Apology 39–47

I will now myself set out the business of the Christian association, so that, having refuted the evil, I may show the good. We are a body knit together by a shared religious conviction, by unity of discipline, and by the bond of hope. We come together in a meeting and congregation, so that, as if forming a band, we may besiege God with our prayers. This violence is pleasing to God. We pray also for the emperors, for their ministers and authorities, for the state of the world, for the peace of affairs, for the delay of the end. We come together to call the divine writings to mind, if the nature of the present times compels us to forewarn or to recognize anything. Certainly with the holy words we nourish our faith, raise our hope, fix our confidence, and no less strengthen discipline by inculcating precepts; there too are exhortations, rebukes, and divine censure. For judgment is passed with great weight, as among people sure that they are in God's sight; and it is the greatest foretaste of the judgment to come if anyone has so sinned as to be banished from sharing in prayer and assembly and all holy fellowship. Approved elders preside, having obtained that honor not by payment but by testimony; for nothing of God's is obtained by payment. Even if there is a kind of treasury, it is not collected from entrance fees, as if religion were bought. Each one deposits a modest contribution on the monthly day, or when he wishes, and only if he wishes, and only if he can; for no one is compelled, but gives voluntarily. These are, as it were, deposits of piety. For they are not spent from there on banquets and drinking bouts and thankless eating-houses, but on feeding and burying the poor, on boys and girls without means and without parents, and on old people now confined to the house, and on the shipwrecked; and if any are in the mines, or on islands, or in prisons, provided it is for the cause of God's school, they become wards of their confession. But it is precisely the working of such love that brands us in the eyes of some. “See,” they say, “how they love one another” (for they themselves hate one another), “and how ready they are to die for one another” (for they themselves will be more ready to kill one another). And that we call ourselves brothers: they rage at this, I suppose, for no other reason than that among them every name of kinship is feigned in affection. But we are your brothers too, by the law of nature, our one mother, though you are hardly men, because you are bad brothers. But how much more fittingly are they both called and held brothers who have acknowledged one Father, God, who have drunk one Spirit of holiness, who from one womb of the same ignorance have come out trembling into the one light of truth! But perhaps we are thought less legitimate because no tragedy cries out about our brotherhood, or because we are brothers in the family property, which among you generally breaks up brotherhood. So we who are mingled in mind and soul have no hesitation about sharing property. All things are held in common among us except our wives. In this one point we dissolve partnership, the only point in which other men practice partnership: they not only usurp the marriages of their friends, but also most patiently supply their own to their friends, following, I suppose, that teaching of their ancestors and wisest men, the Greek Socrates and the Roman Cato, who shared with their friends the wives they had married for the sake of bearing children, so that children might be begotten in other homes as well; whether against the wives' will I do not know. For why should the wives care for a chastity which their husbands had so easily given away? O example of Attic wisdom and Roman gravity: a philosopher and a censor as pimps! What wonder, then, if such love as ours is defamed? For you also disparage our little suppers, apart from their being infamous for crime, as extravagant too. It was of us, no doubt, that Diogenes' saying was spoken: “The Megarians feast as though they would die tomorrow, but build as though they would never die.” But one sees a straw in another's eye more easily than a beam in his own. With so many tribes and curiae and decuries belching, the air turns sour; when the Salii are to dine, a creditor will be needed; the accountants will reckon up the cost of the tithes and feasts of Hercules; for the Apaturia, the Dionysia, and the Attic mysteries a levy of cooks is proclaimed; at the smoke of a dinner of Serapis the firemen will be roused. Only about the dining room of the Christians is there complaint. Our supper shows its reason by its name: it is called by the word for love among the Greeks. Whatever it costs, it is gain to spend in the name of piety, since with that refreshment we help all the needy; not as among you, where parasites strive for the glory of selling their liberty, hired out to their bellies to be fattened amid insults, but because with God there is greater regard for the lowly. If the cause of the banquet is honorable, judge the rest of the order of its discipline by its cause. Being a duty of religion, it admits nothing base, nothing immodest. We do not recline before prayer to God has been tasted first. As much is eaten as the hungry need; as much is drunk as is good for the chaste. They are satisfied as people who remember that even during the night they must worship God; they converse as people who know that the Lord is listening. After water for the hands and the lamps, each is invited into the middle to sing to God, as he can, from the holy Scriptures or of his own composing; from this it is proved how much he has drunk. Prayer likewise closes the banquet. From there we depart, not into gangs of brawlers, nor into bands of roamers, nor into outbursts of wantonness, but to the same concern for modesty and chastity, as people who have dined not so much on a supper as on discipline. This gathering of Christians would rightly be unlawful if it were like the unlawful ones; it would rightly be condemned if anyone could complain of it on the grounds on which complaint is made about factions. To whose ruin have we ever come together? We are the same when assembled as when dispersed, the same all together as individually, injuring no one, grieving no one. When the upright, when the good come together, when the pious, when the chaste assemble, it is not to be called a faction but a council.

On the contrary, the name of faction should be applied to those who conspire in hatred of the good and upright, who cry out against the blood of the innocent, putting forward as a defense of their hatred that further folly too, that they think the Christians are the cause of every public disaster and every popular misfortune. If the Tiber rises to the walls, if the Nile does not rise over the fields, if the sky stands still, if the earth moves, if there is famine, if plague, at once the cry goes up: “The Christians to the lion!” So many to one? I ask you, before Tiberius, that is, before the coming of Christ, how great were the disasters that struck the world and its cities! We read that the islands of Hiera, Anaphe, Delos, Rhodes, and Cos sank with many thousands of people. Plato too records that a land larger than Asia or Africa was snatched away by the Atlantic sea. An earthquake drank up the Corinthian sea too, and the force of the waves cut off a part of Lucania and banished it under the name of Sicily. These things certainly could not have happened without harm to the inhabitants. But where then were, I will not say the Christians, despisers of your gods, but your gods themselves, when the flood wiped out the whole world, or, as Plato thought, only the lowlands? For that they are later than the disaster of the flood is attested by the very cities in which they were born and died, and even those which they founded; for these would not remain today unless they too were later than that disaster. Palestine had not yet received the swarm of Jews from Egypt, nor had the origin of the Christian school yet settled there, when a rain of fire burned up its neighboring regions, Sodom and Gomorrah. The land still smells of burning, and if any fruits of trees are there, they make a show only to the eyes, but turn to ashes when touched. Nor were Etruria and Campania complaining about Christians then, when fire from heaven drenched Volsinii, and fire from its own mountain Pompeii. No one at Rome yet worshiped the true God when Hannibal at Cannae measured his slaughter by the bushel of Roman rings. All your gods were worshiped by all, when the Senones occupied the Capitol itself. And it is well that, if any adversity befell cities, the disasters of the temples were the same as those of the walls, so that I may refute the idea that these things come from the gods, since they happened to the gods too. The human race has always deserved ill of God: first, as undutiful toward him, since, though it understood him in part, it did not seek him, but even invented others besides to worship; then because, by not seeking the teacher of innocence and the judge and avenger of guilt, it grew into every vice and crime. But if it had sought him, it would have followed that it would know him once sought, observe him once known, and find him, once observed, gracious rather than angry. So it ought to know now too that he is angry, the same God who always was, before Christians were named. Whose benefits it enjoyed, bestowed before it fashioned gods for itself, why should it not understand that evils too come from him whose goods it did not recognize as his? It is guilty toward him to whom it is also ungrateful. And yet, if we compare former disasters, lighter ones happen now, since the world received Christians from God. For from that time innocence has tempered the iniquities of the age, and there have begun to be intercessors with God. Finally, when summer holds back the winter rains and the year is a worry, you indeed, fed daily and ready to dine again at once, with baths and taverns and brothels busy, offer rain-sacrifices to Jupiter, proclaim barefoot processions to the people, seek heaven at the Capitol, expect clouds from the ceiling panels, turned away from God himself and from heaven; but we, dried up with fasting and wrung out by every kind of continence, kept from every enjoyment of life, rolling in sackcloth and ashes, beat upon heaven with reproach, touch God, and when we have wrung mercy from him, Jupiter is honored!

You, then, are the troublemakers in human affairs; you are always the ones who draw public misfortunes on yourselves, you among whom God is despised and statues are adored. For it ought to be held more credible that he is angry who is neglected than they who are worshiped; or else they are most unjust indeed, if on account of the Christians they harm their own worshipers too, whom they ought to separate from the deserts of the Christians. “This,” you say, “rebounds on your God too, if he also allows his own worshipers to be harmed on account of the profane.” Admit his dispensations first, and you will not turn it back on us. For he who has once for all appointed an eternal judgment after the end of the age does not hasten the separation, which is the condition of the judgment, before the end of the age. Meanwhile he deals equally with the whole human race, both indulgent and rebuking. He willed that both benefits should be common to the profane and misfortunes to his own, so that in equal fellowship we might all experience both his gentleness and his severity. Because we have learned this from him, we love his gentleness and fear his severity; you, on the contrary, despise both; and it follows that all the plagues of the age come from God to us, if at all, for admonition, to you for chastisement. And yet we are in no way harmed: first, because nothing matters to us in this age except to leave it as quickly as possible; then, because if any adversity is inflicted, it is put down to your deserts. But even if some things graze us too, as people bound up with you, we rejoice rather in recognizing the divine predictions, which confirm, of course, the confidence and faith of our hope. But if all evils come upon you from those you worship because of us, why do you persist in worshiping beings so ungrateful, so unjust, who ought rather to help and champion you in making the Christians suffer, and to separate you from the deserts of the Christians?

But we are also charged under another head of injury: we are said to be unprofitable in business. How so, people who live with you, with the same food, dress, and furnishings, the same necessities of life? For we are not Brahmans or Indian gymnosophists, dwellers in the woods and exiles from life. We remember that we owe thanks to God, our Lord and Creator; we reject no fruit of his works; we plainly use moderation, lest we use them beyond measure or wrongly. So we live with you in this world, not without the forum, not without the meat market, not without baths, shops, workshops, inns, your markets, and other dealings. We too sail with you, and serve as soldiers, and farm, and trade with you likewise; we make our crafts and our works public for your use. How we seem unprofitable to your business, with whom and on which we live, I do not know. But if I do not frequent your ceremonies, I am nonetheless a man on that day too. I do not bathe at dawn at the Saturnalia, lest I lose both night and day; yet I bathe at a decent and healthy hour, which preserves my warmth and my blood; I can be stiff and pale after a bath when I am dead. I do not recline in public at the Liberalia, as is the custom for beast-fighters having their last meal; yet wherever I dine, I dine from your supplies. I do not buy a garland for my head. What does it matter to you how I use the flowers, which I buy all the same? I think they are more pleasing free and loose and straying everywhere. But even if they are bound into a garland, we know a garland with the nose; let those see to it who smell through their hair. We do not come together at the shows; yet if I want the things that are sold at those gatherings, I will take them more freely from their own places. We certainly do not buy incense. If Arabia complains, let the Sabaeans know that more of their wares, and more costly, are spent on burying Christians than on fumigating gods. “Certainly,” you say, “the revenues of the temples dwindle daily: how few now throw in a coin!” For we are not able to bring help both to men and to your begging gods, nor do we think it should be given to any but those who ask. In short, let Jupiter hold out his hand and receive, while meanwhile our mercy spends more street by street than your religion temple by temple. But the other revenues will give thanks to the Christians, who pay what is owed in good faith, by which we abstain from defrauding others; so that, if it were reckoned how much the revenues lose through the fraud and lying of your declarations, the account could easily be settled, the complaint about one kind of revenue being offset by the gain to all the other accounts.

I will plainly admit who, if any, can truly complain of the unprofitableness of Christians. First will be the pimps, procurers, and bath-attendants; then assassins, poisoners, magicians; likewise soothsayers, diviners, astrologers. To be unprofitable to these is a great profit. And yet whatever loss your affairs suffer through this school can be offset by some protection. How much do you value, I do not say those who now drive demons out of you, I do not say those who also pour out prayers for you to the true God, since perhaps you do not believe it, but those from whom you can fear nothing?

But that loss to the state, as great as it is real, no one considers; that injury to the city no one weighs, when so many of us just people are spent, when so many innocent are paid out. For we now call your own records to witness, you who daily preside over the trials of prisoners and settle the charge sheets by your sentences. So many guilty people are listed by you under various charges: which of them, the assassin, the pickpocket, the temple-robber or seducer or thief of bathers' clothes, is also entered as a Christian? Or when Christians are brought forward under their own title, which of them is also such as so many of the guilty are? It is always with your people that the prison seethes, with yours that the mines sigh, with yours that the beasts are fattened, with yours that the producers of shows feed their herds of condemned criminals. No one there is a Christian, unless plainly only a Christian; or if he is something else as well, he is no longer a Christian.

We alone, then, are innocent. What wonder, if it must be so? And indeed it must. Taught innocence by God, we both know it perfectly, as revealed by a perfect teacher, and keep it faithfully, as commanded by an inspector who is not to be despised. But to you human judgment has handed down innocence, and human dominion has likewise commanded it; so your discipline is neither complete nor so much to be feared, for the truth of innocence. Man's wisdom in showing the good is as great as his authority in demanding it; the one is as easily deceived as the other is despised. And so which is fuller: to say, “You shall not kill,” or to teach, “Do not even be angry”? Which is more perfect: to prohibit adultery, or to restrain even from the solitary lust of the eyes? Which is more learned: to forbid evildoing, or evil-speaking too? Which is better instructed: not to permit injury, or not even to allow retaliation for injury? Yet you should know that even those laws of yours which seem to lead toward innocence were borrowed from the divine law, as the older pattern. We have already spoken of the age of Moses. But how great is the authority of human laws, when a man may both escape them, often lying hidden in his crimes, and sometimes despise them, offending by choice or by necessity? Consider them also in view of the brevity of any punishment, which will not remain beyond death. So too Epicurus makes light of all torment and pain, declaring a small one contemptible and a great one not lasting. But we, who are judged under God, the watcher of all, and who foresee an eternal punishment from him, rightly alone attain innocence, because of the fullness of our knowledge, the difficulty of hiding, and the greatness of a torment not lasting but everlasting, fearing him whom even the judge who judges us, the fearers, must fear: fearing God, not the proconsul.

We have taken our stand, I think, against the charge of all the crimes on which the blood of Christians is demanded. We have shown our whole position, and the ways in which we can prove it to be as we have shown, namely from the trustworthiness and antiquity of the divine writings, and also from the confession of the spiritual powers. Who will dare to refute us, not by verbal art, but in the same form in which we have established our proof, from the truth? But while our truth is made plain to everyone, unbelief meanwhile, though convinced of the good of this school, which has now become known from experience and dealings, does not think it a divine thing at all, but rather a kind of philosophy. “The philosophers too,” it says, “teach and profess the same things: innocence, justice, patience, sobriety, chastity.” Why then, if we are compared to them in discipline, are we not likewise made equal to them in the freedom and impunity of our discipline? Or why are they too, as our peers, not pressed to the duties for not performing which we are endangered? For who compels a philosopher to sacrifice, or to swear, or to put out useless lamps at noon? On the contrary, they openly destroy your gods and accuse your superstitions in their writings too, while you praise them. Many even bark at the emperors, and you put up with it, and they are more readily rewarded with statues and salaries than sentenced to the beasts. But rightly: for they are called philosophers, not Christians. This name of philosophers does not put demons to flight. Why should it? since the philosophers count demons next to the gods. It is Socrates' saying: “If the daimonion permits.” The same man, though he had some taste of the truth in denying the gods, yet at the very end ordered a cock to be sacrificed to Aesculapius, I suppose in honor of his father, because Apollo proclaimed Socrates the wisest of all men. Thoughtless Apollo! He bore witness to wisdom for the man who denied that the gods exist. As much as truth burns with hatred, so much does he who presents it faithfully give offense; but he who adulterates and affects it wins favor on this very ground with the persecutors of truth. The truth which the philosophers, its mockers and corrupters, affect with hostility and corrupt by affecting, as men seeking glory, Christians both seek of necessity and present whole, as men caring for their salvation. So we are not equal, as you think, either in knowledge or in discipline. For what certain answer did Thales, that chief of the natural philosophers, give Croesus when he asked about divinity, after the extensions of time for deliberation had so often come to nothing? Any Christian craftsman both finds God and shows him, and from then on assigns to him in fact everything that is sought concerning God; though Plato affirms that the maker of the universe is neither easy to find nor, once found, easy to explain to all. Further, if we make the challenge about chastity, I read part of the Athenian sentence pronounced against Socrates as a corrupter of youths. The Christian does not even exchange the female sex for the other. I know too of the prostitute Phryne inflaming the lust of Diogenes as he lay upon her, and I hear that a certain Speusippus of Plato's school died in adultery. The Christian is born male for his own wife alone. Democritus, by blinding himself because he could not look at women without lust and was pained if he did not possess them, confesses his incontinence by his cure. But the Christian, with his eyes unharmed, does not see women; in mind he is blind against lust. If I defend our uprightness, see, Diogenes with muddy feet tramples on Plato's proud couches with another pride: the Christian is not proud even toward the poor. If I contend about modesty, see, Pythagoras among the Thurians and Zeno among the Prienians aspire to tyranny: but the Christian does not aspire even to the aedileship. If I meet you on equanimity, Lycurgus chose death by starvation because the Spartans had amended his laws: the Christian gives thanks even when condemned. If I compare faithfulness, Anaxagoras refused to return a deposit to his enemies: the Christian is called faithful even by outsiders. If I take my stand on simplicity, Aristotle shamefully made his friend Hermias leave his position: the Christian does not harm even his enemy. The same Aristotle flatters Alexander as shamefully, instead of guiding him, as Plato is sold by Dionysius for his belly's sake. Aristippus plays the profligate in purple under a great show of gravity, and Hippias is killed while laying plots against his city. No Christian ever attempted this on behalf of his own, though they were scattered with every atrocity. But someone will say that some of ours too depart from the rule of discipline. Yet they cease to be counted Christians among us, while those philosophers, with such deeds, continue in the name and honor of wisdom. So what is there alike in a philosopher and a Christian? in a disciple of Greece and a disciple of heaven? in a trafficker in reputation and one in life? in a worker in words and one in deeds? in a builder and a destroyer of things? in a friend and an enemy of error? in a falsifier of truth and its restorer and expounder, its thief and its guardian?

Truth is older than all things, unless I am mistaken; and the antiquity of the divine literature, established above, helps me in this, so that it may readily be believed that it was the treasure-house of all later wisdom. And if I were not now restraining the bulk of this volume, I would range into this proof too. Which of the poets, which of the sophists, has not drunk entirely from the fountain of the prophets? From there, then, the philosophers watered the thirst of their talent, so that it is what they have from ours that makes people compare us with them. Hence, I suppose, philosophy was even expelled by some, I mean by the Thebans and the Spartans and the Argives. While they strove after our things, being men, as we said, greedy for glory and for eloquence alone, if they came upon anything in the holy Scriptures set out in order, they turned it to their own works according to their own fondness for curiosity, neither believing sufficiently that it was divine, so as to refrain from falsifying it, nor understanding it sufficiently, since it was still somewhat clouded then, obscured even to the Jews themselves, whose own property it seemed to be. For even where truth was simple, all the more did human fastidiousness, scorning faith, change it, and in this way they mixed into uncertainty even what they had found certain. For having found God, merely that, they did not discuss him as they had found him, but went on to dispute about his quality, his nature, and his abode. Some assert he is incorporeal, others corporeal, as the Platonists and the Stoics respectively; some that he is made of atoms, others of numbers, as Epicurus and Pythagoras; another of fire, as Heraclitus thought; and the Platonists hold that he cares for things, while the Epicureans hold he is idle and inactive and, so to speak, a nobody in human affairs; the Stoics place him outside the world, turning this mass from outside like a potter; the Platonists within the world, remaining, like a pilot, within what he governs. So too about the world itself, whether it was born or unborn, whether it will pass away or remain, they vary. So too about the state of the soul, which some contend is divine and eternal, others dissoluble; as each one thought, so he introduced or remodeled. No wonder if the talents of the philosophers perverted the old document. From their seed certain men have also adulterated this newer provision of ours with their own opinions, to suit philosophical views, and from the one way have cut many crooked and inextricable paths. I mention this lest the known variety of this school should seem to anyone to make us equal to the philosophers in this too, and lest he judge the truth from the variety of its defenders. But we readily lay down against our adulterers the prescription that the rule of truth is the one that comes from Christ, handed down through his companions, to whom these various commentators will be proved to be somewhat later. Everything against the truth has been built from the truth itself, the spirits of error working this rivalry. By them adulterations of this saving discipline have been suborned; by them certain fables too have been put about, which might weaken faith in the truth by their likeness, or rather win it over to themselves, so that one might think Christians are not to be believed because poets and philosophers are not, or rather think poets and philosophers are to be believed because Christians are not. So we are laughed at when we preach that God will judge; for the poets and philosophers too set up a tribunal in the underworld. And if we threaten Gehenna, which is a store of secret fire under the earth for punishment, we are likewise laughed to scorn; for there is also a river Pyriphlegethon among the dead. And if we name Paradise, a place of divine delight appointed to receive the spirits of the saints, separated from the knowledge of the common world by a kind of wall, that fiery zone, the Elysian Fields have already taken hold of belief. Where, I ask you, do the philosophers or poets get these things, so very like ours? Only from our mysteries. If from our mysteries, as being earlier, then ours are more trustworthy and more to be believed, since even their copies find belief. If from their own minds, then our mysteries will be held to be copies of later things, which the order of things does not allow. For a shadow never precedes the body, nor a copy the truth.