Collected Works 29 part 1/3

A great evil, out of a small one, the scorpion breeds up from the earth. As many poisons as there are kinds, as many ruins as there are species, as many pains as there are colors. Nicander writes of it and depicts it. And yet the one gesture of violence for them all is from the tail, not the mouth; and the tail will be whatever is propagated from the hinder part of the body and lashes. Even so is the scorpion's: that poisoned series of knots, a slender vein within, rising with an arched onset, draws tight at the very top, after the manner of an engine of torture, its hooked sting. Whence too they name from the scorpion a warlike engine that quickens its missiles by a drawing-back. That sting is also a tube, gaping with a fine slenderness, and it pours the venom, wherewith it strikes, into the wound. The familiar season of its danger is summer; with the south and southwest winds it spreads its savage sail.

Among remedies natural things count for most; magic too binds something around; medicine comes to the rescue with iron and with the cup. For some even drink beforehand, hastening to secure protection; but intercourse drains it away, and they thirst anew. For us faith is the safeguard, if it too be not smitten by distrust—by our signing at once, and adjuring, and casting our heel upon the beast. In this way, in fact, we often come to the aid even of the heathen, gifted by God with that power which the Apostle consecrated when he scorned the viper's bite. What, then, does this pen of mine promise, if faith is safe of itself? That it may be safe of itself in other cases too, when it suffers its own scorpions. A bitter mediocrity belongs to these as well: their kind is various, and they are armed in one way only, and are equipped at a fixed season, and by none other than that of heat.

Among Christians this is persecution. When, therefore, faith is aflame and the church is being burned up, as in the figure of the bush, then the Gnostics break out, then the Valentinians creep forth, then all the impugners of martyrdoms boil up, themselves also hot to hurt, to sting, to kill. For, knowing that many are then simple and untaught and weak, and most people mere weathervanes, and Christians only if it please them, they judge that these are never more to be approached than when the entrance of the soul has been loosened by fear—especially when some atrocity has already crowned the faith of the martyrs. And so at first, still dragging their tail from the affections, they set to, or lash as if into the void: 'Is this what innocent men are to suffer? So that you would think him a brother, or a heathen of the better sort. Is this how a sect harmless to no one is to be treated?'

Thereupon they press home: 'men perish without a cause.' For to perish, and without a cause—this is the first sting. Thereafter they now cut in: 'but simple souls do not know what is written, and how, where and when and before whom confession is to be made—except that this is not even simplicity, but vanity, nay madness, to die for God, as though he would save me. So shall he slay, who ought to save? Once Christ died for us, once was he slain, that we should not be slain. If he demands a return, does he too expect salvation from my death? Or does God crave the blood of men, especially if he refuses that of bulls and of goats? Surely he prefers the repentance of a sinner rather than his death. And how does he not desire the death of sinners?'

These things, and whatever other inventions of heretical poisons there may be, whom do they not sting, if not to destruction, at least into gall; if not to death, at least into bile? But you, if your faith is watchful, strike the scorpion then and there with the anathema for your sandal, and leave it dying in its own venom. Otherwise, if it has glutted its blow, the venom is instilled and hastens into the inward parts; at once all the former senses grow numb, the blood of the mind congeals, the flesh of the spirit fades away, the loathing of the Name grows sharp. Now the very mind seeks for itself where it may vomit, and thus weakness, once it has been struck, breathes out its wounded faith either into heresy or into the world. And now, for the present state of things, the heat is at its midpoint, the very dog-star of persecution, from that Cynocephalus himself, forsooth.

Some by fire, some by the sword, some by wild beasts, have proved themselves Christians; others meanwhile, having tasted martyrdom by cudgels and iron claws besides, hunger in prison. We ourselves, like hares, a marked-out prey, are besieged from afar, and the heretics prowl about after their manner. And so the time has warned us, against our native little beasts, to temper with our pen a native theriac. You who read, may you drink. Nor is the draught bitter. If the oracles of the Lord are sweet above honey and the honeycombs, the pigments thereof come from that source. If the promise of God flows with milk and honey, these things taste of that which leads thither. But woe to those who turn sweet into bitter, and light into darkness!

For likewise those too who impugn martyrdoms, interpreting salvation as perdition, refashion the sweet into the bitter as much as the light into darkness; and thus, by preferring this most wretched life to that most blessed one, they substitute the bitter for the sweet as much as darkness for light. But not yet must we treat of the good of the martyr, save first of the duty; nor of its usefulness before its necessity. Divine authority goes first—whether God has willed and commanded any such thing—so that those who deny it to be good may not be persuaded of its expediency, except when they have been subdued. It is fitting that heretics be compelled to their duty, not enticed. Hardness must be conquered, not coaxed. And surely it will be adjudged best enough, whatever shall be proved to have been appointed and enjoined by God.

Let the Gospels wait a little, while I draw out their root—the Law—while thence I elicit the will of God from that very source whereby I recognize him: 'I am,' he says, 'the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt. Thou shalt not have other gods besides me. Thou shalt not make for thyself a likeness of the things that are in heaven, and that are on the earth beneath, and that are in the sea under the earth. Thou shalt not adore them, neither shalt thou serve them. For I am the Lord thy God.' Likewise in the same Exodus: 'You yourselves have seen that I have spoken to you from heaven. You shall not make for yourselves gods of silver, and gods of gold you shall not make for yourselves.' In accordance with these, also in Deuteronomy: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one, and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and with all thy strength and with thy whole soul.'

And again: 'Neither forget the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. The Lord thy God shalt thou fear, and him alone shalt thou serve, and to him shalt thou cleave, and by his name shalt thou swear. You shall not go after strange gods, of the gods of the nations that are round about you; for the Lord thy God is a jealous God in thy midst, lest, being angered, he be indignant and destroy thee from the face of the earth.' But also, setting forth blessings and curses: 'Blessings,' he says, 'if you shall hearken to the commandments of the Lord your God, whatsoever I command you this day, and shall not err from the way which I have enjoined upon you, so as to go and sow to other gods, whom you know not.' Concerning whom, to be utterly rooted out on every side:

'With utter destruction,' He says, 'you shall destroy all the places in which the nations served their gods, which you shall possess as an inheritance, upon the mountains and hills and beneath the leafy trees; and their altars you shall dig up, you shall overthrow and break in pieces their pillars, and cut down their groves, and the graven images of their gods you shall burn with fire, and blot out their name from that place.' Further He urges, when they had entered the land of promise and had exterminated its nations: 'Take heed to yourself, that you do not follow them after they have been exterminated from before your face, that you do not seek out their gods, saying, As the nations do for their gods, so let me also do.'

'But also,' He says, 'if a prophet should rise up among you, or a dreamer of dreams, and give you a sign or a portent, and it come to pass, and he say, Let us go and serve other gods whom you do not know, you shall not hearken to the word of that prophet or dreamer; for the Lord your God is testing you, whether you fear God with your whole heart and with your whole soul. After the Lord your God you shall walk, and Him you shall fear, and His precepts you shall keep, and His voice you shall hear, and Him you shall serve, and to Him you shall cleave. But that prophet or dreamer shall die; for he has spoken to seduce you from the Lord your God.' And likewise under another heading:

'But if your brother by father or mother, or your son or your daughter, or the wife who is in your bosom, or the friend who is as your own soul, secretly entice you, saying, Let us go and serve other gods whom neither you nor your fathers have known, of the gods of the nations that are round about you, near or far off, you shall not consent to go with him, nor shall you hearken to him. Your eye shall not spare him, nor shall you desire him, nor shall you save him; you shall surely inform against him. Your hands shall be upon him first to kill him, and the hands of your people last, and you shall stone him, and he shall die, because he sought to turn you away from the Lord your God.'

He adds also concerning cities: if it were established that any of them, at the persuasion of wicked men, had gone over to other gods, then all its inhabitants should be slain, and all things in it should be made a devoted offering, and all its spoils should be gathered together into all its exits and burned with fire, together with all its vessels and all its people, in the sight of the Lord God; 'and it shall not be habitable,' He says, 'for ever, it shall be built up no more, nor shall anything of its devoted thing cleave to your hands, that the Lord may be turned from the indignation of His anger.' He appended likewise an order of curses among the maledictions against idols: 'Cursed is the man who makes a graven or molten abomination, the work of a craftsman's hands, and sets it up in a secret place.'

But in Leviticus: 'You shall not follow idols,' He says, 'nor make for yourselves molten gods. I am the Lord your God.' And elsewhere: 'The children of Israel are My servants and my children. These are they whom I brought out of the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. You shall not make for yourselves things made by hand, nor set up for yourselves a graven pillar. Nor shall you place a stone as a mark in your land. I am the Lord your God.' And these first things were spoken through Moses, pertaining assuredly to all, to whomsoever the Lord God of Israel should likewise bring out of the Egypt of a most superstitious world and out of the house of human bondage.

But thereafter every mouth of the prophets sounds forth with the voices of the same God, heaping up His same law by a renewal of the same precepts, and denouncing nothing else so principally in the first place as this: to beware of every fashioning and worship of idols. As through David: 'The gods of the nations are silver and gold; they have eyes and see not, they have ears and hear not, they have nostrils and smell not, a mouth and speak not, hands and touch not, feet and walk not. Like unto them shall be those who make them and who trust in them.' III.

Nor let me think it need be disputed whether God rightly forbids His name and honour to be given over to a lie; whether He rightly refuses that those whom He has torn away from the error of superstition should return again into Egypt; whether He rightly does not suffer those whom He has chosen for Himself to fall away from Him. So neither will it be expected that this be examined afresh by us: whether He willed the discipline to be observed which He willed to establish, and whether He justly avenges as forsaken the discipline which He willed to be observed, since He would have established it in vain if He had not willed it to be observed, and would have willed it observed in vain if He had not willed to vindicate it. For it follows that I should prove these determinations of God against superstitions to be as fully carried into effect as they are also vindicated, since upon these will rest the whole rationale of martyrdoms.

Moses was away with God on the mountain, when the people, impatient of his so necessary absence, sought to produce for themselves gods, whereby they rather destroyed themselves. Aaron is pressed, and he orders the earrings of their women to be cast into the fire. For they were about to lose, unto judgment upon themselves, the true ornaments of the ears, the voices of God. The clever fire pours out for them the figure of a calf, thus taunting them as having their heart where their treasure also was, namely in Egypt, which consecrated among the other animals a certain ox as well. And so three thousand men, cut down by their nearest kinsmen, because they had offended a Kinsman so near as God, dedicated both the beginnings and the deserts of transgression.

In Numbers, when Israel had turned aside at Shittim, they go off to lust after the daughters of Moab, are invited to idols, so that they might also commit fornication in spirit; then they eat of their polluted things, and thereupon also worship the gods of the nation, and are initiated into Baal-Peor. For this idolatry too, the sister of adultery, twenty-three thousand, slain by domestic swords, made atonement to the divine wrath. Joshua the son of Nun being dead, they forsake the God of their fathers and serve the idols of the Baalim and of Astarte; and the Lord being angry delivered them into the hands of spoilers, and they were despoiled by them and sold to their enemies, nor could they by any means stand before the face of their enemies. Wherever they had advanced, the hand was upon them for evil, and they were sorely oppressed.

After these things God set over them Judges, whom we understand to be Censors. But they did not persevere in obeying even these. As soon as any of the Judges had died, they turned to sin beyond their fathers, going after the gods of others and serving and worshipping them. Therefore the Lord being angry said: 'Since indeed this nation has transgressed My covenant which I ordained for their fathers, and have not heard My voice, I too will no longer take heed to remove a man from before them out of the nations which Joshua left when he departed.'

And thus, throughout almost all the annals of the Judges and thereafter of the kings, the powers of the surrounding nations being preserved, Israel by war and captivity and the yoke of the alien peoples paid the penalty of God's anger, as often as it had chiefly strayed from Him into idolatry. IV. If therefore this is established both to have been forbidden from the beginning by so many and so great precepts, and never to have been committed with impunity, according to so many and so great examples, and that no crime is reckoned so haughty before God as a transgression of this kind, we ought of our own accord to understand that the intention of the divine denunciations and executions has from that time onward been the patron of martyrdoms, which are not only not to be doubted but even to be endured, for which of course He had made room by forbidding idolatry.

For otherwise martyrdoms would not come to pass. And assuredly He had laid the foundation of His authority beforehand, willing those things to come to pass for which He had made room. For now we are perplexed concerning the will of God, and the scorpion redoubles his sting, denying this will, accusing this will, so as either to insinuate another god whose will this is not, or none the less to destroy our God, whose will is such, or altogether to deny the will of God, if he cannot deny God Himself.

But we, contending elsewhere concerning God and concerning the rest of the body of every heretical doctrine, now draw fixed lines for one particular form of encounter, defending the will of no other God than the God of Israel, that will which made room for martyrdoms, of idolatry which was ever both forbidden by precepts and punished by judgments. For if, by observing the precept, I suffer violence, this will be in a manner the precept of observing the precept: that I should suffer that through which I shall be able to observe the precept, namely violence, whatsoever threatens me and must be guarded against, arising from idolatry. And assuredly he who imposes a precept extorts obedience. He could not therefore have been unwilling that those things should come to pass through which obedience would be established.

It is prescribed to me that I call no other god, that not even by speaking—no less with the tongue than with the hand—I fashion a god, nor worship another, nor in any way venerate any besides that one only who so commands, whom also I am bidden to fear lest I be forsaken by Him, and to love with all my substance so that I may die for Him. Serving in this sacred oath, I am challenged by enemies. I am their equal, unless I surrender to them. Defending this, I fight it out in the battle-line, I am wounded, I am struck down, I am slain. Who willed this end for his soldier, save He who enrolled him with such an oath? V. You have therefore the will of my God. This blow has been met. Now let us consider another stroke, concerning the quality of the will. It is a long matter to show that my God is good, which the Marcionites have already learned from us.

Meanwhile it suffices that He be called God, so that it be necessary to believe Him good. For whoever presumes God to be evil will not be able to stand consistent in both: he must either deny to be God the one he has judged evil, or call good the one he has pronounced God. Good therefore will also be the will of Him who will not be God unless He is good. This is proved also by the goodness of the very thing which God has willed, I mean of martyrdom, since a good thing none but a good Being has willed. I maintain that martyrdom is good in the sight of that same God by whom idolatry is both forbidden and punished. For martyrdom strives against and opposes idolatry. But to strive against and oppose evil, nothing but a good thing can. Not that I deny there to be a rivalry among evils with one another as well as among goods; but the condition of this heading is different.

For martyrdom contends with idolatry not out of some common warfare, but out of its own grace; for it delivers from idolatry. What delivers from evil, who will not pronounce good? What else is the opposition of idolatry and martyrdom than that of death and life? In as much as life will be reckoned to martyrdom, so much will idolatry be reckoned to death. He who calls life evil, has death, which he may call good. This too is a perversity of men: to shake off wholesome things, to take up destructive ones, to seek out dangerous things, to shun remedies, or in short to desire rather to die quickly than to be cured. For there are also many who flee the protection of medicine: for there are many fools, many cowards, and men shamefaced to their own hurt.

And there is plainly, as it were, a savagery of medicine in the scalpel and in the cautery, in the burning of mustard; yet to be cut and burned and stretched and bitten is not on that account an evil, because it brings useful pains; nor because it merely grieves will it be refused, but because it grieves of necessity will it be applied. The fruit excuses the horror of the operation. In short, that man howling and groaning and bellowing under the hands of the physician will afterward heap those same hands with reward, and will proclaim them the best of craftsmen, and will now deny them to be savage. So martyrdoms also rage savagely, but unto salvation. It will be permitted to God also to heal unto life eternal through fires and swords and all manner of bitter things.

But you will marvel at the physician even in this: that he generally applies qualities of remedies about equal to the qualities of complaints, since he aids as it were from the contrary side, coming to the rescue through those very things by which the trouble is suffered. For he checks heats by burdening them further with heats, and quenches burnings by wasting them rather with thirst, and gathers up the excesses of bile with certain bitter draughts, and recalls the fluxes of blood by a little vein poured out over and above.

But will you think that God, and a jealous God indeed, is to be blamed if He has willed to contend with the cause, and by rivalling the injury to do good—to dissolve death by death, to scatter slaughter by slaughter, to shake off torments by torments, to dispel punishments by punishments, to bestow life by taking it away, to help the flesh by harming it, to save the soul by snatching it away? What you deem perversity is reason; what you count savagery is grace. Thus, since God is healing eternal things by means of momentary ones, magnify your God to your own good; you have fallen into His hands, but you have fallen happily. He too fell into your sicknesses. Man always first makes work for the physician; indeed, he himself drew upon himself the peril of death.

He had received from his Lord, as from a physician, a discipline useful enough according to a law of living: that he should indeed eat all things, but abstain from one little tree alone, which the physician himself knew to be for the time inopportune. He listened to the one he preferred, and broke the abstinence. He eats the unlawful thing, and glutted with transgression, he surfeited unto death, most worthy in good faith to perish utterly, because he willed it. But the Lord, having borne with the ferment of the offence until in time the medicine should be tempered, gradually composed the remedies—all the disciplines of faith, and these too rivalling the fault, cancelling the word of death by the word of life, filing down the hearing of transgression by the hearing of devotion. Thus, even when that Physician bids one die, He shuts out the lethargy of death.

Why does man now grudge to suffer from the remedy what he did not then grudge to suffer from the fault? Does it displease him to be slain unto salvation, who was not displeased to be slain unto perdition? Will he be nauseated at the antidote, who gaped after the poison? VI. But if God had set before us martyrdoms under the name of a contest, whereby we should make trial with the adversary, so that he by whom man was gladly struck down should now be steadfastly struck down by him, here too the liberality rather than the harshness of God prevails. For He willed man, plucked out from the jaws of the devil through faith, now also through virtue to become the treader-down of that devil, so that man should not merely have escaped, but should even have vanquished the enemy. He who had called man unto salvation loved also to invite him unto glory, so that we who rejoice at being freed may exult also at being crowned.

Those contests, the strife-loving solemnities and superstitious competitions of the Greeks, both of religions and of pleasures—with what great favour the world now celebrates them, has been permitted even to Africa. Still the several cities disquiet Carthage with congratulations that she has been granted the Pythian games, after the old age of the stadium. Thus from of old it has been held most worthy to engage in a trial of studies, to weigh the arts of bodies and of voices by their excellence, with a prize as index, a spectacle as judge, and the verdict pleasure. In these, bare are the battles, not few the wounds; fists shatter, heels butt, gauntlets tear apart, whips lacerate. Yet no one will taunt the president of the contest for exposing men to violence. Actions for injuries lie outside the stadium.

But mark how much those bruises and gore and welts negotiate for: crowns to wit, and glory and endowment, public privileges, civic stipends, portraits, statues, and—such as the world can bestow—an eternity from fame, a resurrection from memory. The boxer himself does not complain of feeling pain, for he wills it; the crown covers the wounds, the palm obscures the blood; victory swells more than the injury. Will you deem him hurt whom you see glad? But not even the vanquished himself will reproach the master of the games with his fall. Will it be unbecoming to God to bring forth His arts and disciplines into the midst, into this arena of the world, as a spectacle to men and angels and all the powers? To prove flesh and soul in constancy and endurance?

To give to this one the palm, to that one honour, to another citizenship, to another stipends? even to reject some, and to remove the chastised with ignominy? No doubt you prescribe to God at what times or in what manners or in what places He should judge concerning His own household, as though it did not befit a judge to prejudge as well. What now, if He had exposed faith to martyrdoms not under the name of a contest, but even of its own advancement—ought it not to have some accumulation of hope, for which it might drive on its zeal and hang up its vow, whereby it might strain to ascend, since even earthly offices seethe by degrees? Or how are there many mansions with the Father, if not according to the variety of merits? How too shall star differ from star in glory, unless according to the diversity of their rays?

Furthermore, if for this reason it befitted faith that some enhancement of sublimity and renown should be brought forth, such a kind of profit ought to have been that which stands at a great cost: at labour, torture, torment, death. But consider the compensation, when flesh and soul are paid out—than which nothing in man is more precious, the one being the hand of God, the other His breath—that these very things are paid out unto the advancement of those whose the advancement is, that these very things are expended which become the gain, the same being the prices which are also the wages.

God had foreseen also the other infirmities of the human condition, the adversary's snares, the deceits of things, the nets of the world, that faith would be in peril even after the washing, that very many would perish again after salvation—those who had let their wedding garment grow shabby, who had not prepared oil for their little torches, who would have to be sought through mountains and glens and carried back on the shoulders. He appointed therefore second solaces and final defences: the combat of martyrdom and the washing of blood to follow thereafter. Of whose felicity David says: 'Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered. Blessed is he to whom God has not imputed sin.' For to the martyrs, properly, nothing can now be reckoned, seeing that in that washing their very life is laid down.

Thus love covers a multitude of sins: love, namely, which loves God with all its might, whereby it strives unto the end in martyrdom, with all its soul, which it lays down for God, fashions out the man a martyr. Will you call these remedies, counsels, judgments, and even spectacles of God, atrocity? Does God covet the blood of man? And yet I would dare to say He does, if man too covets the kingdom of God, if man too covets sure salvation, if man too covets a second regeneration. No compensation is invidious in which the account either of grace or of injury is mutual. VII.

Let the scorpion still strike, brandishing God as a murderer; I shall plainly shudder at the foul breath of blasphemy stinking from a heretical mouth, but I shall nonetheless embrace such a God out of confidence in reason, by which reason He too pronounced Himself more than a murderer, in the person of His Wisdom, by the voice of Solomon. 'Wisdom,' He says, 'has slaughtered her sons.' Wisdom is Sophia. She slaughtered wisely, surely, in that it was unto life, and rationally, in that it was unto glory. O ingenuity of parricide! O contrivance of crime! O argument of a cruelty which slays for this reason, that the one it slays should not die! And therefore what follows? 'Wisdom is sung in her going-out with hymns'; for the going-out of the martyrs too is sung. 'Wisdom in the streets acts with constancy'; for well does she slaughter her sons.

'But upon the highest walls she speaks confidently,' when indeed, according to Isaiah, this one cries out here: 'I am God's'; and this one shouts aloud: 'In the name of Jacob'; and another inscribes himself: 'In the name of Israel.' O good Mother! I too wish to be reckoned among her sons, that I may be slain by her; I wish to be slain, that I may become a son. But does she only slaughter her sons, or does she also torture them? For I hear God saying elsewhere too: 'I will burn them as gold is burned, and I will test them as silver is tested.' Assuredly through the torments of fires and of punishments, through the examining martyrdoms of faith. The apostle too knows what manner of God he has ascribed, when he writes: 'If God spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us, how has He not with Him also freely granted us all things?'