Apology 24–38

This whole confession of theirs, in which they deny that they are gods and answer that there is no other god but the one to whom we belong, is quite sufficient to repel the charge of injuring religion, above all the Roman religion. For if they are certainly not gods, then certainly there is no religion; if there is no religion, because there are certainly no gods, then certainly we are not guilty of injuring religion. On the contrary, the reproach has rebounded on you, who, worshiping a lie, and not only neglecting the true religion of the true God but even attacking it, commit the real crime of true irreligion. Now, even supposing it were agreed that they are gods, do you not grant, by common estimation, that there is someone higher and more powerful, a kind of prince of the world, of perfect power and majesty? For most people arrange divinity so that they would have the command of supreme dominion rest with one and its offices with many, as Plato describes great Jupiter in heaven accompanied by an army of gods and demons alike. So, they say, the procurators and prefects and governors too must likewise be looked up to. And yet what crime does he commit who, the better to win Caesar's favor, directs his effort and his hope to Caesar himself, and does not grant the title of god to any subordinate chief, any more than that of emperor, since it is judged a capital offense to call anyone but Caesar by it, or to hear him so called? Let one worship God, another Jupiter; let one stretch suppliant hands to heaven, another to the altar of Faith; let one, if you think so, count the clouds as he prays, another the panels of the ceiling; let one vow his own life to his god, another a goat's. For see whether this too does not contribute to the charge of irreligion: to take away freedom of religion and forbid choice of divinity, so that I may not worship whom I will but am compelled to worship whom I will not. No one will wish to be worshiped by an unwilling worshiper, not even a man. And so even the Egyptians have been granted the right to so vain a superstition, to consecrate birds and beasts and to condemn to death anyone who kills a god of this kind. Every province and city also has its own god: Syria Astarte, Arabia Dusares, the Norici Belenus, Africa Caelestis, Mauretania its own princes. I have named Roman provinces, I think, and yet not Roman gods of theirs, because they are no more worshiped at Rome than those who are ranked as gods by local consecration throughout Italy itself: Delventinus of the Casinians, Visidianus of the Narnians, Ancharia of the Asculans, Nortia of the Volsinians, Valentia of the Ocriculans, Hostia of the Sutrians; and among the Faliscans Juno too received a surname in honor of Father Curis. But we alone are kept from a religion of our own. We offend the Romans and are not held to be Romans, because we do not worship the god of the Romans. It is well that there is a God of all, whose we all are, whether we will or not. But with you it is lawful to worship anything except the true God, as though he were not rather the God of all, whose we all are.

I think I have proved enough about false and true divinity, having shown how the proof stands, not only by disputations and arguments but even by the testimony of the very beings you believe to be gods, so that nothing further needs to be reconsidered on this question. Since, however, the Roman name in particular has come up, I will not pass over the contest provoked by the presumption of those who say that the Romans, as the reward for their most careful religiousness, have been raised to such heights that they have seized the world, and that the gods are so real that those who serve them beyond all others flourish beyond all others. This reward, of course, has been paid out by the Roman gods in gratitude: Sterculus and Mutunus and Larentina have advanced the empire! For I would not think that foreign gods wished to favor a foreign nation more than their own, and handed over to people from across the sea the native soil in which they were born, grew up, became famous, and were buried. Let Cybele see to it, if she loved the city of Rome as a memorial of the Trojan race, her own native people, protected of course against the arms of the Achaeans; if she foresaw that she would pass over to the avengers who she knew would subdue Greece, the conqueror of Phrygia. And so she gave a great proof of her majesty conferred on the city even in our own age: when Marcus Aurelius had been taken from the state at Sirmium on the sixteenth day before the Kalends of April, that most holy chief Gallus, on the ninth day before the same Kalends, as he poured out his impure blood, castrating his arms too, issued the usual commands for the welfare of the emperor Marcus, who had already been cut off. O slow messengers! O sleepy dispatches! through whose fault Cybele did not learn of the emperor's death sooner, so that the Christians might not laugh at such a goddess. But Jupiter would not at once have let his Crete be shaken by the Roman fasces, forgetting that cave on Ida, and the bronze cymbals of the Corybants, and the most delightful fragrance of his nurse there. Would he not have preferred that tomb of his to the whole Capitol, so that the land that covered the ashes of Jupiter might rather excel over the world? Would Juno wish the Punic city, loved more than Samos, to be destroyed by the race of Aeneas? So far as I know, “here were her arms, here her chariot; that this should be a kingdom for the nations, if the fates allow, the goddess even then intends and cherishes.” That wretched wife and sister of Jupiter could do nothing against the fates! Plainly “Jupiter himself stands by fate.” And yet the Romans did not give as much honor to the fates, who handed Carthage over to them against the purpose and prayer of Juno, as to that most prostituted she-wolf Larentina. It is certain that many of your gods were kings. If, then, they hold the power of conferring empire, from whom had they received that favor when they themselves reigned? Whom had Saturn and Jupiter worshiped? Some Sterculus, I suppose. But afterward, did the Romans worship, along with their native gods, even some who had never reigned? Yet these were ruled by others who were not yet their worshipers, since they were not yet held to be gods. So giving a kingdom belongs to others, since there was reigning long before these gods were carved. But how vain it is to credit the height of the Roman name to the merits of religiousness, when religion advanced after the empire, or rather the kingdom, was established! Come now, did religion advance their affairs? For although a superstitious meticulousness was conceived by Numa, yet divine worship among the Romans did not yet consist of images or temples. Religion was frugal, the rites were poor; there were no Capitols vying with heaven, but makeshift altars of turf, vessels still of Samian clay, savor rising from them, and the god himself nowhere. For the talents of the Greeks and the Etruscans had not yet flooded the city with the making of images. So the Romans were not religious before they were great, and therefore they were not great because they were religious. Indeed, how could they be great because of religion, when their greatness came from irreligion? For unless I am mistaken, every kingdom or empire is sought by wars and extended by victories. And wars and victories consist mostly of cities captured and overthrown. That business is not without injury to the gods. The same destruction of walls and of temples, equal slaughter of citizens and of priests, similar plunder of sacred and of profane wealth. So the Romans have as many sacrileges as trophies, as many triumphs over gods as over nations, as many spoils as there are images of captive gods still remaining. And so the gods allow themselves to be adored by their enemies, and decree empire without end to those whose injuries rather than flatteries they ought to have repaid. But those who feel nothing are injured as safely as they are worshiped in vain. Certainly it cannot be credible that those grew by the merits of religion who, as we have suggested, either grew by injuring religion or injured it by growing. Even those whose kingdoms were melted into the whole of the Roman empire were not without religions when they lost them.

See, then, whether it is not he who dispenses kingdoms, whose is both the world that is ruled and the man himself who rules; whether it is not he who has ordered the succession of dominions in the world according to their times, who was before all time and made the world a body of times; whether it is not he who raises up or casts down cities, under whom the human race once existed without cities. Why do you go astray? Rome in its woodland days is older than some of her gods; she reigned before she built so great a circuit of the Capitol. The Babylonians too had reigned before the pontiffs, the Medes before the Fifteen, the Egyptians before the Salii, the Assyrians before the Luperci, the Amazons before the Vestal Virgins. Finally, if Roman religions grant kingdoms, Judea would never in the past have reigned, despiser as she was of these common divinities of yours; Judea, whose God you Romans for some time honored with victims, and her temple with gifts, and her nation with treaties; and you would never have ruled her, had she not finally sinned against God in regard to Christ.

Enough of this against the charge of injuring divinity, lest we seem to injure what we have shown does not exist. So, when called on to sacrifice, we refuse to take the step, out of loyalty to our conscience, by which we are sure to whom those services go under the prostitution of images and the consecration of human names. But some think it madness that, when we could both sacrifice on the spot and go away unharmed, keeping our resolve in our minds, we prefer obstinacy to safety. You give us advice, of course, by which we might take advantage of you; but we recognize where such suggestions come from, who is stirring all this up, and how he works, now by cunning persuasion, now by harsh cruelty, to throw down our constancy. It is that spirit, of course, of demonic and angelic make, who, our rival because of our separation from him and envious because of God's grace, fights against us from within your minds, which by secret inspiration he has tuned and suborned to all that perversity in judging and injustice in cruelty with which we began. For although the whole force of demons and spirits of that kind is subject to us, yet like worthless slaves they sometimes mix insolence with fear and long to harm those whom at other times they dread. For fear too breathes hatred. Besides, their condition, made desperate by their prior condemnation, counts it a comfort to enjoy their malice meanwhile, while the punishment is delayed. And yet, when caught, they are subdued and sink to their condition, and those whom they attack from afar they beseech close at hand. So when, like rebels breaking out of the workhouses or prisons or mines or penal slavery of that kind, they burst out against us, in whose power they are, certain that they are no match for us and all the more desperate for it, we resist them, unwillingly, as though they were equals, and we fight back by persevering in what they attack, and we never triumph over them more than when we are condemned for the obstinacy of our faith.

But since it would easily seem unjust that free people should be forced against their will to sacrifice (for elsewhere too a willing mind is prescribed for performing divine worship), it would surely be thought absurd that anyone should be compelled by another to honor gods whom he ought to appease of his own accord for his own sake, lest he have ready to hand the right of liberty to say: “I do not want Jupiter to be gracious to me; who are you? Let Janus meet me angry, with whichever of his faces he likes; what have you to do with me?” You have been shaped, of course, by those same spirits to force us to sacrifice for the emperor's welfare; and on you has been laid the necessity of compelling, as on us the obligation of facing the danger. We come, then, to the second charge, that of injuring a more august majesty, since you watch over Caesar with greater dread and more cunning timidity than Olympian Jupiter himself. And rightly, if you only knew it. For which of the living, whoever he is, is not better than any dead man? But you do not do this from reason so much as from regard for a power that is present: so in this too you will be found irreligious toward your gods, since you devote more fear to a human lordship. In short, among you people perjure themselves more readily by all the gods than by the single genius of Caesar.

Let it first be established, then, whether these to whom sacrifice is offered can bestow welfare on the emperors or on any man at all, and then assign us to the crime of treason: if angels or demons, in substance the worst of spirits, do any good; if the lost preserve, if the damned set free; if, finally, as you know in your own conscience, the dead protect the living. For surely they would first protect their own statues and images and temples, which, I believe, Caesar's soldiers keep safe by their watches. And I think those very materials come from Caesar's mines, and whole temples stand at Caesar's nod. Many gods, in short, have had Caesar angry with them. It helps our case if they have also had him gracious, when he confers on them some liberality or privilege. So how will those who are in Caesar's power, and wholly his, have Caesar's welfare in their power, so as to seem able to grant him what they more easily obtain from Caesar themselves? This, then, is why we are said to offend against the majesty of the emperor: because we do not subject the emperors to their own possessions, because we do not make a game of the duty of praying for their welfare, since we do not think it lies in hands soldered with lead. But you are the irreligious ones, who seek it where it is not and ask it from those who cannot give it, passing over him in whose power it is. Besides, you make war on those who know how to ask for it, who can also obtain it, since they know how to ask.

For we invoke for the welfare of the emperors the eternal God, the true God, the living God, whom the emperors themselves prefer above all others to have gracious to them. They know who gave them their empire; they know, as men, who gave them their soul too; they feel that he is the only God in whose power alone they are, from whom they are second, after whom they are first, before all and above all gods. Why not? since they are above all men, who at least live and are superior to the dead. They reflect how far the forces of their empire reach, and so they understand God: against him they cannot prevail; through him they know that they prevail. Let the emperor make war on heaven, lead heaven captive in his triumph, post guards on heaven, impose taxes on heaven! He cannot. He is great because he is less than heaven. For he himself belongs to him to whom heaven and every creature belongs. He is emperor from the same source from which he was a man before he was emperor; he has his power from the same source from which he has his breath. Looking up there, we Christians, with hands spread out because they are harmless, with head bare because we do not blush, finally without a prompter because we pray from the heart, are always praying for all emperors: for a long life for them, a secure empire, a safe household, brave armies, a faithful senate, an upright people, a quiet world, whatever are the prayers of a man and of a Caesar. These things I cannot ask from any other than from him from whom I know I shall obtain them, since it is he who alone grants them, and I am one to whom it is due that I should obtain them: his servant, who alone observe him, who am put to death for his discipline, who offer him the rich and greater sacrifice which he himself commanded, prayer proceeding from chaste flesh, from an innocent soul, from the Holy Spirit; not grains of incense bought for one as, tears of an Arabian tree, nor two drops of unmixed wine, nor the blood of a rejected ox longing to die, and, after all the defilements, a filthy conscience as well; so that I wonder, when victims are approved among you by most vicious priests, why the entrails of the victims are examined rather than those of the sacrificers themselves. So, then, while we are spread out toward God, let the claws dig into us, the crosses hang us up, the fires lick us, the swords cut our throats, the beasts leap upon us: the very posture of a Christian at prayer is prepared for every punishment. Do this, good governors: wring out the soul that is praying to God for the emperor. This will be the crime, where there is the truth of God and devotion to him.

Now we have flattered the emperor, and lied in the prayers we have mentioned, to escape violence, of course! Plainly this deceit succeeds; for you allow us to prove whatever we defend. You, then, who think that we care nothing for the welfare of the Caesars, look into the words of God, our writings, which we ourselves do not suppress and which many chances transfer to outsiders. Know from them that we are commanded, out of overflowing kindness, to pray to God even for our enemies and to ask blessings for our persecutors. Who are greater enemies and persecutors of Christians than those against whose majesty we are charged with crime? But also by name and openly: “Pray,” it says, “for kings and for princes and powers, that all may be peaceful for you.” For when the empire is shaken, and its other members are shaken with it, we too, though we are thought to be strangers to disturbances, are surely found in some place of the calamity.

There is also another, greater necessity for us to pray for the emperors, and indeed for the whole standing of the empire and for Roman affairs: we know that the mighty force hanging over the whole world, and the very close of the age, which threatens horrible afflictions, is held back by the respite granted to the Roman empire. So we do not wish to experience it, and while we pray that it may be put off we favor Rome's long continuance. We also swear, not by the genii of the Caesars, but by their welfare, which is more august than all genii. Do you not know that genii are called daemones, and from that, with a diminutive word, daemonia? We look up to the judgment of God in the emperors, who has set them over the nations. We know that there is in them what God has willed, and so we want what God has willed to be safe, and we hold that a great oath. But demons, that is, genii, we are accustomed to exorcise, so as to drive them out of people, not to swear by them, so as to confer on them the honor of divinity.

But why should I say more about Christian religion and piety toward the emperor? We must look up to him as the one whom our Lord has chosen, so that I might rightly say: Caesar is more ours, appointed by our God. So, as he is mine, I do more for his welfare, not only because I ask it from him who can give it, or because I who ask am such as to deserve to obtain it, but also because, by setting the majesty of Caesar below God, I commend him the more to God, to whom alone I subject him. And I subject him to one with whom I do not make him equal. For I will not call the emperor God, either because I do not know how to lie, or because I do not dare to mock him, or because he himself will not wish to be called God. If he is a man, it is in a man's interest to yield to God. Let him be content to be called emperor. This too is a great name, which is given by God. He who calls him God denies that he is emperor: unless he is a man, he is not emperor. Even when triumphing in that most lofty chariot he is reminded that he is a man. For it is whispered to him from behind: “Look behind you! Remember you are a man!” And surely he rejoices all the more that he shines with such glory that a reminder of his condition is necessary for him. He would be less if he were then called a god, because he would not truly be so called. He is greater who is called back lest he think himself a god.

Augustus, the founder of the empire, did not even want to be called lord; for this too is a surname of God. I will indeed call the emperor lord, but in the ordinary way, and only when I am not forced to call him lord in place of God. Otherwise I am free with respect to him. For my Lord is one, God almighty and eternal, the same who is his Lord too. He who is father of the fatherland, how is he lord? A name of affection is also more pleasing than one of power. Even heads of households are called fathers rather than lords. So far is it from right that the emperor should be called God, a thing that cannot be believed except as the most shameful, and even pernicious, flattery. If, having one emperor, you called another so, would you not incur the greatest and most implacable offense from the one you had, an offense that even the one you so called would have to fear? Be religious toward God, you who want him to be gracious to the emperor. Stop believing in another god, and so also calling this one god, who has need of God. If flattery of this sort, calling a man god, does not blush for the lie, let it at least fear the ill omen. It is a curse to call Caesar a god before his apotheosis.

So that is why Christians are public enemies: because they do not give the emperors vain or lying or reckless honors; because, as people of true religion, they celebrate even their festivals with conscience rather than with wantonness. A great service, of course, to bring out braziers and couches into public, to feast street by street, to wipe out the city under the look of a tavern, to make mud with wine, to run about in gangs to acts of violence, of shamelessness, to the allurements of lust! Is public joy expressed in this way, by public disgrace? Do these things befit the festival days of emperors, which do not befit other days? Those who observe discipline out of regard for Caesar desert it for Caesar's sake; and the license of bad morals will be piety, and an occasion for luxury will be counted religion? Oh, how rightly we deserve condemnation! For why do we, chaste and sober and upright, fulfill the vows and rejoicings for the Caesars? Why on a happy day do we not shade our doorposts with laurels nor encroach on the daylight with lamps? It is an honorable thing, when a public festival demands it, to dress your house up like some new brothel! I would like, however, in this religion of the second majesty too, in which we Christians are charged with a second sacrilege for not celebrating with you the festivals of the Caesars in a manner that neither modesty nor decency nor chastity permits, and to which the opportunity for pleasure rather than any worthy reason has persuaded you, to show up your loyalty and truthfulness, lest perhaps here too those be found worse than Christians who will not have us counted Romans, but enemies of the Roman emperors. I call the Quirites themselves, the native people of the seven hills themselves, to account: does that Roman tongue spare any Caesar of its own? The Tiber is witness, and the schools of the beasts. Now, if nature had covered our breasts with some kind of transparent material for seeing through, whose heart would not appear engraved with the scene of one new Caesar after another presiding over the distribution of a largess? and that in the very hour when they shout, “May Jupiter add to your years from ours!” A Christian no more knows how to utter these words than to wish for a new Caesar. “But that is the mob,” you say. Mob it may be, yet Romans, and none demand the death of Christians more than the mob. Plainly the other orders are religious, in proportion to their rank, out of loyalty! Nothing hostile breathes from the senate itself, from the knights, from the camp, from the palaces themselves! Where do the Cassiuses and Nigers and Albinuses come from? Where those who besiege Caesar between the two laurels? Where those who practice wrestling in order to throttle his throat? Where those who break into the palace in arms, bolder than all the Sigeriuses and Partheniuses? From among the Romans, unless I am mistaken, that is, from among the non-Christians. And indeed all of them, right up to the outbreak of their impiety, were both offering sacrifices for the emperor's welfare and swearing by his genius, some outside, some inside, and naturally were giving the name of public enemies to the Christians. And those too who are now daily being exposed as partners or applauders of the criminal faction, the gleaning left over after the vintage of parricides: with what fresh and leafy laurels they hedged their doorposts! with what lofty and brilliant lamps they clouded their porches with smoke! with what elegant and proud couches they divided the forum among themselves! not to celebrate public rejoicings, but to rehearse their own prayers already at another's festival, and to inaugurate the model and image of their hope, changing the emperor's name in their hearts. The same services are paid by those who consult astrologers and soothsayers and augurs and magicians about the life of the Caesars, arts which Christians, as revealed by the deserter angels and forbidden by God, do not use even in their own affairs. And who needs to inquire into Caesar's welfare except one who is plotting or wishing something against it, or hoping and waiting for something after it? For one does not consult about loved ones in the same spirit as about masters. The anxiety of kinship is curious in one way, that of servitude in another.

If this is so, that those turn out to be enemies who were called Romans, why are we, who are thought enemies, denied to be Romans? We cannot be counted non-Romans just because we are counted enemies, when those turn out to be enemies who were held to be Romans. So the piety and religion and loyalty owed to the emperors do not consist in services of this kind, which hostility can perform all the more as a cover for itself, but in the conduct that divinity commands to be shown to them as truly as it must be shown to all. For these works of good will are not owed by us to the emperors alone. We do no good with respect of persons, because we do it for our own sake, seeking the payment of praise or reward not from man but from God, the exactor and rewarder of an impartial kindness. We are the same toward the emperors as toward our neighbors. For we are forbidden equally to wish ill, to do ill, to speak ill, to think ill of anyone. Whatever is not lawful against the emperor is not lawful against anyone; what is not lawful against anyone is perhaps all the less lawful against him who is so great through God.

If we are commanded, as we said above, to love our enemies, whom have we to hate? Likewise, if when injured we are forbidden to retaliate, lest we become equal to them by the deed, whom can we injure? For about this, judge for yourselves. How often do you rage against Christians, partly following your own feelings, partly obeying the laws? How often too does the hostile mob, passing you over, attack us on its own authority with stones and fire? In the very frenzies of the Bacchanals they do not spare even dead Christians, but tear them from the rest of burial, from a kind of asylum of death, already changed, already not even whole, cut them up and pull them apart. Yet what retaliation for injury have you ever observed from people so united, so courageous even to death, when a single night with a few little torches could work abundant vengeance, if it were lawful among us to repay evil with evil? But far be it that a divine school should avenge itself by human fire, or grieve to suffer that by which it is proved. For if we wished to act as open enemies, not merely as secret avengers, would we lack strength of numbers and forces? The Moors, no doubt, and the Marcomanni and the Parthians themselves, or any nations, however great, confined to one place and their own borders, are more numerous than those of the whole world! We are but of yesterday, and we have filled everything of yours: cities, islands, forts, towns, market-places, the camps themselves, tribes, decuries, the palace, the senate, the forum; we have left you only the temples. For what war would we not have been fit and ready, even if unequal in forces, we who are so willingly slaughtered, if in this discipline it were not more lawful to be killed than to kill? Even unarmed and without rebellion, merely by being at odds with you, we could have fought you by the odium of separation alone. For if so great a force of people as we are had broken away from you into some remote corner of the world, the loss of so many citizens, of whatever sort, would surely have shamed your dominion, indeed would have punished it by the very desertion. Without doubt you would have been terrified at your solitude, at the silence of affairs, and at a kind of stupor as of a dead world. You would have looked for people to rule. More enemies than citizens would have remained to you. For now you have fewer enemies because of the multitude of Christians, since almost all the citizens of almost all cities are Christians. But you have preferred to call us enemies of the human race rather than of human error. And who would rescue you from those hidden enemies that everywhere lay waste your minds and your health, I mean the assaults of demons, which we drive away from you without reward, without payment? This alone would have sufficed for our revenge: that from then on the possession would lie open, empty, to unclean spirits. Yet, without a thought for the recompense for such protection, you have preferred to judge as enemies a race not only not troublesome to you but even necessary; for we are plainly enemies, not of the human race, but rather of its error.

Should not this school, then, have been ranked, with somewhat more leniency, among the lawful associations, since it commits nothing of the kind usually feared from unlawful associations? For unless I am mistaken, the reason for prohibiting associations rests on care for public order, lest the city be split into parties, which would easily disturb elections, assemblies, councils, meetings, and even the shows with rival clashes of partisanship, especially since men had already begun to treat the service of their violence as something for sale and for hire. But we, cold to every passion for glory and rank, have no need for combination, nor is anything more foreign to us than public affairs. We recognize one commonwealth for all: the world. We likewise renounce your shows, as far as we renounce their origins, which we know were conceived in superstition, and we stand apart from the very things with which they deal. We have nothing to do, by word, sight, or hearing, with the madness of the circus, the immodesty of the theater, the savagery of the arena, the vanity of the athletes' colonnade. How do we offend you if we prefer other pleasures? If we refuse to know how to be entertained, the loss is ours, if anyone's, not yours. “But you reject what pleases us.” Nor do our pleasures delight you. But the Epicureans were allowed to decide on some truth of pleasure, namely calmness of mind; and the Christian way has ample business of its own.