To the Nations 1.1–1.9

The evidence of your ignorance, which condemns the injustice even while it defends it, is ready to hand: all who formerly were ignorant along with you and hated along with you, as soon as it befalls them to know, cease to hate as they cease to be ignorant; indeed they themselves become what they hated, and begin to hate what they had been. So it is that every day you groan over the growing number of Christians. You cry out that the city is besieged, that there are Christians in the fields, in the fortified villages, in the islands; you grieve, as over a loss, that every sex, every age, in short every rank is passing over from you. And yet not even by this do you move your minds to consider some hidden good. You are not permitted to suspect more rightly; you do not care to test it more closely; here alone human curiosity grows numb. You love to be ignorant of what others rejoice to have found; you prefer not to know, because you already hate, as though you were quite sure that, if you knew, you would not hate. And yet if no ground for hatred is found, it will surely be found best to depart from the former injustice; but if a cause is established, nothing will be taken from the hatred, which will rather be heaped up all the more by the consciousness of its justice. Unless, perhaps, you are ashamed to be corrected or unwilling to be excused. I know well the reply with which you usually meet the evidence of our great numbers: a thing is not, you say, to be judged good in advance merely because it converts very many and carries them off to itself. I know of the change of mind toward the worse. How many deserters of a good life are there? How many runaways into perversity? Many, in good faith; indeed more now, as the times draw to their end. But the comparison does not hold. For about evil all are so agreed that not even the guilty, who go over to evil and turn aside from good ways into perverse ones, dare to defend evil as good. Their shameful deeds they hold in fear, their impious deeds in shame. In short, they long to lie hidden, they avoid being seen, they tremble when caught, they deny when accused; not even under torture do they confess easily or always; certainly when condemned they grieve. For they reproach themselves with what they were, and they impute the passage of an evil mind from innocence to fate. So little do they want it to be their own, because they cannot deny that it is evil. But what of this kind happens with the Christians? None is ashamed, none repents, except only of his former life. If he is pointed out, he glories; if he is dragged off, he does not resist; if he is accused, he makes no defense; questioned, he confesses; condemned, he glories. What evil is this, in which the nature of evil ceases?

In this very matter you judge even against the form for judging crimes. For guilty persons brought before you, if they deny the charge, you press with tortures to confess; but Christians who confess of their own accord you crush with tortures to make them deny. What perversity is this, that you fight against confession, change the office of torture, and let the accused escape for nothing by compelling him against his will to deny? You governors, appointed to extort the truth, seek a lie from us alone: that we should say we are not what we are. I suppose you do not want us to be wicked, and so you are eager to shut us out of that name. Others, to be sure, you stretch on the rack and butcher for this, that they may deny what they are said to be; and yet when they deny, you do not believe them; us, if we deny, you believe at once. If you are certain that we are the most guilty of all, why are we treated by you, even in this, differently from the guilty? I do not say that you allow no room either for accusation or for defense (it is not your custom to condemn rashly people who are unaccused and undefended); but, for example, if a case of murder is being tried, the case is not closed nor the inquiry satisfied the moment the man has confessed to the name of murderer. Although you have difficulty believing those who confess, you further demand the details: how often he has killed, with what weapons, in what places, with what spoils, what accomplices, what harborers, so that nothing whatever about the evil man may lie hidden, nor anything be lacking to the truth being prepared for sentence. But in our case, whom you charge with more atrocious and more numerous crimes, you draw up shorter and lighter charge sheets. I suppose you do not wish to burden those whom you wish utterly destroyed, or you think there is no need to inquire into what you already know. This, then, is all the more perverse, if you force us to deny things that you know most certainly. Rather, how much better it would have suited your hatred to set aside the form of trial and strive, out of your own zeal, not for denial, lest you set free those you hate, but for the confession of each crime, so that your enmity might be sated by heaping up the punishments, while it was being established how many of those banquets each had already celebrated, how often he had rushed into incest in the dark! What more? Since the race was to be rooted out, the inquiry ought to have been spread wide and the questioning extended to accomplices and confidants. Let the dealers in infants and the cooks be brought in, and the dogs themselves that serve as bridal attendants: the matter would have been settled. Favor would even have been added to the shows. With what eagerness would people crowd into the arena to see someone fight who had devoured a hundred infants! For if such horrible and monstrous things are reported of us, they surely ought to have been brought to light, lest they seem incredible and the public hatred against us cool. For many do in fact temper their belief in such things, shuddering at the thought that human nature should seek the food of wild beasts, and a union that it has shut off from the human race.

You, then, at other times the most diligent and persistent investigators of far lesser crimes, abandon that diligence in the case of such horrible deeds, surpassing all impiety, neither accepting a confession, which judges must always work for, nor sifting the evidence, which those who condemn must always consult; so it is now plain that the whole charge against us is aimed not at some crime but at a name. So much so that, if the truth of the crimes were established, the very names of the crimes would condemn us, if they applied, so that sentence would be pronounced against us thus: “It is decreed that this murderer,” or “this incestuous man,” or whatever we are charged with, “be led away, crucified, given to the beasts.” But your sentences brand nothing except a confessed Christian. No name of a crime appears, unless the name is the crime. For this in truth is the reason for the whole hatred against us. The name is on trial, which a certain hidden power attacks through your ignorance, so that you are unwilling to know for certain what you are certain you certainly do not know; and therefore you do not believe the things that are not proved, and, lest they be easily disproved, you will not inquire, so that the hated name may be punished on a presumption of crimes. So, that the hated name may be given up, we are compelled to deny; then, denying, we are set free, with complete impunity for the past, no longer bloody nor incestuous, because we have lost that name. But while this principle is being shown in its own place, you, who pursue us to destroy the name, declare: what crime is in a name, what offense, what fault? For there is a ruling against you that you cannot charge crimes which neither the procedure sets out, nor the indictment specifies, nor the sentence enumerates. What is laid before the governor, what is inquired of the accused, what is answered or denied, what is read out from the council: that is what I recognize as a charge. So, as to the desert of the name, if there is any guilt in names, any accusation of words, I think there is no complaint to be made against a word or a name, unless it sounds barbarous, or smacks of ill omen, or is indecent, or is otherwise than befits the one who speaks it or pleases the one who hears it. These are the faults of words or names, just as barbarism is a fault of words and speech, and so are solecism and a clumsy figure. But the name “Christian,” as far as its meaning goes, is interpreted from anointing. Even when you mispronounce us as “Chrestians” (for you are not clearly certain even of the name itself), even so it is formed from sweetness or kindness. So in harmless men you put on trial our harmless name as well: not awkward to the tongue, not harsh to the ears, not evil to anyone, not hostile to the fatherland, but Greek like others, and pleasant both in sound and in meaning. And surely names are not to be punished with sword or cross or beasts.

But you say that the sect is punished in the name of its founder. First, it is surely a proper and customary rule that a sect should be marked by its founder's name, since philosophers too are named after their founders, Pythagoreans and Platonists, as physicians are called Erasistrateans and grammarians Aristarcheans. So if a sect is bad because its founder is bad, the offshoot of a bad name is punished. But that would be presumed rashly. The first thing was to know the founder, so that the sect might be known, rather than to put off examining the founder on account of the sect. But as it is, being necessarily ignorant of the sect because you are ignorant of the founder, or not reviewing the founder because you do not review the sect either, you strike at the name alone, as if in it you had hold of the sect and the founder, neither of whom you know at all. And yet philosophers are free to pass over from you into a sect and to take their founders' name as their own, and no one stirs up hatred against them, though they bark out, openly and publicly, every bitterness of speech against your morals, rites, worship, and way of life, in contempt of the laws, without respect of persons, so that some even hurl their freedom of speech at the emperors themselves with impunity. But the truth, so very troublesome to the world, the philosophers only aspire to, while the Christians possess it; and so those who possess it displease more, because the one who aspires to it plays with it, while the one who possesses it defends it. In fact Socrates was condemned on the side on which he had come nearest to the truth, by destroying your gods. Although the Christian name was not yet on earth then, truth was always condemned. And you will not deny that he was wise, to whom even your Pythian bore witness: “Of all men,” he said, “Socrates is the wisest.” Truth overcame Apollo, so that he pronounced against himself; for he confessed that he was not a god when he affirmed that the man who denied the gods was most wise. But with you he is the less wise for denying the gods, when he was wise precisely because he denied them. You speak of us in the same way: “Lucius Titius is a good man, only he is a Christian.” And another: “I am surprised that Gaius Seius, a serious man, has become a Christian.” In the blindness of folly they praise what they know, censure what they do not know, and spoil what they know by what they do not know. It occurs to no one that a man may be good and prudent because he is a Christian, or a Christian because he is prudent and good, although it is more humane to judge hidden things from manifest ones than to prejudge manifest things from what is hidden. Others marvel that people whom they formerly knew, before this name, as vagrant, worthless, and wicked have suddenly been reformed, and yet they know better how to marvel than how to follow. Others fight with such obstinacy that they fight against their own advantage, which they could gain from association with this name. I know of more than one husband, formerly anxious about his wife's conduct, who could not bear even mice creeping into the bedroom without a groan of suspicion, but who, on discovering the cause of her new diligence and her unusual keeping at home, offered to put up with anything from his wife, denied that he was jealous, and preferred to be the husband of a harlot rather than of a Christian: he was allowed to change his own nature for the worse; he did not allow the woman to be reformed for the better. A father disinherited a son of whom he had ceased to complain. A master sent to the workhouse a slave whom until then he had found indispensable. As soon as anyone discovers that someone is a Christian, he would rather have a criminal. For our discipline betrays itself by itself, and we are betrayed by nothing but our own goodness, just as the wicked shine out by their own wickedness. Or are we alone, against the ordinances of nature, branded as the worst for our goodness? For what distinguishing mark do we display, if not, first, wisdom, by which we do not worship the trifling works of human hands; self-restraint, by which we keep from what belongs to others; chastity, which we do not defile even with our eyes; compassion, by which we are moved toward the needy; truth itself, by which we give offense; freedom itself, for which we know how to die? Whoever wishes to understand who the Christians are must use these signs.

As for what you say, “The worst and most disgraceful in avarice, luxury, and wickedness,” we will not deny that some are. It is enough for the testimony of our name if not all are, if not the greater number. In a body, however sound or clean you like, it must be that some mole sprouts, or a little wart rises, or a freckle discolors. The sky itself is never cleansed by any fair weather so clear that it is not marked by the tuft of some little cloud. A small spot on the forehead, seen on one part as a sample, shows that the whole is clean. The greater portion of good uses a small evil as testimony to itself. When, however, you prove some of ours to be wicked, by that very fact you prove that they are not Christians. Look for the sect to which the wickedness is charged. You yourselves, in conversation, when you speak against us, say: “Why is that man a cheat, if the Christians are self-restrained? Why is he cruel, if they are merciful?” So you bear witness that Christians are not such, when you throw back the question why those who are called Christians are such. There is a great difference between a crime and a name, between opinion and truth. For names too are so established that they have their own boundaries between being called and being. How many, after all, are called philosophers and yet do not fulfill the law of philosophy? All bear a name from their professions; but those bear the name without the excellence of the profession who defame the truth by the mere surface of the word. They are not what they are called merely because they are called so; rather, because they are not, they are called so in vain, and they deceive those who assign the thing to the name, when the standing of the name ought to follow from the thing. And yet such people neither assemble nor share with us, having become yours again through their offenses, since we do not mix even with those whom your force and savagery have compelled to deny. For surely the unwilling deserters of our discipline would more easily be kept among us than the willing ones. For the rest, you call Christians, without cause, those whom the Christians themselves disown, who do not know how to deny themselves.

Whenever your conscience, the silent witness of its own ignorance, is pressed and hemmed in by these propositions and answers of ours, which truth supplies from its own store, you run in a sweat to a kind of little altar of refuge, that is, the authority of the laws: that they would surely not punish this sect unless its deserts had been established before the makers of the laws. What then prevented them from being established likewise before the executors of the laws, since for the other crimes, which the laws likewise forbid and punish, the penalty is withheld unless there has first been an inquiry? For example, the law deals with a murderer, an adulterer; yet the course of the deed is examined, even though the kind of act is known to all. The laws punish the Christian. If there is any deed of the Christian, it must be brought to light. No law forbids inquiry; on the contrary, inquiry works on the laws' behalf. For how will you keep the law by guarding against what the law forbids, if the care for guarding against it is taken away through your failure to find out what you are to keep? No law owes the consciousness of its justice to itself, but to those from whom it seeks obedience. Besides, a law is suspect if it will not have itself proved. Rightly, then, are the laws against the Christians thought just, venerable, and to be observed, for as long as what they persecute is unknown; rightly, once it is known, are they found most unjust and spat upon, with their swords and gibbets and lions. An unjust law has no honor. But, as I think, the justice of certain laws is itself in doubt among you, since every day you temper their harshness and wickedness by new decrees and ordinances?

“Whence, then,” you say, “did so great a report about you gain currency, whose testimony was perhaps enough for the makers of the laws?” Who, I ask, stood surety for its reliability, either to them then or to you since? It is rumor. Is this not the one of whom it is said, “Rumor, an evil than which no other is swifter”? Why an evil, if it is always true? It is not free of lying, and very often, even when it carries the truth, it does not cease from its lust for lying, weaving falsehood into truth by adding, subtracting, and confusing with variations. What is more, its condition is such that it lasts only as long as it lies. For it lives only as long as it proves nothing; once proved, it falls and, as if it had discharged its office of reporting, it departs; from then on the fact is held, the fact is named, and no one says, for example, “They say this was done at Rome,” or “Rumor has it that he has drawn a province,” but “He has drawn a province,” and “This was done at Rome.” No one names rumor except one who is uncertain, because no one is certain by rumor but by knowledge; no one believes rumor but a fool, because the wise man does not believe what is uncertain. Rumor, however widely it has spread in its ambition, must at some time have arisen from one mouth; thence it creeps somehow along the channels of tongues and ears, and the small fault at the origin of the report is so obscured that no one reflects whether that first mouth sowed lies, as often happens, from a spirit of rivalry, or from the whim of suspicion, or even from the fresh pleasure of lying. But it is well that time reveals all things, as your own maxims and proverbs testify, and nature itself, which is so ordered that nothing stays hidden, not even what rumor has not betrayed. See what a prodigy you have suborned against us: what it once reported and has strengthened into belief over so long a time, it has not been able to prove to this day. This name arose under the emperor Augustus; under Tiberius its teaching shone forth; under Nero its condemnation grew strong, so that from this point you may weigh it by the character of the persecutor. If that emperor was pious, the Christians are impious; if he was just, if chaste, the Christians are unjust and unchaste; if he was not a public enemy, we are public enemies. What we are, our condemner himself has shown, for he surely punished what was the opposite of himself. And yet, when all his other acts were erased, this one institution of Nero's alone has remained: just, no doubt, as being unlike its author. So for our age it is not yet two hundred and fifty years. So many criminals in the meantime, so many crosses that have attained divinity, so many infants slaughtered, so many loaves bloodied, so many lamps overturned, so many confusions of unions, and still rumor alone passes judgment on the Christians. It has, indeed, a great foundation in a fault of human nature: it lies more successfully about harsh and atrocious things. For the more you are inclined to malice, the readier you are to believe evil; indeed, a false evil is believed more easily than a true good. Yet if injustice had left any room among you for prudence, justice surely demanded, in order to test the reliability of the rumor, that you examine from whom the rumor could have been given out to the crowd, and so to the whole world. Not from the Christians themselves, I think, since by the very form and law of all mysteries the pledge of silence is owed: how much more for such things as, once betrayed, would not escape instant punishment? If, then, they did not betray themselves, it follows that outsiders did. How, I ask you, did outsiders come to know, since even just and lawful mysteries guard against every outside witness, unless unlawful ones are less careful? And yet it suits outsiders rather to be ignorant, and to invent. The curiosity of members of the household, you say, stole a look through chinks and holes. What then, if members of the household betray these things to you? We are all betrayed by none more than by them; how much more, if the atrocity were so great that the justice of indignation broke every bond of household loyalty? The mind could not have held in what it shuddered at, what the eye was terrified to see. This too is strange, if the one who leapt out with such a right of indignation to report it did not also long to prove it, and the one who heard it did not also take care to see; since the reward is equal for the informer, if he proves what he reported, and for the hearer, if he can believe on his own evidence what he hears. “Then,” you say, “it was first reported and exhibited, heard and inspected, and thereafter committed to rumor.” This indeed passes all wonder, if what is always being committed was caught once, unless we have now stopped doing such things. Yet we are still called by the same name and counted among the same people, and we grow more numerous day by day; the more we are, the more people hate us. Hatred grows as its material grows: as the multitude of the accused advances, why does the multitude of informers not advance with it? As far as I know, our way of life has become better known; you know the days of our meetings too, and so we are besieged and overpowered and held in our very secret gatherings. Yet who ever came upon a half-eaten corpse? Who ever found the marks of teeth in bloodied bread? Who, bursting into the darkness with a sudden light, ever found any foul, not to say incestuous, traces? If we obtain by bribes that we are not dragged out in public as such, why are we overpowered at all? We could avoid being dragged out altogether. For who either sells or buys off the betrayal of a crime without the crime itself? But why should I disparage outside spies and informers, when you charge us with such things as we ourselves would be publishing with the loudest outcry, either heard at once, if they are shown beforehand, or found out later, if they are hidden meanwhile? For no doubt it is the custom for those who wish to be initiated first to go to the master of the rites, or the father. Then he will say: “You need an infant, pledged for this purpose, to be sacrificed, and some bread to be broken in its blood; also candlesticks, for dogs tied to them to knock over, and morsels to draw those same dogs; and you also need a mother or a sister.” What if you have none? I suppose you could not be a lawful Christian. Tell me, do such things, when announced beforehand by others, bear being kept from betrayal? It is no strange thing that those people know. First the business of deceit is carried out: the banquet and the unions are foisted on the ignorant, for they had never before heard anything of the Christian mysteries. Yet afterward they must come to know, if only to prepare them in advance for others whom they bring in. Besides, how absurd it is that the profane should know what the priest does not know! So they keep silent and take it in good part, and break out into no tragedy of Thyestes or Oedipus, and do not drag it before the people. … If nothing of the kind is proved, something great, I know not what, must be judged to exist, the reward for which consists in bearing such atrocities. Wretched and pitiable nations, see, we set before you the promise of our discipline. It promises eternal life to its followers and keepers, and on the other hand threatens the profane and hostile with eternal punishment in eternal fire; for both outcomes the resurrection of the dead is preached. We shall see about the credibility of these things when they are treated in their own place; meanwhile, believe, as we do. For I want to know whether you are ready to come to it through such crimes, as we are said to do. Come, whoever you are, plunge the knife into the infant; or if that is someone else's office, then just watch a soul dying before it has lived; at least catch the fresh blood in which to soak your bread; eat heartily. Meanwhile, recline at table; count the places where mother or sister has lain; note them carefully, so that when darkness falls, testing, no doubt, the carefulness of each, you may not err by falling upon a stranger: you will have committed a sacrilege if it is not incest. When you have carried all this out, you will live forever. I want you to answer: do you value eternity so highly? No; that is why you do not believe it; even if you believed it, I deny that you would want it; even if you wanted it, I deny that you could do it. Why then can others, if you cannot? Why can you not, if others can? At what price would you have impunity and eternity cost? Or do these seem to us things to be bought at any price whatever? Or do Christians have other rows of teeth, other caverns of the throat, other sinews for incestuous lust? I think not. It is enough for us to be distinguished from your position by the truth alone.

Plainly, we are called “the third race.” Dog-faced men, perhaps, or Shadow-feet? Or some Antipodes from under the earth? If you have any reasoning at all in this, I should like you to state the first and second race, so that the third may thus be established. Psammetichus, indeed, thought he had found out by his ingenuity which race was born first. For he is said to have handed over infants fresh from birth, cut off from all human intercourse, to be reared by a nurse whose tongue he had cut out for this very purpose, so that, wholly exiled from the human voice, they might form their speech not by hearing, but, bringing out their own, might mark out as the first nation the one whose sound nature had dictated. The first word reported was BEKKOS; its meaning is the Phrygians' word for bread; so from then on the Phrygians are held to be the first race. But this will be one of the vanities of your fables that we must not handle idly, since by it we are eager to show that your belief is given to vanities rather than to truths. Is it at all credible that, with such a member cut out, the very instrument of the soul laid waste and severed at the root, the throat mutilated (which is dangerously wounded even from outside), the gore then flowing back into the chest, and finally with nourishment cut off for some time, the life of that nurse endured? Come now, suppose she prolonged her life with the remedies of Philomela, whom wiser people take to have been mute not from the cutting out of her tongue but from the blush of shame. If, then, she lived, she could blurt out something dull. And an inarticulate sound, a ringing without the shaping of the lips, can be forced from an open mouth, with the tongue lifeless, from the throat alone. Perhaps the infants, because it was the only sound they heard, imitated it the more easily and a little more tunefully, having tongues, and so stumbled on something that seemed to have a meaning. Let the Phrygians now be first; the Christians are still not third. For how many other successions of nations are there after the Phrygians? But reflect, lest those whom you call the third race should hold the first place, since there is no nation that is not Christian. So whatever nation is first is nonetheless Christian. With ridiculous madness you call us the newest and name us the third. But it is in respect of religion that we are counted the third race, not of nation: so that there are Romans, Jews, and then Christians. But where are the Greeks? Or if they are reckoned among the religions of the Romans, since indeed Rome courted even the gods of Greece, where at least are the Egyptians, who also, as far as I know, have a religion peculiar and curious? Moreover, if those in the third place are so monstrous, what are we to think of those who go before them in the first and second?

But why should I marvel at your vanities, when malice and folly, joined and grown together from your natural make, have come in under the same owner, error? Indeed, because I do not marvel, I must list them, so that on recognizing them you may marvel into what folly you fall, you who want us to be the causes of every public disaster or harm. If the Tiber overflows, if the Nile does not overflow, if the sky stands still, if the earth moves, if plague lays waste, if famine afflicts, at once the cry of all is: “The Christians' fault!” As if those who fear the true God had little to fear, or anything else! I suppose that, as despisers of your gods, we provoke these darts of theirs. As we stated above, for our age it is not yet three hundred years: how many disasters fell before that span upon the whole world, upon particular cities and provinces? How many wars, foreign and civil? How many plagues, famines, fires, chasms and earthquakes has the world gone through? Where were the Christians then, when the Roman state furnished so many histories of its own troubles? Where were the Christians then, when the islands Hiera, Anaphe, Delos, Rhodes, and Cea went to ruin with many thousands of people, or the island larger than Asia or Africa which Plato records was sunk in the Atlantic sea? When fire poured down on the Volsinii from heaven, and on Pompeii from its own mountain? When by an earthquake the Corinthian sea was snatched away? When the flood wiped out the whole world? Where were then, I will not say the Christians, despisers of the gods, but your gods themselves, whom the places and towns in which they were born, lived, and were buried, and even those which they founded, prove to be later than that disaster? For otherwise they would not have survived to this day, had they not come after that disaster. If you do not care to reread and review the testimonies of the ages, which report things otherwise to you, in the first place so as not to pronounce your gods most unjust, who for the sake of their despisers harm their worshippers too, do you not then prove that you yourselves are in error, if you hand down as gods beings who do not distinguish you from the deserts of the profane? But if, as one or another of the silliest says, they are angry with you too because you neglect to root us out, the question of their weakness and meanness is settled: for they would not be angry with you for being slack in punishing if they could do anything by themselves. And you confess this in other ways too, whenever you think you avenge them by our punishment. If one thing is defended by another, it is defended by a greater. Let the gods, then, be ashamed to be defended by a man.