A Plea for the Christians inscription–15

To the Emperors Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Lucius Aurelius Commodus, conquerors of Armenia and Sarmatia, and, above all, philosophers.

Your empire, greatest of sovereigns, has different peoples using different customs and laws, and none of them is prevented by law or fear of punishment from cherishing their ancestral ways, even if they are ridiculous. The man of Troy calls Hector a god and worships Helen, taking her to be Adrasteia; the Lacedaemonian reveres Agamemnon as Zeus, and Phylonoe the daughter of Tyndareus; the man of Tenedos reveres Tennes; the Athenian sacrifices to Erechtheus as Poseidon; and the Athenians perform rites and mysteries for Agraulus and Pandrosus, who were thought guilty of impiety for opening the chest. In a word, among the nations and peoples, people offer whatever sacrifices and hold whatever mysteries they wish. The Egyptians even hold cats, crocodiles, snakes, asps, and dogs to be gods. And to all these both you and the laws give leave, since you consider it impious and unholy to believe in no god at all, but necessary for each to worship as gods whomever he wishes, so that through fear of the divine people may keep from wrongdoing. But why is it that with you (and do not be misled, as the many are, by hearsay) a name is hated? Names do not deserve hatred; it is wrongdoing that deserves penalty and punishment. That is why, admiring your gentleness and mildness and your peaceable and humane attitude toward all, individuals enjoy equal rights, cities share in equal honor according to their rank, and the whole world enjoys deep peace through your wisdom. But we who are called Christians: you have not taken thought for us too, but allow us, who do no wrong and, as the argument will show, are of all people the most piously and justly disposed toward God and toward your rule, to be harassed, plundered, and persecuted, the multitude making war on us for our name alone. So we have ventured to set out our case before you (you will learn from our argument that we suffer without trial and contrary to all law and reason), and we beg you to give some thought to us as well, so that we may at last cease to be slaughtered by informers. For the damage our persecutors do us is not to our property, nor is the disgrace to our civic standing, nor the harm to any other of the lesser things. These we despise, even if the many think them important, since we have learned not only not to strike back at one who strikes us, nor to go to law with those who plunder and rob us, but to those who slap us on the face to turn the other side of the head to be struck too, and to those who take our tunic to give our cloak as well. But when we have given up our property, they plot against our bodies and souls, pouring out a flood of accusations that do not touch us even in suspicion, but belong to the gossips themselves and to people like them.

If anyone can convict us of wrongdoing, small or great, we do not refuse punishment, but think it right to undergo the harshest and most pitiless penalty there is. But if the charge goes no further than a name (to this very day what people say about us is the invention of common and uncritical rumor, and no Christian has been convicted of wrongdoing), then it is now your task, most great, humane, and learned emperors, to remove this abuse from us by law, so that, just as the whole world, individuals and cities alike, has shared in your benefits, we too may be grateful to you, proud that we are no longer the victims of informers. For it does not befit your justice that others, when charged with crimes, are not punished before they are convicted, while in our case the name counts for more than the proofs offered at the trial, the judges not asking whether the accused has done any wrong, but insulting the name as if it were a crime. No name in and of itself is thought either bad or good; names seem bad or good because of the bad or good actions that underlie them. You know this better than anyone, since you proceed from philosophy and every kind of learning. That is why those who are tried before you, even if they face the gravest charges, are confident: they know that you will examine their lives, and will give no weight to names if they are empty, nor to the accusers' charges if they are false; and they accept a verdict of condemnation on the same terms as one of acquittal. We too, then, ask for the treatment given to all: not to be hated and punished because we are called Christians (for what does the name contribute to wickedness?), but to be tried on whatever charges anyone brings against us, and either to be released if we clear ourselves of the accusations, or to be punished if we are found to be wicked; not for the name (for no Christian is wicked, unless he is only playing a part in our profession), but for the crime. This is how we see philosophers tried too. None of them seems to the judge, before the trial, to be good or bad because of his knowledge or art; if he is found to be unjust he is punished, without any charge being brought against philosophy (for the wicked one is he who does not practice philosophy as he should, while the knowledge itself is blameless); and if he refutes the slanders he is released. Let there be equal treatment for us as well: let the life of the accused be examined, and let the name be free of every charge. As I begin my defense of our teaching I must beg you, most great emperors, to be impartial hearers and not to be carried away and prejudiced by common and irrational rumor, but to turn your love of learning and of truth to our teaching as well. For you will not err through ignorance, and we, freed from the uncritical rumors of the many, will cease to be warred against.

Three charges are brought against us: atheism, Thyestean feasts, and Oedipean intercourse. If these are true, spare no class of us; proceed against the crimes; destroy us root and branch, with our wives and children, if indeed any Christian lives like the beasts. And yet even the beasts do not touch their own kind, and they mate by the law of nature, only at one season, for the begetting of offspring, not at will; and they recognize those who do them good. If anyone, then, is more savage than the beasts, what penalty could he suffer for such crimes that would be thought to punish him as he deserves? But if these things are inventions and empty slanders (since by a natural principle vice is opposed to virtue, and opposites war against each other by a divine law), and you yourselves are witnesses that we commit none of these crimes, since you forbid people to inform against us, then it remains for you to examine our life, our teachings, and our loyalty and obedience to you, your house, and your rule, and so at last to grant us no more than you grant to those who persecute us. For we shall overcome them, readily giving even our lives for the truth.

That we are not atheists (I will answer each of the charges in turn, so that it will not be ridiculous for us to leave our accusers unrefuted): The Athenians were right to charge Diagoras with atheism, since he not only divulged the Orphic doctrine and made public the mysteries of Eleusis and of the Cabiri, and chopped up the wooden statue of Heracles to boil his turnips, but openly declared that there is no god at all. But we distinguish God from matter, and show that matter is one thing and God another, and that the gulf between them is great (for the divine is unbegotten and eternal, contemplated by mind and reason alone, while matter is begotten and perishable). Is it not irrational, then, to apply the name of atheism to us? If we thought as Diagoras did, while having so many pledges that move us to piety (the good order, the universal harmony, the size, the color, the shape, and the arrangement of the world), then the reputation for impiety and the reason for our being persecuted might rightly be attached to us. But since our teaching acknowledges one God, the Maker of this universe, who did not himself come into being (for what is does not come into being, but what is not), but made all things through the Word that comes from him, we suffer both things irrationally: we are slandered and we are persecuted.

Poets and philosophers were not thought to be atheists when they turned their minds to God. Euripides, puzzled about those who are ignorantly called gods according to common opinion, says: “If Zeus is in heaven, he ought not to make the same man unhappy.” But concerning the one who is apprehended by knowledge, he teaches as the mind understands it: “Do you see this boundless ether on high, which holds the earth around in its moist embrace? Think this is Zeus; consider this to be God.” For of the former he saw neither real substances underlying them, to which the name is applied (“Zeus, whoever Zeus is, I do not know, except by hearsay”), nor names applied to things that really exist (for where there are no real substances, what more is there than names?). But the other he apprehended from his works, taking the visible things, air, ether, and earth, as a view of what is unseen. So he understood that the one whose works these are, and by whose spirit they are guided, is God. Sophocles agrees with him: “One, in truth, one is God, who made the heaven and the broad earth.” He teaches, with regard to the nature of God, that both heaven and earth are filled with his beauty, and where God must be, and that he must be one.

Philolaus too, when he says that all things are enclosed by God as in a guard-house, shows both that God is one and that he is above matter. Of Lysis and Opsimus, the one defines God as an ineffable number, the other as the excess of the greatest number over the one nearest to it. If, according to the Pythagoreans, ten is the greatest number, being the tetractys and containing all the arithmetical and harmonic ratios, and nine lies next to it, then God is a unit, that is, one; for the greatest number exceeds the smaller one nearest to it by one. As for Plato and Aristotle, I do not go through what they said about God as if I were giving a precise account of the philosophers' teachings. For I know that, just as you surpass all people in intelligence and in the power of your rule, so you excel all in the precise mastery of all learning, succeeding in every branch of it better than those who have made a single part of it their own. But since it is impossible to show, without citing names, that we are not the only ones who confine God to a unity, I have turned to their opinions. Plato, then, says: “To find the Maker and Father of this universe is a task, and having found him it is impossible to declare him to all,” thinking of the one uncreated and eternal God. And if he knows of others too, such as the sun, the moon, and the stars, he knows them as created: “Gods of gods, of whom I am the maker and father of works, indissoluble as long as I will it; everything that has been bound can be undone.” If, then, Plato is no atheist when he thinks of the Maker of all things as one uncreated God, neither are we atheists, who know and hold fast as God the one by whose Word all things were made and by whose Spirit, which comes from him, they are held together. Aristotle and his followers, acknowledging one God as a kind of composite living being, say that God consists of soul and body: they take his body to be the ethereal region, the planets and the sphere of the fixed stars, moving in circles, and his soul to be the reason that governs the motion of the body, itself unmoved but the cause of its motion. The Stoics, even if in their names for the divine they multiply it according to the variations of matter, through which they say the spirit of God passes, in reality think that God is one. For if God is a creative fire proceeding methodically toward the generation of the world, containing within itself all the seminal principles by which each thing comes into being according to fate, and his spirit pervades the whole world, then according to them God is one, called Zeus from the seething (ζέον) of matter and Hera from the air (ἀήρ), and given the other names after each part of matter through which he has passed.

Since, then, it is agreed by nearly all, even against their will, when they come to the first principles of things, that the divine is one, and we for our part affirm that the one who ordered this universe is God, what is the reason that others may freely say and write whatever they like about the divine, while a law is laid down against us, who are able to prove by signs and arguments of truth what we understand and rightly believe, that God is one? Poets and philosophers approached this, as they did other matters, by conjecture: each was moved, through the affinity of his own soul with the breath that comes from God, to seek whether he could find and understand the truth. But they were able only to circle around it, not to find it, since they did not think fit to learn about God from God, but each from himself; that is why each of them taught something different about God, matter, forms, and the world. But for what we understand and believe we have the prophets as witnesses, who spoke out by a divine Spirit about God and the things of God. You too, who surpass others in intelligence and in reverence for what is truly divine, would say that it is irrational to give up believing the Spirit from God, who moved the mouths of the prophets like instruments, and to heed human opinions instead.

That there has been from the beginning one God, the Maker of this universe, consider in this way, so that you may also have the reasoning behind our faith. If there were two or more gods from the beginning, either they were in one and the same place, or each of them was on his own. Now they could not be in one and the same. For it does not follow that, being gods, they are alike; rather, because they are uncreated, they are unlike. Things created are like their models, but things uncreated are unlike, having come into being neither from anything nor after the pattern of anything. Or is God one in the way that hand, eye, and foot are parts belonging to one body, together making up one whole? But Socrates, because he is created and perishable, is composite and can be divided into parts; God is uncreated, impassible, and indivisible, and so is not made up of parts. But if each of them is on his own, since the one who made the world is above the things he made and around what he made and set in order, where is the other god, or the rest? For if the world, made in the shape of a sphere, is enclosed within the circles of heaven, and the Maker of the world is above the things he made, controlling it by his providence over them, what place is there for the other god or the rest? He is not in the world, because it belongs to another; nor around the world, for above it is God, the Maker of the world. If he is neither in the world nor around the world (for everything around it is held by the Maker), where is he? Above the world and God? In another world, or around another? But if he is in another world or around another, then he no longer has anything to do with us (for he does not rule our world), nor is he great in power (for he is in a limited place). But if he is neither in another world (for all things are filled by the Maker) nor around another (for all things are held by him), then he does not exist, since there is nothing for him to be in. Or what does he do, if the world belongs to another, and he is above the Maker of the world, and yet is neither in the world nor around it? Is there some other thing, so that he may stand somewhere? But above it is God and the things of God. And what place will there be, when God has filled everything beyond the world? Does he exercise providence, then? But if he does not exercise providence, he has made nothing. If he neither makes anything nor exercises providence, and there is no other place for him to be in, then this is the one and only God from the beginning, the Maker of the world.

If we were content with considerations of this kind, one might think our teaching merely human. But the voices of the prophets confirm our reasonings. I think that you too, being most learned and knowledgeable, are not unacquainted with the writings of Moses, or of Isaiah and Jeremiah and the other prophets, who, lifted out of their own reasonings in ecstasy when the divine Spirit moved them, spoke out what was worked in them, the Spirit using them as a flute-player breathes into a flute. What, then, do they say? “The Lord is our God; no other shall be reckoned beside him.” And again: “I am God, the first and hereafter, and besides me there is no God.” Likewise: “Before me there was no other God, and after me there shall be none; I am God, and there is none besides me.” And concerning his greatness: “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is the footstool of my feet. What house will you build for me, or what is the place of my rest?” I leave it to you, when you come to the books themselves, to examine their prophecies more precisely, so that with fitting reasoning you may remove the abuse we suffer.

I have shown sufficiently, then, that we are not atheists, since we acknowledge one God, uncreated, eternal, invisible, impassible, incomprehensible, and infinite, grasped by mind and reason alone, surrounded by light, beauty, spirit, and power beyond description, by whom the universe was made through his Word, and is set in order and held together. For we think also of a Son of God. And let no one think it ridiculous that God should have a Son. For we have not formed our ideas of God the Father or of the Son as the poets make up their myths, in which they show the gods to be no better than human beings. The Son of God is the Word of the Father in idea and in operation; for after his pattern and through him all things were made, the Father and the Son being one. And since the Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son, by the unity and power of the Spirit, the Son of God is the mind and Word of the Father. But if, in your surpassing intelligence, it occurs to you to ask what is meant by the Son, I will say briefly that he is the first offspring of the Father: not as having come into being (for from the beginning God, being eternal mind, had the Word in himself, being eternally rational), but as having come forth to be the idea and operation for all material things, which lay like a nature without qualities and an inert earth, the heavier particles mixed with the lighter. The prophetic Spirit also agrees with this account: “The Lord,” it says, “created me as the beginning of his ways, for his works.” And indeed the Holy Spirit himself, who works in those who speak prophetically, we call an effluence of God, flowing from him and returning like a ray of the sun. Who, then, would not be perplexed to hear called atheists those who speak of God the Father and God the Son and the Holy Spirit, and who show both their power in unity and their distinction in order? Nor does our theology stop there: we also speak of a multitude of angels and ministers, whom God, the Maker and Creator of the world, through the Word that comes from him, distributed and appointed to be concerned with the elements, the heavens, the world and what is in it, and their good order.

If I go through our teaching in detail, do not be surprised. I speak precisely so that you may not be carried away by common and irrational opinion but may be able to know the truth; for by means of the very teachings we hold, which are not human but spoken and taught by God, we can persuade you not to regard us as atheists. What, then, are the words on which we are brought up? “I say to you: love your enemies, bless those who curse you, pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” Allow me at this point to raise my voice and speak out boldly, as one making his defense before philosopher-kings. Who among those who analyze syllogisms and resolve ambiguities and explain etymologies, or among those who teach about homonyms and synonyms, predicates and propositions, and what is the subject and what the predicate, and who promise to make their pupils happy by these and similar teachings, have so purified their souls as to love their enemies instead of hating them, and, instead of reviling (to say the least) those who first insulted them, to bless them, and to pray for those who plot against their lives? On the contrary, they are forever wickedly digging out these secrets of their art for themselves, always wanting to do some harm, since they have made their business an art of words and not a display of deeds. But among us you would find uneducated people, craftsmen, and old women, who, if they cannot prove in words the benefit of our teaching, show in deeds the benefit of their choice. They do not recite speeches but show good actions: when struck they do not strike back, when robbed they do not go to court, they give to those who ask, and they love their neighbors as themselves.

Would we, then, purify ourselves in this way if we did not believe that God presides over the human race? That cannot be said. But since we are persuaded that we shall give an account of our whole life here to God, who made both us and the world, we choose the moderate, humane, and despised way of life. We think that we shall suffer no evil here so great, even if people take our lives, as the good we shall receive there from the great Judge for a gentle, humane, and reasonable life. Plato said that Minos and Rhadamanthys would judge and punish the wicked; but we say that even if someone were Minos or Rhadamanthys or their father, not even he would escape the judgment of God. Are those, then, who think life is “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,” and who regard death as a deep sleep and forgetfulness (“sleep and death, twin brothers”), considered pious? While we, who reckon the present life of small and little worth, and are guided by this alone: to know God and the Word that comes from him, what is the oneness of the Son with the Father, what the communion of the Father with the Son, what the Spirit, what is the union of these three and their distinction while united, the Spirit, the Son, the Father; who know that the life we look for is far better than words can tell, if we are brought to it pure from all wrongdoing; and who are so humane that we love not only our friends (“For if you love those who love you and lend to those who lend to you,” he says, “what reward will you have?”): we, being such people and living such a life so as to escape condemnation, are we not believed to be pious? These are small things from great ones, and few from many, so that we may not trouble you further; for those who test honey and whey judge whether the whole is good by a small part of it.

Most of those who charge us with atheism have not even dreamed of what God is; they are ignorant of natural and theological reasoning and have never studied it, and they measure piety by the rule of sacrifices. They accuse us of not offering sacrifice and of not recognizing the same gods as the cities. So consider with me, emperors, both charges, as follows; and first, our not sacrificing. The Creator and Father of this universe needs no blood, nor the smell of burnt fat, nor the fragrance of flowers and incense, since he himself is the perfect fragrance, lacking nothing and needing nothing. The greatest sacrifice to him is that we should know who stretched out and vaulted the heavens and set the earth in place like a center, who gathered the water into seas and divided the light from the darkness, who adorned the sky with stars and made the earth send up every seed, who made the animals and formed the human being. When we hold that God the Creator sustains and oversees all things with the knowledge and art by which he guides them, and lift up holy hands to him, what further need has he of a hecatomb? “With sacrifices and gentle prayers, with libation and the smell of burnt fat, men turn them aside with entreaty, whenever anyone transgresses and sins.” What are whole burnt offerings to me, which God does not need? And yet we must offer a bloodless sacrifice and present our reasonable worship.

The argument about our not coming forward and not recognizing the same gods as the cities is quite silly. Those who charge us with atheism because we do not believe in the gods they know do not agree among themselves about the gods. The Athenians have set up Celeus and Metaneira as gods; the Lacedaemonians, Menelaus, to whom they sacrifice and hold festivals; the people of Ilium cannot bear even to hear his name, and extol Hector instead; the Ceans hold Aristaeus to be the same as Zeus and Apollo; the Thasians worship Theagenes, who even committed a murder at the Olympic games; the Samians, Lysander, despite all his slaughters and all his crimes; Alcman and Hesiod, Medea; the Cilicians, Niobe; the Sicilians, Philip son of Butacides; the people of Amathus, Onesilus; the Carthaginians, Hamilcar. The day would fail me if I listed them all. Since, then, they disagree among themselves about their own gods, why do they accuse us of not agreeing with them? And are not the practices of the Egyptians ridiculous? At their festivals they beat their breasts in the temples as if over the dead, and they sacrifice to the same beings as gods. And no wonder, since they even hold animals to be gods, shave their heads when these die, bury them in temples, and hold public lamentations. If, then, we are impious because we do not practice our piety in common with them, all cities and all nations are impious; for not all recognize the same gods.

But suppose they do recognize the same gods. What then? Because the many, unable to distinguish what is matter and what is God, and how great the gulf between them is, approach idols made of matter, must we too, for their sake, approach and worship the statues? We who distinguish and separate the uncreated and the created, what is and what is not, the intelligible and the perceptible, and give each its proper name? If matter and God are the same, two names for one thing, then we are impious for not considering stones and wood, gold and silver, to be gods. But if they are very far apart from each other, as far as the craftsman is from the material of his craft, why are we accused? For as the potter is to the clay (the clay is the material, the potter the craftsman), so God is the Creator, and matter obeys him to serve his art. And just as the clay by itself cannot become vessels without art, so matter, which receives all things, would not have received distinction, shape, and order without God the Creator. We do not value the pottery more than the one who made it, nor the bowls and gold vessels more than the smith; if there is anything skillful about them we praise the craftsman, and it is he who reaps the glory for the vessels. So too with matter and God: for the arrangement of what has been ordered it is not matter that deserves the glory and honor, but God its Creator. If, then, we were to hold the forms of matter to be gods, we would seem to have no sense of the true God, putting things that can be dissolved and perish on a level with the eternal.