Against the Nations 2.69–3.12

'But our name is new, and the religion we follow was born a few days ago.' To grant for the moment that the charge against us is not false, what is there in human affairs, whether done by bodily work and hands or held by the learning and knowledge of the mind alone, that did not begin at some time and come into the use and experience of mortals? Were medicine, philosophy, music, and all the other arts by which common life has been built up and polished born together with human beings, and did they not rather begin only recently, indeed almost a little while ago, to be practiced, understood, and celebrated? Before Tages the Etruscan reached the shores of light, did anyone know, or care to learn and study, whether anything was signified by the fall of thunderbolts or in the veins of entrails? When did the motion of the stars or the reckoning of nativities begin to be known? Was it not after Theuth the Egyptian, or after Atlas, as some say, that bearer, porter, prop, and pillar of heaven? But why do I mention these small things?

Did not the immortal gods themselves, whose temples you now approach and whose deities you adore as suppliants, as your literature and beliefs hand down, begin to exist, to be known, and to be called by the names given them at certain times? For if it is true that Jupiter with his brothers was begotten of Saturn and his wife, before the marriage and childbirth of Ops there was nowhere a Jupiter, Jupiter the supreme or the Stygian one, nowhere a lord of the sea, nowhere a Juno; indeed, no one else dwelt in the seats of heaven except the two parents, but from their union they were conceived and born and drew the breath of life. So at a certain time Jupiter began to be a god, at a certain time to deserve worship and sacrifices, at a certain time to be set above his brothers in power. And again, if Liber, Venus, Diana, Mercury, Apollo, Hercules, the Muses, the Castors sons of Tyndareus, and Vulcan lord of fire were produced by Father Jupiter and begotten of the son of Saturn, then before Memory, before Alcmena, Maia, Juno, Latona, Leda, Dione, and Semele were made pregnant by the embraces of Diespiter, these too were nowhere at all, nor in any part of the nature of things; but, sown by the intercourse of Jupiter, they were born and began to have some sense of themselves. So these too began to exist at a certain time and to be invoked in the number of the deities for sacred ceremonies. The same can be said in turn of Minerva. For if, as you assert, she sprang from the brain of Jupiter without the casting of any seed, then before Diespiter was born and received the form of bodily limitation in his mother's womb, it is certain that Minerva did not exist and was not counted in the number of things or in any substance; but from the time she sprang from Jupiter's head she began to be a thing and to be set in some essence. So she does not have a primal origin, and at a certain time began to be called a goddess, to be set up in sacred temples, and to be hallowed with inviolable religion. Since this is so, when you speak of the novelty of our religion, do your own not come to your mind, and do you not care to consider when your gods arose, what origins, what causes they have, or from what roots they burst and sprang forth? What sense of shame, or rather what shamelessness, is it to blame another for what you see yourself doing, to make a reproach and charge of things that can be turned back against you in return?

'But what we do is ancient and very old, while what you do is new.' And how does that help you, or harm our case and reasoning? What we practice is new; some day it too will become old. What you practice is old; but at the time it began it was new and sudden. The authority of a religion must be judged not by its age but by its deity, and one must consider not on what day but what one has begun to worship. 'Three hundred years ago,' he says, 'your religion did not exist.' And your gods did not exist two thousand years ago. By what reasoning, or by what calculations, can this be gathered? Not difficult or obscure ones, but such as anyone who wishes can see and, as the saying is, handle with his hands. Who begot Jupiter with his brothers? Saturn, joined in marriage with Ops, as you say, himself begotten of Caelus and Hecate. Who begot Picus, the father of Faunus and grandfather of Latinus? Saturn, as you likewise hand down in your writings and authors. If this is so, it follows that Picus and Jupiter are joined by the tie of brotherhood, as being begotten of one blood and one seed. It is reasonable that what is said is so. From Jupiter and Picus down to Latinus, how many degrees of descent are there? Three, as the line shows. Suppose Faunus, Latinus, and Picus each lived one hundred and twenty years; for it is denied that human life can be extended further. The estimate is fair and clear. So there are a full three hundred and sixty years after these? It is so, as the reckoning shows. Whose father-in-law was Latinus? Aeneas's. Aeneas was the father of whom? Of Ascanius, founder of the town of Alba. For how many years was there kingship at Alba? Four hundred and nearly twenty. What age is the city of Rome shown to be in the annals? It counts one thousand and fifty years, or not much less. So from Jupiter, who is the brother of Picus and the father of the lesser and remaining gods, there are nearly two thousand years to these times, or a full two thousand, to be generous about the age. Since this cannot be refuted, not only is the religion you practice shown to be recently born, but the gods themselves to whom you offer bulls and other victims, at the risk of spoiling their digestion, are shown to be still infants and little children, who ought still to be fed at the breast and with drops of milk.

'But your religions precede ours by many years and are the truer because they are fortified by the authority of antiquity.' And what does it help them to come first by very many years, since they began at a certain time; or what is a span of two thousand years compared with so many thousands of ages? And yet, so that we may not seem to betray our case by so long a pretense, tell us, if it is not troublesome: does the almighty and first God seem to you a new thing, and do those who revere and worship him seem to you to practice and introduce unheard-of, unknown, sudden religions? Is there anything older than he, or can anything be found which precedes him in fact, time, or name? Is he not alone unbegotten, alone immortal and everlasting? Who is the head and source of things? Is it not he? To whom does eternity owe the very fact that it is called eternity? Is it not to him? Is it not brought about by his everlastingness that the ages go on without end? This is beyond doubt and true. So what we follow is not new; but we have learned late what we ought to follow and worship, or where we ought to fix the hope of salvation and place the aids to it. For he had not yet shone forth who would show the way to the wandering and send the light of knowledge to those placed in the deepest darkness and dispel the blindness of ignorance. But does the case turn on this ... alone?

What of this: did you not bring the Egyptian deities called Serapis and Isis into the number of your gods after the consulship of Piso and Gabinius? What of the Phrygian Mother, whose founder is said to be either Midas or Dardanus: did you not begin to know her and learn of her, and hallow her with memorable worship, when Hannibal the Carthaginian was plundering Italy and demanding the rule of the world? Is it not held that the rites of Mother Ceres, adopted a little while ago because they were unknown to you, are called 'Greek', with the very name witnessing to their novelty? Is it not contained in the writings of the learned that the Pompilian invocation lists do not know the name of Apollo? From this it appears and is clear that he too was unknown to you, and afterward at some time began also to be known. So if anyone were to ask you why you took up the worship of the deities we have just mentioned so late, it is certain that you will answer: either because we did not know until lately that they were in the number of the gods, or because we have now been advised by prophets, or because in the harshest circumstances we were saved by their kindness and help. But if you think this is rightly said by you, consider that it has been answered on our side on a similar principle. Our religion is born now: for now he has come, sent to show it to us, to lead us into its truth, to show what God is, and to call us away from things of mere opinion to his worship.

'And why,' he says, 'did it seem good to God the King and Ruler that Christ the Savior should be sent to you from the heights of heaven only a few hours ago, as the saying is?' We ask in return: what is the cause, what the reason, that the seasons are sometimes not restored in their proper months, but winters, summers, and autumns come later? Why do rains sometimes fall after the harvests have withered and the grain has died, rains which ought to have come while things were sound and been supplied at the right times? Indeed, we ask rather this: why, if Hercules had to be born, and Aesculapius, Mercury, Liber, and some others, to be added to the councils of the gods and bring some benefit to mortals, were they produced by Jupiter so late that only posterity knew them, while the antiquity of earlier people was ignorant of them? You will say there was some reason. So there was a reason here too why the Savior of our race came not lately but today. What reason, then? We do not deny that we do not know. For it is not easy for anyone to see the mind of God, nor can man, a blind creature who does not know himself, grasp by any reasoning in what ways God has ordered his affairs: what ought to happen, when, or in what way, only the Father, Ruler, and Lord of all things himself knows. And if I cannot set out for you the causes why something is done in this way or that, it does not at once follow that what has been done becomes undone, and that a fact which has been shown beyond doubt by such kinds of mighty works and powers loses its credibility.

You may object and reply: 'Why was the Savior sent so late?' In infinite and everlasting ages nothing at all can be called late. For where there is no end and no beginning, nothing is premature, nothing slow. For time is known by limits and extremities, which an everlasting series and unmeasured continuity of ages cannot have. For what if the very things to which help had to be brought required that particular time? What if earlier things were of one condition and later ones of another? What if the ancients had to be helped in one way and those who came after cared for in another? Do you not hear your writings telling that there were once men who were demigods, heroes, with huge and vast bodies? Do you not read that infants at their mothers' breasts gave a wail a hundred years old, whose bones, dug up in various regions, hardly convinced their finders that they were the remains of human limbs? It may be, then, that almighty God, the only God, sent Christ only when the human race had begun to be weaker and more fragile in nature, as we are. If what has been done today ought to have been done thousands of years ago, the supreme King would have done it; or if what has been done today ought to have been fulfilled after as many thousands, nothing forced God not to wait for the necessary measures of time. His affairs are carried out by fixed plans, and what has once been decreed to happen cannot be changed by any novelty.

'Why then,' he says, 'if you serve the almighty God and trust that he cares for your salvation and safety, does he allow you to suffer such great persecutions and undergo every kind of punishment and torture?' Let us ask in return: why, when you worship so many and such countless gods, and build them sacred temples, fashion images of gold, slaughter herds of animals, and heap on the altars whole censers full of incense, do you not live exempt from so many dangers and storms by which ruinous and manifold fortunes drive you every day? Why, I say, do your gods fail to turn away from you so many kinds of diseases and illnesses, shipwrecks, collapses, fires, pestilences, barrenness, the loss of children and the confiscation of goods, discords, feuds, wars, the capture of cities, and slavery with freedom taken away? 'But God does not help us at all either in such misfortunes.' The reason is plain and evident. For nothing has been promised us for this life, nor has any help been pledged or aid decreed for us while we are placed in the little bag of this bit of flesh. On the contrary, we have been taught to count all threats of fortune, whatever they are, as small and to value them little; and if ever some heavier violence falls on us, whose end must follow, to count the misfortune a pleasure, and neither to fear nor flee it, so that we may the more easily be stripped of the bonds of the body and escape its dark blindness.

So that harshness of persecution you speak of is our liberation, not persecution, and harassment will not bring us punishment but lead us out to the light of freedom. It is as if some dull and stupid person, when a man has been put in prison, should think that he would never be affected by sufficiently heavy and cruel punishments at the beginning of his questioning unless he raged against the prison itself, broke its material, and burned the roof, and stripped, threw down, and smashed the wall, the doors, and the other parts of the building, not knowing that by doing this he was giving light to the one he seemed to harm and snatching away accursed darkness. In the same way you, with the flames, exiles, tortures, and beasts with which you tear and harass our bodies, do not take away our life, but unknowingly relieve us of our hides and skins; and the more you press on and continue to rage against these images and forms of ours, the more you relieve us of tight and heavy bonds, and, cutting the ties, make us fly away to the light.

Therefore, men, refrain from hindering your hopes with empty questions, and if something is otherwise than you think, you ought not to trust your own opinions rather than a thing so august. The times press on, full of dangers, and deadly punishments hang over us: let us flee to God who saves, and not demand the reason for the gift offered. When the salvation of souls and regard for ourselves is at stake, something must be done even without reason, as Arrian confirms that Epictetus said. We doubt, we hesitate, and we suspect that what is said is not fully credible: let us commit ourselves to God, and let not our unbelief weigh more with us than the greatness of his name and power, lest, while we seek arguments for ourselves by which what we do not want to be true may seem false, the last day creep upon us and we be found in the jaws of hostile death.

All these charges, or rather, to speak truly, these slanders, have long since been answered fully and carefully enough by men eminent in this field and worthy to know this truth, and not the smallest point of any question has been passed over which has not been refuted in a thousand ways and with very strong reasons. There is no need, then, to linger longer on this part of the case. For the matter cannot fail to stand without defenders; nor will the Christian religion be proved true because it has very many supporters and takes its authority from men. It is content with its own strength and rests on the foundations of its own truth, and is not robbed of its force even if it has no champion; indeed, even if all tongues speak against it and strive against it, and conspire with the passion of united agreement to destroy belief in it,

... Now let us return to the order from which we necessarily digressed a little while ago, so that our defense, interrupted too long, may not be said to have yielded the palm to the slanderers as though the charge were proved. For they add this: 'If divine things are dear to you, why do you not worship and adore the other gods with us, nor share common rites with your nations and join in their religious ceremonies?' We can say for the present: for performing the worship of divinity, the first God is enough for us, the first God, I say, the Father and Lord of things, the establisher and ruler of all. In him we worship all that is to be worshiped, adore what it is fitting to adore, and earn by our reverence what the service of reverence demands. For since we hold the head of divinity itself, from which the very divinity of all divine beings, whatever they are, is derived, we think it superfluous to go through them one by one in person, since we do not know who they are or what names they have, and moreover can have nothing clear, grasped, or ascertained about their number.

And as in earthly kingdoms we are under no necessity to adore by name, together with the rulers, those placed in the royal families, but whatever is attached to them feels itself included in the tacit honor paid in the worship of the kings themselves: in the same way, whoever these gods are whom you set before us as existing, if they are royal offspring and spring from the chief head, even if they receive no worship from us by name, they still understand that they are honored in common with their king and included in the reverence paid to him. And let this be said by us on the assumption that it is clear and established that besides the King and Ruler himself there are other heads of deities, which, arranged and separated through ..., make up a kind of people of the common multitude. And do not show us in your sacred buildings, as gods, the effigies, figurines, and images which you too understand, even though you refuse and decline to admit it, are shapes of the vilest clay and the childish fashionings of craftsmen. And since we are speaking with you about a divine matter, we ask you to show this: that there are other gods in nature, power, and name, not those set up in images, which we see, but in that substance in which it is fitting that the power of so great a name should be judged to exist.

But it is not my intention to linger longer on this part of the case, lest we seem to want to stir up very great disputes and join in tumultuous contests. Let there be, as you declare, a populace of deities, let there be countless clans of gods: we agree, we assent, we close our eyes, and we raise no doubt or ambiguity about it in any question. But this we ask and beg to hear from you: from where have you learned, or by what reasoning have you grasped, whether those whom you think exist and worship are in heaven, or some others of unheard-of opinion and name? For it may be that there are those whom you do not think exist, and that those whom you trust exist are found in no part of nature. For you have never flown up to the stars of heaven, nor seen the faces and features of each, nor, remembering that certain gods are there, established the worship of the same gods here as though known and seen. And again we want to hear this: do they have these names by which you call them because you gave them, or did they give them to themselves on their naming days? If these are divine and heavenly names, who brought them to you? But if they have these designations because you applied them, how could you give names to those whom you had never seen, and whom you did not know by any knowledge, what they were like or who they were?

But, as you wish and believe and are persuaded, let these be gods; let them be called even by the names by which popular commonness leads ... to be reckoned. Still, how is it clear to you whether these complete the roll by their names, or whether there are some unknown to you and never brought into your sight and knowledge? For it is not easy to know whether their number is a defined and certain multitude, or whether their population has no sum and is bounded by no reckoning of calculation. For let us suppose that you worship a thousand gods, or rather five thousand: yet in the nature of things it may perhaps be that there are a hundred thousand gods, it may be even more; indeed, as we said a little while ago, the sum of gods may be none, not bounded by any countable limit. So either you too are impious, who apart from a few gods do not perform the services due to the rest; or, if you ask pardon for your ignorance of the others, you will win the same pardon for us if, in a like proportion, we abstain from the worship of those whom we do not know to exist at all.

And yet let no one think that we stubbornly refuse to take up the rites of the other deities, whoever they are. For we stretch out devoted minds and suppliant hands, and do not refuse to go wherever you invite us, if only we learn who these divine beings are whom you press on us, and whom it is right to join to the veneration of the supreme King and Ruler. 'Saturn,' he says, 'and Janus, Minerva, Juno, Apollo, Venus, Triptolemus, Hercules, and all the others, to whom religious antiquity dedicated magnificent temples in almost all cities.' You might perhaps have been able to invite us to the worship of these deities, if you yourselves had not been the first, with the foulness of shameful opinions, to invent such things about them as not only defile their dignity but prove, by the qualities attached to them, that they do not exist at all. For first we cannot be brought to believe that that immortal and most excellent nature is divided into sexes, and that one part is male and the other female. This point men of lively mind have long since set out fully, in Latin as well as Greek writings; and above all Tullius, the most eloquent of the Roman race, fearing no charge of impiety, showed candidly, firmly, and freely, with greater piety, what he thought of such an opinion. If you would take from him the things he wrote with truth of judgment, and not the brilliance of his words, this case would be finished, and would not, as the saying is, require second hearings from us who are but infants in speech.

But why should I say that the chasing of words and splendor of speech are sought from him, when I know that there are not a few who turn away from and flee his books on this subject and will not even admit into their ears the reading of what overthrows their preconceived opinions; and when I hear others muttering indignantly and saying that the senate ought to decree the destruction of these writings, by which the Christian religion is supported and the authority of antiquity overthrown? Rather, if you trust that you say anything ascertained about your gods, convict Cicero of error, refute and disprove him, prove that he says rash and impious things. For to intercept writings and to want to suppress a published reading is not to defend the gods but to fear the testimony of the truth.

And yet, so that no thoughtless person may bring a false charge against us too, as though we believed the God we worship to be male, because when we speak of him we use the masculine gender, let him understand that it is not sex but his name and meaning that is expressed, by the use and habit of speech. For God is not male, but his name is of the masculine gender; which you cannot say in your religion. For you are accustomed to say in your prayers, 'whether you are a god or a goddess', and this exception of doubt declares by its very division that you give sex to the gods. We cannot be brought, then, to believe that the gods are bodies. For they must be bodies if they are male and female, or the distinction of kinds is meaningless. For who of even slight sense does not know that the different sexes of earthly animals were established and formed by that maker for no other reason than that, through the intercourse and unions of bodies, a perishable and fleeting thing might last by the renewal of perpetual succession? What then?

Shall we say that gods beget, that gods are born, and that therefore genital parts were added to them, so that they might supply offspring, and, as each new brood arose, a returning substitution might replace whatever an earlier age had taken away? If this is so, that is, if the gods above beget ... and experience sexes according to these laws, and are immortal and are not worn out by the chills of old age, it follows that all things must be full of gods, and countless heavens could not hold their multitude, since they themselves beget perpetually, and their countless number, multiplied through offspring of offspring, always grows. Or if the obscenity of intercourse is absent from the gods, as is fitting, what cause and reason will be shown why they are marked with those parts by which sex usually recognizes itself through the promptings of its own desires? For it is not likely that these are held for nothing, or that nature wished to play a wanton game in them, loading them with parts they were not to use. For as hands, feet, eyes, and the rest of the structure of the limbs were each set up for certain uses and their own functions, so it is fitting to believe that these parts were prepared for performing their own office; or it must be confessed that in the bodies of the gods there is something empty and useless

and made in vain. What do you say, you holy and undefiled high priests of religion? Do the gods, then, have sex, and do they carry about the ugliness of genital members which it is disgraceful, by decent standards, to utter by their proper names? What remains, then, but to believe that they are eager for the frenzies of lust like unclean four-footed beasts, rush into mutual embraces with rabid desires, and finally, their bodies broken and dissolved, languish in the exhaustion of pleasure? And since certain things are proper to the female sex, it follows that we must believe that goddesses too pay their laws when the months come round, bear the burden of conception with nausea, miscarry, and sometimes give birth prematurely to seven-month offspring. O pure, O holy divinity, separated and removed from every stain of disgrace! My mind longs and burns to see, in those great porticoes and palaces of heaven, gods and goddesses with uncovered and naked bodies; Ceres, full-breasted from nursing Iacchus, as the muse of Lucretius proclaims; and Hellespontine Priapus among the virgin and mother goddesses, carrying about those parts always ready for the campaign of battles. I long, I say, to see goddesses pregnant, goddesses with child, some slowed by the heaviness of the inward burden as their bellies swell day by day, others in long labor seeking the hands of midwives, others pierced by heavy darts and sharp pains, wailing, writhing, and amid all this imploring the help of Juno Lucina. Is it not much more right to curse, to revile, and heap other insults on the gods, than, under a pious pretext, to presume such monsters of opinion about them to their dishonor?

And do you dare to ascribe to us the cause of the gods' offense, when, if a judgment were held, it would be found most certainly to lie in you and to consist in an insult other than you suppose? For if the gods, as you say, are affected by anger and grow hot with indignation of mind, why should we not think that they bear it with great and very great displeasure that you give them sexes, the organs with which dogs and pigs are formed, and that, since you believe so, they are represented in no other way and set out with shameful display? Since this is so, you are the cause of all miseries; you drive the gods, you rouse them to infest the earth with every evil and devise new ones every day, by which they may avenge themselves, provoked by so many wrongs and slanders from you: slanders, I say, and wrongs, which you celebrate partly in shameful fables, partly in unseemly opinions, which your theologians, your poets, and you yourselves also celebrate in shameful rites. You will find human affairs ruined and the gods having thrown away the helm, if indeed it is their concern to rule and administer the fortunes of mortals. For they have no reason to be angry with us, whom they see and perceive neither worshiping nor mocking them, as the saying is, and thinking, rather than believing, much more honorably than you about the dignity of their name. So much for sex.

Now let us come to the appearance and forms in which you believe the gods above are depicted, or rather in which you fashion them and place them in the most spacious seats of temples. And let no one here set against us the Jewish fables and those of the Sadducee sect, as though we too ascribe forms to God: for this is thought to be said in their writings and to be confirmed as a certain thing ... and by authority. These either do not concern us at all and have nothing in common with us in any part, or, if they are shared with us, as is believed, you must seek teachers of deeper understanding, through whom you may learn in what ways the clouds and wrappings of those writings should be unfolded. Our opinion on this is as follows: every divine nature, which never began to exist and will never come to the end of life, lacks bodily outlines and possesses no images of forms by which the outer boundary of the limbs usually closes their joining. For whatever is such, we think is mortal and perishable; and we do not believe that what is confined by outer limits, which a necessary boundary encloses, can have everlasting duration.