to vision; nor, again, that youth revives from old age, because after youth comes
the decrepitude of senility; nor that folly is born with its obtuseness from wisdom,
because wisdom may possibly be sometimes sharpened out of folly. Albinus has some fears
for his (master and friend) Plato in these points, and labours with much ingenuity to
distinguish different kinds of contraries; as if these instances did not as absolutely
partake of the nature of contrariety as those which are expounded by him to illustrate his
great master's principle-I mean, life and death. Nor is it, for the matter of that, true
that life is restored out of death, because it happens that death succeeds life.

CHAPTER XXX.-FURTHER REFUTATION OF THE PYTHAGOREAN THEORY. THE STATE OF CONTEMPORARY CIVILISATION.

1 But what must we say in reply to what follows? For, in the first place, if the living
come from the dead, just as the dead proceed from the living, then there must always
remain unchanged one and the selfsame number of mankind, even the number which originally
introduced (human) life. The living preceded the dead, afterwards the dead issued from the
living, and then again the living from the dead. Now, since this process was evermore
going on with the same persons, therefore they, issuing from the same, must always have
remained in number the same. For they who emerged (into life) could never have become more
nor fewer than they who disappeared (in death). We find, however, in the records of the
Antiquities of Man, that the human race has progressed with a gradual growth of
population, either occupying different portions of the earth as aborigines, or as nomad
tribes, or as exiles, or as conquerors-as the Scythians in Parthia, the Temenidµ in
Peloponnesus, the Athenians in Asia, the Phrygians in Italy, and the Ph£nicians in Africa;
or by the more ordinary methods ofmigration, which they call a9poiki/ai or colonies, for
the purpose of throwing off redundant population, disgorging into other abodes their
overcrowded masses. The aborigines remain still in their old settlements, and have also
enriched other districts with loans of even larger populations. Surely it is obvious
enough, if one looks at the whole world, that it is becoming daily better cultivated and
more fully peopled than anciently.

2 All places are now accessible, all are well known, all open to commerce; most pleasant
farms have obliterated all traces of what were once dreary and dangerous wastes;
cultivated fields have subdued forests; flocks and herds have expelled wild beasts; sandy
deserts are sown; rocks are planted; marshes are drained; and where once were hardly
solitary cottages, there are now large cities. No longer are (savage) islands dreaded, nor
their rocky shores feared; everywhere are houses, and inhabitants, and settled government,
and civilized life. What most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint), is our
teeming population: our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly supply us
from its natural elements; our wants grow more and more keen, and our complaints more
bitter in all mouths, whilst Nature fails in affording us her usual sustenance. In very
deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy
for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race; and yet, when the
hatchet has once felled large masses of men, the world has hitherto never once been
alarmed at the sight of a restitution of its dead coming back to life after their
millennial exile. But such a spectacle would have become quite obvious by the balance of
mortal loss and vital recovery, if it were true that the dead came back again to life.

3 Why, however, is it after a thousand years, and not at the moment, that this return from
death is to take place, when, supposing that the loss is not at once supplied, there must
be a risk of an utter extinction, as the failure precedes the compensation? Indeed, this
furlough of our present life would be quite disproportioned to the period of a thousand
years; so much briefer is it, and on that account so much more easily is its torch
extinguished than rekindled. Inasmuch, then, as the period which, on the hypothesis we
have discussed, ought to intervene, if the living are to be formed from the dead, has not
actually occurred, it will follow that we must not believe that men come back to life from
the dead (in the way surmised in this philosophy).

CHAPTER XXXI.-FURTHER EXPOSURE OF TRANSMIGRATION, ITS INEXTRICABLE EMBARRASSMENT.

1 Again, if this recovery of life from the dead take place at all, individuals must of
course resume their own individuality. Therefore the souls which animated each several
body must needs have returned separately to their several bodies. Now, whenever two, or
three, or five souls are re-enclosed (as they constantly are) in one womb, it will not
amount in such cases to life from the dead, because there is not the separate restitution
which individuals ought to have; although at this rate, (no doubt, ) the law of the
primeval creation is signally kept, by the production still of several souls out of only
one! Then, again, if souls depart at different ages of human life, how is it that they
come back again at one uniform age? For all men are imbued with an infant soul at their
birth. But how happens it that a man who dies in old age returns to life as an infant? If
the soul, whilst disembodied, decreases thus by retrogression of its age, how much more
reasonable would it be, that it should resume its life with a richer progress in all
attainments of life after the lapse of a thousand years! At all events, it should return
with the age it had attained at its death, that it might resume the precise life which it
had relinquished.

2 But even if, at this rate, they should reappear the same evermore in their revolving
cycles, it would be proper for them to bring back with them, if not the selfsame forms of
body, at least their original peculiarities of character, taste, and disposition, because
it would be hardly possible for them to be regarded as the same, if they were deficient in
those characteristics by means of which their identity should be proved. (You, however,
meet me with this question): How can you possibly know, you ask, whether all is not a
secret process? may not the work of a thousand years take from you the power of
recognition, since they return unknown to you? But I am quite certain that such is not the
case, for you yourself present Pythagoras to me as (the restored) Euphorbus. Now look at
Euphorbus: he was evidently possessed of a military and warlike soul, as is proved by the
very renown of the sacred shields. As for Pythagoras, however, he was such a recluse, and
so unwarlike, that he shrank from the military exploits of which Greece was then so full,
and preferred to devote himself, in the quiet retreat of Italy, to the study of geometry,
and astrology, and music-the very opposite to Euphorbus in taste and disposition. Then,
again, the Pyrrhus (whom he represented) spent his time in catching fish; but Pythagoras,
on the contrary, would never touch fish, abstaining from even the taste of them as from
animal food.

3 Moreover, ¦thalides and Hermotimus had included the bean amongst the common esculents at
meals, while Pythagoras taught his disciples not even to pass through a plot which was
cultivated with beans. I ask, then, how the same souls are resumed, which can offer no
proof of their identity, either by their disposition, or habits, or living? And now, after
all, (we find that) only four souls are mentioned as recovering life out of all the
multitudes of Greece. But limiting ourselves merely to Greece, as if no transmigrations of
souls and resumptions of bodies occurred, and that every day, in every nation, and amongst
all ages, ranks, and sexes, how is it that Pythagoras alone experiences these changes into
one personality and another? Why should not I too undergo them? Or if it be a privilege
monopolized by philosophers-and Greek philosophers only, as if Scythians and Indians had
no philosophers-how is it that Epicurus had no recollection that he had been once another
man, nor Chrysippus, nor Zeno, nor indeed Plato himself, whom we might perhaps have
supposed to have been Nestor, from his honeyed eloquence?

CHAPTER XXXII.-EMPEDOCLES INCREASED THE ABSURDITY OF PYTHAGORAS BY DEVELOPING THE POSTHUMOUS CHANGE OF MEN INTO VARIOUS ANIMALS.

1 But the fact is, Empedocles, who used to dream that he was a god, and on that account, I
suppose, disdained to have it thought that he had ever before been merely some hero,
declares in so many words: "I once was Thamnus, and a fish. Why not rather a melon, seeing
that he was such a fool; or a cameleon, for his inflated brag? It was, no doubt, as a fish
(and a queer one too! that he escaped the corruption of some obscure grave, when he
preferred being roasted by a plunge into ¦tna; after which accomplishment there was an end
for ever to his metenswma/twsij or putting himself into another body-(fit only now for) a
light dish after the roast-meat. At this point, therefore, we must likewise contend
against that still more monstrous presumption, that in the course of the transmigration
beasts pass from human beings, and human beings from beasts. Let (Empedocles') Thamnuses
alone. Our slight notice of them in passing will be quite enough: (to dwell on them longer
will inconvenience us, ) lest we should be obliged to nave recourse to raillery and
laughter instead of serious instruction. Now our position is this: that the human soul
cannot by any means at all be transferred to beasts, even when they are supposed to
originate, according to the philosophers, out of the substances of the elements. Now let
us suppose that the soul is either fire, or water, or blood, or spirit, or air, or light;

2 we must not forget that all the animals in their several kinds have properties which are
opposed to the respective elements. There are the cold animals which are opposed to fire-
water-snakes, lizards, salamanders, and what things soever are produced out of the rival
element of water. In like manner, those creatures are opposite to water which are in their
nature dry and sapless; indeed, locusts, butterflies, and chameleons rejoice in droughts.
So, again, such creatures are opposed to blood which have none of its purple hue, such as
snails, worms, and most of the fishy tribes. Then opposed to spirit are those creatures
which seem to have no respiration, being unfurnished with lungs and windpipes, such as
gnats, ants, moths, and minute things of this sort. Opposed, moreover, to air are those
creatures which always live under ground and under water, and never imbibe air-things of
which you are more acquainted with the existence than with the names. Then opposed to
light are those things which are either wholly blind, or possess eyes for the darkness
only, such as moles, bats, and owls. These examples (have I adduced), that I might
illustrate my subject from clear and palpable natures.

3 But even if I could take in my hand the "atoms" of Epicurus, or if my eye could see the
"numbers" of Pythagoras, or if my foot could stumble against the "ideas" of Plato, or if I
could lay hold of the "entelechies" of Aristotle, the chances would be, that even in these
(impalpable) classes I should find such animals as I must oppose to one another on the
ground of their contrariety. For I maintain that, of whichsoever of the before-mentioned
natures the human soul is composed, it would not have been possible for it to pass for new
forms into animals so contrary to each of the separate natures, and to bestow an origin by
its passage on those beings, from which it would have to be excluded and rejected rather
than to be admitted and received, by reason of that original contrariety which we have
supposed it to possess, and which commits the bodily substance receiving it to an
interminable strife; and then again by reason of the subsequent contrariety, which results
from the development inseparable from each several nature. Now it is on quite different
conditions that the soul of man has had assigned to it (in individual bodies ) its abode,
and aliment, and order, and sensation, and affection, and sexual intercourse, and
procreation of children; also (on different conditions has it, in individual bodies,
received especial) dispositions, as well as duties to fulfil, likings, dislikes, vices,
desires, pleasures, maladies, remedies-in short, its own modes of living, its own outlets
of death.

4 How, then, shall that (human) soul which cleaves to the earth, and is unable without
alarm to survey any great height, or any considerable depth, and which is also fatigued if
it mounts many steps, and is suffocated if it is submerged in a fish-pond,-(how, I say,
shall a soul which is beset with such weaknesses) mount up at some future stage into the
air in an eagle, or plunge into the sea in an eel? How, again, shall it, after being
nourished with generous and delicate as well as exquisite viands, feed deliberately on, I
will not say husks, but even on thorns, and the wild fare of bitter leaves, and beasts of
the dung-hill, and poisonous worms, if it has to migrate into a goat or into a quail?-nay,
it may be, feed on carrion, even on human corpses in some bear or lion? But how indeed
(shall it stoop to this), when it remembers its own (nature and dignity)? In the same way,
you may submit all other instances to this criterion of incongruity, and so save us from
lingering over the distinct consideration of each of them in turn. Now, whatever may be
the measure and whatever the mode of the human soul, (the question is forced upon us, )
what it will do in far larger animals, or in very diminutive ones? It must needs be, that
every individual body of whatever size is filled up by the soul, and that the soul is
entirely covered by the body.

5 How, therefore, shall a man's soul fill an elephant? How, likewise, shall it be
contracted within a gnat? If it be so enormously extended or contracted, it will no doubt
be exposed to peril. And this induces me to ask another question: If the soul is by no
means capable of this kind of migration into animals, which are not fitted for its
reception, either by the habits of their bodies or the other laws of their being, will it
then undergo a change according to the properties of various animals, and be adapted to
their life, notwithstanding its contrariety to human life-having, in fact, become contrary
to its human self by reason of its utter change? Now the truth is, if it undergoes such a
transformation, and loses what it once was, the human soul will not be what it was; and if
it ceases to be its former self, the metensomatosis, or adaptation of some other body,
comes to nought, and is not of course to be ascribed to the soul which will cease to
exist, on the supposition of its complete change. For only then can a soul be said to
experience this process of the metensomatosis, when it undergoes it by remaining unchanged
in its own (primitive) condition. Since, therefore, the soul does not admit of change,
lest it should cease to retain its identity;

6 and yet is unable to remain unchanged in its original state, because it fails then to
receive contrary (bodies),-I still want to know some credible reason to justify such a
transformation as we are discussing. For although some men are compared to the beasts
because of their character, disposition, and pursuits (since even God says, "Man is like
the beasts that perish" ), it does not on this account follow that rapacious persons
become kites, lewd persons dogs, ill-tempered ones panthers, good men sheep, talkative
ones swallows, and chaste men doves, as if the selfsame substance of the soul everywhere
repeated its own nature in the properties of the animals (into which it passed). Besides,
a substance is one thing, and the nature of that substance is another thing; inasmuch as
the substance is the special property of one given thing, whereas the nature thereof may
possibly belong to many things. Take an example or two. A stone or a piece of iron is the
substance: the hardness of the stone and the iron is the nature of the substance. Their
hardness combines objects by a common quality; their substances keep them separate. Then,
again, there is softness in wool, and softness in a feather: their natural qualities are
alike, (and put them on a par; ) their substantial qualities are not alike, (and keep them
distinct. Thus, if a man likewise be designated a wild beast or a harmless one, there is
not for all that an identity of soul.

7 Now the similarity of nature is even then observed, when dissimilarity of substance is
most conspicuous: for, by the very fact of your judging that a man resembles a beast, you
confess that their soul is not identical; for you say that they resemble each other, not
that they are the same. This is also the meaning of the word of God (which we have just
quoted): it likens man to the beasts in nature, but not in substance. Besides, God would
not have actually made such a comment as this concerning man, if He had known him to be in
substance only bestial

CHAPTER XXXIII.-THE JUDICIAL RETRIBUTION OF THESE MIGRATIONS REFUTED WITH RAILLERY.

1 Forasmuch as this doctrine is vindicated even on the principle of judicial retribution,
on the pretence that the souls of men obtain as their partners the kind of animals which
are suited to their life and deserts,-as if they ought to be, according to their several
characters, either slain in criminals destined to execution, or reduced to hard work in
menials, or fatigued and wearied in labourers, or foully disgraced in the unclean; or,
again, on the same principle, reserved for honour, and love, and care, and attentive
regard in characters most eminent in, rank and virtue, usefulness, and tender
sensibility,-I must here also remark, that if souls undergo a transformation, they will
actually not be able to accomplish and experience the destinies which they shall deserve;
and the aim and purpose of judicial recompense will be brought to nought, as there will be
wanting the sense and consciousness of merit and retribution. And there must be this want
of consciousness, if souls lose their condition; and there must ensue this loss, if they
do not continue in one stay. But even if they should have permanency enough to remain
unchanged until the judgment,-a point which Mercurius ¦gyptius recognised, when he said
that the soul, after its separation from the body, was not dissipated back into the soul
of the universe, but retained permanently its distinct individuality, "in order that it
might render," to use his own words, "an account to the Father of those things which it
has done in the body;

2 " -(even supposing all this, I say, ) I still want to examine the justice, the
solemnity, the majesty, and the dignity of this reputed judgment of God, and see whether
human judgment has not too elevated a throne in it-exaggerated in both directions, in its
office both of punishments and rewards, too severe in dealing out its vengeance, and too
lavish in bestowing its favour. What do you suppose will become of the soul of the
murderer? (It will animate), I suppose, some cattle destined for the slaughter-house and
the shambles, that it may itself be killed, even as it has killed; and be itself flayed,
since it has fleeced others; and be itself used for food, since it has cast to the wild
beasts the ill-fated victims whom it once slew in woods and lonely roads. 3 Now, if such
be the judicial retribution which it is to receive, is not such a soul likely to find more
of consolation than of punishment, in the fact that it receives its coup de grGce from the
hands of most expert practitioners-is buried with condiments served in the most piquant
styles of an Apicius or a Lurco, is introduced to the tables of your exquisite Ciceros, is
brought up on the most splendid dishes of a Sylla, finds its obsequies in a banquet, is
devoured by respectable (mouths) on a par with itself, rather than by kites and wolves, so
that all may see how it has got a man's body for its tomb, and has risen again after
returning to its own kindred race-exulting in the face of human judgments, if it has
experienced them? For these barbarous sentences of death consign to various wild beasts,
which are selected and trained even against their nature for their horrible office the
criminal who has committed murder, even while yet alive; nay, hindered from too easily
dying, by a contrivance which retards his last moment in order to aggravate his
punishment. But even if his soul should have anticipated by its departure the sword's last
stroke, his body at all events must not escape the weapon: retribution for his own crime
is yet exacted by stabbing his throat and stomach, and piercing his side. After that he is
flung into the fire, that his very grave may be cheated. In no other way, indeed, is a
sepulture allowed him.

4 Not that any great care, after all, is bestowed on his pyre, so that other animals light
upon his remains. At any rate, no mercy is shown to his bones, no indulgence to his ashes,
which must be punished with exposure and nakedness. The vengeance which is inflicted among
men upon the homicide is really as great as that which is imposed by nature. Who would not
prefer the justice of the world, which, as the apostle himself testifies, "beareth not the
sword in vain," and which is an institute of religion when it severely avenges in defence
of human life? When we contemplate, too, the penalties awarded to other crimes-gibbets,
and holocausts, and sacks, and harpoons, and precipices-who would not think it better to
receive his sentence in the courts of Pythagoras and Empedocles? For even the wretches
whom they will send into the bodies of asses and mules to be punished by drudgery and
slavery, how will they congratulate themselves on the mild labour of the mill and the
water-wheel, when they recollect the mines, and the convict-gangs, and the public works,
and even the prisons and black-holes, terrible in their idle, do-nothing routine? Then,
again, in the case of those who, after a course of integrity, have surrendered their life
to the Judge, I likewise look for rewards, but I rather discover punishments. To be sure,
it must be a handsome gain for good men to be restored to life in any animals whatsoever!
Homer, so dreamt Ennius, remembered that he was once a peacock;

5 however, I cannot for my part believe poets, even when wide awake. A peacock, no doubt,
is a very pretty bird, pluming itself, at will, on its splendid feathers; Jut then its
wings do not make amends for its voice, which is harsh and unpleasant; and there is
nothing that poets like better than a good song. His transformation, therefore, into a
peacock was to Homer a penalty, not an honour. The world's remuneration will bring him a
much greater joy, when it lauds him as the father of the liberal sciences; and he will
prefer the ornaments of his fame to the graces of his tail! But never mind! let poets
migrate into peacocks, or into swans, if you like, especially as swans have a respectable
voice: in what animal will you invest that righteous hero ¦acus? In what beast will you
clothe the chaste and excellent Dido? What bird shall fall to the lot of Patience? what
animal to the lot of Holiness? what fish to that of Innocence? Now all creatures are the
servants of man; all are his subjects, all his dependants. If by and by he is to become
one of these creatures, he is by such a change debased and degraded he to whom, for his
virtues, images, statues, and titles are freely awarded as public honours and
distinguished privileges, he to Whom the senate and the people vote even sacrifices! Oh,
what judicial sentences for gods to pronounce, as men's recompense after death! They are
more mendacious than any human judgments;

6 they are contemptible as punishments, disgusting as rewards; such as the worst of men
could never fear, nor the best desire; such indeed, as criminals will aspire to, rather
than saints,-the former, that they may escape more speedily the world's stern
sentence,-the latter that they may more tardily incur it. How well, (forsooth), O ye
philosophers do you teach us, and how usefully do you advise us, that after death rewards
and punishments fall with lighter weight! whereas, if any judgment awaits souls at all, it
ought rather to be supposed that it will be heavier at the conclusion of life than in the
conduct thereof, since nothing is more complete than that which comes at the very last-
nothing, moreover, is more complete than that which is especially divine. Accordingly,
God's judgment will be more full and complete, because it will be pronounced at the very
last, in an eternal irrevocable sentence, both of punishment and of consolation, (on men
whose) souls are not to transmigrate into beasts, but are to return into their own proper
bodies. And all this once for all, and on "that day, too, of which the Father only
knoweth; " (only knoweth, ) in order that by her trembling expectation faith may make full
trial of her anxious sincerity, keeping her gaze ever fixed on that day, in her perpetual
ignorance of it, daily fearing that for which she yet daily hopes.

CHAPTER XXXIV.-THESE VAGARIES STIMULATED SOME PROFANE CORRUPTIONS OF CHRISTIANITY. THE PROFANITY OF SIMON MAGUS CONDEMNED.

1 No tenet, indeed, under cover of any heresy has as yet burst upon us, embodying any such
extravagant fiction as that the souls of human beings pass into the bodies of wild beasts;
but yet we have deemed it necessary to attack and refute this conceit, as a consistent
sequel to the preceding opinions, in order that Homer in the peacock might be got rid of
as effectually as Pythagoras in Euphorbus; and in order that, by the demolition of the
metempsychosis and metensomatosis by the same blow, the Found might be cut away which has
furnished no inconsiderable support to our heretics. There is the (infamous) Simon of
Samaria in the Acts of the Apostles, who chaffered for the Holy Ghost: after his
condemnation by Him, and a vain remorse that he and his money must perish together, he
applied his energies to the destruction of the truth, as if to console himself with
revenge. Besides the support with which his own magic arts furnished him, he had recourse
to imposture, and purchased a Tyrian woman of the name of Helen out of a brothel, with the
same money which he had offered for the Holy Spirit,-a traffic worthy of the wretched man.
He actually reigned himself to be the Supreme Father, and further pretended that the woman
was his own primary conception, wherewith he had purposed the creation of the angels and
the archangels;

2 that after she was possessed of this purpose she sprang forth from the Father and
descended to the lower spaces, and there anticipating the Father's design had produced the
angelic powers, which knew nothing of the Father, the Creator of this world; that she was
detained a prisoner by these from a (rebellious) motive very like her own, lest after her
departure from them they should appear to be the offspring of another being; and that,
after being on this account exposed to every insult, to prevent her leaving them anywhere
after her dishonour, she was degraded even to the form of man, to be confined, as it were,
in the bonds of the flesh. Having during many ages wallowed about in one female shape and
another, she became the notorious Helen who was so ruinous to Priam, and afterwards to the
eyes of Stesichorus, whom, she blinded in revenge for his lampoons, and then restored to
sight to reward him for his eulogies. After wandering about in this way from body to body,
she, in her final disgrace, turned out a viler Helen still as a professional prostitute.
This wench, therefore, was the lost sheep, upon whom the Supreme Father, even Simon,
descended, who, after he had recovered her and brought her back-whether on his shoulders
or loins I cannot tell-cast an eye on the salvation of man, in order to gratify his spleen
by liberating them from the angelic powers. Moreover, to deceive these he also himself
assumed a visible shape;

3 and reigning the appearance of a man amongst men, he acted the part of the Son in Judea,
and of the Father in Samaria. O hapless Helen, what a hard fate is yours between the poets
and the heretics, who have blackened your fame sometimes with adultery, sometimes with
prostitution! Only her rescue from Troy is a more glorious affair than her extrication
from the brothel. There were a thousand ships to remove her from Troy; a thousand pence
were probably more than enough to withdraw her from the stews. Fie on you, Simon, to be so
tardy in seeking her out, and so inconstant in ransoming her! How different from Menelaus!
As soon as he has lost her, he goes in pursuit of her; she is no sooner ravished than he
begins his search; after a ten years' conflict he boldly rescues her: there is no lurking,
no deceiving, no cavilling. I am really afraid that he was a much better "Father," who
laboured so much more vigilantly, bravely, and perseveringly, about the recovery of his
Helen.

CHAPTER XXXV.-THE OPINIONS OF CARPOCRATES, ANOTHER OFFSET FROM THE PYTHAGOREAN DOGMAS, STATED AND CONFUTED.

1 However, it is not for you alone, (Simon), that the transmigration philosophy has
fabricated this story. Carpocrates also makes equally good use of it, who was a magician
and a fornicator like yourself, only he had not a Helen. And why should he not? since he
asserted that souls are reinvested with bodies, in order to ensure the overthrow by all
means of divine and human truth. For, (according to his miserable doctrine, ) this life
became consummated to no man until all those blemishes which are held to disfigure it have
been fully displayed in its conduct; because there is nothing which is accounted evil by
nature, but simply as men think of it. The transmigration of human souls, therefore, into
any kind of heterogeneous bodies, he thought by all means indispensable, whenever any
depravity whatever had not been fully perpetrated in the early stage of life's passage.
Evil deeds (one may be sure) appertain to life. Moreover, as often as the soul has fallen
short as a defaulter in sin, it has to be recalled to existence, until it "pays the utmost
farthing," thrust out from time to time into the prison of the body. To this effect does
he tamper with the whole of that allegory of the Lord which is extremely clear and simple
in its meaning, and ought to be from the first understood in its plain and natural sense.

2 Thus our "adversary" (therein mentioned ) is the heathen man, who is walking with us
along the same road of life which is common to him and ourselves. Now "we must needs go
out of the world," if it be not allowed us to have conversation with them. He bids us,
therefore, show a kindly disposition to such a man. "Love your enemies," says He, "pray
for them that curse you," lest such a man in any transaction of business be irritated by
any unjust conduct of yours, and "deliver thee to the judge" of his own (nation ), and you
be thrown into prison, and be detained in its close and narrow cell until you have
liquidated all your debt against him. Then, again, should you be disposed to apply the
term "adversary" to the devil, you are advised by the (Lord's) injunction, while you are
in the way with him," to make even with him such a compact as may be deemed compatible
with the requirements of your true faith. Now the compact you have made respecting him is
to renounce him, and his pomp, and his angels. Such is your agreement in this matter. Now
the friendly understanding you will have to carry out must arise from your observance of
the compact:

3 you must never think of getting back any of the things which you have abjured, and have
restored to him, lest he should summon you as a fraudulent man, and a transgressor of your
agreement, before God the Judge (for in this light do we read of him, in another passage,
as "the accuser of the brethren," or saints, where reference is made to the actual
practice of legal prosecution); and lest this Judge deliver you over to the angel who is
to execute the sentence, and he commit you to the prison of hell, out of which there will
be no dismissal until the smallest even of your delinquencies be paid off in the period
before the resurrection. What can be a more fitting sense than this? What a truer
interpretation? If, however, according to Carpocrates, the soul is bound to the commission
of all sorts of crime and evil conduct, what must we from his system understand to be its
"adversary" and foe? I suppose it must be that better mind which shall compel it by force
to the performance of some act of virtue, that it may be driven from body to body, until
it be found in none a debtor to the claims of a virtuous life. This means, that a good
tree is known by its bad fruit-in other words, that the doctrine of truth is understood
from the worst possible precepts.

4 I apprehend that heretics of this school seize with especial avidity the example of
Elias, whom they assume to have been so reproduced in John (the Baptist) as to make our
Lord's statement sponsor for their theory of transmigration, when He said, "Elias is come
already, and they knew him not; " and again, in another passage, "And if ye will receive
it, this is Elias, which was for to come. Well, then, was it really in a Pythagorean sense
that the Jews approached John with the inquiry, "Art thou Elias? " and not rather in the
sense of the divine prediction, "Behold, I will send you Elijah" the Tisbite? The fact,
however, is, that their metempsychosis, or transmigration theory, signifies the recall of
the soul which had died long before, and its return to some other body. But Elias is to
come again, not after quitting life (in the way of dying), but after his translation (or
removal without dying); not for the purpose of being restored to the body, from which he
had not departed, but for the purpose of revisiting the world from which he was
translated; not by way of resuming a life which he had laid aside, but of fulfilling
prophecy,-really and truly the same man, both in respect of his name and designation, as
well as of his unchanged humanity. How, therefore could John be Elias? You have your
answer in the angel's announcement:

5 "And he shall go before the people," says he, "in the spirit and power of Elias"-not
(observe) in his soul and his body. These substances are, in fact, the natural property of
each individual; whilst "the spirit and power" are bestowed as external gifts by the grace
of God and so may be transferred to another person according to the purpose and will of
the Almighty, as was anciently the case with respect to the spirit of Moses.

CHAPTER XXXVI.-THE MAIN POINTS OF OUR AUTHOR'S SUBJECT. ON THE SEXES OF THE HUMAN RACE.

1 For the discussion of these questions we abandoned, if I remember rightly, ground to
which we must now return. We had established the position that the soul is seminally
placed in man, and by human agency, and that its seed from the very beginning is uniform,
as is that of the soul also, to the race of man; (and this we settled) owing to the rival
opinions of the philosophers and the heretics, and that ancient saying mentioned by Plato
(to which we referred above). We now pursue in their order the points which follow from
them. The soul, being sown in the womb at the same time as the body, receives likewise
along with it its sex; and this indeed so simultaneously, that neither of the two
substances can be alone regarded as the cause of the sex. Now, if in the semination of
these substances any interval were admissible in their conception, in such wise that
either the flesh or the soul should be the first to be conceived, one might then ascribe
an especial sex to one of the substances, owing to the difference in the time of the
impregnations, so that either the flesh would impress its sex upon the soul, or the soul
upon the sex; even as Apelles (the heretic, not the painter ) gives the priority over
their bodies to the souls of men and women, as he had been taught by Philumena, and in
consequence makes the flesh, as the later, receive its sex from the soul.

2 They also who make the soul supervene after birth on the flesh predetermine, of course,
the sex of the previously formed soul to be male or female, according to (the sex of) the
flesh. But the truth is, the seminations of the two substances are inseparable in point of
time, and their effusion is also one and the same, in consequence of which a community of
gender is secured to them; so that the course of nature, whatever that be, shall draw the
line (for the distinct sexes). Certainly in this view we have an attestation of the method
of the first two formations, when the male was moulded and tempered in a completer way,
for Adam was first formed; and the woman came far behind him, for Eve was the later
formed. So that her flesh was for a long time without specific form (such as she
afterwards assumed when taken out of Adam's side); but she was even then herself a living
being, because I should regard her at that time in soul as even a portion of Adam.
Besides, God's afflatus would have animated her too, if there had not been in the woman a
transmission from Adam of his soul also as well as of his flesh.


A TREATISE ON THE SOUL
======================

A TREATISE ON THE SOUL continued

CHAPTER XXXVII.-ON THE FORMATION AND STATE OF THE EMBRYO. ITS RELATION WITH THE SUBJECT OF THIS TREATISE.

1 Now the entire process of sowing, forming, and completing the human embryo in the womb
is no doubt regulated by some power, which ministers herein to the will of God, whatever
may be the method which it is appointed to employ. Even the superstition of Rome, by
carefully attending to these points, imagined the goddess Alemona to nourish the f£tus in
the womb; as well as (the goddesses) Nona and Decima, called after the most critical
months of gestation; and Partula, to manage and direct parturition; and Lucina, to bring
the child to the birth and light of day. We, on our part, believe the angels to officiate
herein for God. The embryo therefore becomes a human being in the womb from the moment
that its form is completed. The law of Moses, indeed, punishes with due penalties the man
who shall cause abortion, inasmuch as there exists already the rudiment of a human being,
which has imputed to it even now the condition of life and death, since it is already
liable to the issues of both, although, by living still in the mother, it for the most
part shares its own state with the mother. I must also say something about the period of
the soul's birth, that I may omit nothing incidental in the whole process. A mature and
regular birth takes place, as a general rule, at the commencement of the tenth month.

2 They who theorize respecting numbers, honour the number ten as the parent of all the
others, and as imparting perfection to the human nativity. For my own part, I prefer
viewing this measure of time in reference to God, as if implying that the ten months
rather initiated man into the ten commandments; so that the numerical estimate of the time
needed to consummate our natural birth should correspond to the numerical classification
of the rules of our regenerate life. But inasmuch as birth is also completed with the
seventh month, I more readily recognize in this number than in the eighth the honour of a
numerical agreement with the sabbatical period; so that the month in which God's image is
sometimes produced in a human birth, shall in its number tally with the day on which God's
creation was completed and hallowed. Human nativity has sometimes been allowed to be
premature, and yet to occur in fit and perfect accordance with an hebdomad sevenfold
number, as an auspice of our resurrection, and rest, and kingdom. The ogdoad, or eightfold
number, therefore, is not concerned in our formation; for in the time it represents there
will be no more marriage. We have already demonstrated the conjunction of the body and the
soul, from the concretion of their very seminations to the complete formation of the
f£tus. We now maintain their conjunction likewise from the birth onwards;

3 in the first place, because they both grow together, only each in a different manner
suited to the diversity of their nature-the flesh in magnitude, the soul in intelligence-
the flesh in material condition, the soul in sensibility. We are, however, forbidden to
suppose that the soul increases in substance, lest it should be said also to be capable of
diminution in substance, and so its extinction even should be believed to be possible; but
its inherent power, in which are contained all its natural peculiarities, as originally
implanted in its being, is gradually developed along with the flesh, without impairing the
germinal basis of the substance, which it received when breathed at first into man. Take a
certain quantity of gold or of silver-a rough mass as yet: it has indeed a compact
condition, and one that is more compressed at the moment than it will be; yet it contains
within its contour what is throughout a mass of gold or of silver. When this mass is
afterwards extended by beating it into leaf, it becomes larger than it was before by the
elongation of the original mass, but not by any addition thereto, because it is extended
in space, not increased in bulk; although in a way it is even increased when it is
extended: for it may be increased in form, but not in state.

4 Then, again, the sheen of the gold or the silver, which when the metal was any in block
was Inherent in it no doubt really, but yet only obscurely, shines out in developed
lustre. Afterwards various modifications of shape accrue, according to the feasibility in
the material which makes it yield to the manipulation of the artisan, who yet adds nothing
to the condition of the mass but its configuration. In like manner, the growth and
developments of the soul are to be estimated, not as enlarging its substance, but as
calling forth Its powers.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.-ON THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. ITS MATURITY COINCIDENT WITH THE MATURITY OF THE FLESH IN MAN.

1 Now we have already laid down the principle, that all the natural properties of the soul
which relate to sense and intelligence are inherent in its very substance, and spring from
its native constitution, but that they advance by a gradual growth through the stages of
life and develope themselves in different ways by accidental circumstances, according to
men's means and arts, their manners and customs their local situations, and the influences
of the Supreme Powers; but in pursuance of that aspect of the association of body and soul
which We have now to consider, we maintain that the puberty of the soul coincides with
that of the body, and that they attain both together to this full growth at about the
fourteenth year of life, speaking generally,-the former by the suggestion of the senses,
and the latter by the growth of the bodily members; and (we fix on this age) not because,
as Asclepiades supposes, reflection then begins, nor because the civil laws date the
commencement of the real business of life from this period, but because this was the
appointed order from the very first. For as Adam and Eve felt that they must cover their
nakedness after their knowledge of good and evil so we profess to have the same
discernment of good and evil from the time that we experience the same sensation of shame.

2 Now from the before-mentioned age (of fourteen years) sex is suffused and clothed with
an especial sensibility, and concupiscence employs the ministry of the eye, and
communicates its pleasure to another, and understands the natural relations between male
and female, and wears the fig-tree apron to cover the shame which it still excites, and
drives man out of the paradise of innocence and chastity, and in its wild pruriency falls
upon sins and unnatural incentives to delinquency; for its impulse has by this time
surpassed the appointment of nature, and springs from its vicious abuse. But the strictly
natural concupiscence is simply confined to the desire of those aliments which God at the
beginning conferred upon than. "Of every tree of the garden" He says, "ye shall freely
eat; " and then again to the generation which followed next after the flood He enlarged
the grant: "Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; behold, as the green
herb have I given you all these things," -where He has regard rather to the body than to
the soul, although it be in the interest of the soul also. For we must remove all occasion
from the caviller, who, because the soul apparently wants ailments, would insist on the
soul's being from this circumstance deemed mortal, since it is sustained by meat and drink
and after a time loses its rigour when they are withheld, and on their complete removal
ultimately droops and dies.

3 Now the point we must keep in view is not merely which particular faculty it is which
desires these (aliments), but also for what end; and even if it be for its own sake, still
the question remains, Why this desire, and when felt, and how long? Then again there is
the consideration, that it is one thing to desire by natural instinct, and another thing
to desire through necessity; one thing to desire as a property of being, another thing to
desire for a special object. The soul, therefore, will desire meat and drink-for itself
indeed, because of a special necessity; for the flesh, however, from the nature of its
properties. For the flesh is no doubt the house of the soul, and the soul is the temporary
inhabitant of the flesh. The desire, then, of the lodger will arise from the temporary
cause and the special necessity which his very designation suggests,-with a view to
benefit and improve the place of his temporary abode, while sojourning in it; not with the
view, certainly, of being himself the foundation of the house, or himself its walls, or
himself its support and roof, but simply and solely with the view of being accommodated
and housed, since he could not receive such accommodation except in a sound and well-built
house.

4 (Now, applying this imagery to the soul, ) if it be not provided with this
accommodation, it will not be in its power to quit its dwelling-place, and for want of fit
and proper resources, to depart safe and sound, in possession, too, of its own supports,
and the aliments which belong to its own proper condition,-namely immortality,
rationality, sensibility, intelligence, and freedom of the will.

CHAPTER XXXIX.-THE EVIL SPIRIT HAS MARRED THE PURITY OF THE SOUL FROM THE VERY BIRTH.

1 All these endowments of the soul which are bestowed on it at birth are still obscured
and depraved by the malignant being who, in the beginning, regarded them with envious eye,
so that they are never seen in their spontaneous action, nor are they administered as they
ought to be. For to what individual of the human race will not the evil spirit cleave,
ready to entrap their souls from the very portal of their birth, at which he is invited to
be present in all those superstitious processes which accompany childbearing? Thus it
comes to pass that all men are brought to the birth with idolatry for the midwife, whilst
the very wombs that bear them, still bound with the fillets that have been wreathed before
the idols, declare their offspring to be consecrated to demons: for in parturition they
invoke the aid of Lucina and Diana; for a whole week a table is spread in honour of Juno;
on the last day the fates of the horoscope are invoked; and then the infant's first step
on the ground is sacred to the goddess Statina. After this does any one fail to devote to
idolatrous service the entire head of his son, or to take out a hair, or to shave off the
whole with a razor, or to bind it up for an offering, or seal it for sacred use-in behalf
of the clan, of the ancestry, or for public devotion?

2 On this principle of early possession it was that Socrates, while yet a boy, was found
by the spirit of the demon. Thus, too, is it that to all persons their genii are assigned,
which is only another name for demons. Hence in no case (I mean of the heathen, of course)
is there any nativity which is pure of idolatrous superstition. It was from this
circumstance that the apostle said, that when either of the parents was sanctified, the
children were holy; and this as much by the prerogative of the (Christian) seed as by the
discipline of the institution (by baptism, and Christian education). "Else," says he,
"were the children unclean" by birth: as if he meant us to understand that the children of
believers were designed for holiness, and thereby for salvation; in order that he might by
the pledge of such a hope give his support to matrimony, which he had determined to
maintain in its integrity. Besides, he had certainly not forgotten what the Lord had so
definitively stated: "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter
into the kingdom of God; " in other words, he cannot be holy.

CHAPTER XL.-THE BODY OF MAN ONLY ANCILLARY TO THE SOUL IN THE COMMISSION OF EVIL.

1 Every soul, then, by reason of its birth, has its nature in Adam until it is born again
in Christ; moreover, it is unclean all the while that it remains without this
regeneration; and because unclean, it is actively sinful, and suffuses even the flesh (by
reason of their conjunction) with its own shame. Now although the flesh is sinful, and we
are forbidden to walk in accordance with it, and its works are condemned as lusting
against the spirit, and men on its account are censured as carnal, yet the flesh has not
such ignominy on its own account. For it is not of itself that it thinks anything or feels
anything for the purpose of advising or commanding sin. How should it, indeed? It is only
a ministering thing, and its ministration is not like that of a servant or familiar
friend-animated and human beings; but rather that of a vessel, or something of that kind:
it is body, not soul. Now a cup may minister to a thirsty man; and yet, if the thirsty man
will not apply the cup to his mouth, the cup will yield no ministering service. Therefore
the differentia, or distinguishing property, of man by no means lies in his earthy
element; nor is the flesh the human person, as being some faculty of his soul, and a
personal quality; but it is a thing of quite a different substance and different
condition, although annexed to the soul as a chattel or as an instrument for the offices
of life.

2 Accordingly the flesh is blamed in the Scriptures, because nothing is done by the soul
without the flesh in operations of concupiscence, appetite, drunkenness, cruelty,
idolatry, and other works of the flesh,-operations, I mean, which are not confined to
sensations, but result in effects. The emotions of sin, indeed, when not resulting in
effects, are usually imputed to the soul: "Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after,
hath already in his heart committed adultery with her. But what has the flesh alone,
without the soul, ever done in operations of virtue, righteousness, endurance, or
chastity? What absurdity, however, it is to attribute sin and crime to that substance to
which you do not assign any good actions or character of its own! Now the party which aids
in the commission of a crime is brought to trial, only in such a way that the principal
offender who actually committed the crime may bear the weight of the penalty, although the
abettor too does not escape indictment. Greater is the odium which falls on the principal,
when his officials are punished through his fault. He is beaten with more stripes who
instigates and orders the crime, whilst at the same time he who obeys such an evil command
is not acquitted.

CHAPTER XLI.-NOTWITHSTANDING THE DEPRAVITY OF MAN'S SOUL BY ORIGINAL SIN, THERE IS YET LEFT A BASIS WHEREON DIVINE GRACE CAN WORK FOR ITS RECOVERY BY SPIRITUAL REGENERATION.

1 There is, then, besides the evil which supervenes on the soul from the intervention of
the evil spirit, an antecedent, and in a certain sense natural, evil which arises from its
corrupt origin. For, as we have said before, the corruption of our nature is another
nature having a god and father of its own, namely the author of (that) corruption. Still
there is a portion of good in the soul, of that original, divine, and genuine good, which
is its proper nature. For that which is derived from God is rather obscured than
extinguished. It can be obscured, indeed, because it is not God; extinguished, however, it
cannot be, because it comes from God. As therefore light, when intercepted by an opaque
body, still remains, although it is not apparent, by reason of the interposition of so
dense a body; so likewise the good in the soul, being weighed down by the evil, is, owing
to the obscuring character thereof, either not seen at all, its light being wholly hidden,
or else only a stray beam is there visible where it struggles through by an accidental
outlet. Thus some men are very bad, and some very good; but yet the souls of all form but
one genus: even in the worst there is something good, and in the best there is something
bad. For God alone is without sin; and the only man without sin is Christ, since Christ is
also God. Thus the divinity of the soul bursts forth in prophetic forecasts in consequence
of its primeval good;

2 and being conscious of its origin, it bears testimony to God (its author) in
exclamations such as: Good God! God knows! and Good-bye! Just as no soul is without sin,
so neither is any soul without seeds of good. Therefore, when the soul embraces the faith,
being renewed in its second birth by water and the power from above, then the veil of its
former corruption being taken away, it beholds the light in all its brightness. It is also
taker up (in its second birth) by the Holy Spirit, just as in its first birth it is
embraced by the unholy spirit. The flesh follows the soul now wedded to the Spirit, as a
part of the bridal portion-no longer the servant of the soul, but of the Spirit. O happy
marriage, if in it there is committed no violation of the nuptial vow!

CHAPTER XLII.-SLEEP, THE MIRROR OF DEATH, AS INTRODUCTORY TO THE CONSIDERATION OF DEATH.

It now remains (that we discuss the subject) of death, in order that our subject-matter
may terminate where the soul itself completes it; although Epicurus, indeed, in his pretty
widely known doctrine, has asserted that death does not appertain to us. That, says he,
which is dissolved lacks sensation; and that which is without sensation is nothing to us.
Well, but it is not actually death which suffers dissolution and lacks sensation, but the
human person who experiences death. Yet even he has admitted suffering to be incidental to
the being to whom action belongs. Now, if it is in man to suffer death, which dissolves
the body and destroys the senses, how absurd to say that so great a susceptibility belongs
not to man! With much greater precision does Seneca say: "After death all comes to an end,
even (death) itself." From which position of his it must needs follow that death will
appertain to its own self, since itself comes to an end; and much more to man, in the
ending of whom amongst the "all," itself also ends. Death, (says Epicurus) belongs not to
us; then at that rate, life belongs not to us. For certainly, if that which causes our
dissolution have no relation to us, that also which compacts and composes us must be
unconnected with us. If the deprivation of our sensation be nothing to us, neither can the
acquisition of sensation have anything to do with us. The fact, however, is, he who
destroys the very soul, (as Epicurus does), cannot help destroying death also. As for
ourselves, indeed, (Christians as we are), we must treat of death just as we should of the
posthumous life and of some other province of the soul, (assuming) that we at all events
belong to death, if it. does not pertain to us. And on the same principle, even sleep,
which is the very mirror of death, is not alien from our subject-matter.

CHAPTER XLIII.-SLEEP A NATURAL FUNCTION AS SHOWN BY OTHER CONSIDERATIONS, AND BY THE TESTIMONY OF SCRIPTURE.

1 Let us therefore first discuss the question of sleep, and afterwards in what way the
soul encounters death. Now sleep is certainly not a supernatural thing, as some
philosophers will have it be, when they suppose it to be the result of causes which appear
to be above nature. The Stoics affirm sleep to be "a temporary suspension of the activity
of the senses; " the Epicureans define it as an intermission of the animal spirit;
Anaxagoras and Xenophanes as a weariness of the same; Empedocles and Parmenides as a
cooling down thereof; Strato as a separation of the (soul's) connatural spirit; Democritus
as the soul's indigence; Aristotle as the interruption of the heat around the heart. As
for myself, I can safely say that i have never slept in such a way as to discover even a
single one of these conditions. Indeed, we cannot possibly believe that sleep is a
weariness; it is rather the opposite, for it undoubtedly removes weariness, and a person
is refreshed by sleep instead of being fatigued. Besides, sleep is not always the result
of fatigue; and even when it is, the fatigue continues no longer. Nor can I allow that
sleep is a cooling or decaying of the animal heat, for our bodies derive warmth from sleep
in such a way that the regular dispersion of the food by means of sleep could not so
easily go on if there were too much heat to accelerate it unduly, or cold to retard it, if
sleep had the alleged refrigerating influence.

2 There is also the further fact that perspiration indicates an over-heated digestion; and
digestion is predicated of us as a process of concoction, which is an operation concerned
with heat and not with cold. In like manner, the immortality of the soul precludes belief
in the theory that sleep is an intermission of the animal spirit, or an indigence of the
spirit, or a separation of the (soul's) connatural spirit. The soul perishes if it
undergoes diminution or intermission. Our only resource, indeed, is to agree with the
Stoics, by determining the soul to be a temporary suspension of the activity of the
senses, procuring rest for the body only, not for the soul also. For the soul, as being
always in motion, and always active, never succumbs to rest,-a condition which is alien to
immortality: for nothing immortal admits, any end to its operation; but sleep is an end of
operation. It is indeed on the body, which is subject to mortality, and on the body alone,
that sleep graciously bestows a cessation from work. He, therefore, who shall doubt
whether sleep is a natural function, has the dialectical experts calling in question the
whole difference between things natural and supernatural-so that what things he supposed
to be beyond nature he may, (if he likes, ) be safe in assigning to nature, which indeed
has made such a disposition of things, that they may seemingly be accounted as beyond it;
and so, of course, all things are natural or none are natural, (as occasion requires.

3 With us (Christians), however, only that can receive a hearing which is suggested by
contemplating God, the Author of all the things which we are now discussing. For we
believe that nature, if it is anything, is a reasonable work of God. Now reason presides
over sleep; for sleep is so fit for man, so useful, so necessary, that were it not for it,
nota soul could provide agency for recruiting the body, for restoring its energies, for
ensuring its health, for supplying suspension from work and remedy against labour, and for
the legitimate enjoyment of which day departs, and night provides an ordinance by taking
from all objects their very colour. Since, then, sleep is indispensable to our life, and
health, and succour, there can be nothing pertaining to it which is not reasonable, and
which is not natural. Hence it is that physicians banish beyond the gateway of nature
everything which is contrary to what is vital healthful, and helpful to nature; for those
maladies which are inimical to sleep-maladies of the mind and of the stomach-they have
decided to be contrariant to nature, and by such decision have determined as its corollary
that sleep is perfectly natural. Moreover, when they declare that sleep is not natural in
the lethargic state, they derive their conclusion from the fact that it is natural when it
is in its due and regular exercise. For every natural state is impaired either by defect
or by excess, whilst it is maintained by its proper measure and amount.

4 That, therefore, will be natural in its condition which may be rendered non-natural by
defect or by excess. Well, now, what if you were to remove eating and drinking from the
conditions of nature? if in them lies the chief incentive to sleep. It is certain that,
from the very beginning of his nature, man was impressed with these instincts (of sleep).
If you receive your instruction from God, (you will find) that the fountain of the human
race, Adam, had a taste of drowsiness before having a draught of repose; slept before he
laboured, or even before he ate, nay, even before he spoke; in Order that men may see that
sleep is a natural feature and function, and one which has actually precedence over all
the natural faculties. From this primary instance also we are led to trace even then the
image of death in sleep. For as Adam was a figure of Christ, Adam's sleep shadowed out the
death of Christ, who was to sleep a mortal slumber, that from the wound inflicted on His
side might, in like manner (as Eve was formed), be typified the church, the true mother of
the living. This is why sleep is so salutary, so rational, and is actually formed into the
model of that death which is general and common to the race of man.

5 God, indeed, has willed (and it may be said in passing that He has, generally, in His
dispensations brought nothing to pass without such types and shadows) to set before us, in
a manner more fully and completely than Plato's example, by daily recurrence the outlines
of man's state, especially concerning the beginning and the termination thereof; thus
stretching out the hand to help our faith more readily by types and parables, not in words
only, but also in things. He accordingly sets before your view the human body stricken by
the friendly power of slumber, prostrated by the kindly necessity of repose immoveable in
position, just as it lay previous to life, and just as it will lie after life is past:
there it lies as an attestation of its form when first moulded, and of its condition when
at last buried-awaiting the soul in both stages, in the former previous to its bestowal,
in the latter after its recent withdrawal. Meanwhile the soul is circumstanced in such a
manner as to seem to be elsewhere active, learning to bear future absence by a dissembling
of its presence for the moment. We shall soon know the case of Hermotimus. But yet it
dreams in the interval. Whence then its dreams? The fact is, it cannot rest or be idle
altogether, nor does it confine to the still hours of sleep the nature of its immortality.
It proves itself to possess a constant motion;

6 it travels over land and sea, it trades, it is excited, it labours, it plays, it
grieves, it rejoices, it follows pursuits lawful and unlawful; it shows what very great
power it has even without the body, how well equipped it is with members of its own,
although betraying at the same time the need it has of impressing on some body its
activity again. Accordingly, when the body shakes off its slumber, it asserts before your
eye the resurrection of the dead by its own resumption of its natural functions. Such,
therefore, must be both the natural reason and the reasonable nature of sleep. If you only
regard it as the image of death, you initiate faith, you nourish hope, you learn both how
to die and how to live, you learn watchfulness, even while you sleep.

CHAPTER XLIV.-THE STORY OF HERMOTIMUS, AND THE SLEEPLESSNESS OF THE EMPEROR NERO. NO SEPARATION OF THE SOUL FROM THE BODY UNTIL DEATH.

1 With regard to the case of Hermotimus, they say that he used to be deprived of his soul
in his sleep, as if it wandered away from his body like a person on a holiday trip. His
wife betrayed the strange peculiarity. His enemies, finding him asleep, burnt his body, as
if it were a corpse: when his soul returned too late, it appropriated (I suppose) to
itself. the guilt of the murder. However the good citizens of Clazomenµ consoled poor
Hermotimus with a temple, into which no woman ever enters, because of the infamy of this
wife. Now why this story? In order that, since the vulgar belief so readily holds sleep to
be the separation of the soul from the body, credulity should not be encouraged by this
case of Hermotimus. It must certainly have been a much heavier sort of slumber: one would
presume it was the nightmare, or perhaps that diseased languor which Soranus suggests in
opposition to the nightmare, or else some such malady as that which the fable has fastened
upon Epimenides, who slept on some fifty years or so. Suetonius, however, informs us that
Nero never dreamt, and Theopompus says the same thing about Thrasymedes; but Nero at the
close of his life did with some difficulty dream after some excessive alarm. What indeed
would be said, if the case of Hermotimus were believed to be such that the repose of his
soul was a state of actual idleness during sleep, and a positive separation from his body?

2 You may conjecture it to be anything but such a licence of the soul as admits of flights
away from the body without death, and that by continual recurrence, as if habitual to its
state and constitution. If indeed such a thing were told me to have happened at any time
to the soul-resembling a total eclipse of the sun or the moon-I should verily suppose that
the occurrence had been caused by God's own interposition, for it would not be
unreasonable for a man to receive admonition from the Divine Being either in the way of
warning or of alarm, as by a flash of lightning, or by a sudden stroke of death; only it
would be much the more natural conclusion to believe that this process should be by a
dream, because if it must be supposed to be, (as the hypothesis we are resisting assumes
it to be, ) not a dream, the occurrence ought rather to happen to a man whilst he is wide
awake.

CHAPTER XLV.-DREAMS, AN INCIDENTAL EFFECT OF THE SOUL'S ACTIVITY. ECSTASY.

1 We are bound to expound at this point what is the opinion of Christians respecting
dreams, as incidents of sleep, and as no slight or trifling excitements of the soul, which
we have declared to be always occupied and active owing to its perpetual movement, which
again is a proof and evidence of its divine quality and immortality. When, therefore, rest
accrues to human bodies, it being their own especial comfort, the soul, disdaining a
repose which is not natural to it, never rests; and since it receives no help from the
limbs of the body, it uses its own. Imagine a gladiator without his instruments or arms,
and a charioteer without his team, but still gesticulating the entire course and exertion
of their respective employments: there is the fight, there is the struggle; but the effort
is a vain one. Nevertheless the whole procedure seems to be gone through, although it
evidently has not been really effected. There is the act, but not the effect. This power
we call ecstasy, in which the sensuous soul stands out of itself, in a way which even
resembles madness. Thus in the very beginning sleep was inaugurated by ecstasy: "And God
sent an ecstasy upon Adam, and he slept. The sleep came on his body to cause it to rest,
but the ecstasy fell on his soul to remove rest: from that very circumstance it still
happens ordinarily (and from the order results the nature of the case) that sleep is
combined with ecstasy.

2 In fact, with what real feeling, and anxiety, and suffering do we experience joy, and
sorrow, and alarm in our dreams! Whereas we should not be moved by any such emotions, by
what would be the merest fantasies of course, if when we dream we were masters of
ourselves, (unaffected by ecstasy. In these dreams, indeed, good actions are useless, and
crimes harmless; for we shall no more be condemned for visionary acts of sin, than we
shall be crowned for imaginary martyrdom. But how, you will ask, can the soul remember its
dreams, when it is said to be without any mastery over its own operations? This memory
must be an especial gift of the ecstatic condition of which we are treating, since it
arises not from any failure of healthy action, but entirely from natural process; nor does
it expel mental function-it withdraws it for a time. It is one thing to shake, it is
another thing to move; one thing to destroy, another thing to agitate. That, therefore,
which memory supplies betokens soundness of mind; and that which a sound mind ecstatically
experiences whilst the memory remains unchecked, is a kind of madness. We are accordingly
not said to be mad, but to dream, in that state; to be in the full possession also of our
mental faculties, if we are at any time. For although the power to exercise these
faculties may be dimmed in us, it is still not extinguished;

3 except that it may seem to be itself absent at the very time that the ecstasy is
energizing in us in its special manner, in such wise as to bring before us images of a
sound mind and of wisdom, even as it does those of aberration.

CHAPTER XLVI.-DIVERSITY OF DREAMS AND VISIONS. EPICURUS THOUGHT LIGHTLY OF THEM, THOUGH GENERALLY MOST HIGHLY VALUED. INSTANCES OF DREAMS.

1 We now find ourselves constrained to express an opinion about the character of the
dreams by which the soul is excited. And when shall we arrive at the subject of death? And
on such a question I would say, When God shall permit: that admits of no long delay which
must needs happen at all events. Epicurus has given it as his opinion that dreams are
altogether vain things; (but he says this) when liberating the Deity from all sort of
care, and dissolving the entire order of the world, and giving to all things the aspect of
merest chance, casual in their issues, fortuitous in their nature. Well, now, if such be
the nature of things, there must be some chance even for truth, because it is impossible
for it to be the only thing to be exempted from the fortune which is due to all things.
Homer has assigned two gates to dreams, -the horny one of truth, the ivory one of error
and delusion. For, they say, it is possible to see through horn, whereas ivory is
untransparent. Aristotle, while expressing his opinion that dreams are in most cases
untrue, yet acknowledges that there is some truth in them. The people of Telmessus will
not admit that dreams are in any case unmeaning, but they blame their own weakness when
unable to conjecture their signification. Now, who is such a stranger to human experience
as not sometimes to have perceived some truth in dreams?

2 I shall force a blush from Epicurus, If I only glance at some few of the more remarkable
instances. Herodotus relates how that Astyages, king of the Medes, saw in a dream issuing
from the womb of his virgin daughter a flood which inundated Asia; and again, in the year
which followed her marriage, he saw a vine growing out from the same part of her person,
which overspread the whole of Asia. The same story is told prior to Herodotus by Charon of
Lampsacus. Now they who interpreted these visions did not deceive the mother when they
destined her son for so great an enterprise, for Cyrus both inundated and overspread Asia.
Philip of Macedon, before he became a father, had seen imprinted on the pudenda of his
consort Olympias the form of a small ring, with a lion as a seal. He had concluded that an
offspring from her was out of the question (I suppose because the lion only becomes once a
father), when Aristodemus or Aristophon happened to conjecture that nothing of an
unmeaning or empty import lay under that seal, but that a son of very illustrious
character was portended. They who know anything of Alexander recognise in him the lion of
that small ring. Ephorus writes to this effect. Again, Heraclides has told us, that a
certain woman of Himera beheld in a dream Dionysius' tyranny over Sicily.

3 Euphorion has publicly recorded as a fact, that, previous to giving birth to Seleucus,
his mother Laodice foresaw that he was destined for the empire of Asia. I find again from
Strabo, that it was owing to a dream that even Mithridates took possession of Pontus; and
I further learn from Callisthenes that it was from the indication of a dream that
Baraliris the Illyrian stretched his dominion from the Molossi to the frontiers of
Macedon. The Romans, too, were acquainted with dreams of this kind. From a dream Marcus
Tullius (Cicero) had learnt how that one, who was yet only a little boy, and in a private
station, who was also plain Julius Octavius, and personally unknown to (Cicero) himself,
was the destined Augustus, and the suppressor and destroyer of (Rome's) civil discords.
This is recorded in the Commentaries of Vitellius. But visions of this prophetic kind were
not confined to predictions of supreme power; for they indicated perils also, and
catastrophes: as, for instance, when Caesar was absent from the battle of Philippi through
illness, and thereby escaped the sword of Brutus and Cassius, and then although he
expected to encounter greater danger still from the enemy in the field, he quitted his
tent for it, in obedience to a vision of Artorius, and so escaped (the capture by the
enemy, who shortly after took possession of the tent); as, again, when the daughter of
Polycrates of Samos foresaw the crucifixion which awaited him from the anointing of the
sun and the bath of Jupiter.

4 So likewise in sleep revelations are made of high honours and eminent talents; remedies
are also discovered, thefts brought to light, and treasures indicated. Thus Cicero's
eminence, whilst he was still a little boy, was foreseen by his nurse. The swan from the
breast of Socrates soothing men, is his disciple Plato. The boxer Leonymus is cured by
Achilles in his dreams. Sophocles the tragic poet discovers, as he was dreaming, the
golden crown, which had been lost from the citadel of Athens. Neoptolemus the tragic
actor, through intimations in his sleep from Ajax himself, saves from destruction the
hero's tomb on the Rhoetean shore before Troy; and as he removes the decayed stones, he
returns enriched with gold. How many commentators and chroniclers vouch for this
phenomenon? There are Artemon, Antiphon, Strato, Philochorus, Epicharmus, Serapion,
Cratippus, and Dionysius of Rhodes, and Hermippus-the entire literature of the age. I
shall only laugh at all, if indeed I ought to laugh at the man who fancied that he was
going to persuade us that Saturn dreamt before anybody else; which we can only believe if
Aristotle, (who would fain help us to such an opinion, ) lived prior to any other person.
Pray forgive me for laughing. Epicharmus, indeed, as well as Philochorus the Athenian,
assigned the very highest place among divinations to dreams. The whole world is full of
oracles of this description:

5 there are the oracles of Amphiaraus at Oropus, of Amphilochus at Mallus, of Sarpedon in
the Troad, of Trophonius in B£otia, of Mopsus in Cilicia, of Hermione in Macedon, of
Pasiphäe in Laconia. Then, again, there are others, which with their original foundations,
rites, and historians, together with the entire literature of dreams, Hermippus of Berytus
in five portly volumes will give you all the account of, even to satiety. But the Stoics
are very fond of saying that God, in His most watchful providence over every institution,
gave us dreams amongst other preservatives of the arts and sciences of divination, as the
especial support of the natural oracle. So much for the dreams to which credit has to be
ascribed even by ourselves, although we must interpret them in another sense. As for all
other oracles, at which no one ever dreams, what else must we declare concerning them,
than that they are the diabolical contrivance of those spirits who even at that time dwelt
in the eminent persons themselves, or aimed at reviving the memory of them as the mere
stage of their evil purposes, going so far as to counterfeit a divine power under their
shape and form, and, with equal persistence in evil, deceiving men by their very boons of
remedies, warnings, and forecasts,-the only effect of which was to injure their victims
the more they helped them; while the means whereby they rendered the help withdrew them
from all search after the true God, by insinuating into their minds ideas of the false
one?

6 And of course so pernicious an influence as this is not shut up nor limited within the
boundaries of shrines and temples: it roams abroad, it flies through the air, and all the
while is free and unchecked. So that nobody can doubt that our very homes lie open to
these diabolical spirits, who beset their human prey with their fantasies not only in
their chapels but also in their chambers.

CHAPTER XLVII.-DREAMS VARIOUSLY CLASSIFIED. SOME ARE GOD-SENT, AS THE DREAMS OF NEBUCHADNEZZAR; OTHERS SIMPLY PRODUCTS OF NATURE.

1 We declare, then, that dreams are inflicted on us mainly by demons, although they
sometimes turn out true and favourable to us. When, however, with the deliberate aim after
evil, of which we have just spoken, they assume a flattering and captivating style, they
show themselves proportionately vain, and deceitful, and obscure, and wanton, and impure.
And no wonder that the images partake of the character of the realities. But from God-who
has promised, indeed, "to pour out the grace of the Holy Spirit upon all flesh, and has
ordained that His servants and His handmaids should see visions as well as utter
prophecies" -must all those visions be regarded as emanating, which may be compared to the
actual grace of God, as being honest, holy, prophetic, inspired, instructive, inviting to
virtue, the bountiful nature of which causes them to overflow even to the profane, since
God, with grand impartiality, "sends His showers and sunshine on the just and on the
unjust. It was, indeed by an inspiration from God that Nebuchadnezzar dreamt his dreams;
and almost the greater part of mankind get their knowledge of God from dreams. Thus it is
that, as the mercy of God super-abounds to the heathen, so the temptation of the evil one
encounters the saints, from whom he never withdraws his malignant efforts to steal over
them as best he may in their very sleep, if unable to assault them when they are awake.

2 The third class of dreams will consist of those which the soul itself apparently creates
for itself from an intense application to special circumstances. Now, inasmuch as the soul
cannot dream of its own accord (for even Epicharmus is of this opinion), how can it become
to itself the cause of any vision? Then must this class of dreams be abandoned to the
action of nature, reserving for the soul, even when in the ecstatic condition, the power
of enduring whatever incidents befall it? Those, moreover, which evidently proceed neither
from God, nor from diabolical inspiration, nor from the soul, being beyond the reach as
well of ordinary expectation, usual interpretation, or the possibility of being
intelligibly related, will have to be ascribed in a separate category to what is purely
and simply the ecstatic state and its peculiar conditions.

CHAPTER XLVIII.-CAUSES AND CIRCUMSTANCES OF DREAMS. WHAT BEST CONTRIBUTES TO EFFICIENT DREAMING.

1 They say that dreams are more sure and clear when they happen towards the end of the
night, because then the vigour of the soul emerges, and heavy sleep departs. As to the
seasons of the year, dreams are calmer in spring, since summer relaxes, and winter somehow
hardens, the soul; while autumn, which in other respects is trying to health, is apt to
enervate the soul by the lusciousness of its fruits. Then, again, as regards the position
of one's body during sleep, one ought not to lie on his back, nor on his right side, nor
so as to wrench his intestines, as if their cavity were reversely stretched: a palpitation
of the heart would ensue, or else a pressure on the liver would produce a painful
disturbance of the mind. But however this be, I take it that it all amounts to ingenious
conjecture rather than certain proof (although the author of the conjecture be no less a
man than Plato); and possibly all may be no other than the result of chance. But,
generally speaking, dreams will be under control of a man's will, if they be capable of
direction at all; for we must not examine what opinion on the one hand, and superstition
on the other, have to prescribe for the treatment of dreams, in the matter of
distinguishing and modifying different sorts of food.

2 As for the superstition, we have an instance when fasting is prescribed for such persons
as mean to submit to the sleep which is necessary for receiving the oracle, in order that
such abstinence may produce the required purity; while we find an instance of the opinion
when the disciples of Pythagoras, in order to attain the same end, reject the bean as an
aliment which would load the stomach, and produce indigestion. But the three brethren, who
were the companions of Daniel, being content with pulse alone, to escape the contamination
of the royal dishes, received from God, besides other wisdom, the gift especially of
penetrating and explaining the sense of dreams. For my own part, I hardly know whether
fasting would not simply make me dream so profoundly, that I should not be aware whether I
had in fact dreamt at all. Well, then, you ask, has not sobriety something to do in this
matter? certainly it is as much concerned in this as it is in the entire subject: if it
contributes some good service to superstition, much more does it to religion. For even
demons require such discipline from their dreamers as a gratification to their divinity,
because they know that it is acceptable to God, since Daniel (to quote him again) "ate no
pleasant bread" for the space of three weeks.

3 This abstinence, however, he used in order to please God by humiliation, and not for the
purpose of producing a sensibility and wisdom for his soul previous to receiving
communication by dreams and visions, as if it were not rather to effect such action in an
ecstatic state. This sobriety, then, (in which our question arises, ) will have nothing to
do with exciting ecstasy, but will rather serve to recommend its being wrought by God.

CHAPTER XLIX.-NO SOUL NATURALLY EXEMPT FROM DREAMS.

As for those persons who suppose that infants do not dream, on the ground that all the
functions of the soul throughout life are accomplished according to the capacity of age,
they ought to observe attentively their tremors, and nods, and bright smiles as they
sleep, and from such facts understand that they are the emotions of their soul as it
dreams, which so readily escape to the surface through the delicate tenderness of their
infantine body. The fact, however, that the African nation of the Atlantes are said to
pass through the night in a deep lethargic sleep, brings down on them the censure that
something is wrong in the constitution of their soul. Now either report, which is
occasionally calumnious against barbarians, deceived Herodotus, or else a large force of
demons of this sort domineers in those barbarous regions. Since, indeed, Aristotle remarks
of a certain hero of Sardinia that he used to withhold the power of visions and dreams
from such as resorted to his shrine for inspiration, it must lie at the will and caprice
of the demons to take away as well as to confer the faculty of dreams; and from this
circumstance may have arisen the remarkable fact (which we have mentioned ) of Nero and
Thrasymedes only dreaming so late in life. We, however, derive dreams from God. Why, then,
did not the Atlantes receive the dreaming faculty from God, because there is really no
nation which is now a stranger to God, since the gospel flashes its glorious light through
the world to the ends of the earth? Could it then be that rumour deceived Aristotle, or is
this caprice still the way of demons? (Let us take any view of the case), only do not let
it be imagined that any soul is by its natural constitution exempt from dreams.

CHAPTER L.-THE ABSURD OPINION OF EPICURUS AND THE PROFANE CONCEITS OF THE HERETIC MENANDER ON DEATH, EVEN ENOCH AND ELIJAH RESERVED FOR DEATH.

1 We have by this time said enough about sleep, the mirror and image of death; and
likewise about the occupations of sleep, even dreams. Let us now go on to consider the
cause of our departure hence-that is, the appointment and course of death-because we must
not leave even it unquestioned and unexamined, although it is itself the very end of all
questions and investigations. According to the general sentiment of the human race, we
declare death to be "the debt of nature. So much has been settled by the voice of God;
such is the contract with everything which is born: so that even from this the frigid
conceit of Epicurus is refuted, who says that no such debt is due from us; and not only
so, but the insane opinion of the Samaritan heretic Menander is also rejected, who will
have it that death has not only nothing to do with his disciples, but in fact never
reaches them. He pretends to have received such a commission from the secret power of One
above, that all who partake of his baptism become immortal, incorruptible and
instantaneously invested with resurrection-life. We read, no doubt, of very many wonderful
kinds of waters: how, for instance, the vinous quality of the stream intoxicates people
who drink of the Lyncestis; how at Colophon the waters of an oracle-inspiring fountain
affect men with madness; how Alexander was killed by the poisonous water from Mount
Nonacris in Arcadia. Then, again, there was in Judea before the time of Christ a pool of
medicinal virtue.

2 It is well known how the poet has commemorated the marshy Styx as preserving men from
death; although Thetis had, in spite of the preservative, to lament her son. And for the
matter of that, were Menander himself to take a plunge into this famous Styx, he would
certainly have to die after all; for you must come to the Styx, placed as it is by all
accounts in the regions of the dead. Well, but what and where are those blessed and
charming waters which not even John Baptist ever used in his preministrations, nor Christ
after him ever revealed to His disciples? What was this wondrous bath of Menander? He is a
comical fellow, I ween. But why (was such a font) so seldom in request, so obscure, one to
which so very few ever resorted for their cleansing? I really see something to suspect in
so rare an occurrence of a sacrament to which is attached so very much security and
safety, and which dispenses with the ordinary law of dying even in the service of God
Himself, when, on the contrary, all nations have "to ascend to the mount of the Lord and
to the house of the God of Jacob," who demands of His saints in martyrdom that death which
He exacted even of His Christ. No one will ascribe to magic such influence as shall exempt
from death, or which shall refresh and vivify life, like the vine by the renewal of its
condition.

3 Such power was not accorded to the great Medea herself-over a human being at any rate,
if allowed her over a silly sheep. Enoch no doubt was translated, and so was Elijah; nor
did they experience death: it was postponed, (and only postponed, ) most certainly: they
are reserved for the suffering of death, that by their blood they may extinguish
Antichrist. Even John underwent death, although concerning him there had prevailed an
ungrounded expectation that he would remain alive until the coming of the Lord. Heresies,
indeed, for the most pan spring hurriedly into existence, from examples furnished by
ourselves: they procure their defensive armour from the very place which they attack. The
whole question resolves itself, in short, into this challenge: Where are to be found the
men whom Menander himself has baptized? whom he has plunged into his Styx? Let them come
forth and stand before us-those apostles of his whom he has made immortal? Let my
(doubting) Thomas see them, let him hear them, let him handle them-and he is convinced.

CHAPTER LI.-DEATH ENTIRELY SEPARATES THE SOUL FROM THE BODY.

1 But the operation of death is plain and obvious: it is the separation of body and soul.
Some, however, in reference to the soul's immortality, on which they have so feeble a hold
through not being taught of God, maintain it with such beggarly arguments, that they would
fain have it supposed that certain souls cleave to the body even after death. It is indeed
in this sense that Plato, although he despatches at once to heaven such souls as he
pleases, yet in his Republic exhibits to us the corpse of an unburied person, which was
preserved a long time without corruption, by reason of the soul remaining, as he says,
unseparated from the body. To the same purport also Democritus remarks on the growth for a
considerable while of the human nails and hair in the grave. Now, it is quite possible
that the nature of the atmosphere tended to the preservation of the above-mentioned
corpse. What if the air were particularly dry, and the ground of a saline nature? What,
too, if the substance of the body itself were unusually dry and arid? What, moreover, if
the mode of the death had already eliminated from the corpse all corrupting matter? As for
the nails, since they are the commencement of the nerves, they may well seem to be
prolonged, owing to the nerves themselves being relaxed and extended, and to be protruded
more and more as the flesh fails.

2 The hair, again, is nourished from the brain, which would cause it endure for a long
time as its secret aliment and defence. Indeed, in the case of living persons themselves,
the whole head of hair is copious or scanty in proportion to the exuberance of the brain.
You have medical men (to attest the fact). But not a particle of the soul can possibly
remain in the body, which is itself destined to disappear when time shall have abolished
the entire scene on which the body has played its part. And yet even this partial survival
of the soul finds a place in the opinions of some men; and on this account they will not
have the body consumed at its funeral by fire, because they would spare the small residue
of the soul. There is, however, another way of accounting for this pious treatment, not as
if it meant to favour the relics of the soul, but as if it would avert a cruel custom in
the interest even of the body; since, being human, it is itself undeserving of an end
which is also inflicted upon murderers. The truth is, the soul is indivisible, because it
is immortal; (and this fact) compels us to believe that death itself is an indivisible
process, accruing indivisibly to the soul, not indeed because it is immortal, but because
it is indivisible.

3 Death, however, would have to be divided in its operation, if the soul were divisible
into particles, any one of which has to be reserved for a later stage of death. At this
rate, a part of death will have to stay behind for a portion of the soul. I am not
ignorant that some vestige of this opinion still exists. I have found it out from one of
my own people. I am acquainted with the case of a woman, the daughter of Christian
parents, who in the very flower of her age and beauty slept peacefully (in Jesus), after a
singularly happy though brief married life. Before they laid her in her grave, and when
the priest began the appointed office, at the very first breath of his prayer she withdrew
her hands from her side, placed them in an attitude of devotion, and after the holy
service was concluded restored them to their lateral position. Then, again, there is that
well-known story among our own people, that a body voluntarily made way in a certain
cemetery, to afford room for another body to be placed near to it. If, as is the case,
similar stories are told amongst the heathen, (we can only conclude that) God everywhere
manifests signs of His own power-to His own people for their comfort, to strangers for a
testimony unto them. I would indeed much rather suppose that a portent of this kind
happened from the direct agency of God than from any relics of the soul:

4 for if there were a residue of these, they would be certain to move the other limbs; and
even if they moved the hands, this still would not have been for the purpose of a prayer.
Nor would the corpse have been simply content to have made way for its neighbour: it
would, besides, have benefited its own self also by the change of its position. But from
whatever cause proceeded these phenomena, which you must put down amongst signs and
portents, it is impossible that they should regulate nature. Death, if it once falls short
of totality in operation, is not death. If any fraction of the soul remain, it makes a
living state. Death will no more mix with life, than will night with day.

CHAPTER LII.-ALL KINDS OF DEATH A VIOLENCE TO NATURE, ARISING FROM SIN.-SIN AN INTRUSION UPON NATURE AS GOD CREATED IT.

1 Such, then, is the work of death-the separation of the soul from the body. Putting out
of the question fates and fortuitous circumstances, it has been, according to men's views,
distinguished in a twofold form-the ordinary and the extraordinary. The ordinary they
ascribe to nature, exercising its quiet influence in the case of each individual decease;
the extraordinary is said to be contrary to nature, happening in every violent death. As
for our own views, indeed, we know what was man's origin, and we boldly assert and
persistently maintain that death happens not by way of natural consequence to man, but
owing to a fault and defect which is not itself natural; although it is easy enough, no
doubt, to apply the term natural to faults and circumstances which seem to have been
(though from the emergence of an external cause ) inseparable to us from our very birth.
If man had been directly appointed to die as the condition of his creation, then of course
death must be imputed to nature. Now, that he was not thus appointed to die, is proved by
the very law which made his condition depend on a warning, and death result from man's
arbitrary choice. Indeed, if he had not sinned, he certainly would not have died. That
cannot be nature which happens by the exercise of volition after an alternative has been
proposed to it, and not by necessity-the result of an inflexible and unalterable
condition.

2 Consequently, although death has various issues, inasmuch as its causes are manifold, we
cannot say that the easiest death is so gentle as not to happen by violence (to our
nature). The very law which produces death, simple though it be, is yet violence. How can
it be otherwise, when so close a companionship of soul and body, so inseparable a growth
together from their very conception of two sister substances, is sundered and divided? For
although a man may breathe his last for joy, like the Spartan Chilon, while embracing his
son who had just conquered in the Olympic games; or for glory, like the Athenian Clidemus,
while receiving a crown of gold for the excellence of his historical writings; or in a
dream, like Plato; or in a fit of laughter, like Publius Crassus,-yet death is much too
violent, coming as it does upon us by strange and alien means, expelling the soul by a
method all its own, calling on us to die at a moment when one might live a jocund life in
joy and honour, in peace and pleasure. That is still a violence to ships: although far
away from the Capharean rocks, assailed by no storms, without a billow to shatter them,
with favouring gale, in gliding course, with merry crews, they founder amidst entire
security, suddenly, owing to some internal shock. Not dissimilar are the shipwrecks of
life,-the issues of even a tranquil death.

3 It matters not whether the vessel of the human body goes with unbroken timbers or
shattered with storms, if the navigation of the soul be overthrown.

CHAPTER LIII.-THE ENTIRE SOUL BEING INDIVISIBLE REMAINS TO THE LAST ACT OF VITALITY; NEVER PARTIALLY OR FRACTIONALLY WITHDRAWN FROM THE BODY.

1 But where at last will the soul have to lodge, when it is bare and divested of the body?
We must certainly not hesitate to follow it thither, in the order of our inquiry. We must,
however, first of all fully state what belongs to the topic before us, in order that no
one, because we have mentioned the various issues of death, may expect from us a special
description of these, which ought rather to be left to medical men, who are the proper
judges of the incidents which appertain to death, or its causes, and the actual conditions
of the human body. Of course, with the view of preserving the truth of the soul's
immortality, whilst treating this topic, I shall have, on mentioning death, to introduce
phrases about dissolution of such a purport as seems to intimate that the soul escapes by
degrees, and piece by piece; for it withdraws (from the body) with all the circumstances
of a decline, seeming to suffer consumption, and suggests to us the idea of being
annihilated by the slow process of its departure. But the entire reason of this phenomenon
is in the body, and arises from the body. For whatever be the kind of death (which
operates on man), it undoubtedly produces the destruction either of the matter, or of the
region, or of the passages of vitality: of the matter, such as the gall and the blood; of
the region, such as the heart and the liver; of the passages, such as the veins and the
arteries .

2 Inasmuch, then, as these parts of the body are severally devastated by an injury proper
to each of them, even to the very last ruin and annulling of the vital powers-in other
words, of the ends, the sites, and the functions of nature-it must needs come to pass,
amidst the gradual decay of its instruments, domiciles, and spaces, that the soul also
itself, being driven to abandon each successive part, assumes the appearance of being
lessened to nothing; in some such manner as a charioteer is assumed to have himself
failed, when his horses, through fatigue, withdraw from him their energies. But this
assumption applies only to the circumstances of the despoiled person, not to any real
condition of suffering. Likewise the body's charioteer, the animal spirit, fails on
account of the failure of its vehicle, not of itself-abandoning its work, but not its
vigour-languishing in operation, but not in essential condition-bankrupt in solvency, not
in substance-be-cause ceasing to put in an appearance, but not ceasing to exist. Thus
every rapid death-such as a decapitation, or a breaking of the neck, which opens at once a
vast outlet for the soul; or a sudden ruin, which at a stroke crushes every vital action,
like that inner ruin apoplexy-retards not the soul's escape, nor painfully separates its
departure into successive moments. Where, however, the death is a lingering one, the soul
abandons its position in the way in which it is itself abandoned. And yet it is not by
this process severed in fractions: it is slowly drawn out;

3 and whilst thus extracted, it causes the last remnant to seem to be but a part of
itself. No portion, however, must be deemed separable, because it is the last; nor,
because it is a small one, must it be regarded as susceptible of dissolution. Accordant
with a series is its end, and the middle is prolonged to the extremes; and the remnants
cohere to the mass, and are waited for, but never abandoned by it. And I will even venture
to say, that the last of a whole is the whole; because while it is less, and the latest,
it yet belongs to the whole, and completes it. Hence, indeed, many times it happens that
the soul in its actual separation is more powerfully agitated with a more anxious gaze,
and a quickened loquacity; whilst from the loftier and freer position in which it is now
placed, it enunciates, by means of its last remnant still lingering in the flesh, what it
sees, what it hears, and what it: is beginning to know. In Platonic phrase, indeed, the
body is a prison, but in the apostle's it is "the temple of God," because it is in Christ.
Still, (as must be admitted, ) by reason of its enclosure it obstructs and obscures the
soul, and sullies it by the concretion of the flesh; whence it happens that the light
which illumines objects comes in upon the soul in a more confused manner, as if through a
window of horn.

4 Undoubtedly, when the soul, by the power of death, is released from its concretion with
the flesh, it is by the very release cleansed and purified: it Is, moreover, certain that
it escapes from the veil of the flesh into open space, to its clear, and pure, and
intrinsic light; and then finds itself enjoying its enfranchisement from matter, and by
virtue of its liberty it recovers its divinity, as one who awakes out of sleep passes from
images to verities. Then it tells out what it sees; then it exults or it fears, according
as it finds what lodging is prepared for it, as soon as it sees the very angel's face,
that arraigner of souls, the Mercury of the poets.

CHAPTER LIV.-WHITHER DOES THE SOUL RETIRE WHEN IT QUITS THE BODY? OPINIONS OF PHILOSOPHERS ALL MORE OR LESS ABSURD. THE HADES OF PLATO.

To the question, therefore, whither the soul is withdrawn, we now give an answer. Almost
all the philosophers, who hold the soul's immortality, notwithstanding their special views
on the subject, still claim for it this (eternal condition), as Pythagoras, and
Empedocles, and Plato, and as they who indulge it with some delay from the time of its
quitting the flesh to the conflagration of all things, and as the Stoics, who place only
their own souls, that is, the souls of the wise, in the mansions above. Plato, it is true,
does not allow this destination to all the souls, indiscriminately, of even all the
philosophers, but only of those who have cultivated their philosophy out of love to boys.
So great is the privilege which impurity obtains at the hands of philosophers! In his
system, then, the souls of the wise are carried up on high into the ether: according to
Arius, into the, air; according to the Stoics, into the moon. I wonder, indeed, that they
abandon to the earth the souls of the unwise, when they affirm that even these are
instructed by the wise, so much their superiors. For where is the school where they can
have been instructed in the vast space which divides them? By what means can the pupil-
souls have resorted to their teachers, when they are parted from each other by so distant
an interval? What profit, too, can any instruction afford them at all in their posthumous
state, when they are on the brink of perdition by the universal fire? All other souls they
thrust down to Hades, which Plato, in his Phµdo, describes: as the bosom of the earth,
where all the filth of the world accumulates, settles, and exhales, and where every
separate draught of air only renders denser still the impurities of the seething mass.

CHAPTER LV.-THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF THE POSITION OF HADES; THE BLESSEDNESS OF PARADISE IMMEDIATELY AFTER DEATH. THE PRIVILEGE OF THE MARTYRS.

1 By ourselves the lower regions (of Hades) are not supposed to be a bare cavity, nor some
subterranean sewer of the world, but a vast deep space in the interior of the earth, and a
concealed recess in its very bowels; inasmuch as we read that Christ in His death spent
three days in the heart of the earth, that is, in the secret inner recess which is hidden
in the earth, and enclosed by the earth, and superimposed on the abysmal depths which lie
still lower down. Now although Christ is God, yet, being also man, "He died according to
the Scriptures," and "according to the same Scriptures was buried. With the same law of
His being He fully complied, by remaining in Hades in the form and condition of a dead
man; nor did He ascend into the heights of heaven before descending into the lower parts
of the earth, that He might there make the patriarchs and prophets partakers of Himself.
(This being the case), you must suppose Hades to be a subterranean region, and keep at
arm's length those who are too proud to believe that the souls of the faithful deserve a
place in the lower regions. These persons, who are "servants above their Lord, and
disciples above their Master," would no doubt spurn to receive the comfort of the
resurrection, if they must expect it in Abraham's bosom. But it was for this purpose, say
they, that Christ descended into hell, that we might not ourselves have to descend
thither.

2 Well, then, what difference is there between heathens and Christians, if the same prison
awaits them all when dead? How, indeed, shall the soul mount up to heaven, where Christ is
already sitting at the Father's right hand, when as yet the archangel's trumpet has not
been heard by the command of God, -when as yet those whom the coming of the Lord is to
find on the earth, have not been caught up into the air to meet Him at His coming, in
company with the dead in Christ, who shall be the first to arise? To no one is heaven
opened; the earth is still safe for him, I would not say it is shut against him. When the
world, indeed, shall pass away, then the kingdom of heaven shall be opened. Shall we then
have to sleep high up in ether, with the boy-loving worthies of Plato; or in the air with
Arius; or around the moon with the Endymions of the Stoics? No, but in Paradise, you tell
me, whither already the patriarchs and prophets have removed from Hades in the retinue of
the Lord's resurrection. How is it, then, that the region of Paradise, which as revealed
to John in the Spirit lay under the altar, displays no other souls as in it besides the
souls of the martyrs?

3 How is it that the most heroic martyr Perpetua on the day of her passion saw only her
fellow-martyrs there, in the revelation which she received of Paradise, if it were not
that the sword which guarded the entrance permitted none to go in thereat, except those
who had died in Christ and not in Adam? A new death for God, even the extraordinary one
for Christ, is admitted into the reception-room of mortality, specially altered and
adapted to receive the new-comer. Observe, then, the difference between a heathen and a
Christian in their death: if you have to lay down your life for God, as the Comforter
counsels, it is not in gentle fevers and on soft beds, but in the sharp pains of
martyrdom: you must take up the cross and bear it after your Master, as He has Himself
instructed you. The sole key to unlock Paradise is your own life's blood. You have a
treatise by us, (on Paradise), in which we have established the position that every soul
is detained in safe keeping in Hades until the day of the Lord.

CHAPTER LVI.-REFUTATION OF THE HOMERIC VIEW OF THE SOUL'S DETENTION FROM HADES OWING TO THE BODY'S BEING UNBURIED. THAT SOULS PREMATURELY SEPARATED FROM THE BODY HAD TO WAIT FOR ADMISSION INTO HADES ALSO REFUTED.

1 There arises the question, whether this takes place immediately after the soul's
departure from the body; whether some souls are detained for special reasons in the
meantime here on earth; and whether it is permitted them of their own accord, or by the
intervention of authority, to be removed from Hades at some subsequent time? Even such
opinions as these are not by any means lacking persons to advance them with confidence. It
was believed that the unburied dead were not admitted into the infernal regions before
they had received a proper sepulture; as in the case of Homer's Patroclus, who earnestly
asks for a burial of Achilles in a dream, on the ground that he could not enter Hades
through any other portal, since the souls of the sepulchred dead kept thrusting him away.
We know that Homer exhibited more than a poetic licence here; he had in view the fights of
the dead. Proportioned, indeed, to his care for the just honours of the tomb, was his
censure of that delay of burial which was injurious to souls. (It was also his purpose to
add a warning), that no man should, by detaining in his house the corpse of a friend, only
expose himself, along with the deceased, to increased injury and trouble, by the
irregularity of the consolation which he nourishes with pain and grief. He has accordingly
kept a twofold object in view in picturing the complaints of an unburied soul:

2 he wished to maintain honour to the dead by promptly attending to their funeral, as well
as to moderate the feelings of grief which their memory excited. But, after all, how vain
is it to suppose that the soul could bear the rites and requirements of the body, or carry
any of them away to the infernal regions! And how much vainer still is it, if injury be
supposed to accrue to the soul from that neglect of burial which it ought to receive
rather as a favour! For surely the soul which had no willingness to die might well prefer
as tardy a removal to Hades as possible. It will love the undutiful heir, by whose means
it still enjoys the light. If, however, it is certain that injury accrues to the soul from
a tardy interment of the body-and the gist of the injury lies in the neglect of the
burial-it is yet in the highest degree unfair, that should receive all the injury to which
the faulty delay could not possibly be imputed, for of course all the fault rests on the
nearest relations of the dead. They also say that those souls which are taken away by a
premature death wander about hither and thither until they have completed the residue of
the years which they would have lived through, had it not been for their untimely fate.
Now either their days are appointed to all men severally, and if so appointed, I cannot
suppose them capable of being shortened;

3 or if, notwithstanding such appointment, they may be shortened by the will of God, or
some other powerful influence, then (I say) such shortening is of no validity, if they
still may be accomplished in some other way. If, on the other hand, they are not
appointed, there cannot be any residue to be fulfilled for unappointed periods. I have
another remark to make. Suppose it be an infant that dies yet hanging on the breast; or it
may be an immature boy; or it may be, once more, a youth arrived at puberty: suppose,
moreover, that the life in each case ought to have reached full eighty years, how is it
possible that the soul of either could spend the whole of the shortened years here on
earth after losing the body by death? One's age cannot be passed without one's body, it
being by help of the body that the period of life has its duties and labours transacted.
Let our own people, moreover, bear this in mind, that souls are to receive back at the
resurrection the self-same bodies in which they died. Therefore our bodies must be
expected to resume the same conditions and the same ages, for it is these particulars
which impart to bodies their especial modes. By what means, then, can the soul of an
infant so spend on earth its residue of years, that it should be able at the resurrection
to assume the state of an octogenarian, although it had barely lived a month?

4 Or if it shall be necessary that the appointed days of life be fulfilled here on earth,
must the same course of life in all its vicissitudes, which has been itself ordained to
accompany the appointed days, be also passed through by the soul along with the days? Must
it employ itself in school studies in its passage from infancy to boyhood; play the
soldier in the excitement and vigour of youth and earlier manhood; and encounter serious
and judicial responsibilities in the graver years between ripe manhood and old age? Must
it ply trade for profit, turn up the soil with hoe and plough, go to sea, bring actions at
law, get married, toil and labour, undergo illnesses, and whatever casualties of weal and
woe await it in the lapse of years? Well, but how are all these transactions to be managed
without one's body? Life (spent) without life? But (you will tell me) the destined period
in question is to be bare of all incident whatever, only to be accomplished by merely
elapsing. What, then, is to prevent its being fulfilled in Hades, where there is
absolutely no use to which you can apply it? We therefore maintain that every soul,
whatever be its age on quitting the body, remains unchanged in the same, until the time
shall come when the promised perfection shall be realized in a state duly tempered to the
measure of the peerless angels.

5 Hence those souls must be accounted as passing an exile in Hades, which people are apt
to regard as carried off by violence, especially by cruel tortures, such as those of the
cross, and the axe, and the sword, and the lion; but we do not account those to be violent
deaths which justice awards, that avenger of violence. So then, you will say, it is all
the wicked souls that are banished in Hades. (Not quite so fast, is my answer. I must
compel you to determine (what you mean by Hades), which of its two regions, the region of
the good or of the bad. If you mean the bad, (all I can say is, that) even now the souls
of the wicked deserve to be consigned W those abodes; if you mean the good why should you
judge to be unworthy of such a resting-place the souls of infants and of virgins, and
those which, by reason of their condition in life were pure and innocent?

CHAPTER LVII.-MAGIC AND SORCERY ONLY APPARENT IN THEIR EFFECTS. GOD ALONE CAN RAISE THE DEAD.

1 It is either a very fine thing to be detained in these infernal regions with the Aori,
or souls which were prematurely hurried away; or else a very bad thing indeed to be there
associated with the Biaeothanati, who suffered violent deaths. I may be permitted to use
the actual words and terms with which magic rings again, that inventor of all these odd
opinions-with its Ostanes, and Typhon, and Dardanus, and Damigeron, and Nectabis, and
Berenice. There is a well-known popular bit of writing, which undertakes to summon up from
the abode of Hades the souls which have actually slept out their full age, and had passed
away by an honourable death, and had even been buried with full rites and proper ceremony.
What after this shall we say about magic? Say, to be sure, what almost everybody says of
it-that it is an imposture. But it is not we Christians only whose notice this system of
imposture does not escape. We, it is true, have discovered these spirits of evil, not, to
be sure, by a complicity with them, but by a certain knowledge which is hostile to them;
nor is it by any procedure which is attractive to them, but by a power which subjugates
them that we handle (their wretched system)-that manifold pest of the mind of man, that
artificer of all error, that destroyer of our salvation and our soul at one swoop.

2 In this way, even by magic, which is indeed only a second idolatry, wherein they pretend
that after death they become demons, just as they were supposed in the first and literal
idolatry to become gods (and why not? since the gods are but dead things), the before-
mentioned Aori Biaeothanati are actually invoked,-and not unfairly, if one grounds his
faith on this principle, that it is clearly credible for those souls to be beyond all
others addicted to violence and wrong, which with violence and wrong have been hurried
away by a cruel and premature death and which would have a keen appetite for reprisals.
Under cover, however, of these souls, demons operate, especially such as used to dwell in
them when they were in life, and who had driven them, in fact, to the fate which had at
last carried them off. For, as we have already suggested, there is hardly a human being
who is unattended by a demon; and it is well known to many, that premature and violent
deaths, which men ascribe to accidents, are in fact brought about by demons. This
imposture of the evil spirit lying concealed in the persons of the dead, we are able, if I
mistake not, to prove by actual facts, when in cases of exorcism (the evil spirit) affirms
himself sometimes to be one of the relatives of the person possessed by him, sometimes a
gladiator or a bestiarius, and sometimes even a god;

3 always making it one of his chief cares to extinguish the very truth which we are
proclaiming, that men may not readily believe that all souls remove to Hades, and that
they may overthrow faith in the resurrection and the judgment. And yet for all that, the
demon, after trying to circumvent the bystanders, is vanquished by the pressure of divine
grace, and sorely against his will confesses all the truth. So also in that other kind of
magic, which is supposed to bring up from Hades the souls now resting there, and to
exhibit them to public view, there is no other expedient of imposture ever resorted to
which operates more powerfully. Of course, why a phantom becomes visible, is because a
body is also attached to it; and it is no difficult matter to delude the external vision
of a man whose mental eye it is so easy to blind. The serpents which emerged from the
magicians' rods, certainly appeared to Pharaoh and to the Egyptians as bodily substances.
It is true that the verity of Moses swallowed up their lying deceit. Many attempts were
also wrought against the apostles by the sorcerers Simon and Elymas, but the blindness
which struck (them) was no enchanter's trick. What novelty is there in the effort of an
unclean spirit to counterfeit the truth?

4 At this very time, even, the heretical dupes of this same Simon (Magus) are so much
elated by the extravagant pretensions of their art, that they undertake to bring up from
Hades the souls of the prophets themselves. And I suppose that they can do so under cover
of a lying wonder. For, indeed, it was no less than this that was anciently permitted to
the Pythonic (or ventriloquistic) spirit -even to represent the soul of Samuel, when Saul
consulted the dead, after (losing the living) God. God forbid, however, that we should
suppose that the soul of any saint, much less of a prophet, can be dragged out of (its
resting-place in Hades) by a demon. We know that "Satan himself is transformed into an
angel of light" -much more into a man of light-and that at last he will "show himself to
be even God," and will exhibit "great signs and wonders, insomuch that, if it were
possible, he shall deceive the very elect. He hardly hesitated on the before-mentioned
occasion to affirm himself to be a prophet of God, and especially to Saul, in whom he was
then actually dwelling. You must not imagine that he who produced the phantom was one, and
he who consulted it was another;

5 but that it was one and the same spirit, both in the sorceress and in the apostate
(king), which easily pretended an apparition of that which it had already prepared them to
believe as real-(even the spirit) through whose evil influence Saul's heart was fixed
where his treasure was, and where certainly God was not. Therefore it came about, that he
saw him through whose aid he believed that he was going to see, because he believed him
through whose help he saw. But we are met with the objection, that in visions of the night
dead persons are not unfrequently seen, and that for a set purpose. For instance, the
Nasamones consult private oracles by frequent and lengthened visits to the sepulchres of
their relatives, as one may find in Heraclides, or Nymphodorus, or Herodotus; and the
Celts, for the game purpose, stay away all night at the tombs of their brave chieftains,
as Nicander affirms. Well, we admit apparitions of dead persons in dreams to be not more
really true than those of living persons; but we apply the same estimate to all alike-to
the dead and to the living, and indeed to all the phenomena which are seen. Now things are
not true because they appear to be so, but because they are fully proved to be so. The
truth of dreams is declared from the realization, not the aspect.

6 Moreover, the fact that Hades is not in any case opened for (the escape of) any soul,
has been firmly established by the Lord in the person of Abraham, in His representation of
the poor man at rest and the rich man in torment. No one, (he said, ) could possibly be
despatched from those abodes to report to us how matters went in the nether regions,-a
purpose which, (if any could be, ) might have been allowable on such an occasion, to
persuade a belief in Moses and the prophets. The power of God has, no doubt, sometimes
recalled men's souls to their bodies, as a proof of His own transcendent rights; but there
must never be, because of this fact, any agreement supposed to be possible between the
divine faith and the arrogant pretensions of sorcerers, and the imposture of dreams, and
the licence of poets. But yet in all cases of a true resurrection, when the power of God
recalls souls to their bodies, either by the agency of prophets, or of Christ, or of
apostles, a complete presumption is afforded us, by the solid, palpable, and ascertained
reality (of the revived body), that its true form must be such as to compel one's belief
of the fraudulence of every incorporeal apparition of dead persons.

CHAPTER LVIII.-CONCLUSION. POINTS POSTPONED. ALL SOULS ARE KEPT IN HADES UNTIL THE RESURRECTION, ANTICIPATING THEIR ULTIMATE MISERY OR BLISS.

1 All souls, therefore; are shut up within Hades: do you admit this? (It is true, whether)
you say yes or no: moreover, there are already experienced there punishments and
consolations; and there you have a poor man and a rich. And now, having postponed some
stray questions for this part of my work, I will notice them in this suitable place, and
then come to a close. Why, then, cannot you suppose that the soul undergoes punishment and
consolation in Hades in the interval, while it awaits its alternative of judgment, in a
certain anticipation either of gloom or of glory? You reply: Because in the judgment of
God its matter ought to be sure and safe, nor should there be any inkling beforehand of
the award of His sentence; and also because (the soul) ought to be covered first by its
vestment of the restored flesh, which, as the partner of its actions, should be also a
sharer in its recompense. What, then, is to take place in that interval? Shall we sleep?
But souls do not sleep even when men are alive: it is indeed the business of bodies to
sleep, to which also belongs death itself, no less than its mirror and counterfeit sleep.
Or will you have it, that nothing is there done whither the whole human race is attracted,
and whither all man's expectation is postponed for safe keeping? Do you think this state
is a foretaste of judgment, or its actual commencement?

2 a premature encroachment on it, or the first course in its full ministration? Now
really, would it not be the highest possible injustice, even in Hades, if all were to be
still well with the guilty even there, and not well with the righteous even yet? What,
would you have hope be still more confused after death? would you have it mock us still
more with uncertain expectation? or shall it now become a review of past life, and an
arranging of judgment, with the inevitable feeling of a trembling fear? But, again, must
the soul always tarry for the body, in order to experience sorrow or joy? Is it not
sufficient, even of itself, to suffer both one and the other of these sensations? How
often, without any pain to the body, is the soul alone tortured by ill-temper, and anger,
and fatigue, and very often unconsciously, even to itself? How often, too, on the other
hand, amidst bodily suffering, does the soul seek out for itself some furtive joy, and
withdraw for the moment from the body's importunate society? I am mistaken if the soul is
not in the habit, indeed, solitary and alone, of rejoicing and glorifying over the very
tortures of the body. Look for instance, at the soul of Mutius Scµvola as he melts his
right hand over the fire; look also at Zeno's, as the torments of Dionysius pass over it.
The bites of wild beasts are a glory to young heroes, as on Cyrus were the scars of the
bear.

3 Full well, then, does the soul even in Hades know how to joy and to sorrow even without
the body; since when in the flesh it feels pain when it likes, though the body is unhurt;
and when it likes it feels joy though the body is in pain. Now if such sensations occur at
its will during life, how much rather may they not happen after death by the judicial
appointment of God! Moreover, the soul executes not all its operations with the
ministration of the flesh; for the judgment of God pursues even simple cogitations and the
merest volitions. "Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery
with her already in his heart. Therefore, even for this cause it is most fitting that the
soul, without at all waiting for the flesh, should be punished for what it has done
without the partnership of the flesh. So, on the same principle, in return for the pious
and kindly thoughts in which it shared not the help of the flesh, shall it without the
flesh receive its consolation. Nay more, even in matters done through the flesh the soul
is the first to conceive them, the first to arrange them, the first to authorize them, the
first to precipitate them into acts. And even if it is sometimes unwilling to act, it is
still the first to treat the object which it means to effect by help of the body. In no
case, indeed, can an accomplished fact be prior to the mental conception thereof.

4 It is therefore quite in keeping with this order of things, that that part of our nature
should be the first to have the recompense and reward to which they are due on account of
its priority. In short, inasmuch as we understand "the prison" pointed out in the Gospel
to be Hades, and as we also interpret "the uttermost farthing" to mean the very smallest
offence which has to be recompensed there before the resurrection, no one will hesitate to
believe that the soul undergoes in Hades some compensatory discipline, without prejudice
to the full process of the resurrection, when the recompense will be administered through
the flesh besides. This point the Paraclete has also pressed home on our attention in most
frequent admonitions, whenever any of us has admitted the force of His words from a
knowledge of His promised spiritual disclosures. And now at last having, as I believe,
encountered every human opinion concerning the soul, and tried its character by the
teaching of (our holy faith, ) we have satisfied the curiosity which is simply a
reasonable and necessary one. As for that which is extravagant and idle, there will
evermore be as great a defect in its information, as there has been exaggeration and self-
will in its researches.


ON THE FLESH OF CHRIST
======================

ON THE FLESH OF CHRIST Tertullian

c. AD 155–220

North African lawyer and the first great Latin theologian.

INTRODUCTION

This was written by our author in confutation of certain heretics who denied the reality
of Christ's flesh, or at least its identity with human flesh-fearing that, if they
admitted the reality of Christ's flesh, they must also admit his resurrection in the
flesh; and, consequently, the resurrection of the human body after death. [Translated by
Dr. Holmes.]

CHAPTER I.-THE GENERAL PURPORT OF THIS WORK. THE HERETICS, MARCION, APELLES, AND VALENTINUS, WISHING TO IMPUGN THE DOCTRINE OF THE RESURRECTION, DEPRIVE CHRIST OF ALL CAPACITY FOR SUCH A CHANGE BY DENYING HIS FLESH.

1 They who are so anxious to shake that belief in the resurrection which was firmly
settled before the appearance of our modern Sadducees, as even to deny that the
expectation thereof has any relation whatever to the flesh, have great cause for besetting
the flesh of Christ also with doubtful questions, as if it either had no existence at all,
or possessed a nature altogether different from human flesh. For they cannot but be
apprehensive that, if it be once determined that Christ's flesh was human, a presumption
would immediately arise in opposition to them, that that flesh must by all means rise
again, which has already risen in Christ. Therefore we shall have to guard our belief in
the resurrection from the same armoury, whence they get their weapons of destruction. Let
us examine our Lord's bodily substance, for about His spiritual nature all are agreed. It
is His flesh that is in question. Its verity and quality are the points in dispute. Did it
ever exist? whence was it derived? and of what kind was it? If we succeed in demonstrating
it, we shall lay down a law for our own resurrection. Marcion, in order that he might deny
the flesh of Christ, denied also His nativity, or else he denied His flesh in order that
he might deny His nativity; because, of course, he was afraid that His nativity and His
flesh bore mutual testimony to each other's reality, since there is no nativity without
flesh, and no flesh without nativity.

2 As if indeed, under the prompting of that licence which is ever the same in all heresy,
he too might not very well have either denied the nativity, although admitting the
flesh,-like Apelles, who was first a disciple of his, and afterwards an apostate,-or,
while admitting both the flesh and the nativity, have interpreted them in a different
sense, as did Valentinus, who resembled Apelles both in his discipleship and desertion of
Marcion. At all events, he who represented the flesh of Christ to be imaginary was equally
able to pass off His nativity as a phantom; so that the virgin's conception, and
pregnancy, and child-bearing, and then the whole course of her infant too, would have to
be regarded as putative. These facts pertaining to the nativity of Christ would escape the
notice of the same eyes and the same senses as failed to grasp the full idea of His flesh.

CHAPTER II.-MARCION, WHO WOULD BLOT OUT THE RECORD OF CHRIST'S NATIVITY, IS REBUKED FOR SO STARTLING A HERESY.

1 Clearly enough is the nativity announced by Gabriel. But what has he to do with the
Creator's angel? The conception in the virgin's womb is also set plainly before us. But
what concern has he with the Creator's prophet, Isaiah? He will not brook delay, since
suddenly (without any prophetic announcement) did he bring down Christ from heaven.
"Away," says he, "with that eternal plaguey taxing of Caesar, and the scanty inn, and the
squalid swaddling-clothes, and the hard stable. We do not care a jot for that multitude of
the heavenly host which praised their Lord at night. Let the shepherds take better care of
their flock, and let the wise men spare their legs so long a journey; let them keep their
gold to themselves. Let Herod, too, mend his manners, so that Jeremy may not glory over
him. Spare also the babe from circumcision, that he may escape the pain thereof; nor let
him be brought into the temple, lest he burden his parents with the expense of the
offering; nor let him be handed to Simeon, lest the old man be saddened at the point of
death. Let that old woman also hold her tongue, lest she should bewitch the child. After
such a fashion as this, I suppose you have had, O Marcion, the hardihood of blotting out
the original records (of the history) of Christ, that His flesh may lose the proofs of its
reality. But, prithee, on what grounds (do you do this)? Show me your authority.

2 If you are a prophet, foretell us a thing; if you are an apostle, open your message in
public; if a follower of apostles, side with apostles in thought; if you are only a
(private) Christian, believe what has been handed down to us: if, however, you are nothing
of all this, then (as I have the best reason to say) cease to live. For indeed you are
already dead, since you are no Christian, because you do not believe that which by being
believed makes men Christian,-nay, you are the more dead, the more you are not a
Christian; having fallen away, after you had been one, by rejecting what you formerly
believed, even as you yourself acknowledge in a certain letter of yours, and as your
followers do not deny, whilst our (brethren) can prove it. Rejecting, therefore, what you
once believed, you have completed the act of rejection, by now no longer believing: the
fact, however, of your having ceased to believe has not made your rejection of the faith
right and proper; nay, rather, by your act of rejection you prove that what you believed
previous to the said act was of a different character. What you believed to be of a
different character, had been handed down just as you believed it. Now that which had been
handed down was true, inasmuch as it had been transmitted by those whose duty it was to
hand it down. Therefore, when rejecting that which had been handed down, you rejected that
which was true.

3 You had no authority for what you did. However, we have already in another treatise
availed ourselves more fully of these prescriptive rules against all heresies. Our
repetition of them hereafter that large (treatise) is superfluous, when we ask the reason
why you have formed the opinion that Christ was not born.

CHAPTER III.-CHRIST'S NATIVITY BOTH POSSIBLE AND BECOMING. THE HERETICAL OPINION OF CHRIST'S APPARENT FLESH DECEPTIVE AND DISHONOURABLE TO GOD, EVEN ON MARCION'S PRINCIPLES.

1 Since you think that this lay within the competency of your own arbitrary choice, you
must needs have supposed that being born was either impossible for God, or unbecoming to
Him. With God, however, nothing is impossible but what He does not will. Let us consider,
then, whether He willed to be born (for if He had the will, He also had the power, and was
born). I put the argument very briefly. If God had willed not to be born, it matters not
why, He would not have presented Himself in the likeness of man. Now who, when he sees a
man, would deny that he had been born? What God therefore willed not to be, He would in no
wise have willed the seeming to be. When a thing is distasteful, the very notion of it is
scouted; because it makes no difference whether a thing exist or do not exist, if, when it
does not exist, it is yet assumed to exist. It is of course of the greatest importance
that there should be nothing false (or pretended) attributed to that which really does not
exist. But, say you, His own consciousness (of the truth of His nature) was enough for
Him. If any supposed that He had been born, because they saw Him as a man, that was their
concern. Yet with how much more dignity and consistency would He have sustained the human
character on the supposition that He was truly born;

2 for if He were not born, He could not have undertaken the said character without injury
to that consciousness of His which you on your side attribute to His confidence of being
able to sustain, although not born, the character of having been born even against! His
own consciousness! Why, I want to know, was it of so much importance, that Christ should,
when perfectly aware what He really was, exhibit Himself as being that which He was not?
You cannot express any apprehension that, if He had been born and truly clothed Himself
with man's nature, He would have ceased to be God, losing what He was, while becoming what
He was not. For God is in no danger of losing His own state and condition. But, say you, I
deny that God was truly changed to man in such wise as to be born and endued with a body
of flesh, on this ground, that a being who is without end is also of necessity incapable
of change. For being changed into something else puts an end to the former state. Change,
therefore, is not possible to a Being who cannot come to an end. Without doubt, the nature
of things which are subject to change is regulated by this law, that they have no
permanence in the state which is undergoing change in them, and that they come to an end
from thus wanting permanence, whilst they lose that in the process of change which they
previously were. But nothing is equal with God;

3 His nature is different from the condition of all things. If, then, the things which
differ from God, and from which God differs, lose what existence they had whilst they are
undergoing change, wherein will consist the difference of the Divine Being from all other
things except in His possessing the contrary faculty of theirs,-in other words, that God
can be changed into all conditions, and yet continue just as He is? On any other
supposition, He would be on the, same level with those things which, when changed, lose
the existence they had before; whose equal, of course, He is not in any other respect, as
He certainly is not in the changeful issues of their nature. You have sometimes read and
believed that the Creator's angels have been changed into human form, and have even borne
about so veritable a body, that Abraham even washed their feet, and Lot was rescued from
the Sodomites by their hands; an angel, moreover, wrestled with a man so strenuously with
his body, that the latter desired to be let loose, so tightly was he held. Has it, then,
been permitted to angels, which are inferior to God, after they have been changed into
human bodily form, nevertheless to remain angels? and will you deprive God, their
superior, of this faculty, as if Christ could not continue to be God, after His real
assumption of the nature of man? Or else, did those angels appear as phantoms of flesh?
You will not, however, have the courage to say this;

4 for if it be so held in your belief, that the Creator's angels are in the same condition
as Christ, then Christ will belong to the same God as those angels do, who are like Christ
in their condition. If you had not purposely rejected in some instances, and corrupter in
others, the Scriptures which are opposed to your opinion, you would have been confuted in
this matter by the Gospel of John, when it declares that the Spirit descended in the body
of a dove, and sat upon the Lord. When the said Spirit was in this condition, He was as
truly a dove as He was also a spirit; nor did He destroy His own proper substance by the
assumption of an extraneous substance. But you ask what becomes of the dove's body, after
the return of the Spirit back to heaven, and similarly in the case of the angels. Their
withdrawal was effected in the same manner as their appearance had been. If you had seen
how their production out of nothing had been effected, you would have known also the
process of their return to nothing. If the initial step was out of sight, so was also the
final one. Still there was solidity in their bodily substance, whatever may have been the
force by which the body became visible.What is written cannot but have been.

CHAPTER IV.-GOD'S HONOUR IN THE INCARNATION OF HIS SON VINDICATED. MARCION'S DISPARAGEMENT OF HUMAN FLESH INCONSISTENT AS WELL AS IMPIOUS. CHRIST HAS CLEANSED THE FLESH. THE FOOLISHNESS OF GOD IS MOST WISE.

1 Since, therefore, you do not reject the assumption of a body as impossible or as
hazardous to the character of God, it remains for you to repudiate and censure it as
unworthy of Him. Come now, beginning from the nativity itself, declaim against the
uncleanness of the generative elements within the womb, the filthy concretion of fluid and
blood, of the growth of the flesh for nine: months long out of that very mire. Describe
the womb as it enlarges from day to day, heavy, troublesome, restless even in sleep,
changeful in its feelings of dislike and desire. Inveigh now likewise against the shame
itself of a woman in travail which, however, ought rather to be honoured in consideration
of that peril, or to be held sacred in respect of (the mystery of) nature. Of course you
are horrified also at the infant, which is shed into life with the embarrassments which
accompany it from the womb; you likewise, of course, loathe it even after it is washed,
when it is dressed out in its swaddling-clothes, graced with repeated anointing, smiled on
with nurse's fawns. This reverend course of nature, you, O Marcion, (are pleased to) spit
upon; and yet, in what way were you born? You detest a human being at his birth; then
after what fashion do you love anybody? Yourself, of course, you had no love of, when you
departed from the Church and the faith of Christ.

2 But never mind, if you are not on good terms with yourself, or even if you were born in
a way different from other people. Christ, at any rate, has loved even that man who was
condensed in his mother's womb amidst all its uncleannesses, even that man who was brought
into life out of the said womb, even that man who was nursed amidst the nurse's simpers.
For his sake He came down (from heaven), for his sake He preached, for his sake "He
humbled Himself even unto death-the death of the cross. He loved, of course, the being
whom He redeemed at so great a cost. If Christ is the Creator's Son, it was with justice
that He loved His own (creature); if He comes from another god, His love was excessive,
since He redeemed a being who belonged to another. Well, then, loving man He loved his
nativity also, and his flesh as well. Nothing can be loved apart from that through which
whatever exists has its existence. Either take away nativity, and then show us your man;
or else withdraw the flesh, and then present to our view the being whom God has redeemed-
since it is these very conditions which constitute the man whom God has redeemed. And are
you for turning these conditions into occasions of blushing to the very creature whom He
has redeemed, (censuring them), too, us unworthy of Him who certainly would not have
redeemed them had He not loved them?

3 Our birth He reforms from death by a second birth from heaven; our flesh He restores
from every harassing malady; when leprous, He cleanses it of the stain; when blind, He
rekindles its light; when palsied, He renews its strength; when possessed with devils, He
exorcises it; when dead, He reanimates it,-then shall we blush to own it? If, to be sure,
He had chosen to be born of a mere animal, and were to preach the kingdom of heaven
invested with the body of a beast either wild or tame, your censure (I imagine) would have
instantly met Him with this demurrer: "This is disgraceful for God, and this is unworthy
of the Son of God, and simply foolish. For no other reason than because one thus judges.
It is of course foolish, if we are to judge God by our own conceptions. But, Marcion,
consider well this Scripture, if indeed you have not erased it: "God hath chosen the
foolish things of the world, to confound the wise. Now what are those foolish things? Are
they the conversion of men to the worship of the true God, the rejection of error, the
whole training in righteousness, chastity, mercy, patience, and innocence? These things
certainly are not "foolish.

4 Inquire again, then, of what things he spoke, and when you imagine that you have
discovered what they are will you find anything to be so "foolish" as believing in a God
that has been born, and that of a virgin, and of a fleshly nature too, who wallowed in all
the before-mentioned humiliations of nature? But some one may say, "These are not the
foolish things; they must be other things which God has chosen to confound the wisdom of
the world. And yet, according to the world's wisdom, it is more easy to believe that
Jupiter became a bull or a swan, if we listen to Marcion, than that Christ really became a
man.

CHAPTER V.-CHRIST TRULY LIVED AND DIED IN HUMAN FLESH. INCIDENTS OF HIS HUMAN LIFE ON EARTH, AND REFUTATION OF MARCION'S DOCETIC PARODY OF THE SAME.

1 There are, to be sure, other things also quite as foolish (as the birth of Christ),
which have reference to the humiliations and sufferings of God. Or else, let them call a
crucified God "wisdom. But Marcion will apply the knife to this doctrine also, and even
with greater reason. For which Is more unworthy of God, which is more likely to raise a
blush of shame, that God should be born, or that He should die? that He should bear the
flesh, or the cross? be circumcised, or be crucified? be cradled, or be coffined? be laid
in a manger, or in a tomb? Talk of "wisdom! You will show more of that if you refuse to
believe this also. But, after all, you will not be "wise" unless you become a "fool" to
the world, by believing" the foolish things of God. Have you, then, cut away all
sufferings from Christ, on the ground that, as a mere phantom, He was incapable of
experiencing them? We have said above that He might possibly have undergone the unreal
mockeries of an imaginary birth and infancy. But answer me at once, you that murder truth:
Was not God really crucified? And, having been really crucified, did He not really die?
And, having indeed really died, did He not really rise again? Falsely did Paul "determine
to know nothing amongst us but Jesus and Him crucified; " falsely has he impressed upon us
that He was buried; falsely inculcated that He rose again. False, therefore, is our faith
also.

2 And all that we hope for from Christ will be a phantom. O thou most infamous of men, who
acquittest of all guilt the murderers of God! For nothing did Christ suffer from them, if
He really suffered nothing at all. Spare the whole world's one only hope, thou who art
destroying the indispensable dishonour of our faith Whatsoever is unworthy of God, is of
gain to me. I am safe, if I am not ashamed of my Lord. "Whosoever," says He, "shall be
ashamed of me, of him will I also be ashamed. Other matters for shame find I none which
can prove me to be shameless in a good sense, and foolish in a happy one, by my own
contempt of shame. The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must needs
be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it
is absurd. And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is
impossible. But how will all this be true in Him, if He was not Himself true-if He really
had not in Himself that which might be crucified, might die, might be buried, and might
rise again? I mean this flesh suffused with blood, built up with bones, interwoven with
nerves, entwined with veins, a flesh which knew how to be born, and how to die, human
without doubt, as born of a human being.

3 It will therefore be mortal in Christ, because Christ is man and the Son of man. Else
why is Christ man and the Son of man, if he has nothing of man, and nothing from man?
Unless it be either that man is anything else than flesh, or man's flesh comes from any
other source than man, or Mary is anything else than a human being, or Marcion's man is as
Marcion's god. Otherwise Christ could not be described as being man without flesh, nor the
Son of man without any human parent; just as He is not God without the Spirit of God, nor
the Son of God without having God for His father. Thus the nature of the two substances
displayed Him as man and God,-in one respect born, in the other unborn; l in one respect
fleshly in the other spiritual; in one sense weak in the other exceeding strong; in on
sense dying, in the other living. This property of the two states-the divine and the
human-is distinctly asserted with equal truth of both natures alike, with the same belief
both in respect of the Spirit and of the flesh. The powers of the Spirit, proved Him to be
God, His sufferings attested the flesh of man. If His powers were not without the Spirit
in like manner, were not His sufferings without the flesh. if His flesh with its
sufferings was fictitious, for the same reason was the Spirit false with all its powers.
Wherefore halve Christ with a lie? He was wholly the truth.

4 Believe me, He chose rather to be born, than in any part to pretend-and that indeed to
His own detriment-that He was bearing about a flesh hardened without bones, solid without
muscles, bloody without blood, clothed without the tunic of skin, hungry without appetite,
eating without teeth, speaking without a tongue, so that His word was a phantom to the
ears through an imaginary voice. A phantom, too, it was of course after the resurrection,
when, showing His hands and His feet for the disciples to examine, He said, "Behold and
see that it is I myself, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have; "
without doubt, hands, and feet, and bones are not what a spirit possesses, but only the
flesh. Howdo you interpret this statement, Marcion, you who tell us that Jesus comes only
from the most excellent God, who is both simple and good? See how He rather cheats, and
deceives, and juggles the eyes of all, and the senses of all, as well as their access to
and contact with Him! You ought rather to have brought Christ down, not from heaven, but
from some troop of mountebanks, not as God besides man, but simply as a man, a magician;
not as the High Priest of our salvation, but as the conjurer in a show; not as the raiser
of the dead, but as the misleader of the living,-except that, if He were a magician, He
must have had a nativity!

CHAPTER VI.-THE DOCTRINE OF APELLES REFUTED, THAT CHRIST'S BODY WAS OF SIDEREAL SUBSTANCE, NOT BORN. NATIVITY AND MORTALITY ARE CORRELATIVE CIRCUMSTANCES, AND IN CHRIST'S CASE HIS DEATH PROVES HIS BIRTH.

1 But certain disciples of the heretic of Pontus, compelled to be wiser than their
teacher, concede to Christ real flesh, without effect, however, on their denial of His
nativity. He might have had, they say, a flesh which was not at all born. So we have found
our way "out of a frying-pan," as the proverb runs, "into the fire," -from Marcion to
Apelles. This man having first fallen from the principles of Marcion into (intercourse
with) a woman, in the flesh, and afterwards shipwrecked himself, in the spirit, on the
virgin Philumene, proceeded from that time to preach that the body of Christ was of solid
flesh, but without having been born. To this angel, indeed, of Philumene, the apostle will
reply in tones like those in which he even then predicted him, saying, "Although an angel
from heaven preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you,
let him be accursed. To the arguments, however, which have been indicated just above, we
have now to show our resistance. They allow that Christ really had a body. Whence was the
material of it, if not from the same sort of thing as that in which He appeared? Whence
came His body, if His body were not flesh? Whence came His flesh, if it were not born?
Inasmuch as that which is born must undergo this nativity in order to become flesh. He
borrowed, they say, His flesh from the stars, and from the substances of the higher world.

2 And they assert it for a certain principle, that a body without nativity is nothing to
be astonished at, because it has been submitted to angels to appear even amongst ourselves
in the flesh without the intervention of the womb. We admit, of course, that such facts
have been related. But then, how comes it to pass that a faith which holds to a different
rule borrows materials for its own arguments from the faith which it impugns? What has it
to do with Moses, who has rejected the God of Moses? Since the God is a different one,
everything belonging to him must be different also. But let the heretics always use the
Scriptures of that God whose world they also enjoy. The fact will certainly recoil on them
as a witness to judge them, that they maintain their own blasphemies from examples derived
from Him. But it is an easy task for the truth to prevail without raising any such
demurrer against them. When, therefore, they set forth the flesh of Christ after the
pattern of the angels, declaring it to be not born, and yet flesh for all that, I should
wish them to compare the causes, both in Christ's case and that of the angels, wherefore
they came in the flesh. Never did any angel descend for the purpose of being crucified, of
tasting death, and of rising again from the dead. Now, since there never was such a reason
for angels becoming embodied, you have the cause why they assumed flesh without undergoing
birth.

3 They had not come to die, therefore they also (came not) to be born. Christ, however,
having been sent to die, had necessarily to be also born, that He might be capable of
death; for nothing is in the habit of dying but that which is born. Between nativity and
mortality there is a mutual contrast. The law which makes us die is the cause of our being
born. Now, since Christ died owing to the condition which undergoes death, but that
undergoes death which is also born, the consequence was-nay, it was an antecedent
necessity-that He must have been born also, by reason of the condition which undergoes
birth; because He had to die in obedience to that very condition which, because it begins
with birth, ends in death. It was not fitting for Him not to be born under the pretence
that it was fitting for Him to die. But the Lord Himself at that very time appeared to
Abraham amongst those angels without being born, and yet in the flesh without doubt, in
virtue of the before-mentioned diversity of cause. You, however, cannot admit this, since
you do not receive that Christ, who was even then rehearsing how to converse with, and
liberate, and judge the human race, in the habit of a flesh which as yet was not born,
because it did not yet mean to die until both its nativity and mortality were previously
(by prophecy) announced. Let them, then, prove to us that those angels derived their flesh
from the stars.

4 If they do not prove it because it is not written, neither will the flesh of Christ get
its origin therefrom, for which they borrowed the precedent of the angels. It is plain
that the angels bore a flesh which was not naturally their own; their nature being of a
spiritual substance, although in some sense peculiar to themselves, corporeal; and yet
they could be transfigured into human shape, and for the time be able to appear and have
intercourse with men. Since, therefore, it has not been told us whence they obtained their
flesh, it remains for us not to doubt in our minds that a property of angelic power is
this, to assume to themselves bodily Shape out of no material substance. How much more,
you say, is it (within their competence to take a body) out of some material substance?
That is true enough. But there is no evidence of this, because Scripture says nothing.
Then, again, how should they who are able to form themselves into that which by nature
they are not, be unable to do this out of no material substance? If they become that which
they are not, why cannot they so become out of that which is not? But that which has not
existence when it comes into existence, is made out of nothing. This is why it is
unnecessary either to inquire or to demonstrate what has subsequently become of their
bodies. What came out of nothing, came to nothing.

5 They, who were able to convert themselves into flesh have it in their power to convert
nothing itself into flesh. It is a greater thing to change a nature than to make matter.
But even if it were necessary to suppose that angels derived their flesh from some
material substance, it is surely more credible that it was from some earthly matter than
from any kind of celestial substances, since it was composed of so palpably terrene a
quality that it fed on earthly ailments. Suppose that even now a celestial flesh had fed
on earthly aliments, although it was not itself earthly, in the same way that earthly
flesh actually fed on celestial aliments, although it had nothing of the celestial nature
(for we read of manna having been food for the people: "Man," says the Psalmist, "did eat
angels' bread," ) yet this does not once infringe the separate condition of the Lord's
flesh, because of His different destination. For One who was to be truly a man, even unto
death, it was necessary that He should be clothed with that flesh to which death belongs.
Now that flesh to which death belongs is preceded by birth.

CHAPTER VII.-EXPLANATION OF THE LORD'S QUESTION ABOUT HIS MOTHER AND HIS BRETHREN. ANSWER TO THE CAVILS OF APELLES AND MARCION, WHO SUPPORT THEIR DENIAL OF CHRIST'S NATIVITY BY IT.

1 But whenever a dispute arises about the nativity, all who reject it as creating a
presumption in favour of the reality of Christ's flesh, wilfully deny that God Himself was
born, on the ground that He asked, "Who is my mother, and who are my brethren? " Let,
therefore, Apelles hear what was our answer to Marcion in that little work, in which we
challenged his own (favourite) gospel to the proof, even that the material circumstances
of that remark (of the Lord's) should be considered. First of all, nobody would have told
Him that His mother and brethren were standing outside, if he were not certain both that
He had a mother and brethren, and that they were the very persons whom he was then
announcing,-who had either been known to him before, or were then and there discovered by
him; although heretics have removed this passage from the gospel, because those who were
admiring His doctrine said that His supposed father, Joseph the carpenter, and His mother
Mary, and His brethren, and His sisters, were very well known to them. But it was with the
view of tempting Him, that they had mentioned to Him a mother and brethren which He did
not possess. The Scripture says nothing of this, although it is not in other instances
silent when anything was done against Him by way of temptation. "Behold," it says, "a
certain lawyer stood up, and tempted Him. And in another passage: "The Pharisees also came
unto Him, tempting Him.

2 Who was to prevent its being in this place also indicated that this was done with the
view of tempting Him? I do not admit what you advance of your own apart from Scripture.
Then there ought to be suggested some occasion for the temptation. What could they have
thought to be in Him which required temptation? The question, to be sure, whether He had
been born or not? For if this point were denied in His answer, it might come out on the
announcement of a temptation. And yet no temptation, when aiming at the discovery of the
point which prompts the temptation by its doubtfulness, falls upon one so abruptly, as not
to be preceded by the question which compels the temptation whilst raising the doubt. Now,
since the nativity of Christ had never come into question, how can you contend that they
meant by their temptation to inquire about a point on which they had never raised a doubt?
Besides, if He had to be tempted about His birth, this of course was not the proper way of
doing it,-by announcing those persons who, even on the supposition of His birth, might
possibly not have been in existence. We have all been born, and yet all of us have not
either brothers or mother. He might with more probability have had even a father than a
mother, and uncles more likely than brothers. Thus is the temptation about His birth
unsuitable, for it might have been contrived without any mention of either His mother or
His brethren.

3 It is clearly more credible that, being certain that He had both a mother and brothers,
they tested His divinity rather than His nativity, whether, when within, He knew what was
without; being tried by the untrue announcement of the presence of persons who were not
present. But the artifice of a temptation might have been thwarted thus: it might have
happened that He knew that those whom they were announcing to be "standing without," were
in fact absent by the stress either of sickness, or of business, or a journey which He was
at the time aware of. No one tempts (another) in a way in which he knows that he may have
himself to bear the shame of the temptation. There being, then, no suitable occasion for a
temptation, the announcement that His mother and His brethren had actually turned up
recovers its naturalness. But there is some ground for thinking that Christ's answer
denies His mother and brethren for the present, as even Apelles might learn. "The Lord's
brethren had not yet believed in Him. So is it contained in the Gospel which was published
before Marcion's time; whilst there is at the same time a want of evidence of His mother's
adherence to Him, although the Marthas and the other Marys were in constant attendance on
Him. In this very passage indeed, their unbelief is evident. Jesus was teaching the way of
life, preaching the kingdom of God and actively engaged in healing infirmities of body and
soul;

4 but all the while, whilst strangers were intent on Him, His very nearest relatives were
absent. By and by they turn up, and keep outside; but they do not go in, because,
forsooth, they set small store on that which was doing within; nor do they even wait, as
if they had something which they could contribute more necessary than that which He was so
earnestly doing; but they prefer to interrupt Him, and wish to call Him away from His
great work Now, I ask you, Apelles, or will you Marcion, please (to tell me), if you
happened to be at a stage play, or had laid a wager on a foot race or a chariot race, and
were called away by such a message, would you not have exclaimed, "What are mother and
brothers to me? " And did not Christ, whilst preaching and manifesting God, fulfilling the
law and the prophets, and scattering the darkness of the long preceding age, justly employ
this same form of words, in order to strike the unbelief of those who stood outside, or to
shake off the importunity of those who would call Him away from His work? If, however, He
had meant to deny His own nativity, He would have found place, time, and means for
expressing Himself very differently, and not in words which might be uttered by one who
had both a mother and brothers. When denying one's parents in indignation, one does not
deny their existence, but censures their faults. Besides, He gave Others the preference;

5 and since He shows their title to this favour-even because they listened to the word (of
God)-He points out in what sense He denied His mother and His brethren. For in whatever
sense He adopted as His own those who adhered to Him, in that did He deny as His those who
kept aloof from Him. Christ also is wont to do to the utmost that which He enjoins on
others. How strange, then, would it certainly have been, if, while he was teaching others
not to esteem mother, or father, or brothers, as highly as the word of God, He were
Himself to leave the word of God as soon as His mother and brethren were announced to Him!
He denied His parents, then, in the sense in which He has taught us to deny ours-for God's
work. But there is also another view of the case: in the abjured mother there is a figure
of the synagogue, as well as of the Jews in the unbelieving brethren. In their person
Israel remained outside, whilst the new disciples who kept close to Christ within, hearing
and believing, represented the Church, which He called mother in a preferable sense and a
worthier brotherhood, with the repudiation of the carnal relationship. It was in just the
same sense, indeed, that He also replied to that exclamation (of a certain woman), not
denying His mother's "womb and paps," but designating those as more "blessed who hear the
word of God."

CHAPTER VIII.-APELLES AND HIS FOLLOWERS, DISPLEASED WITH OUR EARTHLY BODIES, ATTRIBUTED TO CHRIST A BODY OF A PURER SORT. HOW CHRIST WAS HEAVENLY EVEN IN HIS EARTHLY FLESH.

1 These passages alone, in which Apelles and Marcion seem to place their chief reliance
when interpreted according to the truth of the entire uncorrupted gospel, ought to have
been sufficient for proving the human flesh of Christ by a defence of His birth. But since
Apelles' precious set lay a very great stress on the shameful condition of the flesh,
which they will have to have been furnished with souls tampered with by the fiery author
of evil, and so unworthy of Christ; and because they on that account suppose that a
sidereal substance is suitable for Him, I am bound to refute them on their own ground.
They mention a certain angel of great renown as having created this world of ours, and as
having, after the creation, repented of his work. This indeed we have treated of in a
passage by itself; for we have written a little work in opposition to them, on the
question whether one who had the spirit, and will, and power of Christ for such
operations, could have done anything which required repentance, since they describe the
said angel by the figure of "the lost sheep. The world, then, must be a wrong thing,
according to the evidence of its Creator's repentance; for all repentance is the admission
of fault, nor has it indeed any existence except through fault. Now, if the world is a
fault, as is the body, such must be its parts-faulty too;

2 so in like manner must be the heaven and its celestial (contents), and everything which
is conceived and produced out of it. And "a corrupt tree must needs bring forth evil
fruit. The flesh of Christ, therefore, if composed of celestial elements, consists of
faulty materials, sinful by reason of its sinful origin; so that it must be a part of that
substance which they disdain to clothe Christ with, because of its sinfulness,-in other
words, our own. Then, as there is no difference in the point of ignominy, let them either
devise for Christ some substance of a purer stamp, since they are displeased with our own,
or else let them recognise this too, than which even a heavenly substance could not have
been better. We read in so many words: "The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second
man is the Lord from heaven. This passage, however, has nothing to do with any difference
of substance; it only contrasts with the once "earthy" substance of the flesh of the first
man, Adam, the "heavenly" substance of the spirit of the second man, Christ. And so
entirely does the passage refer the celestial man to the spirit and not to the flesh, that
those whom it compares to Him evidently become celestial-by the Spirit, of course-even in
this "earthy flesh. Now, since Christ is heavenly even in regard to the flesh, they could
not be compared to Him, who are not heavenly in reference to their flesh.

3 If, then, they who become heavenly, as Christ also was, carry about an "earthy"
substance of flesh, the conclusion which is affirmed by this fact is, that Christ Himself
also was heavenly, but in an "earthy" flesh, even as they are who are put on a level with
Him.

CHAPTER IX.-CHRIST'S FLESH PERFECTLY NATURAL, LIKE OUR OWN. NONE OF THE SUPERNATURAL FEATURES WHICH THE HERETICS ASCRIBED TO IT DISCOVERABLE, ON A CAREFUL VIEW.

1 We have thus far gone on the principle, that nothing which is derived from some other
thing, however different it may be from that from which it is derived, is so different as
not to suggest the source from which it comes. No material substance is without the
witness of its own original, however great a change into new properties it may have
undergone. There is this very body of ours, the formation of which out of the dust of the
ground is a truth which has found its way into Gentile fables; it certainly testifies its
own origin from the two elements of earth and water,-from the former by its flesh, from
the latter by its blood. Now, although there is a difference in the appearance of
qualities (in other words, that which proceeds from something else is in development
different), yet, after all, what is blood but red fluid? what is flesh but earth in an
especial form? Consider the respective qualities,-of the muscles as clods; of the bones as
stones; the mammillary glands as a kind of pebbles. Look upon the close junctions of the
nerves as propagations of roots, and the branching courses of the veins as winding
rivulets, and the down (which covers us) as moss, and the hair as grass, and the very
treasures of marrow within our bones as ores of flesh. All these marks of the earthy
origin were in Christ;

2 and it is they which obscured Him as the Son of God, for He was looked on as man, for no
other reason whatever than because He existed in the corporeal substance of a man. Or
else, show us some celestial substance in Him purloined from the Bear, and the Pleiades,
and the Hyades. Well, then, the characteristics which we have enumerated are so many
proofs that His was an earthy flesh, as ours is; but anything new or anything strange I do
not discover. Indeed it was from His words and actions only, from His teaching and
miracles solely, that men, though amazed, owned Christ to be man. But if there had been in
Him any new kind of flesh miraculously obtained (from the stars), it would have been
certainly well known. As the case stood, however, it was actually the ordinary condition
of His terrene flesh which made all things else about Him wonderful, as when they said,
"Whence hath this man this wisdom and these mighty works? " Thus spake even they who
despised His outward form. His body did not reach even to human beauty, to say nothing of
heavenly glory. Had the prophets given us no information whatever concerning His ignoble
appearance, His very sufferings and the very contumely He endured bespeak it all. The
sufferings attested His human flesh, the contumely proved its abject condition. Would any
man have dared to touch even with his little finger, the body of Christ, if it had been of
an unusual nature;

3 or to smear His face with spitting, if it had not invited it (by its abjectness)? Why
talk of a heavenly flesh, when you have no grounds to offer us for your celestial theory?
Why deny it to be earthy, when you have the best of reasons for knowing it to be earthy?
He hungered under the devil's temptation; He thirsted with the woman of Samaria; He wept
over Lazarus; He trembles at death (for "the flesh," as He says, "is weak " ); at last, He
pours out His blood. These, I suppose, are celestial marks? But how, I ask, could He have
incurred contempt and suffering in the way I have described, if there had beamed forth in
that flesh of His aught of celestial excellence? From this, therefore, we have a
convincing proof that in it there was nothing of heaven, because it must be capable of
contempt and suffering.

CHAPTER X.-ANOTHER CLASS OF HERETICS REFUTED. THEY ALLEGED THAT CHRIST'S FLESH WAS OF A FINER TEXTURE, ANIMALIS, COMPOSED OF SOUL.

1 I now turn to another class, who are equally wise in their own conceit. They affirm that
the flesh of Christ is composed of soul, that His soul became flesh, so that His flesh is
soul; and as His flesh is of soul, so is His soul of flesh. But here, again, I must have
some reasons. If, in order to save the soul, Christ took a soul within Himself, because it
could not be saved except by Him having, it within Himself, I see no reason why, in
clothing Himself with flesh, He should have made that flesh one of soul, as if He could
not have saved the soul in any other way than by making flesh of it. For while He saves
our souls, which are not only not of flesh, but are even distinct from flesh, how much
more able was He to secure salvation to that soul which He took Himself, when it was also
not of flesh? Again, since they assume it as a main tenet, that Christ came forth not to
deliver the flesh, but only our soul, how absurd it is, in the first place, that, meaning
to save only the soul, He yet made it into just that sort of bodily substance which He had
no intention of saving! And, secondly, if He had undertaken deliver our souls by means of
that which He carried, He ought, in that soul which He carried to have carried our soul,
one (that is) of the same condition as ours;

2 and whatever is the condition of our soul in its secret nature, it is certainly not one
of flesh. However, it was not our soul which He saved, if His own was of flesh; for ours
is not of flesh. Now, if He did not save our soul on the ground, that it was a soul of
flesh which He saved, He is nothing to us, because He has not saved our soul. Nor indeed
did it need salvation, for it was not our soul really, since it was, on the supposition, a
soul of flesh. But yet it is evident that it has been saved. Of flesh, therefore, it was
not composed, and it was ours; for it was our soul that was saved, since that was in peril
of damnation. We therefore now conclude that as in Christ the soul was not of flesh, so
neither could His flesh have possibly been composed of soul.

CHAPTER XI.-THE OPPOSITE EXTRAVAGANCE EXPOSED. THAT IS CHRIST WITH A SOUL COMPOSED OF FLESH-CORPOREAL, THOUGH INVISIBLE. CHRIST'S SOUL, LIKE OURS, DISTINCT FROM FLESH, THOUGH CLOTHED IN IT.

1 But we meet another argument of theirs, when we raise the question why Christ, in
assuming a flesh composed of soul, should seem to have had a soul that was made of flesh?
For God, they say, desired to make the soul visible to men, by enduing it with a bodily
nature, although it was before invisible; of its own nature, indeed, it was incapable of
seeing anything, even its own self, by reason of the obstacle of this flesh, so that it
was even a matter of doubt whether it was born or not. The soul, therefore (they further
say), was made corporeal in Christ, in order that we might see it when undergoing birth,
and death, and (what is more) resurrection. But yet, how was this possible, that by means
of the flesh the soul should demonstrate itself to itself or to us, when it could not
possibly be ascertained that it would offer this mode of exhibiting itself by the flesh,
until the thing came into existence to which it was unknown, that is to say, the flesh? It
received darkness, forsooth, in order to be able to shine! Now, let us first turn our
attention to this point, whether it was requisite that the soul should exhibit itself in
the manner contended for; and next consider whether their previous position be that the
soul is wholly invisible (inquiring further) whether this invisibility is the result of
its incorporeality, or whether it actually possesses some sort of body peculiar to itself.

2 And yet, although they say that it is invisible, they determine it to be corporeal, but
having somewhat that is invisible. For if it has nothing invisible how can it be said to
be invisible? But even its existence is an impossibility, unless it has that which is
instrumental to its existence. Since, however, it exists, it must needs have a something
through which it exists. If it has this something, it must be its body. Everything which
exists is a bodily existence sui generis. Nothing lacks bodily existence but that which is
non-existent. If, then, the soul has an invisible body, He who had proposed to make it
visible would certainly have done His work better if He had made that part of it which was
accounted invisible, visible; because then there would have been no untruth or weakness in
the case, and neither of these flaws is suitable to God. (But as the case stands in the
hypothesis) there is untruth, since He has set forth the soul as being a different thing
from what it really is; and there is weakness, since He was unable to make it appear to be
that which it is. No one who wishes to exhibit a man covers him with a veil or a mask.
This, however, is precisely what has been done to the soul, if it has been clothed with a
covering belonging to something else, by being converted into flesh.

3 But even if the soul is, on their hypothesis, supposed to be incorporeal, so that the
soul, whatever it is, should by some mysterious force of the reason be quite unknown, only
not be a body, then in that case it were not beyond the power of God-indeed it would be
more consistent with His plan-if He displayed the soul in some new sort of body, different
from that which we all have in common, one of which we should have quite a different
notion, (being spared the idea that) He had set His mind on making, without an adequate
cause, a visible soul instead of an invisible one-a fit incentive, no doubt, for such
questions as they start, by their maintenance of a human flesh for it. Christ, however,
could not have appeared among men except as a man. Restore, therefore, to Christ, His
faith; believe that He who willed to walk the earth as a man exhibited even a soul of a
thoroughly human condition, not making it of flesh, but clothing it with flesh.

CHAPTER XII.-THE TRUE FUNCTIONS OF THE SOUL. CHRIST ASSUMED IT IN HIS PERFECT HUMAN NATURE, NOT TO REVEAL AND EXPLAIN IT, BUT TO SAVE IT. ITS RESURRECTION WITH THE BODY ASSURED BY CHRIST.

1 Well, now, let it be granted that the soul is made apparent by the flesh, on the
assumption that it was evidently necessary that it should be made apparent in some way or
other, that is, as being incognizable to itself and to us: there is still an absurd
distinction in this hypothesis, which implies that we are ourselves separate from our
soul, when all that we are is soul. Indeed, without the soul we are nothing; there is not
even the name of a human being, only that of a carcase. If, then, we are ignorant of the
soul, it is in fact the soul that is ignorant of itself. Thus the only remaining question
left for us to look into is, whether the soul was in this matter so ignorant of itself
that it became known in any way it could. The soul, in my opinion, is sensual. Nothing,
therefore, pertaining to the soul is unconnected with sense, nothing pertaining to sense
is unconnected with the soul. And if I may use the expression for the sake of emphasis, I
would say, "Anim£ anima sensus est"-"Sense is the soul's very soul. Now, since it is the
soul that imparts the faculty of perception to all (that have sense), and since it is
itself that perceives the very senses, not to say properties, of them all how is it likely
that it did not itself receive sense as its own natural constitution?

2 Whence is it to know what is necessary for itself under given circumstances, from the
very necessity of natural causes, if it knows not its own property, and what is necessary
for it? To recognise this indeed is within the competence of every soul; it has, I mean, a
practical knowledge of itself, without which knowledge of itself no soul could possibly
have exercised its own functions. I suppose, too, that it is especially suitable that man,
the only rational animal, should have been furnished with such a soul as would make him
the rational animal, itself being pre-eminently rational. Now, how can that soul which
makes man a rational animal be itself rational if it be itself ignorant of its
rationality, being ignorant of its own very self? So far, however, is it from being
ignorant, that it knows its own Author, its own Master, and its own condition. Before it
learns anything about God, it names the name of God. Before it acquires any knowledge of
His judgment, it professes to commend itself to God. There is nothing one oftener hears of
than that there is no hope after death; and yet what imprecations or deprecations does not
the soul use according as the man dies after a well or ill spent life! These reflections
are more fully pursued in a short treatise which we have written, "On the Testimony of the
Soul. Besides, if the soul was ignorant of itself from the beginning, there is nothing it
could have learnt of Christ except its own quality.

3 It was not its own form that it learnt of Christ, but its salvation. For this cause did
the Son of God descend and take on Him a soul, not that the soul might discover itself in
Christ, but Christ in itself. For its salvation is endangered, not by its being ignorant
of itself, but of the word of God. "The life," says He, "was manifested," not the soul.
And again, "I am come to save the soul. He did not say, "to explain" it. We could not
know, of course, that the soul, although an invisible essence, is born and dies, unless it
were exhibited corporeally. We certainly were ignorant that it was to rise again with the
flesh. This is the truth which it will be found was manifested by Christ. But even this He
did not manifest in Himself in a different way than in some Lazarus, whose flesh was no
more composed of soul than his soul was of flesh. What further knowledge, therefore, have
we received of the structure of the soul which we were ignorant of before? What invisible
part was there belonging to it which wanted to be made visible by the flesh?

CHAPTER XIII.-CHRIST'S HUMAN NATURE. THE FLESH AND THE SOUL BOTH FULLY AND UN-CONFUSEDLY CONTAINED IN IT.

1 The soul became flesh that the soul might become visible. Well, then, did the flesh
likewise become soul that the flesh might be manifested? If the soul is flesh, it is no
longer soul, but flesh. If the flesh is soul, it is no longer flesh, but soul. Where,
then, there is flesh, and where there is soul, it has become both one and the other. Now,
if they are neither in particular, although they become both one and the other, it is, to
say the least, very absurd, that we should understand the soul when we name the flesh, and
when we indicate the soul, explain ourselves as meaning the flesh. All things will be in
danger of being taken in a sense different from their own proper sense, and, whilst taken
in that different sense, of losing their proper one, if they are called by a name which
differs from their natural designation. Fidelity in names secures the safe appreciation of
properties. When these properties undergo a change, they are considered to possess such
qualities as their names indicate. Baked clay, for instance, receives the name of brick.
It retains not the name which designated its former state, because it has no longer a
share in that state. Therefore, also, the soul of Christ having become flesh, cannot be
anything else than that which it has become nor can it be any longer that which it once
was, having become indeed something else.

2 And since we have just had recourse to an illustration, we will put it to further use.
Our pitcher, then, which was formed of the clay, is one body, and has one name indicative,
of course, of that one body; nor can the pitcher be also called clay, because what it once
was, it is no longer. Now that which is no longer (what it was) is also not an inseparable
property. And the soul is not an inseparable property. Since, therefore, it has become
flesh, the soul is a uniform solid body; it is also a wholly incomplex being, and an
indivisible substance. But in Christ we find the soul and the flesh expressed in simple
un-figurative terms; that is to say, the soul is called soul, and the flesh, flesh;
nowhere is the soul termed flesh, or the flesh, soul; and yet they ought to have been thus
(confusedly) named if such had been their condition. The fact, however, is that even by
Christ Himself each substance has been separately mentioned by itself, conformably of
course, to the distinction which exists between the properties of both, the soul by
itself, and the flesh by itself. "My soul," says He, "is exceeding sorrowful, even unto
death; " and "the bread that I will give is my flesh, (which I will give) for the life of
the world. Now, if the soul had been flesh, there would have only been in Christ the soul
composed of flesh, or else the flesh composed of soul.

3 Since, however, He keeps the species distinct, the flesh and the soul, He shows them to
be two. If two, then they are no longer one; if not one, then the soul is not composed of
flesh, nor the flesh of soul. For the soul-flesh, or the flesh-soul, is but one; unless
indeed He even had some other soul apart from that which was flesh, and bare about another
flesh besides that which was soul. But since He had but one flesh and one soul,-that "soul
which was sorrowful, even unto death," and that flesh which was the "bread given for the
life of the world,"-the number is unimpaired of two substances distinct in kind, thus
excluding the unique species of the flesh-comprised soul.

CHAPTER XIV.-CHRIST TOOK NOT ON HIM AN ANGELIC NATURE, BUT THE HUMAN. IT WAS MEN, NOT ANGELS, WHOM HE CAME TO SAVE.

1 But Christ, they say, bare (the nature of) an angel. For what reason? The same which
induced Him to become man? Christ, then, was actuated by the motive which led Him to take
human nature. Man's salvation was the motive, the restoration of that which had perished.
Man had perished; his recovery had become necessary. No such cause, however, existed for
Christ's taking on Him the nature of angels. For although there is assigned to angels also
perdition in "the fire prepared for the devil and his angels," yet a restoration is never
promised to them. No charge about the salvation of angels did Christ ever receive from the
Father; and that which the Father neither promised nor commanded, Christ could not have
undertaken. For what object, therefore, did He bear the angelic nature, if it were not
(that He might have it) as a powerful helper wherewithal to execute the salvation of man?
The Son of God, in sooth, was not competent alone to deliver man, whom a solitary and
single serpent had overthrown! There is, then, no longer but one God, but one Saviour, if
there be two to contrive salvation, and one of them in need of the other. But was it His
object indeed to deliver man by an angel? Why, then, come down to do that which He was
about to expedite with an angel's help? If by an angel's aid, why come Himself also? If He
meant to do all by Himself, why have an angel too?

2 He has been, it is true, called "the Angel of great counsel," that is, a messenger, by a
term expressive of official function, not of nature. For He had to announce to the world
the mighty purpose of the Father, even that which ordained the restoration of man. But He
is not on this account to be regarded as an angel, as a Gabriel or a Michael. For the Lord
of the Vineyard sends even His Son to the labourers require fruit, as well as His
servants. Yet the Son will not therefore be counted as one of the servants because He
undertook the office of a servant. I may, then, more easily say, if such an expression is
to be hazarded, that the Son is actually an angel, that is, a messenger, from the Father,
than that there is an angel in the Son. Forasmuch, however, as it has been declared
concerning the Son Himself, Thou hast made Him a little lower than the angels" how will it
appear that He put on the nature of angels if He was made lower than the angels, having
become man, with flesh and soul as the Son of man? As "the Spirit of God. however, and
"the Power of the Highest," can He be regarded as lower than the angels,-He who is verily
God, and the Son of God? Well, but as bearing human nature, He is so far made inferior to
the angels; but as bearing angelic nature, He to the same degree loses that inferiority.

3 This opinion will be very suitable for Ebion, who holds Jesus to be a mere man, and
nothing more than a descendant of David, and not also the Son of God; although He is, to
be sure, in one respect more glorious than the prophets, inasmuch as he declares that
there was an angel in Him, just as there was in Zechariah. Only it was never said by
Christ, "And the angel, which spake within me, said unto me. Neither, indeed, was ever
used by Christ that familiar phrase of all the prophets, "Thus saith the Lord. For He was
Himself the Lord, who openly spake by His own authority, prefacing His words with the
formula, "Verily, verily, I say unto you. What need is there of further argument? Hear
what Isaiah says in emphatic words, "It was no angel, nor deputy, but the Lord Himself who
saved them."

CHAPTER XV.-THE VALENTINIAN FIGMENT OF CHRIST'S FLESH BEING OF A SPIRITUAL NATURE, EXAMINED AND REFUTED OUT OF SCRIPTURE.

1 Valentinus, indeed, on the strength of his heretical system, might consistently devise a
spiritual flesh for Christ. Any one who refused to believe that that flesh was human might
pretend it to be anything he liked, for-as much as (and this remark is applicable, to all
heretics), if it was not human, and was not born of man, I do not see of what substance
Christ Himself spoke when He called Himself man and the Son of man, saying: "But now ye
seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth; " and "The Son of man is Lord of the
Sabbath-day. For it is of Him that Isaiah writes: "A man of suffering, and acquainted with
the bearing of weakness; " and Jeremiah: "He is a man, and who hath known Him? " and
Daniel: "Upon the clouds (He came) as the Son of man. The Apostle Paul likewise says: "The
man Christ Jesus is the one Mediator between God and man. Also Peter, in the Acts of the
Apostles, speaks of Him as verily human (when he says), "Jesus Christ was a man approved
of God among you. These passages alone ought to suffice as a prescriptive testimony in
proof that Christ had human flesh derived from man, and not spiritual, and that His flesh
was not composed. of soul, nor of stellar substance, and that it was not an imaginary
flesh; (and no doubt they would be sufficient) if heretics could only divest themselves of
all their contentious warmth and artifice.

2 For, as I have read in some writer of Valentinus' wretched faction, they refuse at the
outset to believe that a human and earthly substance was created for Christ, lest the Lord
should be regarded as inferior to the angels, who are not formed of earthly flesh; whence,
too, it would be necessary that, if His flesh were like ours, it should be similarly born,
not of the Spirit, nor of God, but of the will of man. Why, moreover, should it be born,
not of corruptible [seed], but of incorruptible? Why, again, since His flesh has both
risen and returned to heaven, is not ours, being like His, also taken up at once? Or else,
why does not His flesh, since it is like ours, return in like manner to the ground, and
suffer dissolution? Such objections even the heathen used constantly to bandy about. Was
the Son of God reduced to such a depth of degradation Again, if He rose again as a
precedent for our hope, how is it that nothing like it has been thought desirable (to
happen) to ourselves? Such views are not improper for heathens and they are fit and
natural for the heretics too. For, indeed, what difference is there between them, except
it be that the heathen, in not believing, do believe; while the heretics, in believing, do
not believe? Then, again, they read: "Thou madest Him a little less than angels;

3 " and they deny the lower nature of that Christ who declares Himself to be, "not a man,
but a worm; " who also had "no form nor comeliness, but His form was ignoble, despised
more than all men, a man in suffering, and acquainted with the bearing of weakness. Here
they discover a human being mingled with a divine one and so they deny the manhood. They
believe that He died, and maintain that a being which has died was born of an
incorruptible substance; as if, forsooth, corruptibility were something else than death!
But our flesh, too, ought immediately to have risen again. Wait a while. Christ has not
yet subdued His enemies, so as to be able to triumph over them in company with His
friends. 4 Chapter XVI.-Christ's Flesh in Nature, the Same as Ours, Only Sinless. The
Difference Between Carnem Peccati and Peccatum Carnis: It is the Latter Which Christ
Abolished. The Flesh of the First Adam, No Less Than that of the Second Adam, Not Received
from Human Seed, Although as Entirely Human as Our Own, Which is Derived from It.

5 The famous Alexander, too, instigated by his love of disputation in the true fashion of
heretical temper, has made himself conspicuous against us; he will have us say that Christ
put on flesh of an earthly origin, in order that He might in His own person abolish sinful
flesh. Now, even if we did assert this as our opinion, we should be able to defend it in
such a way as completely to avoid the extravagant folly which he ascribes to us in making
us suppose that the very flesh of Christ was in Himself abolished as being sinful; because
we mention our belief (in public), that it is sitting at the right hand of the Father in
heaven; and we further declare that it will come again from thence in all the pomp of the
Father's glory: it is therefore just as impossible for us to say that it is abolished, as
it is for us to maintain that it is sinful, and so made void, since in it there has been
no fault. We maintain, moreover, that what has been abolished in Christ is not carnem
peccati, "sinful flesh," but peccatum carnis, "sin in the flesh,"-not the material thing,
but its condition; not the substance, but its flaw; and (this we aver) on the authority of
the apostle, who says, "He abolished sin in the flesh.

6 Now in another sentence he says that Christ was "in the likeness of sinful flesh," not,
however, as if He had taken on Him "the likeness of the flesh," in the sense of a
semblance of body instead of its reality; but he means us to understand likeness to the
flesh which sinned, because the flesh of Christ, which committed no sin itself, resembled
that which had sinned,-resembled it in its nature, but not in the corruption it received
from Adam; whence we also affirm that there was in Christ the same flesh as that whose
nature in man is sinful. In the flesh, therefore, we say that sin has been abolished,
because in Christ that same flesh is maintained without sin, which in than was not
maintained without sin. Now, it would not contribute to the purpose of Christ's abolishing
sin in the flesh, if He did not abolish it in that flesh in which was the nature of sin,
nor (would it conduce) to His glory. For surely it would have been no strange thing if He
had removed the stain of sin in some better flesh, and one which should possess a
different, even a sinless, nature! Then, you say, if He took our flesh, Christ's was a
sinful one. Do not, however, fetter with mystery a sense which is quite intelligible. For
in putting on our flesh, He made it His own; in making it His own, He made it sinless.

7 A word of caution, however, must be addressed to all who refuse to believe that our
flesh was in Christ on the ground that it came not of the seed of a human father, let them
remember that Adam himself received this flesh of ours without the seed of a human father.
As earth was converted into this flesh of ours without the seed of a human father, so also
was it quite possible for the Son of God to take to Himself the substance of the selfsame
flesh, without a human father's agency.

CHAPTER XVII.-THE SIMILARITY OF CIRCUMSTANCES BETWEEN THE FIRST AND THE SECOND ADAM, AS TO THE DERIVATION OF THEIR FLESH. AN ANALOGY ALSO PLEASANTLY TRACED BETWEEN EVE AND THE VIRGIN MARY.

1 But, leaving Alexander with his syllogisms, which he so perversely applies in his
discussions, as well as with the hymns of Valentinus, which, with consummate assurance, he
interpolates as the production of some respectable author, let us confine our inquiry to a
single point-Whether Christ received flesh from the virgin?-that we may thus arrive at a
certain proof that His flesh was human, if He derived its substance from His mother's
womb, although we are at once furnished with clear evidences of the human character of His
flesh, from its name and description as that of a man, and from the nature of its
constitution, and from the system of its sensations, and from its suffering of death. Now,
it will first by necessary to show what previous reason there was for the Son of God's
being born of a virgin. He who was going to consecrate a new order of birth, must Himself
be born after a novel fashion, concerning which Isaiah foretold how that the Lord Himself
would give the sign. What, then, is the sign? "Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a
son. Accordingly, a virgin did conceive and bear "Emmanuel, God with us. This is the new
nativity; a man is born in God. And in this man God was born, taking the flesh of an
ancient race, without the help, however, of the ancient seed, in order that He might
reform it with a new seed, that is, in a spiritual manner, and cleanse it by the removal
of all its ancient stains.

2 But the whole of this new birth was prefigured, as was the case in all other instances,
in ancient type, the Lord being born as man by a dispensation in which a virgin was the
medium. The earth was still in a virgin state, reduced as yet by no human labour, with no
seed as yet cast into its furrows, when, as we are told, God made man out of it into a
living soul. As, then, the first Adam is thus introduced to us, it is a just inference
that the second Adam likewise, as the apostle has told us, was formed by God into a
quickening spirit out of the ground,-in other words, out of a flesh which was unstained as
yet by any human generation. But that I may lose no opportunity of supporting my argument
from the name of Adam, why is Christ called Adam by the apostle, unless it be that, as
man, He was of that earthly origin? And even reason here maintains the same conclusion,
because it was by just the contrary operation that God recovered His own image and
likeness, of which He had been robbed by the devil. For it was while Eve was yet a virgin,
that the ensnaring word had crept into her ear which was to build the edifice of death.
Into a virgin's soul, in like manner, must be introduced that Word of God which was to
raise the fabric of life;

3 so that what had been reduced to ruin by this sex, might by the selfsame sex be
recovered to salvation. As Eve had believed the serpent, so Mary believed the angel. The
delinquency which the one occasioned by believing, the other by believing effaced. But (it
will be said) Eve did not at the devil's word conceive in her womb. Well, she at all
events conceived; for the devil's word afterwards became as seed to her that she should
conceive as an outcast, and bring forth in sorrow. Indeed she gave birth to a fratricidal
devil; whilst Mary, on the contrary, bare one who was one day to secure salvation to
Israel, His own brother after the flesh, and the murderer of Himself. God therefore sent
down into the virgin's womb His Word, as the good Brother, who should blot out the memory
of the evil brother. Hence it was necessary that Christ should come forth for the
salvation of man, in that condition of flesh into which man had entered ever since his
condemnation.

CHAPTER XVIII.-THE MYSTERY OF THE ASSUMPTION OF OUR PERFECT HUMAN NATURE BY THE SECOND PERSON OF THE BLESSED TRINITY. HE IS HERE CALLED, AS OFTEN ELSEWHERE, THE SPIRIT.

1 Now, that we may give a simpler answer, it was not fit that the Son of God should be
born of a human father's seed, lest, if He were wholly the Son of a man, He should fail to
be also the Son of God, and have nothing more than "a Solomon" or "a Jonas," -as Ebion
thought we ought to believe concerning Him. In order, therefore, that He who was already
the Son of God-of God the Father's seed, that is to say, the Spirit-might also be the Son
of man, He only wanted to assume flesh, of the flesh of man without the seed of a man; for
the seed of a man was unnecessary for One who had the seed of God. As, then, before His
birth of the virgin, He was able to have God for His Father without a human mother, so
likewise, after He was born of the virgin, He was able to have a woman for His mother
without a human father. He is thus man with God, in short, since He is man's flesh with
God's Spirit -flesh (I say) without seed from man, Spirit with seed from God. For as much,
then, as the dispensation of God's purpose concerning His Son required that He should be
born of a virgin, why should He not have received of the virgin the body which He bore
from the virgin? Because, (forsooth) it is something else which He took from God, for "the
Word "say they, "was made flesh.

2 Now this very statement plainly shows what it was that was made flesh; nor can it
possibly be that anything else than the Word was made flesh. Now, whether it was of the
flesh that the Word was made flesh, or whether it was so made of the (divine) seed itself,
the Scripture must tell us. As, however, the Scripture is silent about everything except
what it was that was made (flesh), and says nothing of that from which it was so made, it
must be held to suggest that from something else, and not from itself, was the Word made
flesh. And if not from itself, but from something else, from what can we more suitably
suppose that the Word became flesh than from that flesh in which it submitted to the
dispensation? And (we have a proof of the same conclusion in the fact) that the Lord
Himself sententiously and distinctly pronounced, "that which is born of the flesh is
flesh," even because it is born of the flesh. But if He here spoke of a human being
simply, and not of Himself, (as you maintain) then you must deny absolutely that Christ is
man, and must maintain that human nature was not suitable to Him. And then He adds, "That
which is born of the Spirit is spirit," because God is a Spirit, and He was born of God.
Now this description is certainly even more applicable to Him than it is to those who
believe in Him.

3 But if this passage indeed apply to Him, then why does not the preceding one also? For
you cannot divide their relation, and adapt this to Him, and the previous clause to all
other men, especially as you do not deny that Christ possesses the two substances, both of
the flesh and of the Spirit. Besides, as He was in possession both of flesh and of Spirit,
He cannot possibly, when speaking of the condition of the two substances which He Himself
bears, be supposed to have determined that the Spirit indeed was His own, but that the
flesh was not His own. Forasmuch, therefore, as He is of the Spirit He is God the Spirit,
and is born of God; just as He is also born of the flesh of man, being generated in the
flesh as man. 4 Chapter XIX.-Christ, as to His Divine Nature, as the Word of God, Became
Flesh, Not by Carnal Conception, Nor by the Will of the Flesh and of Man, But by the Will
of God. Christ's Divine Nature, of Its Own Accord, Descended into the Virgin's Womb.

5 What, then, is the meaning of this passage, "Born not of blood, nor of the will of the
flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God? " I shall make more use of this passage after I
have confuted those who have tampered with it. They maintain that it was written thus (in
the plural) " Who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will
of man, but of God," as if designating those who were before mentioned as "believing in
His name," in order to point out the existence of that mysterious seed of the elect and
spiritual which they appropriate to themselves. But how can this be, when all who believe
in the name of the Lord are, by reason of the common principle of the human race, born of
blood, and of the will of the flesh, and of man, as indeed is Valentinus himself? The
expression is in the singular number, as referring to the Lord, "He was born of God. And
very properly, because Christ is the Word of God, and with the Word the Spirit of God, and
by the Spirit the Power of God, and whatsoever else appertains to God. As flesh, however,
He is not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of man, because it was by the will
of God that the Word was made flesh.

6 To the flesh, indeed, and not to the Word, accrues the denial of the nativity which is
natural to us all as men, because it was as flesh that He had thus to be born, and not as
the Word. Now, whilst the passage actually denies that He was born of the will of the
flesh, how is it that it did not also deny (that He was born) of the substance of the
flesh? For it did not disavow the substance of the flesh when it denied His being "born of
blood" but only the matter of the seed, which, as all know, is the warm blood as convected
by ebullition into the coagulum of the woman's blood. In the cheese, it is from the
coagulation that the milky substance acquires that consistency, which is condensed by
infusing the rennet. We thus understand that what is denied is the Lord's birth after
sexual intercourse (as is suggested by the phrase, "the will of man and of the flesh"),
not His nativity from a woman's womb. Why, too, is it insisted on with such an
accumulation of emphasis that He was not born of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor
(of the will) of man, if it were not that His flesh was such that no man could have any
doubt on the point of its being born from sexual intercourse? Again, although denying His
birth from such cohabitation, the passage did not deny that He was born of real flesh;

7 it rather affirmed this, by the very fact that it did not deny His birth in the flesh in
the same way that it denied His birth from sexual intercourse. Pray, tell me, why the
Spirit of God descended into a woman's womb at all, if He did not do so for the purpose of
partaking of flesh from the womb. For He could have become spiritual flesh without such a
process,-much more simply, indeed, without the womb than in it. He had no reason for
enclosing Himself within one, if He was to bear forth nothing from it. Not without reason,
however, did He descend into a womb. Therefore He received (flesh) therefrom; else, if He
received nothing therefrom, His descent into it would have been without a reason,
especially if He meant to become flesh of that sort which was not derived from a womb,
that is to say, a spiritual one.

CHAPTER XX.-CHRIST BORN OF A VIRGIN, OF HER SUBSTANCE. THE PHYSIOLOGICAL FACTS OF HIS REAL AND EXACT BIRTH OF A HUMAN MOTHER, AS SUGGESTED BY CERTAIN PASSAGES OF SCRIPTURE.

1 But to what shifts you resort, in your attempt to rob the syllable ex (of) of its proper
force as a preposition, and to substitute another for it in a sense not found throughout
the Holy Scriptures! You say that He was born through a virgin, not of a virgin, and in a
womb, not of a womb, because the angel in the dream said to Joseph, "That which is born in
her" (not of her) "is of the Holy Ghost. But the fact is, if he had meant "of her," he
must have said "in her; "for that which was of her, was also in her. The angel's
expression, therefore, "in her," has precisely the same meaning as the phrase "of her. It
is, however, a fortunate circumstance that Matthew also, when tracing down the Lord's
descent from Abraham to Mary, says, "Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was
born Christ. But Paul, too, silences these critics when he says, "God sent forth His Son,
made of a woman. Does he mean through a woman, or in a woman? Nay more, for the sake of
greater emphasis, he uses the word "made" rather than born, although the use of the latter
expression would have been simpler.

2 But by saying "made," he not only confirmed the statement, "The Word was made flesh,"
but he also asserted the reality of the flesh which was made of a virgin We shall have
also the support of the Psalms on this point, not the "Psalms" indeed of Valentinus the
apostate, and heretic, and Platonist, but the Psalms of David, the most illustrious saint
and well-known prophet. He sings to us of Christ, and through his voice Christ indeed also
sang concerning Himself. Hear, then, Christ the Lord speaking to God the Father: "Thou art
He that didst draw me out of my mother's womb. Here is the first point. "Thou art my hope
from my mother's breasts; upon Thee have I been cast from the womb. Here is another point.
"Thou art my God from my mother's belly. Here is a third point. Now let us carefully
attend to the sense of these passages. "Thou didst draw me," He says, "out of the womb.
Now what is it which is drawn, if it be not that which adheres, that which is firmly
fastened to anything from which it is drawn in order to be sundered? If He clove not to
the womb, how could He have been drawn from it? If He who clove thereto was drawn from it,
how could He have adhered to it, if it were not that, all the while He was in the womb, He
was tied to it, as to His origin, by the umbilical cord, which communicated growth to Him
from the matrix?

3 Even when one strange matter amalgamates with another, it becomes so entirely
incorporated with that with which it amalgamates, that when it is drawn off from it, it
carries with it some part of the body from which it is torn, as if in consequence of the
severance of the union and growth which the constituent pieces had communicated to each
other. But what were His "mother's breasts" which He mentions? No doubt they were those
which He sucked. Midwives, and doctors, and naturalists, can tell us, from the nature of
women's breasts, whether they usually flow at any other time than when the womb is
affected with pregnancy, when the veins convey therefrom the blood of the lower parts to
the mammilla, and in the act of transference convert the secretion into the nutritious
substance of milk. Whence it comes to pass that during the period of lactation the monthly
issues are suspended. But if the Word was made flesh of Himself without any communication
with a womb, no mother's womb operating upon Him with its usual function and support, how
could the lacteal fountain have been conveyed (from the womb) to the breasts, since (the
womb) can only effect the change by actual possession of the proper substance? But it
could not possibly have had blood for transformation into milk, unless it possessed the
causes of blood also, that is to say, the severance (by birth) of its own flesh from the
mother's womb.

4 Now it is easy to see what was the novelty of Christ's being born of a virgin. It was
simply this, that (He was born) of a virgin in the real manner which we have indicated, in
order that our regeneration might have virginal purity,-spiritually cleansed from all
pollutions through Christ, who was Himself a virgin, even in the flesh, in that He was
born of a virgin's flesh. 5 Chapter XXI.-The Word of God Did Not Become Flesh Except in
the Virgin's Womb and of Her Substance. Through His Mother He is Descended from Her Great
Ancestor David. He is Described Both in the Old and in the New Testament as "The Fruit of
David's Loins." 6 Whereas, then, they contend that the novelty (of Christ's birth)
consisted in this, that as the Word of God became flesh without the seed of a human
father, so there should be no flesh of the virgin mother (assisting in the transaction),
why should not the novelty rather be confined to this, that His flesh, although not born
of seed, should yet have proceeded from flesh? I should like to go more closely into this
discussion. "Behold," says he, "a virgin shall conceive in the womb. Conceive what? I ask.
The Word of God, of course, and not the seed of man, and in order, certainly, to bring
forth a son. "For," says he, "she shall bring forth a son. Therefore, as the act of
conception was her own, so also what she brought forth was her own, also, although the
cause of conception was not. If, on the other hand, the Word became flesh of Himself, then
He both conceived and brought forth Himself, and the prophecy is stultified. For in that
case a virgin did not conceive, and did not bring forth; since whatever she brought forth
from the conception of the Word, is not her own flesh. But is this the only statement of
prophecy which will be frustrated? Will not the angel's announcement also be subverted,
that the virgin should "conceive in her womb and bring forth a son? " And will not in fact
every scripture which declares that Christ had a mother?

7 For how could she have been His mother, unless He had been in her womb? But then He
received nothing from her womb which could make her a mother in whose womb He had been.
Such a name as this a strange flesh ought not to assume. No flesh can speak of a mother's
womb but that which is itself the offspring of that womb; nor can any be the offspring of
the said womb if itowe its birth solely to itself. Therefore even Elisabeth must be silent
although she is carrying in her womb the prophetic babe, which was already conscious of
his Lord, and is, moreover, filled with the Holy Ghost. For without reason does she say,
"and whence is this to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? " If it was not as
her son, but only as a stranger that Mary carried Jesus in her womb, how is it she says,
"Blessed is the fruit of thy womb? What is this fruit of the womb, which received not its
germ from the womb, which had not its root in the womb, which belongs not to her whose is
the womb, and which is no doubt the real fruit of the womb-even Christ? Now, since He is
the blossom of the stem which sprouts from the root of Jesse;

8 since, moreover, the root of Jesse is the family of David, and the stem of the root is
Mary descended from David, and the blossom of the stem is Mary's son, who is called Jesus
Christ, will not He also be the fruit? For the blossom is the fruit, because through the
blossom and from the blossom every product advances from its rudimental condition to
perfect fruit. What then? They, deny to the fruit its blossom, and to the blossom its
stem, and to the stem its root; so that the root fails to secure for itself, by means of
the stem, that special product which comes from the stem, even the blossom and the fruit;
for every step indeed in a genealogy is traced from the latest up to the first, so that it
is now a well-known fact that the flesh of Christ is inseparable, not merely from Mary,
but also from David through Mary, and from Jesse through David. "This fruit," therefore,
"of David's loins," that is to say, of his posterity in the flesh, God swears to him that
"He will raise up to sit upon his throne. If "of David's loins," how much rather is He of
Mary's loins, by virtue of whom He is in "the loins of David? "

CHAPTER XXII.-HOLY SCRIPTURE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT, EVEN IN ITS VERY FIRST VERSE, TESTIFIES TO CHRIST'S TRUE FLESH. IN VIRTUE OF WHICH HE IS INCORPORATED IN THE HUMAN STOCK OF DAVID, AND ABRAHAM, AND ADAM.

1 They may, then, obliterate the testimony of the devils which proclaimed Jesus the son of
David; but whatever unworthiness there be in this testimony, that of the apostles they
will never be able to efface, There is, first of all, Matthew, that most faithful
chronicler of the Gospel, because the companion of the Lord; for no other reason in the
world than to show us clearly the fleshly original of Christ, he thus begins his Gospel:
"The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. With a
nature issuing from such fountal sources, and an order gradually descending to the birth
of Christ, what else have we here described than the very flesh of Abraham and of David
conveying itself down, step after step, to the very virgin, and at last introducing
Christ,-nay, producing Christ Himself of the virgin? Then, again, there is Paul, who was
at once both a disciple, and a master, and a witness of the selfsame Gospel; as an apostle
of the same Christ, also, he affirms that Christ "was made of the seed of David, according
to the flesh," -which, therefore, was His own likewise. Christ's flesh, then, is of
David's seed. Since He is of the seed of David in consequence of Mary's flesh, He is
therefore of Mary's flesh because of the seed of David.

2 In what way so ever you torture the statement, He is either of the flesh of Mary because
of the seed of David, or He is of the seed of David because of the flesh of Mary. The
whole discussion is terminated by the same apostle, when he declares Christ to be "the
seed of Abraham. And if of Abraham, how much more, to be sure, of David, as a more recent
progenitor! For, unfolding the promised blessing upon all nations in the person of
Abraham, "And in thy seed shall all nations of the earth be blessed," he adds, "He saith
not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ. When we
read and believe these things, what sort of flesh ought we, and can we, acknowledge in
Christ? Surely none other than Abraham's, since Christ is "the seed of Abraham; "none
other than Jesse's, since Christ is the blossom of "the stem of Jesse; "none other than
David's, since Christ is "the fruit of David's loins; "none other than Mary's, since
Christ came from Mary's womb; and, higher still, none other than Adam's, since Christ is
"the second Adam. The consequence, therefore, is that they must either maintain, that
those (ancestors) had a spiritual flesh, that so there might be derived to Christ the same
condition of substance, or else allow that the flesh of Christ was not a spiritual one,
since it is not traced from the origin of a spiritual stock.


ON THE FLESH OF CHRIST
======================

ON THE FLESH OF CHRIST continued

CHAPTER XXIII.-SIMEON'S "SIGN THAT SHOULD BE CONTRADICTED," APPLIED TO THE HERETICAL GAINSAYING OF THE TRUE BIRTH OF CHRIST. ONE OF THE HERETICS' PARADOXES TURNED IN SUPPORT OF CATHOLIC TRUTH.

1 We acknowledge, however, that the prophetic declaration of Simeon is fulfilled, which he
spoke over the recently-born Saviour: "Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising
again of many in Israel, and for a sign that shall be spoken against. The sign (here
meant) is that of the birth of Christ, according to Isaiah: "Therefore the Lord Himself
shall give you a sign: behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son. We discover, then,
what the sign is which is to be spoken against-the conception and the parturition of the
Virgin Mary, concerning which these sophists say: "She a virgin and yet not a virgin bare,
and yet did not bear; "just as if such language, if indeed it must be uttered, would not
be more suitable even for ourselves to use! For "she bare," because she produced offspring
of her own flesh and "yet she did not bear," since she produced Him not from a husband's
seed; she was "a virgin," so far as (abstinence) from a husband went, and "yet not a
virgin," as regards her bearing a child. There is not, however, that parity of reasoning
which the heretics affect: in other words it does not follow that for the reason "she did
not bear," she who was "not a virgin" was "yet a virgin," even because she became a mother
without any fruit of her own womb. But with us there is no equivocation, nothing twisted
into a double sense. Light is light; and darkness, darkness; yea is yea; and nay, nay;

2 "whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. She who bare (really) bare; and although
she was a virgin when she conceived, she was a wife when she brought forth her son. Now,
as a wife, she was under the very law of "opening the womb," wherein it was quite
immaterial whether the birth of the male was by virtue of a husband's co-operation or not;
it was the same sex that opened her womb. Indeed, hers is the womb on account of which it
is written of others also: "Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the
Lord. For who is really holy but the Son of God? Who properly opened the womb but He who
opened a closed one? But it is marriage which opens the womb in all cases. The virgin's
womb, therefore, was especially opened, because it was especially closed. Indeed she ought
rather to be called not a virgin than a virgin, becoming a mother at a leap, as it were,
before she was a wife. And what must be said more on this point? Since it was in this
sense that the apostle declared that the Son of God was born not of a virgin, but "of a
woman," he in that statement recognised the condition of the "opened womb" which ensues in
marriage. We read in Ezekiel of "a heifer which brought forth, and still did not bring
forth.

3 Now, see whether it was not in view of your own future contentions about the womb of
Mary, that even then the Holy Ghost set His mark upon you in this passage; otherwise He
would not, contrary to His usual simplicity of style (in this prophet), have uttered a
sentence of such doubtful import, especially when Isaiah says, "She shall conceive and
bear a son."

CHAPTER XXIV.-DIVINE STRICTURES ON VARIOUS HERETICS DESCRIED IN VARIOUS PASSAGES OF PROPHETICAL SCRIPTURE. THOSE WHO ASSAIL THE TRUE DOCTRINE OF THE ONE LORD JESUS CHRIST, BOTH GOD AND MAN, THUS CONDEMNED.

1 For when Isaiah hurls denunciation against our very heretics, especially in his "Woe to
them that call evil good, and put darkness for light," he of course sets his mark upon
those amongst you who preserve not in the words they employ the light of their true
significance, (by taking care) that the soul should mean only that which is so called, and
the flesh simply that which is confest to our view and God none other than the One who is
preached. Having thus Marcion in his prophetic view, he says, "I am God, and there is none
else; there is no God beside me. And when in another passage he says, in like manner,
"Before me there was no God," he strikes at those inexplicable genealogies of the
Valentinian ¦ons. Again, there is an answer to Ebion in the Scripture: "Born, not of
blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. In like manner,
in the passage, "If even an angel of heaven preach unto you any other gospel than that
which we have preached unto you, let him be anathema," he calls attention to the artful
influence of Philumene, the virgin friend of Apelles. Surely he is antichrist who denies
that Christ has come in the flesh. By declaring that His flesh is simply and absolutely
true, and taken in the plain sense of its own nature, the Scripture aims a blow at all who
make distinctions in it.

2 In the same way, also, when it defines the very Christ to be but one, it shakes the
fancies of those who exhibit a multiform Christ, who make Christ to be one being and Jesus
another,-representing one as escaping out of the midst of the crowds, and the other as
detained by them; one as appearing on a solitary mountain to three companions, clothed
with glory in a cloud, the other as an ordinary man holding intercourse with all, one as
magnanimous, but the other as timid; lastly, one as suffering death, the other as risen
again, by means of which event they maintain a resurrection of their own also, only in
another flesh. Happily, however, He who suffered "will come again from heaven," and by all
shall He be seen, who rose again from the dead. They too who crucified Him shall see and
acknowledge Him; that is to say, His very flesh, against which they spent their fury, and
without which it would be impossible for Himself either to exist or to be seen; so that
they must blush with shame who affirm that His flesh sits in heaven void of sensation,
like a sheath only, Christ being withdrawn from it; as well as those who (maintain) that
His flesh and soul are just the same thing, or else that His soul is all that exists, but
that His flesh no longer lives.

CHAPTER XXV.-CONCLUSION. THIS TREATISE FORMS A PREFACE TO THE OTHER WORK, "ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH," PROVING THE REALITY OF THE FLESH WHICH WAS TRULY BORN, AND DIED, AND ROSE AGAIN.

But let this suffice on our present subject; for I think that by this time proof enough
has been adduced of the flesh in Christ having both been born of the virgin, and being
human in its nature. And this discussion alone might have been sufficient, without
encountering the isolated opinions which have been raised from different quarters. We
have, however, challenged these opinions to the test, both of the arguments which sustain
them, and of the Scriptures which are appealed to, and this we have done ex abundanti; so
that we have, by showing what the flesh of Christ was, and whence it was derived, also
predetermined the question, against all objectors, of what that flesh was not. The
resurrection, however, of our own flesh will have to be maintained in another little
treatise, and so bring to a close this present one, which serves as a general preface, and
which will pave the way for the approaching subject now that it is plain what kind of body
that was which rose again in Christ.


ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH
================================

ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH Tertullian

c. AD 155–220

North African lawyer and the first great Latin theologian.

INTRODUCTION

The heretics against whom this work is directed, were the same who maintained that the
demiurge, or the god who created this world and gave the Mosaic dispensation, was opposed
to the supreme God. Hence they attached an idea of inherent corruption and worthlessness
to all his works-amongst the rest, to the flesh or body of man; affirming that it could
not rise again, and that the soul alone was capable of inheriting immortality. [Translated
by Dr. Holmes.]

CHAPTER I.-THE DOCTRINE OF THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY BROUGHT TO LIGHT BY THE GOSPEL. THE FAINTEST GLIMPSES OF SOMETHING LIKE IT OCCASIONALLY MET WITH IN HEATHENISM. INCONSISTENCIES OF PAGAN TEACHING.

1 The resurrection of the dead is the Christian's trust. By it we are believers. To the
belief of this (article of the faith) truth compels us-that truth which God reveals, but
the crowd derides, which supposes that nothing will survive after death. And yet they do
honour to their dead, and that too in the most expensive way according to their bequest,
and with the daintiest banquets which the seasons can produce, on the presumption that
those whom they declare to be incapable of all perception still retain an appetite. But
(let the crowd deride): I on my side must deride it still more, especially when it burns
up its dead with harshest inhumanity, only to pamper them immediately afterwards with
gluttonous satiety, using the selfsame fires to honour them and to insult them. What piety
is that which mocks its victims with cruelty? Is it sacrifice or insult (which the crowd
offers), when it burns its offerings to those it has already burnt? But the wise, too,
join with the vulgar crowd in their opinion sometimes. There is nothing after death,
according to the school of Epicurus. After death all things come to an end, even death
itself, says Seneca to like effect. It is satisfactory, however, that the no less
important philosophy of Pythagoras and Empedocles, and the Plantonists, take the contrary
view, and declare the soul to be immortal;

2 affirming, moreover, in a way which most nearly approaches (to our own doctrine), that
the soul actually returns into bodies, although not the same bodies, and not even those of
human beings invariably: thus Euphorbus is supposed to have passed into Phythagoras, and
Homer into a peacock. They firmly pronounced the soul's renewal to be in a body, (deeming
it) more tolerable to change the quality (of the corporeal state)than to deny it wholly:
they at least knocked at the door of truth, although they entered not. Thus the world,
with all its errors, does not ignore the resurrection of the dead. 3 Chapter II.-The
Jewish Sadducees a Link Between the Pagan Philosophers and the Heretics on This Doctrine.
Its Fundamental Importance Asserted. The Soul Fares Better Than the Body, in Heretical
Estimation, as to Its Future State. Its Extinction, However, Was Held by One Lucan. 4
Since there is even within the confines of God's Church a sect which is more nearly allied
to the Epicureans than to the prophets, an opportunity is afforded us of knowing what
estimate Christ forms of the (said sect, even the) Sadducees. For to Christ was it
reserved to lay bare everything which before was concealed: to impart certainty to
doubtful points; to accomplish those of which men had had but a foretaste; to give present
reality to the objects of prophecy; and to furnish not only by Himself, but actually in
Himself, certain proofs of the resurrection of the dead. It is, however, against other
Sadducees that we have now to prepare ourselves, but still partakers of their doctrine.
For instance, they allow a moiety of the resurrection; that is, simply of the soul,
despising the flesh, just as they also do the Lord of the flesh Himself. No other persons,
indeed, refuse to concede to the substance of the body its recovery from death, heretical
inventors of a second deity. Driven then, as they are, to give a different dispensation to
Christ, so that He may not be accounted as belonging to the Creator, they have achieved
their first error in the article of His very flesh; contending with Marcion and Basilides
that it possessed no reality; or else holding, after the heretical tenets of Valentinus,
and according to Apelles, that it had qualities peculiar to itself.

5 And so it follows that they shut out from all recovery from death that substance of
which they say that Christ did not partake, confidently assuming that it furnishes the
strongest presumption against the resurrection, since the flesh is already risen in
Christ. Hence it is that we have ourselves previously issued our volume On the flesh of
Christ; in which we both furnish proofs of its reality, in opposition to the idea of its
being a vain phantom; and claim for it a human nature without any peculiarity of
condition-such a nature as has marked out Christ to be both man and the Son of man. For
when we prove Him to be invested with the flesh and in a bodily condition, we at the same
time refute heresy, by establishing the rule that no other being than the Creator must be
believed to be God, since we show that Christ, in whom God is plainly discerned, is
precisely of such a nature as the Creator promised that He should be. Being thus refuted
touching God as the Creator, and Christ as the Redeemer of the flesh, they will at once be
defeated also on the resurrection of the flesh. No procedure, indeed, can be more
reasonable. And we affirm that controversy with heretics should in most cases be conducted
in this way.

6 For due method requires that conclusions should always be drawn from the most important
premises, in order that there be a prior agreement on the essential point, by means of
which the particular question under review may be said to have been determined. Hence it
is that the heretics, from their conscious weakness, never conduct discussion in an
orderly manner. They are well aware how hard is their task in insinuating the existence of
a second god, to the disparagement of the Creator of the world, who is known to all men
naturally by the testimony of His works, who is before all others in the mysteries of His
being, and is especially manifested in the prophets; then, under the pretence of
considering a more urgent inquiry, namely man's own salvation-a question which transcends
all others in its importance-they begin with doubts about the resurrection; for there is
greater difficulty in believing the resurrection of the flesh than the oneness of the
Deity. In this way, after they have deprived the discussion of the advantages of its
logical order, and have embarrassed it with doubtful insinuations in disparagement of the
flesh, they gradually draw their argument to the reception of a second god after
destroying and changing the very ground of our hopes. For when once a man Is fallen or
removed from the sure hope which he had placed in the Creator, he is easily led away to
the object of a different hope, whom however of his own accord he can hardly help
suspecting.

7 Now it is by a discrepancy in the promises that a difference of gods is insinuated. How
many do we thus see drawn into the net vanquished on the resurrection of the flesh, before
they could carry their point on the oneness of the Deity! In respect, then, of the
heretics, we have shown with what weapons we ought to meet them. And indeed we have
already encountered them in treatises severally directed against them: on the one only God
and His Christ, in our work against Marcion, on the Lord's flesh, in our book against the
four heresies, for the special purpose of opening the way to the present inquiry: so that
we have now only to discuss the resurrection of the flesh, (treating it) just as if it
were uncertain in regard to ourselves also, that is, in the system of the Creator. Because
many persons are uneducated; still more are of faltering faith, and several are weak-
minded: these will have to be instructed, directed, strengthened, inasmuch as the very
oneness of the Godhead will be defended along with the maintenance of our doctrine. For if
the resurrection of the flesh be denied, that prime article of the faith is shaken; if it
be asserted, that is established. There is no need, I suppose, to treat of the soul's
safety; for nearly all the heretics, in whatever way they conceive of it, certainly
refrain from denying that.

8 We may ignore a certain Lucan, who does not spare even this part of our nature, which he
follows Aristotle in reducing to dissolution, and substitutes some other thing in lieu of
it. Some third nature it is which, according to him, is to rise again, neither soul nor
flesh; in other words, not man, but a bear perhaps-for instance, Lucan himself. Even he
has received from us a copious notice in our book on the entire condition of the soul, the
especial immortality of which we there maintain, whilst we also both acknowledge the
dissolution of the flesh alone, and emphatically assert its restitution. Into the body of
that work were collected whatever points we elsewhere had to reserve from the pressure of
incidental causes. For as it is my custom to touch some questions but lightly on their
first occurrence, so I am obliged also to postpone the consideration of them, until the
outline can be filled in with complete detail, and the deferred points be taken up on
their own merits.

9 Chapter III.-Some Truths Held Even by the Heathen, They Were, However, More Often Wrong
Both in Religious Opinions and in Moral Practice. The Heathen Not to Be Followed in Their
Ignorance of the Christian Mystery. The Heretics Perversely Prone to Follow Them. 10 One
may no doubt be wise in the things of God, even from one's natural powers, but only in
witness to the truth, not in maintenance of error; (only) when one acts in accordance
with, not in opposition to, the divine dispensation. For some things are known even by
nature: the immortality of the soul, for instance, is held by many; the knowledge of our
God is possessed by all. I may use, therefore, the opinion of a Plato, when he declares,
"Every soul is immortal. I may use also the conscience of a nation, when it attests the
God of gods. I may, in like manner, use all the other intelligences of our common nature,
when they pronounce God to be a judge. "God sees," (say they); and, "I commend you to God.
But when they say, "What has undergone death is dead," and, "Enjoy life whilst you live,"
and, "After death all things come to an end, even death itself; "then I must remember both
that "the heart of man is ashes," according to the estimate of God, and that the very
"Wisdom of the world is foolishness," (as the inspired word) pronounces it to be. Then, if
even the heretic seek refuge in the depraved thoughts of the vulgar, or the imaginations
of the world, I must say to him: Part company with the heathen, O heretic!

11 for although you are all agreed in imagining a God, yet while you do so in the name of
Christ, so long as you deem yourself a Christian, you are a different man from a heathen:
give him back his own views of things, since he does not himself learn from yours. Why
lean upon a blind guide, if you have eyes of your own? Why be clothed by one who is naked,
if you have put on Christ? Why use the shield of another, when the apostle gives you
armour of your own? It would be better for him to learn from you to acknowledge the
resurrection of the flesh, than for you from him to deny it; because if Christians must
needs deny it, it would be sufficient if they did so from their own knowledge, without any
instruction from the ignorant multitude. He, therefore, will not be a Christian who shall
deny this doctrine which is confessed by Christians; denying it, moreover, on grounds
which are adopted by a man who is not a Christian. Take away, indeed, from the heretics
the wisdom which they share with the heathen, and let them support their inquiries from
the Scriptures alone: they will then be unable to keep their ground. For that which
commends men's common sense is its very simplicity, and its participation in the same
feelings, and its community of opinions; and it is deemed to be all the more trustworthy,
inasmuch as its definitive statements are naked and open, and known to all.

12 Divine reason, on the contrary, lies in the very pith and marrow of things, not on the
surface, and very often is at variance with appearances.

CHAPTER IV.-HEATHENS AND HERETICS ALIKE IN THEIR VILIFICATION OF THE FLESH AND ITS FUNCTIONS, THE ORDINARY CAVILS AGAINST THE FINAL RESTITUTION OF SO WEAK AND IGNOBLE A SUBSTANCE.

1 Hence it is that heretics start at once from this point, from which they sketch the
first draft of their dogmas, and afterwards add the details, being well aware how easily
men's minds are caught by its influence, (and actuated) by that community of human
sentiment which is so favourable to their designs. Is there anything else that you can
hear of from the heretic, as also from the heathen, earlier in time or greater in extent?
Is not (their burden) from the beginning and everywhere an invective against the flesh-
against its origin, against its substance, against the casualties and the invariable end
which await it; unclean from its first formation of the dregs of the ground, uncleaner
afterwards from the mire of its own seminal transmission; worthless, weak, covered with
guilt, laden with misery, full of trouble; and after all this record of its degradation,
dropping into its original earth and the appellation of a corpse, and destined to dwindle
away even from this loathsome name into none henceforth at all-into the very death of all
designation? Now you are a shrewd man, no doubt:

2 will you then persuade yourself, that after this flesh has been withdrawn from sight,
and touch, and memory, it can never be rehabilitated from corruption to integrity, from a
shattered to a solid State, from an empty to a full condition, from nothing at all to
something-the devouring fires, and the waters of the sea, and the maws of beasts, and the
crops of birds and the stomachs of fishes, and time's own great paunch itself of course
yielding it all up again? Shall the same flesh which has fallen to decay be so expected to
recover, as that the lame, and the one-eyed, and the blind, and the leper, and the palsied
shall come back again, although there can be no pleasure in returning to their old
condition? Or shall they be whole, and so have to fear exposure to such sufferings? What,
in that case, (must we say) of the consequences of resuming the flesh? Will it again be
subject to all its present wants, especially meats and drinks? Shall we have with our
lungs to float (in air or water), and suffer pain in our bowels, and with organs of shame
to feel no shame, and with all our limbs to toil and labour? Must there again be ulcers,
and wounds, and fever, and gout, and once more the wishing to die? Of course these will be
the longings incident on the recovery of the flesh, only the repetition of desires to
escape out of it.

3 Well now, we have (stated) all this in very subdued and delicate phrases, as suited to
the character of our style; but (would you know) how great a licence of unseemly language
these men actually use, you must test them in their conferences, whether they be heathens
or heretics.

CHAPTER V.-SOME CONSIDERATIONS IN REPLY EULOGISTIC OF THE FLESH. IT WAS CREATED BY GOD. THE BODY OF MAN WAS, IN FACT, PREVIOUS TO HIS SOUL.

1 Inasmuch as all uneducated men, therefore, still form their opinions after these common-
sense views, and as the falterers and the weak-minded have a renewal of their perplexities
occasioned by the selfsame views; and as the first battering-ram which is directed against
ourselves is that which shatters the condition of the flesh, we must on our side
necessarily so manage our defences, as to guard, first of all, the condition of the flesh,
their disparagement of it being repulsed by our own eulogy. The heretics, therefore,
challenged us to use our rhetoric no less than our philosophy. Respecting, then, this
frail and poor, worthless body, which they do not indeed hesitate to call evil, even if it
had been the work of angels, as Menander and Marcus are pleased to think, or the formation
of some fiery being, an angel, as Apelles teaches, it would be quite enough for securing
respect for the body, that it had the support and protection of even a secondary deity.
The angels, we know, rank next to God. Now, whatever be the supreme God of each heretic, I
should not unfairly derive the dignity of the flesh likewise from Him to whom was present
the will for its production. For, of course, if He had not willed its production, He would
have prohibited it, when He knew it was in progress. It follows, then, that even on their
principle the flesh is equally the work of God. There is no work but belongs to Him who
has permitted it to exist.

2 It is indeed a happy circumstance, that most of their doctrines, including even the
harshest, accord to our God the entire formation of man. How mighty He is, you know full
well who believe that He is the only God. Let, then, the flesh begin to give you pleasure,
since the Creator thereof is so great. But, you say, even the world is the work of God,
and yet "the fashion of this world passeth away," as the apostle himself testifies; nor
must it be predetermined that the world will be restored, simply because it is the work of
God. And surely if the universe, after its ruin, is not to be formed again, why should a
portion of it be? You are right, if a portion is on an equality with the whole. But we
maintain that there is a difference. In the first place, because all things were made by
the Word of God, and without Him was nothing made. Now the flesh, too, had its existence
from the Word of God, because of the principle, that here should be nothing without that
Word. "Let us make man," said He, before He created him, and added, "with our hand," for
the sake of his pre-eminence, that so he might not be compared with the rest of creation.
And "God," says (the Scripture), "formed man. There is undoubtedly a great difference in
the procedure, springing of course from the nature of the case. For the creatures which
were made were inferior to him for whom they were made;

3 and they were made for man, to whom they were afterwards made subject by God. Rightly,
therefore, had the creatures which were thus intended for subjection, come forth into
being at the bidding and command and sole power of the divine voice; whilst man, on the
contrary, destined to be their lord, was formed by God Himself, to the intent that he
might be able to exercise his mastery, being created by the Master the Lord Himself.
Remember, too, that man is properly called flesh, which had a prior occupation in man's
designation: "And God formed man the clay of the ground. He now became man, who was
hitherto clay. "And He breathed upon his face the breath of life, and man (that is, the
clay) became a living soul; and God placed the man whom He had formed in the garden. So
that man was clay at first, and only afterwards man entire. I wish to impress this on your
attention, with a view to your knowing, that whatever God has at all purposed or promised
to man, is due not to the soul simply, but to the flesh also; if not arising out of any
community in their origin, yet at all events by the privilege possessed by the latter in
its name.

CHAPTER VI.-NOT THE LOWLINESS OF THE MATERIAL, BUT THE DIGNITY AND SKILL OF THE MAKER, MUST BE REMEMBERED, IN GAUGING THE EXCELLENCE OF THE FLESH. CHRIST PARTOOK OF OUR FLESH.

1 Let me therefore pursue the subject before me-if I can but succeed in vindicating for
the flesh as much as was conferred on it by Him who made it, glorying as it even then was,
because that poor paltry material, clay, found its way into the hands of God, whatever
these were, happy enough at merely being touched by them. But why this glorying? Was it
that, without any further labour, the clay had instantly assumed its form at the touch of
God? The truth is, a great matter was in progress, out of which the creature under
consideration was being fashioned. So often then does it receive honour, as often as it
experiences the hands of God, when it is touched by them, and pulled, and drawn out, and
moulded into shape. Imagine God wholly employed and absorbed in it-in His hand, His eye,
His labour, His purpose, His wisdom, His providence, and above all, in His love, which was
dictating the lineaments (of this creature). For, whatever was the form and expression
which was then given to the clay (by the Creator) Christ was in His thoughts as one day to
become man, because the Word, too, was to be both clay and flesh, even as the earth was
then. For so did the Father previously say to the Son: "Let us make man in our own image,
after our likeness. And God made man, that is to say, the creature which He moulded and
fashioned;

2 after the image of God (in other words, of Christ) did He make him And the Word was God
also, who being in the image of God, "thought it not robbery to be equal to God. Thus,
that clay which was even then putting on the image of Christ, who was to come in the
flesh, was not only the work, but also the pledge and surety, of God. To what purpose is
it to bandy about the name earth, as that of a sordid and grovelling element, with the
view of tarnishing the origin of the flesh, when, even if any other material had been
available for forming man, it would be requisite that the dignity of the Maker should be
taken into consideration, who even by His selection of His material deemed it, and by His
management made it, worthy? The hand of Phidias forms the Olympian Jupiter of ivory;
worship is given to the statue, and it is no longer regarded as a god formed out of a most
silly animal, but as the world's supreme Deity- not because of the bulk of the elephant,
but on account of the renown of Phidias. Could not therefore the living God, the true God,
purge away by His own operation whatever vileness might have accrued to His material, and
heal it of all infirmity? Or must this remain to show how much more nobly man could
fabricate a god, than God could form a man? Now, although the clay is offensive (for its
poorness), it is now something else.

3 What I possess is flesh, not earth, even although of the flesh it is said: "Dust thou
art, and unto dust shall thou return," In these words there is the mention of the origin,
not a recalling of the substance. The privilege has been granted to the flesh to be nobler
than its origin, and to have happiness aggrandized by the change wrought in it. Now, even
gold is earth, because of the earth; but it remains earth no longer after it becomes gold,
but is a far different substance, more splendid and more noble, though coming from a
source which is comparatively faded and obscure. In like manner, it was quite allowable
for God that He should dear the gold of our flesh from all the taints, as you deem them,
of its native clay, by purging the original substance of its dross.

CHAPTER VII.-THE EARTHY MATERIAL OF WHICH FLESH IS CREATED WONDERFULLY IMPROVED BY GOD'S MANIPULATION. BY THE ADDITION OF THE SOUL IN MAN'S CONSTITUTION IT BECAME THE CHIEF WORK IN THE CREATION.

1 But perhaps the dignity of the flesh may seem to be diminished, because it has not been
actually manipulated by the hand of God, as the clay was at first. Now, when God handled
the clay for the express purpose of the growth of flesh out of it afterwards, it was for
the flesh that He took all the trouble. But I want you, moreover, to know at what time and
in what manner the flesh flourished into beauty out of its clay. For it cannot be, as some
will have it, that those "coats of skins" which Adam and Eve put on when they were
stripped of paradise, were really themselves the forming of the flesh out of clay, because
long before that Adam had already recognised the flesh which was in the woman as the
propagation of his own substance ("This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh " ),
and the very taking of the woman out of the man was supplemented with flesh; but it ought,
I should suppose, to have been made good with clay, if Adam was still clay. The clay,
therefore, was obliterated and absorbed into flesh. When did this happen? At the time that
man became a living soul by the inbreathing of God-by the breath indeed which was capable
of hardening clay into another substance, as into some earthenware, so now into flesh.

2 In the same way the potter, too, has it in his power, by tempering the blast of his
fire, to modify his clayey material into a stiffer one, and to mould one form after
another more beautiful than the original substance, and now possessing both a kind and
name of its own. For although the Scripture says, "Shall the clay say to the potter? "
that is, Shall man contend with God? although the apostle speaks of "earthen vessels" he
refers to man, who was originally clay. And the vessel is the flesh, because this was made
of clay by the breath of the divine afflatus; and it was afterwards clothed with "the
coats of skins," that is, with the cutaneous covering which was placed over it. So truly
is this the fact, that if you withdraw the skin, you lay bare the flesh. Thus, that which
becomes a spoil when stripped off, was a vestment as long as it remained laid over. Hence
the apostle, when he call circumcision "a putting off (or spoliation) of the flesh,"
affirmed the skin to be a coat or tunic. Now this being the case, you have both the clay
made glorious by the hand of God, and the flesh more glorious still by His breathing upon
it, by virtue of which the flesh not only laid aside its clayey rudiments, but also took
on itself the ornaments of the soul.

3 You surely are not more careful than God, that you indeed should refuse to mount the
gems of Scythia and India and the pearls of the Red Sea in lead, or brass, or iron, or
even in silver, but should set them in the most precious and most highly-wrought gold; or,
again, that you should provide for your finest wines and most costly unguents the most
fitting vessels; or, on the same principle, should find for your swords of finished temper
scabbards of equal worth; whilst God must consign to some vilest sheath the shadow of His
own soul, the breath of His own Spirit, the operation of His own mouth, and by so
ignominious a consignment secure, of course, its condemnation. Well, then, has He placed,
or rather inserted and commingled, it with the flesh? Yes; and so intimate is the union,
that it may be deemed to be uncertain whether the flesh bears about the soul, or the soul
the flesh; or whether the flesh acts as apparitor to the soul, or the soul to the flesh.
It is, However, more credible that the soul has service rendered to it, and has the
mastery, as being more proximate in character to God. This circumstance even redounds to
the glory of the flesh, inasmuch as it both contains an essence nearest to God's, and
renders itself a partake of (the soul's) actual sovereignty.

4 For what enjoyment of nature is there, what produce of the world, what relish of the
elements, which is not imparted to the soul by means of the body? How can it be otherwise?
Is it not by its means that the soul is supported by the entire apparatus of the senses-
the sight, the hearing, the taste, the smell, the touch? Is it not by its means that it
has a sprinkling of the divine power, there being nothing which it does not effect by its
faculty of speech, even when it is only tacitly indicated? And speech is the result of a
fleshly organ. The arts come through the flesh; through the flesh also effect is given to
the mind's pursuits and powers; all work, too, and business and offices of life, are
accomplished by the flesh; and so utterly, are the living acts of the soul the work of the
flesh, that for the soul to cease to do living acts, would be nothing else than sundering
itself from the flesh. So also the very act of dying is a function of the flesh, even as
the process of life is. Now, if all things are subject to the soul through the flesh,
their subjection is equally due to the flesh. That which is the means and agent of your
enjoyment, must needs be also the partaker and sharer of your enjoyment. So that the
flesh, which is accounted the minister and servant of the soul, turns out to be also its
associate and co-heir.

5 And if all this in temporal things, why not also in things eternal?

CHAPTER VIII.-CHRISTIANITY, BY ITS PROVISION FOR THE FLESH, HAS PUT ON IT THE GREATEST HONOUR. THE PRIVILEGES OF OUR RELIGION IN CLOSEST CONNECTION WITH OUR FLESH. WHICH ALSO BEARS A LARGE SHARE IN THE DUTIES AND SACRIFICES OF RELIGION.

1 Now such remarks have I wished to advance in defence of the flesh, from a general view
of the condition of our human nature. Let us now consider its special relation to
Christianity, and see how vast a privilege before God has been conferred on this poor and
worthless substance. It would suffice to say, indeed, that there is not a soul that can at
all procure salvation, except it believe whilst it is in the flesh, so true is it that the
flesh is the very condition on which salvation hinges.And since the soul is, in
consequence of its salvation, chosen to the service of God, it is the flesh which actually
renders it capable of such service. The flesh, indeed, is washed, in order that the soul
may be cleansed; the flesh is anointed, that the soul may be consecrated; the flesh is
signed (with the cross), that the soul too may be fortified; the flesh is shadowed with
the imposition of hands, that the soul also maybe illuminated by the Spirit; the flesh
feeds on the body and blood of Christ, that the soul likewise may fatten on its God. They
cannot then be separated in their recompense, when they are united in their service. Those
sacrifices, moreover, which are acceptable to God-I mean conflicts of the soul, fastings,
and abstinences, and the humiliations which are annexed to such duty-it is the flesh which
performs again and again to its own especial suffering.

2 Virginity, likewise, and widowhood, and the modest restraint in secret on the marriage-
bed, and the one only adoption of it, are fragrant offerings to God paid out of the good
services of the flesh. Come, tell me what is your opinion of the flesh, when it has to
contend for the name of Christ, dragged out to public view, and exposed to the hatred of
all men; when it pines in prisons under the cruellest privation of light, in banishment
from the world, amidst squalor, filth, and noisome food, without freedom even in sleep,
for it is bound on its very pallet and mangled in its bed of straw; when at length before
the public view it is racked by every kind of torture that can be devised, and when
finally it is spent beneath its agonies, struggling to render its last turn for Christ by
dying for Him-upon His own cross many times, not to say by still more atrocious devices of
torment. Most blessed, truly, and most glorious, must be the flesh which can repay its
Master Christ so vast a debt, and so completely, that the only obligation remaining due to
Him is, that it should cease by death to owe Him more-all the more bound even then in
gratitude, because (for ever) set free.

CHAPTER IX.-GOD'S LOVE FOR THE FLESH OF MAN, AS DEVELOPED IN THE GRACE OF CHRIST TOWARDS IT. THE FLESH THE BEST MEANS OF DISPLAYING THE BOUNTY AND POWER OF GOD.

1 To recapitulate, then: Shall that very flesh, which the Divine Creator formed with His
own hands in the image of God; which He animated with His own afflatus, after the likeness
of His own vital vigour; which He set over all the works of His hand, to dwell amongst, to
enjoy, and to rule them; which He clothed with His sacraments and His instructions; whose
purity He loves, whose mortifications He approves; whose sufferings for Himself He deems
precious;-(shall that flesh, I say), so often brought near to God, not rise again? God
forbid, God forbid, (I repeat), that He should abandon to everlasting destruction the
labour of His own hands, the care of His own thoughts, the receptacle of His own Spirit,
the queen of His creation, the inheritor of His own liberality, the priestess of His
religion, the champion of His testimony, the sister of His Christ! We know by experience
the goodness of God; from His Christ we learn that He is the only God, and the very good.
Now, as He requires from us love to our neighbour after love to Himself, so He will
Himself do that which He has commanded. He will love the flesh which is, so very closely
and in so many ways, His neighbour-(He will love it), although infirm, since His strength
is made perfect in weakness; although disordered, since "they that are whole need not the
physician, but they that are sick; " although not honourable, since "we bestow more
abundant honour upon the less honourable members;

2 " although ruined, since He says, "I am come to save that which was lost; " although
sinful, since He says, "I desire rather the salvation of the sinner than his death; "
although condemned, for says He, "I shall wound, and also heal. " Why reproach the flesh
with those conditions which wait for God, which hope in God, which receive honour from
God, which He succours? I venture to declare, that if such casualties as these had never
befallen the flesh, the bounty, the grace, the mercy, (and indeed) all the beneficent
power of God, would have had no opportunity to work.

CHAPTER X.-HOLY SCRIPTURE MAGNIFIES THE FLESH, AS TO ITS NATURE AND ITS PROSPECTS.

You hold to the scriptures in which the flesh is disparaged; receive also those in which
it is ennobled. You read whatever passage abases it; direct your eyes also to that which
elevates it. "All flesh is grass." Well, but Isaiah was not content to say only this; but
he also declared, "All flesh shall see the salvation of God. " They notice God when He
says in Genesis, "My Spirit shall not remain among these men, because they are flesh; "
but then He is also heard saying by Joel, "I will pour I out of my Spirit upon all flesh."
Even the apostle ought not to be known for any one statement in which he is wont to
reproach the flesh. For although he says that "in his flesh dwelleth no good thing; "
although he affirms that "they who are in the flesh cannot please God," because "the flesh
lusteth against the Spirit; " yet in these and similar assertions which he makes, it is
not the substance of the flesh, but its actions, which are censured. Moreover, we shall
elsewhere take occasion to remark, that no reproaches can fairly be cast upon the flesh,
without tending also to the castigation of the soul, which compels the flesh to do its
bidding. However, let me meanwhile add that in the same passage Paul "carries about in his
body the marks of the Lord Jesus; " he also forbids our body to be profaned, as being "the
temple of God; " he makes our bodies "the members of Christ; " and he exhorts us to exalt
and "glorify God in our body." If, therefore, the humiliations of the flesh thrust off its
resurrection, why shall not its high prerogatives rather avail to bring it about?-since it
better suits the character of God to restore to salvation what for a while He rejected,
than to surrender to perdition what He once approved.

CHAPTER XI.-THE POWER OF GOD FULLY COMPETENT TO EFFECT THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH.

1 Thus far touching my eulogy of the flesh, in opposition to its enemies, who are,
notwithstanding, its greatest friends also; for there is nobody who lives so much in
accordance with the flesh as they who deny the resurrection of the flesh, inasmuch as they
despise all its discipline, while they disbelieve its punishment. It is a shrewd saying
which the Paraclete utters concerning these persons by the mouth of the prophetess Prisca:
"They are carnal, and yet they hate the flesh. Since, then, the flesh has the best
guarantee that could possibly accrue for securing to it the recompense of salvation, ought
we not also to consider well the power, and might, and competency of God Himself, whether
He be so great as to be able to rebuild and restore the edifice of the flesh, which had
become dilapidated and blocked up, and in every possible way dislocated?-whether He has
promulgated in the public domains of nature any analogies to convince us of His power in
this respect, lest any should happen to be still thirsting for the knowledge of God, when
faith in Him must rest on no other basis than the belief that He is able to do all things?
You have, no doubt amongst your philosophers men who maintain that this world is without a
beginning or a maker. It is, however, much more true, that nearly all the heresies allow
it an origin and a maker, and ascribe its creation to our God.

2 Firmly believe, therefore, that He produced it wholly out of nothing, and then you have
found the knowledge of God, by believing that He possesses such mighty power. But some
persons are too weak to believe all this at first, owing to their views about Matter. They
will rather have it, after the philosophers, that the universe was in the beginning made
by God out of underlying matter. Now, even if this opinion could be held in truth, since
He must be acknowledged to have produced in His reformation of matter far different
substances and far different forms from those which Matter itself possessed, I should
maintain, with no less persistence, that He produced these things out of nothing, since
they absolutely had no existence at all previous to His production of them. Now, where is
the difference between a thing's being produced out of nothing or out of something, if so
be that what existed not comes into being, when even to have had no existence is
tantamount to having been nothing? The contrary is likewise true; for having once existed
amounts to having been something. If, however, there is a difference, both alternatives
support my position. For if God produced all things whatever out of nothing, He will be
able to draw forth from nothing even the flesh which had fallen into nothing; or if He
moulded other things out of matter, He will be able to call forth the flesh too from
somewhere else, into whatever abyss it may have been engulphed.

3 And surely He is most competent to re-create who created, inasmuch as it is a far
greater work to have produced than to have reproduced, to have imparted a beginning, than
to have maintained a continuance. On this principle, you may be quite sure that the
restoration of the flesh is easier than its first formation.

CHAPTER XII.-SOME ANALOGIES IN NATURE WHICH CORROBORATE THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH.

1 Consider now those very analogies of the divine power (to which we have just alluded).
Day dies into night, and is buried everywhere in darkness. The glory of the world is
obscured in the shadow of death; its entire substance is tarnished with blackness; all
things become sordid, silent, stupid; everywhere business ceases, and occupations rest.
And so over the loss of the light there is mourning. But yet it again revives, with its
own beauty, its own dowry, is own sun, the same as ever, whole and entire, over all the
world, slaying its own death, night-opening its own sepulchre, the darkness-coming forth
the heir to itself, until the night also revives-it, too, accompanied with a retinue of
its own. For the stellar rays are rekindled, which had been quenched in the morning glow;
the distant groups of the constellations are again brought back to view, which the day's
temporary interval had removed out of sight. Readorned also are the mirrors of the moon,
which her monthly course had worn away. Winters and summers return, as do the spring-tide
and autumn, with their resources, their routines, their fruits. Forasmuch as earth
receives its instruction from heaven to clothe the trees which had been stripped, to
colour the flowers afresh, to spread the grass again, to reproduce the seed which had been
consumed, and not to reproduce them until consumed. Wondrous method! from a defrauder to
be a preserver, in order to restore, it takes away; in order to guard, it destroys; that
it may make whole, it injures;

2 and that it may enlarge, it first lessens. (This process) indeed, renders back to us
richer and fuller blessings than it deprived us of-by a destruction which is profit, by an
injury which is advantage, and by a loss which is gain. In a word, I would say, all
creation is instinct with renewal. Whatever you may chance upon, has already existed;
whatever you have lost, returns again without fail. All things return to their former
state, after having gone out of sight; all things begin after they have ended; they come
to an end for the very purpose of coming into existence again. Nothing perishes but with a
view to salvation. The whole, therefore, of this revolving order of things bears witness
to the resurrection of the dead. In His works did God write it, before He wrote it in the
Scriptures; He proclaimed it in His mighty deeds earlier than in His inspired words. He
first sent Nature to you as a teacher, meaning to send Prophecy also as a supplemental
instructor, that, being Nature's disciple, you may more easily believe Prophecy, and
without hesitation accept (its testimony) when you come to hear what you have seen already
on every side; nor doubt that God, whom you have discovered to be the restorer of all
things, is likewise the reviver of the flesh.

3 And surely, as all things rise again for man, for whose use they have been provided-but
not for man except for his flesh also-how happens it that (the flesh) itself can perish
utterly, because of which and for the service of which nothing comes to nought?

CHAPTER XIII.-FROM OUR AUTHOR'S VIEW OF A VERSE IN THE NINETY-SECOND PSALM, THE PHOENIX IS MADE A SYMBOL OF THE RESURRECTION OF OUR BODIES.

If, however, all nature but faintly figures our resurrection; if creation affords no sign
precisely like it, inasmuch as its several phenomena can hardly be said to die so much as
to come to an end, nor again be deemed to be reanimated, but only re-formed; then take a
most complete and unassailable, symbol of our hope, for it shall be an animated being, and
subject alike to life and death. I refer to the bird which is peculiar to the East, famous
for its singularity, marvelous from its posthumous life, which renews its life in a
voluntary death; its dying day is its birthday, for on it it departs and returns; once
more a phoenix where just now there was none; once more himself, but just now out of
existence; another, yet the same. What can be more express and more significant for our
subject; or to what other thing can such a phenomenon bear witness? God even in His own
Scripture says: "The righteous shall flourish like the phoenix; " that is, shall flourish
or revive, from death, from the grave-to teach you to believe that a bodily substance may
be recovered even from the fire. Our Lord has declared that we are "better than many
sparrows: " well, if not better than many a phoenix too, it were no great thing. But must
men die once for all, while birds in Arabia are sure of a resurrection?

CHAPTER XIV.-A SUFFICIENT CAUSE FOR THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH OCCURS IN THE FUTURE JUDGMENT OF MAN, IT WILL TAKE COGNISANCE OF THE WORKS OF THE BODY NO LESS THAN OF THE SOUL.

1 Such, then, being the outlines of the divine energies which God has displayed as much in
the parables of nature as in His spoken word, let us now approach His very edicts and
decrees, since this is the division which we mainly adopt in our subject-matter. We began
with the dignity of the flesh, whether it were of such a nature that when once destroyed
it was capable of being restored. Then we pursued an inquiry touching the power of God,
whether it was sufficiently great to be habitually able to confer this restoration on a
thing which had been destroyed. Now, if we have proved these two points, I should like you
to inquire into the (question of) cause, whether it be one of sufficient weight to claim
the resurrection of the flesh as necessary and as conformable in every way to reason;
because there underlies this demurrer: the flesh may be quite capable of being restored,
and the Deity be perfectly able to effect the restoration, but a cause for such recovery
must needs pre-exist. Admit then a sufficient one, you who learn of a God who is both
supremely good as well as just -supremely good from His own (character), just in
consequence of ours. For if man had never sinned, he would simply and solely have known
God in His superlative goodness, from the attribute of His nature. But now he experiences
Him to be a just God also, from the necessity of a cause;

2 still, however, retaining under this very circumstance His excellent goodness, at the
same time that He is also just. For, by both succouring the good and punishing the evil,
He displays His justice, and at the same time makes both processes contribute proofs of
His goodness, whilst on the one hand He deals vengeance, land on the other dispenses
reward. But with Marcion you will have the opportunity of more fully learning whether this
be the whole character of God. Meanwhile, so perfect is our (God), that He is rightly
Judge, because He is the Lord; rightly the Lord, because the Creator; rightly the Creator,
because He is God. Whence it happens that that heretic, whose name I know not, holds that
He properly is not a Judge, since He is not Lord; properly not Lord, since He is not the
Creator. And so I am at a loss to know how He is God, who is neither the Creator, which
God is; nor the Lord, which the Creator is. Inasmuch, then, as it is most suitable for the
great Being who is God, and Lord, and Creator to summon man to a judgment on this very
question, whether he has taken care or not to acknowledge and honour his Lord and Creator,
this is just such a judgment as the resurrection shall achieve. The entire cause, then, or
rather necessity of the resurrection, will be this, namely, that arrangement of the final
judgment which shall be most suitable to God.

3 Now, in effecting this arrangement, you must consider whether the divine censure
superintends a judicial examination of the two natures of man-both his soul and his flesh.
For that which is a suitable object to be judged, is also a competent one to be raised.
Our position is, that the judgment of God must be believed first of all to be plenary, and
then absolute, so as to be final, and therefore irrevocable; to be also righteous, not
bearing less heavily on any particular part; to be moreover worthy of God, being complete
and definite, in keeping with His great patience. Thus it follows that the fulness and
perfection of the judgment consists simply in representing the interests of the entire
human being. Now, since the entire man consists of the union of the two natures, he must
therefore appear in both, as it is right that he should be judged in his entirety; nor, of
course, did he pass through life except in his entire state. As therefore he lived, so
also must he be judged, because he has to be judged concerning the way in which he lived.
For life is the cause of judgment, and it must undergo investigation in as many natures as
it possessed when it discharged its vital functions.

CHAPTER XV.-AS THE FLESH IS A PARTAKER WITH THE SOUL IN ALL HUMAN CONDUCT, SO WILL IT BE IN THE RECOMPENSE OF ETERNITY.

1 Come now, let our opponents sever the connection of the flesh with the soul in the
affairs of life, that they may be emboldened to sunder it also in the recompense of life.
Let them deny their association in acts, that they may be fairly able to deny also their
participation in rewards. The flesh ought not to have any share in the sentence, if it had
none in the cause of it. Let the soul alone be called back, if it alone went away. But
(nothing of the kind ever happened); for the soul alone no more departed from life, than
it ran through alone the course from which it departed-I mean this present life. Indeed,
the soul alone is so far from conducting (the affairs of) life, that we do not withdraw
from community with the flesh even our thoughts, however isolated they be, however
unprecipitated into act by means of the flesh; since whatever is done in man's heart is
done by the soul in the flesh, and with the flesh, and through the flesh. The Lord
Himself, in short, when rebuking our thoughts, includes in His censures this aspect of the
flesh, (man's heart), the citadel of the soul: "Why think ye evil in your hearts? " and
again: "Whosoever looketh on a woman, to lust after her, hath already committed adultery
with her in his heart. So that even the thought, without operation and without effect, is
an act of the flesh.

2 But if you allow that the faculty which rules the senses, and which they call
<i>hegemonikon, has its sanctuary in the brain, or in the interval between the eyebrows,
or wheresoever the philosophers are pleased to locate it, the flesh will still be the
thinking place of the soul. The soul is never without the flesh, as long as it is in the
flesh. There is nothing which the flesh does not transact in company with the soul, when
without it does not exist. Consider carefully, too, whether the thoughts are not
administered by the flesh, since it is through the flesh that they are distinguished and
known externally. Let the soul only meditate some design, the face gives the indication-
the face being the mirror of all our intentions. They may deny all combination in acts,
but they cannot gainsay their co-operation in thoughts. Still they enumerate the sins of
the flesh; surely, then, for its sinful conduct it must be consigned to punishment. But
we, moreover, allege against them the virtues of the flesh; surely also for its virtuous
conduct it deserves a future reward. Again, as it is the soul which acts and impels us in
all we do, so it is the function of the flesh to render obedience. Now we are not
permitted to suppose that God is either unjust or idle. Unjust, (however He would be, )
were He to exclude from reward the flesh which is associated in good works;

3 and idle, were He to exempt it from punishment, when it has been an accomplice in evil
deeds: whereas human judgment is deemed to be the more perfect, when it discovers the
agents in every deed, and neither spares the guilty nor grudges the virtuous their full
share of either punishment or praise with the principals who employed their services.

CHAPTER XVI.-THE HERETICS CALLED THE FLESH "THE VESSEL OF THE SOUL," IN ORDER TO DESTROY THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE BODY. THEIR CAVIL TURNS UPON THEMSELVES AND SHOWS THE FLESH TO BE A SHARER IN HUMAN ACTIONS.

1 When, however, we attribute to the soul authority, and to the flesh submission, we must
see to it that (our opponents) do not turn our position by another argument, by insisting
on so placing the flesh in the service of the soul, that it be not (considered as) its
servant, lest they should be compelled, if it were so regarded, to admit its companionship
(to the soul). For they would argue that servants and companions possess a discretion in
discharging the functions of their respective office, and a power over their will in both
relations: in short, (they would claim to be) men themselves, and therefore (would expect)
to share the credit with their principals, to whom they voluntarily yielded their
assistance; whereas the flesh had no discretion, no sentiment in itself, but possessing no
power of its own of willing or refusing, it, in fact, appears to stand to the soul in the
stead of a vessel as an instrument rather than a servant. The soul alone, therefore, will
have to be judged (at the last day) pre-eminently as to how it has employed the vessel of
the flesh; the vessel itself, of course, not being amenable to a judicial award: for who
condemns the cup if any. man has mixed poison in it? or who sentences the sword to the
beasts, if a man has perpetrated with it the atrocities of a brigand? Well, now, we will
grant that the flesh is innocent, in so far as bad actions will not be charged upon it:

2 what, then, is there to hinder its being saved on the score of its innocence? For
although it is free from all imputation of good works, as it is of evil ones, yet it is
more consistent with the divine goodness to deliver the innocent. A beneficent man,
indeed, is bound to do so: it suits then the character of the Most Bountiful to bestow
even gratuitously such a favour. And yet, as to the cup, I will not take the poisoned one,
into which some certain death is injected, but one which has been infected with the breath
of a lascivious woman, or of Cybele's priest, or of a gladiator, or of a hangman: then I
want to know whether you would pass a milder condemnation on it than on the kisses of such
persons? One indeed which is soiled with our own filth, or one which is not mingled to our
own mind we are apt to dash to pieces, and then to increase our anger with our servant. As
for the sword, which is drunk with the blood of the brigand's victims, who would not
banish it entirely from his house, much more from his bed-room, or from his pillow, from
the presumption that he would be sure to dream of nothing but the apparitions of the souls
which were pursuing and disquieting him for lying down with the blade which shed their own
blood?

3 Take, however, the cup which has no reproach on it, and which deserves the credit of a
faithful ministration, it will be adorned by its drinking-master with chaplets, or be
honoured with a handful of flowers. The sword also which has received honourable stains in
war, and has been thus engaged in a better manslaughter, will secure its own praise by
consecration. It is quite possible, then, to pass decisive sentences even on vessels and
on instruments, that so they too may participate in the merits of their proprietors and
employers. Thus much do I say from a desire to meet even this argument, although there is
a failure in the example, owing to the diversity in the nature of the objects. For every
vessel or every instrument becomes useful from without, consisting as it does of material
perfectly extraneous to the substance of the human owner or employer; whereas the flesh,
being conceived, formed, and generated along with the soul from its earliest existence in
the womb, is mixed up with it likewise in all its operations. For although it is called "a
vessel" by the apostle, such as he enjoins to be treated "with honour," it is yet
designated by the same apostle as "the outward man," -that clay, of course, which at the
first was inscribed with the title of a man, not of a cup or a sword, or any paltry
vessel. Now it is called a "vessel" in consideration of its capacity, whereby it receives
and contains the soul;

4 but "man," from its community of nature, which renders it in all operations a servant
and not an instrument. Accordingly, in the judgment it will be held to be a servant (even
though it may have no independent discretion of its own), on the ground of its being an
integral portion of that which possesses such discretion, and is not a mere chattel. And
although the apostle is well aware that the flesh does nothing of itself which is not also
imputed to the soul, he yet deems the flesh to be "sinful; " lest it should be supposed to
be free from all responsibility by the mere fact of its seeming to be impelled by the
soul. So, again, when he is ascribing certain praiseworthy actions to the flesh, he says,
"Therefore glorify and exalt God in your body," -being certain that such efforts are
actuated by the soul; but still he ascribes them to the flesh, because it is to it that he
also promises the recompense. Besides, neither rebuke, (on the one hand), would have been
suitable to it, if free from blame; nor, (on the other hand), would exhortation, if it
were incapable of glory. Indeed, both rebuke and exhortation would be alike idle towards
the flesh, if it were an improper object for that recompence which is certainly received
in the resurrection.

CHAPTER XVII.-THE FLESH WILL BE ASSOCIATED WITH THE SOUL IN ENDURING THE PENAL SENTENCES OF THE FINAL JUDGMENT.

1 "Every uneducated person who agrees with our opinion will be apt to suppose that the
flesh will have to be present at the final judgment even on this account, because
otherwise the soul would be incapable of suffering pain or pleasure, as being incorporeal;
for this is the common opinion. We on our part, however, do here maintain, and in a
special treatise on the subject prove, that the soul is corporeal, possessing a peculiar
kind of solidity in its nature, such as enables it both to perceive and suffer. That souls
are even now susceptible of torment and of blessing in Hades, though they are disembodied,
and notwithstanding their banishment from the flesh, is proved by the case of Lazarus. I
have no doubt given to my opponent room to say: Since, then, the soul has a bodily
substance of its own, it will be sufficiently endowed with the faculty of suffering and
sense, so as not to require the presence of the flesh. No, no, (is my reply): it will
still need the flesh; not as being unable to feel anything without the help of the flesh,
but because it is necessary that it should possess such a faculty along with the flesh.
For in as far as it has a sufficiency of its own for action, in so far has it likewise a
capacity for suffering. But the truth is, in respect of action, it labours under some
amount of incapacity;

2 for in its own nature it has simply the ability to think, to will, to desire, to
dispose: for fully, carrying out the purpose, it looks for the assistance of the flesh. In
like manner, it also requires the conjunction of the flesh to endure suffering, in order
that by its aid it may be as fully able to suffer, as without its assistance it was not
fully able to act. In respect, indeed, of those sins, such as concupiscence, and thought,
and wish, which it has a competency of its own to commit, it at once pays the penalty of
them. Now, no doubt, if these were alone sufficient to constitute absolute desert without
requiring the addition of acts, the soul would suffice in itself to encounter the full
responsibility of the judgment, being to be judged for those things in the doing of which
it alone had possessed a sufficiency. Since, however, acts too are indissolubly attached
to deserts; since also acts are ministerially effected by the flesh, it is no longer
enough that the soul apart from the flesh be requited with pleasure or pain for what are
actually works of the flesh, although it has a body (of its own), although it has members
(of its own), which in like manner are insufficient for its full perception, just as they
are also for its perfect action.

3 Therefore as it has acted in each several instance, so proportionably does it suffer in
Hades, being the first to taste of judgment as it was the first to induce to the
commission of sin; but still it is waiting for the flesh in order that it may through the
flesh also compensate for its deeds, inasmuch as it laid upon the flesh the execution of
its own thoughts. This, in short, will be the process of that judgment which is postponed
to the last great day, in order that by the exhibition of the flesh the entire course of
the divine vengeance may be accomplished. Besides, (it is obvious to remark) there would
be no delaying to the end of that doom which souls are already tasting in Hades, if it was
destined for souls alone.

CHAPTER XVIII.-SCRIPTURE PHRASES AND PASSAGES CLEARLY ASSERT "THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD." THE FORCE OF THIS VERY PHRASE EXPLAINED AS INDICATING THE PROMINENT PLACE OF THE FLESH IN THE GENERAL RESURRECTION.

1 Thus far it has been my object by prefatory remarks to lay a foundation for the defence
of all the Scriptures which promise a resurrection of the flesh. Now, inasmuch as this
verity is supported by so many just and reasonable considerations-I mean the dignity of
the flesh itself, the power and might of God, the analogous cases in which these are
displayed, as well as the good reasons for the judgment, and the need thereof -it will of
course be only right and proper that the Scriptures should be understood in the sense
suggested by such authoritative considerations, and not after the conceits of the
heretics, which arise from infidelity solely, because it is deemed incredible that the
flesh should be recovered from death and restored to life; not because (such a
restoration) is either unattainable by the flesh itself, or impossible for God to effect,
or unsuitable to the final judgment. Incredible, no doubt, it might be, if it had not been
revealed in the word of God; except that, even if it had not been thus first announced by
God, it might have been fairly enough assumed, that the revelation of it had been
withheld, simply because so many strong presumptions in its favour had been already
furnished. Since, however, (the great fact) is proclaimed in so many inspired passages,
that is so far a dissuasive against understanding it in a sense different from that which
is attested by such arguments as persuade us to its reception, even irrespective of the
testimonies of revelation.

2 Let us see, then, first of all in what title this hope of ours is held out to our view.
There is, I imagine, one divine edict which is exposed to the gaze of all men: it is "The
Resurrection of the Dead. These words are prompt, decisive, clear. I mean to take these
very terms, discuss them, and discover to what substance they apply. As to the word
resurrectio, whenever I hear of its impending over a human being, I am forced to inquire
what part of him has been destined to fall, since nothing can be expected to rise again,
unless it has first been prostrated. It is only the man who is ignorant of the fact that
the flesh falls by death, that can fail to discover that it stands erect by means of life.
Nature pronounces God's sentence: "Dust thou art, and unto dust shall thou return. Even
the man who has not heard the sentence, sees the fact. No death but is the ruin of our
limbs. This destiny of the body the Lord also described, when, clothed as He was in its
very substance, He said, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again.
For He showed to what belongs (the incidents of) being destroyed, thrown down, and kept
down-even to that to which it also appertains to be lifted and raised up again;

3 although He was at the same time bearing about with Him "a soul that was trembling even
unto death," but which did not fall through death, because even the Scripture informs us
that "He spoke of His body. So that it is the flesh which falls by death; and accordingly
it derives its name, cadaver, from cadendo. The soul, however, has no trace of a fall in
its designation, as indeed there is no mortality in its condition. Nay it is the soul
which communicates its ruin to the body when it is breathed out of it, just as it is also
destined to raise it up again from the earth when it shall re-enter it. That cannot fall
which by its entrance raises; nor can that droop which by its departure causes ruin. I
will go further, and say that the soul does not even fall into sleep along with the body,
nor does it with its companion even lie down in repose. For it is agitated in dreams, and
disturbed: it might, however, rest, if it lay down; and lie down it certainly would, if it
fell. Thus that which does not fall even into the likeness of death, does not succumb to
the reality thereof. Passing now to the other word mortuorum, I wish you to look
carefully, and see to what substance it is applicable. Were we to allow, under this head,
as is sometimes held by the heretics, that the soul is mortal, so that being mortal it
shall attain to a resurrection;

4 this would afford a presumption that the flesh also, being no less mortal, would share
in the same resurrection. But our present point is to derive from the proper signification
of this word an idea of the destiny which it indicates. Now, just as the term resurrection
is predicated of that which falls-that is, the flesh-so will there be the same application
of the word dead, because what is called "the resurrection of the dead" indicates the
rising up again of that which is fallen down. We learn this from the case of Abraham, the
father of the faithful, a man who enjoyed close intercourse with God. For when he
requested of the sons of Heth a spot to bury Sarah in, he said to them, "Give me the
possession of a burying place with you, that I may bury my dead," -meaning, of course, her
flesh; for he could not have desired a place to bury her soul in, even if the soul is to
be deemed mortal, and even if it could bear to be described by the word "dead. Since,
then, this word indicates the body, it follows that when "the resurrection of the dead" is
spoken of, it is the rising again of men's bodies that is meant.

CHAPTER XIX.-THE SOPHISTICAL SENSE PUT BY HERETICS ON THE PHRASE "RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD," AS IF IT MEANT THE MORAL CHANGE OF A NEW LIFE.

1 Now this consideration of the phrase in question, and its signification-besides
maintaining, of course, the true meaning of the important words-must needs contribute to
this further result, that whatever obscurity our adversaries throw over the subject under
the pretence of figurative and allegorical language, the truth will stand out in clearer
light, and out of uncertainties certain and definite rules will be prescribed. For some,
when they have alighted on a very usual form of prophetic statement, generally expressed
in figure and allegory, though not always, distort into some imaginary sense even the most
clearly described doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, alleging that even death
itself must be understood in a spiritual sense. They say that which is commonly supposed
to be death is not really so,-namely, the separation of body and soul: it is rather the
ignorance of God, by reason of which man is dead to God, and is not less buried in error
than he would be in the grave. Wherefore that also must be held to be the resurrection,
when a man is reanimated by access to the truth, and having dispersed the death of
ignorance, and being endowed with new life by God, has burst forth from the sepulchre of
the old man, even as the Lord likened the scribes and Pharisees to "whited sepulchres.
Whence it follows that they who have by faith attained to the resurrection, are with the
Lord after they have once put Him on in their baptism.

2 By such subtlety, then, even in conversation have they often been in the habit of
misleading our brethren, as if they held a resurrection of the dead as well as we. Woe,
say they, to him who has not risen in the present body; for they fear that they might
alarm their hearers if they at once denied the resurrection. Secretly, however, in their
minds they think this: Woe betide the simpleton who during his present life fails to
discover the mysteries of heresy; since this, in their view, is the resurrection. There
are however, a great many also, who, claiming to hold a resurrection after the soul's
departure, maintain that going out of the sepulchre means escaping out of the world, since
in their view the world is the habitation of the dead-that is, of those who know not God;
or they will go so far as to say that it actually means escaping out of the body itself,
since they imagine that the body detains the soul, when it is shut up in the death of a
worldly life, as in a grave.

CHAPTER XX.-FIGURATIVE SENSES HAVE THEIR FOUNDATION IN LITERAL FACT. BESIDES, THE ALLEGORICAL STYLE IS BY NO MEANS THE ONLY ONE FOUND IN THE PROPHETIC SCRIPTURES, AS ALLEGED BY THE HERETICS.

1 Now, to upset all conceits of this sort, let me dispel at once the preliminary idea on
which they rest-their assertion that the prophets make all their announcements in figures
of speech. Now, if this were the case, the figures themselves could not possibly have been
distinguished, inasmuch as the verities would not have been declared, out of which the
figurative language is stretched. And, indeed, if all are figures, where will be that of
which they are the figures? How can you hold up a mirror for your face, if the face
nowhere exists? But, in truth, all are not figures, but there are also literal statements;
nor are all shadows, but there are bodies too: so that we have prophecies about the Lord
Himself even, which are clearer than the day For it was not figuratively that the Virgin
conceived in her womb; nor in a trope did she bear Emmanuel, that is, Jesus, God with us.
Even granting that He was figuratively to take the power of Damascus and the spoils of
Samaria, still it was literally that He was to "enter into judgment with the elders and
princes of the people. For in the person of Pilate "the heathen raged," and in the person
of Israel "the people imagined vain things; ""the kings of the earth" in Herod, and the
rulers in Annas and Caiaphas, were gathered together against the Lord, and against His
anointed.

2 He, again, was "led as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a sheep before the shearer,"
that is, Herod, "is dumb, so He opened not His mouth. "He gave His back to scourges, and
His cheeks to blows, not turning His face even from the shame of spitting. "He was
numbered with the transgressors; " "He was pierced in His hands and His feet; " "they cast
lots for his raiment" "they gave Him gall, and made Him drink vinegar; " "they shook their
heads, and mocked Him; " "He was appraised by the traitor in thirty pieces of silver. What
figures of speech does Isaiah here give us? What tropes does David? What allegories does
Jeremiah? Not even of His mighty works have they used parabolic language. Or else, were
not the eyes of the blind opened? did not the tongue of the dumb recover speech? did not
the relaxed hands and palsied knees become strong, and the lame leap as an hart? No doubt
we are accustomed also to give a spiritual significance to these statements of prophecy,
according to the analogy of the physical diseases which were healed by the Lord; but still
they were all fulfilled literally: thus showing that the prophets foretold both senses,
except that very many of their words can only be taken in a pure and simple signification,
and free from all allegorical obscurity; as when we hear of the downfall of nations and
cities, of Tyre and Egypt, and Babylon and Edom, and the navy of Carthage;

3 also when they foretell Israel's own chastisements and pardons, its captivities,
restorations, and at last its final dispersion. Who would prefer affixing a metaphorical
interpretation to all these events, instead of accepting their literal truth? The
realities are involved in the words, just as the words are read in the realities. Thus,
then, (we find that) the allegorical style is not used in all parts of the prophetic
record, although it occasionally occurs in certain portions of it.

CHAPTER XXI.-NO MERE METAPHOR IN THE PHRASE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD. IN PROPORTION TO THE IMPORTANCE OF ETERNAL TRUTHS, IS THE CLEARNESS OF THEIR SCRIPTURAL ENUNCIATION.

1 Well, if it occurs occasionally in certain portions of it, you will say, then why not in
that phrase, where the resurrection might be spiritually understood? There are several
reasons why not. First, what must be the meaning of so many important passages of Holy
Scripture, which so obviously attest the resurrection of the body, as to admit not even
the appearance of a figurative signification? And, indeed, (since some passages are more
obscure than others), it cannot but be right-as we have shown above -that uncertain
statements should be determined by certain ones, and obscure ones by such as are clear and
plain; else there is fear that, in the conflict of certainties and uncertainties, of
explicitness and obscurity, faith may be shattered, truth endangered, and the Divine Being
Himself be branded as inconstant. Then arises the improbability that the very mystery on
which our trust wholly rests, on which also our instruction entirely depends, should have
the appearance of being ambiguously announced and obscurely propounded, inasmuch as the
hope of the resurrection, unless it be clearly set forth on the sides both of punishment
and reward, would fail to persuade any to embrace a religion like ours, exposed as it is
to public detestation and the imputation of hostility to others. There is no certain work
where the remuneration is uncertain. There is no real apprehension when the peril is only
doubtful. But both the recompense of reward, and the danger of losing it, depend on the
issues of the resurrection.

2 Now, if even those purposes of God against cities, and nations, and kings, which are
merely temporal, local, and personal in their character, have been proclaimed so clearly
in prophecy, how is it to be supposed that those dispensations of His which are eternal,
and of universal concern to the human race, should be void of all real light in
themselves? The grander they are, the clearer should be their announcement, in order that
their superior greatness might be believed. And I apprehend that God cannot possibly have
ascribed to Him either envy, or guile, or inconsistency, or artifice, by help of which
evil qualities it is that all schemes of unusual grandeur are litigiously promulgated.

CHAPTER XXII.-THE SCRIPTURE BID OUR SUPPOSING EITHER THAT THE RESURRECTION IS ALREADY PAST, OR THAT IT TAKES PLACE IMMEDIATELY AT DEATH. OUR HOPES AND PRAYERS POINT TO THE LAST GREAT DAY AS THE PERIOD OF ITS ACCOMPLISHMENT.

1 We must after all this turn our attention to those scriptures also which forbid our
belief in such a resurrection as is held by your Animalists (for I will not call them
Spiritualists), that it is either to be assumed as taking place now, as soon as men come
to the knowledge of the truth, or else that it is accomplished immediately after their
departure from this life. Now, forasmuch as the seasons of our entire hope have been fixed
in the Holy Scripture, and since we are not permitted to place the accomplishment thereof,
as I apprehend, previous to Christ's coming, our prayers are directed towards the end of
this world, to the passing away thereof at the great day of the Lord-of His wrath and
vengeance-the last day, which is hidden (from all), and known to none but the Father,
although announced beforehand by signs and wonders, and the dissolution of the elements,
and the conflicts of nations. I would turn out the words of the prophets, if the Lord
Himself had said nothing (except that prophecies were the Lord's own word); but it is more
to my purpose that He by His own mouth confirms their statement. Being questioned by His
disciples when those things were to come to pass which He had just been uttering about the
destruction of the temple, He discourses to them first of the order of Jewish events until
the overthrow of Jerusalem, and then of such as concerned all nations up to the very end
of the world.

2 For after He had declared that "Jerusalem was to be trodden down of the Gentiles, until
the times of the Gentiles should be fulfilled," -meaning, of course, those which were to
be chosen of God, and gathered in with the remnant of Israel-He then goes on to proclaim,
against this world and dispensation (even as Joel had done, and Daniel, and all the
prophets with one consent ), that "there should be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and
in the stars, distress of nations with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring, men's
hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the
earth. "For," says He, "the powers of heaven shall be shaken; and then shall they see the
Son of man coming in the clouds, with power and great glory. And when these things begin
to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.
He spake of its "drawing nigh," not of its being present already; and of "those things
beginning to come to pass," not of their having happened: because when they have come to
pass, then our redemption shall be at hand, which is said to be approaching up to that
time, raising and exciting our minds to what is then the proximate harvest of our hope. He
immediately annexes a parable of this in "the trees which are tenderly sprouting into a
flower-stalk, and then developing the flower, which is the precursor of the fruit.

3 "So likewise ye," (He adds), "when ye shall see all these things come to pass, know ye
that the kingdom of heaven is nigh at hand. "Watch ye, therefore, and pray always, that ye
may be accounted worthy to escape all those things, and to stand before the Son of man; "
that is, no doubt, at the resurrection, after all these things have been previously
transacted. Therefore, although there is a sprouting in the acknowledgment of all this
mystery, yet it is only in the actual presence of the Lord that the flower is developed
and the fruit borne. Who is it then, that has aroused the Lord, now at God's right hand so
unseasonably and with such severity "shake terribly" (as Isaiah expresses it ("that
earth," which, I suppose, is as yet unshattered? Who has thus early put "Christ's enemies
beneath His feet" (to use the language of David ), making Him more hurried than the
Father, whilst every crowd in our popular assemblies is still with shouts consigning "the
Christians to the lions? " Who has yet beheld Jesus descending from heaven in like manner
as the apostles saw Him ascend, according to the appointment of the two angels? Up to the
present moment they have not, tribe by tribe, smitten their breasts, looking on Him whom
they pierced. No one has as yet fallen in with Elias; no one has as yet escaped from
Antichrist; no one has as yet had to bewail the downfall of Babylon.

4 And is there now anybody who has risen again, except the heretic? He, of course, has
already quitted the grave of his own corpse-although he is even now liable to fevers and
ulcers; he, too, has already trodden down his enemies-although he has even now to struggle
with the powers of the world. And as a matter of course, he is already a king-although he
even now owes to Caesar the things which are Caesar's.

CHAPTER XXIII.-SUNDRY PASSAGES OF ST. PAUL, WHICH SPEAK OF A SPIRITUAL RESURRECTION, COMPATIBLE WITH THE FUTURE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY, WHICH IS EVEN ASSUMED IN THEM.

1 The apostle indeed teaches, in his Epistle to the Colossians, that we were once dead,
alienated, and enemies to the Lord in our minds, whilst we were living in wicked works;
that we were then buried with Christ in baptism, and also raised again with Him through
the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised Him from the dead. "And you, (adds he),
when ye were dead in sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath He quickened together
with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses. And again: "If ye are dead with Christ from
the elements of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to
ordinances? " Now, since he makes us spiritually dead-in such a way, however, as to allow
that we shall one day have to undergo a bodily death,-so, considering indeed that we have
been also raised in a like spiritual sense, he equally allows that we shall further have
to undergo a bodily resurrection. In so many words he says: "Since ye are risen with
Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God.
Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. Accordingly, it is in our
mind that he shows that we rise (with Christ), since it is by this alone that we are as
yet able to reach to heavenly objects. These we should not "seek," nor "set our affection
on," if we had them already in our possession. He also adds:

2 "For ye are dead"-to your sins, he means, not to yourselves-"and your life is hid with
Christ in God. Now that life is not yet apprehended which is hidden. In like manner John
says: "And it doth not yet appear what we shall be: we know, however, that when He shall
be manifest, we shall be like Him. We are far indeed from being already what we know not
of; we should, of course, be sure to know it if we were already (like Him). It is
therefore the contemplation of our blessed hope even in this life by faith (that he speaks
of)-not its presence nor its possession, but only its expectation. Concerning this
expectation and hope Paul writes to the Galatians: "For we through the Spirit wait for the
hope of righteousness by faith. He says "we wait for it," not we are in possession of it.
By the righteousness of God, he means that judgment which we shall have to undergo as the
recompense of our deeds. It is in expectation of this for himself that the apostle writes
to the Philippians: "If by any means," says he, "I might attain to the resurrection of the
dead. Not as though I had already attained, or were already perfect. And yet he had
believed, and had known all mysteries, as an elect vessel and the great teacher of the
Gentiles; but for all that he goes on to say: "I, however, follow on, if so be I may
apprehend that for which I also am apprehended of Christ.

3 Nay, more: "Brethren," (he adds), "I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one
thing (I do), forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those
things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of blamelessness, whereby I
may attain it; "meaning the resurrection from the dead in its proper time. Even as he says
to the Galatians: "Let us not be weary in well-doing: for in due season we shall reap.
Similarly, concerning Onesiphorus, does he also write to Timothy: "The Lord grant unto him
that he may find mercy in that day; " unto which day and time he charges Timothy himself
"to keep what had been committed to his care, without spot, unrebukable, until the
appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ: which in His times He shall show, who is the blessed
and only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords," speaking of (Him as) God It is
to these same times that Peter in the Acts refers, when he says: "Repent ye therefore, and
be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come
from the presence of the Lord; and He shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached
unto you: whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which
God hath spoken by the mouth of His holy prophets."

CHAPTER XXIV.-OTHER PASSAGES QUOTED FROM ST. PAUL, WHICH CATEGORICALLY ASSERT THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH AT THE FINAL JUDGMENT.

1 The character of these times learn, along with the Thessalonians. For we read: "How ye
turned from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven,
whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus. And again: "For what is our hope, or joy, or
crown of rejoicing? Are not even ye in the presence of our Lord God, Jesus Christ, at His
coming? " Likewise: "Before God, even our Father, at the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ,
with the whole company of His saints. He teaches them that they must "not sorrow
concerning them that are asleep," and at the same time explains to them the times of the
resurrection, saying, "For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also
which sleep in Jesus shall God bring with Him. For this we say unto you by the word of the
Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of our Lord, shall not prevent
them that are asleep. For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with
the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise
first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the
clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we be ever with the Lord. What
archangel's voice, (I wonder), what trump of God is now heard, except it be, forsooth, in
the entertainments of the heretics?

2 For, allowing that the word of the gospel may be called "the trump of God," since it was
still calling men, yet they must at that time either be dead as to the body, that they may
be able to rise again; and then how are they alive? Or else caught up into the clouds; and
how then are they here? "Most miserable," no doubt, as the apostle declared them, are they
"who in this life only" shall be found to have hope: they will have to be excluded while
they are with premature haste seizing that which is promised after this life; erring
concerning the truth, no less than Phygellus and Hermogenes. Hence it is that the Holy
Ghost, in His greatness, foreseeing clearly all such interpretations as these, suggests
(to the apostle), in this very epistle of his to the Thessalonians, as follows: "But of
the times and the seasons, brethren, there is no necessity for my writing unto you. For ye
yourselves know perfectly, that the day of the Lord cometh as a thief in the night. For
when they shall say, `Peace, 'and `All things are safe, 'then sudden destruction shall
come upon them. Again, in the second epistle he addresses them with even greater
earnestness:

3 "Now I beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our
gathering together unto Him, that ye be not soon shaken in mind, nor be troubled, either
by spirit, or by word," that is, the word of false prophets, "or by letter," that is, the
letter of false apostles, "as if from us, as that the day of the Lord is at hand. Let no
man deceive you by any means. For that day shall not come, unless indeed there first come
a falling away," he means indeed of this present empire, "and that man of sin be
revealed," that is to say, Antichrist, "the son of perdition, who opposeth and exalteth
himself above all that is called God or religion; so that he sitteth in the temple of God,
affirming that he is God. Remember ye not, that when I was with you, I used to tell you
these things? And now ye know what detaineth, that he might be revealed in his time. For
the mystery of iniquity doth already work; only he who now hinders must hinder, until he
be taken out of the way. What obstacle is there but the Roman state, the falling away of
which, by being scattered into ten kingdoms, shall introduce Antichrist upon (its own
ruins)? "And then shall be revealed the wicked one, whom the Lord shall consume with the
spirit of His mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of His coming:

4 even him whose coming is after the working of Satan, with all power, and signs, and
lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish."

CHAPTER XXV.-ST. JOHN, IN THE APOCALYPSE, EQUALLY EXPLICIT IN ASSERTING THE SAME GREAT DOCTRINE.

1 In the Revelation of John, again, the order of these times is spread out to view, which
"the souls of the martyrs" are taught to wait for beneath the altar, whilst they earnestly
pray to be avenged and judged: (taught, I say, to wait), in order that the world may first
drink to the dregs the plagues that await it out of the vials of the angels, and that the
city of fornication may receive from the ten kings its deserved doom, and that the beast
Antichrist with his false prophet may wage war on the Church of God; and that, after the
casting of the devil into the bottomless pit for a while, the blessed prerogative of the
first resurrection may be ordained from the thrones; and then again, after the consignment
of him to the fire, that the judgment of the final and universal resurrection may be
determined out of the books. Since, then, the Scriptures both indicate the stages of the
last times, and concentrate the harvest of the Christian hope in the very end of the
world, it is evident, either that all which God promises to us receives its accomplishment
then, and thus what the heretics pretend about a resurrection here falls to the ground; or
else, even allowing that a confession of the mystery (of divine truth) is a resurrection,
that there is, without any detriment to this view, room for believing in that which is
announced for the end.

2 It moreover follows, that the very maintenance of this spiritual resurrection amounts to
a presumption in favour of the other bodily resurrection; for if none were announced for
that time, there would be fair ground for asserting only this purely spiritual
resurrection. Inasmuch, however, as (a resurrection) is proclaimed for the last time, it
is proved to be a bodily one, because there is no spiritual one also then announced. For
why make a second announcement of a resurrection of only one character, that is, the
spiritual one, since this ought to be undergoing accomplishment either now, without any
regard to different times, or else then, at the very conclusion of all the periods? It is
therefore more competent for us even to maintain a spiritual resurrection a the
commencement of a life of faith, who acknowledge the full completion thereof at the end of
the world


ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH
================================

ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH continued

CHAPTER XXVI.-EVEN THE METAPHORICAL DESCRIPTIONS OF THIS SUBJECT IN THE SCRIPTURES POINT TO THE BODILY RESURRECTION, THE ONLY SENSE WHICH SECURES THEIR CONSISTENCY AND DIGNITY.

1 To a preceding objection, that the Scriptures are allegorical, I have still one answer
to make-that it is open to us also to defend the bodily character of the resurrection by
means of the language of the prophets, which is equally figurative. For consider that
primeval sentence which God spake when He called man earth; saying, "Earth thou art, and
to earth shalt thou return. In respect, of course, to his fleshly substance, which had
been taken out of the ground, and which was the first to receive the name of man, as we
have already shown, does not this passage give one instruction to interpret in relation to
the flesh also whatever of wrath or of grace God has determined for the earth, because,
strictly speaking, the earth is not exposed to His judgment, since it has never done any
good or evil? "Cursed," no doubt, it was, for it drank the blood of man; but even this was
as a figure of homicidal flesh. For if the earth has to suffer either joy or injury, it is
simply on man's account, that he may suffer the joy or the sorrow through the events which
happen to his dwelling-place, whereby he will rather have to pay the penalty which, simply
on his account, even the earth must suffer. When, therefore, God even threatens the earth,
I would prefer saying that He threatens the flesh: so likewise, when He makes a promise to
the earth, I would rather understand Him as promising the flesh; as in that passage of
David:

2 "The Lord is King, let the earth be glad," -meaning the flesh of the saints, to which
appertains the enjoyment of the kingdom of God. Then he afterwards says: "The earth saw
and trembled; the mountains melted like wax at the presence of the Lord,"-meaning, no
doubt the flesh of the wicked; and (in a similar sense) it is written: "For they shall
look on Him whom they pierced. If indeed it will be thought that both these passages were
pronounced simply of the element earth, how can it be consistent that it should shake and
melt at the presence of the Lord, at whose royal dignity it before exulted? So again in
Isaiah, "Ye shall eat the good of the land," the expression means the blessings which
await the flesh when in the kingdom of God it shall be renewed, and made like the angels,
and waiting to obtain the things "which neither eye hath seen, nor ear heard, and which
have not entered into the heart of man. Otherwise, how vain that God should invite men to
obedience by the fruits of the field and the elements of this life, when He dispenses
these to even irreligious men and blasphemers; on a general condition once for all made to
man, "sending rain on the good and on the evil, and making His sun to shine on the just
and on the unjust!

3 Happy, no doubt, is faith, if it is to obtain gifts which the enemies of God and Christ
not only use, but even abuse, "worshipping the creature itself in opposition to the
Creator! You will reckon, (I suppose) onions and truffles among earth's bounties, since
the Lord declares that "man shall not live on bread alone! In this way the Jews lose
heavenly blessings, by confining their hopes to earthly ones, being ignorant of the
promise of heavenly bread, and of the oil of God's unction, and the wine of the Spirit,
and of that water of life which has its vigour from the vine of Christ. On exactly the
same principle, they consider the special soil of Judµa to be that very holy land, which
ought rather to be interpreted of the Lord's flesh, which, in all those who put on Christ,
is thenceforward the holy land; holy indeed by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, truly
flowing with milk and honey by the sweetness of His assurance, truly Judµan by reason of
the friendship of God. For "he is not a Jew which is one outwardly, but he who is one
inwardly. In the same way it is that both God's temple and Jerusalem (must be understood)
when it is said by Isaiah: "Awake, awake, O Jerusalem! put on the strength of thine arm;
awake, as in thine earliest time," that is to say, in that innocence which preceded the
fall into sin.

4 For how can words of this kind of exhortation andinvitation be suitable for that
Jerusalem which killed the prophets, and stoned those that were sent to them, and at last
crucified its very Lord? Neither indeed is salvation promised to any one land at all,
which must needs pass away with the fashion of the whole world. Even if anybody should
venture strongly to contend that paradise is the holy land, which it may be possible to
designate as the land of our first parents Adam and Eve, it will even then follow that the
restoration of paradise will seem to be promised to the flesh, whose lot it was to inhabit
and keep it, in order that man may be recalled thereto just such as he was driven from it.

CHAPTER XXVII.-CERTAIN METAPHORICAL TERMS EXPLAINED OF THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH.

1 We have also in the Scriptures robes mentioned as allegorizing the hope of the flesh.
Thus in the Revelation of John it is said: "These are they which have not defiled their
clothes with women," -indicating, of course, virgins, and such as have become "eunuchs for
the kingdom of heaven's sake. Therefore they shall be "clothed in white raiment," that is,
in the bright beauty of the unwedded flesh. In the gospel even, "the wedding garment" may
be regarded as the sanctity of the flesh. And so, when Isaiah tells us what sort of "fast
the Lord hath chosen," and subjoins a statement about the reward of good works, he says:
"Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thy garments, shall speedily arise;
" where he has no thought of cloaks or stuff gowns, but means the rising of the flesh,
which he declared the resurrection of, after its fall in death. Thus we are furnished even
with an allegorical defence of the resurrection of the body. When, then, we read, "Go, my
people, enter into your closets for a little season, until my anger pass away," we have in
the closets graves, in which they will have to rest for a little while, who shall have at
the end of the world departed this life in the last furious onset of the power of
Antichrist.

2 Why else did He use the expression closets, in preference to some other receptacle, if
it were not that the flesh is kept in these closets or cellars salted and reserved for
use, to be drawn out thence on a suitable occasion? It is on a like principle that
embalmed corpses are set aside for burial in mausoleums and sepulchres, in order that they
may be removed therefrom when the Master shall order it. Since, therefore, there is
consistency in thus understanding the passage (for what refuge of little closets could
possibly shelter us from the wrath of God? ), it appears that by the very phrase which he
uses, "Until His anger pass away," which shall extinguish Antichrist, he in fact shows
that after that indignation the flesh will come forth from the sepulchre, in which it had
been deposited previous to the bursting out of the anger. Now out of the closets nothing
else is brought than that which had been put into them, and after the extirpation of
Antichrist shall be busily transacted the great process of the resurrection.

CHAPTER XXVIII.-PROPHETIC THINGS AND ACTIONS, AS WELL AS WORDS, ATTEST THIS GREAT DOCTRINE.

1 But we know that prophecy expressed itself by things no less than by words. By words,
and also by deeds, is the resurrection foretold. When Moses puts his hand into his bosom,
and then draws it out again dead, and again puts his hand into his bosom, and plucks it
out living, does not this apply as a presage to all mankind?-inasmuch as those three signs
denoted the threefold power of God: when it shall, first, in the appointed order, subdue
to man the old serpent, the devil, however formidable; then, secondly, draw forth the
flesh from the bosom of death; and then, at last, shall pursue all blood (shed) in
judgment. On this subject we read in the writings of the same prophet, (how that) God
says: "For your blood of your lives will I require of all wild beasts; and I will require
it of the hand of man, and of his brother's hand. Now nothing is required except that
which is demanded back again, and nothing is thus demanded except that which is to be
given up; and that will of course be given up, which shall be demanded and required on the
ground of vengeance. But indeed there cannot possibly be punishment of that which never
had any existence. Existence, however, it will have, when it is restored in order to be
punished. To the flesh, therefore, applies everything which is declared respecting the
blood, for without the flesh there cannot be blood.

2 The flesh will be raised up in order that the blood may be punished. There are, again,
some statements (of Scripture) so plainly made as to be free from all obscurity of
allegory, and yet they strongly require their very simplicity to be interpreted. There is,
for instance, that passage in Isaiah: "I will kill, and I will make alive. Certainly His
making alive is to take place after He has killed. As, therefore, it is by death that He
kills, it is by the resurrection that He will make alive. Now it is the flesh which is
killed by death; the flesh, therefore, will be revived by the resurrection. Surely if
killing means taking away life from the flesh, and its opposite, reviving, amounts to
restoring life to the flesh, it must needs be that the flesh rise again, to which the
life, which has been taken away by killing, has to be restored by vivification.

CHAPTER XXIX.-EZEKIEL'S VISION OF THE DRY BONES QUOTED.

1 Inasmuch, then, as even the figurative portions of Scripture, and the arguments of
facts, and some plain statements of Holy Writ, throw light upon the resurrection of the
flesh (although without specially naming the very substance), how much more effectual for
determining the question will not those passages be which indicate the actual substance of
the body by expressly mentioning it! Take Ezekiel: "And the hand of the Lord," says he,
"was upon me; and the Lord brought me forth in the Spirit, and set me in the midst of a
plain which was full of bones; and He led me round about them in a circuit: and, behold,
there were many on the face of the plain; and, lo, they were very dry. And He said unto
me, Son of man, will these bones live? And I said, O Lord God, Thou knowest. And He said
unto me, Prophesy upon these bones; and thou shalt say, Ye dry bones, hear the word of the
Lord. Thus saith the Lord God to these bones, Behold, I bring upon you the breath of life,
and ye shall live: and I will give unto you the spirit, and I will place muscles over you,
and I will spread skin upon you; and ye shall live, and shall know that I am the Lord. And
I prophesied as the Lord commanded me: and while I prophesy, behold there is a voice,
behold also a movement, and bones approached bones.

2 And I saw, and behold sinews and flesh came up over them, and muscles were placed around
them; but there was no breath in them. And He said unto me, Prophesy to the wind, son of
man, prophesy and say, Thus saith the Lord God, Come from the four winds, O breath, and
breathe in these dead men, and let them live. So I prophesied to the wind, as He commanded
me, and the spirit entered into the bones, and they lived, and stood upon their feet,
strong and exceeding many. And the Lord said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the
whole house of Israel. They say themselves, Our bones are become dry, and our hope is
perished, and we in them have been violently destroyed. Therefore prophesy unto them, (and
say), Behold, even I will open your sepulchres, and will bring you out of your sepulchres,
O my people, and will bring you into the land of Israel: and ye shall know how that I the
Lord opened your sepulchres, and brought you, O my people, out of your sepulchres; and I
will give my Spirit unto you, and ye shall live, and shall rest in your own land: and ye
shall know how that I the Lord have spoken and done these things, saith the Lord."

CHAPTER XXX.-THIS VISION INTERPRETED BY TERTULLIAN OF THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODIES OF THE DEAD. A CHRONOLOGICAL ERROR OF OUR AUTHOR, WHO SUPPOSES THAT EZEKIEL IN HIS CH. XXXI. PROPHESIED BEFORE THE CAPTIVITY.

1 I am well aware how they torture even this prophecy into a proof of the allegorical
sense, on the ground that by saying, "These bones are the whole house of Israel," He made
them a figure of Israel, and removed them from their proper literal condition; and
therefore (they contend) that there is here a figurative, not a true prediction of the
resurrection, for (they say) the state of the Jews is one of humiliation, in a certain
sense dead, and very dry, and dispersed over the plain of the world. Therefore the image
of a resurrection is allegorically applied to their state, since it has to be gathered
together, and recompacted bone to bone (in other words, tribe to tribe, and people to
people), and to be reincorporated by the sinews of power and the nerves of royalty, and to
be brought out as it were from sepulchres, that is to say, from the most miserable and
degraded abodes of captivity, and to breathe afresh in the way of a restoration, and to
live thenceforward in their own land of Judµa. And what is to happen after all this? They
will die, no doubt. And what will there be after death? No resurrection from the dead, of
course, since there is nothing of the sort here revealed to Ezekiel. Well, but the
resurrection is elsewhere foretold: so that there will be one even in this case, and they
are rash in applying this passage to the state of Jewish affairs;

2 or even if it do indicate a different recovery from the resurrection which we are
maintaining, what matters it to me, provided there be also a resurrection of the body,
just as there is a restoration of the Jewish state? In fact, by the very circumstance that
the recovery of the Jewish state is prefigured by the reincorporation and reunion of
bones, proof is offered that this event will also happen to the bones themselves; for the
metaphor could not have been formed from bones, if the same thing exactly were not to be
realized in them also. Now, although there is a sketch of the true thing in its image, the
image itself still possesses a truth of its own: it must needs be, therefore, that must
have a prior existence for itself, which is used figuratively to express some other thing.
Vacuity is not a consistent basis for a similitude, nor does nonentity form a suitable
foundation for a parable. It will therefore be right to believe that the bones are
destined to have a rehabiliment of flesh and breath, such as it is here said they will
have, by reason indeed of which their renewed state could alone express the reformed
condition of Jewish affairs, which is pretended to be the meaning of this passage. It is.
however, more characteristic of a religious spirit to maintain the truth on the authority
of a literal interpretation, such as is required by the sense of the inspired passage.

3 Now, if this vision had reference to the condition of the Jews, as soon as He had
revealed to him the position of the bones, He would at once have added, "These bones are
the whole house of Israel," and so forth. But immediately on showing the bones, He
interrupts the scene by saying somewhat of the prospect which is most suited to bones;
without yet naming Israel, He tries the prophet's own faith: "Son of man, can these bones
ever live? "so that he makes answer: "O Lord, Thou knowest. Now God would not, you may be
sure, have tried the prophet's faith on a point which was never to be a real one, of which
Israel should never hear, and in which it was not proper to repose belief. Since, however,
the resurrection of the dead was indeed foretold, but Israel, in the distrust of his great
unbelief, was offended at it; and, whilst gazing on the condition of the crumbling grave,
despaired of a resurrection; or rather, did not direct his mind mainly to it, but to his
own harassing circumstances,-therefore God first instructed the prophet (since he, too,
was not free from doubt), by revealing to him the process of the resurrection, with a view
to his earnest setting forth of the same. He then charged the people to believe what He
had revealed to the prophet, telling them that they were themselves, though refusing to
believe their resurrection, the very bones which were destined to rise again.

4 Then in the concluding sentence He says, "And ye shall know how that I the Lord have
spoken and done these things," intending of course to do that of which He had spoken; but
certainly not meaning to do that which He had spoken of, if His design had been to do
something different from what He had said.

CHAPTER XXXI.-OTHER PASSAGES OUT OF THE PROPHETS APPLIED TO THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH.

1 Unquestionably, if the people were indulging in figurative murmurs that their bones were
become dry, and that their hope had perished-plaintive at the consequences of their
dispersion-then God might fairly enough seem to have consoled their figurative despair
with a figurative promise. Since, however, no injury had as yet alighted on the people
from their dispersion, although the hope of the resurrection had very frequently failed
amongst them, it is manifest that it was owing to the perishing condition of their bodies
that their faith in the resurrection was shaken. God, therefore was rebuilding the faith
which the people were pulling down. But even if it were true that Israel was then
depressed at some shock in their existing circumstances, we must not on that account
suppose that the purpose of revelation could have rested in a parable: its aim must have
been to testify a resurrection, in order to raise the nation's hope to even an eternal
salvation and an indispensable restoration, and thereby turn off their minds from brooding
over their present affairs. This indeed is the aim of other prophets likewise. "Ye shall
go forth," (says Malachi), "from your sepulchres, as young calves let loose from their
bonds, and ye shall tread down your enemies. And again, (Isaiah says): "Your heart shall
rejoice, and your bones shall spring up like the grass," because the grass also is renewed
by the dissolution and corruption of the seed.

2 In a word, if it is contended that the figure of the rising bones refers properly to the
state of Israel, why is the same hope announced to all nations, instead of being limited
to Israel only, of reinvesting those osseous remains with bodily substance and vital
breath, and of raising up their dead out of the grave? For the language is universal: "The
dead shall arise, and come forth from their graves; for the dew which cometh from Thee is
medicine to their bones. In another passage it is written: "All flesh shall come to
worship before me, saith the Lord. When? When the fashion of this world shall begin to
pass away. For He said before: "As the new heaven and the new earth, which I make, remain
before me, saith the Lord, so shall your seed remain. Then also shall be fulfilled what is
written afterwards: "And they shall go forth" (namely, from their graves), "and shall see
the carcases of those who have transgressed: for their worm shall never die, nor shall
their fire be quenched; and they shall be a spectacle to all flesh" even to that which,
being raised again from the dead and brought out from the grave, shall adore the Lord for
this great grace.

CHAPTER XXXII.-EVEN UNBURIED BODIES WILL BE RAISED AGAIN. WHATEVER BEFALLS THEM GOD WILL RESTORE THEM AGAIN. JONAH'S CASE QUOTED IN ILLUSTRATION OF GOD'S POWER.

1 But, that you may not suppose that it is merely those bodies which are consigned to
tombs whose resurrection is foretold, you have it declared in Scripture: "And I will
command the fishes of the sea, and they shall cast up the bones which they have devoured;
and I will bring joint to joint, and bone to bone. You will ask, Will then the fishes and
other animals and carnivorous birds be raised again, in order that they may vomit up what
they have consumed, on the ground of your reading in the law of Moses, that blood is
required of even all the beasts? Certainly not. But the beasts and the fishes are
mentioned in relation to the restoration of flesh and blood, in order the more
emphatically to express the resurrection of such bodies as have even been devoured, when
redress is said to be demanded of their very devourers. Now I apprehend that in the case
of Jonah we have a fair proof of this divine power, when he comes forth from the fish's
belly uninjured in both his natures-his flesh and his soul. No doubt the bowels of the
whale would have had abundant time during three days for consuming and digesting Jonah's
flesh, quite as effectually as a coffin, or a tomb, or the gradual decay of some quiet and
concealed grave;

2 only that he wanted to prefigure even those beasts (which symbolize) especially the men
who are wildly opposed to the Christian name, or the angels of iniquity, of whom blood
will be required by the full exaction of an avenging judgment. Where, then, is the man
who, being more disposed to learn than to assume, more careful to believe than to dispute,
and more scrupulous of the wisdom of God than wantonly bent on his own, when he hears of a
divine purpose respecting sinews and skin, and nerves and bones, will forthwith devise
some different application of these words, as if all that is said of the substances in
question were not naturally intended for man? For either there is here no reference to the
destiny of man-in the gracious provision of the kingdom (of heaven), in the severity of
the judgment-day, in all the incidents of the resurrection; or else, if there is any
reference to his destiny, the destination must necessarily be made in reference to those
substances of which the man is composed, for whom the destiny is reserved. Another
question I have also to ask of these very adroit transformers of bones and sinews, and
nerves and sepulchres: Why, when anything is declared of the soul, do they not interpret
the soul to be something else, and transfer it to another signification?-since, whenever
any distinct statement is made of a bodily substance, they will obstinately prefer taking
any other sense whatever, rather than that which the name indicates.

3 If things which pertain to the body are figurative, why are not those which pertain to
the soul figurative also? Since, however, things which belong to the soul have nothing
allegorical in them, neither therefore have those which belong to the body. For man is as
much body as he is soul; so that it is impossible for one of these natures to admit a
figurative sense, and the other to exclude it.

CHAPTER XXXIII.-SO MUCH FOR THE PROPHETIC SCRIPTURES. IN THE GOSPELS, CHRIST'S PARABLES, AS EXPLAINED BY HIMSELF, HAVE A CLEAR REFERENCE TO THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH.

1 This is evidence enough from the prophetic Scriptures. I now appeal to the Gospels. But
here also I must first meet the same sophistry as advanced by those who contend that the
Lord, like (the prophets), said everything in the way of allegory, because it is written:
"All these things spake Jesus in parables, and without a parable spake He not unto them,"
that is, to the Jews. Now the disciples also asked Him, "Why speakest Thou in parables?
And the Lord gave them this answer: "Therefore I speak unto them in parables: because they
seeing, see not; and hearing, they hear not, according to the prophecy of Esaias. But
since it was to the Jews that He spoke in parables, it was not then to all men; and if not
to all, it follows that it was not always and in all things parables with Him, but only in
certain things, and when addressing a particular class. But He addressed a particular
class when He spoke to the Jews. It is true that He spoke sometimes even to the disciples
in parables. But observe how the Scripture relates such a fact: "And He spake a parable
unto them. It follows, then, that He did not usually address them in parables; because if
He always did so, special mention would not be made of His resorting to this mode of
address.

2 Besides, there is not a parable which you will not find to be either explained by the
Lord Himself, as that of the sower, (which He interprets) of the management of the word of
God; or else cleared by a preface from the writer of the Gospel, as in the parable of the
arrogant judge and the importunate widow, which is expressly applied to earnestness in
prayer; or capable of being spontaneously understood, as in the parable of the fig-tree,
which was spared a while in hopes of improvement(?)an emblem of Jewish sterility. Now, if
even parables obscure not the light of the gospel, how unlikely it is that plain sentences
and declarations, which have an unmistakeable meaning, should signify any other thing than
their literal sense! But it is by such declarations and sentences that the Lord sets forth
either the last judgment, or the kingdom, or the resurrection: "It shall be more
tolerable," He says, "for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than for you. And "Tell
them that the kingdom of God is at hand. And again, "It shall be recompensed to you at the
resurrection of the just.

3 Now, if the mention of these events (I mean the judgment-day, and the kingdom of God,
and the resurrection) has a plain and absolute sense, so that nothing about them can be
pressed into an allegory, neither should those statements be forced into parables which
describe the arrangement, and the process, and the experience of the kingdom of God, and
of the judgment, and of the resurrection. On the contrary, things which are destined for
the body should be carefully understood in a bodily sense,-not in a spiritual sense, as
having nothing figurative in their nature. This is the reason why we have laid it down as
a preliminary consideration, that the bodily substance both of the soul and of the flesh
is liable to the recompense, which will have to be awarded in return for the co-operation
of the two natures, that so the corporeality of the soul may not exclude the bodily nature
of the flesh by suggesting a recourse to figurative descriptions, since both of them must
needs be regarded as destined to take part in the kingdom, and the judgment, and the
resurrection. And now we proceed to the special proof of this proposition, that the bodily
character of the flesh is indicated by our Lord whenever He mentions the resurrection, at
the same time without disparagement to the corporeal nature of the soul,-a point which has
been actually admitted but by a few.

CHAPTER XXXIV.-CHRIST PLAINLY TESTIFIES TO THE RESURRECTION OF THE ENTIRE MAN. NOT IN HIS SOUL ONLY, WITHOUT THE BODY.

1 To begin with the passage where He says that He is come to "to seek and to save that
which is lost. What do you suppose that to be which is lost? Man, undoubtedly. The entire
man, or only a part of him? The whole man, of course. In fact, since the transgression
which caused man's ruin was committed quite as much by the instigation of the soul from
concupiscence as by the action of the flesh from actual fruition, it has marked the entire
man with the sentence of transgression, and has therefore made him deservedly amenable to
perdition. So that he will be wholly saved, since he has by sinning been wholly lost.
Unless it be true that the sheep (of the parable) is a" lost" one, irrespective of its
body; then its recovery may be effected without the body. Since, however, it is the bodily
substance as well as the soul, making up the entire animal, which was carried on the
shoulders of the Good Shepherd, we have here unquestionably an example how man is restored
in both his natures. Else how unworthy it were of God to bring only a moiety of man to
salvation-and almost less than that; whereas the munificence of princes of this world
always claims for itself the merit of a plenary grace! Then must the devil be understood
to be stronger for injuring man, ruining him wholly? and must God have the character of
comparative weakness, since He does not relieve and help man in his entire state?

2 The apostle, however, suggests that "where sin abounded, there has grace much more
abounded. How, in fact, can he be regarded as saved, who can at the same time be said to
be lost-lost, that is, in the flesh, but saved as to his soul? Unless, indeed, their
argument now makes it necessary that the soul should be placed in a "lost" condition, that
it may be susceptible of salvation, on the ground that is properly saved which has been
lost. We, however, so understand the soul's immortality as to believe it "lost," not in
the sense of destruction, but of punishment, that is, in hell. And if this is the case,
then it is not the soul which salvation will affect, since it is "safe"already in its own
nature by reason of its immortality, but rather the flesh, which, as all readily allow, is
subject to destruction. Else, if the soul is also perishable (in this sense), in other
words, not immortal-the condition of the flesh-then this same condition ought in all
fairness to benefit the flesh also, as being similarly mortal and perishable, since that
which perishes the Lord purposes to save. I do not care now to follow the clue of our
discussion, so far as to consider whether it is in one of his natures or in the other that
perdition puts in its claim on man, provided that salvation is equally distributed over
the two substances, and makes him its aim in respect of them both.

3 For observe, in which substance so-ever you assume man to have perished, in the other be
does not perish. He will therefore be saved in the substance in which he does not perish,
and yet obtain salvation in that in which he does perish. You have (then) the restoration
of the entire man, inasmuch as the Lord purposes to save that part of him which perishes,
whilst he will not of course lose that portion which cannot be lost, Who will any longer
doubt of the safety of both natures, when one of them is to obtain salvation, and the
other is not to lose it? And, still further, the Lord explains to us the meaning of the
thing when He says: "I came not to do my own will, but the Father's, who hath sent me.
What, I ask, is that will? "That of all which He hath given me I should lose nothing, but
should raise it up again at the last day. Now, what had Christ received of the Father but
that which He had Himself put on? Man, of course, in his texture of flesh and soul.
Neither, therefore, of those parts which He has received will He allow to perish; nay, no
considerable portion-nay, not the least fraction, of either. If the flesh be, as our
opponents slightingly think, but a poor fraction, then the flesh is safe, because not a
fraction of man is to perish;

4 and no larger portion is in danger, because every portion of man is in equally safe
keeping with Him. If, however, He will not raise the flesh also up at the last day, then
He will permit not only a fraction of man to perish, but (as I will venture to say, in
consideration of so important a part) almost the whole of him.But when He repeats His
words with increased emphasis, "And this is the Father's will, that every one which seeth
the Son, and believeth on Him, may have eternal life: and I will raise him up at the last
day," -He asserts the full extent of the resurrection. For He assigns to each several
nature that reward which is suited to its services: both to the flesh, for by it the Son
was "seen; "and to the soul, for by it He was "believed on. Then, you will say, to them
was this promise given by whom Christ was "seen. Well, be it so; only let the same hope
flow on from them to us! For if to them who saw, and therefore believed, such fruit then
accrued to the operations of the flesh and the soul, how much more to us! For more
"blessed," says Christ, "are they who have not seen, and yet have believed; " since, even
if the resurrection of the flesh must be denied to them, it must at any rate be a fitting
boon to us, who are the more blessed.

5 For how could we be blessed, if we were to perish in any part of us?

CHAPTER XXXV.-EXPLANATION OF WHAT IS MEANT BY THE BODY, WHICH IS TO BE RAISED AGAIN. NOT THE CORPOREALITY OF THE SOUL.

1 But He also teaches us, that "He is rather to be feared, who is able to destroy both
body and soul in hell," that is, the Lord alone; "not those which kill the body, but are
not able to hurt the soul," that is to say, all bureau powers. Here, then, we have a
recognition of the natural immortality of the soul, which cannot be killed by men; and of
the mortality of the body, which may be killed: whence we learn that the resurrection of
the dead is a resurrection of the flesh; for unless it were raised again, it would be
impossible for the flesh to be "killed in hell. But as a question may be here captiously
raised about the meaning of "the body" (or "the flesh "), I will at once state that I
understand by the human body nothing else than that fabric of the flesh which, whatever be
the kind of material of which it is constructed and modified, is seen and handled, and
sometimes indeed killed, by men. In like manner, I should not admit that anything but
cement and stones and bricks form the body of a wall. If any one imports into our argument
some body of a subtle, secret nature, he must show, disclose, and prove to me that
identical body is the very one which was slain by human violence, and then (I will grant)
that it is of such a body that (our scripture) speaks.

2 If, again, the body or corporeal nature of the soul is cast in my teeth. it will only be
an idle subterfuge!For since both substances are set before us (in this passage, which
affirms) that "body and soul" are destroyed in bell, a distinction is obviously made
between the two; and we are left to understand the body to be that which is tangible to
us, that is, the flesh, which, as it will be destroyed in hell-since it did not "rather
fear" being destroyed by God-so also will it be restored to life eternal, since it
preferred to be killed by human hands. If, therefore, any one shall violently suppose that
the destruction of the soul and the flesh in hell amounts to a final annihilation of the
two substances, and not to their penal treatment (as if they were to be consumed, not
punished), let him recollect that the fire of hell is eternal-expressly announced as an
everlasting penalty; and let him then admit that it is from this circumstance that this
never-ending "killing" is more formidable than a merely human murder, which is only
temporal. He will then come to the conclusion that substances must be eternal, when their
penal "killing" is an eternal one. Since, then, the body after the resurrection has to be
killed by God in hell along with the soul, we surely have sufficient information in this
fact respecting both the issues which await it, namely the resurrection of the flesh, and
its eternal "killing.

3 Else it would be most absurd if the flesh should be raised up and destined to "the
killing in hell," in order to be put an end to, when it might suffer such an annihilation
(more directly) if not raised again at all. A pretty paradox, to be sure, that an essence
must be refitted with life, in order that it may receive that annihilation which has
already in fact accrued to it! But Christ, whilst confirming us in the selfsame hope, adds
the example of "the sparrows"-how that "not one of them falls to the ground without the
will of God. He says this, that you may believe that the flesh which has been consigned to
the ground, is able in like manner to rise again by the will of the same God. For although
this is not allowed to the sparrows, yet "we are of more value than many sparrows," for
the very reason that, when fallen, we rise again. He affirms, lastly, that "the very hairs
of our head are all numbered," and in the affirmation He of course includes the promise of
their safety; for if they were to be lost, where would be the use of having taken such a
numerical care of them? Surely the only use lies (in this truth): "That of all which the
Father hath given to me, I should lose none," -not even a hair, as also not an eye nor a
tooth.

4 And yet whence shall come that "weeping and gnashing of teeth," if not from eyes and
teeth?-even at that time when the body shall be slain in hell, and thrust out into that
outer darkness which shall be the suitable torment of the eyes. He also who shall not be
clothed at the marriage feast in the raiment of good works, will have to be "bound hand
and foot,"-as being, of course, raised in his body. So, again, the very reclining at the
feast in the kingdom of God, and sitting on Christ's thrones, and standing at last on His
right hand and His left, and eating of the tree of life: what are all these but most
certain proofs of a bodily appointment and destination?

CHAPTER XXXVI.-CHRIST'S REFUTATION OF THE SADDUCEES, AND AFFIRMATION OF CATHOLIC DOCTRINE.

1 Let us now see whether (the Lord) has not imparted greater strength to our doctrine in
breaking down the subtle cavil of the Sadducees. Their great object, I take it, was to do
away altogether with the resurrection, for the Sadducees in fact did not admit any
salvation either for the soul or the flesh; and therefore, taking the strongest case they
could for impairing the credibility of the resurrection, they adapted an argument from it
in support of the question which they started. Their specious inquiry concerned the flesh,
whether or not it would be subject to marriage after the resurrection; and they assumed
the case of a woman who had married seven brothers, so that it was a doubtful point to
which of them she should be restored. Now, let the purport both of the question and the
answer be kept steadily in view, and the discussion is settled at once. For since the
Sadducees indeed denied the resurrection, whilst the Lord affirmed it;

2 since, too, (in affirming it, ) He reproached them as being both ignorant of the
Scriptures-those, of course which had declared the resurrection-as well as incredulous of
the power of God, though, of course, effectual to raise the dead, and lastly, since He
immediately added the words, "Now, that the dead are raised," (speaking) without
misgiving, and affirming the very thing which was being denied, even the resurrection of
the dead before Him who is "the God of the living,"-(it clearly follows) that He affirmed
this verity in the precise sense in which they were denying it; that it was, in fact, the
resurrection of the two natures of man. Nor does it follow, (as they would have it, ) that
because Christ denied that men would marry, He therefore proved that they would not rise
again. On the contrary, He called them "the children of the resurrection," in a certain
sense having by the resurrection to undergo a birth; and after that they marry no more,
but in their risen life are "equal unto the angels," inasmuch as they are not to marry,
because they are not to die, but are destined to pass into the angelic state by putting on
the raiment of incorruption, although with a change in the substance which is restored to
life. Besides, no question could be raised whether we are to marry or die again or not,
without involving in doubt the restoration most especially of that substance which has a
particular relation both to death and marriage-that is, the flesh.

3 Thus, then, you have the Lord affirming against the Jewish heretics what is now
encountering the denial of the Christian Sadducees-the resurrection of the entire man.

CHAPTER XXXVII.-CHRIST'S ASSERTION ABOUT THE UNPROFITABLENESS OF THE FLESH EXPLAINED CONSISTENTLY WITH OUR DOCTRINE.

1 He says, it is true, that "the flesh profiteth nothing; " but then, as in the former
case, the meaning must be regulated by the subject which is spoken of. Now, because they
thought His discourse was harsh and intolerable, supposing that He had really and
literally enjoined on them to eat his flesh, He, with the view of ordering the state of
salvation as a spiritual thing, set out with the principle, "It is the spirit that
quickeneth; "and then added, "The flesh profiteth nothing,"-meaning, of course, to the
giving of life. He also goes on to explain what He would have us to understand by spirit:
"The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. In a like sense He
had previously said: "He that heareth my words, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath
everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but shall pass from death unto
life. Constituting, therefore, His word as the life-giving principle, because that word is
spirit and life, He likewise called His flesh by the same appellation; because, too, the
Word had become flesh, we ought therefore to desire Him in order that we may have life,
and to devour Him with the ear, and to ruminate on Him with the understanding, and to
digest Him by faith.

2 Now, just before (the passage in hand), He had declared His flesh to be "the bread which
cometh down from heaven," impressing on (His hearers) constantly under the figure of
necessary food the memory of their forefathers, who had preferred the bread and flesh of
Egypt to their divine calling. Then, turning His subject to their reflections, because He
perceived that they were going to be scattered from Him, He says: "The flesh profiteth
nothing. Now what is there to destroy the resurrection of the flesh? As if there might not
reasonably enough be something which, although it" profiteth nothing" itself, might yet be
capable of being profited by something else. The spirit "profiteth," for it imparts life.
The flesh profiteth nothing, for it is subject to death. Therefore He has rather put the
two propositions in a way which favours our belief: for by showing what "profits," and
what "does not profit," He has likewise thrown light on the object which receives as well
as the subject which gives the "profit. Thus, in the present instance, we have the Spirit
giving life to the flesh which has been subdued by death; for "the hour," says He, "is
coming, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall
live. Now, what is "the dead" but the flesh? and what is "the voice of God" but the Word?

3 and what is the Word but the Spirit, who shall justly raise the flesh which He had once
Himself become, and that too from death, which He Himself suffered, and from the grave,
which He Himself once entered? Then again, when He says, "Marvel not at this: for the hour
is coming, in which all that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and
shall come forth; they that have done good, to the resurrection of life; and they that
have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation," -none will after such words be able
to interpret the dead "that are in the graves" as any other than the bodies of the flesh,
because the graves themselves are nothing but the resting-place of corpses: for it is
incontestable that even those who partake of "the old man," that is to say, sinful men-in
other words, those who are dead through their ignorance of God (whom our heretics,
forsooth, foolishly insist on understanding by the word "graves" )-are plainly here spoken
of as having to come from their graves for judgment. But how are graves to come forth from
graves?

CHAPTER XXXVIII.-CHRIST, BY RAISING THE DEAD, ATTESTED IN A PRACTICAL WAY THE DOCTRINE OF THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH.

1 After the Lord's words, what are we to think of the purport of His actions, when He
raises dead persons from their biers and their graves? To what end did He do so? If it was
only for the mere exhibition of His power, or to afford the temporary favour of
restoration to life, it was really no great matter for Him to raise men to die over again.
If, however, as was the truth, it was rather to put in secure keeping men's belief in a
future resurrection, then it must follow from the particular form of His own examples,
that the said resurrection will be a bodily one. I can never allow it to be said that the
resurrection of the future, being destined for the soul only, did then receive these
preliminary illustrations of a raising of the flesh, simply because it would have been
impossible to have shown the resurrection of an invisible soul except by the resuscitation
of a visible substance. They have but a poor knowledge of God, who suppose Him to be only
capable of doing what comes within the compass of their own thoughts; and after all, they
cannot but know full well what His capability has ever been, if they only make
acquaintance with the writings of John. For unquestionably he, who has exhibited to our
sight the martyrs' hitherto disembodied souls resting under the altar, was quite able to
display them before our eyes rising without a body of flesh.

2 I, however, for my part prefer (believing) that it is impossible for God to practise
deception (weak as He only could be in respect of artifice), from any fear of seeming to
have given preliminary proofs of a thing in a way which is inconsistent with His actual
disposal of the thing; nay more, from a fear that, since He was not powerful enough to
show us a sample of the resurrection without the flesh, He might with still greater
infirmity be unable to display (by and by) the full accomplishment of the sample in the
self-same substance of the flesh. No example, indeed, is greater than the thing of which
it is a sample. Greater, however, it is, if souls with their body are to be raised as the
evidence of their resurrection without the body, so as that the entire salvation of man in
soul and body should become a guarantee for only the half, the soul; whereas the condition
in all examples is, that which would be deemed the less-I mean the resurrection of the
soul only-should be the foretaste, as it were, of the rising of the flesh also at its
appointed time. And therefore, according to our estimate of the truth, those examples of
dead persons who were raised by the Lord were indeed a proof of the resurrection both of
the flesh and of the soul,-a proof, in fact, that this gift was to be denied to neither
substance.

3 Considered, however, as examples only, they expressed all the less significance-less,
indeed, than Christ will express at last-for they were not raised up for glory and
immortality, but only for another death.

CHAPTER XXXIX.-ADDITIONAL EVIDENCE AFFORDED TO US IN THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES.

1 The Acts of the Apostles, too, attest the resurrection. Now the apostles had nothing
else to do, at least among the Jews, than to-explain the Old Testament and confirm the
New, and above all, to preach God in Christ. Consequently they introduced nothing new
concerning the resurrection, besides announcing it to the glory of Christ: in every other
respect it had been already received in simple and intelligent faith, without any question
as to what sort of resurrection it was to be, and without encountering any other opponents
than the Sadducees. So much easier was it to deny the resurrection altogether, than to
understand it in an alien sense. You find Paul confessing his faith before the chief
priests, under the shelter of the chief captain, among the Sadducees and the Pharisees:
"Men and brethren," he says, "I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee; of the hope and
resurrection of the dead I am now called in question by you," -referring, of course, to
the nation's hope; in order to avoid, in his present condition, as an apparent
transgressor of the law, being thought to approach to the Sadducees in opinion on the most
important article of the faith-even the resurrection. That belief, therefore, in the
resurrection which he would not appear to impair, he really confirmed in the opinion of
the Pharisees, since he rejected the views of the Sadducees, who denied it. In like
manner, before Agrippa also, he says that he was advancing "none other things than those
which the prophets had announced.

2 He was therefore maintaining just such a resurrection as the prophets had foretold. He
mentions also what is written by "Moses ", touching the resurrection of the dead; (and in
so doing) he must have known that it would be a rising in the body, since requisition will
have to be made therein of the blood of man. He declared it then to be of such a character
as the Pharisees had admitted it, and such as the Lord had Himself maintained it, and such
too as the Sadducees refused to believe it-such refusal leading them indeed to an absolute
rejection of the whole verity. Nor had the Athenians previously understood Paul to
announce any other resurrection. They had, in fact, derided his announcement; but they
would have indulged no such derision if they had heard from him nothing but the
restoration of the soul, for they would have received that as the very common anticipation
of their own native philosophy.

3 But when the preaching of the resurrection, of which they had previously not heard, by
its absolute novelty excited the heathen, and a not unnatural incredulity in so wonderful
a matter began to harass the simple faith with many discussions, then the apostle took
care in almost every one of his writings to strengthen men's belief of this Christian
hope, pointing out that there was such a hope, and that it had not as yet been realized,
and that it would be in the body,-a point which was the especial object of inquiry, and,
what was besides a doubtful question, not in a body of a different kind from ours.

CHAPTER XL.-SUNDRY PASSAGES OF ST. PAUL WHICH ATTEST OUR DOCTRINE RESCUED FROM THE PERVERSIONS OF HERESY.

1 Now it is no matter of surprise if arguments are captiously taken from the writings of
(the apostle) himself, inasmuch as there "must needs be heresies; " but these could not
be, if the Scriptures were not capable of a false interpretation. Well, then, heresies
finding that the apostle had mentioned two "men"-"the inner man," that is, the soul, and
"the outward man," that is, the flesh-awarded salvation to the soul or inward man, and
destruction to the flesh or outward man, because it is written (in the Epistle) to the
Corinthians: "Though our outward man decayeth, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.
Now, neither the soul by itself alone is "man" (it was subsequently implanted in the
clayey mould to which the name man had been already given), nor is the flesh without the
soul "man ": for after the exile of the soul from it, it has the title of corpse. Thus the
designation man is, in a certain sense, the bond between the two closely united
substances, under which designation they cannot but be coherent natures. As for the inward
man, indeed, the apostle prefers its being regarded as the mind and heart rather than the
soul; in other words, not so much the substance itself as the savour of the substance.
Thus when, writing to the Ephesians, he spoke of "Christ dwelling in their inner man," he
meant, no doubt, that the Lord ought to be admitted into their senses.

2 He then added, "in your hearts by faith, rooted and grounded in love,"-making "faith"
and "love" not substantial parts, but only conceptions of the soul. But when he used the
phrase "in your hearts," seeing that these are substantial parts of the flesh, he at once
assigned to the flesh the actual "inward man," which he placed in the heart. Consider now
in what sense he alleged that "the outward man decayeth, while the inward man is renewed
day by day. You certainly would not maintain that he could mean that corruption of the
flesh which it undergoes from the moment of death, in its appointed state of perpetual
decay; but the wear and tear which for the name of Christ it experiences during its course
of life before and until death, in harassing cares and tribulations as well as in tortures
and persecutions. Now the inward man will have, of course, to be renewed by the suggestion
of the Spirit, advancing by faith and holiness day after day, here in this life, not there
after the resurrection, were our renewal is not a gradual process from day to day, but a
consummation once for all complete. You may learn this, too, from the following passage,
where the apostle says: "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for
as a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which
are seen," that is, our sufferings, "but at the things which are not seen," that is, our
rewards:

3 "for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are
eternal. For the afflictions and injuries wherewith the outward man is worn away, he
affirms to be only worthy of being despised by us, as being light and temporary;
preferring those eternal recompenses which are also invisible, and that "weight of glory"
which will be a counterpoise for the labours in the endurance of which the flesh here
suffers decay. So that the subject in this passage is not that corruption which they
ascribe to the outward man in the utter destruction of the flesh, with the view of
nullifying the resurrection. So also he says elsewhere: "If so be that we suffer with Him,
that we may be also glorified together; for I reckon that the sufferings of the present
time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us. Here again
he shows us that our sufferings are less than their rewards. Now, since it is through the
flesh that we suffer with Christ-for it is the property of the flesh to be worn by
sufferings-to the same flesh belongs the recompense which is promised for suffering with
Christ. Accordingly, when he is going to assign afflictions to the flesh as its especial
liability-according to the statement he had already made-he says, "When we were come into
Macedonia, our flesh had no rest; " then, in order to make the soul a fellow-sufferer with
the body, he adds, "We were troubled on every side;

4 without were fightings," which of course warred down the flesh, "within were fears,"
which afflicted the soul. Although, therefore, the outward man decays-not in the sense of
missing the resurrection, but of enduring tribulation-it will be understood from this
scripture that it is not exposed to its suffering without the inward man. Both therefore,
will be glorified together, even as they have suffered together. Parallel with their
participation in troubles, must necessarily run their association also in rewards.

CHAPTER XLI.-THE DISSOLUTION OF OUR TABERNACLE CONSISTENT WITH THE RESURRECTION OF OUR BODIES.

1 It is still the same sentiment which he follows up in the passage in which he puts the
recompense above the sufferings: "for we know; "he says, "that if our earthly house of
this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a house not made with hands, eternal in the
heavens; " in other words, owing to the fact that our flesh is undergoing dissolution
through its sufferings, we shall be provided with a home in heaven. He remembered the
award (which the Lord assigns) in the Gospel: "Blessed are they who are persecuted for
righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Yet, when he thus contrasted the
recompense of the reward, he did not deny the flesh's restoration; since the recompense is
due to the same substance to which the dissolution is attributed,-that is, of course, the
flesh. Because, however, he had called the flesh a house, he wished elegantly to use the
same term in his comparison of the ultimate reward; promising to the very house, which
undergoes dissolution through suffering, a better house through the resurrection. Just as
the Lore also promises us many mansions as of a house in His Father's home; although this
may possibly be understood of the domicile of this world, on the dissolution of whose
fabric an eternal abode is promised in heaven, inasmuch as the following context, having a
manifest reference to the flesh, seems to show that these preceding words have no such
reference.

2 For the apostle makes a distinction, when he goes on to say, "For in this we groan,
earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven, if so be that
being clothed we shall not be found naked; " which means, before we put off the garment of
the flesh, we wish to be clothed with the celestial glory of immortality. Now the
privilege of this favour awaits those who shall at the coming of the Lord be found in the
flesh, and who shall, owing to the oppressions of the time of Antichrist, deserve by an
instantaneous death, which is accomplished by a sudden change, to become qualified to join
the rising saints; as he writes to the Thessalonians: "For this we say unto you by the
word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not
prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a
shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ
shall rise first: then we too shall ourselves be caught up together with them in the
clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord."

CHAPTER XLII.-DEATH CHANGES, WITHOUT DESTROYING, OUR MORTAL BODIES. REMAINS OF THE GIANTS.

1 It is the transformation these shall undergo which he explains to the Corinthians, when
he writes: "We shall all indeed rise again (though we shall not all undergo the
transformation) in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump "-for none
shall experience this change but those only who shall be found in the flesh. "And the
dead," he says, "shall be raised, and we shall be changed. Now, after a careful
consideration of this appointed order, you will be able to adjust what follows to the
preceding sense. For when he adds, "This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this
mortal must put on immortality," this will assuredly be that house from heaven, with which
we so earnestly desire to be clothed upon, whilst groaning in this our present
body,-meaning, of course, over this flesh in which we shall be surprised at last; because
he says that we are burdened whilst in this tabernacle, which we do not wish indeed to be
stripped of, but rather to be in it clothed over, in such a way that mortality may be
swallowed up of life, that is, by putting on over us whilst we are transformed that
vestiture which is from heaven. For who is there that will not desire, while he is in the
flesh, to put on immortality, and to continue his life by a happy escape from death,
through the transformation which must be experienced instead of it, without encountering
too that Hades which will exact the very last farthing?

2 Notwithstanding, he who has already traversed Hades is destined also to obtain the
change after the resurrection. For from this circumstance it is that we definitively
declare that the flesh will by all means rise again, and, from the change that is to come
over it, will assume the condition of angels. Now, if it were merely in the case of those
who shall be found in the flesh that the change must be undergone, in order that mortality
may be swallowed up of life-in other words, that the flesh (be covered) with the heavenly
and eternal raiment-it would either follow that those who shall be found in death would
not obtain life, deprived as they would then be of the material and so to say the aliment
of life, that is, the flesh; or else, these also must needs undergo the change, that in
them too mortality may be swallowed up of life, since it is appointed that they too should
obtain life. But, you say, in the case of the dead, mortality is already swallowed up of
life. No, not in all cases, certainly. For how many will most probably be found of men who
had just died-so recently put into their graves, that nothing in them would seem to be
decayed? For you do not of course deem a thing to be decayed unless it be cut off,
abolished, and withdrawn from our perception, as having in every possible way ceased to be
apparent. There are the carcases of the giants of old time;

3 it will be obvious enough that they are not absolutely decayed, for their bony frames
are still extant. We have already spoken of this elsewhere. For instance, even lately in
this very city, when they were sacrilegiously laying the foundations of the Odeum on a
good many ancient graves, people were horror-stricken to discover, after some five hundred
years, bones, which still retained their moisture, and hair which had not lost its
perfume. It is certain not only that bones remain indurated, but also that teeth continue
undecayed for ages-both of them the lasting germs of that body which is to sprout into
life again in the resurrection. Lastly, even if everything that is mortal in all the dead
shall then be found decayed-at any rate consumed by death, by time, and through age,-is
there nothing which will be "swallowed up of life," nor by being covered over and arrayed
in the vesture of immortality? Now, he who says that mortality is going to be swallowed up
of life has already admitted that what is dead is not destroyed by those other before-
mentioned devourers. And verily it will be extremely fit that all shall be consummated and
brought about by the operations of God, and not by the laws of nature. Therefore, inasmuch
as what is mortal has to be swallowed up of life, it must needs be brought out to view in
order to be so swallowed up; (needful) also to be swallowed up, in order to undergo the
ultimate transformation.

4 If you were to say that a fire is to be lighted, you could not possibly allege that what
is to kindle it is sometimes necessary and sometimes not. In like manner, when he inserts
the words "If so be that being unclothed we be not found naked." -referring, of course, to
those who shall not be found in the day of the Lord alive and in the flesh-he did not say
that they whom he had just described as unclothed or stripped, were naked in any other
sense than meaning that they should be understood to be reinvested with the very same
substance they had been divested of. For although they shall be found naked when their
flesh has been laid aside, or to some extent sundered or worn away (and this condition may
well be called nakedness, ) they shall afterwards recover it again, in order that, being
reinvested with the flesh, they may be able also to have put over that the supervestment
of immortality; for it will be impossible for the outside garment to fit except over one
who is already dressed.

CHAPTER XLIII.-NO DISPARAGEMENT OF OUR DOCTRINE IN ST. PAUL'S PHRASE, WHICH CALLS OUR RESIDENCE IN THE FLESH ABSENCE FROM THE LORD.

1 In the same way, when he says, "Therefore we are always confident, and fully aware, that
while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord; for we walk by faith, not be
sight," it is manifest that in this statement there is no design of disparaging the flesh,
as if it separated us from the Lord. For there is here pointedly addressed to us an
exhortation to disregard this present life, since we are absent from the Lord as long as
we are passing through it-walking by faith, not by sight; in other words, in hope, not in
reality. Accordingly he adds: "We are indeed confident and deem it good rather to be
absent from the body, and present with the Lord; in order, that is, that we may walk by
sight rather than by faith, in realization rather than in hope. Observe how he here also
ascribes to the excellence of martyrdom a contempt for the body. For no one, on becoming
absent from the body, is at once a dweller in the presence of the Lord, except by the
prerogative of martyrdom, he gains a lodging in Paradise, not in the lower regions. Now,
had the apostle been at a loss for words to describe the departure from the body? Or does
he purposely use a novel phraseology? For, wanting to express our temporary absence from
the body, he says that we are strangers, absent from it, because a man who goes abroad
returns after a while to his home.

2 Then he says even to all: "We therefore earnestly desire to be acceptable unto God,
whether absent or present; for we must all appear before the judgment-seat of Christ
Jesus. If all of us, then all of us wholly; if wholly, then our inward man and outward
too-that is, our bodies no less than our souls. "That every one," as he goes on to say,
"may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be
good or bad. Now I ask, how do you read this passage? Do you take it to be confusedly
constructed, with a transposition of ideas? Is the question about what things will have to
be received by the body, or the things which have been already done in the body? Well, if
the things which are to be borne by the body are meant, then undoubtedly a resurrection of
the body is implied; and if the things which have been already done in the body are
referred to, (the same conclusion follows): for of course the retribution will have to be
paid by the body, since it was by the body that the actions were performed. Thus the
apostle's whole argument from the beginning is unravelled in this concluding clause,
wherein the resurrection of the flesh is set forth; and it ought to be understood in a
sense which is strictly in accordance with this conclusion.

CHAPTER XLIV.-SUNDRY OTHER PASSAGES OF ST. PAUL EXPLAINED IN A SENTENCE CONFIRMATORY OF OUR DOCTRINE.

1 Now, if you will examine the words which precede the passage where mention is made of
the outward and the inward man, will you not discover the whole truth, both of the dignity
and the hope of the flesh? For, when he speaks of the "light which God hath commanded to
shine in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord in the
person of Jesus Christ," and says that "we have this treasure in earthen vessels," meaning
of course the flesh, which is meant-that the flesh shall be destroyed, because it is "an
earthen vessel," deriving its origin from clay; or that it is to be glorified, as being
the receptacle of a divine treasure? Now if that true light, which is in the person of
Christ, contains in itself life, and that life with its light is committed to the flesh,
is that destined to perish which has life entrusted to it? Then, of course, the treasure
will perish also; for perishable things are entrusted to things which are themselves
perishable, which is like putting new wine into old bottles. When also he adds, "Always
bearing about in our body the dying of the Lord Jesus Christ" what sort of substance is
that which, after (being called) the temple of God, can now be also designated the tomb of
Christ? But why do we bear about in the body the dying of the Lord? In order, as he says,
"that His life also may be manifested. Where? "In the body.

2 In what body? "In our mortal body. Therefore in the flesh, which is mortal indeed
through sin, but living through grace-how great a grace you may see when the purpose is,
"that the life of Christ may be manifested in it. Is it then in a thing which is a
stranger to salvation, in a substance which is perpetually dissolved, that the life of
Christ will be manifested, which is eternal, continuous, incorruptible, and already the
life of God? Else to what epoch belongs that life of the Lord which is to be manifested in
our body? It surely is the life which He lived up to His passion, which was not only
openly shown among the Jews, but has now been displayed even to all nations. Therefore
that life is meant which" has broken the adamantine gates of death and the brazen bars of
the lower world," -a life which thenceforth has been and will be ours. Lastly, it is to be
manifested in the body. When? After death. How? By rising in our body, as Christ also rose
in His. But lest any one should here object, that the life of Jesus has even now to be
manifested in our body by the discipline of holiness, and patience, and righteousness, and
wisdom, in which the Lord's life abounded, the most provident wisdom of the apostle
inserts this purpose: "For we which live are alway delivered unto death for Jesus' sake,
that His life may be manifested in our mortal body.

3 In us, therefore, even when dead, does he say that this is to take place in us. And if
so, how is this possible except in our body after its resurrection? Therefore he adds in
the concluding sentence: "Knowing that He which raised up the Lord Jesus, shall raise up
us also with Him," risen as He is already from the dead. But perhaps "with Him" means
"like Him: "well then, if it be like Him, it is not of course without the flesh.

CHAPTER XLV.-THE OLD MAN AND THE NEW MAN OF ST. PAUL EXPLAINED.

1 But in their blindness they again impale themselves on the point of the old and the new
man. When the apostle enjoins us "to put off the old man, which is corrupt according to
the deceitful lusts; and to be renewed in the spirit of our mind; and to put on the new
man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness," (they maintain) that
by here also making a distinction between the two substances, and applying the old one to
the flesh and the new one to the spirit, he ascribes to the old man-that is to say, the
flesh-a permanent corruption. Now, if you follow the order of the substances, the soul
cannot be the new man because it comes the later of the two; nor can the flesh be the old
man because it is the former. For what fraction of time was it that intervened between the
creative hand of God and His afflatus? I will venture to say, that even if the soul was a
good deal prior to the flesh, by the very circumstance that the soul had to wait to be
itself completed, it made the other really the former. For everything which gives the
finishing stroke and perfection to a work, although it is subsequent in its mere order,
yet has the priority in its effect. Much more is that prior, without which preceding
things could have no existence. If the flesh be the old man, when did it become so? From
the beginning?

2 But Adam was wholly a new man, and of that new man there could be no part an old man.
And from that time, ever since the blessing which was pronounced upon man's generation,
the flesh and the soul have had a simultaneous birth, without any calculable difference in
time; so that the two have been even generated together in the womb, as we have shown in
our Treatise on the Soul. Contemporaneous in the womb, they are also temporally identical
in their birth. The two are no doubt produced by human parents of two substances, but not
at two different periods; rather they are so entirely one, that neither is before the
other in point of time. It is more correct (to say), that we are either entirely the old
man or entirely the new, for we cannot tell how we can possibly be anything else. But the
apostle mentions a very clear mark of the old man. For "put off," says he, "concerning the
former conversation, the old man; " (he does) not say concerning the seniority of either
substance. It is not indeed the flesh which he bids us to put off, but the works which he
in another passage shows to be "works of the flesh. He brings no accusation against men's
bodies, of which he even writes as follows: "Putting away lying, speak every man truth
with his neighbor: for we are members one of another. Be ye angry, and sin not: let not
the sun go down upon your wrath:

3 neither give place to the devil. Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him
labour, working with his hands (the thing which is good), that he may have to give to him
that needeth. Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is
good for the edification of faith, that it may minister grace unto the hearers. And grieve
not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. Let all
bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil-speaking, be put away from you,
with all malice: but be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
even as God in Christ hath forgiven you. Why, therefore, do not those who suppose the
flesh to be the old man, hasten their own death, in order that by laying aside the old man
they may satisfy the apostle's precepts? As for ourselves, we believe that the whole of
faith is to be administered in the flesh, nay more, by the flesh, which has both a mouth
for the utterance of all holy words, and a tongue to refrain from blasphemy, and a heart
to avoid all irritation, and hands to labour and to give; while we also maintain that as
well the old man as the new has relation to the difference of moral conduct, and not to
any discrepancy of nature.

4 And just as we acknowledge that that which according to its former conversation was "the
old man" was also corrupt, and received its very name in accordance with "its deceitful
lusts," so also (do we hold) that it is "the old man in reference to its former
conversation," and not in respect of the flesh through any permanent dissolution.
Moreover, it is still unimpaired in the flesh, and identical in that nature, even when it
has become "the new man; "since it is of its sinful course of life, and not of its
corporeal substance, that it has been divested.

CHAPTER XLVI.-IT IS THE WORKS OF THE FLESH, NOT THE SUBSTANCE OF THE FLESH, WHICH ST. PAUL ALWAYS CONDEMNS.

1 You may notice that the apostle everywhere condemns the works of the flesh in such a way
as to appear to condemn the flesh; but no one can suppose him to have any such view as
this, since he goes on to suggest another sense, even though somewhat resembling it. For
when he actually declares that "they who are in the flesh cannot please God," he
immediately recalls the statement from an heretical sense to a sound one, by adding, "But
ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit. Now, by denying them to be in the flesh who
yet obviously were in the flesh, he showed that they were not living amidst the works of
the flesh, and therefore that they who could not please God were not those who were in the
flesh, but only those who were living after the flesh; whereas they pleased God, who,
although existing in the flesh, were yet walking after the Spirit. And, again, he says
that "the body is dead; "but it is "because of sin," even as "the Spirit is life because
of righteousness.

2 When, however, he thus sets life in opposition to the death which is constituted in the
flesh, he unquestionably promises the life of righteousness to the same state for which he
determined the death of sin, But unmeaning is this opposition which he makes between the
"life" and the "death," if the life is not there where that very thing is to which he
opposes it-even the death which is to be extirpated of course from the body. Now, if life
thus extirpates death from the body, it can accomplish this only by penetrating thither
where that is which it is excluding. But why am I resorting to knotty arguments, when the
apostle treats the subject with perfect plainness? "For if," says he, "the Spirit of Him
that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Jesus from the dead
shall also quicken your mortal bodies, because of His Spirit that dwelleth in you; " so
that even if a person were to assume that the soul is "the mortal body," he would (since
he cannot possibly deny that the flesh is this also) be constrained to acknowledge a
restoration even of the flesh, in consequence of its participation in the selfsame state.
From the following words, moreover, you may learn that it is the works of the flesh which
are condemned, and not the flesh itself: "Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the
flesh, to live after the flesh: for if ye live after the flesh ye shall die;

3 but if ye, through the Spirit, do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. Now
(that I may answer each point separately), since salvation is promised to those who are
living in the flesh, but walking after the Spirit, it is no longer the flesh which is an
adversary to salvation, but the working of the flesh. When, however, this operativeness of
the flesh is done away with, which is the cause of death, the flesh is shown to be safe,
since it is freed from the cause of death. "For the law," says he, "of the Spirit of life
in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death," -that, surely, which he
previously mentioned as dwelling in our members. Our members, therefore, will no longer be
subject to the law of death, because they cease to serve that of sin, from both which they
have been set free. "For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh,
God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and through sin condemned sin in
the flesh " -not the flesh in sin, for the house is not to be condemned with its
inhabitant. He said, indeed, that "sin dwelleth in our body. But the condemnation of sin
is the acquittal of the flesh, just as its non-condemnation subjugates it to the law of
sin and death. In like manner, he called "the carnal mind" first "death," and afterwards
"enmity against God;

4 " but he never predicated this of the flesh itself. But to what then, you will say, must
the carnal mind be ascribed, if it be not to the carnal substance itself? I will allow
your objection, if you will prove to me that the flesh has any discernment of its own. If,
however, it has no conception of anything without the soul, you must understand that the
carnal mind must be referred to the soul, although ascribed sometimes to the flesh, on the
ground that it is ministered to for the flesh and through the flesh. And therefore (the
apostle) says that "sin dwelleth in the flesh," because the soul by which sin is provoked
has its temporary lodging in the flesh, which is doomed indeed to death, not however on
its own account, but on account of sin. For he says in another passage also"How is it that
you conduct yourselves as if you were even now living in the world? " where he is not
writing to dead persons, but to those who ought to have ceased to live after the ways of
the world

CHAPTER XLVII.-ST. PAUL, ALL THROUGH, PROMISES ETERNAL LIFE TO THE BODY.

1 For that must be living after the world, which, as the old man, he declares to be
"crucified with Christ," not as a bodily structure, but as moral behaviour. Besides, if we
do not understand it in this sense, it is not our bodily frame which has been transfixed
(at all events), nor has our flesh endured the cross of Christ; but the sense is that
which he has subjoined, "that the body of sin might be made void, " by an amendment of
life, not by a destruction of the substance, as he goes on to say, "that henceforth we
should not serve sin; " and that we should believe ourselves to be "dead with Christ," in
such a manner as that "we shall also live with Him. On the same principle he says:
"Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed. To what? To the flesh? No, but
"unto sin. Accordingly as to the flesh they will be saved-" alive unto God in Christ
Jesus," through the flesh of course, to which they will not be dead; since it is "unto
sin," and not to the flesh, that they are dead. For he pursues the point still further:
"Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it, and that ye
should yield your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield ye
yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead "-not simply alive, but as
alive from the dead-" and your members as instruments of righteousness. And again:

2 "As ye have yielded your members servants of uncleanness, and of iniquity unto iniquity,
even so now yield your members servants of righteousness unto holiness; for whilst ye were
the servants of sin, ye were free from righteousness. What fruit had ye then in those
things of which ye are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now, being
made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the
end everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Thus throughout this series of passages, whilst withdrawing
our members from unrighteousness and sin, and applying them to righteousness and holiness,
and transferring the same from the wages of death to the donative of eternal life, he
undoubtedly promises to the flesh the recompense of salvation. Now it would not at all
have been consistent that any rule of holiness and righteousness should be especially
enjoined for the flesh, if the reward of such a discipline were not also within its reach;
nor could even baptism be properly ordered for the flesh, if by its regeneration a course
were not inaugurated tending to its restitution; the apostle himself suggesting this idea:
"Know ye not, that so many of us as are baptized into Jesus Christ, are baptized into His
death?

3 We are therefore buried with Him by baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised
up from the dead, even so we also should walk in newness of life. And that you may not
suppose that this is said merely of that life which we have to walk in the newness of,
through baptism, by faith, the apostle with superlative forethought adds: "For if we have
been planted together in the likeness of Christ's death, we shall be also in the likeness
of His resurrection. By a figure we die in our baptism, but in a reality we rise again in
the flesh, even as Christ did, "that, as sin has reigned in death, so also grace might
reign through righteousness unto life eternal, through Jesus Christ our Lord. But how so,
unless equally in the flesh? For where the death is, there too must be the life after the
death, because also the life was first there, where the death subsequently was. Now, if
the dominion of death operates only in the dissolution of the flesh, in like manner
death's contrary, life, ought to produce the contrary effect, even the restoration of the
flesh; so that, just as death had swallowed it up in its strength, it also, after this
mortal was swallowed up of immortality, may hear the challenge pronounced against it: "O
death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? " For in this way "grace shall
there much more abound, where sin once abounded.

4 In this way also "shall strength be made perfect in weakness," -saving what is lost,
reviving what is dead, healing what is stricken, curing what is faint, redeeming what is
lost, freeing what is enslaved, recalling what has strayed, raising what is fallen; and
this from earth to heaven, where, as the apostle teaches the Philippians, "we have our
citizenship, from whence also we look for our Saviour Jesus Christ, who shall change our
body of humiliation, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body" -of course
after the resurrection, because Christ Himself was not glorified before He suffered. These
must be "the bodies" which he "beseeches" the Romans to "present" as "a living sacrifice,
holy, acceptable unto God. But how a living sacrifice, if these bodies are to perish? How
a holy one, if they are profanely soiled? How acceptable to God, if they are condemned?
Come, now, tell me how that passage (in the Epistle) to the Thessalonians-which, because
of its clearness, I should suppose to have been written with a sunbeam-is understood by
our heretics, who shun the light of Scripture: "And the very God of peace sanctify you
wholly. And as if this were not plain enough, it goes on to say: "And may your whole body,
and soul, and spirit be preserved blameless unto the coming of the Lord. Here you have the
entire substance of man destined to salvation, and that at no other time than at the
coming of the Lord, which is the key of the resurrection.

CHAPTER XLVIII.-SUNDRY PASSAGES IN THE GREAT CHAPTER OF THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD EXPLAINED IN DEFENCE OF OUR DOCTRINE.

1 But "flesh and blood," you say, "cannot inherit the kingdom of God. We are quite aware
that this too is written; but although our opponents place it in the front of the battle,
we have intentionally reserved the objection until now, in order that we may in our last
assault overthrow it, after we have removed out of the way all the questions which are
auxiliary to it. However, they must contrive to recall to their mind even now our
preceding arguments, in order that the occasion which originally suggested this passage
may assist our judgment in arriving at its meaning. The apostle, as I take it, having set
forth for the Corinthians the details of their church discipline, had summed up the
substance of his own gospel, and of their belief in an exposition of the Lord's death and
resurrection, for the purpose of deducing therefrom the rule of our hope, and the
groundwork thereof. Accordingly he subjoins this statement: "Now if Christ be preached
that He rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the
dead? If there be no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen: and if Christ be
not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found
false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ, whom He
raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not
Christ raised:

2 and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, because ye are yet in your sins, and
they which have fallen asleep in Christ are perished. Now, what is the point which he
evidently labours hard to make us believe throughout this passage? The resurrection of the
dead, you say, which was denied: he certainly wished it to be believed on the strength of
the example which he adduced-the Lord's resurrection. Certainly, you say. Well now, is an
example borrowed from different circumstances, or from like ones? From like ones, by all
means, is your answer. How then did Christ rise again? In the flesh, or not? No doubt,
since you are told that He "died according to the Scriptures," and "that He was buried
according to the Scriptures," no otherwise than in the flesh, you will also allow that it
was in the flesh that He was raised from the dead. For the very same body which fell in
death, and which lay in the sepulchre, did also rise again; (and it was) not so much
Christ in the flesh, as the flesh in Christ. If, therefore, we are to rise again after the
example of Christ, who rose in the flesh, we shall certainly not rise according to that
example, unless we also shall ourselves rise again in the flesh. "For," he says, "since by
man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. (This he says) in order, on
the one hand, to distinguish the two authors-Adam of death, Christ of resurrection;

3 and, on the other hand, to make the resurrection operate on the same substance as the
death, by comparing the authors themselves under the designation man. For if "as in Adam
all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive," their vivification in Christ must be
in the flesh, since it is in the flesh that arises their death in Adam. "But every man in
his own order," because of course it will be also every man in his own body. For the order
will be arranged severally, on account of the individual merits. Now, as the merits must
be ascribed to the body, it must needs follow that the order also should be arranged in
respect of the bodies, that it may be in relation to their merits. But inasmuch as "some
are also baptized for the dead," we will see whether there be a good reason for this. Now
it is certain that they adopted this (practice) with such a presumption as made them
suppose that the vicarious baptism (in question) would be beneficial to the flesh of
another in anticipation of the resurrection; for unless it were a bodily resurrection,
there would be no pledge secured by this process of a corporeal baptism. "Why are they
then baptized for the dead," he asks, unless the bodies rise again which are thus
baptized? For it is not the soul which is sanctified by the baptismal bath: its
sanctification comes from the "answer. "And why," he inquires, "stand we in jeopardy every
hour?

4 " -meaning, of course, through the flesh. "I die daily," (says he); that is,
undoubtedly, in the perils of the body, in which "he even fought with beasts at Ephesus,"
-even with those beasts which caused him such peril and trouble in Asia, to which he
alludes in his second epistle to the same church of Corinth: "For we would not, brethren,
have you ignorant of our trouble which came to us in Asia, that we were pressed above
measure, above strength, insomuch that we despaired even of life. Now, if I mistake not,
he enumerates all these particulars in order that in his unwillingness to have his
conflicts in the flesh supposed to be useless, he may induce an unfaltering belief in the
resurrection of the flesh. For useless must that conflict be deemed (which is sustained in
a body) for which no resurrection is in prospect. "But some man will say, How are the dead
to be raised? And with what body will they come? " Now here he discusses the qualities of
bodies, whether it be the very same, or different ones, which men are to resume. Since,
however, such a question as this must be regarded as a subsequent one, it will in passing
be enough for us that the resurrection is determined to be a bodily one even from this,
that it is about the quality of bodies that the inquiry arises.


ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH
================================

ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH continued

CHAPTER XLIX.-THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. WHAT DOES THE APOSTLE EXCLUDE FROM THE DEAD? CERTAINLY NOT THE SUBSTANCE OF THE FLESH.

1 We come now to the very gist of the whole question: What are the substances, and of what
nature are they, which the apostle has disinherited of the kingdom of God? The preceding
statements give us a clue to this point also. He says: "The first man is of the earth,
earthy"-that is, made of dust, that is, Adam; "the second man is from heaven" -that is,
the Word of God, which is Christ, in no other way, however, man (although "from heaven "),
than as being Himself flesh and soul, just as a human being is, just as Adam was. Indeed,
in a previous passage He is called "the second Adam, " deriving the identity of His name
from His participation in the substance, because not even Adam was flesh of human seed, in
which Christ is also like Him. "As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy; and
as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. Such (does he mean), in
substance; or first of all in training, and afterwards in the dignity and worth which that
training aimed at acquiring? Not in substance, however, by any means will the earthy and
the heavenly be separated, designated as they have been by the apostle once for all, as
men. For even if Christ were the only true "heavenly," nay, super-celestial Being, He is
still man, as composed of body and soul;

2 and in no respect is He separated from the quality of "earthiness," owing to that
condition of His which makes Him a partaker of both substances. In like manner, those also
who after Him are heavenly, are understood to have this celestial quality predicated of
them not from their present nature, but from their future glory; because in a preceding
sentence, which originated this distinction respecting difference of dignity, there was
shown to be "one glory in celestial bodies, and another in terrestrial ones," -"one glory
of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for even one
star differeth from another star in glory, " although not in substance. Then, after having
thus premised the difference in that worth or dignity which is even now to be aimed at,
and then at last to be enjoyed, the apostle adds an exhortation, that we should both here
in our training follow the example of Christ, and there attain His eminence in glory: "As
we have borne the image of the earthy, let us also bear the image of the heavenly. We have
indeed borne the image of the earthy, by our sharing in his transgression, by our
participation in his death, by our banishment from Paradise. Now, although the image of
Adam is here borne by is in the flesh, yet we are not exhorted to put off the flesh;

3 but if not the flesh, it is the conversation, in order that we may then bear the image
of the heavenly in ourselves,-no longer indeed the image of God, and no longer the image
of a Being whose state is in heaven; but after the lineaments of Christ, by our walking
here in holiness, righteousness, and truth. And so wholly intent on the inculcation of
moral conduct is he throughout. this passage, that he tells us we ought to bear the image
of Christ in this flesh of ours, and in this period of instruction and discipline. For
when he says "let us bear" in the imperative mood, he suits his words to the present life,
in which man exists in no other substance than as flesh and soul; or if it is another,
even the heavenly, substance to which this faith (of ours) looks forward, yet the promise
is made to that substance to which the injunction is given to labour earnestly to merit
its reward. Since, therefore, he makes the image both of the earthy and the heavenly
consist of moral conduct-the one to be abjured, and the other to be pursued-and then
consistently adds, "For this I say" (on account, that is, of what I have already said,
because the conjunction "for" connects what follows with the preceding words) "that flesh
and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God," -he means the flesh and blood to be
understood in no other sense than the before-mentioned "image of the earthy;

4 "and since this is reckoned to consist in "the old conversation," which old conversation
receives not the kingdom of God, therefore flesh and blood, by not receiving the kingdom
of God, are reduced to the life of the old conversation. Of course, as the apostle has
never put the substance for the works of man, he cannot use such a construction here.
Since, however he has declared of men which are yet alive in the flesh, that they "are not
in the flesh," meaning that they are not living in the works of the flesh, you ought not
to subvert its form nor its substance, but only the works done in the substance (of the
flesh), alienating us from the kingdom of God. It is after displaying to the Galatians
these pernicious works that he professes to warn them beforehand, even as he had "told
them in time past, that they which do such things should not inherit the kingdom of God,"
even because they bore not the image of the heavenly, as they had borne the image of the
earthy; and so, in consequence of their old conversation, they were to be regarded as
nothing else than flesh and blood.

5 But even if the apostle had abruptly thrown out the sentence that flesh and blood must
be excluded from the kingdom of God, without any previous intimation, of his meaning,
would it not have been equally our duty to interpret these two substances as the old man
abandoned to mere flesh and blood-in other words, to eating and drinking, one feature of
which would be to speak against the faith of the resurrection: "Let us eat and drink, for
to-morrow we die. Now, when the apostle parenthetically inserted this, he censured flesh
and blood because of their enjoyment in eating and drinking.

CHAPTER L.-IN WHAT SENSE FLESH AND BLOOD ARE EXCLUDED FROM THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

1 Putting aside, however, all interpretations of this sort, which criminate the works of
the flesh and blood, it may be permitted me to claim for the resurrection these very
substances, understood in none other than their natural sense. For it is not the
resurrection that is directly denied to flesh and blood, but the kingdom of God, which is
incidental to the resurrection (for there is a resurrection of judgment also); and there
is even a confirmation of the general resurrection of the flesh, whenever a special one is
excepted. Now, when it is clearly stated what the condition is to which the resurrection
does not lead, it is understood what that is to which it does lead; and, therefore, whilst
it is in consideration of men's merits that a difference is made in their resurrection by
their conduct in the flesh, and not by the substance thereof, it is evident even from
this, that flesh and blood are excluded from the kingdom of God in respect of their sin,
not of their substance; and although in respect of their natural condition they will rise
again for the judgment, because they rise not for the kingdom. Again, I will say, "Flesh
and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; " and justly (does the apostle declare this
of them, considered) alone and in themselves, in order to show that the Spirit is still
needed (to qualify them) for the kingdom. For it is "the Spirit that quickeneth" us for
the kingdom of God; "the flesh profiteth nothing.

2 There is, however, something else which can be profitable thereunto, that is, the
Spirit; and through the Spirit, the works also of the Spirit. Flesh and blood, therefore,
must in every case rise again, equally, in their proper quality. But they to whom it is
granted to enter the kingdom of God, will have to put on the power of an incorruptible and
immortal life; for without this, or before they are able to obtain it, they cannot enter
into the kingdom of God. With good reason, then, flesh and blood, as we have already said,
by themselves fail to obtain the kingdom of God. But inasmuch as "this corruptible (that
is, the flesh) must put on incorruption, and this mortal (that is, the blood) must put on
immortality," by the change which is to follow the resurrection, it will, for the best of
reasons, happen that flesh and blood, after that change and investiture, will become able
to inherit the kingdom of God-but not without the resurrection.

3 Some will have it, that by the phrase "flesh and blood," because of its rite of
circumcision, Judaism is meant, which is itself too alienated from the kingdom of God, as
being accounted "the old or former conversation," and as being designated by this title in
another passage of the apostle also, who, "when it pleased God to reveal to him His Son,
to preach Him amongst the heathen, immediately conferred not with flesh and blood," as he
writes to the Galatians, (meaning by the phrase) the circumcision, that is to say,
Judaism.

CHAPTER LI.-THE SESSION OF JESUS IN HIS INCARNATE NATURE AT THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD A GUARANTEE OF THE RESURRECTION OF OUR FLESH.

1 That, however, which we have reserved for a concluding argument, will now stand as a
plea for all, and for the apostle himself, who in very deed would have to be charged with
extreme indiscretion, if he had so abruptly, as some will have it, and as they say,
blindfold, and so indiscriminately, and so unconditionally, excluded from the kingdom of
God, and indeed from the court of heaven itself, all flesh and blood whatsoever; since
Jesus is still sitting there at the right hand of the Father, man, yet God-the last Adam,
yet the primary Word-flesh and blood, yet purer than ours-who "shall descend in like
manner as He ascended into heaven" the same both in substance and form, as the angels
affirmed, so as even to be recognised by those who pierced Him. Designated, as He is, "the
Mediator between God and man," He keeps in His own self the deposit of the flesh which has
been committed to Him by both parties-the pledge and security of its entire perfection.
For as "He has given to us the earnest of the Spirit, " so has He received from us the
earnest of the flesh, and has carried it with Him into heaven as a pledge of that complete
entirety which is one day to be restored to it. Be not disquieted, O flesh and blood, with
any care; in Christ you have acquired both heaven and the kingdom of God.

2 Otherwise, if they say that you are not in Christ, let them also say that Christ is not
in heaven, since they have denied you heaven. Likewise "neither shall corruption," says
he, "inherit incorruption. This he says, not that you may take flesh and blood to be
corruption, for they are themselves rather the subjects of corruption,-I mean through
death, since death does not so much corrupt, as actually consume, our flesh and blood. But
inasmuch as he had plainly said that the works of the flesh and blood could not obtain the
kingdom of God, with the view of stating this with accumulated stress, he deprived
corruption itself-that is, death, which profits so largely by the works of the flesh and
blood-from all inheritance of incorruption. For a little afterwards, he has described what
is, as it were, the death of death itself: "Death," says he, "is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin
"-here is the corruption; "and the strength of sin is the law" -that other law, no doubt,
which he has described "in his members as warring against the law of his mind," -meaning,
of course, the actual power of sinning against his will. Now he says in a previous passage
(of our Epistle to the Corinthians), that "the last enemy to be destroyed is death. In
this way, then, it is that corruption shall not inherit incorruption; in other words,
death shall not continue. When and how shall it cease?

3 In that "moment, that twinkling of an eye, at the last trump, when the dead shall rise
incorruptible. But what are these, if not they who were corruptible before-that is, our
bodies; in other words, our flesh and blood? And we undergo the change. But in what
condition, if not in that wherein we shall be found? "For this corruptible must put on
incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. What mortal is this but the flesh?
what corruptible but the blood. Moreover, that you may not suppose the apostle to have any
other meaning, in his care to teach you, and that you may understand him seriously to
apply his statement to the flesh, when he says "this corruptible" and "this mortal," he
utters the words while touching the surface of his own body. He certainly could not have
pronounced these phrases except in reference to an object which was palpable and apparent.
The expression indicates a bodily exhibition. Moreover, a corruptible body is one thing,
and corruption is another; so a mortal body is one thing, and mortality is another. For
that which suffers is one thing, and that which causes it to suffer is another.
Consequently, those things which are subject to corruption and mortality, even the flesh
and blood, must needs also be susceptible of incorruption and immortality.

CHAPTER LII.-FROM ST. PAUL'S ANALOGY OF THE SEED WE LEARN THAT THE BODY WHICH DIED WILL RISE AGAIN, GARNISHED WITH THE APPLIANCES OF ETERNAL LIFE.

1 Let us now see in what body he asserts that the dead will come. And with a felicitous
sally he proceeds at once to illustrate the point, as if an objector had plied him with
some such question. "Thou fool," says he, "that which thou sowest is not quickened, except
it die. From this example of the seed it is then evident that no other flesh is quickened
than that which shall have undergone death, and therefore all the rest of the question
will become clear enough. For nothing which is incompatible with the idea suggested by the
example can possibly be understood; nor from the clause which follows, "That which thou
sowest, thou sowest not the body which shall be," are you permitted to suppose that in the
resurrection a different body is to arise from that which is sown in death. Otherwise you
have run away from the example. For if wheat be sown and dissolved in the ground, barley
does not spring up. Still it is not the very same grain in kind; nor is its nature the
same, or its quality and form. Then whence comes it, if it is not the very same? For even
the decay is a proof of the thing itself, since it is the decay of the actual grain.

2 Well, but does not the apostle himself suggest in what sense it is that "the body which
shall be" is not the body which is sown, even when he says, "But bare grain, it may chance
of wheat, or of some other grain; but God giveth it a body as it pleaseth Him? " Gives it
of course to the grain which he says is sown bare. No doubt, you say. Then the grain is
safe enough, to which God has to assign a body. But how safe, if it is nowhere in
existence, if it does not rise again if it rises not again its actual self? If it rises
not again, it is not safe; and if it is not even safe, it cannot receive a body from God.
But there is every possible proof that it is safe. For what purpose, therefore, will God
give it "a body, as it pleases Him," even when it already has its own "bare" body, unless
it be that in its resurrection it may be no longer bare? That therefore will be additional
matter which is placed over the bare body; nor is that at all destroyed on which the
superimposed matter is put,-nay, it is increased. That, however, is safe which receives
augmentation. The truth is, it is sown the barest grain, without a husk to cover it,
without a spike even in germ, without the protection of a bearded top, without the glory
of a stalk.

3 It rises, however, out of the furrow enriched with a copious crop, built up in a compact
fabric, constructed in a beautiful order, fortified by cultivation, and clothed around on
every side. These are the circumstances which make it another body from God, to which it
is changed not by abolition, but by amplification. And to every seed God has assigned its
own body -not, indeed, its own in the sense of its primitive body-in order that what it
acquires from God extrinsically may also at last be accounted its own. Cleave firmly then
to the example, and keep it well in view, as a mirror of what happens to the flesh:
believe that the very same flesh which was once sown in death will bear fruit in
resurrection-life-the same in essence, only more full and perfect; not another, although
reappearing in another form. For it shall receive in itself the grace and ornament which
God shall please to spread over it, according to its merits. Unquestionably it is in this
sense that he says, "All flesh is not the same flesh; " meaning not to deny a community of
substance, but a parity of prerogative,-reducing the body to a difference of honour, not
of nature. With this view he adds, in a figurative sense, certain examples of animals and
heavenly bodies:

4 "There is one flesh of man" (that is, servants of God, but really human), "another flesh
of beasts" (that is, the heathen, of whom the prophet actually says, "Man is like the
senseless cattle" ), "another flesh of birds" (that is, the martyrs which essay to mount
up to heaven), "another of fishes" (that is, those whom the water of baptism has
submerged). In like manner does he take examples from the heavenly bodies: "There is one
glory of the sun" (that is, of Christ), "and another glory of the moon" (that is, of the
Church), "and another glory of the stars" (in other words, of the seed of Abraham). "For
one star differeth from another star in glory: so there are bodies terrestrial as well as
celestial" (Jews, that is, as well as Christians). Now, if this language is not to be
construed figuratively, it was absurd enough for him to make a contrast between the flesh
of mules and kites, as well as the heavenly bodies and human bodies; for they admit of no
comparison as to their condition, nor in respect of their attainment of a resurrection.
Then at last, having conclusively shown by his examples that the difference was one of
glory, not of substance, he adds: "So also is the resurrection of the dead. How so? In no
other way than as differing in glory only. For again, predicating the resurrection of the
same substance and returning once more to (his comparison of) the grain, he says:

5 "It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonour, it is
raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body,
it is raised a spiritual body. Now, certainly nothing else is raised than that which is
sown; and nothing else is sown than that which decays in the ground; and it is nothing
else than the flesh which is decayed in the ground. For this was the substance which God's
decree demolished, "Earth thou art, and to earth shalt thou return; " because it was taken
out of the earth. And it was from this circumstance that the apostle borrowed his phrase
of the flesh being "sown," since it returns to the ground, and the ground is the grand
depository for seeds which are meant to be deposited in it, and again sought out of it.
And therefore he confirms the passage afresh, by putting on it the impress (of his own
inspired authority), saying, "For so it is written; " that you may not suppose that the
"being sown" means anything else than "thou shalt return to the ground, out of which thou
wast taken; "nor that the phrase "for so it is written" refers to any other thing that the
flesh.

CHAPTER LIII.-NOT THE SOUL, BUT THE NATURAL BODY WHICH DIED, IS THAT WHICH IS TO RISE AGAIN. THE RESURRECTION OF LAZARUS COMMENTED ON. CHRIST'S RESURRECTION, AS THE SECOND ADAM, GUARANTEES OUR OWN.

1 Some, however, contend that the soul is "the natural (or animate) body, " with the view
of withdrawing the flesh from all connection with the risen body. Now, since it is a clear
and fixed point that the body which is to rise again is that which was sown in death, they
must be challenged to an examination of the very fact itself. Else let them show that the
soul was sown after death; in a word, that it underwent death,-that is, was demolished,
dismembered, dissolved in the ground, nothing of which was ever decreed against it by God:
let them display to our view its corruptibility and dishonour (as well as) its weakness,
that it may also accrue to it to rise again in incorruption, and in glory, and in power.
Now in the ease of Lazarus, (which we may take as) the palmary instance of a resurrection,
the flesh lay prostrate in weakness, the flesh was almost putrid in the dishonour of its
decay, the flesh stank in corruption, and yet it was as flesh that Lazarus rose again-with
his soul, no doubt. But that soul was incorrupt; nobody had wrapped it in its linen
swathes; nobody had deposited it in a grave; nobody had yet perceived it "stink; "nobody
for four days had seen it "sown. Well, now, this entire condition, this whole end of
Lazarus, the flesh indeed of all men is still experiencing, but the soul of no one.

2 That substance, therefore, to which the apostle's whole description manifestly refers,
of which he clearly speaks, must be both the natural (or animate) body when it is sown,
and the spiritual body when it is raised again. For in order that you may understand it in
this sense, he points to this same conclusion, when in like manner, on the authority of
the same passage of Scripture, he displays to us "the first man Adam as made a living
soul. Now since Adam was the first man, since also the flesh was man prior to the soul it
undoubtedly follows that it was the flesh that became the living soul. Moreover, since it
was a bodily substance that assumed this condition, it was of course the natural (or
animate) body that became the living soul. By what designation would they have it called,
except that which it became through the soul, except that which it was not previous to the
soul, except that which it can never be after the soul, but through its resurrection? For
after it has recovered the soul, it once more becomes the natural (or animate) body, in
order that it may become a spiritual body. For it only resumes in the resurrection the
condition which it once had. There is therefore by no means the same good reason why the
soul should be called the natural (or animate) body, which the flesh has for bearing that
designation. The flesh, in fact, was a body before it was an animate body.

3 When the flesh was joined by the soul, it then became the natural (or animate) body.
Now, although the soul is a corporeal substance, yet, as it is not an animated body, but
rather an animating one, it cannot be called the animate (or natural) body, nor can it
become that thing which it produces. It is indeed when the soul accrues to something else
that it makes that thing animate; but unless it so accrues, how will it ever produce
animation? As therefore the flesh was at first an animate (or natural) body on receiving
the soul, so at last will it become a spiritual body when invested with the spirit. Now
the apostle, by severally adducing this order in Adam and in Christ, fairly distinguishes
between the two states, in the very essentials of their difference. And when he calls
Christ "the last Adam," you may from this circumstance discover how strenuously he labours
to establish throughout his teaching the resurrection of the flesh, not of the soul. Thus,
then, the first man Adam was flesh, not soul, and only afterwards became a living soul;
and the last Adam, Christ, was Adam only because He was man, and only man as being flesh,
not as being soul. Accordingly the apostle goes on to say: "Howbeit that was not first
which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual," as
in the case of the two Adams.

4 Now, do you not suppose that he is distinguishing between the natural body and the
spiritual body in the same flesh, after having already drawn the distinction therein in
the two Adams, that is, in the first man and in the last? For from which substance is it
that Christ and Adam have a parity with each other? No doubt it is from their flesh,
although it may be from their soul also. It is, however, in respect of the flesh that they
are both man; for the flesh was man prior to the saul. It was actually from it that they
were able to take rank, so as to be deemed-one the first, and the other the last man, or
Adam. Besides, things which are different in character are only incapable of being
arranged in the same order when their diversity is one of substance; for when it is a
diversity either in respect of place, or of time, or of condition, they probably do admit
of classification together. Here, however, they are called first and last, from the
substance of their (common) flesh, just as afterwards again the first man (is said to be)
of the earth, and the second of heaven; but although He is "of heaven" in respect of the
spirit, He is yet man according to the flesh.

5 Now since it is the flesh, and not the soul, that makes an order (or classification
together) in the two Adams compatible, so that the distinction is drawn between them of
"the first man becoming a living soul, and the last a quickening spirit," so in like
manner this distinction between them has already suggested the conclusion that the
distinction is due to the flesh; so that it is of the flesh that these words speak:
"Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward
that which is spiritual. And thus, too, the same flesh must be understood in a preceding
passage: "That which is sown is the natural body, and that which rises again is the
spiritual body; because that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural:
since the first Adam was made a living soul, the last Adam a quickening spirit. It is all
about man, and all about the flesh because about man.

6 What shall we say then? Has not the flesh even now (in this life) the spirit by faith?
so that the question still remains to be asked, how it is that the animate (or natural)
body can be said to be sown? Surely the flesh has received even here the spirit-but only
its "earnest; " whereas of the soul (it has received) not the earnest, but the full
possession. Therefore it has the name of animate (or natural) body, expressly because of
the higher substance of the soul (or anima, ) in which it is sown, destined hereafter to
become, through the full possession of the spirit which it shall obtain, the spiritual
body, in which it is raised again. What wonder, then, if it is more commonly called after
the substance with which it is fully furnished, than after that of which it has yet but a
sprinkling?

CHAPTER LIV.-DEATH SWALLOWED UP OF LIFE. MEANING OF THIS PHRASE IN RELATION TO THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY.

1 Then, again, questions very often are suggested by occasional and isolated terms, just
as much as they are by connected sentences. Thus, because of the apostle's expression,
"that mortality may be swallowed up of life " -in reference to the flesh-they wrest the
word swallowed up into the sense of the actual destruction of the flesh; as if we might
not speak of ourselves as swallowing bile, or swallowing grief, meaning that we conceal
and hide it, and keep it within ourselves. The truth is, when it is written, "This mortal
must put on immortality," it is explained in what sense it is that "mortality is swallowed
up of life "-even whilst, clothed with immortality, it is hidden and concealed, and
contained within it, not as consumed, and destroyed, and lost. But death, you will say in
reply to me, at this rate, must be safe, even when it has been swallowed up. Well, then, I
ask you to distinguish words which are similar in form according to their proper meanings.
Death is one thing, and morality is another. It is one thing for death to be swallowed up,
and another thing for mortality to be swallowed up. Death is incapable of immortality, but
not so mortality. Besides, as it is written that "this mortal must put on immortality,"
how is this possible when it is swallowed up of life? But how is it swallowed up of life,
(in the sense of destroyed by it) when it is actually received, and restored, and included
in it?

2 For the rest, it is only just and right that death should be swallowed up in utter
destruction, since it does itself devour with this same intent. Death, says the apostle,
has devoured by exercising its strength, and therefore has been itself devoured in the
struggle "swallowed up in victory. "O death, where is thy sting? O death, where is thy
victory? " Therefore life, too, as the great antagonist of death, will in the struggle
swallow up for salvation what death, in its struggle, had swallowed up for destruction.

CHAPTER LV.-THE CHANGE OF A THING'S CONDITION IS NOT THE DESTRUCTION OF ITS SUBSTANCE. THE APPLICATION OF THIS PRINCIPLE TO OUR SUBJECT.

1 Now although, in proving that the flesh shall rise again we ipso facto prove that no
other flesh will partake of that resurrection than that which is in question, yet
insulated questions and their occasions do require even discussions of their own, even if
they have been already sufficiently met. We will therefore give a fuller explanation of
the force and the reason of a change which (is so great, that it) almost suggests the
presumption that it is a different flesh which is to rise again; as if, indeed, so great a
change amounted to utter cessation, and a complete destruction of the former self. A
distinction, however, must be made between a change, however great, and everything which
has the character of destruction. For undergoing change is one thing, but being destroyed
is another thing. Now this distinction would no longer exist, if the flesh were to suffer
such a change as amounts to destruction. Destroyed, however, it must be by the change,
unless it shall itself persistently remain throughout the altered condition which shall be
exhibited in the resurrection. For precisely as it perishes, if it does not rise again, so
also does it equally perish even if it does rise again, on the supposition that it is lost
in the change. It will as much fail of a future existence, as if it did not rise again at
all.

2 And how absurd is it to rise again for the purpose of not having a being, when it had it
in its power not to rise again, and so lose airs being-because it had already begun its
non-existence! Now, things which are absolutely different, as mutation and destruction
are, will not admit of mixture and confusion; in their operations, too, they differ. One
destroys, the other changes. Therefore, as that which is destroyed is not changed, so that
which is changed is not destroyed. To perish is altogether to cease to be what a thing
once was, whereas to be changed is to exist in another condition. Now, if a thing exists
in another condition, it can still be the same thing itself; for since it does not perish,
it has its existence still. A change, indeed, it has experienced, but not a destruction. A
thing may undergo a complete change, and yet remain still the same thing. In like manner,
a man also may be quite himself in substance even in the present life, and for all that
undergo various changes-in habit, in bodily bulk, in health, in condition, in dignity, and
in age-in taste, business, means, houses, laws and customs-and still lose nothing of his
human nature, nor so to be made another man as to cease to be the same; indeed, I ought
hardly to say another man, but another thing. This form of change even the Holy Scriptures
give us instances of.

3 The hand of Moses is changed, and it becomes like a dead one, bloodless, colourless, and
stiff with cold; but on the recovery of heat, and on the restoration of its natural
colour, it is again the same flesh and blood Afterwards the face of the same Moses is
changed, with a brightness which eye could not bear. But he was Moses still, even when he
was not visible. So also Stephen had already put on the appearance of an angel, although
they were none other than his human knees which bent beneath the stoning. The Lord, again,
in the retirement of the mount, had changed His raiment for a robe of light; but He still
retained features which Peter could recognise. In that same scene Moses also and Elias
gave proof that the same condition of bodily existence may continue even in glory-the one
in the likeness of a flesh which he had not yet recovered, the other in the reality of one
which he had not yet put off. It was as full of this splendid example that Paul said: "Who
shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body. But if
you maintain that a transfiguration and a conversion amounts to the annihilation of any
substance, then it follows that "Saul, when changed into another man," passed away from
his own bodily substance; and that Satan himself, when "transformed into an angel of
light," loses his own proper character. Such is not my opinion.

4 So likewise changes, conversions and reformations will necessarily take place to bring
about the resurrection, but the substance of the flesh will still be preserved safe.

CHAPTER LVI.-THE PROCEDURE OF THE LAST JUDGMENT, AND ITS AWARDS, ONLY POSSIBLE ON THE IDENTITY OF THE RISEN BODY WITH OUR PRESENT FLESH.

For how absurd, and in truth how unjust, and in both respects how unworthy of God, for one
substance to do the work, and another to reap the reward: that this flesh of ours should
be torn by martyrdom, and another wear the crown; or, on the other hand, that this flesh
of ours should wallow in uncleanness, and another receive the condemnation! Is it not
better to renounce all faith at once in the hope of the resurrection, than to trifle with
the wisdom and justice of God? Better that Marcion should rise again than Valentinus. For
it cannot be believed that the mind, or the memory, or the conscience of existing man is
abolished by putting on that change of raiment which immortality and incorruption
supplies; for in that case all the gain and fruit of the resurrection, and the permanent
effect of God's judgment both on soul and body, would certainly fall to the ground. If I
remember not that it is I who have served Him, how shall I ascribe glory to God? How sing
to Him "the new song," if I am ignorant that it is I who owe Him thanks? But why is
exception taken only against the change of the flesh, and not of the soul also, which in
all things is superior to the flesh? How happens it, that the self-same soul which in our
present flesh has gone through all life's course, which has learnt the knowledge of God,
and put on Christ, and sown the hope of salvation in this flesh, must reap its harvest in
another flesh of which we know nothing? Verily that must be a most highly favoured flesh,
which shall have the enjoyment of life at so gratuitous a rate! But if the soul is not to
be changed also, then there is no resurrection of the soul; nor will it be believed to
have itself risen, unless it has risen some different thing.

CHAPTER LVII.-OUR BODIES, HOWEVER MUTILATED BEFORE OR AFTER DEATH, SHALL RECOVER THEIR PERFECT INTEGRITY IN THE RESURRECTION. ILLUSTRATION OF THE ENFRANCHISED SLAVE.

1 We now come to the most usual cavil of unbelief. If, they say, it be actually the
selfsame substance which is recalled to life with all its form, and lineaments, and
quality, then why not with all its other characteristics? Then the blind, and the lame,
and the palsied, and whoever else may have passed away with any conspicuous mark, will
return again with the same. What now is the fact, although you in the greatness of your
conceit thus disdain to accept from God so vast a grace? Does it not happen that, when you
now admit the salvation of only the soul, you ascribe it to men at the cost of half their
nature? What is the good of believing in the resurrection, unless your faith embraces the
whole of it? If the flesh is to be repaired after its dissolution, much more will it be
restored after some violent injury. Greater cases prescribe rules for lesser ones. Is not
the amputation or the crushing of a limb the death of that limb? Now, if the death of the
whole person is rescinded by its resurrection, what must we say of the death of a part of
him? If we are changed for glory, how much more for integrity! Any loss sustained by our
bodies is an accident to them, but their entirety is their natural property. In this
condition we are born. Even if we become injured in the womb, this is loss suffered by
what is already a human being. Natural condition" is prior to injury.

2 As life is bestowed by God, so is it restored by Him. As we are when we receive it, so
are we when we recover it. To nature, not to injury, are we restored; to our state by
birth, not to our condition by accident, do we rise again. If God raises not men entire,
He raises not the dead. For what dead man is entire, although he dies entire? Who is
without hurt, that is without life? What body is uninjured, when it is dead, when it is
cold, when it is ghastly, when it is stiff, when it is a corpse? When is a man more
infirm, than when he is entirely infirm? When more palsied, than when quite motionless?
Thus, for a dead man to be raised again, amounts to nothing short of his being restored to
his entire condition,-lest he, forsooth, be still dead in that part in which he has not
risen again. God is quite able to re-make what He once made. This power and this unstinted
grace of His He has already sufficiently guaranteed in Christ; and has displayed Himself
to us (in Him) not only as the restorer of the flesh, but as the repairer of its breaches.
And so the apostle says: "The dead shall be raised incorruptible" (or unimpaired). But how
so, unless they become entire, who have wasted away either in the loss of their health, or
in the long decrepitude of the grave?

3 For when he propounds the two clauses, that "this corruptible must put on incorruption,
and this mortal must put on immortality, " he does not repeat the same statement, but sets
forth a distinction. For, by assigning immortality to the repeating of death, and
incorruption to the repairing of the wasted body, he has fitted one to the raising and the
other to the retrieval of the body. I suppose, moreover, that he promises to the
Thessalonians the integrity of the whole substance of man. So that for the great future
there need be no fear of blemished or defective bodies. Integrity, whether the result of
preservation or restoration, will be able to lose nothing more, after the time that it has
given back to it whatever it had lost. Now, when you contend that the flesh will still
have to undergo the same sufferings, if the same flesh be said to have to rise again, you
rashly set up nature against her Lord, and impiously contrast her law against His grace;
as if it were not permitted the Lord God both to change nature, and to preserve her,
without subjection to a law. How is it, then, that we read, "With men these things are
impossible, but with God all things are possible; " and again, "God hath chosen the
foolish things of the world to confound the wise?

4 " Let me ask you, if you were to manumit your slave (seeing that the same flesh and soul
will remain to him, which once were exposed to the whip, and the fetter, and the stripes),
will it therefore be fit for him to undergo the same old sufferings? I trow not. He is
instead thereof honoured with the grace of the white robe, and the favour of the gold
ring, and the name and tribe as well as table of his patron. Give, then, the same
prerogative to God, by virtue of such a change, of reforming our condition, not our
nature, by taking away from it all sufferings, and surrounding it with safeguards of
protection. Thus our flesh shall remain even after the resurrection-so far indeed
susceptible of suffering, as it is the flesh, and the same flesh too; but at the same time
impassible, inasmuch as it has been liberated by the Lord for the very end and purpose of
being no longer capable of enduring suffering.

CHAPTER LVIII.-FROM THIS PERFECTION OF OUR RESTORED BODIES WILL FLOW THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF UNDISTURBED JOY AND PEACE.

1 "Everlasting joy," says Isaiah, "shall be upon their heads. Well, there is nothing
eternal until after the resurrection. "And sorrow and sighing," continues he, "shall flee
away. The angel echoes the same to John: "And God shall wipe away all tears from their
eyes; " from the same eyes indeed which had formerly wept, and which might weep again, if
the loving-kindness of God did not dry up every fountain of tears. And again: "God shall
wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death," and therefore no
more corruption, it being chased away by incorruption, even as death is by immortality. If
sorrow, and mourning, and sighing, and death itself, assail us from the afflictions both
of soul and body, how shall they be removed, except by the cessation of their causes, that
is to say, the afflictions of flesh and soul? where will you find adversities in the
presence of God? where, incursions of an enemy in the bosom of Christ? where, attacks of
the devil in the face of the Holy Spirit?-now that the devil himself and his angels are
"cast into the lake of fire. Where now is necessity, and what they call fortune or fate?
What plague awaits the redeemed from death, after their eternal pardon? What wrath is
there for the reconciled, after grace? What weakness, after their renewed strength? What
risk and danger, after their salvation? That the raiment and shoes of the children of
Israel remained unworn and fresh for the space of forty years;

2 that in their very persons the exact point of convenience and propriety checked the rank
growth of their nails and hair, so that any excess herein might not be attributed to
indecency; that the fires of Babylon injured not either the mitres or the trousers of the
three brethren, however foreign such dress might be to the Jews; that Jonah was swallowed
by the monster of the deep, in whose belly whole ships were devoured, and after three days
was vomited out again safe and sound; that Enoch and Elias, who even now, without
experiencing a resurrection (because they have not even encountered death), are learning
to the full what it is for the flesh to be exempted from all humiliation, and all loss,
and all injury, and all disgrace-translated as they have been from this world, and from
this very cause already candidates for everlasting life; -to what faith do these notable
facts bear witness, if not to that which ought to inspire in us the belief that they are
proofs and documents of our own future integrity and perfect resurrection? For, to borrow
the apostle's phrase, these were "figures of ourselves; " and they are written that we may
believe both that the Lord is more powerful than all natural laws about the body, and that
He shows Himself the preserver of the flesh the more emphatically, in that He has
preserved for it its very clothes and shoes.

CHAPTER LIX.-OUR FLESH IN THE RESURRECTION CAPABLE, WITHOUT LOSING ITS ESSENTIAL IDENTITY, OF BEARING THE CHANGED CONDITIONS OF ETERNAL LIFE, OR OF DEATH ETERNAL.

1 But, you object, the world to come bears the character of a different dispensation, even
an eternal one; and therefore, you maintain, that the non-eternal substance of this life
is incapable of possessing a state of such different features. This would be true enough,
if man were made for the future dispensation, and not the dispensation for man. The
apostle, however, in his epistle says, "Whether it be the world, or life, or death, or
things present, or things to come; all are yours: " and he here constitutes us heirs even
of the future world. Isaiah gives you no help when he says, "All flesh is grass; " and in
another passage, "All flesh shall see the salvation of God. It is the issues of men, not
their substances, which he distinguishes. But who does not hold that the judgment of God
consists in the twofold sentence, of salvation and of punishment? Therefore it is that
"all flesh is grass," which is destined to the fire; and "all flesh shall see the
salvation of God," which is ordained to eternal life. For myself, I am quite sure that it
is in no other flesh than my own that I have committed adultery, nor in any other flesh am
I striving after continence. If there be any one who bears about in his person two
instruments of lasciviousness, he has it in his power, to be sure, to mow down "the grass"
of the unclean flesh, and to reserve for himself only that which shall see the salvation
of God.

2 But when the same prophet represents to us even nations sometimes estimated as "the
small dust of the balance," and as "less than nothing, and vanity," and sometimes as about
to hope and "trust in the name" and arm of the Lord, are we at all misled respecting the
Gentile nations by the diversity of statement? Are some of them to turn believers, and are
others accounted dust, from any difference of nature? Nay, rather Christ has shone as the
true light on the nations within the ocean's limits, and from the heaven which is over us
all. Why, it is even on this earth that the Valentinians have gone to school for their
errors; and there will be no difference of condition, as respects their body and soul,
between the nations which believe and those which do not believe. Precisely, then, as He
has put a distinction of state, not of nature, amongst the same nations, so also has He
discriminated their flesh, which is one and the same substance in those nations, not
according to their material structure, but according to the recompense of their merit.

CHAPTER LX.-ALL THE CHARACTERISTICS OF OUR BODIES-SEX, VARIOUS LIMBS, ETC.-WILL BE RETAINED, WHATEVER CHANGE OF FUNCTIONS THESE MAY HAVE, OF WHICH POINT, HOWEVER, WE ARE NO JUDGES. ANALOGY OF THE REPAIRED SHIP.

1 But behold how persistently they still accumulate their cavils against the flesh,
especially against its identity, deriving their arguments even from the functions of our
limbs; on the one hand saying that these ought to continue permanently pursuing their
labours and enjoyments, as appendages to the same corporeal frame; and on the other hand
contending that, inasmuch as the functions of the limbs shall one day come to an end, the
bodily frame itself must be destroyed, its permanence without its limbs being deemed to be
as inconceivable, as that of the limbs themselves without their functions! What, they ask,
will then be the use of the cavity of our mouth, and its rows of teeth, and the passage of
the throat, and the branch-way of the stomach, and the gulf of the belly, and the
entangled tissue of the bowels, when there shall no longer be room for eating and
drinking? What more will there be for these members to take in, masticate, swallow,
secrete, digest, eject? Of what avail will be our very hands, and feet, and all our
labouring limbs, when even all care about food shall cease? What purpose can be served by
loins, conscious of seminal secretions, and all the other organs of generation, in the two
sexes, and the laboratories of embryos, and the fountains of the breast, when concubinage,
and pregnancy, and infant nurture shall cease? In short, what will be the use of the
entire body, when the entire body shall become useless?

2 In reply to all this, we have then already settled the principle that the dispensation
of the future state ought not to be compared with that of the present world, and that in
the interval between them a change will take place; and we now add the remark, that these
functions of our bodily limbs will continue to supply the needs of this life up to the
moment when life itself shall pass away from time to eternity, as the natural body gives
place to the spiritual, until "this mortal puts on immorality, and this corruptible puts
on incorruption: " so that when life shall itself become freed from all wants, our limbs
shall then be freed also from their services, and therefore will be no longer wanted.
Still, although liberated from their offices, they will be yet preserved for judgment,
"that every one may receive the things done in his body. For the judgment-seat of God
requires that man be kept entire. Entire, however, he cannot be without his limbs, of the
substance of which, not the functions, he consists; unless, forsooth, you will be bold
enough to maintain that a ship is perfect without her keel, or her bow, or her stern, and
without the solidity of her entire t frame. And yet how often have we seen the same ship,
after being shattered with the storm and broken by decay, with all her timbers repaired
and restored, gallantly riding on the wave in all the beauty of a renewed fabric!

3 Do we then disquiet ourselves with doubt about God's skill, and will, and rights?
Besides, if a wealthy shipowner, who does not grudge money merely for his amusement or
show, thoroughly repairs his ship, and then chooses that she should make no further
voyages, will you contend that the old form and finish is still not necessary to the
vessel, although she is no longer meant for actual service, when the mere safety of a ship
requires such completeness irrespective of service? The sole question, therefore, which is
enough for us to consider here, is whether the Lord, when He ordains salvation for man,
intends it for his flesh; whether it is His will that the selfsame flesh shall be renewed.
If so, it will be improper for you to rule, from the in utility of its limbs in the future
state, that the flesh will be incapable of renovation. For a thing may be renewed, and yet
be useless from having nothing to do; but it cannot be said to be useless if it has no
existence. If, indeed, it has existence, it will be quite possible for it also not to be
useless; it may possibly have something to do; for in the presence of God there will be no
idleness.

CHAPTER LXI.-THE DETAILS OF OUR BODILY SEX, AND OF THE FUNCTIONS OF OUR VARIOUS MEMBERS. APOLOGY FOR THE NECESSITY WHICH HERESY IMPOSES OF HUNTING UP ALL ITS UNBLUSHING CAVILS.

1 Now you have received your mouth, O man, for the purpose of devouring your food and
imbibing your drink: why not, however, for the higher purpose of uttering speech, so as to
distinguish yourself from all other animals? Why not rather for preaching the gospel of
God, that so you may become even His priest and advocate before men? Adam indeed gave
their several names to the animals, before he plucked the fruit of the tree; before he
ate, he prophesied. Then, again, you received your teeth for the consumption of your meal:
why not rather for wreathing your mouth with suitable defence on every opening thereof,
small or wide? Why not, too, for moderating the impulses of your tongue, and guarding your
articulate speech from failure and violence? Let me tell you, (if you do not know), that
there are toothless persons in the world. Look at them, and ask whether even a cage of
teeth be not an honour to the mouth. There are apertures in the lower regions of man and
woman, by means of which they gratify no doubt their animal passions; but why are they not
rather regarded as outlets for the cleanly discharge of natural fluids? Women, moreover,
have within them receptacles where human seed may collect; but are they not designed for
the secretion of those sanguineous issues, which their tardier and weaker sex is
inadequate to disperse?

2 For even details like these require to be mentioned, seeing that heretics single out
what parts of our bodies may suit them, handle them without delicacy, and, as their whim
suggests, pour torrents of scorn and contempt upon the natural functions of our members,
for the purpose of upsetting the resurrection, and making us blush over their cavils; not
reflecting that before the functions cease, the very causes of them will have passed away.
There will be no more meat, because no more hunger; no more drink, because no more thirst;
no more concubinage, because no more child-bearing; no more eating and drinking, because
no more labour and toil. Death, too, will cease; so there will be no more need of the
nutriment of food for the defence of life, nor will mothers' limbs any longer have to be
laden for the replenishment of our race. But even in the present life there may be
cessations of their office for our stomachs and our generative organs. For forty days
Moses and Elias fasted, and lived upon God alone. For even so early was the principle
consecrated: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of
the mouth of God. See here faint outlines of our future strength! We even, as we may be
able, excuse our mouths from food, and withdraw our sexes from union. How many voluntary
eunuchs are there! How many virgins espoused to Christ!

3 How many, both of men and women, whom nature has made sterile, with a structure which
cannot procreate! Now, if even here on earth both the functions and the pleasures of our
members may be suspended, with an intermission which, like the dispensation itself, can
only be a temporary one, and yet man's safety is nevertheless unimpaired, how much more,
when his salvation is secure, and especially in an eternal dispensation, shall we not
cease to desire those things, for which, even here below, we are not unaccustomed to check
our longings!

CHAPTER LXII.-OUR DESTINED LIKENESS TO THE ANGELS IN THE GLORIOUS LIFE OF THE RESURRECTION.

To this discussion, however, our Lord's declaration puts an effectual end: "They shall
be," says He, "equal unto the angels." As by not marrying, because of not dying, so, of
course, by not having to yield to any like necessity of our bodily state; even as the
angels, too, sometimes. were "equal unto" men, by eating and drinking, and submitting
their feet to the washing of the bath-having clothed themselves in human guise, without i
the loss of their own intrinsic nature. If therefore angels, when they became as men,
submitted in their own unaltered substance of spirit to be treated as if they were flesh,
why shall not men in like manner, when they become "equal unto the angels," undergo in
their unchanged substance of flesh the treatment of spiritual beings, no more exposed to
the usual solicitations of the flesh in their angelic garb, than were the angels once to
those of the spirit when encompassed in human form? We shall not therefore cease to
continue in the flesh, because we cease to be importuned by the usual wants of the flesh;
just as the angels ceased not therefore to remain in their spiritual substance, because of
the suspension of their spiritual incidents. Lastly, Christ said not, "They shall be
angels," in order not to repeal their existence as men; but He said, "They shall be equal
unto the angels, that He might preserve their humanity unimpaired. When He ascribed an
angelic likeness to the flesh, He took not from it its proper substance.

CHAPTER LXIII.-CONCLUSION. THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH IN ITS ABSOLUTE IDENTITY AND PERFECTION. BELIEF OF THIS HAD BECOME WEAK. HOPES FOR ITS REFRESHING RESTORATION UNDER THE INFLUENCES OF THE PARACLETE.

1 And so the flesh shall rise again, wholly in every man, in its own identity, in its
absolute integrity. Wherever it may be, it is in safe keeping in God's presence, through
that most faithful "Mediator between God and man, (the man) Jesus Christ," who shall
reconcile both God to man, and man to God; the spirit to the flesh, and the flesh to the
spirit. Both natures has He already united in His own self; He has fitted them together as
bride and bridegroom in the reciprocal bond of wedded life. Now, if any should insist on
making the soul the bride, then the flesh will follow the soul as her dowry. The soul
shall never be an outcast, to be had home by the bridegroom bare and naked. She has her
dower, her outfit, her fortune in the flesh, which shall accompany her with the love and
fidelity of a foster-sister. But suppose the flesh to be the bride, then in Christ Jesus
she has in the contract of His blood received His Spirit as her spouse. Now, what you take
to be her extinction, you may be sure is only her temporary retirement. It is not the soul
only which withdraws from view. The flesh, too, has her departures for a while-in waters,
in fires, in birds, in beasts; she may seem to be dissolved into these, but she is only
poured into them, as into vessels.

2 And should the vessels themselves afterwards fail to hold her, escaping from even these,
and returning to her mother earth, she is absorbed once more, as it were, by its secret
embraces, ultimately to stand forth to view, like Adam when summoned to hear from his Lord
and Creator the words, "Behold, the man is become as one of us!" -thoroughly "knowing" by
that time "the evil" which she had escaped, "and the good" which she has acquired. Why,
then, O soul, should you envy the flesh? There is none, after the Lord, whom you should
love so dearly; none more like a brother to you, which is even born along with yourself in
God. You ought rather to have been by your prayers obtaining resurrection for her: her
sins, whatever they were, were owing to you. However, it is no wonder if you hate her; for
you have repudiated her Creator. You have accustomed yourself either to deny or change her
existence even in Christ -corrupting the very Word of God Himself, who became flesh,
either by mutilating or misinterpreting the Scripture, and introducing, above all,
apocryphal mysteries and blasphemous fables.

3 But yet Almighty God, in His most gracious providence, by "pouring out of His Spirit in
these last days, upon all flesh, upon His servants and on His handmaidens," has checked
these impostures of unbelief and perverseness, reanimated men's faltering faith in the
resurrection of the flesh, and cleared from all obscurity and equivocation the ancient
Scriptures (of both God's Testaments ) by the clear light of their (sacred) words and
meanings. Now, since it was "needful that there should be heresies, in order that they
which are approved might be made manifest; " since, however, these heresies would be
unable to put on a bold front without some countenance from the Scriptures, it therefore
is plain enough that the ancient Holy Writ has furnished them with sundry materials for
their evil doctrine, which very materials indeed (so distorted) are refutable from the
same Scriptures. It was fit and proper, therefore, that the Holy Ghost should no longer
withhold the effusions of His gracious light upon these inspired writings, in order that
they might be able to disseminate the seeds of truth with no admixture of heretical
subtleties, and pluck out from it their tares. He has accordingly now dispersed all the
perplexities of the past, and their self-chosen allegories and parables, by the open and
perspicuous explanation of the entire mystery, through the new prophecy, which descends in
copious streams from the Paraclete. If you will only draw water from His fountains, you
will never thirst for other doctrine: no feverish craving after subtle questions will
again consume you;

4 but by drinking in evermore the resurrection of the flesh, you will be satisfied with
the refreshing draughts.


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Where each text comes from, and the licence under which it may be reused.

EXCERPTS OF THEODOTUS English translation from the Ante-Nicene Fathers (edited by
Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson and A. Cleveland Coxe; New York, 1885–1896; public
domain), translated by William Wilson (1806-1888), as transcribed by volunteers of English
Wikisource . SermonIndex has only divided it into chapters and short sections; the wording
is the translator’s own. No Greek or Latin text is shown beside it, and no modern English
version has been made. Licence. The translation is in the public domain (published before
1929). The Wikisource transcription is offered under the Creative Commons Attribution-
ShareAlike licence; we credit it here. Licence: Public domain.

FRAGMENTS English translation: an older public-domain translation as collected in the
Writings-Database (HistoricalChristianFaith), mostly from the Ante-Nicene, Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers and similar nineteenth-century editions. SermonIndex has only divided
it into chapters and short sections; the wording is the translator’s own. No Greek or
Latin text is shown beside it yet, and no modern English version has been made. Licence:
Public domain.

TO THE MARTYRS English translation: an older public-domain translation as collected in the
Writings-Database (HistoricalChristianFaith), mostly from the Ante-Nicene, Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers and similar nineteenth-century editions. SermonIndex has only divided
it into chapters and short sections; the wording is the translator’s own. No Greek or
Latin text is shown beside it yet, and no modern English version has been made. Licence:
Public domain.

THE APOLOGY English translation: an older public-domain translation as collected in the
Writings-Database (HistoricalChristianFaith), mostly from the Ante-Nicene, Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers and similar nineteenth-century editions. SermonIndex has only divided
it into chapters and short sections; the wording is the translator’s own. No Greek or
Latin text is shown beside it yet, and no modern English version has been made. Licence:
Public domain.

TO THE NATIONS English translation: an older public-domain translation as collected in the
Writings-Database (HistoricalChristianFaith), mostly from the Ante-Nicene, Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers and similar nineteenth-century editions. SermonIndex has only divided
it into chapters and short sections; the wording is the translator’s own. No Greek or
Latin text is shown beside it yet, and no modern English version has been made. Licence:
Public domain.

THE SOUL'S TESTIMONY English translation: an older public-domain translation as collected
in the Writings-Database (HistoricalChristianFaith), mostly from the Ante-Nicene, Nicene
and Post-Nicene Fathers and similar nineteenth-century editions. SermonIndex has only
divided it into chapters and short sections; the wording is the translator’s own. No Greek
or Latin text is shown beside it yet, and no modern English version has been made.
Licence: Public domain.

TO SCAPULA English translation: an older public-domain translation as collected in the
Writings-Database (HistoricalChristianFaith), mostly from the Ante-Nicene, Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers and similar nineteenth-century editions. SermonIndex has only divided
it into chapters and short sections; the wording is the translator’s own. No Greek or
Latin text is shown beside it yet, and no modern English version has been made. Licence:
Public domain.

THE SHOWS, OR DE SPECTACULIS English translation: an older public-domain translation as
collected in the Writings-Database (HistoricalChristianFaith), mostly from the Ante-
Nicene, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers and similar nineteenth-century editions.
SermonIndex has only divided it into chapters and short sections; the wording is the
translator’s own. No Greek or Latin text is shown beside it yet, and no modern English
version has been made. Licence: Public domain.

ON IDOLATRY English translation: an older public-domain translation as collected in the
Writings-Database (HistoricalChristianFaith), mostly from the Ante-Nicene, Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers and similar nineteenth-century editions. SermonIndex has only divided
it into chapters and short sections; the wording is the translator’s own. No Greek or
Latin text is shown beside it yet, and no modern English version has been made. Licence:
Public domain.

THE CHAPLET, OR DE CORONA English translation: an older public-domain translation as
collected in the Writings-Database (HistoricalChristianFaith), mostly from the Ante-
Nicene, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers and similar nineteenth-century editions.
SermonIndex has only divided it into chapters and short sections; the wording is the
translator’s own. No Greek or Latin text is shown beside it yet, and no modern English
version has been made. Licence: Public domain.

SCORPIACE English translation: an older public-domain translation as collected in the
Writings-Database (HistoricalChristianFaith), mostly from the Ante-Nicene, Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers and similar nineteenth-century editions. SermonIndex has only divided
it into chapters and short sections; the wording is the translator’s own. No Greek or
Latin text is shown beside it yet, and no modern English version has been made. Licence:
Public domain.

ON FLIGHT IN PERSECUTION English translation: an older public-domain translation as
collected in the Writings-Database (HistoricalChristianFaith), mostly from the Ante-
Nicene, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers and similar nineteenth-century editions.
SermonIndex has only divided it into chapters and short sections; the wording is the
translator’s own. No Greek or Latin text is shown beside it yet, and no modern English
version has been made. Licence: Public domain.

A TREATISE ON THE SOUL English translation: an older public-domain translation as
collected in the Writings-Database (HistoricalChristianFaith), mostly from the Ante-
Nicene, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers and similar nineteenth-century editions.
SermonIndex has only divided it into chapters and short sections; the wording is the
translator’s own. No Greek or Latin text is shown beside it yet, and no modern English
version has been made. Licence: Public domain.

ON THE FLESH OF CHRIST English translation: an older public-domain translation as
collected in the Writings-Database (HistoricalChristianFaith), mostly from the Ante-
Nicene, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers and similar nineteenth-century editions.
SermonIndex has only divided it into chapters and short sections; the wording is the
translator’s own. No Greek or Latin text is shown beside it yet, and no modern English
version has been made. Licence: Public domain.

ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH English translation: an older public-domain translation
as collected in the Writings-Database (HistoricalChristianFaith), mostly from the Ante-
Nicene, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers and similar nineteenth-century editions.
SermonIndex has only divided it into chapters and short sections; the wording is the
translator’s own. No Greek or Latin text is shown beside it yet, and no modern English
version has been made. Licence: Public domain.