To the Nations 1.10–1.19

Pour out now all your poisons, hurl every dart of calumny at this name: I shall not stop to repel them any further; later they will be blunted by an account of our whole discipline. For now, I will turn back upon you these same darts plucked from our body; I will show the same wounds of crimes buried in yourselves, so that you may fall by your own swords and javelins. First, then, as to what you aim at us in a general accusation, desertion of the institutions of the ancestors, consider again and again whether you do not share that crime with us. For see: in every department of life and discipline I recognize that antiquity is corrupted, indeed destroyed, among you. Of the laws it has already been said above that you have buried them under new decrees and ordinances day by day. As for the rest of the ordering of human life, it lies open how much you have changed from your ancestors, in dress, bearing, furnishings, in food itself, in speech itself; for you banish what is old as stale. Antiquity is shut out everywhere, in business, in duties; your authority has thrown down the whole authority of your ancestors. Indeed, what is more to your disgrace, you always praise the olden times and nonetheless reject them. By what perversity did the vanities of your ancestors deserve to remain and be approved among you, when you reject the things you approve? But even that very thing which you appear to keep and defend most faithfully as handed down from the ancestors, the chief thing for which you arraign us for transgression, from which the whole hatred of the Christian name draws its life, I mean the worship of the gods: I will show that it is likewise destroyed and despised by you. Except that there is no reason why we should likewise be held despisers of the gods, since no one despises what he knows does not exist at all. What exists at all can be despised; what is nothing suffers nothing. So it must suffer from those for whom it exists. All the more are you weighed down, who believe they exist and despise them, worship them and spit on them, honor them and provoke them. One may recognize this at once from this: since you worship different gods, some one and some another, you surely despise those whom you do not worship. One cannot be preferred without insult to another, and no choice is made without rejection. He who takes up one out of many has looked down on the one he does not take up. But so many and so great gods cannot be worshipped by all. So you despised them already from the first, not afraid, of course, to arrange things so that not all could be worshipped. And indeed those most wise and prudent ancestors, whose institutions you do not know how to renounce, above all in the matter of your gods, are themselves also found guilty of impiety. I lie if they had not decreed that no general should dedicate a temple he had vowed in war before the senate had approved it, as happened to Marcus Aemilius, who had vowed one to the god Alburnus. Surely it is a most impious, nay a most insulting deed, to place the honor of divinity at the discretion and whim of human judgment, so that he is not a god unless the senate has allowed him to be. The censors have often razed shrines without consulting the people. Certainly the consuls, on the authority of the senate, banished Father Liber with his rites not only from the city but from all Italy. Moreover, Varro records that Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates and Anubis were kept out of the Capitol, and that their altars, thrown down by the senate, were rebuilt only by the violence of the populace. And yet the consul Gabinius, on the Kalends of January, when he could scarcely get the victims approved because of the throng of the populace, since he had made no decision about Serapis and Isis, held the senate's judgment weightier than the rush of the mob and forbade the altars to be set up. You have, then, among your ancestors, if not the name, yet the Christian sect, which neglects the gods. If at least you were blameless in your honors toward the gods, they would stand accused of injuring religion; but I find that among you the advance of superstition and of impiety have conspired together. For how much more irreligious you are found! The private gods whom you call Lares and Penates by a household consecration you trample with a household license too, selling them and pawning them as need or fancy takes you. Such sacrileges of contempt would indeed be more tolerable, except that they are the more insulting for being petty. But the complaints of the private and household gods are relieved by some comfort, in that you treat the public gods more shamefully and insultingly still. First, those whom you have put up at the auction spear and subjected to the tax-farmers, you knock down every five years, posted for sale among your revenues. So the Serapeum, so the Capitol is bid for, knocked down, and leased like the forum, under the same crier's voice and the same exaction of the quaestor. Yet lands burdened with tribute are the cheaper, and persons of men assessed for the poll tax are the less noble (for these are the marks of captivity); but the gods: the more tributary, the more holy; or rather, the more holy, the more tributary. Majesty is turned into a source of gain, trade is advertised through religion, holiness begs to be leased. You demand payment for the ground of the temple, for access to the rite, for offerings, for victims. You sell the whole of divinity. It may not be worshipped free of charge. In fact more is paid to the tax-farmers than to the priests. The insult of taxing the gods, which is surely to be reckoned as contempt, was not enough; you are not content to have withheld honor from the gods unless you also cheapen whatever honor you do give by some indignity. For what at all do you do to honor them that you do not offer equally to your dead? You build temples to the gods, and temples equally to the dead; you build altars to the gods, and altars equally to the dead; you inscribe the same titles, you give statues the same forms, according to each one's art or business or age: an old man is figured as Saturn, a beardless youth as Apollo, a maiden as Diana, a soldier is consecrated in Mars, and a smith in Vulcan. No wonder, then, if you slaughter the same victims for the dead as for the gods and burn the same incense. Who could excuse this insult, which in whatever way ranks the dead with the gods? To kings, indeed, priesthoods have also been assigned, and sacred equipment, sacred wagons and chariots, couches for goddesses and banquets for gods, festivals and games. Plainly, since heaven lies open to them, this too is not without insult to the gods: first, because it would not be fitting for others to be numbered among them, even if it were granted to become gods after death; second, because the man who saw someone received into heaven would not perjure himself so freely and openly before the people unless he despised those by whom he swore, as do those who permit him to perjure himself. For they themselves agree that what they swear by is nothing; indeed they even reward him besides, because he has publicly despised the avengers of perjury. And yet how few among you are clean of perjury? Indeed the danger of swearing by the gods has now vanished, since swearing by Caesar is held the weightier religious act, which itself tends to eclipse your gods; for those who perjure themselves by Caesar would be punished more readily than those who swear by any Jupiter. But contempt is the more honorable, having a certain glory of pride; for it sometimes comes from confidence, or from a secure conscience, or from a natural loftiness of mind. Derision, however, the more wanton it is, the more marked is its bite of insult. Recognize, then, how you are found to be deriders of your divinities. I do not speak of how you behave in sacrificing: that you slaughter every animal that is worn out and wasting, and of the fat and sound ones offer the parts useless for eating, heads and hoofs, feathers and bristles plucked off, and whatever you would have thrown away at home too. I pass over what the common people or sacrilegious gluttony will think fits the religion of your ancestors; yet the most learned and most weighty, in so far as they believe that weight and prudence advance through learning, are always the most irreverent toward your gods, and their literature never stops, except to bring in the more shamefully vain or false things about the gods. I will begin with that very study of yours from which every worthless fellow gets his dreams: as much honor as you award him, so much you have taken from your gods, by glorifying the one who made sport of them. We still remember Homer. He, I think, is the one who treated divine majesty on the terms of the human condition, steeping the gods in human mishaps and passions; who, setting them at odds in their favors, matched them in pairs like gladiators; who wounds Venus with a human arrow, keeps Mars in chains for thirteen months, perhaps to perish there, parades Jupiter as having nearly suffered the same at the hands of the heavenly rabble, or wrings tears from him over Sarpedon, or presents him most foully in lust with Juno, recommending his lustful desire by recalling and listing his mistresses. After that, which of the poets, on the authority of their chief, was not insolent toward the gods, either by revealing what was true or by inventing what was false? And did the tragic or comic poets spare them, so as not to set forth the troubles and punishments of a god? I say nothing of the philosophers, whom pride of severity and hardness of discipline, secure from all fear, and some breath of truth as well, raise up against the gods. In fact Socrates, to insult them, swears by an oak, a dog, and a goat. For though he was condemned for this, yet since the Athenians repented of the condemnation, so far as even to punish his accusers, testimony is restored to Socrates, and I can retort that what is now condemned in us was approved in him. Diogenes too made some jest or other at Hercules, and the Diogenes of the Roman pen, Varro, brings in three hundred Joves, or Jupiters as they should be called, without heads. Other wanton wits even serve up your pleasures through the disgrace of the gods. Examine among yourselves the sacrilegious elegances of your Lentuli and Hostii, whether in their tricks and jokes you laugh at the mimes or at your gods. You also receive with great pleasure the writings of actors, which depict every foulness of the gods. Majesties are debauched before your eyes in an impure body. The mask of some god or other covers a disreputable and degraded head. The Sun mourns his son struck down by the thunderbolt, while you rejoice; Cybele sighs for a disdainful shepherd, and you do not blush; and you endure the recital of Jupiter's charges set to music. Plainly you are more religious in the gladiators' arena, where over human blood, over the filth of punishments, your gods dance out plots and stories for the dispatch of the guilty, or else the guilty are punished in the person of the gods themselves. We have often seen Attis, the god from Pessinus, castrated, and a man who was being burned alive had been dressed as Hercules. We have laughed, too, at the midday games' sport with the gods, when Father Dis, Jupiter's brother, leads away the gladiators' corpses with a mallet, and when Mercury, with his little wings on his bald head and his caduceus heated red, tests with the branding iron bodies already lifeless or feigning death. Who could track down every one of these things further, whether they disturb the honor of divinity, whether they bring the summit of majesty to the ground? Surely they are reckoned as contempt, both on the part of those who do such things and of those who accept them. So I do not know whether your gods do not complain more of you than of us. Having despised them on the one side, you flatter them on the other; you buy them off if you commit any offense; and in the end you may do as you please with those whom you willed to exist. We, however, turn away from them altogether.

Nor are we charged under this name only with having deserted the common religion, but with having brought in a monstrous superstition. For some of you have dreamed that our god is an ass's head. Cornelius Tacitus planted this suspicion. For in the fourth book of his Histories, where he treats the Jewish war, beginning from the origin of the nation and arguing as he pleased about both that origin and the name of their religion, he reports that the Jews, when on a march through desert places they were suffering from want of water, escaped by using as guides to a spring some wild asses, which were thought to be going to look for water after grazing; and that for this favor the likeness of a similar beast is worshipped by the Jews. From this, I suppose, it was presumed that we too, as near to the Jewish religion, are initiated into the same image. But the same Cornelius Tacitus, surely the most talkative of liars, forgetting his assertion, reports later that Pompey the Great, having defeated the Jews and taken Jerusalem, entered the temple, searched it, and found no image. Where then was that god? Surely nowhere more than in so memorable a temple, especially one closed to all but the priests, where they need not fear an outsider. But why should I defend this, when I have for the moment declared a confession of everything, all of which is to be turned back equally upon you? Let our god be believed to be some asinine person: surely you will not deny that you have the same thing as we? Indeed you worship whole asses, together with their Epona, and all beasts of burden, cattle, and wild beasts, which you likewise consecrate together with their stalls. And perhaps this is what you charge as a crime: that among worshippers of every beast, we worship only asses.

And whoever asserts that we are priests of the cross will be our fellow worshipper. The nature of a cross is a sign made of wood; you too worship the material, with an image on it. Although, just as yours has a human figure, so ours has its own. Never mind the features, so long as the nature is the same; never mind the shape, so long as it is the very body of a god. But if a difference arises on this point, how does the Athenian Pallas, or the Pharian Ceres, differ from the stake of a cross, when they are represented without shape by a rough stake and a mere unformed block of wood? Every piece of timber that is fixed upright is part of a cross, and indeed the greater part. But the whole cross is charged to us, with its crossbar, of course, and with that projecting seat. In this you are the more blameworthy, who have dedicated a maimed and truncated wood, which others have consecrated whole and built up. Yet for the rest you have the religion of the whole cross intact, as I shall show. You do not know that the very origin of your gods came from this gibbet. For every image, whether carved from wood or stone, or cast in bronze, or produced from any other richer material, must be preceded by the modeller's hands. Now the modeller first sets up a wooden cross, since our own body too has the line of a cross silently and secretly placed in it: the head rises up, the spine runs straight, the shoulders project crosswise; if you set a man with his hands outstretched, you will have made the image of a cross. On this beginning, and as it were a prop, the clay, woven on over it, gradually fills out the limbs, builds up the body, and puts over the cross within whatever posture the clay was meant to take; from there, by compass and leaden rules, the preparation of the image will pass over into marble, or clay, or bronze, or whatever the god is to be made of. From the cross the clay, from the clay the god: in a way the cross passes into the god through the clay. So you consecrate the cross, from which the consecrated one begins. Let it be said by way of example: from an olive stone, a peach kernel, or a peppercorn tempered under the earth, a tree rises up into branches, foliage, and the appearance of its kind. If you transplant it, or use a shoot from its branches for another, to what will what comes from the layer be attributed? Surely to that grain, kernel, or stone? For when the third stage is ascribed to the second, and likewise the second to the first, the third will be traced back to the first, passing through the second. No more need be argued on this, since by a natural rule every kind refers its standing to its origin, and the more a kind is valued by its origin, the more the origin is found in the kind. If, then, in the kind of the gods you worship the cross as their origin, this will be the kernel and primordial grain from which whole forests of images are propagated among you. But now for the plain facts. You venerate Victories as divinities, and indeed as the more august the more joyful they are. The supports in the middle by which they raise the structure will be crosses; the trophy is, so to speak, crosses within. So the religion of the camp worships crosses even in its Victories: it adores the standards, swears by the standards, prefers the standards even to Jupiter himself. But that whole array of images and all that worship of gold are necklaces of crosses. So too in the banners and flags, which the soldiery guards with no less sanctity, those streamers are the clothing of crosses. You are ashamed, I suppose, to worship crosses unadorned and bare.

Others, indeed, more humanely think that the sun is the Christians' god, because it has become known that we pray toward the east, or make holiday on the day of the sun. What? Do you do less? Do not most of you, in an affectation of worshipping the heavenly bodies, at times move your lips toward the sunrise? It is you, surely, who have even taken the sun into the calendar of the seven days, and among the days have preferred it to the day before it, a day on which you give up your bath or put it off until evening, or devote yourselves to rest and feasting. This you do in turning aside from your own religions to foreign ones. For the Jewish feasts, the sabbaths and the “pure supper,” and the Jewish rites of lamps, and fasts with unleavened bread, and prayers by the shore, are all surely foreign to your gods. So, to return from this digression: you who reproach us with the sun and its day, acknowledge the kinship; we are not far from your Saturn and your sabbaths.

Rumor has now put about something new concerning our god. Not long ago a most abandoned fellow in this city, a deserter even of his own religion, a Jew only by the loss of his skin, and all the more so after the bites of beasts, since by hiring himself out to them every day he now goes about with his whole body ripe for flaying, exhibited a picture against us with this inscription: ONOCOETES. The figure had the ears of a donkey, wore a toga, held a book, and had one foot hoofed. And the crowd believed the infamous Jew. For what other kind of seed is there for our infamy? So throughout the whole city “Onocoetes” is proclaimed. But this too, being a thing of yesterday, lacking the authority of time and weak from the character of its author, I will gladly take up in my zeal for turning things back. Let us see, then, whether here too you are caught along with us. For it makes no difference of what shape they are, so long as we give our care to deformed images. You have gods with a dog's head and a lion's head, gods horned like the ox, the ram, and the goat, goat-born or snake-bodied, winged on foot, forehead, and back. Why then do you single out our one? Many Onocoetae are found among you.

If we meet on equal terms in the matter of gods, it follows that there is no difference between us in sacrifice or rite either, so that the comparison may be satisfied from another angle. We, it is said, offer sacrifice or initiate by infanticide. As for you, if what you have done by the slaughter of human beings and by infanticides has slipped your memory, you will recognize it in its proper order; for now we put off most of it, lest we seem to handle the same things everywhere. Meanwhile, as I said, the match is not lacking on another side. For even if we do it one way, you too are no less infanticides, you who are indeed forbidden by the laws to kill newborn infants; yet no laws are evaded with such impunity and such security, with everyone knowing, by the connivance of a whole generation. Nor does it make a difference that you do not kill them in a sacred rite or for a god. Indeed this is the harsher, that you dispatch them by cold and hunger or to the beasts, or drown them in water, a longer death. And if in any respect it is done differently among you, add this, that you extinguish your own offspring, and whatever falls short on the other count will be made up, nay heaped up over, in you. But we are said to dine on that victim of impiety. While this too is recognized in you, where it is more fittingly placed, we are not far removed from your voracity. If yours is lewd and ours cruel, we are joined, perhaps, by nature, in which cruelty always agrees with lewdness. And yet what do you do less, nay, what do you not do more? Do you gape too little after human flesh, because you devour it living and grown? Do you lap human blood too little, because you draw out blood that was yet to be? Do you feed too little on an infant, because you drink up the whole infant before its time?

We come to the hour of the lamps, the ministry of the dogs, and the devices of darkness. Here I fear I may have to give way. For what such thing shall I charge against you? But come, praise the plan of our bashful incest: that we have contrived an adulterous night, so as to defile neither the light nor true night; that we have thought it right to spare even earthly lights; that we play a trick even on our own conscience; for whatever we do, if we like, we can merely suspect it. But your incests enjoy, in their freedom, every light and every night and the whole witness of heaven; and, that they may turn out the more happily, while you commit incest openly with all heaven for witness, you alone do not know it; we, however, can recognize our crimes even in the dark. Plainly the Persians, as Ctesias reports, live freely with their mothers, as knowingly as they do without horror. And the Macedonians too clearly practise what they approved: for when Oedipus with his eyes torn out first came on their stage, they received him with laughter and derision. The tragic actor, dismayed, drew back his mask and said, “Gentlemen, have I displeased you?” The Macedonians answered: “No, you played it finely; but the writer is most foolish if he invented it, or Oedipus most mad if he did it.” And from then on one said to another, “He drove at his mother.” But one nation or another: how small a stain on the whole world! We, of course, have infected every sun and polluted every ocean! Name, then, some nation free of the things that drag the whole human race into incest. If any nation lacks intercourse itself and the constraints of age and sex, not to say lust and luxury, that will be the nation free of incest. If there is some nature set apart from the human condition, so as to be exposed neither to ignorance nor to error nor to chance, that alone will be able to answer the Christians more firmly. Consider, then, lust tossed among errors as among winds, and see whether peoples are lacking on whom the broad and rough shoals of error may drive them into this crime. Above all, when you expose your infants to the mercy of strangers, or give them for adoption to better parents, do you forget how much material for incest is supplied, how great an opening is made for accidents? Plainly those of you who are stricter from some discipline, or from a definite scruple, hold back your lust from such an outcome in every place, at home or abroad, lest the scattering of seed and the leaps of lust everywhere produce children unknown to you, on whom either the parents themselves or other children might later fall, since lust shuts out even the restraint of age. As many adulteries, as many acts of defilement, as many errors of public lust, whether under a fixed or a roaming signboard, so many minglings of blood, so many joinings of families, so many channels to incest. From this the veins of plots flow for the mimes and comedies; from this too came that tragedy which broke out not long ago and was judged when Fuscianus was prefect of the City. A boy of noble birth, through the chance negligence of his attendants, went out beyond the door, was carried off by passers-by, and was lost to his home. A Greek who had nursed him … Then, changed by age, he was brought back from Asia to Rome to the slave market. His father unknowingly bought him and used him in the Greek fashion; then, as was his custom, the master sent the youth to the fields and to chains. There his tutor and his nurse had long been undergoing punishment. The whole story is laid before them; they tell each other their fortunes: they, that their charge had been lost in boyhood; he, that he too had been lost from boyhood; and moreover, by the same event, that he had been born at Rome of a respectable house; perhaps he also recounted certain tokens. So, by the will of God, that so great a stain might be brought home to the world, their spirit is shaken day by day, the times correspond with his age, the eyes recall something of the features, some peculiarities of the body are recognized. The diligence of the inquiry, once pressed, drives on the masters, or rather now only the parents. The slave-dealer is traced and, unhappily, found. When the crime is revealed, the parents cure themselves with a noose; the prefect assigns the property to the son who unhappily survived, not as an inheritance but as the wages of defilement and incest. That one example of a public outbreak of such crimes lurking among you was enough. Nothing happens only once in human affairs. Only once, plainly, could it be dug out of the sacraments of our religion, I suppose! You make the charge, and the same things are found among you even without sacraments.

As for the charges of obstinacy or presumption, if you put any forward, not even these stand outside a common comparison. The first obstinacy is the one reckoned second after the religion of God, that concerning Caesar's majesty: we are called irreligious toward the Caesars, because we neither propitiate their images nor swear by their genii. We are named enemies of the people. So be it, when from among you nations Caesars arise every day, Parthian, Median, and Germanic! Here let the Roman race see in whom the untamed and foreign nations are. Yet it is you who, from among our own people, conspire against our own rulers. We certainly acknowledge the Roman loyalty to the Caesars! No conspiracy ever broke out, no Caesar's blood left its stain in the senate or in the very palace, no majesty was ever usurped in the provinces! Syria still reeks with the stench of corpses; Gaul still does not wash in its Rhone. But I pass over the crimes of madness, since not even these allow the name of Roman. I will address the sacrileges of frivolity and recognize the irreverence of the native race itself: the festive lampoons that the statues know, those sly sayings now and then from the assembly, and the curses that ring in the circus. If not with arms, at least with your tongue you are always rebels. But it is another thing, I suppose, not to swear by Caesar's genius; for there is a question about the right to perjury, since you do not swear in good faith even by your gods. But we do not call the emperor a god; on this point, as the common saying goes, we make a face. Rather, you who call Caesar a god both mock him, by calling him what he is not, and curse him, because he does not wish to be what you call him. For he prefers to live rather than to become a god.

The rest of our obstinacy you place under this heading: that out of hardness and contempt of death we do not refuse in our minds your swords, crosses, and beasts, nor fire nor tortures. But your forebears and ancestors learned from virtue not only to despise all these things but even to hold them in high praise. How many and how great men has the sword found willing! It is tiresome to go through them. The novelty of a cross, many-spiked and enclosed, your Regulus willingly dedicated; the queen of Egypt made use of her own beasts; and the fire which, after her, the Carthaginian woman entered in her country's last hour, more steadfast than her husband Hasdrubal, Dido herself had taught women to rush into. And an Athenian woman wore out the tortures, refusing the tyrant; at last, lest her body and her sex give way, she bit off her tongue and spat it out, the whole instrument of the confession she had torn out. But you count these things as glory in your own people, and as hardness in ours. Destroy now the glory of your ancestors, so that you may destroy us as well. Be content even to detract from the praise of your forefathers for the moment, so as not to give us room on these points. Perhaps the character of the times, in a sturdier antiquity, demanded harder spirits. But now, in the tranquillity of peace, spirits are milder, and men's minds too, even toward strangers. “Very well,” you say, “compare yourselves with the ancients; we must pursue with hatred in you what we do not approve, because it is not found in us.” Answer, then, point by point. I do not ask for examples in the same terms. If contempt of death, of course, made the sword the stuff of legends for your ancestors, surely it is not from love of life that you hire yourselves out to the trainers of gladiators for the sword, and it is from fear of death that you enlist in the army! If a woman has a famous death by beasts, you go of your own free will to the beasts every day in the midst of peace. If no Regulus among you has yet bargained for the cross, the engine for nailing the body, yet contempt of fire has now appeared, since recently a man hired himself out to be clothed in a burning tunic and to run a set distance. If a woman defied the scourges, this too was lately repeated by one who ran the gauntlet through the rank of the huntsmen, to say nothing of the Spartan glory.

So far, I think, the dreadful charges of Christian obstinacy. If we share these with you, it remains for us to compare the matters in which we are ridiculed. And yet all our obstinacy is built on convictions; for we look forward to the resurrection of the dead. The hope of resurrection is contempt of death. Laugh, then, as much as you like at these most stupid minds that die in order to live; but that you may laugh more easily and guffaw more freely, take a sponge, or meanwhile your tongue, and wipe out for the moment your own writings, which likewise assert that souls will return into bodies. And yet how much more acceptable is our belief, which maintains that they will return into the same bodies! And how much vainer is your tradition that a man's spirit will return in a dog or a mule or a peacock! Likewise we announce a judgment appointed by God after death according to each one's deserts. You ascribe this to Minos and Rhadamanthus, while meanwhile rejecting the more just Aristides. By that judgment, we say, the wicked will pass eternity in eternal fire, and the pious and innocent in a delightful place. With you too the state of Pyriphlegethon and of Elysium is arranged in no other way. Nor do the mythmakers and poets alone sing such things; the philosophers too affirm the return of souls and the allotment of judgment.