駁異教徒 第 2 章 第 1/5 段

If any opportunity could be granted me at this point, I would wish, making a slight digression from the defense I had principally undertaken, to exchange such words as these with all those to whom the name of Christ is hateful: "If you count it no affront to answer something when questioned, expound to us and tell us: what matter, what cause is there, that you assail Christ with such grievous wars, or what offenses of his do you hold, that at the mere mention of his name you boil over with the ardors of your raging hearts? Has he, claiming for himself royal power, occupied the whole circle of the earth with most hostile legions, and destroyed some nations peaceful from their origin, and compelled others to obey him with subjugated necks?

Did he, blazing with the fires of avarice, claim by right of ownership all those riches with which the human race so zealously strives to be filled? Did he, exulting in the cravings of lusts, break by force the barriers of chastity, or stealthily lie in wait for the marriages of others? Did he, swollen with the haughtiness of arrogance, inflict injuries and insults everywhere without distinction of any person?" "And did he not hold forth to all both the light of life and remove the peril of ignorance?" Even if he had not been worthy of your listening and believing, on this very account he ought not to have been spurned by you—that he showed you saving things, that he chose for you the ways to heaven and the vows of immortality.

"But indeed he is worthy of hatred, because he drove religions from the world, because he forbade access to the worship of the gods." Is he then charged as the extinguisher of religion and the author of impiety—he who introduced the true religion into the world, who opened the gates of piety to men who were blind and truly living in impiety, and showed them to whom they should submit themselves? Or is there any religion truer, more dutiful, more powerful, more just, than to know the supreme God, to know how to make supplication to the supreme God, who alone is the head and fount of all good things, the Father, founder, and creator of everlasting things, from whom all things earthly and all things heavenly

are animated by movement and watered with vital force, and who, if he did not exist, there would surely be nothing at all that could bear any name or substance. Unless perhaps you doubt whether he of whom we speak is the Ruler, and believe rather that it is Apollo, Diana, Mercury, or Mars. Give a true judgment, and, looking around at all these things which we see, one will sooner doubt whether the rest are gods than he will hesitate about God, whom we all naturally know—whether when we cry out "O God," or when we set up that God as witness of the wicked, and, as though he beheld us, lift our faces to heaven. "But he forbade men to make supplication to the lesser gods." For do you know who or where the lesser gods are?

Has any suspicion or mention of them ever touched you, that you should with reason take it ill that their cults were abrogated and that they were bereaved of the bestowal of honor? But if the elation of mind and the vanity which the Greeks call 'typhus' did not stand in your way and hinder you, you might long since have known what he forbade to be done, and why, within what bounds he willed the true religion to stand, and how great a danger was arising for you from what you supposed to be obedience, or from what evils you would have emerged, had you renounced the treacherous error. But all these things will be recalled more clearly and plainly when we have been carried somewhat further forward.

For we shall show that Christ did not teach the nations impiety, but delivered the ignorance of wretched men from most wicked robbers. "We do not believe," you say, "that the things he says are true." What then? Do the things which you deny to be true stand clear among you, since things impending and not yet suffered can by no reasonings be refuted? "But he himself does not prove what he promises." So it is: for there can be, as I said, no verification of things to come. Since, then, this is the condition of future things, that they can be grasped and comprehended by no touch of anticipation, is it not the purer course, out of two uncertain things hanging in doubtful expectation, rather to believe that which offers some hope than that which offers none at all?

For in the one there is no peril, since what is said to be impending is void and empty if it should come to pass; but in the other there is the greatest loss—that is, the loss of salvation—if, when the time has come, it should be laid open that it was no lie. What do you say, O ignorant ones, most worthy even of weeping and pity? Do you thus not dread that these things may perhaps be true which are objects of contempt to you and furnish matter for laughter? Do you not at least revolve within yourselves, under secret thoughts, lest that which on this day you with obstinate perversity refuse to believe, a late time should confute and an irrevocable repentance chastise? Do not even these at least produce in you the proofs for believing—that already through all lands, in so brief a span of time, the sacraments of this immense name have been spread abroad;

that there is now no nation so barbarous in its ways and ignorant of gentleness, which, turned by love of him, has not softened its harshness and, taking on tranquillity, passed over into placid feelings; that orators, grammarians, rhetoricians, jurisconsults, and physicians, endowed with such great talents, and even those who probe the secrets of philosophy, seek after these things, spurning those in which a little before they trusted; that slaves choose rather to be tormented by their masters with whatever punishments they may decree, wives to be divorced, children to be disinherited by their parents, than to break the Christian faith and lay down the sacraments of the saving warfare;

that although such great kinds of punishment have been set forth by you against those who follow the laws of this religion, the cause grows all the more, and against all threats and prohibitions of terrors the people more courageously strives on, and is roused to the zeal of believing by the very goads of the prohibition itself? Do you perchance believe that these things come to pass everywhere and to no purpose, that these minds are taken over by chance assaults? Is not this then divine and sacred? Or that such great conversions of souls come to pass without God, so that, though the executioner's hooks and countless other tortures (as we have said) hang over those about to believe, as if seized by a kind of sweetness and by love of all the virtues, they receive the doctrines made known to them and set the friendships of Christ above all things in the world?

Unless perhaps these men seem to you dull and foolish—men who through the whole world now conspire and come together into assent to this belief. What then? Do you alone, steeped in wisdom and by the sheer force of intelligence, see some other thing, I know not what, and something profound? Do you alone understand that all these things are trifles; do you alone reckon as words and childish absurdities those things which we promise ourselves will come from the sovereign King? Whence, I ask, has so much wisdom been handed to you, whence so much acuteness and vivacity, or from what disciplines of knowledge were you able to draw so much of heart, to imbibe so much of divination?

Is it because you know how to decline verbs and nouns through cases and tenses; because you know how to avoid barbarisms and solecisms; because you know how to bring forth speech that is rhythmical, well-structured, and composed, or to recognize it when it is uncouth; because you hold in memory the Fornix of Lucilius and the Marsyas of Pomponius, sealed and delivered; because you know what are the issues in lawsuits, how many kinds of cases, how many of pleadings, what genus is, what species, by what reasonings the opposite is distinguished from the contrary—do you therefore imagine that you know what is false, what is true, what can or cannot be, what the nature of the lowest and highest things is? Has that common saying never brushed your ears, that the wisdom of man is foolishness with the supreme God?

(cf. 1 Cor. 3:19). And you yourselves inwardly perceive, when at any time you dispute about obscure matters and proceed to unlock natural secrets, that the very things you say, which you assert, which for the most part you defend with a life-and-death contention, you do not know, and that each one guards his own suppositions, as though proved and comprehended, with stubborn struggle. For what, if I discern the truth, can we know through ourselves—even if all the ages be spent in the investigation of things—we whom some circumstance and contrived envy has brought forth so blind and proud that, though we know nothing at all, we nevertheless deceive ourselves and are lifted up into the opinion of knowledge under the swelling of an inflated breast?

For, to pass over things divine and matters plunged in natural obscurity, can any mortal explain that which the famous Socrates in the Phaedrus [Pl. Phaedr. 230] cannot comprehend—what man is, or whence he is, doubtful, changeable, shifting, deceitful, manifold, of many forms; for what uses he has been brought forth, by whose genius he was devised, what he does in the world, why he undergoes so great swarms of ills; whether the earth, turned by the rottenness of some slime, animated him, as it does worms, as it does mice, or whether by the hand of some maker and fashioner he received these lineaments of body and the shape of a face?

Can one know, I say, these things set in our midst and placed among common perceptions—by what causes we are plunged into sleep, by what we awaken, in what manners dreams and visions come to be; nay rather, what Plato ponders in the Theaetetus [Plat. Theaet. 158b], whether we are ever awake, or whether that very thing called being awake is a portion of a perpetual sleep, and what we seem to be doing is a dream; whether, when we say that we see, we see by the straining of rays and light, or whether images of things fly to us and settle in our pupils; whether flavor is in things or comes to be by the contact of the palate; from what causes hairs lay aside their inborn blackness—not all alike, but by little and little, growing gray by addition?

What is it that all liquids, when mixed, make one body, while oil alone refuses to suffer immersion into itself, but, ever impenetrable to its own nature, gathers itself together transparently? And finally, the mind itself, which is declared by you to be immortal and a god—why in the sick is it sick, in infants dull, in old age worn out, babbling delirious and mad things? The infirmity and ignorance of these matters is the more pitiable in that, though it may happen that we sometimes say something true, this very thing itself is uncertain to us—whether we have said anything true.

And since you are accustomed to laugh at our faith and to mangle our very credulity with facetious jests, tell me, O merry ones, steeped and sated with the draught of unmixed wisdom: is there any kind of business in life, occupied and active, which its performers undertake, take up, and set about without faith going before? You travel abroad, you sail—do you not believe that, your business transacted, you will return home? You cleave the earth with iron and fill it with variety of seeds—not believing that you will receive the crop in the seasonal turns? You couple the partnerships of marriage—not believing that they will be chaste and of dutiful covenant toward husbands?

You take up offspring of children—not believing that they will be safe and, through the stages of age, come to the goals of old age? You commit the ailments of your bodies to the hands of physicians—not believing that diseases can be soothed and their harshness relieved? You wage wars with enemies—not believing that you will bring back victory by the successes of battles? You venerate and worship the gods—not believing that they exist and lend propitious ears to your supplications? And what of those things concerning matters set apart from human knowledge, which you yourselves write and constantly read—did you behold them with ocular inspection and hold them handled by your hands? Does not whoever of you there is believe this or that author?

Does he not maintain, by a kind of guarantee of faith, that what is said by another has been persuaded to be true—not that he himself has ascertained it? He who says that the origin of all things is fire or water—does he not believe Thales or Heraclitus? He who places the cause in numbers—does he not believe Pythagoras of Samos, or Archytas? He who divides the soul and constitutes incorporeal forms—does he not believe the Socratic Plato? He who applies a fifth element to the principal causes—does he not believe Aristotle, the father of the Peripatetics? He who threatens the world with fire, and that a time will come when it shall burn—does he not believe Panaetius, Chrysippus, Zeno? He who ever fashions and destroys worlds out of indivisible bodies—does he not believe Epicurus, Democritus, Metrodorus?

He who affirms that nothing can be comprehended by man, and that all things are wrapped in blind obscurities—does he not believe Arcesilaus, Carneades, or, in short, some devotee of the older or more recent Academy? And let us grant that the very leaders and fathers of the aforesaid opinions—do they not say the things they say as things entrusted to their own suppositions? For Heraclitus saw that things come to be by conversions of fire; Thales, by the concretion of waters; Pythagoras, that numbers come together; Plato, the incorporeal forms; Democritus, the concourses of indivisibles? Or those who affirm that nothing at all can be comprehended—do they know whether what they say is true, so that they understand that the very thing they define is a pronouncement of truth?

Since, therefore, you have nothing ascertained and known, and assert all those things which you write and comprise in thousands of books with credulity as your guide, what sort of judgment is this, so unjust, that you should deride our faith—which you perceive that you hold in common with us in your own credulity? "But you believe wise men and men instructed in every kind of discipline." No doubt those men who determine nothing and pronounce nothing as one, who wage wars with their opponents on behalf of their own opinions and ever fight with hostile obstinacy, who, when the one overturns, destroys, and tears down the decrees of the other, have made all things uncertain and have shown, by their very dissension, that nothing can be known.

But suppose these things are no hindrance and pose no obstacle to your obligation to believe and give ear to them: what is it, then, that in this matter gives you the greater advantage, or us the less? You believe Plato, you believe Cronius, you believe Numenius, or whomever you please; we believe and rest content in Christ. How great is this injustice, that, when both of us stand upon authorities, and it is common to us and to you alike to believe upon another's word, you wish it granted to you to accept what those men have said, yet are unwilling to hear and to regard the things which are set forth by Christ? And yet, if we should choose to weigh cause against cause and part against part, we are the better able to show what we have followed in Christ than you what you have followed in the philosophers.

And indeed we followed these things in Him: His magnificent works and His most mighty powers, which He put forth and displayed in manifold miracles, whereby anyone could be brought to the compulsion of belief and could faithfully judge that the things which were being done were not those of a man, but of some divine and unknown power. Have you followed such powers in the philosophers, that it should have been more fitting for you to believe them than for us to believe Christ? Was any one of them ever able, by a single word or by the command of a single order, to check and to still — I do not say the ragings of the sea or the furies of storms — nor to restore sight to the blind, nor to give it to those born without eyes, nor to recall the dead to life, nor to break up long-standing diseases;

but what is far slighter — to heal by a single word of interdiction a boil, the itch, or a little thorn clinging in the callus of the skin? Not that we deny that they are either praiseworthy for the integrity of their character, or well furnished with every kind of study and discipline; for we know that they speak in the most brilliant words and flow in polished compositions, that they conclude syllogisms most acutely, arrange inductions in orderly sequence, render the formulae proper to their definitions, distinguish and divide, say much concerning the kinds of numbers, much concerning music, and even expound matters of geometry by their own maxims and precepts. But what is that to the point? Do enthymemes,

syllogisms, and other like things guarantee that those men know the truth, or that on that account they are worthy that we should of necessity believe them concerning the most obscure matters? A contest between persons is not to be weighed by the powers of eloquence, but by the excellence of deeds accomplished. He is not to be called a good authority who has set forth a discourse elegantly, but he who follows up what he promises with the surety of divine works. You may bring forward against us your arguments and the subtleties of your conjectures:

if Christ Himself — let me say this with His peace and by His leave — had used these in the assemblies of the peoples, who would have acquiesced, who would have listened, who would have judged that He was openly promising anything, or who would have followed one who boasted of empty and bare things, however imprudent he were and of foolish credulity? It was the powers set before their eyes and that unheard-of force of things — both what was done by Himself openly and what was celebrated throughout the whole world by His heralds — that kindled those flames of longing, and made nations and peoples run together with one mind to the assent of one faith, and made nations most unlike in their customs.

For those things can be enumerated and reckoned in the account, which were done in India, among the Seres, the Persians, and the Medes; in Arabia, Egypt, in Asia, Syria; among the Galatians, Parthians, and Phrygians; in Achaia, Macedonia, Epirus; in the islands and in all the provinces which the rising and the setting sun surveys; and finally in Rome herself, the mistress of the world, in which, although men were engaged in the arts of King Numa and in ancient superstitions, they nevertheless did not delay to forsake their ancestral rites and to grow together with the Christian truth. For they had seen the chariot of Simon Magus and his fiery four-horsed cars blown apart by the mouth of Peter and vanished at the naming of Christ;

they had seen, I say, that man who trusted in false gods, and who was betrayed by those very gods when he began to fear them, hurled down by his own weight and lying with his legs shattered; and afterwards, when he had been carried to Brundisium and was worn out with tortures and shame, cast himself down again headlong from the very summit of a lofty roof-top.

All these things you neither know were done, nor have you wished to know them, nor have you ever judged them necessary for you; and while you trust in your own hearts and call what is mere conceit by the name of wisdom, you have given place to deceivers — to those, I say, harmful ones, whose interest it is that the Christian name should be blotted out — for pouring their darkness over such great matters and obscuring them, for snatching away your faith and subjecting you to contempt; so that, because they foresee that their end is at hand in proportion to their deserts, they might also send upon you a cause whereby you too could come into peril and be bereft of the divine kindness.

Meanwhile, however, O you who admire, who are astonished at the maxims of the learned and of philosophy — do you not thus think it most unjust to ride roughshod over us and to mock us, as though we were saying foolish and brutish things, when you are found to say the very same or such like things which you laugh at us for saying and pronouncing? Nor is my discourse with those who, scattered through the various by-ways of the sects, have made these and those parties by the diversity of their opinions: you, you I address, who follow Mercury, who follow Plato and Pythagoras, and you others who are of one mind and advance by the same paths of tenets in unity. Do you dare to laugh at us, because we venerate and worship the Father and Lord of things, and because we commit and entrust our hopes to Him?

What of your Plato in the Theaetetus — that I may name him above all — does he not counsel the soul to flee from the earth, and, as far as it is possible, always to dwell in thought and mind about that Supreme One? Do you dare to laugh at us, because we say that there will be a resurrection of the dead — which indeed we confess that we say, but which is heard by you otherwise than as we mean it? What does the same Plato say in the Statesman? Does he not write that, when the world begins to rise from the western regions and to incline toward that pole which belongs to the rising sun, men will again burst forth from the bosom of the earth as grey-haired, decrepit old men, and, when the years begin to grow longer, will pass back through the same stages by which growth now takes place, and cease at the cradles of infancy?

Do you dare to laugh at us, because we provide for the salvation of our souls — that is, for our very selves? For what are we men, if not souls shut up in bodies? Do you not all bear cares for their preservation? Is it not that fear which holds you, lest you cling fast, fastened as if with driven nails to your bodies, that you abstain from all vices and lusts? What do those rites of secret arts mean for themselves, by which you address I know not what powers, that they may be favorable to you and place no obstacles of hindrance before you as you return to your ancestral seats? Do you dare to laugh at us, when we speak of hells and of certain inextinguishable fires, into which we have learned that souls are cast down by their foes and enemies?

What of the same Plato of yours, in that volume which he composed on the immortality of the soul — does he not name Acheron, Styx, Cocytus, and the rivers, and Pyriphlegethon, in which he asserts that souls are rolled, plunged, and burned up? And a man of no crooked prudence and of weighed and pondered judgment undertakes an inextricable position: that, while he says souls are immortal, everlasting, and freed from bodily solidity, he yet says they are punished and affected with the sensation of pain. But which of men does not see that whatever is immortal, whatever is simple, can admit no pain, while whatever feels pain cannot possess immortality? Nor yet does his authority decline very far from the truth.

For although, being a man of gentle and benevolent will, he thought it inhuman to condemn souls with a capital sentence, he nevertheless did not without reason conjecture that they are cast into rushing rivers, foul with globes of flame and miry whirlpools. For they are cast in, and, reduced to nothing, they vanish away in the frustration of everlasting extinction. For they are of a middle quality, as has been ascertained on Christ's authority, and are able to perish if they have not known God, and to be delivered from life and from destruction if they have applied themselves to His threats and His indulgences — and what is unknown is laid open.

This is man's true death, this the one that leaves nothing remaining — for that which is discerned before our eyes is the separation of souls from bodies, not the last end of abolition — this, I say, is man's true death, when souls that know not God shall be consumed through the torment of a most lengthy time by a fierce fire, into which certain cruelly savage beings, unknown before Christ and disclosed by Him alone who knows, shall cast them.

Wherefore there is nothing that should deceive us, nothing that should promise us empty hopes — that which is said by certain new men, puffed up with an immoderate opinion of themselves: namely, that souls are immortal, next in rank of dignity to the Lord and Prince of things, brought forth by that Begetter and Father, divine, wise, learned, and no longer touched by any contact of the body. Because this is true and certain, and we have been brought forth from a perfect One with an unamendable perfection, we live blameless and therefore beyond reproach, good, just, and upright, of no viciousness; no cupidity conquers us, no lust dishonors us, and we keep and preserve intact the tenor of all the virtues.

And because from one fountain the souls of us all flow down, therefore we feel one and the same accord; we differ not in morals, not in opinions; we all know the same things, and — as many men as there are in the world — there are not just as many sentiments, nor are they distinguished by infinite variety. But while we slip and hasten down toward human bodies, from the circles of the world there follow us the causes by which we become evil and most wicked, seethe with cupidities and wrath, spend our life in disgraceful deeds, and are condemned to public lust by the prostitution of venal bodies. And how can bodies join themselves to incorporeal things, or how can things made by God the Prince be led over by weaker causes to the dishonorings of vices?

Are you willing, O men, to lay aside your ingrained conceit and haughtiness, you who claim God as your Father and contend that you have one and the same immortality with Him? Are you willing to seek, to investigate, to search out what you yourselves are, whose you are, from what Father you are reckoned, what you are doing in the world, by what manner you are born, in what way you leap forth into life? Are you willing, with favor laid aside, in silent reflections to perceive clearly that we are living beings either like all the rest or not distant by very much difference? For what is it that would indicate that we differ from their likeness? Or what eminence is there in us so great that we should disdain to be enrolled in the number of living beings? From those bones their bodies are founded and bound fast by the binding-together of sinews;

and our bodies too, by a like arrangement, are founded from bones and bound fast by the binding-together of sinews. They take in air through their nostrils and give it back, drawn to and fro through their breathing; and we likewise draw in and breathe out the spirit in frequent passages. They are distinguished into female and male kinds; into just as many sexes are we too formed by our Author. They bring forth their young through the womb and procreate by bodily unions; and we too are born from the couplings of bodies and are poured forth and sent out from the wombs of our mothers. They are sustained by food and drink and discharge and cast off their superfluous filth by the lower and hinder parts; and we too are sustained by food and drink, and pour out through the same channels what nature has now rejected.