To adore God the Prince, the Lord of all things whatsoever that are, who holds the supreme height of all supreme beings; to invoke Him with venerable submission; in weary circumstances to embrace Him, so to speak, with all our senses; to love Him, to look up to Him — is this an execrable and ill-omened religion, full of impiety and sacrilege, defiling with the superstition of its newness the ceremonies established of old? 26.1. Is this, I ask, that bold and monstrous crime on account of which the greatest heavenly ones
aim at us the stings of their angers and indignations — on account of which you yourselves, when a savage lust has come over you, strip us of our goods, banish us from the seats of our fathers, inflict capital punishments, torture, tear apart, burn us up, and, at the last, cast us to wild beasts and to the manglings of brutes? 2. Whoever condemns this in us, or reckons it to be placed among any accusation, he is either to be called by the name of a man — however much he may seem otherwise to himself — or else must be believed to be a god, however much he himself may profess through a thousand seers that he is one? 3.
Does the Dodonaean Trophonius or Jupiter name us impious, and is he too to be called a god and reckoned in the order of divine powers — he who either fastens the charge of impiety upon those serving the supreme King, or is himself tortured that His majesty and worship should be preferred to his own? 4. Are the Delian or Clarian, the Didymaean, Philesian, Pythian Apollo also to be held divine — he who either does not know the supreme Emperor, or is ignorant that He is supplicated by us with daily prayers? 5. And if he did not know the secrets of our hearts nor recognize what we hold in our inmost feelings, he could yet, either by his ears know that we invoke the supreme God and pray to Him for what we ask, or by the very sound of the voice which we use in prayers discern it. 27.1.
It is not yet the place for us to explain who all these are that condemn us, and whence they are, how much they can do or know, why they tremble at the mention of Christ, and why they hold His disciples as foes and hateful; yet let us fix this one thing together in a single definition for those who promise a human understanding: we Christians are nothing else than worshippers of the supreme King and Prince under Christ our Master; nothing else, if you consider it, will you find to be involved in this religion. 2.
This is the sum of the whole action, this the appointed goal of our divine duties; this the end; before Him we all, according to custom, prostrate ourselves; Him with united prayers we adore; from Him we demand things just and honorable and worthy of His hearing — not that He Himself desires us to be suppliants or loves to see the veneration of so many thousands laid low; this is our advantage, and looks to the account of our own benefit. 3. For because, by the fault of our inborn weakness, we are prone to faults and to the various appetites of lust, He suffers Himself always to be conceived by our thoughts, so that, while we pray to Him and strive to deserve His gifts, we may receive the will to innocence and cleanse ourselves from every stain by the cutting away of all our transgressions. 28.1.
What do you say, O sacred ones, what, O divine interpreters of the law? Are those of a better cause who adore the Grundulian Lares, the Aii Locutii, the Limentini, than are we all who worship the God, the Father of all things, and demand from Him protection for our weary and languishing affairs? 2. And do those seem to you shrewd, wise, most prudent, and worthy of no reproach who revere the Fauns, the Fatuae, and the geniuses of cities, who reverence the Terrors and the Bellonas — while we are pronounced dull, stupid, foolish, blunted, and brutish, who have given ourselves to God, by whose nod and will everything that is stands firm and is fixed fast in the perpetuity of its own essence? 3.
Is this the judgment you pronounce, this the law you establish, this you promulgate — that whoever adores your little slaves should be honored with the amplest honors, while whoever has supplicated you yourselves, the masters, should deserve the extreme punishment of the cross? 4. In the greatest cities and among the more powerful peoples, sacred rites are publicly performed to harlots once let out for hire and prostituted to common lust: there is no swelling of indignation in the gods. Temples with lofty gables have been raised on high to cats, to beetles, and to heifers: the derided powers of the divinities are silent, nor are they touched by any envy, because they behold the sanctities of vile animals set on a par with themselves. 5.
To us alone are they hostile, to us are the gods most bitter enemies, because we venerate their Father — through whom, if they exist, they have begun to be and to have the substance of their own name and majesty, from whom, so to speak, they feel that they have obtained their very deity and recognize themselves in the number of created things, by whose will and choice they both perish and are dissolved, and yet can neither be dissolved nor perish? 6. For if we all concede that there is one sole Prince, whom no other thing precedes in the antiquity of time, after Him it must needs be that all things have been both born and brought forth and have leapt forth into the nature of their own name. 7. And if this is fixed and settled, it will be consequent for us to confess that even the gods are born, and that they derive the origin of their beginning from the Prince, the fountain of things.
And if they are born and begotten, they are assuredly also near to destructions and perils. 8. 'But,' you say, 'they are believed to be immortal, everlasting, and sharing in no end whatever.' — Then this is the gift and bounty of God the Father, that they have merited to be the same throughout unending ages, though by nature they are frail and dissoluble. 29.1. And would that it were granted, with the whole world gathered into the likeness of one assembly, to use this address and to be placed within the hearing of the human race. 2. Are we, then, in your eyes guilty of an impious religion, and, because we approach the Head and pillar of things with venerable submissions, are we called (to use your own reproach) ill-omened and atheists? 3.
And who more rightly shall bear the odium of these names than he who either knows, or seeks after, or believes in some other god in preference to this One? 4. Do we not all owe to Him this very first thing, that we are, that we are called men, that by Him we are held together, whether as souls sent forth or fallen through the blindness of this body? Does it not come to us from Him that we move, that we breathe and live, and by that very power of living does He not bring it about that we exist and are stirred by animal motion? 5. Do not the causes flow from Him by which our welfare is upheld with the bounty of various pleasures? This world in which you live — whose is it, or who has granted you to retain the enjoyment and possession of it? 6.
Who, that you might discern the things placed beneath, that you might touch and consider them, gave this public light? Who, lest the vital elements should grow numb, fixed fast in the torpor of sluggishness, established the fires of the sun, destined for the increase of things? 7. Since you believe the Sun to be a god, do you not inquire after his Founder and Maker? Since among you the Moon is a goddess, do you not likewise take care to know who is her Begetter and Fashioner? 30.1.
Does not the thought come upon you to consider and inquire in whose possession you dwell, in whose property you are, whose is this earth which you weary, whose is this air which you draw back and forth with your vital breath, whose fountains you use, whose liquid, who has arranged the blasts of the winds, who has devised the billowing clouds, who has distinguished the fruit-bearing powers of the seeds with the proper character of their reckonings? 2. Does Apollo rain for you, does Mercury rain for you; have Aesculapius, Hercules, or Diana fashioned the plan of rains and storms? And how can this be, since you profess that in the world they were born and at a fixed time took up their vital consciousness? 3.
For if the world surpasses them in the antiquity of time, and, before they were born, nature already knew rains and storms, then those born later have no right to make rain, nor can they insert themselves into those systems which they found already at work here and being administered by a greater Author. 31.1. O greatest, O supreme Procreator of things invisible! O Thou Thyself unseen and never comprehended by any natures! Worthy, worthy art Thou in truth — if only Thou must be called worthy by a mortal mouth — that every breathing and intelligent nature should never cease both to hold and to render Thee thanks; to Whom the whole of life should fittingly fall down on bended knee and supplicate with unbroken prayers. 2.
For Thou art the First Cause, the place and space of things, the foundation of all things whatsoever that are, infinite, unbegotten, immortal, everlasting, sole, whom no bodily form delineates, whom no circumscription bounds, devoid of quality, of quantity, without place, motion, and disposition, concerning whom nothing can be said or expressed by mortals through the signification of words; who, that Thou mayest be understood, must be kept in silence, and, that erring conjecture may track Thee through a shadow, of whom nothing at all must be muttered. 3. Grant pardon, O supreme King, to those who persecute Thy servants, and — as is proper to Thy kindness — forgive those who flee the worship of Thy name and religion. It is no wonder if Thou art unknown: it is a matter of greater wonder if Thou art known;
unless perchance someone dares — for this is what remains to frenzied madness — to hesitate and doubt whether this God exists or not, and whether He has been believed in through the tested truth of faith or through the opinion of empty rumor. 4. For we hear that certain men, given to the study of philosophizing, partly deny that there is any divine power, partly daily ask whether there is; while others construct the sum of things out of fortuitous chances and rash collisions and fabricate it by the impulse of diversity — with whom at this time we shall have no contest at all over such obstinacy. 5. For those who think soundly say that to contradict foolish things is a mark of greater folly. 32.1.
Our discourse is with those who, while agreeing that the race of gods is divine, doubt about the greater ones, since they confess that these same are plebeian and of a humbler sort. What then? Shall we strive and labor to maintain matters so great by arguments? Far, far away let this depart from us — far, I say, as the saying goes, let this madness be averted. 2. For it is as dangerous to approach the proving of God the Prince by arguments as it is to wish to know by reasoning of this kind that He exists. Nor does it make any difference or discrepancy whether you deny Him or assert Him and confess that He exists, since both such assertion of a thing and the denial of an incredulous refuter lie under the same fault. 33.1. Is there any of mankind who has not entered the day of his first birth with the notion of this Prince?
In whom is it not inborn, not affixed, nay, almost impressed and implanted upon him in the very generative parts of his mother, that there is a King and Lord, the Governor of all things whatsoever that are? 2. In short, if the dumb living creatures themselves could gape open in speech, if they could be loosed into the facility of our tongues — nay, if trees, clods, rocks, animated with vital sense, could produce the sound of a voice and articulate the joints of words — would they not, with nature as their guide and mistress, in the good faith of an uncorrupted simplicity, both understand that God exists and cry out that He alone is Lord of all things? 34.1.
'But in vain,' one says, 'do you assail and attack us with a false and slanderous charge, as though we went about to deny that there is a greater God, since by us Jupiter is both named and held to be best and greatest, and since to him we have established most august seats and the immense Capitols.' 2. — You attempt to couple unlike things and to force them, with the confusion you have introduced, into one appearance. For God the Almighty is known, by the one mind of all and by the common assent of mortality, neither to have been begotten nor ever to have been brought forth into a new light, nor to have begun to be from any point of time or age. 3. For He Himself is the fount of things, the sower of ages and of times. For these do not exist of themselves, but from His perpetuity they proceed, perpetual and infinite, in ever-continued succession. 4.
But Jupiter, as you relate, has both a father and a mother, grandfathers, grandmothers, brothers; but lately, formed in the womb of his mother, completed and finished in ten months, he rushed forth with vital sense into a light unknown to him. 5. Therefore, if these things are so, how can Jupiter be a god, since it is agreed that He is everlasting, while the other is alleged by you both to have had a birthday and, terrified by the new circumstance, to have uttered a pitiable wailing? 35.1. But let them be, as you wish, one, and not differing in any force of divine power and majesty: why then do you persecute us with unjust hatreds? Why do you shudder at the mention of our name as of the worst omen, if you worship as a god the very one whom we too worship?
Or why do you contend that in the same cause the gods are friendly to you but foes and most hostile to us? 2. For if there is one religion common to us and to you, the wrath of the heavenly ones ceases; but if they are hostile to us alone, it is manifest that both you and they do not know God, whom it is clear, from the very indignations of the divine powers, is not Jupiter. 36.1. 'But,' one says, 'the gods are not on that account hostile to you, because you worship the Almighty God, but because you contend that a man, born and — what is infamous to base persons — slain by the punishment of the cross, both was God and still survives, and you believe that he yet exists and adore him with daily supplications.' 2.
— If it is agreeable to you, friends, expound who these gods may be who believe that Christ is worshipped by us to their injury: Janus, the founder of the Janiculum, and Saturn, the author of the Saturnian city; Fenta Fatua, the wife of Faunus, who is called the Good Goddess but who was better and more praiseworthy in the drinking of wine; 3. those Indigetes who creep along the river and dwell in the channels of the Numicius among frogs and little fishes; Aesculapius and Father Liber, the one born of Coronis, the other hurled down from the generative parts of his mother by a thunderbolt; Mercury, poured from the womb of Maia and — what is more divine — of a fair one; 4. the bow-bearing Diana and Apollo, carried about through the flights of their mother and to the wandering islands of Virtue; the offspring of Dione, Venus,
the mother of a Trojan household's man and the publisher of her own inner shame; Ceres, born within the bounds of Trinacria, and Proserpina, occupied in gathering flowers; 5. the Theban or the Tyrian Hercules, the one buried within the bounds of Spain, the other burned up in the Oetaean flames; the Tyndarid Castors, the one accustomed to break in horses, the other a good boxer and unconquerable with the raw gauntlet; the Titans and the Moorish Bocchores and the Syrian gods, offspring of eggs; 6. Apis brought forth in the Peloponnese and named Serapis in Egypt; under Ethiopian suns the swarthy Isis, mourning her lost son and her spouse mangled limb from limb;
we pass over and go beyond the royal offspring of Ops, whom your authors in their books have handed down to you as you learn by heart what they were and of what sort: 7. do these, then, receive with wounded ears that Christ is worshipped and taken by us and reckoned as a divine power, and, having forgotten a little before of what lot and condition they were, do they refuse to impart to another that which has been granted to themselves? 8. Is this the justice of the heavenly ones, this the holy judgment of the gods? Is this not a kind of envy and avarice, not a certain sordid disparagement — to wish that their own fortunes alone should stand pre-eminent, and that the estate of others should be pressed down and trampled in despised humility? 37.1. 'We worship a man that was born.' — What then? Do you worship no man that was born? Not one and another? Not countless others?
Nay rather, have you not raised up all whom you now have in your temples out of the number of mortals, and bestowed on them heaven and the stars? 2. For if perchance it has escaped you that they were of a human lot and of a common condition, unroll the most ancient records and run through the writings of those who, being near to antiquity, handed down all things in clear truth without any flatteries. 3. Then assuredly you will learn from what fathers, from what mothers each was begotten, in what region born, of what race, what they did, performed, endured, kept busy doing, and what fortunes of adversity and of prosperity they felt in undertaking their affairs. 4.
But if, knowing that they were carried in wombs and lived on the fruits of the earth, you nonetheless cast at us the worship of a born man, you do things sufficiently unjust — in that you establish that to be damnable in us which you yourselves also constantly practice, or in that you are unwilling that it should be permitted to others in like manner what you allow to be lawful for yourselves. 38.1. But let us concede — for the moment lending a hand to your opinions — that Christ was one of us, of a single frailty and condition of mind, soul, and body: is He not worthy, on account of the grace of such great benefits, to be called by us a god and to be perceived as a god? 2.
For if you have entered into the register of the gods Liber, because he discovered the use of wine; Ceres, because of that of bread; Aesculapius, because of that of herbs; Minerva, because of that of the olive; Triptolemus, because of that of the plow; and finally Hercules, because he overcame and subdued wild beasts, thieves, and the many-headed water-snakes: 3. with how great honors ought He to be endowed by us who, by imparting the truth, has led us away from great errors; who has restored us — wandering, as it were, blindly here and there and without any guide — from broken and pathless places to more level ground: 4. who has shown what that is which is fruitful and, from the beginning, salutary to the human race — God: who He is, how great, and of what sort:
who permitted us both to understand and taught us — so far as our mediocrity was able to grasp — the profound and unutterable depths of Him; 5. who most kindly caused it to be known by what Author, by what Father this world was constituted and founded; who set forth the manner of its birth, and its matter, never before presumed by anyone's knowledge — whence the generative heat of the sun is drawn to its fires, why the moon is always in motion, whether by the same or by other causes it is believed always to resume light and darkness; 6.
what the origin of animals is, what the principles are that the seeds possess, who fashioned man himself, who formed him, or from what kind of matter He confirmed the very construction of bodies; what sense is, what the soul is, whether it flew to us of its own accord or was sown and procreated together with the very inward parts; whether it lives as a partaker of death or has been endowed with the perpetuity of immortality; what state awaits us when, dissolved, we shall have departed from our limbs — whether we are going to see, or shall have no memory and recollection of ourselves and our consciousness; 7. who binds fast our arrogance and has made our necks, lifted up with haughty brow, acknowledge the measure of their own weakness:
who showed that we are shapeless living creatures, that we trust in vain opinions, that we grasp nothing comprehended, know nothing, and do not see the things that are set before our eyes; 8. who — that which surpassed and went beyond all gifts — led us over from false religions to the true religion: who raised us up from inert signs and things fashioned out of the vilest mud to the stars and heaven, and made us mingle words of supplication and the converse of prayers with God the Lord of things. 39.1. I used to venerate, O blindness, but lately the images just brought forth from furnaces, gods upon the anvils and fabricated out of hammers, the bones of elephants, paintings, and fillets on aged trees;
Whenever I had caught sight of a stone made smooth and grimy with the anointing of oil, I fawned upon it and addressed it, as though a present power dwelt within, and I begged favours from a block that felt nothing; and those very gods, whom I had persuaded myself existed, I assailed with grievous insults, since I believed them to be wood, stones, and bones, or to dwell in matter of that kind. 2. Now, led into the paths of truth by so great a Teacher, I know what all these things are, I judge worthy things of what is worthy, I offer no insult to the divine name, and what is owed to each, whether to person or to head, I assign by unconfused ranks and authorities. 3.
Shall Christ then, on this account, not be held by us to be God, nor be honoured with all the worship of that divinity than which nothing greater can even be conceived — He from whom, long since and while yet living, we have received such great gifts, and from whom, when the day shall come, we look for greater still? 40.1. 'But He was fastened to a gibbet and perished.' — What has that to do with the case? For neither the manner nor the disgrace of His death alters His words or His deeds, nor will the authority of His teachings seem the less because He departed from the bonds of the body not by a natural dissolution but withdrew through violence brought upon Him. 2. Pythagoras of Samos was burned alive in a shrine on an unjust suspicion of aiming at tyranny: did the things he taught lose their proper force because he poured out his spirit not willingly but assailed by cruelty?
3. In like manner Socrates, condemned by the judgment of his own city, suffered capital punishment: are the things he discoursed upon concerning morals, virtues, and duties made void because he was unjustly driven out of life? 4. Countless others, strong in glory, virtue, and repute, experienced the forms of most bitter deaths — such as Aquilius, Trebonius, Regulus: were they on that account judged base after life, because they perished torn and tortured not by the public law of the fates but by a most cruel kind of death? 5. No innocent man ever slain wickedly is held in ill repute, nor is he stained with the mark of any disgrace who endures grievous penalties not by his own deserving but through the savagery of his tormentor. 41.1.
And yet, O you who mock us for worshipping a man who died a disgraceful death, do not you yourselves, by the consecration of shrines, deify Father Liber, torn limb from limb by the Titans? 2. Did you not name Aesculapius, the discoverer of remedies, after the penalties and the punishment of the thunderbolt, the guardian and president of health, well-being, and safety? 3. Do you not invite with sacrifices, victims, and burning incense that very great Hercules, whom you yourselves relate to have been burned alive [after punishments] and consumed on his funeral pyre? 4. Do you not, by the loud acclamation of the Galli, testify that Attis the Phrygian, cut off and robbed of his manhood, is the propitious god, the holy god, in the sanctuaries of the Great Mother? 5.
Do you not say that Romulus himself, the father torn to pieces by the hands of the senators, is Quirinus and a son of Mars, and honour him with priests and sacred couches, and adore him in the most splendid temples, and after all this swear that he ascended to heaven? 6. Either, therefore, you too are to be laughed at, who count as gods and worship men slain by the most grievous torments; or, if there is a sure reason why you think you must do this, then permit us also to know for what causes and reasons we do the same. 42.1. 'You worship a man that was born.' — Even were this true, as was said in the passages above, yet for the many and so bounteous gifts which have come to us from Him, He ought to be called and named God. 2.
But since He is God in very truth, and without the ambiguity of any doubt, do you suppose that we would deny that He is worshipped by us in the highest degree and is named the president of our body? 3. 'Then,' some frenzied, angry, and excited man will say, 'is that Christ God?' — 'God,' we shall answer, 'and God of the inner powers, and — what may torment the faithless with most bitter pangs — sent to us for the greatest cause by the supreme King.' 4. He, grown more insane and furious, will perhaps demand that it be proved whether the matter stands as we say. 5.
— There is no greater proof than the trustworthiness of the deeds done by Him, than the newness of His powers, than all those fatal decrees dissolved and undone, which peoples and nations beheld accomplished under His light with none dissenting — which not even they themselves dare to charge with falsity, whose ancient and ancestral laws He showed to be most full of emptiness and of most idle superstition. 43.1. He will perhaps again meet us with those many other slanderous and childish cries: 'He was a magician; He accomplished all those things by secret arts; He stole from the sanctuaries of the Egyptians the names of powerful angels and their recondite disciplines.' 2. — What say you, O little ones, chattering with the garrulity of rash speech about things unknown and unfamiliar to you?
Were then those things which were done the tricks of demons and the sports of magical arts? 3. Can you point out, can you show us from all those magicians who ever existed throughout the ages, one who did anything like Christ, even to a thousandth part? One who did it without any force of incantations, without the juices of herbs and grasses, without any anxious observance of rites, libations, or seasons? 4. For we do not press and inquire what things they promise to do, or in what kinds their whole doctrine and practice is wont to be comprised. 5.
For who does not know that these men either strive to foreknow things impending, which necessarily come by their appointed order whether one will or no; or send deadly wasting upon whomsoever they please; or break asunder the affections of kinsfolk; or unlock without keys the things that are shut; or bind mouths in silence; or in the racecourse weaken, spur on, or hold back the horses; or upon the wives and children of strangers, whether they be male or of the female sex, cast the flames of forbidden love and frenzied lusts; or, if they seem to venture anything useful, do it not by their own power but by the power of those whom they invoke? 44.1.
But it is established that Christ, without any aids of external things, without the observance of any rite or law, accomplished all those works which He did by the mere possibility of His own name; 2. and that — as was proper, fitting, and worthy of the true God — He bestowed on us nothing harmful or hurtful but what was helpful, wholesome, and full of aid, by the munificent generosity of His bounteous power. 45.1. What say you again, O men? Was He then a mortal, or one of us, whose command, whose voice uttered in the common and everyday words of the people, ailments, diseases, fevers, and other torments of the body fled from? 2.
Was He one of us, whose presence, whose very look that race of demons plunged in men's vitals could not bear, and terrified by a new power gave up its possession of the limbs? 3. Was He one of us, at whose command foul leprous blotches obeyed, driven off at once, and left the discoloured flesh restored to a harmony of colours? 4. Was He one of us, at whose light touch the flowings of blood stood still and checked their immoderate discharge? 5. Was He one of us, from whom the dropsical and torpid waters fled, that penetrating fluid vanished, and the swollen vitals subsided in health-giving dryness? 6. Was He one of us who bade the lame to run, and the thing was at once done; who bade the maimed stretch out